The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  Hansard records Refshauge saying:

  This agreement marks a significant outcome for the people of Wellington . . . It will resolve the oldest native title claim lodged in Australia. I am sure that the spirit of co-operation that has led to this agreement will serve as a model for future agreements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in New South Wales. (my italics)

  How straightforward and convincing the written, official version is, so reassuring and unified. Anyone reading the records – including the parliamentary ones – could be forgiven for thinking the whole Native Title process for the Wellington Wiradjuri was simple and no-one had ever disagreed with anyone. No bitter conflict within the Aboriginal community, no accusations or insinuations, no hurt, no split.

  In following the story of the Wiradjuri, I have had to face the fact that, even knowing how questionable reality is, how it can dissolve overnight, part of me still wants to believe in a smooth, coherent, continuous story. It is an attitude easily exploited by those who have reasons to hide the complex truth. I had begun to see that the remembered version, Joyce’s version – many-stranded, tangled, subjective – might be more truthful. History, by definition written, is not necessarily the truth.

  21

  Patrick Reidy and the Wiradjuri

  It was late autumn, months since my first failed phone call to Rose. Outside the air was cool and leaves swirled and gathered under parked cars and flattened themselves onto windscreens. I curled up with local history books sent to me from the Wellington Library. There were still gaps in the Native Title conflict, but I wanted to find out what happened in the 150 years between the missionaries’ zealous efforts to save Native souls in the early nineteenth century and the crime statistics of the late twentieth.

  Like my own ancestors, the Wiradjuri didn’t write anything down. And neither did white observers write much after the initial exotic difference of the Natives wore off. Perhaps the eighteenth-century urge to observe and record had finally given way to the nineteenth-century desire for exploitation and progress. Perhaps the Natives had become Abos and were simply a nuisance in the great surge of development. Whichever it was, I found myself missing the obsessive recording of the missionaries.

  There were still some threads I could follow: the few local history books and Lee Thurlow, the local historian whom Joyce had mentioned. I could talk to Joyce again and to one of her friends, Evelyn, who still lived out at Nanima.

  The earliest history was written in 1906 by the editor of the local newspaper, who mentioned only that ‘the Blacks’ soon thinned out and that in 1840 sixty troopers were stationed across the river at Montefiores where a village had begun to grow, to ‘quell disturbances by blacks on outer stations’. He says, sympathetically, that they naturally objected to their land being taken by unscrupulous white men.

  A later history reports that an Aborigine from Wellington had originally shown Lieutenant Percy Simpson the route from Bathurst and then there is no further mention of Aborigines for the next 125 years of the town’s history. It’s one of those smooth, glossy accounts written to celebrate the town and its families, padded out with advertisements for various shops and businesses. I couldn’t help checking the chapter titled ‘Men and Women Who Played Their Part in the Work of the Town’ to see if any of my ancestors were mentioned. I was foolishly pleased to see five Reidys and one Kennedy listed and wanted to immediately check each entry.

  I skimmed down the page with Patrick Reidy’s name on it. The words jumped out at me. In 1867 a committee of three men was appointed to look into how and where to set up a Town Common. The committee settled on a fine parcel of land along the Macquarie River a few miles south-east of the town and that year the Common was formally gazetted. Although the men on the committee probably didn’t see it that way, this was the moment the land was officially taken from the Wiradjuri. One of the three men on that committee of land thieves was my own ancestor, Patrick Reidy!

  I stared at the entry. I could hardly believe it. It wasn’t just symbolic to say my ancestors took the land from the Wiradjuri in the first place. After all this time I had discovered one of them, Patrick Reidy, really did take it.

  As Patrick’s bones lie in the soil by Curra Creek, he can’t be called to account for anything anymore. In his day I suppose he strode about, bearded and waist-coated, once a poor, rebel Limerickman, now lord of his domain at last. I am sure he didn’t think of himself as a land thief. To him, this land was freely available for the taking. There were no fences or stone walls or deeds of title – and the Natives didn’t seem to be doing anything with it. He could not have had any idea of the effect of the loss of land on the people who had lived on it forever, any idea that their descendants would be sticking needles in their arms, or that his own descendants would be mugged in the streets because of it.

  In the most recent history, Patrick was mentioned again, this time in connection with an Aboriginal cricket team formed in 1882. They soon ‘displayed a mastery of the game which embarrassed other players’. The cricket field they used was at Sarsfield, Patrick’s farm on the banks of the Curra Creek. I pictured him again, still bearded, but this time in cream flannels, watching the elegant swing of willow in skilful black hands. Perhaps he had started to get ideas about himself by now, imitating his former English lords with his own wooded park and cricket meadow.

  The following year, the story continued, the local Aboriginal cricket team beat the Wellington eleven by twenty-eight runs in the first innings and the white team declined to finish the match. Shortly afterwards a return match was organised and once more the Aboriginal team beat the white men, this time by five runs. The local paper said, with a curious pride: ‘The dusky sons of the soil marched off triumphantly victorious, quite prepared to beat the English eleven players should they come this way.’

  Lester Daley, the Aboriginal kid who sat in the desk behind me in high school, played cricket. I remember his white shirt untucked, revealing dark skin above his white shorts. He played in the same team as my brother Terry and they often won. But it was for rugby league football that Aborigines became stars in Wellington – and across the country. I wondered why they didn’t keep playing cricket. Perhaps the white teams got tired of being beaten and wouldn’t play them anymore.

  The next mention of Aborigines was the 1901 Census, which recorded there were sixty-eight Aborigines in the Wellington district. This seems a ridiculously low number, since 100 years later there was more than 1000, but in those days, only ‘full-bloods’ were counted as Aborigines: ‘Oh but they are half white, you can’t count them as Aborigines.’ Of course they were counted as Aborigines when it came to applying for jobs or being allowed to vote or own property or being approved of as suitable marriage partners for people like my grandmother.

  The final mention is just a few years later. The Sanitary Inspector reported to the Wellington Council on the condition of the Aborigines’ camp near the Town Common where there were eighteen huts sheltering up to eighty people. This was Blacks Camp where Joyce’s mother, Maggie May, was born. ‘Upon enquiry,’ said the Inspector, ‘I was informed that as many as 13 people were living in a small three-roomed hut.’ Aborigines had lung illnesses and some had died of tuberculosis. There were no sanitary facilities and there was a serious risk that the town’s water supply would be contaminated.

  This last comment seemed to have been the motivation for a demand that the camp be moved. It echoed the story Bill Riley and Joyce told of their grandfather writing a letter to Queen Victoria about the flooding and poor conditions, and her letter in reply advising them to relocate. Whatever the motivating force, council or queen, they were moved to the present Nanima site in 1910. The Aboriginal Welfare Board built some houses, which the local newspaper reported were little better than the huts they had left.

  There was nothing more to be found in the local history books. For my own ancestors, Patrick, land thief an
d cricketer, and a handful of others were named. The Wiradjuri were barely recorded as a people and not one individual was mentioned. Not a single name.

  But the Wiradjuri were there, working as stockmen, drovers, fencers, shearers, shed-hands, scrub-cutters, horse-breakers, shepherds and general farmhands – all the wide range of skilled work necessary on country properties. According to Gaynor’s research, once the supply of convicts dried up, workers were needed to replace them, and once their hunting land was taken, the Aborigines needed work. In the 1880s, over eighty per cent of Aborigines in Wellington were employed. They sometimes stayed on one property but more often moved onto another district when seasonal work was finished. In those days without large machinery, farm work required a lot of men so not even small ‘cockies’ could run a property on their own. This means that my early ancestors, the Kennedys and Reidys and Müllers, and even the ex-convict William Yarnold, once he became a land-owner, must have had Aboriginal workers.

  The Wiradjuri women around Wellington, like Joyce, also worked on the larger properties as maids and cooks and nurse-maids and sometimes as wet nurses and midwives. They were mostly younger women who, if they liked their employers, stayed until they were married and then followed their husbands’ work. Because the women were often involved with the care and bringing up of children, they were also taught English social skills and etiquette.

  The Aboriginal men had better relations with their employers than women did. They said they would yarn together with the boss at smoko and the boss might lend his truck for the weekend – whereas Aboriginal women said the wives were ‘all la-de-da’. It was because the bosses nearly always worked alongside their Aboriginal hands, doing the same hard physical work, whereas the wives ‘didn’t actually work with you, they told you what to do and told you to do it again if you didn’t do it properly’.

  What else did the Wellington Wiradjuri do for 150 years?

  They were born at Blacks Camp or Nanima and delivered by Maggie May; attended Nanima school; a handful went on the bus to high school; some attended church until it blew away in the big storm; tried to avoid hospital when they were sick; played sport exceptionally well; swam and fished in the Macquarie River; met for corroborees up until the 1870s; occasionally looked for bush food; cooked and cleaned and sewed for whites; dressed up and went to dances; drank beer when the palest of them could buy it; sang, played guitar; rode horses and sulkies; visited Aunties and Uncles; married – sometimes other Wiradjuri, sometimes whites or Chinese; argued with each other; fought in wars – the Boer, the First and Second World Wars; endured removal of children, discriminatory laws and racist attitudes; sat on verandas and talked, cried quietly, and laughed out loud in that loose, immoderate way that used to scare me a bit as a child when I walked past them hanging about Cameron Park. By that time, the time of my conscious childhood, the last corroboree was over by nearly 100 years, moieties were forgotten, the beautiful bora trees were burned and the Wiradjuri kept to themselves. They were like shadows in their own place, on the edge of life, or at least that was how I thought of them until I found a photograph taken in the 1950s of a Wiradjuri couple outside a tin hut in the market gardens.

  The photograph showed a handsome man, Gindin, in an open-necked shirt, sportscoat and felt hat, standing in a ‘cool’ fifties pose – arms loosely held in front of him, beer in one hand, one leg bent as if he’s about to dance. Mona, a pretty woman in a swing skirt, is hanging off his elbow. The way they are standing says so much about them and their relationship to each other – he is the centre around which she revolves – but also their relaxed relationship to their surroundings. They are at home, confident, stylish.

  Gindin in particular, is conscious of how he presents. He reminded me of Kabbarrin in the missionary journals when he refused to wear the blue coat Watson had bought because it made him look like a ‘new chum’. Gindin would have disdained the blue coat as well. He might be living in a tin hut, but he’s never going to be less than stylish. It’s a consciousness of appearance that connects him as much to Paris as to Kabbarrin – it’s the look that matters. Gindin and Mona both look so at ease, so in charge of their world. Their elegance suggests that life wasn’t all bad during those years for the Wiradjuri, but it’s not just their awareness of self and style that intrigued. Their stance, their gaze, made me realise, that, for them, we were the shadows, irrelevant white folk on the fringe of their lives.

  22

  The Town Historian

  By late winter, I was heading west to Wiradjuri country again. This time the hillsides and paddocks were smoothly green under a bleached feathery cloak of late winter grasses, a luxury for this country. The barren drought of my childhood, greyish brown and disheartening, had repeated monotonously since then. Some seasons were good but growing anything was always a struggle. For the Wiradjuri, even before the Europeans arrived, cyclic seasons of severe drought must have made finding enough food and game difficult at times.

  I had arranged another meeting with Joyce and her friend Evelyn, who had lived out at Nanima for years. Before that though, I was going to meet Lee Thurlow. He was reputed to know more about this town’s story than everyone else put together. I hadn’t forgotten my hasty promise to Joyce about finding the bora ground. If anyone knew where it was, it would be Lee.

  He was waiting for me on his veranda when I pulled up outside his small weatherboard house. I approached his front gate with my papers and recorder, conscious of looking like a city interloper. He was in his mid forties, with an intense, alert, slightly ‘ready for attack’ manner and the kind of wiry energy that never sits still. Because Joyce had said he knew all about Wiradjuri families I’d been expecting him to be Aboriginal and so was surprised that he looked white. He said later he had as much, or rather, as little, Aboriginal background as I did; an Indigenous ancestor back in the mid nineteenth century.

  We stood on the veranda exchanging civilities and I had the impression I wasn’t going to be let inside unless I passed some sort of test. Eventually he asked me into his cold kitchen. Its neat, plain style reminded me of Joyce’s place. I sat down at the table but he remained standing and stayed that way for the next two and a half hours, pacing a bit and going into another room, only sitting down for the last five minutes. I didn’t lose my sense of having to pass a test, which seemed at first to do with the purity of my intentions, but I soon saw it was to do with my methods. Did I have a clue what I was talking about or was I some city fool spouting stuff from books about which I had no first-hand knowledge? I realised he could see I was some sort of fool, but perhaps not irretrievable. And being local did give me some points.

  I began with my research. I’d read the superintendent of the penal settlement had offered settlers a bounty for killing Aborigines, and troopers had been stationed in the district ‘to quell disturbances’, so, I wondered, were there any massacres around here?

  ‘A lot of what those historians say is off the top of their head.’ Lee was immediately on fire. ‘You have to go back to the journals and letters of the time. That bounty was just rumour put about by unscrupulous whites to scare the Aborigines into letting them have their land. And the troopers were here because it was the western frontier up until the 1850s. No-one knew what was beyond. There were no massacres in Wellington. I go out to the places things happened, get a feel for it,’ he added, making his real point. ‘People say, oh yeah, I know everything, I’ve read this book, but how many have been there? I have. Anything to do with Wellington, I’ve been there and walked around. Not just read it in a book.’

  I felt put in my place. I could only acknowledge my inadequacy. What I really wanted to know was what happened in the years after early settlement. I had done some more research – from books, I hardly dared mention – about the 1850s gold rush at Wellington but not found any connection with the Wiradjuri. Were they involved in the gold rush?

  ‘The gold rush changed things for the W
iradjuri. You’ve only got to think about it. Young fellas, twenty years old, born when the place was already settled. They pretty quick worked out that the whitefellas would give them money for this stuff. You have to think about what it was like then. No-one had much money, you had to be reasonably well off to even own a horse, and suddenly there was this chance of money.’ Lee kept pacing as he talked, firing his words intently.

  I had an image of a tall young Wiradjuri man, panning for gold, filling a dilly-bag with nuggets, taking it to the gold-buyer’s tent to sell or exchange it for food. I’ve always thought finding gold, a lump of shiny stone from the earth, was the purest and most ancient way to make a living. It was the earth yielding up its pretty things and you just had to keep an eye out, pick the stones up or wash them out of the dirt and they were yours, treasure for the taking.

  ‘Did they find much?’

  ‘Same as anyone.’ Lee shrugged. ‘White or black, some did, some didn’t.’

  Then there were the Chinese, up to 5000 in the district, some of whom stayed and had market gardens along the river. The Yick Lees, the Loosicks. And later, after the goldrush, the Ah Sees and Coons. Aborigines worked for them in the gardens, which was how the Chinese–Aboriginal connection began. They were both second-class citizens, the bottom of the order, so it was natural that they would meet and intermarry. Wiradjuri did seasonal work in the market gardens through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the back-breaking work of harvesting vegetables. I did it one year, picking beans at Coon’s market garden, but I only lasted until lunchtime. You were paid by what you picked and I was too slow.