Fascinated by the idea that an ancient Aboriginal legend may have actually come to life in the 1980s, I tried to question him further, but after his brief moment of openness he suddenly became reticent again, and the others refused to even confirm what Gunbuk had told me when I tried to question them….

“I’ve run into a brick wall with my own people,” said Garbarla, finally finishing his monologue, looking across at Ernie Singleton who sat on the edge of his seat, listening with wrapt attention to his friend’s tale.   After his legal abduction by his grandmother in 1960, Joseph Garbarla (as he had come to think of himself) had been raised in white society in Queensland and educated to Bachelor of Arts standard, doing majors in economics and sociology, before returning to Victoria in early 1983.   He had been pleasantly surprised to find that the white-supremacist attitudes of Queensland did not exist in his home state any longer.   So he was able to get rapid employment at the Glen Hartwell Institute of Technology, teaching TAFE (Technical and Further Education) students in the evenings four nights a week — having been offered a full-time position teaching in the day, which he had turned down so that he could live with his tribe on their reservation just outside Pettiwood (four or five kilometres from Merridale where Ernie Singleton lived) and try to fit back into tribal life by day, while teaching by night.   Initially he had taught only economics and sociology, but from the start of the 1984 season in February, he had been granted permission to introduce a course of Aboriginal studies into the TAFE curriculum — although he had been expressly forbidden to use the word Koori (the political name certain Aboriginal groups use) anywhere in the course.   Having spent so much of his life in white society Garbarla knew that unlike the Aborigines who had unquestioning faith in both religion and the supernatural, the white man had little faith in his religion and none in the supernatural.   So he fully expected Ernie to scoff at his tale of a rainbow-coloured serpent writhing across the sky.

Instead Ernie sat there in silence, staring at his friend, not knowing what to say, not knowing what to believe.   Eighteen months ago he would certainly have rejected Garbarla’s story out-of-hand, like most whites he would have been simply unable to believe in a gigantic flying serpent.   But eighteen months ago his attitude toward the supernatural had undergone a painful transformation.   Literally painful, since in early February 1983 Ernie (who had hardly had a day’s illness in his life up until then) had been overwhelmed by horrendous aches and pains in his limbs and his back; agony that seemed to penetrate right through to his bones.   At their worst the pangs felt as though every bone in his body had been shattered — although he knew this wasn’t the case, because even at their worst he was able to move around, though at first uncertain whether movement helped or made things worse.