‘Funny, isn’t it? How the whole world turns out for a couple of white fishermen …’

I let that sit in the blackness of the tent like a malicious entity.

‘… when it was around here that the sealers abducted our tribal women and took them to the islands to be their slaves. And nobody came to their rescue.’

You roll over and press your nose to mine. I can smell the brine of your tears.

‘Shhh, don’t talk,’ I say.

You spread yourself across me, engulfing me completely. You are my summer white girl — my delicate joey, hand-reared. I know that you will always return. You are devoted to me, indebted.

One day I will set you free, but not yet.

After all, summer isn’t over.

DESCENDANT

Ms McGregor cast her eyes around the room. ‘How many students in this class identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander?’

Dorothy snapped a freckled hand toward the ceiling, oblivious to the ugly sweat mark at her armpit. ‘I am.’ She waited, uncaring, for the sniggers to come from the back of the class. And come they did.

The teacher looked straight through Dorothy and surveyed the rest of her Grade Ten social science class. ‘Anyone else?’ she asked with a sigh.

Dorothy waved her arm and wriggled in her chair. She was, after all, the chairperson of the ASPA committee. ASPA stood for Aboriginal Students and Parents Association. She’d convinced the principal to allow her to set up the ASPA committee three years ago, when she was in Grade Seven. She wrote to the Department of Education twice a week for almost an entire year until they eventually agreed to provide the funds.

~

Dorothy was a proud blackfella from a well-known family. Within her community, she was a somebody. She attended all the community events that she could make it to and had done so for as long as she could remember. Two years ago, she’d been picked to attend the Aboriginal Students Congress in Canberra, as the Tassie representative. The rest of the congress selected her to make a media announcement following their sitting. The whole thing made the national news and Dorothy enjoyed small-town celebrity status for the best part of a month. The following year, she won ‘Aboriginal student of the year,’ an award given out by her local Aboriginal center as part of their NAIDOC Week celebrations.

She might be a somebody at home and within her community, but at school she was a nobody — unpopular and a loner.

The other students made fun of her appearance. She wasn’t a polished Instagram model, like the popular girls in her class. Her hair was usually greasy and hung in strings over her eyes. Her face was sprayed with freckles and her eyes, emerald green, had an intensity of someone beyond her years. And while most of the girls in her grade were now looking more like adult women, Dorothy remained stick thin and childlike. Her PE teacher remarked in front of the class one day that she looked like the girl who played Carrie in the original movie. The other students taunted her about this, even though Sissy Spacek was well before their time.