thinking about Maningrida

This boy was one of my students when I taught at the  Maningrida school in Arnhem land in 1989. Rodney. He probably has kids of his own by now. I don’t know, because I have never been back. 

It was the end of the year, and we went out to the billabong as a special break up celebration. What I remember is how the kids came alive out there - like all kids do around water.  They smeared white clay all over their hands, faces, and black bodies. They  looked so beautiful, and so right in that landscape. 

Much better than how they looked in a classroom, furrowing their brows trying to grasp hold of our peculiar whitefella ways, our measuring and labelling and  numbers. Their  own language had no words for numbers beyond one, two, three and many. 

They had six words to describe their changing seasons, and innumerable words (so the linguist told me) for local varieties of shellfish.

These kids’ ancestors had lived in this place for thousands of years attuned to  the tides and winds and seasons, with out ever needing to measure time or space or volume as we do. 

As I floundered around explaining how there were sixty seconds in a minute and when the big hand was on 8, it meant ‘twenty to’ , it all seemed sillier and sillier. I felt like I was sinking into quicksand.

I also noticed how we whitefellas are always asking questions. And how so  much of being a (white, Western) teacher was about asking questions you already knew the answer to, and waiting for someone to get it ‘right’. 

The kids often took this as a wild guessing game. As I pointed to countries on the yellowed classroom map of the world, they enthusiastically  called out random names of countries - ‘America!’ , ‘China!’  - hoping to hit the jackpot.

They yelled out times tables in noisy rythmic unison, like a chant or a prayer - and had not the slightest sense of what multiplication was. 

At times I wondered what the hell I was doing there.  I always had the feeling I learnt more from the kids than they did from me.

Maningrida was a sort of exile for me, a magical and lonely time in a country more foreign than India or France. I’d come with a broken heart, having fled as far from Melbourne and my ex-lover as I could go without leaving the country. The children at Maningrida helped heal my heart, with their  bright voices and cute dancing , their joy and affection.  They were like Nature spirits, so pure.

With their husky midnight blue voices. There were two questions they always asked “Where’s your Mother?” and “Where’s your Country?”.

As I pointed vaguely to the south, there was an empty, displaced  feeling in my heart, of my own foreignness to this country.

Mum's voice in the mildewy phone box under the mango tree, from two thousand miles away, coughing. A few weeks before the end of term. Her cancer had returned. The smell of rotting mangoes filled my nostrils. I walked down to the muddy, mangrove-y beach and looked out at the Arafura Sea, where you occasionally saw crocodiles sliding through the milky water. I knew it was time to go - back to my Country, and back to my Mother


Soon after the day I took these photos, I left Maningrida. As the little plane took off and the settlement shrank into a toy town among swampy greenery and snakey brown rivers, I had the thought that I would probably never return

Now, more than twenty years later, I’ve been presented with an opportunity to go back to Maningrida, for a couple of days. It's in a few months time, as part of an environmentalists/philanthropists field trip. I think I’ll go .