Some months ago, Voices of Women Inc called for texts by women about the Riverina. Not just any text, but 800-word stories to be read and acted in performance, short monologues by women of the Riverina on Wiradjuri Country. Themes were to be based on personal experience with something about resilience.
Voices of Women is a not-for-profit organisation that presents new work by Australian women writers by powerful women actors, and collaborates with artists and musicians. https://voiceswomen.com/
I’m a woman from the Riverina, so I thought I’d “have a go”, but when I finished my 800 words I realised that I had not written what you would call a story. I sent it off anyway by the due date, with a note saying I realised it wasn’t on cue, and sure enough, it was not what they wanted for personal monologue performance. So I’ve decided to post the text here as a blog, as Riverton Press was born in the Riverina.
the land I love
When I sit at the rowing machine in a Sydney gym, I imagine I’m on the Murrumbidgee. As a 10-year-old, I was never in the tinnie on my own because the river is treacherous but now I forget the gym and row, willows on one side, a gumtree woodland on the other.
When I go back to Wagga at flood time, I can’t get enough of looking at the lagoons and billabongs, I know the Library is sand-bagged and soggy, the caravan park at Wagga Beach has been moved off-site, I’ve had to drive around because Eunony Bridge is closed and Oura’s under water, but I love it, the water, the birds, the reflections, the green.
I also love it when it’s dry and the colours are those of dry grass and red sand or dusty loam. This also is a time of tension, of worry about fire and wind. My mother used to fret: Why haven’t the neighbours cut their grass?
When I hear the crows in Sydney, I hear their eternal lament (what is their trouble exactly??), and I miss the accompanying voices of the sheep. I was never any good at school choir, this was the soundtrack. I didn’t know then that laughing jackasses (as my father called them) and raucous cockatoos are unique, that the rest of the word has no idea of the scandal of yellow-crested squawking birds descending on your fruit trees.
I lived some years in Mexico City, I rode the busy subway, crowded buses, collective taxis, I attended large concerts and demonstrations. In short, I learned to be part of the masses, and while learning this I would remember the spaces where I grew up, the space many Australians take for granted. As a child I didn’t know that the Milky Way would not be with me every night, that those wide horizons and mirages on the roads would shrink in accordance with my urban choices.
My family knew of course that we weren’t the first on our patch of land, and our white fella history was brief. The old man (my grandfather) had moved there in 1927, he and his sons had planted willow trees all along the riverbanks. That’s an unfortunate choice in today’s knowledge, as the willow has proved a pest, but it made for a very pretty outlook and was enjoyed by the cows (another bad choice) who enjoyed the shade and ate all leaves within reach. We only had a few cows, milkers, our farm was defined as sheep and wheat. There was a stand of eucalypts along the river flat that suggested the original vegetation. Next door, a series of billabongs filled and emptied with the seasons. White fella had used one of these as a tip for tins and bottles (those days were pre-plastic), in a show of his feckless land and water management. There was a similar tip in a gully near the river on our farm, though we never used it. Obviously the plan of my grandfather’s generation was for the river to take their rubbish away…
Those eucalypt stands were full of the land’s past history, that of the Wiradjuri people, we commonly saw scarred trees and would hazard guesses about a canoe or shield being made there. Up on the sandhills was a spot with ash coloured soil, made I suppose, of sand and ash, my father called it a “blackfella’s oven”. I could feel the presence of the Wiradjuri, yet I wondered where they were, I was not told of invasion, massacres, discrimination and social exclusion. Yet I wondered, why is this water on the road to Narrandera called Poison Waterholes Creek? I could not understand that anyone could poison a water supply, when surely everyone of whatever colour needed that water.
My parents sold the farm in the 1970s, to a family, not a corporation, and I saw the place 30 years later. I was astonished at how it had moved to what I could only call agro-industry, with bigger machinery and irrigation installations, metallic silos.
Even when I was a child, we knew that hard-hoofed animals were bad for our soil. I could see on the farm how much land had been cleared for cropping, but at least we still had paddock trees. Today’s big farming and pivot irrigation don’t allow for trees. I have flown over the Riverina, and find it devastating to see the vast areas of cleared flat land dedicated to monocrops.
We all need food, but country will have to be very resilient indeed to survive our farming practices and the challenges of climate change. It is not improbable to imagine the Milky Way shining over an earth empty of all that which was given us.
Photos from Narrandera and Tumut, New South Wales.