Once, there was a mother, Ninija, who had a baby boy called Bijada, Emu child. Only much later, when he grew and sprouted hair, did he take the name ‘ginger’ because of his crinkly ginger-coloured hair. He was almost too big to be kept in her dilly bag like all the other children, his long legs with their bulging knees stuck out such a long way. As he grew, he loved to spend time with the Emus, running after them and copying their long legs. Bijada and his mother moved around the Lands following the ever-turning wheel of the seasons and the migration of the Emus from best spot to best spot. The tall, curious Emus were never very far away from Ninja and her Emu boy. They, too, followed the seasons of mother and Bijada, watching for their kisses, tears, pranks and tiredness and inhaling the delicious Casuarina smoke from the Fires they made.
As Landowner it was Mother’s responsibility to make Fire to tell her People that she was visiting a Dreaming site, for she must look after the Land sites of her People’s Dreaming Heroes. And again, she would make Fire when she used her boomerang to kill one of the Emus so that she and Bijada could cook and feed, only killing sick or injured birds or those who were pecked because they were in some way different to the others so that they were pecked. Or if a Bird was elderly and vulnerable to opportunist Dingos or Black Vulture.
Bijada squealed with joy when mother got her elaborately decorated small boomerang out of its roo pouch sown together with papyrus thread.
She taught him to be as quiet as a sleeping frog while she got into position, ready to stun her prey on her first throw. She knew exactly how far away to squat and how much force to apply to her throw, often, depending on the Wind, throwing in the opposite direction from her prey. Once she had launched her hand-made boomerang, their black eyes would follow its outlandish route, transfixed by the sound of its spinning whirr. When the target Bird had buckled at its bulging knees, killed instantly and painlessly, Bijada would ‘woop’ and ‘whirl’ himself around, pretending that he, too, was boomerang.
One Day on ninija Rock at the Great Python Waterhole during the height of the Dry season, Mother and Ginger drank and washed some of the orange dust of the Lands from their faces in the cool green and sacred Water, known to everyone as the tears of Rainbow Python, checking their faces in the clear reflection. Behind them, one of the pairs of their Emus was bending their blue necks and drinking too, looking with their round hazel eyes into the deep rock-sided pool and making sipping sounds as they filled up saucers of their beaks with cool tears and swallowed.
It was then that they both heard a strange growling, not of Dingo or Camel, their eyes meeting to register it in the waterhole mirror. Mother darted to the edge of the Rocks and looked down into the Desert. There, low in the Sky, she saw a small white Bird going down to land, and she instantly knew that the strange noise was coming from it.
She knew it was the white-fella’s Bird that carried People up into Air, but ginger had never seen it before. Bijada ran to her side to look, watching the white Bird put down its black feet to make a dust Cloud and stop. Then, as Bijada rubbed his eyes in disbelief, three white People got out of Bird’s stomach.
Mother and Bijada watched on and off from their high rocks, but mother did not make Fire not wanting white-fella to see them and come to take sacred Water from the secret hole. Bijada kept close, leaning against her hot black flesh as Sun slowly walked down to rest her blue cloak across Desert Sand. And old Moon was ripe like Desert Apple, and the white People climbed back inside the white Bird, and all was silent again. As darkness thickened, mother took their few things into the opening of a small Cave at the back of the Waterhole and wrapped Bijada in her Roo coat, singing his favourite Emu song until he made sleep. Then she went outside to watch the white Bird again.
A little later, the white man entered Bird and brought out three big rolls he opened around Fire. Mother had seen white-fella use these things before. They would climb inside so they were covered entirely, so they were under roof, and could never see the campfires in Sky, or feel Night’s embrace against their skin. She found it hard to understand why white people hid themselves away from the Great Mother. Much later, as mother slept with her deep breaths, still as a Pelican resting her empty beak on a twig, Bijada suddenly woke and crept out of the Cave to the edge of the Waterhole to watch with big, sleepy eyes.
The white man got up suddenly and went to white Bird’s belly. He returned to the campfire, slowly unrolling thin black Eel, which kept its tail inside Bird, and brought another box with handles. Soon, there were colours and lightning flashes coming from the box. Blue. Green.
Red. Orange. They flashed on, one after the other. Bijada could see the colours on their faces and thought it must be a box full of rainbows. The white fellas all big-smiled at each other, and next, the white man made more Koroboree, ritual music with the black box.
They all got up and started dancing, a strange slow dance that Bijada had never seen before, unlike Emu dance.
Bijada boy was fascinated thinking the Lightning men had placed their spiky fingers on white fella and filled them with Lightning, the way they did in the Lands in the Dry. He looked and looked, but he couldn’t be certain it was the Lightning Men. He stood up to run to ask mother, but he couldn’t stop watching the strange white-fella Desert ceremony. He crouched again to watch a little more, safe in the sound of mother’s resounding snores from nearby. The pair of Emus who always stayed closest to them were roosting together, their long legs folded beneath them, keeping watch over him. White fellas were really white ghosts, just like Mother always said, he thought. Maybe they were snake which had lost its skin.
The next Day the white People had gone when Mother woke up. The Emu pair had moved away from the Waterhole onto the ledge below. She was glad white-fella had packed up and flown back to white-fella Skies, so she immediately made Fire next to the Great Python Waterhole to let everyone know she was there.
Bijada came when he smelled the cooking of Emu eggs on the sizzling Rock, and as he ate them, he told mother about the visit of the Lightning men.
She listened but was surprised that she had not heard their noisy light show, so she doubted him. In the end, she told her Bijada boy that white-fella had his own way of making lights and noise and that it was different to the Desert way. She thought nothing more of it, and they soon packed up their few belongings and moved with the Emus across to the banks of the Green River, which was reduced to a trickle as the Dry reached its peak.
The years passed, and bijada grew and grew. He soon left mother to join the men for initiation, and then one Day, he was presented with his Churinga, his totem insignia, which meant he had become a man. It was made of shining grey Stone with several strange holes in it. Around the holes were the sacred painted circles of Bijada, Emu man. Eventually, partly because he was of ninija but mostly because he was so gentle and wise, he became keeper of the Bijada Churinga storehouse, which contained all the Churingas of his Country. He must look after them and learn all the names of all his Emu brothers.
He married Bandicoot, Desert Rat woman 1500 miles away, walking there along the songlines, collecting some songs to take to his new wife as a wedding gift. Mother did not see him for some years and had never met his wife, but she knew that she had a child and that the child was a girl-child. Then, on one appointed Day, ninija was ready to welcome ginger’s girl-child. She ambled with tired steps into the Lands, and her mother called her ‘little mother,’ for Jirubuga, Porcupine girl Gina, was to become the new Landowner when her mother ended her physical journey. Mother must teach her little mother everything.
But soon, mother also knew that Bijada had left his new Lands to find a new Dreaming of the flashing pictures in Lumaluma’s city. He had left with a large bottle at his side, plenty of greenbacks in his blue jeans pocket, and the tightened buckle of white man’s broad leather belt across his strong black abdomen. The elders rebuked him for no longer joining the rituals, not caring for the Emus, and not watching over the Churinga storehouse.
He did not seem to care about his People, so the elders asked him to leave. They told him that he could not share their Dreaming any longer.
They told him he must find his new Dreaming in Lumaluma’s city.
Mother cried. She talked to him with her deep voice across the Air. She begged him not to leave, warning him that the Sky Heroes would not let him go on with his Sky journey if he turned his back on them in this way. That white man also would not be able to help him, and in time he would be trapped alone in lumaluma’s city of empty white ghosts who stored fear in their blue eyes. She pleaded with him that white-fella had no Dreaming Ancestors or Lands like theirs and that instead, they had ‘Easy’ and ‘Happy’ and ‘Sexy.’ Once his Spirit was deep inside that big bottle, it would become a tiny insect slowly creeping down into a golden Sea where it sipped and sucked on and on, and it would become his very own secret golden Sea, but bijada, his Emu soul, would be nowhere in sight. Then soon he would not want anything else except nectar, ‘Easy’ and ‘Happy’ and ‘Sexy’ nectar.
But there were no ears or eyes in ginger, Bijada boy. He had already left the Lands.
Mother tried to remember and remember when lumaluma could have seeped into the Bijada boy.
She tried and tried. Then one Night, she suddenly remembered white Bird landing in the Desert beneath ninija Rock to make Koroboree, ritual music, and Bijada’s stories of the visit of Lightning men.
‘Those no Lightening men!
That lumaluma. He seep into that boy with flashing pictures and women wriggling in tight-skin clothes, and bright colour lights like Glow-worms and Beetles, and music made inside white-fella’s machines. Now Bijada has been called to make some new Dreaming in lumaluma’s city on him terms, with his Spirit inside that bottle which he sucks at all the time.’
Mother remembered so well how her Bijada boy had sucked at her, black on black.
‘Now he will suck on white mamma.’
‘Now he will cover up his beautiful black body with white-fella’s denim blue, cover his pink soles with white-fella’s white shoes, white socks. ‘
‘Now he will stick his rising Sun inside a thin white body, shedding his Bijada sunshine on white devil woman every morning. ‘
Precisely as she had predicted, she found Bijada in lumaluma’s city in clothes: white-fella’s denim sleeves and legs, white-fella’s plastic on his feet, and white-fella’s black scraped leather cap on his head. He had slid down the side of the tiny yellow telephone box enclosed on all sides by white-fella’s seeing Stone “glass,” on to white-fella’s floor, not Mother Earth’s skin. His black skin was scuffed and sweaty, his long legs folded beneath him, his wide mouth open and toothless.
Mother’s Spirit slid imperceptibly into the cubicle close against her slumped Emu boy. His ubiquitous bottle was propped up against his thin chest, empty, and one of his large black hands, just like mother’s but even bigger, carved with dried Emu boy blood, lay along the inside ground; the other was wedged up close to his ear grasping Lumaluma’s black plastic telephone. As Mother held him, wanting to tear away the ripped, stained shirt of Lumaluma, which covered his Desert skin, closing him away like Sand fall, she could hear the strange sounds like Gurrwayi Gurrwayi, the Storm Bird, coming out of the black telephone, on and on.
‘Waaah!’
‘Who inside that black telephone?’ she screamed.
But Lumaluma was ignoring the call.
