Debra Dank is a Gudanji and Wakaja woman and a mother, grandmother and educator. These are important biographical notes, because this book is about all those qualifiers that not only make the author who she is, but ground the story as a whole and guide its purpose.
Part memoir, part bush guide and manual of manners, this is a book to lean on and take your time. First of all, this is a story to learn from. In the introduction to it, Dank calls it “a strange kind of letter, written in my place,” and yet that strange weaving back and forth through time and dimension adds to the reader’s experience.
We Come With This Place is a gem of a book, one that Australians in particular should read and refer to. In this way, it belongs alongside iconic memories of the desert, such as Ninu – Grandmother’s Law, by Nura Nungalka Ward, about the life of a Yankunytjatjara woman from the Central Desert; and Two Sisters, the story of the Walmajarri brothers, Ngarta and Jukuna, who leave the Great Sandy Desert.
Dank takes his time at the beginning of the story. She tells you about the land she grew up in, a character unto herself, and all its dust and broken rocks, but that’s only a small part of the whole – there’s so much more to that stretch of country in far west Queensland, across the Barkly Plateau and the Gulf of Carpentaria. She was born the black daughter of a black rancher, which is a pervasive fact of her family life, and the threat of Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland in the 1950s and 1960s hangs over her heads. The unseen threat is forged in images of a sudden swarm of locusts engulfing their van towards Oban station, and the fish-filled sky as it writhes with rain settling over the barren streets of Camooweal.
There is a heaviness throughout the book, of being robbed, missing and also accidental death: Dank’s childhood was one of discovery and keen observation of both the beauty and brutality of Australian rural life. Hungry and thirsty people and animals litter the pages; the emancipated cattle gathered around a house, or the extreme rationing of fresh water.
This is also the story of the family: of Dank, of his brothers, his parents, his grandparents and his ancestors through time; of Bungmaji and the three Mararamana, the women of the water and others. Many stories focus on the fascination, forgiveness, and adoration of a troubled father. In particular, of Dank’s father, Soda, whose story follows the eternal footsteps as he escapes station owners and mission priests, traversing a hot country with a small stone or hard seed where “the presence of the body stranger produced water in his mouth”. We see him while he dances, jokes with his children, works non-stop and also suffers. There’s his reunion with his biological mother, Lucy, and the heinous crimes he witnesses in that moment before they’re separated again.
Dank is particularly adept at showing the inside through the eyes and hearts of children: the magic fish, the things that can poison, the mangled yellow bodies of grasshoppers, the farming accidents, in this case, a man sucking the point of a carbine and ending up “without his brain”. The sting of the red meat ant and the unexpected and confusing kindness of white strangers are stories told side by side; everything, it seems, has beauty and pain intertwined. There is the food and drink that bridges time, place and joy in their broken hearts: the story of conkerberries (bush plum), mamugujama in Gudanji language, “so favored by all of us, including turkeys.” And the beautiful story of Dank’s grandfather plucking five perch from a secret hole in the desert, where he discovers “how we can get fish out of cold water in arid places.”
There are silent revelations found in fresh and salt water, and the fusion of each in her marriage to a white man, and in returning with her adult children to the country where her son is so eager to take off his shoes, so his feet can breathe. on the floor. bank; as he says, “my feet have felt all those things here before”.
In the end, Dank confronts the violence that was never meant to enter his family tree, but did, and overcomes it. It is as if these enormous heartbreaks had lodged in her mouth when she was a child, unable to say so many things out loud. Here, in the intimacy and communion of the page, Dank’s voice is heard clearly and bravely, and we, readers, fellow citizens of this country, are further enriched because this book was written.