Quotes Flashcards
Jacaranda Tree
Jacaranda Tree – “One year in the Jacaranda’s bleakness Mum had strung a tyre- swing onto its fattest branch.”
Camp fire
“They were the best of times, the three of us at the fire, laughing and talking over the top of the things we never talked about.”
Mungi
“Mungi was his name, the first turtle ever. They said he was a tribesman who was speared in the neck while protecting himself under a hollowed-out tree. But the ancestor spirit was watching and decided to let him live by reincarnation or something. ‘Anyway, using the empty tree trunk as his shell, he was allowed to live peacefully forever as a turtle.’ Or so Mum would say.”
Racist
“He’d sometimes tease me and call me a ‘halfie’ and ‘coconut’. We’d be laughing and chasing each other around the yard being racist and not even knowing it.”
Pain
- “I thought about Mum’s pain being freed from her wrist, leaving her body, or what was left of it.”
- “We get drunk on the salt air and laughter: The ocean we her safe place, a place where she always felt she belonged until she got raped there.”
Aboriginal
“I felt Aboriginal because Mum had made me proud to be, told me I got magic and courage from Gundyarri, the spirit man. It was then I felt Aboriginal, I felt like I belonged, but when Mum left, I stopped being Aboriginal. I stopped feeling like I belonged. Anywhere.”
Heritage
“‘My mum was Aboriginal.’
‘No shit? You don’t look like an Abo.’
‘My old man isn’t though; his family are from the First Fleet and everything. Rich folk they were, fancy folk from England.’ (May lying about her ancestry to Pete)”
Domestic Violence
“Every night it happened, I began to wake before they’d even come home, my body waiting for the back door to fling open and bang against the wall, for them to be already at each other’s throat, or laughing and chatting before a blue would start. (May about the difficulties of living in her Aunty’s volatile home)”
Trauma
“You got family in the city too girl, gunna show ya where ya don’t belong dumb black bitch, you don’t look abo. When I looked into the mirror I saw a girl, lost and hollow – the same as every other 15-year-old.”
Her people
“She says that our people are born from quartz crystal, hard water. We are powerful people, strong people. Water people, people of the rivers and the lakes. They [the mining magnets] look at the land and say there is nothing here. (May when she meets Issy at the depleting Lake Cowal) ”
Shelter
“‘Well don’t be shame now, everyone need somewhere to stay. Some people got it and some people doesn’t. Come and stay with the women and me.’”
Relative
“You’re just like your grandmother, you know that? But she knew it. She died of hope, you know that. The thing is, we weren’t allowed to be what you’re looking for and we weren’t told what was right, we weren’t taught by anyone.” Speaking to Percy last known Gibson.
Ancestor
“It all makes sense to me now. Issy’s drawing in the sand, boundaries between the land and the water, us, we come from the sky and the Earth, and we go back to the sky and the Earth, bone and fluid.”
Strength
“I do not cry, my eyes are hardened, like honeycomb… Brittle crumbling sugar. He puts his hand out toward me; we shake hands, a pact that I won’t be here digging up his past when he gets back. And I’m not.”
