Children of Arnhem's Kaleidoscope

Children of Arnhem’s Kaleidoscope

Memoir by Graham Wilson

Acknowledgements
   I wish to thank a range of people who have contributed to this book. First, thanks to those who encouraged me to write the story of my childhood and life living in the remote Top End of the Northern Territory of Australia.
   I also wish to thank the many people who have contributed to this story through lives lived in this place, particularly my extended family, missionaries who worked at Oenpelli, people who worked for the Northern Territory Department of Primary Industry and many station people from across the NT and most especially the aboriginal people of western Arnhem Land.
   Collectively you have given me the rich experiences which make this story live in my mind, and give the colour of the telling.

Copyright
Children of Arnhem’s Kaleidoscope
Graham Wilson
Copyright Graham Wilson 2012
Published at BeyondBeyondBooks
   ISBN 978-0-9871971-3-9

Prologue
   Yesterday, November 23rd, I went to Oenpelli, an aboriginal town in Arnhem Land. It was two days after my father was buried in Darwin, next to where my mother was buried six years before. A memorial service was held, recounting his pioneering exploits.
   The most beautiful part was a gathering of about six aboriginal women, standing in a semicircle around his grave. They spontaneously sang a hymn in Gunwinku, the language of the Oenpelli people. Other people threw handfuls of dirt into the grave. It was a hauntingly lyrical melody, an expression of their private affection.
   There were other people at Oenpelli who could not come in to Darwin but wanted to say their sorry’s too. So I drove to Oenpelli and walked around the town, amongst these people, enveloped in a steamy wet season build up day, as aboriginal people came up and murmured their regrets at my Dad’s passing.
   Later I walked out across the Oenpelli plains, to where the first water of the wet season was spilling from the end of the billabong onto the floodplains; just myself and a few hundred squawking waterbirds feasting on natures first wet season flush.
   The afternoon sky turned purple, then olive-black, above the sunlit sandstone hills, as a storm built. Flashes and rumbles increased as I walked back towards Oenpelli, watching as the sweep of rain blotted out the view of the hills. A sudden blast of cold air at the storm’s leading edge swept me with it’s fresh rain smell. At the church, on the edge of the plains, I took shelter. The storm lashed out it’s brief fury, then was gone. Rising steam and a few puddles were all that remained.
   I said farewell to Oenpelli. It was time to begin my return to Sydney. On impulse I decided to drive back to Darwin along the old Jim Jim Road, an early road to Oenpelli. I planned to camp out on the plains once across the South Alligator River. Here, in my childhood, buffalo by thousands and more, were seen.
   Another more massive storm was brewing. I crossed the South Alligator River, driving through a few inches of water and thought. “Well - the big river is behind me and the road is clear ahead to Darwin”. A short time later, tropical sheets of rain began to fall. I pulled over onto a small gravel ridge on the side of the road to sit the storm out. After half an hour, it eased to a drizzle, which continued into the night. I slept in the car, thinking morning would be a better time to travel.
   The grey light of 6 am dawn saw a small amount of high cloud, but the rain was gone. I proceeded, cautiously at first, but the gullies were dry, other than one or two with a trickle of water. My mind was still on the events of the last few days, but all seemed well. I swept around a bend, and there was a gully with some water flowing through it, about a foot deep I thought.
   In the split second before I was into it, I had the chance to brake to a stop, but my instant decision was, it's fine, keep going. Suddenly one foot of water was three, and before I knew it the current picked up the light four-wheel-drive up. I was floating in the creek, with no engine and water bubbling inside. As the car drifted downstream, away from the road, the water outside was deeper, coming up over the dash.
   I thought; “It's time to get out of here”, but with no engine and no electricity, the windows and doors were securely locked. I crawled into the back and tried to unlock the tail gate. No luck there either. Here I was, in a glass encased bubble, slowly flowing down an ever-increasing river towards the sea, while the car slowly settled ever deeper into the water.
   After 30 or 40 yards it seemed to catch something on the bottom and movement stopped. My bubble still held me trapped and it really was time to get out, while my head was above the water. Two or three kicks at the window made no impression on the hardened glass. “Not good”, I thought. Then I realised there was a skylight. I couldn't open that either, so it was time to kick in earnest, two hard kicks and suddenly the glass shattered.
   I retrieved what I could find of my possessions floating in the cabin, and scrambled to the shore, none the worse for wear, except for a few glass cuts to my feet. Two hours of trudging up the dirt road, then a road train came along. I got a lift to Darwin.
   Then, the unpleasantness of destroying a rental car, expensive and embarrassing, when you have to explain your stupidity.
   It was a lesson in two parts, how quickly security can turn to tragedy and that I should never have underestimated the fickle power of the Northern Territory. The rain, a moderate tropical storm where I was, had barely run water. Far upstream 84 millimetres came from this storm, focused in one narrow river channel. I tasted its power in my moment of inattention. I don't know why my hands and voice were shaking that afternoon, I was in one piece. Cars can be replaced, people can't.
   Back to the first beginning. It’s over 6 years now since the fateful phone call that began the writing of this story. My sister in New Zealand rings occasionally, at night or the weekend. So a phone call in mid-afternoon is unusual; “Have you heard what happened to Mum?” No (I think did she win a prize or something). “There’s been a car accident and she’s been killed”. … Silence!
   All the urgent, routine arrangements take place; book a flight to Darwin, deal with a lot of other shocked family and friends, make funeral arrangements; it’s all a bit of a blur now.
   On the morning of the funeral I have a memory of standing there and looking at Mum’s face; still, peaceful, lined with 75 years of living. Later, listening to an Irish song, one line brought that image of my mother flashing into my mind.
   “her face is a well worn page, and time all alone is the pen”
   It captured a bit of my mother’s passing and the rich life that she lived, reflected in her final face; kind, dignified and written with its own history.
   This book is an attempt to share this history with others, and so to leave a record of the unusual life of her and my father, a richness in which our whole family has partaken.
   As a child it did not occur to me that my parents were different from an average suburban Mum and Dad. I accepted as normal living in Arnhem Land; where the aeroplane came now and then, or sometimes a boat came up the river; that most of my playmates were black; that for four or five months of each year it was a world cut off by water, and at opposite times it was a world of smoke, fire and bulldust, punctuated by intense black thunderheads and lightning.
   My earliest childhood memories, when I was two years old, sit in that blur between babyhood and remembering.
   The first is an Oenpelli visitor taking me to the back paddock behind our house, to see a new calf; walking through tall brown grass, above my head, a clear blue sky above, expecting to see a soft baby animal of the story books, small and cuddly. Instead this giant creature, taller than I, on wobbly legs, with brown and white patches on half wet skin. It jumped and frightened me when I went to touch it.
   The second memory is crossing the river (East Alligator) with my father. First; slipping down a silty river bank to a huge brown-yellow channel with green overhanging trees. Then being lifted into a dugout canoe, rough-carved, sculpted from one huge tree. In the bottom grey mud, dried grass and a couple inches of muddy water. Me, looking out over sides, almost as high as myself, at the huge muddy river swirling beyond. My father and an aboriginal man, with black shiny skin, pushing off, the current taking us and slowly paddling across the running tide towards the green distant bank. My memory fades; no crocodiles though certainly they were there, no birds though probably screeching overhead, nothing but wonder and bright colour seen through childhood eyes.
   Partial memories drift across the next 2 years; on a trailer behind a tractor with my mother, sisters and a tribe of aboriginal ladies and children. Going through red-yellow sandstone hills towards a billabong, gritty bulldust in our eyes and mouths. We bounce across washouts, dodge branches and pandanus prickles whipping past us. We live in a tin house with ant-bed floors and a black lady that my mother calls the house-girl. Then a final memory of flying to Darwin just before my fourth birthday in a small plane, looking out the window as black dots of buffalo and brown dots of ant-beds go by amongst a mosaic of trees and floodplains. This was the end of the first great adventure of my life, as an Oenpelli child. It remains forever burnt into my mind, a child amongst children, amidst the myriad colours of Arnhem Land.
   As an adult reflecting back I realise not only was I a child of Arnhem Land, but so too were my parents; coming to this  unknown land, full of strange places and unfamiliar people, which they discovered for the first time. While knowing white society and its ways, and with much practical common sense, they knew little of the land to which they came. This is also their story of discovery.