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 OnePeacefully Sleeping.‘A true friend and companion of the Adnyamathanha people. 254Quorn, November 2004Dear TracyHi hoping this will find you all well as parting of this leaves me the same…I am pleased that you could find out more about my grandfather. Yes Wanaaring andBourke are not a bad place, but I couldn’t live there unless you were born there. Yes it isnearly time for Christmas and it only 12 month that you and Murray and children movedaway from the Flinders. I have been back to Nepabunna and Iga Warta couple of times thisyear and visit everybody. My son Philip is still working at Iga Warta and I am still writingto Grace and we are good friends now for I found my last Auntie because she will be myfather’s cousin.Well Tracy I will come to a close.Now take careRegards, from Daisy.Another EndingThis is not an ending for me, not really. Nor for you. Lives don’t end, no matter where thebodies are buried or ashes scattered. Bye and bye, we all meet, in some way, weavingourselves into each other until we are all bound together in one hybrid tapestry of stories. Iwill never finish learning about new stories about Rebecca and Jim, and who could ever tellstories of me without including the ten years of my life when they were my constantcompanions and quest? And you will never finish with their stories, either; nor with mine.You’ll want to know what happened next. You’ll want to know what the moral of it all is.Every parable was like that, originally, until some editor couldn’t help themselves but try andexplain it all, as if there’s a rule for living in there somewhere. It’s not like that: this parableof the lives of Jim and Rebecca and the Adnyamathanha community cracks open what wethought was colonial history, to let us see something new about the ways people live and die180