Snake Circle

  Now I contacted Thommo again, to see how the Health Commission’s demand for a chest X-ray could best be handled. He wrote them a letter, advising them of his specialist qualifications and that I was in his care. Although there were a few raised eyebrows within the Commission’s clerical staff, this must have been effective. After I completed the rest of the medical requirements, I heard nothing further in this regard.

  At the Aboriginal and Islander Dance School, I found that a white woman had been brought in to take my place, teaching the literacy classes and maintaining the little newspaper we had put out. She was on the payroll. I was taken aback by this because the work I had done for the School had been on a voluntary basis. Carole Johnson sought to appease me by informing me that the work I had commenced with the students had proven so valuable that it had enabled her to then seek funding to ensure its continuation.

  I went to visit Joe Croft, at the time a working partner at Coo-ee, an Aboriginal arts and crafts shop in Paddington. Joe, a friend over many years, had helped me to get a parcel of gifts ready when I’d first departed for Harvard, throwing in discounts and cut-price items from the shop to boost my meagre store. He had once intimated that he was privy to some aspects of traditional knowledge. At the time, I had not had any reason to explore this with him, and thinking perhaps his knowledge was limited to ‘men’s business’, I decided that it was no concern of mine. Now, however, I confided in him the problem of Beverly and Robert’s inability to conceive, and he said to leave it with him. He knew of some traditional practices but needed time to decide on the most appropriate one. He would also start putting together another parcel for me to take back to Boston.

  MumShirl was ecstatic when I turned up at her door. She pushed gawking children aside and came rushing to hold me to her breast. ‘When,’ she said, ‘can we go out to celebrate?’

  I thought I would arrange an outing to coincide with the receipt of my first pay. Then we could go to a very cheap place as I was anxious to save as much money as I could.

  A publisher had been found for the book I had written for her, Heinemann Publishing in Melbourne. Nick Hudson, the managing editor, got in touch and said he was coming to Sydney to speak with MumShirl and me about its format and forthcoming release. He chose the Golden Ox for our dinner meeting, an expensive restaurant in Regent Street, Redfern, and put together a party which included Sydney-based people associated with the company.

  When MumShirl arrived she had a relative with her, and we had to draw up an extra chair to the reserved table. After she had sat down, MumShirl looked around in an agitated fashion, and soon the door opened and more of her relatives trooped in to join us. They too drew up chairs and tables were rearranged to accommodate them. After Nick Hudson’s querulous look, to which I replied with a shrug, I whispered to MumShirl, ‘How many more have you got coming?’

  ‘Only one more. She’ll be here any minute. It’s my party, we’re celebrating my life, and we’re also celebrating your return . . .’ she turned her head and announced to the table, ‘from Harvard with a Master’s degree.’

  As if that were not enough, MumShirl called, ‘Waiter, waiter, bring . . .’ indicating Nick, ‘that man the wine list.’

  Nick was gracious in defeat, and, following his example, I relaxed to enjoy the evening. Nick ordered several wines to go with the meal, one of which came in a long thin black bottle.

  MumShirl called the waiter.

  ‘Do you have any more of these bottles out the back? Empty ones? My prisoners make sets of glasses out of these.’ Then she demonstrated to all at the table how the bottoms and tops were cut off with a glass cutter, and joined together again in a different formation to become sleek long black glasses.

  The waiter scrounged around in the garbage and set aside all the bottles he could find. Then MumShirl decided we would all have to drink enough of that particular wine so that her prisoners could make two half-dozen sets from the empties she intended to take home.

  I think everyone was completely gob-smacked by her, and they all ate and drank up as she’d ordered them to do. A merry party was being had by all, when she turned to me and said loudly, ‘Well, now that you’ve got your degree, show them all what you can do.’

  I looked at her blankly. I mean, really, I had no idea whether she expected me to do card tricks, leap up on the table and dance, or merely dazzle people with a verbal display. Fortunately the moment was interrupted by the waiter wanting dessert orders.

  I began to dread having to tell her that I was returning to Boston, and chose not to do so that night.

  Nick, very moved by MumShirl’s larger-than-life personality now that he had met her in person, was even more keen to get a move on with publishing her book, and asked me to provide some photographs for it. MumShirl insisted we include a group photograph taken on Erambie Mission just outside Cowra, MumShirl’s childhood home, to mark Coronation Day, 12 May 1937. I contacted. Robert Merritt, author of The Cake Man, which had been staged at the National Black Theatre, and contracted him to help identify the people in the photo as the Merritts were also from Cowra. I would pay him with the residue of the Bardas Foundation funding for the book. I thought it would take him a week at least to travel there to do the job, but he was back the very next day, task completed. He was extremely happy to pocket a week’s wages for a project he had been able to finish through his family’s knowledge and connections without even leaving town.

  When I went to collect MumShirl to take her to the photographic studio for some further shots, she was already preparing a list in her mind of things she wanted us to do together in the future, including drives in the Health Commission car to country prisons.

  ‘Mum, I know you’re not going to be happy about this, but I’m going back to Boston. I’ve got a chance to become the first Black doctoral graduate in this country, and I’m going to take it.’

  ‘You’ve met a man over there, and you’re going to get married and stay there,’ she replied, her face crumbling and bottom lip quivering. I had rarely seen her so upset except when she attended a death or a funeral.

  ‘No, there’s no man, no marriage. I just want to have a go at something that’s never been done before, and I know I can make it.’

  ‘But you’ve already got the degree. You said you’d bring it here to show me.’

  A thought flashed through my mind. With MumShirl on one side and my blood mother on the other, both objecting to my leaving, this project was not going to be easy.

  ‘That’s the one I went over to get, and yes, I’ve got it. But there’s an even higher one, and if I had it, people would have to call me “Doctor”.’

  ‘Oh, like Fred Hollows and old Nugget [Coombs]? Well, that would be very fancy’

  ‘This isn’t about being fancy, Mum. It’s about showing that Blacks have got what it takes, but that we haven’t had opportunity’

  I could see MumShirl grappling with these ideas but also becoming increasingly unhappy.

  ‘Well, who’s going to help me while you’re gone?’ she asked plaintively.

  MumShirl had always managed, one way or another, long before she’d met me. She had commandeered assistance when it wasn’t voluntarily forthcoming. As she often said, she had ‘robbed Peter to pay Paul’ whenever that seemed the only way. Although she had come to rely on me a great deal over the years we had worked together, I still knew she’d manage.

  My mother lobbed onto my doorstep, down from Tweed Heads, as promised. She admired the snapshots which had been taken at my graduation (the portraits by the school’s official photographer had not yet arrived). When I shared my news with her, her reaction was anger. ‘You run away and leave this little boy,’ she said, referring to my towering university student son, ‘and drag this little girl all over the world. I don’t know what you’ve got in your mind.’

  ‘Yes, and you’ll be dead again before I get back, I know. Can we skip the arguments? No Black person has ever had this opportunity before—and I’d be crazy
not to take it.’

  ‘You’ll be sorry, my girl. Sorry you spoke to your mother like that, and sorry you don’t know your place in this society. Whoever heard of the sorts of things you keep putting your hand up to do?’

  ‘Precisely, Mum. If I have a chance to go first and don’t take it, there may not be a chance for a second and a third. If I go and I’m successful—and I know I will be—then I’m going to make damned sure there’s a long chain of graduates who follow me.’

  ‘Don’t swear at me, young lady,’ she huffed as she walked from the room. I would have laughed aloud if I hadn’t sensed how frustrated she was at not being able to force me to obey her will. I had grown up under the rain of my mother’s expletives, of which ‘damned’ would have been her very mildest oath. She tried to struggle through the rest of her visit without reference to my plans. I, however, broke my own resolution not to harass her further about my parentage by bringing up the subject in what I hoped might be an oblique manner.

  ‘Mum, is there any point in my looking for records of the person you’ve said is my father while I’m in America?’

  I received a question in response, typically Mum. ‘Will you be upset if I say at this late stage that the answer is no?’

  ‘I’m not upset. As a matter of fact I’ve been reading all this cultural stuff which says children normally take their identity from their mother.’ Mum peered at me with a most suspicious look, not knowing whether to be pleased or if this was another of my ‘tricks’, as she called them.

  ‘Now, we both know you’ve told me a lot of coverups in the past, trying to have me believe your parents and grandparents were Scottish or Irish, but many of the bits and pieces I’ve picked up from you and from Aunty Glad have made me think that what you’ve told me in the past has not been exactly true, or, at best, only partly true. How can I take my identity from you if you won’t even tell me what it is?’

  I had settled myself down comfortably and companionably in a chair beside her at the kitchen table, trying to establish a setting in which she could feel trust and perhaps, at long last, break her silence and confide in me. I was even using the least accusative form I could think of with which to approach this thorniest of all her sides. She stared at me from behind her spectacles in the long silence that followed my question, and I could see her eyes dart into a hundred places before she drew herself up to reply. When she did, I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or cry.

  ‘You won’t be happy with this answer either, dear. There is Scots and Irish floating in here,’ she said, indicating the blood pumping through the veins in her old and spotted hands, ‘but if you go back far enough, we’re White Russians.’

  With that pronouncement, Mum pushed back her chair and fled once more into the sanctuary of her bedroom.

  I continued to sit for a while, alternately holding my head in my hands in despair, and chuckling at her nerve. White Russian indeed. So much for taking my identity from my mother—I could already imagine the startled and sympathetic looks I would draw if I proclaimed myself to be a White Russian. Delusional, people would whisper.

  The very idea forced me to recall a young, very dark-skinned girl whom I had taken in to live with us for a few months while she got herself sorted out. After a few evenings spent talking with her, she had suddenly spoken to me in high dudgeon. ‘You think I’m Aboriginal, don’t you? Well, I’m not. I’m white.’ I had been taken aback. She had gone on to give me, in the face of enormous evidence to the contrary, the basis on which she had decided upon her whiteness.

  It had, therefore, come as no great surprise to me when, a few months after she left my home, I learned that she had been hospitalised for attempting suicide. She repeated the attempt several times, and complicated her life with drug use. It was only some time later, after she had come to terms with her Aboriginality and blackness, that she recovered and began to build a reasonable life and future for herself, given the restraints imposed upon us all by racism.

  Following this attempt to pin my mother down once more, I sighed and went on being who I had always thought I was anyway. I would waste no more time chasing my mother’s phantoms, who she said she was, who she said my father was. It all felt so futile and unnecessary. I would look in the mirror every morning to ensure I was still who I was yesterday, and the day before, and I’d be very surprised if I ever saw a White Russian staring solemnly back at me.

  I received a number of phone calls from the media following the publicity about my return to Australia. During one, a live-to-air broadcast with a Perth radio station, I was asked: ‘Do you feel that now you have received a Master’s degree from Harvard that you’ll be acceptable to the Australian public?’

  I was shocked. ‘Does every Black person in Australia have to have a Harvard degree to make us acceptable, equal even, to the most poorly educated white? Is that what you’re asking?’ I stormed back, impatient with the crassness and the absurdity which lay behind his racial-superiority line of questioning.

  Heinemann’s intended to hold MumShirl’s book launch as soon as the publication was ready, which was after I had returned to Boston. Nevertheless, it fell upon me to choose a suitable venue and draw up an invitation list. I chose Murawina, an Aboriginal preschool program in Eveleigh Street, because of its ease of access—right at Redfern station—and centrality of location for the Black community. I felt it was important that a book about the life of one of the Black community’s Elders should be highlighted to the children of the area, giving them, perhaps, incentive to want to learn to read.

  A Sydney-based Heinemann representative tippy-toed around the venue, and rang me with his reservations. For over ten years the media had promoted the area as black and unsafe, and he feared white people attending the launch might be attacked. I tried to reassure him that this was extremely unlikely, that the mood of the community would be very high around this event, but the hesitation remained in his voice.

  I rang Nick Hudson to discuss the issue. Wherever MumShirl and I had decided, he assured me, was where it would be held. He said he would make catering arrangements for about twenty to thirty people, advising me that normally only the family and interested friends turned up to these events. ‘But MumShirl has more than a hundred relations in Sydney, and there are hundreds more who regard her as “family”, and that’s not even counting her friends,’ I argued.

  ‘Well, how many do you reckon is a fair thing?’ he asked.

  ‘Five hundred, at least,’ I replied.

  I finally got him to up the number he was prepared to cater for, though it was still not as high as I would have liked. I was sure he was beginning to wonder about the expense, though he didn’t mention it.

  Finally, I asked Brian Syron, with his theatrical flair, to jump in and stage-manage the event in my absence. He said he would be delighted, and was abuzz with ideas even before we had finished our conversation. I said I would leave it all to him, he was to go ahead and do anything he liked.

  MumShirl grew agitated about the book being released while I was not even in the country. Couldn’t it wait until I came back?

  ‘Why, Mum? There’s something worrying you, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes. What if someone gets angry about something in the book? Who’ll be there to answer the questions?’

  ‘Angry? Angry about what? Laurie’s out of jail. The police who set him up in the frame, they’ve already been exposed in the Supreme Court, so they’re not likely to say anything. Who’s going to get angry about what’s in the book?’

  ‘Well, the Queen. She’s a nice lady and I didn’t mean to offend her by having that bit in the book.’

  In MumShirl, there is an episode about how, on being invited to lunch with Queen Elizabeth II, she arrived to discover a huge crowd milling in an enormous dining room, the tables laid with numerous glasses and many sets of knives, forks and spoons at each place. Intimidated and alarmed that she would not know which glass or piece of cutlery to use, MumShirl had asked for directio
ns to the toilet—and then just kept walking, right on out the back and away.

  ‘Mum, if the Queen reads your book, I will be very, very surprised. The chances are zero. And, if she did read what happened at that lunch, she would not be angry. She probably doesn’t like having to have lunch like that either.’

  ‘D’you think so?’ she asked, relief rising in her eyes, but still the shadow of doubt troubling her.

  ‘Mum, believe me. Thousands of books come out every year, and a lot of them say very nasty things about the Queen. I’ll bet she doesn’t read any of them. If she were to read your book, we would be very flattered—but the truth of it is that she won’t.’

  There had been many times when MumShirl’s naivety had been touching, and it had often been difficult for me to predict what was likely to trouble her. Although encouraged by my reassurance, she made me promise to come back to Australia immediately if the Queen’s lawyers threatened to sue her. I smiled to myself as I told her that I’d be happy to take full responsibility.

  Pat Laird, whose Saturday Centre Press had published my Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Action, was pleased to learn I was returning to Harvard. She told me she had been very lonely since the death of her husband, Kenneth. As I had shared with her some of the trials I had encountered through having to take care of Naomi and also study, she said she would love to have Naomi stay with her. She would be company, an interest for her, another person in her home. She had a small second bedroom—would I please, please, trust her to do this?

  There had been occasions in Cambridge when other parents had tried to undermine my authority in regard to Naomi. Some even went so far as to phone me when I had refused to allow my daughter to join a group of children who were going to somewhere called ‘a haunted house’ at midnight on Halloween. At twelve years old, I felt Naomi was too young to be out without someone I personally knew and trusted at this hour. I had heard stories about maniacs who put sewing needles and pieces of glass into apples and sweets which had then been given to children as Halloween treats. The woman who rang, a parent herself, was abusive on the phone. ‘Everybody is going,’ she told me, repeating the chant that my daughter used whenever she wanted to get her own way. ‘Everybody is not going’, I told the woman firmly. ‘I am not going,’ I hadn’t been asked, ‘and Naomi is not going either—and that’s final,’ I said, before hanging up.