Collective Trauma, Memory, and Guilt Theme Analysis

A dictionary, even if this language isn’t mine alone, even if it’s something we grow into and then, living long enough, shrink away from. I am writing because the spirits are urging me to remember, and because the town needs to know that I remember, they need to know now more than ever before.

[…] 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.

Poppy used to call the Murrumby River the Big Water, and it had once flowed through the country, from state to state, south to north. August’s memory of the river was faint since the water had ceased flowing since she was a girl, and not just because of the Dam Built but because of the Rain Gone. And some say because enough people cry water in this whole region, Murrumby thinks she’s not needed at all.

Yield itself is a funny word—yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land, the thing he’s waited for and gets to claim. A wheat yield. In my language it’s the things you give to, the movement, the space between things. It’s also the action made by Baiame, because sorrow, old age, and pain bend and yield.

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.

That vile inhumanity practiced by the white-skinned Christian on his dark-skinned brother in order to obtain land and residence, for “peaceful acquisition”—that includes capture, chains, long marches, whipping, death on the roadside, or, if surviving all these—the far more terrible fate—being sold like brutes of the field as unpaid labor to the highest bidder.

“Joe mentioned Native Title. That he talked with Pop about claiming the land.”

“Couldn’t ever happen—I’ll tell you why—there’s no artifacts. No water in Murrumby, no fish—and fishing would mean Nana, or whoever’s living here, would have a cultural connection to the land to maintain, the…well, ‘resources’—okay? Another thing, there’s no language here. Our people’s language is extinct, no one speaks it any more so they can tick that box on their government form that says ‘loss of cultural connection.’ You see?”

“Poppy taught us some.”

“Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes song? Yeah, he taught me that too. But I mean language that is connected to this place, this landscape.”

“Nana told me last night Poppy was writing a dictionary.”

Aunt Nicki shook her head before she answered. “Even if he was writing it, won’t change anything. They grew up on the Mish, remember, and language wasn’t allowed.”

They were returning to make peace. I’d give them a cuppa, and if they felt like it, a walk around the property. They’d tell me how they tracked the place down, how they remembered being here. Some were old enough to remember my mother. They were freeing themselves from their lives of good grace or misery—either way, they needed to see where everything began for them. I would talk with them, would nod and acknowledge them. That’s what the old, returning people wanted, someone there to receive them, believe them, help, in some way, to put the pieces together.

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.”

“You hate religion—that’s original. What about all the churches and paintings and poetry?”

“What about all the wars?”

“I’m having déjà vu. I think I’ve had this conversation a hundred times and I still think humans would have warred and slaughtered each other with or without religion.”

“Over land?” he turned and looked at her with a gravity, but also a question. He moved back to the bookshelf. “Or race wars?”

“Yeah, and even if we all had the same skin tone, it’d be language, and then even if we spoke the same language, it’d be eye shape, nose length, people with thick hair…”

I acknowledge that [other prisoners] endured a terrible fate: their family bonds broken, businesses shut down, and livelihoods taken from them—but they haven’t become the enemy to two crowds.

I retired to my hut during the days when I heard the wagon and vehicles arriving to take the children away. I kept pressing upon the residents that my hands were bound, that I could not do a thing against the Law. They ceased to address me fondly as gudyi and turned from me, as they should have, as I deserved, with a deep and wounding contempt.

The books say a civilization must meet four criteria: it must show house building, domestication of animals, agricultural activity, and reverence for the dead. Reverence for the dead, this is the carving on the trees, this is the ceremony, the care. The Gondiwindi didn’t throw them in the earth and walk away. […] It seems when I ask the ancestors, they show me many places—too many unmarked gravesites all over this country—and they cry, and say they weren’t responsible. But when the ancestors were in charge of their living and dead bodies they can find the spot, and we take flowers to those holy places. We have always been a civilization, us.

The three of them broke from a giggle to belly laughs. August felt there, felt effortlessly at home, felt as if a vibration were being shared between the three generations of women. Felt as if she might laugh that way, on Prosperous, after everything, after death and theft and secrets and lies and the muddied water, and the diesel and the blood—after all that—she felt as if she was home. Belonged.

She was trying to figure out how people valued a thing, what made something revered while other things were overlooked. Who decided what was out with the old, what had to have a replacement? What traditions stayed and what tools, household items, art, things, evidence of someone, languages, fell away. But when she tried to draw a vague line to the artifacts of Prosperous she was stumped—why the artifacts of Middlesbrough were important and not those from home.

August wanted to hand the papers back and to tell them everything, draw them close and whisper that their lives had turned out wrong, that she and her family were meant to be powerful, not broken, tell them that something bad happened before any of them was born. Tell them that something was stolen from a place inland, from the five hundred acres where her people lived. She wanted to tell them that the world was all askew and she thought it was because of the artifacts, that she thought they should understand it was all so urgent now, that they knew truths now, to tell them that she wasn’t extinct, that they didn’t need the exhibition after all.

The words! What have we done by taking the words of our God and turning them on their heads for our own purposes? And I am of that number. What have I done, dear Dr. Cross, that I feel such guilt in replacing Baymee with the Lord? What right had I to erasure? What right did I have to say one belief begs another? What right does any person? What has man done to man?

To be isolated is to be unable to act. That’s what we were—isolated—from our family, from our language, from our cultural ways, and from our land. And then we were taken ngumbaay-dyil. But it wasn’t really that we were together, it just looked humane, a face in a crowd. But we were brutalized, we turned on each other, we were isolated in our humiliation but we couldn’t leave neither. […] We weren’t really all together in one place, we weren’t residents in those places, us kids on our cots, we were criminals by birth, inmates since we could walk. Together and isolated at once.

“And then we’re all migrants here, even those first-fleet descendants; we forget we’re all in someone else’s country. And too often we don’t have the vision, the respect, to bother learning the native language! To even learn to respect the culture where we live.”

“Because it doesn’t make life easier?” August asked.

“Because we have to learn it’s personal—we learn that through looking after the land. That we’ll all continue not really having a collective identity unless we take a long and hard look back and accept the past and try to save the land we live on…that’s what I think.”

Maybe you are looking for a statue, or a bench by the banks of the Murrumby to honor the people who have lived by the river. Better, there is water returning, nudging what was dead. Better the burral-gang congregate here often. Better these words and better we are still here and that we speak them.

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.