My Place

by Sally Morgan

  ‘Are we related to you, then?’

  ‘Well now, which way do you go by, the blackfella’s way or the white man’s way?’

  ‘The blackfella’s way.’

  ‘Then I’m your grandfather,’ he said, ‘and your mother would be my nuba*, that means I can marry her.’ Mum laughed. We felt excited at discovering even that.

  Jack went on to explain that he was, in fact, Nanna’s cousin and that his mother’s sister had been on Corunna in the very early days and had married one of the people from Corunna.

  ‘I could have been there myself as a young baby,’ he added, ‘but that’s too far back to remember. I was born in 1903 and worked on Corunna from 1924 onwards. Foulkes-Taylor owned it then. They was a real good mob, that Corunna lot, but, slowly, they started drifting away. They didn’t like the boss.’

  ‘What about Lily?’ Mum asked, ‘did you know her?’ Lily was Nan and Arthur’s half-sister.

  ‘Lily? I’d forgotten about her. Oh yes, I knew Lily, she was a good mate of mine. So was her bloke, Big Eadie. He was a Corunna man too. Aah, we used to have a lot of corroborees in those days. We’d all get together and have a good old corroboree. I can’t explain to you how it made us feel inside. I loved the singing, sometimes we’d get a song and it’d last for days. Lily was a good singer, you could hear her voice singin’ out high above the others. All those people are gone now. I suppose Arthur and Daisy are dead, too?’

  ‘Arthur is, but my mother is still alive,’ replied Mum.

  Jack was very moved. ‘Why didn’t you bring her with you?’

  ‘We tried,’ I replied ‘but she reckoned she was too old to come North. Said her legs wouldn’t hold her up.’

  Jack laughed. ‘That’s one thing about Mulbas**,’ he said, ‘they can find an excuse for anything! She’s one of the last old ones, you know. Gee, I’d like to meet her!’

  ‘Maybe she’ll come next time,’ I said hopefully. ‘Did Lily have any children, Jack?’

  ‘No. She wanted to. She was good with kids. Looked after plenty of kids in her time. She could turn her hand to anything, that woman. How many kids did Daisy have?’

  ‘Only me,’ Mum said sadly, ‘I’d love to have come from a big family.’

  ‘Ooh, you ask around,’ Jack laughed, ‘you’ll soon have so many relatives you won’t know what to do with them. You’d be related to a lot up here.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Too right. You might be sorry you come!’

  ‘There was another sister,’ I interrupted, ‘I think she was full blood, but died young, her name was Rosie.’

  ‘That’d be right. A lot of full bloods died young in those days.’ ‘I can’t believe we’ve met you,’ I sighed. ‘All these people have just been names to us, talking to you makes them real. We didn’t think anyone would remember.’

  ‘Aah, mulbas have got long memories. Most around here remember the kids that were taken away. I should have been taken myself, only the policeman took me in after my mother died. Then he farmed me out to other people so I was able to stay in the area.’

  ‘I suppose it wasn’t often that happened.’

  ‘No. I was one of the lucky ones.’

  ‘Did you know a bloke called Maltese Sam?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Oh yeah, he’s dead now.’

  ‘Could he have been my mother’s father?’

  ‘No, no, not him. I couldn’t tell you who her father was. Maybe the station-owner. There’s plenty of pastoralists got black kids runnin’ around.’

  I asked Jack if there was anyone else we should talk to.

  ‘You fellas go and see Elsie Brockman, she’s your relation, Albert’s wife.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Mum asked in astonishment, ‘I thought they’d all be dead by now.’

  ‘Oh, Albert’s been gone a while, but Elsie’s still here. Only be as young as you,’ he said to Mum. ‘Then there’s a big mob in Marble Bar you should see, and Tommy Stream in Nullagine. Any of you fellas speak the language?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘but Arthur could and Daisy can. They wouldn’t teach us.’

  ‘Shame! There’s mulbas here know their language and won’t speak it. I’m not ashamed of my language. I speak it anywhere, even in front of white people.’

  ‘Do you speak the same language as my mother?’ Mum asked.

  ‘I speak four languages. Light and heavy Naml, Balgoo and Nungamarda and Nybali. Your mother’s language would be Balgoo, but she would speak Naml too. All those old ones from Corunna spoke both. Those two languages are very similar.’

  Mum and I exchanged glances. We were going to tackle Nan about that when we got home.

  ‘You mob sure your granny never came back?’

  ‘Not that we know of, why?’

  ‘Well, I recall meeting a Daisy in ’23. I was workin’ between Hillside and Corunna at the time. Never seen her before. It was like she appeared outa nowhere. Took her from Hillside to stay at Corunna. She had family there she wanted to visit. Half-caste she was, pretty, too. She was pregnant, baby must have been near due.’

  ‘I don’t think it’d be her,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, I just wondered.’

  I was wondering, too.

  It was all too much. Our heads were spinning, we seemed to be inundated with new information. The children were becoming restless, so Paul suggested that we go and have some lunch and talk over what to do. We said goodbye to Jack. It seemed awful, leaving him so soon. We’d only just met and we really liked him. We promised to call back in if we had the opportunity.

  Over lunch, we talked about Elsie Brockman. Mum and I both felt it was probably a different person. We reasoned that, as Uncle Albert had been the oldest and quite a bit older than Nan, it would be unlikely for his wife to only be in her fifties. It would have made her, at the very least, thirty years younger than Albert. We decided to go to Marble Bar, instead.

  Fortunately for us, we arrived in Marble Bar on pension day. This meant that most of the people were around town somewhere.

  A group of old men were sitting patiently under a tall, shady tree in the main street, waiting for the mail to arrive. We parked nearby and walked over and introduced ourselves. Jack had told us to ask for Roy.

  ‘We’re looking for Roy,’ I said.

  ‘I’m him,’ replied an elderly man with a snow-white beard, ‘what do you want?’

  ‘Gidday,’ I smiled and held out my hand. ‘I’m Sally and this is Paul and my mother, Gladys.’ We shook hands all round. ‘We’re trying to trace our relatives,’ I explained, ‘they came from Corunna, went by the names of Brockman or Corunna. We heard you worked on Corunna.’

  ‘Not me! I worked on Roy Hill and Hillside, but you’d be related to Jiggawarra, wouldn’t you? I worked with him on Hillside, he built the homestead there, a good carpenter. A good man.’

  Another older man interrupted. ‘Who are these people?’ he obviously asked in his own language.

  ‘Brockman people,’ Roy replied. ‘Oh yes,’ the other smiled, ‘your mob’s from Corunna. You’d be related to most of the people round here, one way or another.’

  ‘You lookin’ for your mob now?’ another asked kindly.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘My grandmother was taken from here many years ago.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he agreed, ‘hundreds of kids gone from here. Most never came back. We think maybe some of them don’t want to come home. Some of those light ones, they don’t want to own us dark ones.’

  ‘I saw picture about you lot on TV,’ chipped in another. ‘It was real sad. People like you wanderin’ around, not knowin’ where you come from. Light-coloured ones wanderin’ around, not knowin’ they black underneath. Good on you for comin’ back, I wish you the best.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I smiled, ‘we are like those people on TV. We’re up here trying to sort ourselves out.’ Then, turning back to Roy, I said, ‘Did you know Lily, Roy?’

  ‘What do you want to know for?’

  ‘
She’s my aunty,’ Mum said proudly.

  Roy was taken aback for a minute. ‘That’s right, I forgot about that.’

  ‘Go on, Roy, tell them about Lily,’ the others teased.

  Roy shook his head. ‘I’m not sayin’ nothin’. I’m not sayin’ a word about Lily.’ The other men chuckled. Lily was now a closed topic of conversation.

  ‘What about Maltese Sam?’ I asked.

  ‘Maltese? He’s finished with this world now.’

  ‘I was told he was my grandmother’s father, you know, the father of Jiggawara’s sister.’

  ‘No, no, that’s not right,’ said Roy.

  ‘You got that wrong,’ others chorused, ‘who told you that?’

  ‘Oh, just someone I know in Perth.’

  ‘How would they know, they not livin’ here,’ replied another. ‘We all knew Maltese, it’s not him, be the wrong age.’

  ‘Do any of you know who her father might have been?’ I asked quietly.

  There was silence while they all thought, then Roy said, ‘Well, she was half-caste, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it must have been a white man. Could have been the station-owner. Plenty of black kids belong to them, but they don’t own them.’

  Just then, we were interrupted by a lady in her fifties. ‘Who are you people?’ she asked as she walked up to our group.

  ‘Brockman people,’ Roy said crossly, ‘we’re talkin’ here!’

  ‘You Christian people?’ she asked Mum.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew it,’ she replied excitedly, ‘I knew it in my heart. I was walkin’ down the street when I saw you people here and I said to myself, Doris, they Christian people, they your people. Now, what Brockman mob do they come from?’

  ‘My mother is sister to Albert Brockman,’ explained Mum.

  ‘Oh, no! I can’t believe it. You’re my relations. My aunty is married to Albert Brockman.’

  ‘She’s not still alive, is she?’ I asked quickly.

  ‘Yes, she’s livin’ in Hedland. She was a lot younger than him.’ Mum and I looked at each other. We were stupid. We should have believed what Jack told us.

  ‘Come home and have a cup of tea with me,’ urged Doris, ‘I’ll ring Elsie and tell her about you, she won’t believe it!’

  We thanked the men for their help and said goodbye.

  As we walked down the main street, Doris said, ‘You’re lucky you didn’t come lookin’ for your relations any earlier, we’ve only all just been converted. Those Warbos* people came through and held meetings. It’s made such a different to this town, there’s not many drunks now.’

  Doris made us a cup of tea when we got to her place and we encouraged her to talk about the old days. She said she could remember Annie, Nan’s mother, from when she was a small child, and that she thought she’d died somewhere in the thirties at Shaw River.

  ‘All the old people had a little camp out there,’ she explained to us. ‘There was nowhere else for them to go. All the old Corunna mob died out there.’

  ‘Did Lily die out there, too?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘Roy wouldn’t tell us anything about Lily.’

  Doris chuckled. ‘That’s because she was one of his old girlfriends. He doesn’t like to talk about his old girlfriends.’ We all laughed.

  Just then, another lady popped in. She was introduced to us as Aunty Katy. She was Elsie’s sister. We all shook hands and began to talk again.

  ‘Lily was very popular around here,’ Aunty Katy told us. ‘She could do anything. Everyone liked her, even the white people. She never said no to work.’

  ‘How did she die?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Now, that’s a funny thing,’ replied Aunty Katy, ‘she came back from work one day and was doing something for one of the old people, when she dropped down dead, just like that! It was a big funeral, even some white people came. Poor old darling, we thought so much of her.’

  ‘She married Big Eadie from Corunna Downs, but there were no children,’ added Doris.

  ‘You know, if your grandmother was Daisy, then her grandmother must have been Old Fanny,’ said Aunty Katy. ‘I’m in my seventies somewhere, but I can remember her, just faintly. She was short, with a very round face, and had a habit of wearing a large handkerchief on her head with knots tied all the way around.’

  I smiled. Mum just sat there. It was all too much.

  Just then, the rest of the family arrived. Trixie, Amy and May. We shook hands, then sat around and had a good yarn. In the process, we learnt that Nan’s Aboriginal stepfather had been called Old Chinaman and that he had indeed been a tribal elder on Corunna and had maintained this position of power until the day he died. Also, Annie had had a sister called Dodger, who had married, but never had any children. We also learnt that Albert had been a real trickster, even in his old age.

  We all laughed and laughed as funny stories about Albert’s pranks kept coming, one after the other. By the end of the afternoon, we felt we knew Albert nearly as well as them.

  Just as the sun was setting, Doris said, ‘You fellas should go and see Happy Jack. He knew Lily well. She worked for his family for many years. He lives down near Marble Bar pool.’

  We were anxious to learn as much as we could, so we took Doris’ advice and headed off in search of Happy Jack.

  One look at Jack’s place and it was obvious that he was an excellent mechanic. His block was strewn with many mechanical bits and pieces, as well as half-a-dozen landrovers that he was in the process of fixing.

  We explained who we were and showed him some old photos Arthur had given us of the early days. At first, he didn’t seem to take in what we were saying, but when it finally dawned on him who we were, he was very moved.

  ‘I just can’t believe it,’ he exclaimed, ‘after all these years.’

  ‘I know you don’t know us, Jack,’ I said, ‘but it would mean so much to us if you could tell us about Lily, we know very little and we would like to be able to tell Daisy about her when we go home.’

  ‘I’m happy to tell you anything I know,’ he said as we settled ourselves around his kitchen table. ‘She was a wonderful woman. A wonderful, wonderful woman. She worked for my family for many years. You know, she’s only been dead the better part of fifteen years, what a pity she couldn’t have met you all.’

  ‘We wish we’d come sooner,’ I replied. ‘Doris told us so many of the old ones have died in recent years.’

  ‘That’s right. And that Corunna mob, there was some very good people amongst that mob. They were all what you’d call strong characters, and that’s by anyone’s standard, white or black. Now, my family, we started off most of the tin mining in this area. We would go through and strip the country, and all that old Corunna mob would come behind and yandy* off the leftovers. I think they did well out of it. We were happy for them to have whatever they found, because they were the people tribally belonging to that area. It was like an unwritten agreement between them and us. Now and then, others would try and muscle in, but we wouldn’t have any of that, it belonged to that mob only. We let them come in and carry on straight behind the bulldozers. It gave them a living. We were very careful about sacred sites and burial grounds too, not like some others I could mention. The old men knew this. Sometimes, they would walk up to us and say, ‘One of our people is buried there.’ So we would bulldoze around it and leave the area intact.

  ‘Now Lilla, that’s what a lot of us called her, not Lily, Lilla. She was a great friend of my mother’s. She worked in the house and was a wonderful cook. Later when I married, she helped look after my kids too. She had a fantastic sense of humour. You could have a joke with her and she’d laugh her head off. All the descendants of that mob are interlocked now, they’re all related around here, I can’t work it out. It’s worse than my own family. What’s Daisy like, is she fairly short?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, Lilla was like that. Though mind you, in her
later years, she became a fairly heavy woman, must have been good pasture she was on. She was wonderful to the old people, even though she was old herself, she worked really hard looking after them. We used to call her The Angel. She was what you’d call a Black Nightingale, really, and I mean that in a dedicated way. Some of those old ones at Old Shaw camp couldn’t move off their mattresses, they were crippled. That didn’t worry Lilla, she’d heave them off and heave them back on again. If she got into trouble, she’d come and see one of our family, because she knew we were on the radio and could get the Flying Doctor in. You see what I mean, she was a beautiful old woman, a very gentle woman, and when she died, I felt very sad, because I felt a thing was lost from amongst the people then.

  ‘Is there anyone else we could talk to who might help us?’ I asked after a few minutes silence. I was amazed at how steady my voice seemed. All I wanted to do was cry, but my voice sounded so firm and steady, like it belonged to someone else.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Jack thoughtfully. ‘You should go to the Reserve and see Topsy and Old Nancy. Nancy is well into her nineties and Topsy well into her eighties. I think I remember them saying they were on Corunna very early in the piece, they might know your grandmother, they were great friends of Lilla’s. The only thing is, they only speak the language, you’d have to get someone to interpret.’

  ‘Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘You don’t know what this means to us.’ We all had tears in our eyes then. While Jack had been speaking of Lilla, it was as though we’d all been transported back into the past. As though we’d seen her and talked to her. Lily was a real person to us now. Just like Albert was.

  ‘Jack,’ I said as we left, ‘would you mind if I put what you told me in a book?’

  ‘You put in what you like. I’m very proud to have known her. I’m extremely proud to have known that woman. The way she conducted herself, the way she looked after her own people was wonderful. Your family has missed knowing a wonderful woman.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I whispered.

  We drove back to the caravan park in silence. Even the children were quiet. We unpacked the van and set up our things for tea. Once again, tea came out of a tin. I don’t think we’d have cared what we ate. We wouldn’t have tasted it. Mum and I couldn’t help thinking of all the things we’d learnt about our family. Our family was something to feel proud of. It made us feel good inside, and sad. Later that night, Mum and I sat under the stars, talking.