Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss review – a mighty and generous heartsong
The river – the mighty Marrambidya – does not discriminate. “It does not care what colour a man’s skin is,” writes Anita Heiss. “It does not care how important you are to the people who love you, it does not care that one day it can provide you with life and the next it can take it from you.” The Wiradyuri people know the strength and rhythms of the river. They have tried to share their knowledge, but the white settlers haven’t listened (“We could teach them a lot, if they just listened”). It is the early 1850s, and the fledgling township of Gundagai has been built – with tenacious ignorance – on the flat of a floodplain. The river is waiting.
Anita Heiss’s indelible new novel, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (River of Dreams), begins on a sodden midwinter night, as the river breaks its banks and churns through Gundagai. The current is so ferocious it rips the clothes from bodies. Clinging to the roof of one of the town’s only stone houses, Wagadhaany – a Wiradyuri teenager – wills her father to find her.
It’s a scene embroidered from a true tale of extraordinary heroism. The Gundagai flood of 24 June 1852 remains Australia’s deadliest, with 89 lives lost. A pair of Wiradyuri men, Yarri and Jacky Jacky, saved more than 60 townsfolk from the seething river; Yarri spent three days and nights ferrying survivors to safety in his bark canoe, one by one. In Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray, Heiss conjures the story of Yarri’s proud daughter, an enslaved housemaid who is saved from the floodwater, but not free. “She is grateful to be alive,” Heiss writes. “But she hates that being alive reminds her that she is still powerless in her own life.”
There are books you encounter as an adult that you wish you could press into the hands of your younger self. Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray is one of those books – a novel that turns Australia’s long-mythologised settler history into a raw and resilient heartsong. Wagadhaany watches as her father is honoured in a town ceremony, but when it comes to the kind of recognition that matters – a wage for his work as a stockman, land title, access to medicine, the very basics of personhood – the praise amounts to nothing. The white men her father rescued will drive Wagadhaany’s family – her miyagan – out of their homeland. They will slaughter flocks of cockatoos to spare their wives the roosting noise; gut hundreds of emus because they’ve heard the birds swallow gold. As Wagadhaany grows, the griefs accrete.
The settler family that claims Wagadhaany as their servant – avaricious James Bradley, and his leering brother, David – have legacy building dreams. After the devastation of the Gundagai flood, they decide to seek their fortune elsewhere. Colonial law decrees that Wagadhaany must accompany the brothers, as if she were property, even though it means an indefinite separation from her country and kin. Might James’s new wife, Louisa, offer distraught Wagadhaany the quiet solace of friendship?
It’s a simple story, simply told: a young woman searching for herself and home
Heiss is an accomplished chronicler of the knots and nuances of female intimacy (see her 2014 novel Tiddas), and the tenuous friendship in this book is her best work. Louisa and Wagadhaany are trapped in a snarl of power, necessity, suspicion and genuine affection. Louisa is a Quaker – daughter of a chocolate magnate – aflame with virtuous ideals and reformist zeal. She’s come to New South Wales to campaign for racial equality, and Wagadhaany is essential to her plan: “A perfect conduit” to the Wiradyuri community. Does Louisa see Wagadhaany as a companion or a cause? Does she – can she – truly see Wagadhaany at all? “Louisa had been so focused on claiming Wagadhaany as family for herself,” Heiss writes. “She had not realised that she was not hers to claim.”
Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray is a novel of the myopia and cruelty of “good” intentions. It is also a joyful love story, and a literary celebration of the Wiradyuri language, which is woven throughout. Wagadhaany’s name means dancer, but the Bradley brothers never bother to learn it, and she is forbidden from using her mother tongue inside their house. Keeping the words alive in her mind is a potent act of defiance, and of belonging. For language is as much a territory as land, and as much a home – the site (and means) of memory and story and history. “Using Wiradjuri language on the cover of my novel (and throughout the text) makes a strong statement … regarding the reclamation and maintenance of the traditional language of my family,” Heiss has explained.
Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray is a book that families can share; a book that belongs in every high-school classroom in the country. It’s a simple story, simply told: a young woman searching for herself and home. Yet there is nothing simple about that search on the colonial frontier. In granting such intimate access to Wagadhaany’s mind, and to her anguished heart, Heiss invites readers to feel rather than watch her journey, and through her, to trace some of the old wounds in our country’s story. It is a mighty and generous invitation.
Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss is out now through Simon & Schuster
