Kambarang

'Now that we are at least fifteen kilometres from your place and you won't walk that far,' I said to Flame as we hurtled towards the inlet, 'I need to tell you my plans for the evening,'
'Far out Woman,' she said, 'it's not like you are making me feel uncomfortable or anything. Can I get out now?'
'No. You know how I asked you to help me with Bobcat's ceremony?'
'Yeah.'
'Well, I don't want to bury her. I want to burn her.'
'Oh ... oh, I'm totally good with that,' Flame said immediately, shaking her head. 'Um, is this a spiritual thing? I mean ... you know, consigning her to the ashes.'
'Nah,' I said. 'Her body is so full of poison that she is completely toxic and I don't want anyone -' nodding to the dogs in the back - 'digging her up.'

Flame was quiet for a while. We got onto the Broke track and she opened a can of gin. 'Wonder how Bobcat will go on the fire?' She asked suddenly.
'She always liked it when I lit the fire,' I said and then, looking at Flame, broke into a weird kind of hysterical laughter. 'Wonder how Bobcat will go on the fire? Oh my God, that's so funny.'

On that hot Wednesday the peppermints suddenly bloomed and all the bugs in the country hatched; pouring out of the ground, out of rotten fence posts and leaf litter. I'd already that day received a postcard from a friend long dead and had Bobcat put down in the local community garden's shed. It was one of those odd days. A decent fire and the cremation of a dead cat wrapped in my favourite pashmina shawl was the least strange event.

(Note: I did discover that the pashmina was not made from a Tibetan goat's belly hairs but something quite synthetic.)

Bobcat and the Ball

I have a thing in my handbag that resembles a pool ball. About the same size, it lights up with a skull and crossbones whenever it’s shaken, and it gets shaken a lot because it‘s in my handbag. It flickers with rainbow lights, taking me by surprise when I reach in for my phone or wallet.

The old cat is not dead yet. She has some nasty lumps including one on the back of her neck. I’m convinced this is her identification chip trying to work its way out of her body. Bob, are you listening? I tried so hard to get your cat registered when that local council bylaw went through, but all the vets had chucked out their records post five years and for an environmentalist who had fought so hard for that law and bequeathed me your cat, you were a bit light on her details. She’s gonna die an unlicensed fringe dweller, your beloved Ebony.

 Just know that I’m going somewhere here folk, for anyone bewildered by my tangents. We organised Bob’s wake, ten years ago now, because he wanted a wake of the living dead. He wanted to be there for it, and for his living wake to be predicated upon the Day of the Dead, years before the Mexican festival became sexy in Western culture. We found a wheel chair and dressed it up with fake flowers and a disco ball for him. We got the band back together. We decorated the house with flowers, glowering skulls and images of Clarissa. Then we busted Bob out of the hospice and we partied with him until he was sick and tired of us all. He died a few days later and we all quietly hoped that tipping him out of the wheelchair on the driveway that night hadn’t contributed to his demise.

It’s been ten years since I started A WineDark Sea. It’s been ten years since Bob died. He was my first friend who died of natural causes instead of by their own hand in this little harbour town and I still don’t do death that well. His death was big for me and it taught me a lot about humanity and humility. I did the rounds of the vets. No juice. ‘Bring her in and we’ll scan the chip and sign the papers,’ several vet nurses said to me on my attempts to make Ebony legal. But I’d already decided against bringing Bob’s cat to a surgery unless it was for the green dream. It would upset her too much. Those other deaths during that time upset me too, but that’s another story.

The old cat who Bob bequeathed to me is still alive. She must be 18 years old. ‘No way,’ say the Elders, shaking their heads. Recently Ebony became ‘incontinent’. I write that with a parenthesis because I know it is her passive-aggressive nature that made her shit under my bed. She hates me. After all, I am a human. She loved Bob, but she does not like humans. She loves my Mum who visits once a week but that's because Mum feeds her sardines, However, since I’ve had the conversation out loud with Mum about Ebony’s final visit to the vet, the cat has rallied, valiantly, and headed straight for the kitty litter.

 And that disco skull and crossbones pool ball at the bottom of my handbag?

‘Maybe when Ebony finally goes, the batteries will go out on that ball,’ my friend said to me recently, when I showed her the ball, still glimmering after ten years. Another friend had brought it to Bob’s living wake, in the spirit of the Day of the Dead, and I’d found it in the garden the next day. It still lies in my handbag, a decade later, flashing its grinning skull when I least expect it.

Still life with cat

There are layers to that title seeing as Bobcat is so old now that her body (and to be horribly specific her urinary tract) is failing. I can't bring myself to do it though. Anyway, a favourite pastime this season of the year is to collect fungi in the forest and, if the spores are brown, make spore prints on paper. I cut off the stalk and leave the mushrooms gills down on paper overnight. Next morning all of the spores have fallen from the mushroom and created a kind of mushroom ghost on white paper. This particular print is blurred because the shroom was a bit too big. They grew in dinner plate gatherings on the driveway and I was pretty excited because they looked like fieldies and I was gonna eat me some mushroom steaks. The problem was they tasted bloody awful, so bad I wasn't sure if I was going to have to make a town dash to the nursing post. Nothing happened, as this post will tell you. I made some prints instead of eating them. I came home one day to see that Bobcat had walked all over it.
So ... when the day comes I will have her art to remember her by.

A Journey Travelled

Hey, here is a great book:

The cover of Murray Arnold's book shows an image of Mokare', a man who played a pivotal role liaising between the local Menang population and colonisers in the 1820-1830s. I like everything about this book cover ... the dots and stripes across the body correlate to both Mokare's culture and the town hall. You can walk down the main drag and when you get to the library, his statue and the town hall are equidistant to each other.

It's not only the cover though. Murray Arnold has taken up the challenge of turning the wealth of available material into a coherent narrative of what exactly happened in King George Sound in the years between first contact and 1926. Nice work, Murray. A Journey Travelled is written in a vivid, layman's language which I appreciate, (because I'm one of those academics who rail against the brick wall that academia cements itself inside.) This is an everywoman's readable history of the great southern region*. Murray Arnold's epilogue, much like the final page in Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance, is quite devastating. A Journey Travelled is a good read and it's a really important addition to the small canon of recorded history about the impact of colonisation on the south coast of Western Australia.

Pickled sardines

Just putting it out there ... does anyone have a tried and true recipe for pickled sardine fillets?

We call them 'mulies' where I come from. These particular fish are my formative experience as a worker, when I dropped out of school and the folks packed me off to the fish factory. I think they reasoned that hosing rotten mulies out from under brine tanks would make me question my footloose tendancies and send me hightailing it back to the comfort of the English Lit, Social Studies, Algebra and Art.

Not so. I fell in with the lot whose Tshirt sleeves were squared with packets of winnie blue, who smoked joints in the car park at lunch time and brawled over errant husbands and wives. I loved it. (Well, Mum and Dad did say uni was too expensive.) I loved seeing the salmon fishers come in with their trucks full of fish seined straight off the beach. I loved working at that cold factory on the channel where the southerly blew straight from Antarctica to my spot at the the conveyor belt. We waited in our woollies for the mulie fishers to come in with their bounty. At 11pm the women working in the vegetable section brought us ice cream containers of  hot par-fried potato chips. Salted. I think those partially raw potato chips were the best meals I've ever eaten in my life.

In 2008, a few weeks before my mate Bob died, he said to me, "I've been cooking up mulies for Bobcat. I buy them in the bait section, rinse them, wipe off the scales with my fingers and cook them real quick, add a bit of gelatine and give her this kind of beautiful sardine brawn." I only realised later that he was giving me instructions on how to nourish the black cat he was bequeathing me. "She really loves it," he said gently.

Ebby has thrived and grown glossy and fat from my work as a fisherwoman but lately we've had to buy fish. Today I saw a bag of mulies in the supermarket pet food freezer that looked remarkably, really, fucking yummy. I've spent enough time in fish factories and on commercial boats to know which fish have been handled badly - the bruised, the inedible and nothing but bait fish - and which ones will be good fodder for us bipeds.

This bag of bait looked particularly tasty so I bought them, took them home, filleted them and salted them down. I'm wondering now if you pickle sardines the same way as I pickle herring every year. Any ideas or old family secrets you are willing to impart?

(And the cat? She's pretty happy.)

The Bob Spot

About a year before Bob died he built a website and filled it up with all sorts of interesting things.
For a start, he created an online version of Daisy Bates' genealogies of south coast Noongar families. He also added some Noongar language resources, including the indigenous names of plants. Then there is a list of Noongar whalers and Nebinyan's whaling songs ... and Bob's blog Kyangardarup.

I remember when he'd finally built his website, he came around for dinner one night and showed me around the place. I was impressed but it has taken a few years to understand just how important his work is.

This year, just after the fourth anniversary of his death, the website disappeared. Maybe Bob stopped paying the rent or something. It was a bit of a scary moment - until I remembered that in 2009, Spencer Collins (aka Colin) had foreseen this event and rebuilt it, putting it somewhere else safe. I don't really know how this stuff works. You'll have to ask Colin - just click on his name above and it will take you back to 2009 when he was rebuilding the site.

Anyway, the point is that Colin saved Bob's website from disappearing forever. Ciaran wrote to me the other day, saying that this act of protecting the site was really smart thinking and should be recognised in some way. And so it should, but neither of us are sure how.

Noongar bidi(pathways) from 'Mokare's Domain' R.A. Ferguson, in 'Australians to 1788'(1988) 

The WineDark link to Bob's home page is at the bottom of 'From the Wild West'. If you are interested in Noongar history and language, climate change issues, environmentalism, poetry, music, memes, the ANZACs and all things magpie, have a look around. And thanks Colin. Nice work.

Bob

Tonight the aluminium window slid shut on its own and my daughter Pearlie peered outside, a bit spooked, to see Bobcat staring at her in the dark eve before the moonrise.
"Don't worry. That was Bob," I said and at that moment I realised what day it is.
It's been four years.
Hey Bob ... hello there mate.

A Conference of Crows

Two crows meet in the paperbark tree outside my tent every morning. In the gloaming - those still, cold moments before the sun rises over the cliffs, when the wind breathes in before she blows - they stop for their daily conference. By dawn they are gone, to deal with matters of the day.

Someone told me that crows once wanted to be our familiars in the way of cats and dogs. The story went that we rejected them for being too clever, for walking on two legs and that, for avian critters, they resembled our own undertakers a bit too much for comfort.

For a while I lived on crow mountain, home of the local crow moiety. It was there that I finally understood and grew to love crows. One crow I know perched on the rainwater tank and chatted to the black cat. She's a bit Siamese and she talks. This crow always answered her and had something further to say and the conversation ambled along. I've always wondered what they talked about.

Nothin' Strange About an Axe in the Barn

It's been a strange week.

On Monday I started to drive home from Margaret River and made it to Karridale before I decided that five hours of concentrating on forest roads in my state was a really bad idea. I was so tired from my sister's wedding that I was dizzy and shaky. I pulled into a layby and told the teens that we were turning back. They agreed (probably eying off a second day off school) and we drove to Augusta to stay with another Toa sister for the night. She showed me the remains of her motorbike after the recent fires that burned down her house.

Looking at that lovely piece of art that was once a motorbike brings the Margaret River fires into perspective. 800 degrees. Definitely not a "stay and defend" situation on Isaac's Ridge that day.

Back home on Tuesday, I started packing up the house. Captain Chaos stepped in and throttled the gas and the internet. Can't blame the guy really; I know he's happiest rolling that way. Stormboy went to his Dad's and I decided that the best way to pack my life into boxes and say my final goodbyes to Bob was to stay drunk the whole time. Three days later, I heartily recommend this procedure to anyone who is moving house.

One of my mates said recently, "There are two universal laws that I have worked out so far. Stuff eats stuff and stuff moves stuff." This week, I'm just stuff that moves stuff. So long as I start drinking after sundown, turn up the music (Bob Dylan's Desire is the flavour for some reason) then I get heaps of stuff packed and am able to move it the next day. It's been fun in a strange kind of way. Also, being stuff that eats stuff, like smoked salmon and blue castello on crackers for dinner (no pots and pans, no gas, damn, what a shame), is not a bad short term solution to the life long conundrum of how to live.

Tomorrow is the big piano-moving day. Everyone's back seems to be fucked and it's looking like it's going to be a shitfight getting the Howard's heirloom piano from where I've been caring for it to its new home with the musos. The last time I moved the piano, a black king skink crawled out all grumpy and covered in white paint from its hibernating hidey hole.

The real estate agent messaged me tonight to say that the new owner is arriving exactly fifteen minutes after the only four folk I know with good backs are converging to move the piano for me. Oh well. Ho hum.

Tonight Stormboy came home to sort out his teenage travesty of a bedroom. When we moved in he was a boy and now he is a kind of child/man/hairy faun. "Imagine there was an earth quake! Or maybe a fire," I told him when he looked about his room in utter despair. "What would you take? What are the most important things to you?"

That sparked him into action. We threw out piggy banks, slinkies, goggles and snorkles, ill fitting clothes, kites, music magazines and ten years' worth of leggo. He's a gifted artist and carefully stashed all of his drawings. And hair gel. He made sure his best paintings were put aside for folk who wanted them. Then we headed for the back yard to set fire to his guitar, the one with no strings and a twisted neck.

I patted down my kerosene scented, smoking clothes.
"What about that old computer? Do you need anything on it?"
"Nah."
"Go on then, Stormboy. Get the axe."
I could see him thinking, Mum's pretty loose at the moment. She's really going through something.
But he got the axe. I supervised. Well, I shielded my eyes and wineglass from the flying plastic shards while he got stuck into the computer under the streetlights.

Later he said, "Sometimes I can't believe I've got a Mum like you."
And I thought, what amazing children ... despite me.

On a Mission

The panting of a brindle dog
disturbed my washing up.
I ran through the house to the veranda.
A yellow-eyed chicken killer,
part mastiff, pitty, kelpie
and born to partake in this county's gifts,
slurped water from the tub under the tap

"Come here. C'mon. Here boy."

He looked at me like I was a crazy
and loped away, up the street.

When Bob lived
here
I used to pitstop too.
A cup of Bob's grimy tea
and I was ready for the world.

Two Thirty Thinking

Insomnia night ... I have no idea exactly why it is.
Perhaps it is the unseasonal warm wind, the failure to wriggle my toes enough,
the thought of being alone and how much longer I can bear it,
or my visions of recent hatched, matched and dispatched.
Maybe it is the building plans spinning in my head,
wondering how The Girl is going,
the aeroplane I'm getting on, to deliver a paper to a roomful of historians
(can you imagine a tougher crowd?)
or that this week my whole world shifted a bit
when a publisher said they'd take a punt on my book.

Perhaps it is just Bob's house. He was an insomniac.
About an hour ago, the trucks began coming in from Perth. When their gears begin shifting down to turn into the freight depot, I know it's going to be a while - of forklifts and reversing beeps and something that sounds like gas cylinders being thrown around inside a concrete shed. Bob told me once about a sleepless night. The trucks arrived and the forklifts began. He wandered down the hill in his dressing gown and dirty glasses and I'll bet his hair was doing that mad scientist thing. He asked them to keep the noise down as he was having trouble sleeping.
They stopped and stared at him. Those guys had been driving for five hours and probably had to do the return trip after they unloaded. They told him to fuck off.

A few years ago, instead of a screen and a qwerty, I would have curled up with my pen and my journal
as was my wont,
scrawled pages of black angst, then shut the covers ...
and now I'm blogging my insomnia.
Heh heh, sorry guys. Service will be resumed soon.
There's another truck. Now where is my tartan dressing gown and dirty glasses?

Bob and the Coming of the Dogs

I sat in Bob's kitchen. He was sitting somewhere near the refrigerator, tired, wasted, animated and giving Shark and I the rave about his imminent lecture on the coming of the dogs. He thought that as the dingoes made their way south three thousand years ago, local technology changed to the point where it changed the whole Menang culture - from a matriarchal culture to a patriarchal one. He talked some more and Shark listened intently. I wandered outside to commune with the chickens and get scratched up badly by Bobcat (who always does this when she is lying in the sun, I later discovered.) I thought I'd heard it before and had plenty of Bob time left to hear it again.

He never lived to give that third public lecture. The second one created a groundswell at the Albany library. Bob was pretty sick by then and his physical appearance shocked many people.

Two years ago today, he died. I haven't stopped kicking myself, for many things, but mainly not staying in the kitchen that day and listening to the rest of the story.

Photo by Shark, May 2008.

A Short History of Thing Lust

There was a Thing that sat in the garden of my hippy, mad scientist neighbour; a broken thing, turquoise blue. It was a piece of pottery that I walked by everyday on my way for a teapot cup of tea. It lay in his garden like a sidelined, problematic friend; beautiful, neck broken, stretched up into a truncated crimson passion.

"Can I have that busted vase, Bob?"
"No ... a friend made it and gifted it to me." It was special to him, this piece.
For years, whenever I visited, I lusted after this broken thing shining in the wintergrass. Not his enamel chamberpots found in ancient bush camps, his late night dope-induced brilliance, the pages of scrawled music, guitars in galvanised and padded cases, his C.G. Von Brandenstein's Nyungar language first edition books; just that broken vase. The bower bird in me just wanted to possess that pretty turquoise and crimson glaze.

One day. Dying he was and decided it was up to me, as his former neighbour and old friend, to look after things.
And that vase, turquoise with a crimson throat and broken at the neck, lies in the same place, patient against a long, dried out summer and the emerald green of a post-thunderstorm nitrogen-cranked rain. It has never lost its whacky, oriental glow. Twenty years later and after all my pestering, it was never gifted to me but every morning, during my teapot cup of tea, I catch its gypsy flare amongst the leaves.

Dave and Bob

Bob's Fish Pictures #2

No. 18. Crenilabrus?
Native name Knelmich, Miname or Minamen.
Common rock fish or parrot fish of the sealers.
Poor and soft. Inhabits bold (sic) rocky shores, where it is troublesome to the fisher by carrying off his bait. Caught by hook 3rd. May 1841.





No. 37.
Labrus?
Native name Paril, Kunol, or Bomburn.
Black rock fish of the sealers.
Inhabits rocky shores, and grows to the size of fifteen or twenty punds weight. Poor soft eating. Speared by Warrawar, 12th. May 1841.






No. 12.
Laorus?
Native name Ianon't Worogut, or Cumbeak.
Inhabits weedy places in deep water and along sandy bays. Sometimes taken by the natives on the edge of banks. Excellent eating. Caught by hook 18th. March 1841.





No. 30.
Native name Moolet.
Red Rock Perch .
Inhabits rocky shores. Bites eagerly and is a gross feeder. Indifferent eating. Caught by hook, 6th. April 1841.





No. 35.
Genus not ascertained.
Native name -Koogenuck, Kuejuimeck or Knowl.
Little known to the sealers.
Dorsal spines remarkable; scales large; grows to a large size; the flanks scales of one weighing twenty eight pounds, measures an inch and a half in length, and an inch and a quarter in breadth. (They are cycloid).






No. 47.
Labrus laticlavius.
Native name Kanup or Parill. (Green Fish).
Is a rare inhabitant of rocky shores. Caught by hook 17th. August 1841. Poor eating.





No. 48.
Aulopus Purpurissatus.
Native name Kardar.
Very rare. Caught by hook on a rocky shore by Mr. Sholl of Albany, 14th. July 1841.



Pictures Courtesy of the British Museum of Natural History.
Brown italics are the descriptions by R. Neill in the appendix to Eyre's journal.

Robert Neil's Snakes, 1840

Torn-ock, Tukyte, N. Name. Venemous. Length of specimen 4 foot 9 inches



Williamlungar N. Name not venemous





Norn, N. Name. Psuedohaje nigra. Male (?) Venemous - deadly
Specimen 3 3/4 feet long




Kirry-gura, Williamlungar, N. Name.
But doubtful if poisonous.





Bardick, N. Name.



coronatus, latin. Venemous but not dreaded by the Aborigines.




Diamond Backed Snake.



Aren't they beautiful? I've only labelled them with what I could decipher. N. Name means Nyungar Name. In my next post I'll tell the tale of Robert Neil, Bob and the Fish Pics.

Pictures courtesy of the British Museum of Natural History.

Bob

I think it is time to write about Bob. It's been a few months and like any catastrophe, time is needed to process how we really feel. It's difficult; time also hardens up a story into something solid and unmovable. I want to do the experience of knowing him and seeing him go some kind of justice. This may be an extended post... bear with me.

Recently there has been some comments posted on this blog from people I don't think I've ever met, who learnt of Bob's demise from afar and expressed a kind of sad disbelief to hear that he is gone. This story is really for you and it is only one story - mine. There are so many others.

It has been pretty direct. I live in his house now. I inherited his black cat Ebony. On nights late I see her lurking, panther like and talking to me in that siamese cat manner and i think, "There he is. She is Bob." Mad, I know. I tell myself that. I think, she's just a cat and she misses him too.

He was the strange long haired man I met twenty years ago, playing guitar on the staircase of the old whale chaser. I always loved the way he'd pull out a guitar and subject us to his songs. "Sweet Fortunata" was my favourite. He was so excited about that song, he came over and played it the same day of composition.

He possessed an occasional maniacal intensity, other times he was gentle, always eccentric, always a THINKER and always a bloody Pisces, acutely sensitive and willing to shovel out the shit at the same time.

He worried about me. When I was going through a particularly nasty emotional patch, he sat with me at the State Records Roadshow at the museum and said, "What's going on Sarah? Are you pregnant?" (He knew I wasn't, he was fishing.) He worried about me and I worried about him.

The conversations I will miss. We'd sit in his kitchen, I'd make the tea and off we'd go. History, vague theories on love and lust, Nyungar stories, writers we love, what we are reading right now, feminist/postmodern/gender/music theory, then we'd fall into unabashed gossip. He was THE best for gossip.

Intellectually he was twenty years ahead of the rest of us. His brother told Aussie of a family fight in 1974. It was your classic family fun Christmas day where the fight spills out onto the footpath. It started because Bob told his father that the world would run out of oil in 2040.

A few years ago, christmas day again, he told us that the polar bears would soon start drowning because they would have too far to swim between ice floes. I know how his father felt. We all told him to shut up and let us enjoy our christmas lunch. And hey - the polar bears are drowning as I write this.

He made talking about the weather into an art form. He could sing Yothu Yindi's "Treaty" in language. He was a pain in the arse pit bull terrier at town council meetings. He would patiently explain my flaws whilst smelling like a chookpen, in unwashed clothes. He was always there for me. He could have made a million dollars fixing all the computers he did, but he got fed instead and was happy with that.

When I think back, I used to get so frustrated at all the work he did for other people and not ask to be paid. I used to think that maybe he didn't feel worthy enough to expect it and that he was being used. But now ... the legacy he leaves is one of good deeds.

When he first got sick, he was so full of anger. His teeth were giving him the shits and the government dentist wasn't listening, ripping out teeth or just filling them in and not listening when Bob came back and said that something was still wrong. It is a long ride on a push bike, all up hill to the dentists clinic from here. The saga dragged on and on. So it was cancer under his teeth and I think about that every time I roll up another coffin nail and smoke it.

Secondary arrived six months later and things got serious. People were shocked. Bob worked harder than I've ever seen him work. He built another chook pen, wrote and presented an amazing series of lectures on Nyungar history, chopped down the Mulberry tree that had kept his house dark and damp for years, let the light in. He played in his band "The Hughs" that he nurtured every thursday, kept up his pilgrimage to Cosi's Cafe, worked on getting the fish pictures published. He was running out of time.




He rang me one night and told me he wanted to have the party to end all parties. I dissolved when I hung up the phone. My daughter said, "He's dying isn't he, Mum," and I just nodded because I couldn't say anything.

He turned up at the nursery where I worked, with Aussie and Irish. "Can we have the party at your place?" It was to be a Mexican Festival of the Dead, to laugh in the face of death, with a Freida Khalo theme. I found a self-portrait of Khalo with thorns and a blue bird at her throat. "Yes!" said Bob. In the end though, we decided on Clarissa, a kind of gory patron saint of the festival

Both of us began inviting people. I was moving house and I had a shit head cold, so I couldn't visit him at all for a few weeks. The knowledge that someone you love is going to die soon is easy enough to avoid with black humour and a busy lifestyle, until one encounter happens to be so terrifyingly and acutely REAL, that this knowledge cannot be avoided anymore.

This happened on his verandah, when my cold was gone and we chatted. It was winter solstice, exactly a week before his party. He was in good spirits, not in too much pain and this kind of essential goodness shone out of him. I told a joke, it wasn't even really funny and he threw back his head and laughed and laughed and laughed. The first shock was seeing his completely naked gums. It was like surprising somebody stark naked. I was shocked! But then it was the joy. He was so joyous, it was radiating from him in waves. He was up there with the Dalai Lama and this is not written lightly.

People flew and drove from all over to say hello and goodbye at the Mexican Festival of the Dead. We decorated the whole house with flowers, skulls, armloads of bracken and candles. We found a wheel chair for Bob and decked it out with plastic roses.
SilverBeat and the Freedom Police, his old bands, were revived and cranked out the favourites on the verandah. The Nyungar elders arrived. We burnt the Mulberry tree in a massive bonfire out in the paddock. It rained all night and it didn't matter.

Bob's son Aedan was there, helping out. He'd just finished his exams, otherwise Bob would have held the party on the Solstice. Bob was happy, there were a few surprises for him in the way of dedicated compositions and long lost friends showing up. He held pride of place, sitting in the flowered wheel chair with a disco light spinning on the floor behind him. Women draped themselves around his feet. (No really, they did.)

Bob died at Hospice four days later, age 56. No one except perhaps for himself expected it to happen so soon. He crashed on Monday and went into a kind of coma. The party was the last time we ever talked together. I wasn't really sad, until the day after he was put into the ground. I was joyous, like some of that joy in him had permeated my shell. The last few days spent with him at Hospice were so exhausting and beautiful. It felt the same as being at the birth of a child. When I entered the outside world again - I knew that everything had changed and nothing would ever be the same.


Yes Tim, Aunty Avril spoke in language at Bob's funeral. She talked about how much he had done for the Nyungars. His coffin was draped in the Aboriginal flag and when he was lowered, Glenda and Vern folded it and gave it to Aedan. On the way there, I saw six red tailed black cockatoos fly over the sheoak hill, a rare sight in these parts. They flared that brilliant red against their black feathers and the pale blue winter sky.