KILL TO EAT (4TH YEAR-LITERATURE)

"Kill to Eat”

My father worked for the Government as a
ganger of an Aboriginal workforce that helped
to build roads, load and unload the supply ships,
and carry out all the menial tasks around the
island. For this work he received a small wage
and rations to feed his seven children. (I was the
third-eldest daughter.) We hated the white man’s
rations—besides, they were so meagre1 that even
a bandicoot2 would have had difficulty existing
on them. They used to include meat, rice, sago,3
tapioca,4 and on special occasions, such as the
Queen’s Birthday festival, one plum pudding.
Of course, we never depended upon the rations
to keep ourselves alive. Dad taught us how to
catch our food Aboriginal style, using discarded
materials from the white man’s rubbish dumps.
We each had our own slingshots to bring down
the blueys and greenies—the parrots and lorikeets5
that haunted the flowering gums. . . .
One rule he told us we must strictly obey. When
we went hunting, we must understand that our
weapons were to be used only for the gathering
of food. We must never use them for the sake of
killing. This is, in fact, one of the strictest laws
of the Aborigine, and no excuse is accepted for
abusing it.
One day we five older children, two boys and
three girls, decided to follow the noise of the
blueys and greenies screeching from the flowering
gums.6 We armed ourselves with our slingshots
and made our way towards the trees.
My sisters and I always shot at our quarry
from the ground. The boys would climb onto the
branches of the gum trees, stand quite still, and
pick out the choicest and healthiest birds in the
flock. My elder brother was by far the best shot
of all of us. He was always boasting about it,
too. But never in front of our mother and father,
because he would have been punished for his
vanity. He only boasted in front of us, knowing that
we wouldn’t complain about him to our parents.
The boys ordered us to take up our positions
under the trees as quietly as possible. “Don’t
make so much noise!” they told us. In spite of
the disgust we felt for our boastful brother, we
always let him start the shooting. He was a dead
shot, and we all knew it. Now we watched as
he drew a bead on the large bluey straight across
from him. The bird seemed intent on its honey
gathering from the gum tree. We held our breath,
and our brother fired.
Suddenly there was a screeching from the
birds and away they flew, leaving my brother as
astonished as we were ourselves. He had been so
close to his victim that it seemed impossible he
should have missed . . . but he had. We looked
at him, and his face of blank disbelief was just
too much for us. We roared with laughter. My
other brother jumped to the ground and rolled
over and over, laughing his head off. But the
more we laughed, the angrier my elder brother
became.
Then, seeming to join in the fun, a kookaburra7
in a nearby tree started his raucous8 chuckle,
which rose to full pitch just as though he, too,
saw the joke.
In anger my elder brother brought up his
slingshot and fired blindly at the sound. “Laugh
at me, would you!” he called out. He hadn’t even
taken time to aim.
Our laughter was cut short by the fall of the
kookaburra to the ground. My brother, horrified,
his anger gone, climbed down and we gathered
silently around the stricken bird. That wild aim
had broken the bird’s wing beyond repair. We
looked at each other in frightened silence,
knowing full well what we had done. We had
broken that strict rule of the Aboriginal law. We
had killed for the sake of killing, and we had
destroyed a bird we were forbidden to destroy.
The Aborigine does not eat the kookaburra. His
merry laughter is allowed to go unchecked, for
he brings happiness to the tribes. We call him our
brother and friend.
We did not see our father coming towards us.
He must have been looking for firewood. When
he came upon us, we parted to allow him to see
what had happened. He checked his anger by

remaining silent and picking up a fallen branch.
Mercifully he put the stricken bird out of its
misery. Then he ordered us home. . . .
Father spoke for the first time since we had
killed the kookaburra. He asked for no excuses
for what we had done, and we did not offer any.
We must all take the blame. That is the way of
the Aborigine. Since we had killed for the sake of
killing, the punishment was that for three months
we should not hunt or use our weapons. For
three months we would eat only the white man’s
hated rations.
During those three months our stomachs
growled, and our puzzled dog would question
with his eyes and wagging tail why we sat around
wasting our time when there was hunting to
be done.
It happened a long time ago. Yet in my dreams,
the sad, suffering eyes of the kookaburra, our
brother and friend, still haunt me.

1 lacking in quality or quantity,
scanty
2small marsupial that eats insects
and plants
3starchy food from the sago palm
4thickener, often prepared as
pudding
5small Australian parrot
6tree that yields gum
7brownish kingfisher bird whose
call sounds like laughter