They’re over here. They’re both here.’ And then to us, ‘Come on you, get up. Come on, wake up. Time to go.’
Dellie was slower to wake. The man bent down and hauled us both to our feet.
I asked, suspiciously, ‘Who are you?’
‘Police. Come on, let’s go.’
We were taken to the police station where several detectives sat around questioning us about why we had run away and where we thought we were going. I told them about being expelled from school, and one of them remembered me from my previous report about Arthur. They seemed sympathetic and told us that Mum had come down first thing in the morning to report us missing. We wondered how they’d found us but were too nervous to ask.
When they took us home in a police car, Mum already knew we were coming and was waiting for us on the verandah. She was angry and, stiff-lipped, she thanked the policeman who brought us in. Then she turned her wrath on us as soon as he had gone down the stairs. She called us sluts and accused us of having run away with boys, made us take off our clothes and examined our underwear; I had no idea what for.
When she finally exhausted her rage and was willing to listen for a minute, I told her what had happened at the school. That I’d run away so I wouldn’t have to disappoint her, and that Dellie had just come with me because she had heard me getting ready to go. Mum calmed down a bit towards us when she heard this, but she set her face in a very hard expression which lasted for days. She wouldn’t give us food that night, saying that we should be happy to starve at home since we’d been happy to starve in the quarry. On Sunday she made us work ail day, finding all sorts of jobs for us to do. And she made us work separately, as she said that I was a troublemaker and I had led my sister into mischief.
On Monday, Mum told me to stay at home while she took Dellie and Leonie to school. She was away for a long time, and when she came back, Mum said that she’d been to see Sister Joan. She had told Mum that I’d been expelled because I had tattoos all over my back, and I was turning into a very rough sort of girl whom they didn’t want at the school. She had said that I was a bad influence on the other girls, who were trying to be good Christians.
As she was leaving St Pat’s, Mum had hurled the rosary beads and cards Sister Joan had given me down the hall and called Sister Joan a hypocrite, at the top of her voice.
After this, she had gone straight to the police, who’d promised to make their own inquiries of Sister Joan. Then she came home and ripped the shirt off my back. Mum said she knew that I didn’t have tattoos, but Sister Joan had been so definite that she just had to check. I had no tattoos on my back or anywhere else, which Mum surely would have known if she had ever come with me to the swimming pool.
During the week the police reported to Mum that they’d been unable to influence Sister Joan, and that my expulsion had to stand. Mum sent me down to the state high school to see if I could be enrolled there. The headmaster told me to come back the next day. I was afraid to go there because I hadn’t been to a coeducational school since third grade, but I knew it was my only hope. Next day the headmaster told me that I couldn’t attend his school. When Mum spoke to him about his decision she was told that it was because my cousin, Betty, was there, and the headmaster had said that he understood that we ran wild together. Mum knew I hadn’t even seen Betty for months and none of us had any idea what she might have been up to, but Mum had found it impossible to convince him otherwise. ‘Tell her to come back and try next year,’ he had said as she was leaving.
Although Betty was as fair-skinned as my mother, she was the only girl of ‘colour’ I’d seen attending that school. The headmaster had told Mum that he couldn’t have the two of us’ there. In her own way, Mum was as shocked as I was by this turn of events, and her impotence to help and protect me made her very gruff with me. As for my own feelings, I was reeling from the devastation of my life and the injustices that were happening to me. I’d still harboured the childish notion that mothers could somehow make things right, straighten out the world and save their children’s rapidly collapsing dreams. When Mum was unable to do this, I felt betrayed. I could feel myself being pushed towards the wretchedness and despair of the Aboriginal women whose eyes I’d looked into at the maternity hospital, and I had to find some way to resist.
‘What happens to me now?’ I asked her, as there were no other high schools.
I was shocked when Mum said, ‘Well, you’re fourteen. You could get married.’ For heaven’s sake, I hardly even knew any boys and the ones I did were about fourteen or fifteen years old. Mum said Catholics like girls to marry early, and that in Spain and Italy many girls were married by fifteen. I had to remind her that I wasn’t going to be a Catholic any longer because they were such hypocrites.
‘You get a job then, that’s what happens,’ Mum said.
Over the next few weeks I scoured the employment column every day, but jobs in Townsville were generally advertised by word of mouth. Somebody always had a relative or knew of a friend looking for work. Because I’d been fixated on becoming a doctor, Mum told me to go up to the Townsville General Hospital and find out about becoming a nurse’s aide, until I was old enough to take up training. I wasn’t happy about this but it seemed like the next best thing. I was even less happy when I was told not to bother writing out an application—because dark girls couldn’t train as nurses at their hospital.
I was beginning to despair when Mum brought in the newspaper and pointed out an ad for a store hand at the Town Hall newsagency, in Flinders Street. The shop was about three doors down from Stuart Ritchie’s chemist shop, and Mum told me to ask Mr Ritchie if he would kindly give me a reference. He said he would be happy to, and that he’d walk down and tell Mr Foley personally how pleased he had been with my work.
My job at the newsagency was to unpack crates of books, comics and toys at the back of the store. Almost every morning, large crates were delivered and I had to count the items, tick them off against the invoice, make a note when orders were short, then dust the goods down and take them to the front of the store.
After I had been there a short while I would be asked occasionally to help out behind the counter during rush periods, and eventually I came to relieve staff on lunch breaks and sick days Mr Foley was a good-natured man, well-known around the town, and he also lived ‘through’ the cutting that ran along our street.
When Sister Joan put me out of St Pat’s, Mum had taken my sisters away too and enrolled them in state schools. She said she didn’t want them mixing with hypocrites who were supposed to save souls but who instead threw souls out—if they were coloured—and into circumstances where they were likely to get lost.
Dellie began to run around with girls I didn’t know, white girls from her new school, and we started to grow apart. My job meant that I was coming and going at different hours from her, and she and Leonie were doing things much more by themselves. I continued to put in a lot of time at the pool, but my trainer had told me that they had refused my application to enter the Townsville to Magnetic Island swim. I had to have a three-year clean bill of health after meningitis before they’d be prepared to take the risk. I suppose they didn’t want me dying on the way. On weekends I was swimming twice the required distance in laps, so there was no chance that I’d exhaust myself with the effort, but the officials remained unconvinced.
Dessie and Reg Mills had moved back to Townsville and lived in a Housing Commission building at Garbutt with their growing family. Housing Commission dwellings were just old aeroplane hangars with rusting roofs and a fibro wall down the centre, which divided them in two. Their internal walls didn’t reach the floor or roof, so privacy was minimal.
Reg drank a lot and several times he tried to molest me when he’d been drinking. Even when he hadn’t been drinking, and when Dessie was out of earshot, he’d make suggestions that my breasts would grow if someone massaged them. The idea of showing any male the two tiny peas which had formed on my chest was laughable, so I made it my busin
ess to avoid being alone with him. Nevertheless, I often went to Dessie’s place to escape being at home, and it was a base to hang around and from which to go places with my friends. From Dessie’s house I was able to go to the Garbutt picture theatre without having to worry about how to get back to my home.
Mum said she would buy a car for Arthur and me; Mum didn’t drive. She and Dessie had both told me their versions of how, before I was born, Dessie had run out into the street from between two parked cars when she saw Mum driving along in a car, and Mum had accidentally run over her. Mum hadn’t driven since that day, and swore she would never drive again. Arthur didn’t have a licence and I was too young to get one, but that didn’t stop Mum. She bought an old Vanguard, and Arthur practised until he got his licence. She also coached him with the road rules.
Arthur was always telling stories about what a hero he’d been during the war, a rear gunner, and it seemed strange that he hadn’t learned to drive during that time. Later, his mother and brother, Ivor, told Mum that Arthur had not been in the war at all. Ivor had been called up, but Arthur had been a barber in Wales—just as he was in Townsville.
Although Arthur could sign his name, make change for the price of his haircuts and other ordinary purchases, he was illiterate. Often, to our mirth, he had difficulty with words written and spoken. We had often cracked up hearing comments he made, such as when we wanted to go somewhere suddenly, he would say, ‘If you’d told me earlier I’d have got myself repaired.’
With Mum’s help, Arthur struggled to learn the rules of the road off by heart. Once he became a licensed driver he began to referee soccer games in the surrounding towns. Mum would always sit in the front seat of the car to read the road signs to him.
My sisters were made to go to the matches, and from time to time I’d agree to go too, as I was interested in exploring the nearby towns, such as Ayr, Homehill and Ingham. We went to Lucinda Point, near Ingham, which at the time consisted only of a long and beautiful deserted sandy beach with a pier running out into the water. I fell in love with it and schemed to go back there, to immerse myself in its magic.
I agreed to go to any soccer games that were scheduled for Ingham, but when we were almost there I’d set up some ploy designed to get them to drop me at Lucinda Point and pick me up after the game. Frequently it worked.
The main attractions for me there were the peace and beauty, and an old Black man, who lived somewhere nearby, whom I had met on our first visit to the beach. I had run along the dunes and suddenly stumbled into a big depression in the sand in which sat this old man and his dog. The dog leapt up to bark at me and the old man silenced him with some foreign-sounding words spoken in his very soft voice. The dog had slunk back behind the man, watching me, and I’d spoken briefly to the man and run off. But there was something about him and his aura which found their way into my dreams, and I longed to return to the Point.
The next time I convinced Mum and Arthur that I’d rather spend my time at Lucinda Point instead of watching sweaty men run around kicking a ball, I took along a towel and a sandwich. The beach stretched for miles and was devoid of any sign that anyone had ever been there; not even a footprint sullied the smooth golden sand. I was afraid to wander further up the beach again in case the dog was around. Instead, after a few splashes in the water, I lay on my back above the waterline, peacefully engrossed in an inspection of the red glow of the sun on the inside of my eyelids.
In a strange way I wasn’t surprised when the old man’s shadow suddenly cooled my feet and caused me to open my eyes and jump up into a sitting position to check out where the dog was.
‘You again, eh,’ he said. His dog stood behind him, watching me warily. I noticed the dog was old too, but I didn’t trust strange dogs old or young. ‘Where you from?’
‘America,’ I answered, hoping to impress him. He continued to look at me carefully and I was glad I’d pulled my shorts and top on over my togs because, although he wasn’t looking at my body or legs, I curiously felt a bit immodest.
The old man made a clucking sound with his mouth and turned to walk away. It felt as if there was only him and me in the world and in that moment I became desperate for him not to leave.
‘Don’t you believe me?’ I called at his back. He was wearing an old pair of pants rolled up almost to his knees, and his stick legs bore shiny scars on the skin of his calves.
‘No.’ He muttered more words I didn’t understand, and I wasn’t even sure that he was speaking to me. The sea rolled behind him, keeping up its own deep sounds, making his voice harder to hear. Then I realised he wasn’t speaking in English.
‘Well, I’m from Townsville.’
‘You got no pidgin?’
I didn’t know what this meant, so I just said no.
‘I know your people.’ My ears pricked up. ‘Snake people from north.’
‘D’ya want some of my sandwich?’ I asked, trying to get him to sit down on the sand and talk to me for a while.
This was the first of several chats we had during that soccer season.
Over time, I learned that the old man lived alone in a shack nearby where, he said, he had everything he needed. He told me wondrous stories about crocodiles, which he said were plentiful in the rivers north, and of sharks and other creatures. At times he seemed angry that I didn’t already know the stories he was telling me, and he complained that ‘children today know nothing’.
Of ‘my people’, he had little to say, and didn’t want to be drawn further on the question. He did tell me, however, that snake people have to look out for dogs because many breeds of dogs attack snakes. I was a bit amused by this because, in my mind, I had come to fancy myself as the taipan, the deadliest snake in Ram Chandra’s collection, even though I would begin to tremble whenever I saw a dog. When I asked the old man if I was a taipan, he shook his head. ‘No, not taipan. You fella snake fall on ‘im and kill ‘im, hug ‘im to death.’ I didn’t see myself falling on any dog and hugging it to death, but then I hadn’t yet heard about the huge pythons that live in the tropical rainforests and can throttle a bullock to death in their coils.
He said he ‘watch the weather’, and when I asked him if he had some sort of rain dance, he laughed. ‘No need to ask for water ‘round here,’ he eventually replied. ‘Everything green, that sugar cane, trees. Dance over there.’ He indicated the land behind us, the west.
The old man could tell days in advance when a storm or a cyclone was going to hit, and he would walk up to higher land when he saw floods coming. He complained that no one wanted to know his secrets about how he saw the weather coming. When I offered to learn he startled me by leaning towards me and running his hand over my head, feeling the bristly short curls which Mum kept cropped close to my head. ‘Sure you girl?’ he asked. ‘Only boy can learn. Humbug nephew.’
Arthur stopped going to Ingham because the players on one team held him upside down by his ankles when they won. Everything in his pockets fell onto the ground, money, keys, the lot. He and Mum talked about it all the way back to Townsville, while we kids rolled our eyes and giggled in the back seat.
Mum thought the players’ joke was disrespectful, that they only did it because Arthur was so short, and she insisted he wasn’t to go back until the club had apologised to him. Arthur said that the team had bought him drinks afterwards in the pub, while Mum had waited in the car. But she said this wasn’t good enough, they had to know they’d done the wrong thing. Arthur wanted to let it rest because he liked feeling needed, and being a referee made him feel as if he had some authority over the big brawny players. He continued to referee in Townsville, Ayr and Homehill, and the following year he resumed driving to Ingham. By that time, however, I was no longer living at home.
The old man’s words about ‘my people’ kept popping up in my dreams, pushing me to find out more about myself. So again I tackled my mother, this time taking another tack.
‘Is there Aboriginal blood in our family?’ I asked her one day, whi
le I was holding a long piece of fabric clear of the floor as she sewed it.
‘Every family that’s been up here for more than two generations has got a touch of the tar,’ she responded, quite absent-mindedly.
I was so stunned by her answer that I couldn’t think of what to ask next. ‘Almost every family,’ she corrected herself.
‘Well, why don’t we ever say we’re Aboriginal?’
‘Because we’re not! Don’t start that business again, Roberta.’ Mum was growing angry now and her attention was no longer distracted by the sewing.? touch of the tar doesn’t make a person an Aborigine. Nobody in their right mind would want to be an Aborigine. You want to live in a bush hut? Then, say you’re an Aborigine! You want to live worse than an animal?’
‘But you’re always saying I should be proud to be a coloured girl. When I ask you about where the colour comes from, you always talk about how rotten black people live, how they swing from trees and live in mud.’
I could feel another full-blown row about to erupt, and was relieved when Mum took a deep breath and went back to plying her needle and cranking her treadle.
At the next break, while she made her adjustments to the sewing, she continued. ‘You’re as good as a white person, and if you behave yourself properly, they’ll treat you like a white person. You’ll get the same opportunities, and the same chance to make a decent life for yourself. If you want to keep hanging around with the darkies at Garbutt, then you’ll get pregnant and nothing will save you. You’ll end up living in a bloody humpy and having a tribe of kids that the government’ll take away from you. So you hear me straight, you’re as good as a white person and you’ve got to act like a white person, or I won’t be responsible for your fate. That’s all I’m going to say on the matter.’
Snake Cradle Page 15