The currawong nested in my mother’s hair and the egg swelled in her belly till it hatched through her thighs and I was born with dark feathery down, a stick-legged person watched by the black and yellow eye of the currawong. It was always there. Often just a fleeting speck of vision somewhere to the side or in branches among leaves. Watching.
That was before they came, the day an island floated through the bay and possums shinned up the stumps and bared limbs that studded the surface. Or so it seemed. The scene snatched visions of panic from awed faces and many fled through the bush to hide from the terror. These were their nuwi, their boats, their vessels. Out of them sprang an endless leak of people. And when they came ashore, they strutted like emus preening their feathered rumps. These creatures from the sea barnacled in coloured bark turned out not to be animals like us but from the other side of death, their skin turned inside out.
I had seen it as a child. Corpses of our kin. Bodies, after life had seeped from their nostrils, bloated in the summer heat, the flies rubbing their legs with glee, pricking the flesh and humming their dirge of dying. The spirit fought against the skin to escape and when the hide blistered and burst, the flesh peeled back to reveal the pink inner skin of death. Those of that pink skin were now here, the dead returned, and deadly turned, ghosts amongst us.
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