“Southerners call it Occupation Day. We, here, in the North don’t want that victim mindset. We call it Survival Day.”
Three people were sitting around the table on North Queensland’s Magnetic Island. Lind, the host, Binanjal1, who has been taken in by Lind some time ago and Sindbad, the traveller, who found temporary refuge in their house. They were talking about Australia Day. In 1788 the British flag was raised by the occupying fleet on January 26th in Sydney Bay. The day was designated as an all-national holiday in the thirties and universally accepted only in the nineties, Sindbad learned. It has been controversial from the beginning and not only among aboriginals.
“My mother was taken to a small island in the Atlantic together with hundreds of aboriginal children from different tribes, away from their families. They grew up there in a kind of a prison. That’s how our language was cut.”
“I read that aboriginals speak a different kind of English with some grammatical features transferred from their languages. Is that true?”, Sindbad asked.
“Oh, we have our Creole. And some words were preserved. And the song lines.”
“Are you pure blood, Binanjal?”
”I’m mixed blood. My mother comes from the West.”
“I mean are you pure blooded Aboriginal?”
“I have no white enemy in me.”
Binanjal means lizard in the Yalanji language. Although yalanci, with the same pronounciation, is ‘liar’ in Turkish, Binanjal didn’t seem to be lying, only possessing a seething, underlying anger. The Sky Lizard was sure to lead me to him, Sindbad thought. His old-styled, almost archaic English, his intensity created a kind of a trance. Sindbad was left with deep feelings but found it difficult to remember the unusual chain of thoughts. There was nothing else to go by, though. When he pulled out his notebook, Binanjal remained silent.
“Up to the seventies we were possessions of the whites, maids, servants without pay. Even today we aren’t treated equally. My brother cut someone, he got sentenced to 18 years.” He laughed. “And where do you think they put him? In the kitchen. With all the big knives.”
“He got 18 years when he didn’t even kill the other guy?”
“He spent that time in prison to the very last day. I raised my niece for her mother was shot in the head in the street. Many people were killed, several members of my family. What could we have done? We were powerless.”
“New Years’ Eve party is a satanistic ritual designed to put people in Western time where they cannot be at peace. Whites only know fighting. Everything is black and white like in chess. They are always stressed, always at war with something. We lived together with nature, other tribes and other beings. The whites spray poisons from planes to kill mosquitoes. We didn’t get bitten by mosquitoes. We had small fires around our camps.”
“But chess comes from India”, Sindbad retorted.
“It started there but, like so many other things, it changed in the hands of whites. Whites make people turn against each other. They build huge cauldrons everywhere where they fight.”
“Cauldrons…?”
“Huge cauldrons where a lot of people fit. You can also lock them in there.”
“You mean sports stadiums?”
“Yeah, huge cauldrons.”
“Mangoes ripen much later nowadays. Everything’s changing. Seasons are shifting, things happening out of sync. Western civilization disturbs the flow of events.”
“I looked at the sky and saw the face of the cyclone. It was angry. Whites give names to cyclones but they have faces not names.”
“A lot of things can be read from the sky. The night sky we called mirabuka. Mira, star, and buka, family. The family of stars. When you die, that family grows by a new member. A new star is being born in the sky.”
“This society is controlled by men. Yet the river of life flows through the women. Now whites are also talking about mitochondrial DNA, carried only by women. We always knew this. Everybody had their role, women and men alike. There were laws about who can marry whom. You had to marry from a different tribe to keep the bloodlines strong.”
Lind gave a present to Sindbad, a didgeridoo. Although the traveller didn’t take it with him, possession of it filled him with a sense of prid,. Whereever you are in the world, he thought, you walk in a different way knowing you own a didgeridoo on Magnetic Island.
Of Binanjal’s works, the artist only allowed a few curtains to be photographed, some details of which are presented here. He soon retired to the garage where he lived and painted. He refused to accept the room Lind offered to him, sspending hours on the garage floor softly playing his instrument.
“Everything is in the songs, the vibrations. We have been resonating these themes since ancient times. It would be high time to listen.”
Not their real names
This is lovely - and a synchronicity. I am just reading Marlo Morgan's Mutant Message Down Under, and now this. Yes, the songs...