WHERE THE RIVERS MEET: New Writing from Australia

Winter 2006 (18:2) • 180 pages, illustrated
Edited by Frank Stewart, Larissa Behrendt, Barry Lopez, and Mark Tredinnick

Authors include Judith Beveridge, Tony Birch, Vivienne Cleven, Louise Crisp, Robyn Davidson, Luke Davies, Adrienne Eberhard, Stephen Edgar, Delia Falconer, Robert Gray, Martin Harrison, Kevin Hart, Ashley Hay, John Jenkins, Melissa Lucashenko, David Malouf, John Mateer, Roger McDonald, Louise Oxley, Bruce Pascoe, Deborah Bird Rose, Kim Scott, Don Watson, Samuel Wagan Watson, Tara June Winch, and Alexis Wright. The art consists of photographs by Ricky Maynard.

Where the Rivers Meet is a remarkable collection of new fiction, essays, and poetry from Australia, a complex society and a country with a multilayered history. Among Australia’s many resources is a large community of outstanding writers that includes a growing number of novelists, poets, and essayists of Indigenous descent. Their stories—many of them previously untold in literature—deepen and expand our understanding of the experiences that make up Australia’s past and present.

Many of the authors in Where the Rivers Meet—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous—address their country’s struggle to create a shared citizenship and sense of belonging for people whose histories have often been embattled. Some state that the key to this shared belonging is the creation of a more just relationship to the land and issues of ownership. Others seek clarity and rejuvenation in the continuity of the country’s harsh and beautiful wildness. Still others emphasize, in the words of Melissa Lucashenko, that we need to hear “the small, quiet stories in a human mouth” in order to truly know this land and its people.

He is said to be a mighty hunter, and maybe he is, but that’s not what matters. Nobody who was just chasing rabbits would wear his belt slung low at that interesting and supremely attractive angle. He is chasing the Seven Sisters, and he really gives them a run—all over Australia, north and south, east and west, and all around the whole world. Call him what you will, everywhere people seem to know that it is women he’s hunting. I knew him in North America, where I grew up with him, and when I came to Australia, I started hearing about his adventures in this country. I imagined him wearing an Aboriginal belt: a well-ochred string with the brightest and shiniest of pearl shells strategically placed. Actually, I didn’t fully appreciate the meaning of men’s thighs until I saw Aboriginal men dance. Even the oldest greybeard can make you feel dizzy as you sit on the ground with your eyes fastened on…but these are not the best thoughts for a lady in a single swag on a night when it’s way too cold to even go for a walk. Best to leave Orion to his nightly chase and try to get some sleep.

—Deborah Bird Rose

All that there was was beauty and bluff;
Then a deeper thing grows.
In the coinage of rapture
I will pay you my praise.

You will tell me every story
As we drive; in your eyes
Whole forests will flicker past,
Whole skies, enormous mysteries.

—Luke Davies

I, Mary the Larrikin, tart of Jerilderie, have loved for roast beef and I have loved for the feather on a well-trimmed hat. In my room above the hotel bar I have felt a squatter’s spurs and sucked once on a bishop’s fingers. The perfumes of my thighs have greased many a stockman’s saddle and kept him company through lonely nights. Men can nose out my room from thirty miles away, their saddlebags tight and heavy with desire. But of all the men I have ever loved, Ned Kelly, dead three years before they put him in the ground, stole my heart away....

In the Republic of Love, Kelly said, we will soak beds thick with emerald sheets and curtains. There will be so much bread to go around that we will scoop out the hearts of loaves and use them for our babies’ cradles. They will nestle in the warmth of the fresh-baked centres and rock sideways on the curving crusts.

—Delia Falconer

Father of the tall bruised days of summer
And lightning words

Of the child’s first step
And smack just entering her vein

Of moonlight
Over the half-stoned girl raped in the park,

His hands clamped on her wrists,
His face a fist—

Ah, the game is over, Father, so come on out
And sit awhile

And tell her something soft and slow.

—Kevin Hart

There is a ferocity, an unbridled rate of change, implicit in any story that starts so recently with so few people on the edge of such a big space and ends where and how we are now. But every so often, you put your foot on a rock on the water's edge, a rock that's sat for thousands of years, wearing and weathering at the rate of the world's change, not the rate imposed by the people who master it. The rock is untrammelled, surviving the concrete and the bitumen, the retaining walls, the reclaimed land, and the shorelines that have shifted further and further to accommodate bigger boats, more people, a faster life.

There's a security in standing on such a rock: you can rest on the border it makes between past and present and look out to the horizon, to the future.

—Ashley Hay

We Aboriginal peoples around the globe identify ourselves primarily by the landscapes we call home. We are saltwater people, freshwater people, island people, forest people, desert people. It is taken for granted that the landscape which has fed and nurtured our ancestors has shaped us in deep, unspoken ways. Who understands this? Gardeners, perhaps. Stonemasons. Certain poets. Some farmers, and some fishermen, but by no means all.

In Yugambeh, the language of the Gold Coast and its hinterland, the inland peoples around Beaudesert greet each other, “Jingawahlu?” This means “From where? Where have you travelled, stranger, and can you a tale unfold?”

—Melissa Lucashenko

Merrington sat with his shoulder jolting against the passenger door. He seldom spoke, but Corker could almost hear the cogs in that gnarly brain. Light shone across into the heart of the mountain, purple against the tightly massed trees, the eucalypts giving out their oils and mists of oils, blue-growth tips among the red-growth tips creating mixtures of colour. An artist would know that without being told.

The Toyota climbed the winding gravel track, its tyres spitting stones into gullies of fern. Up higher were exposed ridges of silver-topped ash and conical ant hills that looked like mud-built houses. Native reeds sprouted among the dry stones. Corker said that he often imagined all of Australia in these four thousand acres: the walloping variety of the country, from the Southeast forests to the outcrops of the Kimberley; the distillation of abundant space in a wagtail balanced on a blade of grass, nipping at ripe seed heads. He'd seen them in both places: cousins across a line wider than imagination.

—Roger McDonald

While we walk you are telling me
how people here were hunted over cliffs,
force-fed Christ and wrong-skinned children.
There was that spineless skeleton
with broken thighs
uncovered when sand moved away.

The names here chafe and drag like chains:
Victory Hill, Cape Grim, Suicide Bay.
We put them behind us
as best we can, letting rain and sea
begin to work us loose.

—Louise Oxley

Sing? Perhaps that is not the right word, because it is not really singing. And it is not really me who sings, for although I touch the earth only once in my performance—leaving a single footprint in white sand and ash—through me we hear the rhythm of many feet pounding the earth, and the strong pulse of countless hearts beating. Together, we listen to the creak and rustle of various plants in various winds, the countless beatings of different wings, the many strange and musical calls of animals who have come from this place right here. And, deep in the chill night, ending the song, the curlew’s cry.
   Death bird, my people say.
   Obviously, however, I am alive. Am bringing life.
   People smile at me, say:
      “You can always tell.”
      “You can’t hide who you are.”
      “You feel it here?”
   And, tapping their fists on my chest,
      “Speak it from the heart.”

—Kim Scott

We collect pipis, squirming our heels into the shallow water, digging deeper under the sandy foam. Reaching down for our prize, we find lantern shells, cockles, and sometimes periwinkles, bleached white. We snatch them up, filling our pockets. We find shark-egg capsules like dried-out leather corkscrews and cuttlebones and sand-snail skeletons, and branches, petrified to stone. We find sherbet-coloured coral clumps, sponge tentacles and sea mats, and bluebottles—we bust them with a stick. We find weed ringlet doll wigs and strings of brown pearls; I wear them as bracelets. We get drunk on the salt air and laughter. We dance, wiggling our bottoms from the dunes’ height. We crash into the surf, we swim, we dive, and we tumble. We empty our lungs and weigh ourselves cross-legged to the seabed. There we have tea parties underwater. Quickly, before we swim up for mouthfuls of air.

—Tara June Winch
((Photo by Darren James)
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