Merry Koori Blak and
Starry White Massive
I had been travelling down to Sydney from Newcastle for work every Wednesday for the past year, which means I had walked past Urrunga about forty times before we spoke. That’s accounting for a few weeks of illness and the days when he wasn’t there. Forty times of being aware of this man living in the tunnels on Eddy Avenue outside Central Station and walking past him with a million other commuters.
Why didn’t I say hello before? Perhaps a bit of guilt, and a bit of shame, but mostly I didn’t want to disturb the man. Just because he was there, did I have the right to access him? Did he seek connection or privacy? I did not know, and I weighed up that it was not my business to find out. Better to err on the side of caution. And what could I do for him anyway? What could I offer him? In what way could my presence possibly be of any value to him?
He would often have company anyway. I remember one morning when he had a younger Aboriginal man sitting talking to him. This same man locked eyes with me and held out his hand. Our hands connect and we hold our grip for a moment, then I kept moving while he stays in place. Another morning I saw a tall blonde woman with a deep voice standing over him, pointing her finger and yelling ”Uncle! Uncle!” clearly trying to get a word in edgewise while he argued a bunch of inaudible words at her. There were also weeks when all traces of him were gone, and the tunnel was clean and empty.
If you’ve never been to the tunnels before, these are signature pieces of Sydney architecture. 100 year old viaducts clad in Maroubra sandstone. They run about 25 metres long with a broad, gentle curvature that gives them a distinct look. They provide shade and cool and a bit of protection from the noise of the city while still being right in the thick of it, which is what I can imagine is at least part of the attraction for Urrunga setting up shop there. It also provides the canvas for the most magnificent mural that he has created there.
On any of the given weeks when Urrunga is there, his camp usually features a makeshift tent, several blankets and cushions, as well as an assortment of drink bottles, tuna cans, chip packets, and art supplies. He gets fairly spread out. There are actually two under bridge tunnels, one right next to the station and one next to the park and he exclusively favours the park-side tunnel. My office is on Wentworth Avenue in Surry Hills so this is the tunnel that I pass through, along with an assortment of other commuters, at around 8:50am.
The morning I finally sit with Urrunga is on the last work trip of the year for me, and the way that it happens is out of the blue. I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping well recently. I’m also particularly stressed this morning with a major project deadline looming. In fact it’s presentation day and I am largely unprepared, wrestling with feelings of resentment over compressed timelines and missing budgets.
On this morning I notice that the man—who I will soon come to know by name—is talking to himself with a particular intensity as people walk by. He seems agitated, like something has set him off. He seems to want someone to listen and so I slow my walk until we make eye contact and he begins to talk to me directly. Taking this as an invitation to join him, I sit down and rather than any formal introduction or reset he simply continues on with his stream of thought and I try to keep up.
Urrunga doesn’t make a lot of eye contact, or if he does it’s hard to tell as most of his face is hidden in a dense scrub of grey hair. He’s also softly spoken, and with so much of his talking aimed at the ground and muffled by the noise of traffic, it’s often hard to take in every word. But I get enough of his story to follow along. He seems to realise that I’m here to listen and not just toss a few coins and pass through, and gets a bit more comfortable, a bit more connected. His ranting crystallises into storytelling, and he asks me if I want him to make me a drawing, which, of course, I do.
“Got a pen?”
As I search my bag, I get a vision of my favourite ballpoint sitting on my bedside table. The one day I leave it at home. I pull my hands out and gesture with my empty palms.
“Don’t worry, I’ve probably got one here”
He digs into his many orderless possessions and pulls out a cracked clear biro with surprising speed. He then proceeds to tear the lid from a still-in-use pizza box and use it as a canvas, occasionally taking a bite of what looks like day old Margherita. Two pigeons fly in, attracted to the smell, and as he shoos them away, they turn on each other, viciously biting at each other’s faces, something I had never seen them do before.
At first he draws a large arrow patterned with graphic from the Aboriginal flag, pointed towards the hole at the top of the pizza box. In one of the few times that he looks directly at me, he asks me, rhetorically
“Where is it going?”
He then starts scribbling in the centre of the box lid, rough, hurried, formless lines, almost childlike. But these lines very quickly start to form the wild, wirey mane of a man. As he draws, Urrunga shares vignettes from his life. He talks about how he and his sixteen brothers and sisters are all children of the Stolen Generation, and that he’d only met some of the survivors in recent years. While he doesn’t go into great detail about his boy’s home experiences, he tells me that he will never forgive the people there for the way that they treated him. All I can do is say that I am sorry, and keep listening.
The face of the man in his drawing has grown to include a bare chest and a grass skirt, and then a double-jointed arm that ends in a giant boomerang. As he draws this he tells me about his regret over not being able to live in the traditional ways. He talks about his love of the bush and of waterholes and how much he hates wearing clothes and wishes he could just roam naked, especially in the hotter months. Just two weeks ago temperates in the CBD soared to a record of 37.8°C.
Urrunga tells me that he is a Yorta Yorta man, and he draws three bands across the figures biceps, representing the three rivers that flow into that region. He shares stories from home and not all of them are good, like the time when he was beaten up at a funeral by another man, possibly a brother, with a flagon of port. He also tells me about the time when he was bitten by a crab, and had a vision of a man with eight legs. Laughing about this he incorporates the crab into the drawing, transforming the mans’ other arm into a giant claw.
As he begins to work on the final details of the drawing, his focus again shifts to land “They’d probably treat me better if I owned real estate … but I don’t want to own real estate! You can’t own the land, the land owns us”. He begins to write down words and ideas for me to research later. He then adds one heart to the tip of the boomerang to represent himself and one to the bottom to represent me. In the space at the top, above the head, he writes: Merry Koori Blak and Starry White Massive.
The drawing is complete and our time draws to a close, but before I go I ask him about the mural that has been surrounding us this whole time - a complex rainbow of shapes and images and words that stretches almost the entire length of the tunnel. A remarkable and layered work that I have admired every time that I have walked this passage. Urrunga tells me that the police have prevented him from adding to it and all I can say is that I hope it goes untouched by anyone else then.
As I stand and agree to visit again, Urrunga, this man who is clearly suffering from depression, emphysema, and extreme poverty, wishes me a “Merry Christmas” and says “God Bless You”.
As I turn onto Elizabeth Street towards my destination, I see the buildings, the cars, and the people, and yet all I can feel is loss. The whole city feels like a counterweight to what has been taken away, as if all that I have, and all that we have is there because of what he and his people have been denied. And I imagine Urrunga, in a different past or a different future, would be doing much the same as what he is doing now, seated, chatting and drawing, only he would be free to do it.