Dirt Poor Islanders

by Winnie Dunn

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'Islanders must do everything together. We painted ngatu together. We crossed the ocean together. We settled on isles together. We took up Christianity together. We entered into new citizenships together. We became wage workers together. We lived with generations upon generations stacked in fibro houses together. We became half-White together. We got nits together. We sooked together. We stayed poor together. Together. Together. Together.'

Meadow Reed used to get confused when explaining that she had grandparents from Australia, Tonga and Great Britain. She'd say she was full-White and full-Tongan, thinking that so many halves made separate wholes. Despite the Anglo-Saxon genetics that gave Meadow a narrow nose and light-brown skin, everybody who raised her was Tongan. Everybody who loved her was Tongan. This was what made her Tongan.

Growing up in the heat-hummed streets of Mt Druitt in Western Sydney, Meadow will face palangis who think they are better than Fobs, women who fall into other women, what it means to have many mothers, a playful rain and even Pineapple Fanta.

For this half-White, half-Tongan girl, the world is bigger than the togetherness she has grown up in. Finding her way means pushing against the constraints of tradition, family and self until she becomes whole in her own right. Meadow is going to see that being a dirt poor Islander girl is more beautiful than she can even begin to imagine.

Dirt Poor Islanders is a potent, mesmerising novel that opens our eyes to the brutal fractures navigated when growing up between two cultures and the importance of understanding all the many pieces of yourself.

'a loving, yet challenging, portrait of the Tongan-Australian community . . . this is truly groundbreaking fiction' MELISSA LUCASHENKO, Miles Franklin winning author of Too Much Lip

'ferocious and tender . . . no one is spared and so much is revealed, including the complexity and power of being Tongan.' SHANKARI CHANDRAN, Miles Franklin winning author of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens

'A fresh and vital new voice. The language dances on the page and creates vibrant characters alive and dripping with life.' FAVEL PARRETT, Miles Franklin shortlisted author of Past the Shallows

'I couldn't put it down. I laughed and I cried and I could smell the food and picture the places. Groundbreaking. Powerful. Brilliant. Masterpiece.' SELA AHOSIVI-ATIOLA

Release date: March 27, 2024

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 304

Sample

Blood soaked soil as flesh of flesh became full-form. A grounded woman, named Va’epopua, was crying under a toa tree. ‘Ah weh, ah weh.’ From above, the god of gods watched as his son was emerging, crown first. Fluids flowed from the depths of Va’epopua. Her son was born into earth, covered in kaka and tissue.

When her son took his first breaths, Va’epopua carried him to the edge of a nearby lagoon – a stretch of water that expanded horizon to horizon. Within gentle ripples, she cleaned her son’s soft scalp, which was the colour of bark. He wailed and wailed as the grounded woman’s thighs, thick as dirt, trembled in the wash.

Va’epopua gnashed at her son’s umbilical cord with her teeth and swore silence of her infidelity with divinity. Placing a kiss on her newborn’s wide forehead with soil-soaked lips she murmured, ‘We make of each other only.’

Alone, Va’epopua raised her son. Taught him the ways of fonua, the earth. Talo, ‘ufi and manioke were to always be planted in sets of three. Brown coconut was for milking, whereas green coconut was for juicing. All seafood was permitted for consumption except for turtle; its shell was the sacred mound on which they sailed through the endless moana.

As the toa tree grew ever taller, so too did the boy. From sand to sprout to leaves to fruit – it became clear to him that everything emerged from somewhere. So, when his arms became as lanky as brambles, the demi-god questioned his mother. ‘What are we made from?’

Va’epopua sifted through shells with her starfish-wide palms and replied, ‘Land.’

The lagoon stretched further still and so too did the demi-god. From coral to seaweed to salt to wave – it became clearer to him that everything emerged in pairs. Somehow, he knew that he could not be made of woman alone. So, when the demi-god’s calves became as wide as stumps, he questioned his grounded mother yet again. ‘I am made from what?’

Slowly planting taro with her stiff knuckles and gnashing inside her cheeks, Va’epopua whispered, ‘Different.’

When the earth and demi-god could no longer expand and there was nothing more to know below, Va’epopua pointed sky-wards. From bark to flesh to cloud to heaven, she could no longer hide her shame from her son. In a hollow tone she confessed, ‘Majesty.’

The grounded woman watched through saltwater as her son ascended, crown first, upon the branches of the toa tree. The demi-god climbed into Pulotu – the spiritual realm – where the god of gods was awaiting the return of his seed.

Speak English, you savage. That’s what the pālangi said as soon as they heard my grandmother’s voice. Especially Sharon, the Bogan who lived across from us. An inflatable pool sat idly on her front lawn and shone stark white in the suburban sun. Like a wax-coated skeleton, Shazza stood dripping next to her wheelie bins. The streets of Mount Druitt hummed with heat yet I was shivering behind my grandmother.

Nana yelled back in Tongan, ‘Pālangi fie me’a!’ This roughly translated to, ‘All White people think they are better than us!’

Shazza stared us down like we were a segment on 60 Minutes and stomped her thongs on the concrete driveway as if she understood what my grandmother was saying. The slap of Shazza’s rubber soles echoed throughout the western suburbs before she shrieked at us, ‘Pack ya hula-hula crap and shove it! It can’t be out on public property like that, ya loon.’ Shazza’s saggy pale skin was sunburnt in the spots her Australian flag bikini didn’t cover. The ‘hula-hula crap’ was our ngatu – a type of Tongan mat. My grandmother’s ngatu was spread out underneath us and all across our front yard until it spilled onto the footpath in front of our house.

Nana and I had spent all morning painting patterns on the flattened mulberry bark as she taught me every shape. Fo’i hea to mark the plantings of taro, manioke and ‘ufi. Manulua to symbolise the winged meeting of two birds. Vakatou to illustrate the double-hulled canoe that allowed us to be the first seafaring people of the world. Fakamalu’okatea, which was Nana’s favourite design because it revealed the story of a woman who gave birth under a toa tree. Even though my grandmother never said it to me, I reckoned fakamalu’okatea was her favourite because Nana was also born under the shade of fronds, which had spread over the ground of our village, Malapo.

As the sun wore into evening, I looked up at Nana from the ngatu. This close, I saw that the marks on my grandmother’s face were like the shapes on the ngatu. A blotch under her left eye, like a rock, was my father. A cluster of beauty spots on the bridge of her nose were my aunties, Meadow, Jasmine, Heilala, Lily and Daisy. In wrinkles by my grandmother’s mouth was my uncle Talasi and Nana’s husband, Tupou. And somewhere in the folds of her pores were my brother Jared, my sister Nettie and me.

Crows croaked above us on powerlines and the shadows of palm trees grew over us. My fingers curled around the thin handle of a paintbrush, with its bristles coated in thick black ink. The backs of my hands held the weight of Nana’s melon palms as she helped me outline the ancient markings of our ancestors. Together, we traced back to a time when Tonga was nothing but earth.

‘Ta’e. Ta’e. Ta’e.’ I heard these words as if my grandmother was speaking in the broken English she reserved for me and my siblings because we didn’t speak Tongan. ‘Kaka. Kaka. Full you of kaka!’ Nana’s puckered brown mouth was curved downwards like an inverted crescent moon. Her afro, a black cloud, waved back and forth.

Shazza banged her bony fists on the lids of her wheelie bins, and started to drag her Bogan trash down to the kerb. But she kept her blue-eyed glare on us. ‘This here Ozstrayla dammit, eff off to Fiji.’

Spitting back in full Tongan, my nana raised both of her fists, which were the size of rockmelons. I only found out later that Nana was cursing Sharon for being a dole-bludging meth-head harlot while she, my grandmother, slaved away at Arnott’s biscuit factory just to put corned beef on the table. ‘Youse fink you pore? Me know pore.’

Shazza shoved up a rude finger at us, as if the gesture could return us to the tiny islands from which my nana came. I shivered again. But not me, not me. I was born here.

Shazza was so focused on flipping us off that she forgot about her kiddie pool. Her heels wobbled against plastic sides until she stumbled into the water. The wheelie bins fell sideways and spilled open – revealing crushed VB cans, emptied Weet-Bix boxes and stubbed ciggies.

Nana cackled like a fire was emanating from a deep and righteous place inside her.

Sharon flayed her lanky limbs. ‘Watch it, lady! I’ll deck ya on that bloody footpath.’

Nana kept laughing, her afro vibrating.

Shazza stomped back into her house with the Union Jack of her bikini bottom disappearing beneath her coccyx bone.

Once more, I shivered behind my grandmother’s back. The streets of Mount Druitt slowly closed in around me as if it was a city to be destroyed by God; reverting me to the dirt of my ancestors.

I never painted ngatu with my grandmother again.

4 Avery Street was my nana’s first real home. A fiftieth birthday present from her seven children: my father, Aunty Meadow, Aunty Jasmine, Aunty Heilala, Aunty Lily, Aunty Daisy and Uncle Talasi. It was my home too, but only on the weekends. My dad would drop off his first three kids, and then he’d go back to his second wife, step-son and my two baby half-sisters.

Nailed to the front of the heavy wooden door of my Nana’s house was a red and gold plaque that read, ‘Fe’ofa’aki’, which meant ‘Love one another’. ‘My home, as home God, we luff,’ Nana explained, tears running down her face as she swallowed the gift her children bestowed upon her. The Home of Fe’ofa’aki was a red and cream two-storey structure made of cement and wrought iron; flanked by two wide and blossoming palm trees.

When I first saw my nana’s house, I thought it was a castle right in the middle of Mount Druitt.

‘Nah, some Wogs built it in the sixties and then some Lebbo druggos bought it in the nineties and trashed it. That’s why we could afford it,’ my aunty Meadow clarified.

The night she explained that to me, Aunty Meadow’s weight was wrapped tightly in a giant towel. I watched as she patted dry her bare breasts, stomach and thighs – which all fell into each other in fleshy, fair and freckly folds.

‘Got my rags!’ she lamented. ‘All these cramps but I can’t have kids because I got the shallow end of the gene pool. What a burden.’ There were streaks of red within her towel’s fibres.

I shrugged. ‘You got me.’

For the rest of the night, Aunt Meadow and I caught a re-run of The Lion King on the Foxtel she’d bought five years earlier, back when we lived in housing commission. The little black subscription box was the most expensive tech we owned and it served as a reminder that Aunty Meadow was fulfilling her duties of providing for the family as Nana’s eldest daughter and my mehekitanga.

Of all my aunties, I was Meadow. We were the same: both the first-born daughters, both half-Tongan and half-White, and both named ‘Meadow’. Aunty Meadow taught me that in English our name meant ‘a piece of grassland’ and in Tongan we were simply ‘grass’. This was the reason we were sometimes called by the nickname ‘Musie’. But we rarely referred to each other this way. To me, my aunty was ‘Lahi’, meaning ‘senior’. To Lahi, I was ‘Si’i’, meaning ‘junior’. We even shared our name, according to Lahi, with the daughter of a mobster in some show I wasn’t allowed to watch. Typical.

Eventually Lahi went on to explain, like an encyclopedia, that for Tongans, the more names a person was given the more important they were. Among all my names, it took me ages to memorise my actual and full one: Meadow Kakala Theresa Fe’ofa’aki Reed. Every distant relative I ever came across took the time to recite each title like I was part of the royal family. But I only liked my last name because it sounded the same as ‘read’.

Even though I only visited 4 Avery Street on weekends and school holidays, it was our first real home. The house lives in my memory like a permanent resident. Nana exists on the outside; painting ngatu or tending to her garden along the wrought-iron fence.

One Saturday, I was helping Nana pull weeds. All day we uprooted large clumps of bindis, buckhorn and tiny clusters of clovers. When I wanted a break, I grabbed bundles of roots and ran over to the storm drain just past our house and stuffed the weeds in the gutter. There, I peeked a glimpse over at Sharon’s house.

I hadn’t seen Shazza since the incident with the wheelie bins. The Wogs next door – on our side of Avery Street – said she had become a recluse after her son died of a meth overdose. I stared at Shazza’s dilapidated bungalow, with the grass of her front lawn grown to knee height, until I noticed her blinds moving. I rushed back to my grandmother.

‘Pālangi fie me’a,’ Nana reminded me through a breathy laugh. The tanned soft-firm skin of her upper arms shook like clipped bird wings.

Nana paused to rip an aloe from its stem and showed me the thick clear sap oozing from its open wound. She explained in a mixture of Tongan and English, ‘Put open on pala me show me show.’ She brought the aloe vera flesh to an old graze on my knee, which I had gotten from tripping while playing footy with my brother, Jared. I was so unco for a Fob, probably from being half-pālangi. The aloe vera cooled the fresh whitish skin of my scab and left a sticky sheen. The tickly sensation made me giggle. From a thin, still-growing tree, Nana plucked nonu, white-yellow fruit, which reminded me of the grubs in Pumbaa’s mouth.

I had watched The Lion King one hundred and twenty-seven times because Mufasa’s death reminded me of my mummy, Le’o. Mummy died and crossed an unwinding path into heaven months and months ago. With each re-run, I sat with my nose pressed up against the bulky TV screen just as Mufasa fell from the cliffside and into the stampede below. ‘Nooooooo,’ I whispered along with Simba as I remembered how my mummy was placed in a box and lowered into a dark, dark hole dug out of the mud at Rookwood Cemetery.

With her melon palms, Nana crushed the fruit until its juice ran out from her clenched fist. ‘Drink from tha nonu an’ no mo’ pala in hea.’ My grandmother pulled back her full brown lips to reveal bark-coloured gums and gold-plated front teeth. In the back of her mouth were dark, dark gaps. I drew my own lips down and swore to gee-oh-dee that it was the nonu which made Nana’s teeth fall out.

When my grandmother saw my resistance, she scoffed and bit into the nonu herself. She warned, ‘You puke, you get big sick, no come me.’

Mixed in with these medicine plants were rose bushes of every colour. Nana’s first husband, Liam, who was English-Scottish, had introduced her to roses.

Liam left our family when my dad was still a boy. He went back to England and then back to Scotland and then married an Irish-Welsh lady. Or so I heard when my aunties serious-talked. Apparently Liam became dead to our family when he didn’t show up for the birth of his first granddaughter: me. We carried his pālangi last name, Reed, like a tomb-stone. Lahi, who knew more than any wizard at Hogwarts, once explained to me the meaning of our leftover last name. ‘British and Scottish origin. Means someone with red hair.’ Then she tightened her black low-ponytail with a grimace.

Despite all that, I knew Liam was the only reason my nana was able to bring our family to Australia. I pieced all this together from years of overheard serious-talk between my aunts, who believed I was too young to understand.

Nana was forced to leave Tonga as a teenager because she fell in love with a poor village boy – ‘poor’ as in ‘worth less than the dirt on his feet’.

‘‘Ikai’, meaning ‘No’, was all my nana’s father, Great-Grandpa Palisi, needed to say in his Catholic preacher voice to end the relationship. Hours later, Great-Grandpa Palisi shipped Nana off to New Zealand. There, she stayed with her aunt Hina, who was my great-aunt.

Named after an old god, Great-Aunt Hina taught my grandmother how to dress in flared pants and loose floral button-downs – a world away from Tonga’s plain grey dresses, ta’ovala and sandals. As Nana grew into adulthood, she came to love her aunt so much that she even denounced the Catholicism of her father and converted to her aunt’s Wesleyan church.

It was at the Wesleyan church, while trimming a bouquet of roses for the minister’s podium, that Nana met Grandpa Liam. Tired with his life in England, Liam had travelled to New Zealand by boat and then joined the church for a bit of fun. (He was also bored of his own Catholic upbringing). Upon witnessing my nana’s melon fingers gracefully cutting rose stems with a rusted kitchen knife, Liam bent on one knee.

‘‘Io’, meaning ‘Yes’, was all Great-Aunt Hina needed to say, in her Wellington College of Education studies voice, to secure the relationship. As mehekitanga, Great-Aunt Hina knew too well that her teaching degree could not bring the remainder of our family to New Zealand. Only a White man held such powers.

Shortly after their marriage, Liam and my grandmother migrated to Sydney. Their move was made easy, firstly, because of Liam’s British citizenship. And, secondly, because Grandpa Liam lied and said my grandmother was Māori, who were the only Islanders exempt from the White Australia Policy.

By the time Liam and Nana’s first son, my father, was born, the White Australia Policy had ended and my grandmother had already listed tens of tens of tens of family members ready to immigrate. Shortly after my aunty Jasmine’s birth in the early 1980s, my grandparents were divorced, but by then all of our family had obtained permanent visas. Yet, even with so many more empty mouths, Liam left an empty bank account and a ‘no return’ address – swearing he’d given enough charity to our family and our culture to last several lifetimes.

Being one of the first Tongan women to marry, bear children with, and then divorce a young White man, my grandmother ensured we were among the first Tongans to live in Australia as ‘Australians’.

From Great-Grandpa Palisi, who shipped his own daughter away from her land. From the pālangi, Liam, who left his Tongan bride better yet worse off. To Tupou, the Tongan man Nana married after all this, who did nothing but piss his wife off. ‘Da old god come bird. Swoop-swoop an’ snip-snipi da worm. For make man. Si’i. Memba. All man kai tha dirt. Disgust! But no-no dis. Dat paku days. Tēvolo timi.’

I knew kai was ‘eating’ and tēvolo meant ‘devils’ but as if I could know-know everything my grandmother was saying. Instead, I just rubbed at my temples and watched as she tended to her flowers – spraying extra water on the petals purple in hue. Maybe all Nana’s history was predetermined by a higher power. After all, my grandmother’s Tongan name was Losē, meaning that her English name was Rose.

Only my grandmother’s melon hands could open the House of Fe’ofa’aki. Her palms were plump and pleated by the years she worked at Arnott’s biscuit factory in North Strathfield. Even though we didn’t live at Nana’s, we spent so many weekends there that I knew the house like it was my own.

The front of Fe’ofa’aki unlocked to a small hallway made of wood. On the left was a massive archway that marked the entrance into the living room. On the right was the flimsy door to my aunty Jasmine’s room.

Aunty Jasmine was the third-eldest child, born after my father and Aunty Meadow. She was the biggest woman in our family. Her full tummy fell down in one lump all the way to her skinny knees. ‘Changerooms in Target call me an apple like the forbidden fruit,’ she once explained while rolling her body around like a swollen snake. In Tongan, Aunty Jasmine’s name was Sesimina, which is why we sometimes called her ‘Big Sesi’ instead of her full English name. In the days I spent within the House of Fe’ofa’aki, everyone knew each other in both English and Tongan because it was what we were made out of – whiteness and dirt.

Hung beside Aunty Jasmine’s bedroom door was a framed picture of the Virgin Mary standing in a field . . .