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 OneI’m not sure which order I will do things in next. I will probably drive over the small hilland park next to the ruins of Mrs Forbes’s old hut, and go for a walk down the creek to see ifthere’s water in the waterhole. I like to sit down there.I will see a few people in town: Gladys and Mick Wilton, Ian and Judy Johnson, AuntieMona Jackson. I’m not sure who will be living in Granny Gertie’s flash new home.I will also go to visit those I knew in the cemetery, lying beside their husband or wife or ina plot still big enough for those yet to come. ‘Hello Granny Gertie, its me, Tracy, visitingyou. Murray Muirhead’s wife. Well, I used to be. And hello, Leo, and Artie. I’ve beenwriting about you. Wonga wonga, you stay there now.’On my way back out of town that I will take the track up the hill south of the community,and pull up, right there on the track, because no one much will come by. I’ll walk over theuneven ground with my camera, ready to take yet more photographs of the two graves I havealready tried to capture from so many angles. The safety fence is still in place, and theartificial flowers under the glass jar on Mrs Forbes’s grave still have some colour. I’ll wishI’d picked some wild flowers to place on Jim’s neat white gravel, and in front of Rebecca’sdignified headstone. She smiles up at me from the cameo portrait embedded into the darkstone.‘It’s me, Becky. It’s me, Jim. Just coming by to say hello again. I’ve finished writingabout you, you know. But I’ll still come. I’ll still be coming back.’ I’ll stand and watch for awhile: I might see the same three donkeys watching me from behind the scrub, or the whiteswell of hundreds of corellas wheeling through the air above me. East, the ever-blue ofWayanha, Mt McKinlay, will watch me back. That’s the way that Becky is facing, I will178