As I journey with Debra Dank in her book We come with this place, I feel the dirt, I hear the birds, taste and smell the fruit of Garranjini, writes Congregational Leader Sister Catherine McCahill.

We come with this place. I repeat the title. We come with this place. Not “from” but “with”.

Over the course of my lifetime, I have read a range of literature by and about Australia’s Indigenous people, but nothing has entered my psyche, educated and transformed me as has this book by Debra Dank. As I journeyed with her in her country, with her memories and her experiences, my spirit was penetrated and expanded. ’Being neighbour’ to an Indigenous person can no longer be the same for me.

Debra is a Gudanji/Wakaja woman, like her ancestors “born of Garranjini through the freshwater and the hill country.” As she writes:

“Today Gudanji go to Garranjini, time and again, and see where the water ate away the rock and left there its mouth memory, and we talk to the women because they are still in that place listening, watching and making. … We return because the water that flowed over that rock, washing its way to Garranjini, flows within our skin too, and the water washes away all that we collect from other places and reminds us that water always reshapes to its skin.”

Debra enables me to appreciate more deeply that if, and when, I might meet her, I will be meeting her country. In her prose I feel the dirt, I hear the birds, taste and smell the fruit:

I walked off a bit, feeling my heels break through the hard crust into the soft dirt below, training my hand through the short, crisp leaves to grasp the sweet berries. The soft almost-prickly of the nearly there thorns on the stem of the bush was a small prices to pay. … Rolling a single berry between my fingers, I smoothed the skin to a polish and flicked it into my mouth. The taste squirted onto my palate and ran down the back of my throat and my memory ran back to a different place, a long time ago.

Over and again, I understand anew that to meet Debra is to be in her country. Like so many other places, Garranjini has felt, smelt and heard the trauma of the Gudanji people. For Debra’s family the massacres, violence, dispossession and removal of children are in living memory:

… something awful happens here, and it sits in this country and is waiting. And we walk with the story of those awful things – sitting just under our skin and inside the skin of our Country. … Sometimes, in some places, the story seeps out and, like the sap of the bloodwood, hardens and falls to the ground, dry and crumbling, taking that story back into the earth.

She shares poignantly the experiences of her father, Soda, and the manifestation of generational trauma that she then experiences as his child. Again, I pay my respect and express my sorrow in allowing her words to speak:

The angry words became screams that were chased and interspersed by grunts and shouts of victory – six of them. Shouts so obscene that when the filth that filled them spewed into the air, the breeze stilled and refused to pick them up and help them fly free. Instead, the breeze ensured the wickedness dropped to the ground, and sat in the dirt.

(Soda’s) cousins, who were older, later told him of the fear and deep sadness that lived at that place back then, and different fear and sadness that followed. They told him how the Methodist minister would often collect the babies but never take them to his car as he drove off the station. They told him of the places that showed newly turned earth after visits and how the cries of the babies would be carried in the middle of the night, to quickly fade and be gone.

Debra is clear in her purpose. She is paying tribute to Gurranjini: “I want to tell Gurranjini that I remember and I know.” She invited me, the reader, to know with her as she expressed the hope for her people near the opening of her book:

All of us know that terrible things happened here, and one day I hope we might be able to be smart and speak through that pain that curls into itself and keeps the words away, to let the word free and start to heal the pain.

Listen well when this country is telling you our story. Listen with your feet in the sand your heart in your hands and give it over to this country. She deserves it most.

Debra achieved this. I read her prose in awe of her person, her land, her memory and her people.

Near the end of the narrative, after I have been invited to hear, to see, to smell, to feel and touch Gurranjini, she takes me with her to the Borrooloola Festival. She is there with her children and grandchildren. I have not yet been to a Borrooloola Festival, but I have often seen and heard it in the media. Now, through Debra, I have finally felt it and touched for a rare moment the life of countless generations:

I went back to before this country felt the stomping that had created its heartbeat. I imagined feet striking the ground, becoming more than a whisper in this place. I imagined the many feet stomping had become one with my heartbeat and so my stomping in that ceremony added my place to the long line of dancers before me from that first ceremony at Garranjini. All those women stomping heartbeats into our country, celebrating and birthing life, on and on.

I know the essence of who I am, my kujiga, and where I belong, come from the shadows and whispers that I see and hear and feel when I am on country. I don’t know who the authors of those whispers are, but I hear them and they call to me in ways that are clear and loud and safe. I feel them calling for my feet to move to a rhythm that is deep inside my bones, but that I see when I am looking at our place, feeling the breeze or eating the fish we have been given.

As I turn the final page, I sit in the stillness of Debra and her precious granddaughter holding hands. Gurranjini came to me in Debra – with deep respect and gratitude I thank her.

We come with this place, Debra Dank (Echo Publishing, 2022).