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 Onecommunity, a country, for the sake of my husband’s career. ‘I can write my book anywhere,’I had said, seeing the urgency on his face as he considered the job offer in Adelaide. ‘I justdon’t want to live in a city again,’ I added.I arrive in the middle of the night, and first unload my sleeping children onto themattresses on the floor in one room. Then I start on the animals. The dark calms them, andeven the geese are quiet as I nervously take them by the neck one by one from their cage andput them into the new yards. I set water and feed in place by torch light, and return to thehouse to lie beside my children. Even their night breathing echoes in the empty house. One ofthem wakes and cries and I settle them again with soothing sounds. I take a long time to getto sleep.Nepabunna, 1956It is the first Monday of the New Year, and Bill and Florence have helped Mrs Forbes over toher new home. Mrs Forbes sits in the grey light of the corrugated iron in her rocking chairand by her old table that have been brought up from over the hill. The Hathways smilebenignly at her as they close the door. ‘[She] has settled down very well: the fresh interest hasdone her a lot of good’, wrote Brother Hathaway to Pastor Samuels. 235By mid-April, Pastor Samuels has agreed to order a small wood stove ‘for Mrs. Forbes’mansion.’, as he calls the ‘one bedroom and a kitchen – [a] corrugated iron shack with a flatroof.’ 236 It has become too difficult for Mrs Forbes to cook on the open fire that smokes hertiny space, and there are many days when she does not cook at all. Besides, the children whocome so readily for a bullseye lolly or a sip of her Bonox – or Bovril when Pastor Samuels164