2011 - Theses - Flinders University

Section E: TransculturationsRefer to Book 2 Exegetical Essay SixLife Writing Chapter Seventeen‘He didn’t want to leave us...’Maynard’s Well, December 2007I don’t want to write the next chapter. If this were fiction I would find a pass through themountains and lead Jim out to the plains. But this is history, and the ending is already carvedforever in the mulga wood cross in that tiny cemetery at Nepabunna. It is only the journeythat is uncertain. It is only the path that I can soften and smooth with a storyteller’s flourish,to make the passing gentler for Jim, because I cannot change the destination.Nepabunna, Christmas, 1934Jim is cooking 350 rock cakes, while Bertha Wyld is baking the Christmas puddings andcakes, and Mr Wyld is resting having mixed the batter for them all under his wife’sdirection. 149 Their daughters are licking spoons and bowls whenever they can. ‘I never wantto see another rock cake again!’ Jim will write to Violet Turner, in a happy, helpless kind ofmood after a day where all are fed and ‘finished.’ 150 Jim can’t help feeling softly sad that MrWyld played Father Christmas this time. Jim thinks he’d like to do it again, perhaps nextyear.The old men have been able to hold ceremony again this year, and the mood of the wholecamp is lighter, relieved, and even the women and children participate like they are going to acarnival. 15197