The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  ‘It must have changed since then, that was more than ten years ago.’

  ‘Nothin’s changed. What’s changed? Tip is still there, water treatment plant still the same. It doesn’t have facilities to treat this kind of pollution. I’ll show you what the water from the tap is like.’ He jumped up again and fetched a plastic bucket of brownish water from the front room. ‘I got that from the tap yesterday.’

  Well, it has been raining, I thought. Later I looked up the latest river quality data and found the faecal coliform count for the day of the brownish bucket of water was seventeen, a very long way from the data that fell off the back of a truck, but not zero either.

  I took a deep breath. I had to get back on track or I would be here all day being swept along in his battles.

  ‘This river pollution is really important, I mean everyone in the town needs to know if it still is the case, but it hasn’t got anything to do with the battle over the Common, has it? I asked you about why the government gave the land to one lot when the other lot had shown they were the traditional owners.’

  ‘Which lot do you think agreed to let the tip stay on the Common and keep quiet?’

  Before I left, Lee took two calls on his mobile. One was from Violet Carr, Wayne’s mother, complaining about how dirty the tap water was today, and the other was from Wayne, still in Sydney, about the upcoming registration determination. When Wayne heard I was there, he said, ‘Look, the thing she has to understand about the tip, it’s on that sacred site I was tellin’ her about. Pine Hill.’

  I remembered he had told me about Pine Hill when we talked in Erskineville, after I had stopped the tape and we were at his front door. Pine Hill was where Wandong (or Yandong), the son of Baiame and progenitor of the Wiradjuri lived. Pine Hill. The son of Baiame who brought into existence all the hills, Baron Rock too, and the rivers, had lived on that very hill. I knew that when Baiame slept he rolled over and the salt water covered his body. The moon and stars fell down and became embedded in his muddy flesh, white fossil crescents and star shapes, and I had found them in a dry gully when I was a child. Apparently one day in the future, Baiame will roll over again and the salt water will once more cover his body. I wondered whether it would wash away the jam tins and tomato sauce bottles, car chassis and disposable nappies sticking onto his son’s skin.

  I tried to ring Rose but there was no reply. I couldn’t tell if I was relieved or not.

  Later I looked through the Wellington Times clippings about the tip that Lee had given me – some of them written by Beryl O’Brien, a local journalist and second cousin of mine. There was opposition from Traditional Families, along with other locals, when the tip was first established on part of the Common in the mid eighties.

  ‘What Rose is doing is against Aboriginal law,’ Wayne is reported as saying in the newspaper. ‘Elders set rules under Aboriginal law. There’s been no respect for our elders and decisions are being made without their consent.’

  He also said they were concerned about the road that Rose had built on the Common, the location of the tip, illegal sewerage and the likelihood of pollution leaching into the river. The blockade lasted a week and resulted in the council agreeing to allow Wayne to address it on the Common issue. The Environmental Protection Agency was asked to inspect the tip, but it turned out pollution measurement devices were already in place there.

  There was really nothing anyone could call evidence to link the decision to transfer the Common to Rose’s committee to fears that if the Traditional Families had the Common, they would continue to kick up a stink about the tip and river pollution. Garbage disposal, sewerage and water quality are local council issues; land rights are a Federal and State issue and there is no piece of paper that links the two. There are only mutterings.

  Back in Kings Cross the weeks slipped by. It felt like I was nearing the end of the story, but there was still Rose. I still wanted to ask Wayne why he was bothering with a Native Title claim when he knew Rose had freehold title to the Common, but I kept putting it off. When I finally did try to phone there was a message saying his number was no longer connected. I wondered if he had not been able to pay his bills or whether he had just moved on. I rang Joyce. It took a few days of phone calls before I found her at home and she told me Wayne had moved back to Wellington. He was living in Short Street, up the road from the house where my Aunt Dorothy had lived with her husband and children.

  He answered the phone immediately and didn’t sound at all surprised to hear from me.

  ‘How’s Wellington?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s my place, I’m home,’ he said.

  He sounded happy and relaxed. He had his grandchildren with him and they were settling in well.

  ‘I’ve got one more question for you,’ I said. ‘I know we talked about all this, but I need you to clarify why you are continuing with the Native Title claim when it won’t give any real rights over the Common because it’s freehold now?’

  ‘So everyone knows we were right in the first place. The Land Council, Native Title Services, the government – they will all have to admit we were right all along, the Traditional Families are the rightful custodians.’

  Wayne simply wanted it admitted by all concerned that they had the inalienable right to the land, the right by Wiradjuri law for 40,000 years and acknowledged by Australian law since 1993, to say this land was theirs. And that Rose and her mob did not have the right. Well, Rose might but she hadn’t gone about it according to Aboriginal law.

  It must have stuck like a barbed spearhead in Wayne’s side that Rose was sitting on the land that his ancestors, the most feared clan in the whole Wiradjuri nation, had defended for unwritten millennia.

  ‘And there’s other sacred sites. I can show you some if you like. Too hot now, but when it gets a bit cooler or early one mornin’,’ he said.

  He kept on going before I could say anything. He was an orator in front of the assembly, he was going to have his say. He couldn’t let it go; it would be like letting go of the only thread that connected him to his own soul.

  ‘So, you want a moral victory then?’

  ‘More than that. Once our claim is registered – and Teitzel says we can’t fail, we have such a strong case – we will use it as a platform to ask why the wrong people were given the land. And why weren’t we listened to. They all knew, we told ’em. We want to expose the way the so-called land rights system really works.’

  ‘You want to attack the whole thing?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s big. The way it works now, anyone can be on a local land council. It’s a denial of Aboriginal tribal identity. It’s forced assimilation.’

  ‘So this is not just about ownership of the Common?’

  ‘It’s about the policies of relocatin’ tribal people all over the place. There’s nineteen different tribal groups in Dubbo and you see all the trouble they have there. It sets Aboriginal people against each other. Divide and rule. It’s colonial policy.’

  ‘What do you want to happen then?

  ‘For a start, the land councils need to be replaced by tribal councils. Each tribe has its own council. And stop shifting people around all over the place, making it impossible for them to stay on their own land.’

  ‘I think it’s more ignorance than deliberate policy,’ I defended.

  ‘It’s subliminal,’ Wayne said. ‘They don’t admit it, but they don’t really respect Aboriginal law.’

  He went on to point out that all the other cultural groups in Australia – Chinese, Vietnamese, Italians – were encouraged to practise their own language and cultures. Why wasn’t the difference of separate Aboriginal nations recognised? He wanted to undo a system that, under the guise of land rights, was undoing the ancient rule of elders and dividing and ruining Aboriginal communities.

  ‘It’s going to take a while,’ I said.


  ‘That’s all right. I’m not goin’ anywhere. Everyone knows I’m not gunna give up on this.’

  After the phone call I went downstairs to the café for a coffee. The young woman who brought it to my table was French so I chatted for a minute. The coffee smelled and tasted like memory, rich and addictive, and I sat back, at ease despite the strange restlessness Wayne’s determination aroused. The street flowed with the sounds of different languages as it had ever since Europeans began disembarking from sailing ships and steamers down in the bay and walking up the steep steps to Kings Cross. Each language, each person, carried a different story. Sometimes I want to hear every one of them.

  32

  Sacred Sites

  After weeks of phone calls, Tim had managed to pin Lee and Wayne down. They were going to show us some Wiradjuri sacred sites, traditional meeting places along the river and in the hills behind town. I had left it to Tim to set up. Simply by being male he had more clout with Lee and Wayne than I did, but he also shared their general suspicion of my reliance on books rather than the world in front of me. Even though I had met Lee and Wayne first and introduced them to Tim, I knew I was lucky to be allowed to come along. I stayed overnight in the cabin by the river so as to be up and ready to go when they were.

  The Wellington Valley can be as cool and white-grassed as the high country on a clear autumn morning; I do remember numb fingertips, and frost crunching underfoot on the way to the backyard toilet when I was a child, but somehow I recall the Valley as continually hot. It was not cold now, just unseasonably cool. A breeze lifted my hair as I walked along the veranda outside the retirement units where I’d arranged to pick up Tim. The fresh morning air made it feel like another brighter, more lively place.

  Tim was already inside, having a cup of tea with Mum. He got up to make me one while I took his place on Mum’s right side where she could hear better. She couldn’t make tea anymore; it wasn’t safe for her to lift a jug of boiling water. Even drinking a cup of tea was a bit risky. I watched as she lifted the cup wobbling to her lips and then placed it wobbling back down in its saucer.

  But she wanted to hear about our plans.

  ‘Don’t think they want a girl along,’ I said to Mum, winking.

  ‘You be careful now.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. They probably think I’ll slow them down. I’ll get to the top of that hill before any of them.’

  After finishing the tea we left in my car. We collected Lee and then Wayne, and Tim got in the car with them while I drove along behind. I followed them to The Falls on the Macquarie River, which are not any kind of falls but rather a ford. No-one seems to know why it’s called The Falls; perhaps someone heard it wrong once and it was repeated and gradually changed in everyone’s minds.

  We were out past the edge of town along a road that was gravel until fairly recently and still does peter off into dirt. It’s the unknown side of town to me; I can’t ever remember going out that way as a child. I realise it doesn’t take much for a place to feel foreign to me. It seems contradictory that the early morning streets of Paris feel familiar, while a road on the other side of my home town can shimmer with strangeness.

  When I pulled up and got out of the car I remembered the first time I came to The Falls, probably in my late twenties. It was a ferocious summer day, hot beyond the capacity of thought or will, and I had walked a short way along the river bank looking for somewhere to swim, before simply stopping in my tracks, stunned by the heat. I’d stood in silence. There were red river gums and she-oaks around me and sandy soil underfoot. I waited; sweaty skin, flies – and the promise that something would be revealed. The yearning for whatever it was took hold of me as it had before in the bush, the familiar pang of the moment before revelation. And then in a few more moments it had gone and I was left hot and desolate as always.

  It wasn’t going to happen today. We were about business. The river was muddy and there were dried-out car tracks backing and turning away from the ford. The men stood with their hands in their jacket pockets, looking at the ground and scratching patterns in the soil with the toes of their boots. They were waiting for me.

  Corroborees were held here right up to the end of the nineteenth century, Wayne explained. I had read about this place but had not known where it was. He said his ancestors built a huge Baiame figure here from sand and soil, metres long, lying on the ground.

  ‘It was made for initiation ceremonies. Re-built each year.’

  ‘That was out at the bora ground, wasn’t it? The Baiame figure?’

  He looked at me. ‘Nah, it was here.’

  ‘Well, there was one at the bora ground too. That’s what I’ve read in Henderson.’

  Wayne ignored me. He took some photos out of his jacket pocket. He showed me three of them. They were pictures of men with painted bodies and feathers in their hair, copies of images taken at the last corroboree held here some time in the late 1870s.

  ‘Women can’t see the rest,’ he said. He gazed at me intently, willing me to argue, I thought.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and stepped back.

  Wayne held the other photographs out to Tim who took them carefully. He was almost cradling them. I could see he felt honoured.

  ‘I’ll get him later and hold him down and make him tell me,’ I joked.

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Tim said.

  He was terse and serious and I felt uncomfortable. I was only joking. Wayne and Lee took no notice of me. I looked around and tried to imagine flickering firelight and stamping feet and painted bodies in the ancient dark. I didn’t feel anything. There was nothing here.

  We got back in the cars and drove into town and across several streets to the junction of the Bell and Macquarie. We parked in the V between the rivers and got out. It was a stony, sandy strand. Wayne told us that a gigantic kangaroo was drawn here, not carved but made in outline with stones and rocks. It was created before a hunt, a kind of spell to bring hunting success. I wondered if it was made before every hunt or just sometimes when the hunters were desperate – surely a lot of work to do when you were hungry – but I didn’t ask.

  I can’t remember why, and it could have been apropos of nothing, but Wayne suddenly started talking about the killing of ‘unfit’ children. ‘If you were born with anything wrong with you, you were knocked on the head. Or if you couldn’t learn or keep up, you were knocked on the head.’ He gave me his intent look again.

  ‘They couldn’t carry anyone who couldn’t carry themselves,’ I said. ‘Subsistence life.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s just the way it was. I’m just saying it like it was. Too old or crook, or a kid who couldn’t keep up, knocked on the head.’ He wasn’t defending or accusing; he was almost dispassionate except that he still seemed to be trying to get a reaction. ‘Knocked on the head,’ he said again.

  Some things are better now, I thought, but didn’t say. And then Wayne said the words exactly as I’d thought them: ‘Some things are better now.’

  I nodded without looking at him.

  For a few minutes we discussed whether we would go out to Pine Hill where the tip was, but Wayne wanted to take us out to Bushrangers Creek first. I said I had already been out to Pine Hill and so had Tim, so we all headed out along Bushrangers Creek road. We went up past the showground – the land that had belonged to our great-grandparents years ago – and past Kellys’ house with all the truck and car bodies lying around and then into the bush. It still felt like the ‘other way’ home, still had its air of difference and slight danger.

  We stopped just past the turn-off to Mount Arthur where the Aboriginal shanty settlement had been. I had a vague picture in my head of the tin houses being there during my early childhood, but later on when the shanties had disappeared I wondered if I had imagined them. Before Nanima, Wayne had lived there with his grandmother in one of the houses made of flattened hone
y tins. He showed us the spot; all that was left of his childhood home was a few bits of rusty battered tin. There was some fencing wire and a few cans lying around in the tussocky grass. The ground was stony, nothing much would grow here.

  ‘When I was a kid I always wanted to live here in one of these houses,’ Tim said suddenly.

  Coming from anyone else it might have sounded patronising, but I knew he meant it. His face had the glow of childhood yearning. Tim, with his thick Buddy Holly glasses, had been a curious, snowy-haired kid who lived in his own world. Tim hadn’t wanted, still didn’t want, what most other people want. Wayne looked at him and grinned.

  I walked through the grass, kicking, finding scattered remains. I felt more connected to this place. People had lived here; I remembered them. Lee and I trailed around, picking up the odd tin to identify, golden syrup cans and sauce bottles, while Tim and Wayne talked, exchanging facts and lining up memories of their separate boyhoods.

  Wayne was a bit edgy as well. Tim noticed it and mentioned it to me later. We both thought it would have been in this place in the middle of his childhood that the sexual abuse had happened. He didn’t want to stay here long.

  We headed up the road towards Mount Arthur. Wayne showed us a valley at right angles to the road and narrowing as it headed up into the bush before widening out into a kind of circular space. Like a birth canal, I thought. At the end was a large rock, almost lingam-shaped. Around it there were shoots of green nourished by run-off and better soil.

  ‘Here,’ said Wayne, ‘is where children were brought in the night and given their star-name.’

  ‘Really? A star-name! What was that? How did that work?’

  ‘Their star-name – their star was pointed out to them and it was theirs. From when they were born. It was their star-name.’

  ‘So they brought them here, little kids, in the dark?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He looked around. He seemed sad suddenly, that strange almost pointless sadness that can wash through anyone at any time. It was a sunny morning, starting to warm up, a few centuries since the Europeans arrived thinking nothing much was going on here.