Settlers in Wadawurrung
water Whadjuk water
by Nadia Rhook
Here, we celebrate that we are, toward the end of our brief history, still visitors. The caravan wheels are chocked for the summer. My grandfather wakes at sunrise to sit on the pier and watch the tides rise and fall. Rod in hand, bucket at feet. He skins his catch in the caravan annex. There’s nowhere to hide from the smell. Nana crumbs and fries the fillet. Golden fruit of the sea. Oil running into carefully folded paper towel. Crinkle cut potato fries in the pan.
We swim until our bathers are full. When the sun dips, we shower in the cubicle with sisters and cousins and laugh at the clumps of green and brown plants stuck to our bellies. The fresh hot water is bliss. Not because it’s fresh and hot but because it’s a sting-less imitation of the salt river-meets-ocean water we’ve reluctantly left for the day.
Years later, 350,000 kilometres west, on another Country, my mother and my out-laws and my love and I play in the Indian Ocean. After, we lie on grass to air-dry then drive inland, to a new home, and laugh about the piles of sand tucked into bathers. We dump them onto the bathroom floor. Messy, unplanned sandcastles. Our laughter showers us with childhood, the place where land and sea do not need to be the same thing, do not need to be gentle, do not need to submit to each other, in order to exist in the same word.
A disease is spreading, unevenly, across the world and there’s something bigger than Australia about swimming together in this Ocean (highway to England, backroad to Montevideo). We struggle to push nostalgia down. It’s so buoyant now, always bobbing on the mind’s surface. The caravan. The pier. The seaweed clinging to belly. The nostalgia floats until the next wave arrives.
‘Beach’ visits me here, over and again, rocks me, foetus, to sleep.
In Her Wake : a short historical fiction
They arrived lips tingling with the promise of capital. Eliza dipped her fingers into the sandy, loved boodja, moved her free hand to shade her baby’s face, and asked Jim again is this feasible?
The critiques have been cutting. For fifty years too much land has been granted to too few people. Officers are failing to cultivate the soil. Her own husband has been granted more than he can possibly use. Our time in this colony moves to the irregular beat of a home-front. She wakes to hot tea, angst, and news. He sometimes returns with blood and fresh haunting on his pants. She fixes them.
He’d fought in many battles so he called their work an 'invasion'. She preferred to call it ‘life’. After all, she was only 13 when they met and now, she’s around 19. A woman in the language of the law and of her men.
In the beginning, we plunge into the civilising project, buoyed by fast progress. We believe in the power of education. A child needs to know their history to know how kings and queens are divined. But hard work under a hot sun is no more romantic than nursing a baby at sea with your nipples cracked, or teaching children to be gentle during a protracted war and soon the violence of all this spills out of the drawers until there’s more mess than you can expect a servant to tidy. Then, we become tired. No-one can sleep through the night while under instructions from a strict government.
Eliza stays for ten years before returning to the land from where she came. As the ship slaps against the Indian Ocean she observes a cluster of buildings, sloping hills sidling up to the open sea. Like an ex-lover testing the distance between two once tangled bodies, she moves her tongue from the top of her front teeth down to their pointy tips.
P-earth
Holding onto the ‘th’ for as long as it takes to infuse the air around her with a small mist of England, noticing how invisible her words must appear to those swimming in her wake.
Footnote
This poem was written on stolen boodja about events that took place on Whadjuk Noongar boodja.
This poem is a fictional account of the true story of Ellen Mangles who was the wife of James Stirling, an England-born soldier and colonist who led the Pinjarra massacre where Binjareb men, women and children were killed for living on their own country.
Ellen and James married in Guildford, England, on Ellen’s sixteenth birthday. After ten years living on Whadjuk boodja Ellen returned to England.
Nadia Rhook’s debut poetry collection is ‘boots’ (UWA Publishing, 2020). In early 2020 her flash fiction ‘Settler Dawns’, was shortlisted for the Writing WA ‘Flash the Cover’ Competition. Nadia has scholarly publications in international and national journals, including Postcolonial Studies, Australian Historical Studies, Itinerario and the Journal of Women’s History. Her poetry and creative non-fiction works are published in journals including Cordite Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Authora Australis, Portside Review and Westerly. Nadia’s poetry has recently been published in the anthologies ‘What We Carry’ (Recent Work Press), and ‘Twice Not Shy’ (Night Parrot Press).