The Great Heat

Aunty Gladys, you are one of the few remaining elders who experienced the Great Heat and I would like to get your impressions of this for the record. Can you tell me about life before the Great Heat?

Life was bad before the Great Heat. There were a lot of problems. A lot of people were depressed, this means overcome with sadness. A lot of our Nyungar mob were in trouble with drugs and alcohol, just to ease the pain of what the wadjilla, I mean white man, did and kept on doing to us…Oh, sorry son, you know you’re one of us now, right?

Yes Aunty, of course.

A long time ago wadjilla killed us when they came to this land, they took our kids away and forced us to live a long way away from our home, our country. Then when I was young, in the 21st Century, they pretended to be our friends, they’d parade us around at their festivals and meetings. They’d do welcome to country and brag about multicultural Australia. But the systems they imposed on us showed us that they spoke false. They still didn't care about us.

What do you mean Aunty?

They destroyed our sacred sites. The monarch – the police, that kept law and order, when they killed us, which was often, they never got any payback, some got promotions, which showed us they still didn’t value our lives like they did the lives of white people. They locked us up in prisons and continued to take our kids away. It made our people angry and sad, so much that many of us turned against each other. Some of us tried to fit into the white culture but for many it was very difficult. Lots of us lost our culture and without that, we had nothing. It got so bad that our young people, even as young as your babies, started to take their own lives.

Tell me about the Great Heat.

Well by the time I was born, it was already really hot. Too hot to live on this land. But the white man just kept ignoring all the signs that the earth was slowly drying into a pile of dust. They locked themselves up in their fancy houses with high powered air conditioners that made the air cool and dug their heads in the burning sand. But the more they did this, the worse it got. There started to be less and less fresh food as it was too hot to grow anything. Animals that were bred to be eaten slowly died while farmers scrambled to find ways to keep them cool and alive. But it was a lost cause, at this point nothing could save them. The electricity that they needed to keep everything cool was just making the heat worse and worse. But like some of our people were addicted to gunja and other drugs, these wadjilas were addicted to their money and their comfort. And they kept on going, burning the boodja, decimating the earth. Right up until the end of last century they were still driving their polluting cars – they were still flying around in aeroplanes! They were still doing this, even as the world was turning into one giant oven.

Were there fires?

Yes, there were fires that killed many. But because the fires were in the bush and the people who made decisions were in the city, nobody seemed to care until there was a big fire in the city. Then people started speaking out. Your mum became a warrior. She’d always fought with us but now she was pregnant with you and so worried about what would happen. She was like my big sister. But people didn’t listen. Some people did but the people with the power didn’t. We were stuck in a world run by the people least suited to lead.

Did they ever listen?

In around the year 3000 a person deemed important by the wadjilas, a politician, died from the heat. Essentially he was cooked alive. People had been dying from heat exhaustion and other things but by around 3000 it had become so hot that if you were outside or even inside in an uninsulated house your organs would be cooked. This started to happen with alarming regularity. As the electricity grid started failing due to the heat, people started to die in their own homes. It was a painful, horrific way to die but by this time there was nothing anyone could do.

When did we come here?

We started to come here way back when I first met your mum. In fact, our elders started stocking the caves with provisions for us even before I was born. They remembered how to do this, from ration times. You see we knew, or at least our old people had told us, that the Great Heat would come but that we would be okay because of our skin, our connection to culture and our knowledge of the land and sacred sites. These caves were one of our most sacred sites and we knew that we may need to come here one day to survive. These caves, that reach deep into the earth, right down to the waakal, were the only places habitable during the Great Heat and those of us with cultural knowledge passed down from our elders, were the only people who knew about them.

Aunty, why did you bring me here?

Your mum was loved by many of our people. You were just a little baby, and she couldn’t care for you in that heat. We wanted her to come but it was too hot to travel at that point – easier to keep a little baby cool than a big white lady. We could still live in the heat long after the white people as we had evolved to cope with the elements. So, it was sad to say goodbye to your mum, but I knew by taking you I was doing what she wanted most, ensuring your safety. And look what a wonderful young man you’ve become. Marrying our girl Alinta, going through the Lore and now you are helping to tell our story. To make sure our history is written – this was a big problem for us after colonisation, before the heat, the white men had so many written stories, we only had stories spoken down from our elders that we held in our hearts and minds. So the white people disregarded our stories and made up a history for this country and for us which removed the facts that were most important to our lives.

Is that why you brought me Aunty? To write the stories?

No son, we brought you because of love. But when you act out of love, you always make the right decisions, whether you realise it or not. You see you were perfect to come with us because all those years when you were little, you were happy to sit in here and read and write. Just like your mum. It was still too hot outside for you back then. Now that things are getting cooler it’s safe outside for a white person but for a long time it was not.

Are there other survivors?

We have heard of some. There is even a rumour of a white community that found a cave down south. I’m not sure if that’s true as I can’t imagine how they’d be surviving now. But you never know. And you know if we could have brought the whole mob of them here, we would have but there wasn’t room.

After all the things the white people did to you, you would have brought them here and saved them?

Yes son, I’m not one for holding grudges. But even some of our mob sadly perished. And some came and didn’t want to live the cultural life. We couldn’t have people here who caused trouble. You know how cramped it was when we were all deep in the cave. We had to look after our people first, and we knew that people who had culture would be the right people. Those are the people who understand that we don’t own the earth and all it has to offer, rather the earth owns us. As such we must look after it. We only take what we need, never more. We share whatever we have. These concepts, so central to our mob, were so at odds with the white fella ways. And it wasn’t just the wadjilas, it was also some of our mob, as we followed their lead, we only cared about money, about gold and riches and too bad about our mother earth and too bad about our fellow man!

I think I understand now.

What son?

The locket. Remember mum’s gold locket that I gave Alinta when we made our commitment? I couldn’t understand why you took that off us and buried it. I thought because it was a heart, a symbol of love, which drives everything you do, I thought you would love it.

Oh son, I’m sorry about that, perhaps I acted rashly. But we don’t want the Wadjela ways to creep in here. I saw Alinta’s eyes light up. I saw her cousins looking jealous. I couldn’t have that my boy. I know you didn’t mean anything by it. One day when I know we are safe, when I know that our culture is truly protected and prevailing, I will give it back, I promise. I know where it is.

Thanks Aunty. That’s probably enough for now. But there’s just one question I have. I know that you and lots of our mob here lived in the city before the heat. I’ve been reading lots of papers that say that the Aboriginal people who lived in the cities had lost their culture.

That was what white people wanted to believe but we never lost it – some of us did of course – but most of us didn’t. The white people who were interested in finding out, like your mum, knew about our culture. The rest, well, they always underestimated us. Think of this, we had looked after this country, this land, some say for 70,000 years, we say, since the beginning. And within a few thousand years the white man had damaged the earth to annihilation. At any point, did they ask us? Did they listen to us? Did they say to us, ‘What should we do to save this precious land?’ No, they did not. I just keep thinking that if they had, we wouldn’t be here now. And I feel sadness for them as my joy increases. I watch Uncle Donald tending to the new Lilly Pilly shoots that he’s so proud of and I see baby Albert hand feeding the orphan joeys. I feel such happiness as I watch the earth, this great majestic mother of ours, slowly heal and renew herself after of all those years of damage and blistering heat. They could have rejoiced with us over this and all the simple things, a waterhole with a slightly shiny surface, a wisp of cool air on the face, sleeping with our arms cradling little ones under the stars.

But rather they disappeared. For all white man's delusion of domination and immortality, his false Gods and cenotaphs, his final epitaph, not so mighty: "Engulfed in the desert's parched silence, I was nothing but another grain of sand in the wind."