Read Online Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko - Free Book Online Page A

was a bit cool. Both Stevo and Caro had worn jumpers the whole time they’d been at the farm, and traces of mist still lingered this morning, ghosting the big camphors in the dip. Fairy-wrens twittered like manic high-pitched machine guns in the neighbouring lantana bushes. The cold wasn’t worrying them; they chittered like they were onto their fifth strong espresso. Jo smiled. She loved those little birds.
    â€˜It’s like Narnia,’ Caroline said as she drained her final drops onto the last bag and stood gazing. ‘It’s so lush, and so peaceful.’
    Jo spoke then, about how time warped once you left the highway and entered Byron Shire proper. Even your blood pumped more slowly, leisurely winding its way through arteries and veins, takingits own sweet time. No rush hour here, and still not a traffic light to be found in the shire. And enough shades of green to put Ireland to shame.
    â€˜It’s my idea of heaven,’ Caro said, collapsing to sit cross-legged beneath the slash pines that fringed the dam.
    Jo looked around. She knew that feeling. The resident kingfisher flashed past on its way back to its nest, a blurred blue rocket with something long wriggling in its mouth.
    â€˜Yeah, I still can’t believe we own it, eh. I keep waiting for someone in a uniform to turn up and wave a bit of paper at me and tell me to piss off.’
    â€˜But isn’t it Bundjalung land?’ Caroline said in suprise. ‘That’s why Stevo jumped at the chance to be in on the deal.’
    Jo winced and turned away to hide it. The deal. As if retrieving your ancestral land was some kind of a game, not the work of generations. The blueprint of your life, and the only thing worth working for.
    â€˜Yeah, but Bundjalung covers a lotta country. We know our ancestors come from somewhere around here, but not exactly where. I’ve resigned myself to never knowing. Some things just happened too long ago to find out.’
    Caroline chewed this over.
    â€˜But the way Stevo talks sometimes, it’s all that matters, getting back to the land. Mabo and all that.’
    Jo sighed. Land was the lodestone, the foundation of absolutely everything in the culture. On the other hand, she hated rhetoric.
    â€˜Well he can talk Mabo all he wants, but they took our grandparents and the rest of em away to assimilate our families and fuck up our connections to land. And it very nearly worked. So there’s a bloody great need to compromise in families like ours. Why do you think Stevo’s run overseas and stayed there?’
    She gazed at Stevo’s girlfriend, conscious of the chasm between them. Cos you have to be a fucked up blackfella to know what it’s like, not being able to prove who you are, or where you belong. The agony of the stolen descendents, hiding in shame as if it was all theirfault. Or else getting hypertension trying to fit in; to force history never to have happened simply because it shouldn’t have. Jo rammed her garden fork into the ground beneath the pines. Who elected me spokesperson, she thought, as she picked up the watering buckets. End of lesson.
    â€˜I’m running off at the mouth – must be from spending so much time on my own. This valley’s full of people that want to earbash ya.’
    â€˜It’d be worth it to live here. It’s ... perfect.’ Caroline’s face softened as the female heron Jo had christened Bluey lifted awkwardly from the dam and flapped towards the creek over the road, where it would be unmolested except by grazing bullang and the occasional wedgetail.
    â€˜You could always stay on and do that fencing.’
    â€˜Um ... nah. The flights are booked. It’ll have to wait till next time, sorry.’
    Beneath her breath, unheard by Caro, Jo whispered very softly: jingawahlu mulinyin.
    â€˜Gorgeous,’ Caroline reiterated, bony white hands propped on her bony white hips.
    â€˜Well, why else would I sell my