"You sit 'ere, this way" said Jungarrayi, but I didn't hear,
I was watching instead the painted breasts of a woman,
ochred white and red, soft and curved and patterned like the land.
I watched the way her hands picked up her son -
little brother to the one they made a man that night.

I listened to the sound of the women as they sang
and knew I knew too little to understand their song -
sat all night long like a child in church
terrified
that I might do the wrong thing.

The hours dragged on. The women, wailing left.
At last they circumcised the boy,
now man, dark blood dripping on the sand.
I suppose I must have flinched -
old Jungarrayi laughed and held my hand.

I would not have known the way of it unless I'd seen the book,
months later, when I picked it up to look at his photo
and found it held a transcript of his life -
his Father massacred at Coniston in 1928 -
my Father's year of birth.

When I asked if it was all worthwhile -
looking after me, after that,
he stared abstractly at a point above my head,
his youngest daughter's child upon his lap.
He paused, said something to the child instead.

And just for a moment I thought he hadn't heard,
leaned forward,
opened my mouth to speak,
then caught his eye and stopped -
and never spoke a word.

A note for the reader:

August is the anniversary of the 1928 Coniston massacres, in which a police party led by Constable William Murray carried out reprisals against the Warlpiri people of Central Australia. Murray himself admitted to 17 killings, both men and women. The official Board of Enquiry found 31. Later researchers estimate a conservative minimum of 70 murders over a six week period - men, women and children.

The survivors, when they speak of it at all, still refer to this as "the killing time."