by Patti Miller
I silently complained about the dream until it was time to get up. Then I looked on the internet to see what I could find out about Wellington. I’m not one to ignore a dream instruction however dull it is, especially when there is nothing else on offer.
That’s when I found out that just a few months after the Mabo decision in 1993, which ruled Indigenous Australians had a natural law right to their native land, the first ever post-Mabo Native Title claim in Australia was made in my home town.
I knew immediately that this was the story my dream meant. I can’t understand or defend this knowing, but there was a blind sense of having found what I was looking for. The story of my place might not tell me who I was, but if I could examine its weave, I might at least see what my cloak was made of.
That first morning I read dozens of articles online. Astonishingly, the land claim appeared to have been resolved just the day before. According to the newspapers, a parcel of land called The Town Common at Wellington had been returned under the NSW Land Rights Act to the original Native Title claimants within the last twenty-four hours. It wasn’t a native title decision, but I didn’t know that yet.
The timing struck me as extraordinary. It seemed too much of a coincidence to have the dream the night the claim was resolved. It was also my mother’s birthday, which was unrelated, but when you’re in that heightened state of discovery, everything seems to have meaning. To me at that moment, it conveyed a sense of purpose, a sense that this was indeed my story.
I had very few clues. I didn’t know how the Mabo decision worked in practice; I didn’t know the difference between Native Title and Aboriginal Land Rights, or why the claim had gone on for so long, nor any of the people involved. In the face of all that I didn’t know, I felt overwhelmed, but there is nothing like a dream instruction and a few coincidental dates to create a fiery sense of destiny.
I wished I had kept in touch with Joyce. She wasn’t mentioned in any of the articles, but her brother Bill Riley was. My mother had told me Bill had died a few years ago, but Joyce would be sure to know what had been going on. I would have to find her again.
The other name that kept appearing was Rose Chown. There were a couple of photographs of her too, an imposing-looking woman, sturdy and solid like a small monolith, perhaps in her forties, black-skinned with long straight black hair flowing down her back. I gazed at the screen. Her large dark eyes stared back in a slightly hooded way as if she didn’t want the photographer to see into her. She was vice president and spokesperson for the Wellington Town Common Committee, the group that had made the land claim. According to the newspaper reports, the case had dragged on over the years, since 1993 in fact, and from the sketchy details it seemed the main reason was that there had been opposition to the claim, not from white landholders but from another Aboriginal group. And it looked like Bill Riley was a spokesperson for the other group. I was puzzled. Why was one group of Aborigines opposing another group’s land claim?
Without an introduction, I was reluctant to ring anyone. Living in the middle of Kings Cross with memories of growing up in a white family on a farm near a country town didn’t give me automatic permission to waltz back in and start asking questions. Besides, if there were sides then there could be conflict and I could make it worse by talking to the wrong person first. And they might well be suspicious of a strange white woman ringing them up without warning. Still, I had to ask someone and Rose seemed the obvious person to begin with.
It took me a week to track Rose down through the Aboriginal Health Centre and then I rang her quickly before I lost my nerve.
‘I’m one of the Millers from out Suntop way. Out along the Yeovil Road.’
‘Yeah, I know it. You turn off at Fingerpost.’
‘That’s it. We had a place past Suntop school. My dad has died but my mum still lives in Wellington, at Maranartha, you know, the retirement village? I live in Sydney now but I still go up there a lot.’
Having located myself in the landscape, I plunged into the dream and finding the Native Title story and asked would she help me. It didn’t go so well. From this safe distance, I’m still trying to work out when the conversation first went awry. Was it when I said I wanted to hear everyone’s side of the story? That was when her voice changed. Whatever Rose thought I was referring to, she was ready to deflect me.
‘We don’t want to hash over problems in the past with other people. And we don’t want them to hash over their problems with us.’
Her voice was noticeably cooler; not defensive, but suddenly keeping me at arm’s length with a tone that implied she might not talk to me at all. There was no overt conflict, no raised voice. I tried to make up the ground I’d so deftly cut from under myself.
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I understand. I just want to hear the story.’
I rattled on, agreeing with everything she said, panicked that I might lose her before I’d even begun. I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been. What was I thinking, a white woman who had grown up on Rose’s country, implying that Aborigines argued among themselves about who had rights to the land, so why should we believe any of them? It wasn’t what I meant, but that’s how it sounded. I’d probably blown my chance to talk to the woman who made the first post-Mabo Native Title claim in Australia.
I kept talking, too much and too fast. ‘I just want to talk to lots of people. I’m really interested in how the Native Title claim all happened – I mean it took years, didn’t it? I come up to visit my mum often. I’ve just been up, last weekend, and I thought I’d come up again in a couple of weeks. Maybe the first week after the New Year.’
Rose listened but I knew I wasn’t making much headway. She would not commit to a time or place but she ended up agreeing that I could telephone her when I next came to Wellington to see how we got along from there.
At least, that’s what I said. ‘We’ll see how we get along.’
She said, ‘We’ll see what transpires.’
I felt wrong-footed again, misjudging the register. Who says ‘transpires’? I put the phone down. I had almost certainly blown it already. Why couldn’t I have kept my mouth shut? I had only meant to suggest that I had an idea of what had been going on.
I picked my way backwards to the beginning of the phone call, trying to remember what I said after introducing myself.
‘I’m interested in writing about the Wiradjuri land claim.’ Direct and simple.
‘So are we,’ Rose had responded swiftly. ‘We want our history to be written.’
Ah, there it was! Right at the beginning of the first exchange. The moment I felt the sharp tug of something being wrenched away that I had thought was mine. It was my story, I found it, it was my dream; I could see the plaintive, illogical justifications going by at the speed of light, but Rose was far too quick for me. I wasn’t ready, I didn’t have much of a hold on it anyway – didn’t even know what I was trying to hold onto.
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Maybe we can be of use to each other.’
Even as I said it I knew it wasn’t true. Whatever I thought I was doing, I had no intention of ‘being of use’, of writing a history for the Wiradjuri committee or for anyone else. I am not a historian or anthropologist or ethnologist. Not even a journalist. I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was heading but some dumb part of me knew I had to try to follow the muttered instructions that had come into my sleeping brain from the dark.
I couldn’t give it up. I had no idea of which way to go and no compass to guide me.
I’ve always liked compasses. I like the look of them, especially the old-fashioned ones made of brass with a glass cover, small enough to fit into the palm of your hand. Most of all I like the extraordinarily mysterious means by which a compass works – the way its fine needle, delicately balanced, aligns itself with the north–south magnetic field of the interior of earth itself. The electrons in th
e magnet are pulled in line by the magnetic field of the earth, which is created by the slow whirling of the molten iron core. Even apart from the fabulous science, it strikes me as wonderful that the earth has created a means by which her inhabitants can find their way.
Of course, the Wiradjuri could find their way without compasses. Following stars and rivers and rocky hills, they navigated their way across vast tracts of land. They made pathways too, worn over millennia by traders carrying axes and arrowheads, and messengers carried carved sticks along them to arrange corroborees and battles. The bush wasn’t as trackless as the Europeans thought it was, nor as unreadable, but longitude and latitude and compasses are lovely constructions and easier to interpret than landscape.
My original compass was the landscape I grew up in, the farm and a few square miles of surrounding land. Despite longing for other lands, lands that existed in books, whenever I looked at this country, I knew who I was and where I was going. I was born on this dry land, so was my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, perhaps even an ancestral Wiradjuri great-great-grandmother. I did not live in the central west after I left school, but I didn’t have to. The place sang in my bones, there was no chance I would lose my way.
But I had, several times. The insubstantiality of self, says the Buddhist monk Chogyam Trungpa, is the truth of being, but I have found it a desolate place. He says the experience of self is one fleeting thought after another, which we generate fast enough to create the illusion of a continuous and solid self, a bit like the frames of a film creating the illusion of continuous movement. Despite being an inveterate collector of evidence of my continuity – memories, talismans, photographs – I must have slowed down in splicing together the frames.
For years I have kept a photograph on my desk of Baron Rock, the rocky hill behind our farm. I suppose I have always known it was evidence of who I was. Geologically described, Baron Rock is a lopsided volcanic plug, weathered over millions of years to a rocky outcrop surrounded by flat land and gentle undulations. There is nothing spectacular about its shape or size – although from a certain angle it has the appearance of a resting lion – but whenever I looked at it, I felt like a Christian gazing at the stony cave in Bethlehem, an Aborigine regarding Uluru. My brothers and sisters and I explored it when we wanted adventure. Its cliffs and caves and high rocky shelves offered more possibilities than the open paddocks all around us. From the high windy top we could see for miles in every direction. When I stood up there, I wondered if Aborigine kids before me had ever climbed up and looked out over the unbroken countryside and wanted something different to happen.
5
Heading Home – and Leaving
Two weeks after the dream, Anthony and I drove west out of the city to visit my mother. Before we left, I rang Rose Chown again to let her know I was coming up in the hope she might have relented and would agree to talk to me, but she didn’t answer the telephone. Perhaps she was away. Each time the telephone rang out I wondered about the relief I felt.
In the Blue Mountains, which rise at the end of the suburbs, Anthony and I stopped to see an old friend. Banksias and grevilleas waved their ancient-looking fronds, their odd spiky flowers pretending to be civilised in her garden. She made us a cup of tea and we sat on her wide front veranda, catching up. I told her I had decided to write the story of the Native Title claim in my home town and its connection to my own family’s history. I said was I going to interview the people who had made the claim just as soon as I could make a few contacts.
‘Why should they talk to you?’ she asked. It wasn’t so much a question as an accusation; I was minding other people’s business.
‘I come from there. I’m a local,’ I said, feeling defensive.
‘Yes, but not for a long time. And you’re not Aboriginal.’
I felt like telling her about Joyce being related to me, but it didn’t feel true enough to repeat, especially since I had done nothing about it.
‘But people know my family. They know who I am,’ I said instead.
‘Mmm.’ Again it was a disapproving sound. ‘You can’t just turn up and expect people to talk to you.’
She had studied Aboriginal culture for years and knew what she was talking about, but there was a certain tone of possessiveness as well. It was her territory and I was trespassing, or that’s what I imagined in my prickly state.
‘I wasn’t just going to turn up. I am going to ask around, find some contacts.’ I didn’t want to tell her about Rose turning me down already.
‘There’s a woman at Sydney Uni in the Anthropology department who might be able to help. Gaynor Macdonald. She has researched and written a lot about the Wiradjuri. I don’t have her address but I am sure you could find it easily.’
‘Is she Wiradjuri?’
‘No, but she knows a lot. She knows how to approach people.’
I took out a piece of paper and wrote Gaynor’s name on it. I didn’t have enough of anything, information or contacts, to turn down any help.
We headed up the highway to Victoria Pass and wound down the other side of the mountains towards the beginning of Wiradjuri territory.
‘Still want to take this on?’ Anthony asked.
A few hours later we sat in the car in Percy Street, the main street in Wellington. It’s called Nanima Crescent for part of the way, but it’s all the same street, lined with old shops on one side, half of them empty, and Cameron Park on the other.
‘I’m sorry I came from this puddle and not an ancient hilltop village in the south of France,’ I said. ‘That would be more exciting.’
‘It’s hardly your fault.’ Anthony shrugged.
We both stared out the car window. It was tiring just looking at the street empty of cars, the boarded-up department store, the ugly shit-yellow Bi-Lo supermarket wall where the lovely iron-laced verandas of the Royal Hotel used to be. No-one cared enough to stop it being knocked down.
No-one bothered with anything much in Wellington. My mother kept us updated with developments: the new supermarket was the main topic of conversation for six months; a new jail that was going to be built on the outskirts of town by Richard Crookes (!) occupied conversation for another twelve months; then another new supermarket supplied more fuel. One quirky café opened in the old Spanish missionary style school, but it wasn’t enough to change the mood of a whole town.
In Australian terms, Wellington is an old town. It celebrated its sesquicentenary when I was a teenager – I remember writing a story called ‘Gold’ for the Shire Council’s commemorative competition. It made a symbolic parallel between finding gold near Wellington and the golden sunshine on golden wattle and the golden future. Truthfully, I didn’t see or want any kind of future there, golden or otherwise. I couldn’t wait to leave, feared not leaving.
Still, it’s a pretty town, despite the desolate main street. It dozes around its two rivers in a valley surrounded by hills, and there are the solid Federation houses with wide verandas and rose gardens. It’s just that it feels dispirited, as if life never amounted to what was promised. Even in the hopeful nineteenth century, a visitor commented in a local history book, ‘stagnation is the term most appropriate to the life of the district’. The weary smell of stagnation; I think that’s what I smelled as a teenager at school in Wellington and had to leave to avoid breathing it in. Now every year the population shrinks, every year there are fewer and fewer children and teenagers, more and more elderly women like my mother struggling slowly along the footpath past the empty shops towards the gaudy supermarket. It’s as if the town is repeating one of my mother’s refrains, ‘Life is tedious’, but without her dry ironical expression.
Anthony shifted in his seat and made to open the car door. ‘But yeah, I’m sorry you didn’t come from an ancient hill-top village as well,’ he said.
He didn’t really care, but he had t
he usual escapist fantasies; it would have been nice to be walking from the family’s vineyard down cobbled streets to sit in a shady square drinking pastis and afterwards doing some research in the local medieval church. He could handle that. So could I.
It wasn’t all talk. Anthony and I had left Australia together only a few years before, after our sons had grown and before we moved to the city. Because we had become parents at the beginning of our twenties we hadn’t traipsed across Asia and around Europe like many of our newly footloose generation. It was decades later, at the beginning of the new millennium, before we flew across the mountains and plains with our plan of living in Paris for a year. I’d pressed my nose to the aeroplane window, trying to see the family farm below. It wasn’t an altogether unreasonable aim: our farm was under the Sydney to Darwin to Europe flight path and all through my childhood my brothers and sisters and I watched the jet planes fly high overhead, making narrow white trails across the sky on their way to the rest of the world, our hearts filling with longing.
There below me were the memory-ghosts of the brother who became an artist, and the one who ended up a blokey Buddhist, and the youngest one who played in the Aboriginal cricket team, and the schoolteacher who preferred to fly and the one who married an Aborigine, and the older sister who became a nurse, and the little sister who sat drifting on the back step half the day; all of us eight kids standing on our patch of ancient ground, dreaming of somewhere else.
It felt melancholic to be looking down at the square drought-brown paddocks. Twenty-five years later and yet another long cycle of drought. The farm was definitely somewhere beneath me, but I had to acknowledge that 47,000 feet was too far above the ground to recognise any landmarks with certainty.
There is something about flying that creates detachment in me – an eternal now, the past never was and there never will be anything else. It’s as if being in the God position – looking down – creates the exact image for being able to see myself. I didn’t much like what I saw as I flew out over the edge of Australia. Someone, someday soon, would find out that I wasn’t who I said I was. Not that they would discover I was someone else, but they would see how carefully I had made myself, a pastiche of thoughts, desires, memories to ward off dissolution.