Writer:- Gayle Andrews
Western Australia
ASHES TO ASHES
I love dust storms. I know farmers hate them, but to me they are wonderful, magical things.
My first teaching job was at a tiny, remote school for Aboriginal kids way out in the desert. Boy, it was challenging, but also fascinating. While I was there, one of the old tribal elders died. Suddenly, nobody would go anywhere near the shack he lived in. They believed his ghost walked about until the rains came to wash away his footprints. Of course, those footprints stayed around for a long, long time, even if you couldn’t see them. But I loved the thought, that people somehow live on in the dust and the dirt, rather like their essence embedded in the ground. Perhaps that’s what started my love for the storms.
When I married George and we moved to the farm, there was an old, tumble down house a couple of paddocks over from our home. No-one knew who’d built it, or when. Probably some poor sod who came out here hoping to find gold and wealth in the Great South Land, but instead found heat and flies, redbacks and copperheads. What happened to those long-forgotten people? Did they die here, or did they move away? I can’t know, but I do know that their house, that tiny place, slowly crumbled away. I guess it was made of daub, as they used to call it, really just a mudbrick building, and in time it simply slid back to its natural state, a pile of red earth. Of course, nowadays you get yuppy type rammed earth homes that cost a fortune, and I want to shout out, “Hey, it’s just mudbrick, and it’ll all be dirt one day.”
And then there’s George. He was never the same after Vietnam. Spat upon on the streets of Sydney when he returned, sworn at and called a baby-killer. That just about killed him, my poor darling. He sort of shrunk into himself after that. Some days he’d simply take off on his old motorbike, head east, camp out for a while. He never said how long he’d be gone, and I never asked; he just needed to be out there, in the red dirt, with the ghosts. When he passed, I took his ashes out there, way out mulga, and scattered them there, gave him back to the dirt he loved so much.
When Ronnie, our only boy, died in a car accident, I knew what I had to do. I took him out there and scattered him under the same scrubby tree as his Dad. I knew that’d make George happy. I cried a bit, my tears falling in splatters onto the red earth, but at least my two lovely blokes were together again.
So, when I see a huge, swirling dust storm, I know what I’m seeing is millions of footprints, millions of tears, old houses, my George, my Ronnie, the essence of those — women, babies, old men — who’ve gone before.