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 One….The majesterial pace of the long low dark liner Oruba has slowed to stalling whenBecky hands the letter she has quickly sealed and addressed to the thin clergyman waiting onthe deck, who places it in his satchel with all the others and prepares to embark the pilot boatchafing to get about its business back upstream now they had reached Deal. Becky is crying,as are many others grasping the ships rail, half shut eyes brimming and watching theircountry slide away from them as they move into open waters with a mist of spray clinging tothe fine hairs of their cheeks. All she can say to her sisters until whenever she might chanceupon a mailman, is in that slender envelope she has surrendered. They would hear hersadness in her words, she is sure, but they would never see her face shining with tears and saltspray.…Thank you for your goodbyes. I didn’t expect to be able to take Mother’s Rocking Chair,but am grateful you could pay the steward to arrange it…Nepabunna, 1950At the start of the new year, Fred Eaton is writing his weekly missive to Pastor Samuels inthe UAM office in Adelaide. ‘There was no corroborree,’ he types in conclusion, missing theend of the line as he tries to fit the final word on the page and cheat the typewriter’s returncarriage. He curses the contraption that Samuels has arranged for his use, in the mildestterms.Fred is struggling with changes of his own. Federal UAM has modified its practice as a‘faith mission’, and is suggesting that missionary staff be put on wages! Mr and Mrs Eaton,who have lived through decades of poverty that they can only rationalise as ‘God’s will’,cannot abide a change in ‘God’s Will’ at this late juncture. Fred throws his lot in with Mr146