The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  Patti Miller was raised on a farm in central western NSW and has worked teaching writing for over twenty years. Her many books include Writing Your Life (Allen & Unwin, 1994, 2001), The Last One Who Remembers (Allen & Unwin, 1997), Child (Allen & Unwin, 1998), Whatever the Gods Do (Random House, 2003) and The Memoir Book (Allen & Unwin, 2007). In 2012 she is teaching at the innovative Faber Academy in Sydney.

  For

  Connie Miller

  who was more inclined to read than work

  1921–2010

  Contents

  1Blackfellas

  2Wiradjuri Land

  3Identity Terror

  4Dreaming

  5Heading Home – and Leaving

  6Keeping Out of Trouble

  7Memory and Place

  8The Common and Nanima Reserve

  9In Search of an Inland Sea

  10Who Will Talk to Me?

  11The Mind of a Thief

  12The Missionaries’ Diaries

  13More Inclined to Read than Work

  14Living at Nanima Reserve

  15Thieving Ancestors

  16Whose Native Title?

  17A Wild Irishman

  18Gold

  19Native Title Fight

  20Native Title Histories

  21Patrick Reidy and the Wiradjuri

  22The Town Historian

  23Elders Usurped

  24The Niece of Jimmy Governor

  25Trying to Talk to Rose

  26Searching for the Bora

  27Not Taking Nonsense

  28A Wiradjuri Man

  29Identity

  30Who Belongs?

  31Australia Day

  32Sacred Sites

  33What Happens in Wellington

  34Country Rose

  35Native Title

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  1

  Blackfellas

  ‘D’ya have any blackfella in ya?’ The skinny woman across the room looked directly at me.

  I was at a gathering of Wiradjuri women elders in Wellington, the country town on the central western plains of New South Wales where I grew up. It was a while ago now, because my mother still lived in her own house a few streets away. The other women, standing around the table with their cups of tea and biscuits, stopped chatting and listened. It was their regular meeting at the Aboriginal Health Centre and they had been discussing the usual problems: drug and alcohol addiction, violence, sexual abuse, heart disease. It seemed every woman there had one family member, or more, struggling with at least one of the problems, but they laughed and swapped stories as they attended to business. I was a ring-in from the city; I’d offered to help them write their stories and so the elders had suggested I come up to talk to them first. They had been amiable and listened politely as I outlined how it might work; now business had finished and they were waiting. The woman’s question felt like a trap of some kind but not too dangerous.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not as far as I know.’

  I was aware of my accent falling into the flatter, broader sounds of my childhood. It always happened, an automatic adjustment towards the person I was talking to; it slipped either way, posh or broad. It bothered me. I couldn’t even hold onto my own accent.

  The skinny woman grinned and everyone who was listening chuckled. Cups were put down on saucers and arms were folded. It was clear they all knew what she was getting at and they were preparing to have a bit of fun with me. Despite my family’s long history here, I was an outsider. I’d been away too long. And even though I had grown up in this district on a farm only twenty kilometres away, none of the women looked familiar to me. I suppose people change after twenty-five years.

  They were still waiting. It was still my turn.

  ‘Why? Do you know something I don’t?’

  The woman grinned again, her eyes sparkling with the mischievous look of someone who likes to stir. She was in her forties, about the same age as I was, dark-haired and dark-skinned.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ she said. ‘Ask Joyce Williams, Bill Riley’s sister.’

  She pointed to an older woman with curly grey hair, small and neat, the only one I’d thought looked interested when I spoke during the meeting. I had met her brother several years ago. Bill had come to see me at my mother’s house when he heard I was looking for someone to tell me local Aboriginal stories. I was researching childhood stories and was looking for the ones I hadn’t heard, the Aboriginal tales of how the hills and rivers and rocky outcrops were brought into being. Bill was a great storyteller.

  I had found Bill in a roundabout way through my youngest brother, Terry, who used to have an Aboriginal girlfriend and played in the Aboriginal cricket team. Terry was accepted as one of them, I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because he has always had a ‘watching from the edge’ air about him, aware of, but not really part of, the busy world. One of the Aboriginal men I talked to had said, ‘Terry’s just like an Aborigine, worse sometimes’. And then he laughed.

  The women watched me as I circled around the narrow crowded room towards Joyce. The Health Centre was in an old corner shop, a nest of different-sized rooms freshly painted and fitted out, but still poky. I had to push past several chairs, which made a scraping noise as they slid on the floor. It was mid morning and already hot in the closed-in room. I felt sweat trickling under my black top.

  ‘The others reckon I should ask you if I have any Aboriginal in me.’

  Joyce looked at me shrewdly. ‘The whitefellas and the blackfellas have two different stories about who’s related to who in this town.’

  The other women burst out laughing. I stood there feeling like an unwilling clown. I hate not knowing what everyone else knows.

  ‘Ya dad’s Don Miller.’

  It was more a statement than a question so I just nodded. There were dozens of Millers in Wellington, not all of us related. It didn’t even occur to me until later to be surprised that Joyce, a woman I’d never met before, knew who I was, who my father was, who I was related to.

  ‘Ya heard of ya dad’s grandma, Rosina May?’

  Of course I’d heard of her. My father used to tell us about visiting her smoky, dirt-floored hut when he was a boy. He always said she was ‘a blackfella’, but we didn’t really believe him because he always grinned when he said it.

  ‘Well, my grandfather was John May, Rosina’s brother. Ya dad’s grandma and my grandad are brother an’ sister. So me an’ you, we’re cousins.’

  Now it was my turn to grin. I’m as red-haired and freckle-faced as they come. There’s no way I would have imagined I had Aboriginal ancestors. I could hear my heart beating.

  ‘But I think Rosina’s parents came out from England. They must have been white. If we’re cousins we must be related through the white side,’ I countered.

  ‘Don’t you remember how dark ya pop was?’

  It was true; Dad’s father, Frank, did have dark skin. He and my grandmother, Emily, had bought a house in town after they handed the farm on to their youngest son. The oldest son, Donald, my father, already had his farm, bought from an uncle, so he didn’t need any help. The house in town had a big yard where Granny Miller grew roses, sweet peas, poppies, pansies and snow-on-the-mountain out the front and vegetables out the back. She was a renowned gardener and must have luxuriated in being able keep her garden thriving with ‘town water’ every day. My pop watched her work from the veranda, digging, weeding, raking. I don’t recall him ever doing anything ex
cept sitting and watching. Now I remembered that even in the winter, sitting hunched in his chair with a rug on his knees, his face and hands were dark. I felt a quick thrill of excitement.

  ‘And what about Kevin and Dickie Miller?’ the skinny woman chimed in. ‘Especially Dickie. You only have to look at ’im.’

  Kevin and Dick were my second cousins, several years older than me. They were both shearers, working in our shed some years. While they were shearing they wore blue dungarees and singlets and their arm muscles were sweaty and sometimes streaked with oil from the shearing machinery. They both seemed a bit dangerous. Dick, especially, had a reputation for being wild. I remembered his large features and dark skin and his defiant, handsome ‘bad boy’ air.

  ‘Ask Claudia what she reckons,’ said the woman. ‘You know Claudia, Dickie’s wife, dontcha?’ She indicated a large, soft-looking black woman standing to the back of the group. I had never seen her before, my own cousin’s wife.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said, embarrassed.

  She answered shyly, clearly unwilling to be part of the game. She looked at me quickly then looked away to the woman who had started the conversation.

  I turned back to Joyce. ‘So where did they come from, the Mays?’

  ‘Here. Wellington. Just out by Guerie, you know.’

  That rang a bell. My father had done some family research at one stage, as people often do, and I recalled there was a Guerie connection. A large door to the past seemed to be swinging open; I felt a mounting surge of delight and uncertainty but tried to hide my excitement.

  ‘And John May was your grandfather and Rosina’s brother?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I said.’

  ‘Was he dark or white?’

  ‘He was pretty light. Not as dark as Rosina. She was dark.’

  ‘But they were proper brother and sister?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  A bit impatient with me now. The other women started talking to each other again. The game was already over.

  Joyce turned and introduced me to a young Aboriginal woman who had just come in. She worked at the Health Centre and was her granddaughter, I think, but I’m not sure of that now. ‘This is my cousin Patti.’

  I shook her hand, blushing. Was it true? Whites claiming dubious Aboriginal ancestry had always irritated me. Joyce shouldn’t accept me so easily; I’m just a nosy ring-in. And so damn white it was silly. I want to have Aboriginal ancestry – who wouldn’t want to be connected to 40,000 years of lineage in their homeland? – but to look at I’m still as pale as my original European ancestors. At the same time, I couldn’t keep the smile off my face as Joyce kept introducing me as her cousin. What if the ancient line of Wiradjuri blood did flow in my veins? What if some of my ancestors really had strode long-legged through the bush, danced in fire-lit corroborees, slept under the stars for tens of thousands of years right here in this place where I was born? A deep longing pulsed somewhere in the region of my heart, irrational perhaps, but irresistible.

  Maybe there was a Wiradjuri woman waiting in the past for me, but would that change who I was? Would I have a different identity?

  2

  Wiradjuri Land

  As a child, I didn’t know I was growing up on Wiradjuri land. I lived on Marylands, a wheat and sheep farm near Wellington, about 250 miles from Sydney. We called Wellington ‘town’ and we drove there to buy groceries, to go to St Patrick’s church and for my five brothers to play cricket. The Western Stores dominated the main street, along with the sturdy nineteenth-century banks, the Greek milk bar and Cameron Park. The other side of the park followed the curves of the Bell River which flowed into the Macquarie, itself beginning as a stream in the mountains near Bathurst and flowing all the way up through the Macquarie Marshes to the Darling, which eventually entered the sea near Adelaide more than a thousand kilometres away. I knew my geography but I didn’t know the land these rivers flowed through was Wiradjuri. I hadn’t even heard the word.

  The names of tribes, or nations, were not taught at school in those days; only Aborigines existed. Aborigines had lived on our property in the olden days. I learned this at the one-room school up the road from our farm, but my father had also found evidence. One day when he was walking across the back paddock he came upon two stone axes. One of them was of a reddish brown stone and roughly made. The other was grey and smooth, with a perfectly sharp edge. I loved to hold it and was very proud of it, partly because it gave me some status to have such a good specimen for Social Studies, but also, I suspect, because I had the idea that Aborigines weren’t impressive compared to the Chinese or Egyptians or anyone else we learned about, and I was relieved that they could make something so beautiful and so skilfully shaped.

  I admired our Albert Namitjira paintings – I didn’t know they were prints – on the wall at school too. Even my grandmother had a Namitjira picture in her house in town; he was popular in the early sixties. I loved the purpling haze of hills and the white trunks of the gum trees and the red earth – and most of all that a real Aborigine had painted them. I don’t remember seeing any traditional Aboriginal art, except photographs in a schoolbook of historical bark paintings and of body painting, which my brothers tried to copy with white paint on their faces and chests.

  My brothers and sisters and I played at being Aborigines just as we played Cowboys and Indians: building gunyahs or mia-mias out of sticks and bark; digging up fat white grubs with orange heads and daring each other to eat them; making spears and bull-roarers; practising our tracking skills. I especially wanted to be a tracker. Being able to follow an animal or person days after they had passed by noting the faint mark of their paw or foot print was impressive enough, but observing such tiny changes as a bent blade of grass or broken twig suggested extraordinary powers. There were lots of tracks for us to practise on: each other’s bare footprints, perky magpie scribblings, solid clumpy cattle hooves, the neat semicircle of a horse’s hoof, small, delicate sheep hooves – although sheep, to our continuing surprise, would all trot one behind the other for years on end, making deep paths across the farm, easy to follow and most useful if we had to walk through a paddock of Bathurst burrs or prickly grasses.

  Sometimes we made our own tracks: bird claw prints with sticks, or snake tracks by twisting the side of the foot on fine dust. The skill was in beginning and ending the track subtly enough to convince, for the point of this whole painstaking exercise was to fool a younger brother or sister into believing there was a snake nearby. Being in the middle of eight kids, fifth from the top, I was both tricked and a ‘tricker’, as we called it. There was great annoyance in being tricked, and great glee in being a successful tricker, but if our mother or father were told, we had to confess and take the consequences of making up stories.

  By the time I was ten or eleven, I had started making up stories at night for my younger sister, Mary, with whom I shared the front room. Our room must have been the living room originally as the front door of the house opened straight into it and it had a fireplace and mantelpiece, but it had been a bedroom for all our family’s time. Its walls were made of smooth vertical slabs of wood, too thick to be called boards, between which I could see sunlight glittering if I was in bed during the day. It was too cold in winter and too hot in summer, part of a poor settler’s house built for English conditions with the addition of lino since then, and lilac paint. We slept without sheets in the winter, preferring the cosy prickle of woollen blankets to the icy feel of cotton, although when I think of it now, it probably was also that we didn’t have enough sheets to go around in the winter when the washing could be flapping wet on the line for a few days. In summer, we lay outside on blankets under the stars and told stories until it was cool enough to go inside.

  My sister was dark-eyed and brown-skinned and looked like a bush Aborigine with her bird’s nest tangle of sun-bleached hair, a complete contrast to my red hair and frec
kles. I would often find her sitting on the back step, staring dreamily into another world, which irritated me because I didn’t have access to wherever she was. At the same time, she was agile and a fast runner on her thin wiry legs – the fastest for her age in the district with bundles of blue ribbons from the sports days to prove it. In bed at night, she was the perfect listener, completely entering into the stories I invented, which were often serial fables about the moon and stars or instructional tales such as the life cycle of a drop of water, suitably personified with its own character traits. Once, for months, the story was the adventures of two Aboriginal children. I loved telling this story. Forty years later, I still remember the central characters’ names, Aruma and Allarie, which I found in a Women’s Weekly article on Aboriginal words.

  I chronicled the children’s daily lives: hunting possums and lizards, catching fish, collecting seeds and witchetty grubs, making little boomerangs, lighting fires with two sticks and – each night at the close of the story – snuggling up under their kangaroo skin rugs by the fire. Allarie, the girl, was older than her brother, Aruma, and consequently spent quite a bit of time explaining how to track kangaroos and emus and goannas, as well as how to make coolamons, nulla-nullas and boomerangs. They lived on either the banks of the nearby Little River, or the Macquarie, which ran through Wellington; I can’t remember which, but they were definitely on a river because I knew they would need a water supply. On the farm there was a creek, which only flowed after heavy rain, and two waterholes, both too small and muddy to drink from or catch anything other than yabbies. Once, Aruma and Allarie walked across our land, on a long day’s chase after a honey bee. They climbed one of our gum trees and played in our creek and drank a little of the muddy water because they were so thirsty.

  One night I thought of the most exciting story-line with the most thrilling conclusion ever. I was so excited I nearly told Mary immediately. But I already knew most of the pleasure was in the withholding, so I kept it to myself and started telling the story.