The Fringe Dwellers

by Nene Gare

  NENE GARE was born Doris Violet May Wadham in Adelaide in 1919. One of seven children, she left school at fourteen. She went to Muirden Business College and the Adelaide School of Art—she intended to be a painter—and worked at Myer.

  In her early twenties she went to Perth. Not long after, she met Frank Gare and they married in 1941. She began writing short stories for magazines and newspapers, and attended Perth Technical College to further her interest in art. Her husband went to Duntroon to become a patrol officer in Papua New Guinea, where the couple moved with their two children after the war. The eldest died tragically there.

  Two more children followed after their return to Perth. The family moved to Carnarvon, where Nene Gare helped run a banana plantation, then Geraldton. In 1961 The Fringe Dwellers, which fictionalised their ten years of living alongside Aboriginal people, was published. It was immediately acclaimed as a groundbreaking novel.

  Four more books, along with numerous anthologised short stories, followed over the next two decades. An award-winning artist, Gare also held several exhibitions.

  The Fringe Dwellers was reprinted more than twenty times, and filmed by Bruce Beresford in 1986.

  Nene Gare died in 1994. Kent Town: A 1920s Girlhood was published posthumously.

  MELISSA LUCASHENKO is of European and Murri heritage, and lives between Brisbane and the Bundjalung nation. She has published four novels: Steam Pigs, which won the Dobbie prize, Killing Darcy, Hard Yards and Too Flash. Her fifth novel will be published by UQP.

  ALSO BY NENE GARE

  Fiction

  The Fringe Dwellers

  Green Gold

  Bend to the Wind (stories)

  A House with Verandahs

  An Island Away

  Non-fiction

  Kent Town: A 1920s Girlhood

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © the estate of Nene Gare 1961

  Introduction copyright © Melissa Lucashenko 2012

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Heinemann, London 1961

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922079541

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921961823

  Author: Gare, Nene, 1919–1994

  Title: The fringe dwellers / by Nene Gare ; introduction by Melissa Lucashenko.

  Series: Text classics

  Subjects: Aboriginal Australians—Fiction. Sisters—Fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Fighting in the Margins

  by Melissa Lucashenko

  The Fringe Dwellers

  ‘THEY look like people, that’s the trouble,’ wrote Judith Wright, referring to the salesmen who arrive at your front door, masquerading as human beings. Wright’s phrase often does good service for Aboriginal people too, faced with the endless task of telling allies from enemies.

  This was my dilemma as I came cautiously to The Fringe Dwellers. Research soon revealed, though, that in the 1950s Nene Gare had welcomed Aboriginal women into her home in Geraldton as friends, rather than as servants (an unthinkable act to many white West Australians of the time—probably still unthinkable to many white Australians today). Of poor and marginalised origins herself, Gare witnessed the vicious racism that scarred Aboriginal lives, and she wrote perceptively about what she saw.

  But, I also learned, she was married to Frank Gare, who in 1962 was reluctantly appointed the Commissioner for Native Welfare—and the words ‘Welfare’ and ‘Protector’ sit bitterly in Aboriginal mouths even now. Go to any Aboriginal community in Australia and you will soon find the victims, the stolen generations, and also the unacknowledged children and grandchildren, of many so-called Protectors. The Gares, by all accounts, were of a different stamp: people who genuinely tried to force legislative and political change, and who were active in resisting the mores of the time that said that Aboriginal children were ‘better off’ being raised by strangers in white institutions.

  The Fringe Dwellers was Nene Gare’s response to the commonplace West Australian racism that kept Aborigines segregated from white society. It was an attempt to speak out about the injustices she was confronted with on her doorstep, living as she did a stone’s throw from a fringe camp on the aptly named Mount Misery.

  When I opened the novel, a sentence on the first page leapt out: ‘Trilby was classified as a half-caste.’ These days we avoid the term, for its imprecision as well as its offensiveness. But Gare doesn’t write that Trilby was a half-caste, but rather that she was classified as one. The phrase underlines a hard, ongoing fact of Aboriginal life: as a black girl Trilby was one thing, but white Australia insisted on seeing her as another, and as a mere category at that. This was encouraging; I read on.

  In The Fringe Dwellers the teenage Comeaway sisters, Trilby and Noonah, reluctantly leave their younger brother and sister behind on the mission, and return to their parents’ ramshackle existence on the fringes of a country town. Here, a few hours north of Perth, is the freedom that Trilby has longed for: a chance to escape the stifling oppression of mission life, and, she hopes, the trap of her Aboriginality. Pragmatic Noonah begins training as a nurse, bringing in money to the near-destitute family. Trilby dreams of working in a shop—of anything except ‘kids or cleaning’.

  It soon becomes evident that her dreams are one thing, and life in an unwelcoming West Australian country town is quite another. Grey-eyed Trilby meets a scattering of unambitious relatives and comes to know her extended family for the first time. Seduced by a young Aboriginal lad, Phyllix, she regrets the indiscretion, and quickly rejects him. Trilby determines to go back to school for a year so that she can get a ‘good job in an office, something like that’. Overt racism dogs the girls wherever they go, from sneers in the town milk bar to stares on the train. When Trilby punches a racist white student in the face the principal calls her in, but she is not expelled, nor is her dream of escape extinguished.

  Life in the fringe camp is simple but sociable: ‘Ten yards to the liveness and laughter of other people.’ There is never much food, as the feckless Mr Comeaway is more inclined to yarn his days away with his brother Charlie than to make the journey down to the wharf for paid work. But, through a combination of gambling skill, child endowment, calling in of favours and communal obligation, Mrs Comeaway scratches together enough tucker to go around.

  All is well enough until Noonah persuades her parents to attempt the move to the Wild-Oat Patch—a new housing development in town, designed to assimilate the ‘coloured’ population. Here there will be respectability, and the chance for young Bartie and Stella to come back to the family. And so the slide to isolation and ‘civilisation’ (‘Only Noonah worried about things like rent’) begins. The inevitable horde of Comeaway rellies soon arrives to stay. Trilby, despair-ing of life in a house designed for four and accommodating closer to twenty-four, discovers that she is pregnant. Jail, madness—‘It’s not really my baby’—and worse soon follow. The move towards white society has, it turns out, been a move towards annihilation.

 
What are we to make of this story, first published in 1961, from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century? Nene Gare was a writer far ahead of her time, and her sympathies are unmistakeable. Trilby and Mrs Comeaway are heroes, with a supporting cast of Aboriginal characters who are mostly rounded and nearly all likeable. Gare had a good grasp of many of the ways white civilisation, or white racism (the two are sometimes indistinguishable for Aboriginal people, something she also understood), affected black Australians. And she doesn’t fall into the trap, common to outsiders who decide to depict Aboriginal life, of thinking that she is the only white person ever to sympathise. There are plenty of racist whites in The Fringe Dwellers, but there is a variety of others too: a man in a milk bar who interrupts the intolerable rudeness of the other patrons; the insufferable but well-meaning neighbour at the Wild-Oat Patch; the school principal who gives Trilby the benefit of the doubt.

  There are anomalies. For this Aboriginal reader, it seems unlikely that two prodigal daughters arriving in their parents’ home after a long train ride from the mission would not be offered food and drink, when both are available. Other than the term ‘monarch’ for police, no Aboriginal language is spoken until well into the final third of the book, and then sparingly. And only old Skippy the ‘full-blood’ has a country—the Kimberley, to which he longs to return. The other fringe dwellers have been forced away from their tribal life to a degree that is almost unrecognisable today, a forcing-away described by May, a camp dweller, in the final chapter: ‘“An now they wants to push us further back.” The black eyes sparkled. “Jack says we moved all we gonna move. We stay put now. They can all just damn well move themselves…”’

  May has guts and grit in spades, for like all Nene Gare’s Aboriginal characters she is a real person, with the strengths and weaknesses of all humanity. And Gare saw, too, the inherent cruelty of the system Aborigines were subject to. Not long after arriving home from the mission, Noonah argues that Bartie is desperately unhappy there, and needs to come back home. Their mother resists the idea.

  Mrs Comeaway’s lower lip was pendulous, her smooth brow puckered…‘It’s like this here,’ she said at last. ‘You kids don’t understand proper…Up there, theys all the same, nothing to choose between em. Nobody don’t call em names just because they coloured. An even if they don’t like it for a little while…’

  ‘I hated it,’ Trilby burst forth. ‘All the time I was there I hated it.’

  Three chapters later Noonah is forced to explain to her mother what incarceration on the mission felt like:

  ‘happiness isn’t just food and a bed and clothes. Not for children…they feed you and teach you to brush your teeth and they give you a bed in a proper room, but they could never teach us to stop wanting our mothers and fathers and our own homes…It’s like being sick all the time. Not in your stomach, but up here.’ She put a thin hand against her heart. ‘The little kids pretend Mrs Gordon is their mother. Whenever she walks round they crowd up against her and hold onto her hands or her frock…I know they’re pretending she’s their mother, because I used to pretend myself.’

  Gare saw what it was for the children to live torn away from a mother’s love. And she recognises Aboriginal pain for what it is: simple human pain. But Mrs Comeaway has surrendered her children voluntarily, afraid of the racism they will be exposed to in the outside world. While he has his concerns, Mr Comeaway too has come to terms with his children being raised hundreds of kilometres away in a white institution. And pregnant Trilby rejects her unborn baby, planning to send it off to the authorities. I found this parental acquiescence an odd contrast with, say, the heroic stance of the Aboriginal father in Archie Roach’s 1990 anthem ‘Took the Children Away’: ‘Dad shaped up and stood his ground / He said, “You touch my kids and you fight me.”’

  Nene Gare knew a lot of Aboriginal people well, and wrote Aboriginal lives that ring true on the page. But the idea of Aborigines resisting missionisation and organising their own affairs, rather than being the happy subjects of the ‘partment’ man beloved of old Skippy, isn’t raised in this novel. Mum Comeaway is wise in a sloppy, take-life-as-it-comes kind of way, and Trilby is both ambitious and angst-ridden about the number she has been dealt in Australia’s racism lottery. But neither they, nor Mrs Green who lives on the hill, nor the hard-bitten Rene Riley who has known and rejected white city life, are shown to have the capacity to run their lives independently, to exercise real social or political power. But then, perhaps it is too much to ask a white writer at the start of the 1960s to have envisioned self-determination for black Australians.

  What Nene Gare did do so successfully, in the most popular of her books, was to speak out in the face of a white Western Australia that held Aboriginality in withering paternalistic contempt. She had the imagination and the life experience to portray for a white audience—and maybe for the first time—a world in which Aboriginal men and women are both decent and normal, despite their being treated as far less than that. Perhaps this, as much as anything, was the reason that Judith Wright’s old friend Oodgeroo Noonuccal agreed to play a role in Bruce Beresford’s 1986 film of the novel. I think she very probably recognised herself in its pages.

  And it is the reason why Gare’s story deserves to be read today. Her protagonist may feel forever trapped in the margins, but she is determined to keep fighting for the rights that she knows she deserves. Critically, like her mother, her sisters and her brother, young Trilby Comeaway is still alive at the end of The Fringe Dwellers, fiercely alive.

  To my friends, with love

  ONE

  Trilby paused to look back at the mission. The box-like buildings straggling either side of the wide roadway were ugly, utilitarian, and the only graceful note was lent by the tall wide-reaching gums which shaded them. At this distance the children’s voices sounded like the carolling of birds, echoing and re-echoing as they laughed and called to each other.

  Trilby stuck a long leg over the boundary fence, lifting her skirt high above the line of barbed wire at the top. Safely over, she bent her head against the wind and continued her walk. Outside the fence the slender-leaved wattles spread circular skirts to break the force of the southerly. In this dry red land of North-Western Australia the southerly blew all summer long, strong and straight. It blew Trilby’s hair back from her face and down her faded cotton skirt between her legs. It inclined her figure at an angle and only her down-bent gaze shielded her eyes from the flying red dust.

  Soon the mission was just a block of indistinct outlines, and the bell-like voices were truly those of the birds. A line of river-gums appeared and as they grew more distinct Trilby speeded her steps. Under the trees was the river-bed, dry and sandy now, but still cool beneath the low trailing branches of the ghost gums. Trilby stopped to look wistfully at a mud-bottomed hollow that sometimes, when there had been good rains farther north, held water all through the long dry summer; but the rains had been sparse this year and the pool was dry. She stooped to brush a scurrying line of big black ants from a sandy spot beneath one of the trees, then she settled herself down, her back against its trunk. Here, where the force of the wind was broken, there were small bush flies by the hundred. They settled on the girl’s face and arms and legs and lost themselves in her hair. She leaned over to pick a frond of leaves to use as a fly-switch.

  Trilby was classified as a half-caste. For years now she had lived at the mission. There were four of the Comeaways there—Trilby’s older sister Noonah, and the young ones, ten-year-old Bartie and the baby Stella, who was six. Trilby had always hated the life, though the active rebellion of her first year or so had dwindled to a dreary acceptance, lighted only by wild plans for the life she would lead when she was free. She dreamed of excitement and gaiety and laughter and joyous adventure, but these things did not belong to mission life, and until now there had always been the cold awakening to this fact. Not today, though. Today she could dream as much as she liked. Only one more night at the mission for herself an
d Noonah. One more night between herself and the wonder of pleasing herself what she did. Her mouth curled upward in ecstasy.

  With her face turned to the clear strong light, it seemed that most of the dark blood in this girl had drained into hands and feet, leaving the skin of her face a glowing amber, highlighted with gold. There were stripes of gold in her hair too, over dark honey. But her eyes were her most outstanding feature. Between curving black lashes they glinted like silver.

  Trilby’s grandfathers, both of them, had been white. The cold arrogance of one had been centred in the narrow grey eyes that Trilby had inherited. From him, too, she had her slim height and her high-held head. And perhaps her stubborn rebellious spirit. Back at the mission she was considered a spitfire, cheeky and almost unmanageable. The other kids teased her about her strange light eyes, but Trilby was only acting when she bit back at them. At fifteen she was not yet brave enough to tell them she liked to be different. And that she liked most to be different from coloured people. The lovely velvet-brown eyes of most of the other children went unadmired. She preferred her own long secretive eyes.

  She flung a careless arm across the tree and leant her soft cheek against its hard satin trunk. The sprays of delicate pointed leaves dipped and danced about her face. Across from her, in the very centre of the dry river-bed, a tortured gum grew almost parallel with the earth but its foliage strained towards the sky, lifting and rippling as the wind drove it ever downward. The coarse white sand rose in clouds, the wind went flying through the leaves, and presently Trilby, in tune with her surroundings, flung straining arms tightly round her tree. Happiness leapt in her heart like a living thing so that laughter was caught in her throat and strangled there. The hardness of the wood crushed her chest but she only pressed closer to it, as if this were life itself she held in her arms. But at last there were tears as well as laughter, and the tears slipped down her cheeks and were bitter and salt on her tongue.