salt
by Jay McKenzie
From the rocks, I gaze across Ocean. It is dawn, and above the stripe of water, a shy copper line, reedy as a eucalypt branch, prepares to stretch and grow into daylight. I pull a tight bud of air into my nostrils, hold until the next breeze strikes, then push it out, free, to dance with the spindrift.
My son, legs crossed, arranges shells around himself on the sand, pressed firm by an overnight rain. This fleshy little being that I created in my body is as familiar with these sands as he is with the whorls on his fingertips, the meaty toes he pokes me with while I sleep. For now, he is under the watchful gaze of my own Earth Mother. She smiles, and she is Ocean made flesh, saltwater in her veins.
I turn back to Ocean. She is Bibi Nagula: Mother Saltwater.
Bibi Nagula, I whisper, show me only what I need, gift me only what I deserve. She responds by caressing my ankles with slow, warm fingers.
Sharp shards, the spines and shells of generations of sea creatures pulled tight together in the loving embrace of Bibi Nagula form the reef beneath my feet. The stab stab in my soles is a reminder that I am of Skin and Earth, not just Ocean.
I empty my lungs, inhale a bodyful of salted air, belly and chest swelling, and dive as the aarli do, arcing then line-straight. Down I plunge, down into her crystal-cavern depths, licked warm and clean. A mossy turtle raises her paddle and veers into the blue. Past rainbow aarli, past queenfish spooked to scatter like sand grains in a storm, I follow the reef wall down down down.
They huddle in clusters on the rock, some with mouths agape as though paused in conversation. Abundant, ready. I ask Bibi Nagula to guide my fingers and the tide pulls them over a jagged colony jutting from a recessed shelf. It is instinct that draws the quartzite blade from my belt and practise that prises two ripe and firm molluscs away from their companions into my palms.
Inside my body, stretched taut, the pockets of air beg to be released. I touch the shells to my brow, praise Bibi Nagula for this bounty. Tilting away from the reef, my toes find a launch pad and I propel myself upwards, salt and skin as one and I am lighter than the skittish bream or the tangled hair of seaweed or the gentle nip of sea lice. Slower than a sunset, I release the thinnest strand of air from my tight lungs.
Up I sail, water slipping across my skin like a fine rain, up and up, oyster shells pointing to the surface, guiding me home. All the while, the gentle leak of air from my body entwines with the silt and the weed and the roe.
The shells pierce the surface first. Sounds become roars and the gasp escaping my lips is primal and deafening. I suck greedily at the morning breeze, shaking saltwater from my hair.
In the softly pinkening light, the shells I have selected are as grey and ordinary as a rock. But they are thick and solid, hinting at the milk-shone glaze within. I push onto the reef with my elbows and watch the figures on the sand. My Earth Mother is kneeling by my son, and together they examine something that rests in his palm. She folds her hands around his, and they form a circle, robust and dependable as the sun.
#
We call them the Irukandji men. Their skin is translucent as the domes of jellyfish we must avoid at Bibi Nagula's depths, shot through with veins electric and blue as lightning forks.
At first, they just watch. We laugh at their clumsy language, their tiny hands that cannot shuck, their thin voices that do not carry on a breeze, and the way they roll their garments to their knees to poke a wrinkle into Bibi Nagula's surface with quivering toes.
My Earth Mother doesn't laugh. Nor do the Elders who pass tales with songline traders who whisper of terrible violence. They cannot harm, say the rest of us to one another. They cannot even swim! The Elders shake heads, pound heels into the dirt, talk of weapons.
#
To watch my father work by the fire lulls me into a thick delicious heaviness. Though his hands are old, they work lizard-quick using a tiny blade, eyes closing from time to time to let the ancestors guide his fingers. Under his work, the plain old guwan shells become riji: sacred objects. He is a storyteller, my father, etching the tales of the waves, the currents, the spouts, and that mystical land beneath Bibi Nagula’s surface into the shells, scratching the ramu into patterns for fortune and virility to the boys that will wear them.
We sit in silence as my father works, and my son climbs into my lap, curling like an oyster in the shell of my folded legs. I rake my fingers through his thick, salt encrusted hair, and a shiver of sand dusts his shoulders. Above, winking across the cave-black sky, the nebulous body of Dark Emu gazes down, and my eyes droop closed, Earth holding me from below.
#
The men are barely recognisable as Ngaru. Proud tribesmen by reputation, these figures are hunched and coiled with eyes cast into the dust at their feet. Between cane-wielding Irukandji men they trudge, heavy feet starved of the rhythms of the Gamwaaan plain, stamping dust from the rude wooden planks that lead onto the boats.
The vessels themselves are hulking. Multiplying, jerking up and down by the shore. When I dream, I am trapped in the belly of one of these boats, and Bibi Nagula cannot hear my plea to take me into her arms.
These men they bring are not men of the Ocean: they are men of the vast plains and rock and scrub, more at home skinning numbat than being nourished by Ocean's feast.
They say that more come because many have drowned on a lungful of Bibi Nagula's wrath. That boys as young as my own have been tied to rocks and thrown to circling gandaar for failing to deliver guwaan into the snapping hands of the Irukandji men. Another story still of a fleet of men chained together and pushed overboard.
My blood stops in my veins when I hear these horrors murmured by the fire. My father says that the Irukandji men don’t really care for the guwaan, but for the shimmering ball that sometimes nestles within. I almost laugh. What use is that? I muse. But it is too dark and terrible for laughter.
#
They watch, with their cold-pool eyes and a hand raised to form a shadow across pinkening faces. Sometimes, they look between us and the snake-like ornament coiled around their wrists, they murmur to one another, point bone-white fingers at us.
Why do they watch? we ask one another, but our voices tremble. We shake off the fog they cast upon us and dive for the guwaan as always, as though there are not light eyes and plucked-skinned bodies watching us move beneath Bibi Nagula's soft folds.
#
They ask my name in halting Bardi. Udihana, I tell them, gatherer of Shells. That first day on the boat, they call me Hannah.
Eight of the ten women they've dragged aboard get sick, chests heaving, yellow belly liquid escaping their mouths. I move between the slick planks and the juddering bodies to daub their brows with a saltwater-soaked rag. Sister, I tell them in turn, Bibi Nagula will protect you.
Over an impossibly deep chasm between reefs, the men throw down a twine and tether the reluctant vessel to the rocks. They haul us to our feet and stand our bodies against the wet timber. One speaks, alien words, except when he frowns over the word guwaan, lips curling as though the word is unpleasant in his mouth. They want us to dive for guwaan, says an older woman. Another sobs. Two still are retching guttural echoes from their lungs.
Bibi Nagula, we say together, show me only what I need. But before we've finished our permissions, the thin girl has been poked overboard by a man with a stick. The rest of us scramble to leap into the waves.
We hit the water like the frozen rain-rocks that come during the monsoons, one after another, splash splash splash. I am accustomed only to seeing the fish and the turtles and the rays when I'm under, but today, wide, panicked eyes of women, hair swirling wildly around their faces surround me. I kick to the surface, find the boat with my fingers and empty my lungs. I suck a hungry breath before diving down.
The thrashing, yelps and squeals that perfumed the surface are suffocated here, blanketed. Only the soft pops of wayward air bubbles slip past my ears.
It is hard to block out the kicking feet, the grasping hands of the other women, but I must. Harder still is to ignore the soft knit of hair drifting gently behind a motionless body. I focus on what is ahead: the sun-puddled coral, the welcoming hands of the seaweed, and below, the guwaan coveted by these skinless men.
The reef is abundant, though I select only one, a fat, wide paddle of a thing with a moist pink lip blushing at its outer edges. My blade frees it and I kick for the surface. Thank you, Bibi Nagula, I think, but she lashes me with a cold angry tongue.
We are hauled aboard by groaning wet ropes. The guwaan are snatched from the hands of those of us who returned with a shell or two.
Only seven of us shiver wetly on the timber.
#
I dream of my son: the apple of his cheek, the slope of his nose like a sand dune tipping a bow to Ocean. And the scent of the baby sweat that dampens his hairline when he sleeps.
They keep us under rough matting in the shadow of the boats. A man with a face like crumpled cloth tells us that we can return home soon, that we may take gifts for our family. But they take us on the boats by day, and at night Dark Emu frowns and the world tilts and I start to forget what my father's hands look like.
#
We are now only five. Sibini hit her head off a post three days ago and yesterday, Nahla simply didn't wake.
Overnight, Earth has gathered her forces and a lumbering grey cloud, dark as eyes, has swallowed the sky. Bibi Nagula churns and baulks, and there are blazing-hot rows between the Irukandji men and our dwindling number huddle together on the shore.
She is angry, says one woman. They strip her of her fruits, her dignity. She will make them pay.
Two Irukandji men push one another. One lands in the dirt on his back. No, he shouts, as the other dangles a fist over his face. No.
Finally, a word of theirs we understand.
#
The vessel lists from side to side. Even the Irukandji men are fighting to keep their food in their bellies. The five of us stand firm in the centre of the deck, hand in hand, feet planted wide.
Bibi Nagula, we chant, show me only what I need, gift me only what I deserve. Over and over we say it. Over and over.
We remain in the circle when the boat is moored and the Irukandji men wipe the spittle from their lips and the bile from their garments.
Bibi Nagula Bibi Nagula Bibi Nagula
Dive, hollers one of the men. Now.
We remain in our circle. No, we say. No.
And we're still gripping hands, still saying no when Bibi Nagula sends the sky fire beast to tear the boat in two.
No.
My son, legs crossed, arranges shells around himself on the sand, pressed firm by an overnight rain. This fleshy little being that I created in my body is as familiar with these sands as he is with the whorls on his fingertips, the meaty toes he pokes me with while I sleep. For now, he is under the watchful gaze of my own Earth Mother. She smiles, and she is Ocean made flesh, saltwater in her veins.
I turn back to Ocean. She is Bibi Nagula: Mother Saltwater.
Bibi Nagula, I whisper, show me only what I need, gift me only what I deserve. She responds by caressing my ankles with slow, warm fingers.
Sharp shards, the spines and shells of generations of sea creatures pulled tight together in the loving embrace of Bibi Nagula form the reef beneath my feet. The stab stab in my soles is a reminder that I am of Skin and Earth, not just Ocean.
I empty my lungs, inhale a bodyful of salted air, belly and chest swelling, and dive as the aarli do, arcing then line-straight. Down I plunge, down into her crystal-cavern depths, licked warm and clean. A mossy turtle raises her paddle and veers into the blue. Past rainbow aarli, past queenfish spooked to scatter like sand grains in a storm, I follow the reef wall down down down.
They huddle in clusters on the rock, some with mouths agape as though paused in conversation. Abundant, ready. I ask Bibi Nagula to guide my fingers and the tide pulls them over a jagged colony jutting from a recessed shelf. It is instinct that draws the quartzite blade from my belt and practise that prises two ripe and firm molluscs away from their companions into my palms.
Inside my body, stretched taut, the pockets of air beg to be released. I touch the shells to my brow, praise Bibi Nagula for this bounty. Tilting away from the reef, my toes find a launch pad and I propel myself upwards, salt and skin as one and I am lighter than the skittish bream or the tangled hair of seaweed or the gentle nip of sea lice. Slower than a sunset, I release the thinnest strand of air from my tight lungs.
Up I sail, water slipping across my skin like a fine rain, up and up, oyster shells pointing to the surface, guiding me home. All the while, the gentle leak of air from my body entwines with the silt and the weed and the roe.
The shells pierce the surface first. Sounds become roars and the gasp escaping my lips is primal and deafening. I suck greedily at the morning breeze, shaking saltwater from my hair.
In the softly pinkening light, the shells I have selected are as grey and ordinary as a rock. But they are thick and solid, hinting at the milk-shone glaze within. I push onto the reef with my elbows and watch the figures on the sand. My Earth Mother is kneeling by my son, and together they examine something that rests in his palm. She folds her hands around his, and they form a circle, robust and dependable as the sun.
#
We call them the Irukandji men. Their skin is translucent as the domes of jellyfish we must avoid at Bibi Nagula's depths, shot through with veins electric and blue as lightning forks.
At first, they just watch. We laugh at their clumsy language, their tiny hands that cannot shuck, their thin voices that do not carry on a breeze, and the way they roll their garments to their knees to poke a wrinkle into Bibi Nagula's surface with quivering toes.
My Earth Mother doesn't laugh. Nor do the Elders who pass tales with songline traders who whisper of terrible violence. They cannot harm, say the rest of us to one another. They cannot even swim! The Elders shake heads, pound heels into the dirt, talk of weapons.
#
To watch my father work by the fire lulls me into a thick delicious heaviness. Though his hands are old, they work lizard-quick using a tiny blade, eyes closing from time to time to let the ancestors guide his fingers. Under his work, the plain old guwan shells become riji: sacred objects. He is a storyteller, my father, etching the tales of the waves, the currents, the spouts, and that mystical land beneath Bibi Nagula’s surface into the shells, scratching the ramu into patterns for fortune and virility to the boys that will wear them.
We sit in silence as my father works, and my son climbs into my lap, curling like an oyster in the shell of my folded legs. I rake my fingers through his thick, salt encrusted hair, and a shiver of sand dusts his shoulders. Above, winking across the cave-black sky, the nebulous body of Dark Emu gazes down, and my eyes droop closed, Earth holding me from below.
#
The men are barely recognisable as Ngaru. Proud tribesmen by reputation, these figures are hunched and coiled with eyes cast into the dust at their feet. Between cane-wielding Irukandji men they trudge, heavy feet starved of the rhythms of the Gamwaaan plain, stamping dust from the rude wooden planks that lead onto the boats.
The vessels themselves are hulking. Multiplying, jerking up and down by the shore. When I dream, I am trapped in the belly of one of these boats, and Bibi Nagula cannot hear my plea to take me into her arms.
These men they bring are not men of the Ocean: they are men of the vast plains and rock and scrub, more at home skinning numbat than being nourished by Ocean's feast.
They say that more come because many have drowned on a lungful of Bibi Nagula's wrath. That boys as young as my own have been tied to rocks and thrown to circling gandaar for failing to deliver guwaan into the snapping hands of the Irukandji men. Another story still of a fleet of men chained together and pushed overboard.
My blood stops in my veins when I hear these horrors murmured by the fire. My father says that the Irukandji men don’t really care for the guwaan, but for the shimmering ball that sometimes nestles within. I almost laugh. What use is that? I muse. But it is too dark and terrible for laughter.
#
They watch, with their cold-pool eyes and a hand raised to form a shadow across pinkening faces. Sometimes, they look between us and the snake-like ornament coiled around their wrists, they murmur to one another, point bone-white fingers at us.
Why do they watch? we ask one another, but our voices tremble. We shake off the fog they cast upon us and dive for the guwaan as always, as though there are not light eyes and plucked-skinned bodies watching us move beneath Bibi Nagula's soft folds.
#
They ask my name in halting Bardi. Udihana, I tell them, gatherer of Shells. That first day on the boat, they call me Hannah.
Eight of the ten women they've dragged aboard get sick, chests heaving, yellow belly liquid escaping their mouths. I move between the slick planks and the juddering bodies to daub their brows with a saltwater-soaked rag. Sister, I tell them in turn, Bibi Nagula will protect you.
Over an impossibly deep chasm between reefs, the men throw down a twine and tether the reluctant vessel to the rocks. They haul us to our feet and stand our bodies against the wet timber. One speaks, alien words, except when he frowns over the word guwaan, lips curling as though the word is unpleasant in his mouth. They want us to dive for guwaan, says an older woman. Another sobs. Two still are retching guttural echoes from their lungs.
Bibi Nagula, we say together, show me only what I need. But before we've finished our permissions, the thin girl has been poked overboard by a man with a stick. The rest of us scramble to leap into the waves.
We hit the water like the frozen rain-rocks that come during the monsoons, one after another, splash splash splash. I am accustomed only to seeing the fish and the turtles and the rays when I'm under, but today, wide, panicked eyes of women, hair swirling wildly around their faces surround me. I kick to the surface, find the boat with my fingers and empty my lungs. I suck a hungry breath before diving down.
The thrashing, yelps and squeals that perfumed the surface are suffocated here, blanketed. Only the soft pops of wayward air bubbles slip past my ears.
It is hard to block out the kicking feet, the grasping hands of the other women, but I must. Harder still is to ignore the soft knit of hair drifting gently behind a motionless body. I focus on what is ahead: the sun-puddled coral, the welcoming hands of the seaweed, and below, the guwaan coveted by these skinless men.
The reef is abundant, though I select only one, a fat, wide paddle of a thing with a moist pink lip blushing at its outer edges. My blade frees it and I kick for the surface. Thank you, Bibi Nagula, I think, but she lashes me with a cold angry tongue.
We are hauled aboard by groaning wet ropes. The guwaan are snatched from the hands of those of us who returned with a shell or two.
Only seven of us shiver wetly on the timber.
#
I dream of my son: the apple of his cheek, the slope of his nose like a sand dune tipping a bow to Ocean. And the scent of the baby sweat that dampens his hairline when he sleeps.
They keep us under rough matting in the shadow of the boats. A man with a face like crumpled cloth tells us that we can return home soon, that we may take gifts for our family. But they take us on the boats by day, and at night Dark Emu frowns and the world tilts and I start to forget what my father's hands look like.
#
We are now only five. Sibini hit her head off a post three days ago and yesterday, Nahla simply didn't wake.
Overnight, Earth has gathered her forces and a lumbering grey cloud, dark as eyes, has swallowed the sky. Bibi Nagula churns and baulks, and there are blazing-hot rows between the Irukandji men and our dwindling number huddle together on the shore.
She is angry, says one woman. They strip her of her fruits, her dignity. She will make them pay.
Two Irukandji men push one another. One lands in the dirt on his back. No, he shouts, as the other dangles a fist over his face. No.
Finally, a word of theirs we understand.
#
The vessel lists from side to side. Even the Irukandji men are fighting to keep their food in their bellies. The five of us stand firm in the centre of the deck, hand in hand, feet planted wide.
Bibi Nagula, we chant, show me only what I need, gift me only what I deserve. Over and over we say it. Over and over.
We remain in the circle when the boat is moored and the Irukandji men wipe the spittle from their lips and the bile from their garments.
Bibi Nagula Bibi Nagula Bibi Nagula
Dive, hollers one of the men. Now.
We remain in our circle. No, we say. No.
And we're still gripping hands, still saying no when Bibi Nagula sends the sky fire beast to tear the boat in two.
No.