Snake Dancing

by Roberta Sykes

  William also, in the main, did not like my friends. He said he had nothing in common with Margaret and Henry Reynolds, and refused the occasional invitations to their home for a meal. Consequently, Margaret and I shared mainly lunches, something I did not regret. I enjoyed hearing her perspective on a range of political issues. We sometimes met in the Lowth’s Hotel lower bar for lunch. One of my warmest memories of that period of my friendship with Margaret is of the day when, after months of drinking orange juice, I succumbed and took a vodka and orange at midday with my meal. To me this was the epitome of waywardness. That afternoon I pushed the pram with baby Naomi sleeping in it up the hill to my house, a little lightheaded and feeling deliciously rebellious.

  My main complaint about William was his possessiveness, which surfaced in a multitude of ways. He seemed to feel that he ‘owned’ me and resented any time that I spent doing anything that he could not relate directly to himself. He sometimes burned my books if I read them instead of watching television programs alongside him. He became jealous of anyone I spoke to, including women, and he would make nasty remarks about them within their earshot.

  As well, his attitude towards my Murri friends was far from desirable, though I have since realised that his attitude is shared by many white people. Generally he did not object if I helped them, but he did not like me socialising with them. Indeed, he was quite tolerant of anyone I brought to the house in need of assistance, and there were many, but he did not like to come home and find a group of us sitting around having a cup of tea and a yarn.

  Thinking about this over time, I came to believe that William felt that my marriage to him, a white person, elevated me. I was expected to assume the role of advocate and patron, a position with which he obviously felt comfortable. It didn’t seem to occur to him that my Murri friends were my support network, that we talked about the racism we suffered and ways to overcome it.

  Mum could see that I was again becoming increasingly unhappy with my life and that I felt I was stagnating. She offered to pay for a correspondence course to enable me to do Senior, the Queensland equivalent of university entrance. I was cheered by this, and enthusiastic. The only subject I couldn’t manage alone was French, but the Technical College held evening classes. William resented my attendance at these classes, and when he discovered that the teacher was a man, he burned all my French books and forbade me to go. Within a few months I abandoned the course altogether because of his attitude.

  Meanwhile, I had been busy attending as many meetings as possible of the local chapter of OPAL. We had participated in a demonstration against McKimmins, a Flinders Street store which had never hired anyone of colour. Flowing from the demonstration, we were invited to put up a display of Aboriginal cultural artefacts. Koiki Mabo and I did most of the work collecting the pieces. On the day Koiki turned up with coconut fronds which he plaited right there in the store to make mats on which we stood the items.

  Members began to ask me to represent OPAL, although the organisation was multi-racial and there were more qualified members than me. I was sent as the local delegate to attend regional and state meetings, first to Cairns and later to Brisbane. I was also invited to give presentations about OPAL and our goals to local service clubs. When William was unwilling to look after the children, my friends quite happily took over the task.

  A small group of us planned to attend the Cairns regional meeting, and to travel there by bus. On the day, I was waiting at the bus depot when I had a feeling that I should go home and catch a later bus. Without really knowing why, I did so, and was upset to learn that the bus I had forgone had been involved in an accident. No one was seriously injured, but I wished I had been surer about my premonition so that I could at least have alerted the passengers.

  The Brisbane conference was extremely educational for me. The series of speakers opened my mind to the possibility of creating opportunities for people of colour which had hitherto not existed. I met John Newfong, who would later become an active player in the Black movement in the south.

  Throughout this period, the peaceful activism we were involved in unfortunately drew the attention of authorities. Our phones were tapped. Margaret Reynolds’ house was broken into, and stolen papers were later returned by police who claimed to have found them in Flinders Street. One of the letters still had a pound note attached to it, which was a donation towards the struggle, so the police story seemed highly unlikely.

  Through Mrs Mitchell I had met a man who had been a television news cameraman in the south, but had become disillusioned with the callousness he found in the industry. He still had an Arriflex camera and wanted to help us. With his assistance, at a FCAATSI conference held in Townsville, I interviewed some very courageous Aboriginal people, including Vincent Lingiari, the Gurindji Elder who led his people on a strike against appalling work conditions. We were disturbed when the film disappeared on its way back from processing in the south, something that had never happened to this man’s work in the past.

  Major problems arose during the organisation of the conference, too. Evelyn Scott had booked the former migrant hostel, which was now being hired out to groups, for delegates to stay in. But almost on the eve of the event she was informed that it was ‘unavailable’. Palm Island delegates were enormously disadvantaged when they learned that the two boats which regularly serviced the island were to be put up on slips for repair. For both boats to be out of commission simultaneously was unprecedented.

  Driving home early one afternoon from the conference, I was curious to see a van parked in front of an empty scout hall on an otherwise long deserted stretch of road close by the conference venue. I did a U-turn and pulled up behind it. I was startled when the back door of the van opened and a man hopped out. Behind him I could see that the van was fitted out with recording equipment. The man stood blinking for a moment while his eyes adjusted to the bright sunlight, and when he was able to make out my car, he took fright and jumped straight back into the van. I returned to the conference and told organisers what I’d seen. They laughed—it was a public meeting, anyone could have come and recorded the sessions. It didn’t make any sense at all that the powers-that-be should choose to record the conference covertly from a van parked out in the tropical heat.

  The fact that we were under surveillance by ASIO became something of a laughing matter. Hearing any interference or static on our phone lines we would often joke, and ask, ‘Are you hearing us loud and clear, ASIO?’

  Margaret Reynolds invited me to a ladies’ luncheon being held at a seaside hotel at which the renowned Faith Bandler was to speak. I had never been to anything like this and amused Margaret by fretting about what I should wear. As I suspected, I was the only woman of colour there, apart from Faith. Although I turned up nicely decked out for the day, Faith’s appearance blew me away and still remains in my mind. She was the most elegant woman I had ever seen, beautifully groomed and wearing absolutely spotless little white gloves. It was unusual to see anyone wearing gloves in North Queensland’s tropical heat, and the difficulty involved in keeping them so pristine was a feat in itself. When I saw how this room full of white women responded so positively to the manner in which Faith presented herself, her calm way of explaining the ramifications of the upcoming referendum, what it would mean to race relations and how voters should seize this opportunity for change, I was completely entranced.

  I was becoming increasingly active in the struggle. The ABC invited me to give a radio interview with the jounalist Jim Downes. Afterwards he asked if I’d join him at a nearby hotel for a drink and a chat about the program. We had just settled down when a female attendant came and told Jim, ‘We’ll serve you but we won’t serve her. Hotel policy.’ Jim was staggered. He had just completed an interview with me in which he had implied that the energies we at OPAL were putting into calling for change were not really warranted.

  Much later I flew to Sydney to spend a week with a friend, Carol Neist. I took the opportunity to visit the Foundation of
Aboriginal Affairs, as I had heard many positive things about it. Mr Tom Williams met me and showed me around the Foundation’s offices. He then took me to lunch, and he discussed the goals of the Foundation, its history and operations, and I gave him an update on issues we were confronting in North Queensland. We were both delighted at the result of the recent referendum held in May 1967, which had, we thought, admitted Aboriginal people into full citizenship, but we were disappointed by the lack of action flowing from it. We began to wonder what it meant.

  On my return to Townsville, Tom Williams wrote a couple of letters to me. When William discovered them he became very angry and said he suspected me of having had an affair with Tom. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Tom, an older man, had impressed me with his quiet manner and the determination and commitment which shone through in his voice. I had dropped in unannounced and found that he wore a suit at the office, something I had not seen before but which I felt set a very positive standard and provided local youth with an excellent role model for achieving success. But apart from these impressions and their political impact, I knew virtually nothing about the man and said so to William.

  By this time we had installed a phone at the house, which William needed to run his business. One day some people I didn’t know rang and asked if I could come and see them urgently. At the small market garden which they ran, they told me that they employed a Torres Strait Islander who also lived in a tiny shack on their property. He had been arrested, they felt wrongfully, but they had no one they could turn to for help. They had seen me interviewed on television and found my name in the phone book.

  I had previously been called on to do odd jobs that no one else knew how to handle. A young destitute Black woman of limited intellectual ability had been found being abused by men in the street. I’d taken her home and given her a roof, meals, and even some responsibility around the place, until she got back on her feet. She had eventually married a white man who also lacked a full intellectual capacity and, to everyone’s surprise, they had a child who they doted on much more lovingly and carefully than many parents with far fewer handicaps.

  The case of the arrested gardener was a new problem for me, and initially I didn’t have a clue how to handle it. By then I had an extensive network, and outside my direct circle of contacts were people I had gone to school with, some of whom had become professionals around the town. Although they hadn’t put their hands up to help, I felt that they could, in an emergency, be imposed upon.

  The police alleged that the gardener had stolen a gold watch. The gardener, who had a very poor command of English and also limited intellectual ability, told us that he and a woman companion had been beaten up by a number of white men and gone to Casualty for treatment. When the police were called to the hospital, one of them had produced a gold watch from the gardener’s clothes, which were on the floor because he was wearing a hospital smock while his injuries were being attended to. He was sure the watch had not been in his possession prior to their arrival.

  When at last the case came before the court, the gardener had legal representation. The judge heard the man’s difficulty with speech and realised that the gardener was unable to tell the time, and that his lifestyle did not require him to do so. Why, then, would he have stolen a watch? The judge dismissed the case against him.

  There were no Aboriginal legal services at this time. It would be almost a decade before the concept was developed and formally acted upon by the Townsville Black community.

  Although I had chosen to stay away from the court during the hearing, the police may have learned of my involvement through their discussions with the market garden proprietors. The information was innocent enough but from then on, often when I was out on the street alone, the police would stop me. This was especially the case after I finished work late at night at Lowth’s Hotel. Although we lived only three blocks away, the presence of the Army recruits had made the streets unsafe for women alone after dark, so I always travelled by car. Sometimes the same policemen from the previous night would be waiting beside my car when I came out, and they would again ask me for my licence and registration papers, and carry out a full-scale inspection of the vehicle at that late hour. Once when they found a tyre and rim off William’s work truck in the boot waiting to be repaired, the police threatened to book me for having a bald spare tyre. They only backed off when I pointed out how much larger that tyre was than the tyres on my car.

  A number of times men followed me home after work. They didn’t know me from Adam, hadn’t spoken to me, but, on seeing a Black woman driving alone, they did foolish and dangerous things such as tailgating my car, and flashing their lights at me from behind. As we lived in a cul de sac, once these strangers pulled into our little laneway behind me there was nowhere they could easily go. On occasions William had to come bursting out of our house and chase them away. Once, he followed a car back into town where it reached high speeds along the main streets, but he managed to get its number before it disappeared from view. When he saw the car again a few days later, he followed it to the top of Castle Hill before approaching the driver, whose wife was sitting beside him. The driver told William that he had been on duty at the Army base on the night of the incident, but had loaned his car to friends who he was reluctant to name. His wife was extremely unamused.

  At other times, when I was walking in the street, I was approached by strange men who propositioned me. Some of these creatures were both ugly and dirty. They would indicate that they had a bottle of beer in the brown paper bag under their arm, and in return for my sexual favours they would offer me half. Unfortunately these incidents happened frequently, and deeply distressed me. I would often flee in alarm and suffer nightmares and flashbacks for days. I resented the fact that these men obviously thought my value was half a bottle of beer. I was unable to report any of this to the police, because the police were now lined up in my mind with the harassers.

  I became increasingly withdrawn from William. Although he didn’t condone these emotional assaults, he felt that they were petty and that, if anything serious happened, I should turn to him for protection. He couldn’t see that there was a whole system of racism at work which produced these events. Indeed, this system even encouraged them by maintaining Blacks in a position of vulnerability and at the bottom of all the totem poles, economically and socially. This system had to be overturned.

  The more I withdrew, the more angry and desperate William became to hang on to me and restrict my freedom. He would come home from work, change and go out again, leaving me with no one to care for the children on nights when I had to go to work. Sometimes I could arrange a sitter from amongst women who also worked at the hotel who I knew were not rostered on that night, but at other times I had to ring in and cancel.

  I was also unhappy about the manner William had begun to adopt towards Russel. I objected to the apparently careless blows he sometimes landed on the child; Russel seemed to be ducking a lot. William regularly went out to the Barrier Reef on fishing expeditions with his friends, and I had to beg him on a few occasions to take Russel along. More ominously, though, he derided Russel because he loved to dance. After one such incident, Russel had come to me in tears and asked, ‘Mum, what’s a poofter?’ He suffered no scars or bruises, but I worried about the emotional damage.

  William had also begun raising his voice and threatening to hit me. Late one night, after I had just come home from work, William held me against a wall and threw a punch which landed close to my head, narrowly missing my face. He said that the next time his punch would land on me. This blow was so hard that he fractured his hand and had to have it set and put in a splint for six weeks. I knew then that our marriage was over; I was not prepared to live in constant fear. I told him that I wouldn’t leave him while he was handicapped and unable to carry on his business, but I planned to use the six weeks to arrange my affairs so that I could leave.

  Those weeks seemed interminable. I was kept buoyed, however, b
y dreams that I’d begun to have sometime ago and which continued during that period. Much earlier, disenchanted with the quality of many of the things I’d been reading, I’d taken to the typewriter and started to write my own stories and articles. Then a voice came into my dreams telling me that this was the direction in which I was to go. I should move to the south, said this man’s voice, where I would become a jounalist and author. I thought this voice belonged to my deceased father, whoever he might have been, and that he was directing me from beyond the grave, from a place where he could see not only the past but also the future.

  I spoke to Margaret Reynolds and told her of this dream and my growing ambition. Margaret cautioned me, telling me that jounalists have been to schools where they learned to do that type of work. I thought this may have been the case because I had noticed a certain sameness about many of the things I’d been reading. Nevertheless, I felt that, without the inhibitions imposed by learning all the rules, my writing would be exploratory and fresh. I might be a trendsetter rather than a follower. I had no idea of the risks that such a path would entail.

  While William’s hand was knitting, I was invited to Evelyn Scott’s house for a meeting with Denis Walker. We had heard news of growing militancy in the south, that Kath Walker’s son had started a National Tribal Council in Brisbane, and I was eager to learn more. Much earlier, Neville Bonner had come up from Brisbane and held a meeting with us in an effort to gain our support for his bid to be placed on the Liberal Senate ticket. People who had known him when he had been working as a Native Police officer on Palm Island had politicised the meeting by telling us how Bonner had behaved towards his fellow Murris while in that position. Our response to him was not as warm as it may otherwise have been, although he later won the place on the ticket and was elected to the Senate.