Swallow the Air

HSC Belonging

Swallow the Air

Passage 7: Text version

May meets Issy, an Aboriginal activist manning a blockade by the lake.

The church gave her the name Isabelle. Her mother gave her the name Galing, which means water dreaming. She is an elder, and that means she has a responsibility to protect what belongs to her people. To teach. She's been living at the place where they make all the white laws for the country, the Parliament House. She said all those years ago they declared an embassy, a part of government that was dedicated to her people. She lives between the embassy and this blockade at the lake where we met. Her mother's land and my mother's land.

The mining company wants to leach cyanide underneath the saltbush land. Issy says that they make a blockade and stay there for as long as it takes for them company shareholders to back out, for company to leave, take their fences, their electricity, take all their machines and generators and leave. Take themselves and don't come back.

Issy says they don’t understand that just because you can’t see something don’t mean it’s not there. She says that under the earth, the land we stand on, under all this there is water. She’s says that our people are born from quartz crystal, hard water. We are powerful people, strong people. Water people, people of the rivers and the lakes.

They look at the land and say there is nothing here.

wiray — no

dhuray — having

We laugh at that, it is our little joke.

Because we’ve got plenty, she says, smiling.

Issy smoothes her wiry hair with an open palm, gently. Hair the colour of ash, and under the gaze of flames she seems alight. Her face is a pool of small pulses, bumps and folds, lines taking us which ways. Her eyes are small slivers and they shine like fish scales. They are lucid and kind, but almost feverish as she speaks.

Issy says that the lake works like a heart, pumping its lifeblood from under the skin. She says there are many hearts, and with them, many valves and veins. This, she adds, as smoke dances across her shadowy lips, is all life. murun. Everything is part of the heart, everything is water, and when we listen closely we can hear the shifting beneath us, the gathering above us, and within us a churning.

Swallow the Air p145

Questions

1.How does Winch emphasise the importance of 'water' to the idea of belonging in the passage?

2.What connection does May feel with Issy when they first meet?

3.Explain the notion of belonging in '...protect what belongs to her people.'

HSC Belonging: Swallow the Air1