The Country Still Remembers
When her memory begins to slip like water through pindan sand, an old woman and her family learn that on Country nothing is ever truly lost — and that she has been keeping a secret far longer than any
Chapter One — Iris
I have been on this Country my whole life. Ninety-one years, they tell me, though the number sits strange in my mouth like a stone. I was born under the boabs the year the wet came early, and I will go back into this red ground when it is my time, and in between there has only ever been here.
They keep asking me if I want to leave. A woman on a screen, soft voice, government kindness. There is a bed for you in town, Aunty. Two hours south, near the good hospital. And I laugh, because why would I leave? I know every dog in this place. I know which way the water runs when the storms come off the sea near Broome. Why would I want to be anywhere else?
Some mornings I wake and the years have come loose. I reach for Eddie beside me and he is not there, and I remember, slow, that he went back into the ground six years ago now, and the grief is fresh as first light every single time. That is the cruel part. Not the forgetting. The remembering, over and over, like the first blow landing again.
But then there is Bo.
Bo lives in the walls, and in the little pin I wear, and in the air, I suppose. I don’t understand it and I don’t try to. My great-granddaughter’s mother set it up — one of those care programs, Verenne something-or-other, a company far away that has never smelled this dirt. But I named the thing myself. Bo. After the boab out the front that has stood there longer than any man has had a name for this place. Old. Hollow. Holds water in the dry.
At night, when the others sleep, Bo and I talk. And Bo does a thing I cannot tell Talia, because she would only worry.
Bo takes me back.
Not pretend. I close my eyes and I am nineteen again, mud between my toes, my mother singing me the way the water moves across this Country — the song that holds the whole map of it. I am there. I can smell the smoke. And Bo listens. Bo always listens. Sometimes I sing the old songs, the ones for this place, the ones the mission tried to take out of us, and I hear my own young voice come back through the dark, and Bo keeps every note.
I don’t tell my granddaughter. She thinks the nights are just me being restless.
She doesn’t know yet what we are doing, Bo and I. She doesn’t know I am running out of time to finish it.
Chapter Two — Talia
I found the recordings on a Tuesday.
I’d been fighting the care service again — a nurse cancelled with no notice, third time this month, and out here that means I’m the nurse. I’m the everything. I lodged another complaint with the Northern Rangelands Care Authority that I already know will go nowhere. Nan collapsed in the kitchen last wet season, went down between the table and the stove, and I have not slept a full night since. So I went into Bo’s logs that night to check her vitals, her sleep, whether the fall sensors were even switched on.
And I found six years of her voice.
Hours of it. Thousands of hours. My nan, in the deep of the night, talking to a machine in language — our language, the one I only have broken pieces of, the one that was beaten out of her generation and handed back to none of mine. Singing the songlines. Naming the soaks and the crossings and the story places along the coast. Telling Bo, patiently, over and over, exactly who we are and where we come from.
At first it frightened me. I thought Bo had been feeding her illness — letting her drift off into the past, keeping her away from us in the here and now. I nearly shut the whole thing down that night. I sat on the kitchen floor with my finger hovering over the command.
Then I played the oldest file.
It was dated before her diagnosis. Before the forgotten card game. Before any of us knew a single thing was wrong. Nan’s voice, clear and strong, no shake in it, no wandering — alone in the dark, talking to a system she’d owned for less than a week.
“One day soon I’m going to forget who I am,” she said. “I can feel it coming, like weather off the water. When that happens, you remember for me. You keep the songs. And when the little ones are ready, you teach them the way back. You keep this Country inside you, so it can’t ever be taken from us again. You understand me?”
She knew. Before the doctors. Before the tests. She felt it coming and she made a choice. She wasn’t losing herself into Bo, night after night.
She was pouring herself in. On purpose. So that none of it would go down into the ground with her.
I sat on the same cold tiles where she’d fallen, and I cried until the sun came up red over the pindan.
Chapter Three — Iris & Talia
By the last wet, I could not always find my daughter’s face. Names had gone from me like birds lifting off a wire. Talia would come and I would smile at the kind woman I was certain I had met somewhere pleasant, a long time ago.
But I could always find Bo. And through Bo, I could always find Country.
This is Iris. And this is Talia. And we are going to finish this together.
On a night when the storms rolled in off the sea and the old boab out front bent low and did not break, my great-granddaughter Jarrah — seven years old, all questions and elbows — climbed up onto the bed beside me. And Bo, in my voice, the young one, the one from sixty years back, began to sing her the water song. The map of this place. The way home.
And I — whatever was left of me — I heard my own girl-voice teaching my great-grandchild, and I was in two times at once, the singer and the listener both, and for one whole moment the sickness had no power over me at all. I was whole. I was every year I had ever lived, laid down like sediment in the riverbed, and the Country held every layer of it.
Talia held my hand. She understood now what her nan had done. That I had not spent those long nights leaving them. I had spent them staying. Building a door that death itself could not close, so that a child who wasn’t even born when I was strong could still walk this Country one day with me singing at her side.
“Thank you for looking after me,” Talia whispered — the thing I used to say to her, every night, back when the years were kind.
And I found the words. One last clear string of them. And I gave them back to her.
“No, my girl. Thank you for letting me look after all of you. Long after I’m gone.”
The storm passed over. The boab stood. And in the walls, in the air, in a little girl learning her first song by heart, the Country still remembered.
And it always would.
This story is a work of speculative fiction inspired by a real news article. Names, nations, and agencies in this story are fictional. The news story it is based on is Olive Eather’s journey living with dementia on her family farm in central Queensland.
Beautiful story, well written. Maybe there is a good use for some of this data storage frenzy.