THE SMOKE BIRD
“ … he could see where I was blind …”
Across the Nullabor, at the coastal town of Carnarvon, I had a very good friend, an old Aboriginal mystic called Jidda.
Jidda was a huge man with a great blossoming belly that over-hung his belt like a bag of chaff. His eyes were soft, deep and luminous – knowing eyes, eyes that delved beyond the superficialities of life to dwell in mysterious realms I could never understand. He could see where I was blind.
Whenever old Jidda came into town from his bush camp out along the Gascoyne River, he used to stop for a cup of tea and a yarn, catching up on the latest news.
Once, when we were talking on the front verandah, he indicated a bird – a Smoke Bird he called it – that was happily flittering from branch to branch of a nearby Poinciana tree.
Jidda said the bird was his constant companion. It accompanied him everywhere.
“It’s like a spirit bird,” he told me. “It look after me. If something go wrong up ahead, it starts singing out, warning me. If you see that bird, then you know I’m around. Will you remember that?”
“Yes, I’ll remember it,” I replied but, to be perfectly honest, I all but dismissed the notion at once, putting it down to his rather superstitious Yammatji nature.
Jidda had a dark, esoteric side. He saw, or sensed, ghosts, or the spirits of the dead. He was alert to omens indicating accidents, death or illness, and was always alerting me to the presence of unseen dangers he could sense.
Walking with him in the bush, he would abruptly halt, his big arm barring me from further progress, and he would murmer: “We better go back. There been ‘feather-foot’ (a clandestine tribal executioner) here.”
When my wife died 500-odd kilometres away in the Royal Perth Hospital, Jidda drove up soon afterwards in his battered Toyota truck, saying: “You’ve had some bad luck, eh?”
And he hugged me to his plumpness and wept.
It wasn’t until a long while later that I started to wonder how he had learnt of the “bad luck” so quickly. Out in his bush camp, not far from Gascoyne Junction, he had no access to telephones or two-way radios.
Within weeks of my bereavement, Jidda came to me with a proposal, saying: “That missus for me, we been thinking. We don’t like you being on your own. It make us worry. You can have our eldest daughter. She a woman now. She can cook little bit. Wash your clothes. That’s if you want.”
I truly appreciated the sincerity of his offer, but thankfully declined, telling him I preferred to be alone.
Eventually I left the western coast to work with an Aboriginal community out in the desert of the Pitjantjatjara lands near the South Australian-Northern Territory border.
The memories and pain of my life in the West dimmed over the next two years as I absorbed myself in the troubled lives of others, struggling with youthful petrol sniffers, alcoholism and a terrible corruption caused by ignorant politicians and bureaucrats in far-away places.
Lying awake late one night at Indulkana, my mind too perplexed to sleep, I was startled when the telephone rang.
A familiar voice said: “That you, old fella?”
It was Jidda calling from distant Carnarvon. My brain flooded with questions.
“How did you find out where I was? … Where did you get my number? … How are you, you beautiful old bastard?”
Jidda responded with typical brevity: “I find you easy. They got many devil-devil (evil spirits) where you are?”
“Sure,” I answered. “Probably hundreds of them.”
“I got to be careful. I gunna come over your way soon to see you.”
“When?”
“Soon … soon …”
“I really missed you, Jidda. It’s good to hear your voice.”
Again, the grunting, unemotional response: “Yair. Well, I go now. I come soon.”
A short while later I had occasion to phone another Aboriginal friend of mine living at Roebourne, in the north-west of Western Australia. In the midst of a random conversation, Margaret said: “You know about your old mate, Jidda, eh? He died …”
My blood immediately turned cold.
“That can’t be true,” I snapped, completely in denial of her statement. “I only spoke to him …”
“He’s gone alright,” she insisted. “I went down for his funeral.”
In quiet moments, feeling sad and introspective, I tried to rationalise everything to myself. Finally, I came to the logical conclusion that Jidda must have phoned me very shortly before his death. Maybe even hours before. That could be the only explanation.
In recent months, having left the Pitjantjatjara lands, I was walking alone in the rough, rocky foothills on the southern slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges, near Alice Springs, removing myself physically and spiritually from the weird world of men. In that wild bush country one could easily imagine to be free of civilisation and its dubious advantages.
I stopped, looking slowly around me at the listening scrub. An ancient silence lay over the dreaming landscape. The stillness was complete. Just trees. No wildlife at all. Rocks. Peace. The trees were absolutely motionless. Not a breath of a breeze.
Then, off to one side of my gaze, a movement attracted my attention. Looking into the upper branches of an old Ironwood tree my eyes fixed on a single bird with smoky-coloured feathers that was flitting from one limb to another. Looking down at me. Looking away. Looking back again. Almost as if it were deliberately trying to have me notice it.
In a moment, without a sound, the Smoke Bird took flight and swiftly winged its way off to be lost in the hidden valleys of the Ranges.
Somewhere in my mind I could hear Jidda’s voice whispering: “I come to see you … soon …”
-B.J.C.
