My Kaathii Sister – by Julie Janson
RUNNER-UP, GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2025
“She’s gone to Bourke on the back of a truck with that fatherless baby”
My mother laughs, and sighs, shutting her thin purse
A week of rough driving and sleeping under green canvas
We students live in the Anglican manse for free until Terese kissed
A blackfella, in 1972
The minister throws us out for being immoral and the dope I guess
I push a broken pram down the rock-strewn road to the Reserve
Helping Doctor Max at his clinic on broken grass and thorns
The humpy sits in majestic isolation in northwestern country
Washing flaps white on a rope and I fly back to kuthi songs from blue blinding sky
The river and hot tin shack, of sticks and cardboard from the tip
Where Jenny boils water from the Barka in forty-four gallon drums
We hang nappies on barbed wire over white dust
By our river, my kaathii sister
The sun shines, burnt and broken glass glinted
And Barkindji Murri ladies play bingo on carboard with buttons
The nuns ride past on bikes in long blue saris
What were they doing out there amongst Nyemba people?
Not needed in India alongside Mother Theresa
Reserve house walls, corrugated, whitewashed
The way our history is whitewashed
A nun sewing centre where machines whirred on cotton flowery moo-moos
No killing happened in this land, all happy smiling brown people
Eating nuts and berries – they tell us “Jesus saves”
And Jenny taking down the china cups and saucers from a suitcase
To fill with tea and Sunshine powdered milk eating yellow damper from the fire in the middle of her shack
And golden syrup and camp pie and stolen oranges
Where four children slept with mum
And Manny bought a live sheep to soothe with kind words before cutting her throat
To feed a barbeque to the Reserve mob
Together Jews, hippies, Indians, Greeks and Blacks, all outcasts from town
Old Murri men speaking of their initiation, showing us scars
Sharing a flagon
Of how they trudged at thirteen years old for days in the semi-desert of mulga and bones
With only a kali bottle of water – a Schweppes glass bottle
Of catching gulbree emu by lying on your back and shaking legs in the air
The curious bird beaten and cooked, or the eggs made into a cake
Telling me stories – trucked from a hundred miles because of flood
And dumped by the grey river full of catfish and cod
I knew Essie Coffey and her house of beaten tin in Dodge City, Brewarrina
Her sixteen-mil movie “My Survival as an Aborigine” shown on a sheet
and her baking light-as-air dampers in the ashes,
for thirty Murri kids and me
Her dancing the hula while her hubby played the ukelele
A Muruwari woman of high regard
Thirty people lived in her fibro house
I loved Uncle Bill Reid the Pastor and his kind heart and saw
how his hand shook when he heard
Stories of Major Nunn’s campaign when troopers mowed down hundreds of Blacks like
Rabbits in a shooting gallery, we weep
The Reserve, a place where Gunjies drove past at midnight,
Hovering, waiting to bash a drunk Murri man
And a black-eyed girl with baby on her hip begging me to help
At midnight
To stop the cops flogging, but I was nothing and nobody in their eyes
We are asked to leave the Ladies Lounge at the Railway Hotel
Jenny too black and me too blond and an unmarried mother
To be spat at and rocks hurled by young men in trucks hooning
A humpy home with Laminex table, a meat safe and tins of camp pie
Of women dubais cross legged on the ground
And washing flying in hot Bourke wind
I stood in the horrible heat with flies
With the girl mothers, to ask the fat Gunjie for
Vouchers for Fire Famine and Flood Relief
We buy flour, tea and biscuits and tins of corned beef
Eating, laughing with babies on laps by fires in the far country
The pale blue paper letter crinkled in my hand from my English Mum
telling me, I was a bad mother
And my homeless brother travelling by brown rattler train all that way
To see me in my Bourke shack, growing pumpkins
He ran across the red dust street lined with purple jacarandas
Wearing a tea cosy on his head and his hand down his underpants
I can’t help him as I am a bad Koori mother with a fatherless baby
I sit by the Barka fishing for catfish with Jenny my kaathii sister
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Image: John Robert McPherson/Wikimedia Commons
This poem appeared in Island 173 in 2025. Order a print issue here and see the poem as the author intended.
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