The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  There was rain in the night but by the time I awoke the sky was already crisply blue so everything felt freshly washed and flapping dry. The river was flowing strongly from the rain, muddy and swirling with sticks. From the veranda I saw something making circular patterns in the water and then a large fish leapt and fell back. A kingfisher watched from a branch above it, judging it too big to do anything about. It waited for a while then soared elegantly up the river, a flash of blue feathers shining in the light.

  It would have been easy to sit there all morning but I had arranged to visit the local History Museum and later to talk to Joyce and her friend Evelyn. I gathered up my notebooks and drove into town. From the outside, the museum was familiar; it had been the Catholic presbytery when I was a child, and before my memory, the Bank of NSW. Dorothy, my mother’s lively sister, the one who chased the mugger down the street, was married in the front room when it was a presbytery because she, a wilful blonde, was marrying a Protestant and wasn’t allowed to marry in the church.

  Inside I paid my entry fee and even in the first room felt my heart sink. The room where Dorothy had married was now crowded with mementoes of other lives. The glass cases, tables, the documents and clippings – everything looked dusty and worn out. In the room upstairs dedicated to Fong Lee’s shop, boxes of Star starch and Rexona liniment and press-studs and saucepans, ordinary things that I hoped might move me, looked dispirited, as if they suspected they might all be worth nothing. Even though they were protected under glass, silk wedding dresses were thinning, gloves were wearing through, chamber pots were cracking.

  There was a helpful volunteer who unlocked the little country schoolroom that had been transported whole to the grounds of the museum. It was meant to be set up as it might have been 100 years ago, but I recognised the desks with marble inkwells, the leather school bags, even the alphabet charts on the wall. Somehow, much too soon, my childhood had ended up in a museum.

  I returned to the main building. In the back corridor were a few shelves with Aboriginal artefacts. It was a meagre collection: one carved tree trunk, a few spearheads and axe-heads, some grinding stones. One of the grinding stones caught my eye. It was a beautiful shape, perfectly spherical on the bottom but less curved on the top with a faint rim where the two sides met. It was a lovely thing and I went to touch it but pulled myself back.

  ‘Oh, you can touch it. Pick it up if you like,’ the volunteer encouraged.

  I picked it up carefully. It was just the right weight and its curves were utterly exact under the palms of my hands as well as to my eye. I wondered how we know when a form is exactly as it must be. To be able to instantly take in the finest degree of angle and line and find it pleasing makes me wonder what we are designed for. I wondered if Kabbarrin made it. No, he would not have had the patience. Maybe it was Bungarri, the man who made the clay doll so beautifully, or perhaps one of the women.

  I put it back and looked at the carved tree. I had known it was there, had found it when I interviewed Bill Riley all those years ago.

  ‘I think that tree may be from a bora ground. Do you know of a bora ground around here?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve heard something. It doesn’t exist anymore.’

  ‘No, I guess it doesn’t. But I reckon there needs to be an Aboriginal Museum to keep safe what’s left. Not stuck out the back here.’

  ‘Oh, Aborigines are not interested in history,’ he said. He was well meaning, not racist. He had simply noticed that no Aborigines came to the museum and drawn his own conclusion.

  It was probably just as well they didn’t come. At least they avoided the hurt and shame of seeing their history stuck in the back passageway. There was no-one to blame for it; the museum volunteer was giving his time to protect local history and for him, as for most Australians, the Aborigines were a necessary and troubling part of the story of the past. He didn’t notice that the museum contained only one side of the story: the artefacts of the invaders’ victory and Aboriginal defeat.

  I think of the objects I keep – curiously shaped stones from places I have visited, my photograph of Baron Rock, photographs of those I love, books I’ve read, childhood paintings done by my sons, a ruby glass jug handed down from one of my Reidy ancestors, a cartoon sketch of me in Paris drawn by a friend. These are part of the museum of myself, the things I would try to take with me if a fire swept through the apartment, the evidence of my story about who I am. They help form the distinct edges of myself. I wonder at the Wiradjuri appearing not to need to keep evidence, at least not before the Europeans arrived. They had functional objects – coolamons and string bags, and sacred objects – churinga and carved trees, but not individual collections of things arranged on mantelpieces or kept in drawers. I wonder then if their identity was less individual, more merged with each other and with place. I wonder if even their sense of self was more amorphous, more fluid, floating into casuarinas and wallabies and rocks. Kangaroo-man, magpie-woman, snake-man. Perhaps the childhood nightmare of my self disappearing into the universe would not have frightened them at all.

  Because Evelyn was a resident there, I had arranged to meet with Joyce at Bellhaven, the nursing home up on the hill where my father had died. I hadn’t been back there since. My mother returned once to pick up Dad’s clothes and afterwards she said, ‘It’s so strange, I thought it was a lovely place when Don was there. Without him there, it’s horrible. Just all these corridors and sick old people.’ He was always the glow that lit her world, made it a rosy colour instead of her natural ironical silvery-grey shading.

  I drove up the hill past my grandmother’s old house, the grandmother who didn’t want to be related to Aborigines. She had lived in town the whole time I knew her. Once, when someone asked her if she missed the farm, she had said, ‘What? Miss cooking and cleaning up after thirty men.’

  Gran Miller had no patience for nostalgia, but still, she would have hated to see the desolate mess that had once been her pretty garden. The roses, sweetpeas, stocks, pansies, poppies, alyssum, snow-on-the-mountain, all gone. The house, too, looked derelict although it appeared from the car in the driveway and a few toys in the yard, that a family lived there.

  Bellhaven was past Gran’s house, just below the old District Hospital sprawling elegantly across the hilltop. The District was the location of many of my mother’s stories: where she started her nurse’s training; where she and her friend Cayley carried a dead body out through the window so as not to disturb the live patients; where my father, diamond ring in hand – the ring that was stolen when my mother’s house was broken into fifty years later – proposed ‘under the pan-room window’. These days, the District is a hotel and restaurant and we occasionally have lunch in the ‘veranda ward’. My mother is amused that the old mortuary is now Reception.

  I turned into the Bellhaven grounds and saw that the nursing home had changed, nearly doubled in size. I didn’t recognise anything in the side wing I went into, but from the first room I passed I heard Joyce’s voice. She called me in and introduced me to her husband, Ned. I apologised for taking Joyce’s time and he smiled and said, ‘She’ll be back.’

  We walked along the new labyrinth of corridors to Evelyn’s room. Evelyn looked up from her wheelchair, her large kind eyes taking me in with interest, but without the same alertness as Joyce. A young nurse, who had just finished helping her wash and dress, said we could take Evelyn around to one of the small sitting rooms if we liked. We could have it to ourselves.

  We settled down there, me with my recorder and notes, Evelyn in her wheelchair and Joyce perched opposite. To look at, the two old friends were a study in contrasts: Evelyn plump and soft-bodied, wearing loose pants and a big blue cardigan; Joyce compact and small, smart as ever in a crisp ‘mountain gear’ style of jacket.

  I quickly explained what I wanted: just some of Evelyn’s stories so I had a better idea of what life was like for the Wiradjuri in Wel
lington over the last eighty years or so. To give me some idea of their side of the story.

  Evelyn told me she was born at Brewarrina on the Barwon River in the far north-west of the state. ‘Nearly born in a row boat on the Barwon,’ she said. ‘My mother was just about to give birth in the boat, but they got to the other side.’

  ‘Who was your mother?’

  ‘She was a Wighton and my dad was a Governor. After Bre we lived everywhere, Bulgandramine, Peak Hill, Nanima, Dubbo. And I’m back at Nanima now.’

  Her family moved to the Bulgandramine Mission near Peak Hill when she was three months old. She had an early childhood memory of sitting in a carved tree waiting for her father to come home. He had to get permission from the manager of the Mission to go into town or do anything and then in 1940 the Mission closed and they all had to move into Peak Hill. It was a very prejudiced place in those days; the adults couldn’t go into any of the pubs or clubs and if you went to hospital, you were put on the veranda.

  ‘Same in Wellington,’ said Joyce. ‘We were always on the veranda.’

  I had heard about that before, but I also remembered visiting Dad in hospital once and he was in a veranda ward. I would have to ask my mother about that.

  ‘What about going to the swimming pool? Or the pictures?’ I asked.

  ‘We had to sit down the front at the picture hall. One time, I sneaked down the back and the manager, ’e came and grabbed me by the ear and said, C’mon, get back down ’ere you little nigger.’ Evelyn chuckled. ‘He called me nigger. Didn’t know why he was callin’ me that – I had red hair!’

  ‘Same thing in Wellington,’ Joyce chipped in. ‘All the Koori kids down the front.’

  ‘Why?’ I said, embarrassed by the sudden childhood memory of being scared of the kids downstairs at the front of the pictures. We went to the pictures no more than once a year, and we had to sit upstairs. I don’t remember thinking of the kids downstairs as Aboriginal, just as rough and noisy.

  ‘Just the rules in them days,’ said Joyce.

  There wasn’t a trace of bitterness in her voice. Both of them, so cheerful.

  ‘It was segregation, like South Africa. Didn’t you feel angry?’

  There was silence for a moment, then Evelyn said, ‘Not really angry. More like, it was sort of hurt. I felt that hurting inside, you know.’

  Her eyes were pained and she said it as if I would know, but I didn’t. I knew what it was to be poor and have newspaper instead of toilet paper and lino floors and to be dressed in hand-me-downs, but I didn’t know our house and our clothes were shabbier than most people’s until I was a teenager. Poverty wasn’t seen as a problem in my family, it wasn’t even mentioned except as a certain disdain for anyone who was ‘flash’. But as part of a farming family, however poor, I had something the Aborigines didn’t – a sense that I belonged in the main story.

  ‘And my Uncle Andy, Andy Towney he was, he came back from the Vietnam War and he went to have a beer and he wasn’t allowed in the RSL club. In Peak Hill.’

  ‘That would have been in the 1970s! That late!’

  I would have been a teenager by then, with two of my own brothers conscripted into the army. I had just become aware of the war as an issue and had attended my first moratorium march, proudly wearing my badge back at school. It didn’t seem possible that kind of racism had been happening just a few kilometres away at the same time.

  It didn’t seem unusual to Evelyn. She continued on with her history. Her family moved to the ‘Four Mile’ near Molong and when she was seven or eight she started going to a white school. She remembered that there was an old teacher who loved classical music and on the first day she played Johann Strauss on one of ‘those old phonograms, you know’ and Evelyn loved it. Her eyes shone with remembered delight. ‘I loved Johann Strauss all my life. You know that film, Strictly Ballroom? At the beginning? Dah dah dah da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. I knew it straightaway.’

  I laughed and hummed the waltz beat with her. I had only recently learned to waltz myself and I told Evelyn I waltzed around the room by myself, practising the steps. I didn’t tell her I had been in an apartment in Paris – that would definitely be flash.

  ‘Didja?’ She smiled.

  I thought of my mother waltzing around the kitchen on the farm and seven-year-old Evelyn first hearing the Viennese melody in Molong, and me practising and counting, one two three, one two three, in an apartment on the other side of the world. There were connecting threads everywhere as much as there were gaps and disjunctions.

  ‘But were any of the teachers prejudiced? Did they treat you badly?’

  ‘Some of them were.’ Evelyn didn’t elaborate.

  ‘We always had to go and do work outside. Gardening. Picking up rubbish. We spent most of our time outside,’ Joyce chipped in.

  ‘Yeah, we spent most of our time outside too,’ said Evelyn.

  To both of them, it was perfectly normal, hardly cause for comment.

  ‘Did you like doing anything in school?’

  ‘I liked drawing. I still like drawing. I sometimes draw the carved tree I used to wait for my dad in. I still remember it.’

  ‘And the other kids? How did they treat you?’

  ‘I didn’t mix with other kids. My dad kept us to ourselves. He kept an eye on us. He walked me to school every day. It was a long way.’

  ‘He was very protective?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, he kept us in a little world of his own, you know. He wouldn’t let us out. I wasn’t even allowed to play with other kids except from my mother’s family.’

  ‘Why was that?

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was because of Jimmy Governor . . .’

  ‘Were you related to Jimmy Governor?’

  ‘Yeah, he was my uncle.’ There was a certain tiredness and regret to her voice, as if she’d had to say it too many times.

  ‘Your father’s brother?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Afterwards, when I listened to our taped conversation, I could hear the eagerness in my voice. Jimmy Governor was infamous; books had been written and films had been made about him. He was a young Aboriginal outlaw who, with his brother and friend, had rampaged across the state, killing nine people by the end of it. My mother said her great aunts had told her they locked their doors and windows in fear of Jimmy Governor when it was rumoured he was in the district. He started off on a farm near Gilgandra where my father’s family also had a property, killing a group of five women and children, the family of the man he worked for. The women had apparently taunted Jimmy’s white wife for marrying a black man.

  ‘Maybe if he had married from his own people it probably would never ever have happened,’ Evelyn said.

  Again that sense of regret and I suddenly realised she felt deep sorrow for the terrible turn his life had taken. It was all an exciting story to me, a larger-than-life thriller about someone else a long time ago, aglow with the violent romance of the past. To her it was her lovely young uncle, her father’s beloved brother, who had ruined so many lives and his own. He was only twenty-five, the same age as my youngest son, and he had violently killed women and children.

  ‘I only know what my mum and dad told me. Jimmy’s wife used to go up there to the home and do some washin’ and ironin’ for them [the family] and old Mister, whats’isname, Mister Mawby, used to follow her home on horseback and show himself to her. And he followed her around the house saying, why had she married a black bastard. And she’d go home and tell Jimmy what happened.’

  ‘He was pushed too far?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. He was starved too, wasn’t given any bread for the fencin’ he’d done.’

  Evelyn’s voice was low and sympathetic. She understood, she knew the hurting inside herself, the pain of not being regarded as fully human. Her soft face looked distressed. She had
one of those natures that knows and feels the pain of others and I felt shame at my sudden leap of excitement in finding her kinship to notoriety. I had no business with Jimmy Governor. I tried to shift back.

  ‘So, your dad wanted to protect you from what people thought of him.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘Did it make you shy, being kept away?’

  ‘I wasn’t shy.’ She drew this last syllable out to suggest she had another word. ‘I really had a hate towards white people.’ She said it without the least feeling of giving offence. ‘It was my husband who brought me out of it. He worked for Ansett.’

  Her husband, Fred, had been a local Aboriginal star, the main attraction in an Ansett Airlines tourism program in Dubbo. Tourists were flown up from Sydney and given a taste of outback Australia, including Fred and his boomerang making and throwing. He was evidently a showman by nature, outgoing, warm, funny, and people loved him.

  ‘He used to try and get me to go to their parties and I used to say, you wouldn’t catch me over there, they’re your white friends, you go.’ She laughed at her own cheek. ‘Ahh, I wouldn’t go.’

  ‘But he talked you round?’

  ‘Yeah, he brought me out of that shell, you know. When I started getting involved with white people, I found they were really nice.’

  ‘Same mix as other people anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. It took a while, gettin’ adjusted to white people.’

  I shifted forward, trying to pretend that she wasn’t talking about me. For a moment I had a glimpse of what I looked like from the other side.

  Evelyn started recounting her earlier life. Her father worked as a farmhand and a shearers’ help and was paid in rations; her mother did some housework at various places, but she couldn’t remember if she was paid money or not. Her dad was Pentecostal and her mum was Catholic and she followed her mum’s side because they let you dance and have a drink. We grinned together at that; the Catholics could have a drink and a dance, not like that other killjoy lot sitting with a disapproving set to their mouths.