Not Just Black and White

by Lesley Williams

  In addition to the children, Willie kept adding to the household each time he came across an animal in need of saving. At one time or another we had two dogs, a cat that loved climbing trees but was frightened of heights and couldn’t get back down without Willie’s assistance, a duck too neurotic to go into the water and swim, a paddock of horses, and a goat that thought it was a horse. We also had useful pets such as pigs and chooks, which eventually ended up on the dinner plate. This was the kind of life Willie had always dreamed about – nothing fancy, just a place in the countryside surrounded by family and animals – and I was happy to share this dream with him.

  Life was going well and I was slowly growing in confidence as a mother. Our landlady, who was a kindly woman and doted on the children, encouraged me to enrol Dan in preschool through the Distance Education program that operated out of Brisbane. Because we lived some distance away from the nearest school, we were eligible to participate in the program until the building of the local preschool was completed later that year. This meant I would have to supervise Dan’s lessons and then send the completed work back via the post. Although the activities were designed to teach young children basic numeracy and literacy skills – tasks I could easily do – they also helped me gain confidence, knowing I was responsible for the early education of my child.

  Around this time, Willie decided to go into business for himself. With a loan from his parents we purchased a second-hand truck and started our own timber-hauling business. Soon we were offered long-haul jobs that required him to deliver equipment to mine sites in remote areas throughout the state. This meant we needed to trade in the old timber truck and upgrade, with the help of a bank loan, to a much larger truck more suited for longer road trips.

  Like many other small businesses that had debts at that time, we battled to stay afloat and pay the sky-high interest rates. This was made harder when some of the businesses Willie did contract work for were late in paying him. It meant that my husband worked even longer hours, spending weeks at a time away on long-haul trips in the truck, in an effort to meet the shortfall in our cash flow. But no matter how hard the poor man worked, it didn’t seem to ever be enough. As the money dried up for the family to live on day to day, so did his optimism for the future. I guess this was the trigger for the resurfacing of the mental demons that he’d battled against as a younger man.

  Willie had depression. I didn’t really know what that meant in those days. I thought he was just ‘feeling down’. I’d try to cheer him up and make life around the house less stressful for him. But it wasn’t enough. In his own way, Willie tried everything to get better. He’d spend time visiting his parents and his brother, Alan. It was our Friday night ritual to drive into town and have dinner with Alan and his family. The kids played with their cousins, Blair, Scott and Philippa (Pip), and I chatted to my sister-in-law Sue, while the two brothers would spend hours, sometimes, talking over a few beers. On weekends, Alan would bring his family out to our farm, where Willie taught the kids to ride horses. Then occasionally Willie and Alan would take the children on fishing and camping trips during the holidays, which I know he thoroughly enjoyed.

  But each time the bank’s interest rates rose, we’d have to get rid of another animal and I’d have to scratch more items off the shopping list. This would make Willie feel he couldn’t provide for his family, and that made him feel a failure as a husband and a father. All of Willie’s earnings were being spent making truck repayments, paying the hefty vehicle registration, filling the thirsty fuel tanks with diesel or buying new tyres for the truck and trailer. There was always something the truck needed so Willie could work and earn a wage, but in the end there wasn’t any money left to actually live on. It was a never-ending vicious cycle, lasting several years. But by 1983 things had got so bad that I realised, despite my husband’s hard work, we were probably going to drown in debt.

  Willie was weary and depressed. I had to do something, anything, to help him. His family had pitched in and helped out – they were always good like that. In the past, Grandma and Grandfather Williams were forever ferrying me around, taking me grocery shopping or to the baby health clinic appointments, because I didn’t have my licence and couldn’t drive. Even Sue would drive from the other side of town to pick Dan up from class, once he began attending lessons at the new preschool. Of course, I was grateful for the help, but I decided it was time for me to pitch in and help myself.

  First, I got my driving licence after taking private lessons along dusty bush tracks – courtesy of Grandfather Williams and Willie – so I could be more independent. Next I gave up the smokes, cold turkey. If we were struggling to buy a carton of milk for our children to drink but could still find the money to buy a packet of cigarettes, then I had my priorities wrong. I was also literally sick of having bronchitis and needing my mother-in-law to look after the kids because of my filthy habit. But, as honourable as my lifestyle changes were, it still wasn’t enough to feed our family and keep a roof over our children’s heads. I needed to do more. The answer was simple: I had to get some paid work. But a woman in her mid thirties, with only a basic primary school education and limited work experience, had bugger all chances of finding a job that paid well. I didn’t care – any job was good enough for me. I was in no position to be fussy. There was only one thing I was trained to do, and do well: cleaning.

  An Aboriginal lady I knew cleaned houses in the local area. She offered me some work, helping her clean a couple of afternoons a week. The ten dollars I earned wasn’t a lot, but it meant the grocery trolley could have a few extra items in it the next time I shopped. However, the interest rates kept going up and my modest cleaning wage quickly became eaten up by the overdue bills and truck expenses. To really change the fortunes of my family, I had to think of another way to earn decent money and I had to earn it fast.

  Farms and sprawling hills surrounded our house in the Calico Creek valley. At the end of our road was a bean farm owned by the Kelly family. I initially baulked at the gumption needed to ring up the owner and ask for a job but, before my paranoia could take over, I picked up the phone. With my nervous stutter returning, I asked Mr Kelly to take me on.

  It was late in the term and Dan and Rodney were still at school. The only obstacle to my hitting the bean patch was Tammy. Now five, she was too young for primary school, but each morning she travelled into town on the bus with her brothers to attend preschool. At lunchtime, I had to pick her up when her session finished. If I took a job working on the bean patch, there was no way I’d be finished in time to collect her from preschool. This meant she would have to come bean picking with me and miss the final month of her classes.

  I started work on the bean patch on Tuesday 1 November 1983, the same day as the famous Melbourne Cup horse race. While the rest of the nation stopped to watch the race, I was in a race of my own – to pick enough beans to stop the bank from repossessing the truck and to pay the electricity bill before the power was cut off. After years of hard physical domestic work, I was not in the best shape to be lugging big sacks of beans uphill beneath the glaring Queensland sun. My arms hurt and my back ached from the constant bending over to pick the beans, but I worked on, pushing through the pain barrier. What kept me going was imagining that each individual bean was a dollar note dangling on the stalk in front of me, willing me to pick it. One dollar. Two dollars. Three dollars. With that incentive the steep slopes of the bean patch didn’t seem so daunting.

  The eight-hour stints on the hill were especially challenging for Tammy. She’d have to be up at dawn with her brothers to get ready for the long, hot day ahead. The boys would head off in one direction, on the bus to school, while we travelled on the back of the farmer’s truck with the other pickers, towards the bean patch.

  I had to give Tammy explicit instructions to stay in the bean row with me. The stalks were just as tall as she was and I didn’t want to lose her in the patch. Tammy had her own little bucket, a
round ice-cream container, to fill with beans. With the handle looped over her forearm, she’d tear off up the hillside, stripping each bush almost completely bare of beans, leaves and even parts of the stalk itself. I’d try to explain to her that she needed to keep the smaller, immature beans on the bush for next week’s pick, but she didn’t understand. So I’d let her go, knowing that the extra leaves and twigs she pulled off would add to the weight of my bag, and we were paid by weight.

  Tammy would be chatting away to me as she picked, her little legs working hard not to get bogged in the muddy soil.

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ she’d urge from several bushes ahead as I lagged behind, hauling a large fertiliser bag full of beans up the side of the hill. I couldn’t tell my little girl that my back ached and the muscles in my legs throbbed – although she could’ve easily guessed, by the way I staggered up the slope. There was no way I could catch up.

  Tammy

  I thought nothing of being the only child going out to pick beans. I sat quite happily with my mother and the other ladies on the back of a work truck as it chugged up the hill towards the bean patch in the early hours of the morning. We kept to ourselves and didn’t interact much with the other pickers – whose skin colour I noticed was different from ours. If one of the ladies looked at me and smiled, I’d politely say ‘hello’ before edging closer to Mum. Even at that age, I could sense my mother’s nervous cautiousness but I didn’t understand why. I would always follow her lead and be nervous and cautious too.

  At ‘smoko’ or morning-tea time, Mum would find a shady spot beneath a tree, away from the other ladies, for us to sit and eat. Instinctively I learned from watching her that there were invisible boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – unfamiliar others, not family. I didn’t know who ‘they’ were, but whenever my brothers and I were around people who were not family, we always had to be on our best behaviour. We were never told this, but simply followed our mum’s silent cues. If she relaxed and interacted with ‘those other people’ then we knew it was okay to let down our guard and relax, too.

  Working on the bean patch wasn’t physically hard for me – perhaps because the bushes were hardly higher than me, and so I didn’t have to bend over to pick. I was cheerful because bean picking gave me the chance to play in puddles and slosh up the muddy slope with Rodney’s cowboy boots on, which I secretly wished were mine. Bean picking was merely something I had to do with my mother, instead of going to preschool. Unlike my older brothers, I had no idea at age five of our financial destitution, other than ‘Mummy needs to pick beans so she can buy some food for us’. There was no sense of urgency or desperation. Yet even I could see that the work was difficult for Mum. I’d be several bushes ahead of her, singing nursery rhymes or chatting away to her, when I’d look back and see her wiping the sweat off her brow, struggling to drag the bag full of beans through the mud and up the hill.

  This is the earliest and clearest memory I have of seeing my mother painfully struggling. Until then, I thought life was scripted like a storybook, where the characters are always cheerful and enjoy happy-ever-after endings. I no longer wanted to sing nursery rhymes. I just wanted Mummy’s pain to go away. There wasn’t much I could do to help her, other than pick as many beans as I could. Then perhaps once all the beans were picked we could both be happy again, like in the fairy tales she read to me at night.

  Lesley

  The heat of the midday sun made me exhausted and nauseous. I could see that my child was also tiring.

  ‘It’s okay, Tam,’ I’d say. ‘You just sit up under the tree and I’ll finish off the last row by myself.’ She followed my instructions and toddled off alone up the hill. I walked in the other direction to the bottom of the row, feeling so guilty that my youngest child was sitting there patiently by herself, waiting for me to finish before she could go home for her afternoon nap.

  After working on the patch for about two weeks, payday finally arrived. Each of the workers was handed an envelope with our wage inside. My God, there was $152! It was the most money I’d ever earned in a fortnight. It was nearly twenty years since I first received my pay directly from Andrée, and that was quite a bit less because I was getting room and board. That evening it was easy to overlook the aches and pains in my body as I cooked a hearty meal for my family. Laughter and chatter came from the lounge room, where the boys were building Lego trucks and Willie was giving Tammy a horsey-ride on his knee. Just for a moment our family had some breathing space. My children had food to eat, the bills for the month were paid and I seemed to have my fun-loving husband back, for the time being.

  By mid December 1983, school had finished for the year and Willie’s contract work was drying up again as businesses shut down for Christmas. With the boys on holidays and no one to look after them, my bean-picking work gang swelled to four. Like Tammy, each of the boys had their own ice-cream buckets. Dan, who was all but ten, could see the physical effort it took me to walk up the hill with the fertiliser bag.

  ‘Let me help you, Mum,’ my eldest son would insist as he assisted me in dragging the bag along. I knew I’d been blessed with good kids. They might’ve seen their friends at school with the latest clothes and toys, but they never pestered their father and me to buy these things for them. Without complaining, each of my children walked the rows of the bean patch. I felt sad that they couldn’t be swimming in the creek or playing with their Lego and spending their summer holidays doing what children should be doing.

  What kind of mother was I, I wondered, that I have to take my children bean picking with me? But I couldn’t let guilt distract me. I had to keep on picking if the five of us were to be fed.

  Chapter 18

  Lesley

  January 1984 was not only the start of a new calendar year; it was also when the bills mounted up again. The money Willie was owed for the work he did the previous year was coming through in dribs and drabs – a little bit this week, then nothing for a couple of weeks after that. There wasn’t much contract work around for him and it’d be months before the beans were ready for me to go picking again. The reality of our circumstances hit us, and the holiday spirit crumpled like used wrapping paper.

  We were in dire straits. It was a battle simply to exist. There was no bloody way, though, that I was going to give up on my family, or watch my husband sink further into despair. I couldn’t do nothing. I was going to find a job. I wasn’t going to give up until I did.

  While volunteering in the boys’ classrooms, I’d noticed that some of the parents of the Aboriginal students were waiting outside the school gates – just as I once had. I walked over and began to chat with them – the same way Dan’s grade-four teacher, Mrs Wilson, had done earlier for me when she peered out of the classroom window and noticed I was too intimidated to come closer. Having previously worked in remote Aboriginal communities, Mrs Wilson understood our cultural practices and social problems. She put me at ease so I felt comfortable to enter the school’s boundaries.

  Now, other Aboriginal parents were asking me questions, like how their children were going at school, and what their teachers were like? If there were problems, they’d also ask me to talk to the teachers on their behalf. It dawned on me that there was a need for someone to help Aboriginal parents to engage with the school. To do what Mrs Wilson had done for me, but on a much larger scale. I realised that that someone, who could help other Aboriginal families, could be me. I was going to create a job out of what I was already informally doing. I was going to be an ‘Aboriginal School Liaison Officer’, or some other flash title.

  When I was next at the school I made it my business to see the principal, Mr Baker. I was still plagued by my usual insecurities of approaching someone in authority, but I was desperate. I didn’t care about rejection. I just had to make him see that there was a need for him to employ me.

  ‘I’ve … um-m … noticed that th-th-there are a number of Aboriginal students at the sc
hool,’ I said anxiously, a hint of my stutter returning.

  ‘I-I-I was thinking that there might be a need for someone like me to work as a sort of “go-between” person … to work between the teachers and parents of Aboriginal students.’

  I had the principal’s attention and he appeared interested in what I was saying, so I continued.

  ‘You see the Aboriginal parents are nervous about talking with you and the teachers. Th-th-they’ve got lots of questions they want to ask about how their children are going. Maybe then, I was wondering … um … that I could be a go-between – linking Aboriginal families with the school. The parents know me and will tell me their problems; I can then help the teachers to understand their issues.’

  It didn’t take Mr Baker long to answer.

  ‘That sounds like a great idea. It makes sense having someone like you, Lesley, working at the school. But there aren’t many Aboriginal students at this school, so as to justify the Education Department creating a full-time position. Why don’t you ask around at the other schools in the local area and see if you can get support from the other principals? Then you could offer to provide this type of support to all of the schools in the district.’

  I couldn’t believe he liked the idea! While he didn’t offer me a job on the spot, at least he gave me an idea about how I could go about making my case to the Education Department for a job. I had hope and I knew I was on the right track. But then the enormity of the task set in.

  Tammy

  Did you think you’d be given a job just like that from Mr Baker – with no approval from the Education Department or funding for the position?

  Lesley

  I suppose I did. To be honest I didn’t give it any thought. I had no idea about government processes or which department was responsible for the school and employing staff. I’d always thought that the principal was in charge of everything – like Mr Crawford, the principal who had been at the Cherbourg Settlement School.