The Cherry Picker's Daughter

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by Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert




  Note from the publisher

  The day after we received the very last corrections and amendments to the manuscript from Aunty Kerry, she quietly passed away on her final journey to the Tjukurpa. Right up to the end, we received the warmest, most caring emails from her, just making sure everything was in order, that the manuscript was exactly as she wanted it, that the photos were all there and the captions finalised and correct, that the cover was exactly as she envisaged. She touched our hearts with her love, her humility, her talents and an extraordinary life dedicated to helping others in so many ways. We feel both humbled and honoured that she trusted us with the task of bringing this important and timely story into the light of day at a time when Aboriginal history is being redefined and rewritten by First Nations’ storytellers. All Australians need to know the truth of the lived experiences of our First Nations’ sisters and brothers since Europeans arrived, and the rich cultural heritage that has sustained them through the recent brutal history, and their ancestors and this precious continent for millennia.

  To that end, Wild Dingo Press has founded a new imprint with Wakka Wakka Wulli Wulli writer, academic and songwoman, Tjanara Goreng Goreng. Deadly Dingo Books has been set up to publish, exclusively, the work of First Nations’ writers. The Cherry Picker’s Daughter is the foundation title to be released by this new imprint. While the author dedicated her book to her Mummy, we dedicate our Deadly Dingo Books to the author, Kerry Reed-Gilbert.

  Praise for The Cherry Picker’s Daughter

  A wonderful yarn by an Aboriginal Elder about a bygone way of life.

  — Melissa Lucashenko, award-winning Goorie author, 2019 Miles Franklin award winner

  The opening of this memoir is grounded in an acute sense of place and belonging. Kerry tells the reader: ‘Our families have been here for a long, long time, right from the very start’. This unbroken connection to place and people permeates the narrative as Kerry recalls a life of tremendous difficulty and stress, always with a sense of unflappability, courage, determination and humour. ‘You gotta laugh!’ is a mantra that appears throughout the work…

  The Cherry-Picker’s Daughter is the book that all Australia needs to read for its testimony to courage, determination and resilience; and for what it says about activism that takes place a long way from public venues and media. As the statement at the front makes clear: This book is dedicated to Mummy. The life of Joyce Hutchings should signal a reassessment of the way Aboriginal activism has been viewed to date.

  — Jeanine Leane, Wiradjuri writer and academic

  If you were touched by Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, you’ll treasure this book. The exquisite prose is simple, matter-of-fact yet intimate, like a child whispering secrets to a friend. Aunty Kerry, a Wiradjuri elder, an activist, poet and educator, sadly passed in July, adding poignancy. Everyone should read this, and ponder how we unjustly trap people within our judgements.

  — Robert O’Hearn, Booktopia

  The Cherry Picker’s Daughter: a childhood memoir brings alive a true story of a blended Koori family in New South Wales in the 1950s through the eyes of a young daughter, the author. A hardworking Koori family, ‘river people’, building bridges across rivers, love, towns, racism, truths and intergenerational trauma. The family’s survival shaped by seasonal fruit-picking and a constant fear of the ‘the welfare’s’ power to remove the children.

  — Charmaine Papertalk Green, poet, writer and artist

  Thank you, Kerry, for sharing your story—so much pain and hurt, but such life-affirming strength and love too.

  — Kate Grenville AO, award-winning author

  Kids bounce into this world with such capacity for hope and love and attachment; how painful it was to read the ways this was betrayed by an Australia that I wish had known better. This memoir felt important in my hands, historical, vital—and joyful. It described a childhood I needed to know, and filled me with deepest admiration and respect. I cried many tears for Kerry Reed-Gilbert and was so grateful for her wonderful Mummy.

  — Sofie Laguna, award-winning author

  An unflinching memoir of courage and resilience in the face of overwhelming odds by a remarkable Wiradjuri woman, that speaks to her spirit and strength and to the love and courage of the woman who raised her. An important book for all Australians.

  — Joy Rhoades, author

  At its heart, [The Cherry Picker’s Daughter] is primarily a story of mothers and daughters both present and absent. This is a story about the fearlessness of Indigenous women; a stirring ode to a woman who worked to the bone to care for her children and to protect them as best she could from a world that threatened, ostracised and abused them. To borrow from Melissa Lucashenko’s foreword, ‘the fighting spirit of senior Wiradjuri women is a mighty thing’.

  — Georgia Brough, ArtsHub

  About the author

  A Wiradjuri woman from Central New South Wales, Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert performed and conducted writing workshops nationally and internationally. She was the inaugural Chairperson of the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN) 2012– 2015 and 2017–2018 and continued as Patron until she passed away in 2019. In 2013 she co-edited a collection of works By Close of Business. She was a member of the ACT Us Mob Writing (UMW) group and was FNAWN co-editor for the Ora Nui Journal collaboration between First Nations Australia writers and Maori writers.

  In 2015, Kerry was shortlisted for the Story Wine Prize. In 2016 and 2017 she compiled and edited editions of A Pocketful of Leadership in the ACT 2016 and A Pocketful of Leadership in First Nations Australia Communities, a collection of First Nations’ voices from across Australia. Kerry was a former member of the Aboriginal Studies Press Advisory Committee and her poetry and prose have been published in many journals and anthologies nationally and internationally, including in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. Her works have been translated into a number of languages including French, Korean, Bengali and Dutch.

  Published by Deadly Dingo Books

  Imprint of Wild Dingo Press

  Melbourne, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.wilddingopress.com.au

  First edition published by Deadly Dingo Books 2019

  Second edition published by Deadly Dingo Books 2020

  Text copyright © Kerry Reed-Gilbert 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owners and the publisher of this book.

  Designer: Debra Billson

  Painting on cover by Mathew Merritt, 2020

  Editor: Catherine Lewis

  Printed in Australia.

  Reed-Gilbert, Kerry, 1956-2019, author.

  The Cherry Picker’s Daughter / Kerry Reed-Gilbert.

  ISBN: 9781925893311 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925893328 (ebook:ePDF)

  ISBN: 9781925893335 (ePub)

  This book is dedicated to Mummy.

  Author’s Note

  My name is Kerry Reed-Gilbert and I am an Aboriginal Elder of the Wiradjuri Nation. My journey in this lifetime has been one of growing up as the youngest of eight in a family that was blended sixty years before that term became fashionable. My family was a mixture of cousins, and mostly, we came in twos. We were raised by ‘Mummy’, my father’s older sister, Joyce. Mummy always has been my mother my entire life and hers. I am Mummy’s baby.

  My mother, Goma, who was a white woman, was murdered by my father, Ke
vin Gilbert, in January 1957 and buried at Parkes in New South Wales. My Aboriginal father was given a life sentence for this crime which dramatically changed all our lives, and he served fourteen and a half years before his release. In Long Bay Jail, he was known as Number 16.

  Kevin Gilbert was my biological father who I have referred to here as ‘my father’ or ‘the Old Man’. The term ‘Daddy’ refers not to Kevin Gilbert but rather to Ned Hutchings, the husband of Mummy. Daddy and Mummy Hutchings raised me and my brother, Kevin, along with their other children, both biological as well as other family members. As motherless kids whose father was in jail, my brother Kevin and I were made State Wards (along with our siblings, Paddy and Lynnie, after their own father, my Uncle Athol, one of Mummy’s older brothers, died).

  The story of my life as an Aboriginal ward of the State and cherry picker takes place mostly in Condobolin and Koorawatha. There are also sections set in Sydney, as well as Orange and Leeton, the fruit-picking districts of central and southern New South Wales.

  These are my memories of growing up Koori within an extended family in country New South Wales, through the good times and bad. I have done my best to remember accurately, but they are a personal recollection of my life and my family’s times.

  To Kevin, Lynnie and Paddy: this book is ours.

  Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert

  Wiradjuri Nation

  Canberra

  2019

  Foreword

  When Aunty Kerry asked me to help her with her memoir of growing up as a fringe-dweller and fruit picker in the 1950s, she didn’t have to ask me twice. I retained very clear memories of sitting at Griffith University in Brisbane as a young student, soaking up the words of her father, Kevin Gilbert, in his classic, Living Black. And I vividly remembered where I was in 1988, driving in my car and hearing Uncle Kevin’s lacerating words coming over the ABC radio, ‘I am not your “Aboriginal problem”. You—and your Bicentenary—are mine’.

  The idea that I might contribute in a small way to the next generation of the Gilbert family writing was as welcome as it was unexpected. As we talked over a few months, it was quickly evident that it was the lives of the fruit-picking poor which was central to Aunty Kerry’s story. I’d known Aunty Kerry in Canberra for years as a tireless advocate for Aboriginal people and Aboriginal writing. And, of course being older, I knew that she must have lived through the era of active assimilation of Aboriginal people. I was not quite prepared though, for what I read in her draft manuscript. This is Australia’s hidden history brought to light, and it is sobering to read what one Black family went through in mid-twentieth-century New South Wales. If Menzies had any forgotten Australians, these were surely them.

  As young children, Kerry and her siblings lived on ‘the Island’, literally building and rebuilding their own bridge across the flooded Lachlan River so they could reach the town and school. Her Mummy took the kids along with her, following the fruit-picking seasons because that was one of the few ways for the very poor to survive. Their reality was of growing up always in makeshift housing, and constantly frightened of the hated Welfare coming to take away the kids; kids who became State Wards after the murder of Kerry’s mother. Once, living on the edge of the local cemetery, for want of drinking water. And the love and connection of the extended Koori family overriding all this dire poverty, always. Kerry writes about ‘the picking’ and about what it is to be a child whose unknown father is incarcerated, far away, for a mysterious crime. Would he ever be released, and would he come home when he was? And what about the whispered rumours she had heard— were they true?

  Around the time we finished our first round of edits, Aunty Kerry told me that someone had accused her of being a ‘privileged Black’.

  ‘If only they knew, hey?’ she laughed. I laughed, too, for I knew that this memoir of her extraordinary life would be on the record soon enough.

  This book taught me many things. First and foremost, it taught me that the fighting spirit of senior Wiradjuri women is a mighty thing. It also showed me that quiet achievers can be hiding in the most amazing stories. I hope you enjoy this window into Koori life, and the Koori world. I feel honoured to have played a small part in its coming to fruition.

  Melissa Lucashenko

  Meanjin-Brisbane

  2018

  Acknowledgements

  This book started many years ago and has taken a long time to get here, but along the way, I have walked many miles (kilometres) with many people. Here are just a few. I have to say thank you to my daughters Lesa and Melanie, my grandkids and family. To Anita Heiss, thank you, Tidda, for sharing the journey; you’ve been there since the very beginning when I pulled my writing out of the drawer. A special mention to Kate Grenville for providing her support and expertise in the early stages of The Cherry Picker’s Daughter. I couldn’t have done it without you and Anita. To Melissa Lucashenko, thank you for working on the manuscript with me: I appreciate your guidance and sistahood. People such as Cathy Craigie, Jeanine Leane, Yvette Holt, Charmaine Green, Sharon Mununggurr, Barbara Nicholson, Jared Thomas: I treasure each step we took together. Special mention has to be for Geoff Ross and Tony Duke: thank you both for everything.

  It’s important that I remember to acknowledge the Us Mob Writers (UMW) group and especially Samantha Faulkner and Lisa Fuller: thanks for our KLaS meetings, loved every one of them. Just as important is the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN): here’s to all the deadlies from Jimmy Everett and the working party, to all Board members past and present and our FNAWNees: thanks for making my life special.

  Many thanks to Cathi, Alex and Jessica from Wild Dingo Press. Thanks for taking a chance on The Cherry Picker’s Daughter. I hope you’re as proud of it as me.

  Last but not least is you, the reader. Thank you for picking my book up and taking it home—it’s a story to be shared.

  In Unity,

  Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert

  Contents

  Part One

  1. A town called Condo

  2. One big Mob

  3. My Island home

  4. When the river floods

  5. Bunyips, spirits and animals

  6. Kids will be kids, and jumping fences

  7. This old house

  8. The silo and the Welfare Man

  9. Going home to the Island

  10. ‘Your mother’s dead’

  11. Living at the cemetery

  Part Two

  12. Back on the Island

  13. Daddy’s home

  14. Happy Christmas

  15. 1964: my Island home all gone

  16. Too many tents, too much heartache

  17. What’s a State Ward?

  18. Cherry-picking time

  19. All the way to Grafton Jail

  20. Behind the bars

  21. Earning a quid

  22. The school’s racist

  23. Decimal currency in Sydney

  24. Back to the paddocks

  25. Blue, the ‘hero’ dog

  26. Christmas under the cherry tree

  27. Leeton Show and the Mormons

  28. Morisset Mental Hospital

  29. We got grandparents

  30. Koora: the little town on the railway track

  31. Pay day and trains, and getting shot at

  32. Anzac Day and Martin Luther King

  33. Mother’s Day and White Trash

  34. A letter from the Queen

  35. Hearing the stories of my mother

  36. Nearly fifteen

  37. A fight and a visitor

  38. The cherry pickers and the Tent Embassy

  39. My mother’s grave and the Gilbert name

  40. A daughter’s love

  41. Motorbikes and life

  42. Writing in Ghent, New York

  Part One

  1

  A town called Condo

  Family reunion, here at last! It’s taken many years to make ours happen, we’re a big Mob. A big Wir
adjuri family scattered from pillar to post across this land. It’s happening on the Island, my Island home. We’ve had many happy years living here; it was a place where I lived when I was young. Throughout the years, the mere mention of Condo and the Island brings wonderful memories, touched with a tinge of ‘if only’.

  Sparks crackle from the fire burning. Meat is sizzling, sausage sandwiches are happening with kids running around, making it one of the happiest days of my life. We’re back in a place where memories flash before your eyes and tears and laughter hit you at the same time. This spot is where our house used to be before it got burnt down many years ago; suddenly a wave of sadness hits me. The night creeps in as the kids get put to bed in one of the many tents pitched around the yard. The men pull up empty drums and chairs for us women so we can sit around the fire. My grandsons find the best chair in the house for me they reckon, all the while telling me to watch out for the shaky leg and not to wiggle around in my seat too much.

  ‘Haha,’ I tell them, ‘it’s hard to stop these old bones from creaking, let alone wiggle anymore’.

  Pricking my ears is the voice of my brother Paddy, he’s the best storyteller. He can tell them big ones as well; whether they’re true or not, I love listening to his yarns. No matter what, you know it’s gonna be a beauty. Big booms of laughter thump my ears as tears roll down my face, pains start way down in my belly hurting from too much laughter.

  Slowly a piercing pain sears my heart through the laughter as the emptiness rears its ugly head and I gulp back the tears of missing her. Glancing around the fire, I watch people and their shadows. A smile counters my sadness as I listen to others who, just like me, still roll their R’s and can’t pronounce their H’s as they speak. Hidden within the faces of the oldies, a glimpse of grief flickers and I know they, too, are missing loved ones who have gone to our Ancestors. Tears gush and this time it’s not from laughter. I say a little prayer to Mummy, telling her how much I love her and that we shall be together again soon.

 

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