Free Remembered By Heart: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing by Sally Morgan

Mantarta waterhole. Although Mantarta is a jila, it hasn’t got a water serpent in it.
    When I was a child I learnt to kill small lizards to eat. I killed the thorny devil, dragon lizards, and small marsupials. I cooked them myself and ate them. Sometimes my grandmother or older sister would kill a blue-tongue lizard for me.
    After the wet season, we’d leave Mantarta and hunt and gather around the freshly watered country. As we travelled we drank water from pools in the swampy ground, then we returned to Mantarta. We hunted and gathered west of Mantarta, getting water from the
jumu
Nyalmiwurtu, Lirrilirriwurtu, Yirrjin, Warntiripajarra and Pirnturr. These were jumu we drank from as we travelled about after the wet season when jumu had water in them.
    Our journeys also took us to quite a few jila south of Mantarta — Wirtuka, Paparta, Mukurruwurtu, Warnti and Japirnka.
    Some years, in the cold weather, we travelled north to other permanent waterholes. We went to Walypa, then to Wayampajarti, Wirrikarrijarti, Kurralykurraly and to Wanyngurla. At Wanyngurla there were a lot of bush onions to gather and eat. We also went to Tapu, then Kurrjalpartu, Wiliyi and Kayalajarti.
    Following the rainy season and right through into the cold season we gathered many different grass seeds to eat. These are the names of the grasses: nyarrjarti, puturu, ngujarna, nyalmi, manyarl, jiningka, purrjaru and karlji. We call this kind of food
puluru.
We also gathered bush onions. Another food we gathered in that season was the nectar from various hakea and grevillea blossoms. We used to suck the nectar from the flowers or soak the flowers in water to make a sweet drink.
    When the hot season came, we gathered seeds from acacia trees. We also collected flying termites that we found in antbed. People used to go looking for them in the early morning with a heavy stick, and smash the antbed with the stick to get termites. They used a coolamon to separate some of the termites from the dirt and covered the rest with sand to pick up later. When they came back they uncovered them and separated the rest of them, and then took them back to their camp. They put the termites out in the sun to dry and left them there until they were crisp. Only then were they ready to eat, after the sun had done its work. Everybody ate them — they were delicious.
    We used to eat a desert nut called
ngarlka.
The nuts dropped to the ground when they were ripe. The whole year round we could gather them from under the trees, in the hot season and the cold season. We could eat them any time. The new nuts hang there on the trees unripe until the hot season comes.
    For food we used to hunt and kill feral cat, bandicoot,dingo, fox, two kinds of hare-wallaby, sand goanna, different kinds of snake, rough-tailed goanna, blue-tongue lizard and echidna.
    We travelled like that year after year, from one waterhole to the next, drinking at jila and drinking at jumu, at rockholes and at claypans, hunting animals and gathering the fruit and seeds of the land.
    A good rainy season made the grasses grow well and gave us many kinds of seed and plenty of nectar from the flowers. In a poor wet season, very little grass grew and there wasn’t much seed for us to gather. In a good year with a lot of rain we were able to store away the seed to eat later on.
    To store the seed we would strip some bark from a paperbark tree to wrap the seed in a parcel, or we’d gather some strong grass and use that to make a container like a nest for holding the seed. We wrapped the seed tightly in packages, and tied them up. Then we cut four forked sticks from a tree, put rails across, and built a frame on top of them. We arranged parcels of food wrapped up in grass or bark on the frame. Then we built a small hut over the top of it to prevent the food from getting dry. We left it there so that we could come and get it later when we needed it and the trees no longer had seeds.
    Sometimes we stored