Some nights, the roo

Two solitary campers in the dunes at Antechamber Bay, our first night on the island. The moon is brightful overhead when I'm ripped from my dreams by the presence and weight of a kangaroo on me. A giant roo, so heavy, squashing. I lie with stillness for a long time. When I eventually drag myself up out of my canvas cocoon I can't see him, he's dissolved into the sheltering scrub. Disappointed, relieved, I burrow back into sleep. In the morning Robyn reports her encounter with a wombat when she ventured out for a midnight jish. But this was no wombat sitting on me, it was kangaroo. Something about that heavy tail, those thumper bumper feet, the sweet grassy breath.

The story of the scary teddy bear in the Flinders sidles into memory. A friend told as a child not to go to a certain gorge because it was home to a menacing giant teddy bear. Years later the forbidden gully offers up some remains. The bone men identify them as megafauna, like a dipro-doton or that giant wombat, can't remember what exactly, anyway, something big and furry with huge eyes, like a scary teddy bear.



At Snake Lagoon a few nights later I'm woken by someone crawling into my swag behind me. Alert, not alarmed. Maybe it's Robyn, maybe her tent's collapsed. Yet peeling myself up from the layers of bag and swag, I can't see anyone. Now I'm spooked, and jumpy when a possum races up and starts drinking as I'm jishing, snarling when I try to shoo it away. Later that night I wake again, cocoon drenched with dew. Lie awake for hours until the first sun dries out the nest, returning some sleep.

******

Chinese New Year three years earlier, another full moon, I'm heading to the supermarket at dusk. As I'm walking past the court house, the one with the nipple, I notice an Aboriginal guy coming my way. An clean-shaven older man, missing some teeth, very dark, wearing a red cap. He looks really familiar, resembles the peacemaker Uncle from the ancient salt lake where I'd slept so well in the sandy riverbed around the time of that Woomera business.



Where us raggedy mob were told by this Uncle, 'See that old hill over there, you can look at her from here and love her, appreciate her beauty, but you can't go there, you can't see her closer than this.'
Now my gaze connects with that of the man, and we begin stepping through a small ritual of recognition.



Hi! How have you been? How's everything, how's everyone over there? and so on.



We pull away from the warmth of bodies greeting, and it's about now that I realize that I don't recognise this guy, I've never seen him before, yep, he's a total stranger. Maybe he's coming to the same conclusion, who knows. But a connection's been established, and he's explaining that its his friend's birthday and he's buying some port to take back to the hostel to celebrate. He's hungry, and I share some dosh with him for Chinese food, and he asks if I want to sit down with him for a while. His name is John, I can't catch his last name, and he's a Larrakea man, from the Top End.



We find a bench in that little mall between the Hilton and the Court house and straight up he tells me, “We know stories about this place.”



Gesturing to Victoria Square, he says this was a place for ceremony but now it's all blocked off. Indeed it's surrounded by cyclone fencing and populated by tents, for yet another bike race or shitty Clipsal event.



We've got stories about this place, you should listen to me.



This was an important place for men, and back there – he's gesturing with his head and I'm figuring he's talking about back of the river – that was a special place for women.



The men would dance naked. And the women would dance naked.



We've got stories for this place. I know the stories about this place. And for the island.



He starts singing, giant spirit beings that travel through the country, from north to south, and then west, shaping the features of the land as they move through it.



The men were chasing a kangaroo, he jumped away, and that's how Kangaroo Island was formed.



For each story fragment he tells me, he sings the song for it in language. The song is similar each time, a refrain, repeated. Just the name of the animal changes.



Crow. Eagle. Kangaroo.



I'm trying to change my ears into radar, to capture each sound, to remember. The giant kangaroo is jumping, and wherever it lands, the imprints from its feet and tail create salt lakes.



He's singing and he's talking and he's telling me emphatically – you should be writing this down, you should be recording this, he keeps miming the movement of pen on paper.



We know stories about this place.



I'm wishing Steve could be here because he's a culture man, a Narungga man, also Kuarna and Ngarrindjeri man; a performer, passionate about country and culture. He's already got receptive ears, knows how to listen, and feel words, take utterances deep inside, flow them out again. I've seen him do this.



John repeats that I should record these stories, and I'm explaining I have a camera but they're all back home, round the corner. I don't even have a pen on me. We borrow one from a taxi driver and exchange details. He says he'll be at St Lukes dormitory for a while.



The stranger leaves me with a present - three fine plastic bracelets – red, yellow, black [the Aboriginal colours, the symbolic colours of indigenous pride] – 'to remember'.

******

A year later I'm at that same court house in Vic Square, inside this time, with my friend and her son, up the back of a large court room. The only other people are way down the front, a judge on a kind of stage, and a couple of lawyers, it's their game clearly. The tight fraternity of the law, Adelaide-style. Living by the courts I see the daily drifts, the lawyers and paralegals with their wheelies, cops with warrant batches and bumtown leather satchells, the odd government stiff silk flown in by the A-G's department for dirty deeds not done cheap – yes, I remember you well Mr Charles Gunst QC in the Adelaide Family Court and your Bahktiari bullshit. Friday night pissups at the Crown and Sceptre, beards and bellies and laughing blondes. Our legal neighbours in the courtyard of Mitchell Chambers, they only know the words to American Pie, but they sure sing 'em with gusto, repeatedly. If you live in Port Adelaide I guess you watch boats and docklife, in Surflen Street it's lawyers you see sailing by.



My friend is here to bear witness to the sentencing in a hit and run case. A friend of hers, a cousin, was runover, killed crossing West Terrace. He wasn't charged up, he'd been off the grog for a while, and no yarndi neither. He was just crossing the road. The driver must have been aware that he's run this man down, cos he chucked a U-ey, returning to the impact point, then turned again, and sped off. Driver was drunk, driving without a license. Had a mate with him, also smashed. Apparently he drove to his uncle's place. Hung there for a couple of hours, then reported the accident to the cops.



Thirteen people have died around West Terrace since the City Council moved the blackfellas out of the Square, my friend tells me back then. Rapes, murders and crossing the road. But, outa sight, outa mind.



Due to a 'procedural error', the cops never charged the young bloke for driving unlicensed. I'm not sure if he got done for drunk driving. But now is the day of reckoning, on some charge of driving without due care, and leaving the scene of an accident. The guy hasn't bothered fronting up today, phoned in sick the lawyer reckons. Or did the dog eat his homework? No matter, the judge and the lawyers confer, it's all pretty matey, and they never look back at their audience. Who knows if they know we are there.



The no-show gets off, no conviction, no jail time, no fine, no nothing.



Sweet! Give the man a medal!



We leave the court. No-one says anything. I'm gutted, so I can only imagine how my friends must feel. The man's son is already lost, devastated by the death. I lamely ask my friend if there's anything I can do, write a letter or something, take it to the media.



Leave it she says, just leave it alone, let it be.

******

The second night on the island we sleep at Wreckers Beach, and again have a camp site to ourselves. In the morning I set off to get water, making a diversion along the ridge to check out if there's a whale, even though it's the wrong season. There are no other happy campers around this remote beach so I'm surprised to see someone sitting on the shoreline, looking out to sea. The figure is wearing a dark hooded cloak, and sits so very still, a heavy melancholy immediately infects me. I stand watching, then feel a bit like a pervert so I resume my mission to wrench water from those Ligurian bees. Returning via the ridge I see the figure is no longer there, but there's a trail on the wet sand. Moving closer to the soft edge of the dunes my gaze follows the sand smear, coming to rest on a supine figure halfway up the beach. Clearly no longer human, but without glasses I'm a mole.



I'm on the beach. Up close but not too personal with a huge fur seal. She's slumped over seaweed, enormous and lethargic. I'm concerned that she's so far from the shoreline and her head's pointing completely in the wrong direction. Maybe she's dying, how good can it be to be so far from the water and her crew? And the tide's going out. The seal is a fat brown mirror of my ignorance, and I realise that a swag is almost as pretentious as a four-wheel drive, only it's cheaper to run.

Later I find a fisherman, and he tells me not to worry, it's a seal thing, she's probably been swimming and fish feasting for three days; now she's bone tired and needs to rest.

******

Last night I dream I'm in the sea and there's a shark, and giant parrot fish. I have to save two kids but I can't find them. I wake to the radio news, a boy in Esperance just had his leg bitten off by a Great White. A black bird is pecking away outside my bedroom door, and I recall the Bobo bird that visited mum's garden daily in the months before she died. Every time I opened the back door, that homely speckled bird would fly in from the Secret Passage down the side of the house, and hang about. Simon saw her too, but we don't think mum ever did, as she was locked up in Glenside most of that time, with all the responsibilities that being a 2000 year old Sybyl entails.



After the funeral we never saw that Bobo bird again, but there was this annoying chabooba of a blowfly that flew into the living room just before the wake and stayed for three days. I thought it could be mum, transformed into a fly on the wall, enjoying her final tea party and checking we were doing everything right. Si wasn't convinced, but then, he's always been more skeptical about ghosts and fairies, shapeshifting and farsight and all that stuff.



Which leads into another story, my encounter with a malevolent ghost in my Uncle's place in the Bronx back in '88.