What Lies Beneath the Mud

by Ivana Lucic (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

Making a local connection Australia

I am most humbled by a thick, sulphuric, mangrove sludge coating my body from the chest down, much-the-wiser for it too. I was the odd one out, somehow mangled in the back seat in the northern tip of Western Australia, traipsing into the receding riverbeds to go mud crabbing. I was a third wheel and the fourth one in the car, privy to an utmost unique emotional experience of a family rekindling the fire of their heritage. Daniel was a true Australian. Not the footie-playing, Euro-backpacking, Victoria Bitter after a surf kind but the one who’s genetic makeup stretches across the shores of Vietnam to England, the Philippines and the northern Kimberley coast, where we found ourselves now. By all definitions of the country, truly Australian. Dan’s dad was of Aboriginal descent and had much like most in his generation been forcibly removed from his family. His language scrubbed from his tongue, his heritage washed clean from his skin, his history pulled beneath him in the name of becoming a ‘true blue Aussie’ in Melbourne. He brought his son, born only days before myself, back to his father’s and his father’s fathers land, the land of the Yawuru people. Guiding us to the low tides of Roebuck bay is Bart. With a burning passion to revive interest in his Yawuru heritage, we could not manage to pass a single shrub or tree without hearing the traditional remedies it bore to the locals. Tales of desert vines acting as painkillers when intricately wrapped around the head, or fruits with Vitamin C content that was unrivalled in the rest of the globe spilled from Bart’s lips as if he couldn’t pass on his knowledge to Dan and his dad quickly enough, years and decades and generations of culture tumbled from Bart in ceaseless stories. We arrive at Roebuck Bay as the sun breaks the horizon for the morning. It’s winter in Broome, a balmy 30 degrees and the tides are just right for Bart to show us how to catch a crab the way Dan’s grandfather would have. Armed with little more than a metal rod and rubber boots, we slowly sink our way into riverbeds. Bart moves naturally amongst the exposed roots, can instinctively tell the sand that sinks you from the one that doesn’t. While Dan and I are slipping and sliding and getting stuck in sinkholes, airing out pungent sulphuric gases that do little to appetite our morning stomachs. Bart is barefoot and halfway down the muddy shores. His words ring heavy, a contrast to his light steps. Stories about the lands stolen. About the language dying. Of hills that were made of cowry shells, only to be sold on to the highest bidder. Of the complicated history entangled of the Aboriginal people with their home land. To the untrained eye, there is no life in the banks where the tide disappears in the evenings and returns at mid-day. But Bart can what generations of men have learned during in the low tides of the ‘Makuru’ season. Expertly and without much effort he plucks a 24-inch crab from under the roots of a mangrove. He does this over and over and over again, only highlighting Dan and I’s lack of hunting skills, certainly not refined amongst the corner shops of high street. As Bart’s wife prepared our measly catching’s, mostly supported by Bart and kindly supplemented with Woolworths chicken, ancient histories came forth. Stories of the man Dan’s dad knew by legend, the men who protested the fracking of their soil and who won against governments infiltration on their lands. With the energy of a coiled spring, Bart rattles Dreamtime stories as Dan, his father and I eagerly drink in the memories of people passed while showing us how to properly eat a crab. We split up after a late lunch, vowing to meet again. Which we do. Bart's vision is not set on the past, it’s very much with Dan and Dan’s children. And it's humbling to feel that it’s never too late to come home.