I been speak yu

After school the other day my daughter, Seffy, went to do her homework and the young fella, Kibby, was up to something (probably no good, but it’s easier to turn a blind eye, most of the time).  Some time later, a blood curdling cry interrupted my writing.  I ignored it till Kibbim came in crying.

“I been play with the phone first,” he said, eyes brimming with tears.  “Seffy been take it from me.”

“What about the five minute rule?  Did you have it for five minutes, so it was time for her turn?”  I asked, bristling with irritation at his lapse into broken, Broken English.

Just then, Seffy barged in and whacked Kibbim on his back.  Tears trailed down her cheeks.

“Kibbim been hit me,” she wailed.

For some reason, I find crimes against grammar intolerable (including my own).  The violence between the kids wasn’t such a concern. 

I want the kids to be fluent speakers of the English language.  How else will they be able to do well at school and study at university, if they so wish? And how else can they challenge authority without being ‘shame’ of their English?

Tony and I have always tried to speak English around the kids, but it’s not easy.  For a start, Tony’s first language is Broken English.  And Broken English is so similar to English, but it’s a more relaxed language, without so many exceptions to the rules like English.

In English, you’d say, “I went to IBIS and bought rice.”

In Broken English, you’d say, “I been go IBIS and buy rice.”

I don’t speak Broken English. But when I hear it spoken I can’t help but let the odd Broken English phrase slip in, having lived here for so long.  

Tony might tell me about someone.

“Who’d tha?” I’d say, meaning, ‘Who?’

He might ask me if I paid the boys’ wages on pay day.

“Bumbai,” I say, meaning ‘Later‘. “I go make dinner first.” 

In Broken English, you can have two comparatives in the one sentence:  “That dingy is more bigger.”

I reckon Broken English is logical, but at the end of the day our kids need to be able to speak, read and write the Queen’s English.  It’s not negotiable with Tony and me.

But it’s not working.

Back to the present.  When the kids came to me complaining about each other in broken, Broken English or just plain bad English, I been feel my wile come up, my anger.

“Get out from here, both o’ you.  Bumbai I go…” I pause my growl (it is more effective to reprimand children in Broken English than English, but I must speak English). “Bumbai, I will give you some very serious consequences.  Actually, I’ll call your father.”

That did the job.  Both the kids wiped off their tears. Kibbim shook a fist at Seffy and she stuck her tongue out at him.  My wile been come up again.

I turned back to the computer screen and took some deep breaths.  And ignored the bang against a wall and subsequent moan. 

Skin Colours: Many

A couple of weeks ago, I was flicking through the photo album and found this photo taken in December, 2011 of my son and his friends.  It had featured in the local paper, Torres News, at the time with a caption along the lines of:  How many thirteen year olds fit into a bath tub?

It wasn’t until seeing the photo in November, 2012 that reminded me of a bedtime story my mother told me in 1979 about skin colour. I didn’t pay much attention to Mum at the best of times and that may be why the story didn’t make sense to me until thirty-three years later.

In 1977, we moved from ultra-conservative, middle-class, suburban Perth to the University of Technology in Lae, the capital of Morobe province in Papua New Guinea. The uni tech campus was a great plot of land filled with university buildings, staff accommodation, shops, a doctors’ surgery, sports facility, some manicured grounds, football fields and tennis courts.

The staff was comprised of people from all over the world. When there were get-togethers under someone’s house, which was often, there was a delightful array of skin colours. We moved there when I was eight and I knew, somehow, this was a pretty special situation.

Two years later, Mum sat on the bed and started going on about mixed-raced marriages. That’s what they were called back then. PCism hadn’t come into being. These days, they’d be called cross-cultural relationships!

So Mum told me a bedtime story about how wonderful it was to see all these mixed-raced couples and families living in harmony at uni tech. Mum’s stories were always eclectic, and she had a pretty impressive vocabulary which may have been why she didn’t hold my attention for the duration.

I recall there was one about why I was not to write any more gruesome ghost and vampire stories because it was unhealthy for my psyche. One about why we ate lecithin and unprocessed bran for breakfast and not Frosty Fruits like my best friend, Rebecca. One about not making fun of the girl in grade seven because her “bathers” were see-through. And repeat bedtime stories focused about why it was not okay to joke about the “M” family who pissed in a bucket on Sundays so the wee could go on the orchids. But this particular story about mix-raced marriages is etched in my mind, even though it took a while to make sense.

“Catherine, I can tell you that in thirty years, the world will be full of beautiful brown-skinned people, thanks to all these mixed-raced marriages.”

I didn’t see the big deal because in my world, the world of uni tech, that was how things were. Sure there were some PNG, Australian, Taiwanese, Sri Lankan, British, Egyptian, Kenyan, Filipino and American ‘purist’ families, but there were plenty of families where one person was white and the other, well, not-white.

I remember an Australian nurse (six-feet tall and massively obese) who was married to a Nigerian architect (five-seven and slight). They had three nut-brown children. There was a boy, my age, named Tux. He was a pain in the arse but his older sister, Faye was so cool. When a man flashed her, she gazed at his goods and said, “Mmm, I’ve seen better.”

Another best friend was Seff (one of two friends my daughter is named after). She was a Tolai girl, dark-skinned with a blonde afro. She was adopted by a couple: the wife was white, the husband, Chinese. (He worked in accountancy – people were known more by their department than anything else) and they had two daughters, petite and pretty like porcelain dolls, named Mei-ling and Su-yen.

And another best friend (you can never have too many best friends at ten), Rachel Ma had a Chinese father and an English mother, who spoke real posh. At the time, I swore Rachel looked like a regular white girl – pale skin, hazel eyes and long, straight brown hair. I used to say to Mum, “She doesn’t look Chinese at all,” and Mum would just smile. Recently, I saw some slides of Rachel and me together and she is so obviously Chinese. As a nine-year-old, I could only see the similarities between us: long hair, Holly Hobby dresses, nagging parents and annoying little brothers.

If there were fights between the kids at uni tech, they were complex matters with serious causes, never related to racial backgrounds. Amanda lost the lid to my purple Texta, Roderick stabbed me with a lead pencil, I didn’t want to be best friends with Lorelei any more, Kim picked all the ripe guavas without leaving any for me, I took Ahila’s seat in the bus. And being a dickhead. (Well, that was always a good reason to get picked on). Hell, no one even got teased for having a stutter, being a bit slow, having a bad haircut or even having a mum who didn’t wear a bra.

Nope, skin colour – and there were many – meant absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.

I forgot about Mum’s bedtime story till 2012 when I looked at the photo of four kids in a bath. Then it hit me.

Following my experiences at uni tech, and somehow unconsciously, as an adult I gravitated towards a multi-cultural community of many skin colours. I ended up in a “cross-cultural” relationship, which resulted in beautiful brown-skinned babies.

Of course, my children’s dark skin means absolutely nothing, except for one saving grace – I don’t have to worry about lathering them with sunscreen each time they step out the door!

Obituary for a mango tree

It was a vision of towering arboreal grandeur: a mango tree that is said to have been planted in the 1930s by Mr Saranealis. He owned the property on the corner of Blackall Street and Victoria Parade and he and his family lived in a corrugated iron shack there. In those days, people grew most of their own fruit and vegetables, and mango trees were a valuable source of food. The tree was known as Buddy Saranealis’s tree.

But now the tree is no longer.

 Buddy Saranealis's Tree on 5 November

The Fresh Food Company owned the property after Mr Saranealis. There was a butchery on the grounds and they used a tree stump as a cutting block. Later, the property passed to Mr Cadzow and his wife, Ivy, who built the place that became known as the Four Winds Building. Sometime in the seventies, the Department of Native Affairs, the DNA, bought the property. In the mid-nineties, a friend of mine and her daughter rented out the upper level. In the early 2000s, Maritime Safety had an office there and in April, 2004, the TSRA’s Gab Titui Cultural Centre was opened and with it the café.

I can recall many visits to the café. I reclined in the shade of the massive mango tree and sipped my coffee while the children ran around on the lawn and hid in the bushes that circled the base of the trunk. They picked the red star-shaped flowers from the bushes and sucked the ‘honey’ from the stems. I never thought much about the tree except that it gave great shade. It had been there forever and I assumed it would stay that way.

When the word got around in October that the tree was to be lopped, chopped and chipped to make way for a performance area, there was quiet dissent within the community: ranging from ya gar-style nostalgia to mild anger.

“I heard plenty children were conceived under that tree”, said one man.

“I heard there’s been plenty parties there, too,” said another.

“They can’t cut an old tree down,” said some.  “It provides shade.”

“Surely, the tree should be heritage listed,” said others.

 So I set out on an investigation. I wanted to record something of the tree’s life and maybe get together a small band of tree-hugging protestors. In the back of my mind I felt sure the tree had some heritage-listed significance. But if my mission failed, at least there would be some record of its life, so it didn’t die in vain.

I hoped I would hear many sentimental yarns about kids, now in their sixties and seventies being chased off as they collected mangoes, lovers meeting in the dead of night behind the massive trunk or yarns about broken arms from falling off boughs. Surely, there had to be lovers’ initials gouged out of the crumbly, black bark?

But I found nothing.

Some people could remember the tree always being there, but they had no juicy memories. It was a mango tree. There are many mango trees on the island.

A few people even said they couldn’t even remember it. After all, it was back from the road on private property.

There didn’t seem to be anything that would get it within cooee of a heritage listing (the tree had to have some cultural, historical or aesthetic significance or some special association to the people of TI). And no one came forward.

The lopping deadline, 5 November, drew near. People muttered about the injustice and suggested ‘someone’ should do ‘something’ to stop it. Some even concocted fantastical naked protests (tee hee!).

I mentioned the matter to my husband while I was making dinner, the week before deadline.

When he told me he was cutting down the tree, I grabbed the sink to stop myself falling over. So shocked was I.

“And before you go on about it,” he said, “it’s really rotten and the branches could fall and hurt someone.”

“Can you save it?”

He could if he cut back every branch to the trunk (which would be a bit of an eyesore for a year).

But the roots were growing under the building; a major problem. 

And the TSRA wanted it removed. It needed the performance space.

The community remained silent (except for complaints to each other), waiting for ‘someone’ to do ‘something’.

Monday the fifth came and passed peacefully, aside from the mechanical whir of chainsaws that shattered the still, dry season heat.

What took eighty years to grow was nothing but a pile of woodchip six hours later.

What an ignominious ending to a long and inconspicuous life that was, briefly, greater in impending death.

Lots of space thereafter!

Bad mother! Good mother!

There was much hype preceding today’s solar eclipse.  I felt that, as a good mother, I should encourage my children to view the eclipse.  After all, it would be an educational experience for them.

I was talking to a friend yesterday who said I’d need to make a pinhole camera to see the eclipse.  He reckoned it could be done with a colander and that way you get to see multiple eclipses at the same time.

I knew we had a colander.  Tony took the handles off it and uses it as a steamer for the crayfish tails he and the kids catch.  It is down the backyard next to the brick stove where the crayfish get steamed.  Well, it’s supposed to be there. But I’ve also seen it used as a military helmet so it could be anywhere in the garden.  I get really cranky when I find cutlery, saucepans and other kitchen equipment in the garden.

Anyway, back to the potentially educational eclipse experience.

Tony woke me at 7.25 this morning and announced there had been heaps of people up at Greenhill (which towers above us, sort of, by TI standards) watching the eclipse.

I was gripped by guilt. I had forgotten all about waking up early to see the eclipse. Why hadn’t I pulled my finger out and done something to show the kids this unique and infrequent phenomenon?  After all, as a student of teaching, I know a good part of the new national science curriculum is devoted to earth sciences and inquiry skills. In fact, my last assignment had been based on a science investigation. I could have turned this into a science investigation for the kids, one that was educational and enjoyable.   

Oh, I was such a bad mother. 

Because it was early and I could hear the kids, and the extra one who stayed over, playing contentedly in the kitchen I stretched out and gave the matter some deep thought.  I thought of some reasons to justify my slackness.

I had actually been a good mother.

I remembered a solar eclipse from when I was quite young.  My dad, a scientist himself, had made what I recall as some sort of viewing device, but it was probably a pinhole camera. He dragged me and my brothers onto our back patio to view this truly amazing event.

Thank God for Google.  I reckon the date was 20^th June, 1974.  I was five and we lived in Perth.  Dad must have taken the day off work because it was a Thursday.  Also, it would have been a school day, but sometimes we were allowed to stay home from school when there were educational experiences to be had, like when Samantha the boxer dog had her first litter of puppies and we watched the squashed, slimy creatures enter the world.

When the eclipse was on that day, the sky was a clear blue and there was an eerie, streaky sort of light, as if it wasn’t solar but fluorescent. 

“Look, see the moon start to move in front of the sun,” said Dad, with endless enthusiasm. He was pointing at a piece of white paper laid out on the paved surface. “Catherine, what are you doing over there?  Come and look.” 

It wasn’t fair. My two little brothers were allowed to ride their plastic scooters around.

I reluctantly traipsed back from the rubber tree plant that I was pulling leaves from and watching the thick, white sap ooze out. 

Watching a shadow on a piece of paper did not hold my attention.  The plastic wheels of the boys’ scooters went crunch, crunch, crunch over the pavers. It made me mad that they got to play.  My attention wandered.  Why not just look straight up at the sun?

“Catherine.  Your father has told you not to look at the sun,” said Mum.

“This is boring,” I said.

“There is no such word as boring,” said Mum, but I’d heard my best friend, Carolyn say that word lots of times, so I wasn’t quite sure if Mum was telling the truth.

“Isn’t this incredible, Beverley?” said Dad.  “The moon is passing…”

And I heard bla, bla, bla.

“Darling, stop squinting,” said Mum.  “You’ll end up with wrinkles around your eyes.” 

I stared at the dark shape on the white paper and shifted on my feet. I picked at a nail, bit the nail and seethed that Stephen and Matthew got to play while I had to watch something that was so boring.  The plastic wheels kept going crunch, crunch, crunch.

I smiled at the memory.

On Wednesday, the fourteenth of November, 2012 at 7.30am I took another long stretch out on bed, and thought, I am so glad I slept in, I mean, glad I didn’t wake the kids at five o’clock on a school day.  They needed their sleep.

Then I got up and made a cup of tea.  

Just some white woman

In a shop, I said hello to a woman I admire and respect.  She didn’t respond and I figured she hadn’t heard me.  Five minutes later she said hello. 

“Hi,” I said.  “I said hello before, but you didn’t hear.”

“Oh, I thought you were just some white woman.”

I was wounded by the dismissive retort; I was a ghost.

Ironically, Islanders of eons past used to call Europeans, markay meaning white devil, ghost or spirit on account of their pale skin.

Ion Idriess wrote in Isles of Despair about a Scotswoman, Barbara Thomson, the sole survivor of a shipwreck on Entrance Island in 1844.  She was claimed by the chief as the spirit of his dead daughter.

I thought you were just some white woman. The words floated around my head.

Well, I am white, even though I’ve lived on TI for nineteen years, married an Islander, own a house and operate businesses.  I am still white.

Hang on!  What is the significance of being white?

Many white people drift onto and off TI, overwhelmingly white public servants and increasingly, tradies and backpackers.  If we are completely honest about the situation, there is limited professional or skilled labour on the island so most of it is imported, albeit temporarily.

How temporarily?  Well, many teachers come to the Torres Strait to do ‘country service’, a minimum of two years, though they may stay a year, or two, or three.

Doctors and nurses arrive for even shorter periods – measured in weeks, often.

Then you can factor in all the other public servants of federal and state departments and the shire council.

There is also the increasingly popular ‘backpacker’ market, young travellers employed in the pubs, hotels and other businesses, mostly short term.

Don’t forget the ‘au pair’ trade: foreigners working as nannies for European couples who both work.

I consider how many Europeans have stayed in the Torres Strait for ten years.

Not many.  In fact, very few.

That means hundreds of European public servants have passed through the Strait to fill a skilled and unskilled labour void.  They have hardly been here long enough to be noticed in the street or supermarket or pub.

Gee, if I was Islander, I might be a bit dismissive about Europeans blowing through; them kole people go stap a couple of years then dhempla go go.

Why would Islanders foster friendships with Europeans when most of them are gone after two years?

If I was Islander, I might think of Europeans as markay, ghosts floating onto the island and off into the ether.

So, I really am “just some white woman.”

It’s a fact.  I didn’t need to feel wounded.

Qantas greedy-gutsiness reaches new altitude!

I used to give the Qantas of yesteryear the thumbs-up on the Cairns to Horn Island leg.

Those were the good old days. Passengers could take a suitcase and additional luggage, packed with food, since prices on TI are fairly exy. There’s a good reason for this.

If you want to drink fresh cow’s milk and champagne and eat baby spinach and Wagyu beef, all of which need to be freighted up from south-east Queensland and further afield, you gotta take the cost on the chin. Or the hip pocket.

We live a simple culinary life in an effort to limit the extremely high cost of living on TI. Between the fish Tony catches, the fruit and vegies we grow and the great weekly deals offered by the local IBIS supermarket, our food bill is just manageable.

We don’t drink, well, Tony doesn’t drink. I might scoff a glass of wine every three or four weeks, but I don’t buy alcohol and wouldn’t know a Cabernet from a Chardonnay or a Rosé.

Many years ago, much to my family’s disgust, I issued a military style ban on junk food, so we saved on food as well as dental expenses.

However, I do take every opportunity to stick to our food budget, and a great way is to buy some semi-staples when I am in Cairns. I bring them home in my luggage.

Check out the price comparisons:

Item	Brand	TI price	Cairns price
1kg cheese	Generic	$15.29	$6.47
1kg powdered milk	Generic	$12.07	$6.99
1kg frozen corn kernels	Generic	$7.66	$1.99
250g cream cheese	Generic	$3.68	$1.99

You get the picture – food on TI is very costly, but that’s because we, stupid humans (myself included) insist on sticking to an essentially European diet within a few degrees of the equator where none of that type of food grows.

So, in the past, I have taken a few kilos of powdered milk in my backpack, and an esky as luggage on the flight from Cairns to Horn…at no cost even if my luggage weight exceeded the limit. My record was 105kg!

Then, a few years ago, Qantas actually started enforcing the 23kg baggage limit. Initially it was a huge shock, and a costly one. But I worked around it. You could still bring a suitcase and an esky, and providing it was 23kg max, you weren’t up for excess baggage fees. It was a safety issue, I was told. I understand, I said, each time I coughed up the excess $$.

Then last year, things got really dirty. Qantas instituted a cunning rule (which applied in practice to the check-in at Cairns, not Horn Island): any second piece of luggage would incur $30 in excess baggage fees…even if both your suitcase and second bag weighed less than 23kg in total.

That is not the “spirit of Australia”. That is corporate greedy-gutsiness.

I should pause here to mention how wonderful the ground staff, pilots and cabin crew always are. And a big thanks to Annie on the morning flight from Cairns to Horn on November 1!

Back to my story. Two pieces of luggage weighing a total of 23kg can’t possibly compromise safety. For the 17 years I travelled with two or three or four bags, there was no safety issue, even if they weighed way more than 23kg.

But, if you are a diamond frequent flyer Qantas club member, or whatever it is, you get extra kilos at no extra cost. Safety? Rubbish.

Come on, Qantas, where is your spirit of Australia? We are not a huge population on the busiest domestic route. We are struggling families trying to keep our food bills down.

I am getting to the point of my long story…

I recently flew to Cairns with my son. We had a total of 41kg between us, but at the check-in on Horn, I was slogged a $30 third item fee (the employee was very kind about it). Staff at the Horn Island check-in had never actually enforced the 2011 rule before.

That got me mad. I wanted to bring back some cheese and frozen vegies. Then I realised there’s no point getting mad. Get even.

So I did. For the trip back, I packed up some frozen peas and corn and block cheese and a leg of lamb for good measure! Into an insulated bag it went and then into my suitcase.

The final score:

One piece of luggage.

21.5kg.

One to Catherine Titasey.

One up to Qantas. 

Life goes on

It’s October and the granite headstones rise from the charred surrounds of the Thursday Island cemetery.  Charcoal crunches under the sturdy sole of my Keens walking shoes.  There’s not a blade of grass in sight and the only leaves are those on gum trees which by a miracle, have not been razed by the fire.  The few remaining clumps of leaves are a vivid russet, crisp and shrunken and hanging stiffly at awkward angles to the blackened boughs.  There is death at every turn.

            Rewind seven months.  By the end of the wet season in April, TI is weighted under thick grass and verdant foliage that veils tree branches.  Gravestones on the slope are hidden by thick guinea grass, two metres tall.  The air is humid and redolent of new growth; rich, earthy, sweet.  Then the south-easterly wind, or sager, returns with a vengeance after five months’ absence.  Every drop of moisture is leached from the soil and sucked from the trees.  Leaves turn a sickly, pale khaki. The grass becomes coarse and patchy and the groundcover shrivels like old skin to expose topsoil.  The fine, brown dust invades my joggers or coats my thronged feet. The wind is unrelenting, like lashings of a whip; it is dry – so dry it stings my throat.  The gusts scatter dry grass, leaves and twigs that attach themselves to my legs or tights or find their determined way under my shirt.  I feel like I am being clawed by nature.  By late September, the landscape is brittle and dehydrated; a tinderbox.

            Late September is the start of the holidays.  There’s not much to do on the holiday.  Kids get bored   It’s no coincidence that bushfires ignite at this time, year after year.  By day, scarlet flames engulf Millman Hill then Green Hill then Rosehill then the scrub behind TAFE then the cemetery.  The shiny red fire truck is nearby and the blue boiler-suited figures of the auxiliary fire fighters, the firies, dot the smoky landscape as they desperately try to back burn.  There is property to protect: houses, the TAFE, the fuel storage at the power station.  As one fire burns itself out, another erupts. Ash settles on TI like grey confetti and the pool is full of charcoal shavings.  Streaks of purple grey smoke are whipped to the northwest by the hot, violent sager.  By night, I am woken by the deep hum of the diesel fire engine as it passes, rising to a crescendo and fading into the sager.  The firies are responding to another call-out; another deliberately lit inferno.

            Our house is on the windward side of TI so we are protected from the fires, until…

            Fire starts on Horn and smoke is blown across the channel to TI and into our house.  But the wind drops on sundown and the haze, illuminated by fluorescent lighting, settles for the night.  I lie in bed, inhale the thick, burnt-wood smoke and imagine I am sleeping by a campfire.  This goes on for a week.  My children start coughing and complaining of dry, itchy eyes.  I make lemon and honey drinks and eye baths of warm salty water.

            By early-October, there is nothing left to burn on TI and what was scrub or forest is now ash and charcoal.  There is space to walk and no scratchy grass, no lecherous twigs.  It is a relief. I explore the slopes behind the cemetery and admire the headstones that were hidden by the guinea grass, now majestic as they rise from desolation.  Eerily, they are unaffected by the fire as if inured against the ravages of time.  I recall the ghostly images from the 2009 Victorian fires; single houses standing inexplicably in black paddocks, once suburbia. 

            I trek over the barren slopes. Clouds of ash float with each footstep.  The white marble grave of a young girl, like an island in a sea of black, bears a mark of grief; a dull tinsel wreath, red, pink and silver.  The granite headstone of a father is laden under artificial blossoms, faded by time to pale purple, pink, orange.  And a lone frangipani tree blooms with snow-white and yellow blossoms that contrast with the thick leaves of the deepest green.  The wet season rain is a couple of months off. But when I stand in the silence and gaze at the black earth, pinpricks of green have started their journey heavenward, despite the dry. 

Life goes on.

Straight after the fire.

Two weeks after the fire.