Free Still Waving by Laurene Kelly

Please come. Say you will.’
    â€˜I’ll say I will, but I won’t.’
    â€˜Why not? Your mum will let you.’
    â€˜No she won’t.’
    â€˜Course she would.’
    â€˜Not now. Mum’s sister, Auntie Dolly is real sick. It’s not good.’
    â€˜I’m sorry about your aunt, Ruby.’
    â€˜Well she’s old so what can you expect. I’m looking after the young’uns while Mum stays with Auntie. It won’t be long now.’
    â€˜I’m sorry. Maybe next holidays?’
    â€˜Mark it in your diary, girl. I’ll be there.’
    There was a crackle on the line. ‘You haven’t got a storm up your way, have you?’ I asked.
    â€˜I was going to ask you the same thing.’
    â€˜Maybe somewhere between here and Goodooga there’s lightning.’
    â€˜That’s a lot of country to cover. It certainly isn’t out this way. There hasn’t been a cloud in the sky for months. It’s dry as a bone out here, but Uncle Ted reckons a big rain’s coming. Uncle’s got everyone working to flood-proof the community. Some town people laugh at old Uncle, especially when he tells them that it’s going to flood bigger than Noah’s. I told him I believe him. Uncle’s one of the old people and he’s still got the knowledge, and there aren’t many left. If Uncle says it’s going to rain big time, it’s going to rain big time.’
    â€˜How old’s your uncle?’
    â€˜No one knows. But he has thousands andthousands of years’ knowledge about his country in his head.’
    â€˜Amazing. He’d know every little sign.’
    â€˜Uncle reckons most people are fools because they have very short memories. He reckons some of them have forgotten what rain is, and that they’ve forgot about these rivers when they’re angry. He’s making these canoes with the young’uns.’
    â€˜Is he rounding up all the animals like Noah?’
    â€˜Don’t be stupid.’
    â€˜Down here, we’ve got smoke blocking out the sun a lot of the time. I can smell the bushfires up in the National Park from here.’
    â€˜There’s some burning up Queensland, but there aren’t enough trees for a bushfire around here. It’s just the sheep in the paddocks at the mercy of grass fires, poor buggers.’
    I took a deep breath. I was so sensitive to the subject of fire.
    â€˜Well I hope your uncle’s bloody rain makes it down here.’
    â€˜It will girl, and then you’ll all be moaning.’
    â€˜Anything else happening?’
    â€˜A few people got the run for causing all this trouble.’
    â€˜What kind of trouble?’
    â€˜You know drinking and fighting. I’m sick of it. It’salways the same people. Like clockwork, pension day and it’s on.’
    â€˜It sort of happens here too, when it’s hot and people have had too much to drink. Sometimes there’s full-on brawls in the street between all these yobbos.’
    â€˜Mum does this night patrol stuff with some other aunties. They pick up young kids and get ’em off the street. I see Mum’s heartbroken night after night with some of these kids’ home lives.’
    â€˜It’s all so sad, Ruby. Do you think it’s hopeless?’
    â€˜Some days I think it’s worse than hopeless. I want to do something to change it. That’s why Mum’s so strict on me about sex and stuff. She says whenever I’m going out, even to school, be good and if you can’t, be careful. Mum says it like I’m out bloody doing it every day. What does she think?’
    I laughed. ‘Maybe she thinks you do it at school.’
    â€˜In the toilet.’
    â€˜On the sports field.’
    â€˜Errgh, can you believe it? Some kids do it in broad bloody daylight.’
    â€˜Revolting. Especially the toilet. Those toilets are so bad, and that’s after they’ve been