The Watermill Read online

  There are names of renowned Ngurungaeta, says Joy: Ningulabul, the songman, whose people lived in the Macedon area; Billibellary and his son, Simon Wonga. Bebejan and his wife, Tooterie, a woman of knowledge, whose kin lived on the Yarra banks, in the area where the city now stands. And their son, Beruk, born in the Yarra Valley, circa 1824—William Barak for European ears.

  As a child Barak saw the invaders arrive. He witnessed the theft of his peoples’ lands and saw them corralled in mission stations and on reserves. He was present with his cousin Simon Wonga and other survivors from the Kulin clans, as they tried to secure land in 1859, at Acheron, a station north of the Great Divide. They were forced eight kilometres out, to the Mohican Run—‘Cold Country’ the Kulin called it—when a local grazier took possession of their fertile patch.

  Barak was with them in 1862, back in Acheron, as they attempted again to work the land. They were joined by lay preachers, John Green and his wife Mary, recent immigrants from Scotland, who would become trusted allies and friends. Again, local graziers intervened. It fell to Barak and Wonga, accompanied by John Green, to lead their dispossessed peoples in search of a new haven in the territory that had, until so recently, been their secure home.

  Today Acheron is a bus stop on the highway dissecting a valley of vineyards and fenced estates. Cattle country. Grazing herds lift their heads and gaze warily at passers-by. Many times, in the years since Aunty Joy opened her door, I have imagined the trek, a band of forty men, women and children, in March 1863, making their way from Acheron back south.

  The route would have led past the razor-backed Cathedral Range. They would have encountered loggers and graziers, and teamsters on timber wagons with steel-rimmed wheels. They crossed the Divide by way of the Black Spur, on a track the Wurundjeri had cleared on previous treks.

  I think of them whenever I travel the Black Spur Drive with its hairpin bends, flanked by forests of mountain ash and embankments thick with lichens and ferns. And I think of them on the descent—the hardest part of the trek behind them—into an expanse of fertile valley, in search of a new Eden on their ancient lands.

  They finally settled, Aunty Joy tells me, on the banks of Badger Creek, near its confluence with the Birrarung, a Wurundjeri camping site chosen by Wonga and Barak. They named it Coranderrk, after the mauve and cream flowering bush that grew there. Thinking, perhaps, at least here we will be safe.

  We sit in the living room, Faris, Majida and I. The one-bedroom flat is on the second floor of a public housing estate, a twenty-minute walk from where I grew up, at the northern limits of my childhood beat. It is well kept and neat. The living-room floor is polished boards, and the kitchen floor is covered in linoleum, patterned in alternating squares of light and dark blue.

  Whenever I visit there is food on the coffee table: bowls of almonds, cashews and pistachios, Majida’s walnut and date scones and her home-baked cakes. Our shoes are shelved on the front door rack. From the sofa, where we sit, there is a view through the open doorway to the kitchen window and the upper branches of a tree. In winter the branches are bare; in spring they are thick with leaves. In autumn, they are cloaked in auburns and golds. Mid-afternoon the chatter of children on the way home from school can be heard. Inside, all is still.

  ‘With Faris I am lucky,’ Majida says. ‘He looks like my dad. He says the things my dad said, and, like my dad, he is patient.’ Turning to Faris, she says, ‘I am lucky to be with you. We suffer the same fate.’

  ‘I am like the wind,’ says Faris, ‘one hour good, the next hour bad. I feel hot all the time.’

  No matter how often she has heard him say this, Majida follows every word. She is with him as his spirit rises, and with him when it falls.

  ‘We suffer the same fate,’ she repeats. ‘Our great-grandfathers were Feyli Kurds who came to Iraq from Iran. We were both born in Iraq: Faris in Wasit, me in Baghdad. Faris in 1968, me in 1967. I lost my mother at thirteen, Faris lost his father at the same age. I looked after my younger brothers and sisters, and he looked after his.

  ‘Our families were deported from Iraq back to Iran: Faris lived in Yazd, and I in Teheran. I sailed from Indonesia by boat in 2000, Faris in 2001. I settled in Sydney, Faris in Melbourne. And after all that time we met.

  Turning to Faris she says, ‘Faris, that is why I understand you. That is why when you are sleeping in the day time, I don’t wake you.’

  Faris cannot sleep. He paces the rooms late at night. He watches television into the early hours but cannot sit still. He walks to subdue his thoughts. He follows the beat of his feet. He walks the neighbouring streets, the gravel paths of Princes Park and, further afield, past the cafes in Sydney Road, seeking the comfort of city lights.

  When he does sleep, it is in short bursts—from nine till noon, from noon till three, and from four until the fall of night. Even as he sleeps there is no respite. He dreams of the boat going under, and of his wife, Layla, and his daughter, Zahra. They are in the ocean. His daughter’s hand is in his. She slips from his grasp. He follows her, but she is like melting butter, disappearing, reappearing. Vanishing.

  Years later he sings to her as he sleeps. The same Arabic lullaby night after night. It is Majida who hears it. She is woken by his restless turning and his faltering voice. She watches him mouthing the words. She listens as his breath eases and he returns to sleep.

  Faris Shohani’s ordeal began in 1980. He was twelve years old. During the Iran–Iraq war his family was placed under surveillance and denounced as foreigners and spies. To be Kurdish Shia with ancestry in Iran was perceived as a threat by the paranoid regime of Saddam Hussein. Or was it simply an opportunity to seize possessions and homes?

  Faris was at school that day. The police entered the classroom in the early afternoon. The teacher saw the colour drain from Faris’s face. The headmaster, Mr Omran, protested, but the police ignored his pleas. Faris was escorted to the police station. His entire family was there: three brothers, four sisters, his mother and father, cousins, uncles and aunts.

  They were interrogated for two days, stripped of their papers—birth certificates, passports, military service books, property deeds—and they were driven by army vehicles to the Iranian border with nothing but the clothes they wore. They were ordered to move on and not look back.

  They crossed the border at night and lived for eight months in a refugee camp in a grass-floored tent, then in tents again for two years in a second camp. They were moved to a third camp where they lived for five years in a single room. Throughout their twenty-one years in Iran they were stateless. They had returned as strangers to the land their forebears had lived in a century ago.

  Faris’s great-grandfather was raised in the Zagros Mountains in Iran, near the border with Iraq. We have no friend but the mountains, so the Kurdish saying goes. But the mountains were unable to sustain them. Faris’s great-grandfather had left the city of Ilam in search of a better life. He stole across the border into Iraq, made his way to the town of Badra, and finally settled in Wasit, now a two-hour drive southeast of Baghdad.

  Faris shakes his head in wonder: ‘When my family lived in Iraq, they said you are from Iran. You are not one of us. And when we were forced back to Iran, they said you are from Iraq, you are not one of us. The Kurdish people in the north of Iraq were Sunni and we were Shia. At school in Iran my children were called bad names. They were Arabi not Persian. We did not have passports. We did not have papers. We were not allowed to work.

  ‘There was a kind man. He gave me a job in his factory. He was in danger for his kindness. I did not want him to have trouble. I did not want my children to suffer. We did not belong here. We did not belong anywhere. We were nothing.’

  Aunty Joy guides me over Coranderrk Station. The people seized the opportunity, she says. They cleared the land, tilled the soil, dug irrigation channels, and planted wheat and hops. They built a school, a bake house, wooden houses, a brick homestead and a church. They ran cattle, produced cheese, butter and meat; set
up craft industries. Market gardens. Turned a profit. Played by the rules of the new game.

  Station manager John Green and his wife Mary sat with them, worked with them, raised their own children alongside the Kulin children. They learnt the Woiwurrung language, recognised the peoples’ knowledge and love of Country, and their birthright to their lands. The Greens had come from the old world to the new, only to discover it was far more ancient than the old.

  Again, the invaders fastened their eyes on the land. The people took a stand. With the death of Simon Wonga in 1875, Barak became the Ngurungaeta of the Wurundjeri. He was a man of many parts, says Aunty Joy—a spokesman, a diplomat and negotiator, a singer, dancer and craftsman, an artist who depicted Woiwurrung life. A keeper of knowledge. A leader of his people in dark times.

  He had witnessed it all. He knew the stakes. He led three marches, sixty kilometres from Coranderrk to Parliament House, protesting plans to shut down the station. Barak and the people of Coranderrk filed petitions, wrote letters to newspapers, to the colonial government and to the Board that was set up to ‘protect’ them. They formed deputations, gave evidence at hearings and, after his dismissal as station manager in 1875, they fought for the reinstatement of John Green, the man who had sat with them on equal ground.

  Big story this. Of men and women who battled to create a secure life for their children. Of underpaid wages and siphoned-off profits. Of a yearning for self-government and the formation of strategic alliances. Of rebels and resistors, broken promises and betrayals. The story is being reclaimed by the descendants. Hearing it told has deeply changed the way I see this land.

  At first the resistors succeeded. Coranderrk survived, but it would not last. The odds were stacked against it from the start. It takes time for the true horror to sink in, the ruthless logic of dispossession, the greed. A body blow was dealt with the passing of state legislation in 1886: ‘An Act to provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria’.

  Protection is a cruel euphemism. More accurate to call it by its popular name: the ‘half-caste act’. It led to a policy of the forced removal of so-called ‘mixed-race’ residents under the age of thirty-five from missions and reserves. Sixty residents were ordered off Coranderrk, says Aunty Joy.

  It was an act of violence. A violation. It ripped families apart, shredded communities, severed bonds of kinship and depleted the station of its labour force. It defined rights in accordance with self-serving hierarchies based on arbitrary classifications of race.

  In 1893, the land allotted for Coranderrk was halved. Barak remained on the station till his death in 1903. When Joy’s father, born and raised on Coranderrk, returned from the European battlefields, wounded after active service in World War I, he too was ordered off. He was deemed half-caste, says Joy, and judged to have no claim on the place of his birth.

  The station was finally closed in 1924. Some of the remaining people were transferred hundreds of kilometres east to Lake Tyers. ‘Why do you keep taking away things from us?’ Aunty Joy quotes Barak. ‘We are dying away by degree.’

  There is a portrait of Barak, painted in 1899 by Victor de Pury, titled ‘King Barak, Last of the Yarra Tribe’. The portrait is of its time. Idealised. Romantic. Enclosed in a gilt frame. It does not reflect his fierce resistance. Nevertheless, it is painted with a measure of respect.

  The artist’s father, Swiss immigrant and winemaker Guillaume de Pury, was a friend of Barak’s. And Barak was a frequent guest in the De Pury home at Yeringberg, within walking distance of Coranderrk; it is said that the two men exchanged their knowledge of farming, that Barak explained the ways of his people and their deep kinship with their lands.

  But there was a difference. Barak’s movements, his place of residence and status were now subject to the dictates of the state. He was robbed of agency, not truly free to go where he wished. Barak could not meet his allies on equal ground.

  Barak is painted with a mane of white hair and a full white beard. He wears a high-collared jacket. His gaze is distant, and intense. Says Aunty Joy: ‘When I look at the King Barak portrait, I see my uncle as a proud and strong Indigenous Australian man. I also see the deep buried sadness of a heartbroken man.’

  There is a Yiddish term, luftmensch. Literally ‘person of air’. It describes a people who live on the margins and are forced to survive by their wits, subject to contested borders, restrictions in status and in fluctuating rights to the ownership of land.

  It is a term that can apply to those torn from their places of birth. The refugee is a person of air. Uprooted, stealing across borders, scaling barbed-wire fences, languishing in camps. Seeking a way out. The refugee runs from one place to the next for so long, she no longer feels the ground beneath her feet.

  Here, perhaps, is where we meet. The Wurundjeri were uprooted, and the land they had worked and sustained for millennia was taken by whatever means: the force of arms, guile and deception, and the rule of a foreign law.

  In the portrait, the state of the luftmensch is intimated in Barak’s gaze. It is fixed on a lost world, but it is also a world that lives on through him; and while he lives, the stories are being passed on to his heirs. His gaze is at once dignified and preoccupied. It breaks through time. It is a reminder: We are still here. We have not been broken.

  That gaze. I know it well. I had seen it as a child in Meier and Hadassah. It could come upon them at any time, drawing them elsewhere. It was Hadassah’s gaze as she moved about the house, singing Yiddish songs born out of the landscapes of her youth. She too was no longer tethered to the earth—raging: I have a story to tell. No one understands. No one sees. No one knows who I am.

  She clung to her sense of self through song. Her mezzo-soprano voice reverberated in every room. Insistent, anguished at the edges, growing louder. Declaring: I am still here. You cannot take my voice from me. If you dare, I will raise it higher.

  And it was the gaze I saw in my father when he returned from work. After the evening meal was done, he rose from the table with his eyes fixed on a distant point. It lured him through the dining room and the passage to the front bedroom, and to the dressing table, his makeshift desk. He sat behind closed doors, with his head bent over the works of Yiddish poets, writing of the landscapes of his youth.

  He had brought the books with him from Poland. Flowers and leaves, gathered in the Russian–Polish borderlands, were pressed between the pages. He read the books many times over, and transcribed extracts and entire texts, and added poems of his own. I discovered the transcribed works just weeks ago. Written in notebooks, on strips of paper and pieces of cardboard, and assembled in a two-ringed folder between hard black covers. I had overlooked the folder when I’d gathered his writings and reflections in 1992, after his death.

  There are 324 numbered pages. Some are reinforced by yellow tape. The Yiddish script of the poems is compact and neat, written in a calligrapher’s hand. Meier’s comments are scrawled in the margins. On the first page, in red biro, is a short prologue, titled ‘A treasure’. Meier writes:

  Reflections, excerpts from works, entire texts of songs and poems from various authors, artists—people of great spirit, who have, in my journey through life, called out to me, requesting that I transcribe them, so that I can draw inspiration from them—a balsam for the soul.

  As a child, I caught glimpses of Meier’s world, places that would draw me on a quest to see them. Back then, I was more at home on the streets. Meier was a remote presence, up before dawn. I heard him pottering in the kitchen, making breakfast; heard the back door close and the back gate unlatch, as he set out via the back lane on the four-block walk to the Lygon Street tram. He was going through the daily motions, walking over bluestone lanes and bitumen paths on his way to work at the Victoria Market. His steps were light, the tread of a luftmensch making ends meet by selling socks and stockings.

  But his mind was elsewhere. Only at the makeshift desk was he grounded. In transcribing the poems, he too was makin
g a statement: No matter how far I have journeyed, I will keep you with me, my beloved poets, and the landscapes we once walked on. I have not abandoned you. You live on through me.

  And I have seen that gaze, too, in Faris. It is haunted, and haunting: the gaze of a man stripped of his sense of belonging and defined as worthless. After twenty-one years of statelessness, Faris no longer felt the ground beneath his feet. It was time to get out. He was free of restraint. Weightless. Ready to take flight.

  Faris’s son, Ali, was nine, and his daughter, Zahra, seven, when the family sold all they possessed to purchase passports and tickets. They were flown to Kuala Lumpur and bused to Malaysia’s east coast. They were in the hands of others: fishermen and smugglers, government officials, border police.

  The adults waded out in the shallows with their children to a boat that took them to Sumatra. They travelled on by ferry to Java, where they lived for a time in a hostel with fellow asylum seekers en route to a new life.

  Faris sought smugglers in Jakarta and in the markets of Cisarua. He was told to look out for the man driving a Mercedes. The man said he was only able to take four members of the family. He would accept payment once the boat arrived in Australia. He offered to take Ali for free. Ali left in mid-August with his grandmother, Fadilha, Faris’s sister, Mina, and his brother, Mohamed. The boat made landfall at Ashmore Reef, 320 kilometres from the Australian mainland.

  Faris continued his search. He was directed to the Egyptian smuggler Abu Quassey. At first, Faris was suspicious of his promises and his boasts of a spacious, well-equipped boat. Abu Quassey charmed the children. They were drawn to his grand gestures and extravagant tales. A new Eden awaited them beyond the horizon, he told them. Just one last stretch of water, he assured him. You will see.

  Zahra called him Uncle. Whenever Abu Quassey showed up at the hostel she would run to him, kiss him and say: ‘Uncle, hurry up with our trip. I am missing Ali so much.’