by Kim Mahood
When he crept back to the fire he found the body fallen on its side and rendered harmless, and the next time he shot an Aborigine it was not by accident, and he did not try to burn the body. He took off one of his spurs and scratched a mark on the metal rail of the stockyards, and looked the other Aboriginal stockmen in the eye, shook his head and said—Poor bugger, killed by ricochet, you can see where the bullet bounced off the rail.
The son was a mere shadow of his father. He was tall and dark and handsome and hopeless. He played the guitar and danced well and told a good story. He was neither violent nor angry, and hadn’t the stomach for shooting Aborigines, though he once shot a rooster in the main street of Borroloola in the early hours of the morning. It woke him up, he told the magistrate who fined him a thousand dollars, morning after morning at about three o’clock, until he could stand it no longer.
He was married long enough to father two children to a voluptuous redhead, before she left him and went home to her parents, taking the children with her. She took the children away because he drank, and he drank because she took his children away. He fell hopelessly in love with a woman who said she would leave him unless he stopped drinking. But he couldn’t see the harm in it, since he never saw himself slobbering and unconscious, falling over people at social gatherings. He didn’t take her seriously, and when she went he was dumbfounded. He drank himself into a stupor to drown his sorrows.
Later he pulled himself together and made a patched-up sort of life for himself. He drove trucks for a living, and from time to time there was talk of a partnership in a business, of buying his own truck, of acquiring a bit of land. But somehow the schemes never quite materialised, and one day he was in his early fifties, still drinking and still not over the woman who had left him twenty years before. And not too long after that he was found kneeling on the steps of his trailer home, after a night of heavy drinking, choked to death on his own vomit.
Since I have grown up and lived in towns and cities I have seen a great many men like this. I have seen the equivalent in women, and in the young. So it is not the country which produces such people, but something within human society. The difference I found when I was growing up was that these men came into my life, they were a part of it. They could not be overlooked and forgotten. They were always there, a source of frustration, grief and irritation, rubbing your face in their plight. You were forced to understand that while there was nothing you could do to change them or their lives, you were nevertheless implicated in their condition.
12
TOMORROW A BIG WOMEN’S business ceremony begins near Billiluna Station, across the border in Western Australia. I have been in touch with the Balgo women’s project officer to see if it is all right for me to attend. All the Aboriginal women from Tanami Downs have gone already. This morning an old man came over to ask me if I was going to the ‘bijnis’, and I told him yes. I will come back here when it is over. For the moment it is a relief to get back on the road, to slip back into the panacea of movement.
There are a couple of abandoned cars along the track to the border, and a scattering of beer cans, evidence that this is the grog run from Balgo to Rabbit Flat. I can almost hear my father’s ashes rattling irritably in their India tea caddy. To leave rubbish behind on the track or at a campsite was a hanging offence in my childhood. I remember occasions when my father stalked into geological survey camps and demanded of a discomfited survey boss that he send whoever was responsible back to clean up the evidence of transient campsites.
The country shows the mark of the dry times. The cattle are lean, the land brittle and dusty. The perennial grass plains, Davidson’s ‘very good pastoral country’, are chewed to a yellow stubble. There are gates and fence lines, stock tanks and holding yards. The great empty wilderness of my memory is subdued, domesticated. I cannot help but feel regret.
Another measure of the changes, ironically, is this women’s business for which I am heading. I cannot imagine such an event in the years when I lived in this country. Then, the notion that Aboriginal women had any sort of power would have been an absurdity. Now I am travelling towards an occasion which has been made possible through government funding and the involvement of white women co-ordinators (city girls for the most part, drawn by dreams and political ideals). It is an acknowledgement of the importance of the black women’s relationship to their country. Philosophically I am excited by it, curious and hopeful. Closer to home I feel like a creature that evolved in a different time, stepping hesitantly into an unknown present.
THERE ARE NO WOMEN IN the Davidson journal, and none in my father’s stock-route report. There are very few in the station diary. The domestic events of the homestead do not warrant mentioning unless there is some sort of drama, such as the homestead being threatened by bushfire. The women’s names which recur on page after page are place names, lakes and springs and hills named after mothers and wives and daughters.
In 1900, in Davidson’s era, the north was a man’s country. But there were exceptions. In 1902 Daisy Bates made a droving trip with her husband and son. In her written account of the trip she refers to her husband only once, and then simply as the boss drover. In fact she mentions the Chinese cook, who emerges as a distinct personality, far more frequently and familiarly than she mentions her husband. She talks about her cattle, her land, her plant of horses and men. She also apparently abandons the entire outfit, including husband and son, as soon as they reach their destination, and returns to Fremantle, after which she embarks on the work among the Aborigines for which she achieved her somewhat controversial fame. One feels a flicker of sympathy for the silent Jack Bates, whom Daisy apparently married with little regard for the fact that she was still married to Breaker Morant. Neither man seems to have pursued her with pleas or demands that she come back and be a proper wife and mother. Daisy struck an early blow for women to travel on their own terms in the bush, and to marry and leave whom they please, but she achieved it through a capacity to invent and reinvent herself which appears almost pathological. She also began a tradition which has steadily gained momentum, that of white women aligning themselves with Aboriginal people as a means of freeing themselves from the conventions of their own society.
We had our own local example, as cranky and complex a character as Daisy herself. The eccentric and eccentrically-named Olive Pink camped at Thompson’s Rockhole near the Granites for several years in the 1940s, at a time when the population of the Tanami–Granites region consisted of three white miners and a small group of Aborigines. Having waged an increasingly vitriolic campaign against various government departments for their neglect of Aboriginal, particularly female Aboriginal, welfare, she moved to the Granites as an act of solidarity with the people whose rights she championed. Eventually she became too ill to remain and retreated to Alice Springs where she grew into the figure of legend I encountered as a child.
There is a revealing early letter, written while she was studying anthropology under AP Elkin, in which Miss Pink outlines her resistance to investigating only Aboriginal women.
It would be no use talking to the women about the things Dr Elkin wants me to investigate … As you know, I am not fond of the company of my own sex for long. (I told you that in relation to whites & it’s the same with blacks. I like talking about ‘things’—ideas—& beliefs—(not food & babies & ornaments & love affairs & all the things a really womanly woman should! …
I keep impressing on Mick & the others that white women know all the things white men know …
I show them things in Spencer for the very reason you suggest not to!!!! To show that I know things black women may not know, so they may as well tell me others!
Miss Pink was the town witch during my childhood, the demoness around whom all sorts of apocryphal tales were woven. She would march down the street in her pith helmet and sandshoes, haranguing everyone she encountered. She lived in a hut on the tract of land which has since become her memorial, the Olive Pink Flora and Fauna Reserv
e, and it was a dare among the local children to sneak as close as possible to the hut and throw stones at it. Miss Pink would erupt from inside, looking like a deranged Victorian governess, brandishing a rifle and occasionally firing off shots and shouting threats. Like other children of my age in Alice Springs, I knew the stories about Miss Pink. I always kept carefully outside the boundaries of her territory, Miss Pink’s Hill as we called it, for I had heard the tales of Miss Pink and her rifle. I knew the stories of her long-running battle with the firemen, whom she accused of unseemly dress (or lack of it), which resulted in her being evicted from her hut in Todd Street. I knew of her letters of complaint about the local aero club, who she claimed were in the habit of gliding low over her roofless corrugated-iron bathroom while she was in the tub. I knew, vaguely, that she had lived out bush with the Aborigines for a time. I knew she was a mad old woman obsessed with things sexual, Aboriginal and conservational. She was an example of what became of women who did not get married and who lived alone and who were full of unpopular and strongly held opinions.
I met her from time to time, in the local library or marching along in the sandy creek bed on her way to town. She was, on these occasions, surprisingly ordinary, though peculiarly dressed. She wore the pith helmet of legend, but my memory of her is in a belted cream gabardine raincoat. She was always pleasant and cheerful, though I remember her taking the librarian to task over some ‘tripe’ among the books she was returning. I watched her furtively from behind the safety of the library shelves, terrified that she might suddenly demand of me some embarrassing, self-revealing behaviour. This was someone who did not recognise the boundaries between what was acceptable behaviour and what was not. A brush with her might result in one suddenly finding oneself on the wrong side of the boundary, aligned with her in eccentric isolation.
I can imagine the figure she cut, in the 1930s and 40s, among the laconic bushmen and the outlaws and ruffians on the goldfields around the Granites. She must have been an extraordinarily strong-willed and remarkable woman, but she would have seemed to them merely absurd. Her middle-aged Victorian virginity, coupled with her outspoken attacks on the sexual behaviour of white men towards Aboriginal women, made her vulnerable to the kind of prurient scorn that bluestocking attitudes have always aroused.
She held opinions that put her beyond the pale, and her abrasive and difficult personality alienated most of the support for her pioneering research into Aboriginal culture. It is only now, since she is safely dead and cannot contradict the process of softening the rougher edges of her opinions, that her anthropological writings and her stance on land rights are being re-examined seriously. For a time, sobered by the example of Miss Pink and Daisy Bates, I wondered whether the only women who could exist on their own terms in the country were the eccentric and the mad, whether the resistance and difficulties they encountered made them madder and more eccentric. But maybe it was the other way around. Maybe the Outback allowed room for a personality like Miss Pink’s to expand in all its cranky formidable visionary uniqueness. She pushed a little wider the gap opened by Daisy Bates, into which white women have continued to infiltrate in growing numbers.
When I was a child this process had barely begun. There were a few female anthropologists scattered about, but the notion of women’s law as a separate and significant category in the understanding of Aboriginal society had not seeped through into the wider consciousness. Aboriginal women were visible enough, because of their role in the domestic life of homesteads, but behind them trailed something invisible, impenetrable, unknowable. They came into the homestead in their crisp clean dresses and washed dishes and swept floors and laughed and told stories. They went walking with the white children and taught them to read tracks and identify bush tucker and catch goannas. And then they went away into their own camps and houses and closed the doors, both metaphoric and actual. My only attempt to open one of these doors, a real one, resulted in having a boot thrown at me. I had gone after dark to deliver a message to the head stockman’s wife, Daisy. The wife of the only other married stockman was staying with her, and I could hear their voices talking softly inside the main room of the house. I knocked and called out, and the voices stopped. I tried the door, pushed it partly open, and something hit it with a loud clunk. I yelled, there was a burst of nervous laughter, and Daisy embarrassedly let me in. They had thought I was one of the local devils which inhabit the night-time, coming to get them. Both women were out of their own country, huddled together each night for mutual support in a place full of wandering spirits.
Daisy was a quiet, introverted girl who did not much like white people. She never volunteered anything, worked quietly in the house and went away into her private world. So it was a surprise to us when telegrams began arriving from the Alice Springs police, asking after her whereabouts. Whatever she had done, we conjectured that it couldn’t have been too bad, and replied to the telegrams that she had gone to Western Australia, whereabouts unknown. One morning my brother Bob spotted a police vehicle at the top gate. Daisy, washing dishes at the sink, looked stricken. The children grabbed her arm, dragged her out the front door and disappeared into the mulga as the policeman came up the back path from the shed. My mother and I gave him a cup of tea, made conversation, told him we had heard nothing of Daisy for months. When he had gone and I whistled the all-clear, we extracted the story of Daisy’s brush with the law. She was in town, bored and miserable, awaiting the birth of her first child. Half a bottle of cream sherry activated her dislike of white people in general and policemen in particular. It wasn’t too difficult to find a policeman to insult, hit, and escape from, in spite of being eight and a half months pregnant. I suspect it was the indignity of being assaulted and then outrun by a young woman so obviously pregnant that had kept the police on Daisy’s trail for so long.
Millie came to us before Daisy. She had known my mother years before, in another part of the country. Millie was outgoing, cheerful, articulate, almost a stereotype of the fat, jolly, motherly black woman. She had a pierced nasal septum, through which she used to stick matches with a great sleight-of-hand flourish to amuse us. With Millie we went tracking and digging. She told us stories and painted our faces. Fat as she was, no goanna could outrun her. When one of the stockmen came to my father in a state of great embarrassment to tell him he had contracted gonorrhoea from her, my father was furious, especially since it fell to him to administer her medication. He was a prudish man. He did not want to have to deal with the messy evidence of clandestine sexual activity. Millie treated the matter with equanimity. When my father arrived at her shed with the first of the daily penicillin injections, intending to administer it in her arm, she presented him with a large bare rump. He admitted later that it tickled his sense of the absurd, that he of all people should find himself in such a situation.
AT WILSON’S CAVE, THE LAST bore on the Tanami Downs side of the Western Australian border, I stop and boil the billy. It is not far from here to Ngulipi outstation, where the cattle manager for the Balgo community lives. It has been Malley’s job for some years now. During the Mongrel Downs years, when Malley was head stockman, he was part of the extended family of the station, and a role model for us children with his quiet good nature and wonderful horsemanship. It will be good to see him and his wife Oriel again, but for the moment I need to sit and absorb the silence. There is real pleasure in choosing my own time and place to do this. In the past it was always someone else’s decision. I made a promise to myself back then that one day I would come back on my own terms, and it seems I have kept it.
I led a double life during those years—a sixties schoolgirl wearing miniskirts and white lipstick, full of antiauthoritarian bravado, displaced in the holidays by a responsible young stockman, all frivolity banished, struggling to establish and maintain a place in the world of the station. I have talked to friends who also went from the country to boarding school, and they reinforce my experience. Teenage rebellion found its focus against the disciplin
e of school life and the authority of boarding house staff. The normal struggle to separate oneself from parents was circumvented. Those brief bursts of holiday freedom were too precious to waste, and there was no precedent for conflict. The self-referential world of the station had shape and order. The value-shifting world of the urban sixties had no place here. I emerged from my boarding school years with the parental bond intact, while the other, independent self made its decisions and developed unhindered by reference to home and family. The independence took on an idealised, secretive form, not having been allowed to manifest its uncomfortably real shape within the family. In any case, to risk triggering in my father the soundless outrage of his disapproval was beyond me. It was easier to keep the worlds apart.
I was fiercely proud of my family and the life we lived, but at some deep level I knew even then that it was not for me. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t want any of the women’s lives I saw as I was growing up.
The white women I remember fell into two categories, the active and the passive. The passive ones seemed on the whole more contented. I cannot tell in retrospect if they were happier. What I do remember is that men were responsible for most of the unhappiness of women. This seemed to be a given, accepted by everyone. Blame settled like an act of nature, before which everyone acquiesced.
Although there were always unattached white women in the country, the culture of the Outback was fundamentally masculine. This was still largely true in the sixties. To what extent it was actually misogynist I am not sure. There were, after all, so few white women to measure it by, and the Aboriginal women occupied a separate cultural and psychological strata which rendered the term almost meaningless. I had no real limitations placed on me for being a girl. The men I encountered, black and white, treated me with regard and affection. And yet I absorbed through my own skin and the antenna of adolescence a sense that to be female was to be subtly contaminated.