The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  ‘Crows are all right, I don’t mind them. But the eaglehawk is powerful, majestic. He flies up so high, he’s detached from everything. With his bird’s-eye view of the world from so far up, so detached, he must have some wisdom about all this, eh?’

  She looked at me directly. There was such longing in her eyes and voice that I felt disturbed. It wasn’t simply poetic fancy, it was something she wanted very soon. She was utterly worn out; she’d had enough of all this.

  ‘Yep, he must,’ I said.

  Things were never simple enough to take sides. Perhaps she did not have incontestable right to this land by Wiradjuri law, and Wayne and Joyce had every right to object, but in her heart, this was her place.

  Rose closed the gate behind me and I walked back to my car. Within a few minutes I had left the Common but I was still on Wiradjuri land. I’d still be on Wiradjuri land if I drove in any direction for hundreds of kilometres – east to the Blue Mountains, west to Wagga Wagga, south to the Murrumbidgee River, north to Gilgandra. It had always been Wiradjuri land, but one day soon, the written law would acknowledge it.

  From the top of Pine Hill, Wellington came into view. It looked peaceful and pretty, the streets regular and tree-lined, the wheat silos rising in the centre like a temple compound on the railway line. The rivers made two long protective arms, the hills on the other side – Moreebna and Irribung and Durra – formed a solid bush-covered backdrop. I couldn’t see the footstep of Baiame, but that was only because I didn’t know what to look for. The town looked the same as it always had.

  35

  Native Title

  The year is nearly done. It is already the next summer since I talked to Rose and I am sitting on the wide country veranda of a house my brothers and sisters and I have rented in Wellington so that we can spend Christmas with our mother. After William Yarnold and Ann Smith were condemned to exile and sent across the wide ocean in a stinking convict hold, after Patrick Reidy fled starvation, after Pieter Müller left his safe cold village and after all of them trudged out into this stolen land to transplant themselves in a strange dry soil, not one of our generation owns a house in Wellington.

  The house we have rented was built nearly a century ago, with various rooms added on over the years so it has a labyrinth of original rooms with tin-pressed ceilings joined onto a mid-twentieth-century rumpus room with glass doors and air-conditioning. There is a large beautiful garden with native eucalypts and bottlebrush and wattle growing alongside exotic lilies, gardenias and azaleas, and pretty pathways and a swimming pool. Our mother tells us that her father, a master painter, used to work for the architect who built and lived in this house and she is sure her father painted it at one time, maybe in the 1930s.

  Today, eighty or so years later, there are grandchildren and great grandchildren and new bikes and wrapping paper and a strange blinking purple Christmas tree that came with the house. Inside, near the blinking tree, my younger son is reading Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father to my mother. It has taken an age to take her to the chair with her walking frame and she will only make the effort of getting up again to go to the lunch table. She is very frail, her skin covered in bruises from just the pressure of hands and she cannot sit upright without the help of cushions. I like seeing them together, the young man in the morning of his life, reading, and the old woman, nearly ninety, head leaning forward as she listens intently, both of them absorbed in the politics and the poetic writing.

  It is the end of a long year of drought, but yesterday, Christmas Day, ‘good steady rain’ started to fall. It is still falling and it feels like a blessing even to those of us, most of us, who have lost the religion and God we were brought up with. We all remember the even longer drought of the sixties and so now we spend hours at a time sitting on the veranda, gazing at the silvery curtain of rain falling, falling, each of us feeling the joy of the parched soil drinking it in. Our memories float in the washed air; the farm, the old house, our father gone, our mother nearing her end – we all know, though we don’t say, that it will be our last Christmas with her – all of us still children in ourselves.

  Suddenly, my youngest brother, Terry, comes out through the gauze door onto the veranda carrying a copy of the Wellington Times. He shows me the front page. There is a large photo of Joyce and Wayne and his mother, Violet, smiling broadly under the heading ‘Land Reclaimed’. I look up at my brother and he grins.

  ‘They’ve done it!’ I exclaim. ‘After all this time! I didn’t believe it would happen.’ I feel elated and can’t help smiling but then I realise I’m a bit disappointed that no-one has rung and told me. I know I don’t matter in this at all, but I’ve been taking it fairly personally.

  I ring Wayne and a child answers the telephone. She says Wayne is outside fixing up the car. I hear her calling out my name but his reply is indistinguishable. The child comes back and asks if I can ring back in half an hour.

  This time Wayne answers.

  ‘Still got to fix the car after all this?’ I say.

  ‘Yep,’ he says. ‘Life goes on.’

  ‘I just saw it in the paper.’

  ‘Isn’t it bloody wonderful! That photo was taken out on the Common.’

  ‘I thought it must have been. You all look pretty pleased. Best Christmas present ever.’ I wonder if it’s jarring to link it to Christmas but Wayne agrees.

  ‘I didn’t think it would ever happen,’ I add.

  ‘Yeah. I knew it would though. I wasn’t ever goin’ to give up. Not ever. I got the news a few days ago, my birthday actually. I thought Teitzel – he rang me – must have been kiddin’ me at first. Thought it was the best birthday ever. Everything just happening the way I dreamed.’

  ‘It’s fantastic. And now the rain has come too.’ I am not really changing the subject.

  ‘Good steady rain,’ he says. ‘It’s like a blessing.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what my dad used to say out on the farm. The land is happy too.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he says. ‘Everything has happened just perfect.’

  ‘I hope you’ve all celebrated.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m having a few days off, but then I’ll keep going. There’s still a lot to do. It’s only the beginning for my people.’

  Afterwards I sit back on the veranda. I remember Rose and wonder how she is feeling. I hope she is with her family and I hope no-one is waving the newspaper headlines in front of her. On this rainy day when the grass and trees and red soil are drinking in great joyful gulps, I try to believe everyone might get along. I imagine for a moment Rose and Joyce and Wayne and all the rest, sitting down and putting aside their differences and past hurts and sorting it all out and everyone having their place. Even me, with my faint unproved trace of Wiradjuri, I would have a place. It was possible.

  The rain falls on the gums and the azaleas and speckles the swimming pool. The city born-and-bred grandchildren are standing solemnly at the veranda’s edge, a little awed by their parents’ honouring of simple rain. I see a magpie hunching wetly under the swimming pool shelter. I suppose when the sun comes out and the rain is glistening on the leaves and grass, he will start to sing.

  Epilogue

  It is nearly Christmas again. Since last year when we all gathered on the veranda and watched the rain, my mother, Connie Miller, and Rose Chown have both died. My mother, determined and ironic until the end, died in Maranartha with my Buddhist brother on one side and me on the other. Rose died suddenly of a heart attack, alone, near her humpy on the Common. As the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, ‘Worlds in them have died.’

  The rain that began at Christmas continued throughout the year and, although I have not seen it, I believe the Wellington Valley, with native grasses swaying on the hillsides and all the creeks flowing, is as beautiful as it has ever been. I have not returned there since my mother died, but I will. It’s where the stories come fro
m.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the Wiradjuri people who shared their knowledge and their memories with me so generously: Joyce Williams, Evelyn Powell, Wayne Carr and Rose Chown (now deceased). Without their open-hearted conversations I would not have been able to write this book. Thanks are due to Darren Ah See for speaking to me about Aboriginal Health issues. I offer thanks to local historian Lee Thurlow, to anthropologist Gaynor Macdonald, and to my brother, Tim Miller, for sharing their knowledge and joining in the search for the Wiradjuri story. I have tried to be faithful to what I heard and read. I hope I have represented everyone’s memories and knowledge accurately and ask them to forgive any of my lapses. This is no more than my own version of the many stories I found.

  Boundless thanks are due to Hilary M Carey and David A Roberts for extracts from the online version of The Wellington Valley Project: letters and journals relating to the Church Missionary Society Mission to Wellington Valley NSW 1830–45, where I spent many addicted hours reading the missionaries’ diaries and letters. Note, where different missionaries have spelled the same Wiradjuri name in different ways, I have kept Reverend Watson’s spelling.

  I would also like to acknowledge some of the many other sources that inform this story: Wiradjuri Places, The Macquarie River Basin by Peter Kabaila, 1998; History of Wellington by Robert Porter, 1906; Wellington Valley, Its History and Progress 1817–1934 by WM Smith, 1934; Ghosts of Burrendong by Dale Edwards, 2008; The Adventurous Memoirs of a Gold Diggeress 1841–1909 by Mary Ann Tyler, 1985; The Glint of Gold by Kerrin Look and Daniel Garvey, 1999; They Came to a Valley by DI McDonald, Wellington, 1968; Initiation Ceremonies of Wiradjuri Tribes by RH Matthews; and Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies by J Backhouse. And a special acknowledgement to the Mitchell Library for Observations on the Colony of New South Wales and Van Dieman’s Land by John Henderson, 1832; and An Australian Language: the Wiradjuri Dialect by J Günther, 1892.

  And again, thanks to Gaynor Macdonald for her essay ‘A Man’s Wage for a Man’s Work: equality and respect in Aboriginal working lives in NSW’, 2004; for her books Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back: a Wiradjuri Land Rights Journey, 2004, and Keeping That Good Name, 2001, written with Evelyn Powell; and for the loan of an SBS video, Native Title.

  I also want to acknowledge the many articles I read in the Sydney Morning Herald and in the Wellington Times and on numerous websites, including those of the Native Title Research Unit, the National Native Title Tribunal, NSW Hansard, NSW State Records, the South Australian Museum’s Tinsdale collection, Water Info NSW, Convict Records, the NSW Bureau of Statistics and Crime Research – the analytical work of Don Weatherburn in particular, the online schooling site Skwirk, Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements (ATNS), the NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs, and the NSW Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts especially their Maynggu Ganai Historic draft conservation management plan.

  There are many other people who answered my questions in phone calls, emails and conversations – thank you to all whose names I have not always recorded, but who include officers at Wellington Shire Council; NSW Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts; Wellington Times Office; Wellington Historical Museum; and the librarian at the Wellington branch of the Macquarie Regional Library.

  Thank you to Pamela Freeman and Clare Forster for their invaluable structural comments, Janet Hutchinson for her sensitive editing, and Alexandra Payne at UQP for holding it all together with such grace.

  Lastly, let me thank Anthony Reeder for his writing insights, endless support and more trips to the central west than even love has required.

  First published 2012 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  www.uqp.com.au

  uqp@uqp.uq.edu.au

  © 2012 Patti Miller

  This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/

  978 0 7022 4936 5 (pbk)

  978 0 7022 4818 4 (ePDF)

  978 0 7022 4819 1 (ePub)

  978 0 7022 4820 7 (kindle)

  Author photograph by Sally Flegg

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