yorro-yorro

michael leunig never fails to impress
not only does he draw the best cartoons
but he can tell a great story as well
found the following as part of an article
in the melbourne age on this australia day
a story certainly worth remembering
so presented here for my posterity

I once lived in a small town in central Victoria, and there it was my good fortune to dwell in a house across the street from a little old lady named Mrs Heggie. She was a bright soul and I often found her rustling about like a wren in her front garden and took delight in chatting with her about whatever was at hand. One autumn morning we were talking about the news: a ghastly story of a young woman taken by a crocodile in the Prince Regent River of north-west Australia.

"Frightful creatures those big crocodiles," offered my neighbour, and I told her how I had only just recently met an old indigenous man from that country and how much he had enchanted me as he spoke about the beautiful dangers of life up there in the Kimberley.

"Oh yes, and who would that be?" inquired Mrs Heggie in the most excited and unusually pointed way.

"David Mowaljarlai was his name," I replied.

"Oh, and how is David these days?" she inquired in a matter-of-fact voice.

After a moment of blank incomprehension, I told her that he seemed fine and thought that perhaps she had misheard me or was having a mixed-up dotty moment and inquiring after somebody in her imagination.

"Do you know of David Mowaljarlai?" I asked.

"Oh yes, he was such a lovely young man; he rescued me from the plane crash."

What then followed in the sunshine of our quiet little street was Mrs Heggie's astonishing story.

She had worked on a mission in Kimberley during the 1930s where cyclones and pirates could suddenly descend from the sea to terrorise the community, and where the giant black crocodiles roamed freely along the river banks and shores of a wild land.

One day she had made a long and difficult journey in the region to attend to some practical business and was offered a quick ride back to the mission in a biplane piloted by a Salvation Army missionary.

"He was a good pilot but a dreadful navigator," recalled Mrs Heggie.

The plane got lost and ran out of fuel, resulting in an emergency landing on a mangrove flat surrounded by deep water and crocodiles in the Prince Regent River.

"We sat on the wings for nearly a week listening to the crocodiles underneath us at night and drank water we collected from the fabric of the plane. The Salvation Army man lost his nerve and I had to spend all my energy trying to calm him down. He was a terrible sook and this annoyed me very much.

"I told him that David from the mission would find us, as I believed he would. David and I had a special understanding of each other and he always seemed to know where I'd be.

"One morning I looked up and there across the water at the edge of the bush was David with his lovely smile. He had found us. He had the most beautiful smile. But you know, to this day, whenever the Salvation Army people come collecting at my door, I give them a donation but I always feel annoyed because of that pilot behaving like a frightened child — he really wasn't much help."

In later life David Mowaljarlai travelled the country and spoke urgently and eloquently of his concern for the wellbeing of white society, which he could see was suffering from a loss of spirit and an incomprehension of the land in which it lived.

His integrity and wisdom often included an important word from his Ngarinyin language: a word that could be very useful to this country in these depressed and anxious times. I use it often.

"Yorro-yorro" is the word — and it means "everything standing up alive" or "the spirit in the land that makes everything stand up alive".

Mrs Heggie had lots of yorro-yorro.

"Each day faces you like a murderer," said Mowaljarlai also — but he said it as an enlivening truth to stimulate the spirit and to remind us of yorro-yorro.

It's a beautiful Wandjina country word to use on Australia Day — or any other day, for that matter. David Mowaljarlai gave it to us and left us with it.

When you've got yorro-yorro you don't need a flag.