Ode to Sovereignty Day....

I got to the ripe old age of 27 without hardly ever seeing a black fella. Or woman for that matter. I remember the first time I saw a black African, whose skin was shining blue black, and I couldn’t help but stare, as I’d never seen anyone like him. I grew up around the Blue Mountains, spent lots of time in Sydney, travelled up the east coast, moved to South Australia and lived in the hills……and barely a black fella was seen. I didn’t even know that this country had been populated by indigenous people until year 5 at school, when we had a relief teacher who read us a story about Pemulwuy. It came as a bit of a shock. And not long after I was watching telly with my stepfather, and saw on the news the Tent Embassy in Canberra, with some fascinating looking coloured people, and when my stepfather explained they were asking for land rights and they were the traditional owners, it made complete and instant sense to me that if the land had been theirs, we should just give it back!! He didn’t quite agree. I heard vague stories about how they got all sorts of special attention, and got more money from the D.S.S. than anyone else, and had special services at schools and universities, and got free land and houses and all sorts of myths that typically abound about people that are ‘different’ (like refugees). I also got warned about Redfern in my forays to Sydney, and told that I’d be in danger if I went there. I had a friend years later who went to university and stayed with a white woman in Redfern, and I went to visit her quite regularly, but even then, the indigenous folk were kind of shadowy background figures that didn’t really impact on me, except for my fascination when I saw them. I was also brought up a Mormon, with it’s inbuilt racism, and taught from day dot that black people were somehow inferior – Cain’s punishment had been to be turned into a black man, and the creation myth of my religion stated that all black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and folk other than white fella’s, were getting punished for being fence sitters in heaven, by being sent to earth as a colour other than white. So when I did see an indigenous person, I found it hard to not leave with a slight distaste in my mouth…they were somehow more uncouth, animal like, dirtier and unknown in a potentially scary way.

I left my childhood religion and realized my taught racism (sexism, homophobia, etc), and did my best to transcend it. After leaving home I spent some time in the area around Bathurst, where there was still the odd Aboriginal. I hung out with an indigenous girl at school for a while, and was surprised that there was not much difference, and she didn’t really want to talk about it much. As I got older I hung out with dykes and witches and goddess worshippers and started hearing better things about the indigenous folk of this land, but not as much as I did about Native Americans and Eastern mystics and Voodoo religions. Then nearing the age of 28, and Saturn Return, I decided it was time to check out the desert. It was time to take an initiatory trip through the middle of the country in the middle of summer and really learn about the country I lived in, as well as facing my fears and setting myself a challenge. To tell the truth, I didn’t really think much about the indigenous folk I might meet, or even realize that I was about to enter the main country that had been left to them to inhabit, after the white folk had divided and conquered the more alluring coastal and farming areas.

So off I set, car serviced, spares onboard, lots of water stored, and all my hippy and witchy artifacts along for the ride. The first place I stopped after Adelaide was Port Augusta, where there were more black fella’s around than I’d ever seen in my life. I had no idea what to do so I just smiled, and got lots of smiles back. They were in fact the only people who did smile at me, and made happy comments as I passed them. I was staying at a youth hostel, when I started getting the warnings that I became used to as my journey unfolded. I was told to stay away from a certain pub in town cause it was a black pub, and they’d probably either harass me, steal my money, or try to rape me. And also to stay away from a bridge on the other side of town cause that’s where the indigenous kids hung out and jumped off to swim in the surrounding waters, and that was also a dangerous area. Port Augusta was also the first place I came across where valuable assets – like the drive through bottle shop, and a very luxurious caravan park which I camped at for a while – were surrounded by high razor wire….suggesting that violence occurred that the white fellas needed protecting from. So I kept smiling at the black fella’s, and went and parked my car surreptitiously near the bridge and watched all the kids jumping off the bridge and having a ball. There was a certain un-domesticatedness about them that I found really attractive, but I was still very new to the whole situation and unsure about everything.

I guess it was around this time that I realized there was a whole other part to my journey that I hadn’t suspected before. I’d never really had firsthand experience of Aboriginals, and had heard a lot of guff, which I knew from life experience was most likely exaggerated or just untrue, and also realized that I knew nothing, and that any preconceptions I had would most likely be far from the mark. So I decided it was time to learn about this amazing land I was entering, and it’s traditional care takers, without making any judgements at all until I felt like I’d learnt from my own experiences.

After a few days I got ready to head into the desert….in my 84 Gemini that was tending to overheat, afraid of the heat, afraid of the unknown, afraid of being on my own, afraid of all sorts of things. For about the first hour driving out of Port Augusta towards Coober Pedy, I was shaking….legs barely managing to stay on the pedals…totally terrified of my big adventure into the great unknown.

Every petrol station I stopped at on the way up, when the attendant saw I was a white woman travelling on my own, took it on himself or herself to warn me that I was entering dangerous territory, and I got told over and over again that if I saw any black fella’s on the road, even if it looked like I hit them, to just keep going and not stop, cause they’d steal, rape then murder me as soon as I did. I was quite bewildered by this, and realizing I still knew nothing, just decided to keep observing and see what panned out.

In Coober Pedy there was a lot more unhappy, obviously drunk and scarred indigenous folk on the streets. I watched the locals treat them like scum and animals, and the tourists try to deal with them and have an ‘authentic’ outback experience. A lot of Aboriginals were asking for money, and a lot of locals were disparagingly telling them to fuck off and get drunk somewhere else. I was still paying attention, but also a bit distracted by the international tourists that I was bumping into and my own trip of self realization and fear facing. From Coober Pedy I went out to Uluru. It was suprising how few black fella’s were actually at or around the luxury resort of Yulara, and how easy it was to have a totally white experience of the heart of the country without an indigenous person in sight. The guides were white, the hoteliers were white, even the shit kickers were white – though they were all very happy to be selling Aboriginal paintings and boomerangs and all the other tourist clap trap that suggested we were an integrated country that honoured it’s original inhabitants………

Anyway, if I were to tell you every story that happened for me to form a conclusion about the indigenous inhabitants of this land, it would end up being a very very long story, and I really want to just tell a simple story for this day in our country – Invasion or Survival or Sovereignty Day – otherwise known to rather heartless folk who don’t mind celebrating genocide, as Australia Day. 

In Alice Springs I learnt a lot. I met a lot of racist white folk and a few beautifully behaved white folk. And I met lots of chocolate brown folk in varying states of sobriety, and totally understood the desire to be out of it, in the face of so many inequalities and downright disgusting behaviors of many of the white residents in town. I heard stories from all sides of the fence and understood them. I noticed the fact that the town existed in unofficial apartheid. There were black taxi’s and white taxi’s, black toilets and white toilets, black pubs and white pubs, and a whole heap of extra special rules that were designed to keep indigenous folk out of shops. And on my way out to work at a station as a Jilleroo, my car broke down and about 4 white folk, and 1 very nervous indigenous man, stopped to ask me if I wanted help. I asked them all to ring the station I was on my way to, and get them to come help me, and out of all those people, it was only the indigenous man who actually rang. 

SNAPSHOT......... I’m standing at a big row of phones in Alice Springs about to make a phone call, when a black man walked up to me not speaking much English. But his name was Leonard Possum, and he wanted me to help him use the phone so he could ring his woman, and he didn’t know how a phone worked. I was delighted to help, and he gave me the number on some paper and the coins for the phone, and we walked two phones down to where he wanted to ring. In the space of that time, two very white men obviously leant out from their phones to glare at him and watch his every step. The harsh woman who I was working for stomped up to us while I was dialing, and started speaking to him like he was a recalcitrant, deaf and dumb child…. “Where are you from?! Where’s your community?! You go ring them and get them to help you?! Leave her alone?!” To which I of course replied, “I’m doing this gentleman a favour, which I’m happy to do, and you can bloody well leave him alone!” Leonard was kind of cringing the whole time we stood there, and we were watched by about another 4 white men the whole time I was helping him. I felt ashamed.

Overall, I saw the white folk using a few black fella’s getting drunk and showing some undomesticated behaviours, as an excuse to act very very badly……. Bone jarringly badly. As if they weren’t even human.

SNAPSHOT......... The same harsh woman I worked for who had me busy in my Jillerooing duties of cleaning her house, decided to take me to her daughter’s, so I could clean her house too. On the way there she threw a beer bottle out the window, saying “We can blame the boongs for that one!!”, with a jackal like leer on her face. At her daughters house, after a day of cleaning in 50 degree heat, we barbecued by a waterhole. They told me with glee it was a sacred men’s site, as they threw more bottles in the water. The sweet faced young white couple were talking about how good it was that the canoe tree in Goolwa had been ringbarked. “It’s about time someone got the black bastards back!!” They said. Got them back for what? For being victims of genocide?? For walking nervous and shaky through the streets, unwilling to look at anyone?? On the way home, the woman I was working for saw a flock of galah’s, and sped up to try and hit one, managing to kill one on the bullbar, where it got stuck, head lolling and feathers flying, right in front of my window. I felt sick and ashamed. 

So many other things happened. I met an indigenous man called Billy White, who wore a white cowboy hat and white clothes and lived on White Street. He was the most gentle, philosophical, thoughtful and compassionate man I met in Alice Springs. In lots of places actually. And a sweet white hippy woman who treated the black fella’s like absolute gold, and gave me a beautiful example of how best to treat the native owners of the land.

And then I’d had my fill, had been around town for over a month, and decided it was time to head up through the middle and then strike for the east coast. On my way out of town, about 11 o’clock at night, I got overtaken by a low slung holden, spewing smoke from it’s exhaust, packed tight with huge hulking people. Not far down the road I wasn’t surprised to see them pulled over by the side of the road, and would you believe it, but all the warnings flooded my head and I went to keep driving. Till I came to, remembered all the things I saw and people I’d met and stories I’d collected, and I pulled over to the side of the road, did a u turn, and headed back. Where I met 5 huge indigenous men, who asked me if I could give them a lift to their community so they could get help to come back and tow the car. I told them I only had room for one passenger, (hippy artifacts take up a lot of room you know!) and they nudged forward an old fella who got in the front passenger seat. Before we drove off, we introduced ourselves, (he didn’t speak much English) and I said to him, “You’re welcome in my car. There’s my cigarettes, and there’s my water, and there’s the music if you want to listen to it, just make yourself at home." Nearly the whole way to his community, about 100kms or so, he kept telling me in every way he could think of, how alike we were. He was grabbing my arm and saying “You’re white”, and then grabbing his own arm and saying “I’m black”, and then waving his fingers between us saying “We’re the same…..we’re the same”. I grinned. And I laughed. And I felt such overwhelming gratitude that this heartfelt man wanted me so much to know how similar we were. We got to his community and before he got out of the car, he grabbed my hand and kissed it. I instantly kissed his hand back, and we both parted richer and warmer and happier from the whole experience.

And I’d like to leave my tale on that note. A perfect metaphor for the whole trip, and what I learnt from it. My family and I have gone on to travel to a lot more places and have had a lot more experiences, and every single one of them has been respectful, connected, and significant. The native caretakers of this land are some of the most beautiful, deep, and spiritual people I’ve ever had the privilege to meet. And I’m real glad that my skin colour doesn’t prejudice black fella's as much as a lot of white fella’s let skin colour prejudice them, to connect, and share, and increase understanding and awareness.

Home

My dream for the world is simple. Along with the right to clean water, clean food, and a purposeful occupation that inspires a person to follow their destiny, I believe it should be a human right to have a home.  

A home, a sanctuary, a private place where we can choose who enters the sanctum, where we can let down our guard, and just be.

A home where we belong to the land more than the land belongs to us.  Where our attraction to it is more important than pieces of paper.

A home where our choices and lifestyle are respected.  Where we feel sovereign and autonomous and free. 

  

A home, where children are free to roam safely, exploring their surroundings and developing their unique relationship with the land and it's inhabitants.

A home where we don’t have to mortgage our souls and our lives, and compromise our existence to be. 

A home that reflects the individuality and character of the home dweller.  With objects of inspiration and beauty all around.

A home in co-existence with the animals and plants that surround it. 

A home that we never have to leave unless we want to. 

A home where both parents or any combination of care givers can choose to stay at home to bring up their children, without having to sacrifice one of them to the bondage of banks.  

Join with me if you feel so inclined

to wish a home like this 

for us all

...... 

The story continues…..

So. A brief recap. We’d all got a bit stressed about the lateness of the second twin, then decided to sleep on it for a bit. I couldn’t sleep, and lay in bed listening to the sounds of Currawong clearing out the birthing pool, clearing the energy of the first birth, and making way for the second….

By the time I realized that no sleep was going to happen, I came out to a cleared and cleaned space, and a Currawong with a mission. He set about making food and starting to deal with the kids that were waking up. “Is there another baby yet?”…..”No, not yet”. Everyone slowly woke and we all hung out on the lounges chatting about what to do now. It’s amazing how a little bit of sleep can turn a desperate situation into one more manageable. Lisa decided to go off and do a bit of research on twin births and ring some old and trusted midwife friends, and we decided to give Russell Smith the Ayurvedic masseur a ring and see if he could help.

I consider myself extremely honoured to call Russell and Alison friends, he drums with Currawong and they inspire the hell out of each other, and is what I call a real healer. He swears, doesn’t read, smokes cigarettes, and doesn’t pull any of the ‘my shit don’t stink’ crap that so many ‘healers’ and ‘gurus’ I’ve known in my past push. He’s real, and honest, and calls a spade a spade, and has people come to him from all over the world, cause what he does really works. Alison is one of those women who makes you just wanna crawl into her lap and get lashings of mother love. She creates beautiful spaces and foods and moods, and giggles and laughs all the while. A more generous couple are hard to find. And bless their hearts, and may love and beauty rain on their heads forever more, within half an hour they were here. They just came. Russell straight away got to work on me, and Alison lay next to me chatting, spreading ease of mind like a balm. Russell started reading my body and telling me what was going on. It turns out my body had decided that it’s job was done! That was birth wasn’t it? Push one baby out and it’s over! My womb had blockages, and my uterus hadn’t contracted down, so even though baby number 2 was head down and ready to go, there was no punch from my uterus to help him out. A whole stack of fear had also locked itself in with the blocked womb, and it was all just stuck. He was massaging my feet and it HURT! And then he did all sorts of other work on my legs and by the time he got back to the bit that had hurt, it didn’t hurt anymore.

Meanwhile Lisa had come back from her research trip, Alison was pottering around cleaning the house, doing dishes and the like, and Russell got Currawong down to give him a work over too. We were all gobsmacked when Lisa reported that she’d found a statistic about the average amount of days between twins being born as 47 days….. It seems that many twins are born prematurely, and when one comes out early, they do their best to keep the second one in for as long as possible. She’d also bounced what was happening off some trusted advisors, and they all agreed that while I was healthy, and the baby  inside was healthy, there was no ‘normal’ time for twins to be born. In fact, in the days before hospital births became the norm, it was not uncommon at all for twins to be born days or even weeks apart. It’s only since birth has entered the treadmill of a hospital schedule that the second twin has only been allowed half an hour to make their own entry, before the birthing woman is induced to bring them on.

Peri-natal psychologists and midwives I’ve talked to have all found that quite often babies who are dragged into life by their legs and arms as in the case of caesareans, or induced to be born at more convenient times, set up life patterns of feeling like they’re being dragged through life against their will. Like they’re never on time to do the right thing, and that people around them are always overshadowing them and making decisions for them against their will. It seems quite stunning to me in the light of such logical conclusions about how birth sets us up for life, that we do anything apart from gentle welcomes to the world, with the mother, baby and family all being respectfully honoured in their journey.

But back to the story. I reckon I’m fortunate to be one of the few women in a western world at this point in our history, to experience the reality of having just given birth to a baby, but needing to put that baby to the side with other people holding it in the hours following the birth, because I had another baby inside me that needed to be birthed as well. I kept looking at Max and realizing that if he was a ‘singleton’ (a rather dubious term in my opinion((sounds to me like ‘simpleton’)), coined by mothers of ‘multiples’, to describe single baby’s…), I’d be holding him and staring at him and RESTING!! But it wasn’t to be. During the time that Currawong was getting a massage, my uterus started contracting. It was like the after pains you get after birthing that get more intense the more babies you have. I thought it was birthing contractions at first, till I tried moving like I did with contractions and it hurt more….I had to stay completely still for uterine contractions it seemed. Before Russell left he told me that “it would go like a bullet now..” I liked his metaphor. We were all relieved and felt like the whole experience was a lot more ‘normal’. We told Lisa she should head home and get some supplies and have a rest…none of us had expected it would be going this long! Not long after the blessed couple left, Lisa headed home for a while too. We all agreed that we were part of 2 separate births, and all was totally normal and fine.

There was a gentle and graceful pause in events for a bit of a breather. We hung out with Max and the other kids, and Currawong and I went walking round the property to walk through the contractions moving the uterus down, that slowly morphed into starting to contract a baby out. We stopped off to have a chat with some fellow community dwellers on the way, keeping them up to date with what was going on. It’s all a bit of a haze to me now, and was even receding quickly at the time, as I was still in that intense timeless space you go to in birthing. Come to mention that space, I was really into goddess chants for the sound track of these births, and had about 6 on repeat throughout the whole 49 hours…. Except for when Currawong created diversions around the fact that other music was on. For me in that timeless space it was wonderful…repetitive…. meditative…. reassuring. For everyone else it was mind numbingly annoying, but bless them all, nobody said anything to me till days after it was all over. Just ask Lisa how she likes goddess chants now……

And like Russell predicted, it did indeed progress like a bullet. Steady strong contractions that moved rhythmically in a mathematical dance through time scales to really close together. Around 9 that night I rang Lisa again, and told her that it was all on again. She got here quickly and the birth journey continued steadily till 12 that night.

When Balthazar woke up crying and wanting to jump in the pool, and Max also woke up for a feed.

It would have to be one of the most surreal experiences of my life – to be in the middle of intense birthing, contractions about 3 minutes apart, and have a crying toddler, as well as a newborn baby wanting a feed……. It totally threw me. I slipped into sergeant major mode, instructing Currawong, mum and Lisa to “take Max from me now!”, as I was about to have a contraction, and then “bring him to me now!”, as I quickly fed him before the next wave hit. Poor mum almost tripped while holding him, I had her running round so much.

Once the worst of the crisis was over, Max back asleep and the decision made to let Balthazar just hang out, I found myself at that time and intensity just before the body gets ready to push, and got scared again. I was feeling washes of memory from when I was birthing Balthazar, and he was held up so high by the cord round his neck that he could only lower his bum so far, which was lucky, cause if he had engaged he would have been strangled. But during the time of trying to bring a breech baby on, I’d stuck my fingers inside myself and been able to feel his soft squishy skin, but he never came out that way, he was cut out by caesarean instead. So I was having flash backs, and exhausted, and awake for two days previous, and at that full on time in birth when I knew it was almost over, and it wasn’t happening. My body had birthed Max so beautifully and easily on it’s own, I just had to step back and let it happen. But my body wasn’t effortlessly pushing this baby out. I started getting full of fear again. What if this was as far as we could get on our own and had to transfer our whole show on the road and to the hospital? What would they say to a baby that had been born two days before and another inside me? Had we come so far only to end up in another emergency caesarean experience? Were all my fears about not being able to perform coming to fruition?

Everyone else was equally tired, and trying their best to keep my flagging spirits up, but I started to get stalked by fear again. My body wasn’t taking over the show and letting me sit back in the directors seat anymore. I could feel that everything was in place, but rather than just submit to strong contractions to hug my second baby out, I found I had to physically push and grunt and yell and scream and WORK to get the second baby down the birth passage. After about 12 at night, when Max and Balthazar woke, I felt like the whole process flagged. Then the fear hit, and at about 1 in the morning I realized that my fears were actually having a physical impact on this part of the birth journey. I told Lisa to remind me to tell her what was happening for me around that time, because I didn’t want to speak it and give it power. But at about 2 in the morning I was still pushing hard, yelling and grunting, and we were still getting nowhere. I slipped down again. In this roller coaster of a birth story, this bit was the hardest and darkest.

Around this time everyone else was off doing stuff, and it was just Lisa by the side of me in the pool. She knew what was going on. I broke my promise to myself to not tell her about the fear again until after the baby was born, and told her what was happening for me. She looked me in the eye and said in a voice full of compassion and feeling, that she was really sorry that the whole caesarean experience had happened to me. And it was really good to hear. Made me cry….. 

After all the working out and about and around and through my caesarean experience, this felt like a final let go. I surprised myself, and maybe her too, with coming right back with all the reasons why I was glad that it had happened, and how many of my birthing fears I’d faced through that time that I’d survived, and the compassion and  understanding I now felt for other women who had caesareans, instead of the smug homebirthcentric perception I’d had before, and how much I’d learnt about myself and my body, and all of a sudden the show seemed to be back on the road! There was nothing left to fear I remembered! I’d dealt with what I’d been given before and only gained learning and insight, so no matter what happened now, I knew I had the skills and the ability to gracefully travel through it. This little moment didn’t miraculously change the whole situation into a movie like dream ending, but it certainly gave me the ‘oomph’ I needed to keep grunting, and yelling, and pushing my second baby out. No beat-poet, hippy birth this time! I reckon from about 12 at night till 4.05am when my second baby was born were the hardest, longest, scariest and most physically and emotionally intense hours of my life. It seemed to take forever. And then some. 

And then just a little bit more. 

And not to forget the last bit. 

And the bit in the middle.

I think you get the point.

And then at 4.05 in the morning of Monday the 23rd of August, 49 hours after my waters broke to begin the entry of Maxamillion, a little baby was born in the sac. Which burst just before coming out. It was like opening the most amazingly soft, velvety present I’ve ever been given, pulling the membranes from the head and trying to work out which gender we’d been gifted with. Like I said before, all the odds were on a girl baby being the second one out of my womb. Through the birth I’d been mentioning fairly solidly how my ‘little witch girl’ was on her way, and wondering what she’d look like, and telling ‘her’ to hurry up………..the first thing I said was, “It’s not a boy is it!?!?!”

It was.

Hale, healthy and hearty, a big sized boy with a round head from being born in the sac, and the largest baby I’ve ever pushed through my birth canal. At the end of a long birthing and previous baby born. Born in the water and at home, without any need to disrupt the bubble and go anywhere after they were born. After pulling off his sac, and holding him to my breast like I always do, I got some time to look at him. He looked like Burt bloody Newton. It took me a little while to get over that one.

Griffyn had woken up just before he was born, and came out as he was being caught. Balthazar was watching, wrapped up completely in the experience, Jess, Oma and Lisa were all around the pool, and Currawong was standing behind me. I was on such a high, it was OVER! And had been ultimately allright…. The end of my birthing career was a roaring success. Now it was done I started to feel quite euphoric. Tired, but euphoric. I went to sit on the lounge with him, (the name Merlin Radbod didn’t quite make it till a few days later), and did that staring thing I do after a baby is born. The placenta was born, and it was finally and completely over. We had a homebirth, waterbirth of twins, a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Caesarean), grand multiparous, epic, that had a happy ending.

And here’s the weird thing. Lisa hadn’t been able to work out why the first umbilical cord of Max’s had kept pumping blood, and had gone to a serious amount of effort to ensure it was kept clamped. And the reason why was that there was only one placenta. Non identical twins are meant to have separate placenta’s, and if they do join up, you can see where they’ve merged. No fusion line or connection of two separate placenta’s was evident, it was just one enormous placenta with two umbilical cords and a membrane between the two boys. And had kept pumping through Max’s detached cord. How bizarre is that……

Now at this point you may be tempted to say that no wonder it worked out so well, as I was an experienced mother of 5, and Lisa was an experienced midwife of decades, and of course we were trusting birth and being zen with the whole situation, but you’d be mistaken. We both had serious limits being tested and boundaries being pushed. And were worried until the very end. But maybe both a little prone also, to hoping for the best. And it paid off for us all.

So. Successful outcome of two healthy babies, happy family and midwife, and a homebirth to boot, and Lisa sweeps through the house like a spring morning breeze and makes sure that everyone’s settled and covered and warm and fed and happy and packed and headed off home, and JUST as she left, the other girls started to wake and I looked around in despair, suddenly completely and thoroughly exhausted, and completely daunted by the beginning of another noisy day in our home. My big 17 year old Jess walked up and demanded Merlin, told Griffyn to take Max, instructed mum to take the three other kids to her house for the day, and told us we could sleep while her and Griffyn looked after the babies. And through serendipity and providence, we all got some well earned sleep.

And it was really good.