2011 - Theses - Flinders University

White Lives in a Black Community: The lives of Jim Page and Rebecca Forbes in the Adnyamathanha communityTracy SpencerVolume One Creative Writing Component: Excerpted Chapters from Volume Three Appendix OneSection F: BelongingRefer to Book 2 Exegetical Essay SevenLife Writing Chapter Twenty‘In the Sweet Bye and Bye...’Nepabunna, March 1949It is ration day, and Mrs Forbes is hurrying to spend her pension. She is bent over against thedust being whipped in eddies about her, and is clasping an assortment of bags: one for tea,one for flour, one for sugar, and one for rice or sometimes tins of meat. Rains have scatteredthe wild meat who can find their water in any crevice now and not just the waterhole, andeven the occasional ‘found’ mutton the men smuggle into camp has become a rarity;McLachlan’s campaign against the mission means they dare not be caught. 203 There had notbeen any tinned meat in the store last week either, and Mrs Forbes feels a weakness in herbones.Watch her tiny figure – she has always been short and slight – in its long dress and pulleddown felt hat, rapping short steps along the dusty pad from her hut to the store.Mrs Forbes does not tarry at the store: see her toiling back the way she came, her bagsswinging in rhythmic disjunction with their unequal weights. Over the hill she labours, out ofsight.In the dark of her hut, Mrs Forbes arranges her things, and herself, as she always does. Shestands before the camp oven on the hob, the way she always does, not too close, not too far,stirring the small lump of meat in its milky soup, listening to the small slapping sounds of142