I started to make the rounds of a few African embassies, some of whose citizens had attended my presentations and had indicated to me that they thought their governments were sympathetic with the Black Australian cause.
Talk of the threat of my arrest had travelled widely, I found, and representatives at some embassies bluntly told me to go away. Even my presence at their offices was being construed as some sort of threat; it might draw the attention of police, might upset their aid relationship with Australia. I was disheartened. Tanzania, I’d been told, had a reputation for extending shelter to people, but that office also turned me down. Nigeria, which was one of the countries I hadn’t approached, contacted me and told me that I would be welcome there.
Around this time, while travelling to one of my rural engagements, I read in an English newspaper that the Aboriginal China tour was underway, and the report said the group was presently in Red Square. The thought of Cheryl Buchanan, Chicka and Gary discussing everything they saw and laughing together at the end of the day was in sharp contrast to my own isolation, and I burst into tears. Other passengers stared at me coldly.
The idea that I may have to abandon my life in Australia completely continued to cause me great stress. I was, by then, staying with Lynne and John Roberts, who were associated with Abjab. Lynne was well-known, had her own business and lived in a wealthy area of London, and I felt very safe under her aegis. I thought the police would be less likely to make another move against me while I was at her house. Everyone in her family was helpful and supportive towards me, and Lynne, noticing that I felt the bitter cold through the short cotton coat that Bruce McGuinness had taken off his back and given me for the trip, took me to a store and fitted me out in a wool-lined suede coat with pants to match. This generous gesture helped me overcome some of the very negative feelings I had about being in England.
Abjab decided it would be appropriate for me to travel to the US where I could try to interest representatives at the United Nations in our plight. I had already made one side trip, to Switzerland, where I met, amongst others, the Reverend Charles Spivey at the World Council of Churches. He had introduced me to Andrew Young, who would much later become the first Black US Ambassador to the United Nations.
In New York I first stayed at the flat of a young white Australian, Mark Lazaros, an ophthalmology student, who was somehow known to Abjab members. At the Methodist Mission to the United Nations I met an outgoing Black woman, Melba Smith, who invited me to stay at her place in Harlem. Under her guidance I was able to establish contact with a range of United Nations people, many of whom, unfortunately, turned out to be more interested in chatting me up than in taking a political interest in the conditions of Blacks in Australia.
I was in New York in December 1972 when the federal elections were held in Australia. I rang the Australian Consul’s office many times to try to get the results. Failing this, I then phoned some Australian media offices and, almost despairing at the disinterest exhibited by these expatriate reporters, finally learned that Labor, under Gough Whitlam’s leadership, had won. I felt enormously relieved. I could at last go home.
On my return to London, en route to Australia, my hosts, Lynne and John Roberts, organised a farewell party for me on my last night. At the height of the celebrations, at which there were many people who were strangers to me, I was approached by a man who, it turned out, was an Australian journalist. ‘Don’t you remember me?’ he asked. ‘I’m from Townsville. I used to stone you when you were little.’
I went into shock. Emotions and scenes from these childhood stonings flashed through my mind, mixed with emotions and memories of having been raped, beaten and left to die in the bush. My stomach turned over and, despite the bitterly cold London winter’s night, I walked out of my own party and prowled the streets for hours. When I came back and found the house in darkness, I slipped in to wash, rest and pack. I was on my way home.
9
My plane arrived in Sydney on the final day of a ten-day heatwave. I welcomed the simmering weather after my long sojourn out in the cold. Things in my flat looked askew. I soon found that my little address book full of international contacts was missing from a tiny space under the bottom drawer of the desk where I had concealed it. I would later discover passages of letters from Lionel Brockman to me had been printed in some newspapers. I asked the woman who lived next door if she had seen anyone entering my flat, and she had. She had watched two plain clothes men, she thought were police, go into my place.
I had written from London to Eric Strasser asking him to begin action so I could gain access to my children, and just over a week later William flew them down. I was so happy to see them and they to see me. I had brought them back clothes, toys and kites. We walked to nearby Moore Park to fly their kites on days when there was sufficient breeze. Eric and his wife Dee spent a day helping me entertain them, and Russel raved over Eric’s car, a Jaguar.
William rang every day the children were with me, not to speak to them but to be reassured that I intended to send them back. Over the time, however, I noticed a slight change in his conversation, a move from ‘send them back’ to ‘bring them back’. When I picked up on it, I said he had sent them in the care of a flight attendant, and I would do this too. No, he responded, I was to bring them. He would pay for my round trip ticket. To avoid further hassles I agreed, on the proviso that he arrange for me to stay elsewhere overnight other than at Mum’s house where he still lived.
I felt William regarded this as some sort of test. Would I, after spending a few weeks with my children, be able to leave them again? This stiffened my resolve to get custody of the children and stay in Sydney. After accompanying them home, talking with William and staying overnight with his friends, I hugged and kissed both children warmly.
Very shortly after this, William phoned again. He said he was putting Russel and Naomi on the next plane. Having to care for the children would stop me running around the world making trouble. Russel had mentioned to him about ‘the man with the Jaguar’ and, quick to assume that Eric was more than my solicitor and friend, William was very displeased. I had always believed it was inevitable that William would pass the children over to me and, not wishing to involve them in a legal tug of war, I’d just bided my time.
My bedsitter was too small for anything more than a visit from the children, I told him. I’d need two weeks in which to find a more suitable place.
While certainly true, there were other reasons why I did not want William to send the children down immediately. My phone number and address had been listed in the phone book under my name and I had, over the period of my occupancy, received a number of racist crank calls, including several death threats. A molotov cocktail had been left at my door, and other unsuccessful efforts made to kill or frighten me. During the children’s visit I had reasoned that, having just spent three months in England, the chance anyone knew yet that I was home was remote. After being back in Australia for a while though, the danger would return and increase. I would have to pay greater attention to the children’s security than I ever had to my own.
As well, the day after William rang me I was leaving to attend a regional planning committee meeting being held in Jamaica for the Sixth Pan-African Congress. I had received a call a few days earlier from a man, Roderick Francis, who had just returned to Jamaica from London. While in the UK he had read reports on my tour and, through one of the organisers, had located my number in Australia. In Jamaica, he had urged the conference to include the South Pacific region as part of the ‘Black world’, suggesting that I might be a likely representative.
Roderick turned out to be a wealthy eccentric who lived in a large rambling dirt-floor shack on a dairy farm which he owned. The New Zealand Dairy Company, he told me, had bought out the only milk processing plant on the island and closed it down, forcing farmers to sell their dairy cows to American farmers. New Zealand then began to export its dairy products to Jamaica. Roderick had held out against this.
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br /> Aged about eighty, he had seen an electric organ in England and decided he wanted to learn to play it. He had installed a wooden floor in one room to give the instrument stability, and he had electricity connected to just that one room. When he heard that I played keys, we spent a happy half hour or more playing duets, much to the amusement of the other delegates he was hosting.
I met many very significant people at this meeting, including Carlos Moore, who had been a Minister in Castro’s Cabinet but was living in exile in France at the time; Abdias di Nascimento, then in exile in the US but later to resume his position as the only Black senator in Brazil; and Mrs Garvey, widow of Marcus Garvey, leader of a broadbased ‘Back to Africa’ movement throughout the West Indies and North America. Mrs Garvey later organised for the speech I presented there to be published in an American magazine, Black World. It was the first article I had ever had published outside Australia.
The Australian Test Cricket team was in Jamaica when I arrived, and on the second evening Rastafarians came to the conference to inform me of the cricketers’ outrageous behaviour and sexual indiscretions. Wherever they played, I was told, they left a crop of ‘cricket babies’ to be born to young teenage girls who were unable to look after them. The strain on their families, I heard, was enormous, and the girls were scorned, their life chances diminished. As the majority of people of colour in Jamaica were poor, I was upset and ashamed to learn that white Australians were contributing to their poverty by refusing to acknowledge and support the women they impregnated and the babies they created. Other West Indians present agreed that this practice was not limited to Jamaica.
We talked, too, about the position of Blacks in Australia, and the Rastas asked me to write out some information on these conditions. A speedy writer, I quickly jotted down five or six pages of notes as I had all the information, including statistics, in my head.
The next night high-ranking police came to my hotel to question me. Did I know, they asked, that Rastas had that day handed out information sheets about conditions faced by Australian Aborigines outside the cricket ground? Did I, in fact, write the flier?
They warned me that if I wrote any more sheets I would be in serious trouble. The flier they showed me contained only a fraction of the information I had already written up, and I agreed not to write any more.
They came back the following night to show me another information sheet, and inquire if I was the author. This time they told me I was placing their country in a difficult position, because Jamaica and Australia were both members of the Commonwealth. Their prime minister did not want to do anything to embarrass Australia, which these revelations on Aboriginal conditions would surely do.
On my last night in the country, senior police came again with yet another handout and told me they had no option but to deport me. I wasn’t afraid, although I could see they were grim. I informed them then of the political situation in Australia, how our government had recently changed through an election which Prime Minister Manley may not yet have heard about. I said that the present government would not be embarrassed by health, education, unemployment and environmental conditions described in the fliers. It would condemn them as the work of the previous government, which had been in power for the last twenty-three years. My deportation, I added, would be an embarrassment, for Jamaica not for Australia. If they were determined to deport me, I continued, even though I had planned to leave the next day, I’d be happy to wait a few more days to give them time to process their paperwork.
The police apologised and I left the next day. Following comments I made after my return I was contacted by a courageous person, Graeme Orr, who had previously played international cricket for Australia. He had left the game, he said, because he’d been unable to tolerate the racist behaviour of his fellow players.
On arriving back from Jamaica, I changed planes in Sydney and flew to Canberra where a Black conference had been convened. Arriving on its second day, I was concerned to hear that ‘Islanders’ had been expelled from the meeting. ‘Who’s doing this, and how are they deciding who is an Islander?’ I asked the first person I met there. ‘Sydney Blacks are behind this, and it’s on hair,’ I was told.
I was hit with the sharp memory of this same modus of separation which had occurred at St Joseph’s Orphanage in Rockhampton when I was a child. Brother and sister, separated; members of the same family, separated—on the basis of their straight or curly hair. It was hard to believe Blacks were now doing the same thing to each other. I walked into the auditorium where the conference was being held and sat down.
On the platform I saw many of the familiar faces, and in the first few rows sat a number of traditional Aboriginal people, mainly men. I listened to the proceedings, which seemed quite ordinary. The expulsions of the previous day were not mentioned. Kevin Gilbert, no longer on parole and consequently able to travel to Canberra, came up to sit beside me, and I whispered to him what I had heard.
‘Those fellows,’ he said, indicating the people who sat on the stage, ‘made the tribal people think that after they fought to get their land off the white fellahs, they’d have to fight to get it off the Islanders too. Not everyone here agrees—but no one wants to be seen to oppose the traditional people. You know how it is.’
‘So what about me?’
‘You’re with me,’ Kevin responded. You’ve been one of us since the beginning, and if they put you out they put me out too.’ Although I appreciated Kevin’s gesture of friendship, I asked him politely to move away. He knew the reason—I wanted to see if anyone was going to say anything about my hair and, if so, I didn’t want his presence to deter them.
During the morning tea break I saw Faith Bandler, who I’d learned was one of the people expelled from the conference, talking earnestly in the foyer. She was with her old FCAATSI colleague, Gordon Bryant, the new Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Labor government. Faith, I thought, had been in the struggle before many of these young Turks were even born. We had reached a very sad day in Black affairs!
After this episode I began to seriously question some of the dicta of the Black movement. The cry for ‘Black unity and solidarity’, it seemed to me, was being manipulated. It was trotted out in the main to prevent Blacks who were being victimised within the movement from discussing their pain with outsiders. Sayings such as, ‘Don’t argue in front of whites’ and ‘Keep Black things in-house’ were being evoked in an effort to create an unjust class structure even within the group active in the struggle against inequality.
I determined then to work with those Kooris who I felt were doing honest and important work, not armchair critics. I would leave alone those people driven by goals of complete self-interest who promoted separatism. Unity and solidarity were important, but it was equally important to sort out how these ideas were to be used effectively. Otherwise they threatened to become vehicles for severe social disruption within the Black community. Dispossession and the concept of justice through land rights, for example, were critical issues that needed to be supported and promoted by everyone, black and white. However, advocacy of these issues did not mean that all supporters and promoters, themselves, intended to make land claims.
Discrimination, selective prosecution and imprisonment, racism and racist violence were amongst the issues that affected every black person, and there was a great need in these areas for unity and solidarity to break these things down. Although I stayed on for the duration of the conference, I left very disheartened.
On my return to Sydney I received yet another blow. Ian rang from Melbourne to inform me that, in my absence, he had attended a party where he had heard me being defamed. The Minister for Science and External Territories, Mr William Morrison, had told a roomful of people that I would go far, that I’d slept my way to the top. Ian had been astounded and challenged the minister. In response, Mr Morrison had listed names of politicians or their family members with whom he claimed I had had affairs. Ian made a note of the names, and spoke to other
people at the party who were prepared to go to court on my behalf if I wanted to sue. Furthermore, he had made a cursory check of the list to find that a politician’s son, with whom the minister had alleged I had had intimate relations, was only twelve years old. Mr Morrison had concluded his attack by saying to Ian, ‘What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you getting yours?’ Ian was livid and urged me to take action.
I considered all the people who had worked so hard to help bring about a change of government, and all the people who I hoped would benefit. The new government had been in power just two months. Would I be the first to try to bring it down, after all that I had gone through to help it gain power? Yet I had to do something. I didn’t know Mr Morrison, and couldn’t fathom why he would make such false accusations against me, not to mention sullying the names of his Labor Party colleagues.
I wrote him a letter.
Dear Mr Morrison, I am aware that at XYZ address and at this specific time, in the company of Messrs A, B and C, and witnessed by D, E and F, you did make the following remarks about me.
As well as advising him that I was sending copies of my letter to all the people whose name he had mentioned, I demanded an apology. I further told him that his behaviour was sexist and racist, and that as the position of Minister for External Territories would bring him into contact with non-white countries, especially Papua New Guinea, I regarded him as totally unfit for the job.
In addition to the men whose names he had mentioned, I sent a copy of my letter to Gough Whitlam’s wife, Margaret. While I chose not to make a formal complaint, I wanted the matter dealt with broadly in-house, not swept under the carpet.
The only response I received was from Barry Cohen, MP, who had been a familiar figure around the Aboriginal Embassy and was known by almost everyone there. He phoned to tell me Mr Morrison had been confronted by many of his parliamentary colleagues, that the only excuse he had offered was that he was drunk at the time, and that he was now living in fear of reading a newspaper in case he should find the matter on the front page.
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