The Modern Jajabor

The road chooses the jajabor; the jajabor chooses not the road.

A meeting of jajabors while on the road is a surprisingly uncommon event.  Many days may pass without hint of another, and in settled periods the absence of even evidence leads one to wonder if others at all exist.  Yet there are the travel websites, with postings like ‘I left home three years ago on a three-month trip.  I’m never going back.’  The jajabor’s footprints may be light but they step, nonetheless.

When one jajabor does meet another, in my experience it’s a happy event, a meeting without formality and no more constraint to it than the hopping about of a sparrow on a windowsill.  There’s calmness in not needing to explain or greatly elaborate; to without effort pursue simple talk of adventure, with travel tales consumed as readily as rice.  Jajabors don’t ask the questions settled people do.  They don’t need to.

Of course it’s jajabors of the modern variety of which I write, the ones who use passports and planes; but I should explain first about using the Bangla word, jajabor, which is something similar to the English word, nomad.  It came about by accident.

In Dhaka people speak of the Bedey.  I’m not sure if it’s the Bedey who visit Hatiya Island, but in the winter months the nomads come, setting up their n-shaped tents in thatch and plastic sheeting on any patch of empty land. 

I’ve heard the Hatiyalas say the ones who live on boats can drink brackish, delta water; that they barely set foot on land.  I’m not sure how much is true.  Like nomads or semi-nomads in many countries they have a reputation for trickery and fortune telling.  It may well be undeserved.  Still, as in other parts of the country, when the nomads visit Hatiya they camp wherever they find ground and are for the most part left undisturbed.

Yet it wasn’t the presence of the traditional nomads in Hatiya that led me to learn the word surprisingly early.  I don’t suppose ‘jajabor’ is usually considered basic Bangla.  It was because of the Assamese singer Bhupen Hazarika, who sings that famous Bangla tune Ami Ek Jajabor, I am a nomad.  Unlike in the lyrics I didn’t reach the Mississippi, but I did like the idea of the song.

Learning about his thoughts is a way to understand our own.

Modern jajabors face shared problems and chief among them is explaining to non-travellers about travel.  People ask, why travel or why travel there?  The reasons are many and to account for them properly would require a conversation of some length.  It’s not always called for, especially as the result is likely to be disappointing.  Non-travellers usually have other priorities and a differing world view.  They don’t understand.

For example, one jajabor I know, an Italian Mexican-born one currently ‘pausing’ in Bulgaria, said that when asked why he lives in Bulgaria he just says the girls are pretty.  The Bulgarians are content with that and it circumvents the need to elaborate.  A more sophisticated reason might be that since he was young he was fascinated with Eastern Europe and one thing led to another.

It’s funny: I taught him the word ‘jajabor’ and he discovered its opposite, the term for people who prefer a life in one place.  He called them: ‘sedentarians.’

When it comes to explanations, I have similar troubles.  When Australians asked why I was moving to Ukraine some years ago, I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to live in a country that begins with a ‘U’.’  It started people listing: Uruguay, Uganda, Uzbekistan… it was so much easier, it didn’t take hours.

In Hatiya, when I used to visit almost annually from Sydney, the circumstances were even more difficult when a Hatiyala would ask, very occasionally, why.  My Bangla was still very basic and more than that, I simply did not know how to speak of the inspiration of travel.  I could not explain how much there is to learn from other cultures or properly clarify how much enjoyment I took from their company, that in even the basic elements of their daily lives, which they take for granted, I found new wisdom and, often, hope.  How could I say that I wanted to understand their life experiences and way of thinking in order to better comprehend mine?  What is universally human, what is cultural and what is the individual?  I would’ve liked to have explained such ponderings, but I had no ability.

So instead I simply pointed to the tents by the road and said, ‘Ami ek jajabor’.  The answer made Hatiyalas laugh.  It was a simple statement, but it made me start to wonder…

The last modern jajabor I met was probably that British-born one in Kolkata a few years ago.  His name was something plain like Ken or Mike and we met in the queue at the Bangladeshi Consulate while organising visas.  He also didn’t have a pen.  Besides that there was little about him to suggest he was a jajabor.  It was when we started talking that I could imagine it.

The jajabor consumes travel stories like rice.

The first sign was that his travel plans sounded complicated and evolving.  He was down from Korea, had been to Bangladesh, was in India on a detour due to a wedding invitation that had surfaced and wished to return to Bangladesh en route back to Korea.  He taught English, he said, which is not atypical for a jajabor.  I started to consider… maybe, yes maybe…

And the sedentarians wonder what the jajabor is searching for; and it makes the jajabor laugh.

Perhaps because I know Kolkata I did something unusual for a jajabor, I asked Ken or Mike if he wanted to go for a meal when our visa work was done.  I write unusual because jajabors rarely team up.  They follow their own journeys and despite having much in common, say goodbye as easily as hello.

So we chatted more, somewhere up on Park Street. I heard about his circles in the sand, his plan to see South America for at least a year before teaching again and then setting out for African wanderings.  He never wanted to return to the U.K .Naturally I spoke of Bangladesh and the pull of the Meghna River; and he said he had liked Bangladesh. 

Even in the distant sunset the jajabor can find himself

But what I remember most fondly about Ken, or Mike, is when I asked what he would do when all the travelling was done.  I wanted to see if his answer was the same as mine. 

‘I guess I’ll decide which country I like the best,’ he said, ‘and I’ll stay there.’

‘You’re lucky,’ he continued, ‘You’ve found yours.’

More recently I sat in a party in Dhaka, with shondesh and delicious home cooked savoury items on a plate and I confessed to a Bangladeshi who lives in Sydney that I’m actually a bit of a jajabor.  His eyes lit up at the idea and he said eagerly, ‘Well, I moved to Sydney so perhaps I’m a jajabor too?’  And maybe it’s true.  It can be that the scope of jajabor-minded public is far broader than I was used to thinking.  When I consider it, in many Bangladeshis there are certain signs: curiosity, adaptability, a sense of humour and love for going places, even if that means not further than visiting relatives in another district, as far as opportunity allows.

Yet this jajabor may have progressed to being an ex-jajabor.  His jajabor life may be done.  Or could it simply be that from around-the-world-and-back-again he found himself perfectly content within the most jajabor-minded majority culture of all?

In many Bangladeshis are signs: curiosity, adaptability, a love of going places...

Weighing up the options

Which road chooses you?

A. the mountain road, to Bolivia?

B. the camino del sur, to Argentina, Chile & Uruguay?

C. the delta road, to Bangladesh?

D. the spiritual road, to India?

E. none of the above.










This article is also published in the Star, here: The Modern Jajabor

Not Bengali, but Love Lungi

Link to my article on BDNews24.com about me, Baridhara and the humble lungi....

Not Bengali, But Love Lungi

The Min Min

 I

He’s never seen the Min Min, but his Cousin Mandy has. 

It was after he got his first car that the country around Coonabarabran finally opened up, when the frustration of having travelled six hours from Sydney only to reach the beginning of the real outback was overcome.  He had his cousin and a green Mazda as willing partners and there were trips, hundreds of kilometres in a day.  Together over a latte at the Jolly Cauli café they planned; together they drew big circles in the sand, to the west and to the northwest.

Mandy would be the model of a farmer’s daughter had her father been a farmer.  Her trim figure, short wavy blond hair and the face that’s seen a season or two: there’s nothing to suggest she’s not a child of the country; and true to her origins she’s a storyteller. 

In Coonabarabran stories have their own life, such that to question the factuality of a narration is an activity without relevance.  City people don’t always understand this, but questioning the actuality of a Coonabarabran story is like trying to count the bulky rural raindrops as they hit the tin roof during a summer afternoon storm.  There was only ever to listen and enjoy, which is what he did when Mandy told him of her encounter with the Min Min.

Nonetheless he’s wondered what the secret to the success of her storytelling might be.  Perhaps it’s in her face that never lights up with excitement or drops in disappointment as she narrates.  She never gets carried away with her words.  He’s wondered if it might be the wheat field accent that, with its elongated and contorted vowels, soothes to make the dramatic sound as clear and obvious as sitting on a rock in the garden of a summer evening with a cup of tea in the hand.  The cicadas are loudly chirping. 

And when the telling gets eerie her tone doesn’t waver; when the telling gets hilarious there’s barely a note of laughter in it.  However she does it, Mandy can make wild statements sound as indisputable as reading off a shopping list.  He admires her skill.

And if she speaks of the city it doesn’t alter anything.  Even when the subject matter turns urban her storytelling remains a rural creature despite the geography of its words.

And he might not be telling it right.  It’s best that she should do it.

They made it to the unlikely Macquarie Marshes to west of Coonamble on one of their sand circles.  It’s a wetland at a junction of rivers in otherwise dry country.  He negotiated his first red-mud road to get there, the road damp from the marshes.  There’d been an eagle, as a human a third as high, sitting in the dry grass of the sunburnt reed lands along the road side.  Eagles can’t take off straight away, Mandy said.  As much as they are kings of the sky they need a run up to take flight. 

A few yards behind that eagle was a fox, pushing itself flat against the ground in that stalking posture and inching forward toward the bird.  What would’ve been the result he couldn’t say, because the dust-kicking rumble of the car scared fox and scared bird.  The eagle took a few ungainly steps and started to unfold its enormous wings while the fox ran away.

The sky grows ever larger in the flat country beyond Coonamble.  It’s blue and weighty when there’s no rain about, meaning most of the time.  The sky pulled them further, or was it adventure, and by lunch the two cousins had reached as far as the small town of Carinda, with its population of a hundred and ninety four.  Carinda seemed to have only one shop, a post office cum grocery store cum café.  There were pigeon holes screwed up on one of the walls with a slot allocated to each household.  Who could be bothered delivering mail when the locals have legs and can walk a few hundred metres to collect it?  To the side of the grocery shelves there was a single plastic table: the café.  They sat there and asked the store keeper for a menu.  But who could be bothered to write up a menu when people can just open their mouths and speak?

‘What do you want?’

‘What do you have?’

‘Well what do you want?’

‘Well what do you have?’

In that country where a flat white is a coffee with milk, they might’ve settled for a corned beef sandwich.

Turning back for Coonabarabran they came across the unlikely event of rain.  It was with city trepidation that he steered along the red-dirt-becoming-red-mud road, wetter than at the marshes, muddier than at the marshes.  It made the car slide sideways a bit as he drove.  A red-mud road was not too much of a worry, Mandy said.  It was the black-mud road that was the nightmare.

II

In another dirt circle to the northwest where the land grows rocky and lifeless, they one day reached Lightning Ridge.  Aunt Mary, Mandy’s mother, was with them then.  Lightning Ridge is a mining town, about two thousand people, situated atop the world’s largest known deposit of black opal gemstones.  Miners come from across the world to settle there, to spend days in backyard-type mines underground, in the hope of striking it rich.  They busied themselves at the mining museum and saw a house made of glass bottles.  By late afternoon they were still on their way home, not much beyond Collarenebri, and they’d chosen a short cut route with about forty kilometres of dirt before Wee Waa.  Well, in that country that doesn’t see much rain, by a city dweller’s luck it came again, as grey clouds rolled in from the west and the first drops started plonking against the windscreen.  There was a problem.  The road this time was black-dirt.

‘We’d better get out of here fast,’ Mandy said as the clouds closed in.

‘What happens if we don’t make it?’ the city cousin foolishly asked.

‘We’ll get bogged,’ the country cousin replied, ‘and it’ll be a week until the road dries enough to pull the car out.  Whatever you do, don’t touch the brake.  Keep moving or you’ll slide and if you go off the edge of the road we’ll never get out of it.’

Suddenly the mere forty kilometres seemed like four hundred as he kept the motion going, as the raindrops became more frequent and the road started to become slippery.  All the while there was the groaning and banging of black-dirt and rocks tumbling beneath the car’s underbelly.  It was the bloody four-wheel drives, Mandy said, that made the deep wheel ruts that made the road all but impassable for city sedans like his.  The rain kept coming.  The dirt and rocks kept groaning and banging.  The car kept rolling on.

‘Problem is,’ Mandy said, ‘if you do get bogged and it takes a week to get the car out, in the meantime there’ll be no one to guard it and whoever does happen to come along might take the tyres, the wheels, anything that can be salvaged.  After a week when you come to get it there might only be a wreck.’  It would’ve been impossible to guard the vehicle in that middle-of-nowhere country.  He was worried.

They took a risk in a patch where there seemed to be a bit of sand to the land and he stopped the car, cautiously applying the brake.  He wanted Mandy to take the wheel as with her knowledge of red-dirt and black-dirt she might be able to get them back onto the tar stretch faster.  It was a road that needed country hands.

It was a deep thankful city relief and a more exhilarated, humoured country one that greeted them when finally they emerged at the safety of the tar.  They’d made it through!  Her husband back in town would never believe how foolish they’d been to attempt that road in that Mazda with rain clouds about, Mandy said.  It wasn’t the end of trouble though.  By the time they’d reached the Newell and the last one hundred or so kilometre stretch back into town from Narrabri, it was the end of evening, the beginning of night.  It’s the perfect feeding time for kangaroos.  By the hundreds they lined the roadside and he’d never seen them so thick.  Any one of them could, with a singular hop and a splatter of blood, destroy the car’s engine. 

The semi-trailers that plied that route down from Queensland don’t even slow down for the roos, he saw, and the semis account for almost all the road-kill carcases along the way; but for his city sedan the impact could’ve been fatal.  With a limit of one hundred kilometres per hour they rarely reached sixty as his nerves climbed new mountains although the land is for the best part flat.  City people like the roos, Mandy said, and think they’re cute.  ‘Well they are cute, but on the road they’re a menace.’

And yet without incident they made it through, that too, they made it through!  The junction of the Oxley and the Golden Fleece roadhouse on the outskirts of town were the final symbols of a safe return.

 III

There and back they tried the Gwabegar Road on another evening, in a convoy of two vehicles.  Mandy’s husband drove one while she drove the other, because of the roos and the faster pace possible without a city cousin behind the wheel.  Along with Mandy’s sons, his sister was with them then and they’d stocked provisions for the evening, including champagne, for the swimming expedition under the stars.  It’s scrubby country out that way, the Pilliga Country of grey-leafed eucalypts and short Pilliga pines.  It’s sandy and rocky in the place where two of his great grandfathers, the maternal ones, had once become neighbours.  And it’s under the land the water is, in the artesian basin. 

They were headed for a bore where water was pumped to the surface to service the homesteads and cattle.  And when it comes up the water is hot.

The cattle dam they knew of was a good hundred and fifty kilometres from town in the middle of an unmarked scrub paddock.  Without any indication they’d reached the spot the cars pulled off the road and stopped.  There was a gate of the typical cattle variety, and after unclasping the chain they drove through, making sure the gate was closed again behind them.  The dam was some metres into the paddock.

It might’ve stunk, that place, of cow dung and the mud might’ve squelched underfoot but the water left no doubt it was mineral, delivering that inner body warmth that only mineral water can; and overhead there was no doubt why the astronomers had chosen Coonabarabran as the site for their observatory: in the scrub country without the light pollution of a single house the night sky was awash with stars.  The champagne cork popped.  Cows occasionally mooed.  The nearest human to their group was who-bloody-knew how many kilometres away.

They laughed at him, the country cousins.  It was on the way back when he couldn’t figure out how to close the cattle gate.  And yet, in the following days the tide turned.  They’d decided to head to Sydney in convoy, with Mandy’s car following his.  She wanted it that way because her car’s engine had the risk of breakdown about it as country cars often seem to; and after five and a half hours they’d crossed the Blue Mountains, with the final descent and the blanket of city smog on the Cumberland Plain of Sydney to the east before them.  It was there that Mandy asked him to take over the driving, while his sister could drive his car.  She was out of practice with city traffic, she said.  It made her nervous.

IV

But about the Min Min, well, as he remembers it, as she told it and as best he can, it was like this:  she was on her way back down from Queensland, it was in those days, and it was night.  She drove the road, without another car or a house in sight, much as they had, when all of a sudden strange lights appeared in the sky to the side of the road.  They were bright and at low altitude and seemed altogether not too far off the roadway itself, somewhere beyond the eucalypts in the nearest paddock.  There is no human factor that could be making lights like that, mainly because there are so few humans around and it was odd because the lights seemed to be following the car, moving parallel to it at some distance through the paddocks.  She could see their shine in the gaps between the trees. 

The lights seemed to be keeping up with the car’s speed easily.  She stopped the car.  The lights stopped.  She accelerated.  The lights accelerated.

Mandy thought it might be the Min Min.  The Min Min light is famous from the Gulf Country south to the start of New South Wales.  Many people have seen it and it’s mentioned in aboriginal legends.  Nobody can explain it. 

She thought it might be the Min Min, true enough, but she didn’t know what to do about it, in that country of vastness, in the darkness of the night without a soul to ask for help, in the days before mobile phones.  And then, after about half an hour, as suddenly as it had appeared the Min Min was gone. 

But he might not be telling it right.  It’s best that she should do it.

Dog house made from bottles

The Min Min Light is hardly the only unusual phenomenon the world has to offer.  Kashem Bhai in Bangladesh, for example, called on the help of Diabula and possibly the Portuguese to get him into the bazaar one day.  In Dhaka there's the phenomenon of the rishka wisdom to keep the wheels turning.  Meanwhile in Ukraine and Russia there's a phenomenon that's a bit more man-made: the cities that don't exist.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Min Min

A Beginning and An End

It’s too easy to conclude that lifelines are of concrete: fluid and flexible to begin but at a later time hardened.  People get set in their ways as they age, it is said, and opinions, it follows, eventually date rather than develop.  It’s not so straightforward.  It can as easily be that a beginning comes within a nonagenarian end.

Azaleas were for the springtime, the air sweet with the pungency of gardenias.  Impatiens kept the colour through the year.  In Grandma’s garden, phlox and hollyhocks, snapdragons and dracaena coaxed from cuttings kept the days filled.  It was annual and perennial.  It was growth.

The side gate was wooden and immaculately grey, and upon stepping into the garden she’d greet me with a ‘G’day mate.’ The greeting stood out as an older Australian tradition, historical at the least in Sydney’s suburbia. 

She’d likely spent hours in sun-hatted toil, trowel turning, digging, weed removing and thinking; for her efforts there was talk, not only of the plants but of the blue wrens for which the bird bath had been bought.  It was the result of hours on a mat on her knees. 

We’d wander inside and the reddish linoleum-topped table was set with deliberation, the tablecloth positioned diagonally and the homemade biscuits and sour tasting sandwiches of pickled onions, mustard or relish at home on the particular decorative dish she’d chosen. There’d be a plump, patterned glass on its coaster for soft drink.  Tables aren’t set so precisely anymore, not for morning tea.

Always neatly dressed, Grandma kept her hair short, curled into a perm with hot rollers; and after the food she’d bring in the teapot to rest upon the wooden teapot board.  The pot would be dressed in a hand knitted cosy to keep the tea warm.  Such detail! Perhaps I only wish to show that there was much about her to seem old-fashioned.

And there was contrast, for hers were not the only morning teas in those busy years that bookmarked the millennium.  In the government department where I worked there was, scheduled once a week, a morning tea for team-building.  There was a cake roster but we’d each arrange our own cup of coffee.  Naturally, those morning teas were hastier and marked by slightly forced chat that overshadowed the stress of deadlines.  The bosses rarely attended.  They were busy. 

Meanwhile, Grandma used to have a doctor, a hairdresser, several others visiting her home.  She’d mark up their scheduled comings in her diary.  That’s how many westerners like to imagine their old age, staying independently.  I know she enjoyed those visits because they brought company in the daytime hours.  But on the day I arrived while the doctor was visiting, I was surprised to see Grandma embarrassed. 

Once the doctor left she said, ‘she’s a good doctor but she always talks badly about the Greeks and Italians.  But they do alright here, don’t they?’  The doctor thought they used too much concrete and tiling in their Mediterranean gardens, Grandma explained, but she didn’t mind their style.

I never heard her speak badly of any nationality, but we never spoke of such things.  She seemed somehow distinct from society.  Nonetheless, on that day I thought perhaps she was at the start of something.

What was more surprising happened at the time she was admitted to hospital for a minor procedure, just for a few days.  She found herself in a ward in a suburb of Sydney that is predominantly Turkish.  The ward she shared with a talkative, middle aged Greek-Australian woman, and in the bed opposite, a woman of Somali origin. 

Grandma thought to make mention of how the Greek lady kept her company.  She’d sampled homemade Greek food and liked it.  And she lent towards me to whisper, ‘but that other lady, she is so dark that sometimes when I see her face after waking up I forget where I am and I get scared.  She tried to talk to me.  I don’t understand a word.’ She was being totally honest.

‘But I suppose she’s alright,’ Grandma said, ‘We are who we are, aren’t we?’

It’d never occurred to me how much Australian society had changed since she was born.  In the span of her ninety plus years, change wasn’t only a matter of electricity, cars, vacuum cleaners and microwaves.  There’d been the migration waves too: amongst them the Italians and Greeks from the 1950s and Africans since the 1990s.  When Grandma was born, assuming it was in a hospital, it’s probable that all of her baby-contemporaries shared her fair complexion.  It was a largely British-Australian society into which she was born.

As I said goodbye in the hospital, I leant in to kiss her and at the same time shook her hand; and after that, instinctively and accidentally, put my hand to my heart.  I was embarrassed by the small gesture she hadn’t noticed, because it’s not an Australian custom but a welcome habit from the Bangladeshi village. 

Meanwhile at the office there was contrast.  It was strange the day one of the bosses not only found time to attend morning tea but embarked upon a small speech about how it was that Muslims would never fit into Australian society.  ‘They think differently,’ she said to her team.  It was her main point.  As it was known I had friends in Bangladesh, the little speech may have been for my benefit.  Or it was simply a personal view that needed airing.  Either way, I think differently too.

I’d not bother to mention it but it wasn’t the only time I heard senior public sector managers talk like that.  Such displays in Australia are, in practice, in reality, accepted.  A bit of racism might even be considered a good way to get ahead.  It’s mistaken for national loyalty by some. 

In a broader sense there would appear to remain some confusion between racism and leadership in Australia.  Sadly, ironically, the department I write of has responsibility for anti-discrimination legislation.  It was disturbing that even there Muslims could be on the outer.

Grandma meanwhile had a spontaneous side.  The woman who would never forget a birthday, having presents wrapped and tied with ribbon sometimes months in advance, was also the one who thought to crawl under her dining table to hide from her great grandson.  He had to find her.  Her mind stayed sharp and her bone joints were not unwilling to bend.

The last year of my father’s mother was 2001.  Her grandchildren had grown and Sydney had become a post-modern, multicultural society.  It was the year of the terrorist attacks on New York’s twin towers, her last.

Some people adapt.  Others don’t.  And it’s interesting because just as Grandma’s tolerance of others seemed to be on its rise, so it quickly faded, as if there was no place left for it.  And there was loss.

But at a time when tolerance in Australian society was in steep and rapid decline maybe there really wasn’t any place for it.

At age 93.

One could say it’s still the nation’s foremost security risk, the type of ‘us and them’ exclusion that prevents any society from flourishing and creates all the other security consequences.  It remains well-protected, the ‘us and them,’ because down under the ‘us and them’ retains many important advocates.  Some degree of extremism is not a problem as long as it’s of the white kind.

Some people adapt.  Others don’t.  I wonder if Australian public processes will ever catch up to Grandma. 

It can be that she waited, several months later when she again went into hospital.  Her hair was long, straight and tumbled down over her shoulders when I saw her last.  I never knew she had hair like that.  If it had been of a colour other than white she might’ve looked as a teenager. 

Of course it's all about learning to think, appreciating different ways of thinking and, well, adding a little heart. 


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: A Beginning and An End

The Adventure Gene

The Bread Knife in the Warrumbungle Mountains

The six-year-old was crying.  He was sitting on the tan carpet with the cow-pattern texture to it, in the shadowy room at the end of the hallway.  It’s not that there wasn’t a window, there was, but the mulberry tree outside and the roof of the neighbours’ metallic carport took away most of the sun.  His bedroom was long and rectangular; and the curtains were brown with pictures of African animals on them.  There was no mystery or suspicion to the darkness of the room.  The shadow made it cooler than the rest of the house and he was used to it.

In front of him was a black suitcase with a cheap aluminium band around it where its lid met the base and two aluminium latches to spring open with a click or push down to grip the case shut.  There was a key hole but no key.  The six-year-old cried because he was going away and in what had been his school bag there were not now books and stationery but the bare essential supplies he’d thought he’d need.  There was no despair in the plan.  It was not because there was anything wrong with his life; there’d been no argument or untoward incident of any description.  He was crying from pre-missing his family, knowing that he’d not see them again, for he’d decided it was time to move into the dry grasslands and eucalypt forests of the extinct volcanic Warrumbungle Mountains at the zero point of the Castlereagh River, to live with the kangaroos. 

It was usual after setting up the campsite that Dad would be busy with collecting scraps of wood to stoke a fire and boil a billy for tea, or would be unpacking the esky, piling bread and a tub of butter on the boot of the Kingswood in order to make sandwiches.  His brothers and sisters would be helping Dad, lying in the tent or maybe climbing the hill across the small rocky stream that was lined with casuarina trees.

Dad never paid much attention to where his children were.  He must’ve been worried as he waited for the six-year-old to find his way back to the campsite from a nearby walk but he never said anything.  He never stifled his children’s sense of adventure because he always wanted them to be independent and confident and so, as the older brother had once climbed a quite high volcanic rock without ropes, a splendid outcrop arched as a dinosaur’s spine, the most Dad would say was, ‘You be careful.’  He liked to see his children trust themselves and believe in their abilities; and secretly he liked it better to see his eldest son come down again from the dinosaur rock safely.  

For the children there was magic in it, especially for the youngest.  On the hill across the casuarina creek the older ones had found a small cave and there were many six-year-old questions about it:  how deep it was, how big its entrance was and what it was like inside.  It was quite high on the hill the middle brother said and the six-year-old alone wouldn’t be able to get there, but his brother offered to take him, later, assuming he could find it again as the entrance was small.  Dad didn’t hear news about the cave.  Such things were strictly children’s matters.

But it wasn’t usually the hill that craved attention but the nearer grasslands.  Through the grasses there was a whole network of tracks leading off from the campsite.  Some of them were wide enough for a four-wheel drive and together they made a kind of cow-pattern across the landscape, diverging, re-emerging and joining, dipping down to meet the mostly dry stream beds where the stinging nettles often grew.  It was in that terrain, particularly in the cooler evenings that he would wander off.  It was there he would see the kangaroos.

In truth he never went very far but when measured in six-year-old steps distances are a good deal further and there were always animals to see.  It wasn’t only the kangaroo mobs that’d usually be resting under a tree, only getting up slowly and hopping lightly away as he got close, despite him having trodden as quietly as possible so as not to alarm them.  There were emus, often in pairs and sometimes with a clutch of brown striped chicks at their feet.  The emus had eyes like his teachers when they scanned the classroom from their desks to see who it was that was talking out of turn.  Emu eyes seem to look over the rims of glasses even though there are none.  They are intellectual birds except for when they run and their grass skirts of feathers sway about like a car wash machine, giving away their stupidity. 

View of the Warrumbungles

The country was full of rabbits and many a burrow entrance was inspected with the hope one would come out, and it was common to see them as they darted away or raced back into the burrow to escape that very visibility.  More occasionally it’d be their enemy, the fox, with his bushy reddish tail scurrying away from sight; and there were rarer animals: wombats with their bigger burrows and stories of tiger quolls and once, though it was up into the mountains and not by the campsite, high in a gum tree there’d been a koala.  Meanwhile the kookaburras would be laughing at him and at the scenery.

That trail network never seemed to finish and finding out exactly where each leg diverged, re-emerged and joined was exacting work.  And the further the six-year-old went the more he’d discover there was to discover, like the secret valley far down on the left side where there was the greenery of a few ferns to keep things looking cooler.  Being alone never worried him because he never was alone.  There were the roos, emus, rabbits and foxes at the least.  They all seemed friendly enough, albeit shy.  He knew there were snakes: red-bellies, yellow-bellies and king browns, and he’d heard the story of how his oldest brother had once stepped on a red-belly while on a picnic in the city and had to be rushed to hospital in an ambulance.  But he never actually saw a snake and he suspected that they were probably more misunderstood than vicious.  Why would a snake bite him when he meant it no harm? 

It was indeed not the animals but the plants that it seemed important to be wary of, less because of the spiky thistles and more because of the nettles.  It’d happened that he’d been stung and it was painful.  Despite the nettles being pointed out to him by his brother so that he’d learnt to recognise them, they grew in many places and sometimes from thinking about the roos and their society he’d forget.  But after he’d been stung a few times he didn’t forget; and he knew, his second brother had done it for a bee sting once, that if he could find some bracken fern it was possible to pull it out of the ground and rub its roots on the sting site.  His second brother had made that up of course but the six-year-old had felt slightly better once the newly discovered remedy had been applied.

It wasn’t a plan without practicality.  He’d thought it all through and knew it wouldn’t be easy.  For a start, the roos were rather shy and it’d take time to properly make acquaintance with them; and he’d have to learn their language and routines.  But once they trusted him he could pat them and feel the softness of kangaroo fur.  Even as they slept under the tree in the mob he could be there with his head on one for a pillow.  They wouldn’t mind.  They’d get used to him in the end.

And it’d happen, after some time, that he’d know how to communicate in emu, rabbit and fox too.  He’d know where to go to visit them at their homes and have accurate knowledge of where each trail and small valley led.  The nettles would be no problem then and if ever there was an accidental encounter he’d know precisely where the bracken ferns grew.  He’d know too where that cave was that his brothers had found on the hill.  Perhaps there were bats that lived inside it to become friends with.

He’d thought of water.  He’d have to learn to drink from the streams and truth is it’d happened anyway.  His oldest brother had taught him to cup his hands and hold them under a part of the stream that had a flow to it, where the water was wedged between two small rocks or such.  The water that flowed was cleaner his brother said.  He’d thought of food.  He knew it’d take time to adjust but the roos would teach him which grasses and leaves to eat and his stomach would get used to it after a while; but in light of the adjustment period for the new diet he’d asked Mum to put together a few sandwiches in a brown paper sandwich bag that was now one of the items in his suitcase.  She didn’t imagine those sandwiches were for the transition before he ate only leaves and grass.  She thought the six-year-old was hungry and didn’t know the packet she’d put together had been stored for later.

Most of the rest of the space in the suitcase had been allotted to his stuffed toys.  In particular there’d be no leaving the dog called Boowy that’d been a present for his third Christmas behind.  Boowy wouldn’t like staying in the house without him and he was sure to get along equally well with the roos.  He cared so much about his stuffed toys, not only Boowy but Zebra, Pink Spots, Keemore and the white horse called Blanco that he’d once taken sheets of white paper and painted in turn each of their portraits.  The portraits were stuck to wooden boards for display, but got piled up behind the red cupboard in the end.  And although they were all coming along he cried thinking of how he’d miss Mum and Dad and his brothers and sister.  Boowy would miss them too.  Yet when he thought about his life ahead with the roos he felt happy and excited.  It was a dilemma.

The Bread Knife

That was to be the last day with the human family.  Mum and Dad were already busy packing their own bags and loading the car for the six hour, five hundred kilometre drive from Sydney to Coonabarabran where his grandmother lived.  They would stay the first night there and in the morning Dad would leave early to drive down to the service station for fuel, perhaps to make sure the gas bottle for the stove was full, and to fill the esky with ice so that at least for the first day there could be cold drinks, butter for the bread and liquid milk for the tea.  He’d come back with the final provisions having been bought and the children would say goodbye to Mum who wasn’t as keen on camping as the rest of the family.  She preferred to stay in town mostly, to talk to her mother and her own brothers and sisters who used to randomly wander into the kitchen and sit down for a cup of tea.

The six-year-old knew not to say anything.  He wouldn’t be allowed to stay living with the kangaroos, it was certain.  So he was ready to dry his eyes and pretend everything was normal when he was called to the Kingswood he had secretly named Tigger, the white family sedan in the driveway out the back of his Sydney house, for the drive to Coonabarabran.  He only wondered if he would leave for his new life before or after the family hiked the Bread Knife trail that stretched and wound its way up into the peaks of the extinct volcanoes.  It would take the whole day and make everybody tired and probably he’d ride on Dad’s shoulders in the higher parts of the trail.  Maybe he’d wait until that’d been done.

As it turned out the six-year-old was a little too consumed with thoughts.  He’d been called several times but in his bedroom at the end of the hall he hadn’t heard.  They searched him out and of course his bedroom was an obvious place to look.  It’d been sudden that his sister had walked into the room and seen him sitting on the floor in front of his suitcase.  There’d been no chance to dry his eyes.

‘What are you crying for?’ she asked.

Well, the emotions were a bit overwhelming for the six-year-old, so as much as he didn’t mean to, he just blurted out the plan.  ‘I’m running away,’ he sobbed, ‘I’m going to live with the kangaroos!’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ his sister said.

Roo with Joey

Memories are found in many things, not only in kangaroos. Memories are in waterfalls, dance steps and even in the winter.

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Adventure Gene