Riding the Black Cockatoo Read Free

bill.’
    The other men around the barbecue, bar or lunchroom would all shake their heads in disgust and utter statements like ‘Useless black pricks’.
    Then, without fail, one of the more sensitive souls in the group would roll out this chestnut: ‘Trouble is, the poor bastards are cavemen. I hate to say this, but they would’ve been better off if we’d wiped ’em all out.’
    I heard that statement many times over the years and I could never help but wonder, ‘Hang on, just how could an extinct race be better off ?’
    But of course I never asked the question out loud.
    Then there were the jokes; there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of Abo jokes doing the rounds of the schoolyards and campfires of my youth. We often brought these gags from home; and the fact that Uncle Bazza had told them around the table at Sunday lunch seemed to legitimise their craven humour. Deep down I had an inkling that something was amiss and my stomach often twisted in guilty discomfort, but it was always easier to laugh along. These jokes were never really funny and they connected with the mean streak that lurks within us all, the mean streak that left unchecked can spread like a toxic bloom. There was one particular joke that stepped beyond meanness. This joke began circulating during the 1980s Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. This was a major inquiry into the disproportionate number of Aboriginal men who were committing suicide or dying while in police watch-houses and prisons. I found this joke so disturbing that every time I heard it, the seconds seemed to slow down as I waited for an adult – anyone – to say, ‘Now listen here, that’s not funny! Those dead men have grieving mothers.’ But no one said a thing, least of all me. Another memory, another shard for my hot-air balloon.
    The joke ran like this:
    What do you call three blackfellas in a prison cell?
    A mobile.

CHAPTER
TWO
    { 18 SEPTEMBER 2005 }
    A few days after my big announcement to the class, I called into my parents’ house to feed the cat; they had gone away for the weekend. I hadn’t been sleeping well; I’d lain awake all night obsessing about the skull and the girl in my class – her unbelieving eyes. As I stood at the kitchen sink replenishing the cat’s water bowl, I decided to look for Mary. That was the name my father had given to the skull when it was handed to him 40 years ago. Years later, a medical specialist told Dad that the cranium actually belonged to a male, but the female name stuck. The specialist also informed Dad that the ‘specimen’ had most likely died from syphilis. Syphilis, or ‘the pox’ as it was called in the days when it was common and highly feared, is a sexually transmitted disease that if left untreated eats away the organs, including the brain, and literally rots the skull from the inside out, causing agonising pain, madness and then death. This disease was just one of many that English soldiers, sailors, convicts and settlers brought to Australia. Before contact, the Indigenous population was largely free of influenza, tuberculosis, whooping cough, measles and most sexually transmitted diseases. Aboriginal people had no immunity to these alien diseases, and when they spread the local population perished – not just in ones or twos, but often by the community.
    ‘See these cracks and lesions on the temple,’ my father used to explain knowingly to curious visitors, ‘that is where the syphilis ate away at the skull. The poor wretch would have been quite insane when he died.’
    I started to poke around the mantelpiece, where Mary had always sat. When Mum and Dad started babysitting my first daughter, Bianca, I had quietly asked Mum to put Mary out of sight. She understood. It was easier approaching Mum on such a delicate matter; Dad would have responded with one of his looks, the kind that suggested in no uncertain terms that I’d gone soft in the head.
    The ‘mantelpiece’ was really a 1960s