The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  ‘I’ve rung her, but so far she won’t talk to me.’

  ‘She can be elusive. Have you tried Joyce Williams?’

  So Joyce was involved.

  Gaynor went on to warn there might be problems if I talked to both Joyce and Rose. They were on opposite sides. On one side was the Wiradjuri Wellington Aboriginal Town Common Committee; Rose Chown was the spokesperson and the centre of media attention. On the other side were the Nanima Progress Association and the Wellington Aboriginal Corporation, meaning Bill Riley and Joyce and the Carrs and Stanleys, along with several other families.

  So that was what the sudden coolness in the conversation with Rose was all about. I had wrecked my chance because I hadn’t known what was going on. I didn’t even know exactly where The Common, the land they were arguing over, was. I had an idea it was out along the Macquarie River somewhere, but it was floating in my mind, not located anywhere exactly.

  I thought about our farm, Marylands. It was precisely anchored, had exactness; I could follow the road out past the showground and through the hills to Fingerpost and down along Anderson’s creek and then up past the abandoned school and the first right past the tin church. I could see the old wooden farmhouse by the dry creek at the end of a bumpy lane. I could have walked along the lane blindfolded and not stumbled.

  I remember dreamily walking along the new lane from the gate to the farmhouse. The old lane was in the flat paddock along the creek, but it was boggy and sometimes impassable when it rained, so my father made a new road using a blade attached to the front of the blue tractor. I can still remember the first lane, but it has the feel of myth now, the pearly sheen of indistinctness, whereas the second lane is shiny bright. It is sandy and gravelly underfoot; there is lucerne and wheat growing on the side; there are flies buzzing at my back; there is a blood knee where I fell on the gravel; there are squabbles with brothers and younger sister; there are cattle looming and staring in their impenetrable way; there are lambs who run after us thinking we are their mothers, making us feel special that a creature has chosen us.

  I am not really dreaming; in fact, I am concentrating deeply as I am composing a poem. It is early morning and I am walking the kilometre to the farm gate where we will climb into the back of the teacher’s ute and be driven the rest of the way to school. The paddock has been planted with spring wheat, which is now about ten centimetres high; delicate blades of new wheat, on this morning sparkling with millions of dew diamonds, each one splitting the light into red and blue and emerald green fire. The beauty moves me deeply; in fact, I don’t think I have ever seen anything so beautiful in my entire life. I feel the ache of desire to capture and convey the beauty. I don’t know if I have ever had that ache before. I see the dew prisms splitting the sunlight, I see the rhythmic rows of wheat serried up the slope, the bright freshness of the shoots, and I shift and slide words in my brain. Stars, diamonds, glittering wand, twinkle, sparkle. I come up with a bouncy, rhyming poem that will stay in my head for the rest of my life like a banal pop song.

  Another year and later in the season, when the wheat is nearly over our heads, my little sister and I find a secret ‘room’, a clear space in the paddock where the soil is too sandy to allow any wheat to grow. In there, just away from the lane, we cannot be seen, or think we can’t be. Like a pair of large bowerbirds, we decorate the sandy floor of our room with coloured bits of broken plates, flowers, buttons, old costume jewellery and then we lie down and gaze at the clouds, telling each other what shapes we can see.

  In the top corner of this paddock, over the hill and well out of sight of the house, is a stand of tired-looking pines where I have my famous English picnic. Deep in Enid Blyton fantasy, I persuade my younger brother and sister to have a picnic just like children in a book. Despite my best efforts, the dried peanut butter sandwiches arranged on a tea-towel spread on the sheep poo under the spindly pines do not convince. The desolate heat and scratchy Paterson’s curse overrule my story. That failure too stays with me for the rest of my life.

  The constructed world dominated even out in the central west, hundreds of miles from the city. Roads, paddocks, crops, sheds, English trees unhappily growing outside their own soil. There wasn’t much of the uncultivated world of the Wiradjuri left by the time several generations had ploughed and harrowed and sown and harvested.

  Some of my memories do attach to the actual soil though, and the native trees, and the creek, which must have been there when the Wiradjuri wandered by with their axes, a shallower channel before the land had been cleared and flood waters rushed down slopes into the gully, but essentially the same. The creek was dry nearly all the time, only flowing after a good storm or long steady rain. We stood on the veranda and listened to the glorious roar of water and watched the brown tumult for a couple of hours until it all disappeared again. Then we went down and inspected the new headland or island or peninsula carved out by the rush of water, or a tree branch caught in the waterhole, or a sheep drowned.

  I remember the different qualities of the ground beneath my feet too: the warm summer dust outside the front gate, the clay in the creek that the swallows used one year to make their wonderful mud tunnels, the grains of sand on the ant mound by the sheep yards, the clods of red earth in the ploughed paddocks, the damp soil near the bottom waterhole. I remember the configuration of limbs on gum trees and kurrajongs: the one that split into two trunks where cattle used to rub their backs; the one with raised roots we could play cars in; the one my brother carved a large face into which was ever after known as the ghost tree. I remember the sky: endlessly blue for too long; the trail of a jet making a narrow road in the sky; the extraordinary whorl of a freak tornado that arrived one day and tore the huge pepper tree next to the house right out of the ground; the vermilion sunsets behind Baron Rock caused by volcanic eruptions in Indonesia in the 1960s; the thrilling build of thick puffy cumulus clouds and the peaceful drumming of rain on the roof.

  8

  The Common and Nanima Reserve

  I spent the next several weeks at home researching. First, I located the Common. It was to the east of town, the opposite side to our farm, 183 hectares of gentle grassy hills stretching from the outskirts of Wellington on the south-eastern side to the Macquarie River as it bends back around to Nanima Reserve. Nanima is a separate parcel of about forty hectares, bordered on one side by the river and not subject to claim. The Town Common was first established by the Town Common Committee in 1867, marking the official moment the land was taken from the Wiradjuri. For quite some time I thought that theft was nothing to do with me.

  I hadn’t known anything about the Common as a child, but even out on the farm, I’d heard about Nanima. I knew that was where most of the Aborigines lived and didn’t question why they had a separate village. I didn’t actually go there until my early twenties when I was doing a university assignment on ‘race relations in a country town’. I drove around interviewing whites and Aborigines with my chunky late-seventies tape recorder, feeling very sophisticated. It’s more than twenty-five years ago now and the details are hazy in my mind, but I remember taking the road out to Nanima as if I was on a trek into unknown Africa. The landscape seemed different, unfamiliar. Dry spiky grass, strange rocks, disturbing gullies. I drove over a hill then came into a small settlement of neat fibro houses with wire fences. I don’t recall any gardens.

  The impression left after almost three decades is of bareness, of houses stuck on a landscape rather than settled into it. No-one would really talk to me except the white schoolteacher. I did try to interview a bunch of Aboriginal women but they laughed a lot and refused to speak into the tape recorder.

  I had not been back there since. Even when I was earnestly doing my race relations research, I had not thought to find out anything about the history of Nanima, but although it wasn’t part of the claim, it was the reason that so many Wiradjuri and other Aborigines were living on the Common. I
t was originally part of a network of Crown land specifically ‘reserved’ for Aboriginal use. The more I read about the system of reserves the more it started to look as if, inadvertently, it might have ‘set-up’ the opposing sides of the title fight a century later.

  Reserves were created because, in the fifty or so years after the first white settlement, there had been bloody guerrilla warfare between the white invaders and black defenders – not that the legislators would have described them in those terms. It was decided to allow Aborigines their own land for ‘secure’ occupation in the hope of reducing the conflict. The British House of Commons stated in the 1830s that the Aborigines had ‘a plain right and a sacred right’ to their land but it was, in a sense, managing prisoners of war.

  In the 1880s, a Protector of Aborigines was appointed and the Aboriginal Protection Board created to manage reserves. It was recommended that reserves be established away from towns so that ‘the corrupting influence of Europeans was limited’, a noble-sounding segregation. At the same time as separating Aborigines from Europeans, all Aborigines were treated as one people, tribal identity was disregarded altogether. Often, people from different and possibly warring tribes were forced to live on one reserve.

  A report from 1915 by the Aboriginal Protection Board states:

  Nanima, Wellington: The schoolroom presents a cheerful appearance, and everything about it is kept clean and tidy. Reading and recitation are both creditable. Suitable poetry is memorised. Writing uniformly good. In arithmetic problems are freely used, and the work is generally accurate. In drawing, needlework, and singing, good work is done. Manual work includes paper folding, netting, and raffia work, and is a source of general interest.

  It sounds so pleasant, so resolutely civilised. This was what I believed about life at Nanima when I was a child; that life was a round of reading, arithmetic, drawing, needlework, singing, raffia work. Why shouldn’t everyone live happily ever after?

  Naturally, that’s not the way it was. Aboriginal people had to ask permission to leave the reserve, to get a job or even to get married. They could be – and were – moved from one reserve to another without being asked. They could not own a house or any land and their homes and mail could be searched without their permission. Their daily lives were regimented and the smallest of transgressions could result in severe punishments. There was also a complete ban on any traditional Indigenous celebrations and on their language and customs. On many reserves, even their names had to be Anglicised. Many children were taken away from the supposed ‘bad influence’ of their families. Some parents were forced to leave their children by the threat of having their rations cut.

  It didn’t end in the nineteenth century. Until I was a teenager, Aborigines could only vote in some states; they were not counted in the general census; they did not have freedom of movement. If they had a ‘preponderance of Aboriginal blood’ – or if they lived on a reserve, no matter what their percentage of Aboriginal blood – they could not receive old age, invalid or widow’s pensions, nor any maternity allowance. They could, however, apply for a Certificate of Exemption, which meant they would not be legally considered to be Aboriginal, their identity erased. In effect, it certified you were not who you were born as! If you signed it and had a character reference from a ‘respectable’ white person such as a teacher or policeman, you were exempt from the laws that controlled the lives of the rest of your people. You had a new identity – although it could be revoked if any of its conditions were broken. These certificates were in force until the referendum of 1967 that allowed Aborigines to be counted as citizens. It was the year I started high school in Wellington.

  I try to imagine complete powerlessness in my own country, the humiliation of having others direct my life: my sons being taken away from me; the impossible-to-heal tearing of the heart; the erasure of everything that tells me who I am – kinship, country, language. No bloody wonder, I thought, no bloody wonder the domestic violence, the alcohol, the drugs, the sexual violence, the break-ins, the street muggings. No bloody wonder at all.

  I thought about Mrs Richardson at home in her own house, never feeling safe again. None of it was her fault but she had been cruelly made to pay for it.

  9

  In Search of an Inland Sea

  I tried to ring Rose again. It was January by now, the middle of a long hot spell. My red hair and freckled face, made for the Irish coolness of my mother’s ancestors, felt damp and sticky and my determination seemed to melt as well. It was difficult to make the effort to ring someone who probably didn’t want to talk to me. I just wanted to lie on cool lino in front of a fan with a wet flannel on my face. On the fifth attempt of the week, Rose finally answered.

  ‘You’re a hard woman to get hold of.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m outside most of the time. Trees I planted need waterin’ in this heat.’

  ‘God, that’d be hard work. Do you have a hose, or buckets?’

  ‘Buckets. Got a tap an’ buckets.’ Her voice was matter-of-fact, a dark-brown depth to it, like earth, but held back as well.

  I realised she was not going to talk to me. There was a tone of regret in the ordinary things she was saying, as if she didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

  ‘I’ve decided to get on with writing my own book instead,’ she said. She had given it serious thought and was sorry to let me down but she was firm.

  ‘That’s good,’ I said, my heart banging in disappointment. ‘It’s good to write your own book.’ And then rapidly, ‘But I’d like to try to explain what I want to do. I didn’t really make it clear before. I come from Wellington, from Wiradjuri land, but I’ve lost my connection to it. I thought writing about it might help me. I don’t mean to take your story, but just to find my connection to it.’

  I nervously reiterated and wandered and corrected myself, but I must have said something useful.

  ‘I’ll take your telephone number,’ she said eventually. ‘I might give you a ring myself some time.’

  Some chance! It had taken long enough to get hold of her when I had the power to ring her; it would be as good as never if she were supposed to be ringing me. But it was all that was on offer so I slowly and clearly repeated my number.

  ‘I really would love to meet you,’ I said.

  When I put the receiver down, tears sprang. With a bit more effort I could find others to talk to, but my first step was now a gaping hole.

  I couldn’t give up on Rose yet. I went to the study and wrote a long letter explaining my desire to find the story of my place. I wrote the letter quickly, rushed up to the post office and posted it. It seemed strange, something from another century, to write a pleading letter, put it an envelope, stick a stamp on it and drop it in the postbox. Surely such a simple way of sending messages should work.

  Years ago, Bill Riley had told me that his people believed the willy wagtail was a messenger. He said it would bring messages from your family hundreds of miles away.

  ‘We didn’t need phones.’ He grinned, his arms folded at my mother’s table.

  I scribbled notes, trying to hold his eye at the same time. It had taken me weeks to track him down. Mum brought us tea in her ‘good’ cups and fruit cake, and listened too. Bill seemed pleased to have a small audience and had extended his visit.

  I nodded. Out on the farm under Baron Rock, we kids all thought the willy wagtail was telling us something. It always flew up in a tiny whir of black-and-white wings and fan-shaped tail and then darted and hopped about us, spreading its feathers and getting our attention while it chirruped something intently. One of my brothers – he became a teacher – stated that it said ‘sweet pretty creature’ but I thought it was saying something different every time.

  Or perhaps, on the lookout for secret messages, I just hoped it was. Reading had given me the sense that there was a parallel world of adventure and beauty alongside the ordinary one, if o
nly I could find a way through. Sometimes, when I was out walking, I would turn quickly, my shoulder forward, hoping to turn at just the right spot to slip sideways through the narrow door into the parallel world. I suppose it was a longing for something else to happen, for the ordinary to stretch its dusty skin and the extraordinary to burst through in all its glory.

  Somewhere along the way out of childhood, the idea of the extraordinary was transmuted into the actual world beyond those paddocks and that town, especially the world of Europe. I suppose that was when the Striding Man was born. I longed for the world on the other side of the planet, a land floating on clouds in my head. The Imagined World. It grew and grew inside my brain, nourished by books and occasional films, until it took up all the space.

  In anyone’s reckoning, how could one-horse Wellington and a few Wiradjuri arguing about a mere 200 years of dusty recorded history acted out under gum trees compete with Paris and all her lights. Wellington had no Picasso, no Notre Dame or Pei pyramid, no Sartre, no Molière, no Victor Hugo. No revolutionary heroes, kings, courtesans, palaces. No corner bistros, no cobbled lanes, no balconies balanced above teeming streets, no dream of itself as the centre of the world.

  Until the morning of my terse dream, the answer was always obvious. I didn’t understand why it had changed, why suddenly the story of the place I came from might matter.

  My ancestors lived in Wellington for five generations before me; their bones must be part of the soil by now, mixing with bones of Wiradjuri people and rotting trees and decomposing grasses. Some of my forebears may have killed Wiradjuri, one perhaps had children with them. My story mingled with the Wiradjuri story a long time ago. But how had my ancestors come to be there in the first place? What was anyone doing out there so far from civilisation? While no-one was talking to me, I started reading the explorers’ journals and histories held at the Mitchell Library in Sydney.