This year I taught an Indigenous studies unit at the uni. Living in the bush requires
residents to be ‘agile’ as the Prime Minister put it recently, defining our
need to have at least three jobs in the gig economy to survive in rural areas.
Anyway, I’ve been working for this department in
other capacities for quite a few years and when I was given the new unit I
noticed that for the field trip, our remote campus was not afforded the same
opportunities as those in the city. They were going to Wadjemup or Rottnest
Island where hundreds of Aboriginal men were historically incarcerated in a
campaign to remove strong, young Aboriginal men from their communities.
I decided that my regional students would go
out to the massacre memorial site at Cocanarup for our field trip, and so a few weeks ago we met below the campus building, breathing early morning mist as
we piled into a little bus.
We drove east for three hours. It’s often the
flatlands out there, farming country punctuated by the skins and skulls of wild
pigs hung on fences, roadhouses peopled by indifferent staff and stubble piled
against fences after the last blow. It’s soldier settlement country; land given
to returned servicemen after the war. A gift. Here is some hard scrabble country
for you to eke out a living, said the Gifters.
We went past there to salmon gum country. I
took my students to the old cemetery to show them how Noongar people were
segregated in those days, buried in unconsecrated, unmarked graves. There are
two graveyards; one for Noongar, the other for the whites. A husband and wife
are buried in separate graveyards. She was Aboriginal. He was white.
At this point I began to realise I was
responsible for mental wellbeing of my students and also for Swan who’d come along in a cultural awareness capacity. I’d given them all the
information – the newspaper archives, chapters from books and reports of the
massacre – but this was the first time I’d taken them onto this country. The country is really powerful. It’s both grim and, beautiful. Amongst the garden
in the centre of the Noongar cemetery lay the skeleton of a boomer kangaroo.
After fuelling up in town and buying some
excellent Chico rolls, we drove back out of town and went down to the river.
Since the floods last year, the river’s course has changed and everything looks
different. The flood was so violent that it carried the bridge a few hundred
metres downstream. It’s difficult to orient yourself when a river course has
changed, and when we got down to what used to be a rocky fording, the swathe of
deep sand and the enormity of that river flood made us park the bus and walk in
to John Dunne’s grave.
John Dunne’s behaviour was the reason for his
execution and the subsequent retribution. As I walked past his grave to the
riverbed, I asked Swan, ‘What do you think?’ I knew that the massacre started
around here somewhere. ‘Just leave things where they are,’ Swan said. ‘Don’t
pick up anything.’ This reminded me of one of his colleague’s advice years
before. ‘Don’t move anything around out there.’
I could see from the smashed trees above the
trickle of water that the river in flood must have been three hundred metres
wide a year ago. I began to feel anxious because floods like these reveal all
kinds of ghosts and bones. What do we do, if we find bones?
‘Just don’t move anything.’
I told my students as they roamed the riverbed,
taking photos and picking up stuff. ‘Please don’t take anything away from
here.’
The riverbed was covered in every kind of
stone imaginable, every colour, every texture, it was all there. It was like
beach combing after a storm where the freakiest shit had washed up.
One of the students found a bone then,
sticking out of the riverbed. It looked like a femur, or a human hip bone. She
said, does this look like a human bone to you? And I agreed that it did.
I had a stinker of an emotional reaction to
her bone find. I know the history of the massacre and I’ve spent a fair bit of
time in this country. My sister is the children’s librarian in a nearby town
where a patriarch had shot dead his whole family only a few days before. She’d
recited baby rhyme time to all of those kids. Somehow, I managed to emotionally
conflate these two massacres more than 130 years apart. I felt so angry and
useless about our ongoing predilection for human violence. Swan headed up the track towards the
bus.
‘People!,’ I exploded to the woman who’d
found the bone, as we left the river. ‘Fucking people!’ I was close to tears.
We took photos of the bone and I sent them to
someone I know at Aboriginal Affairs. I rang him that night to talk about the
process from here on in. He thought the bone looked too ‘robust’ to be human. One
of his roles is to organise reburials of Aboriginal remains when bones have
been disturbed by floodwaters, industrial earthworks or sand dune shift. He
sent the photos to the officer in charge at the local police station. This
protocol seems to work well: when somebody finds skeletal remains, the police
work out whether the bones are human or animal, and then, whether they are part
of a recent crime scene or an historic Aboriginal burial. If they are deemed the
latter it’s referred back to Aboriginal Affairs.
I spent a week thinking and dreaming about
this bone, this person, thinking about the massacre, wondering how, when Dunne
gets his gravestone with white pickets all around it, the people’s
bodies were piled in a mass grave on the riverbank. How many more miles might
this femur have walked? It’s easy to lose sleep over this stuff and yet the
dead no longer care (hopefully). That bone.
A week later my contact at the department
said that he’d heard back from the police. It was an animal bone.
Oh. Mixed feelings soundtrack. So, if it
wasn’t a human bone then my last week of anguish and raging against humanity
was entirely misplaced. I didn’t want to feel disappointed that it wasn’t a human
bone, but I did feel disappointed and so I felt bad about that. ‘Well, I guess
that is a good thing,’ I replied via text to him. This emotional dissonance
plagued me until the next day, when he forwarded me an email from the police
department’s forensic anthropologist. She wrote that the bone was not human but
quite possibly from … wait for it … a PREHISTORIC QUADRUPED.
In other words, a giant freaking wombat. You
know, mega fauna. I got the email right before the next class with my students
after the field trip. Not many of them knew about the bone find. I’d kept it
quiet because I wanted it to go through official channels. But when I told them
the story and read out the email you should have seen the bouncing going on in
the room. We went down to the river and found MEGAFAUNA!!!
I rang the officer in charge at the local
police station. He was so excited. He’d gone to the river and dug up the
bone. When he got the report back, he’d taken his kids down to the river to
talk to them about dinosaurs and megafauna. ‘I was here during the floods,’ he
said. ‘I was the first to lay hands on the man who drowned here. That
river. That river changed its course during the flood.’ He went on to say that
it was possibly not a hundred-year flood but a thousand-year flood. He wanted
Noongar people to come back here.
‘I just want to take out a shovel and dig up more
stuff on the river,’ he said. ‘There must be gold there but prehistoric
quadrupeds, that’s amazing!’
‘Don’t go rogue on me, mate,’ I said. ‘Let me
sniff around the archaeology department and the museum first.’
At this point there was radio silence from
the local Noongar who I’d been in contact with. I began to realise that archaeologists
converging on this area, digging up bones, was probably not such a great thing.
‘Just don’t move things around out there,’
he’d said to me all those years ago.
Still. I sent the photos of the copper’s
dug-up bones to a paleontologist at the museum. He replied two days later, ‘This is a cattle
bone. This is not a prehistoric quadruped
bone. This is a cattle bone.’ Those were pretty much his exact words, two
weeks after I took my students to massacre country at the river. It was quite a
downy, uppity, downy kind of fortnight.
