The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  ‘So where are you up to with it then? I know your lot has made your own Native Title Claim?’

  ‘Yeah, the Traditional Families claim. We called ourselves the Gallagabang Corporation an’ put our claim in 2007 or maybe it was the end of 2006, you can check, and this year we just got a new lawyer, Phillip Tietzel. Absolutely brilliant bloke, he used to work in Darwin. He’s worked on these sort of cases before.’

  ‘So is the claim registered?’

  ‘It’s goin’ through pre-registration tests. It’s been going back and forth for a while now. The Native Title tests . . .’ He shook his head in exasperation. ‘Askin’ questions like do you stand naked in the river an’ fish. We’re contemporary Aborigines, they’re not taking changes into account. And language. No-one speaks language in Wellington anymore. I’m learnin’ it now. The last person I knew that did was my Auntie Martha Daley. She was what we call a “clever woman”. People still marvel at some of the things she could do.’

  ‘Was she related to Lester Daley?’

  ‘Lester? She was his grandmother.’

  ‘I went to school with him. He sat behind me in class and we talked all the time.’

  ‘You’d know Neil Harvey too then? And the Steins?’

  ‘One of my brothers was married to Helen Stein.’

  The Steins were Aboriginal on both sides of the family, although Helen didn’t like to identify as Aboriginal even though her Nana Smith was black. I remember her telling me one day to be careful of the ‘Abos’ down in the park and another time she told her mother, who was ‘dark’, not to speak to her when she served table at a ball Helen was attending.

  ‘There was three of them Stein girls.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Helen was the middle one, the prettiest. My mother was friends with Pat, their mother.’

  The conversation had shifted gradually and easily into a different register. He knew where I fitted in the pattern of families in Wellington, I wasn’t just a random person unconnected to anyone or anything. I had been identified – and I suddenly wondered if my identity wasn’t who I was, but what I was part of.

  I settled back more comfortably in the chair. There was a different feeling between us, a warmth and ease. Wayne was in charge of the conversation but he listened intently. He spoke like an orator, impassioned and articulate, often with the unusual turns of phrase and mispronunciations of someone who has taught himself.

  It felt odd that I had not met him before. He was almost exactly the same age as me and had grown up in the same small town; we must have passed each other in the street dozens of times.

  28

  A Wiradjuri Man

  Wayne’s mother was Violet Stuart, ‘a very fine-looking woman’, he said several times, and his father a Norwegian who didn’t stick around. He was raised mainly by his grandmother at Nanima and went to the Nanima school where he was taught by Jim Cahill right through primary school.

  ‘Joyce says he was a good man,’ I said.

  ‘He had a lot of faith in me. He wasn’t a bad sort of a fella. He made me stay in and study when the others were playin’.’

  ‘I bet you didn’t like that.’

  ‘I didn’t mind then. I won a scholarship for high school in town. The government paid for my uniform and everything. I was in the top six students out of eight classes [that’s at least 200 students] for the first three years of high school. Then I just went walkabout. If you’re smart enough, you know when you’re being patronised. This identity thing caught up with me. I went crazy, berserk.’

  I wanted to ask what he meant by ‘identity thing’ and ‘berserk’. I supposed he was talking about Aboriginal identity, but it sounded like there might have been something else to it. He kept talking. I waited.

  ‘I met my missus when I was sixteen. Together thirty-nine years.’

  ‘Is she a Wiradjuri woman?’

  ‘No, she’s a Kempsey woman.’

  ‘That’s a long way from Wellington. How did you meet her?’

  ‘They had these Aboriginal dances in George Street in Sydney. It was ’69. Her uncle was a singer in the band and she came along to listen to him. A lovely-looking Aboriginal girl. She was sixteen when we first got together and nine months later we had a baby. I just couldn’t handle it. Didn’t realise I’d found my perfect partner right then and there. A very attractive woman, a highly intelligent woman, the most natural mother, a wonderful, caring nurturing woman. I just didn’t wake up to it. I just didn’t wake up to it. I just didn’t wake up to it.’

  She must have left him, I thought. Who has such regrets when their beloved is still around?

  ‘I’d go walkabout for a year, two years. And walk back into my house, my wife, my kids – and she treated me with the same affection. She said to me, I know who you are. She understood me. I was a wild child, a wild man. Oh yeah, a madman, a complete madman.’

  ‘What do you mean? Breaking the law?

  ‘Absolutely. Doin’ things I should’na done. Beltin’ people. Smashin’ people. Everywhere. In Wellington. And Sydney.’

  ‘Did you feel chaotic?’

  ‘Absolutely mental. Absolutely mental.’

  There was a weight to these words, to the whole turn the conversation had taken and I kept feeling I was talking to my Buddhist brother who also went through mental torment for nearly a decade. Many seasons in hell. There was the same steady weight of pain, past now, but long and hard enough to have formed an iron anchor in his soul.

  There was a silence. He was making up his mind about something.

  ‘You reflect back on why you behaved that way. See . . .’

  There was another longer silence and I realised he was going to show me the wound. I felt nervous but I was used it; it happens all the time in writing classes. I sometimes think writing is a kind of surgery of wounds, cleaning them out and, with any luck, stitching the skin delicately back together.

  ‘You see, I feel like I can say I’m a fairly intelligent fella. I know that. And as you get older, you don’t get wiser unless you reflect back and start making adjustments, to address your past. If you don’t, it shows you were a dummy. So, I was thinkin’ about my past life, things I blotted out of my past history.’

  A silence again.

  ‘You see, I was molested when I was seven or eight.’

  There it was. A childhood pierced and drained out. The worst of it is, it’s a wound that never properly heals. I didn’t want to ask him who, or what happened. It wasn’t my business. The details come unbidden to my mind anyway. It has happened in our family too, some of our children abused, and I know how it undoes people. It’s the utter disregard for the separateness of another’s being, it’s as if you just don’t count.

  ‘I was all right and then when I was sixteen . . . you reach a certain age and you start reflectin’ back. You remember. And you have your first drink, and you rebel.’

  ‘It’s happened in my family. I know.’

  ‘I’m amazed I never got locked up for killin’ someone.’

  ‘Or yourself.’

  ‘Yeah. You think about it. You try to blot it out. Use drugs. Alcohol. I had all these wonderful opportunities – lost. All these teachers ringin’ my grandmother – she reared me up, very strict, very stern, urgin’ me back to school. I wouldn’t go back. Then, as I said, I got together with my missus and had a baby nine months later. Couldn’t handle it. I treated my family pretty badly. I was there for them, when I was there, but when I was drunk, I went crazy. I set them a bad example with my missus . . .’

  ‘When did it change?’

  ‘When I was thirty-seven.’

  I was struck by the odd precision of it. As if he woke up one morning and everything was different.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I think it was just maturity. It took
me a long time, right through from when I was sixteen until thirty-seven. It didn’t change right away. I reflected about things and I started to change for the better. Then probably the most significant thing after that was the phone call from Joyce. A frail little woman, eighty-four, but a fighter. I love her, I’d die for her.’

  I did some quick arithmetic and realised he must have been in his early forties then. Wayne had received a phone call that changed his life and gone back up to Wellington and got stuck into the Native Title fight around the time I was saving up to leave Australia and stride around Europe in my flapping coat.

  ‘But my daughter, she’s a drug addict. Two kids. And their father was too. Both drug addicts. Uncivilised, both of them.’

  I started to ask what he meant by ‘uncivilised’, but he was in the full steady flow of a story that had to be told.

  ‘I happened to be in Sydney when the father died. His family was Italian, wealthy family, and they said, well, what are we going to do with these little blackfellas? I said I’d look after them. I wouldna done it if I hadn’t got involved in this Native Title business. This struggle has reinforced me, not just as a person, but my Aboriginality. It brought out my Wiradjuri spirit. Too many Aboriginal people have forgotten it’s part of Aboriginal culture to look after kids in this situation. It’s my responsibility to look after them, discipline them, re-educate them. They were uncivilised when I got them, no manners. They appreciate now they’ve got someone in their corner to protect them – I do the washin’, ironin’, cleanin’, cookin’ – I even did a cookin’ course so I’d know how to do it properly.’

  There was just a little pride about the cooking course, the first I had heard. For the rest, he was simply recounting what had happened, what needed to be done. I wondered again about his wife, where she was, why he was looking after the kids on his own. And his daughter, where was she?

  ‘A better dad this time?’

  It was none of my business. I shouldn’t have asked. I could feel the sting of resentment at the prodigal’s return. I hadn’t belted anyone, smashed anyone, walked out on my kids – why was I the one who had lost the way?

  ‘Without a doubt.’ There wasn’t the faintest trace of desire to defend himself. ‘This is the sort of dad I should have been. These children brought out another aspect of the journey. Absolutely brilliant. These kids were uncivilised. The girl, she’s an alcohol syndrome child. A wonderful, lovely little lady now. The boy, he’s ADHD. No sugar, tea, coffee, sweets in this house . . . It’s made me realise what I had missed out on with my kids – and what I had done to my wife, wandering out, causing all this commotion. I’d be away for a year, or two. She is just this most remarkable woman. Just this rock-solid individual female.’

  His voice was intense, the broad Aboriginal accent flattening the sound and giving his praises an almost mesmerising sound. I couldn’t look away from his eyes.

  ‘She was looking after them, she’s a drug and alcohol counsellor, but this wonderful woman, she couldn’t handle these kids. The boy, he was a misogynist at six years old. Wouldn’t treat her with respect. It was making her sick. I said, the best I can do for you, darlin’, is, I’ll look after the kids. I’ll get another place, we’ll visit and you recuperate. I know how hard it was for her now, bringing up our kids.’

  ‘She lives nearby?’

  ‘Yeah. I take the kids ’round there sometimes. The girl, she wants to see her mother, but her mother’s in jail. If she’s not in jail, she’s in rehab and then she’s usin’ again.’

  ‘What was your daughter’s problem?’ I knew the answer and wondered why I had to make him say it.

  ‘It was me.’ There was no self-pity, no asking for forgiveness, just a simple acknowledgement. He had failed as a father and he took full responsibility for the mess of her life. The clear light of his truth-telling felt like some kind of grace.

  ‘She was absolutely beautiful, gorgeous, highly intelligent, same intelligence as her mother. Sandy blonde hair, olive skin, eyes of four colours according to the weather – light brown, to light green, to dark green, to blue. People would stop us in the street and say they had to take a photo. Now she’s a lost cause.’

  ‘Not really. She could change.’

  ‘No. She’s a lost cause. She’s a lost cause.’ He said it over and over, his voice flat.

  I didn’t want to agree with him. All those gifts, all that beauty and intelligence. That child with the four-coloured eyes who had come through him into the world, sitting blankly in a cell or on the street somewhere. There should be a chance for her. Sometimes there is too much pain and it doesn’t make you stronger, it just wounds you forever.

  ‘So it’s your grandkids now.’

  ‘Yeah. They have to be educated and know Aboriginal law. They have to go into the future with their identity intact.’

  We both sat for a bit.

  I wondered about second chances and whether everyone gets them or not. Whether a whole country gets another chance to do things right and whether it ever makes up for doing it so badly the first time.

  ‘I often sit down and reflect back on my life and every aspect of it has been a fascinatin’ journey, a fascinatin’ life.’ Wayne was gazing intently, not at me, but a focused, short-distance gaze as if he were seeing his life on a screen just in front of him. ‘When you look into it, it’s just been a typical Aboriginal person’s life. All the hardships, all the opportunities let go. I’m so glad it’s all happened to me, because it’s made me who I am now.’

  29

  Identity

  It was the middle of the afternoon, quiet and hot, the gauze door filtering the summer light. ‘Shut the wire door,’ my father used to yell when we ran into the house. I could hear the rattling bang and click of the door in my mind still. I felt the faint acrid pang of envy. Wayne believed his story so passionately; for me there was a gap, I was always the observer. I couldn’t do without my story but I didn’t merge with it the way he did.

  Did that mean Wayne knew who he was and I didn’t? Each of us was made of threads from different parts of the world but we had been born and grown up on the same land. I wondered what difference it would have made if his Norwegian father had taken him back to Norway and brought him up with Viking tales and fjords, snow falling at dusk and Ibsen. Or if my ancestors had stayed in Ireland and I had grown up in Limerick with green fields and stony villages and studied at Trinity. Even with the same genes, the story could so easily be different; a series of random chances that determines where the cloak of identity is hung.

  There was a feeling of no-one else being in the street, of just us and our conversation. I imagined it was always that way around Wayne, that his intensity pulled everyone’s attention towards him, but that his attention ranged out restlessly across streets and cities, all the way across the country to his childhood and back to the corridors and offices of power that seemed to be obstructing his people’s future. His conversation circled away from his own family, his grandchildren and his care of them, back to the wider Aboriginal community, the politics of land and power, but it was clear it was a continuum to him. It was always about protecting Wiradjuri identity.

  Wayne’s assessment of Aborigines involved in ‘the dispossession industry’, as he called it, was blunt. He reckoned that Aborigines in the system were supporting a government agenda that, as he’d pointed out, was not protecting identity but encouraging assimilation. He said they were interested only in keeping their generous pay packets. I couldn’t imagine Wayne was ever afraid of a fight, but I didn’t really want to get into that territory. I tried to return to the thread of the Wiradjuri land claim.

  ‘So is the Traditional Families claim over the Common?’ It was a rhetorical question; no-one had suggested it was anything else.

  ‘Nah, nah. It’s big, an area 100 by 130 kilometres.’

  ‘Really! That sounds lik
e a large part of the central west!’

  Wayne explained that it extended from near Dubbo in the north to near Molong in the south, and from the Hervey Ranges in the west to Eulan in the east. My childhood farm was part of it, although of course Native Title did not extend over freehold land. I suddenly realised that meant it did not extend over Rose’s freehold land either. It seemed too confronting to point that out and ask him what he therefore thought Native Title would actually give the Traditional Families, so I said nothing. I would ask later.

  ‘But the Common is the most important part of it. It’s the only piece of untouched tribal land in the Wellington Valley. We’re not going to build anything on it, do anything to it. We want to leave it.’

  I wondered again what power he thought he would have to control what Rose did, but changed tack.

  ‘What about Aboriginal artefacts though? A Keeping Place? Wouldn’t you want to build a Keeping Place? I know farmers have collected a lot of things over the years.’

  ‘We’re going to negotiate to get them back and build a cultural centre.’

  He started explaining his plans for the future, including the reconstruction of the convict settlement at the Maynu Gagnal site, to be used as an Aboriginal cultural centre. It seemed neatly circular to him to reclaim the site of the first invasion of the Valley as a place to tell Wiradjuri history and culture.

  ‘That would cost a lot,’ I said sceptically.

  He grinned. ‘I figure the land they took from us, the 100 by 130 kilometres, might be worth, say, a billion dollars. All we want is a few million back, then we could do everything we want. Study the benefits of native fruits, buy a property and grow the trees, set up a small factory to make juices. We have to start negotiating.’