Snake Dancing

by Roberta Sykes

  Della had completed a stenographer, receptionist and bookkeeping course, but she was appalled by the racism she confronted when she applied for positions that matched her skills. As well, her relationship with her husband was tense. John seemed to me to be a strange and aloof person, given to secretive comings and goings at all hours of the day and night.

  When Mum learned that I was struggling to hold down a job and care for Russel, she seized upon the opportunity to visit us all. She said she was pleased to get away from Arthur, and hoped he would find somebody else to keep him out of gaol in her absence and even to look after him permanently. She planned to stay for six months.

  Leonie had been wanting to find a place on her own, and Mum’s imminent arrival prompted her departure. She moved into a room in Kings Cross and went through what Mum described as her ‘arty phase’, living by drawing and making jewellery to sell in the street. I had heard Leonie, on several occasions, telling some Chinese friends of ours that she was part-Chinese, and later informing some Japanese friends that she was part-Japanese. When I asked her about this, she’d told me her reason was that if there was another war, with the Chinese or the Japanese, she wanted them to spare her. The idea seemed half-baked, but when I reflected upon it later I felt that her behaviour and the strange lifestyle she adopted around that time were probably symptomatic of her confusion about her identity.

  Although Russel was considered too young to start school, I applied to enrol him at the Catholic School just across the street because he was already so advanced. He knew his numbers and alphabet and was able to read, though his favourite reading was the TV guide. The nuns sent us to an office in the city to have him undergo some tests, which he passed with flying colours, so they let him start.

  I had written to Dessie asking her to send down the tea-chests with all my home-making equipment in them, along with Russel’s fire engine, but they hadn’t arrived. Mum wrote to her too, but neither of us received a reply. So the flat was very make-do. Leonie and I had decorated the room with empty liqueur bottles scrounged from Beppi’s restaurant, which was just below our window, placing them all on a high narrow shelf which ran around the entire room. Mum thought they looked terrible and fretted that if any of the nuns from Russel’s school came by, they would think we were alcoholics.

  Mum’s fear was almost realised when I called to pick Russel up one day, and a young nun asked if she could come to the flat to talk about his progress. I had no option but to agree, though I stopped Mum from removing the bottles. ‘I’m sure she’ll know they’re just decoration,’ I told her. ‘She knows we couldn’t afford such expensive grog.’

  After learning that we were lapsed Catholics, the nun came often and we shared many conversations. I was curious about why a very beautiful woman with extraordinarily grace had joined the order. In turn, she was just as curious about the things that motivated me, and we formed a warm friendship. Although her order forbade her from taking food or even a drink of water at our place, she would often drop over unexpectedly and, if it was convenient, spend an hour or so. Although I had enjoyed the companionship and support of Sister Sebastian during my school days, I had come to regard nuns and their restricted lifestyle, which prevented them from being in touch with the real world, in a very negative manner. This young woman gave me cause to re-evaluate my thoughts, and even after we had both left Sydney we continued to correspond.

  Mum, who had never during my lifetime had a real holiday, found it difficult to adjust once Russel started school. I came home from work one day to find her weeping. I realised that she would find it impossible to cope with being alone throughout the day, so I picked up the newspaper and, like a miracle, found a part-time job vacancy at a kindergarten just three or four streets away. Mum applied and was accepted to clean and keep the kindergarten in order for a few hours each morning. She regaled us with the story of her interview. Another applicant had been interviewed before her, she said, and when the other woman left, the interviewer had said confidentially to Mum, ‘A lovely lady, but I couldn’t let her have the job. She wouldn’t have been able to keep up. She was sixty if she was a day.’ As Mum was also well over sixty, she hoped the interviewer wasn’t going to ask her age!

  I had found a good job working as a hostess in the Polynesian Room at the American National Club in Macquarie Street, in the city. It was an exclusive club for the very wealthy, with a limited membership. People who wanted to join were put on a waiting list. When a member died, if the next applicant on the list was suitably refereed, they were offered the membership. Evening meals were served in one of several dining rooms on the floor below ours, but lunch was taken at a smorgasbord in the Polynesian Room. Almost all the staff in the Polynesian Room were, as a general rule, non-white. A couple of Asian guys ran the bar, and a Maori woman, Lillian, and I usually spent our shifts working on the floor. The setting up and food arrangement for the weekday lunches were overseen by a white woman named Karen.

  The work was very easy after some of the jobs I’d held. We wore long light cotton frocks with large tropical flowers printed on them, and the barmen wore tropical shirts. When people arrived on our floor, Lillian and I had to greet them by their names. When women arrived alone to wait to be joined by their husband or friends, we sat and talked with them so they did not feel or look like they were alone. When their company arrived, we offered to summon a bar steward to attend to them, then made ourselves scarce. When they weren’t busy the barmen taught us how to make and serve a wide range of cocktails, and we perfected our silver service dexterity, skills which would come in very handy later. Much of my time was spent doing crosswords or reading, which we were permitted to do as long we stood up and if there were no members or guests on the floor.

  We were, I supposed, hired to be decorative, servile, quietly attentive and non-threatening. The room boasted a huge photograph of a Hawaiian Island on the back wall, and we added to the atmosphere. Guests often asked where we were from, hoping perhaps that we hailed from Polynesia. When I answered ‘Townsville’ they often responded, ‘No, where are you really from.’ If I persisted with my answer, some became angry and abusive. ‘You can’t be Aboriginal,’ they’d tell me, ‘you’re far too bright and pretty.’ I was deeply disturbed by this attitude, though I had a sneaking feeling it was meant to be a compliment. My ambivalence increased when I was requested by the management to be photographed in our glamorous uniform by a noted photographer, Ted Roberts. Only six copies of one particular print were to be made, I was told. One to be sold on each of four continents, one for the club and one for me. Ted Roberts was famous for his exclusive prints.

  The manager of the club, a Swiss, proposed to me. We had had no dates, no personal relationship of any description, but he had become aware of my situation—a single mother struggling by myself. When Russel became ill, he had offered to collect all Russel’s dirty laundry and take it to his own flat to wash. I thought this was kind as the shared laundry facilities in my block meant that I had to sit on the roof and watch that our clothes didn’t disappear while they were drying. His offer to marry me and give Russel and me a home came as a complete surprise. Mum, however, was William’s strong advocate in his absence, not that I was seriously entertaining the idea of marrying a complete stranger. There was a feeling of deja vu about the situation, which made me think that there were perhaps a lot of very lonely men in the world.

  William spent his whole time in England pining to come back. He wrote constantly saying that, although he greatly valued the opportunity to visit his mother, his heart was with me and he wanted to return and get married. He was working and saving every penny for his fare.

  We were married in the Wayside Chapel, Kings Cross, in July 1966. Mum had returned to Townsville by then, but Della and Leonie, with their respective husbands, attended. So too, strangely, did two people—a brother and sister—who just turned up at the church, saying they were related to me. I was very surprised, but in the hurly-burly of the wedding photos and
moving our gathering onto the reception, they left and I have never seen them again. I have often wondered who these people were and what their relationship was to me.

  I had made a friend, Christine Nieniewska, who helped prepare the food for the reception. Living not far away in a small flat in Rushcutters Bay with her daughter, Justine, Christine had been a wonderful friend to me during William’s absence, helping take care of Russel. Although I regularly saw my sisters, Christine had been my confidante during this time.

  Della, completely disillusioned with her prospects in Australia, was planning to go to New Zealand to try her luck there. I was apprehensive on her behalf and yet envious of her courage to strike out for the great unknown. She had no idea whether New Zealand would offer her the opportunity to use her skills, but from her experience here she knew that Australia would not.

  William had found a job working on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and he hated it. He joked about it, saying he was expected to scrub the whole bridge down with steel wool, but he was extremely dissatisfied. On the night after our wedding, he told me to be ready to give notice at work, that we were going back to Townsville so he could find a better job. ‘I don’t want my wife to work,’ he said.

  ‘But I’ve always worked. I like working, and you’ve never said anything before,’ I replied, shocked by the suddenness of his remark and the vehemence behind it.

  ‘We weren’t married before, so I wasn’t in the position to tell you what to do. But now I am.’ I felt an ominous shudder pass over me.

  We had no money to buy a car, so we travelled to Townsville by train. I had learned from Mum and Aunty Glad that Dessie Mills did not intend to surrender my tea-chests. So, on the way through Brisbane, anticipating trouble from her and her tattooed lover, I went to the police station nearest her shop and asked one of the officers to accompany me. The store was closed and Dessie refused to come out. The young policeman entered the premises and came back with one tea-chest. It contained a bent and battered old aluminium pot, one anodised lid from my own pretty set of saucepans which didn’t fit the pot, and some grubby ragged sheets that definitely weren’t mine. Dessie had told the officer that this was all I had left with her. He was terribly embarrassed but said there was nothing more he could do. Gone were all the things I had collected and with which I had hoped to start my married life, along with Russel’s bright red fire engine.

  Okay, I thought, so Dessie has stolen these things. There’s a lesson in this for me; I will harden my heart against her, and never speak to her again. At the same time, I was sad about having to make this resolution for my own emotional protection. I felt that I was losing many of the people with whom I had grown up. Leila, dead from suicide; Della, on her way to New Zealand, and I had had a premonition that it would be twenty years before she would return; and Leonie was heaven only knew where. At the time it felt as if I only really had Dessie left from my childhood group, and her betrayal was devastating.

  When we arrived in Townsville, we found that tenants had recently vacated the cottage I had grown up in, and Mum said that if we would accommodate Nellie and William would do some work on the old timber house, which was in very poor shape, we could have it dirt cheap. William was an excellent handyman and amateur carpenter, ready to turn his hand to almost anything, so he jumped at the opportunity.

  Taking an almighty chance that the years had wrought some attitudinal changes amongst the nuns at Saint Joseph’s and Saint Patrick’s, the school from which I had been expelled, I made an appointment to discuss enrolling Russel. The young nun with whom I had formed a friendship in Sydney had given me the idea that I should at least try.

  I was not surprised to be interviewed by a nun who had been at the school during the time I had attended, but I was unprepared when she told me that she had no idea that I had been expelled. She was regretful, she said, that this had happened and would try to find out something about it. Russel had a glowing report from the Sydney convent, so she saw no reason why he could be refused now, except that he had not been baptised.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I informed her. ‘And I’ll pray for you while you do,’ she told me with a smile. ‘Meanwhile I’ll expect to see him next Monday. He can continue his Christian education while you think too.’

  4

  Townsville was in the process of rapid change. Australia was caught up in the Vietnam War and the Army had built a new barracks on the edge of town. Townsville had become the first and last stop for Army personnel on their way to the war. Nineteen-year-old men were leaving, they thought, to die, and for many it was the first time they were away from parental authority. They wanted to ensure that they were not going to die without having tasted the ‘pleasures’ of life. Hard drinking and roughly pursuing women of any age, they made the townspeople feel decidedly unsafe. Returning soldiers, too, brought in vices. Townsville was the first place in Australia outside of a capital city to have a drug clinic, and the clinic was on the base.

  This small country town, where everyone knew almost everyone else, at least by sight, had been thrust into a new role by the influx. Bigger stores opened, rock’n’roll bands and stars added Townsville to their tour schedules. New movie theatres, hotels and nightclubs opened while the old ones received face-lifts.

  On an expanse of vacant bushland out near Mum’s house in Aitkenvale, where she had moved to provide me with isolation during my pregnancy with Russel, the University College of Townsville was being built. It would cater for the growing educational needs of the area and was also attracting new people to Townsville. This was the first tertiary institution in north Australia and it promised to provide a focus for studies that related directly to life and rural pursuits in the tropics as well as to marine life in tropical waters.

  William got a job with the council, painting white lines down the centre of roads. Many Murri families had moved into town. The tenants in old Mrs Sullivan’s house, which Mum still owned, were a young Black family—Cedric Geia, his wife and baby. Cedric also worked for the council and as soon as we were settled and had purchased a car, Cedric and William drove to work together. Actually, since William had spent all his savings on his ticket back to Australia, I bought our first car, a fact which was later to become a bone of contention.

  When he wasn’t at work, William applied himself diligently to the task of renovating the house. Mum was happy to supply the timber, paint and whatever else was required. In no time at all, the run-down old house had built-in cabinets in the kitchen, bright paint and new floor coverings throughout. I sewed curtains, and between us we transformed the place into a home.

  I learned to cook, particularly William’s favourite meals. It took some adjusting for him to eat cold meats and salads in December. He missed the snow around this season, too, although one year we had a hail storm in the middle of summer which left the town temporarily strewn with white balls of ice. This was the nearest he came to satisfying his nostalgia.

  Russel enjoyed school and quickly made friends. A sprinkling of other Black children now attended the Catholic school, unlike during my days there.

  I felt enormously relieved when William said he would legally adopt Russel. He made the application and, surprisingly, we were visited by the police. Although natural children can arrive into virtually any circumstances, and children living with parents in defacto arrangements are not automatically called into question, the families of children who are being adopted are subjected to rigorous inspection.

  By this time there were policewomen in Queensland, and it was a policewoman who came to our house. She had obviously read old police reports about the circumstances in which I had become pregnant with Russel. Consequently, her attitude towards William in his willingness to undertake the role of father and the nice home he appeared to be providing for us was almost congratulatory. William preened.

  Our marriage and the subsequent adoption procedure gave me a tremendous feeling of security. I was able to obtain a new birth certificate for Russel on which
William appeared as his father, even though William had not yet arrived in Australia at the time of Russel’s birth. I recalled the trauma I had experienced when Mum had forced me to sign the papers regarding his birth, how I had squirmed to write ‘unknown’ in the box for ‘Father’, knowing the stigma this would bring Russel. Now, while he was still too young to appreciate the implications, Russel was given a new surname and the legitimacy that I had craved for him.

  William and I had many good times together and with Russel. Initially William enjoyed what he thought of as my eccentricities, especially my relationship with snakes. On a visit to Cairns once, we called on a man who kept a backyard zoo. When we saw two huge rock pythons in a large pen, I wanted to film them with William’s little Super-8 home-movie camera. They were eighteen and twenty-feet long, and their girth was as thick as a big man’s forearm. William’s gallantry was such that he insisted on going into the cage and taking the film himself. I was very impressed with his courage, even when we got home and discovered his nervousness had caused the hand-held camera to shake wildly throughout the process, making the snakes all but indiscernible.

  William liked to dance, too, but when we met he was not very good at it. Under my tutelage, though, he became quite proficient, and we developed a range of moves and techniques that often caused other dancers to clear the floor just to watch us. With my Polynesian friend, Ena, we chased music and dance venues all over town and rarely missed an opportunity to attend a party, as long as it involved dancing. Ena and I spent hours getting ready for these events, and for a giggle I’d often wear a blond wig, very much in vogue at the time. Thus attired, we attended parties—one at which Johnny O’Keefe was a guest—and we always had a very good time.