‘Don’t worry, they won’t come back and we won’t see them again. They’re all talk. They say things like that because they’re dumb, they don’t know what else to say.’
Louise liked Mandy’s response. ‘There’s plenty of boys around like them – but there are others. You just gotta pick ’em carefully,’ continued Mandy.
‘Thanks, I just wasn’t sure what to do.’
‘You’ll soon learn. Just think about your inside world, how you believe in yourself and then you won’t have to give two hoots about those boys – then you’ll see that your outside world is not so important, that’s what my grandma taught me.’
Louise was intrigued; she’d never thought like that.
‘You have to choose your boyfriends carefully. Come on, I’ll drop these paintings off at my place and then we can go back to the pond.’
They walked three blocks away from the town centre to a street lined with boxy fibro cottages. ‘Wait here and I’ll dump the satchel.’ Mandy walked up the weed-strewn path of the third house. In a couple of minutes she emerged.
‘This is my sister’s place. She’s twenty-five and she’s got four kids as well as me living with her.’
There was an old beaten-up car in the driveway. Two Aboriginal men came out. They stood near the front door and waved to them.
‘I told them about you. They won’t say anything when they first meet you, but they’re okay.’
The girls walked back to the pond. Louise tried to clear her mind from the experience with the boys. She was still thinking about the way Mandy handled the situation and about her advice to believe in yourself. She’s so strong, thought Louise. They talked as they walked, mostly about their grandmothers. To Louise’s surprise, Mandy said she’d like to come to the farm.
Louise wasn’t sure how to respond, although she wanted to be encouraging. ‘I’m here for the rest of the week. My grandma says it would be okay. When would you like to come?’
‘Whenever.’
‘What about Thursday. Thursday morning? You could stay for lunch.’
Mandy looked apprehensive. The tough girl in the park had disappeared. She had never been invited out before by someone like Louise.
She shrugged. ‘Okay.’
‘Good. And you can tell me more about dot painting.’ Louise was confident her grandmother would make Mandy welcome. She knew Margaret Davitt thought that Crystal Brook was more interesting with Aboriginal people in the population.
‘I thought I was only going to say hello to you at the football and now it’s all turned out so good,’ said Louise.
‘Yep, sure has.’
Sunlight jagged through the trees. The girls spent an hour chatting, paddling in the pond and watching fingers of light penetrate the water.
‘Here, chew this grass till your spit turns green,’ said Mandy. ‘That’s how we learn to live off the land.’
‘I’ll try.’ Louise chewed fronds of grass into a bitter mash and then spat it out. ‘This is fun, we should do this again.’
‘If you want to.’
They wandered back to the oval. Louise thought about Mandy, with her eyes full of devilry and love. She loved her dot paintings and sketches of kangaroos, and had noticed her notebook – probably full of stories about Aboriginal camps and cooking fires. The girls sat on the grass, chatting until they heard the sound of a car pulling up.
Margaret Davitt waved and got out. Louise walked over and hugged her. ‘Can Mandy come to the farm on Thursday morning and stay for lunch?’
‘Yes, I don’t see why not.’ Margaret turned to Mandy. ‘You’ll be most welcome.’
Mandy pushed her hair away from her face and smiled.
‘Thursday morning then,’ said Louise.
Farm Visit
MANDY ARRIVED AT the farm at ten o’clock on Thursday, earlier than expected. She was dropped off by one of the men Louise had seen, an uncle, in the battered Datsun that she’d seen in their driveway. Mandy looked hesitant.
‘Thanks for coming’ Louise said warmly. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’
Inside the farmhouse, Mandy gazed at the well-ordered kitchen. They talked about life on the farm and who originally lived there. Margaret Davitt spoke modestly about her home and then produced fruit juice and brownies. Mandy looked at the family photographs and recognised Louise as a small child. How happy she looked with her brothers. They finished their drinks.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ Louise said, ‘I’ll show you the farm.’
‘You girls take some chocolate and wear raincoats, it’s going to rain today,’ Margaret said.
‘Okay, thanks ,Grandma,’ Louise said, pocketing a bar of chocolate.
They set off, thick clouds hanging low across the yellow-green contours of surrounding hills. A steady breeze blew and sodden leaves lay in clumps under rugged old gum trees. They walked across an empty paddock studded with huge red gum trees, some with blackened trunks from lightning strikes, others gnarled and twisted as if contorted with pain. Branches moved in the breeze and, in the dull light, lorikeets, rosellas, magpies and some honeyeaters darted and flew.
‘Rivers once flowed across this land, in the Dreaming,’ Mandy said suddenly.
‘What’s the Dreaming?’
‘It’s about how we once lived, about our ancestors, about our closeness to the land and how we imagine what the land was like a long time ago.’
‘That’s amazing.’
‘See this land, where that road runs between the hills in long curves? I reckon a river once flowed there.’ Mandy pointed.
Louise looked towards the denuded hills and tried to imagine a flowing river once being there. What on earth was all this about, she wondered.
She sensed that Mandy knew the land at a deep level. She had not heard anything like this before and couldn’t make much sense of it, but it left its mark. A mould of loving and learning from indigenous people was being set. Her mind began to fill with ideas about living on the land thousands of years before.
‘I’ll think differently about this land now. It must have been someone else’s land before my grandpa and his dad came here,’ Louise said, shifting and staring ahead.
‘Come on. We need to reach those hills. And taste them,’ Mandy said.
Louise wondered what Mandy meant by ‘tasting’ the hills.
They walked from paddock to paddock, opening and closing gates, moving briskly in the slight drizzle. They finally reached the limits
