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 One‘And I’m Jim. Jim Page. Mr Page’ he calls after her, but his words do not carry, andbesides, his attention is suddenly taken by a ferocious chorus of barking away by a grove oftrees. Taking a stick from the fire to light his hurricane lamp, Jim gratefully picks up themorsels and takes them into his shelter. The rest of the community watches his shadowmoving like a giant across the canvas in the gathering dark; watching too for lumberingshapes in the darkness in the minera grove. Mothers bend low over their sleeping children tofeel for soft and steady breaths upon their cheeks. Yamuti not take them tonight.Jim is writing again by a cantankerous lamp, trying to capture the events of the day. But hiswords seem like scribbles of one learning to write, unable to stretch the familiar terms toencompass what had happened to him. 147 Really, he doesn’t know what had happened. Hecan’t make out any pattern, except then he was outside, and now he is inside this camp. Hetries to remember anthropology he has read, who does what when two tribes meet but failsand can only write ‘Met natives. Have built me a shelter and Mrs Forbes has brought mesome cold tea.’ 148, It’s neither a letter nor a report, he thinks, and abandons the gesture.Watch him sleeping, in the loose weave of shade from the moonlit night. Beneath his eyelids, his eyes are flickering, fast. The day replays and replays, sifting and sorting, findingpatterns that resolve into a dark iris of a bird, perched above him, blue wing feathers glintingin moonlight that pours towards Jim’s tent from around the preened folds of Artawararlpanhamountain, Mt Serle.96