Context piece Flashcards
Intro para
Dust swirls in gusts around them, reddening the sun and blurring the horizon. Their two silhouettes fall side by side on the sand. The older man shields his eyes and points to a shadow ahead – “This is the place”. As the wind settles, the rusty veil falls back to reveal a jagged cliff face; even from a distance the boy can see the white outlines of handprints at its base. Closer up, the shapes are distorted by the ridges of the rock. The man points to a small handprint “That’s my nanghai’s hands made with white clay. Back when he was small.” He puts his hand on top, as if to compare. “They hadwere made to leave for the town, soon after.”
Para 1 - they sit down - moving out
They sit down in the shadow of the cliff – cross-legged, the man fixes his eyes on the horizon and begins to talk. As his gravelly voice recounts the tale of his father, the son watches how his hands move, seeming to pull the words along with them on an invisible string. It was a performance of storytelling that the man had practiced many times, modulating his voice to sound what he imagined the elders of old had sounded like. He never could be completely sure that it wasn’t just an ideal that he had developed on his own, but it was the best he could do. Marvin tells his son about his own father, Yindi Ganyin. Yindi , like generations before him, had been born in Anmatyerr country. He’d barely had time to start learning the names of the trees when his family was persuaded to leave their land and settle in Alice Springs, as part of a Northern Territory-wide centraliszation program that hoped to integrate Aboriginal communities into White Australia.
Para 1 - effects - Marvin’s tone
Marvin remembers how his father’s tone used to grow cold when he talked about that time – he’d hated it in Alice Springs. There was nothing for the family there – the country wasn’t theirs, everything was different. They were settled in corrugated iron houses and the children sent to the missionary school, squeezed into the stiff white shirts and beige trousers that the teachers used to form the boys into a pale echo of the kind of child they could never be. Traditional learning – the passing on of the custodianship of the land to the next generation – was discouraged.
Para 1 - twenty years later
Twenty years later, when Marvin was born, the community was, like so many others across Australia, plagued by alcohol abuse and a growing sense of despair. No-one knew who they were meant to be there. The town was dead – people didn’t want them in the bigger ones., and Tthey couldn’t go back home since it has been sold. Marvin glances at the handprints and then back at his son “Our country is who we are. Even trees die without roots.”
Para 2 - growing up
Growing up, Marvin lived on the stories his grandmother told him. She talked, hands locked together in her lap, of the dances they would do at funerals, when they honoured lost elders for ten days – the north wind dance, the fire dance, the cockatoo dance. Marvin would imagine the way their contorting bodies, stomping feet and thrusting spears moved together, each dancer melting into a many-legged creature, sand flying, sweat streaming. He longed to lose himself – not in a kerosene haze, but in the feeling of being part of something larger, something with the permanence of the sky and the wind. He knew he was something more than his existence in the town allowed him to be.
Para 2 - in 1976
In 1976, when the Aboriginal Land Rights Act was established, he decided to go back. Others didn’t want to go, even the ones who’d been born in their country. They said they’d been in the town for too long, it was all they knew. Most had never been taught their Dreaming – the ancestor that gave rise to them – and its Songline, the path it took through the Dreamtime landscape when the world was born. They’d lost the language, the music… That knowledge disappearing was worse than being moved. The land didn’t mean anything to them. Marvin takes a handful of sand and lets it run through his fingers, leaving stains on his skin. “That’s why we came out here, soon after you were born. We, and the others who came back, we have our homeland now”.
Para 3 - the day’s shadows, explanation
The day’s shadows begin to lengthen, and Marvin’s face grows grave. He begins to talk in that urgent, serious manner that the boy has only seen glimpses of when sneaking around the campfire late at night, when he was meant to be asleep. The boy interrupts sometimes to ask the meaning of a word but most of it he understands. The government are going to stop giving the homelands funding – no more buildings, medicine, check-ups. The towns are being developed instead, homelands communities encouraged to move in.
Para 3 - they want to bring us back
“They want to bring us back.” Marvin looks at his son, trying to make sure he understands. “They want it to be like old times, when they only had to reach out a hand to put us under the thumb”. The elders are angry across the homelands – they thought the people in power had changed, had understood that things were different now. Instead, the state was continuing to pursue the same policy of what it considered enlightenment and development that it had stuck to before. It couldn’t let go of the narrative that had kept it going for so long. If they move back to the towns, their spirits will die. “The whitefellas don’t see that we can be a part of their Australia while belonging to ours too.”
Para 3 - the boy listens
.” The boy listens and nods as Marvin tells him that this is why he will be leaving soon, to go to the city and make people understand. Darol tries to imagine his father in the shadow of the buildings he had seen pictures of before, the cold, anonymous blocks towering above him, but the image doesn’t come.
Para 4
The light is fading now. Streaks of red run across the cliff face, illuminating some handprints and leaving others in the shade. Darol puts his hand to the rock, feeling the warmth of the day run out of it. He chews the white clay in his mouth, and then sprays it around his hand like Marvin had shown him – the outline of his fingers that remains just touches that of his grandfather. Marvin picks up their spears and looks his son in the eye “I want you to know who you are, Darol. Where your home is”. Together, they turn around and walk back into the open desert.
