If Someone Took You They'd Soon bring You Back

Returning to country feeds my mother’s longing to lie beside her mother in
a paddock of towering red gums, shifting skies and ancient swamps. Settlers
unknowingly damaged that fragile environment, cleared it for cloven-
hooved creatures, diverted potable water out to sea and disturbed – edging
towards annihilated – the traditional custodians and their ways. My mother
remembers Boandik people crossing family land as if she were fixed and
they were not.
She dies in Adelaide during a Covid-19 outbreak; perhaps she would
have anyway. A circle of women, my two sisters, my brother’s wife and I,
keen over her body at a funeral parlour, just hours before government eases
a hard lockdown and relinquishes her body to her prepaid Penola plot. A
generation earlier, her mother, my Scottish-descended then seventeen-year-
old grandmother, rode her horse to work as a parlour maid at Yallum Park,
Penola, where original William Morris wallpaper still covers the walls of
formal rooms. I am named after a Yallum manor lady.
During my mother’s dying days, I play a set of Strathspeys on my phone
that launch her into vivid childhood memories.