The Crow Eaters Read online

  I wander off by myself into the fields where the old Australian Rules posts still stand from the kids’ camps held here in the 1990s, and towards a small, lonely building in a stand of trees. This was probably the grimmest building of Torrens Island’s quarantine station. I open the door and see the porcelain slab of the morgue and the drain for autopsies sluicing out below into the earth. It now smells like honey inside, as bees regularly set up nests in the corners of the room.

  I hear the horn of a tugboat out in the harbour as it ploughs through the water, dragging an enormous tanker, the Alpine Magic from Hong Kong, along to the open sea. It’s still busy in Port Adelaide, with industry everywhere on the water, and new breweries, galleries and museums filling the streets in town. Once this place acted as the gatekeeper for those seeking new opportunities from Adelaide, either the New Australians looking to depart from Customs House and sail to Paraguay, or those who had arrived from afar and were hoping to make South Australia their new home. Now it is a museum relic being slowly swallowed by the weeds.

  Out beyond the tanker I can see the power station at Pelican Point to the north and the other, still caged by wire, to the south. Power issues have been an enduring narrative in modern South Australia, though in between these two symbols, Torrens Island’s quarantine station and its past lay mostly hidden in between the two sets of chimney stacks which frame the port and this obscure part of Adelaide’s past.

  The final task I set out on is possibly the most important. It is one I think is essential to include in an exploration of Adelaide, and one which hasn’t been delved into maybe as much as it should have been. It is the story of the Kaurna people in the city. The Kaurna people are the traditional owners of the Adelaide Plains, which extend from Cape Jervis in the south up to Crystal Brook in the north. As Kaurna Elder Lewis Yerloburka O’Brien said about the Kaurna Walking Trail, ‘Yertarra padnima taingiwiltanendadlu’ (‘When we walk the land we become strong’). I take this prompt to navigate the city using the Graham F Smith Peace Foundation’s map to guide me. There are many ‘sites’ in Adelaide, though I will use the trail of Kaurna stories to help me find a different path in the city.

  Many of these places are ones that I’m aware of but I’ve never stopped at, or I never knew exactly where they were. I begin the walk at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander War Memorial on the corner of Victoria Drive. A paved Rainbow Serpent – one of the creation figures of the Kaurna, leads the way, snaking towards the bronze coolamon, a traditional vessel now used to contain the ritual fire lit here to honour those who served. Standing above it are the statues of a Second World War male soldier (tulya) and a female nurse (kuku kangkalangkala), tall and proud on the boulders above the park. Indigenous Australians have served in every war since the federation of Australia, despite not receiving many of the same basic human rights. In the First World War it is estimated that there were 1000 Indigenous people enlisted, though there are records of only one Indigen-ous person receiving access to the widespread soldier settlement land distributions after the war. During the Second World War, again there were many Indigenous people serving, though there was more vocal opposition this time, especially as the promise of receiving citizenship was one of the motivating factors to enlist. William Cooper, secretary of the Indigenous Australians League said that it was absurd that Indigenous people should be placed in a position, ‘of defending the land which was taken from him [sic] by the White race without compensation or even kindness’.

  Nearby, the plaques also recognise the diversity which has kept the city buoyant during crises in the past, from the Sikh soldiers and their service from 1849 to 1947 to the Australian Army Nursing Service in the Second World War.

  From the bronze statues I walk across the grass and down to the King William Street underpass. I’ve walked through here many times before, but I’ve never stopped to look at the walls. I’ve always rushed past the tiles on the way to somewhere else; now I move in and look at them properly. Clearly painted is the message ‘You are standing on Kaurna land’. This is a very simple statement, one I’d never really acknowledged until now. The tiles are luminescent aqua, showing a scene of the environmental history of the city here. This used to be a place where the Kaurna would hunt and gather their food, and as I walk slowly along next to the tiles, I see paintings of platypus and of the gudgeon fish, which is no longer here – it was once a staple which they fished from the river here before it was dammed upstream.

  Not far from the underpass, I notice another site on the Kaurna Trail which I’d never really stopped to look at. In the water below Adelaide Oval there is a collection of metal ‘folded’ boats inscribed with writing. These were made by artist Shaun Kirby and the writing is from hand-written letters from immigrants coming here in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nearby, on the shore, is another fold of metal with Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi writing: ‘Ngaiera karralika kauwingga taikutti yerra kumanendi’ (‘The sky and the outer world are connected in the waters and the two become one’). From here I look across to the stadium. I register that I’m the only one doing the Kaurna Trail here today.

  The map then directs me to a site hidden in plain view on the grass in front of the Festival Centre. It is the decorated yellow tile headstone of Kaurna Elder Doris May Graham, who worked on the reconciliation cause. The yellow headstone has an embedded boomerang on its surface, and the words ‘Trust was the start of it, joy was a part of it, love was the heart of it’ are written on it.

  Across the river is Pinky Flat, now full of lunchtime joggers straining to finish their circuit before the rain swoops in over the city. Pingku, also known as the bilby, was a traditional food of the Kaurna, and initially also of the struggling early settlers. Along the grassy banks of the river there once would have been Aboriginal camps and 200 endemic plant species to supplement their diets. Seeing this interpretive and historical lens does evoke a sense of sadness, naturally, though I am grateful for the fact that I can wander along the riverbank in the centre of the city, with no-one the wiser, and appreciate this part of the Kaurna experience.

  The Kaurna Trail crosses the river and descends into a stand of tall gums and thick reeds on the edge of the water. The rain starts and as I pull my jacket close; the lunchtime runners sprint past in a blur, trying to get back to shelter, or their offices in time. Along the Karrawirra Pari (River Torrens) there is a huge eucalypt with the signs of a giant scar on it – where bark was taken by the Kaurna to make shields, bowls or maybe a canoe. I walk along the weir, now slick and slippery with rain, and look out across the sheets of water to the old gaol. It was opened in 1841 and closed in 1988, and the big stone walls are still prominent back behind the railway lines. When the settlers arrived, they determined that because they weren’t from convict stock a gaol wasn’t necessary and any prisoners were kept off-shore on the HMS Buffalo. Later, a tent was built, and prisoners were chained to logs, until the prison was finally constructed. Archaeological digs have revealed that this was also one of the first locations where the settlers camped – among the Kaurna – when they first arrived at the place they would call Adelaide. While the historical value of the gaol is interesting, and I have walked through the yards and seen the stretches of green grass along the edge of the wall where hanged prisoners are buried, and have walked into the pit of the hanging tower, which operated up until 1964, the Kaurna link to this place is a sombre one. When Governor Hindmarsh proclaimed the colony of South Australia on 28 December 1836, he stated his ‘firm determination to punish with exemplary severity, all acts of violence or injustice which may in any manner be practiced [sic] or attempted against the natives who are to be considered as much under the Safeguard of the law as the colonists themselves’, when in reality few were ever held to account for their cruelty to the Kaurna in the early years.

  I continue walking the trail in the lashing rain. It takes me across to Pirltawardli, which was where many of the Kaurna were moved in 1837, and huts, gardens, a schoolhouse and a storehouse were
built to pressure the Aboriginal residents to integrate. The spot is now marked with a beautiful sculpture of a brush-tailed possum in the trees. It is only when I look up that I notice I’m now tramping across an inner-city golf course.

  The trail continues back into the bustle of the city and the next marker, Yarakartarta, sits in the forecourt of the InterContinental Hotel. This sweeping outdoor artwork is a beautiful textured sculpture wall designed by Kookatha artist Darryl Pfitzner, where the paintings of Kaurna artist Muriel Van Der Byl – of emus, fish, snakes, kangaroos, wallabies and rivers – have been transferred into colourful ceramic tiles to tell the story of Dreaming ancestors Ngurunderi and Tjilbruke.

  I continue walking this solitary trail, surrounded by the movement of the everyday, oblivious city. I pass the big, dark columns of Old Parliament House: it too has a link to the Kaurna beyond the flags that now flap above. On 28 May 1997 in a hopeful gesture for the future, the parliament expressed its regret and acknowledged pain caused by the forced separations of Aboriginal people before 1964. A darker side of the past is also remembered here, when Governor Gawler would have his speeches translated into Kaurna language and he proclaimed, ‘Black men – We wish to make you happy. But you cannot be happy unless you imitate good white men.’

  I continue on, past the now wonderful Migration Museum, though the site here also played a part in the sadness of this trail, as it was once part of a boarding school used to separate Aboriginal families. I wander into the South Australian Museum, now exhibiting Kaurna shields – Wokali – with smears of ochre on them and melancholy pictures of Kaurna woman Ivaritji wrapped in a wallaby-skin coat. This regal looking woman was the daughter of Charlotte and Ityamaiitpina, born in Port Adelaide in the 1840s. She is considered by anthropologists to have been the last person to have detailed knowledge of the Kaurna traditions.

  I walk along North Terrace, bumping past hordes of students with their eyes on books or scanning phones, and I see a banner flapping from a pole showing a picture of Rebecca Richards from 2010 as the first Indigenous Rhodes Scholar. Later, I pause at the lake in the Botanic Gardens – now rich and full of the beautiful smell of the plants and the earth after rain. This was a favourite place of Ivaritji’s father, known by the settlers as ‘King Rodney’, who was an important contributor to reconciliation in the colonial era.

  My final stop takes me down to Victoria Square. I find it an unlovely place now, big and sparse and devoid of any real spirit except the flashing colours of the cars and the traffic lights around it. It was once an important Indigenous meeting place, though now it is vacant except for a few skateboarders and people walking elsewhere. This was once the main camp of the Tarntanya people, according to Ivaritji, and in this square on 12 July 1971 the newly designed Aboriginal flag was flown for the first time in Australia.

  This trail might be a small symbol of what the Kaurna presence once was here, but I’m glad to have walked it. I understand something deeper about my city. And while not all of it is positive, there’s surely something hopeful about knowledge and being aware of the stories and the different layers and interpretations which exist across the places we call our homes.

  I am back in my garden at the end of winter. The sky is grey, and it has been for weeks. There were 21 millimetres of rain overnight, it was sheeting in sideways across the hills and there have been more than 60 millimetres for the week, a stark contrast to the drought, the dry paddocks and empty reservoirs of the east coast. The soil is soft to dig into now and even with the most cursory scrape I find pencil-sized worms and rich chocolate cake–like earth just below the surface.

  During our own hot, dry summer, while I was travelling around South Australia, I lost a few plants in my garden, scorched and sapped by the sun. As I get down in the dirt again to replace them, I remember back to the moment I was in this same patch of my yard the previous year, when I discovered the shards of clay from the Coppin Brothers brickworks here. It revealed the layers of Littlehampton’s story, which inspired me to look closer at South Australia. Since then I have followed the roads, rivers and fences around to the corners of the state and I have interpreted the invisible lines left by nuclear blasts, state borders, topographical contours, fault lines, rainfall delineations and personal connections to the land, to learn more of the stories of the state. I have travelled thousands of kilometres north, south, east and west. I’ve slept in swags and dodgy motels, I’ve had good coffee in the strangest places and I’ve shared meals with so many people in South Australia who I’d never have met if not for this quest.

  I realise, as I dig out the old, dead roots of the remnants of the dried-out gardenia, that I haven’t told all the stories of South Australia. I’m sure that as soon as my fingers find the final full stop on the final page of this book, there’ll be other people with different histories who show me new lines to follow still, in this state which has adopted me; other people with unique stories to discover. But I kind of like that. I hope that this book is just the beginning of more of South Australia finding its way to the surface, just like the pieces of clay from the brickworks, so that there is a clearer sense of the people and the places that make it a state that’s not on the way to anywhere, but one that doesn’t need to be either.

  This started out as a passing curiosity to learn a little more about my new home. It has become much more than that. As travel writer Paul Theroux wrote of his time in China, ‘It has become another part of my life,’ rather than simply another trip. I feel the same. I’m going to miss the long drives and the late-night arrivals, the desert sunsets and the taste of the first beer at strange pubs in new places. But then I realise that – unlike many of my literary idols, like Paul Theroux and the first book of his I read, Riding the Iron Rooster, about his time in China, or even Bill Bryson’s Down Under on his time exploring Australia; a place far off and exotic for him then – this is still my backyard. I don’t need to hope and wish that I might find myself back here one day, like Bryson and Theroux did. I’m already here. I had lunch with a friend the other day and he told me about Cactus Beach and the fishing near the Bight; another friend told me about a bird reserve called ‘Gluepot’ that I’d never heard of before. These places are in reach and now that I’ve started digging into the stories of South Australia, I don’t think I’ll ever stop.

  I clean out the last of the old gardenia roots and in its place, on top of the shards of clay and whatever else might be down there in the earth, I plant a native karkalla, or pigface, hardy enough to endure the seasons here.

  I recently watched a British television show called Detectorists, about two men who wander the fields of their English village with metal detectors, looking for treasure. When one finds a golden Saxon aestel (a pointer used to follow the words in manuscripts), despite the money and fame he acquires, he is beset by bad luck until he places something else of value back in the earth. It is an offering to allow someone else in the future to dig it up and to create their own story of discovery in the fields. I like the metaphor it presents, of replacement and renewal. It makes me think of my garden and of South Australia more broadly. As I plant the karkalla, I’m putting something back in the soil where I found the shards and brick remnants at the beginning of this. Maybe it’s wishful thinking and there’ll be nothing more than a service station here in the future, though I like the idea that in 20 years or 50 years, when this plant dies or is moved, someone will find some of the stories I and my family have left here, and it’ll make them wonder and look a little closer at the place they live as well.

  READING LIST

  Adelaide Kaurna Walking Trail, 3rd edition. .

  Adelaide Observer (1890), ‘General News’. 2 August, p. 28. .

  — (1895), ‘Lyrup’. 23 March, p. 43. w.trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/161818656?searchTerm=Lyrup%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20&searchLimits>.

  Anderson, T (1905), Arcadian Adelaide. Modern Printing Company, Adelaide.

  Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016), Census data. South Australia Community Profile. .

  Beadell, L (2002), Still in the Bush. New Holland, Sydney.

  Briand, R (1971), White Man in a Hole. Phuong-Hoang Press, Melbourne.

  Buford, B (1993), Among the Thugs. Vintage, London.

  Burchill, E (1964), Innamincka. Rigby, Adelaide.

  Burra History Group Inc. Burra: history. .

  Cane, S (1992). Heritage Values of the Nullarbor Plain. Department of Arts, Sports, the Environment & Territories.

  Cave, D (2018), ‘Elon Musk Likes It Here. Will other tech innovators follow?’ The New York Times, 9 April. .

  Cawthorne, E (1974), The Long Journey. Hansen Print, Naracoorte.

  Chatwin, B (1977), In Patagonia. Penguin Books, London.

  Chittleborough, J (2005) ‘John Ainsworth Horrocks (1818–1846)’. Australian Dictionary of Biography. .

  Clifford, G & Lecture, G (1866), Ten Years in the Bush by Julian Tenison Woods, abridged version. Penola Historical Selections, Penola.