The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  It was tempting to try to imagine the inner life of this undersized youth stepping off the gangplank one probably sunny – it was a drought – October morning. He was most likely dazzled by the light, glad to be on solid ground, relieved that he was still alive. But I can only assume what was going through his mind. Like the Wiradjuri, he left no records, no words. He probably couldn’t write. I only know he was daring enough to try to radically change his life by stealing a large sum of money – and unskilled or unlucky enough to be caught.

  The year he arrived the most significant thing to happen in the colony was that the Blue Mountains, 100 kilometres west of Sydney, had been crossed by Europeans for the first time. Before explaining why this mattered to William and all his descendants, a girl called Ann Smith, who wasn’t even born when William stepped off the boat, needs to arrive as well.

  At four feet ten and half inches, Ann was even shorter than William. She had brown hair and dark brown eyes and a ‘dark ruddy’ complexion. I’m not sure what William’s ‘dark pale’ skin looked like, but I do get a picture of a rosy-cheeked Ann. She was a nurse-girl from London with no education – and according to the ship’s indent, she was sent to Australia on the Earl of Liverpool for an apocryphal crime – stealing apples. She arrived in Sydney in April 1831. Only sixteen years old and she’d been sent to the other side of the world to a place she must have barely known existed for helping herself to a few pieces of fruit.

  She was ‘disposed of’, as it said in the indent, to a Robert Broad of George Street, perhaps the reputed silversmith. She mustn’t have been kept long, because there’s a record of her marrying William Yarnold two years later, on 17 June 1833 at St John’s Church in Wilberforce, a village about forty miles to the north-west of Sydney. She was eighteen years old, he was forty. I was intrigued by this short, criminal couple who found each other on the far side of the planet; they seem like a pair of well-matched delinquents, members of Britain’s huge underclass, uneducated, undernourished, with no opportunities – and restless enough to do something about it.

  Seventeen years after he arrived, in 1830, William had been given his ticket-of-leave, a certificate that allowed him to do paid work, set up a business and own land, but not to travel out of the district without permission. Ann was given her certificate of freedom in 1845; that’s fourteen years for apples. They had a daughter, Elisabeth, the year after they married.

  Why and exactly when they went to the Wellington Valley I don’t know, but they were definitely there by 1849 because William was issued with a ticket-of-leave passport to travel in Wellington. It is possible he was one of the convicts sent to the Wellington Penal Colony with Percy Simpson in the 1820s and decided to return there after he was married. Or perhaps he had heard of land for free and boldly headed out into the unknown with his young wife and child.

  When he was first given his ticket-of-leave, William was listed as a butcher. Twenty-one years later he is recorded only as a farmer, a landowner. Whatever his line of work, he certainly would have had dealings with the Wiradjuri. It was only thirty years since the first whites had arrived there and the Wiradjuri were still living a mainly traditional life. How they treated each other I don’t know, but I’m guessing William was not an entirely reformed character. He probably took what he could get his hands on; he certainly took Wiradjuri land.

  It seems Ann and William spent the rest of their lives in this valley. An Ann Smith was buried in the Pioneer Cemetery in Wellington in 1861 aged forty-five, the exact age my Ann would have been; and there’s record of a William Yarnold buried in nearby Guerie. The convicts’ daughter, Elisabeth, married the German immigrant, Pieter Josef Müller. Gold had been discovered in 1856 so perhaps he was a treasure-seeker. It appears Müller too did not keep a diary, but he must have decided to settle down and give his children a future as English-sounding Millers in this strange, raw place.

  And that, it appears, is how the Millers of Wellington came into being. From the beginning they were farmers on Wiradjuri land, all of them descended from a pair of young crooks and a stray German who arrived in the district in the first few decades of white settlement. Perhaps they were kind to the Wiradjuri, perhaps not – they certainly dispossessed them – but whatever they did, the Millers are not in any of the history books, not even the local history ones. There are no streets or parks or creeks named after them. They were not rich or influential people, they didn’t stand for office, they didn’t build bridges or write books. They probably didn’t even think of anything much besides looking after their families.

  Except for William and Ann for whom I have an awed admiration – how could I not admire their gutsy survival of the worst the ruling class could throw at them? – I guiltily admit I’ve always found the rest of the Miller ancestors an unimaginative, stolid lot. I don’t wish they were rich or ruled the world, I just wish they had done or said something memorable.

  Perhaps that’s why I like Joyce’s version of the family history – it wasn’t written down, but it was recounted and it was much more complex than recorded history. In her story, one of the Millers married a Wiradjuri woman, or the daughter of a Wiradjuri woman, and that has created another whole pattern of descent. Even though I was brought up to identify with an Irish, English and European tradition without a trace of Wiradjuri, and even though there is no written evidence for it, I want to believe Joyce’s story because it connects me to a history on this land thousands of years beyond William and Ann’s arrival 200 years ago. It would mean my DNA is made out of this place and I could imagine, however unscientifically, that there was a hidden, faded Wiradjuri part of my cells shaping something of who I am, a faintly remembered echo of blood and country.

  16

  Whose Native Title?

  Next morning in my caravan-park cabin, I looked over the rough timeline I’d put together of the land claim. It was a sketchy record of dates of various Acts, Claims, Agreements, not comprehensive and possibly faulty. My plan was to show it to Joyce and ask her to correct the inaccuracies and fill in the details. I picked it up and took it out to the veranda to sit at the wrought-iron table.

  Kookaburras and galahs were flapping about between the river gums in their noisy loutish way. I had been woken before dawn by their laughter and screeches but the sound was comforting, as the sounds of a safe childhood always are, and I’d gone back to sleep easily. I sat and watched a trail of something white, like petals, falling gently from the sky in front of me. Puzzled, I stepped off the veranda to pick one up. It was a small pink-tipped feather. In fact, the ground was scattered with them. I remembered that Wiradjuri men used to stick feathers in their hair when they were preparing for battle.

  A little later I called in at my mother’s unit and had morning tea with her. She was fascinated by Joyce’s stories and wanted to hear all about her and the Native Title claim. Now that it was difficult for her to read, Mum spent more time watching television, keeping up with politics and current affairs and she jumped at the chance to discuss the latest issues with me. Mostly she kept her views to herself in Wellington; she knew how to keep the peace. Once, she bravely stood up at the Catholic Women’s League meeting and defended single mothers, but usually she ‘just banged pots and pans around loudly’, as an astute friend of hers remarked, when she disagreed with the general opinion. I didn’t mind telling her Joyce’s stories, although I had told her most of them the evening before when I’d called in for dinner. Her beautiful sharp memory was starting to flicker on and off. I asked if I could take some of her neenish tarts to give to Joyce and when she said yes I packed them in a lunch box and left quickly.

  When I presented the tarts to Joyce she popped one in her mouth immediately while I sat down at her table with my folder and cassette recorder. The room was as neat and spotless as the day before and she was as welcoming, although a little tired. She had been at the school all morning, again taking a class on Aboriginal culture.

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nbsp; I pulled the timeline out and showed it to her. A slightly bothered look immediately flitted across her face. She didn’t want to look at my page of dates, and indeed didn’t look at it the whole time I was there. I plunged in anyway.

  ‘So who was involved in forming the Elders’ Council in 1980? I’ve heard Teddy Bell was part of it?’ I pointed at my timeline.

  ‘They were havin’ meetin’s unknown to us. Teddy Bell was comin’ up from Sydney. He didn’t live here.’ Joyce left that behind quickly, it wasn’t relevant anymore, it was too long ago and too much had happened since. ‘But ask Lee Thurlow if you want to know,’ she added.

  ‘Who’s he again?’

  ‘He keeps all our records. He knows all about this. You should talk to him. He knows about Rose’s committee leaving us out of the claim.’ She repeated then what she had told me on the phone several weeks before: that the Town Common Committee had left the Traditional Families out of the Native Title claim and included names of people who weren’t even Aboriginal.

  ‘So there’s basically two sides, one lot who are descended from local Wiradjuri and the other lot who are not?’

  I felt myself lining up with Joyce. It seemed obvious enough that Native Title must be established through lineage; no-one could argue with that.

  ‘Yeah, and that’s why we’ve put in our own claim. We’ve got a solicitor, a good bloke, and it’s goin’ to be sorted. Teitzel’s ’is name.’

  ‘When did you do that?’

  ‘A while back.’

  I doggedly decided to stay on my original track. I could ask her about the new claim later.

  ‘Ah, let’s go back to the committee who made the claim in ’94. Rose Chown was the vice president and Vivienne Griffin was the president?’

  ‘Yeah. And Rose and Vivienne are first cousins. The Bell family.’

  Rose’s parents were Gladys and Ronnie Bell. Gladys’s mother was a Towney from Peak Hill up on the Bogan River. Ronnie’s father was Roy Bell and his mother was Tillie Stanley. Vivienne’s father was John, known as Jacky Bell, and he was Ronnie’s brother. Her mother was Trixie Grace, and Trixie’s mother was from Cowra. Teddy Bell was Vivienne’s brother.

  At first all this seemed to have nothing to do with the Native Title claim and who was entitled to the land; it was just family history, tangled and off the point and impossible to follow for someone outside the family. But then Joyce said something that made me realise it was the heart of the matter.

  ‘It’s passed down on the mother’s side. If you are Wiradjuri or not. Granny May told us.’

  Suddenly I remembered Henderson, the nineteenth-century amateur ethnologist. When he was in the Wellington Valley he had noted that the Wiradjuri traced their lineage through their mothers.

  ‘I know, that’s right,’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve read about it. In a journal from the 1830s, Henderson, I think. That’s right.’

  Joyce looked at me as if I had said something completely irrelevant. I had the grace to blush. She went on. ‘Granny May told us that wherever your mother’s afterbirth was buried, that was your land.’ She stopped and grinned. ‘I said that to the Town Council when I was addressin’ them and said I reckon that means I own the land down where the motel is. And they all laughed and one of ’em said, there’s no doubt about ya, Joyce.’

  There was that wicked grin again. No doubt about ya. I hadn’t heard that expression for years.

  So was it all to do with the mothers? Rose’s mother was from the Bogan River, and Vivienne’s mother was from Cowra, neither of them local Wiradjuri. Joyce’s mother was born at Blacks Camp next to Nanima, so Joyce was. That part was simple enough but I had to go back over the Bell family connections to try to get it straight. As I repeated what I thought she’d said, Joyce patiently corrected me. It seemed she had family trees in her head for all the Aboriginal families in Wellington – and then I remembered that she had known who my father and grandfather and great grandmother were when she first met me, even though I’d had no idea who she was. I couldn’t see how she remembered it all. I needed it written down.

  It was about half an hour since I’d asked my original question about the first Native Title claim and I had gained a great deal of family history and several stories, but still didn’t know how events had unfolded in Wellington.

  ‘So when the first claim was made, were you invited to be on the committee?’

  ‘We didn’t know they were even meetin’. We didn’t even know about this mediation, until another old Aboriginal fella told us we had better git along down there. This mediation. Who was it with, you know, the government fella?’

  ‘French, was it? Robert French?’ I checked my timeline. The uses of having things written down. I could see the claim was lodged in February 1994 and the newly established Native Title Tribunal headed by Justice French had held a mediation at Wellington Primary School in May the same year.

  ‘That’s ’im. French. And they were telling ’im and the papers they were the traditional owners, but they’re not. They were told then they didn’t have enough evidence for Native Title and they didn’t get it in the end either because they’re not the traditional owners. That’s why we have made our own claim. The Traditional Families claim. We’re called the Gallangabang Corporation. You ask Wayne Carr about it.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Violet Carr’s ’is mum. She’s on the claim, but Wayne is lookin’ after it.’

  ‘Where’s he? Have you got his number?’

  I wrote it down for later.

  When I returned to Sydney I tried to find out why Rose’s claim had failed. According to the newspapers, Justice French, who headed the mediation between all the groups, said he found the parties quite ready to negotiate behind closed doors: ‘the first day was better than I’d hoped – though I can’t guarantee it will lead to an agreement, I found the parties ready to talk about alternatives and not given to hardline attitudes . . . I think we have made some progress today . . .’

  The same article reports Rose Chown saying she was disappointed that the claim had caused conflict within the Wiradjuri and that she was hopeful ‘all parties could come to some sort of agreement’. Bill Riley, of the Wellington Aboriginal Corporation, is also reported as believing there could be a compromise. And, on the face of it, it seemed as if this optimism was justified because in February the following year an agreement was signed by all the parties, including the Wellington Lands Council, the first agreement mediated under the new Native Title Act.

  But this report of a signed agreement was not the way Joyce explained it to me.

  ‘I went along to the Annual General Meeting of the Land Council and there was a takeover by Rose’s mob, which was why the agreement was signed. I was just goin’ to listen and not cause any trouble.’

  Then, as she recounted it, the people who were elected as office bearers in the Land Council were from ‘all over the place’, meaning they were not local Wiradjuri, and no-one discussed the Town Common in the open meeting.

  ‘But then, when we all left – they told us to go – they would discuss business. The new lot discussed what was goin’ to happen and passed a motion supportin’ the Town Common claim.’ She looked at me meaningfully.

  Joyce went back to telling me about her grandfather Farbie May, and how he had organised a petition for a school at Nanima in 1908. She recounted at some length the names on the petition – Rileys, Stanleys, Daleys and Mays. I thought at first she was off on another sidetrack of family history, but she finished off with, ‘And there wasn’t one Bell or Ah See.’ In other words, there was no record of any of Rose’s or some of the other claimants’ ancestors at Blacks Camp or Nanima even 100 years ago let alone 40,000 years ago. For Joyce, it was further direct evidence that some of the families who had been granted freehold ownership of the land did not have the right to it.

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p; Joyce told me she had the petition document somewhere but we didn’t get time to find it. That afternoon, however, I found a copy of it in a history book in the town library. It was just as Joyce had said. The writing was in black ink, a few blots, the signatures variations of that flowing style everyone once used. Some of the signatures with elegant loops on all the letters reminded me of my father’s hand.

  Back at Joyce’s that same morning, I asked how Rose responded when Joyce tried to explain who was entitled to the land. Rose wouldn’t listen to her evidence, Joyce said, wouldn’t acknowledge her as an elder. She thought Rose felt guilty at not including all the families. It had divided the Aboriginal community.

  ‘You used to meet people in the park and go and ’ave a cool drink and a feed in the café, it doesn’t happen anymore,’ she said.

  The Aborigines used to hang about in Cameron Park when I was a kid. The park was their place. The bus stop for Nanima was just outside the entrance and so the park was used as a gathering place. It extended right down one side of the main shopping street, Percy Street, named after the young superintendent of the penal colony. The park was the town’s pride and joy, winning prizes in state competitions with its fine oaks and cedars and neatly tended oval and crescent-shaped beds of pansies and poppies and stocks with gravelled walkways and a playground. There was also a war memorial inscribed with the names of the fallen – including two of my great uncles, one of whom is buried in the muddy battlefield of Villiers-Bretonneux in northern France. Their names are written in gold lettering and are watched over by an angel seated on a plinth and holding a sword. Down the slope by the Bell River where the old public swimming pool used to be was a rose garden that my mother always admired. We were taken to the park to play on the swings and slippery dips, and my father took us down to the river to pee – he didn’t trust public toilets – but the park clearly didn’t belong to us. It belonged to the other people, the Aborigines.