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 Onedidn’t know where he was going, but he just trailed along and came to this big paddock ofpeople there....He came to this place where the Adnymathanha people were camping - we say‘Minerawuta’ or ‘Ram Paddock’. Our people saw him coming on a pushbike and theywondered: “Why? What’s this fellow want? Is he a ghost?” That’s why the kids ran offand took off to their family. The men in the olden time, the elders of the area, were reallystrong in their culture. They went and met the young fellow and started to talk to him. Idon’t know how with the language. Our people must have known just a bit of English inthat time, although our people talked lots in the Adnyamathanha. ‘Yura ngawala’ they callit. They welcomed him into the camp and he started sitting there and talking to them. Hestayed with the elder men. He looked after them because the women wouldn’t haveanything to do with that part of it. He told them who had sent him, and that he’d been sentto tell them about the Gospel, but mainly to work with them first. This is at Minerawuta,not Mt Serle. Mt Serle’s still over there. 143Angepina station, near Copley, April 1930Becky has heard the news racing like wildfire around the camp. The missionary! Themissionary is here at last! Jack and Raymond have run off with the other children, to see thismarvel their mother has told them about. A teacher! Learning to be educated! Writing liketheir Mum! Old Rachel Johnson is setting her fire to rights, ready to join the crowd; MayWilton too, with a swarm of children at her skirt. Jean Clarke lifts back the blanket thatserves as door to Becky’s hut.‘You coming? He’s here, you know, just like you said he’d be.’ But Becky feels suddenlyexposed, after months of waiting. The thought of a white missionary at Minerawuta is like amirror to her, and she sees herself in frayed clothes, hair cut roughly as she could reach itbehind her back, her cheeks coarse and showing spidery red veins. Most of all, she seesherself framed in a tin and sapling hut, dirt for floorboards, cooking on the ground.‘I’ll be there directly’, she says, non-committally, and sees Jean shrug as she drops theblanket and leaves Becky alone, in the dim light.86