AustLit
Prologue
The arid landscape of my dream was utterly tangible. I stood in a burnt orange yellow sand desert beneath a cloudless azure sky—the bright sunlight and desert heat my allies for a change. In the distance, I saw a telltale dust column rising, and a vision of Predator flashed through mind. Simultaneously, I sensed something cunning—something to be feared by the wise. It moved haphazardly, as if searching for a particular scent—mine—and my dream-self prepared for fight or flight.
Then a sound rose and overwhelmed the approaching threat. It was a natural sound, unnaturally loud—the rustle of moving sand. I turned to face it. It was so unswerving that I could guess its destination and in an explosive rush of strewn sand, it appeared.
Pre-electric Lifestyle
When I reflect on my more than sixty years of life, I have no doubt that I was a naive, plurri lucky Murri when I was young. Because of Mum’s mum, who understood the efficacy of the three R’s (readin’, ritin’ and ‘rithmetic), I too attended school daily, without fail, from year one to year ten. Still, my heartfelt desire in those early years—before electricity—was to spend time outdoors under the wide central Queensland sky with my countless friends, cousins, brothers, uncles and aunts. We roamed in the bush, in the sea, beside rivers and creeks. Each moment an education in gathering and hunting.
I didn’t become aware of racism until I started work, which may have been because of where we grew up. In my hometown, if my memory serves me correctly, actions spoke louder than class, skin colour or race. Most families knew each other by sight or through acquaintances and most respected any neighbour be they black, brown, yellow or pale pink—these differences mattered little as long as one demonstrated decent morals and ethics. For children, it was a warm and friendly existence—the opposite of living in the city, and a world away from the experiences of our extended relatives living on Reserves.
If proof of my naivety had been required, it would’ve been crystal clear to anyone watching my first attempt to open a bank account in 1969 in my hometown on the central Queensland coast. My hard-working single mother had ordered me to undertake the task, and in those days it was a unique child who said no to their mother (never to their father) unless they had some type of death wish. More scared of Mum’s wrath and disappointment than my own fear, I duly arrived at the intimidating building and reluctantly, abruptly made my way inside. I peered nervously around at the clean, shiny, very tall walls, the latest fittings and the artificial lighting. I glanced surreptitiously at the non-Indigenous, well-dressed customers that looked confident and comfortable. My tummy did flip-flops, my palms grew sweaty, my face grew hot. Nek-minute! My feet whisked me outside, and nothing could make them re-enter.
But my naivety didn’t end there. At fifteen, on board a Greyhound bus on a trip to Mt Isa, a song I hadn’t heard before played on the radio ‘They call the wind Mariah’. From the lyrics I assumed I’d have to learn another language in ‘the Isa’. “The rain is Tess, the fire's Joe and they call the wind Mariah”, the lyrics informed my confused innocent mind. (The popular song from Lerner and Loewe’s musical, Paint Your Wagon.)
In 1979, while I was working in Rockhampton (Rocky) as an Aboriginal Health Assistant for the Aboriginal Health Program (AHP), I came to understand that being of Aboriginal descent had historical and personal implications that were deeply shocking.
When a non-Indigenous AHP sister nurse told me we were on our way to visit the reserve at Woorabinda (Woori), I wrongly assumed we were visiting Aboriginal families that lived close to an animal reserve. Imagine my shock and horror when the nurses pulled off the road! And my tears came hot and abruptly as they explained the history, what had happened and where we were visiting. Although it was embarrassing to cry, neither love nor money could have stopped me. The ‘fair go’ country I’d grown up in had imprisoned its own people in barbed wire enclosures, forcibly stopping them from practicing their cultures and languages. The realisation knocked my proverbial indigenous socks off. Then a respected Elder from Woori explained that my mother’s family often visited the reserve (in the horse and buggy days) to visit two of Mum’s sisters who’d been taken from her family of sixteen and incarcerated there. As soon as I was able, I rang and asked Mum why she hadn’t told me any of this; she didn’t beat around the bush “Are you completely stupid boy?” she said. “I had five children to bring up by myself after your father gave in to the booze. Aboriginal children were being taken off their families willy-nilly at the time. I told everyone we were Sri-Lankan on your father’s side and South Sea Islander on mine. Anyway, I’d have thought your uncles or aunts would have told you all this by now!” she said gruffly. She laughed at my recent education, lightening the mood between us.
But I would never again be the naive youth that my school friends and family had known—my disillusionment lit pathways in my mind that I hadn’t known existed before. I vowed that I would always stand up for Aboriginal Australians and do everything possible to support our advancement into the modern Australia that I’d previously been so deeply, quietly proud of; the modern Australia that I thought I’d known.
I leapt into my new role. I listened to Elders’ stories about life before and after Aboriginal people had been rounded up and forced into reserves—the alien spaces that had no regard for ancient traditional boundaries or religious practices. I began to spend my lunch hours at the local library, reading historical accounts of first contact and the violence that accompanied it. As I learnt more, my indignation grew exponentially.
One of the main problems that came out of the imprisonment of our already violently subjugated people was alcohol abuse—a problem which I have first-hand experience with. After losing a child, my father turned to alcohol while my mother turned to Jesus and women’s liberation. But it was my mother who prevailed. She taught both me and my (often violent) father lessons we would never forget. In Dad’s case, Mum knocked him (a feared, well-known grass-fighter no less) down with her stove-top clothes iron; the nearest thing to hand. The lesson in my case was gentler, taught through her quiet dignity and refusal to take a backward step from bullies. Mum silenced authoritative tyrants of all persuasions with her honesty; she never raised a hand in violence unless, of course, lives were at stake.
In line with the AHP’s move to attempt local Health-worker designed education and awareness programs, I and around twenty other ATSI QLD Health Assistants were sent to the Biala City Community Health Centre in Brisbane. We went to gain a certificate in alcohol and drug counselling, the need for which was so desperate that a two-year university social work degree had been condensed into a three-month course for AHP staff. But the majority of us had never even finished primary, let alone secondary school, so the workload was overwhelming. In the end, the only positive thing to come out of the course was the paper that allowed us to work semi-professionally with medical and health professionals.
Back in Rocky, the psychological approach and artifices I’d learnt about proved useless in real-time situations with our woeful abusers. But the insights I’d gained into Western strategies around drug addiction opened my eyes to the huge differences that existed between the two societies I’d grown up in—Indigenous and non-Indigenous. I saw, with black and white clarity, the wall in Western culture between theory and practice. At the clinic, we discovered that hard work with clients and their extended families around education and awareness far exceeded the success we had with Western thought-based, individualist approaches to drug addiction.
So, with several local Elders, I threw myself into setting up and running an alcohol and drug in-house counselling service as well as a company to work with relevant government departments. Due to my education as well as my confidence in dealing with professional and public service whites, I held positions in this company of senior counsellor, president and secretary/treasurer. We had an office-come-counselling service called Yumbah House, and a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the local base hospital. The MoU meant clients were offered a stay in a state detoxification centre to kickstart their sobriety, rehabilitation and reintegration into society.
Yumbah House had a glowing reputation in its inaugural year. It was the first time an all-Aboriginal service had attempted to help the many sore and sorry abusers in our area. We were respected to the point that we could go anywhere, anytime, regardless of whether we were with Woori mob or city Murris from other reserves. We had complete immunity from the social upheaval that was the norm—a norm that I soon realised was the inevitable result of more than forty seven different Tribes (many of them not from this specific land) being forced to live together behind barbed wire in dry semi-desert country. Yet even in the supposedly violent anti-social Woori, I was allowed—even encouraged—to set up a 16mm film projector on the bar of the wet canteen pub on Friday evenings. I showed animated educational films about the effects of alcohol on the human body, while folk around me drank on regardless, occasionally raising cheery voices (and glasses) to my effort.
And this effort was how I found myself camping on the banks of the Mackenzie River in 1979—a site favoured by local clans for generations and generations. I was on a counselling retreat with a group of newly dry Woori clients; my role to encourage those who were detoxing, and to begin guiding them toward employment—a means to keep idle hands at bay. I was exhausted after the first day setting up camp—what with chasing after clients in Woori (who’d said they’d come then forgotten the date), organising food and bedding, driving four hours in the heat on red bulldust dirt roads from Rocky to Woori (no aircon in those days), to finally arrive at Mackenzie River.
The clients chose a site where they were happy to sleep on bedrolls and swags on the ground around the campfire. But me, being the boss (so they said), I thought it appropriate to have my own shelter—a one-man tent—set up on a hillock a little distance away from the rest of the group. As I lay my weary head down that night, little did I know that this would be a night of choices that would change my life—at least as much as learning about the reserves had. I casually drifted off to sleep with the warm sound of chatter echoing off the river’s still surface.
To Sleep, Perchance to ...
The distinct whisper of moving sand. I turned toward the swelling noise—so unswerving I could guess its source. In an explosive rush of strewn sand, it appeared.
My wildest dreams could never have imagined such a dignified presence as stood swaying before me in glorious living colour. The Egyptian-Greek manifestation of the mythical griffin stood transformed into an Aboriginal warrior sand goanna. This spirit-being, with the head and shoulders of an Aboriginal man, and the body of a megafauna Megalania prisca moved gracefully, full of restrained power, speaking softly and gently. In awe, my fear collapsed. The words spoken were in an ancient tongue that only fit the dreamscape, yet I could understand them. “The false thing coming will tempt you with fame, fortune and flattery, but know this man of dust! Beneath its neatly polished worldly-wise exterior, it is insipid, without substance or passion”, it said, chin-lipping toward the dust column that so unnerved me. Then, one of its long sharp curved claws at the end of its leather skinned legs reached out and stopped in front of my stomach. “There is a bad thing that must come out for you to fulfil your destiny, man of dust”, I heard it say. I flinched, but the spirit-being’s words of wisdom assuaged my apprehension and I consented to its gnarly claws reaching inside my body. One wordless sensation later, the claw reappeared gripping a writhing amorphous mass, and though I’d never consciously felt its influence, I abruptly felt a sense of well-being—a rapturous glow of perfect health and at least half my body weight lighter. The Goanna-man lifted the claw up so it could see what it had caught. Then it ate the mess, triggering a scream of frustration from the other presence; a scream that was clearly, bluntly ignored. The being turned away—job done I guess—and as its long lizard tail swung behind it, it levelled several sand dunes half my height with miraculous ease.
“Wait! Please!” I called, desperate to talk, to know more. The being paused and turned its head and shoulders toward me, giving me a view of the entire massive body that took my breath away and trapped hesitant, graceless emotion in my throat.
“Please? I just—I only um—wished to say ah—thank you!”
The Goanna-man grinned, turned away, laughed—a hearty chortle that dissipated in the sounds of shifting sands, then… nothing.
I was rejuvenated and felt so airily light that I fancied I could have even floated up into the sky and off! But I also sensed the need to face off my predator on the ground, so I could use any advantage that height and space might give me in a running battle. I rose slowly into the clear desert air, and to my surprise the predator rose with me, allowing my first proper view of it. It’d taken the form of a man, though in my present exhilarated state, I knew it to be a shapeshifter. And a shapeshifter that used its victim’s experiences and memories to allay the fears its presence evoked. At this particular moment, it was a pale skinned, European type man-of-the-world wearing a beautifully cut suit, matching tie and trilby hat. It carried an expensive looking briefcase and a hand-carved walking stick, and with a confident twirl of its stick and tip of its hat, the predator came on jauntily, unable or unwilling to disguise the arrogant core that shone from its eyes.
In a flash, I understood the Goanna-man’s warning—I saw the attention to the sacred that my ancient people had given for centuries of generations. And I understood that the shallow world being offered me could not compare to the depth of the Dreamtime and its Laws. I made a choice there and then and flew away as fast as my dreaming allowed. The cunning thing shouted desperately about the gifts, riches, fame and fortune that I was throwing away in my (supposedly) ill-conceived rush of emotion that was “…nothing, you fool! Nothing to do with real life!” I heard echoes across the sands behind me as I raced away through the desert. I emerged from the experience aware of ‘real life’ and my time in the world since then has reinforced that my choice that night was, indeed, the right one.
A Blessed Murri
I woke in my tiny tent feeling like a brand new being—a freshly recharged human-being-spirit ‘as humans were meant to be’, I thought. I shot out of the tent and ran flat out toward the river where I leapt into the air and into the water in joyous celebration of the dream and its portent. As I emerged from my impulsive baptism, I heard laughter ringing out—my clients were standing on the bank cackling and laughing. As soon as I was out, they queried the meaning of my early morning swim. I explained the dream and how light and refreshed I felt, and an awed hush fell over the group.
“Ere! Look! See what was ‘der, movin’ roun’ your ten’ ‘der boss! Real ‘hearly-part ‘dis mornin’ eh!” I was told, as I was led back to my tent. Surrounding my tent were the tracks of a large goanna that had repeatedly circled my sleeping, dreaming form. I was told I’d been blessed. “‘Dat Totem ‘por ‘dis area ‘ere—‘e is ‘at ole Gwanna-man!” one of the men explained earnestly, to nods and grunts of agreement. The tracks were so fresh that we were able to follow them down the hillock to a large tree close to the water where one of the men indicated a spot halfway up the trunk. There, a huge sand goanna—almost as long as I am tall—clung to the tree trunk.
Sic igitur
It took a while for that incident to gel in my mind, although I understood that something extraordinary had happened. I felt cleansed. I’d observed our first peoples’ values, set against the Western world’s impetuous melee to bind time, possess the tangible, gain individual fame and fortune, and dominate.
Sometimes harsh, sometimes joyous, often confusing—life has defended that dreaming experience with an integrity that has held me steady. The experience has fashioned my life through to my death and onward, in the circle through which our spirits come and go.
Riches, material possessions, appearance and self-centred superiority are illusory goals, the dream avowed. In the time since, I’ve neither seen nor experienced a single thing to make me doubt that ancient wisdom, nor do I expect to in what’s left of the time allotted my sacred journey on these sacred lands.
John is a 62 year old indigenous Australian of Kabi-kabi Aboriginal, South-Sea-islander, Nepalese and Indian/Sri-Lankan descent. John was born in Gladstone, Qld, and worked for Qld Railways and various construction firms throughout Queensland, until injuries forced him into trying a less physical path.
In 1990 - at thirty-six years of age - John began a BA, majoring in Literature and Aboriginal Studies. He graduated ten years later while working for Central Queensland University (CQU) in the multi-media section. During this time John also gained a certificate in Film & Television production at AFTRS in Sydney.
In 2004, after 14 years at CQU John took his family to the Aboriginal community of Aurukun, on Cape York, where he met Noel Pearson. Together they created the Higher Expectations Program (HEP): a full secondary scholarship, sponsored by Macquarie Bank’s philanthropic arm MGF, in an attempt to solve some of the huge social problems and high school dropout rate in the Cape’s Indigenous remote communities. To date HEP has over 40 University graduates – all ‘firsts’ from those 18 remote communities. The program is now called the Cape York Leadership Program (CYLP), and had its 10 year anniversary in 2016.
John had to stop work owing to several chronic construction work injuries. He lives in Far North Queensland, and promotes his series of 10 fiction books about the 50,000 years of Aboriginal life prior 1770, through to today: The Featherfoot Series. He has several short stories and poems published and several more fiction stories ‘on the go’.
Some of John’s other publications are:
1. 'The Believers: the burning man'; in Indo-Australian Anthology of Short Fiction, 2014, AUTHORSPRESS, ISBN: 978-81-7273-824-2.
2. 'Guru PP' in From all walks of life, 1995, Central Qld University Press, ISBN: 1 875902 03 1
3. Online Poetry: 'You still wonder' Creative Spirits
4. Online Poetry X 3 poems @: http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A71531
John plays guitar, photographs nature, writes poetry and songs about his people, and tries to sing occasionally. He has four children (Luke, Rain, Bindi & Yeady), ranging in ages from 18 to 40 and six wonderful grandchildren. John’s mother - ‘Aunty Lorna’ Wenitong – started the first Aboriginal Health Program in Qld out of Mt Isa in the late 1960s and his younger Brother Mark, was one of the first indigenous doctors in Qld, and is credited with being the mind behind the Australian Indigenous Doctor’s Association (AIDA) in Australia.
This story is a part of the Growing Up Indigenous in Australia collection, published by AustLit in 2018.