Snake Circle

by Roberta Sykes

  ‘I’ve just come from Strelley. It’s not true that they don’t let people in. In fact, Elders came and collected me from the airport, everyone made me feel very welcome. I think, at least as far as the Black community is concerned, access is being controlled by rumour. Have you ever tried to go there?’

  ‘Oh,’ replied Oriel, ‘I’m going to a childcare meeting in Port Hedland in a couple of weeks. Maybe I’ll—’

  ‘I think it might be a very good idea. I don’t think a big mob should try to go at once, but whatever support you might be able to muster for them in the long term, I feel sure they’re appreciate it if you turned up to help.’

  I rang to make the courtesy appointment with Don McLeod, as I had promised to do, and Gerri again said she’d be happy to drive me. ‘Oh, you can even come in, bird,’ I told her affectionately. ‘I’m sure you want to hear what he’s got to say’ Gerri was an old and dear friend, and we often talked to each other in this loose way.

  Gerri filled me in with her considerable knowledge of Don McLeod, whose presence amongst the Blacks had spread fear into the hearts of all those who sought to oppress them.

  From everything I had heard, I was therefore not surprised to find a rather short, old, very cocky man waiting for us, though several other things did astonish me. It was a warm and sunny day outside, but he was huddled in sweater, coat and rugs in front of a radiator, which had forced the room temperature up to a near heatwave. He sat in a gloomy room behind a desk, with papers and books heaped around him.

  Don had a foul mouth, and we were barely seated before he slyly began to tell me about ‘trouble-makers’, ‘yellow-fellows from the south’, ‘half-castes and so on’, peppered liberally with invectives. He mentioned by name some of these people whom he professed to despise, Gary Foley and others of my acquaintance. ‘I’ve heard of you, too,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Well, if you’ve heard of me, then you know I don’t accept this sort of language. If you intend to be rude, and to talk badly about people you don’t even know, some of whom happen to be friends of mine, I’m leaving.’

  I gave Gerri the nod and we both rose.

  ‘Okay. I won’t swear,’ he said brusquely just as we reached the door. ‘Anything else?’

  I turned back towards him. ‘There’ll be no talk about “yellow-fellows” and “half-castes”. I hate those sorts of expressions. Do you think people had a choice about whether they were going to be white or black or yellow, as you call it?’

  ‘Oh, alright,’ he said, sulking a little as though I had spoiled his good fun.

  After that we spent the next hour in quite reasonable discussion about a range of subjects which affected not only Strelley but state and federal politics. He may not have met everyone he claimed not to like, but he was widely read on most of the important issues.

  As we left, Gerri summed him up. ‘The old bugger was lonely’ He had drawn out our visit as long as he possibly could, bringing up new topics each time he thought we were getting restless and likely to leave.

  ‘Yeah, but he’s obviously been a tough nut in his day. I wouldn’t have liked to be a copper trying to cross him, he would have been ferocious.’

  Gerri laughed. Yes, he was. He out-talked and outwitted all those who came around trying to con the Strelley mob out of anything. But he could also sit for days on end with the Elders until they came to a consensus about which way they wanted to go. That’s one of the main reasons why they respect him, I think.’

  ‘Knew when to talk and when to shut up, eh? Well, he didn’t practise much of the latter today’

  Gerri, a diabetic, was cramming her mouth with sweets which she kept in the glovebox for just that purpose. ‘Let’s go and get something to eat, eh. I’m starving. The old bugger didn’t even offer us a cup of tea or a biscuit.’

  I grimaced. ‘With the state of that room, I don’t know if I would have trusted drinking out of his cups,’ I replied as Gerri gunned the engine and we drove away.

  There were just two more stops, Adelaide and Melbourne, to be made before I finished off my program with some interviews in Sydney. At Barbara Graham’s insistence and on her glowing recommendation, I had contacted the Aboriginal Task Force in Adelaide, and been asked to give a presentation to students as I passed through. There I met Mary Ann Bin-Sallik, who was destined to become the third link in my chain of Australian Black Harvard graduates, and the second to achieve her doctorate there.

  In Melbourne, I interviewed Wayne Atkinson, Colin Bourke and Hyllus Maris, all of whom were actively involved in innovative educational endeavours. Hyllus also talked about her writing and the screenplay, Women of the Sun, co-written with her friend, Sonia Borg, a ground-breaking saga in four episodes.

  Arriving back in Sydney, I was exhilarated by the degree of support I had received in what could have been an impossible task. People everywhere had facilitated my passage, arranged accommodation, transport and interviews and made valuable suggestions for inclusion in my thesis, and even brought their own tape-recorders when they’d learned that mine had died.

  The only person I had contacted well in advance of my arrival, and again when I had first landed in Sydney, was Margaret Valadian. Despite this, I was unable to interview her. I went to the college she was operating in Balmain and spoke to her colleague, Natasha McNamara. Margaret was willing, I was told, but she just didn’t have any time.

  I rounded off the project with interviews with Bob Morgan and Errol West, then Deputy Chair of the National Aboriginal Education Committee, and Kevin Cook, General Secretary of Tranby Cooperative College for Aborigines in Sydney.

  On arriving home from Boston, I had contacted the Health Commission to arrange an extension of my study leave. I also explained, with regrets, that I would not have time to do my usual three months’ work for them. When I rang again I was told that the Minister for Health, Laurie Brereton, had asked to see me.

  I went into the government offices and sat waiting in a little anteroom on the top floor. A couple of slender young men walked past and one of them spoke to me briefly, saying I would not need to wait long. Still I waited. Then one of these young men came to the office door as the other left, and signalled me to enter. It was only then that I realised with a shock that I had forgotten what Laurie Brereton looked like, I had been expecting an older man, more like the rotund executives and ministers I was accustomed to. I felt a bit of a fool as I sat, legs neatly crossed at the ankles, wondering what I was expected to say to this minister whom I had not recognised.

  Laurie was relaxed, but apologised that our meeting would be necessarily brief because he had been called back to Parliament to vote on some important issue. Would I, he asked, come out to his house for dinner? His wife, Patricia, would be delighted to see me again, and we could catch up with the changes that had been occurring, in the Department as well as the political arena, in a more convivial atmosphere.

  ‘Sure,’ I agreed. Laurie gave me an address in Kensington and stood up to leave.

  ‘Can I bring my son? I don’t have a car now, and he could drive me.’

  ‘No worries, he’ll be welcome.’

  When I told my friend Maureen Morales, who was also Laurie Brereton’s sister-in-law, about the dinner invitation, she asked if I would mind if she came along too. As Maureen also didn’t own a car, Russel could drive both of us.

  Patricia was a bit flustered with children, preparing the meal and tidying the house, when we arrived. She also seemed a bit upset, because someone had recently stolen her Longines watch, and she appeared to miss it.

  When Laurie arrived, he took a quick look at Russel and said to me, ‘You didn’t need to bring a bodyguard.’

  ‘This, Laurie, is my son. His name is Russel. You recall I asked if it would be okay to bring him, he’s the only one who has a car.’

  He was probably surprised to find himself looking up at Russel, who stood a few inches taller than Laurie and kept himself remarkably fit. He worked with young street people at an
inner-city refuge and felt he could ill afford to look as though he was unable to take care of himself if the need arose.

  We spent a pleasant evening, talking about wide-ranging issues of government policy, how they impacted on young people, such as those who came through the refuge, the Health Commission, the prisons, while tucking into the great meal that Patricia had miraculously whipped up in next to no time.

  As the evening drew to a close, Laurie leaned across the table towards me and said, ‘You don’t need to worry about your job at the Health Department. We’ve kept your position open for you.’

  ‘Laurie, I was doing that job before I had two degrees from Harvard. I want to do another job.’

  ‘But—you’re already the most senior Black in Aboriginal Health.’

  ‘Exactly. And there are no courses in Aboriginal anything at Harvard.’

  He stared at me for a moment before a flash of comprehension came into his eyes.

  ‘Oh, God. I know what you’re saying.’

  ‘Yes, well good. I want to do another job when I come back. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  We all took our coffee into the lounge room where Laurie produced a cigarette and began to smoke it. The Health Department had recently launched a nonsmoking campaign, and I couldn’t resist the urge to tease him.

  ‘The Minister for Health smokes?’ I said, mock sternly.

  ‘Well, no. Not in public. One a day. That won’t kill me, will it? And I’m trying to give that one up, too.’

  The next to last item on my agenda was to visit Norma Williams and see how her preparations towards applying to Harvard were going. I found her much happier than when we had last met. She was in the middle of a course on teacher education, she told me, which she would finish the following year. She was very much enjoying the challenge of polishing up her study and essay-writing skills, and felt sure she would be ready and confident to begin tackling the quest for a Harvard Master’s degree by the time I returned. She was slowly making arrangements within her family for her children to be cared for in her absence, even though, if her application was accepted, she would not be leaving for just over a year.

  One thing was really bothering her, she confided in me. Her marriage to the father of her children, Gary Williams, had long since broken down. Now she wanted to get a divorce so that her Harvard educational certification could appear with her maiden name, Ingram. This, she thought, would also be inspirational to other members of her family and her Wiradjuri clan, as the Ingram name was well known and respected within this circle. She would love to be able to bring credit to it in this way.

  I gave her the phone number of my friend Eric Strasser, who had already proved to be extremely helpful to me with legal matters for more than a decade. ‘Eric will help you with this,’ I told her.

  ‘But I’ve no money for a divorce. I can’t afford a lawyer’

  ‘Then Eric’s just the man you need.’

  I was grateful for the small coterie of friends and supporters I had built up over the years. Eric Strasser, in particular, had always prove to be a stalwart. He would probably be pleasantly surprised, I thought, that the task I was leaving him to look after this time was fairly simple, nothing like the major criminal matters I’d had cause to load him up with in years gone by.

  ‘Mum,’ said Russel next day as I began packing for my return to Boston, ‘I heard people take years to write their thesis. Are you sure you’ll be back by Christmas?’

  I stopped, sat down, took his hands in mine. He had again agreed to look after his sister until my return in just over three months, and he sounded so worried.

  ‘There’s one thing I know for sure, child, and that’s how to write. I worried about the coursework, because that was something I’d never done. But I’ve finished that now, and all I have to do is turn those,’ indicating the pile of interview cassettes I had amassed for my research, ‘into a few hundred pages. For others, that might be hard work, but for me, it’s the easy part. I’ll be home by Christmas, and that’s a promise.’

  He brightened, whether to please me or because he believed me, I had no idea.

  So, this is it, I thought as I winged my way back to Boston to complete the final assignment of my doctoral requirements. Now, nothing could stop me.

  My abstract had been accepted, my literature review was finished, there was just the data analysis and compilation, and the writing to go. I had a crystal clear idea, based on the interview material I had collected, how the diverse subject matter would need to be linked in order to make sense. I had initially thought about a sequence in which to place the subjects, but rejected that notion in favour of a constellation. This would be the only way to give each area and issue the full attention it required, favouring neither the urban nor the traditional voices over the other.

  I spent a couple of weeks letting the constellation spin in my head, before it settled down into a logical form. Scholars normally transcribe their interviews and shuffle through them in paper form. In my case, though, the words of my interviewees were still indelibly implanted in my memory. I would have no trouble accessing them, turning to the tapes only to verify the direct quotes once I had written them down.

  Then, for ten days I did nothing but write, rising early in the morning to begin, falling into my bed late each night. When I had all but completed the work, Dick Katz offered me the use of his computer. I could go to his house each day after his family had left, and put everything into the computer, where it could be changed or altered as required.

  The problem, as I confided in him, was that I was unfamiliar with computers. I had never used one except to look up references in the library. ‘Oh, that’s okay. You just type everything in, and either my wife or I will help you to print it out,’ he said.

  So for two weeks I worked in Dick’s house, but as I went home every night I felt empty and dissatisfied. I was used to working with a typewriter, and at the end of the day seeing a very satisfying pile of completed pages sitting on the desk beside me. After using the computer all day, I seemed to go home with nothing more than the few notebooks I had brought with me in the morning.

  Words disappeared from the screen, sometimes whole paragraphs, and I spent what felt like a lot of time on the phone to Dick’s wife, with her prompting me with the combination of keys to strike to recover the missing text.

  The computer ran an early word-processing program and in American. Dick joked one morning that he had spent most of the previous night running ‘Search’ to locate all the instructions to ‘centre’ the work, instead of ‘center’ the work, which I had inserted. I knew he was just making an effort to help me overcome the computer anxiety I was experiencing, but instead I grew even more alarmed that I’d never be able to cope this way.

  Things got worse when I tried to print out my chapters. Spaces I had left in which to insert diagrams came out split over two pages. I became increasingly embarrassed about calling Dick or his wife at work for help. I noticed a comma missing on a page, and when I inserted it and tried to print it out again, this tiny change had nudged that line into another, causing all subsequent pages to be one line over.

  On the day of the first winter snow, as I trudged through the cold to catch my bus back to Fresh Pond, I came to a decision. It might possibly take me weeks to master the computer sufficiently so as to turn out my work in perfect form, where it would only take me ten days if I were to type it up on the old typewriter I had borrowed. I was running out of time and my mind was made up.

  Different students, friends of mine, came by in ones and twos and sat reading four or five pages at a time each, for sense and for typographical errors. A page with a serious typo was typed again, but fortunately there were few of them.

  I had imbued my thesis examiners with my own sense of urgency and, when I had finished the work, they read it with a speed that I could only have hoped for. The Dean agreed to be on the committee for my orals examination, and we were to gather in his house for this part of
the assessment. When we arrived, he had a bottle of champagne sitting up prominently on the table in an ice bucket, and said this was for the celebration as he was sure I would pass. He knew, as my examiners also did by this time, that I was so familiar with my material I could recite it in my sleep—and probably did so.

  The technical support system around Harvard is really quite fantastic. One only needs to take a set of papers, a completed thesis, to the copy shop late in the afternoon, and by early next morning as many copies as were ordered are all ready and collated. I imagined an entire troop of workers tending copy machines in the bowels of buildings surrounding Harvard Square, working non-stop around the clock. Miraculously, overnight copies are even cheaper per page than having them done during daylight hours.

  Thesis passed, and I next had to find a binder. Leather-bound copies for the school, for the library, and, if requested, for readers, are a formal requirement for completion. Not many of my friends had reached this stage, but they dived into phone books on my behalf, locating binders who were the best, the cheapest, and the closest to my apartment. Before long I was looking at a set of beautifully bound copies.

  I had run out of money, but I felt it was imperative that I buy a crimson robe, to which I was now entitled, even if I never got a chance to wear it. I had crossed my fingers, though, that such an opportunity would arise, even though I wouldn’t be in Boston to attend my own graduation. I wrote to Mum. Would she please, please lend me the money?

  An envelope arrived from her and within it a heartening note, surprisingly lucid. ‘It is not every mother who gets the chance to buy their daughter a Harvard doctoral robe,’ she wrote. ‘The enclosed is not a loan, it’s a gift.’

  I was then in a whirlwind of packing, preparing to box up my Boston life and come home, home to Australia. My friends arranged a farewell party for me, and came in bearing gifts and congratulations.

  ‘When you said you’d be finished by Christmas, sistah, I thought you was having me on. But damn, girl, you been and done it.’