A Stolen Life

by Antonio Buti

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you say that Mother never mentioned in your presence the word “Ngarrindjeri”?’

  ‘I can’t remember. She might have but I can’t remember.’

  Nearly got an edge to that one, His Honour muses.

  Has Walsh found a weakness? He probes with a slower delivery.

  ‘There is a distinction, I suppose, between not remembering and saying it never was mentioned. Which one is it?’

  ‘Like I said, it could have happened but I can’t remember.’

  Walsh keeps probing. ‘In preparing to give your evidence in this case, you thought about the fact that the issue of Ngarrindjeri culture and what you might have missed out on is an important issue in the case?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you say to His Honour that, in preparing yourself, you haven’t been able to recall whether there was any mention of Ngarrindjeri while you were with Mother for that year or before you went to Windana?’

  ‘I think there probably was but I can’t remember.’

  Bruce has been at the crease a long time. Is he tiring?

  ‘When you were wandering around Australia at the age of eighteen and nineteen and people asked you which group you came from, you said “Ngarrindjeri”, didn’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you say you were?’

  ‘I’m a South Australian.’

  ‘Do you know what “Nunga” means?’

  ‘I think it means someone from South Australia. Can I say something, Your Honour? Over the years, on my rounds around Australia, I used to drink heavy and when I used to go to different states and that, the terms that was called was a croweater, sandgroper or banana bender, so if you came from South Australia, you were a croweater, so that was the term that I knew.’

  Going round the wicket hasn’t got the break Walsh wants. And Bruce’s body language seems to be saying it’s time for a smoke. His Honour obliges. Bruce has survived another session.

  Walsh continues his relentless attack spread over three days, or two days in court hours. His battle with his adversary has changed from a search for a breakthrough and a wicket to a war of attrition. He traverses the same sad life that Burnside has crossed, but from a different angle. He wants to show that, although Bruce’s life has been unhappy, his downward spiral in mental and physical health is not a consequence of the government’s action in taking him away from his biological family. He has not lost his identity; he has had opportunities to immerse himself in his Aboriginal culture but his descent into alcoholism, reliance on drugs, and resulting breakdown in mental and physical health are a consequence of his own choices, choices he would have made even if he had not been separated from his biological family. The cross-examination seems to be a prelude to what will be Walsh’s narrative when he officially opens the case for the defence.

  Burnside senses this and in his re-examination, now that Walsh is finished, reinforces the feeling of rejection Bruce has felt most of his life. He refers to an exchange that Bruce had with Walsh about his 1995 meeting with Dr Czechowicz, a forensic psychiatrist. Bruce had told Dr Czechowicz that his own kin had rejected him.

  ‘Was it your belief in 1995 that you had been rejected by your own family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  This is clarified to mean that when he returned to live with Thora in Meningie he had felt rejected from his family.

  ‘In 1995 did you understand how it was that you had come to be removed from home as a baby?’

  Walsh objects, ‘I didn’t ask a question that gives rise to the right to re-examine on that.’

  Justice Gray allows the question.

  ‘In 1995 did you know how it was that you had come to be, what process, if any, had been gone through, to remove you from your family and place you with the Davies?’

  ‘No.’

  Bruce has survived a sometimes hostile spell. It is now up to the others in the top order. Can family members build on his opening? They’re in next. But Justice Gray wonders whether the middle order—the expert witnesses—might hold the key, especially concerning the Pentridge incident. Burnside had been anxious to get on the front foot with this; however, Walsh had kept up an aggressive attack.

  On the face of it, Bruce has fabricated the story in a dishonest attempt to graft more compensation from the State. But he had not realised that in the adversarial trial arena, the defence could easily expose his duplicity. Only after several meetings with his legal team did that reality dawn, along with the inescapable conclusion that he had to tell his team the truth or risk fatally damaging his case. That is one hypothesis.

  There is another possible explanation, Justice Gray thinks. It is common ground that there was a stabbing incident at the prison and that Bruce was not working that day. He wonders whether Bruce’s episodic memory might have been affected by a combination of depression and addiction to prescription drugs and alcohol, to the extent that it blurred the line between fact and fantasy. He would have learned about the stabbing when he returned to work at Pentridge. Could he now be transferring the memory of that secondhand account to his own life experience in which violence had been common?

  Justice Gray files that speculative thought into his own episodic memory, from where he will retrieve it when expert witnesses on these matters take the stand. For now, let’s see what the rest of the top order has to offer.

  Chapter 15

  ‘ALL SITTING AROUND, HAVING A FEED AND A CUPPA’

  Hilda loves her brother Bruce. She wants to help him today, just as she remembers wanting to help him take his first baby steps such a long time ago. They were a family then—Tom, George, baby Bruce and her, with their mum and dad in their home at One Mile Camp. True, they lived in a shack, and it was made out of old bits of tin, but it was home for all that. She was Hilda Trevorrow then. Now, about to take the witness stand, the first of Bruce’s family to testify, she will introduce herself as Hilda Day.

  Hilda Day, too, has known hardship and heartbreak. Her first baby, Debra, was born prematurely and with Down syndrome. Baby Debra did not want for love and Hilda and Robert soon adapted to the role of first-time parents with a little girl who had special needs. A little girl who knew instinctively that she belonged. They were family.

  Family. Just one word, yet that one word conveys so much. Bruce’s personal day in court had ended yesterday with Burnside asking him, ‘Could you tell His Honour where you think you belong?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ was his response.

  Hilda, as a witness in waiting, had not heard that poignant ending to Bruce’s testimony. She could not have foreseen that she would begin her day with equally moving poignancy.

  ‘Do you have a memory of Bruce when he was a baby?’ O’Connor puts the question.

  ‘Yes.’

  O’Connor does not wear the prestigious ‘silk’ of her lead counsel, but she is experienced and intuitive, and knows which buttons to push.

  ‘Can you tell His Honour everything you can remember about him up until the time that you didn’t see him again?’

  ‘He was just our baby. I was teaching him to walk. That’s all I can remember.’

  O’Connor has the answer she wants: ‘He was just our baby.’ The bitter censure of an egregious act of stealing a baby’s entitlement to family needs no express words.

  She moves on. ‘At any time before Bruce left your family, do you recall your mum and dad having arguments or fights about anything?’ O’Connor had raised this question when she proofed Hilda as a witness before her appearance. Here, too, she knows the answer, but she wants Justice Gray to hear it from Hilda.

  ‘Yes, that’s when Jim Clarke came across from Victoria.’

  That is it: the answer she needs. Now she has to tie its relevance down so firmly that the defence cannot loosen it. She needs to pre-empt what she knows will be an attempt by the Crown to allege that Thora had walked out on her family irresponsibly.

  By this time, Hilda has been on the stand for a long t
ime, during which she has had to recall for the court her own family hardships and heartaches. After Debra was born, Robert and she had four more children, a son (also named Robert), followed by three girls (Sonia, Karen and Angela). Robert Junior later developed an alcohol addiction and took his own life. Karen and her husband also succumbed to drugs and they, too, each ended their life prematurely. Telling their stories has been emotionally draining for Hilda. O’Connor senses that she is tiring under the barrage of intense questioning. She needs her to be alert. Time to ask for a short recess. Justice Gray agrees and calls a ten-minute adjournment.

  When they resume, O’Connor asks Hilda, ‘Can you tell us what happened when Jim Clarke walked through the door?’

  ‘I think he just—he just asked if he was his dad.’

  ‘He asked your dad?’

  ‘“Are you my dad?” and they were identical so there was no question about it.’

  ‘Were you there? Did you hear that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Walsh does not object. Good, O’Connor says to herself. We’ve dodged a hearsay bullet. But too easily. Walsh is saving his ammunition for cross-examination, she reasons.

  ‘How did that cause, if it did, an argument between your mum and dad?’ By hastily inserting the phrase ‘if it did’, she has narrowly avoided an objection to ‘leading’ the witness to the answer she wants.

  ‘She accepted the other three children. She just didn’t know how to handle another one.’

  ‘When you say “she accepted the other three children”, which three children are you talking about?’

  ‘Rita, Alice and Joseph.’

  ‘So you’re saying she accepted the other three children that were your dad’s before she met your dad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve told His Honour she didn’t know how to handle the other one.’

  ‘Yes.’

  With Hilda’s answers to her well-framed questions, O’Connor has painted the court a picture of Thora as a loving, capable mother and a resolute, caring wife. But with Jim Clarke’s appearance, the steadfast wife and resilient mother could take no more. She needed time and space to think. She had left the shack at One Mile Camp in search of both. O’Connor knows it is too easy from this picture to sheet home the blame for the family breakdown to Joe. Astutely, she sets out to bulletproof Hilda against such a claim. She wants the court to hear directly from Hilda how Joe walked with baby Bruce in his arms all the way to Meningie on that awful Christmas Day, how he cried for his Brucey when he did not return from hospital. And she wants Hilda to tell the court about the self-proclaimed ‘caring’ Mrs Evans who had denounced Thora and Joe as irresponsible parents because their views on raising children differed from hers. ‘Very nasty, very violent,’ was how Hilda will describe her to Justice Gray. Finally, O’Connor wants Gray to hear directly from Hilda how Bruce suffers emotionally because the actions of the State have deprived him of the comfort and support of immediate and extended family. She wants His Honour to hear how Hilda has reached out in love to Bruce but that, because others had taken him and set him down in a no man’s land between two cultures, he has lost the capacity to respond to her.

  ‘Why was that?’ she asks.

  ‘He had—I don’t know—he sort of had not much time for me. He’d always sort of felt that because I wasn’t taken away. I was staying home. I was to blame somehow.’

  ‘Do you feel loved by him?’

  ‘No.’

  It is done; no more questions. O’Connor has prepared Hilda for the attack and, in the process, has alerted Justice Gray to the likely spurious charges (counterclaims, in the words of the court) that the defence will launch. Let the battle begin.

  Justice Gray directs his attention to the defence table. ‘Mr Walsh?’

  In a rapid-fire onslaught, Walsh sets out to destroy both Hilda’s credibility and Joe Trevorrow’s integrity as a father. This will be no random spray from a fully loaded magazine. Rather, it will be thirty-two rounds well sighted and delivered with sharpshooter precision to elicit yes, no or (mostly) one-word answers.

  ‘You were a young girl when you last saw your brother Bruce when he left at a young age.’ Not when they took him, but when he left. Subtle, but effectively conceding nothing.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How old were you at that time?’

  ‘Nine.’

  ‘Prior to Bruce leaving, you’d lived with Mother and Father but at times Mother had left the home.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Before that time, Father would occasionally go fishing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And occasionally he’d work with nets and fishing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He would be given alcohol.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He would drink from time to time, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sometimes Father didn’t have alcohol so he didn’t drink?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you agreeing with me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hilda has given her evidence in chief that Joe was not a habitual drinker. No point picking a fight with Walsh over his implication that if the grog was there, Joe would drink it.

  ‘After Bruce had been born and in early 1957, that’s the year after Bruce was born, Mum and Dad had been living at One Mile Camp?’ Walsh continues.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mum and Dad had an argument, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were taken by Mr Evans with your mother out to a cottage on the Coorong.’

  ‘Yes. Mum was.’

  ‘Did you stay with Mr and Mrs Evans?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did any of the children go with Mum to the Coorong?’

  ‘The boys went with her, Tom and George.’

  ‘You stayed with Mr and Mrs Evans.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long did you stay with Mr and Mrs Evans at that time?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Mum had to go to hospital for some treatment at about that time?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You might have forgotten that?’

  ‘No, I don’t know.’

  ‘You have no recollection?’

  ‘No recollection.’

  ‘It could have happened?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There were lots of things about your life at the age of nine years that you now don’t recall. Do you accept that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When you look back into the past, you’ll remember some things but a lot that has occurred in the past, particularly when you were younger, you might forget; do you accept that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you come back to live with Mother in 1957 before Bruce left? Namely, after you’d gone to live with the Evanses, did you come back to live with Mother before Bruce left?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long were you back at home before Bruce left?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘It might have been as little as weeks.’

  ‘Could have been, yes.’

  ‘Just don’t know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You told His Honour about a time when there was a disagreement between Mother and Father about Jim Clarke; do you recall that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was that the argument that occurred in early 1957 at the time you then went off to the Evanses and Mother went to Coorong? Was that the argument?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What was the argument at the time that you went to the Evanses and Mum went to Coorong, if you know?’

  ‘No, I don’t know.’

  ‘All you know is that Mum went to Coorong and you ended up with the Evanses; is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In that period of 1957, did you stay at other people’s places apart from Mr and Mrs Evans?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you say that the only recollection you have
is of either staying with the Evanses or staying at One Mile Camp?’

  O’Connor objects to the question. She has been satisfied with Hilda’s performance. She has stood up well to the barrage, which Walsh has delivered with rapid-fire pointedness. His intention is clear. He will maintain the brusque intensity of his interrogation in the hope that by denying Hilda the luxury of a pause between questions he will lead her into contradicting herself. But Hilda is following O’Connor’s advice; she is giving Walsh only clipped, unembroidered answers. She is making Walsh do all the work. O’Connor thinks it is time to remind Walsh that she understands his tactic.

  ‘Your Honour,’ she says, ‘that’s the wrong question, with respect. The question she was asked was, “Did you stay with any other people?” and she said “No.” Then it’s rephrased to “Your only recollection is …” That’s unfair. She says “No.” Her evidence is that she didn’t stay with other people. That’s what her answer means and it is unfair to rephrase her answer in a form that implies she has no memory of something that did in fact happen.’

  Justice Gray might easily have decided that the question has already been asked and answered. However, mindful that he has been tolerant of O’Connor’s occasional leading questions during evidence in chief, he suggests, ‘Perhaps you’ll have to rephrase the question, Mr Walsh.’

  With slightly poor grace, Walsh concedes. ‘I could spend some time debating the issue but I’ll rephrase it. It doesn’t matter.’ He puts the question again, gets the same answer. Yet he has avoided a nit-picking argument with the judge, which might have cruelled his plans to continue this line of attack on Hilda’s credibility.

  The relentless barrage continues. Hilda, however, seems equal to the challenge.

  ‘You don’t really know why Mother left, do you, at that time? All you know is that it coincided with Jim Clarke coming there; isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For all you know, Mother might have left for other reasons which were never disclosed to you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She wouldn’t have left us.’

  ‘You say she would have told you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lots of things that you weren’t told by Thora.’