Currawalli Street by Christopher Morgan

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    When she first heard the sulphur-crested cockatoo call out it sounded like someone screaming in pain, but Johnny explained to her where the sound came from. And when one of the builders working on the house two doors up was crushed by timber that fell from an overturning dray pulled by an ox, she knew what a scream of pain really sounded like. She arrived in the front yard of number fourteen at the same time asMaria from number sixteen. The other workmen were trying to move the load of timber from the man’s bloodied body and had just lifted the dray off him. The ox had fallen down dead, a victim of the heat. The man screamed as each piece of timber was lifted. Both women knelt beside him and Maria held his face in her hands as Kathleen wiped the perspiration from his forehead. She kept one hand on the timbers that still sat on his abdomen and legs, hoping that she might be able to stop them from falling further across his chest. As each length of timber was removed the smell of fresh blood grew stronger. Eventually enough timber had been taken away that she could see that the remaining lengths closest to his body were soaked in it.
    As the load on his body lightened, the man’s screams became fainter. He began to tremble and suddenly his eyes focused on something behind Kathleen’s head. Then he slipped away. At exactly that moment, a strand of her hair freed itself from the bun it was tied in and fell, touching him on the cheek. She brushed it away. Maria told the workmen that there was no need to rush anymore, and those words were more devastating than the man’s screams had been.
    Kathleen has since come to be fond of the sulphur-crested cockatoo and its shriek. No bird has ever made her laugh in delight before. Cockatoos fly together in a large gang like drunken wharf workers and they live to cause trouble. They pick orchards clean in a day, bite through veranda posts, slide down iron roofs until the inhabitants inside can’t take the noise anymore. Twenty could be slaughtered but forty would be back tomorrow with the very knowledge that the dead twenty had learned the day before. There is in these birds something at play that walks in step with the land. Some communion that doesn’t make sense in the wayKathleen knows things. There are stories of some cockatoos living for over two hundred years and so they may have seen the first white settlers coming ashore, struggling with wooden barrels that smelled of the pickling oil inside mixed with sea water that had soaked through the wood; seen the ropes from canvas tents fanned out like the legs of a thin octopus that was uncomfortable on the land, and wondered at the pathetic scratching in the dirt into which frail seeds were tossed, destined to rot away. No wonder cockatoos scream wickedly like they do.
    If Kathleen is to be honest, this country scares her. The darkness here belongs to someone else. And it is at night that she feels it the strongest, that she is a stranger in a strange land. A few times late in the evening she has seen something indistinguishable moving in the distance among the currawalli trees; occasionally too she has smelled a strangely beautiful aroma in the air first thing in the morning. Something beyond what she knows. Sometimes she feels what might be the soft feathers of bulrushes touching her arm. When she first arrived at the farm to take up her teaching position and she was standing a little away from the house, trying to comprehend a sky so big, a local Aboriginal woman appeared in front of her, holding out her hand curled up in a ball. When she was sure that Kathleen was looking at the hand, she uncurled her fingers and revealed a ball of white bulrush tops. She leant forward and lifted Kathleen’s hand, guiding it onto the top of the bulrushes so that both women were enclosing the flowers. They held that clasp for two minutes until the moment was broken by a gang of cockatoos landing a few yards from