The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  I remembered a dream I had one night when I was no more than five or six years old. In the dream, there was a large airy spinning object like a Catherine wheel, which I somehow knew was the entire universe, and a tiny spinning shape, which I knew to be myself. The large Catherine wheel shape tried to absorb me and I knew that if it did, I would no longer exist. I struggled with all my might and with pure terror. Just as the large spinning shape was about to succeed, I awoke, petrified. I was comforted by my mother and went on through the remaining years of country childhood as solid as the earth beneath my feet. If occasionally the feeling of insubstantiality floated back, I ignored it.

  I persuaded myself that was just the state of transition making me feel unanchored. I was a traveller to the centre of the imaginary world. I came from the far reaches of Western civilisation and I was heading for its heart. I was an innocent and curious man, tallish and thin, wearing a narrow coat to my ankles and carrying some kind of duffle bag. I was the Striding Man, a mythic figure. My face was a little weatherworn, I wasn’t young, but still as eager as a youth, and I walked with easy strides. I was travelling towards the great city I had only heard about from other travellers’ tales.

  The Striding Man felt clear inside me, like an ancestor. Not one of the wild Irish Reidys and Kennedys who, my mother said, lay drunk around the bottom of Ponto Hill, or the hard-working English Whitehouses, but Pieter Josef Müller who, our branch of the family says, came from south-western Alsace, the part that was snatched back and forth between Germany and France. According to family lore, he was born in a village there in 1836, which, if true, actually makes him French, overturning years of family history. Either way, some years later he made his way to a seaport and then to Sydney, Australia and eventually to Wellington.

  It was only fancy. Who did I think I was, swanning off to Paris? All the Millers – Müller became Miller, legend had it, around the First World War – were sturdy, short, peasant-looking folk who would have trudged steadily rather than strode elegantly, coat flying. You couldn’t accuse any of them of being dreamy, romantic travellers. Pieter Müller arrived in Wellington in the 1850s and his descendants have been there tilling the soil ever since.

  One hundred and fifty years later, his great, great, great granddaughter flew over the family farm, across the coast of Australia, halfway around the planet to finally circle over the Ile de France and Paris, her mind drugged with anticipation. The Imagined Life was taking physical form, and I was deeply puzzled. Despite believing in it for so long, my brain could not quite grasp how those pictures stored in imagination could exist outside it. As the flight descended, my mind, slightly unhinged by tiredness and jetlag, shuttled back and forth across its constructions, a blind weaver in the dark. The bright world of childhood memory seemed no more than a film I had once seen.

  From the oval jet window, I joyfully recognised the patchwork of summer cultivation below: squares of yellow wheat fields, lemon-green meadows, cut-outs of dark green fairytale forest, stone villages, church spires, a chateau. I felt a pang of longing.

  ‘Is it real?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s as real as you need it to be,’ Anthony said.

  Months later when I felt I might belong there in Paris, I saw paintings of Montmartre when it was still a wooded hill dotted with vineyards and windmills and of the Seine when the gardens of grand houses swept down to its edge, and desperately wished it was my place, my history, my ancestors who said and did and thought this place into being. How quickly and easily I found myself unfaithful. There was no conflict, just an easy slipping into the arms of the Imagined World. I wondered how the connection to the land of my childhood, those few square miles of Wiradjuri country, could be thrown off so lightly.

  6

  Keeping Out of Trouble

  My mother, ‘pretty Connie Whitehouse’ as my father, the most romantic of the solid Millers, used to call her, was waiting for us on the veranda of her retirement unit. It was only a one-room unit, poky compared to the sprawling house she’d had to sell after the stroke. She was sitting on the cane chair my sister had bought her, ready for someone to talk to, a woman in her late eighties who had lived her life within a small sphere. She had been born in Wellington to John Whitehouse, house-painter and trumpet player, and Linda Reidy, barmaid, in a little house only a few streets away. Half a kilometre or so wasn’t a long way to go in more than eighty years, but she did travel in her mind, being a great reader despite refusing to go back to school after she had rheumatic fever when she was twelve years old.

  We gave her the fruit and biscuits we had bought at the ugly Bi-Lo supermarket, a bit shame-faced because my mother had doggedly refused to shop there herself when she could still walk down the street. She wasn’t going to support a supermarket that would put people she knew out of business. But since then the family grocery store belonging to my eldest brother’s friend had closed, so there was no point in holding out any longer. And anyway, as everyone said, the supermarket did give young people jobs and kept them out of trouble.

  Keeping out of trouble has not been that easy in Wellington. I had found out in my post-dream reading that, apart from the Native Title claim, Wellington had made the national newspapers for only two reasons over the last two decades. One was a murder down the road from our farm: ‘I shot lotto winner’s standover man, honest,’; the other was the overall crime rate. Crime was always one of the main topics of conversation with shopkeepers and with my mother’s friends, most of who had had their houses broken into at least once.

  My mother was mugged a few years ago. She was in her seventies then and still living in her own house. She was walking home over the railway bridge when she noticed some children watching her. The older ones were about ten, a younger one perhaps six, the Artful Dodger, as Mum called him. My mother was alert because Dorothy, her older sister, had been mugged on the same route home a few months before. A girl had ridden past, grabbed her bag and knocked her to the ground. Dot, being a feisty character, had clambered up and given chase for a block or two despite her bleeding shin, but there’s not a lot a feisty woman in her late seventies can do, so she had to admit defeat and reported the incident to police.

  As she came off the bridge, my mother thought the children had disappeared, although as she crossed Simpson Street she saw the Artful Dodger standing on the other side of the road. A minute later the boy ran past, lifting her bag and frightening her but not knocking her down, before tearing up the street ahead of her.

  ‘He did it so well, his teacher would have been proud,’ she said dryly.

  She made a half-hearted attempt at giving chase but she had no chance of keeping up with the kids. She reported the theft to police who questioned people in the street and found her bag, minus about $40 cash, under the veranda of an empty house. As with Dorothy’s assailants, the police had a good idea about the identity of the thieves, a group of Aboriginal kids. The thing was, both Dorothy and my mother refused to ‘notice’ whether the children were Aboriginal or not.

  Years later, Mum still said, ‘Everyone asked, were they Aboriginal? And no-one asked, were they white? Even people you wouldn’t expect to ask.’ When I pressed her recently, she reluctantly allowed that they might have been Aboriginal kids with a trailing-off tone that implied it was none of my business if they were.

  Around the muggings period, my son’s Christmas present bike was stolen from my mother’s backyard, and twice, after my father died, her house was broken into. The second time, her engagement ring was stolen. The police identified ‘persons of interest’, but no-one was ever charged for any of these thefts, muggings or break-ins. I don’t know if the ‘persons of interest’ were Aboriginal; my mother never offered any opinion, nor asked the police the race of anyone involved.

  Other people in Wellington were not so discreet. According to the stories I’ve heard every time I return to Wellington, the response is simple and without variety: Ab
origines commit most of the crimes and the crimes only diminish when a particular group is in jail for a year or two.

  ‘Abos,’ they say, ‘Abos.’ With a particular note of contempt in their voices.

  I’ve never known what to say when this term, this tone, is used. They are people I have known all my life.

  At least no-one says boong or coon anymore.

  I sat down beside my mother. ‘How’s it going?’ I said.

  ‘Not too bad,’ she said. ‘But life can be tedious, can’t it?’

  She said it dryly, not bitterly, but it still disturbed me. Her eyesight had faded so much that reading and cryptic crosswords were slipping inexorably out of reach and lately the nurses had started to help her dress, but my mother wasn’t allowed to be tired of life. Her body was slumped as if the effort of coming out onto the veranda to greet us had been too much. She had left her walking frame inside the unit, trying to pretend as long as she could that she didn’t really need it. I fingered the book I had brought up for her. We sat and watched galahs squabbling around the birdbath in the garden.

  ‘Poor Ruth Richardson,’ said my mother.

  I looked over and saw Mrs Richardson walking carefully along the veranda. She had lived on one of the farms in Suntop near us and had always dressed smartly and had a ‘proper’ house, not like our messy falling-down place with a fibro ‘lavvy’ out the back. Her house was painted white and had wide verandas and a green lawn and roses in the garden.

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘What’s the matter with her? She’s not living here now, is she?’

  ‘No. She’s just staying for a couple of weeks. She’s going back home. She’s been very brave about it. She’s a lovely woman.’

  ‘Brave about what?’

  ‘A young Aborigine broke into her house, he was only nineteen, they said, and he attacked her. Ruth has been very brave but she was shattered.’

  My mother had named him as Aboriginal. She had never done that before. It must be even worse than it sounded. I watched Ruth stop, straighten resolutely and knock on someone’s door further along the veranda. Her hair was softly waved, her summer skirt and blouse in matching soft blues, the kind of well-made appearance I have never known how to create.

  ‘Was he from Wellington?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think so.’

  ‘Was she raped?’ It seemed a stupid question, Ruth was in her eighties, as old as my mother.

  My mother nodded.

  We didn’t say anything else, but I could feel my skin burning. I didn’t want to think about it. It seemed an invasion of Ruth’s privacy to even know about it. My mother had always been so disciplined about not gossiping. How could anyone go about his or her ordinary daily business in a town where such a thing had happened?

  When we returned to Sydney I checked the crime figures for Wellington on the Bureau of Crime Statistics website. It surely couldn’t be as bad as a few horrible stories made it sound.

  It was worse.

  For a range of crimes, including sexual assault, domestic violence, break-and-enter, weapons offences and malicious damage, Wellington was consistently from 150 to 300 per cent higher than the state average. Although the bureau didn’t offer a statistical breakdown of offenders by Aboriginality, it did supply a breakdown of persons of interest by Aboriginality for each category of crime. A ‘person of interest’ is someone suspected or accused of committing a crime. Almost every crime – everything except fraud – registered far higher numbers of Aboriginal than non-Aboriginal persons of interest.

  Wellington has a larger proportion of Aboriginal residents than most country towns because of ‘the Mission’ at Nanima, an Aboriginal settlement just outside of town, a remnant of the system of Aboriginal reserves set up more than a hundred years ago. I was curious about it as a child, but had never been there. No-one I knew had ever been there. It was only a few kilometres outside town but it was out of sight, hidden on the other side of the hills surrounding the Wellington Valley. By the 1960s, most Aborigines were living in town although dozens of families still lived at Nanima.

  I looked for more statistics. Crime was not the only problem for Aborigines: the rates of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hospitalisation for alcohol-related health problems and for youth victims of violence were all hundreds of percent higher than in the white population. Still, despite every disadvantage, the Aboriginal population in Wellington was growing. At the turn of the millennium, it numbered 1075, about a quarter of the total population. More people were admitting to Aboriginality, but the birth rate was higher than in the white population as well. In fact, the white population graph for the central west looked like a spindly tree, thin at the youthful bottom with a wide, elderly, out-of-balance branch at the top, while the Indigenous graph was a pyramid, wide at the youthful bottom and tapering to old age at the top. The pyramid looked more solid, more lasting, than the tree.

  But the negative figures continued: the rate of Aboriginal students finishing school was three times lower than the general population; the majority of Aboriginal children lived in one-parent families; an incredible fifty-four per cent were not in the paid work.

  There was nothing new in any of this. It’s the twenty-first century, more than 200 years after the invasion, but when you lose a war, you probably don’t expect to be still suffering two centuries later. At the same time, I didn’t know if any of these facts and figures truthfully revealed why my aunt and mother, both of them poor all their lives, were mugged in their seventies. Or why, in my innocent-looking town of rose gardens and Federation homes, Mrs Richardson was raped at eighty-two years of age.

  7

  Memory and Place

  Rose wasn’t answering my calls. My only other lead was a piece of paper with ‘Gaynor Macdonald, Sydney Uni’, written on it. Apparently she taught anthropology and had researched Wiradjuri culture. Before I rang her, I heard a crow calling mournfully outside the window, a sound I used to be able to reproduce perfectly. As kids, we spent hours practising imitations of bird calls: magpies, kookaburras, plovers, crows. That long slow aaarrrrk, aaarrrrk, aaawwww was my speciality. The crow cried outside in Kings Cross and reverberations of childhood suddenly multiplied all around me: the slope of the land beyond the wheat shed, the kurrajong tree by the gate, the exact lean of the gums down by the dry creek, the hide-smoothed rails of the cow yard, the corrugated iron shearing shed and the smell of sheep poo and wool, the bark of kelpie dogs, the pathetic bleating of sheep in the distance, the longing for rain that never came. There’s the dust under my foot as I make pretend snake trails; there’s the wood heap where the boys had to chop wood for the stove and where chooks’ heads were cut off; there’s the ramshackle chook yard with crows perched on the post on the lookout for an egg to snatch.

  Crows were evil incarnate, not because they stole eggs but because they pecked the eyes out of ewes when they were giving birth and then plunged their cruel beaks into the newborn lambs. I had seen the hollow bleeding eye sockets of a still-living ewe and the entrails of the baby lambs torn out and left half eaten on the dirt before something had disturbed the crows’ macabre feast. Sometimes, high above was an eaglehawk, waiting for its moment to descend and steal its share of the feast, but somehow I didn’t extend my horror and condemnation to the eaglehawks. They always seemed more distant, less involved, not part of what happened on the ground. They were birds of the high places; we saw them circling around Baron Rock, gliding on currents of air, aloof from ordinary daily life.

  I rang Gaynor. A soft, English-sounding voice answered and I felt curiously reassured.

  ‘I was wondering if you can tell me anything about the Wiradjuri Native Title claim that was resolved a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘It wasn’t a Native Title resolution.’

  She explained that although the process had started as a Native Title claim, in the end it had not been a
Native Title decision but a freehold grant under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act. Native Title is simply the recognition of pre-existing rights based on traditional laws and an ongoing connection to the land. It does not give the rights of ownership, such as the right to sell it, but it does give the right to negotiate about what happens on that land. Land Rights grants, on the other hand, give freehold title or a perpetual lease.

  Native Title came out of the Mabo decision in 1992 when the High Court ruled that Indigenous people had a legal title to their land based on their connections to it. It overthrew the false doctrine of terra nullius, which means not the doctrine of uninhabited land as I had thought, but ‘unowned’ land. It was the result of a case brought by Eddie Koiki Mabo, who had been stunned to learn that the land where he was born, Mir Island off the north coast of Australia, which he had always thought he and his family owned, was in fact owned by the Crown. He died before the case was resolved, but the name of a small, dark-skinned man with a halo of hair became the name of the case that restored the original Australians’ title to the land they had lived on for 40,000 years.

  ‘But the first post-Mabo claim was made in Wellington?’ I was scrambling, trying to show I did know something.

  ‘Yes. I was the consulting anthropologist on the claim for several years.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. So you know Rose Chown?’

  ‘Yes. But I haven’t had much to do with her for a while.’