The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  ‘That’s where we have to go to see the bora. Past those rocks, right up to the top. It takes nearly two hours, walking, both ways.’

  He stopped the car.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ I said tersely. ‘That’s a four-hour walk. I have a meeting in Sydney this afternoon and it’s a five-hour drive from here.’

  I had thought we could easily walk there and back in a few minutes. All that arm-twisting just to be left sitting in the car gazing at a hill. I tried to hide my irritation.

  ‘It really takes that long?’

  ‘Yeah. We could go a bit quicker, but it’s pretty steep. It doesn’t look it from here, but it is.’

  ‘You could have told me.’

  Tim didn’t say anything. There was nothing either of us could do about it. He hadn’t told me how long the walk would take and I hadn’t mentioned my meeting in Sydney. I tried to calm down. It would have to be another time.

  ‘Anyway, can we drive a bit further around to the river?’

  He could at least get me a bit closer, having led me this far and left me with nothing.

  ‘The bora’s around the bend and on the other side. You won’t be able to see it.’

  ‘I know that, but just to be a bit closer.’

  Sometimes I act as if hills will slide meekly down in front of me if I push hard enough. Tim recognised my tone and started the car again. We drove around the bottom of the hill, bumped across a tussocky paddock and then stopped again, this time in sight of the river. There was a wide river flat, freshly ploughed, rich dark loam gleaming with the cut of the plough discs.

  ‘Pete has found hundreds of axes between here and the river. It must have been the main camp for thousands of years.’

  ‘Well, it’s a good spot.’

  There would have been fish and six-inch mussels, ducks and swans, emus and kangaroos come down to drink and graze. And edible bulbs and native fruits and wild bees. A good place to spend a few months.

  I got out and walked away from the car, still feeling disappointed. Tim was right – I couldn’t see the bora ground, the landscape was not going to yield to me. It was quiet and still, no wind. The warm air enveloped me. I gazed across the river and imagined an avenue of carved trees still growing in the same warm air. The hill rose to my right quite steeply and I could see there would be a good direct view from its summit.

  I stood for several minutes, trying to listen and watch, but feeling demanding and urgent. The ground was uneven under my feet, hollows and hillocks sloping down to the river, lichen-covered rocks scattered about. It was pointless trying to see anything. This land had been worked by farmers for nearly 200 years; the soil had been ploughed, farrowed, raked, scattered with superphosphate, planted, sprayed with insecticide, harvested, over and over for generations. There was nothing left.

  I looked up. Crows circled high in the blue. I was probably as close as any Wiradjuri woman would have been allowed to get to the bora ground. Closer probably. Perhaps that was all that would be allowed to me. I walked back to the car where Tim waited, leaning against the door. I should just back down and recognise I had already got more than I was due.

  All the same, when we arrived back at the shed where Pete was still working, I asked if I could come back in a few months and climb the hill.

  ‘I just want to have a sit for a while,’ I said.

  He looked at me. ‘Yep, that’s all right. Sometimes when I . . .’ He stopped and then, adjusting the direction of his sentence, continued, ‘Sometimes I go and have a sit too.’

  I nodded. He didn’t have to let on why he went to have a sit.

  We said thank you and goodbye and bumped away up the road, opening and closing gates and slowing down for the cows, some of them now standing belligerently on the track, swishing their tails. Tim didn’t say anything much. I kept twisting back and watching the hill as we drove away.

  27

  Not Taking Nonsense

  On 15 November 2007, my mother’s birthday, the land first seized in 1867 by the original Town Common Committee – including my great-great-great-grandfather, Patrick Reidy – was handed over to Rose’s committee. It was reported the next day, where I read it fresh from my dream instruction, that it was the resolution of the first and longest running post-Mabo Native Title claim. But of course it wasn’t a Native Title result at all. It seems like a minor distinction; after all, Wiradjuri people were granted Wiradjuri land – and it wouldn’t have mattered if Joyce and the other Traditional Families hadn’t made their own Native Title claim.

  Each time I rang her, Joyce said the claim was proceeding, but she wasn’t clear about what exactly was happening. Whenever I wanted a precise date or name, she said to ask Wayne Carr, Violet Carr’s son. She said Wayne lived in Sydney at the moment and she gave me his phone number. He was actively pushing the Traditional Families claim forward. Without him, she said, it would only be the elders and ‘we’ll all be dead before long’.

  It was nearly Christmas 2008 so I waited a few weeks until the New Year and then rang a few times and left messages on his voicemail.

  Hey bro, leave a message.

  By the time I did reach him I was a little nervous.

  ‘Joyce gave me your number. I’m one of the Millers,’ I began. ‘There were eight of us. You might have known some of my brothers. Out at Suntop.’

  ‘That’s out Fingerpost way?’

  ‘Yep. We turned off at Fingerpost.’

  ‘Any relation to Dickie Miller?’

  ‘He was my dad’s cousin.’

  ‘Ah, well, he was married to my sister-in-law Claudia.’

  I relaxed, that wasn’t too difficult. He would talk to me now. As a child I had only seen Dickie when he sometimes did the shearing at our place. As a pretentious teenager I had ignored him, then I hadn’t seen him for years. I had met Claudia at the Health Centre when Joyce first claimed she and I were related, and that was it. I wouldn’t have imagined that, one day, I’d be thanking Dickie Miller for giving me the right connections.

  We arranged to meet during school hours. I already knew Wayne was looking after his two school-age grandchildren and I didn’t want to get in the way.

  Wayne was waiting for me on his veranda when I arrived, the same way Lee Thurlow had been. I liked it. It looked welcoming, as if he couldn’t wait and had to stand eagerly outside his front door, although I did know it was to observe me before I entered his house – and that too seemed a sensible thing to do. You get no sense of a person beforehand if you just wait inside; you need to see him or her coming towards you.

  We shook hands on the veranda and assessed each other. He looked about the same age as me, tall and lean with the easy manner of someone who is used to being attractive but doesn’t play on it. I realised later that physical beauty was something that mattered to him; he mentioned it several times as we talked. He had a boyish air, a quick gaze and a kind of unguarded interest in the world. He reminded me immediately of one of my brothers, the one who is a blokey Buddhist. Like him, Wayne had a relaxed intensity and seemed utterly without my cursed desire to impress. Perhaps it was just that he wore shorts and t-shirt for every occasion as my brother did, but he felt so familiar I could hardly keep from exclaiming.

  The front door of his Erskineville worker’s cottage opened straight into a small lounge room dominated by a huge flat-screen television. As I walked in, alert to being alone in a house with a stranger, the image on the screen was of a meerkat in its characteristic surveying pose, neck stretched up, head swivelling. It looked so like a reflection of me, I nearly laughed. Wayne didn’t offer to turn the television off, or even turn the sound down, and I worried it might be seen as bossy to ask, so for a while we talked under the sharp, faultless gaze of meerkats.

  Although I hadn’t seen anything about him in the newspapers, Wayne had been involved in the
land claim struggle for at least twelve years. Everyone I had talked to referred to him as a source of historical knowledge, so, with a few precise questions, I thought he would fill in the gaps. I should have known by now that I was going to get a whole set of other stories instead. When I listened to the tapes of our conversation afterwards, and waded through at least a dozen pages of scribbled notes, I had a sensation of stepping not onto the straight path I was hoping for, but into a swift flowing river full of sharp bends.

  At first, Wayne covered much the same territory as Joyce. It was Joyce who had alerted him to Rose’s claim. He had been in Sydney for a few years and she had rung him up. It was the phone call that changed his life, he said. It was a statement that meant a lot more than I noticed at first and he circled back to it later.

  ‘Why’d she ring you?’

  ‘I had a reputation in Wellington for not taking nonsense from anyone, especially not from non-Traditional Families.’

  As far as he knew there had not been any public meetings called about the claim. The first contact he had from anyone was when he was co-ordinator of the Wellington Lands Council and a genealogist arrived wanting to know his family tree.

  ‘I wasn’t right up on it then, but I did know my mother and grandmother were traditional women from the Valley, Stuart-Mickeys, directly descended from the oldest recorded families in the Valley.’

  I nodded, noting how he said ‘the Valley’, not Wellington. It made me think about it differently, a geographical area that had been there forever instead of a town.

  ‘Johnnie Stuart was the first Wiradjuri to be given a white name. The army bloke, William Stuart, said, look mate, you’re not a bad sort of a bloke, I’m gunna give you my surname. It’s in his diaries. And Michael Mitchell Mickey got his name from Mitchell, the surveyor. I don’t know what their traditional names were.’

  When he knew about the claim, he went off to meetings, at first ‘naively and innocently agreeing to things’ until he realised ‘the wrong people were the major players’. Like Joyce, he pointed out the Ah Sees were Maori-Chinese originally, and the Bells only had rights through marriage to the Stanleys and so, by Aboriginal law, the Bells had to have the Stanleys’ permission to say or do anything. I had heard all this before, but Wayne had taken his objections further. Because the Ah Sees signed a statutory declaration about their Aboriginality, at a meeting of the State Land Council he accused them of perjury before the Federal Court. It was an open invitation to the Ah Sees to sue him, but they ignored the invitation. Evidence, Wayne reckoned, that they knew they would lose.

  He also took accusations against Rose further. There was one story that intrigued me because it showed a Rose completely at odds with the picture I had formed of her. It was during one of the mediation meetings at the courthouse in Wellington. Wayne wasn’t sure of the judge’s name, but he was ‘a skinny sort of a little fella’.

  ‘Justice French? Or was it Tim Moore, the mediator?’

  ‘I dunno. A skinny fella anyway. I said to him, Your Honour, ask Rose Chown if she advertised the meetings letting everyone know about the Native Title claim. He said, Mrs Chown, did you advertise the meetings? She said, Yes, I did Your Honour. He said, Do you have proof, Mrs Chown? She said, Yes, I have Your Honour. He said, Can you go and get it now? And then she started to cry. Whenever things got a bit tough, she’d cry.’

  ‘And the judge fell for it?’

  ‘He fell for it. “Don’t worry, I accept your word,” he said.’

  ‘It’s odd that she cried. A big strong woman like that.’

  ‘Nah, she’s little.’

  ‘Really? I thought she was large – and impressive.’

  ‘Nah. She’s little. She’s about your size.’

  I’m a little over five foot tall and my physical presence is not one anyone would remark on. I wondered how I could get it so wrong. From the way she out-manoeuvred me every time I rang her, and from her lounging presence on the video Gaynor had loaned me, I still couldn’t imagine her as anything less than a large, powerful woman.

  Wayne said she didn’t know how to conduct herself. He used phrases like that: ‘conduct herself’. He said she offended people she should have kept on side, recounting how she told some Stanley kids to clear off the Common. This was adding insult to injury since she only had rights to land via the Stanleys in the first place. Wayne reckoned she said she would call the police and have them charged with trespass.

  His most inflammatory accusation was about money. It was much the same story as Joyce hinted at, but again, Wayne took it further. He was clearly unafraid of a public fight.

  ‘I contacted funding bodies to see if the funds Rose had been given were properly acquitted and they couldn’t tell me if they were.’

  ‘Who gave her the money?’

  ‘Department of Land and Environment, I think. Anyway, at our local Land Council meeting, I accused Rose of mishandling funds. It was deliberately defamatory. I had no proof whatsoever that she misappropriated funds. All I knew was that she was given over $250,000 altogether from various bodies to revegetate the Common. Planted about thirty trees, eaten by cows. Where did it all go?’

  ‘I can’t repeat that.’

  ‘Yes, you can. It was on the front page of the paper. The Wellington Times. Wayne Carr says such and such.’

  ‘Already in the public domain?’

  ‘Front page. It was a perfect invitation to take me to court.’

  ‘When was that? I’ll check it.’

  ‘Yeah, you check it. It was a few years back. They’re a lot more careful with money they give away these days.’

  I did check. The headline on the front page of the Wellington Times, 28 November 2003, says: ‘Council Seeks Common Ground’.

  Wellington Shire Council has been told it risked signing the town’s Common over to non-traditional owners who had not accounted for the expenditure of thousands of taxpayer dollars.

  Local Aboriginal activist Wayne Carr, who addressed Council on Wednesday night, asked councillors to consider whether they wanted to be seen to be endorsing something from which funds had been misappropriated . . .

  It was a direct and public accusation, but the council’s response seems irritated rather than outraged.

  ‘This matter has been going on for eight years now and Council thought it had been dealt with,’ Councillor Trounce said.

  ‘This Council has bent over backwards to answer queries for the State Government and has encouraged a resolution. Council was never given an opportunity to say who the correct people were . . . Council has no legal or moral ability to interfere with the State Government.’

  The council went on to say, rather helplessly, that they would, however, find out who to write to and raise the two issues: ‘the involvement of non-Wiradjuri Aborigines and the stigma of claims about misappropriated funds’.

  I also found a letter published two weeks later from Vivienne Carr, chairperson of Rose’s committee. She referred to Wayne Carr’s ‘unsubstantiated allegations’ and said she had sought legal representation. She called the allegations ‘vicious’ and wondered scathingly about Mr Wayne Carr, who saw himself as both ‘an accountant privy to confidential documents and a genealogist who knows all about Aboriginal descent’.

  It is more than five years since these accusations and the exchange of threats. Apparently there was nothing more forthcoming from the ‘legal representation’ and no public rebuttal at all from Rose.

  When I got back to Sydney I asked the main funding body about the acquittal of the largest grant and eventually received dozens of pages in reply. Much of the material was considered too sensitive to release, particularly to do with paying wages and the internal costs of the committee. It was impossible to tell either way if funding had been properly spent, but there were no obvious issues or questions.

  At
the same time I discovered another article about Rose being harassed by youths, who pulled down a fence she had put on the Common and hurled rocks at her tin hut. Despite everything Wayne had said, I couldn’t help thinking Rose might not be entirely in the wrong. It wasn’t fair at least, to only have one side of the story.

  Wayne continued with his looping, repeating saga of struggle. He had been writing letters to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and the Native Title Tribunal and Native Title Services and the State Land Council for years. He had been knocking on doors and going to meetings and attending court hearings lodging objections, arguing the case for more than a decade.

  ‘I’ve kept at it like a dog,’ he said. ‘Native Title Services told me they wanted to use a successful outcome for Rose’s mob as a model for Native Title outcomes. I wasn’t going to let our country, our land, be the basis of a model for the dispossession of all Aboriginal people. It was a model of extinguishing connection to country and identity, cultural breakdown, forced assimilation.’

  I didn’t know what he meant at first. Surely Aboriginal land rights were about supporting connection to country and distinguishing the rights of Aboriginal people, not assimilation, but as he went on to talk about himself as a Wiradjuri man, I suddenly realised he meant the assimilation of the many separate Aboriginal identities into one. He talked about Wiradjuri history, about King Burrendong and how the Wellington Wiradjuri were the most feared tribe in the whole of the west. His voice had changed tone, not exactly hardened but it had become more intense, fired by emotion. This was coming near to the heart of the matter for him, the place that gave meaning to everything he did.

  ‘We are the traditional people of the Valley. Have you seen the Common Agreement? It says Rose is a trustee, that she is holding it in trust for the Wiradjuri. She has no rights. You know Pine Hill on the Common, near the tip? We called it Devil’s Hill, its traditional name was Yugagal – it’s a most important sacred site. It’s the home of Wandong. Here we got a person with no rights as Keeper of the Hill, which is one of the most important spiritual sites. I said to the registrar of the Land Rights Act, it’s your job to uphold the integrity of the Act. I’m not gunna let you alone until justice is served here.’