Good reading. Kim Scott’s words about Australian nature and aboriginal culture are always enchanting and killing. I can even smell the earth and ocean. Then I feel like drowning… and… Proud.
“On a sunny day, walking a long arm of rock beside a calm ocean, you see the water suddenly bulging as a great bubble comes to the surface and oh! water streams from barnacled flesh and there is the vast back of a whale. You are enclosed in moist whale breath.
Barnacles stud the smooth dark skin, and crabs scurry across it. That black back must slippery, treacherous like rock… but you see the hole in it’s back, the breath going in and out, and you think of all the blowholes along this coast; how a clever man can slip into them, fly inland one moment, back to ocean the next.
Always curious, always brave, you take one step and the whale is underfoot. Two steps more and you are sliding, sliding deep into a dark and breathing cave that resonates with whale song. Beside you beats a blood-filled heart so warm it could be fire.
Plunge your hands into that whale heart, lean into it and squeeze and let your voice join the whales’ roar. Sing that song your father taught you as the whale dives, down, deep.
How dark is it beneath the sea, and looking through the whale’s eyes you see bubbles slide past you like…”
- Kim Scott, THAT DEAMAN DANCE.
