Marngit Story

Marngit
B. Wongar

When white surveyors come to the bush no-one seemed to know how vast was the baru, Crocodile People Country; even Marngit the tribal healer felt confused when it came to the local boundaries. The land stretched from the seashore inland toward distant ranges as far as monsoons could venture. Through it flowed bowana, river, meandering over the long alluvial plain toward mangrove swamps: ‘It follows the way of Mari, tribal ancestors,’ they told the whites.
The whites boiled their billy on the campfire and handed Marngit a cup of tea with a lump of sugar. They showed him a map, trying to explain that the country lies according to a certain longitude, the word and the number of which meant nothing to the tribal healer. He believed that the land, seen on the paper must belong to someone else and not him; bowana was his though. ‘It marks the way our mari traveled inland.’ The whites poured him another cup of tea and told him to take as many biscuits as he liked. They stuck a white peg near the riverbank and later left behind a whole line of them as they moved upstream across the plain. Marngit thought the pegs were merely a mark to find your way back to camp when you go through dense forest. He told the whites how during wongar, beginning of the world, his tribal ancestor Baru, crocodile, was chased from the mangrove swamps inland by Jambawal, the thunder man, with his lightning spear. The ancestor, badly wounded in a hind leg, moved through the plain with the help of his tail, thrusting it left and right. Those tail marks later turned into water bands as the river meandered along; there are about as many of them as a man can count on the fingers of both hands. While the visitors cut their way through dense forest Marngit told them that in his way inland his ancestors gathered a pile of wood and leaves and tried to make a nest A monsoon storm sent after him by Jambawal brought torrential rain, the water washed away the nest and scattered he eggs through the plain. The eggs turned into billabongs.
Later on, when he had moved deeper inland, Baru laid another clutch of eggs. ‘Our tribal people hatched from them,’ Marngit told the surveyors, ’ever since those mythical times humans have been harassed by Jambawal’s gales and lightning as much as Baru was.’ The whites topped up his cup of tea with Bacardi and told him that with the smell of rum about no malignant spirit would ever be seen again. They asked Marngit to call in his other tribesmen to the camp for cuppa.
Marngit explained that he was the only one left of the Baru people. The last monsoon hit the country so badly the people, fearing they might be washed away to sea, turned into trees to stay holding on to the land. ‘Look, they’re everywhere around us.’ He told the whites that from one end of the country to the other each of the trees is a human afraid of the storm.
Since the trees couldn’t walk the whites kindly offered to take their magic cure against the storm, wind and cold, to them. They loaded a consignment of Bacardi on a helicopter and flying over the green canopy below, sprinkled a drink on each tree so that it would grow stronger, and hold firm against monsoons.
Marngit died not long after his visitors left and the name of his country appeared on the Stock Exchange to tell the world of the vast resources of woodchips and timber to be harvested from the monsoon-saturated bush. The old healer turned into a tree, sprung from a pile of bottles the whites left behind at their surveying camp site. That was only for a while though; as the bulldozers moved in they uprooted and pushed him into the river. It appeared at first that the water might be safer than the land; Marngit pleaded to his Mari, to change him into a Baru.
Being a crocodile he could’ve moved downstream and hide in estuary swamps covered with layers of crushed wood and bark floating on the surface. He hoped that after the whites had cut down the last tree they would leave the bare land and then if you walked into the country and laid a clutch if eggs, man and plants would come back again.