Tony had conspired to create projects that he could work on with Rachel and would find meetings they both had to attend. The more time they spent together, the more intrigued he became with her. She was more than just darkly beautiful. She had a sharp wit, a clear mind, a good sense of humour. She made him laugh and didn’t seem afraid of him or even in awe of him. It didn’t matter how long he had spent with her, he couldn’t wait to see her again. When they had become close, when she had first leaned into him and kissed him softly on the lips, drawing back slowly as she held his gaze, it had felt magical.
Now he was more than smitten with her. Everything about Rachel seemed new. She seemed to respond when he spoke seriously about cases or politics, was constantly interested in what he thought. She pushed him to think about things. He found himself wondering why, with all her sweetness and smarts, she would want him. For the first time he found himself fantasising about a domestic life with someone other than Beth Ann.
He entertained these daydreams but never shared them with Rachel. He’d told her from the start that he would never leave Beth Ann. Rachel had accepted his terms, had never sought to change them. While he was clear about the boundaries between Beth Ann and Rachel it was easy to navigate. But now that his attachment to Rachel had become so deep, so desperate, he was worried that the lines would start to blur. Three weeks ago he had told Rachel that he loved her. He’d surprised himself as the words slipped from him, falling towards her before he could pull them back. It was the first time he had said these words to anyone other than his wife and his daughter.
Tony’s thoughts were interrupted when Carol rang to say that she was sending Darren Brown through.
*
‘You can go through now, my brother. Oh, and do you mind dropping these off to the woman in the third office along the way? Her name is Rachel.’ Carol handed over a pile of phone messages. ‘You can’t miss her. It’s on your way to the boss’s office. Would save me the walk,’ she smiled with a wink.
Several minutes later, Darren knocked on Tony’s door.
‘Come in,’ said Tony in his friendliest voice, gesturing at the chair opposite him. ‘How have you been, son?’
‘Good thanks, sir.’
‘You’re not going to start with that “sir” business again. It’s Tony. Call me Tony.’
‘Okay, si-er-Tony,’ Darren stumbled over his words.
‘Where did we get to last time?’
Darren flicked through his notebook to find his notes, ‘Ummm …’
Tony smiled. He found the nervousness in younger people when they were with him endearing.
Darren looked at his notes. ‘Oh, here we are. You had been talking about how you got to the Tent Embassy. And the impact of men like Maynard, Ferguson and Cooper the generation before. And about the 1967 referendum.’
‘Yes, well, you need to understand what life was like for blackfellas back then. The Freedom Rides that Charlie Perkins had organised in 1965 had really highlighted to many people the way in which there were two Australias, that while there was an emerging middle class for most people, Aboriginal people were living in Third World conditions. And in many country towns there was blatant segregation, like apartheid.
‘The white people in the town hated us and there was always some campaign to close the mission down, especially when others around the state were closed and people had to move over to the remaining missions that were already overcrowded.’
In the town he had grown up in, Tony recalled, there was a separate playground for black kids and no expectation that they would be schooled past the age of twelve, whatever their capability. Even going to the theatre meant sitting in a different section to the whites. The pubs would not allow Aboriginal people inside - although they would sell alcohol at inflated prices out the back door to them - and shop owners viewed Aboriginal people with suspicion, sometimes refusing to serve them. Tony found these indignities humiliating.
‘And one of the worst things,’ he continued, ‘was the way we were targeted by the police. Where I came from, the police would come from the town to the mission whenever anything went missing. The first suspicion was that it was the black kids. I remember how the police came and took five youngsters away for stealing from the general store. They were sent to reformatory school, as it was called back then. And later they found out that one of the coppers had been taking the stuff.’
‘Did the kids get to come back?’ Darren asked, pausing from his note taking.
‘What do you think? But if you are a young kid and you are taken from your family and put in the place where you are being punished, do you think you will ever be the same again? Especially if you were innocent all along but no one believed you because you were a black kid.’
‘Did you ever get arrested?’
‘All the time,’ Tony laughed. ‘If we were drinking, if we were hanging around … you name it and we would get into trouble for it. The coppers knew us all. It wasn’t a big town. They took a dislike to some of us. I went around with a white girl from the town for a while when I was a young lad, maybe about fifteen or so, and they certainly gave me a hard time after that. A couple of times they took me down to the station and tried to get me to confess to something I didn’t do.’
Darren was spellbound and had stopped taking notes. Tony continued. ‘One time I got pinched they took me to the cells and handcuffed me to the door and every time this one copper came past he would punch me in the guts or slap me in the face and say, “Well, you black bastard, are you going to ’fess up to it now?” And you know, the more I stood my ground, the angrier he got. He was going to give me a flogging but I said I would confess and then, when he uncuffed me, I refused to sign the statement. Well, didn’t he get mad.’ Tony laughed at the memory.
‘How did you get out of that?’
‘Well, when he said, “Now sign this,” and I said “No, I didn’t do it,” he jumped over the desk and started to throttle me. And you couldn’t hit back or they’d get you for assault. I just had to take it. Sure took me a while to bounce back from that one. And it was only a few months later that I left the old mission for good.’
‘Must have been pretty hard in those days.’ Darren was looking up, his brow knitted with the same furrow as when he had been writing intently.
While there were hardships for Tony to face, it was hardest for the older people. They had grown up with the mission managers who controlled their lives - where they lived, if they could come and go. They had to do what they were told or they didn’t get their rations; they lived in dirt poor conditions and were subject to inspections to make sure everything was clean. ‘And, you know, over a long period of time when you are told how to do everything, you can lose the ability to do things for yourself.’
Darren nodded solemnly.
‘You can see,’ Tony continued, ‘how we needed something to believe in. And those people who set up the Tent Embassy, they created that. The time had come to take control of our lives, to have some protections and guarantees.’
Tony talked about the political leadership of people like Uncle Chicka Dixon, men who had understood how important it was to give a political education to young Aboriginal people to guide them. ‘These fellows had given up on conservative politics, you know, hoping that change would come slowly and knew that we needed to do something more radical, something more drastic, to really get justice. You need to talk to these blokes.’
Darren wrote carefully as Tony listed the names: Billy Craigie, Michael Anderson, Bertie Williams and Tony Coorie. Gary Foley, Paul Coe, John Newfong, Sol and Bob Bellear. Gordon Briscoe and Sam Watson.
‘They were all involved and they’ll all have a different version of events. I was new to it when I arrived at the Tent Embassy but those guys had been doing the hard yards - setting up the Aboriginal Legal Service, organising the boycott of the South Africans the year before to protest against apartheid. You should have seen them.’ Tony laughed as he remembered. ‘They were sharp dres
sers. Slick suits all in black, dark sunglasses. Me and my mate, Arthur, we were just country boys, boys off the mission. When I saw them, I thought, “I want to be like those blokes”.’
Tony paused. He had reinvented himself after he’d fled the old mission with Arthur that night. The horror could still cause a wave of black dread to wash over him, the images would still haunt him even though there was all that time and distance between who he was now and the events of that terrible, terrible night.
Tony shuddered to dissolve the memory. He looked up. He’d forgotten all about Darren. ‘Sorry, where were we?’
The phone rang. It was Carol announcing Tony’s next appointment.
‘Well, that’s all we’ve got time for today,’ Tony said with a sigh. ‘How are we doing?’
‘I really need to get more information about its impact, its legacy, of what came next.’
‘Make an appointment with Carol at the front desk,’ Tony said magnanimously.
Darren was glad when the session ended. Not that he didn’t admire Tony or feel privileged to have an opportunity to talk at such length with the great man himself but because for the last forty-five minutes all he could think about was Rachel Miles.
13
Rachel still shuddered every time she remembered Tony’s daughter discovering them in that playful embrace. She usually wouldn’t have been so reckless but the rest of the staff were off at a training day and she had thought it was just the two of them in the office. Being discovered by Tony’s daughter made everything so much worse, especially as she admired Simone.
She never thought she would find herself having a relationship with a married man and was surprised at how easy it was to block out the fact that Tony had a whole set of other commitments, a whole other life. She had known of Tony Harlowe since she was at school. She had read his writings and even gone to hear him speak when she was at university. He was dynamic, captivating, the type of person who brought people with him. She had applied to work at the Aboriginal Legal Service knowing that he was in charge and, quite frankly, she believed in him.
When Rachel had begun working with Tony, she enjoyed the tension, the electricity, between them. She was acutely aware of the competition between her male colleagues for her attention - the aggressive, unrelenting suggestions and invitations. Once John Franks pushed up against her in the photocopy room. She could feel his hardness as he muttered, ‘How’d you like to get this into you?’
His rank smell of stale cigarettes was as repulsive to her as his unkempt hair and sleazy smirk. ‘As if,’ she had snapped sharply at him, shoving him back but she was still shaking as she walked back to her office.
From the moment something happened between her and Tony - that evening of their first kiss and the admission of deep attraction - the other men stopped bothering her. All except for John Franks who had slipped past her in the hallway and muttered, ‘Should have known you would only put out for the boss.’
‘What did you say?’ Rachel challenged him, but he only responded with a sneer.
In their growing intimacy, Rachel saw Tony’s vulnerabilities, his insecurities - a side of him that others didn’t see - and she was beginning to love him more because of them. His prepared speech about how he couldn’t leave his wife had clearly been delivered many, many times before and with such seriousness that she had to fight to suppress a giggle. She had not expected him to say that he loved her though. He had seemed too tough for that. When the words had slipped from his mouth she could tell they were not rehearsed, not one of his corny, over-used lines. In fact, he looked surprised that he had uttered them.
Rachel had always been interested in Aboriginal issues. Growing up, she came to suspect that she had Aboriginal heritage herself even though she could not confirm it until she was enrolled in the first year of her university studies.
Raised in the inner-west Sydney suburb of Strathfield, Rachel’s father and mother were both English teachers and her mother heavily involved with the Teachers Federation. When she went to high school she was one of the few students in her class whose parents were still together. She would joke with her younger brother, James, that they should form a support group. ‘The secret to a good marriage,’ her mother would say, ‘is never to go to bed angry.’ ‘The secret,’ her father would quip, ‘is to smile and nod and say “yes dear”.’
It was always clear to Rachel how much her father adored her mother. He would beam when she addressed the union meetings and his gaze would follow her as she took charge and busied around. Her mother’s energy was the efficient whirlwind around which everything revolved while her father was the family’s quiet, contemplative centre. Her parents were focused on resourcefulness and thrift. Her mother made all their clothes when they were young and later would buy outfits for them at the markets, searching through bins and racks. They would purchase all their groceries in bulk and her mother always knew how to spot a bargain.
But amidst this prudent frugality, her parents were demonstrably affectionate to both Rachel and her brother. They were lavished with affection and encouraged to pursue whatever interested them - for Rachel it was ballet, the flute and later the debating team; for James it was soccer, then football and cricket. Even when she did something wrong - like the time she and her friend Janelle were caught smoking on the school excursion - her parents would say, ‘We’re not angry, just so very disappointed in you,’ and that would make her more ashamed and sorry than any other punishment that they could have meted out.
Both her parents loved word games and puzzles. Instead of answering questions simply, even everyday queries like, ‘How are you today, Dad?’ would be answered cryptically. ‘Feeling very happy like the mountaineer who climbed Mount Everest,’ her father would grin. ‘I see, you are “on top of the world”, Daddy.’
When she was only fourteen, Rachel’s father began to teach her how to do cryptic crosswords and solving them soon became a ritual they shared. They had a pattern. The paper would arrive in the morning and they’d make a head start. They would look at the crossword, read all the clues and make a mark beside them if they had an idea of what the answer might be. If part of the clue was an anagram, it was underlined (A Dior creation in most homes (5) - Radio). When sure of the answer, it was placed in the grid. After school Rachel would look at it again. Her father would have a go at it when he came home from work and then after dinner they would try to solve the hardest clues, the ones that still eluded them. If stuck, they would take a break and come back to it later. If they could not complete the puzzle, they would look up the clue the next morning and see where they had gone wrong.
From time to time her father would slip a folded piece of paper into her lunchbox, a riddle for her to solve during the day. The note might say ‘Over it Wilts’ by Cheer Sick Lands and she would have to work it out (an anagram! Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, which she had just started reading). Another day the note might read: ‘Honest but careless, famous last words.’ They had seen Gone with the Wind on the weekend and she knew it was ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.’
She didn’t fight often with her brother but then he tended to keep to himself. James had no aptitude for words or numbers the way Rachel did and instead was preoccupied with sports; he was naturally good at them, while she had no talent and even less passion. When he was a teenager, he became even more withdrawn, more reclusive, moodier. Her room was next to her parents’ and she could sometimes, late at night, hear them through the walls. ‘You don’t know what he suffered before he came to us,’ she once heard her mother say, and ever since suspected that James was adopted.
It explained why her brother had so much trouble fitting in while she enjoyed the same pursuits as her parents. Although she resented the way her mother’s frugality meant her clothes were not as trendy as her friends, she shared her parents’ values and their tastes. She felt she was the ‘good girl’ while James was the ‘problem child’.
The suspicion that James had been adopted
planted a nagging thought and before long she began to question her own heritage, wondering if she had been adopted too. She was darker in her features than her parents, didn’t look like them at all, and she would get called ‘wog’ or ‘Abo’ at school.
She found herself drawn to Aboriginal issues, always felt a deep sympathy for the way they had been treated and for the conditions that they lived in now. She wanted to learn as much as she could about Aboriginal art, culture, politics and history, and she could not but take it personally when people around her - her friends, for example - were not interested, didn’t seem to care or were even hostile towards and intolerant of Aboriginal people. How could you hear all that happened to them, Rachel wondered, and not be moved to care?
Her parents confirmed her suspicions about her own adoption when she was eighteen. She knew the circumstances would most likely be hard to face, that perhaps should be left in the past, but she could not help but wonder.
At university she did her Honours thesis on the role of Aboriginal women in traditional society, countering the dominant stereotype that they were subordinate to Aboriginal men, treated like chattels. This was a particularly important myth to dispel in relation to criminal law where defence lawyers used it as an excuse to get more lenient sentences for their clients when the victim was Aboriginal. She had looked at the cases where judges had made pronouncements about how rape was not such a serious offence in the Aboriginal community and she knew this was something she wanted to change by showing that those stereotypes did not properly represent the role - and respect - given to Aboriginal women in traditional society.
But the yearning to find out who she might be - what was in her genes? what was in her blood? - eventually drove her to make some inquiries.
In the final year of her studies, Rachel made an appointment at a Link-Up office, an organisation that helped Aboriginal people reunite with their families. She met a case-worker, Robynne, and told her, ‘I don’t have any proof that I am Aboriginal but I think I might be. I know that sounds kind of crazy but I don’t know how to explain it.’
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