Where the Families' Graves Lie

A story of two cultures, two worlds, two realities I am divided between.

 

ONE

 

I do not belong here. I am two people. Two faces. Split between two worlds. I belong to two cultures, yet I am apart from them. I belong to two homes, yet I have no home. I belong to a tribe of two swimming turtles, yet I feel alienated from it.

We were once a river-dwelling people, a tall, fair-skinned people. We lived by the cool, shady banks of the Murray River, the Dhungala, and would hunt far and wide. We were good swimmers, good runners and good hunters. We would dance and sing and we would paint and draw. We were the Yorta Yorta tribe. We once lived together, for each other, and would wake up and fall asleep by one another. But that was in a time too far in the past for anyone to recount. Now, we are a shattered few, driven out among the land to dwell in many forgotten corners.

I was born in the large, sunny town of Bendigo in the sacred lands of another tribe. Yet my spiritual land, my tribal land, my real home, lies far to the north beside the gushing waters of the Murray River.

From Cummera the long bridge slides across the border and into Barmah. There, the stretch of tarmac runs deep into the countryside on long, dusty roads. Winding deep into the heart of the Yorta Yorta nation. Here, grey plains and hills stretch as far as the eye can strain, swallowed up by distant horizons in almost every direction. Trees are few, and blister under the heat of the burning sun. The sky is always bright, always clear, always blue, and the chatter of cicadas so alive, even amid the dryness of soil and grass. Once, this was our home, and it still is, though most of its people have long left to go to places all over the land.

Looming hills with grey haze and endless miles of open plain finally turn south and into the running mill of bushland, which runs further south to the Murray. And the Murray, this cool, rapid river stretching through the land in both directions. This blessed river is the heart of life. The heart of civilisation for those who once dwelled in its shade. It provides in abundance, fish and water to cool off in the summer days. It is a haven from the endless plains and the restlessness of the black Yorta Yorta sun.

The Murray. The home to all those of the Yorta Yorta who lived by its banks. The Murray. My home.

Here along the Murray, under the shade of many trees, I can see the homes of many families, many clans, fishing along its banks, and swimming in the water on a warm day. Under my feet is my own tribe, the Yorta Yorta, but around me are the Bangerang, the Ulupna, the Moira, and the Yalaba Yalaba and many others. We are all one family, and the Murray shelters those of us within. The tall, ghost-white, ashen-grey trunks of gum trees protect us from rain, sun, or danger. It is a haven for those who live by its roots. A teeming city of life.

Behind us, past deep horizons of open plains and hills lie the Barmah lakes. Open, blue, fulfilling lakes. Here, birds and ducks and kangaroo gather like a family across its shimmering waters to replenish thirst and need. The lakes provide an oasis to those who live on the nearby lands, a lifeline for the Barmah wild.

Elsewhere across our land are swamps, creeks and forests, centres of life for my people. Centres milling with wildlife. Our land is so vast, so abundant, and so alive. No one, not physically or spiritually, can take this from us. No! We are part of this land. We have grown with it like the trees and grass, like the sun over its surface. We cannot be removed from it. Like the life on this earth we cannot be taken. How I love this land, how I feel its calling, how I am drawn into its sight.

When I see this land I still see my tribe. I watch the men going hunting, gathering food from the abundance of the land. I see them gathering fish from the gushing water of the Murray, and their cages of clamshells, used to trap the fish, or their spears, to cut through the toughest hide. I observe the women going about their business, gathering herbs and berries from the plants, or dancing and singing, clapping hands and raising voices. In the end they would all share what they gathered, and be well fed by nightfall.

Now when I look at my land I wonder where it all went. The respect? The tradition? The tribes? The elders and their stories? I yearn for the flames and the fires burning long into the night. I wonder about the songs and dances, and those who participated in them. I desire the knowledge of my ancestors, the ways of their laws, and spirit of their tales.

So many have forgotten their culture, their heritage, and where they have come from. It is a sad thing, a culture forgotten by its own.

The people who came to this land, who came from many, were once not so much different to us. They believed in the spirits, the dreaming, and the stories. They lived together, for one another, and not for themselves.

Why did their tribes fracture and shatter? Today, our tribe is fractured, and struggles to make its voice heard and its land safe. We strive to be seen, and to heal our problems caused many years ago.

As shattered a few as we remain, we are still strong as one, a family forged with one purpose, one name, and one will to survive. We still know one another and the place we come from, and we still recognise each other by our names and faces, our multitude of blood and skin. We have not forgotten ourselves, and that is what is most important.

There is a spirit which guides us, a power that binds us together as one. Our leaders, our elders, who are all so strong, so well respected, so regal in bearing, keep us together, and keep us fighting, keep us struggling, in a strange world. For them our tribe is always together, in the worst of times, and in the best of them. We push forwards together, we journey together, and we dream one dream of reconciliation together.

Once every decade our tribe gathers to stick the fractured pieces into one giant picture. We reunite to share our stories and lives, to see one another’s faces. We sit around the tables, sometimes lit by the flame of a single candle snapping wildly in the night breeze, having a drink, and talking and laughing among ourselves. No where else do I feel a belonging, so distinct, than when I am with all my family. My tribe.

Yet such times are so rare, and I feel confined in the world I am living in, a foreign culture imposed upon my life which does not at all answer the questions I ask, or allow me the guidance I seek. It enforces upon me a reality which is, for me, just not real. There is no room for spiritual healing, no room for anything beyond our understanding, no time, for a language unwritten. Exploring my culture seems like some forgotten part of myself, yet so strange when learning about it. But I welcome it, and I will make it part of myself once more.

  

TWO

 

The burial-ground, Cummeragunja, lying in the heart of Yorta Yorta land is a place where many families’ graves lie. These graves are continuously loved and tended to by all families, left not to the silence of nature, or to the sun, but to the concern and respect of all those who come to visit them regularly.

Over time the sun, wind and storms, the rotting and withering of the world aging, leaves graves falling apart, decorations burning into nothingness, and scattered idols wasting away over the dry earth. Cows and horses roaming nearby paddocks sometimes escape into the cemetery, breaking over the headstones marking the buried. That is where we come in.

In droves we come on buses, welcomed by the heated distinction of the day, the sweat and the buzzing flies. The weather is untimely for autumn, but this land is strange with its ways. It is spiritual. Through the entrance into this sacred land we come, as a swarm of people, one big family. To my sides and rear, are elders, their children, and their children’s children. Everyone has come, every generation beside me, walking in open arms and with a smile on their face.

We go about cleaning the graves. The men begin by weeding and removing rubbish, before covering holes with dirt, and smoothing the earth in between the graves. The women and children use fallen branches from the surrounding gum trees, and dry, rusty leaves to clear the dirt and adorn the graves. With paint they decorate the tombstones, or repaint long eroded names, and with fingers they adjust photos of the deceased.

Some graves lie almost swallowed by the wilderness, the once tall mounds signifying the buried, indistinguishable from the earth around them. We create the mounds ever higher, as a sign for the world, and its people, so they know where to mourn and where to pay their respects.

It is hard work, but afterwards, we sit and rest, and we laugh some more, before taking photos of our big tribe, our family, drawn from all walks of life, all places across this vast land of ours.

Here in this sacred burial ground, we are welcomed not only by the familiar sight of our family returned to the dirt, but by the animals that live here as well. We are alone with them, absorbed within our own presence and the world we have not had the chance to live in. We are away from all society, our other lives behind us. We have no troubles here. No guilt. No problems. We are comforted by the familiar sight of this land, our home, and we have nothing to fear. Here we get our answers. Here the birds sing us into peace.

       We walk among the few, towering trees of this part of the land. One tree stands above the rest, a mighty, ancient gum tree, standing on the summit of a hill. I am told by my uncle, an elder, that its age stretches far back to the very days of colonisation. I look far up into the sky at this tree, scraping the very bowels of the wide, blue sky. Its very branches peak the world like the summit of a tall building, and grabs the life from the breeze. Its towering, twisting, deformed trunk grows dry and hard, and its crusting bark peels off its sides like the layers of an onion. How potent this tree is standing before me, how it consumes the sky, how it is fierce against the wind and the hallowing sun.

It is a sentinel for our people, an unsleeping guardian, a spirit, protecting this sacred part of our home. It is a lookout for all the land to gaze upon, a sign for my people that they are home.

My mother once told me a story about this land, and its alluring spirit that no word can describe, its enchantment that no man can explain.

She had come here alone, during the cool, early days of spring to visit the graves and pay her respects, to find her inner peace.

As she left the burial ground for the car, the strangest thing happened. With every tree she passed, down the long, bumpy road, the birds, which had been observing her earlier began to follow her, perching on the trees’ branches watching her and singing with joy. My mother recalls feeling a sudden sense of belonging.

Though she was there alone, away from the world around her, she felt she was no stranger to this land. That she was of this earth.

My mother, whom had been away from this land for her whole life, knew whose land this was, and regardless of what the past had decided for her, had no fear or doubt being here. The birds knew their own, and they had let my mother know who she was. Nothing could take that away.

When I pass to the wind, to be returned to the soil, and into the embracing arms of God, I will be buried here. In this sacred land of the Yorta Yorta people. The land of my mothers and fathers. The land where my spirit will fly.

  

 THREE

 

This may be why I feel so different from the culture I have grown up in. Why I am at times so isolated. Why I am not sure if I belong to it or if even I belong anywhere. It is because I am already part of a culture. I already belong to a tribe. I already belong to something else, a different world to the one I am now in.

The family I grew up with is so welcoming to spirits, to the existence of them, the presence and visiting of them. But so many families around us in this strange world are not. The very idea seems alien to them. So unreal. I do not understand them, as much as they do not understand me. Why is it so hard for them to believe in a world beyond their own? I cannot even begin to understand. For me it is something so real, so beautiful, and pure. For my tribe it is something real. Yet, they do not see this, and they look at me as though I am wrong, as though, my thoughts are filled with strange ideas.

While I strive to seek my culture, the world my spirit yearns for, I have still never really been to the lands of the Yorta Yorta, my tribal land. I have been a few times, but I do not live there. Yet when I do visit, I feel like I have known this land for all my life, and if not in this life, in another. Perhaps in some dream now long forgotten.

It is such a real place, such a lively place, a place that I feel a distinction with, in my heart and in my mind. To me it is my spiritual realm, the world my ancestors grew up in. To me, it is the land sitting alongside the Murray.

When I walk over this land, over the prickly grass, the dry soil, or through the endless kilometres of bush, I feel life. This is my land. I say. This is my blood. This is where I come from.

 

FOUR

 

Though I may feel this way about my tribe, my land and my culture, the home I never had the chance to know, I know this isolation will never leave me. No matter how many times I visit my land, rest under its trees, beneath the stars in the night sky, I know that because I was born in another world I will not find sleep there, I will not live there. I know I am an outsider, on both borders, in both cultures.

I will walk among my land, but my heart will remain restless. And I will forever feel isolated from all the good times, and all the bad times, with my tribe. We will always be out of sight of one another, however much we are together.

Yet though I am left to wonder about my tribal land and my culture, the home I was never born in, against which I am torn; I am comforted to know that my home does not lie thousands of miles across the other side of the ocean, in some place I cannot get to, in some other world I cannot reach. No, it is right here in my back yard. Right here. Behind me. I cannot forget that already I am home, however great the distance I am from the land where the families’ graves lie.

This dirt, it is me, as are the trees and the wind. The blue sky and the blistering sun, the endless miles of rugged countryside. No matter where I am in this great land of ours, this dirt, whether red, yellow or brown, is what I belong to, who I am, and I can never forget that.

Reviews

[Siddartha Beth Pierce]

What a wonderful tale of woe and longing for understanding and acceptance. It seems to me by your lovely descriptions that you are very much part of this society - you understand it, you breath it, you live it everyday, you respect it and long for it. Beautifully told tale. I do believe many of us feel the same especially in America where so many have been misplaced from their original origins. I can very much relate to this tale. Your imagery of this place where you came from is lovely. Great write. Thank you for sharing. It still seems to me that you are very much part of that culture no matter where you were born or live now - it is a matter of how you live your life - wherever you are. Well done.
Light,
Siddartha

[Poeticpiers]

My friend I have read your works with interest I sense in you a fellow seeker after truth. Not the dogma of the established religions. A free spirit who thinks for himself mouded as we all are by circumstances of birth and life experience. I was taught seek out that which is good and learn from it. Respect other peoples beliefs although you don't subscribe to them. Your inner spirit is your best guide so listen to it

[ColdSpiral]

This is a powerful piece of writing - heartfelt and evocative. Your description is shown to be a true strength, and your explanation of your own situation - your sense of searching for belonging - is well portrayed.
You've created a wonderfully emotive and informative piece.
Cheers,
Ben