Deborah Bird Roseand my plan was to take the visitors to the park and then stop by the
little bush town of Batchelor on the way home to introduce them to
Nancy Daiyi, the senior woman for the country. I rang her first, to
ask if this was ok. She said yes, and I asked if I could take them into
an area where the water is free of tourists and where the mermaid
custodians of the country are said to live peacefully (Rose 2002 ). She
agreed to that too. Late in the day, we got to Batchelor, and I told her
what we’d done and said that I’d made sure to splash water on the
visitors. She asked if I had called out, and I said no. In her grumpy
and imperious way, she said I should have called out to the old peo-
ple. I was not aware that I was authorized to do that, and I had to
tell her that I didn’t know how. She told her daughter Linda to show
me, and Linda did.
I should state that Nancy’s pedagogy works like this. Her default
position is that the people around her are intelligent and competent
and have observed what to do and know how to do it. She doesn’t
praise people for getting things right; she just growls at them for get-
ting them wrong. I knew why she was saying what she was saying, and
I could appreciate why she was annoyed. However, the following year,
I made the same trip with my young niece, and although I knew I was
supposed to call out, I could not bring myself to do it. I just couldn’t.
What I remember is that my throat wouldn’t work.
I now jump to the year 2001 , when my sister Mary visited me in
Canberra. We drove to Darwin by way of the Birdsville track, the Vic-
toria River District, and Kakadu National Park. We went out to the
Vic River, and when we got to one of the main crossings, we stopped.
I took Mary down to the riverside, got a cup of water and splashed
her, and called out loud and clear. I addressed Jessie, and my voice
was absolutely right.
A question I ask myself retrospectively is: why was I able to call out
in one area and not in another? The quick answer is that in one area
I had spent years of my life fishing with Jessie; we were there together
all up and down this river. On top of that, Jessie, my friend, was dead,
and thus when I called out I could address someone I had known and
been close to. These are good personal and social reasons for the dif-
ference, but they actually are not experientially what the difference