Ch. 1: The Thirsty Land

Waratah woke before the sun had fully opened its eye, her breastbone pressed against the hard earth of the humpy, listening to the land breathe. Even in sleep, Gadigal Country had grown shallow and quick, like an old woman troubled by dreams. The girl pushed aside the possum-skin covering and felt the morning already warm against her face, though the sky was still bruised purple and rose along the sandstone cliffs. No dew. For sixty days, perhaps more, the dawn had come without its silver gift.

She sat up, her hair falling loose around her shoulders, the small dried flowers she had woven there three weeks past now brittle as memory. Eucalyptus. Boronia. They crackled when she touched them, releasing a ghost of their old sweetness into the dry air.

“Ngaya,” she whispered to herself—not quite a prayer, not quite a naming. I am.

Outside, the camp stirred with the careful movements of people who had learned to carry themselves without waste. There was no fat of ease upon the Gadigal now, no lingering at the fire with full bellies and idle hands. Waratah watched Aunty Mirri already seated cross-legged by the grey ashes of the central pit, her silver hair catching the first true light, her coolamon balanced across her knees as she sorted through the last of the old yams. Her digging stick lay beside her, its polished surface worn smooth by decades of seeking. The elder‘s fingers moved slowly, deliberately, as if she were reading Braille in the root vegetables’ wrinkled skins.

“Good morning, little flower,” Aunty Mirri called, though she did not look up. She had ears for footsteps, for breath, for the particular silence of each of her people. “The sun rises thirsty again.”

Waratah walked to her, her bare feet knowing every stone, every hollow, every place where the earth had begun to crack and powder. The country felt different beneath her soles—drawn tight, expectant, withholding. She knelt and pressed her palm flat against the ground, the way she had seen Aunty Mirri do since she was small enough to carry.

“I can feel it,” she said. “The land is… Waiting. But I don't know for what.”

Aunty Mirri's weathered hand covered hers, warm and dry as sun-bleached bark. “Country speaks in its own time, not yours. Listen longer than you wish, and it will tell you what it needs.” She tapped the coolamon with a fingernail. “But first, eat. Your father waits.”

Bilang stood at the edge of the camp where the bush thickened into scrub, his shoulders broad as a river gum‘s trunk beneath the kangaroo-skin cloak he wore against the morning’s deceptive chill. His face, when he turned to watch his daughter approach, held the particular softening it always did for her—a door cracking open in a wall of worry. But the wall was there. Waratah saw it in the new lines bracketing his mouth, in the way his digging stick waited in his hand like an unspoken question.

“The ground is harder today,” he said, by way of greeting. “North side, where the old wattle grove was. We try there.”

They walked without urgency, though urgency lived in the very air. A pair of galahs passed overhead, their raucous cries thinned, their flight paths aimless. No water meant no blossom, no blossom meant no seed, no seed meant the long hunger that Aunty Mirri's stories warned of—the time before the Dreaming was properly settled, when spirits still argued over how country should be arranged.

Bilang found the spot he wanted, a patch of earth that remembered shade from trees now skeletal and grey. He struck the ground with his stick, and the sound came back wrong—too bright, too hollow. Not the deep receiving thrum of moist soil, but the flat percussion of clay baked to pottery.

Waratah knelt opposite him and began to work with her smaller tool, a digging stick Aunty Mirri had given her when she turned fourteen, the wood darkened by her own palms' oils. The earth fought her. Each strike sent vibrations up her arm, and the clay came away in plates and shards, revealing only more clay beneath, the color of old blood, of a sky before storm.

“Slow,” Bilang murmured, though she had not been hurrying. “Slow finds what fast misses.”

But the morning wore on, and what they found was meager: three small yams, twisted as though grown in pain, their flesh fibrous and pale. Waratah held one to her nose and smelled almost nothing, the rich earthy perfume of proper yams faded to a suggestion.

“These won't carry us to the new moon,” she said, before she could stop herself.

Bilang sat back on his heels. His hands, she noticed, were bleeding slightly at the knuckles, the skin split by the work and the dryness. He licked the blood away without comment, a hunter's reflex, but his eyes stayed on the broken ground.

“The River of Stars,” he said quietly. “When I was your age, I could walk there before the sun cleared the ridge and find enough fish for three families. The water came to my knees in the shallow places. My mother—your grandmother, who you never knew—she would sing to the river each morning, giving back words for what we took.” He turned the pale yam in his own palm. “Now I would not know where to find her song. The river has forgotten the tune.”

Waratah reached across the space between them and touched her father‘s wrist, feeling the pulse there, strong but hurried. “We’ll find enough,” she said, though certainty had no home in her voice. “We always have.”

Bilang covered her hand with his larger one, his fingers rough as ironbark. “You are your mother's courage,” he said. “She gave it to you with her last breath, and I have seen it grow each day since.” He stood, brushing red dust from his knees. “But courage needs more than dust to feed upon. Come. The elders speak at noon.”

The camp had drawn inward upon itself, humpies clustered closer than in the old days, as if the people sought warmth from each other's presence where the land offered none. Children who would have been splashing in the river, learning to track, playing the games that taught them country, instead sat listless near the fires, their mothers too weary to shoo them toward useful tasks.

Aunty Mirri had built up the central pit, the smoke rising in a thin, reluctant column that the wind scattered without effort. The elders sat in their semicircle, their faces a map of drought written in deeper wrinkles, in eyes that had watched too much diminishment. Waratah found her place at the edge, beside her father, and felt the weight of the camp's attention gather like water seeking its level.

The old woman began without preamble, her voice finding the storyteller's rhythm that seemed to come from somewhere beneath her words, from the earth itself.

“When the first ancestor walked upon this country—yes, long before your grandmothers‘ grandmothers were seeds in their mothers’ wombs—there was a great thirst. Not this thirst.” She gestured to the sky, the land. “A thirst of the spirit. The people had forgotten to speak to country, had taken without giving thanks, had walked upon the sacred places with soles but no souls.”

A child whimpered somewhere, was hushed. Waratah felt the story settle around her like a familiar skin, though she had not heard this one before. Aunty Mirri's stories were like water themselves—sometimes you recognized the source, sometimes you did not, but you always needed them.

“The land grew silent. The rivers turned their faces away. And the people, oh, the people grew thin not only in their bodies but in their dreaming. Until a young one—not so old as you, Waratah, not so young as little Ngarra there—found a way to give back what had been taken. Do you know what she gave?”

No one answered. The fire popped, a small explosion of sparks that died before they reached knee height.

“Her voice, first. She sang to the land for seven days and seven nights, until her throat was raw as kangaroo meat. Her footsteps, next. She walked every boundary of Gadigal Country, wearing her feet to blood, learning the land‘s true shape. And finally—” Aunty Mirri paused, her eyes finding Waratah across the smoke, holding there with a peculiar intensity. “Finally, she gave her heart’s deepest love. She placed it upon the ground like a coolamon offering, and the land, moved by such a gift, opened itself again. The rivers returned. The yams grew fat. And from the place where her heart had rested, a flower grew, the color of the sacrifice, the color of love that does not count its cost.”

The silence after was different from the silence before—thicker, waiting. Waratah felt her own heart moving in her chest, a small animal restless in its shelter.

But the elder who rose next was not Aunty Mirri. Old Djubug, whose totem was the goanna, whose face bore the ritual scars of initiation from a time when such ceremonies filled whole seasons, leaned upon his spears and spoke with the rasp of one who had swallowed too much smoke.

“The spirit of the land is angry,” he said, and there was no story in his voice, only the flat declaration of one who has seen. “It withholds because we have forgotten the old agreements. The River of Stars dies because we have not given what keeps rivers alive.” He looked slowly around the circle, his gaze touching each face, lingering on the children, the mothers, the hunters with their empty hands. “The land needs a gift. Not yams, not fish, not the words we speak because we remember we should. Something given from the place where love begins, or the thirst will finish what it has started.”

Waratah felt her father's body tense beside her, a rope pulled tight. But she did not look at him. She was watching a movement at the corner of the camp, near the pile of gathered spinifex that would become thatching when rain returned—if rain returned.

A bird. Small, grey-brown, the color of the drought itself, with a wing that hung wrong and a beak that opened and closed without sound. It had flown or hopped or dragged itself to the edge of the living place, seeking what the land no longer offered.

Without rising, without announcing herself, Waratah reached for the cup beside her. It was the one she had carried since childhood, carved by her father from red river gum, its rim worn satin-smooth by her lips. It held her morning ration of water—precious, measured, the camp's stores dwindling daily. She had not yet drunk. The surface trembled as she lifted it, catching light.

She walked to the bird. The camp watched, or did not watch; in hard times, small kindnesses became unbearable to witness, or became necessary as proof that kindness still existed. Waratah did not know which was true, only that the bird's eye, when it turned to her, held no fear, only the exhaustion of one who had reached the end of seeking.

“Here,” she whispered, bending low, extending the cup so the water lapped near the rim. “I have this. Take it.”

The beak dipped, once, twice. The bird's throat moved with the swallowing. She saw the tremor in its injured wing, the way its body folded in upon itself even as it drank, too far gone for much recovery, perhaps, but not too far gone for this. For being seen. For being offered what could be spared, and what could not.

When the water was gone, the bird settled into the dust, its eye closing, its breathing shallow but steady. Waratah sat beside it, her empty cup in her lap, and felt the sun climb higher, drawing moisture from everything exposed to its gaze. She felt, too, Aunty Mirri‘s eyes upon her, and her father’s, and the weight of Djubug's pronouncement still hanging in the smoke-thinned air.

The land needed a gift.

She touched the dried flowers in her hair, felt them crumble to nothing between her fingers. Eucalyptus. Boronia. The names of abundance, of a time when water moved through everything, when to give was natural because there was always enough to replenish what was taken.

“I would give,” she whispered, not to the bird, not to the elders, not to anyone who could hear. “If I knew what was needed, I would give.”

The bird did not answer. But somewhere, in the silence that followed her words, Waratah felt country listening.