Stories
Non-Fiction
Fiction
InformationMerry Koori Blak and Starry Whytte XMassive
He would often have company. I remember one morning when he had a younger Aboriginal man sitting next to him on a milk crate. This same man locked eyes with me and held out his arm. Our hands connected and we held our grip for a moment before releasing. Another morning I saw a tall blonde woman with a smoky voice standing over him, pointing her finger while yelling ”Uncle! Uncle!!” repeatedly. He just kept waving her away like she was a six foot fly. There were also weeks when all traces of him were gone, the tunnel clean and empty.
If you’ve never been to these tunnels before, these are signature pieces of Sydney architecture. 100 year old viaducts clad in Maroubra sandstone. They run about 25 metres long with a broad, gentle curvature that gives them their distinct look. Not round, more like a flattened oval. They provide shade and cool and protection from the noise of the city, which, I imagine is part of the attraction for Urrunga. They also provides the backdrop for the most magnificent mural that he has painted on the interior walls. I would take it in every week, I found it powerful and moving, but there was always this feeling that I was intruding on his private space, his private thoughts.
On any of the given weeks when Urrunga is there, his camp usually featured a makeshift tent, several blankets and cushions, as well as an assortment of drink bottles, tuna cans, chip packets, and art supplies. He gets fairly spread out. There are actually two under bridge tunnels, one right next to the station and one next to the park and he exclusively favours the park-side tunnel. My office is on Wentworth Avenue in Surry Hills so this is the tunnel that I pass through, along with an assortment of other commuters, at around 8:50am.
The morning I finally sit with Urrunga is my last work commute of the year. It’s not planned or expected. I’m actually not at my best. I hadn’t been sleeping well and I’m stressed over a looming project deadline. In fact I’m due to give a presentation that I’m largely unprepared, wrestling with feelings of resentment over compressed timelines and shrinking budgets.
On this morning I notice that the man—who I will soon come to know by name—is talking to himself with a particular intensity as people walk by. He’s agitated, like something has set him off, and he seems to want someone to listen and so I slow my walk until we make eye contact and he begins to talk to me directly. Taking this as an invitation to join him, I sit down and rather than reset or pause he simply continues on with his stream of thought and I try to keep up.
Urrunga doesn’t make a lot of eye contact, or if he does it’s hard to tell as most of his face is hidden in a dense scrub of grey hair. He also tends to direct his soft speech at the ground so words often get lost or muffled, but I hear enough to follow along. He seems to realise that I’m here to listen, not just toss a few coins and pass through, so gets a bit more comfortable, a bit more connected. His ranting crystallises into storytelling, and he asks me if I want him to make me a drawing, which, of course, I do.
“Got a pen?”
As I search my bag, I get a vision of my favourite ballpoint sitting on my bedside table. The one day I leave it at home. I pull my hands out and gesture with my empty palms.
“Don’t worry, I’ve probably got one here”
He digs into his many orderless possessions and pulls out a cracked clear biro with surprising speed and accuracy. Like he has a mental map of all his stuff. He then proceeds to tear the lid from a still-in-use pizza box, now a canvas. Two pigeons fly in, attracted to the smell of day old Margherita. As he shoos them away, they turn on each other, viciously snapping at each other’s faces.
At first he draws a large arrow patterned with the graphic from the Aboriginal flag, pointed towards the hole at the top of the pizza box. In one of the few times that he looks directly at me, he asks, rhetorically
“Where is it going?”
He then starts attacking in the centre of the lid with his pen, carving out rough, frantic lines. They get messier and messier until they start to form the wild, wirey mane of a man. As he draws, Urrunga shares vignettes from his life. He talks about how he and his sixteen brothers and sisters are all children of the Stolen Generation, and that he’d only met some of those who survived in recent years. While he doesn’t go into great detail about his boy’s home experiences, he tells me that he will never forgive the people there for the way that they treated him.
The face of the man in his drawing has grown to include a bare chest and a grass skirt, and then a double-jointed arm that ends in a giant boomerang. As he draws this he tells me about his regret over not being able to live in the traditional ways. He talks about his love of the bush and of waterholes and how much he hates wearing clothes and wishes he could just roam naked, especially in the hotter months. I pay attention to the heat radiating from the end of the tunnel. Two weeks earlier, temperates here hit a record of 37.8°C.
Urrunga tells me that he is a Yorta Yorta man, and he draws three bands across the biceps of his character. He says these represent the three rivers that flow into that region. He shares stories from home and not all of them are good, like the time when he was beaten up at a funeral by another man, possibly a brother, with a flagon of port. He also tells me about the time when he was bitten by a crab, and had a vision of a man with eight legs. Laughing about this he incorporates the crab into the drawing, transforming the mans’ other arm into a giant claw.
As he begins to work on the final details of the drawing, his focus again shifts to land “They’d probably treat me better if I owned real estate … but I don’t want to own real estate! You can’t own the land, the land owns us”. He begins to write down words and ideas for me to research later. He then adds one heart to the tip of the boomerang to represent himself and one to the bottom to represent me. In the space at the top, above the head, he writes: Merry Koori Blak and Starry White Massive.
The drawing is complete and our time draws to a close. I pay him for his work but before I go, I ask him about the mural that has been surrounding us this whole time - this psychedelic rainbow that radiates from the sandstone, covering nearly every inch. Within it are symbols and animals, people and words, songlines and handprints and depictions of country. It feels ancient and modern at the same time. Eternal. Urrunga tells me that the police have prevented him from adding to it and all I can say is that I hope it goes untouched by anyone else then. I hope it outlasts us all.
As I get back on my feet and agree to visit again, Urrunga, this man who is clearly suffering from depression, emphysema, and extreme poverty, wishes me a “Merry Christmas” and says “God Bless You”.
Turning onto Elizabeth Street, towards my destination, I see buildings, cars, and people—signs of life in constant motion—and yet all I can feel is loss. The whole city feels like a counterweight to what has been taken, as if it exists only because of what this man and his people have been denied. I imagine Urrunga, in a different past, or a different future, one that didn’t include us. In this vision, he still sits, chats, and draws, much like he is doing now, only he is truly free to do it.