Serendipity Friday



I was in Cairns in North Queensland for most of last week. I happen to be reading Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed, from which a passage of striking relevance leapt out at me:
You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been. [The bold is mine.]

So when my sister and I were visiting the sacred and profane sites of our childhood in Innisfail last Friday, we exclaimed frequently on how steep hills had been made smooth, long tracks become short, winding paths made straight. perhaps our spouses were right to sniff at these exclamations, but enough things had actually changed: the glorious mango tree at the spot where my sisters and I used to catch the bus to school, and which still features in my dreams, is a branchless trunk, boasting huge epiphytes but no greenery of its own; the great fig tree at the back of our house, which used to be visible from the school yard three miles away, is gone, and so is the Japanese plum tree that marked the top of one of those steep hills; there's a gate at the bottom of the drive to our old home, where there never was before, and just to make things completely clear, the gate sports two "Keep Out" signs. No one was swimming at Flying Fish Point and though the day was beautiful and it's not quite stinger season, the water wasn't inviting. When we went to the still sublime Josephine Falls near Babinda, swimming in the upper pool was forbidden and there was a formidable fence to back the prohibition: apparently we were recklessly endangering our lives back then when we inched out along the rocks under the falls and let ourselves be pounded and then swept away by the force of the water. (The photo shows two sisters and a niece about to slide down to the bottom pool, at a place that's not forbidden, just signposted as dangerous and possibly fatal.)

But it's true that in some ways the North is a place where I've never been. A thing I noticed on this visit that isn't there in my childhood memories is the large Aboriginal presence in the streets, and the way Aboriginal people and Whites manage to be almost completely separate. (I'm not saying that things have changed in this respect, or that I was spectacularly unobservant as a child: I spent very little time in the streets of Cairns, or even those of Innisfail.) A small event that happened in this context may exemplify the notion of going home to a place you have never been.

Penny and I were walking along the Esplanade in Cairns. An Aboriginal woman just ahead of us was pointing excitedly to something in the mud and beckoning (with her whole hand hanging loose from the wrist in that distinctively Aboriginal way) for people from her group to come and look at something, calling out in what we were to realise was Wik Mungkan. Though she had completely ignored us, we moved over to have a look, and Penny deliberately got close enough to make it possible to be included. The woman picked up on her cue and pointed out a couple of big crabs to us. 'When we haven't got our spears, we catch them fellers with a mangrove stick,' she said, illustrating the technique. Penny asked where she was from. 'A small community up on the Cape.' Penny asked the community's name. It turned out she was Margo from Aurukun, said she had worked one of my nieces in the Art Centre and knew the other (now a blog-famous author). Her delight at meeting the Aunty and Uncle of people she knew, and news of them both, was exhilarating, and for a moment we managed to close that great chasmic gap of separation.

Posted: Wed - March 25, 2009 at 12:04 PM           |

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