The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  10 Sept

  It must be allowed that the men are not quite so vile as the females who become wives or prostitutes at so early an age.

  25 Sept

  Mrs G. performed an operation to day, which amused & surprised me, she was cutting the hair of one of our Black youths a very robust & tall fellow called George. I was surprised that Mrs G. had inclination & ability for it for it was a very nasty job; the Blacks exhale commonly a smell which is almost intolerable when you come near them. Besides the young man had just been greasing his hair with fish-fat as they frequently do. The poor fellow was quite proud of having his hair cut by Mrs G. thanked her very much and would say, it was done ‘Capital’.

  In the evening we were highly amused by this very young man and another Jemmy who had been fishing & were very lucky. In less than an hour they caught from 15 to 18 fishes all from about 3 to 6 pounds weight, one they caught which we estimated to weigh nearly twenty. They were very liberal with them both to us & the Natives. When they observed our surprise & delight they were highly gratified and laughed all the time.

  28 Sept

  Mrs G. gave this morning a reading lesson to some of the Black youths on the Establishment, Jemmy, George & Harry, who have taken a fancy to learn reading. When they had done reading or rather spelling they desired Mrs G. to teach them to sing also.

  29 Sept

  We had hardly done breakfast when Mrs G’s. pupils made their appearance desirous to read. When reading was over I gave my singing lesson, in the same way as yesterday.

  1839

  May 25

  I was much amused & struck with some observations of Cochrane’s to day. A certain Individual whose vanity & self conceit attract the notice of most persons, passed by, with so much consequence, that our poor heathen youth could not forbear expressing his disgust & observed: ‘That fellow very proud; No body so proud as that man, he think he magistrate etc etc’ adding very significantly: ‘I believe that fellow not know his heart.’ This evidently shows that C. is aware of the close connection of self-knowledge & humility.

  1840

  April 3

  Besides teaching the few Youths that are remaining occasionally I am still pursuing the study of the language, and have endeavoured yesterday & to day to translate the Lord’s Prayer, into it; not without some difficulty, since, what we should call essential words, are lacking in this language. But some of my most intelligent young men approve of my translation, calling it correct & intelligible.

  25 Dec

  This was a poor Christmas day indeed! How distressing & discouraging! No body at Church but our two White men and about half a dozen Blacks . . . Our Aboriginal youths were in a very bad careless mood determined to run away to the Camp immediately after Service and laughed at all my warnings & exhortations. When I spoke of leaving them Bungary [Bungarri] replied: ‘Well you may, we know now enough.’ This is in a great measure the fruit of all that has passed on this Mission so disgraceful to the Good Cause. They know to take advantage of it; a short time since when I warned Bungary against having any thing to do with a certain worthless treacherous Aborigine, he replied: ‘We are not like Missionaries, we love one another.’ What one’s feeling must be under such circumstances our friends may imagine.

  From the Diary of Brother Johann Handt

  1832

  24 Nov

  Asked some black women this evening who were sitting around the fire, where their children were but they replied, why I asked for their children . . . I told them however that we desired to instruct their children, and to make them like ourselves, after which they replied that they had no children.

  Date unknown

  They are instructed as opportunity presents itself, at home, in the bush or in the camp, by talking, or reading a passage of Scripture, or delivering a short discourse to them, in their own language. Their attention is not always to be gained, as they are frequently given to much talk and jest.

  From the Diary of William Porter

  1838

  31 July

  They are a great deal more inclined to read than to work; being naturally the most indolent people in the world.

  13

  More Inclined to Read than Work

  As I finally clicked off the online journals, I imagined the missionaries writing in the evenings by lamp light, sitting at a desk with an ink pot, pens, blotter, describing their activities, making their observations of the Wiradjuri, pouring out their disappointments and their bitterness against each other. They must have heard the evening sounds of my childhood – crickets chirruping, mopokes calling mournfully, frogs croaking and booming from the river, mosquitoes buzzing – but they don’t mention any of them.

  I liked Watson recording the temperature and the weather; I liked Günther’s surprise at his wife giving one of the Wiradjuri men a haircut – I could feel his awareness of the intimacy of such an act. I laughed out loud at Watson’s indignation with Kabbarrin not wanting to wear the good new blue jacket he’d lately paid sixteen shillings for in Bathurst. Watson clearly didn’t know anything about style.

  Mostly though, the journals had the same effect on me as the religious arguments I used to have with my father when I was a teenager. For a while I’d make the mistake of thinking we, my father and I, were rationally debating the issue around the kitchen table, but the argument always ended when his evidence became, ‘God says.’ With me on one side and God on the other, I didn’t stand a chance. That’s why I’m impressed with Kabbarrin’s argument on the question of how a God is constructed: ‘What God? I believe white man made the Bible and then put down God in it.’ Why didn’t I think of saying that?

  And Bungarri’s quick, sharp dig at the missionaries’ failure to follow the central teaching of Christianity: ‘We are not like the missionaries, we love one another.’ By that stage Günther and Watson could not stand each other and for one of the Natives to assume superiority in understanding Christian charity must have been more than irritating. I can see the innocent look on Bungarri’s face as he so precisely sticks the knife in.

  And even an eight-year-old child could point out the injustice of the unutterably cruel concept of hell: ‘What for all pikininny go to fire, no good that.’ Of course it was no bloody good. I remember trying to accommodate the concept of hell when I was about twelve by deciding if I had to believe it existed then it must be uninhabited.

  I was impressed too with Gungin arguing the politics of ownership and respect and identity – ‘What do you want here? What do you come here for? Why do you not go to your own country.’ And again, another unnamed man, ‘apparently full of self-importance’, according to Watson, argued that the ‘The land all about belonged to natives and he (Watson) was not to mind’.

  But more intriguing than all debates is the Wiradjuri response to the obstinate, one-tracked nagging of the missionaries. Even through the missionaries’ eyes, and even despite their frequent wars with other tribes, the Wiradjuri seem to have been, as a culture, extraordinarily good-humoured. They come across as laconic, easy-going blokes, laughing and joking, a bit puzzled that the missionaries never seemed to get it. When I read of their ‘jesting’ and ‘drollery’ and laughter and sardonic comments, I envied their ease in letting the missionaries’ many and various manias slide off their fish-oiled skin.

  The parsons preached and scolded, were stiff and spiky, angry and miserable. They worried about sex and swearing and stealing and indolence and disobeying the Sabbath, they bickered and argued bitterly among themselves – and they tore their souls apart about why the Natives didn’t want to be like them. The Wiradjuri took the meat and bread and tobacco offered, listened politely for a while, shed tears when the missionaries told moving stories, tried to be accommodating to these obviously unhappy people, attempted to persuade them not to speak so harshly, and then tried to jolly them along with their
high-spirited enjoyment of life.

  What might have really tried the patience of the Wiradjuri – it certainly started to annoy me – was the missionaries’ constant turning of all situations and conversations towards sin and evil, especially the evil of illicit sex, which they mostly blamed on the licentious nature of the ‘women’, often little girls in fact, and on the Aboriginal men who traded their wives so freely. For the missionaries, it wasn’t so much a matter of age or exploitation, but that unmarried sex was sinful, full stop. Which is why it is so neatly paradoxical that it was this sin, committed by one of the missionaries themselves, that finally brought the mission undone. Shockingly, and worse, embarrassingly, it was discovered that William Porter, the catechist, had been having sex with one of the Aboriginal mission women for at least two years!

  Poor Mr Porter had tried for some time to persuade the Mission Society to pay for his fiancée to come from England but the society refused. His sexual relationship with the Aboriginal woman began at the time of the final refusal. What galled the other missionaries the most was that the Aborigines now had a ‘handle against one of our members’. It must have been excruciating to be so caught out, laughed at by their naked congregation.

  I don’t think the missionaries were evil, just misled by doctrine and a desire for influence and by their own stiff-necked personalities. Doctrine distorted their view, made sin appear where there was none, or worse, made the real sins invisible. The missionaries told themselves they simply wanted to save the Natives’ eternal souls, but there is so much frustration in their journal entries at their lack of influence over the local Wiradjuri that it has to be read as thwarted desire for power. Why else be annoyed that Gungin didn’t want to be ordered about by them; why else be so upset that the girls working for them wanted to return to the bush; why else keep stealing Wiradjuri children? There are entries over and over again bewailing the fruitlessness of the missionaries’ efforts. A successful missionary has a great deal of power over minds and bodies but the Wellington Valley missionaries were, to their unending chagrin, unable to gain any real power over the Wiradjuri. The Wiradjuri just weren’t interested.

  In the end, it is Porter’s remark I like the best of any of the journal entries: ‘They are a great deal more inclined to read than to work; being naturally the most indolent people in the world.’

  I laughed aloud when I first read it. At least, along with all their nagging, the missionaries had given the Wiradjuri a love of reading, opening up the sublime possibilities of a vast world. And more importantly for me, they had given them a desire I could recognise. Like them, I am a great deal more inclined to read than to work. For that I am willing to forgive the missionaries a multitude of their sins.

  I have no memory whatsoever of learning to read. I do remember sitting at a wooden kindergarten desk in our one-room school with a book open in front of me, impatiently waiting because I had finished it already. Reading was like breathing; it was impossible not to do it and I’ve been addicted to it for longer than memory will allow. I do remember learning to read in French, real reading that is, not just painfully trying to force meaning word by word from the obstinate page in my high school French class, but actually relishing the juice of narrative. It happened suddenly one evening after I had already been in Paris for six months. The pedantic little cipher that insisted on exact definition must have suddenly slipped, allowing me to fall, surprised, into the joyful stream of meaning.

  I suppose it was something like that for Kabbarrin and Gungin and all the other Wiradjuri youths when they learned to read. But they were not only learning to read in a foreign language as I was, and not only in an unknown script, but without any previous knowledge that black marks on a page could yield a story, could make a voice speak inside your head. It was an extraordinary leap to realise there was sound and colour and action inside those black squiggles in the missionaries’ books. And then to learn what the squiggles meant. There had to be an enticement and that, of course, was the fabulous stories: battles between brothers, warring tribes, rains of fire, seas parting, messages carved on stone, wanderings in the desert, heads of seers on plates, wise elders making decrees, spirit creatures ascending and descending on ladders from the skies – they must have all made sense to the Wiradjuri. It was only natural they had the desire to learn to read the stories for themselves.

  Reading created in me the desire to see the carved faces under the Pont du Neuf – I had read about them in Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame; to walk past Gertrude Stein’s house in the rue Fleurus – I had read of her soirées in Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast; to stare in the window of Picasso’s Bateau Lavoir at the end of my street – I’d read about it in Stein’s An Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; to lounge in Café Flores – I had read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins; to shiver in the cool air in narrow, cobbled Left Bank alleys – I had read Émile Zola’s Therese Raquin and Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot. Black marks on white pages created the desire to live in those streets and breathe in that air, making them far more real than the unwritten world around me.

  Apart from a couple of local histories, which can be bought at the Historical Museum, there are no books written about Wellington. The Wiradjuri stories have been lost or hidden in museums, and we are all bereft.

  14

  Living at Nanima Reserve

  It was several weeks since I had talked to Joyce. When I rang her again one of her grandchildren answered the phone.

  ‘She’s out on the veranda,’ he said.

  I heard him calling out and the sound of a screen door opening and shutting before Joyce picked up the receiver.

  ‘I’m coming up again this week, Joyce. Have you got any time free?’

  ‘Okay. Give me a ring when you get ’ere.’

  ‘Can I make a time to see you now?’

  ‘Nah, give me a ring when you’re ’ere.’

  I put the phone down, unsure whether I had an appointment to see her or not.

  After I arrived in Wellington, I booked into a cabin in the caravan park on the Macquarie River. It was aluminium with bare walls, but it did have a small veranda looking down to the fast-flowing river. The long drought had broken over the last couple of months and the brown water foamed around branches tangled in the roots of magnificent old river gums that must have sheltered Wiradjuri before any of my ancestors ever came here. I unpacked and draped my clothes over chairs. I wondered if Joyce would actually talk to me or whether I’d come on a wild goose chase.

  The next morning I rang her and asked if I could come around. She agreed as if we had already settled on a date and time. I looked through my clothes. I didn’t want to dress too casually and have Joyce think I was not treating her with proper respect, but at the same time I didn’t want to be too ‘flash’. In my family it doesn’t do to be ‘flash’. It’s read as a sign that you think you are better than other people, one of the toffs. As kids, we had one outfit of ‘town clothes’ each and the rest of the time wore whatever we could find in the old kitchen dresser that served as a closet in the unlined passageway. In photographs taken at home, we look like hillbillies from the Depression era with our oversized shorts, short-armed shirts, tight jackets wrongly buttoned, bare feet, hair chopped in a basin cut; there was no chance anyone would mistake us for toffs. I put on my linen skirt and brown top patterned with Chinese writing, quiet and tidy-looking.

  As I drew up outside Joyce’s house and climbed out of the car with my bag of books and micro recorder, a black woman appeared at the door of the neighbouring house. I glanced over. Perhaps I was considered an intruder here.

  ‘Hallo,’ she said shyly.

  ‘G’day,’ I said, and then felt embarrassed.

  An ordinary innocent Aussie, that’s me. The neighbour nodded and disappeared.

  I unlatched Joyce’s gate and walked up the cement path. The front garden was nondescript
, a bush or two, but infinitely neater than the one I grew up in. Our yard was bare dirt with scattered marshmallow grass and, later, a few small patches of lawn that tried to stay alive through droughts. We had a cracked fibro lavatory patched with tin, a mud hut housing the generator, and three long clotheslines stretching from one chicken-wire fence to the other. Our handed-down toys were scattered about, holes were dug here and there for various games, chooks wandered in and were chased out. My mother swept the dirt with a straw broom in an occasional attempt at tidiness. We knew we were poor, but both my mother with her disrespectful Irish attitude and my father with his devotion to religion made us feel we were superior for not having material burdens.

  Joyce’s front door was open so I knocked on the frame of the gauze screen. When Joyce came up the hall and opened the screen my first impression was of perfect neatness. I had dressed correctly, a small critic in my brain breathed more easily. She was small, with curly white hair framing a brown face, observant, friendly eyes. She wore a pastel floral top of the sort that old ladies often wear – she was eighty-four, she told me again, although she looked much younger – and neatly cut navy blue shorts that came to her knees.

  ‘Oh, it’s so nice to have a visitor,’ she said, smiling widely, as if I was doing her a favour instead of being one of a long line of white people imposing on her time.

  She led me down the hall into a dim room dominated by a table covered in a heavy cloth. There was little other furniture apart from a filing cabinet and a sideboard, but there were a number of photographs and what looked liked framed awards on the sideboard. The walls were lined with a soft chipboard – the material used for noticeboards that thumbtacks can be pressed into. Bits of it were gouged out here and there and it was in need of a coat of paint, but the impression was still one of striking neatness.

  I have to explain myself here. It sounds as if I’m saying, ‘my goodness, isn’t it wonderful that some of these Natives can be so neat’, when I’m trying to say, ‘this is so different to my childhood home’. In our house, beds were rarely made, mountains of dirty clothes lined the tin-roofed alleyway between the bedrooms and living room, kitchen cupboards overflowed with sticky tins and jars. There was no system for getting rid of household rubbish, unless grabbing the empty golden syrup tins and sauce bottles and hurling them over the chook yard fence can be called a system.