Tears of the Moon - Di Morrissey [185]
Maya sipped her tea and gave a tremulous smile. ‘That sounds right to me. I guess it’s certainly time to go and see my family again.’
Minnie nodded with satisfaction. ‘The little one should go too, though she’s a bit young for the ceremony, to understand what that means.’ Minnie pointed to the pendant around Maya’s neck. ‘Your father understands all this. You tell him Minnie said it’s time you go south.’
Tyndall agreed immediately when Maya told him of her conversation with Minnie. ‘The old girl is right. These women have played an important part in our life … they are connected to your great-grandmother, your mother, you. They’ve played an important role in Olivia’s life, too. It’s a journey you must make, with Georgie.’
‘I’m a little nervous, but really looking forward to it.’
‘Listen to them, Maya. Not everyone does. Re-tie the knot with your family. I let go of mine and when I thought about making contact it was too late. You and Georgie are all the family I have.’ He dropped his arm about her shoulders and hugged her to him. ‘Tell you what, I’ll sail you down. We’ll take Minnie, make it a sort of family pilgrimage.’
On the trip south on the Mist, Tyndall and Minnie sat on the deck with Georgie and Maya while Ahmed took the wheel. Tyndall told stories about the clan, about how they helped Olivia give birth to little James, the stories Niah had told him of her life and the tales her Macassan grandmother had told her of the family in the land of Marege at the end of the monsoon winds.
As they swung in close to the coast near Cossack, Maya spent a lot of time sitting quietly on deck looking at the shore, taking in the wild semi-arid beauty of it all and feeling for the first time in her life a real sense of belonging. Minnie sat nearby, also content to be with her own thoughts. At first Maya thought this sense of belonging was coming from the sea, for there was something comforting about the steady surging progress of the schooner through the ocean, relying on the wind, on nature. She couldn’t help but think about her ancestors who in the distant past had sailed these winds, these waters. Like her, they had been on a journey, a journey with many unknowns. But it was now the land that dominated her thoughts. There was a harshness about it that was uninviting, yet she was increasingly conscious that the land was reaching out to her somehow. She felt a slowly rising excitement and an impatience to get ashore, to feel earth under her feet. It was hard to understand, impossible to explain, so she said nothing.
Minnie broke the silence. ‘Gettin’ close to our country. That one bilong our mob I reckon,’ she said, indicating a broken spiral of smoke that suddenly rose from a headland.
Maya felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up and smiled at her father and he smiled back. ‘We’ll be dropping anchor in a bit.’
No sooner had the schooner settled into the anchorage than a group of Aborigines walked out of the scrub and onto the beach, waving and cooeeing.
‘How did they know we were here?’ asked Maya, puzzled by the unexpected appearance of the welcoming party.
‘Bush telegraph,’ replied Tyndall enigmatically. ‘Don’t ask me to explain it. Just believe it works.’
The dinghy was surrounded as soon as some of the men had hauled it up on the beach. There was huge excitement among the women at the sight of Maya, because of the pendant she was wearing outside her blouse. Maya stood beside the boat smiling at everyone as Tyndall went through the formalities of briefly acknowledging the elders in their language and Minnie was emotionally