2011 - Theses - Flinders University

‘So we got to leave here. Got to leave our little yakartis and our people buried down therefrom that terrible time, last drought. My little one would be a man by now. 35‘This place has always been big camp for us, but now we got to go. Only place we can goaround here is Minerawuta. We got our well there, and Mr Whyte he’s still new. He’s allright, they reckon. It’s his Ram Paddock, see: Ram Paddock Gate. It’ll be a big camp, I’mtelling you, Mrs Forbes.’Rebecca feels like crying, although she will not. This place they have travelled to, is alreadyno-place: it is dismantling, an activity of anger and yearning when all she wanted, at last, wasa home where Jack said they’d find one: amongst kin. But there are no rations, no work, nowaterholes to camp by. Only a well under the eye of Mr Whyte. For a moment, she sees herpoverty, how a Mr Whyte might see this white lady: thrown onto the grace of the land itself,along with relatives whose very speech is strange to her.Except that he won’t see me like that, she promises herself. She would not be seen in pity.Ngami, Atuna, Mathari, udnyu artu, Mrs Forbes. That’s how they’ll know me.Works CitedBirt, Dr Shanahan and MC. Grg52/1/1903. State Records of South Australia, Adelaide.Brock, Peggy. Yura and Udnyu: A History of the Adnyamathanha of the Northern FlindersRanges. Netley SA: Wakefield Press, 1985.Bunbury, Alisa. Arid Arcadia: Art of the Flinders Ranges. Ed. Jan Hylton and PenelopeCurtin. Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2002.Christine Davis, Clifford Coulthard and Desmond Coulthard, Heritage Team. The FlindersRanges: An Aboriginal View. Reprinted with amendments. ed. Adelaide: AboriginalHeritage Branch, Department of Environment and Planning, 1986.23