Free Riding the Black Cockatoo by John Danalis Page A

looked like the frozen faces of Dreamtime heroes. The Aborigines of my childhood existed only in an imagination drawing on books, films and kitsch. The real ones had been corralled onto the missions and communities of Cherbourg, Woorabinda and Palm Island, or lived in the poorer suburbs that fringed the cities and towns.
    { 3 OCTOBER 2005 }
    I spied Big Rob at the uni refectory. He saw me and waved me over. Rob was having lunch with a young Aboriginal girl who took one look at me and quickly excused herself – in fact she almost ran off. Most likely she was an upset student having a meltdown. But my overactive imagination told me that she’d heard about ‘the ghoul with the skull’ and suddenly there I was in the flesh, swooping in. Whatever the reason for her hasty departure, I’d begun to realise that Aboriginal people feel death very differently to white folk. It’s as though death is almost a living thing; a very real ongoing energy.
    Rob listened intently as I filled him in on all the latest developments; his big frame visibly shivered a number of times. And then he did the weirdest thing. He asked me to say my surname slowly, and then he repeated it a number of times: Dan-al-is, Dan-al-is. He explained that he was committing my name to memory. ‘Big things are going to come from this business. I think maybe you’ll write a book about all this.’
    Rob had no idea that I’d written a couple of children’s picture books. I’d long entertained the idea of writing something more grown-up, but the idea of writing about Mary seemed almost perverse.
    ‘Your life is going to change after all this is over, and your family’s too, you just wait and see.’
    I felt a wave of embarrassment rise up my chest and I explained that I was blessed already, life was good. ‘Anyway, it’s all about Mary, not me.’
    Rob waved my protests away and fixed me with eyes as clear as rockpools. ‘Just you wait, good things are going to come.’
    I’ve never been good with praise, so I changed the subject and launched into my family’s geographic history. I explained that my family all came from Texas, a little border town four hours drive south-west of Brisbane. ‘We’ve been in the city a long time now, though. Before that we came from all over: Greece, Germany, Scotland.’
    I was trying to be polite, that is, in Aboriginal terms. I had read somewhere that when Aboriginal strangers meet they tell each other which country they belong to and then spend a lot of time figuring out who their common acquaintances are. This process of establishing where you are from and who your people are is terribly important and a nice way of getting comfortable with a person; it certainly seems a lot more civilised than that annoying question we in the white world ask: ‘So, what do you do?’ Why do we place so much importance on what we do rather than who we are ?
    ‘So, Rob,’ I asked, gaining confidence in my first steps in Aboriginal etiquette, ‘what’s your country?’
    Rob broke eye contact and looked away.
    I sat frozen as Rob’s story wrapped itself around me like a dark vine. This time I couldn’t turn the page or switch the channel.
    ‘I was taken from my mother when I was a baby. I’ve been piecing together my past for a long time now. But on the mission where my clan was sent to, not many records were kept, maybe they didn’t want us to remember. I’ve found most of my relatives now, even in unmarked graves. I also found my mother in 1994; her name is Alma Toomath. We are from Bibbulman country near the sea. Rob’s my adopted name, my birth name is Jo Cuttabut. Right now I’m in the process of changing it back to the name my mother gave me.’
    Everyone in Australia knows at least a little about the Stolen Generation, about the Aboriginal babies and children who were removed from their mothers, family and culture and placed in government and church-run institutions or with white families. We’ll never know the exact