Lyrebird Hill by Anna Romer Read Free Book Online

shuddering in fear.
    I turned to see Jindera watching me, as she often did, from the darkness of her hut. Her eyes were velvet-black, her smile warm. She beckoned me in.
    A sweet, pungent odour lingered in the confined space, perhaps kangaroo from last night’s feast. Jindera spread a beaten bark mat across the dirt floor and we sat upon it. Placing my journal between us on the mat, she reached for a hide pouch of water and passed it to me. I drank thirstily, then handed the pouch back to Jindera and wiped my lips. Jindera drank, then set the pouch aside and took up my book.
    Carefully she opened to the page I had been working on. It was a rock orchid, its delicate pink throat freckled with brown markings. It was common to this area, springing up in early summer, its brilliant colouring leaping from the grey-green foliage of the bush.
    Jindera did not speak, but pleasure radiated from her. I knew she wasn’t admiring the drawings for their beauty. She had often tried to explain that her people’s drawings captured the spirit of the creatures and plant life they depicted. She said their paintings called to those spirits in the language of dreams.
    My paintings – the flowers and seedpods, orchids and ferns and gumnuts that proliferated on the rocky granite slopes of Lyrebird Hill – were of interest to Jindera because she understood my passion for learning about their healing or dietary properties. Although the subjects of my botanical drawings were beautiful and oftentimes strange, they were not for decoration alone.
    Since the age of fifteen, I had spent every moment of my spare time compiling notes and creating detailed watercolours that catalogued all the edible and medicinal plants known to Jindera. She had asked permission from the clan elders, who had at firstforbidden her to speak to me. Much danger , they had warned, but how much danger could there be in the friendship between two women? Besides, Jindera had existed on the periphery of my life since I was a baby. My frequent visits to the camp had begun when I was fourteen, when we had formed a strong and unbreakable bond. So Jindera had persisted with the elders, and finally – after I presented them with my father’s old muzzleloader, with which they could shoot wallaby – they eventually agreed.
    Jindera paused at a sketch of tubular pink blossoms. Her fingers hovered over the neat lines of copperplate. Though she had no use for reading, I suspected she knew those words by rote. I’d read them aloud to her so many times, page after page until my throat was hoarse. We’d picked over each description in our stolen hours together, Jindera making corrections, adding new facts that occurred to her, snippets of memory, old stories from the vast reserves passed on to her by Mee Mee or one of the other elders. Meanwhile I scribbled frantically – dashing out notes, refining my descriptions, clarifying names – in a bid to keep up with her.
    I tapped the page she was studying.
    ‘That’s the correa we found on the flatlands that day, on the place where the clan fought that southern tribe, do you remember?’
    Jindera shook her head and laughed, her eyes gleaming. Reaching out, she gently squeezed my wrist. ‘You got good memory, Bunna. That happen twenty year before you born.’
    I turned another page and pointed to a drawing of clustered leaves in the shape of four-leaf clovers.
    ‘And this fern, it was sprouting from a pile of wombat bones after the big rain last year.’
    Jindera nodded. ‘Nardoo. Hard time food.’
    I found myself going through the pages, pointing out drawings I considered particularly successful, or reading anecdotes that held special memories for us of shared adventures.
    Jindera reached for the water skin, and again we both drank. My heart was large with her unspoken approval. In our own way, we had fought an important battle – not with spears and nulla-nullas, but with brush and ink, with knowledge and quiet observation. My