I Knew You'd Have Brown Eyes by Mary Tennant Page B

foreign lands. I tossed and turned in my bed but by morning I was up and ready to face the challenges ahead of me. Marie stayed for a few days and filled my head with so much information that it was a relief when it was time for her to leave. I took her to the plane in the blue Toyota. She was sad to be leaving. She’d worked at Gapuwiyak for four years.
    ‘The health workers will look after you,’ she said. ‘They’re a good bunch. And I’m in Gove, so you can call me on the radio any time.’
    Back at the clinic I set about learning about my new career. I was determined to learn as much as I could about these Aboriginal people who had occupied the land for thousands of years. There were some books in the clinic, which I took home and read at night. During the day, when I wasn’t attending to patients, I familiarised myself with the clinic equipment.
    ‘Yapa, this boy needs to go to hospital,’ Yananbuy said.
    ‘Why do you think that?’
    ‘His ’emaglobin is four point two.’ She was holding up a small machine and pointing to his reading. The Aboriginals couldn’t pronounce an ‘h’, but I knew what Yananbuy meant.
    ‘Put his name on the list and we’ll talk to the doctor.’
    How do these kids survive on such low haemoglobin levels?
    I was attending to another lady who had one-month-old twins.
    ‘Greta, they have scabies again,’ I said. ‘Did you wash all their clothes and bedsheets?’
    ‘She doesn’t have a washing machine,’ Maynbunu said. She was standing next to me attending to her patient, who had a thermometer in his mouth.
    ‘Really? Where does she live?’
    ‘In that camp on the road out of town.’
    After the morning clinic Maynbunu and I drove to the camp. It was on the outskirts of the tiny town. As we jumped out of the car, I took in the scene. Greta and her twins lived on a platform with a corrugated iron roof but no walls. It was just big enough for her mattress, which had no sheets. Behind it was a small brick room where I could see a fireplace.
    ‘The kitchen?’
    Maynbunu nodded.
    ‘How many people live around here?’
    ‘Depends, Yapa. When there’s a ceremony could be twenty.’
    ‘Where do they all sleep?
    ‘On the ground, but they share the kitchen.’
    ‘Where’s the bathroom?’
    ‘No bathroom. They use the bush.’
    After that I drove to Greta’s shed each day and brought her, the twins and their clothes to the clinic where we had a washing machine and a baby bath. On the weekends she would bring her twins to my house on the way to the store and I babysat them while she shopped.
    Each morning we would see anything from twenty to fifty patients, a large percentage of the small community of around four hundred. I soon became familiar with the treatment for scabies, intestinal worms and infections that ranged from ears to lungs to skin. If we needed to consult a doctor we asked the patient to return after lunch, when we could talk to a doctor over the two-way radio, since we had no phone. This schedule was called a medical sched, because it was the time when the medical centres in our region were scheduled to use the radio. The doctors were based at Gove Hospital. One came to Gapuwiyak once a fortnight and on those days we lined up all of our sickest patients, who invariably went back with them on the plane to be admitted to hospital.
    After the medical sched we had a general sched in which an Aerial Medical Service nurse based at Gove Hospital called each of the rural health centres one by one to receive and report news. They could be very entertaining and gossipy. More than anything, they briefly connected us to the outside world. The health workers and I would make a cup of coffee and sit around the radio, listening to conversations from the other health centres until it was our turn.
    On one occasion we had a patient who had a leg amputated in Darwin Hospital. According to tradition, not only the bodies of the dead but also body parts need a burial ceremony. So