Both Hands Full Kim Scott’S Ancestral Noongar 2

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Both Hands Full Kim Scott’s ancestral Noongar 2. country is the south-east coast Kim Scott of Western Australia between I know an old man who likes to sit beside a little fire in his suburban Gairdner River and Cape Arid. backyard, little flames flickering brightly and tendrils of smoke almost He is the author of numerous invisible in the shade. pieces of short fiction and the It’s a small fire and strong winds flatten its tongues close to the earth, novels Benang: from the heart insisting they lie down. Of course they spring up again the instant the and That Deadman Dance, both wind abates. of which which won the Miles Franklin award. He works at I’ve many times found that old man asleep, alone beside his campfire. Curtin University. These days, I wake up and I’m an old man myself. 3. Once upon a time my phone rang a little before dawn. Someone had 1. died—it was expected, he’d come home from the hospital with his wife in My adult son saw a movie, and he was the star. Only a ‘home movie’, order to die in his own home with loved ones around him. When she rang, but he was the one in-focus and centre-frame even before he was born. his wife told me he’d passed away, and invited me to say goodbye. So was The ‘narrative’ began nearly twenty-five years ago, continued in fragile I honoured. episodes for a few years before faltering to no satisfying conclusion. I At peace, tucked into his bed, his cheek cold when I kissed him. was a schoolteacher, enthusiastically familiarising myself with the latest People were calmly moving through doorways, hugging one another, audio-visual equipment to use with my students and, as a new father, my smiling gently. I remember the house was warm. Full of love, I thought at immediate family were the subjects of—were subject to—my experiments. the time. The dawn sky was suffused pink and apricot and as I drove home Recently, I dusted off the video-cassette—a technology that had withered the traffic lights, which had glowed so brightly on the drive there, seemed as my son’s life bloomed—and digitised it to take a look. coloured cellophane. My son took it casually from me, watched it alone. He’s still young The deceased man and his wife had married late in life, had spouses enough to be ambushed by a retrospective view and at first, he said, it previous to one another and been in relationships that were not so happy made him laugh: his older brother a toddler, patting his pregnant mother’s as this, their last. ‘He helped me heal,’ his widow said. ‘Encouraged me. stomach. Then, the impossibly young parents and brother so eagerly He let me be me.’ awaiting his birth brought tears to his eyes; the world, pregnant with the possibility of him. 4. Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabakov’s autobiography also opens with a home movie and a child not-yet born, but its emphasis is different: Not so long ago or far away a different older woman—I use no names today—recalled a Noongar story she’d heard when she was a child. It was The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us a halting recall, brought to mind by some other conversation we were that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two having, a tangent taken from talk about organising and formalising the eternities of darkness. (19) Noongar language and stories she carried. First time I recorded this story But, my son and I wondered, isn’t each birth a renewal of the flame of it was on cassette. Last time was an iPad. In the story, someone has been who and what has gone before? killed and burnt: At least, that’s how I remember the conversation. … bones lying there, covered in ash, and ash blowing around a bit. You can sorta see the body, the skeleton I mean. It looks a bit like a little grave, bones just covered. 166 | Westerly 61.1 167 | Kim Scott There! Near the mouth. Just like the tongue was alive, Reading Pullman’s novel, I thought it an arresting image and metaphor, moving, lifting ash into the air, just a few ashes above his and wondered if it might be a way—in fiction—of not only of exploring mouth, where the lips would be. Like a little willy-willy there, the interplay between interior life and the world, but also of offering a the ashes spinning round and round. perspective on moities and totems, and the arguably classical Aboriginal Ashes spinning. perspective that each of us is a unique manifestation of the possibilities Bool wool nyin. of the place we inhabit (Swain 13-51). In my ignorance, I did not know the Then his head’s sitting right there, just above the ground, term came from ancient Greece and Plato’s belief that: like balanced in the willy-willy. …the soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we Kaat are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live Head, and then his neck too. on earth. This soul companion, the daimon, guides us here. In Keeps going like that, the willy-willy, building him up. the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place … Bool wool nyin. So the things that ‘happen’ to us, beyond nature and nurture, Until there’s all of him, just standing there, alive! beyond our genetics and our social conditioning, may be the Bool wool nyin. ‘call’ of the daimon, the soul-companion, call us to our own ‘Magically’ come into being. (Brown 235) character and our own destiny. (Hoff 4-5) She named each body-part as the man appeared in the process of This riff from an interview with James Hillman, an unorthodox reforming; starting tongue, language, bringing him back to life. psychologist, was among examples sent to me by an old friend—a Before beginning this piece of writing, I asked a young Noongar man—a rather anxious individual—whose reading is influenced by his own second son—what he might say to the word, ‘renewal’. ‘Ashes,’ he said, considerations of his heritage, and how he has equipped his children. and I was thrilled, because the story above. ‘Phoenix,’ he continued. ‘Daimon’ piqued my attention, but this seized me: Which is of course and grand tale and the answer true and good, but I was saddened that the Phoenix came to mind, not the story of a body It isn’t enough for a man to put all his love and his attention on reforming and rising from a cold fire-bed in the ashy whirlpool an ancient his son or his children and try to be everything, father, mentor tongue created. child unless you’ve rectified the culture. He has a job to make I would have made the same reply at his age. The story of a body the culture, the world, a place where the child’s daimon can reforming is one I heard in middle adulthood, and had not succeeded in grow.

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