Black Mary

Black Mary—also known as Mary and Waraganj—is Molly Johnson’s mother and a central figure in the novel’s story of recovered kinship. Although she died giving birth to Molly, the fragments of her life are carried forward by Ginny May and later assembled by Yadaka. Her identity changes how Molly understands herself, while her memory becomes a path toward Ngarigo family and cultural continuity.

Identity and family history

Black Mary is the name by which district settlers knew Waraganj, a fair-skinned Aboriginal woman with red hair and pronounced Ngarigo features. Yadaka explains that local people called her “Black Mary” and “whitest gin around”; the first name marked her Aboriginal identity despite her appearance. He says she worked as a cook for drovers, one of whom was Charles Edwards, and identifies her as Molly’s mother. Miss Shirley separately asserts that Charles Edwards was Black Mary’s father, but Father McGuinness challenges the claim as hearsay. The novel thus distinguishes Yadaka’s account of Black Mary’s life and motherhood from the unverified paternity allegation made in the town.

Mary died giving birth to Molly. Molly says she never knew her own mother, and that her father raised her without female influence. Her husband, Joe Johnson, was told this as a matter of her upbringing; the account connects Molly’s isolation from maternal guidance with the violence of her marriage without making that violence Mary’s responsibility. Mary’s absence is therefore both a personal loss and a missing piece of family history that Molly has never been able to name.

Memory carried by Ginny May

Ginny May, Yadaka’s adoptive mother, preserves the story of Mary and her love for a man described as having the wrong skin. She had held the newborn Molly while her father grieved over Mary’s body. The story survives not as an official record but through intimate acts of care and repeated telling: Ginny May also helped Molly bury her firstborn, Jack, and Molly recalls the comfort of a gesture she learned from her.

Molly remembers that Ginny May cried for her father despite not having known him, and that she left Molly with a gesture whose meaning Molly understood as a way of keeping someone present. When Yadaka recognizes this practice, Molly explains its connection to Ginny May and her own family losses. The exchange makes maternal memory tangible across generations: Molly has unknowingly carried forward a form of remembrance learned from the woman who knew her mother’s story.

Recognition and revelation

As Yadaka and Molly speak about their families, Molly discloses that her mother died giving birth to her. Yadaka connects that fact with what Ginny May told him: the name Mary, the circumstances of her death, and Ginny May’s visits to Molly. He realizes that Molly is the child in the story and tells her that her mother was Black Mary. He also identifies her mother as Waraganj and says that the Ngarigo are Molly’s family.

The revelation is not immediately welcomed. Molly slaps Yadaka and orders him off her land, responding to a disclosure that overturns her assumptions about her own background. Yadaka insists that he means no disrespect and frames telling the story as a responsibility: keeping it alive allows Mary’s life to reach beyond her short time. He also relays an account from an old white farmer, including the danger implied by the name settlers used for Mary. The competing tellings do not erase the violence in the story; they show how her life has been preserved through people with different relationships to it, while leaving some parts uncertain.

Presence and inheritance

Later, under the full moon, Molly sees a young fair-skinned Aboriginal woman with red hair holding two swaddled babies. She associates the woman with the figure she had encountered in a vision beneath the water and recognizes the babies as possibly Jack and Daisy, her dead children. The apparition recalls Yadaka’s account of Black Mary, but the scene does not establish its identity beyond Molly’s own recognition and question. Molly calls the woman Mary; for a brief moment she feels that her mother is present and that she is not alone. The figure’s appearance links Molly’s grief for her children with the mother she never knew, without turning that connection into a confirmed, literal explanation.

When Molly and Danny leave Everton, she tells him to identify himself to the people at the cave as Black Mary’s kin. She explains that they are their people and their family. The name that once marked Mary through the settlers’ racial gaze becomes, in Molly’s use, a means of recognition and belonging. It offers Danny a way to approach a community whose kinship ties have been obscured by colonial persecution and separation.

Storykeeping and cultural continuity

In the later family frame, Danny is a grown man with a pregnant Aboriginal wife, Nell, and six children. The children’s varied appearances—including some with red hair and freckles like their great-grandmother—make Black Mary’s presence part of the family’s visible inheritance. The descendants call her Waraganj, a name that places her within their own account of who she was rather than limiting her to the settlers’ label.

The children repeatedly perform the Bullock Story, which Danny has passed down from his mother’s life. Danny’s daughter Molly-Mary plays Molly, and in her temperament he sees something of his mother. The story is also adopted by the Ngarigo, who incorporate it into their traditions of mimicry and dance in recognition of Molly’s bravery and plight. Danny and his siblings are proud that the performance brings their mother into the clan and gives the community a way to share her story. Through that practice, Black Mary’s story is not simply recovered as private ancestry: it becomes part of a living chain of family and communal memory, carried forward alongside the family’s continuing cultural responsibilities.