Purple Threads

By Jeanine Leane

Winner of the David Unaipon Award, an engaging, moving and often funny yarn about growing up in the home of two Aunties running a sheep farm in rural Gundagai. Growing up in the shifting landscape of Gundagai with her Nan and Aunties, Sunny spends her days playing on the hills near their farmhouse and her nights dozing by the fire, listening to the big women yarn about life over endless cups of tea. It is a life of freedom, protection and love. But as Sunny grows she must face the challenge of being seen as different, and of having a mother whose visits are as unpredictable as the rain. Based on Jeanine Leane's own childhood, these funny, endearing and thought-provoking stories offer a snapshot of a unique Australian upbringing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9780702267963

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Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from south-west New South Wales. Her first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: A.D. 1887–1961, won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry, and her first novel, Purple Threads, won the David Unaipon Award. Jeanine has published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness and creative nonfiction. Jeanine was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and she has won the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Poetry twice. She has been the recipient of a Red Room Poetry Fellowship and two Australian Research Council (ARC) Fellowships. Jeanine teaches Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature at the University of Melbourne.

For the women who raised and encouraged my sister and me, and for Peter, Jerome, Eugene and Hugo – the purple threads in my life.

Contents

Introduction by Evelyn Araluen

1 Women and dogs in a working man’s paradise

2 God’s flock

3 Waiting for Petal

4 Lilies of the field

5 Coming home

6 Marching with Hannibal

7 Purple threads

8 Lying dogs

9 Land grab

10 The National Sheep Dip Alliance Party

Epilogue – Country turns

Acknowledgements

Introduction

by Evelyn Araluen

The last time I pulled off the Hume to Gundagai the Murrumbidgee was running fast and full, and the floodgates had closed off Yarri Park. I left my car in the motor inn off Sheridan Street and wandered down to its banks so I could take some photos. Locals swung past in oversized utilities, pulling rattling trailers of bikes and dogs, on their way to the detour higher up the Muniong range. The early evening light shone bright and yellow through the leaves of manna gum, silky oak and imported plane trees scattered through the park, their branches swaying with the amber current. I sent a photo to Jeanine who told me it gets much higher. I sent the same photo to Dad, and he asked – just as he does every time I drive within half a day of Gundagai – if I’ve stopped by the Niagara Café yet.

In the morning I gave Jeanine a ring and she told me how to find her old school, so I headed up the hill past the old Gundagai Gaol, first established as a temporary lock-up in 1859, built from flinty local slate. There were two signs by the closed wooden doors with one advertising times for ghost tours, and the other offering a brief summary of the gaol’s construction and history, which read: ‘The many cultures found in early frontier towns were also represented among prisoners including Chinese, Indians, Aboriginals and Europeans.’ Around the back I found St Patrick’s: an old, red-brick building with iron fretwork and corrugated eaves, now overlooking brightly coloured sunshades and a tidy astroturf playground.

In Purple Threads Aunty Boo recounts the story of St Patrick ridding Ireland of snakes, while reminiscing on her days in domestic service for an elderly Catholic woman in the Great Depression. Standing just outside the school’s gates, I watched as a tapestry of light and shadow cast by low-hanging clouds swam across the swelling green hills and swept the town’s fugitive brick chimneys. I imagined Sunny and Star walking the steep paddocks with their Aunties, looking out for little black lambs, wounded sheep and scraps of stray wool clinging to barbed-wire fences.

Gundagai is a magnet for settler colonial artefacts: the bridge, the road, the dog on the tuckerbox, the browning newspaper clippings boasting of John Curtin’s 1942 visit framed all along the walls of the Niagara. Each relic constitutes a tableau in what Jeanine has elsewhere described as the ‘settler mythscape’ of the colonial imaginary: the constellation of words and ideas and images arranged to sublimate the violent invasion of Aboriginal land into narratives of white possession and the working man’s paradise.

The repetitiveness of the colonial story is particularly pertinent here – as we are told in Purple Threads’s opening pages: Gundagai is a town built three times and drowned twice. The settler mythscape is rewritten and reinscribed on land that doesn’t want it with every planting of a flag, building of a museum, every statue erected to memorialise saints and soldiers and dogs. Walking through Wiradjuri country with a head full of purple threads, the abstraction of these artefacts tracing Gundagai back to St Patrick’s serpent-less countryside seems out of place here: built to occupy everywhere, they belong nowhere.

In contrast, there’s something particular about the hills and rises of Gundagai I think I could confidently pick out from anywhere else in the world, because that’s the way Jeanine writes it. When she writes about dry creek beds bracing their bleached faces against a midday sun in January, or the thunderous sound of rain against the tin roofs in August, she writes the story that belongs here, only here, and truly here.

Purple Threads’s refusal of Western teleological narrative drives gives us something more radical: its centre is not the coming of age or the wounds of history, but rather a farm stolen back from white settlers where multiple generations of Wiradjuri women live in defiance of exploitation and displacement. The narrative unfolds not through crisis or conflict, but instead an intricate historical geography: Nan and the Aunties bemoaning the dry and tired brown earth as pastoral exploitation dries up their country; Sunny’s synaesthetic memory for the bluebells, heath and grass lilies climbing and spilling and spreading through the hills; the flood that fell from the sky and oozed from the earth to wash down to the swollen river flats and swamp the wheat plains.

No story is simply told: once Aunty Boo or Bubby have shared it round the kitchen stove it must run across the hills as Sunny and Star play Heathcliff and Cathy falling in love on the windy moors, or be battled out riding sheep over the rise to march with Hannibal. Story is an act of radical locality, which rejects the ordering of the world into wide abstract categories for shipping grain and gold and wool from one end to the other of it. When it’s time for Nan and the Aunties to go to the hills to dream, they rest with all the stories that have ever been lived or told on that ever-turning country.

When I drove out of town on my way home, I watched those hills as long as I could in my rear-view mirror. I know that to read this book is to go home to Jeanine’s home, where her Aunties walk the hills and talk to one another, and a fire kindles while children sleep in peace. Aboriginal stories, like Jeanine’s, turn in their own time through their own power just like the land: country floods, country burns, country grows and regrows forever.

1

Women and dogs in a working man’s paradise

‘Bloody gammon ya know, girl!’ Aunty Boo would always say. ‘Bloody farmer, stupid the whole damn lot of ’em.’

She said this every day as I walked the winter hills with her looking for dead or injured sheep. She’d have to be well out of earshot of Nan before she started swearing and calling people stupid. Even though Aunty Boo was a big girl, well into her fifties when I was little, Nan would still jar any of us for swearing and calling people stupid. Nan said no-one was stupid. Just different, that’s all.

She was raised a Christian, our Nan, and always said it was best to keep up the act in public. She married a Protestant settler who took her out of domestic service. Aunty Boo reckoned he was a slavedriver who had a big mob of kids to do all the work for him. Nan said she couldn’t have expected any better coming from her station in life and, being a Christian, she said marriage was for better or worse.

Aunty Boo wasn’t anyone’s Christian, especially when she was up on that hill. She said all marriage was for the worse. She stayed single for ninety-six years, just to prove it.

‘Men are like snakes on legs, girl,’ she said as she clipped the wool from the dead wether’s belly with old hand shears. ‘Ya can’t trust ’em! They all cold-blooded. An’ ya can’t bloody train ’em either.’

Nan always said the world is all about men and women and their babies. That’s how things go on. But Aunty Boo had different ideas.

‘All this world needs, girl, is women an’ dogs an’ kids. A good dog, girl, worth all the men in the world rolled into one,’ was her motto.

Course we were always out on the hill when she said all this. We always had a good dog or two with us. The Aunties and Nan had a habit of taking in homeless and injured animals. They usually managed to make them better and then they kept them.

‘Bloody wasteful, them farmers.’

Aunty Boo would heave as she clipped the last bit of wool from the dead wether. I’d always groan then because I knew what was coming next.

‘Now, girl, get that shovel off the wheelbarra. Give this poor thing a decent burial.’

If the rains fail the dirt is bloody hard and unforgiving around Gundagai, even in winter. The town had been built three times. The first two times the settlers ignored the advice of the Wiradjuri people and built on the river flats. It was washed away twice. Now Gundagai huddled on the side of the Muniong Range and boasted of having three songs written about it, the longest wooden bridge in the world – the Prince Alfred that spanned the river between north and south Gundagai – and a famous monument to the working man’s paradise, the Dog on the Tuckerbox.

Sometimes the floods were so mighty that they peaked at the top of the Prince Alfred. When the waters subsided, the carcasses of drowned stock hung high from the bridge poles and gum trees on the flat below. Missing persons reports were high. A car swept off the road near Gundagai could be carried some fifty odd miles all the way downstream to Wagga Wagga. But the big floods didn’t happen much any more. Nan said the country was drying up.

‘Bloody bastards,’ Aunty Boo would puff through gappy teeth as she dug. ‘Look what they done to this ground, girl! Should be black an’ beautiful jus’ like ya could eat it! An’ look, girl. Jus’ look at it … tired an’ brown, what’s left of it.’

Sometimes it could take us ages to bury a sheep. On a summer’s day, the tired ground was like concrete. Digging a grave deep enough to stop the dead sheep being molested by crows or eaten by foxes was slow going. In winter, we would often be sinking in mud up to our ankles and the wet dirt weighed a ton. But there was no point complaining.

‘Poor fella deserves a decent burial afta all he’s done fer the bloody farmers,’ was always Aunty’s standard response.

I liked it better when we found the injured ones or the baby lambs with no mothers because then we just put them in the wheelbarrow and took them home to Nan and Aunty Bubby.

Nan and Aunty Bubby didn’t swear as much as Aunty Boo. Aunty Bubby read English romantic novels and she would have gotten married if it weren’t for the accident. When I wasn’t with Aunty Boo, Aunty Bubby used to teach me how to read, cook, sew and be a good housekeeper. She thought it would be nice for me to marry a good man, preferably rich, have a big house and raise a family like the lucky heroines in the books she read.

‘Ya know, girl,’ Aunty Bubby once said, ‘quickest way to a man’s heart is with good food an’ a clean house.’

Later on, when we were up on the hill, Aunty Boo said, ‘Quicker way to a man’s heart is straight through his chest with a bloody big spear!’

We’d walk all the way to the top of the big hill, pulling the wool off dead sheep to make jumpers and blankets, and picking up the survivors for our pets and friends. Aunty Boo would pull the tufts of wool off the barbed-wire fences that separated our tiny block from the other farms. Nan and Aunty Bubby spun the wool by the fire on winter nights, dyed it all sorts of pretty colours and knitted jumpers, cardigans, scarves, hats and baby clothes to be sold at various farmers’ markets around the Riverina.

One day, one of the farmers came by our place and asked the Aunties and Nan if they wanted some of their sheep slaughtered to eat. Aunty Bubby was polite.

‘No thanks!’

Aunty