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 OneBut my old father reckoned that we had a couple of witchdoctor, see and some people -my sisters - went around to Blinman. They went round to Blinman this way. They wentaround to Blinman. They camped at Blinman. They camped at Angorichina; they campedthere and come round there. But they say that at Angorichina they reckon that Yura thereburied was [a] witchdoctor…He reckoned that he followed them up right back to RamPaddock Gate.....And then while we was there we didn’t do anything about it and we just[thought] something was talking. While we shifting, we come to that little creek there [at]Ram Paddock Gate. This little [creek], when you come to the Ram Paddock. That creek.We come to that - even them two people them old people here. Them two. My aunty anduncle, they come too. We camped in that creek…But the dogs used to bite that problemplace. And we camped there one time and my father heard this, and the thing is coming upagain, this rumbling. That Mrs. Forbes believe ‘It’s there, it’s there’… Grumbling thatplace. Dad went there with the stick and he wanted to kill him but he can’t see. It wasteddy bear and he killed all the kids. 118There, in Gertie’s gleaming new kitchen, a dinosaur had lumbered towards us fromprehistory, scaring Mrs Forbes, killing children, and chilling the air around us. ‘She knowsthis thing’, I thought, watching as Gertie closed in on herself, her mouth a grim line. Sheknew this thing of nightmares and of science, and called it ‘teddy bear’ with warning in herwhispered voice.Pulling back the apricot curtains her nieces had made for her, Gertie pointed out thewindow towards the trees in the creek, and told me about the tree down there where the‘witchdoctor’ from Marree ‘tied up’ the ‘teddy bear’ so it couldn’t cause further harm. Shetold me if you put your ear up to the trunk, you could hear it grumbling, but that I mustn’t gonear there in the late afternoon. 119 I never have.Beltana, Flinders Ranges, 2001Inside the smoky whitewashed walls of the old Australian Inland Mission hostel at Beltana,Keith Nicholls told me the same story:72