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Dust to ClayBy Sue OaksThe dust was everywhere. Powdery dust which rose in clouds, found its way tothe women’s skin, clung to their legs, sticking, cloying to the damp sweat of their naked bodies as they circled around, pulsing to the beat of sticks, drums and heartbeats. Itmingled with the smoke from the fire in the centre, a fire from the branches and brackenthe women had collected earlier in the day and placed carefully in the circle of stones onthe flat, floury ground.Jo felt strangely free as she joined the circle of women, forgetting after a while tohide her eyes from the sight of all that naked flesh. She hadn’t looked at her own bodynaked since the boys were born, had quickly dressed and undressed and made love in thedark. There was no full-length mirror, no bath in which she could have watched her loosewhite stomach rise of its own accord. When she was pregnant, before they moved awayto this lonely town in the middle of nowhere, she had enjoyed watching her tight roundedabdomen as she lay in the warm water. Little bumps would appear where a tiny hand,foot or bottom was preparing for their departure from her womb. But after the birth her abdomen had turned to something alien, a part of her body which she barely recognised.Inside the dusty circle, the women were treading a path, some with their lower halves wrapped in the trademark pink sarong, others with bodies bared from head to toe.Their skin was white and virginal or brown with white marks, where bathers had protected vulnerable skin from UV rays, and some were brown all over. Whenever theycould they would swim in the river, a haven from the endless scorching days where thecool brown water would slide across their hot weary bodies. The river was low and it wasSue OaksCopyright February 20121
 
thickening each day. The paddle steamers pushed slowly through, sounding their horns astheir captains pushed on, defying nature’s cycle. Rain hadn’t touched this ground for months, endless months of ruined crops and empty tanks, crying babies and angry parents, mothers who now found solace in this long, slow, dance to the beat of drums andwooden sticks, in the deep red Mallee dust.‘I can’t go, what if someone from work finds out? The boys will think I’m crazy.There’s just too much work to do on the farm.’ Jo had hesitated as the excuses poured in but she stepped on the last bus as it turned its wheels on the red soil, leaving the crowdsof families, friends and television reporters to enjoy the festival without them. They wereheaded to an unknown, hidden location where they would attempt to invoke the raingods, to voice their protest against this pressing endless dry which threatened to dry their life-source to a trickle.When Jo was little she had lived in the bush, away from the main town and the prying eyes of the men and women who gossiped as they turned the goods in the shopsover in their sun-withered hands. Away from them sat the little weatherboard housewhere Jo’s family lived, which was framed with a forest of ironbark and wattle.Wildflowers grew with abandon, little egg and bacon bushes and flowering grasses whichdotted the undergrowth, emitting rich aromas which changed every season. There wasdust there too, but not this red dust, which enters a home uninvited during a storm and isfound in the strangest of places for months afterwards. There was no mirror in that littlehouse and no need for one. Every day was a new beginning, to wake up with the risingsun, eat a quick home-cooked breakfast and head eagerly outside, leaping off the oldwooden verandah and into freedom. Days disappeared in a world of Jo’s imaginationSue OaksCopyright February 20122
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