RETURN TO COUNTRY

‘Bring him to me,’ said Kurdaitcha, their executioner, I …

           ‘Yes,’ said Papinijuwari. ‘Then I will feed on his dead body.’

           The spirit group were affronted and convened a meeting. They had intervened but the old bike man still lusted for their sacred objects and kept his ways. There was a more immediate concern because a woman had accepted ancestral bones removed from their burial place above the river. The return of these bones would be their focus, then they would deal with the old man.

           Sue lived on the river’s edge of the community. The property had a back gate, entry to a track that gave access to river sand for the concrete used by contractors. The day before a truck had retrieved a load. It was her day off and late in the morning the phone rang.

‘Hello, Sue speaking,’ she said.

‘Sue, it’s Jessie from the building contractors.’

‘What can I do for you Jessie?’

‘Some help I hope, some advice, but I’m not sure. Yesterday the men found human bones in the sand by the river, and my Indigenous workers are very worried. There’s a skull, a leg bone, some other bones, and I’ve put them all into a box. We haven’t told anyone, but I’m quite concerned.’

           ‘That’s alarming news Jessie, and I couldn’t agree more. There’s been a few rumours about that area, so please ask the men to keep it to themselves for now and reassure them I’ll do what’s right. Leave it with me and I’ll get back to you before the end of the day.’

           ‘Okay, but sooner rather than later if you can manage it.’

           Sue paced the room after the phone call, then lay down to relax and think. She supported Aboriginal culture and beliefs and though not a true believer, had heard a few local and unnerving stories.

           She began to recall the details … then felt being led elsewhere, her eyes drawn to the windows facing the lawn, where an Indigenous man appeared and looked in.

           He was the most handsome man she had ever seen; tall, narrow at the waist and hips, broad shouldered, muscular, and wearing nothing but a loin cloth. With black, curly hair and dark irises that contrasted with the crisp white of his eyes, he stood on his left leg, held a spear upright in his right hand, while the foot of his right leg rested on his left knee. Statuesque, he spoke when he had Sue’s attention.

           ‘I am Malingee,’ he said. ‘I want the bones returned.’

           She jumped from the bed and went to the window, only to find him gone. Unbelievable! Was he real or did I dream him, she thought? More than anything she knew what to do, and with urgency, rang her husband.

           ‘Bill, it’s me. I need you to leave work and go to Jessie at the work site. His men found bones in the sand from down the back, and they must be returned and reburied as soon as possible.’

           ‘Roger that,’ he replied without question.

Relieved, Sue hung up. Thank God, she thought, I have a husband who can be relied on in an emergency and trusts my instincts.

           That evening the family reburied the bones with a small ceremony. At the time Sue imagined Malingee nodded, turned and walked away.

           Malingee’s magic worked on the respectful woman, now to the old bike man. They had watched and knew his contributions to the community. The majority wanted to teach him a lesson and encourage the return of their artefacts to country. Finally, Bluetongue Lizard and Bamapana, the tricksters in their group, and Mamu, the dreadful dingo spirit, produced a plan to use as a last resort, with Mamu the appointed Watcher.

An hour from home, this was the furthest David had ridden. Wet season rains had weathered and eroded the sedimentary landscape into wide plains and valleys surrounded by flat topped hills capped with sandstone. This dual pathway left the main track at a right angle and traversed sandy plains full of gullies and scrubby bushland. There were gibber deserts with their assortment of stones, and pebbles that shined metallic with sand licked lustre, while empty creek beds waited. During the dry season cattle trudged head to tail, and single lane paths that were easily navigated on a mountain bike, crisscrossed the landscape.

He loved it here. The stunning landscape, the never ending trails, the challenges and second wind at the halfway mark of a thirty kilometres ride at seventy years of age, which had him flying on the return home; dodging rocks, termite mounds and limbs from lifeless trees. He was Peter Pan!

           David rode daily, and soon learned to look down because the rills, runs and sandy ravines from the wet were an ever changing hazard he wanted to avoid. He rode at speed and enjoyed the cooling wind when he sped past something familiar, braked and leapt from the bike. The piece of stone was around fifteen centimetres long, three centimetres wide, flat on one end and a pointed curve the other. The rocks in the area were sandstone but this was more crystalline. A sharp tap, tap, tap with another rock and the ding, ding, ding confirmed it was quartzite, metamorphosed sandstone, hard and likely a stone tool.

At ten years of age his father gave him four artefacts from the tilled soil of a market garden on the hills that overlooked the Tamar River in Tasmania. He never tired of finding a well-crafted stone tool, and there was a palpable excitement as a visual check was completed. Flat percussion platform at one end, check, point of percussion, check, fissure lines, check, worked and shaped cutting edges on one side only, check. He turned it over and over, caressed, and examined it as you would a gold nugget found prospecting, and smiled as it went into the back pocket of his riding jersey, then turned and headed home.

           As the teacher he loved sharing his knowledge of stone tools to Indigenous children, so the next day showed the class and discovered they had no idea about ancestral cutting tools. He taught what to look for and was pleased days later when several students returned with their own found at the billabong and in the sand by the river where they fished. The billabong was well known to the children for its freshwater crocodile eggs and now had a greater meaning. During recess he shared the find with Lily, one of the Indigenous assistants. She frowned, suddenly serious.

           ‘You need to be careful,’ she said. ‘My son knows bad stuff about a young man who took away something like that. You should have left this on country.’

           ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he said. ‘I showed the kids, and they knew nothing about this part of their culture.’

           ‘I wouldn’t take the chance,’ she said seriously. ‘I’ll get my son to come and talk to you. Just make sure it’s returned.’

The next day, her son Tony dropped into school to see the artefact.

           ‘This is a good one,’ he said seriously. ‘Let me tell you a story in case you’re tempted to keep it. A young bloke was here from France and found a stone axe with part of an old handle and took it back to his country. Not long after it came back in a box with a note from his mate who’d been here with him. This young bloke was no sooner home, and he fell sick and died.’

           David was unsure how to respond but nodded, very aware of Tony’s message. He knew himself though; he was a definite sceptic of a God or spirits.

           That weekend David rode to an area of sculptured sandstone boulders. They were all shapes and sizes, but mostly rounded and layered, and four in a group, balanced atop weathered and eroded soil pedestals like enormous mushrooms. Smooth, silver barked, and leafless coolamon gums grew among them and made for picture perfect photographs.

           He spent time there, wandered amongst the boulders and appreciated the sheer beauty of landforms created over thousands of years.

           By the path back to his bike, an artefact caught his eye. It seemed too small to be of use; triangular, pointed and only two centimetres long and one centimetre wide. The two edges that met at the tip had regular, one-millimetre-long teeth, exactly one millimetre apart. The edges were perfect and so consistently uniform, they could not have been made with the explosive impact of a percussion tool. Its maker had used subtle, pointed pressure, a bone perhaps, which suggested patience and skill. It was an amazing piece, a work of art, and went into his back pocket.

           David turned for a last look, then startled, surprised with a lingering sense the multitude of big rocks were spirits of the dead and guardians of this special place.

           He took a circuitous route home via a dry, rocky creek bed, walked the bike over, rode up a steep section, and came to a near standstill at the top. It was there he fell sideways and landed with his full weight onto the hard ground. He hobbled with his bike for a while then capitulated and rang his wife for a lift. Stiff and sore the next day he limped to work with the aid of a wooden staff. Lily saw him arrive, took one look, and knew what had happened.

‘I told you so,’ she said. ‘You have artefacts that need to be returned to country.’

           There were more falls; three in the most unexpected places. The first required stitches and follow up because of a bad skin infection, the second a sore back for months and never forgotten when he sat up in bed. The final and most serious was in Tasmania. He rode along a footpath, ducked under a small tree, only to run into a wheelie bin. Too slow to react, the fall was impossible to avoid and down he went and fractured his left femur.

It sometimes felt the country wanted him to fail and fall, to be aware of his age, or something else. David flippantly told friends and family the wheelie bin was moved onto the footpath deliberately. Twenty weeks after recovery, his confidence returned, and he put all the mishaps down to age and inexperience.

David rode across a sand pan the year before had been bare. This year was different following an above average wet season, with dead grass everywhere, thick, and high. On a small patch of sand in the grass he saw a stone and knew instinctively there was something unnatural about its shape and markings. He focused on the spot and backtracked. The stone was very heavy, hard, flat, and black, with a well-worn, straight, grooved depression that had caught his eye. He touched a finger to the groove and followed it around the stone as he turned it over. It was contiguous and ran around just below the flat top of the stone. At the opposite end fractures and jagged edges created the cutting tip of a stone axe head.

‘Yes!’ he yelled to no one in particular.

Yet Mamu heard and watched!

This was his best find, excitement tempered a little by unwelcome memories from the earlier warnings. Undaunted, he tucked the artefact into the back of his bike top and continued along what was a straightforward section the previous year, exhilarated and keen to mark this season’s safest trails.

           Too late! Where there had been none there was now a wide, deep channel directly in front of him. In and down went the front wheel and over he went.

‘Damn and hell!’ he shouted, as he sat up and checked for injuries.

           There was nothing broken, only grazed, broken skin, and a trickle of blood. Ejected into the long grass, the axe head had been well hidden and required a thorough search before being found. Unabashed, it was returned to where it belonged, and went on his way.

           Mamu watched and was disappointed with the outcome.

           Branches swished and tugged at clothes as the bike bounced over stones and past bushes on the narrow trail. On the headwind there was the smell of something dead, then a large, bloated shape appeared through the trees off to the left, and into focus came a dead brahman bull. That was not all, David was astounded to see pigs and dingoes, a celebration of carnivores as they vied manically for morsels from the carcass.

           Unafraid, a large, adult dingo seemed apparent as supervisor, then watched and tracked his progress as the other animals scurried into the scrub. David felt him, and unsettled and a little scared, peddled faster to put distance between the affray and his bike.

           With the smell gone, and the animals left behind, he rode down and over the deeply grooved, sandstone creek bed. It was the dry season and easily negotiated by four wheel drive vehicles, but daunting on a mountain bike. The bike bounced across the bumpy rocks, dodged loose stones, and moved over a branch that flicked up and speared through the spokes and stopped the bike dead. These out-of-control falls had happened many times, with reflexes always too slow to stop the fall, and down he went, thud and darkness.

           David woke blurry eyed and disoriented, and in the faded light, knew he had been unconscious for some time. He lay on his back on an altar of sandstone slabs, and gingerly pulled one leg out from under the bike, sat up, while his head throbbed and spun. He checked for injuries and knew there was nothing broken. Then déjà vu, as he became aware of a putrid smell on the evening breeze.

He listened; heard rocks moved, and animals that snuffled and snarled. David turned and saw four of them as they sniffed in his direction, led by the big adult seen earlier. A trickle ran down the side of his head, confirmed as blood by the wipe of his fingers. The dingoes approached, eyes on him, with noses that tilted, twitched, and tasted his scent.

From their darkness beyond, feral grunts and squeals of anticipation and bridled restraint, heralded a worse nightmare. The Anthony Hopkins movie and predatory pigs appeared in a flash as sweat from his beaded brow ran down cheeks and dripped from his chin. Frantic, he looked for defence and found the branch that had caused the fall. It was light, long, and strong, and perfect as a staff.

He felt for his phone, and while distracted, a young dingo made a rush, then howled in retreat at the hard rap on its sensitive nose. David scooted backwards and lent with his back against the sandstone wall that ran alongside the creek. He took his time and with eyes on the four, retrieved the phone. There was no reception and at a loss, screamed at the group.

           ‘Ayah, scat, go!’ he yelled, with a flurry of thrown rocks.

           The smaller animals trotted off a distance, but to his dismay the big adult sat, watched, and waited. He threw more rocks that hit, but the dingo just flicked its head, unaffected. It growled; eyes rigidly fixed.

           ‘What do you want?’ David yelled.

Another growl, loud and purposeful, then a decision dawned. He reached at his back, removed the axe head, and presented it at arm’s length in supplication.

           ‘Is this it?’ he implored.

           ‘Bark, bark!’ Louder, with red eyes unmoved.

           David knew what was needed; rose with the help of his staff, and with a swing of an arm, sent the axe head spinning into the scrub.

A final yelp, and the big dingo trotted after the artefact, followed in procession by the others.

Mamu released the filthy ferals from their darkness, and the dingoes to country. The group’s plan finally came together, with this white man’s arrogance, and disrespect almost his undoing.

David lifted and pushed his bike to the top of the bank. Where there had been none, there were now three bars on his phone. Exhausted and totally spent, he knew he was safe, and what he would be doing with his other artefacts.

Though they never met, Sue and David were inexorably connected, and neither was ever a Doubting Thomas again.

Some were aggrieved, but there were mostly satisfied smiles within the spirit group.