Free Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko Page A

meatless that they resembled great huntsman spiders flopping loosely against the bedcovers.
    â€˜Ah, risk what? Better than risking being bored to fucken death in this bastard dugai joint!’
    Uncle Humbug grumbled on to himself from beneath wild silver eyebrows. Poor old bugger. Well, no, not old – he probably hasn’t even hit sixty yet, Jo thought. But sick as a dog, and just another statistic waiting to pile up in somebody’s report, somebody’s fucking thesis.
    â€˜I’m the one true blackfella for this place, and what’ve I got?’ UncleHumbug spat hotly at the nurse’s retreating back. ‘You dugai bastards sitting on a gold mine ere in Mullum! Everybody cept Humbug making the biggest dollar from this place!’
    â€˜Yes, of course you are,’ the nurse patronised him over her shoulder, ‘and that’s why we need to keep you here to get you healthy, Mr Milbung.’
    Jo stared at the old man. The one true blackfella. Those were the words Twoboy had used the other night at the pub. Were the two men related – or had Uncle Humbug in his madness simply picked up a convenient phrase floating around the zeitgeist?
    Stung with guilt at not busting him out, and filled, too, with curiosity about his claim (for she had always thought of him as a Koori and a southerner) Jo promised that she would call in after work and see about taking him home. Hardly appeased, Uncle Humbug watched as Doctor Michelle put six stitches in Jo’s upper arm.
    â€˜You come get me when you knock orf work, girl,’ he dictated, as she went to leave.
    A hand flung in the air from the other side of the double glass doors was her only answer; giving Uncle a lift home was going to wipe half an hour at least off the time she had available for riding Comet. Humbug took the provision of lifts and food and tithes as his natural born right. Jo was not only youngish and a Goorie, but she was female and therefore, in Frederick J. Milbung’s eyes, entirely subject to his constant demands. Could you get any further from aloof Granny Nurrung with her straight back riding her treadly to church, Jo wondered. And where, she thought in added irritation, were Uncle’s legions of white hippie girlfriends when he needed them? Normally there was at least one dreadlocked drama queen hanging on his every solemn pronouncement and feeling she was all-but-Aboriginal after rooting Humbug for two weeks in the back of his decrepit van.
    â€˜You coming to the beach?’ Jo asked her daughter a few nights later, hoping Ellen might have something going on with friends.
    Ellen shook her head, picked up a toasted sandwich and headed silently back to her room. Jo watched that narrow disappearing back. At what point, she wondered, do you start to worry? At what point does ordinary teenage angst start to look like depression, and isolation, and looming disaster?
    â€˜Well, the dogs are fed. And if I’m not home, I’ll be at Therese’s,’ she called out as she grabbed her keys. ‘Love you!’
    In the South Golden car park Jo could hear the sounds of merrymaking from beyond the dunes, and see sparks flying up from a driftwood fire. Somebody had brought a guitar, and two or three somebodies were singing ‘Flame Trees’, with a mouth organ wailing along for good measure. An old white couple wandered back to the car park through the banksias, their grey hair still dripping from the ocean, and half-zipped wetsuits draped around their hips. Bit bloody late in the year for swimming isn’t it, she thought. Respect.
    â€˜They’re getting pretty happy down there,’ the man warned her with a grin.
    An alcohol-fuelled cheer rose as Jo crested the narrow track. Below the timber lookout platform, Therese sat cross-legged in the sand, a cheap new Chinese ukelele in her lap, smiling broadly and sampling the joint that was doing the rounds of the fire. Drawing closer, Jo could see