Snake Dancing

by Roberta Sykes

  I was happy to tell my Embassy colleagues about the interest in our activities which I had assessed on my wide travels. Many Aborigines in the Centre had heard of the Embassy though few knew the rationale behind it. My task had been to explain as well as I could what we were hoping to achieve.

  On my return to Sydney I began asking questions about Peter, whose surname I had learned was Carette. He had not spent all his time in Alice Springs with Germaine and me, and I was worried that he may have taken inappropriate or culturally offensive photos, perhaps even using the zoom lenses I had seen in his box. I was dismayed to learn that he was the photographer who had donned a medical smock and, posing as a doctor, sneaked into Marianne Faithful’s hospital room and photographed her as she lay unconscious from a suspected drug overdose while in Australia with Mick Jagger. I felt that Germaine must have been aware of his history when she’d made her arrangements with him, and I was alarmed that perhaps I had, once more, naively trusted someone with something so important and been let down. Would I never learn?

  A support group in New Zealand invited me to tour their country and spread word of our activities. In addition to our protest group at the Embassy, we now also had a rather clandestine inner circle, called the National Black Caucus. The Caucus was planning protest marches to be held in all capital cities throughout Australia on National Aborigines’ Day, the second Friday in July, and we were calling for international support.

  I was apprehensive about the reception I might receive from my sister, Della, who had rejected the racism of Australia and gone to live in New Zealand. So I wrote advising her of my visit and leaving it up to her to decide whether she wanted to associate herself with me, and therefore possibly with the movement I was now seen to represent. I need not have worried. She was at the airport to greet me and organised as much time as possible to spend with me. Unbeknown to me, Della attended a public meeting at which I was the guest speaker, and later teased me with, ‘All my life I’ve had to listen to you, and now I find I’m even happy to pay to listen to you.’

  Della had prospered in New Zealand, having scored a good job using her administrative skills with a firm of accountants. With her quick mind and organising abilities, she had risen in the company to become supervisor of her area and, with additional training, was very well placed for advancement into the highly technical sphere of computer progamming. I was pleased for her, and sorry and humiliated that Australia had not yet seen fit to offer similar opportunities to Black women.

  This was my first trip outside Australia and it made an enormous impact on me. I learned during my travels that Maori and South Sea Island people represented more than ninety per cent of prisoners in maximum security, had abysmally low education and employment rates and many lived in extreme poverty. However, my first sight in New Zealand was of a brown-skinned uniformed man leaving from the cockpit of the plane in which I had arrived. A pilot, co-pilot or navigator for the airline, he was the first person of colour I had ever seen working in this capacity and it took my breath away. Despite feeling that people of colour could do everything anyone else can do, in Australia I had been deprived of any opportunity to actually see this, and perhaps doubts instilled by the racism of my earlier experiences lingered. Otherwise I am at a loss to explain the pleasure and shock I received to see this man alight from the plane!

  Driving around Auckland I saw Maori women working in food shops, cutting and handling sandwiches for their white customers. This, too, was something I had never seen before, and to this day it is still a rare sight in Australia.

  During my brief stay I met many wonderful Maori people, including a special couple, Syd and Hana Jackson, who made my trip magic by sharing a great deal of Maori culture with me. Now divorced, Hana remains my dear friend and regular correspondent. I also met with the Polynesian Panthers, and was so taken by the earnest commitment of one of the organisers, Will Ilolahea, that on my return I suggested he be invited to Australia to look around and attend our National Aborigines’ Day march.

  Germaine had preceded me to New Zealand and been arrested for using obscene language. I suffered no such fate as my ideology did not stretch to these types of freedoms. My talks and television appearance focused on the one thing I considered obscene, the way that I and other Black people were being treated in Australia, and I was able to present factual and statistical data which supported this idea.

  Soon after I returned to Sydney Denis Walker rang me from Brisbane—an emergency. A young Murri woman, who I shall refer to here only as A, was in trouble. Would I take her in?

  After being raped when she was fifteen and sixteen years old, now aged seventeen she had again been recently raped by a businessman while hitching from her home town to Brisbane. She went directly to a hospital for medical assistance and tests, and then to a police station to file a complaint. At the police station, she became distressed by the offensive way the officers were speaking to her, and when she responded in kind they threw her onto the floor and pulled her coat up over her head to subdue her. They then charged her with indecent language and put her in a cell.

  When Denis learned of A’s whereabouts he went to the station and bailed her out. She had given police the car licence plate number of the offender and the case would have seemed, on the surface, to be quite straightforward. However, instead of arresting the perpetrator, police began a search for A, officiously visiting houses where they thought she might be staying. The manner in which they did this so upset people that they felt there was a real risk to A’s life. Hence Denis’ call. They wanted to smuggle her out of Queensland to a safe house.

  A was distraught when she arrived, and after I spoke to her I realised she was also suicidal. Her self-esteem was at an all-time low, she was stressed about her situation and desperately unhappy about having to leave her home and friends under these circumstances. As she became increasingly depressed I decided that a complete change of environment was required, she needed to go somewhere where she could feel safe and be in relaxed and caring company. I contacted my Maori friend, Hana, and asked if she and Syd would take A in if I could get her to New Zealand. Hana agreed.

  A’s predicament later became the subject of a pamphlet put out by a Canberra-based coalition, Joint Women’s Action and the Black Liberation Front, and was further discussed in the press. Her life has moved on far past these events and it would compound the tragedy to revisit them upon her now.

  A was just one of many Black rape victims I met during that time. The majority had not even contacted the police because they’d anticipated the reception they would receive. That A was an active member of the Black struggle for liberation had heightened her awareness and caused her to think she had a ‘right’ to protection by the police under the law. The fact that, in claiming this right, she had been forced to go into voluntary exile was pitiful and an indictment on police action and Australian social mores.

  Not long after this, the Australian Union of Students organised an information and support-seeking trip for me to Papua New Guinea, with visits planned to Rabaul, Lae and Port Moresby. In Rabaul, in the company of Mataungan Association leader John Kaputin, who later became a politician when Papua New Guinea was granted independence, and his parents and clan, I committed my first major international faux pax. At the beginning of a special lunch prepared in my honour, I was presented with a very large egg which had been simmered in coconut milk. Eggs were one of the foods I had eliminated from my diet as a means to avoid asthma and stomach upset, as I have an allergy to albumen. So I declined to accept it, although I noticed that no one else had been given one. John quietly tried to insist that I should eat it, but I was adamant. I was scheduled to speak to a large meeting that afternoon and couldn’t afford to risk not being at my best.

  Across the bay from Rabaul sits a huge volcanic mountain, and in the warm ashes near the top a local bird lays its eggs and leaves them to hatch. Eggs laid too high are exposed to excessive heat and perish. These are the only eggs that can be r
emoved. When a special guest is to be feted, youths from John’s village race each other across these shark-infested waters and up the mountainside to where their feet begin to burn in the ash. The first youth to locate an egg by delving around with their hand in the heat holds the prize aloft, and it is carried home and served to the honoured guest. If only I had known!

  The afternoon presentation turned out to be almost the largest, and certainly the most varied, assembly I have ever had the privilege of addressing. Representatives from three language groups attended, and each was provided with an interpreter who shared the platform with me, translating each sentence as it was spoken. A long and somewhat unwieldy process, the audience sat transfixed through more than five hours of talk. John expressed great satisfaction at the end. He told me it was the first Mataungan Association meeting that women had attended, and some of the people had walked through dense jungle for two days to be there. They had heard that ‘a woman warrior’ was going to speak and had made it their business not to miss me. I was humbled by their attention and flattered with their response. When the meeting broke up, the crowd surged forward to touch me. Elders, wearing local attire and adorned with feathers, paint, shell-money ropes around their necks and bones pierced through their skins, came up to shake my hands. One delved into his straw dilly-bag and rattled around, pulling out his only coin, a sixpence, which he extended to me to take to my people. I cannot adequately express the great pleasure this meeting gave me. It made all my work and the hardships I had been through feel worthwhile.

  In Lae I met Michael Somare, soon to become that country’s first prime minister. He seemed concerned that if he was seen to support my mission it may put him off-side with the Australian authorities who were then running his country. In Port Moresby, university students, artists and writers, including renowned poet John Kasaipwalova from the Tobriand Islands, organised my presentations and promised to support our struggle.

  On returning to Sydney Gary Williams and I, as key organisers for the forthcoming National Aborigines’ Day march, were summoned to Police Headquarters in Surry Hills. We were sat down in a room full of hefty white men—detectives—and told not to be nervous! I responded that I had more reason to be nervous than Gary, being the only female in the room. Everyone laughed, which broke the ice, and the police proceeded to question us politely about the route we planned to take and the number of people we thought would attend. The size of turnout, they said, would determine whether the police should halt traffic in the area so we could walk on the streets. Detective Fred Longbottom introduced himself as being in charge of the operation.

  As well, we had made a formal approach to the Town Hall as we wished to use the steps of the Town Hall, in the centre of George Street, as the platform for the speeches. Although many other demonstrations had been granted this leeway, we were told to use the back steps instead. Organisers became incensed by this rejection, interpreting it to mean that Blacks were, as usual, required to use the back door, to take the seat at the back of the bus. We could barely believe their insensitivity.

  When the day dawned, thousands of people turned up in Sydney. A large truck with a cage structure built into its back platform had been converted into a travelling kindergarten in which Koori children played as they participated. Transport had been provided to bring people in from La Perouse and other outlying suburbs.

  Unfortunately, despite our efforts to involve Aboriginal Elders and people who the police should have realised were quite moderate, uniformed officers seemed to anticipate trouble. Without provocation, they moved in to arrest some Black men, Will Ilolahea, visiting from New Zealand, amongst them. These actions angered the crowd and when we reached the Town Hall, we defied the authorities by setting up out the front. Some unionists began to urge the crowd to storm the steps, which were being guarded by a solid line of police.

  I could see alarm rising on the faces of many of the Black women and Elders in the crowd; they had come out to this—for many, their first demonstration—on the understanding that no one would provoke trouble or violence. So, I took the microphone and called for peace. Our union brothers, I said, were running ahead of us, and I called on them to remember that this was a Black demonstration and that they shouldn’t try to take our leadership away from us by trying to make people go in a direction they did not want to take. I was thoroughly and roundly applauded, and the afternoon newspaper labelled me a ‘Peacemaker’. This was one of the few caps created for me by the media that I was not unhappy to wear.

  Towards the end of the presentations, a message came to us up on the speakers’ platform that another of our number had been surreptitiously arrested. Gary Foley took the microphone and scattered expletives through his short address. Immediately I noticed the dismay of some the Elders and also that several officers had begun champing at the bit to arrest him. So I again took the microphone and said, ‘Well, Gary should not have said ****. But it’s a fact that a lot of innocent people have been arrested just for attending this march.’ We took up a collection to try to raise bail.

  As the crowd began to disperse, we noticed the police surging forward to nab Gary. Since I had used the same word, I suggested Gary stand towards the back of the underground railway entrance that we were using for a platform and I stood out on the edge, thinking they might arrest me instead. Given the overwhelming reception I had been given earlier by the crowd, arresting me would prove a very unpopular exercise and I was interested to see how the police would react. Instead, some police doubled around the back of the platform and grabbed Gary by the legs. Supporters on the platform grabbed his shoulders, and when I turned around I could see a tug of war going on, with slightly built Gary in danger of being torn in two.

  Quite suddenly, he wasn’t there. I asked, ‘Where’s Gary?’

  ‘Oh,’ said a Koori wag, quick as lightning, ‘we got him off the police and dropped him over the back into Town Hall station. He was last seen doing a hundred miles an hour in the station, and when a train came through doing only eighty miles, he slowed down and jumped on it!’ Talk about humour—there are some Blacks who can find something funny to say about almost everything.

  I confronted Detective Longbottom, whose face I had seen in the crowd. ‘Why did you try to arrest Foley?’ I asked.

  ‘He swore.’

  ‘So did I!’

  ‘I didn’t hear you swear,’ he replied.

  ‘I said ****,’ I persisted.

  ‘But I didn’t hear you,’ he said, patronisingly ignoring me and gazing up at the front of the Town Hall.

  ‘I said ****, ****, ****,’ I continued until I regained his attention.

  Shaking his forefinger at me, he said, ‘Ah, but I’d proceed against you by summons, if I had heard you,’ and then smirked and walked away.

  My reason for confronting the detectives, quite apart from the occurrence on that day, was because many of our key organisers were being constantly arrested on obscene language charges by police who used obscene language themselves in the process of the arrest. The result was that many organisers were almost afraid to come out of hiding for fear of being imprisoned for unpaid fines emanating from these petty and hypocritical charges. I also hoped to publicly highlight how selectively these charges were being brought, even amongst Black organisers.

  We were saddened that thirteen people had been arrested at our march, but heartened when the news came in that rallies had also taken place in Newcastle, Brisbane, Melbourne and Canberra. In Port Moresby, students had taken to the streets. In Lae, students had taken custody of an Australian Government representative who refused to pass on their message of protest to the Australian Government. When they set him free, he left the area when told that his safety could no longer be guaranteed. A rally was also held outside Australia House in London.

  As Canberra’s winter had deepened and our Embassy had continued to function, we’d begun to hear rumours that the government planned to change the law in order to move us. We had heard similar rumou
rs in the past, but some politicians had thought that when conditions became freezing, we would pack up our tents and go. How wrong they were! The additional hardship served to strengthen our resolve, especially when we compared our camp, in the middle of the nation’s capital and in full sight of the public eye, to the makeshift accommodation and harsh conditions that were permanently ‘home’ to the majority of Aborigines right across the country. We felt we couldn’t complain.

  Rumours of our imminent removal began to intensify. We had a variety of people in high places who channelled information to us, many of whom were unwilling to publicly identify themselves with our mission.

  A group of us were, as often happened, holding a planning meeting in Sydney when someone informed us that word had come in that the Embassy would be torn down and its residents evicted shortly after dawn the next day. Our informant had even sent several plane tickets to enable key people to fly in on the first plane. Gary Foley and I were amongst those elected by the group to go.

  When we arrived, early on the bright sunny though cold morning of Thursday, 20 July 1972, we found the Embassy residents already up, dressed and sitting around drinking cups of tea. They too had learned that Ralph Hunt, Minister for the Interior, had gazetted a Bill in the early hours of that morning to clear the way for our Embassy to be closed down. As we waited, more supporters began to arrive, Faith Bandler amongst them, as well as a small posse of reporters with cameras. We didn’t have too long to wait before a fleet of police cars and wagons hove into view.

  What followed was bedlam. We’d formed a circle, linking arms, around the Embassy’s central tent, singing ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ and watched as police tore down all the other tents and threw away people’s personal belongings. We were then ordered to stand aside, and when we refused to do so, we were attacked.