Nina had been distracted by the sunset-yellow spirit flowers of the moodja tree. She paused to catch her breath, and looked back down the path she and Adi had walked up, leaving everyone else down by Hangman’s Creek. She faintly heard splashes and shouts as the girls cannonballed into the muddy creek; not that there was much water left to splash. As she ducked under an overhanging boulder, Nina noticed it was worn smooth by centuries of hands guiding heads, her own fingers fitting into the imprints as she did the same. Her sunhat swung behind her, her face was flushed from the mountain climb, and tendrils of damp hair clung to the back of her neck, freckled from many summers spent in the sun. The path was littered with fallen leaves, twigs, and pieces of torn eucalyptus bark. Sunlight fell through the trees, heavy and warm on Nina’s face, drying her dress where her bathers, still wet from the creek had left damp patches. Kalari sat on fallen logs lazily flicking their tongues at insects which came too close.
She reached a dead end in the path where a sheer rock face stretched high above her. Around the base, the dusty path had been scuffed up, and a scraggly bush trodden down, revealing an opening just big enough to squeeze into. Adi must have gone this way. Nina stepped into the gloom and found herself in a tunnel which headed directly into the mountain. The roof was low, and Nina was tall for her age, so she had to stoop, running her hands along the damp stone to guide her. A bright shaft of light, dust floating in the golden column, came through an opening in the roof of the tunnel. She called out to Adi, whose reply came from above. Nina squinted into the light, and felt for a way up. Adi bounced over, her dark curls falling around her face as she reached down and grabbed Nina’s hand. As their fingers intertwined, Nina’s skin tingled, just for a moment, before she let Adi haul her up into the light.
‘Look.’ Adi declared triumphantly, as she flung her arms wide at the expansive view. They stood on a natural platform, high on the mountain, which was shaded on three sides by reddish sandstone boulders. Framed by the spindly limbs and leaves of tall wandoo eucalyptus trees and bulgalla trees clinging to the rockface, the fourth side opened onto a view of the bushland which stretched to a faint, heat-wobbly horizon. From this height, they could see the Southern Ridge which was partially obscured by a bushfire smoke haze. Billowing red dust rose from toy-like cars that moved silently through the yellow and brown patchwork doonas of farmland. Hangman’s Creek slithered through the bushland and farmland around to the north side of the mountain where it curled, a silver snake of light, through the karri forests towards the sea. Adi turned with a wide smile, proud of her discovery, to Nina, who was looking through the eyepiece of her disposable camera, capturing the sunlight on Adi’s face and, in the background, the view across the valley. Nina photographed everything; a possum rummaging through a bin on her walk to school, the cracked earth of the dried-up riverbed, shoes hung on the telephone wires, a magpie stealing a kid’s hot chips, Adi sitting at the end of the pier in her bathers looking out across the sea, Adi looking at a painting in a gallery they visited on a school trip to Perth, Adi’s ink-stained fingers from an afternoon on the school playing-field when she had taken a ballpoint to the freckles on Nina’s arm, joining up the dots like a map of constellations. But those disposable cameras gathered dust on her bookshelves, the photos remaining undeveloped.
They sat on the warm stone, dangling their legs over the ledge. Nina’s stomach rattled at the height. She wouldn’t have even come close to the edge if Adi hadn’t been there. She glanced over to Adi, who was drinking from Nina’s water bottle. Adi saw her looking and swung her knee over to bump Nina’s leg.
‘What are you thinking about?’
Nina felt her ears heating up. She stared intently out at the hazy Southern Ridge, trying to ignore Adi’s eyes on her. ‘How did you find this place?’
‘I just had a feeling about it.’
There was a pause, as they both looked out across the view, thinking about different definitions of the word feeling.
They sat in silence, basking in the sun and listened to the loud calls of karrak hiding among the fiery cones of a bulgalla tree. Adi didn’t tell Nina the real reason she had wanted to climb the mountain. She didn’t think Nina would get it. She wasn’t Noongar. It wasn’t her history woven into these mountains. A few weeks ago, the whole mob came over to their place to celebrate Adi’s sister’s birthday with a barbie in the yard. She had been sitting in the tyre swing, hoarding the bowl of Fantales, when an Aunty with wiry grey hair and a big smile that cracked the lines on her face, spotted Adi. They sat together in the shade while Aunty yarned about the mountains, about the waugal that lived in an underground river. Adi hadn’t known boodja stretched as far as the mountains. When she asked Aunty, the old woman had laughed and told her that generations of their ancestors had lived around the rivers and mountains, they would go out there, away from the sea, in makuru season, leaving behind beautiful rock art that could still be seen. Adi asked if Aunty had seen it, but Aunty just smiled softly, koora-koora, she said, a long time ago. She was too old to go climbing a mountain now. They sat in silence, chewing on the Fantales.
The midday sun was beating down and their clothes had dried. The girls returned to the tunnel, Adi jumped down first and Nina carefully climbed in after her, trying not to spill the pink lilly-pilly berries she had collected on their walk. Adi rummaged around in the pockets of her cargo shorts and brought out a small keyring torch which she pointed at the tunnel wall behind Nina. She was surprised that Nina, who was usually so observant, had not seen the rock art. Where Nina had placed her hands as she had guided herself through the cave, a series of red mardaa paintings lined the wall. Red stencilled handprints, a tall figure with long fingers, probably a djenak, and a long snake, the waugal. Adi was unusually quiet as she gently touched the wall next to handprints created by her ancestors that were not much bigger than her own tanned brown hands with her slender fingers and chipped turquoise nail polish.
Adi and Nina followed the long, winding ochre painting of waugal on the wall which continued for several metres before ending in a curling forked tongue. The air became cooler as they walked, a relief from the beating sun outside. A faint draught left goosebumps on their skin. Nina stopped.
‘We should go back. They’ll have noticed we’re gone by now.’ She said, hesitantly, but Adi grabbed her hand, intertwining their fingers, and gently tugged Nina down the slope.
‘Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?’ She said, playfully.
Despite the impending sense of danger that naturally comes with descending into an unknown, dark, tunnel, the feeling that filled Nina’s tummy when Adi eyes and fingers locked with hers, was enough for her to say, ‘Oh, alright then, you first.’
Adi pointed out the glittering stream running alongside their feet must lead somewhere. Sure enough, after they walked for a few more minutes, the narrow tunnel suddenly opened into a vast cavern. The water at their feet disappeared underground and reappeared a few feet away, flowing into a sandy-bottomed crystal-clear lake, which ran the length of the cavern, reflecting hanging stalactites. Great pillars of stalagmites grew up all around them, an underground petrified forest, supporting the domed ceiling of the cave. It smelt, and felt, like an old stone church, and reminded Nina of cathedrals she had visited with her Oma and Opa in Köln. Adi’s torchlight bouncing off the walls looked like the glittering stained-glass windows.
‘Deadly!’ Adi broke their stunned silence. ‘We found a cave?’
Nina nodded, turning to Adi with wide eyes. Together they crossed over a natural bridge and followed a sandy path around the edge of the underground lake. Nina placed her hand to the wall of the cavern to steady herself. It was wet and grainy. She peered closely at the lines of quartz which sparkled along it. Instinctively, she licked her fingers and grimaced, immediately regretting it. The water from the cave wall tasted earthy and salty, as if the earth was silently sobbing for the ravaged landscape above. The baked dry riverbeds, the cracking fields, the blackened forests. It was a wounded landscape, scarred by climate change, by invasion, by the massacres of its people, children stolen from their families, forcibly removed from boodja. As she placed her hands on the wall, Nina felt the ghostly tremors of the landscape blown up in the search for gold. If Adi could feel it, she didn’t say.
‘Hello!’ Adi called out across the water. Hello-lo-lo-lo. The cavern sent back a peeling echo.
Nina pushed her glasses up her nose and gazed around in awe at the calcium carbonate chandeliers. Adi smiled softly, looking at the awe on Nina’s face, before noticing a small yellow petal stuck in Nina’s strawberry-blond hair, just above her left ear, and she instinctively reached over to pick it out. Nina looked at her in surprise. Adi blew the petal off her fingers and it landed on the surface of the crystalline lake, sending out ripples.
As they walked through a series of cavernous rooms, following the water that slowly moved along the sandy bottom, the path disappeared, and the ground became more uneven. They were careful to avoid the cracks and sinkholes. Adi scuffed her feet and sent gravel tumbling into a sinkhole where it splashed into the dark depths. Nina nervously pulled her back, and they took a different route, avoiding the worst of the sinkholes. Down here there was no familiar cacophony of crickets and gulls and crashing waves, no coffee machines and buskers and car engines and bike wheels. Here they were held by the quietness. Just the soft sound of water trickling into the lake, of their footsteps crunching, and their ragged breaths slowly falling into line with each other. The eerie quiet of the cavern had started to send prickles running along Adi’s nerves. It felt like she was walking in the footsteps of other people, not just Nina, but the footsteps were washed away by the waves every time she tried to get a closer look.
‘Which are stalagmites, and which stalactites?’ Adi asked. Nina always knew things like this. That was how they had made friends in the first place. It was biology class in the first week of high school. Adi was struggling with a question the teacher had given them, and Nina had leaned over and explained, in whispers, how to answer the question. That lunch break Adi sidled up to where Nina was reading in the shade and handed her half a Vegemite sandwich. They had been inseparable ever since.
‘I think stalagmites are the ones on the floor and stalactites are on the ceiling, because of that saying; little mites grow up and tights hang down.’
‘That’s silly. But I guess it works if you remember it.’ Adi jumped up to see if she could touch a stalactite. She couldn’t. ‘Maybe we’re little mites who’ve grown up.’ Nina could hear the smile in her voice without looking.
‘D’ya think we are grown up?’
‘I feel grown up. We found a cave! That’s only something grown-ups would do,’ Adi said, throwing her arms into the air and almost tripping over a mound as she did so.
Nina said nothing. She didn’t feel grown up. While the other girls were sneaking into the Bottle-O, smoking cigarettes and kissing boys, she and Adi would still have sleepovers in the yard, reading ghost stories by torchlight under a mozzie net until they fell all asleep to the sound of buzzing insects and croaking frogs. Nina would steal glances at Adi as she fell asleep next to her, watching the camping lantern throwing shadows against her thick dark eyelashes. Adi made her feel safe, even when she was doing something that scared her. Maybe that is what feeling grown-up was? Fearing something but doing it anyway?
Adi’s torch flickered momentarily and then gave up, plunging the cavern into darkness. It felt as if the creature hibernating within the mountain had finally awoken and swallowed them whole. Adi yelped in surprise and gripped Nina’s hand tightly; her turquoise nails leaving red crescent moons in Nina’s palm. Slowly their eyes adjusted. The darkness fled into the deepest corners of the cavern. All around them, along the walls of the cave, the banks of the underground lake, everywhere; a blue, luminous substance glowed. In some places along the roof of the cavern, among the stalactites clusters of glow worms hung reflecting in the lake like a starry sky. Nina could see the shape of Adi’s face in a soft blue light, her dark eyes sparkling as she gazed at their underground galaxy. Nina reached into her purse to take out her disposable camera, but Adi tugged at her hand to get her attention.
‘What is it?’
Adi pointed to the other side of the sparkling lake, where the reaching tendrils of a huge trees root system had pushed through the limestone and were hanging from the cavern, letting light slither through. They must have been much closer to the surface than they thought. They wound their way around the lake and scrambled up a rocky slope towards the sunlight that peeked through the cracks among the rubble and roots. Adi reached up, grabbed hold of some roots above her, and placed her knee on an outcrop of rock. With a grunt, she pulled herself up. Nina watched as her shirt lifted, revealing the small of her back. She had a mole just to the left of her bony spine.
‘Maybe this is a way out?’ she called to Nina as she started to push the weeds and sand aside.
Nina climbed up behind her and together they got to work removing the loose stones and sand, slowly revealing a low tunnel. Light poured into the caves, catching on the dust and sand that floated in the air.
They climbed out into the dusty shadow of the mountain. The afternoon sunlight beat down. That familiar chorus of insects and chattering birds greeted their ears after the eerie quiet of the caves. The thick pale orange trunks of tall karri trees towered over them. A well-trodden dirt path led through the trees, overgrown with ferns and grasses, and littered with dead leaves and strips of bark. Nina held back, worried about snakes, but Adi marched fearlessly forward through the undergrowth towards rickety-looking wooden stairs in the mountain side which led Adi and Nina back to the path they had left earlier that day. Breathless and flushed, they looked at each other when they reached the top of the stairs, and started to laugh, a giddy, bubbling laugh that escaped their lips and followed them as they raced down towards the creek. The other girls had stopped swimming and were stood by the barbie, eating watermelon slices as they drip-dried in their towels. A dad who had volunteered to supervise was cooking snags and sizzling corn-on-the-cob.
‘Watch this!’ Adi said, as she took a running jump across the creek, and landed in the mud on the other side. She wiped her hair out of her face, leaving a muddy streak on her cheek. Nina took off her shoes and socks and carried them in one hand as she carefully crossed the creek on precarious steppingstones, and joined Adi who had sat on a boulder overhanging the water. Nina dipped her fingers into the creek and rubbed at the mud on Adi’s face. Adi shifted her weight and their legs touched, but neither of them moved away.
A clap of thunder growled through the darkening sky, making them jump. The air was cloyingly hot, and Adi felt static electricity run up her arms. Warm, heavy droplets started to land on their skin, their feet dangling into the creek, their bruised, dusty knees, and their flushed cheeks. Tangy petrichor filled the air as the clouds opened and the deluge came down. It pattered across the surface of the creek, sending out eddying rings. Frogs croaked joyfully. It washed the dusty red soil into muddy puddles, sizzled on the hot tin roof of the barbeque shelter, dripped down the fat green leaves of the plants, fell into the cupped palms of curled-up flowers, and sank into the ground.
‘It’s raining!’ Nina said in disbelief. The first rain in months. The drought had broken, djeran season had arrived.
Adi looked up at the eucalyptus trees against the purple-grey sky, ‘I knew it would.’
I wish to acknowledge the indigenous Noongar people who are the traditional custodians of Noongar Boodja (South-West Western Australia) and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. While the places in this story are fictional, they are inspired by the landscape of Wanandi Noongar Boodja, which always has, and always will, belong to the First Nations people.
Glossary of Noongar Language:
birdal - sparks
boodja - country/land
bunuru - the hot, dry season (February-March)
djeran - the cooler, wetter season (April-May)
makuru - the cold, wet season (June-July)
kep koorliny - rain coming
koora-koora - a long, long time ago
djenak - an evil spirit
waugal - the rainbow serpent, a Dreaming creature who created the environment and rivers
mardaa - ochre
kalari - small lizard
moodja - the Nuytsia Floribunda tree
djarraly - Eucalyptus marginata, also known as the jarrah tree
bulgalla - Banksia menziesii, aka the firewood banksia tree
karrak - Calyptorhynchus banksii naso aka Red-Tailed Black Cockatoo
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