Growing Pineapples in the Outback

by Tony Kelly

  I’m surprised at how much Mum is enjoying these rehab classes. It’s one of the two good things that have come out of the sprained ankle. The other is the wheelie walker.

  ‘Are you still going to do the trip out with the physiotherapist so that you can practise with a wheelie walker?’ I ask her.

  ‘Yes, she’s going to come around as soon as the wheelie walker arrives.’

  I hope that’s soon. Legacy has kindly offered to pay for the walker. Mum’s friend Beryl is helping us get it organised. The process for organising any sort of aid for elderly people seems to take an inordinate amount of time. I often think about people who don’t have family or friends to help them navigate the system. How do they manage?

  We’ve discussed the wheelie walker with Mum’s GP, the practice nurse at the GP clinic and the staff at community health, and have spent a ridiculous amount of time navigating the My Aged Care website. Everyone seems to have a different sense of what we need to do. Fingers crossed that we’ve finally worked out how to proceed, and that the wheelie walker will be here soon.

  ‘That’s generous of her,’ I say about the physiotherapist.

  ‘We’re going to visit the places I go to regularly,’ Mum says.

  ‘Good,’ I say. ‘Did she ask you what those places were?’

  Mum nods.

  ‘I told her Woolworths, church and the Irish Club.’

  ‘The Irish Club! Why did you suggest there?’ I ask. ‘You don’t go there very often.’

  ‘I go there for Legacy lunches, and it’s so dark inside,’ she says. ‘I thought it would be a good place to practise.’

  ‘She might think you have a thing for the pokies, Mum.’

  ‘She might,’ Mum agrees.

  ‘Or that you’re an old soak!’

  Mum laughs.

  ‘Lucille rang while I was at work,’ I tell her.

  ‘Is she okay?’ Mum asks.

  ‘She’s broken up for good with Max,’ I say, and I tell her about the phone call.

  She listens, and then asks, ‘Do you feel a long way from her?’

  I hesitate before answering. If I say yes, it might create a situation where Mum feels bad about the fact that I’m here with her and not somewhere else with my daughter; if I say no, it denies the fact that I’m here and would be dishonest.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I say. ‘But it makes no difference whether I’m in Mount Isa or Melbourne. Lucille is on the other side of the world, and I hate it that she’s sad.’

  This is why I feel flat and out of sorts. It has nothing to do with being in Mount Isa or not being in Melbourne or with having to look after Mum. My baby is in pain.

  Mum tells me she understands this feeling. She starts to talk about the various distraught phone calls I made over the years. I groan and roll my eyes, and we laugh about how dramatic I was about everything.

  ‘Ha,’ I say, ‘those phones calls were always a lifesaver. Hearing your voice was all I usually needed.’

  She laughs. ‘I’m glad they made you feel better, because they always made me feel worse!’

  She’s told me this before, and it always reminds me how selfish children can be, and how much we take for granted with our parents.

  I tell Mum that Lucille doesn’t need me to solve her problems or run to her rescue, she just needs me to listen. ‘It’s what you always provided for me, and now it’s my turn,’ I say.

  Mum nods, and we sit without speaking. I remember the lollies in my bag and go inside and get them. We sit in comfortable silence, eating our lollies and watching Tony water the front yard. I wonder if this might be the time for me to ask a few big questions.

  How did Mum feel when Michael was ‘on the run’ for all those years?

  How did she feel when my nephew was accidentally killed?

  How did she feel when Michael himself died?

  How did she feel when Dad would sink into a period of rage and despair?

  How did she feel when she withdrew from society and holed up at home with her pain and shame?

  How does she feel about the fact that her sister hasn’t spoken to her for the last thirty-seven years?

  In the past, I have pushed and prodded Mum to talk about her feelings. I place a great deal of value on talking about how you feel. Mum believes that what is done is done.

  The year before I moved back to Mount Isa, I tried to push her into telling me what happened with her sister. Foolishly, I decided to do this over the phone. The conversation didn’t go well. Mum retreated into irritated denial and then silence. I could tell I had upset her, and after a stilted conversation she hung up.

  The next day I rang her back to apologise. She told me that she had been very upset; so upset, in fact, that she had tripped over a power cord and hit her face on the top of the oil heater, and now had a black eye and a cut on her face. I felt awful about this. Reluctantly, I agreed to not discuss it anymore.

  Over the last eighteen or so months I’ve been waiting for this moment, waiting for the floodgates to open, waiting to be the dutiful daughter who is there for her mother when the day of reckoning comes.

  ‘We used to sit out here when you were small,’ Mum says.

  ‘I remember,’ I say.

  Mum seems surprised to hear this. ‘What do you remember?’

  ‘Michael doing handstands and cartwheels; Dad walking on his hands; us other kids doing wheelbarrow races; the dog, probably Flash, tearing around and barking.’

  Mum smiles. ‘You remember all that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mum smiles.

  ‘Dad would put on the sprinkler, and we’d run through and pretend it was a swimming pool,’ I say.

  ‘I’m glad you have some good memories,’ she says.

  ‘I have lots of those.’

  I wait for Mum to speak.

  She takes another lolly. ‘These are nice, fresh.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  We sit without speaking, and I’m struck by how calm Mum is. In this moment she seems happy and content. I think about what I said to Lu about remaining in the present, about not rehashing the past or worrying about the future, and I realise that this is Mum. After all those years of turmoil, incredibly she now seems to have the capacity to just be in the moment.

  There is no need to go back over all these things. Yes, it would be good to know how Mum felt and what happened – but good for her or for me? Maybe she’s right; maybe some things are best just left in the past.

  14

  The Elephant in the Room

  Tony

  It’s eight-thirty in the morning and I’m thinking of death. Last week I flew to Brisbane to attend Brad’s funeral; the melanoma finally got the better of him. I’d said my final farewell to Brad by text. Twice, in fact. The first time was in April, when he took a serious turn for the worse. ‘Thanks, mate. I’m on the way out, I reckon,’ he replied. He lived for another four months. The second time around, days before he died, I texted him: ‘You’re in my thoughts, good friend. I’ve had great adventures with you, Brad. I’m richer for them all. You’re off on another now, on your own. Go well. Love, Tony.’ He didn’t reply.

  Now I’m outside Diana’s door. Beck’s away and I need to go to work, but Diana hasn’t emerged from her room. Normally she’d have been up for hours by now. I try to recall if I heard her up and about throughout the night. Some nights she and I both lie awake, listening to the dogs barking, the desert wind whistling through the louvres and the trains shunting in the railyards on the other side of the highway. I would hear her shuffling to the toilet at some stage through the night, and no doubt she would hear me pissing loudly into the bowl on the other side of the wall from her bed, until I remembered to direct the flow to the side of the toilet.

  I’m not entirely sure what to do. I don’t want to disturb her if she’s had a
bad night’s sleep and has only just now drifted off, but she could be dead.

  Tentatively, I knock on the door. ‘Diana? I’m off to work. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ Her reply is clipped.

  Disappointment rushes through me, not relief, and this both surprises and embarrasses me. My wish for a swift and peaceful death must be stronger than I realise. How easy it would be for Diana, and how easy it would make life for us. No more continual contemplation of our future. No more juggling two places. No more bloody Mount Isa. But to wish someone dead seems beyond the pale, despite whatever rational justifications one can summon up.

  Diana sleeps in for the next three mornings. Each day I knock on the door before leaving the house and get the same response: ‘I’m fine.’

  I tell Beck over the phone, and we wonder if this is the beginning of the end. A slow and steady decline, until finally she stops breathing in her chair or doesn’t wake up from her sleep. Beck doesn’t seem particularly disturbed or saddened by this prospect; in fact, I sense that she too would feel some relief if it happened this way, and soon. She knows her mother’s death is inevitable, and that there’s a whole range of slow and difficult alternatives that Diana could face. That we all could face.

  By the time Beck returns a couple of days later, Diana is past the worst and is back to her relatively perky self. She flogs both of us at Upwords after dinner and spends the next day making a fruitcake.

  In counterpoint to the possibility that Diana is close to death, and that our time in Mount Isa might come to an end soon, we are becoming more and more immersed in the town. We’re regulars with the community choir, performing at various events around town. Mainly through Beck, we’ve formed a small circle of friends. We’ve been invited to dinner twice now, and have even hosted a small dinner party ourselves. We both play tennis regularly, and I recently became secretary of the local tennis club. Like many clubs in town, it has suffered from the mine’s switch to a seven-day twelve-hour roster, which means that every second week employees can’t reliably attend events. When I put my hand up to join the committee, I didn’t have to compete against a slew of candidates.

  Despite our expanding social options, our life is still simpler than it was in Melbourne, and both Beck and I find that we have plenty of time to write, garden and spend time with Diana.

  Work has hit a sweet spot. I go on a field trip with my anthropologist colleague James to the coast to talk to the descendants of people rounded up like cattle from the west a hundred years earlier and trucked to either Yarrabah, on the end of a rugged promontory south of Cairns, or Palm Island, fifty-three kilometres northeast of Townsville.

  On Palm Island we are invited into Eddie Firebrace’s house. I am struck by its neatness. On one side of the kitchen sink a slotted spoon, ladle, egg flip and potato masher hang on the wall. On the other side, sugar, coffee, Milo, tea and powdered milk containers sit in a row on the bench. Two sheets are folded with precision on the bed next to the table; I am itching to ask why the bed is in the kitchen. A handful of photos adorn the otherwise bare walls of the lounge room. An ex-drinker, I think to myself. Eddie is someone who’s working hard to maintain control.

  I am there with James to talk to Eddie about his grandmother Topsy. Through painstaking archival research, James has discovered that she was one of those ‘old people’ who were rounded up and brought east. Until now, Eddie didn’t know where his grandmother came from. All he knew was that it was from the west somewhere. His family used to live in an area of the community set aside for the ‘sundowners’ – those people who came from the direction where the sun went down.

  A lot of Aboriginal reserves and missions were set up like that, with people from the same group living in enclaves. It was often within these enclaves that laws and customs were maintained, despite the distance, and so they’ve become vital sources of evidence to support native title claims over country far away. Even if people weren’t living on country, they were still connected to it through the practice of their culture, rooted in the country from which they were forcibly removed. Eddie is pleased to finally know, but still I sense his loss at not knowing much about his grandmother and the place she came from.

  Over the course of eight days, James and I visit descendants of the sundowners scattered throughout north Queensland, to share what we’ve found out about their ancestors and learn from them what they know, so that we can form as clear a picture as possible of their native title group. Like other parts of Australia, their country is hotly disputed and has had many failed native title claims. Some of the claimants are descended from ancestors who escaped deportation to the east. They still live on country and some stridently resist the idea that people whose families have not lived on country for a hundred years have a right to be part of the native title group. To me, this feels like dispossession yet again.

  A couple of weeks later I have another trip away, this time to central Queensland, to work on another native title claim. They are a capable and compassionate group, and we have a productive couple of days visiting sites and meeting with shire council members and local pastoralists. They have a huge task ahead of them. Long-term dispossession means that proving continuous connection to country – a key requirement in a native title suit – will be difficult.

  One pastoralist is particularly sceptical of their claim to native title. ‘I’ve been in the district sixty years and haven’t seen a blackfella on my property the whole time,’ the pastoralist challenges us as we sit around the boardroom in the council chambers.

  ‘That’s because you built a fence around the property,’ a claimant replies softly.

  Another adds, ‘My great-grandfather was taken from here against his will. He tried to come back plenty of times. But always he was picked up by the police and brought back to the mission in chains.’

  The pastoralist responds by telling them he grew up on a property in the gulf that had stone outhouses with rifle slits in the walls for shooting blacks if they attacked. I don’t really know why he’s telling this story. Is he seeking some empathy for his views? You see, this is where I have come from; I’m not as bad as that. I can’t help but read it as a threat. The others remain respectfully assertive, despite the deep anger that I can tell is bubbling below the surface.

  There are plans afoot to build a gas pipeline from Tennant Creek to Mount Isa that will connect the offshore gas fields in the Timor Sea with the east coast markets. It’s a big resource infrastructure project that requires land access agreements with over twenty native title groups along its route. Usually negotiations for such agreements take six months or more. One of the groups was initially overlooked until now, and there are only two months left before the deadline for all agreements to be reached. I’ve been asked to step in and lead the negotiations on behalf of the native title group. I’ve never negotiated such an agreement before, and although it feels daunting I’m buoyed by the challenge, and by the confidence placed in me.

  But there’s still the ticking clock of my job back in Melbourne. I need to return by April next year or resign. This has been in the back of my mind the whole time we’ve been here, but its reality is impending. To be honest, I’m not as sanguine about it as I like to think. I’ll definitely resign if Diana is still alive but I’m anxious about it. What the fuck will I do in Melbourne when we eventually do go back? I’ll be in my late fifties, or perhaps sixties. Who will give me a job? Native title law is a limited field, especially in Melbourne.

  I consider and reject the idea of private legal practice. I don’t have the networks, skills or chutzpah to do that. I could work as a consultant. But it seems to me there are already too many consultants out there scrabbling for work. I’m not Aboriginal, and more and more work in Indigenous affairs is, quite rightly, being done by Indigenous people. And increasingly there are highly competent and qualified Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the market, available for
the work I would be competing for.

  ‘I get it,’ I say to Beck from the lounge room. She’s at the kitchen table flicking through a magazine and I’m lying on the couch reading. It’s late Sunday afternoon and Diana’s resting in her room. We have the house wide open and a gentle breeze is circulating.

  ‘Get what?’ Beck looks up.

  ‘What you’re doing to this place. Simplifying it. Decluttering it.’

  ‘Returning it to its 1950s aesthetic,’ Beck adds.

  ‘It looks good. For a small house it sure feels spacious. It has good bones,’ I say, and go back to reading my book.

  A couple of minutes later, Beck says, ‘I can imagine living here after Mum dies.’

  I think on it. ‘Me too. We could do what everyone else does here – make money and then retire east or south in fifteen years. It would solve the work problem and make life very easy.’

  ‘The girls would be horrified,’ Beck says.

  ‘We can’t plan our life around them,’ I say. ‘They might not stay in Melbourne forever,’ I add a few moments later.

  ‘True. But one thing I know for sure is they will never live here,’ says Beck with a hint of resignation in her voice.

  She has a point.

  I continue to read and daydream on the couch. I imagine the other things we would do to the house – open out the dining room onto a deck, renovate the bathroom, plant more and more natives – but at what cost to our family and lives down south?

  Again, I find myself awake in the middle of the night, listening to the growl of the mine, the barking of the dogs and the rattling of the wind, worrying about our future and trying to remind myself to trust in life and believe that it’ll all work out.

  ‘How did you sleep?’ Diana asks when she comes into the kitchen and puts the kettle on.

  ‘Same same,’ I reply.

  I don’t let on that it’s worry more than the nocturnal sounds that kept me awake. I have no doubt Diana is aware of the looming deadline; perhaps she’s kept awake by worries that in a few months’ time we’ll pack up and move back to Melbourne despite our promise to stay. Perhaps she’s willing herself to die, knowing that the alternatives are too grim to think about. But neither of us acknowledge the elephant in the room.