Jedda Gondiwindi Character Analysis

[…] he was telling her that there was a lot to remembering the past, to having stories, to knowing your history, your childhood, but there is something to forgetting it too. […] He was telling her more—that a footprint in history has a thousand repercussions, that there are a thousand battles being fought every day because people couldn’t forget something that happened before they were born. There are few things worse than memory, yet few things better, he’d said. Be careful.

Her mouth ached for something more, wanted some unknown balm, not a kiss, or a meal, or a drink, but something long denied. Since she was a girl the ache had scratched further inside her, for something complete to rest at her tongue, her throat. The feeling that nothing was ever properly said, that she’d existed in a foreign land of herself. How she saw home through the eyes of everyone else but her. The feeling had begun before Jedda vanished.

What exactly she was looking for in the book, she couldn’t be sure. She felt, though, that Poppy had known something, had something to tell her. August felt that it was only he who had understood why she’d left without a word, yet he wouldn’t have himself left without a goodbye. She felt that her poppy had been the only one, unspoken as it was, who knew why she’d never stayed.

The book was second to food when August was little, then the book took the lead. […] But in every mobile-library book, she could never find herself or her sister. Never a girl like August and Jedda Gondiwindi, not ever.

I was buried by scripture, but buoyed by hope, and so when we got our second spring, having two little daughters again in Jedda and August, we opened up Prosperous for all the people. The bula and I would go for long walks up to Kengal Rock. I’d explain how the old people walked up there through those same pastures, used their stone axe before White men brought their own metal axe, where lovers met and they left marks on trees […] Bula would look up at me at those times, eyes wide, all the wonder in the world bustling in their minds. They are my fondest memories, showing bula what great people they came from long ago.

A word came into her mind, fully-formed, she knew what it meant—burral-gang—the brolga. She didn’t know how she knew the word but she knew it. Burral-gang. The brolgas finished their dance. It was [Jedda], dancing. […]

She closed her eyes, a dam had broken, broken their little hearts, hearts born as fragile as clay. With her hands flat on the dry dirt and her eyes blinded with tears, she felt as if she were back home, back on the land she belonged to. At the same time, she thought that this was the saddest place on earth.

“What’s animism?”

“When you believe that the earth—and all living things—are alive with ancestors, with spirits.”

“Is that what you believe?”

She looked at the book. “I think so.”

“Why’d your pop have it, you reckon?”

She smiled widely, “I think he was trying to save the farm.”

“How would he have done that, you think?”

“Dunno, reckon he was trying to explain how the land is special?” Eddie raised his eyebrows for August to go on. “I just remember how much he loved, truly loved, the land, the property.”

I’m done with this word. I’d leave it out completely but I can’t. It’s become part of the dictionary we think we should carry. We mustn’t anymore. See, pain travels through our family tree like a songline. We’ve been singing our pain into a solid thing. The old ones, the young ones too, are ready to heal. We don’t have to be giyal-dhuray anymore, we don’t have to pass that down anymore.