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 A Part 2: JourneysRefer to Book 2 Exegtical Essay TwoLife Writing Chapter Two‘From the land where time begins to the timeless land.’Druid Vale Station, Flinders Ranges 2003I lived at Druid Vale Station, in the Flinders Ranges, where the earliest Ediacran fossils hadbeen found. Rebecca’s headstone bore the epitaph: ‘From the land where time begins to thetimeless land.’ Both the commentary and the funding had been contributed by an Englishfriend of Daisy’s family, who became enamoured of Rebecca’s story recorded in ErnestineHill’s The Great Australian Loneliness when he realised his own mother had been born in thesame place and time as ‘Becky’:‘My name before my marriage was Becky Castledine … I come from Greenwich, wherethey tell the time … Although I was born within the sound of the Bow Bells, the whole ofmy early life was spent in the shadow of the big Observatory.’ 18Beck was born on 3rd March 1873, although the bronze plaque on her grave will forever read1878, after a smudge made on a print of her birth certificate. She was the second child ofGeorge and Eliza, brought up in Walworth, the heart of the old City of London, where thestreets were lined with wares and the damp air was thick with cockney slang and the accentsof Empire as foot and carriage traffic made its way to or from the nearby docks where thegray Thames sucked at its cobbled banks. Her older brother died in infancy, as did another ofher brothers; a third, Jim, died at twenty-two years of age in the Boer War, and the fourth,18