The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  It’s not that we weren’t well cared for – we ate roast lamb and apple pie, wore clean, ironed clothes to town at least – best clothes for church and last year’s best for anything else – and had ample love and freedom; it’s just that my mother seemed to not be interested in running an orderly household – and with eight children, that sort of attitude was always going to result in vast and general mess. She laughed at her lack of housekeeping skills and expected us to have the same disrespect for women whose main interest was a tidy house. My mother was definitely one of those people who were so indolent they would rather read than work. Even now in her retirement village, she explained the oddness of her neighbour by leaning over and quietly confiding, ‘I think she is one of those people who are very neat.’ To my mother, striking neatness was a sign of someone who had a possibly disturbing grasp on the world.

  Joyce gestured for me to sit down at the table. We were both ready to head straight into it. Starting with Joyce meant I was starting with the claim of family, a connection, however tenuous, between the Wiradjuri and my own past. She had told me her grandfather and my great grandmother were brother and sister; that must count for something.

  ‘Where were you born?’ I started.

  ‘In a corrugated iron hut at Nanima. My grandmother, Granny May, delivered me. Everyone called her Granny May – she delivered all the babies born at Nanima and at Blacks Camp on the Common. She was married to John May, but he was called Farbie May.’

  ‘She was the midwife?’

  ‘Yeah. Delivered all the babies. I was born twenty-fourth November 1926, an’ called Joyce Marguerite Riley. My mother was called Maggie May.’

  ‘Maggie May! Like the song.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Joyce gestured towards a large photograph with an old-fashioned frame hanging on the wall above the filing cabinet. I stood up and walked over to have a better look at it. A young Maggie May was sitting in a cane chair, wearing a loose Chinese-looking dress and holding a fan. She was dark-skinned with European features and a gentle, almost timid, manner. According to Joyce, she was my grandfather Frank’s cousin. I wondered if he ever knew her.

  ‘So you reckon Farbie May’s sister was my dad’s grandmother, Rosina?’

  ‘That’s right. He was born out at Murrumbidgerie. Near Guerie.’

  ‘And their mother was Lauannah or Lavinia? In our records, we are not sure which.’

  ‘Laureena.’

  ‘Laureena?’

  ‘Her name was Laureena.’

  Joyce was adamant, no question about it. I hadn’t heard of any Laureena. I needed to check that.

  ‘And Laureena was dark?’

  ‘Yeah, she was dark. I got a sort of memory of sittin’ in the park when I was a little girl next to Laureena. She was a big black woman wearing a black lacy-lookin’ hat.’

  I could see her easily: a plump Aboriginal woman in a fancy hat on the grass in Cameron Park where the Aborigines always hung around when I was a child. It was as close as I could get to the woman who might be my Wiradjuri ancestor. She was no more than a vague picture in Joyce’s mind, slipping and shifting over the years as memory does. Joyce could just as easily have been remembering someone else altogether.

  Joyce had a brother born two years later, Bill, the one I’d met, and an older sister, Eileen, who had died when she was eleven years old after she was accidentally bumped by a boy in the playground and hit her head against the wall of the school. There was another little boy who died, Joyce didn’t know how, and two little sisters, one dead from bronchitis when she was a toddler and the other from convulsions brought on by a cat scratching her face on the day of the first one’s funeral.

  ‘Four of your mother’s children dead! God, how terrible! How did she go on with life after that!’

  ‘These things happened,’ Joyce said.

  Her no-nonsense tone reminded me of Gran Miller, the same pragmatic attitude. Country women, black and white, must have been made of tougher stuff in those days.

  ‘When babies died at Nanima and Blacks Camp they were put in little wooden boxes and then we put ’em in holes in the bank of the river,’ Joyce went on.

  ‘Really? Buried in the river bank?’ It sounded strangely magical, babies in burrows like rows of little sleeping water-creatures, waiting perhaps to be hatched out as a platypus or river fish.

  ‘Yeah, an’ then we put big stones to stop dogs or whatever. But then, one day, a huge flood came and the coffins started to be washed away so some of the young fellas dived down into the flood and grabbed ’em. The babies were re-buried on the Common, but no-one remembers exactly where they are anymore.’

  She seemed to be making a point about the babies being buried on the Common, not just telling a story. Her tone implied something I didn’t understand, but I let it go as Joyce had already gone on into a complicated family history.

  Joyce and her brother Bill lived with Granny and Farbie May after their father, Herbie Riley, and Maggie May split up. Their cousin, Billie May, lived with them too. His mother, Katie May, worked for a station owner who raped her on the weekends when his wife went to town to do the shopping, so she ran away on Christmas Day one year. Her family found her fifty-seven years later in Boggabri and everyone in the town celebrated.

  ‘One day, my cousin, Ruby Riley, was taken away by the Guv’ment and ended up in Parramatta Girls Home in Sydney.’

  ‘Oh, that’s terrible. I’ve heard about that place.’

  ‘So then her brother, Johnny, was claimed by his aunt and his name changed to Johnny George so he wouldn’t be taken away.’

  ‘Good idea.’ I nodded.

  ‘ ’Cept Ruby and Johnny never found each other again. Often we knew when the Guv’ment people were coming though. Well, I didn’t, I was just a kid. One mornin’ very early, still dark in fact, Granny May woke me, told me to get up. But Gran, it’s still dark, I said. No matter, she said, you’re goin’ on holiday to Peak Hill with your Auntie Thelma.’

  It was more than seventy years ago but Joyce remembered the horse and sulky waiting in the dark, a lantern swinging from the backboard. She was eight years old, maybe nine, bundled onto the sulky with Auntie and a few belongings. The horse trotted away from Nanima along the dirt road. There is always a clarity travelling somewhere in the early morning; you never forget the clear, cool strangeness of it and I could see in Joyce’s face the freshness of the memory, her childhood excitement. She was on holiday for two months.

  ‘More ’an twenty-five years later, in the sixties, I was workin’ at Wellington District Hospital when Auntie Thelma came in. I was helpin’ her, givin’ her a bit of a back rub – I wasn’t a nurse, just givin’ her a rub – an’ Auntie said she had something to tell me. She said, Remember that holiday. The Guv’ment was comin’ to take you that day. That’s why you came to stay with me.’

  ‘You were lucky.’

  Joyce grinned. Clever rather than lucky, her look said. She felt well cared for even though their house was made of corrugated iron (crinkle tin, I remember Bill called it) with a dirt floor. There were only seven houses at Nanima at that time and they were all the same. The rest were on the Common where some ‘outsiders from Peak Hill had arrived’, Joyce told me pointedly, and a few humpies half a mile away at Blacks Camp where Granny May had been born. Most people had moved from Blacks Camp to the Nanima site in 1910. Bill Riley had told me years before that their grandfather, John Riley, had written to Queen Victoria about the flooding at Blacks Camp and she had written back advising them to seek out and establish another location, which they duly did. The letter from Queen Victoria was kept at Nanima school for most of the twentieth century, but in the 1990s some kid stole and burnt it. To Bill this was evidence of the general decay that had set in at Nanima by then.

  ‘Our place was lined with wheat bags painted with lime,’ Joyce c
ontinued. She was an easy talker. ‘Still pretty cold in winter, you know the frosts ’ere in winter and too hot in summer. Early on, Granny May used ta cook on an open fire in the hearth, she ’ad a camp oven, but later on we ’ad a proper wood stove. We ’ad a bath made out of flattened kerosene tins and the water was heated in kettles on the fire.’

  ‘We did that too,’ I said, proud of it for the first time.

  The steaming water would be poured into dishes for an all-over wash starting with the face and ending with the ‘tail’. No-one else we knew bathed in a dish – and I made sure no-one at school found out. We didn’t have running hot water, or even running cold water, until I was about ten, when my father built a kitchen and installed a tap. Before then, water had to be carried inside in kettles from the corrugated iron water tanks outside.

  ‘We ’ad a church and a school at Nanima in my day.’

  ‘Were there missionaries at Nanima then?’

  I had thought they left after Porter’s liaison with the Aboriginal woman and the mortifying close of the Mission in Wellington.

  ‘Yeah. They lived next to the church, but they didn’t run the place. Farbie ran things, if anyone did. They ’ad a tin church, painted red, and one afternoon a really big storm blew up.’ She grinned. ‘It was really blowy, and then I was lookin’ out the window and a red sheet of tin blew past! And then another one! And another. The whole church blew away. Next mornin’, all that was left was the organ.’

  She chuckled, delighted by her story.

  ‘Wow – that’s amazing!’

  ‘Yeah, just the organ sittin’ there. Just the organ all by itself. And we all looked at it.’

  And tried to hide their grins, by the look in Joyce’s eyes all these years later. I could just see them gazing soberly at the forlorn organ, trying not to let missionaries see them laughing.

  ‘So the missionaries left after that.’ Joyce chuckled again, her engaging wicked grin lighting up her face.

  She told me then about going to school, still in the era of memorising poetry, doing sums, sewing and raffia work. Miss Rose Taylor was her teacher. Another teacher, Miss Ardell, married one of the Aboriginal students, Ernest Daley, which must have given both their families something to discuss over dinner. I remember Lester Daley sat behind me in school, the only Aborigine in my class. He was nice looking, gentle and shy, and I often whispered to him in maths and borrowed his ruler. I wonder if he was a descendant of Miss Ardell and Ernest.

  ‘I got into trouble from the teachers because some tittle-tats had told the teachers we had painted our bodies with clay down at the river. Miss Taylor said, you have to keep your bodies clean.’

  I clucked sympathetically but Joyce wasn’t really bothered. Her tone was not bitter or even angry, she was just telling it like it was.

  ‘We also got inta trouble for usin’ language. I only knew a few words but old Granny Jewel, Granny Stuart, Auntie Martha Daley, Bert Dempsey and Ben Harris, they could all use language and we would listen and pick up a few words. We would just say, Look at that lot of mayngs [whites] over there, and the teachers would tell us not to use those words.’

  The elders also taught Joyce and the other kids traditional dancing. They would slip their shoes off and dance around a big old fire bucket in the lantern light and the kids would join in, Ned Daley in his hobnailed boots.

  ‘One time there were six of us kids dancin’, havin’ a wonderful time and Granny Stuart suddenly stopped us. How many of you kids are dancin’? she asked. Six, Granny, we said. Six? said Granny. Well who owns that other shadow then? And we counted the shadows and there were seven. There’s someone else dancing, said Granny.’

  I had to break in at this point. ‘What did Granny Stuart think it was?’

  ‘She didn’t say. She jus’ said there was a shadow dancin’ with us.’

  It was time for Joyce to pick up her great grandkids from school. Time for me to go. We hadn’t even started to talk about the Native Title claim although I had a fair idea that’s what Joyce was hinting towards when she mentioned the families from Peak Hill living on the Common. They were the beginning of the problem, the people who didn’t belong. Probably Rose’s family. I couldn’t hope to find out about all that in a few minutes. All Joyce’s information came in the form of stories, and stories take longer than lists of facts.

  As I stood up and bundled my books and tape recorder back in my bag, I tentatively asked if I could come back tomorrow. Joyce said yes immediately, as if it were no imposition at all. Then I remembered the photocopy I’d made for her from Henderson’s journal, the page of drawings of the bora ground on the Macquarie River. I told her what I knew: that they were drawn by a Mr John Henderson in the late 1820s about fifteen years after the first whites arrived. I felt guilty as I handed it to her. This was all I could give – a record of what was destroyed.

  ‘Women were not allowed to see the bora ground, were they?’

  ‘No, that’s right.’ She grinned, seemingly not bothered that we were both breaking an old law. ‘And the men weren’t allowed to be at the birthing places.’

  ‘Do you know where they were, these trees?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Maybe out Bodangara way. There’s a lot of axes and things out that way.’

  ‘I think they might have been closer,’ I said. ‘I’ll find out if I can and I will tell you straightaway.’

  It was stupid making a promise when I had no idea if I could fulfil it, but it seemed necessary to at least try to make reparation.

  15

  Thieving Ancestors

  I didn’t feel like going back to the cabin so I decided to drive out to Nanima to see what it was like these days. It was the same road I had come on nearly thirty years ago but where was the alien landscape I had remembered? It wasn’t dry or harsh at all. The paddocks were knee deep in ripe grasses, creamy and golden with new green growth tingeing it with freshness, the slopes of the hills were gentle, the sky a soft blue scattered with puffy clouds. Except for the gumtrees it could have been a late summer landscape in the south of France. Even the native pines on Pine Hill looked delicate and soft.

  When I crested the hill, I couldn’t see anything over the pines so I kept on driving, thinking I would pull over when I caught sight of the Mission and just observe it from a distance, but I kept going, down through a small herd of horses, over the cattle ramp and into the cluster of houses. The village didn’t look the same as I remembered either. There were about twenty-five buildings lining the T which made up the shape of the settlement; some were fibro, the older ones, but most were brick and some had cultivated gardens, one crowded with bright red, green and yellow gnomes and other cement garden creatures. There was a broken fibro church with a sign, ‘Nanima Shalom Church’, which looked like it had not been used for years, and a closed shop.

  I drove back to the cabin and sat out on the veranda in the river-cooled air. I thought about my father’s stories of going to visit his grandmother Rosina in her dirt-floored hut and wondered if they could be true. It sounded like Nanima but it seemed most unlikely that she lived there because she was married to Charlie Miller, who had a homestead on top of a hill near Wellington. Maybe Dad meant he visited his great grandmother Lauannah or Lavinia or Laureena, whichever it was. Or maybe he was just having us on. And was John ‘Farbie’ May really Rosina’s brother? Surely there would be some record of it in our family tree if it were true.

  Joyce had mentioned the local history researcher, Lee Thurlow, several times. She said he had ‘everything written up’. He kept records of Wiradjuri families, she said, and the land claim. I should go and see him if I wanted to find out more details. In the meantime, I sat down and tried to draw up Joyce’s family tree to see where the gaps were and whether it crossed over with the records my father had started to research before he became ill and died more than ten years ago. I had cop
ies of some of his notes with me and spent the evening sorting through them. Whether we had Wiradjuri ancestors or not, the mere fact of my white ancestors turning up in the Wellington Valley on the currents of English criminal and colonial policy mingled our histories inextricably.

  I pictured my ancestors first setting foot on Australian soil, literally setting foot on soil I mean, not metaphorically. Perhaps because I grew up on the land, when I first set foot on the soil, in both England and Europe, there was the tear-stinging fulfilment of the imagined world meeting the actual. Each time, in fact, I knelt down, a bit pope-like, and put my hands on the ground to make sure of its earthiness. Each time a slight shock, made of faint loss and powerful joy mixed – oh God, it is just real, ordinary dirt.

  I was impressed with my father’s efforts at research. He was not educated past primary school and even during those short years often didn’t go to class if his father needed him for harvesting or hay-making or shearing. His family were not graziers, not one of the landed gentry of Australia, but ‘cockies’, farmers who scratched a living from the soil. According to Dad’s careful notes, my first white ancestor set foot on Australian soil at Sydney Cove on 9 October 1813, just twenty-five years after English settlement began. He was my great, great, great grandfather and his name was William Yarnold, also known as Yarnell.

  William came from Worcestershire and he had just arrived on a sailing ship called the Earl Spencer, named after the ancestor of a well-known late-twentieth-century princess. He was short, only five feet three and a half inches tall, had black hair and hazel eyes and was described in the ship’s indent as having ‘dark pale’ skin. He was just twenty years old – and had been convicted to a life sentence. He wasn’t one of those almost innocents who ‘only stole a loaf of bread’, but a proper crook who stole nearly a hundred guineas from his employer, enough to live on for five years or so, the equivalent of at least $250,000 these days.