alinta

The Tall man from the large white building told them once, that shooting stars were not actually stars at all. He said they were just bits of rock on fire that lived briefly in the night sky. Sometimes, if the sessions went a little longer, he took them out to the tiny patch of grass, growing bravely behind the large white building, and they lay there looking up at the desert sky. You could see shooting stars all the time out here, away from the cities with all the noise and smoke. She asked the Tall man if they were the same as the Other Lights (the ones they saw in the sky from the south). He said ‘No – those lights are different. Those lights are why we have you children here.’

The large white building was on the outskirts of the small town that existed near their protected desert community. There was a Ground Office in the small town there that still sold Coca Cola – 5 years since everything that happened. It was flat, but sweet.

Theirs was one of the larger Indigenous communities of The People, and one of the first that was established after The Return. It held all of her family members. Every week, she and 10 other children from her people, had to leave the community and travel to the large white building and tell the Tall man about their dreams and he would take lots of notes. They were the only children from the community that got the dreams, and she always wondered if other children from other communities got them too. They had to draw every single dream they had in the little black note book that the Tall man had given them and then tell him about the drawings.

Alinta always dreamed about the same thing – her older brother Jiemba.

She asked the elders about the shooting stars. They said they were the eyes of an evil spirit and the flames were the spirit’s claws that it used to grab the souls of the sick and dying. When she asked the elders about the Other Lights in the sky to the south, they didn’t want to talk about them anymore and went quiet. And they didn’t want to talk any more about the strange ships that had suddenly appeared there half year ago. They just said that they had something to do with her dreams. ‘And the government people know this – that’s why they’re scared and they are being so nice to us – because they can’t make us tell them… not since The Return.’

Jiemba had started everything. Her older brother was always wondering off and going walk about, and he would always return with something strange from the desert. He would leave for weeks at a time on his own, without any food or water, even though he was only 13. He would always come back covered in dust and sticks and sometimes with the paint markings of their people starting to fade across his body. She pictured him out there – under a bark tree, mixing the clay and the water and singing as he always did. Her family had stopped asking him where he went because he never told anybody anything. Except for the day he came back with the money. They asked him lots of questions then.

She remembered her parents had been so angry. ‘Where did you go Jiemba – TELL ME!? And tell me where does a 12 year old Aboriginal boy get all this money? WHAT DID YOU DO JIEMBA?!’ They had counted the money then – it was $20,000.00. They took it straight to the elders. Waru, the oldest and the scariest elder, sat Jiemba down. He didn’t even say anything, he just looked Jiemba in the eyes and waited… eventually the quiet boy talked.

Jiemba told them he had discovered a hidden cave, deep in the desert. It sat behind the tumbled down remains of an old Yellow Box tree – what her people called a ‘Directions Tree’. Toward the back of the cave, he found a large stone that was floating there in mid-air. It was an oval shape, Jiemba said. ‘And it glowed red like the Flower of Blood.’ (This is the flower the people in the city called the Desert Pea.) He said it spoke to him, so he had grabbed it and took it with him. When he got to another town, he took it to a Ground Office and showed the people there. One of the men had pulled him aside and told Jiemba that he would give him a lot of money for it. Jiemba was hoping it would be enough money to go on one of the ships that went to the moon. The elders made him draw what the stone looked like.

That was the first night that Alinta and 10 other children of her community started having the dreams. Two months later, three strange ships appeared in the south off the coast, and now the entire world was watching them.

When the news reached their inland community, Alinta could tell the elders were very worried and she knew why. When they looked at the flashing images on the government screens it was clear: the strange ships looked like large stones… and they were a deep red – like blood. Like Jiemba’s stone.

‘They are from the dreaming.’ Waru said. He called the government and told them about the children’s dreams.