DANI POWELL Return to Dust: extract

This week we’re delighted to bring you an extract from Dani Powell’s debut novel Return to Dust. As the title suggests, it is a novel about grief, but it is also a vivid and intimate portrait of the landscape and people of central Australia. Of long road trips with unexpected detours, and life in remote Indigenous communities. The red dust of the desert spills from its pages as we follow Amber, who has returned to Mparntwe/Alice Springs, still mourning the death of her brother.

When Amber first arrived in the town 10 years earlier, she’d felt ‘a sense of coming home that made no sense’ as she’d been born thousands of miles away. Now she has come back to take up a job in a remote community and once again feels her connection to this place, ‘the on and on of it. The ground so solid, the sky so sure.’

In this extract, Amber is still on her way to the job in the remote community, but has been sidetracked by a football match, by giving rides to old friends – including Jennifer and her young daughter Shyanna – and a funeral. She has spent the night in Jennifer’s community, and needs to get moving again.

Extract courtesy of UWA Publishing

Travelling blind

Shyanna is drawing with pink chalk on the concrete at Jennifer’s house the next morning. Bold circles and shapes. Lines that run the full length of the concrete slab, and have cost her most of the chalk stick, now but a stub in her powdery hand. The marks she makes mirror the ladies’ paintings, not in detail so much as style. She’s been watching the women at the art centre, Amber thinks. Shyanna’s face is streaked with pink dust, from where she’s wiped the hair from her eyes. When she notices Amber, she pitches the chalk over the edge of the porch and disappears into the doorway darkness. A queue of shopping bags waits against the wall, alongside a stack of freshly primed and stretched canvases.

Jennifer emerges from the house. ‘You heading off?’

Amber nods. She has a headache from last night’s lack of sleep and is keen to get on the road. She has been caught up here too long. But she wants to see the old lady. She needs to see her. ‘Mavis still here?’ she asks.

‘That old lady out the back. She’s painting.’

Amber follows Jennifer around the side of the house. The little timber stumps that the kids had staked their flowers in have all been blown over. The shade cloth draped across the fence is sagging, defeated. Shyanna hurries to retrieve the plastic flowers from the dirt to make her garden again. ‘Walpa pulka,’ Jennifer says as they pass. ‘Big wind last night.’

Amber is surprised. She hadn’t heard the wind with the windows closed at the visitor’s centre.

Jennifer shakes her head gravely. At the back of the house she points to the plastic bags caught in the fence and branches, the rubbish cast across the yard. A sheet of corrugated iron has wrapped itself around the red gum. The washing she’d draped on the fence to dry was gone this morning, she says. She’d forgotten about it until she saw it strewn across the neighbours’ yard. ‘We had to go looking for our things!’ Jennifer laughs.

When she tells stories, Jennifer throws her body into the telling, so that she is at once the wind, at once the washing. Shyanna chimes in all the time, sometimes echoing her mother, sometimes embellishing. The storyteller sees she has both the child and the whitefella in her grip, and leads them on. She tells Amber that the family up the street had been sleeping outside and were blown from their beds.

Amber laughs now, incredulous. ‘Mulapa?’ Truly?

‘Mulapa.’ She nods, trying to keep a straight face. ‘Ngaltutjara mulapa!’ Very poor things!

Whatever wind there was last night is gone. Mavis is sitting outside on a paint-splattered tarp, crossed-legged, her black polyester funeral skirt stretched over her knees. The creases of dust are like lines on a map. Roads and rivers. Beside her, an array of paints and brushes lie waiting. She hasn’t yet begun.

Shyanna brings the old lady a canvas from the front porch. She takes it without looking up, then reaches for an empty plastic cup. ‘Tjitji!’ she interrupts the child, about to settle. She holds the cup out to Shyanna, who skips across the yard and inside to fill it with water. Amber notices a tremor in the old lady’s outstretched hand. ‘You should sit down,’ Mavis says, throwing her chin towards the ground in front of her. There is something queenly about this lady, and Amber does as she’s told. Jennifer goes inside. Mavis reaches for a stick, begins to poke at the coals. Shyanna settles beside Amber, wriggling to get comfortable, a narrow strip of canvas offcut before her.

It has already been painted on, but she begins to prime it as she has seen the old ladies do. To begin again.

Amber sees she cannot ask for anything after all. Mavis is not the ngangkari today. She is the artist. She is embarrassed to have thought of bothering her. What she felt she needed she can’t even say, and what she thought the old lady could possibly give her seems silly now, in the light of day.

The artist starts by peeling the plastic cling wrap off the paint-encrusted cups, scrunching each in her fist, then letting it fall to the ground. Swiftly a dog appears, sniffs at the discarded balls of plastic, then sidles over to collapse in the sun. The old lady starts her painting with a practical air, as if preparing vegetables for dinner. But soon she leans forward, her back low and rounded. A mop of silver curls falls forward like springs, almost scraping the canvas. Sprouts of grey beard bubble on her chin like steel wool. As she makes the first marks with the selected brush she starts to sing, quietly at first, as if to herself. Like in the car the other night. She continues like this for some time, painting and singing. It is like being privy to some private ceremony, and Amber finds herself falling into reverent composure. Then suddenly Mavis throws back her head, looks at Amber and laughs, that high-pitched single- note shriek of a laugh that belongs to the ladies out here and never fails to disarm. She turns the painting, then, without pause, launches back into her song.

So her stories go. Stories that drift into song as they meander through the landscape. Stories that reach down like roots into this country, are bound to it. Stories a traveller might stuff in her pockets and take with her. Stories to fill you up, that might keep you from getting hungry somewhere down the track. Each stanza punctuated by a gasping breath. And every now and then the storyteller returns to her audience, checks that Amber is listening. ‘Kulini?’ Are you taking it in?

Is she taking it in? How much detail will be lost on this whitefella as her remembering skims the surface, gleaning only the shiny things on the road? Gleaning, straining, gathering and, even then, interpreting. Trying to fit it into a framework she already holds. Despite how long she’s lived in this country, she is still the traveller, with a traveller’s myopic lens. Always passing through. No matter that she has come to know some of the communities, the country out here, still she cannot conceive of the detail the old lady talks about. Or any one place, perhaps. Part of her is impatient, anxious to distance herself from this place and the events of yesterday. To shift camp before the shadow of death once more descends.

But she is listening. She is trying to comprehend as much as she can with her elementary language, language she’s neither heard nor spoken in years. Language rendered obsolete each time she leaves this country, left rattling around in her pocket like old money – beautiful and exotic, but without currency. Here language unlocks the country, illuminates its detail – the ecology, the history, the mythology bound to it. She stretches herself to understand, so that it feels like her whole being, with all of her senses, is reaching towards the old woman’s words. Occasionally Mavis switches to English, to emphasise something for Amber’s benefit, but as she does Amber hears the hollows in the story, sites of dropped detail.

Everything is still, as if time itself has stood still, for a bit. The sun is warm. The sky unbroken blue. Two camp dogs doze limply by the front door, but for the occasional flick of a jaw when the flies become too persistent. A trail of ants follows some cartographic trail across the ground, like an old bush track that can no longer be seen but can nevertheless be followed by those who remember it. Up the street, voices rise and fall, go quiet for a bit, then erupt in a chorus of alternating cheers and sighs, over and over. Must be gambling.

Mavis builds her painting like a topographic map, in thick accretions of acrylic. It is the same painting, always the same painting. Her country. When the old lady talks, it is as if sometimes she is drawing stories from the country around them, and at other times from herself. Looking out, then in, to a map Amber cannot see. As if the country is inside her, animating her. Every now and then she looks up from her work and traces the distant hills with the tip of the brush. As if she is painting a landscape, but she is not. She squints her eyes like she’s seeing right through the country, into its guts. She is speaking not of what is apparent but of what has transpired here, the events that brought this country into being. She talks about a time past and mythic, yet present in the physical landscape. It’s a way of seeing impossible for Amber to really comprehend. But what she can see, although she couldn’t see when she first came here, is that the country is alive with stories. And she knows this now of everywhere.

‘Nyaratja.’ Over there. Mavis sees that the whitefella’s gaze is general, unfocused, and shakes her head. ‘Wiya!’ No! She points again with the paintbrush tip, through a copse of trees to a series of quartz rocks protruding from the earth. ‘Nyaratja – that one.’ Place is precise.

This is what is lost when people pass. This precision, this detail. Family maps, community maps, maps of country. They take it with them when they go. Without its stories, Amber wonders, will the country be mute? And the rest of us – will we be but wayfarers travelling blind?

The old lady sits back, straightens up, surveys the work. ‘Palya.’ She is not finished, but she is finished with her audience. It occurs to Amber that these paintings are maps of sorts. Records of country that reach beyond landscape. Perhaps this is what is being left us, after all. Then, when she’s about to get up, Mavis reaches to touch Amber’s hand, her paintbrush still poised between her fingers. ‘Ananyi?’ Are you going? Amber hesitates. ‘Ngaltutjara,’ the old lady says, tilting her head to the side. ‘You been lost your spirit,’ she whispers.

Words rise inside her. Rise and fall. To open her mouth is to risk the waters rushing out. Waters that writhe with monsters and ugly beasts. That threaten to drown her. Like the child of the high seas, who couldn’t cry out despite her desperate desire to do so. When she tried her throat closed up and no sound came, the effort so intense it caused her face and throat to blacken, like the face of someone drowned. Apart from one day, when a cargo-boat appeared, sailing effortlessly over the watery streets and sounding its siren. This time, the village did not disappear, nor was the girl overcome by sleep. On this occasion, the child recognised the sound from the world she once knew, and rushed to the window, crying out with all her might: ‘Help! Help!’

But Amber didn’t cry out. Water brimmed in her eyes, like waves that would not break. You been lost your spirit. A diagnosis is almost enough.

It is told that the Heliades wept day and night for four months by the grave of their dead brother. That their wasting bodies took root and were soon encrusted in bark, their arms turned to branches. Even so, their tears still flowed. But they hardened in the sun, like honey turned to stone. Is this what it means to have lost one’s spirit? To move through the world each day but have no taste for it? To no longer be able to feel its touch, or receive its offerings? Could the ngangkari see right through her, into the woody forest that flourished there?

‘I was going to ask . . .’ Amber begins, then falters.

From Dani Powell Return to Dust UWA Publishing 2020 PB 180pp $26.99

Like to keep reading? You can buy Return to Dust from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

Tags: Australian desert, Australian fiction, Australian women writers, central Australia, Dani | Powell, Indigneous communities, remote communities, Return to Dust