Snake Dancing
Page 18
Abjab organisers had decided they not only wanted a speaker, they also wanted someone who could write, which was why they had chosen me. Their invitation caused some jealousy and friction in certain sections of the Black community, and a telegram denouncing me as ‘elitist and counter-revolutionary’ was anonymously sent to the organisers. When this telegram was read to me over the phone I immediately recognised the likely author, and chose to confront the person at an organising meeting held one evening in the Shepherd Street building.
As well as the usual Black community organisers, a visiting Quaker, Charlotte Meachim, and several union members, including Bob Pringle, and a Communist Party member, Denis Freney, were among the non-Aboriginal people present at this meeting. Without having to say a word or voice my accusation, Gary Foley took the floor and issued an apology to me on behalf of himself and others who had helped pen their vicious words. He gave no reason for their actions, but I suspected that they had been all sitting around one night, smoking dope, and someone came up with what they all, in a drug-induced haze, thought was a terrific idea. In the cold reality of day, however, they had regretted their actions and were into damage control. I was reputed to have a true and sharp tongue and no one wanted a few lashes, but still I was hurt.
While in the process of preparing for the trip, an invitation had arrived through Chicka Dixon for ten or so Blacks to go to China. Chicka asked me to join the party he was putting together, but because of my previous commitment, and even though I yearned to travel with a Black group instead of alone, I felt obliged to decline. It seemed to me that this invitation, which had also been extended to Gary and his cohorts, had more to do with their change of mind than with anything I was likely to say or do. Suddenly everyone felt wanted and was going somewhere. Perhaps they realised there was no place for envy and jealousy in the work we were trying to do.
I shared with no one that I was hurt, not angered, by their stupid actions. All the anger I carried was directed towards white institutions and individuals responsible for committing or condoning or choosing to remain ignorant about the atrocities that had been perpetrated on me and on other Blacks. I had no anger left to spare to lay on any of the people who I saw as the victims.
Because the flight to England was so long, I had requested three free days upon my arrival in which to orient myself and recover. I was quite appalled, therefore, when I reeled out of Customs, jet-lagged and weary, to find a press conference had been set up for me. This event, unfortunately, set the pace for my visit and I was rushed all over the country, giving talks to any group that had organised a venue and audience.
My primary hosts on arrival were a couple, Mr and Mrs Canteri. I shared their upstairs flat in a large house converted to apartments. I was taken aback to find that, although Australians, their bathroom had been turned into a storeroom, which I understood to be an English habit. I had limited my obsessive showering, cut down from six to two times a day. Nevertheless, I was distraught when I realised it would be nigh impossible to shower even once a day while I was there. Carl Canteri professed himself to be of communist persuasion and was critical of my need for privacy and personal hygiene.
The program that had been organised for me was extensive, and included television, radio and magazine interviews as well as speeches at public venues and tertiary institutions. I arrived in September and an Australian election was to be held in December, so a large part of my work was intended to politicise Australian expatriates and encourage them to vote for a change of government. Labor had been in the wilderness for twenty-three years.
It may have been a slow season for the media in England because news of my visit was quickly picked up and I was on everything, including the front cover of The Observer’s colour magazine. A BBC television program, ‘Late Night Line Up’, usually segmented like ‘Sixty Minutes’, devoted an entire hour to an interview with me.
As well, quite early on, Abjab organisers were contacted by Lord Vestey, who wished to invite me to lunch for an opportunity to talk. He had recently been in Australia and had been horrified by a demonstration against his company during which Blacks had sat in the street wearing signs saying: ‘Vesteys suck Black blood’. Unfamiliar with getting around London I took a taxi to the restaurant instead of travelling by underground, and arrived an hour late. Lord Vestey, a quite young man, however, was still waiting and lunch turned out to be a strange experience.
The restaurant he had chosen was expensive, and he said I could have anything I wished. Sensing my concern at the cost, he confided, ‘The price of meat in England is ridiculous.’ As I understood from research of his family’s extensive global investments, they controlled the price of beef throughout the world. I was, therefore, very interested to hear his comment. We talked about the Gurindji People’s strike on his property at Wave Hill, in the Northern Territory. He explained that he had been trying to excise land to return to the traditional owners for some years but had been prevented from doing so by the incumbent government. We also discussed the widespread incidence of sexual abuse of Aboriginal girls as young as seven on stations he owned, which had been documented in the book The Vestey Story, researched and published by the Australian Meatworkers Union. He admitted that he had learned of these allegations and was mortified. But it was obvious to me that he didn’t feel personally responsible, though he said he would sack any of his employees if he found them to be in any way involved in these practices. He also said he would instruct his Australian manager to make a contribution to the Aboriginal Medical Service to assist with its work. In due time, a small cheque did, in fact, arrive.
Everything on the tour was going quite smoothly, if being run ragged can be considered smooth, when I travelled to Blackpool to attend an important Labour Party conference at which I met many people I had heard about. On my return to London Carl met me at the station, a most unusual event as I normally had to find my way around this strange city completely alone. He said we were going home by taxi, but before we left the station he wished to speak with me.
The police, he told me, had called at the house. He understood they had a warrant for my arrest on charges of assisting an escapee. He had given them an approximate time that I would be home and asked them to come back then.
My mind went into overdrive. I did not know what Carl was talking about, but I knew I had done nothing illegal. I was angry that he had told the police the likely time of my return. I asked him to ring his wife and tell her I hadn’t arrived, and to say that the next train was due in a few hours. He did so reluctantly.
We sat in silence while I turned my brain to the problem in hand. Eventually I asked Carl to ring his wife again and ask if the police had returned and whether she had passed on the mis-information. They had just left so we leapt in a cab and made a dash to the house. I hoped to be safely installed by the time they came again.
I told Carl he was to tell the police I wasn’t home, that I hadn’t returned on the later train, and he was now expecting me to arrive perhaps the next day. He replied that neither he nor his wife were happy to tell lies to protect me, not even to give me time to phone Australia to find out what was going on.
Well, I thought, if Carl wasn’t prepared to tell the police I wasn’t there, then the only thing I could do was, in fact, to not be there. To their dismay I threw my things into my suitcase and walked out of their house into the night.
I had no money and didn’t know a soul, apart from the acquaintances I had made in the process of doing media interviews. One of these, Peter Foges, the producer of ‘Late Night Line Up’, however, had been particularly kind and interested. From a phone box a few blocks away from the flat I called the television station. When he came on the line I was brief. His program was due to go to air in a few minutes and he had little time to talk. He said finding alternative accommodation for me would be no problem, and proposed his mother’s house or that of an ex-girlfriend. He explained that these would be open to me even if I was in trouble with the police. He as
ked me to take a cab to the house of some other friends of his, and he would come by as soon as he had finished work.
When I was ensconced in the house owned by his mother, I rang Carl’s flat daily, without giving him a clue as to my whereabouts, to inquire if he had received any further information. I also rang home.
It was being alleged that on my way to England I had travelled via Perth, where I was supposed to have lodged a large sum of money into the account of Lionel Brockman for him to use to escape. Other rumours abounded. I was supposed to have hired a light plane and left it near the prison. I was supposed to have supplied him with cars and all manner of other things. A warrant for my arrest had been taken out by the Western Australian Government, though presumably the government would have given the papers to the Federal Police in Canberra in order for the London police to be acting on them. I was deeply alarmed.
News of the threat I was under obviously went out on the grapevine, because I was surprised to receive a message from a man in London I didn’t know, a lawyer, Benedict Birnberg. Some years before, I learned, he had assisted in the defence of Richard Walsh, my old boss at Nation Review, and Richard Neville, during their trial for obscenity regarding their magazine, Oz. He had maintained his interest in Australia and was offering to defend me for free.
I went alone by cab to a darkened house in a suburban area, the address Benedict Birnberg had given me on the phone. I was loath to let the cab go because there appeared to be no one at home. When I knocked, however, the door opened a crack and I slipped into the dim hall. Mr Birnberg ushered me into an office, where only a table lamp burned to relieve the gloom. We talked.
Mr Birnberg had a good sense of the dramatic and, having learned that I was scheduled to give a public address at the London Town Hall in a few days, he suggested that I remain in hiding until that date. If the police were going to arrest me, we should engineer for them to do it there in front of the expected large audience. He could, he promised, stave off an extradition order for a month or six weeks, and have me released on bail for a period. This would create the opportunity for me to use a very public platform from which I could talk about the persecution of my people, using my own arrest as an example. He would, he said, be present in the audience at the Town Hall, though not conspicuously. He would only emerge if his services were needed.
I was not the only speaker scheduled to make an address that night, but even so I was surprised at the huge audience of several hundreds which greeted me when I arrived. I was to share the platform with Mervyn Hartwig, Professor Fred Rose and Hannah Middleton. So many attended that they were unable to fit everyone into the auditorium and had to seat some in a nearby room where they could hear but not see, and to where we were asked to adjourn after the address to give the overflow a chance to talk with us.
I was extremely nervous and on edge as I made my way towards the stage, and every hand that reached out to either wave or welcome me I suspected was that of a plainclothes police officer.
Unbeknown to me, however, at home in Australia some journalists had gone to work and had investigated the basis of the charges being made against me. They found, of course, that these charges were completely without foundation, that I had not even been in Western Australia for almost a year, that no plane had been used in Lionel’s walkout of the minimum security prison in which he had been housed, and any money that had been sent had been quite openly mailed to Lionel’s wife to help her with the expenses of the children.
Whatever happened to the charges, warrant and extradition order, I have no idea. They were never served. I came off the platform at the London Town Hall and had coffee with friends before returning to the home of the television producer’s mother. I then continued with my other public speaking commitments and no one ever approached me.
Mum and other members of my family at home in Australia had opened their newspapers one day to find my name on the front page. ‘BOBBI SYKES SOUGHT IN ENGLAND’, the headlines proclaimed. Mum almost had a heart attack. William felt himself justified in keeping Russel and Naomi away from me. I was a bad mother and not worthy of them. I struggled with the knowledge that I might have an enormous fight on my hands to convince any court that I was law-abiding and upstanding. I felt a great urge to see the little ones, to let them know I was not the bogey-man that these articles projected me to be.
I threw myself even harder into my work, agreeing to give talks in increasingly remote towns and villages around England. During these travels I was scheduled to arrive in Birmingham, go on to speak at Warwick, then return the next day to give an address at the Birmingham venue. I was unaware that there was anything extraordinary about this leg of the tour until I was already on the train. I had been surprised and indeed a little suspicious in London when I was told that an Abjab organiser would accompany me part of the way.
The young organiser disappeared to another carriage and I was left alone to read my book, but he returned as we reached our destination. He had something he wanted to tell me, he said, something he thought I should know. A Black group had put their hands up to be the local organisers of my presentation in Birmingham, but Abjab contacts had thought they might not have been able to attract a sufficiently large audience and had instead given the task to a white group.
Members of the Black group had gone to the office a couple of times to raise their objections, and on the last occasion had become enraged and assaulted people including, according to the organiser, a pregnant woman. I thought this was fine news to be presenting me with just as the train was pulling into the station. My estimation of Abjab’s organisational ability was quickly revised downwards. I was, he said, to be on my guard. The upshot of all this was that there were now to be two presentations in Birmingham.
A car whisked us away to Warwick, where Germaine Greer had agreed to share the platform at my public talk. She had also invited me to stay at her house nearby in Coventry overnight before returning to Birmingham.
The meeting was held in a tiered auditorium with swing doors leading outside. We had not long started our presentation when these doors were swung open to reveal a group of Blacks, in the main, men. One was wearing a high crocheted cap in bright colours and when, with an exaggerated theatrical gesture, he took off this cap his long Rastafarian dreads whipped out. I didn’t need two guesses to know who these people were.
Our talk was stopped by this sudden interruption and I was anxious to keep the peace and to get things back on track again, so I said, ‘Welcome, Brothers. Please take a seat,’ and gestured towards the auditorium. From behind me came a loudly hissed comment: ‘Black male chauvinist pigs are as bad as white male chauvinist pigs.’ Germaine! I could have happily strangled her. Fortunately if the Rastafarians had heard her remark they decided to ignore it.
When the presentation resumed the Rastafarians began to gently snipe, asking me inappropriate questions designed, I thought, to elicit whether or not I had known about Abjab’s refusal to allow them to organise a meeting. I replied that we would have plenty of time to talk later, and would they please keep their questions until then.
At the conclusion of the presentations, organisers took up a collection to cover costs and make a contribution towards the Aboriginal program I had talked about. Although it was not really my business, I took charge of the cloth bag in which the notes and coins had been placed. Outside I could see the Rastafarians milling and I wanted, at all costs, to avoid more trouble, and I felt a gesture of my goodwill was necessary to ensure that end. I took the bag over to them, told them I was having dinner with a friend and asked them to mind the bag for me until the next day. Surprise swept over their faces immediately, and I could see that my action had stirred their respect. I also knew that not one penny would be missing. We all went off quietly on our respective ways.
Germaine had a young pregnant woman living with her, and she told me she was looking forward to playing a parenting role. ‘I’ll be Papa,’ she laughed, and said she was taking driving lessons to p
repare for the part. After a pleasant dinner, the young woman went off to her room and Germaine and I sat by the fire with our legs stretched out before us, talking of many things, including our arrests, which had transpired since we had first met. We were like two old soldiers discussing the glories of our battles and our war wounds.
Next day in Birmingham I gave a presentation to a rather small white audience; the room had more empty chairs than full ones. I was almost concluding when a couple of Rastafarians arrived—they had arranged for me to spend the afternoon at their organisation before giving the presentation they had organised for the evening. They laughed and one shook his finger at an organiser over the tiny size of the audience he had attracted, but otherwise they seemed in good humour.
The Rastas had arranged for me to speak in a community hall. It had plywood windows that could be propped open on sticks, which reminded me very much of buildings at home. We arrived early and when people, mainly West Indians and Africans, began to roll in I was very pleased with the extent of their interest. The hall was filled to capacity with adults and many children, and despite it being a very cold evening, a lot of others who were unable to fit in the hall stood outside peering in through the windows.
While the rest of the tour went off without any more upsets, I became increasingly distraught about the possibility of returning to Australia under the existing government, which had already demonstrated its hostile intent towards me. I hoped that the widespread efforts to bring about a change of government would be effective. However, I also began making discreet inquiries, in case they should fail, in the hope of a country offering me asylum. I feared I may have had to wait out a further term of the incumbents’ tenure before another attempt to dislodge them could be made. Because of all the things I had already witnessed and heard, I frankly feared for my life and certainly for my freedom if I was to return to Australia.