EMU DREAMING
RISSOLE THE EMU IS MOTIONLESS, looking me dead in the eye. At this close range, it’s clear she’s either sizing me up for fighting, feeding or mating, and the cerulean shade painting her neck in a dirty watercolour makes me surmise she’s showing her breeding colours. Rissole, I’m thinking, is ready for love.
I see a country thick with tradition and story, for anyone willing and able to take the time to go for a walkabout.
She punctuates the silence with the oddest sound I’ve ever heard issued from a living thing – a kind of booming poonk from the depths of her throat that makes me alert, slightly alarmed and not at all able to take her seriously.
Leaving Rissole to send her poonks into the air to be heard by bachelors up to two kilometres in each direction, I hear the exact same sound from an even less expected source. Eddy Harris is the resident artist at Warrawong on the Darling, here on the breezy billabong outside of Wilcannia in outback New South Wales, and his place as part of the Bakandji (river people) mob means he can not only
