The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  It sounded solid, hopeful. I couldn’t see any government giving them a few million dollars any time soon, but there was no point in saying it. Wayne was clearly going to stay on the case as long as he had breath. His energy seemed unstoppable in the face of constant knock-backs, generated by a kind of obsessive machinery that wouldn’t let him rest.

  ‘So what keeps you going?’ I didn’t mean it so much as a question, but as an acknowledgement of his endurance, but he shifted forward in his chair and looked at me intently.

  ‘Identity,’ he said, ‘because identity is the most important thing. It gives you self-esteem, it gives you something to live for.’

  I shifted forward myself. It felt as if the words were being addressed to me, an instruction, as if he were telling me my problem and its solution; that somehow he had seen into my embarrassingly empty soul and knew what had caused it. I had lost track of my identity and I needed to find it.

  Didn’t I know that already? It felt strangely like I was hearing it for the first time. The amorphous inner state seemed exactly named as it never had been before. There was an authority in the tone of his voice, in his compelling gaze, giving the words a different weight and texture. I suddenly knew that sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon, you could properly hear the truth.

  ‘With our 40,000 years in this country,’ Wayne went on, ‘we cannot allow a little moment in time to break that down, to bring it to a full stop.’

  It was continuity of identity he was talking about, the continuity of culture in relation to place. He knew who he was because of this particular place. His ancestors had lived by this river on this land for tens of thousands of years and that knowledge coursed through him, made fire in his veins and his heart, illuminated him. For him it was the fight to regain this land that gave his life shape and meaning. I thought about my family’s connection, especially my father’s as he walked over the farm or sat on the kerosene tin in the backyard, his face uplifted, receiving benediction. I remembered him saying once that there was nothing like the joy of working the soil to provide food for others. For my father the meaning was nourishment, literally.

  My story was about the town and the family I came from and the Wiradjuri land I was born on, and so was Wayne’s, each of us reaching down into other continents, but always coming up into the light in this soil. Without it, we could not survive.

  ‘The Wellington Valley is the most important place in the whole of Wiradjuri country.’ Wayne’s voice was more intense, almost ringing, as if he were addressing thousands instead of just me in his lounge room in Erskineville. ‘The whole Wiradjuri nation was born in the Valley. Baiame came out of the sea in the east on his emu feet, a giant of a man, with his two wives, and he strode up through the Valley and he created it. It’s the most important place. It’s where the stories come from. That’s why I won’t let it go. I won’t let it go.’

  As I drove home afterwards, the sentence kept coming back to me: it’s where the stories come from. I knew Wayne meant that all stories originated in the Valley, and even more specifically, that they were the stories of origin, of creation, itself. They were the creation stories of his people, the stories of Eden. ‘I come from the place the stories come from’, rang in my head like a chant. It felt like an extraordinary gift; what I had been looking for and hadn’t known was there. I was born where stories were born.

  That night, in the early hours before dawn, the few short hours in Kings Cross when the streets fall silent, I awoke and heard I come from where the stories come from. The sentence simply appeared as I woke up, as if it had been trying to force its way through layers of dreamy sludge and had to wake me so I would hear it. It was a simple reiteration, but a sentence that arrives in the middle of the night is useful, as Anthony said. The words sang through me. They felt different, vibrating with a particular force.

  I lay in the stillness of the night and realised that in the dark labyrinth of the unconscious, the words had expanded and shifted and found a new meaning. I suddenly knew that underlying everything – the patterning of memory, Wayne’s passionate journey, the town’s history of convicts and missionaries and gold-seekers, and even under the Wiradjuri landscape soaked deep in my cells – underneath it all was storytelling itself. It was telling the story that joined me together, joined us all together. In the moonless night a core of knowing formed in me, and what I knew for certain was that identity and connection could only be found in the telling. It wasn’t the threads of the story that really mattered, it was the weaving of the threads.

  It was so quiet I could only hear Anthony breathing. The night wind from the harbour that often rattled and knocked at the old sash windows had died down. It didn’t matter that there might be darkness on either end of life and infinite space all around when there were stories to weave. If they thinned and faded then it was time to get up and start restoring the colours and threads. I thought of my father and his ancestors all dead and gone, and my mother, old and frail in Wellington, and all my brothers and sisters scattered around the countryside, and Wayne and Joyce and Evelyn and Rose, all with their own stories. By history and chance and long ancestry I am from Wiradjuri country and I am part of its story.

  30

  Who Belongs?

  Just before I left, Wayne and I had an argument. I had been going to pick on a few things he said, but each time reminded myself I was there to listen, not argue the point. Then he said something that undid my disciplined intentions.

  ‘You can’t take country out of me. You can’t take country out of the man,’ he said.

  ‘Or woman,’ I said. ‘I go back to Wellington often because my mum still lives there and whenever I go back, it’s like the country knows me.’

  Wayne looked at me, all his attention focused. ‘I know how special you feel about it, but it’s more special to me.’ He said it as gently as he had said anything all afternoon, but I still wasn’t going to let that go.

  ‘I don’t think you can say that. I know about country. And you can’t know if one person’s feeling is more than another’s.’

  ‘Whitefellas say they own country. We don’t say that. We say country owns us.’

  ‘I know it’s not about owning. I know that.’ I felt impatient. Who did he think I was? ‘We don’t own anything there anymore, but it belongs to us. My dad, he had a breakdown and sold our farm and afterwards he didn’t remember what he had done and he said, how could I have sold that land? I love every inch of it. I know the difference between owning and belonging. We don’t own anything, but we belong.’

  ‘Your dad loved it, but whitefellas don’t have the connection that Aboriginal people have.’

  ‘No-one can say what other people are feeling. You can’t know that. And you can’t know whether it’s any more or less than someone else’s feeling.’ My dad’s unproven line of Wiradjuri inheritance came into my mind.

  ‘I believe if your culture is developed to the extent of that connection to the land Aboriginal people have, you can say it, you can make that distinction,’ Wayne said firmly.

  ‘You can’t know anyone else’s inner feeling. You can’t say you love someone or something more than someone else.’ I was repeating myself.

  ‘I think you are wrong.’

  ‘That’s all right, you’re allowed. But I still don’t believe you or anyone else can know what my dad or anyone else felt.’

  ‘There were “clever men” in Aboriginal culture with trainin’ to the highest level. They knew people’s inner thoughts and feelings. They would know.’

  ‘Yes, well, maybe. I’ll grant that could be possible.’

  We had reached the end of it. Neither of us had convinced the other but it felt all right. We were from the same land and it didn’t matter too much that we weren’t going to agree about whose connection was greater. And, truthfully, it was an old argument for me, not enough anymore.

/>   Wayne had been finding out about ‘clever men’ and Wiradjuri spiritual beliefs.

  ‘I love it,’ he said. ‘Our Wiradjuri religion.’

  He talked about the Henderson drawings of the carvings on the bora ground and there was a different air about him, no longer fiercely certain but questing, excited. He was uncovering the lost stories of his people, an explorer in his own culture. I recognised the thrill, the pleasure of knowledge in the way he talked. His eyes were eager, his voice warm, like a boy full of the delight of discovering new territory and the joy of knowing it was his own long lost place. There was treasure in his land that he hadn’t known was there.

  He told me about the cave paintings in the hills around Wellington and the Wiradjuri names of landmarks, each of them formed by Baiame. Mount Arthur out along Bushrangers Creek Road was called Moreebna, and nearby were Irribung and Durra. If you looked down from the top of Durra or Irribung, Wayne said, you could see a 300 metre human footprint – five toes and all – in the landscape, evidence of Baiame’s journey. I remembered the strange air that Bushrangers Creek Road always had, the feeling of danger and discovery.

  We had been talking for a few hours and I knew his grandchildren would be home soon. I wondered if I should leave before they arrived in case they were put out to see a stranger in their lounge room, but just as I was packing my notes and the cassette away, they walked in. They were beautiful-looking children, neatly dressed in fresh blue and white school uniforms, both with an eager story to tell as they came in the door. They were disconcerted to see me, but they acknowledged me and, under Wayne’s watchful eye, greeted me politely.

  He stood up to show me out. His rangy body and focused air again brought my brother to mind and I gave in to the desire to exclaim. After all, I knew something about his life now.

  ‘You remind me so much of one of my brothers. As soon as I saw you. You have the same look, the same air. He’s had a hard time and now he’s found a way for himself. He’s gone off into Buddhism.’

  We were both back out on the veranda now, above the shimmering summer street. The city was all around us, stretching in every direction for as far as we could walk in a day. We exchanged a look, knowing we understood each other. He grinned.

  ‘And I’ve gone off into the Dreamtime.’

  31

  Australia Day

  Late summer had taken hold in the city: black bitumen streets radiating heat, limbs bare and brown, cool surf beckoning and beer on suburban verandas. It felt like time to stop searching, to slip into the green sea water, but I wanted to talk to Lee again and I needed to walk on the Common, to see finally what the fight was all about. It had become mythological and I needed to feel its ordinary soil, its grasses itching my ankles. And there was still Rose.

  Rose lived on the Common and if I was ever going to talk to her, that’s where I would have to go. Everyone I had spoken to was on ‘the other side’ and they had all spoken ill of her. In fairness, I had to hear her point of view, but over the year I had aligned myself with the opposition. I believed in the rightness of their claim and that Rose was in the wrong. If I were to ask her questions, she would have to know where I stood.

  I started ringing her in the morning and on the final attempt that evening she answered. I said I was coming up to Wellington and was hoping we might have that cup of tea and a piece of cake.

  ‘You’ve rung a few times now,’ she said, considering. I could tell from her tone of voice that counted in my favour. ‘I think perhaps we might be able to have that cup of tea some time. Give me a ring anyhow when you get up here.’

  This was the most promising offer yet. She hadn’t given me a meeting place or time, but she was definitely relenting.

  By chance, the day I drove out to Wellington was 26 January, Australia Day. A large American ute with full-sized Australian flags flying from either side of the cabin sped down the motorway beside me as I headed westwards. It was only one ute, but its bulky size and the flags gave it the air of a military convoy, unquestionable right on its side. Between the two flags was a giant plasma-screen television, tied down securely. Other cars passed with smaller flags waving, carefully attached to an aerial or side mirror. I felt like an outsider.

  In Bathurst, where I stopped for coffee, the waitresses had Australian flags painted on their cheeks and a young man on a motor bike rode around and around the hot, mostly deserted streets, a flag wrapped around his shoulders. Then he stopped and sat in the heat outside the café, waiting for I don’t know what. He looked very young and suddenly dispirited, a sad undertow to his patriotic aggression, as if he might at least suspect it was all foolish posturing.

  Past Bathurst, early summer had been unusually rainy so the sides of the road waved with wild wheat and oats and the hillsides were covered with tussocky grasses a metre high, pale gold washed with green, the lovely unnameable colour just before ripeness. All the dams were full, glinting with water, and the creeks and occasional marshes were edged with bright green. Rolling hills unfolded one vista after another, seeming to invite the traveller ever onwards. After more than 400 kilometres the Wellington Valley opened before me as I crested a rise. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have been walking for days and to stand on that hill and see that you were nearly home, just another few hours’ walk.

  Another ten minutes’ drive and I was at the cabin by the river. The water was flowing fast and muddy, the deepest I had seen it for several years. It had flowed past Wiradjuri babies being born and the bora initiation ceremonies and Oxley and the convicts and soldiers and the missionaries and my ancestors. I gazed at it for a few minutes, listening to the wind in the she-oaks making a low shir-shirring sound, like whispering just below comprehension, before turning to unpack.

  First thing next morning I called in to talk to Lee. It was only nine o’clock but the heat was already bouncing off the road when I parked. Lee wasn’t waiting on the veranda for me this time and, as it turned out, was asleep. He answered the door after a few minutes, tousled and sleepy-eyed, blinking at the bright world outside his dim little house, gradually remembering that he had agreed to see me. I said I would come back in half an hour when he was awake. I really only had a couple of questions, a few minutes of his time.

  When I returned he had showered and shaved and was back to his usual speed of a million miles an hour. We went straight into his kitchen, still bare and neat even after a sleep-in, and he poured us each a drink from the water purifier on the sideboard before we sat down at the formica table. No need for cautious standing and checking this time; we already had each other’s measure.

  I asked Lee about the present stage of the claim and he said it was still undergoing pre-registration tests. It had been going back and forth between the lawyer, Tietzel, the Native Title Tribunal and the claimants.

  ‘Teitzel says in his experience with the other claims he’s represented that this one has to be registered or something funny is going on. He said it can’t be knocked on the head.’

  ‘He’s that certain?’

  ‘Yep. He’s done a few of these before where the wrong mob have had a go. There’s no doubt Rose has rights, through the Stanleys, but seventy per cent of the rest have none.’

  ‘So why did the government give the land to Rose’s mob instead of listening to the Traditional Families?’

  ‘You know about the town tip out on the Common?’

  ‘Yes, on the road to Nanima.’

  ‘It’s been used for all sorts – not just town garbage – hospital waste, farm chemicals. Balmain and Leichhardt councils in Sydney used it for a few years as well. And some sewage. There’s these three streams, water courses, that go through it – I can show you the maps – and it’s only 400 metres or so from the river. I can show you. After rain, there’s a lot of seepage into the river. And we get our water just two kilometres down from the tip.’

 
‘Is that right?’

  River pollution was important but didn’t seem to be anything to do with my question. I was trying to stay on track here; I didn’t want to give him anything more than polite interest.

  ‘I could show you documents. You won’t find them on the internet or anywhere else.’ I nodded and he was out of the room and back with two folders, both at least ten centimetres thick, within a few seconds. ‘Just a few bits and pieces on the tip.’ He grinned.

  He knew he was obsessive and was proud of it. He took out various papers showing non-compliance for various water-testing procedures by Wellington Council, some local newspaper clippings chronicling opposition to the tip, and one with an obscured letterhead. He picked up the last one.

  He held it out for me to read but didn’t let me hold it. It was dated 1997 and it contained a report with figures and graphs on the bacterial quality of the Macquarie River at various towns along its length tested over a period of time. ‘Look at this.’ He flicked through the pages. ‘Here are the graphs for the other towns – Dubbo, Narromine. Zero faecal coliforms means drinking quality, up to 150 is okay for swimming, something like 450 for stock use – and here look, the graph for Wellington, 1700, then 1800, 1900.’

  ‘And arrows pointing off the graph.’

  I wrote down the name and identification number of the paper. I thought of the glass of water I had drunk in my cabin this morning and felt a bit queasy.

  ‘Exactly. But you won’t find this anywhere. Fell off the back of a friend’s truck. I showed it to this government minister and he said, Lee, where the hell did you get that and I said never you mind, but I gave him a copy.’ He put the paper away, looking pleased with himself.