The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  A painting by Darwin’s artist from the Beagle voyage, Earle Augustus, titled ‘A Native of the Wellington Valley, 1826’ shows a tall, muscular young man, his chest and upper arms intricately marked, not with tattoos, but the flesh itself carved. His hair, long and curly, is lifted away from his face by a headband and the long curls are separated like ringlets, rather than bushy. The ringlets, I read later, were due to the fish oil that Wiradjuri men and women rubbed into their hair. As I gazed at the image of the nameless young man, I realised he was about the same age as one of my sons. I wondered at the strange fate of becoming an ethnographic exhibit. I cannot even imagine such a thing happening to me, or anyone I know.

  The group of visitors the missionary described was entirely naked, but others describe men wearing a net-like band of kangaroo tendon around their waists with a small tassel attached in front and behind; yet another records men wearing girdles of ‘opossum’ skin and ‘opossum’ skin cloaks neatly sewn with tendons. This particular group had decorated their faces and bodies with red and yellow ochre and white clay and had feathers in their hair. They were well armed, carrying fire-hardened spears over three metres long, a type of cudgel known as a nulla-nulla, a large war boomerang that the Wiradjuri called a bargan, and a narrow wooden shield, having obviously arrived to do battle.

  I read that the night before battles, which were apparently often to do with territorial disputes, there was always a corroboree. The men painted their bodies with lines and shapes and added yellow plumes from white cockatoos’ crests to their woven kangaroo tendon headbands, which Henderson, one of the note-takers, thought made them look as if they were wearing coronets. When evening came, he said, fires were lit and wild and noisy dancing began, enacting mock-battles, ‘skirmishing with great order and exactness’, or mimicking kangaroos, emus, goannas, the dancers slightly bending their knees and quivering their legs in time to the music.

  It sounded like performances by Aboriginal dancers I’ve often seen at the openings of cultural festivals. Mid afternoon on an outdoor stage or in a local hall, after a speech or two by local notables, men and boys with white-painted bodies and wearing red loincloths dance in front of a mostly white audience. The dancers are always rhythmic, the sound of the didgeridoo is always deep and stirring, but there is no trace of the ‘powerful excitement’ that Henderson described. I can barely imagine what it would be like to see a corroboree where there was no sense of performance, only immersion in the ritual. The energy must have been nearly hallucinatory.

  The women were at corroborees as well, seated to one side, and making music by beating on skins stretched between their knees, clacking small weapons together and singing. Henderson, who had recently arrived from India, said that the tunes were the same as those he had heard in Hindustan. He also likened some of the songs to ones he had heard in ‘Bootan’. He made a number of parallels between the Wiradjuri and Indian tribal people, which, he said, indicated their common origins. He also gave a wildly romantic description of the general scene: ‘The night was dark and cloudy; while the broad flame which illuminated the forest, threw a lurid and flickering glare upon their strangely distorted figures; the magic interest was likewise increased by the reflection, that these mimic representations were to be the prelude to a savage and deadly contest.’

  As it turned out, he admits he was wrong about the savage battle because the dispute he mentioned was amicably settled by negotiation the next morning. It seems, most often, disputes were settled this way, by lively discussion between the warriors who argued not as a rabble but, according to Henderson, with the air of great speakers.

  Henderson wrote too of local Wiradjuri spiritual beliefs. The original Creative Being was Baiame, one of whose sons was the evil Mudgegong, who changed most of Baiame’s other children into animals. However, two, Melgong and Yandong (or Wandong) survived and were the progenitors of the present-day Wiradjuri. Baiame is asleep now, but once woke up and rolled over, causing the sea to roll in. A few years later one of the missionaries, Günther, mentioned this same story in his diary:

  They speak of a very great flood, which a long time since covered the whole of this country, even hills & mountains. Many people were drowned, but a number were saved on an island, standing in a flat. They had houses there & the water kept aloof from them. Various other ridiculous tales are connected with it, such as, one man swimming about in the water for several months & kept alive, at last, it appears, he got into some cave & went under the ground for several miles, then coming out at a certain opening; not many miles off from here, which, they said, they would show me.

  The missionaries didn’t know about the series of caves near Wellington so I suppose the tale did sound ridiculous. I have been down into the caves and I also know that ‘the flood-gates of the salt ocean were immediately thrown open and the hills and valleys disappeared beneath the rolling waters’ as Henderson recorded, because as a child I had seen the evidence for myself. While I was still in primary school, I often explored the hills in the farm next to ours with my brothers and sister, hoping the rough, red-faced farmer who owned it wouldn’t catch us tramping across his land. Our hearts beat nervously each time, but we were drawn on by the hope of discovery that seemed much more possible in his folded, bush-covered hills than in our bare, ploughed paddocks. His property had gullies and rocky outcrops and stands of gums and acacias and beckoning hilltops, while ours was only open country where nothing could be hidden.

  One hot summer’s day, all our daring was rewarded when we found fossils of shells and trilobites and sea-fronds in slabs of stone hidden in a gully. We had learnt about such things in our school lessons and knew they were important treasures. Sitting in the Mitchell Library years later, I remembered the utterly joyous thrill of discovery and could feel again the astonishment of a finding a seabed in the middle of the dry hills. The Wiradjuri must have seen fossils – and known what they meant. They knew the deep ocean had covered the land, and sea animals and weeds had floated down and become embedded in the mud and that Baiame had rolled over and the sea had slid off his body and he had become dry land again.

  I was guiltily grateful, too, for Henderson’s observations of the bora ground, a place of sacred ritual for the initiation of young men, one of the most important for all the Wiradjuri, located in a secluded part of the bush on the river bank. I didn’t know where exactly but I hoped that Rose Chown or one of the other Wellington mob might be able to tell me. By coincidence, one of my brothers, Tim, was investigating its location at the same time. An artist, he had the quixotic desire to paint the landscape as it was before the Europeans arrived in Wellington. He said he’d been told the bora was on a property quite near the Native Title land, but he wasn’t sure if it was true or not. I wanted to go there immediately to see if it would yield any of its past, but Tim wouldn’t tell me its location until the property owner agreed to let him visit. He also reckoned we needed to talk with Joyce or, better, a Wiradjuri man, to find out if it was all right to see it.

  The bora, according to Henderson, consisted of an avenue of eucalypt trees about a mile long, each tree carved with various symbols that represented humans transmogrified into animals – snakes, possums, emus, kangaroos – and other natural elements such as lightning and even meteors. At one end of this avenue was an earthen sculpture of a human figure lying on his breast and a representation of the eaglehawk’s eyrie. Along the avenue, symbols of male and female reproductive organs were carved into the earth. There was also one carving, which to Henderson strongly resembled a lingam, the Hindu symbol of both the phallus and of the moment of creation – another piece of evidence in his argument on the origins of the Wiradjuri, but to me, evidence of a connection to my own past. I have an old cup on the window ledge in my study with lingam-shaped stones in it which I had collected for years, even before I had heard of the word. A lingam resembles a human cell as it begins to divide and for Hindus, it is the original shape, the beginn
ing of duality, because it is the shape of one becoming two.

  At the other end of the bora avenue, a narrow path to the left led to a circular clearing enclosed by an earthen wall. During initiation the young male was questioned by an elder disguised as an extraordinary being. If the youth was approved, he was led down the avenue by spear-wielding elders, stopping at each of the carvings as secret knowledge was conveyed, and finally led to the circle where he was seated on the wall. After the ceremonies he was sent out into the bush for a number of days during which he could see no-one. Once initiated, the young man was bound to obey strict laws, including a total avoidance of women until the elders said he was ready to marry.

  Henderson asserts all this was explained to him by a man he refers to as a king of the tribe, who alone had the authority to reveal secrets. Even so, the ‘king’ said he would be killed – and perhaps the whole tribe killed – by neighbouring tribes if they knew he had revealed secrets to the uninitiated.

  I feel uncertain about re-telling it myself, partly because I have no idea whether Henderson was reliable or not – perhaps he just made things up to make himself sound interesting – but more because I wonder if I am stepping too near what was secret knowledge. Still, both feelings are overruled by curiosity and the weary pragmatic thought that it doesn’t matter any more – it’s in Henderson’s book for anyone to read.

  And intriguing as they were, the ethnographic notes were not letting me get any closer to the daily life of the Wiradjuri. The events the note-takers had chosen to write about were not so much from daily life but rather what was spectacular, romantic, shocking. The actual way of life of the Wiradjuri, and their consciousness of being, still eluded me completely.

  I’ve been avoiding writing about the women. Whatever I repeat from the note-takers, it will not look good. It appears that the women didn’t participate in tribal meetings or discussions; that they were given at eleven or twelve years old to much older men who could bestow them as sexual partners on others if they wished; that they were buried sitting up, like men, but in unmarked graves, unlike the men, whose tribal origins were carved on a nearby tree. They did not mix with men in daily life, gathered food separately – grubs and fruits from the bush and mussels from the river – and they always sat at a different fire. It was observed that they were not permitted to eat meat until the men were finished and only if it was given to them. They were often described as very thin.

  They must have had their own domains of power, women’s business, their own lore of fertility and birthing and the gathering of food, and they must have taught their daughters stories of how to follow the honey-bee and what to do when the blood flowed from their bodies, but I have not been able to find records of any of this from the Wellington Valley. The records were made by white men, so of course they were not going to have access to female knowledge or practices.

  But there were many reports of the women being beaten with weapons by their husbands. Too many accounts from too many sources to ignore. One eyewitness told of a high-status man in the Wellington Valley beating his wife with a boomerang, inflicting a wound to the bone. He also says the husband was sorry the next day and bathed her wound with warm water. Nothing new under the sun there.

  My first reaction was to sit horrified with the missionaries, but the Wiradjuri had, I suppose, the same percentage of ill-tempered, violent husbands as in any other culture. No-one can see what happens each evening behind pretty gardens and charming verandas, but a punch or a blow can’t really be hidden when there are no doors to shut or blinds to pull.

  There wasn’t only violence against women recorded by the missionaries, however. A number of distressing accounts told of women killing their newborn babies, including an eyewitness record of a woman trying to kick her newborn into the fire. It was a half-caste baby and probably she had been violently used by a white man and there were, no doubt, any number of practical reasons to end the baby’s life immediately, not least of which was that the rest of the tribe insisted on it. But I thought of the intensity of feeling after the birth of my own babies, the delicate beating of their fontanelles, the fragility of their limbs. I thought too of the African women I saw everyday in Paris when I lived there during my year of Imaginary Life. Their babies were tied to their backs with red and gold and emerald slings, the gorgeous fabrics matching their long loose dresses, the babies’ tiny heads bobbing as their mothers bent down to pick up green bananas at the market near Chateau Rouge. All day, every day, their babies were as near as their own skin.

  I don’t want to pick up my skirts and swish around with a pursed mouth like a missionary’s wife, condemning the Wiradjuri mothers as barbarous as if I knew nothing of the agenda of the note-takers, but it appears there was a degree of violence in Wiradjuri culture that had less to do with the invaders and more to do with a subsistence way of life. Those who were marred in some way, too old or handicapped or of uncertain lineage, were a liability.

  I had wanted to find evidence that I was connected to the Wiradjuri, not necessarily by blood, but by our shared living on the same land. I wanted to know something of their minds and hearts, their inner life before my ancestors arrived. Who were they? I remembered again the pleasure I took in the stone axes my father found on the farm and how I thought they were valuable. I loved to look at them and to touch them. I had imagined the skilful hands that made them, wondered how they had been shaped and smoothed and whether the axe-heads had ever had handles. I had run my finger along the edge of the sharpest one and tried chopping with it and made a rough nick in the gum down by the creek. If they had been axes from anywhere else, I would not have had more than a passing interest in them. I realise now they were sacred relics for me, like saints’ bones for medieval pilgrims, giving connection by sight and touch.

  Even so, I wanted to know that the Wiradjuri were not only interested in using their axes to find enough food and to protect themselves from the mysterious forces of evil. Perhaps it was a futile search; perhaps their ancient tribal consciousness was too different to mine.

  And then, one afternoon in the Library, in the midst of looking through the inadequate records under the high ceiling of the nineteenth-century temple of knowledge, I suddenly realised that is probably what we are all doing all the time – from the dawn of human time – in all our ‘after food-gathering’ activities: ochre cave paintings of bison or kangaroo, Gregorian chanting, Tibetan ritual, Zoroastrian dance, Zulu masks, totems, television, drugs, alcohol, religion, art, shopping, academic research, war. After finding enough food, we try, uselessly enough, all of us, to protect ourselves from the mysterious and terrifying forces of evil. Or even more frightening than evil, the vast void beneath and on either side of breathing life, the infinite place my childhood nightmare had opened up to me and that had come swooping in like a dark bird the moment I faltered in manufacturing the story of myself.

  And that, of course, is where the missionaries properly came into the picture. That was their sole business, protecting themselves and their congregation from the mysterious forces of evil, saving benighted souls caught in superstition. Until I found their diaries I had known nothing about the missionaries apart from their names: Watson, Günther, Handt, Porter.

  The missionaries didn’t think the Wiradjuri had a spiritual life. They had not heard of the Dreamtime or the Rainbow Serpent and dismissed the stories they were told as fantastical. Two hundred years later, the Dreamtime has become a cultural artefact to promote Australia to the rest of the world.

  While I was living in Paris, I saw an Aboriginal painting in the Musée du Quai Branly. It was called Le Temps du Rêve, The Time of the Dreaming. The painting had a yellow ochre background and was covered in swirls of tiny red ochre dots. I don’t remember the name of the artist, but the painting was from Papunya in the Western Desert of Central Australia, thousands of kilometres from Wiradjuri country. As far as I know, everywhere throughout Australia the struc
ture and purpose of traditional Indigenous imagery remains the same: spiritual life and country are indivisible. Paintings and stories are not intended as aesthetic experiences, but as maps, records and stories.

  When I saw this painting and the others from Arnhem Land and the carved pukumani poles from the Tiwi Islands in the post-modern museum on the banks of the Seine, I felt proud. These were the artworks from my place! Through the long narrow windows I could see the museum garden and the pearl sky of Paris, one window revealing the severe beauty of the Eiffel Tower. I realise now that it was the pride of a colonial child, pleased that her parents approved of her new home in the Antipodes enough to display her art in their elegant house.

  But now I think of the bora trees at Wellington. All that is left of them are the drawings of the carved patterns sketched by John Henderson in 1829. The sketches are of a ground plan of the ‘temple’ and of twenty-eight tree trunks, each one carved with different symbols. Most of these are recognisable from other works of ancient and contemporary Aboriginal art – wavy lines, dots, semicircles, concentric rings. But there are other less-used symbols such as rectangles and V-shapes and what look like human parts – a heart and a vulva. The patterns are beautiful. I can’t stop staring at Henderson’s drawings, even though I know Wiradjuri women were not allowed to see the original carvings.

  I wish the bora trees had not been destroyed. I wish I could see them. They were gradually chopped down then burned, the last one, I believe, within my lifetime. If the choice were offered me between the carved trees standing on plinths, uprooted and alone, open to every gaze in the Musée du Quai Branly thousands of miles from home, and what actually happened to the bora trees from my childhood town – burned to ash – I know I would choose the indignity of them being transported across the world. It feels wrong to wish that, but I do. It’s this kind of thinking that makes me realise that my mind is European, the mind of a thief.