Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Discussed: alcohol, racism, divorce
Polaroid Rainbow
Move on big rainbow
Go and fly your colours where the rain don’t fall
I see the sunset over the saltpans now.
— Sister Kate, from the album ‘Lasso Country’
Sister Kate’s lyrics hauled me up the deserted track, all the way to the edge of the tropics, a long, long way from home. It was her soulful albums that helped bring me here in the first place, a fact I kept hidden from my family because they already thought me crazy and sad and grasping at anything that’d keep my mind from wandering back…They weren’t wrong.
I turned the volume up, blasting away the thoughts likely to catch in my addled mind. Outside, the shimmering horizon melted into the distant road. A disturbing beep and the icon of a car appeared and disappeared on the Kia’s dashboard as it bumped over the corrugations. I turned Sister Kate up another notch to drown out the sound. It was only another hundred Ks to Muskeet Ridge. I could live with an intermittent beep until then and besides, from what Georgina told me, the silence once you got to Muskeet Ridge was enough to make you wish for any kind of noise: car beeps, traffic, anything at all. Georgina had a convincing way about her.
‘Christy,’ she’d slurred, taking my arm and hanging onto it with both of hers. I wasn’t sure if she were reassuring me, or steadying herself against the Jack & Coke. ‘You’ve gotta do it, mate.’
As Georgina stumbled outside to slam dunk into a seat on the deck by the pool, I rubbed my bruised arm from where she’d gripped me. I followed my friend into the evening and looked down at her with a combination of frustration and tenderness. There were only two years between us but, now I’d tipped 30 and had already been married, and about to be divorced, I felt far older than my university friend who’d not settled to any one thing yet.
‘Sit down.’
Georgina patted the fibrous seat next to hers. I sat with a bump and wriggled to ease the flaps into a comfortable position under my bum. I was thinner than I’d ever been, which was another item on the growing list of ‘Things to worry about when it comes to Christy’ my parents and sister itemised every morning when I came into the kitchen for breakfast.
‘You’re not eating enough.’ Mum passed me another piece of toast.
‘Jeremy has a place to rent in the city.’ Dad shoved his phone in my face.
‘Come to Northbridge with me this weekend. Alison’s bringing her new man and his friend…’ My much younger sister winked at me over sips of her green apple smoothie.
That was it. I had enough. Thoughts of Georgina’s urging as we sat by the pool shivering a little in the cooling air, wafted around my foggy brain like wisps of fine mist while Sister Kate’s melodies echoed out into the dark, stirring an unease deep within me. There had to be something more, or at least an escape.
‘It’s another world.’ Georgina raised her glass to a horizon only she could see. ‘The teaching’s so damn hard, and you won’t know what hit you but you’ll fall in love with the kids and the place,’ Georgina said before she passed out.
I gazed around at the smattering of guests. All of them looked, to my love-worn eyes, like they were paired up as they talked quietly, edging out of frame, with only the single ones left — passed out and snoring like Georgina. It was time for a change.
* * *
Small town world
Digging for pots of gold
Rainbow skies when it’s cold
Hope is a Chance I’m told.
— Sister Kate feat. Lemon & Steel, ‘Hope is a Chance’, from the album ‘My Community’
I turned the volume down as the track made a last bend into Muskeet Ridge. Rows of brick houses lined the road in a grid pattern like a dusty echo of the housing estates that fringed the city back home. But the kids on rusted bikes (no helmets), women walking barefoot in calf-length faded skirts, men and women sitting on the ground playing cards, other kids running up to the car to see who was inside, teenagers dunking basketballs in the shade of a huge steel canopy, were nothing like those manicured estates of the city. Here was dust and scrub and red dirt everywhere. There, the streets were quiet because people lived behind closed doors. Here, life was outside, everything visible.
* * *
It was the warnings that turned my stomach upside down, not the usual, to-be-expected nerves about meeting a class for the first time, but warnings uttered by my soon-to-be colleagues, people who, maybe, should’ve known better.
‘Don’t get too attached.’ Fred told me. He was the one-eyed refugee from the city I met at the BBQ the Principal, Maureen, put on to welcome me to Muskeet Ridge. ‘They’ll bleed you dry.’
‘Who’s ‘they’?’ I wanted to ask but was too new, too alien, too unsure yet to find a voice to articulate the partitioning of a world into ‘us’ and ‘them’.
‘Don’t listen to him.’ Maureen wagged her finger at Fred only to turn a serious eye on me. ‘But don’t give them any money. They’ll try and humbug you, so the best thing to do is say ‘no’ from the outset.’
I nodded, wondering if now was an opportune time to ask what ‘humbug’ meant.
‘I’ll give you six months.’
A man with his hair tied into a long ponytail greying at the fringes, walked up the path to Maureen’s house, easily the biggest home in Muskeet Ridge. He poured himself a cup of Solo and sat down next to Maureen’s husband, Charlie. I was unsure who was a teacher and who wasn’t in this small crowd of half a dozen or so, mainly white, people. I assumed this new arrival was one of the staff, maybe a teacher.
‘That’s a pretty bad impression you must have of me.’
I tried smiling at the man but the corners of my mouth would not turn up. My lack of confidence, and the divorce from Greg, still too raw for me to find any humour in a stranger underestimating me.
The man shrugged. ‘I thought it was a compliment,’ he said. ‘Most new teachers don’t last that long.’
My stomach flipped over again. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and wondered what had happened to these people to make them so cynical. Weren’t they here to help?
‘I hope I last longer than that.’
‘Adam, leave her alone. Christy’s going to wonder what she got herself into.’
Adam, so that was his name. I watched him shrug, but then wince. Perhaps, behind the bravado, he was one of those who cared, maybe too much.
‘How long have you been here?’ I asked him.
My question drew a smile.
‘Too long.’
‘They call us ‘clouds’,’ said Fred, handing me a plate piled with blackened sausages and coleslaw, and a little white bun balanced on the side. ‘We float in and float out again, white people passing through, just like the clouds that bring the rains.’
‘Well maybe you’re the rainbow at end of the cloud, Christy.’
Adam raised his drink, and then took a long sip while watching me from over the rim of his glass. I went to get some food.
Later that night I put on my well-worn Sister Kate Spotify playlist as I danced around the room, twirling my butterfly sarong in time to the soulful country music, and decided I was going to judge for myself what life was like living on a community. After all, Sister Kate had done it, and look how that turned out.
* * *
My heart once ran dry
In the corridors of a long ago city street
Until I found my way to this place
My home, my community.
— Sister Kate, ‘My Community’, title song from the album ‘My Community’
Sister Kate lived most of her working life in a community like Muskeet Ridge even after she became famous with ‘Hope is a Chance’.
‘I might still be a practicing nun,’ she said into her mic during one live concert I was at, held in a Wheatbelt town on the edge of the desert. ‘But I’m a country girl forever! Now, let’s raise the roof so high God Himself will wake up and shine His glorious light down on us.’
None of us there cared about the religion, we just wanted to hear Sister Kate’s deep, throaty voice raise us to our own raptures. We wanted to sing with lyrics that spoke our language, words that uplifted us.
Sister Kate went on to write a zillion songs, nearly all of them about growing up on a station in the Kimberley and living on, and in, remote communities for over half her adult life. When she won Female Artist of the Year at the Golden Guitar Awards, the rest of Australia heard what us West Australians had known for years, here was a woman who bared her soul, and let us into the innermost workings of her feelings. When she talked of living life with hope, I was hooked.
* * *
As I surveyed the class, waiting for them to settle but with a dawning realisation they weren’t going to be quiet, I thought of Sister Kate, and prayed for strength. Then Kirk walked in.
He appeared at the doorway just after the music rang the start of class. A large woman, dressed in a faded paisley skirt and t-shirt that said ‘Land Rights Now’ with a picture of a fist, held him there with her towering presence even though he was almost shoulder height to her. Then, with a silence that caught the room, the woman crossed the space between us in three large strides, dragging Kirk with her. She pointed to a desk by the front. The boy’s eyes darted everywhere at once, taking it all in as he edged into the seat, then he banged his head down into folded arms.
‘It’s normal that he’s nervous.’ I tried to reassure the woman.
‘He is,’ she said. ‘But I told him, it’s alright, his new teacher knows what to do. She has that way about her. Besides, these children, they must learn Bothways knowledge and you can show him that. He needs to understand before it’s too late.’
‘Good luck with that,’ whispered Adam who, it turned out, took the older language group kids for music and sport which meant I’d be working closely with him after all. He nodded in the direction the woman had gone. I watched her through the window talking with Maureen.
‘You’ll see her around,’ he said. ‘Elaine’s one of the teacher aides. She’s also Aunty to most of the kids in here, including your new one.’
I glanced at Kirk and saw, for a moment, his bright eyes on me. Then they flicked down and my heart sank. What Aunty Elaine saw in me, I had no idea, but if she trusted me enough to reassure her boy then the only thing I could do was try to get to know him.
‘I’m going to tell you a story about my family…’ I began, ‘and then I’d love to hear about yours’.
* * *
‘His father’s in prison and his mother’s a drunk, like most of the kids in this community,’ Adam said later when I asked him about Kirk. ‘Don’t hold out much hope for him. These kids, they’ve got no-one to bring them to school because most of the parents are in town buying the liquor they’re not allowed here, and they stay there, drinking their Centrelink money. Most of the kids’ve got no chance, unless they have some Aunty or Grandmother to keep them in line. It’s hopeless.’
‘Don’t say that.’
Adam rose from the couch on the verandah outside my house. As the only two single teachers, we were accommodated in paired rooms sharing a single wall. It was natural we fell to debriefing after work, over dinner, and into the long evenings when the sun made a slow descent over the ridge and turned the earth purple and orange.
‘Look.’ Adam flopped into the seat next to me and handed me a cracker with cheese and a can of Coke. ‘I’m not saying it’s good, none of it’s good. I’m just trying to let you know the reality of what life’s like for these kids.’
Our rooms faced the road. All along the dusty streets kids rode their bikes, waving at us or coming up to us looking for food. We sent them away after Maureen told us not to encourage them or be too friendly – for fear they would never leave us alone. It all felt wrong somehow; this ‘us’ and ‘them’, this cultural divide, the warnings, the separations, but I had to remind myself I was new here, very, very new.
The next day I asked Maureen if I could teach the children some basic photography. My last Principal donated a class set of ten Polaroid cameras for me to bring up North but Maureen was unconvinced.
‘They don’t value things,’ she warned. ‘If you let them have the cameras, they’ll destroy them.’
‘What if I only let them use the cameras in lessons?’
Maureen shrugged, a sure sign of someone who’d seen it all before, including people like me with high hopes.
‘You can give it a try but don’t expect much.’
* * *
Kirk loved the camera. He grabbed it with both hands and snapped half a dozen pictures before I explained how precious the cartridge paper was, and how it was better to take one image a day. It was only later when I was packing up did I notice three missing cameras and two broken ones. I tossed the smashed ones in the bin.
The next day Kirk arrived in class with one of the missing cameras, and a polaroid. He held out the image. It was a picture of a pair of hands.
‘Aunty Elaine’s.’
Another day, another image. Feet.
‘My Uncle’s.’
After the weekend, a wide lagoon seen between a pair of legs.
‘My Country.’
Then later, day after day…
‘Storm.’
‘Goose.’
‘Bush Tomato.’
And one day, ‘Rainbow.’
* * *
‘Little bugger,’ said Adam.
‘He’s got a knack for it though.’
‘He’s only young but yeah, I guess he has.’
* * *
Aunty Elaine came to my class one day a few weeks later when the last of the cameras were lost or broken.
‘Those kids, they like the Polaroid.’
I made us a cup of tea and set one before her, black, sweet and strong.
‘My grandson, he likes you.’ Aunty Elaine held the cup to her lips. Steam fogged the lens of her glasses and I noticed her blinking through the mist.
‘I like him too.’
‘The kids here, they don’t always feel like they’ve got a future.’
I swallowed a gulp of hot tea. The liquid burnt my throat as it went down.
‘I’ve lost two grandchildren in the last year.’
‘Elaine, I’m so sorry.’
‘They give up,’ she said and her quiet voice carried with it the loss and the pain of her family, and her community. I was reminded of Sister Kate’s heartbreak. The community she’d spent most of her life working with had erupted in violence and several people were killed, including a teenage girl Sister Kate cared for, and it was this tragedy which gave Sister Kate the impetus to make her decision. I admired Sister Kate’s announcement but, like most of Australia, was devastated too. News of loss was a recurring theme on community, sadness an underground swell.
Sister Kate gave the news of her decision after she sang a new ballad near the end of her year-long Australian tour. She was in Sydney for the ARIA Awards where she was tipped to win Best Country Album. The organisers asked her to perform during the live cross.
‘Thank you for inviting me here, Sydney.’
Sister Kate leaned into the microphone. She was wearing a knee length dress in navy blue with small silver ankle boots, and a silver cross on a necklace. Her trademark Gibson Hummingbird guitar was strung across her body, the strap decorated in the colours of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags. Her face was creased with a thousand fold lines but her eyes sparkled as she held the mic, plectrum wedged between her thumb and forefinger, her voice quiet and low. The crowd stilled. She reminded me of Aunty Elaine with the power and dignity of her speech, the layering of years of stories and sadness, her voice heavy with sorrow from too much loss and too much pain.
‘I have loved every moment of this tour and being here means the world.’
The crowd cheered but Sister Kate was not smiling.
‘Every day I’m grateful to God for the gift of music and for being able to share it with you.’ The audience grew silent. I think they knew, like those of us watching at home, that Sister Kate was on the verge of announcing something serious. I pressed my eyes shut as Sister Kate strummed a single chord. The sound was plaintive, as if the note were floating by itself, across the crowd, adrift, alone.
‘I gave my heart to a community a long time ago.’
Someone in the audience coughed.
‘I’m so grateful for all I’ve been able to achieve because of you.’
A few people cheered but Sister Kate raised her hand to ask for silence. A hush fell again. I moved closer to the TV screen holding my arms across my chest. I was sure Sister Kate was speaking to me.
‘It struck me anew,’ the nun continued, ‘that God gave me the gift of music but he also gave me a great deal of love for a people I don’t see enough of. So, Australia, tonight I’m saying ‘Goodbye’ and ‘Thank you!’ But I also want to leave you with a message. I want you to know that even if you only have a sliver of hope, throw everything at it. God bless you all!’
Then she sang her most famous song, and the audience wept for the joy and the love and the hope she gave us, time and again. Maybe we also wept for the loss too.
I left my hope at your front door
And told you I’d be back
The only hope we have today
Is all that’s left undone.
— Sister Kate, feat. Lemon & Steel, ‘Hope is a Chance’ from the Album ‘My Community’.
* * *
Aunty Elaine held out her mug for more tea. I poured hot water over a fresh bag.
‘You got Nice biscuits?’ she said.
I pulled out a packet, my last. The staff ate most of the rest in the first week I was here. I’d been eager to make friends and so I splurged my limited supply of biscuits by pulling out a new packet every morning at smoko. Most of the treats I brought from Perth were gone within the week.
We sat in silence while the distant shriek of kids, and the crunch of biscuits and slurp of liquid filled the room.
‘How’s that young fella doing?’ I asked finally.
Aunty Elaine put down her tea. I didn’t have to say who I was talking about. She knew.
‘He’s better now he’s spent some time on Country.’
She meant the homeland where his family’s traditional lands were. They were a few hours’ drive west, at the base of a long low ridge of purple mountains shaped like caterpillars. Aunty Elaine drew me a snaking diagram in the dust one day to show me the lay of her land.
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
Even to my ears the words sounded hollow but I had no others to share that would ease the pain.
‘The children cause trouble,’ she said, ‘because they’re angry and there’s no one to help them. They see no future. They think, ‘what’s the point of learning if there’s no jobs here?’ And then I have to tell them, you’re the hope. You get that qualification and come back here and make your community stronger. They don’t believe me though.’
‘What can I do, Elaine?’
Aunty Elaine eyed me with a slow look. There was another long silence and I could not stop shuffling in my seat. I knew listening and waiting were important if I wanted to find a way to understand the people in Muskeet Ridge, but I still struggled with not offering solutions and just being present.
‘Kids like Kirk need a rainbow. Kirk’s rainbow is that Polaroid. It makes him feel good. When he feels good, he’s strong. He needs to be strong because his community needs him and if he can keep out of trouble then he’s got a chance.’
I listened to the distant ruckus from the kids playing basketball under the shed and footy on the oval and tried to swallow the hard rock of desolation I felt deep down. Was there hope, for these kids, for these people? Wasn’t that why I was a teacher in the first place though, to help? To try and give my students a purpose through what I could teach them? But even my short time in this community had taught me not to play the saviour role. Many had come before and many would again. It was easy for me to say ‘do this, do that’ but it was not my place and how well did I truly know the culture, the people, the life? I had to remember I was a ‘cloud’. I would float in for a while and then disappear again while the community continued, finding a way, making a world. It was their Country after all; I was merely passing through. I might want things to be different but, in the end, the bit I was responsible for was the teaching, the ‘Whiteways’ teaching, and if that was all I did, then that was OK as long as I did it as well as I could.
Aunty Elaine borrowed $50 bucks from me and then went to find Kirk. She told him I needed help cutting up the mangoes. He ate more than he cut.
* * *
At the end of that year in the community, I drove the Kia southwards, away from Muskeet Ridge. Adam rode in the seat beside me.
‘What’re you grinning at?’ he asked.
I glanced at the empty box Adam held on his lap before answering. It was the box I used to bring the Polaroids up to Muskeet Ridge.
‘You said I’d only last six months.’
Adam chuckled. ‘So I did.’
We drove for a few more kilometres while the dirt kicked up large swirls behind the Kia. Sister Kate’s voice wafted through the speakers, her voice was strong even with the volume turned down.
‘He’ll be OK?’ I asked, apprehensive but desperate to hear the answer.
Adam said nothing for a moment, his fingers beating a drum on the arm rest. We hadn’t been together long enough for me to tell him the sound annoyed me.
‘You know what I think, Christy.’
There was a stillness between us. It was unfair of me to ask the question but I needed the reassurance. Adam leaned his elbow on the window frame as he gazed out at the unfurling brown-ness.
‘It struck me,’ I said a few moments later, ‘a Polaroid’s as ephemeral as a cloud or a rainbow. Didn’t Fred say we were like clouds and that’s how the community thinks of us?’
‘So?’ Adam yawned, not one for philosophising I was learning.
‘I guess – ‘ I began.
‘They got under your skin, didn’t they?’
I gulped, remembering the first night at the BBQ, all the warnings, but it was true, the kids, the community, they meant something to me, something more than I cared to admit.
‘It’s just, I don’t want them to feel like there’s nothing for them, you know? A polaroid doesn’t last, a rainbow disappears, clouds fade away.’
‘You can’t solve all their problems.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, closing my mouth tight and gripping the wheel with both hands as the car dove in and out of fresh monsoonal potholes.
Adam sat up straight. I felt the tension between us, even with Sister Kate’s soothing melodies, but then he laughed.
‘I know where you’re going with this.’
‘What?’
‘I know what you’re going to say. You want to come back, don’t you?’
‘Maybe.’ I joined in the laughter. ‘Yes.’
I felt a peace inside which I’d not experienced before.
‘Yep,’ I said, turning up the volume. I was tempted to sing but instead, I let Sister Kate intone the feelings I wanted to share:
I don’t know when I first heard the word
That Life is made of subtle truths
The Rainbow offers solace from the storm
But a friend can turn the tide around.
—Sister Kate, ‘Future Feelings’, from the album ‘Faith’
Jacqueline Hodder is a writer and teacher living in Naarm, Melbourne. Her stories have featured in local and National competitions including the Nimibiluk and Odyssey House Short Story Awards and she has published works including two historical fiction novels ‘The Sentinel’ and ‘Daughters of Lace’. Most recently Jacqueline has published a travel memoir of her sea turtle volunteering experience in Costa Rica which was featured on the ‘Life’s Booming’ podcast with the ABC’s James Valentine and in the associated publication, ‘Dare’. Jacqueline writes regularly on Substack and can be found at www.jacquelinehodder.com or on Facebook @beyond_by_jacqui
Locative Magazine 