After Before Time

By Robbi Neal

Stories of life from a remote Aboriginal community that sing with vivid and simple life, truth and power. 

At the end of 2008, Robbi Neal and her family travelled to the other end of mainland Australia to a remote Aboriginal community. They planned to stay for twelve months.  Seven years later, they are still there.

This moving collection of linked narratives centring around a remote Indigenous community has been inspired by real people and real events - the stories might read like fiction, but they are based on fact.  The events they describe really happened.  Each story is true to the person who inspired it and Robbi has been given permission to share these truths by writing them down, both by the person who influenced each story and by the Elders concerned.

These stories sing with vivid and simple life, truth and power. These are stories of shame, pain and sorrow, but also joy and love - and they transform our understanding of 'the Indigenous experience'. The narratives tell familiar stories - of dispossession, destitution, children being taken away, hopelessness and powerlessness - but it tells them in a very different, direct, simple and powerfully moving way.  Robbi Neal captures in a unique and compelling way the voices and histories of these people - their warmth, humour, wisdom and often their irrepressible joy. AFTER BEFORE TIME is profoundly fresh, powerful and moving.

'Reading After Before Time is a total heart experience. Be prepared to experience a whole gamut of feelings, as there is no soft-pedalling here. The characters disclose the depth of their anger, sadness, grief and pain, directly and bluntly. But there is also great love, warmth, and generosity of spirit towards each other and towards those whites who, over the generations, have loved and tried to help them. The book is rich with insights into customs, traditional beliefs, practices and culture; and humorous observations of what the protagonists regard as absurd white behaviour and demands.' Newtown Review of Books

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Apr 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781460706121

Robbi Neal

Robbi Neal's first book SUNDAY BEST, a memoir was developed as part of the HarperCollins/Varuna awards program and published by HarperCollins in 2004. AFTER BEFORE TIME, which told stories of indigenous life in a remote community, was published in 2016. THE ART OF PRESERVING LOVE, a story that spanned 25 years from 1905 to 1930 was published in 2018 under the pen name Ada Langton. Robbi also paints and is currently working towards an exhibition scheduled for 2022 at Redot Fine Art Gallery, Singapore. She is a mama of five wonderful humans (you're welcome world). She has lived in country Victoria, Australia, for most of her life and lives only a few of blocks from where her novel THE SECRET WORLD OF CONNIE STARR (2022) is set. She loves to walk down Dawson Street past the church her grandfather preached in, the same church with the same columns that appear in in this book. When Robbi isn't writing, she is painting, or reading or hanging out with her family and friends, all of whom she adores. She loves procrasti-cooking, especially when thinking about the next chapter in her writing. She also loves cheese, any cheese, all cheese and lemon gin or dirty martinis, the blues, and more cheese. Photo Credit: Indea Leslie

Book preview

Members of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are respectfully advised that the following stories may contain images of and references to people who have passed away.

Dedication

Dedicated to the memory of the Old Fella

who taught me about Puuya Kuntha and

to the Old Girl who called me Miintha

Maampa Laka.

To whom it may concern,

I, Lawrence Omeenyo, Elder, Umpila, am writing to confirm our support for Robbi Neal and her stories which she has written.

Her stories are inspired by yarns she has had with me and others. We have given these yarns to her so they can be told. We are proud of her stories and are proud for her stories to be told and proud they are about our people.

Robbi is one of us and we are proud she is doing this writing.

I am writing this on behalf of myself, my Clan and the Art Centre and Community. I am an Elder, Songman and Story teller.

Lawrence Omeenyo

Elder and Director

We, the Elders Dorothy Short, Elizabeth Queenie Giblet and Susan Pascoe, give our permission and blessing for Robbi Neal to have the stories she has written published.

We are glad these stories have been written as they will be available for future generations of our young people so they can know our lives. They will also let others learn what life is like for our people.

It is good for us to have these stories written and told.

Robbi is like our daughter now and we are happy for her to tell these stories and to have them published.

Dorothy Short    

Susan Pascoe    

Elizabeth Queenie Giblet    

Witnessed by Irene Namok    

Dated: 13/04/2015

Contents

Dedication

Before

Robbi’s Yarn

Elsie’s Yarn

Alice’s Yarn

Elaine’s Yarn

Barney’s Yarn

Meg’s Yarn

Joseph’s Yarn

After

Thank you

About the Author

Copyright

Before

Being aware, and acknowledging one’s cultural connection, is something everyone can relate to. It is about identity and having a sense of belonging. For me it is vital to my own wellbeing. Identifying with your own past and being proud of your heritage offers grounding to what you do and how you do it.

For too long now, some of our most respected Elders in the community have been silent, aching to tell their stories. They have shelved their pain and despair, the times of never-ending heartache, to now tell how their lives were impacted by colonisation. This is not the end of their stories, it is perhaps only the beginning – for there is still so much more to tell of the present day and what they think the future holds for their communities and their mobs.

Anyone who knows anything about Aboriginal culture and our ‘ways’ will tell you that we never stop ‘reading’ people. We also know that other Aboriginal people are ‘reading’ us too. We learn a lot by not saying anything at all, and instead just listening. And this is how Robbi’s book After Before Time eventuated.

It is my privilege to have been invited to write the foreword for this book. I have been working with the Old Girls and the Old Fella at the art centre and in the arts business and industry development since 2001, and with Robbi since she arrived in 2009. Even when Robbi was overloaded with work, and up against deadlines, she always found time – and dedicated so much of her free time – to be a good friend, taxi driver, mentor and confidante.

Knowing the complexity of living and working in an Aboriginal community and within an art centre, and the special bond they all had, it was a natural occurrence that the Old Girls and the Old Fella welcomed Robbi into their hearts. They felt comfortable sitting and talking with her. It was as if they were reconnecting with their precious loved ones in the spirit world and verifying that their struggles and memories were still with them. They were also sending a silent message to these younger ones to ‘shape up’. Get off the grog, stay off the grog. Earn respect. It’s not something that gets handed to you on a plate.

The Old Fella was the glue that kept everything together and now he is gone. ‘Hey, life too short,’ I’ve heard before. ‘Gotta tell these young ones what we went through.’ Community life stood still for a long time. He was the Song Man. His standing in the community was never questioned. Thank the heavens he was a proud, hard-working, honest, upstanding man. He earned the respect he got, clearly evident throughout the community and in the art centre.

This one day at the art centre I remember speaking to the Old Fella. His voice was slow, soft and jovial. He was very proud of his clay sculptural work and we were working together in the pottery room. I struggled to piece together the snippets of personal information he shyly but happily talked about. It was all so very interesting but where it fitted into his story timeline was a mystery to me and I was left intrigued. Every now and then, I could see he had a private joke that made him laugh and smile.

You can’t have a book about community life without acknowledging the important roles that women have in the community and in their homes with their families. The Old Girls must have been a ‘force to be reckoned with’ in their younger days. They deserve to be happy now – and happier.

I had the opportunity to sit with the Old Girls while they were hearing back their stories. We were having a lunch break during one of the Cairns workshops. Robbi asked if we would like her to read while we relaxed and enjoyed our lunch. They were smiling their approval and nodding to me when their stories reached times when they were heartbroken or when they were at their lowest ebbs in life. Their stories were captivating, and I better understood their present place in the community, their status, their frustrations, their commitments and the reasons why they stay. I loved listening to the stories, and the next day the Old Girls asked if Robbi would read us some more of the book.

While I recognise who each story belongs to, they could be the stories of many other Aboriginal people with similar backgrounds who have had a community upbringing. These Old Girls are so wonderful to be around, but you’ve got to earn your place to be in their company. Their willpower, their ‘won’t power’ and their strength against adversity is worthy of praise.

Jenuarrie

Jenuarrie’s grandfather’s Country is known as Koinmerburra (Koinjmal) Country. Her long professional visual arts career and her work in Indigenous arts development spans over twenty-five years. She has chaired the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board Visual Arts Panel, been a panel member on the Arts Advisory Committee to the Minister for the Arts, Queensland, and was the Arts Queensland, FNQ Industry Development Officer for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Arts for fourteen years. She is currently an assessment panel member for ArtsLink Queensland and has recently retired as a board member of the Lockhart River Arts Indigenous Corporation.

Robbi’s Yarn

At the end of 2008 my family and I travelled from a country town in Victoria to Cape York in the northern tip of mainland Australia, to a remote Aboriginal community. We planned to stay for one year. We lived there for nearly seven years.

The stories in this book are inspired by real people and real events. Some of the events happened exactly as described, some are an intermingling of events; others I’ve made up to describe people’s experiences of similar events and to make this a story that might compel you to keep reading.

Some of the people described are real, some characters are not and some are fusions of different people. Each story I wrote for a particular person, as a gift from me to them, inspired by the stories they had shared with me about themselves and that they had asked me to share with others. When I had finished writing each story, I read it to the person who I wrote it for, the person who inspired that story and whose life experiences the story was based on.

The Old Fella had said to me, ‘You’re a storyteller. You write, you write it down and tell people about our lives. We want the rest of the world to respect our Culture.’

The Old Fella was sitting on a stool on the art centre verandah, his hands and arms covered in clay, his cap backwards on his soft grey hair. With his hands now white from clay dust, he dunked his Arrowroot biscuit into his lukewarm milky tea. I watched as flecks of dust fell into his tea, then he nodded and continued, ‘You one of us, laka, you must tell our stories so that the world will know us Aboriginal people.’

Soon after I was sitting with the Old Girl, we were in my kitchen having tea and biscuits. She brushed the biscuit crumbs from her turquoise Islander dress with its bright orange flowers, put three sweeteners into her tea, took a cautious sip and said, ‘I am giving my story to you, Miintha Maampa, to tell others.’

She told me about the mission and the days when the community was forcibly removed once again from the place they had come to love. When she had finished she said what the Old Fella had said to me: ‘Telling these stories keeps our hearts strong.’

I wrote their stories and I read them aloud to each of them.

The Old Fella listened, nodding his head.

‘Now this won’t be exactly what happened,’ I warned him. ‘This is what I have imagined from what you have told me.’

What he’d told me was: ‘I didn’t want a girl from here, I took a girl already promised and so there was a big fight, and I won and then they came and they cut her up real bad.’

I took that little snippet, that gem, and put it with what I knew about Old Joseph as a person and turned it into the story in this book. And I did the same with each story in here.

I read his story to him and at the end, with tears in his eyes he said, ‘That’s it girl, you got it. That’s what happened.’ Then he thumped his puuya and said, ‘That’s true to me.’

I sincerely apologise to all Indigenous communities for any facts that are in this book that are not correct and I apologise for any unintended cultural insensitivity. This book is not a history but a partly true, partly imagined story about people’s lives and experiences. It is my love letter to the people who gave me a home.

Every one of the people in this book has enriched my life. I love every one of them. But their lives have been hard and, despite any government freebies they may get that white people don’t, I do not believe there is a single white person in Australia who would want to change places with them and live through what they have suffered. Their strength to survive is immeasurable.

The Old Fella and the Old Girl want the Ancient Songs to live on through the sharing of these yarns.

‘Puuya Kuntha,’ said the Old Fella to me many times. He beat his fist against his chest and smiled.

This book honours his memory and the Old Girl’s memory.

Elsie’s Yarn

Before Time

Three things happened on the day I was born. I didn’t see these things cause I was safely cocooned inside my mother, but I knew, even from those warm waters in her belly, what was happening and after I was born, my grandmother yarned the story of my birth day over and over so I would always know and never forget.

Now I am an old, old lady.

When the men caught kangaroo I would smell him cooking on the fire and my belly would growl for him.

‘Young girls can’t eat kangaroo or it will ruin your knees,’ my gran would say to me.

So I never ate that moist kangaroo meat but now I am old, my knees are ruined anyways, my bones are thin and shaky, my eyes are watery and weak but my mind is still smart and I remember everything, so I get Meg to write these things down for me. She is one of us, she is like my daughter, so I give her my story to give to you so as youse can know what it was like for us that grew up on the bush, on Country.

My story started while all my mob was sitting on the beach. It was our beach – the beach and its coral-filled seas and all the land alongside the beaches, they had belonged to my father and his father and all the fathers before him since the beginning of time. It was a good beach for catching salmon during salmon run, or coral trout, bream, pumpkin fish, trevally or stingray. It belonged to us and we belonged to it. This was our Country and we were a Sea people.

Sitting on the beach this day there was my father, a man who always stood straight with his head held to the sky and his shoulders pushed back and his chest firm and glistening in the sun. There were my two uncles, my father’s younger brothers. There was Big Uncle whose belly was turning soft and Little Uncle whose beard wasn’t yet growing. There was my mother who was full up of me, and my little mother who was my father’s second wife, she was pretty with a smile that lit up the darkest night like the moon, and my aunt who always looked like she got the sour taste of bush lemon in her mouth, and my cousin-brother who was much older than me and my cousin-sister who was older than me by a couple of years, maybe more, whose name would one day be Dorothy. There was my cousin-sister who would be Elizabeth who was just a bubba and last of all my grandmother who smelt like the warm ash that she cooked over.

The men were looking out over the water thinking about a good time to get the fish and they were whittling their spears. The women were weaving their puunyas and quietly yarning about the women and men in another mob and who was playing up with who and who was pregnant to who they shouldn’t be and who was gonna get themselves killed with all their playing around. And the kids were digging in the sand and sometimes kicking it into each other’s faces which would start the one with the face full of sand yelling and then the women would look up from their weaving and give a growl at them kids and the kids would settle down for a bit.

My youngest uncle, Little Uncle, was the one us kids always liked best, cause he would chase us up and down the beach.

‘Grahhhhh,’ he would growl. ‘I’m Awu Man come to catch little children.’

And we would scream with excitement and a little bit of afraid in case Awu Man really was inside him; and if he caught us he would toss us in the air, tickle us and drop us into the waves. He was young and strong, his hair hung down to his shoulders and looked a little wild and his eyes shone, always looking for some fun.

But this day, the day of my birth, Little Uncle wasn’t laughing or playing with us. He wasn’t whittling his spear like his brothers. His eyes were sad and lonely. Nah, on this day he was standing in front of my father and he looked real serious. Like he got real big problem.

He opened his mouth to let his words out but they didn’t come and so he clamped his mouth shut and wandered down to the shore and kicked at the waves and then he wandered back and stood in front of my father again, with his mouth hanging open waiting for those words to come.

The women had stopped yarning and were watching to see what was going on and the kids knew something was up and had stopped annoying each other in the sand and everyone was watching that young uncle of mine.

Little Uncle turned this way and that, wandered off to the shore to kick at that water and back he goes in front of my father. My father watched him, from where he was sitting cross-legged in the sand, with the corners of his mouth turned up. He was trying not to laugh at his youngest brother and as soon as Little Uncle got near my father again, my father quickly pretended to be busy working on his new spear.

Finally Little Uncle approached my father for the fifth time. He took a deep breath for courage and after too long a wait he blurted out, ‘You got two wayimu. Other brother got wayimu. I got no wayimu. This is not a fair thing. You should give one of your wayimu to me.’

My mother and my small mother and aunt and grandmother all took a deep breath, dropped their mouths open and stared at the two men and then at each other. Grandmother saw the worried look on my mother’s face and then Grandmother took another deep breath, looked across from my mother and saw the hopeful look on my father’s second wife, who I called Little Mother. And Grandmother, she smiled quietly inside herself.

Father laughed a deep rolling laugh that echoed out over the sea to the mountains on the other side of the bay. Then he stopped laughing and sat quiet for some time looking at my Little Uncle. Finally he spoke.

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ said Little Uncle.

There was another long silence.

Finally Little Uncle said, ‘Which one? Which one can I have?’

Father looked at his wives like it was a hard decision. He gazed for a long time at my mother who was so very pregnant with me and her heart went down to her feet. She knew she would be given to Little Uncle whose beard didn’t even grow propa yet. Little Uncle, what was she gonna do with a boy like him? Tears formed in her eyes and she took a deep breath ready to give those men a good what for.

Then Father said, ‘You can have the stupid one.’

And Mother relaxed because everyone knew that meant it was Little Mother that was given to Little Uncle.

And Little Uncle said, ‘Alrighty then.’

But they could all see he was holding back his heart from leaping across the sand and Little Mother smiled so big you could see all her teeth and the sun suddenly looked dim against her smile and then she quickly looked down and got busy with her puunya like it made no difference to her. No difference at all.

Nothing more was said. The women went back to their yarning, the kids dug canals in the sand and the men whittled their spears. And Father kept Mother which was just as well because she was full of me and had just felt me pushing hard against her bones.

My father was the oldest of the three brothers and the head of the family. He was a strict man, very strict but in Before Time that was what it was like. Kids’ heads never said to the rest of their body, Don’t do what your father just say, it’s okay for you to swim out to that far off rock because that would get you a quick clip cross the ear.

So as soon as my father said, ‘Eh, you go fetch me that’ or ‘Eh, you go get me this,’ you do that something straightaway. If he said, ‘Palu kalmi – come!’ kids came running quick smart. If he said ‘You get me that bit of driftwood over there!’ you got it to him faster than a blink before his arm could reach out to give a wallop across the head for being too slow. And at night when he sat by the fire to yarn, he would pull me, his youngest child, to him and sit me on his lap and he would gently tickle me under my ribs where I was really tickly to make me laugh and he would laugh along with me. I would run my fingers gently over his chest, tracing the initiation scars carved into his skin that looked like giant worms living under his skin and crisscrossing on a hurried journey and he would sing to me the Ancient Songs so they would settle in my heart and tell me who I am.

So I could understand why Little Uncle was scared to ask my father for one of his wives because Little Uncle couldn’t even grow a propa beard, his body was scrawny and too gangly for his head which looked like a big coconut balancing on top of a stringy sapling. But on the day I was born, my father gave one of his wives away to Little Uncle and that was the first thing to happen.

There was a second thing to happen the day I was born. As soon as my father gave his wife to my uncle and had picked up his net for catching some bait and Little Uncle didn’t think no one was watching no more, Little Uncle turned and gave my little mother a big sloppy grin and she grinned back like she just got everything in the world she ever wanted and my grandmother took a good look at my mother rubbing her belly full of me and she knew the time for sloppy big-eyed looks was over and the time for women’s business had started.

‘Alright youse girls,’ she said, ‘it’s all settled, that’s enough of them eyes looking here and looking there, so let’s go out bush and collect us some snail and yams.’ And she called to the men, ‘Youse watch them piccaninnies real propa while we be gone a while.’

So the women went out in the bush leaving the kids playing in the sand with the men watching over. As the women were out in the bush gathering yams for dyeing grasses my mother got the pain for me that Grandmother knew was coming and she gave birth to me, in the bush under the shade of them yungku, and as soon as I took my first breath, my mother took her last breath. She died, she died while I was being born and my aunts wailed so loud that Father heard from down by the beach and him and my uncles stopped their fishing, they dropped their nets in the sea and they went and sat on the wet sand and waited.

And that’s why I never seen her. Never seen my mother.

But on that day I was born, on that day, three things happened. These were the three things.

One, my uncle got a wife. Two, my mother died. Three, my father woke up that day with two wives and went to sleep that night with no wife to keep him warm at night.

So to this day I never seen my mother, I only seen my father. She has never been spoken of, so I do not know if she was a beautiful one, or if she could weave the best puunyas. I do not know if her puunyas were even and tight, if she made beautiful chaymara or if she found the best yams to crush and dye her grasses till they were a bright deep yellow like the sun going down in the evening over our sea. I do not know if she was propa best at shake-a-leg, praps she was, praps the other men would look at my father with green eyes and wish she was their wife because of the way her hips and breasts moved when she shake-a-leg. But I know nothan about her cept the day she died and to this day I never once said her name.

And so my grandmother and my little mother and my aunt brought me up. And I was okay to be growed up by them.

In Before Time when I was a little girl, my grandmother would make fire on the beach, and my uncles and my father would go out in the canoe and hunt for turtle or dugong. Turtle was my father’s favourite meat, but dugong is my favourite. That turtle smelt like dog shit! The turtle and dugong are easier to catch than fish because they are so big and lazy in the sea, they meander through it like they got no cares in the whole world and they are big enough to feed the whole mob of us, so because them turtle and dugong are