2011 - Theses - Flinders University

White Lives in a Black Community: The lives of Jim Page and Rebecca Forbes in the Adnyamathanha communityTracy SpencerVolume Three Appendices: Creative Life WritingSection C: Contact Zonecountry. And when Jack points to a hill and starts telling a story about an eagle, Rebeccaturns and looks and finally sees the shape, as if it has been there forever.Artoowarrapana Mountain, 2001I’ve had Wildu the eagle pointed out to me many times, where he rests on top ofArtoowarrapana, looking over the Mt Serle homestead, nursing his pride and planning howto teach his two cheeky nephews respect.Edward John Eyre named the mountain Mt Serle, and it was from its pinnacle that his‘worst forebodings’ were ‘realised’ 19 : he could see salt lakes north, east and west, andconcluded that he was captured in a net of boggy salt mud he called the Torrens Horseshoe. 20He was wrong of course, on all counts, a trap for white people who can see only what theireyes tell them, and who fill in the gaps with their fears or desires. Mt Serle had been a foil forwhite men ever since. Surveyed by Goyder in 1850, and taken up as a run not longafterwards, a police station was added after Aboriginal men murdered a white hut keeper forwhipping Aboriginal women and children away from a waterhole he wanted for his sheep. 21The legendary Inbuthina (Pompey) and his supporters carried out guerrilla warfare against theshepherds on Mt Serle, threatening to ‘drive all white men out of the North country.’ 22Despite this, the story Cliff’s father Clem Coulthard told Adele Pring from the EducationDepartment of the first meeting between police and yuras near Mt Serle unfolds like acommunion:‘The first white man took up flour. He was a policeman. He used to take it from Beltanato Mt Serle: used to take it on the packhorse. He mixed up the food for them. It wasbeautiful and they say they wouldn’t take it from him until he started eating it.He used to get bark off the gum trees (as a plate) and he’d eat it first. He passed it onand some of them would pick it up and smell it and have a good look at it then the nextone would take a taste of it and it tasted alright. He wasn’t taking a fit so it must have been16