In Brisbane he met Alison Dawson, a social worker from Bourke. She took him in, put up with his moods and his drinking. He’d been so angry — not at Alison, but at life — that he lashed out at her. She took it, his beating her, several times until she told him that he had to stop thumping her or go. So he left, and blamed her for it.
He moved further north to the hot, sticky cane fields where people did not ask questions. In Townsville, he finally married Linda Dillon, a waif-like woman, fragile as a breath. After the backbreaking work of cutting cane, the softness of Linda seemed to be the answer to the restlessness and the running that was exhausting him. In the summer nights that grudgingly gave hours of dark, he would hold Linda tightly in his arms, feeling as though he had at last found the kind of love that people wrote songs about.
When Linda became pregnant, Danny had at first thought that this was the beginning of his life. But the pressures of work, the pressures of fatherhood and the lack of sleep made his feet itch to take the first step out of the door. He stayed, but rather than leading to a life of stability, this only increased his frustrations, his moods, his anger.
Then he met Gloria, Gloria Davidson. She was the barmaid in the pub where he frequently ended up drunk. He moved in with her when he lost his job. She was one of those women, Danny knew, who thought that they could change him. All he needed was a good woman and Gloria thought she was that good woman. He knew Gloria was fighting a losing battle. He had lost his ability to respect those who loved him, to feel comfortable with their trust in him, when he was in the home. He blamed Bob for that.
Bob. His brother. Bob always conformed, tried too hard to please everyone around him. It was easier for him, with his lighter skin, to pretend that he was as normal as everyone else. He was always trying to get Danny to do what was expected. “Try to fit in,” he would say to him. Danny tried, but he knew that it didn’t matter what he did, people would always look down on him because of the colour of his skin. In a way he could not explain, he had always been jealous of Bob’s ease with others, the way people seemed just naturally to like him. No one ever liked Danny that way.
Bob’s friends, Charles and Benny, would corner Danny in dark places and punch him, telling him Bob had said he didn’t want him hanging around them, that he was spoiling all their fun. Danny didn’t believe that Bob would say what his friends claimed. He never mentioned the taunts to Bob for fear that he would say that what his friends had told Danny was true. This made him feel the way he did when the time stretched to three on a Sunday afternoon and he was still sitting on the stone wall.
But it was the day of the cricket match that changed everything between him and Bob. He had been called ’out’ by Bob’s friends and he hadn’t been; they had cheated. He could still feel the rage of the unfairness and when he looked over at Bob he could see the look on his face, nervous that Danny was going to embarrass him by making a scene. “I hate you,” he’d spat at him as he skulked off to the dormitories.
The large ward where he slept was empty. The summer day lunch time meant that everyone was outside playing. He was shaking with his anger. Bob had once always been there for him but now he was more concerned with making sure his friends were happy rather than his brother. As he stood there, so angry he was breathing hard, Mr Spencer, his house father entered the ward. He walked over to Danny, placing a hand on his back.
“Danny, I have been looking for you.”
“Am I in trouble, sir?” he asked, his voice quivering.
“No. No. Not this time,” he said with a smile. “In fact, quite the contrary. Come with me into my office. I want to show you something.”
Danny wondered what it was that was so special. He was never singled out for good things. He hoped it might be a present, something that would make all the other boys jealous. Something that would make Bob sorry he hadn’t stood up for him, sorry for his betrayal.
“Now Danny,” Mr Spencer said as he closed the door, “you can’t tell anyone about what we do here together, just the two of us. It will be our secret.” Mr Spencer started to unbutton his pants and Danny felt a cold fear begin to freeze into his bones. “And if you do tell, no one will believe you.”
Ever since that moment, he had resented every kindness that Bob tried to show him.
Looking to the sky
30
1995
THERE IS A SCENE in Sons and Lovers where Gertrude Morel walks out in the fields in the twilight almost before midnight. For the longest time I was convinced that D.H. Lawrence had made a mistake: where I live, it never gets dark later than 8 p.m. I didn’t know about the way the sun lights other parts of the planet differently. As I grew older and reread the book, I realised that D.H. Lawrence knew exactly what he was talking about.
Growing up means looking at things differently. Sometimes that’s a good thing; it means you understand the world better. I used to think the sky was Coca-Cola and the planets were the aerated bubbles. Black holes were people sucking through straws. Drinking a glass of soft drink, I was gulping down a whole universe.
Growing up in the cocoon of a loving family meant that finding out that there were children who did not have parents, parents who did not love and care for their children and people in the world who were hateful towards others without much good reason for it all came as a surprise to me when I was a teenager.
Kate didn’t need books to see beyond her fences the way I did. Kate, with her wild curly black hair, her green eyes and sea of freckles, always believed that we were destined for better things. She was waiting patiently for her childhood to pass so that she could begin her adventures, almost as if she were counting the days. She could see so far beyond all she had inherited. “Just imagine,” she would say, “when I’m travel editor for Vogue magazine and can send you postcards from all over the world. And then we can meet up for holidays at some place we’ve picked on a map …” When we were growing up, Kate’s ideas fascinated me as much as they seemed to put other children off. She saw the bigger picture and the possibilities beyond.
It was only when people started to bring it to my attention that I began to realise I was different. When Kate and I were in Grade One at school, Natalie Fletcher stepped in front of me as we were sitting on a bench in the school yard. Her face was so close to mine that I could see the patterns in the pupils of her blue eyes. “You’re an ugly black spider. Black and ugly. Black and ugly,” she said, her two friends trailing after her, laughing. It sounds inconsequential when I tell the story now, but children know hate when they see it, can sense emotion better than they can decipher words. I sat stunned, looking after her as they retreated, before I burst into tears. Kate put her arm around me with the comfort that only another outsider could offer.
That was when I first noticed that my skin was darker than my mother’s, and it was the first time that I noticed it mattered. Mum said I should not be upset, that people just teased me because they were envious, because I had a cultural heritage that they were jealous of, and that I wouldn’t burn in the summer sun. I should have pity for them, she told me. These explanations gave me little comfort when I was being called ’black arse’ or ’black cunt’. Anything ’black’ was an insult, which is why I say that Aunt Daisy is the “white sheep of the family”. Some people try to make you feel bad because you’re different — or because they think you’re different — but when they realise that you are actually proud of those things, they try to take it away from you, tell you that “you’re not a real one” or “you’re an exception”. It’s as though they wanted to enjoy the power to taint you and then attempt to deprive you of the identity they tried to make so shameful. After I read Michel Foucault at university I could better articulate the power to name and then dispossess. And the more I thought about it, the more I concluded that the ones who win always win. George Orwell would have agreed with me, though he would have added something about the corruption that accompanies power.
I knew there were stories that we didn’t he
ar at school, stories beneath the stories we were being told. Local Aboriginal people who had been travelling across the mountain range for thousands and thousands of years aided Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth in their crossing. In this light, all the fuss about their crossing the Blue Mountains as though it was some kind of superhuman feat seemed absurd, unless it was their propensity to suffer sunburn that set them apart from the thousands who had crossed in the centuries beforehand. The Aboriginal people were probably amused at how long it took them to get over the hills.
I always knew we didn’t just disappear into the ether, as the victor’s version of history would have it, and I always knew that our replacement was not passive. I could see the way that my own history was overlooked and overwritten. When we looked at ’settlement’ at school, we didn’t learn about Pemulwuy, who had speared Phillip’s gamekeeper for cruelly mistreating Aboriginal people. This retaliation triggered the wrath of reprisal from Governor Phillip, who gave orders to his men to bring back six Aboriginal heads. He didn’t mind whose ’Aboriginal heads’ they were. This was evidence that white people saw Aboriginal people as all the same. Pemulwuy did resist the Europeans. He made life hell for those who sought to stake a claim over what is now Toon-gabbie and Parramatta. No disappearance into the mists of time for him. When he was finally caught, shot by two men, he ended up a trophy. His head was sent off to London to sit with other trinkets from faraway colonies. The tales of the settlement of Australia and the expansion of the colony attempted to build over the stories of invasion and resistance. When stories of violence and conflict are told, like shifting sands they can bring buildings down. No point in telling the stories of Pemulwuy to high school students learning about settlement and the discovery of a populated mountain range. That would start the sands shifting.
I could understand why people were frightened of those counter-stories, but in my youth I always thought that if people heard them, they would understand the world better and their cruelty to other people, their hatred for no reason, would disappear. I was wrong about this because the sand-shifting stories are better known now than they were when I was at school and it hasn’t changed the way people think about Aboriginal people as much as I would have hoped.
So don’t think I sat there and let them tell me a version of history that I didn’t agree with. Kate would let me get it off my chest. She wouldn’t try and reason me out of my rage or find excuses for others. I’m not sure she always understood what I was mad about, but then neither did I. Sometimes I just got all worked up by things I couldn’t properly explain, but she would listen until I had spent my words, agree regardless, then set my mind on something that made me happy. I would confide in Kate in the hours after school. “That sucks,” she would say, and that would be all I needed to hear as she would drag me to my feet. I’d follow reluctantly, walking towards her swimming pool, happy to be in someone else’s hands. Another reason why I liked her so much was because she had seen some of the worst things that had happened to me and she shared those secrets, so there was no need to explain.
Kate’s mother had left her father — and Kate — for life with a man in Melbourne. Her father had suddenly found himself a girlfriend who was somewhere between his ex-wife’s and his daughter’s ages and spent most of his time at her house. Kate was left alone most of the time. This abandonment by her mother and holding the fort for her father embedded within her a sense of responsibility and maturity that both her parents lacked. Deprived of the freedom that comes with youth, she became restless to travel the world and reinvent a place for herself in each new location she discovered. Kate loved travel writing, especially from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For hundreds of years European women were forbidden to travel without a husband, their family or an escort. Some women who could not be contained by the physical and supposedly moral dangers of travelling used to travel incognito, disguised as men.
Kate especially loved a book by Lady Mary Wortley Montague who went to Turkey in the early 1700s with her husband. In her letters, Lady Montague thought that Turkish women enjoyed more freedom than she did laced up in corset and stays. Hiding beneath a veil, she wrote, a woman could walk the streets anonymously and visit her lovers without being discovered. Kate would sigh and say that “a little freedom can be a dangerous thing”. I think she meant it as much about the way that women travellers had forged pathways for other women upsetting the men folk, as she did about her wish that her parents would give her a little less of it. I admire Kate. She always does exactly what she says she will do. She knows no fear.
Kate always looked to the future, dreaming further ahead than seemed real, past the year, past high school. Yet she would do so with such conviction that I never doubted what she saw was true. When I started making plans for university, it was because Kate had implied that was where we’d been headed all along. I followed her in much the same manner as I had followed her to the swimming pool. I was busy enrolling in my law degree at about the same time my father came home again.
I barely knew my father until the summer when he had his heart attack. I had just finished my first year of high school. Before then he had been a distant figure, almost mythic, compared to the easy familiarity of my mother. It is not surprising he changed so much after his near-death experience. He had never spoken about his childhood before and I had almost assumed he didn’t have one. I knew that he had a family because we used to play at Aunty Pat’s house until she passed away and my cousins were sent to boarding school.
I first began to understand the life that he had led before I was born when we visited the orphanage he’d grown up in. I was twelve then. Even without knowing what he had lived through there, I could sense from the corridors and the walls what it must have been like for him. You know how you can stand in a place and it just speaks to you with its atmosphere? The thing that struck me, that made me feel nervous and cautious, was the stillness and quietness of the place. It was near Christmas and the children had been sent to visit remaining family or billeted into foster homes. We walked through a section that was part of the dormitory for boys. Dad stopped and, looking around the room, said, “This is where Uncle Danny and I were when we first came here. I would sneak into his bed to keep him warm. Well, I guess it was also to console myself, I was so scared.”
If you knew how distant my father was before, you would know that for him to speak of something so personal showed how much he had changed. I guess almost dying from a sick heart is bound to change a person.
After leaving the dormitories, we passed a staircase. Sitting halfway up the flight was a girl about the same age as Kingsley with freckles across her nose, long, straight brown hair and deep brown eyes. The couple giving us the tour went over and spoke to her briefly and then she went up the stairs. I overheard the woman telling Mum that the girl had nowhere to go this Christmas, no family and no foster family. I looked back, curious to catch another glimpse of this girl that no one wanted, but she was gone. I linked hands with my mother, squeezing her fingers tightly, and did not let go until we were back in the car. The girl haunted my thoughts during the long drive back to my home on the other side of Sydney.
The trip to the orphanage had been the start of Dad’s reconnecting with his past. He and Mum were separated then. During school holidays we had to stay with him during the day while Mum worked. Kingsley and I just tagged along when he went to the library and archives, but we were too distracted with inventing ways to break the boredom and not disturb the silence to notice what Dad was doing. He was happier, less angry, when he found his family in Walgett. He changed his name then from Brecht to Boney, and it was as though he had been two different men in one body.
When Dad came back home again, he had to take my mother on her own terms. He had to put up with things he would never have stood for before — cats, dogs, bonsai, her work, her study. I admired him for realising that she was worth all the compromises. He valued her more now that she needed him less. It must be hard to admit tha
t you were wrong and say that you are sorry and live with someone who has seen you at your worst. I forgave him a lot because of his courage to come home again.
University was liberating and disillusioning. I had the freedom to do as I wished and people did not dismiss my criticisms of the way history was told. But the conservatism and insularity of the Law Faculty — from the students much more than the staff—had distressed me and I chided myself for thinking it would have been any different. I was relieved and comforted when Kingsley arrived at the same law school the next year. He had already made the transition from carefree young boy to serious and reserved young man.
In class we skipped over Milirrpum v NabalcoPty Ltd, a 1975 case also known as the Gove Land Rights case. This was taught to us to provide concrete precedent that there was no native title held by Indigenous people. But, if you read the case you will see that Justice Blackburn wrote so much more. He may have found that there was no native title, but he did recognise that Aboriginal people had a set of laws. In his judgment he said the evidence he looked at showed “a subtle and elaborate system highly adapted to the country in which the people led their lives, which provided a stable order of society and was remarkably free from the vagaries of personal whim or influence” existed. He said that “if ever a system could be called ’a government of laws, and not of men’, it is that shown in evidence before me.”
So he saw a government, a system of laws. One could even say he saw sovereignty. But he felt he was held prisoner by the weight of legal precedent, his hands tied by colonial law, and said that “it was beyond the power of this court to decide otherwise than that New South Wales came into the category of a settled or occupied colony”. So these laws and customs that Justice Blackburn described would be treated by the law as invisible. All terra nullius, vacant. Law is like history in that there are dominant, almost mythical ways of talking about it, but when you scratch the surface, you will find many subversive narratives, overlooked, forgotten, smothered by the dominant story.
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