William earned good wages as a painter, working on the mine’s tall chimney shafts. He enjoyed the feeling of freedom working in the open, as well as the sense of danger from working at such a great height. An adventurer, William and his friends went hunting at night and weekends, and he happily took to eating bush turkey and other local food.
Although racism was solidly entrenched in Mt Isa, I often had a hard time convincing William that this was the case. Camps sprang up around the town, and while whites sometimes lived in them, they were predominantly Aboriginal. I sometimes saw pencil-thin barefoot dark children in the streets, their eyes always cast down. Blacks, men or women, were rarely employed in the town, even in menial positions. The local newspaper always carried letters to the editor spelling out how offended some whites were by the sight of the poverty of the Blacks, as though it was their own fault they were so poor. Many hotels refused to admit Blacks, or had segregated areas where they could drink or buy a bottle. At the time Blacks were not permitted by law to drink alcohol, so the sales were illegal, although the publicans were not prosecuted.
After I left the steam laundry, I created a position of status for myself in Mt Isa by always dressing to the hilt. I’d sweep around the supermarket and dusty streets in high heels, wearing some of the elegant clothes that had been made for me by my camp friend in Sydney. I’d walk with William into segregated hotels, dressed to kill, causing every head to turn, and order vodka, with a glass of orange juice on the side, although I really didn’t drink the former. It was just a small way for me to challenge the segregation laws. Once I even ordered a martini, which caused a stir, and, much to our mirth, I was eventually served something completely undrinkable with an olive and an onion in it.
The white family with whom we shared the house had some crude ways which I found unhygienic and offensive. The house was infested with rats, but rather than set traps our housemates left biscuits on the kitchen floor so that the rats would eat them instead of ransacking the supplies in the cupboards. They refused to believe that this practice attracted rats and was even fattening them up. The man was particularly uncouth, and thought it a great joke to fart loudly around the house, even in bed where, after he did so, he would forcibly hold his wife’s head under the sheet. We could hear her screaming.
I found Mt Isa interesting, but not a place where I would have liked to spend the rest of my life. The last straw came for me when, late one night, Russel had a fever and was screaming in pain. He was usually such a good child that I knew something serious was wrong with him. We rushed him to the hospital where a nurse said she would fetch the doctor on duty, who was asleep in a back room. When she returned alone, she told us with embarrassment that the doctor refused to come out. It was obvious from her demeanour that she had told him the patient was black. William was livid but there was nothing he could do. The nurse suggested we give Russel aspirin, and apologised that she had none to offer us. By that time Russel was writhing and thrashing in my arms, tugging at his ears and banging his hands against his head. We paced the floor anxiously all night, trying to pacify the screaming child and worried that he would die. We even discussed making a dash to Townsville to get medical attention, but such a journey on the unsealed roads and bush tracks, which at the time was the state of the ‘highway’, would have taken too long and been far too risky.
Although Russel recovered over the next few days, William and I were galvanised into returning to Townsville. Within a week or so I took Russel to the Townsville General Hospital where he received a complete check-up. Peering into his ears the doctor asked, ‘How long have his eardrums been perforated?’
I gave him a blank look.
‘Oh, you’d know when it happened. He would have been screaming and banging his head!’
‘Well, in that case, two weeks.’
Russel ran around the room while I told Mum about the doctor’s discovery, then he climbed up onto my lap. I stroked his beautiful smooth brown skin and wept silently as I thought that this innocent little child had already become a victim of racism and medical neglect, and that neither William nor I had been able to prevent it. The diagnosing doctor had given me a list of things Russel would never be able to do as a result of his perforated eardrums, such as travel in unsealed planes or deep dive; anything that would put pressure on the drums. At three years old his life and its limitations were already being shaped by racism.
I had discovered a lot about William during this time, most of which was good. He was not a very complex man—gentle, hard working and basically honest. Although his formal education exceeded my own, he was not a keen reader, preferring to play card games or watch television. He was a very moderate social drinker with a hearty appetite for food. Also he had, I thought, a well-developed sense of ‘family’. He was very attentive to my mother and they got on extremely well.
Mum had organised for us to move into Mrs Sullivan’s old cottage, next door to the house I had grown up in. Lodgers were still living there, including Mum’s old friend Nellie, whose sight had badly deteriorated and she was then on the old-age pension. William and I helped out in Mum’s hamburger shop each day while William was looking for work, and he often went on errands for Arthur.
We had only been in Townsville a couple of weeks and were asleep in bed with Russel sleeping nearby, when the door to our bedroom burst open. Two detectives stood in the narrow hallway, with Nellie crying loudly behind them. She had heard them at the front door and when she’d opened it, they’d thrust their way past her, looking for William. The police hauled him out of bed and took him off to the police station.
I quickly dressed Russel and myself and drove down to Mum’s shop. Police were swarming all over it, searching every nook and cranny. I told Mum that the police had William, and she said that she thought they were also arresting Arthur.
When William was finally released, without any charges being laid, he said the police had beaten him up. They had kept asking him what he was doing in a certain street in Railway Estate and what was it that he had put in the boot of his car at a house there. William was unfamiliar with Townsville, having spent only a short time there before, and although he could find his way from one place to another he’d not yet learned the names of streets. Arthur had asked him to pick up some milk crates from a building they had been to previously, and William could always find his way back to anywhere he had been before. The detectives may have thought he was being deceptive by claiming not to know the street they were talking about, but he wasn’t.
I was cross when William was unwilling to make a complaint against the police beating him; his reluctance puzzled me. Throughout the troubling times following the rape in Brisbane and the subsequent trials it had been instilled in me that the role of the police was as protectors and law enforcers. Police who acted against the laws they were sworn to uphold had to be brought to account, at least in my mind. I understood by then that Arthur was dishonest and engaged in criminal stupidity, but William had done nothing except run an errand for Arthur. Merely by his association with Arthur he was assumed to be a criminal.
The police also searched Mum’s house in Aitkenvale and found a starting pistol. It only fired blanks, a relic of Dellie’s days as a successful track athlete. Nevertheless, the police arrested Mum and charged her. She went to court where she was treated lightly, but for years later, when she was in a good mood, we laughingly teased her for being a ‘gun moll’.
During this time, as well as running the hamburger shop, Mum continued to work as a laundress at the Central Hotel, which was three blocks away from the shop along Flinders Street. She was exhausted, and at last she saw her way clear to slowing down a bit. She wanted me to take over the laundress job, and went ahead and arranged it with the manager even though I had not expressed any desire to do so. ‘You need the money,’ Mum said, ‘so just do the work. It’s not too heavy and the manager and his wife will leave you alone.’
The laundry was in a poky lean-to at the back of the hote
l, with only a small window, and the appliances were primitive. Steam and fumes from the gas copper filled the room, along with the rank beer smell of bar towels. The ironing was done on an upstairs verandah, where at least one could catch the breeze coming off Ross River. I had occasionally relieved Mum at this job, and knew that I would be sick to my stomach with the smell of sour beer, but Mum persisted. What I hadn’t told her was that even a wisp of this smell brought on ‘shocks’, flashbacks, as also happened when I smelled beer on anyone’s breath. I was suddenly catapulted back into a dark shed, in great fear and struggling for my life.
During the short time I worked in the laundry, I constantly expressed my unhappiness, but Mum would hear none of it. ‘You are making yourself unhappy,’ she would often tell me. ‘You think you are too good for that sort of work, and you’re not. You have a child to support now, and you have to get any fancy ideas out of your head. Not many coloured women get the chances you’ve had, I can tell you!’
The ‘chance’ I had was to work in a sweathouse. I felt badly, because Mum had been doing the job for years. She had brought us up with the sweat from her brow and labour which had bent her body. I was disappointed that she didn’t appear to want better for her own children. Her expectations were that I should follow in her footsteps. I didn’t have dreams, but I had dreads, and slaving away without any opportunity to use my brain and test my potential was one of them.
A nice thing happened during this time. My Canadian friends, Buddy and Jimmy, moved to Townsville, along with Buddy’s wife, Brunie, and their young daughter, Naomi. They were now involved in the Mormon Church, and I learned a lot from them about the Mormon philosophy. The more I learned, however, the less likely it became that I would ever join. Black people, so they informed me, could join the Church, but only at the very lowest level, where they would have to be content to remain. Their teachings were that being Black meant that the person had been very evil in their last life. White people had been good in past lives and being white was somehow their reward. I found the concept extremely racist and perhaps designed to force Blacks to accept a servile position in society, just as they were made to accept a lowly place if they wanted to be part of this Church. We often argued, and I wondered how they could be party to such a congregation yet accept me into their lives as a valued friend.
Brunie and I spent a lot of time together. She had shoulder length dark glossy hair and was extremely attractive. With glamorous clothes, she caught the eye of many men as we drove around town. I thought her very daring, and it was an adventure just to be in her company. She was an excellent seamstress and made many of the clothes she and her daughter wore, and she was happy to teach me to sew. We made ourselves twin outfits, two-piece white suits with piping on them, that we wore out together with great pride. William was happy enough when Brunie came to visit, but he didn’t take a shine to Buddy or Jimmy, who were generally too busy with their Church duties to sit down and talk often, anyway.
A friend of William’s who lived in Brisbane asked William to be his best man. Leaving Russel in Mum’s care, we drove down for the ceremony. As was often the case, I was the only person of colour at this gathering of relations and friends, but I tried to be positive in my outlook towards everybody and hoped they would be likewise towards me.
At the reception, held in the groom’s parents’ house, I was appalled when the father of the groom came into the kitchen where I was washing dishes and tried to sexually molest me, calling me names when I resisted. Others heard him and came in to take him away, but I was very upset and didn’t want to stay. William later told me that, during my absences earlier in the evening, when I had been preparing food and helping to clean up in the kitchen, he had been shocked by the attitude of his friend’s father towards the idea that William and I were planning to marry. ‘Have an affair with the darkies, by all means. But marry them? Never!’ he had been advised.
Throughout our relationship I had a major problem with William’s selective memory. I always had to keep in mind that racism was a fact of life, and therefore I had to learn ways to protect Russel and myself from this discrimination. William, however, preferred to forget about racism and discrimination, to block them out and pretend they never happened, and he expected me to do the same. Racism often surfaces in what may appear to be an unrelated series of events. Black people must look for this pattern of racism, otherwise they might feel that they themselves have done something wrong which warranted the abuse. Over time, this feeling completely destroys self-esteem, which is essential for one’s happiness and success.
For a variety of reasons, including the distress caused by working at the Central Hotel, William and I were unable to settle down in Townsville. Much to Mum’s annoyance, I gave notice and we packed up and moved to Brisbane. I applied to the Mater Hospital again, hoping there might have been an opening in the ante-natal clinic, but the hospital staff claimed they could find no record of my having worked for them before. Still without my nursing papers, they could only offer me cleaning work. As we were desperate for money, I accepted the position of kitchen-hand for a month, and found myself literally up to my elbows in grey washing-up water from dawn, cleaning huge cooking pots and pans that were too big to be put into the dishwasher. During my last week there, an elderly nun came through the kitchen and she stopped when she saw me.
‘Haven’t I seen you before?’ she asked.
‘I used to work in ante-natal about two years ago,’ I replied, to which she responded, ‘Well, what the devil are you doing here?’
I was mightily embarrassed to have been sprung, and instead of telling her my story, I just shrugged. The job I was doing was so dirty, wet, tedious and seemingly endless—pots and pans from staff and patients’ overnight meals were piled up waiting for me when I arrived and constantly replaced throughout the day—it left me quite dispirited.
Buddy, Jimmy, Brunie and their daughter, Naomi, were also in Brisbane. However, they didn’t live close by so we did not spend much time together. It was a great shock to me, therefore, to hear on the radio that Buddy had shot and killed a man. I went to visit Brunie, to see if she needed help, and found her in the process of changing her name on all her documents so that she could not be identified and associated with the crime. The dead man had been a musician at a club where Brunie worked. He had driven her home after work and an argument had ensued between him and Buddy.
I went with Brunie once to visit Buddy in prison. He was no longer the person I had known, happy and carefree. He cried and begged both of us not to come again, he didn’t want us to see him in such a wretched state. The rifle had broken in two during the course of the argument, he’d claimed, and when he picked it up and pointed the barrel, bullets had come out in rapid succession. Several shots had penetrated the man’s body through the same hole, a feat even an expert marksman would have had trouble performing, and he felt sure that forensic science would prove the murder was an accident. He was deeply distressed by the loss of life, and concerned for the relatives of the victim.
News of the case reached the north and again Mum wrote to me. ‘Do all your friends commit murder? What is it about you that attracts these unsavoury types?’ I was lost for an answer. I would have thought that apparently good, God-fearing church-goers were beyond involvement in any sort of crime. Brunie told me that because of the murder the Mormon Church would no longer accept their participation. I wondered also whether Buddy’s involvement in this catastrophe meant that, under his Church’s principles, in his next life he would come back black.
Dessie Mills, who by this time had left her alcoholic and abusive husband, Reg, was also living in Brisbane. She had picked up with a new partner, Pete, and she was running a fish shop and organising to open a book exchange. William and I agreed to take over the fish shop. Dessie had told us the hours were long but the rewards matched the effort put in and, inexperienced in business, we took her word for it. William continued to work outside and I ran the shop throughout the day wh
ile caring for Russel, and when William came home in the evening we shared the responsibility. It did not take us long to realise we were working day and night and still going downhill. No wonder Dessie had been so keen to palm the business off on to us, we thought. She was locked into a lease which, fortunately, she had not signed over to us. So we told her we were not prepared to continue.
Dessie didn’t appear unduly upset by our decision, although she and her own children were then obliged to move back to the quarters behind the shop where we had been living. This was not long after Christmas, 1965. William and I had bought Russel a splendid pedal car, a big bright red fire engine complete with a little ladder. We had decided to move to Sydney, which seemed to offer better prospects, and we asked Dessie to look after our things until we could arrange for their transport when we found a place to live. We took our clothes but left all the worldly goods—sheets, towels and kitchenware—that we had accumulated, including Russel’s fire engine.
William’s and my life together had been punctuated by times of stress, brought about mainly through contact with people associated with me, such as Arthur and Dessie. So I reasoned that we might have a better chance starting again somewhere new. Intermittently I had been in touch by letter with Skip, who had struck up a relationship with another woman. They now had a child, and he wanted a divorce. I drove to Gatton, outside Brisbane, through a fierce storm to accommodate his wish to have divorce papers served on me. As I was with William, it seemed that a divorce would be in all our interests.
William had been talking for a while about his wish to go back to England to visit his mother. So, we were only in Sydney a short time, in share accommodation in a tiny house off Pitt Street, Redfern, when he sold the car and used the funds to leave.
I moved into a flat in the St James apartment building in East Sydney with my youngest sister, Leonie. We were joined briefly in the same apartment building, though not in the same flat, by Dellie, who had changed her name to Della, married a man named John, who worked for an airline company, and had a young son, Craig.
Snake Dancing Page 7