Mullumbimby (4 page)

Jo drained her coffee cup and went inside to bang on Ellen's door. Bloody teenagers. Just when you think you've got em sussed, they turn around and get you all over again. Riding the neighbour's horses! Bareback! After a week!

‘We don't let it bother us,' Chris said later that week, stirring Tyagarah honey into her cup of tea. ‘The few rednecks on the road. Not when it's this beautiful.' She gestured at the African tulip tree flourishing beside Jo's garden shed. Three king parrots, a male and two females, bobbed in their gorgeous bright crimson and green plumage. The male stood on a narrow branch in front of one of the females, dipping his head first to the left and then the right. It must have meant something to the hen-parrot, because after he completed the ritual, she let him nibble briefly at the back of her neck.

Jo was struck afresh by her friend's ability to be grateful to life when she had enormous buckets and shitloads of Nothing. Nothing except long black curly hair and money problems, that is. Chris lived in a caravan high on the ridge that overshadowed Tin Wagon Road, three creek crossings up among the rainforest. Leech country,
and ticks. And a cranky white neighbour who regarded the long-established dirt track up to her home through his front paddock as a personal favour he was doing her and her father, allowing him to dictate everything from when Chris's nephew could ride his motorbike to refusing them the use of the prettiest little bogie hole for fifty miles around.

‘So tell us about Rob Starr.'

Jo related the conversation she had had at the funeral with her new neighbour. Chris looked pensively at Warrigal sprawled on the veranda.

‘Oh, Warrigal, ya better look out, lad.'

‘I couldn't believe it, eh?' Jo continued. ‘No beating around the bush, just if I see any yella dogs on my place I'll shoot em. I felt like saying, yeah and if I see you in my paddock I'll shoot you too, ya dugai prick ... Only I'd already said I don't have a gun, so it would have lacked a certain something,' she added lamely.

‘Geez, it don't take long, eh? A week on the Road and already you want to shoot the whitefellas.' Chris went off in a fit of laughter, and Jo joined in. They both knew Jo was about as likely to shoot Rob Starr as she was to run off and join the National Party.

‘Come to Bruns tomorrow night and see the full moon with us,' Chris proposed.

‘It's not full already!' Jo said. She swivelled in her seat looking for the pale disc in the afternoon sky.
No way
was it full moon already.

‘Time flies when you're having fun!' Chris looked meaningfully at the paddock in front of them.

Four sagging strands of rusty barbed wire fence framed a view of thistles, billygoat weed, dismantled sheets of corrugated iron, lantana thickets and other assorted old farm junk. Jo's ute was parked at an angle to the house. Its tray overflowed with pieces of nail-riddled timber destined to go on the fire, and rusted metal junk for the skip that was yet to arrive from Bangalow. A doorless fridge stood squarely beside the twin tyre tracks to the front gate. Its open mouth gaped at the passers-by; on the grass around it were scattered a collection of
various-sized fuel drums, big lumps of broken concrete with rusted wire sticking dangerously out of them, anonymous car parts, and what seemed like a never-ending supply of empty beer bottles found beneath the house, the trees, the grass, the car bodies – everywhere. A makeshift fire circle beyond the ute was smoking a billowing white cloud into the sky, telling them that the prevailing breeze was headed south-east towards Ocean Shores. The fire had been burning nonstop for the past week, and Jo wasn't about to run out of fuel for it any time soon.

Fun, Jo considered, picking at a long morse code of scabs on her left forearm. Was it fun? She decided that yes, despite her aching muscles, shredded hands and yawningly empty bank account, it actually was. Except that it was so much more than fun. This was
her farm.
Unbelievably, she and her brother Stevo had together bought back a patch of Bundjalung land, reclaimed a fragment of their country. It wasn't so much fun as a deep, solid vein of primal satisfaction that flooded through her day and night whenever she gazed about her in wonder at the paddocks and trees and mountain. Dawn on the bottom dam made her catch her breath; the evening light along the ridge brought tears to her eyes.
Her
paddocks.
Her
trees.
Her
mountain.

My country, right or wrong.

‘Well, it sure don't feel like work,' she said. ‘Not on your own land.' Chris nodded in agreement, and Jo continued.

‘I'm cleaning this endless shit up for us mob. Making somewhere for me and Ellen, and Stevo when he comes home – and Kym and Jase and the boys eventually, I hope. Get the place in order and look after it the right way. Keep the old people happy.'

‘Yeah. That's right. You're doing it for the family. And the old people.
And
you're a workaholic,' Chris teased.

‘And
I'm a workaholic,' Jo agreed cheerfully. Then made a snarling face to tell Chris that she was getting a bit too bloody cheeky. ‘Aaagh, you're just jealous cos you're never gonna be able to buy back any Gadigal land,' Jo told her.

Chris laughed. ‘God, would I want to? All the womba dugai down
there – anyways, I'm officially Bundjalung now. Aunty Sally told me at Wollumbin Dreaming that they're claiming me. I've been here long enough now after thirty years, she reckons. So how about you knock off busting ya hole and come down to Bruns?'

‘Can't, tidda,' said Jo. ‘Can't get the horses here till I replace that fucking horrible excuse for a fence. Congratulations on joining the tribe, though.'

‘Ah, the work'll still be here next week. Full moon won't,' Chris urged.

‘Christ. Alright ... what time?'

‘I thought head down just before black o'clock hey, and watch the sunset at the rock wall.'

‘Yeah, orright. Pick us up on the way through.' They stood and Jo stretched a weary, weary back. There were a couple more hours of daylight, and several more decades of Mooney junk to be chucked, stored, burned or recycled. She stuck her hat on as they went outside. Once more into the breach, dear friends. Then a sudden thought occurred to her as Chris was leaving.

‘Hey, who's that old aunty round here who rides a pushie? I can't think of her name.'

‘Might be old Granny Nurrung,' Chris said, after a moment's thought. ‘Sam's Nanna. She's got a treadly that she rides to church in Ocean Shores.' Ah, that's it, breathed Jo as the name brought back a flood of vaguely unpleasant memories. Unsmiling Granny Nurrung, she now recalled, had that extremely upright back because the Good Lord Jesus was walking approvingly by her side with every step she took.

‘Yeah, that'll be her,' she called. ‘Seeya when the work's finished! I wish.'

‘No rest for the wicked, darl,' Chris replied, heading in the opposite direction to chauffeur Uncle Pat to the doctor.

‘Ellen,' Jo turned and yelled at the house, ‘I didn't say you could knock off yet, where the bloody hell are ya?'

‘Guess what?' Therese's almond eyes peered through the kitchen window a couple of days later. She heeled her gumboots off onto the bare veranda boards that Jo intended to paint once the two hundred more important jobs – building yards, slashing, lopping, burning, dismantling, poisoning where unavoidable, replanting, digging, mulching, weeding, fertilising – had been completed.

‘You're mad and I'm not?' Jo responded, putting the kettle on.

Therese plonked down at the kitchen table, her body just as grimy as Jo's.

‘That's not news,' Therese answered, tapping on the kitchen table, impatient to deliver her gossip.

‘You've decided to ditch Amanda and come be my fulltime unpaid farmhand and cook?' Jo's face glowed with enthusiasm for this excellent idea.

‘That's it!' said Therese. ‘And I'll chuck in aaall my good advice for free while I'm at it. She reckons she's sick to death of me farting in bed, anyway.'

‘Deal,' said Jo, plonking her cup on the table and sinking into a well-deserved rest. The two women had just made short work of another two hundred metres of decrepit barbed wire. A score of uprooted fenceposts lay beside the fireplace, ready for a bonfire. ‘And I won't even charge you for cuppas,' she added.

‘Seriously, but,' said Therese, ‘about these new blackfellas I met on Monday.'

‘Oh, yeah?' Jo feigned indifference. This was something to be hearing. One would have to be the Spunk from the bookstore, surely. Jo slowly turned her tea mug in front of her, making a wet ring on the speckled laminex.

‘New in town from where?' she asked, pausing in the turning long enough to spoon three sugars in.

‘Got enough diabetes there, luv?' Therese asked. When Jo didn't bite, Therese went on. The Goories were down from Brisbane, and not only new in town, but claiming native title over Tin Wagon Road and the surrounding valley. Twoboy and his brother Lazarus were
here to prove their claim with books and family trees and lawyers and argument by any means necessary.

Hooley dooley.
Hundreds of acres of previously uncontested country. The goonah around here was going to hit the fan and then some.

‘Did he crack onto you?' Jo wanted to know.

‘There was a hint of that,' Therese smiled, ‘till I put him straight about Amanda. I'm all in favour of a light refreshing male between serious relationships, but I told him we're together for the long haul, and he took it alright.' Well, well, well, thought Jo. A liberal blackfella her own age, single, gorgeous, and in her town. Unfuckingbelievable. She briefly scanned the horizon for flying pigs.

‘So how'd you meet em?' Jo said, lifting her aching, grimy feet up onto the kitchen table and not caring if it was rude cos it was Therese and she was as much a sister to her as Kym was, and non-judgemental with it, as a good Buddhist should be. And plus, anyway, she shoulda asked her along to this meeting on Monday morning. It was altogether too cheeky not to. Therese wasn't even a blackfella and here she was knowing the good goss before Jo. Came of being a teacher – she heard everything off the kids. Talk about wikileaks, they had nothing on Ocean Shores Primary.

‘Oh, someone told Laz that Amanda's good with websites, and he wanted some help with theirs,' Therese said. ‘She's gonna do it up for them on Saturday. We were thinking of offering them the spare room for a bit, actually.'

Jo sucked air through her teeth in alarm.

‘What?' Therese reacted.

‘I hope you know what you're getting into. Sticking your oar in.'

‘It's just a website,' Therese waved Jo's anxiety away. ‘Anyway, what's the point of talking up Goorie rights if ya won't actually get involved?'

‘Yeah, and there could be a fucken huge war between all the blackfellas around here for the next fifty years, too, while they work the native title out,' said Jo. ‘Do you really want to be
involved
in that?' Therese had no idea what went down between blackfellas when land
was at stake. Think Gaza, she warned her. Think Custer's Last Stand.

‘Ah, you worry too much,' Therese laughed.

‘Bullshit, I do,' Jo retorted.

Several days later, the horses were installed in their brand-new paddock. Straightaway Jo threw her right leg over Athena, and eased down onto the smooth brown leather of her favourite old stock saddle. Her feet found the stirrups and her body remembered, for the ten thousandth time, the feeling of a horse between her knees. The mare fought against the bit, though, wanting to get free to scratch her foreleg. Jo let the leather reins slide through her fingers so that Athena could stretch and use her teeth on the offending itch. But afterwards the horse began swishing her tail in irritation, sidestepping away from the gate to Tin Wagon Road. Jo shortened the reins, bridging them on the mare's mane, and dug her heels in.
You will do as I say and not what you feel like.
Athena tossed her head in dissent, her tail going like a semaphore. A hind leg lashed out in anger, striking nothing but air.

‘Whattya you been doing with this yarraman?' Jo asked Ellen, who was standing beside the bathtub that now held the horses' drinking water. The kid had a list of Saturday jobs a mile long to get through before she could escape back to her room. Ellen was morose as she wove the end of the hose through five strands of barbed wire so that the slow drip would fill the tub.

‘Riding her.' Duh.

‘Well, she's got the manners of a frigging racehorse all of a sudden,' Jo snapped, finally getting the gate open and riding through. ‘Bugger off, you idiot,' she said, clapping loudly at Comet who was approaching the half-open gate with interest. The colt propped and snorted, and paused long enough for Jo to lean sideways, far out of the saddle, and slide the chain end over its silver knob, securing the paddock. Comet was altogether puzzled to suddenly find the steel gate between himself and his mother.