The bouncing stones

M I C HAEL S M AL L, W RITER MONDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2011

THE BOUNCING STONES ‘Coming up on your right, just below the level of the road, you might catch a glimpse of the Bouncing Stones,’ said Ivy, whose rollicking intonation had suddenly quietened into solemnity. ‘They stretch from under the bank across the beach towards the sea. This is a very sensitive place to my people, so I cannot show the Stones to you. The Bouncing Stones have a very sacred significance.’

‘Exactly what is their significance?’ asked Jeanelle, an art teacher from Pimble, dashing off notes and sketches in the back seat of the 4WD bus, feeling much more comfortable out bush than passing through communities uncared-for, slums, dwellings trashed.

‘Even I don’t know their meaning. This is a woman’s place, but I am not allowed into this sacred site without an elder.’

‘What do the Stones look like?’ Jeanelle persisted, a picture of henges, sarsens and bluestones coming to mind.

‘They are smooth stones of black granite, round or flat. White people throw them, crack them open, steal them for their private collections. This man in Sydney wrote me a letter saying sorry he’d done wrong, how he was returning one of the Stones because it was bringing him bad luck.’

‘Oh, what sort of bad luck?’ perked up Lisa, who’d been called ‘white trash’ by two Aborigine girls in the Alice. Her T-shirt proclaimed a sociology student from Michigan State.

‘Half his house burnt down,’ said Ivy, matter-of-fact.

From the seats behind, she heard laughter of breathy surprise and ‘Serve him right!’

‘The Stones are just around this bend.’

Instead, stood a gang of road workers from Dougal Shire Council. A STOP sign was held against the bus by a striking figure with ginger hair and ruddy complexion, two others watching a grader gouge out the orange soil and scrub and saplings and vines from the embankment, swivel and dump the debris into a truck.

Jeanelle was fidgeting sideways in her seat to sketch a pile of Bouncing Stones, but the other nine passengers were riveted by the navvies’ slow charade.

Ivy had shrunk low in the front seat next to her driver. Only that morning she’d explained how her people snapped twigs, a subtle gesture, or small branches to tell their family which track they’d taken.

Now the grader was scooping up a mass of tender growth in its clutches, grinding and gnashing.

Ivy’s gaze was fixed straight ahead. Another vicious land-grab, but she must keep silent. To her immediate right lay the forbidden Bouncing Stones.

A wave of sadness had knocked her flat, like the bay of Barramundi Dreaming churned up by the unusually wet, windy weather and the additional run-off from the mountains.

There was a wave of anger getting up too, anger that she had to push down. We are the traditional owners, she’d remind herself several times a day, but she was grimly determined to prove that black people and white people could get along. Wasn’t she demonstrating this in her choice of business partner, her driver Tommy, who she was teaching the old ways? Better than him pushing a lawnmower for low government wages. He wasn’t a full blood like herself, perhaps one eighth part; to be truthful; he had the face of a melancholy Mediterranean gangster, but he’d knocked about with the Aborigines of Redfern.

Ivy had read the wind years ago. So many of my people have sold out: petrol sniffing, wife-bashing, drunken violence, child-sex abuse. We must get off welfare, get onto jobs with wages. Develop some business sense to grow our townships, our pride,

pride in our Koori culture.

Tommy was growing impatient, she sensed. She didn’t need a calendar tree to measure the delay, fifteen minutes. With eyes of dull curiosity, Ivy followed the lumbering movements of these white men in their brown ankle-high work boots and blue shorts, their cowboy hats that hardened and distanced them. One man, perhaps out of boredom or sudden impulse, sliced off a sapling with his machete and tossed it on to the orange mud for the grader to grab. The passengers raised a cheer and ‘Your taxes at work!’

Staying silent, she couldn’t help but wonder if the STOP sign was held against her personally, hunched but exposed in the front seat below her own logo: Native Safari Tours. Ivy, whose first name was graciously given by a pastor’s wife, and the second, Dougal, by the Shire itself, had tried not to think about Stop. But the sign had a very hard face. It brought back that day of terror when the police had raided the Mission and burnt down their huts, forced her clan at gun-point to disperse around Mossman. There was no room for her among the large Aborigine families. Her tracker father had the knowledge, though she had lost it, to rig up a hut of paperbark secured by saplings.

She recalled filling in countless job applications, fruitless in Queensland, as it turned out. Only on Groote Eylandt was she allowed any formal education, training as a dental nurse. Dead set on helping her own people and show white people something of her culture, she walked the streets of Cairns for three days, knocking on doors, but the tourist agencies raised eyebrows at her proposals for tours. Right, she would knock them all dead, prove them all wrong, a hungry black dog scrapping for a bone from Aboriginal Services.

‘Think positive,’ she’d say to Tommy, as they’d cruised around Mossman, Daintree, Port Douglas, searching for a booking agent.

‘Why don’t we try this moke hire place?’ said Tommy, ever gloomy.

‘No, it doesn’t feel right. But pull in by that dive shop. They’ll help us.’

Which Meg and Barry did, with an enthusiasm for brochures and personal visits to

travel agents not warranted by the size of their commission. It wasn’t long before agitated tour operators moved in faster than a crocodile closing jaws on a brolga in the mangroves.

‘Ivy Dougal?’

‘Hello, yes, I’m Ivy Dougal.’

‘As a special consideration, we’ll build a viewing platform above the Bouncing Stones to protect them. As long as you lift the closure.’

‘But these Stones are sacred.’

‘Listen, Ivy Dougal, whoever you are, we’ve printed thousands of fliers promising a stop at the famous Bouncing Stones.’

‘But you can’t even skim these Stones across water.’ Though hundreds of boys, small and middle-aged, had skipped to their hearts’ content. ‘And the Stones aren’t famous.’

‘They are now. These brochures say so. Our clients expect a hands-on, look-see, feelgood experience.’

‘I haven’t even set eyes on the Bouncing Stones myself.’

‘So what are they really worth to you then, eh? Why go through all this hassle to reclaim them?’

‘For thousands of years the Bouncing Stones have been sacred to my people. They make a connection between important places. Within a few months, you have broken that connection.’

‘How do you expect to educate us white fellas if you have cut off access?’

‘There are certain places that exist beyond knowledge.’

‘We saw your mug on the tele, Ivy, and you’re poison. We’ll shoot you on the spot if you continue to close off those bloody Stones.’

Until that bullet struck home, she would resist, she would continue her mission.

‘Cooee, Ivy!’ said Jeanelle. ‘That road sign. Are there many cassowaries round here? I did the Habitat yesterday and saw a young one, Cassie.’

‘No, you won’t see hardly any,’ said Ivy. ‘Which is very sad, as the cassowary is the Good Angel to my people. Their numbers are declining. They get tipsy from the overflow of fermented sugar, then get run over by cars.’ Another battle she had won, to protect the Egg of the Cassowary, a giant rock shelter which the shire authorities had planned to dynamite. Should she tell the white people, her customers, these things?

Many was the time Ivy saw the fig tree drop anchor, its steel chains binding round the host tree and wrenching it from its moorings in the dank earth, the trunk forged in hideous directions. Yet a light always shone through the gap in the rainforest canopy, new shoots would spring towards that light, the choked tree would have scattered its seed.

We must not allow ourselves to be strangled any longer, she knew. I have taught these white people . . . no, I have shown these white people the old ways, how to find a food-animal in a hollow tree trunk by tipping a stick with glue from the milky pine, poking it around inside the trunk to see what kind of fur clings to the stick. I have shown them where the feral pig rubs smooth the bole of a tree and the brush turkey scratches for food. I have shown them how to find witchetty grubs in the candlenut tree, how to make baskets from the pandanus, how to dye a dilly bag. Above all, I have shown them how to listen to the cry of the bird that warns of the snake nearby.

The Rainbow Serpent must surely be satisfied.

‘I want to see a real croc,’ whined the youngest of the party. ‘Not just a pretend one like at the Radisson.’

Ivy’s laughter broadened out, fluttering into high-pitched gales, a pattern not unlike the mounting mania of the kookaburra.

‘One of my totems is the crocodile, explained Ivy. ‘As a child before the sugar cane came to the rainforest, I used to play on a swing made from the loy vine above the Daintree River. Whenever a crocodile swam beneath me, my father would speak to him quietly in his language, so the crocodile would never harm me.’

‘Is she going to eat more of those green ants, Mum?’ ‘No, that’s for when you have a cold,’ shrieked Ivy. ‘They taste like lemon. You make lemon tea from the green ants nest.’

All of a sudden, the tourists cheered and clapped. A loaded lorry was harrumphing away and the worker as lollipop signalled GO. Which Tommy promptly did, splashing orange mud at the gang standing hands on hips, glaring at the driver with his touch of the tar and Aborigine sidekick.

Ivy looked straight ahead at the mist of rain on the mountain, felt the moisture soothe the tension from her face and switched on the microphone. ‘Now let me tell you another story, shall I, how the tail of the dingo became Snapper Island . . .

From his spa, Vin McAlloon could only just make out the Devil’s Thumb pointing to reefs of low cloud. Pulses of hot water eased the damp screws in his back. He wouldn’t be cutting any more cane that day, the rain had set in well and truly. The silver spears of the wispy cane flower were tossing rather than bending in the breeze above glistening green leaves, pale green leaves wrapping the stems. Six yellow wagons, three filled with stems of cut cane, half left empty, stood idle on the railway line. Always in the past the cane harvest lifted his spirits, that very moment before razing the tall, ripe stems to the rich-red soil.

But the harvest was unusually wet this year. The rain country, his sugar dreamtime, now hung in streaks of grey: ghostly vapour trails; long, smoky spirals resembling the burning-off of three-year old stems; the pale-to-faint shrouds that blanketed the mountains.

For some months he had been feeling uneasy. There was talk in the community,

political talk. It made him think a bit. His house for a start. Thirty years ago he had reclaimed a swamp and built on the hill above it. On the slope he planted coconut and fan palms above stands of melaleuca. While he was pegging and measuring the foundations, a part-Aborigine showed him some bones, even had the nerve to inform him he was doing wrong building on an Aboriginal burial ground.

‘Boss, the dead bodies were wrapped in paper bark and placed on a platform.’

‘My oath, these are bullock bones!’

‘Would you build on a white man’s cemetery, boss?’ the half-black said, in a tone more off-hand than insolent.

‘Keep your trap shut or lose your job!’

Over the years he’d mounted a collection of Aboriginal artifacts that’d be worth a few bob: axes, grinding stones, spears, even a wooden shield. And now he’d been approached, bold as brass, by some old cockroach, Ivy Dougal – what sort of Abo name was that, for God’s sake? – who wanted to return them to her people in Mossman. Of course, he’d hold on to them. They were his to keep. Even found some of them on his own property.

‘The path to your house, sir, fills me with uneasiness. I noticed when I walked up,’ said Ivy. ‘It’s made of Bouncing Stones.’

‘What, those odd bits of rock? I did pick up a couple of bucket loads off the beach.

Everybody does. The Council was widening that stretch of road.’

‘You shouldn’t of done that, Mr McAlloon. These are the Bouncing Stones. They are sacred to my people. You must give them back straightaway. Otherwise they will bring you nothing but bad luck.’

‘I hope you’re not threatening me!’

‘No, sir, but something may happen. I feel it.’

‘I’m not superstitious.’

‘My people are speaking to a solicitor about our stolen property.’

‘I don’t care a monkey’s brass razoo.’

The rain, a fine drizzle that morning, was now sheeting down across the valley.

Through the steam of his cosy spa, Vin caught sight of a skink, the outward throb of its belly adding a silver line to the wall, then noticed a crack in the cornice, a hairline fissure running zig-zag that he had never noticed before.

Michael Small July 8 – July 9, 1993 P O S T E D B Y MICH A EL A T 02:53 EMAIL THISBLOGTHIS!SHARE TO TWITTERSHARE TO FACEBOOK

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SNUFFLING FOR BLACK GOLD

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THE SCORN OF BECKY PILBEAM

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THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR

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WHERE THERE’S A WILL

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A LEGEND LAUNDERED

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BRIEFED FOR BERLIN

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ROAD TO KAROL BAGH

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CYCLONE CORAL

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A BITTER SPACE

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BEYOND THE GIRRAHWEEN STEPS

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THE BOUNCING STONES

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PUSKAS

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HER MASTER’S VOICE

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M’CRACKEN’S GHOST

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HOMEWARD BOUND

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SOVRAN KING

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L’OSSESSIONE

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ALICE SAFARI

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