Yam daisies are edible tubers that used to grow in vast numbers on the river-flats. They have a yellow flower a bit like a dandelion and a cluster of tubers that—in John’s words—‘hung down like the fingers of a hand’. The Darug dug them up and ate the roots, but would re-plant one of the ‘fingers’ so there’d be a crop again the following year.

Listening to them tell me about those yam daisies, I began to realise how important they were. They were a staple of the Darug diet, the source of bulk and carbohydrate, playing the same role that potatoes did in the Irish diet. Fish and game and other plants were added to that staple but wouldn’t always have been enough on their own.

The yam daisies grew on the same rich soil that the Europeans chose for their own crops. The newcomers dug them up as weeds, and planted corn and wheat. When the Darug people came back, expecting to harvest their yam daisies, and found them replaced by other crops, they harvested them instead.

After I got off the phone I sat for a long time looking out at the front yard, trying to absorb the significance of what I’d learned.

The story of the yam daisies made sense of conflict all over the country. It was the story of settlement in miniature. One event came after another, no one understood what the other side was thinking, and at the end there was bad trouble. It was never a simple matter of right and wrong.

Thinking back to that scene with Governor Phillip and the man he’d slapped, I still didn’t understand it. But I could see now that there were whole grammars of behaviour, dictionaries of culture, that would make sense of the ‘old man’s’ actions. Things to do with the protocols of being a guest and a host, with giving and taking, with respect and authority.

I was appalled at the misunderstanding that must have happened in that moment, even though all parties had only good will towards each other. How easy it was for things to go wrong. Once they’d gone wrong, how hard to put right.

I’d lived in one kind of Australia all my life. Now I was glimpsing a different country I’d been living in too, but never seen. I’d been to Wiseman’s place. Now I had to go back again, but this time to the Aboriginal place.

17. THE BUSH AT NIGHT

17
The Bush at Night

The road was familiar now. The two-car garages, the three-car garages, the retirement villages. The bags of manure.

Around the last hairpin bends, past the pub, down to the ferry. Drive on diagonally. The river, the cliffs, a breeze along the water making dark cats-paws.