The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  Then she started to talk about food. By now I wasn’t asking many questions, Evelyn just talked as if she had been waiting for someone to come and listen. She said she was taught to take only what she needed from the land, that if there were six eggs in the nest, you took only three; that’s what white people didn’t do, they just took everything. And that the thunder woke the land up in the spring and every twenty or so years there was an extra loud thunder that woke everything up. She heard one extra loud this year, she reckoned, and asked Joyce if she’d heard it, but Joyce wouldn’t commit. They both joined in the discussion about cooking and eating goanna – it’s cooked on the coals and it sings when it’s ready. They waited for my astonishment.

  ‘Sings?’ I repeated, duly astonished.

  They chuckled together. ‘Yeah, it sings, sort of whistles really, when it’s ready.’

  They loved to eat it, and to sit around the fire and talk. They still did that sometimes. Joyce had just last week been out on a camp with the Wiradjuri women elders at The Springs on the Little River and they sat around the camp fire for a couple of days. I told them my father used to take us to the Little River to go fishing and swimming in the summer. It was only a few kilometres away, but it was exciting, somewhere different from the endless days on the farm. The thought flickered through my head that perhaps my father did have a connection to Wiradjuri places, barely remembered tales from Rosina, his grandmother. Perhaps there were ghosts of stories in his mind.

  I asked Evelyn about her married life. She had met Fred at a Railway Institute dance in Walcha and married him when she was sixteen. Before that, during the war, she and Joyce had worked in Sydney for a while at a factory.

  ‘Remember the chocolate factory,’ said Joyce, laughing wickedly.

  They both recalled going to dances and being shy of African–American servicemen who were in Sydney on leave. No-one had ever seen black people like them before. So confident.

  She and Fred moved about living at various reserves, but she said in most places Aborigines couldn’t go anywhere without permission from the manager. Not at Nanima though; Nanima was always free and easy, which was why so many Aborigines came there. They came into town and collected their ration tickets for tea, sugar, flour and meat from the police station and then went to Knuckey’s shop and exchanged their tickets. Sometimes, when Fred was away, or any of the husbands, the police wouldn’t give them their tickets. They always went to Knuckey’s because they would let them collect their rations without their tickets. The nuns too, at the convent, would always give them a leg of lamb, and vegetables and milk; Sister Domenica, she was good.

  Most of the Wellington Aborigines, including Joyce and Evelyn at one time or another, had worked in the Chinese market gardens along the river, for the Ah Sees and Loosicks and Yooks.

  ‘Remember the Yook girls at the show,’ said Joyce, and they both laughed. Joyce explained she and Evelyn would come in from Nanima and buy new clothes for the show with their husbands’ shearing cheques. They always said to each other, ‘This year we will beat the Yook girls.’

  ‘The Yook girls were the most beautiful?’

  ‘Oh yes, they always dressed up. Looked beautiful. Let’s beat the Yook girls this year, we would say.’

  Joyce and Evelyn both chuckled, the full, round chuckles born of pleasurable memory.

  I had a sense of having lived in a parallel universe. Although we also dressed up for the show – oh, I had forgotten about that, I always had a new dress for the Agricultural Show – I had no idea the Yook girls were the ones to live up to in Wellington. They were before ‘my time’, but my mother, who would have been young in the same period, had never mentioned the Yook girls either.

  I also had no idea that Aborigines were getting ration tickets from Wellington police station within my own lifetime. Like the returned Aboriginal soldiers not being allowed into the RSL, it sounded like something that had happened in another century, or at least some time in the shadowy past. I suddenly realised I had retained some childish sense that whatever evil had happened in the world, it had happened well before I was born. I suppose it was a way of absolving myself from responsibility, that it wasn’t something I had known anything about.

  I do remember a sense that Knuckey’s was not a ‘nice’ shop to go to and have to reluctantly admit that it might have been because of the Aborigines hanging about outside.

  ‘Was Nanima better or worse in those days?’ I wanted to try to pull Evelyn’s stories together. She had circled around, like Joyce, giving me fragments rather than continuous chronological narrative.

  ‘It was better. Houses might be better now, but it’s untidy. Papers blowing about. Kids drinking. I feel ashamed.’ She looked pained again and wouldn’t say any more.

  She talked instead about Aboriginal heroes. She thought the world of the Olympic gold medallist Cathy Freeman and Senator Aidan Young and the boxer, Anthony Mundine. Evelyn mentioned her granddaughter too, film-maker Sethie Willie, and Joyce’s cousin, Michael Riley, a photographer whose work I had seen in the Art Gallery of NSW and in the Musée du Quai Branly. His photographs were of large skies and land and birds and crucifixes, spare condensed images that looked and felt like my own childhood mixture of country and ritualistic religion. I had been surprised, standing there in Paris, that his experience of growing up in the central west had been so like mine.

  When Joyce criticised Mundine for having a ‘big mouth’, Evelyn defended him. ‘It’s hard for Aboriginal people to get anywhere. I admire him for getting there. It’s good for us.’

  She wouldn’t have a word said against any Aborigines and at one point stated that there was no white culture except beer and football and Holdens. I felt defensive and thought of reminding her about Johann Strauss but realised just in time she was simply trying to say there were a few things to criticise in white culture. I kept my mouth shut.

  It was late afternoon by now. We had talked for over three and a half hours and it was getting dark. I took Evelyn back to her room in her wheelchair and she opened her bedside cabinet and showed me her drawings. She told me again about the carved trees out at Peak Hill and how she climbed them and waited for her dad to come home. She showed me how she still drew the carved patterns around the borders of the drawings she did for her grandchildren. There they were in brightly coloured ink, pinks and blues and yellows, the crisscrossing and diagonals and wavy lines of Wiradjuri carvings, a protective frame around each picture.

  I returned to my mother’s unit, bringing a piece of coconut tart from Kimbell’s Bakery to tempt her appetite. I made us both a cup of tea while she asked me questions about Bellhaven and about my conversation with Evelyn. Evelyn and Joyce were the same age as her, living in the same small town, but she had never met them. I told her what they said about Aborigines being put on the veranda at the District Hospital and she was suddenly disconcerted.

  ‘You know, that’s true. When I was nursing there, Aborigines were automatically put on the veranda.’

  ‘But other people were on the veranda too,’ I said, defending her. ‘I remember Dad being on the veranda one time when he had that ulcer.’

  ‘Yes, other people were, sometimes, but Aborigines were always put on the veranda. As a matter of course. You didn’t think about it.’ She looked troubled by the realisation. ‘It’s terrible what you accept when that’s just the way things are.’

  25

  Trying to Talk to Rose

  I tried to ring Rose a couple more times after I saw Evelyn and Joyce. Each time there was no reply I was slightly more relieved than the time before. I was ‘making an effort’ but I was aligned with the other side by now and she probably knew who I had been talking to and when. On the morning before I drove back to Sydney I rang one last time. The phone rang several times and then she answered. She sounded as surprised to hear from me as I was to hear her answer. She was a littl
e unsure, but she still refused to see me.

  ‘It’s short notice, I understand.’

  I was happy enough to have a way out, but I did reiterate that I’d like to at least meet her and have a cup of tea because she was so central to the original Native Title claim. Her tone changed then, sounded more accommodating. A cup of tea might be possible next time I came up to Wellington.

  After I packed up the cabin I walked to the other side of Montefiores to stretch my legs. I circled past the Lion of Waterloo and back down along the river. Suddenly I realised I was at the junction of the Macquarie and the Bell. Somehow, in all the years, I had not been to the place where the rivers met before, had not even known exactly where it was. Here it was, the place Oxley had stood, delighted with the sight of the pretty Bell flowing into the broader Macquarie, the meeting of rivers telling Wiradjuri and white travellers alike they had arrived in the right place. I stood there, staring at the distinct line where the smaller river disturbed the forward flow of the other. My gaze shifted to the ripples and bumps caused by logs and stones and differences in the depth of the river; long bubbling striations, smooth glassy ovals that lasted for a moment, swirled, slid, reformed. Strands of willow draped on the surface caused fine lacy patterns in the flow of brown water.

  I had the sudden notion I could live by a river. It was one of those thoughts that seems to separate itself out from the general constant blur, and while I knew it was impractical, I considered it for a moment. I thought of Siddhartha sitting and staring at the river and learning what he needed to know. All is change. I must have first read Hermann Hesse’s novel when I was nineteen, the year after I left home. All is change seemed an easy concept to accept in those days. I don’t imagine the Wiradjuri would have found it very comforting as the new pale tribe poured into their land and changed everything.

  All my childhood, Wellington people thought Sydney was a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s a usual attitude for country people to have, perhaps even universal. Several years ago, when I stayed for a few weeks in the far south of France in an old stone house at the end of a labyrinth of country lanes, quiet, peaceful, winter-bare trees making mysterious patterns against the sky, I recognised the landscape instantly; it was everything European stories had led me to desire, but the owner of the farm talked about the evils of Paris, how noisy, frantic and polluted it was. The people in Wellington used exactly the same words about Sydney.

  You will either go astray or be lost in the big city, they said. No-one will recognise you. You will walk down the crowded footpaths along murderous streets fenced in by skyscrapers and no-one will know who your grandmother is, who your cousin married, where your father grew up, what your grandfather did. People will be rude to you, you will not find anywhere to park your car without paying and you won’t be able to breathe fresh air, nor see the stars in the night sky. It’s all true, of course. Sydney – and Paris for that matter – is a ‘den of iniquity’ and the air is dirty and the brilliant theatre of the night sky is a blur.

  Certainly no-one here in Kings Cross knows who my grandmother was, who my cousin married or where my father grew up or what my grandfather did. In Wellington, Joyce knew who my grandmother was before I even met her. In Wellington, even the streets and buildings tell stories about my past. One day when I was walking with my mother across the lane next to Kimbell’s Bakery she suddenly remarked, ‘This is the lane Aunt Millie ran down with the policeman at her heels. She was just placing a bet at the SP bookies and there was a raid and they were after her.’

  Even the lanes know my stories.

  Both my father and mother would have preferred their children to stay in Wellington. All the generations before us had stayed. My father had bought his few acres from his uncle; his brother stayed on their childhood farm; his sisters married in the town. Dad spent years trying to buy a few more acres for my brothers, but he couldn’t afford it and they didn’t want to be farmers anyway.

  I was always going to leave the place where I grew up. I cannot remember a time when I thought I would stay; I could not even imagine wanting to stay. To be trapped there was the definition of despair, of a life utterly wasted. It seemed natural to go because Imaginary Life beckoned and it wasn’t going to ever reveal itself in my home town. I would have to make my stories somewhere else.

  The Wiradjuri left for the bright lights too, but it seems to be different for them. When I left, that was it, I was gone; but the Wiradjuri stay away for a few months or a few years and come back to Wellington for a few months or years, then leave again and come back again. It’s as if they never really leave. They are only visiting elsewhere; in their hearts they are always living in Wellington and are simply away for a bit.

  I partly understand. I don’t feel as if I live in the city. Wherever I go, I am just visiting; not on holiday but not at home either. But neither is Wellington home. I still have no idea where that is. And yet it is easy for me to be at home in any space. Even in a hotel room in Dublin I hang a scarf around the bedpost and drape my trousers over a chair and I’m at home. When I lived under a railway tarpaulin for six months in New Zealand with only a mattress and boxes for furniture, it was home. But in the wide world outside my small enclosures, I am still looking. Perhaps it’s not even a matter of finding a home. Perhaps there are only the stories of where I have been, with or without a compass.

  26

  Searching for the Bora

  By the time I was ready to head west again the summer had arrived. The search for solid ground ought to have seemed peripheral to warm sun on my skin, jacarandas dreaming in the sky above, but I still couldn’t leave it alone. In some ways I had only come full circle, back to knowing what I knew as a child; my self planted in the ground of Wiradjuri country. It was as if that was all there was to know, but it wasn’t enough. It was a whole year since the dream instruction. If I kept going, followed the instruction to the letter, uncovered every last thread, surely it would all come together, tightly woven and convincing. The stories multiplying around me felt like a web pulling me inwards but some things were no closer. I still hadn’t been to the Common, I hadn’t talked to Rose and I still didn’t know where the bora ground was.

  I didn’t know why it mattered to know the site of the bora, but it felt like more than curiosity. All I could think was that something sacred had been destroyed and I ought at least find out where it was.

  With some arm-twisting and telephone calls, my brother Tim finally agreed to show me what he had discovered. After doing his own research, he had talked to Lee Thurlow a few weeks after my visit. He clearly passed more tests than I did, because Lee had confirmed its exact location. I suspected Lee had recognised Tim would also rather learn from the landscape than a book.

  We still wouldn’t be able to stand on the bora. The landowner was not going to allow anyone to tramp over his paddocks, but a farmer across the river had a good view from the top of a hill and he didn’t mind if we looked from there. In fact, Tim had already been there once and made some sketches. He knew how to look at things. I remember the spring I turned eleven and was just beginning to suspect life wouldn’t always stay the same, a family of swallows built their perfect mud nests under an overhanging bank in our creek. Tim, who had just started to draw, took his watercolours one day and painted a picture of the darting swallows and their nests. I remember knowing then that although he wore glasses, he could see far more clearly than I could.

  Tim and I met in Wellington and drove out along the Burrendong Road towards the town’s water storage dam. We turned off onto a track and bumped along, up and down hills, over a couple of cattle grids and through gates. It was a familiar rhythm from childhood, the regular stopping and starting to open and shut gates. Tim drove because he knew the way and I hopped in and out, unhooking the chains. The cattle on either side of the track stared at us in that unfathomable belligerent way that unnerved me as a child and still does. I was relieved when
I had safely opened and shut the final gate.

  The farmer, Pete Truman, was working on a tractor by the shed and stopped, spanner in hand, to greet us. He had the ruddy, weather-beaten face of his tribe and an interested, enquiring look. He wiped his oily hands on back of his dusty trousers and shook hands with us both. We chatted for a few minutes about weather and crops, establishing that we were living in the same world. He had to get on with his work but was happy for Tim to show me where the bora ground was.

  We set off again, following the farm track around the base of a high rocky hill. The hill was covered in silvery-white rye grass, almost obscuring the new green from the recent rain, and there were a few pines, she-oaks and eucalypts scattered between rocky outcrops. There was nothing I could see that set it apart from other hills, but it was different in its effect. It had an atmosphere of power, although not oppressively so; more a sense of silence and knowledge. It created reverie, the dreaming ‘no-thought’ that Proust said he required of art, but for me comes more often from nature.

  ‘That must be a sacred site,’ I said.

  Tim grinned. ‘It is. See that outcrop up there, just above the pines. Pete found a large churinga stone up there. He’s found heaps of stones, but this one was carefully hidden in the rocks. Really big. It must have been very important.’

  ‘What did he do with it?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He’s got it safely somewhere.’

  I didn’t respond. My first thought was the churinga should be left where it was, but then it could easily be found by someone else, someone with less respect for it. Churinga stones carried secret and sacred knowledge and were objects of great power. As Lee said, the lack of a Keeping Place meant that anyone who cared enough not to throw them away was storing sacred stones and carvings in sheds and studies around the country.