The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  The children had heard about the sea from other Aborigines who had ‘gone walkabout’ and passed through their camp, but they had never seen it. They wondered if it was true and longed to see it for themselves. They longed in the same way that my sisters and brothers and I did, with the same passionate, almost hopeless but unrelenting desire that only children can have for something that is not in their power to attain. I had seen the sea when I was seven, three or four years back, before the long drought that took up the rest of my childhood and it had become the site of mythic, never-to-be-repeated joy. It was easy to know exactly how Allarie and Aruma felt. Their desire was so strong that they started making secret plans to set out across the dry rolling plains, across the far mountains and all the way over hundreds of miles to the sea.

  I stretched the story out, mile by mile, detailing the children’s every adventure along the way; how Aruma caught his first goanna, how sometimes they could find nothing to eat and lay down tired and hungry, how they were threatened by snakes and by an evil witchdoctor who was going to ‘point the bone’ at them, how they slept in caves, how they saw the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains, how they smelled the salt of the sea from fifty miles away just like we did. And then I slowed it down even more, so that they slept the night in the tussocky grass on the side of a high sand dune, not realising the sea was on the other side. I stopped the story there for that night. The next day, I had them wake up, stretch, light a fire and cook the magpie they had caught earlier. Not until then did I let them climb the sand dune and there, lo and behold, were eleven huge white birds, each a thousand times bigger than any bird they had even seen, bobbing gently on a vast, all-the-way-to-the-sky, blue and green sea.

  ‘Although they didn’t know the date, not having this way of measuring time,’ I said portentously, ‘it was the twenty-sixth of January, 1788.’

  I don’t recall if Mary was as thrilled as I thought she should be, but I remember my own pleasure in bringing about such an unexpected (I thought) and satisfying conclusion.

  3

  Identity Terror

  After the Wiradjuri elders’ meeting in Wellington, I went back to my mother’s place where I was staying. Her brick Federation house was much bigger than she needed, but when they sold the farm my parents had wanted enough rooms to fit their eight children in whenever they might come home to visit. Dad had died since, so it was just my mother, and on occasion, brief floods of children and grandchildren. She said she felt silly there by herself.

  I sat down at the formica table in the kitchen and told her about our new relations. I was the privileged bearer of news about our family. We were not who we thought we were; we had a richer and more interesting story than anyone knew. We were from deep in this ground; we belonged.

  My mother didn’t seem that surprised. ‘It’s what your dad always said.’

  ‘I know, but we thought he was joking. This is different. Joyce is an elder. She’s claiming us.’

  Mum shrugged. It wasn’t that unusual to have Aborigines in the family; my eldest brother had married a woman of Aboriginal background and they had four beautiful daughters before they divorced, and my youngest brother lived with his Aboriginal girlfriend for two years and brought up her baby daughter as his own before she left for Queensland. Both women were Wiradjuri; we were already related.

  ‘Gran Miller wouldn’t have liked it,’ my mother offered.

  ‘What do you mean? Didn’t she like Aborigines?’

  The Millers weren’t ‘flash’. I couldn’t see what Gran had to feel superior about.

  ‘She wouldn’t have any of that sort of talk. That they were related to the Mays.’

  ‘What? You mean she knew. Why weren’t we told?’

  ‘Don always said it,’ my mother defended.

  ‘Yeah, but he also said he stole you from the blackfellas.’

  My mother smiled. It was a reference to her mass of unruly black hair, part of a set of stories about my parents and their cherishing of each other. My father was a religious man, and anxious, but when it came to my mother he was affectionate and playful, even in his declining years. Once, during the last few months when he sometimes didn’t recognise his family, my mother, her black hair streaked with grey, asked him, ‘Do you know who I am?’ and he answered, ‘Yes, you’re the one with the stripy hair.’

  She talked then about my father instead. I had heard all of her stories about him before, dozens of times, but it didn’t matter. They were like a colour wash over my own memories, strengthening the dye. I let them soak in, tinting my set of images of parents who loved each other, a little rosier and simpler than could be natural, in retrospect, but my mother’s stories affirmed the original colours must have been warm and fast.

  My mother and I didn’t talk about it again that day, but later I did tell my brothers and sisters of the possible Wiradjuri ancestor Joyce had revealed. It was the first echo of Dad’s story we had heard. My youngest brother said he always felt as if the place was speaking to him and my younger sister remembered her dreamy sense of another reality. Everyone liked the possibility of having an Aboriginal ancestor; it seemed a mark of unquestionable belonging in this country. No-one knew if it was true or not, and since nothing appeared to have been recorded, there was probably no way of finding out. On record, Rosina’s father was Charles May and her mother was either Lauannah or Lavinia Chew – which sounds as if she could have been Chinese – but she was supposed to have been born in England. Maybe that was fiction. Maybe she was a local Wiradjuri woman.

  I tried to imagine her. Perhaps she was gentle and shy like my father, or wild and unpredictable like Dickie Miller. Probably slender and short as most of my family is. It was impossible to know the facts. I thought about her more as an image, a poetic idea, a young woman sitting cross-legged in the shade under a river gum, changing the course of my family’s history, connecting me to the Dreamtime. It was seductive, the longed for communion with this place.

  But then I wondered how much my ancestry and history really made me who I am. Did it make any difference if she was truly Wiradjuri or not? How much do these stories of our individual and communal pasts make any of us? They are tales re-told by family or history books, highly selective if not, at times, imaginary. Hair and skin colour and health are inherited, but culture and stories are re-told in the moment. The warp and weft of identity is re-woven every time and is so tightly and thickly made it seems we were born with it, part of our flesh, instead of it being only a cloak.

  I didn’t keep in touch with Joyce. I meant to. For several months afterwards, up to a year or so, it seemed likely that I would call in and see her whenever I went up to Wellington to visit my mother. By the second year it seemed possible, but not really likely, and then, finally, I knew I wouldn’t do it. Joyce would have forgotten me, I had lost her phone number, she might not even be alive anymore, we might not be related anyway, my mother needed more attention these days; there are always plenty of reasons not to stay in touch.

  In this time things had changed in their natural irrevocable way. My mother had had a stroke and had to move to Maranartha, the retirement unit in Wellington. She could still walk and talk, wash herself and get dressed and make a cup of tea – and make her dry political comments – but her peripheral vision was gone. On the edge of her vision there was only absence. Because the mind does not comprehend absence it invented things to put there and so my mother saw castles in paddocks along the road. She knew they weren’t there and was well aware they were visual hallucinations. She only wryly complained that she would have thought her mind would come up with something a bit more sensible than castles to fill in the gaps.

  The loss of peripheral vision made it difficult for her to do cryptic crosswords and to read, her two principal remaining pleasures, but with some retraining and a great deal of effort, she did manage to decipher words, coping with the annoyance of losing the
beginning and ending of lines with a modicum of grace.

  Her limited sight also affected her ability to find her way about. It is extraordinary how much we rely on what we can see on the edges of our vision to make our way around with any confidence. All kinds of information about the fringes of our world are registered and processed, enabling us to step out along the footpath or across the street. My mother’s sense of direction, like mine, was never good so it seemed simply an exaggeration of her natural propensity that she got lost in the retirement unit.

  At the same time, I had also begun to lose my way. It wasn’t dramatic, just a slow dissolving of what had seemed solid. My sons had both left home and my partner, Anthony, and I had moved from the Blue Mountains to a lively street in Kings Cross, the frantic faltering heart of the city. It might seem a perverse instinct to move to the chaos of a city when children are grown; tranquillity and natural beauty are usually more appealing to me. But children had connected me noisily to my community and when they left there was a chilly silence in our tree-filled backyard. I longed for the sound of voices and footsteps, for things being arranged, things being dropped, picked up, tidied, left lying around. I wanted cries, shouts, laughter, arguments, mess, glances, conversations in many languages; I wanted the endlessly various stream of humanity to pass my front door. I wanted my space and time filled up, jam-packed. To hold me in place. And so we moved.

  The problem was, it wasn’t really working. My life was jam-packed, but nothing I did or said felt necessary. The nearest I can come to describing it is that I wasn’t convinced by myself. I knew well enough that a self is made; I had read just enough eastern philosophy and contemporary neuroscience to be persuaded it was all a construction, a flickering of electrical impulses. I could even sit down if I had nothing better to do and list what I was made of – memories, books, imaginings, relationships – it’s just that I could see and feel the vast emptiness under the construction too clearly. I wasn’t terrified, nor panicked, just desolate. I suspected there must be a biological component to the feeling of no ground beneath my feet, that the loss of the ability to create new life must have left a vast space; but the fact is the space had always been there and it had opened up before.

  Years ago, when I had two young children and was immersed in the bread and honey of life, I went through a period of what might be called identity terror. It was a time of my life I’ve tried to understand before. During those months I would lie on my bed – it always began when I was lying down – and what felt like a steel band would start to form around my skull. It didn’t matter if I asked to be held, or if I jumped up and walked around the house, or strode out into the wild garden, or tried to read or watch television, once the tightening began, the panic would always follow.

  The absurd thing was, there was nothing in my life to be anxious about. I was young, not yet thirty. I had – still have – a soul mate, Anthony, who was passionate about the life of art. I had two beautiful sons, a room of my own for writing, and with a little care, money for a week or two in a sprawling share house by the seaside each summer. I breathed in the shimmering pale indigo haze of eucalypts above ochre cliffs; I planted a waratah in memory of my father; I had Sunday lunch with friends on the veranda. Admittedly, I was exhausted from a couple of years of being woken at night by a restless child, but I thought I was managing.

  And yet the panic came and, for what seemed like a long time, stayed.

  It began literally overnight. That first time, I was on a mattress on my friend Merril’s lounge-room floor in Canberra. After dinner and the usual long conversation with Merril, I went to bed my ordinary, cheerful enough self and woke up at around two, panic-stricken. I had not been dreaming but was suddenly wide awake. I couldn’t see anything except for the dim shapes of furniture but I knew something fundamental was missing. My heart thumped as I stared into the darkness. It took some time to realise what was gone; somehow, terrifyingly, nothing had meaning anymore.

  I got up and felt my way to the kitchen and filled a glass with water and drank it. Water is good for all sorts of ailments; the feel of the cold liquid going down my throat might wake whichever part of my brain created meaning.

  I sternly advised myself that, in the morning, all would be as it always had been. I lay awake for hours, feeling the thumping of my heart and the panic and then slept for an hour or two before dawn. When I woke to the early morning light, my throat was dry despite the noisy water I had drunk in the night. And the fear was still there.

  I told Merril what had happened. Astonishingly, she appeared to know what I was talking about. So this happens to other people, I thought. That made me feel better – I am not one of those people who wants to be unique, especially not in suffering.

  We went out walking across a nearby park. I remember a slope of grass, dotted gums, manuka, glittering sunlight in cold wintery air. I could see that it was beautiful, but it did not move me or touch me in any way. I had always depended on beauty. Overnight it deserted me.

  Afterwards Merril tucked me into bed, put on a Bach CD, instructed me to breathe. She told my boys I was not feeling well. I lay there wondering how long meaning was going to abandon me.

  It lasted in varying degrees of intensity for the rest of winter, into the spring and the summer. A few times, not more than two or three, a new terror arrived. The first time it sprang again out of the dark; I was lying in my own bed with Anthony next to me and should have felt as safe and content as any person could feel, but instead I woke and knew that not only had the world around me lost meaning, but my entire identity had dissolved. I had no boundaries; I was as vast as the universe but I was made of nothing except fear. I had read that having no sense of self was a liberation, the end point of the spiritual path, but this could not be what was meant. My self was dispersed, whatever glue that held me together had dissolved.

  Still, over those months when I wrote or read, I felt quite normal; the world melded itself back together and the anxiety abated. I can see now the fact that I could read and write means that I was not in as severe a state as I thought. But I had not experienced tremors and shocks of the mind before and so had nothing to compare them to.

  It would be easy to argue it was all a product of nervous exhaustion, of not enough sleep, but to me that is beside the point. The point is why do neurones give up on the job of creating meaning when they are tired? Why do they give up on the story of self as if it was all a fiction anyway? At times it makes me wonder if there is anything solid about me at all – or about anyone else.

  And then, for months, sometimes years on end, I have not given it a thought. I have been too busy to even notice what I am made of. When I met Joyce for the first time and she told me we were related, it was a period when I was rooted deep in my life, immersed in work and family. The details of my sense of self had proliferated and solidified since that weird split in my late twenties. It was years ago, that dissolved feeling. Her offer of another identity was exciting and attractive; I could feel my blood leaping towards it, but it seemed superfluous. At that time it was a gift I didn’t need.

  4

  Dreaming

  Early one morning in my flat in Kings Cross, I had a dream with no storyline, not even any images, just a muttered sentence. The sentence wasn’t dramatic or symbolic, simply a low voice saying, ‘Go back to the town you came from and tell its story’.

  I woke abruptly. Tell what bloody story? Wellington is a five-hour drive north-west of Sydney, a town of 4000 people and falling, five pubs, two cafés, two supermarkets, one swimming pool, no picture theatre. Where was the story?

  I lay in bed for a while feeling resentful. Anthony was still asleep beside me, softly hunching the sheets around his shoulder as I rolled over.

  I didn’t even come from town. I grew up twenty kilometres west. I bought musk stick lollies at Kimbell’s Tea Rooms in town on Saturday mornings and I swam at the town baths in summe
r. I went to the convent high school in Percy Street for four years, in and out every day on the bus. I was allowed to go down the street to buy groceries for home from the Western Stores if I had a note. Wellington was a town of about 6000 people in the heyday of the late sixties – a small cluster of Federation homes, some pretty cottages, a few Housing Commission fibro places, lots of rose gardens. The streets gathered around the wheat silos towering like ziggurats by the railway line. But even then the town seemed slow, somehow lacking the will to get out of its own way. There was nothing much more to say about it.

  Anthony stirred and then was wide awake and ready to get up in his early bird way.

  ‘I had a dream about Wellington,’ I said.

  ‘Interesting?’

  ‘No, it was just a sentence.’

  ‘Sentences are useful,’ he said.

  As I lay there grumbling, a magpie carolled in the beech tree outside the bedroom window. The carolling of magpies always resonates with happiness for me, bringing back a precise childhood memory of lying in bed one morning during the long drought of the sixties and hearing them sing outside in the gums. The joyful carolling suddenly let me believe for a few seconds that the world outside was not desolate and parched, but green and pretty with streams running and white lambs playing like a farm in a book.

  I was only ten years old, but I had already gained the idea that life in books was not only the best and most correct life, but that the more actual life could resemble life in books, the more real it was. Because most of my books were English, the poor scraggy lambs and dried-out paddocks outside in the hot morning were never going to be real, let alone correct.

  But the magpie was calling again in the present so I sat up a little and peered out through the study windows to the old avocado tree. It had only seven pears on its straggly branches, perhaps its last year of fruit. In the next backyard there was a magnolia and another beech, and then angophora gums and a palm tree, all of them strangers among the old apartment blocks of the city.