Birrung the Secret Friend Read Online Free PDF

the black and white bird that sang in the strange tall trees. Abaroo’s voice was as pretty as that bird’s.
    â€˜Why did you bring Mr Johnson to us?’ Hadn’t she realised that if the Johnsons wanted children in their house, they might tell her to go if they had us?
    Abaroo laughed. She didn’t answer. Elsie sat very still next to me, listening.
    â€˜Why they take us?’ I demanded. ‘We’re just two more mouths to feed.’ A man with three vegetable gardens in the colony was rich. But even three vegetable gardens couldn’t feed the whole colony, and Mr Johnson had a wife and a baby coming to feed too.
    Abaroo paused, as if she was working out my words and what to say. At last she said, ‘Good people. They share makes happy.’ She screwed up her face. ‘The be re al gal —’ (I think that’s what she said) ‘— are not share people.’
    â€˜Be re al gal,’ I said slowly. ‘Is that us? White people?’
    Abaroo nodded.
    Well, she had that right. Most be re al gal in the colony would rather steal than share. They’d been sent here because they were thieves. This might have been the convicts’ second chance, but most didn’t seem to want to take it.
    â€˜Do you . . . do you think Mr Johnson’ll let us stay?’ I felt Elsie go stiff next to me and begin to tremble. It would be hard to go back to our hut after this.
    Abaroo looked at me and Elsie as if she’d never thought that they might not. ‘Yes.’ She sounded so certain I felt like a big rock had fallen off me. Beside me, Elsie relaxed too.
    â€˜Well,’ I said. ‘We better go inside.’ I helped Elsie to her feet. And then I said, ‘Thank you, Abaroo.’
    It was hard, thanking a girl, a black girl. I’d never got into the habit of thanking people before, even Ma, though when we buried her, I wished I had. I didn’t even like to think how much I was thanking this girl for now. For our lives, maybe.
    She looked at me for a moment, then laughed. ‘My name not Abaroo.’
    â€˜But Mr Johnson said it was.’
    â€˜My name . . .’ She said something so fast it was hard to catch.
    â€˜Dibrung?’
    She said the sounds again.
    â€˜Birrung?’
    She looked at me, as if I hadn’t quite got it right, but she knew I wasn’t going to, no matter how many timesshe said it. I reckoned Birrung was closer to her real name than Abaroo, anyhow. And then I thought: The native gibber must be another language. People use different words in other countries, don’t they? I’d never thought the Indians could have a language; reckoned they just made sounds like birds.
    If Abaroo — Birrung — had a language, I could learn it. She and I could talk together and no one else would understand.
    It was too much to think about. Too much had happened in one day.
    Abaroo — Birrung — took Elsie’s hand. I watched the two girls go inside. And above us the moon seemed to sing a lullaby, just like Ma had done, as it played among the clouds.

CHAPTER 6
Staying Put
    So we stayed there, Elsie and me.
    It wasn’t all potatoes and goat’s cheese and clean sheets every week. (I’d never even slept in sheets. Me, Barney Bean, in sheets!)
    There was hard work too, digging up tussocks to make new garden beds and learning what was a weed. Turned out that’s what Mr Johnson’s garden magic was — hard work, watering and weeding, when most in the colony just hoped someone else would do the hard stuff and the rain would come from the sky.
    Mr Johnson didn’t whip me even when I pulled out baby cabbages by mistake. He just showed me how to put them in again and give them a drink of water to ‘settle them back’, his voice all kind and gentle like he enjoyed teaching me.
    Learning about plants was as interesting as I thought it would be. Who’d have thought a giant