The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  Remembering the Aborigines in the park makes me wonder about belonging. I don’t think it’s about ownership, a relationship of law that gives the right to give or sell possessions, but, for me, belonging is about where I fit and what fits with me. It is about where I’m at one, where I’m at home. Belonging might not give any legal rights, but it is far stronger and deeper than ownership because it can’t be bought or traded; in fact, I don’t believe it can be destroyed by material means. If a place belongs to me, whoever owns it, it cannot be taken from me. If I belong somewhere, then it will always acknowledge me. The farm where I grew up, which my father used to own, I suddenly realise, belongs to me still; Baron Rock which no-one in my family has ever owned, has always, will always, belong to me. It must have belonged to the Wiradjuri as well, but a sense of belonging is not exclusive.

  Joyce belongs in the Wellington Valley and the land belongs to her. It seems her ancestors have been in the Valley since the first Aboriginal settlers arrived unrecorded tens of thousands of years ago. But she didn’t talk about that. She talked about her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother and her great-great-grandmother. This is what she knows, the Wiradjuri lineage of mothers. That was why, more than a decade after Rose’s claim was first made, Joyce and the other fourteen families had ended up making their own Native Title claim.

  ‘We don’t want money or nothin’,’ Joyce clarified. ‘Just our land.’

  Native Title, it seems to me, is about belonging. It’s about where you belong and what belongs to you. And it seems the freehold transfer of land under the Indigenous Land Use agreement is about ownership. Freehold land can be developed, built on – and, after five years, sold. When I asked Joyce what she thought was Rose’s motivation for wanting ownership of the land, she looked at me and briefly rubbed her fingertips together. According to her, Rose left Wellington when she was a girl and didn’t come back for twenty years. ‘Twenty years is a long time. You can’t just come back after twenty years.’

  Joyce looked at me and I nodded, but I thought the opposite. It’s not so long, you can come back, it’s not so long. I had been gone for longer, nearer thirty, and the place still drew me back. Identity might fade and wear thin in the middle of the night, might flap in the wind like an old sheet, but I still belonged here. The void could lap over any time; it could soak through the flapping cotton and dissolve meaning; it was always there under my stories and would have to be faced one day, but for now, I knew this place was my ground. It wasn’t a country, not a nation, but hills, valleys, creeks, dry dusty paddocks – dreamy green in a good season – gum trees, she-oaks, stony outcrops, river flats, anthills, dirt tracks, wire gates, water holes, magpies singing in the morning, kookaburras, lizards, snakes, Bathurst burrs, catheads – and over it all the wide blue dome of childhood sky. It had not proved to be a talisman against dissolution, but it felt like somewhere to stand.

  17

  A Wild Irishman

  That evening I visited my mother. When I hugged her I felt how thin her shoulders were through the flowery cotton of her blouse. Bones. She didn’t feel like eating much. On the farm we had always eaten a large ‘dinner’ in the middle of the day, and had ‘tea’ at night, which was usually left over slices of mutton and mashed potato, but now my mother literally had just a cup of tea and a piece of cake. It didn’t seem enough to keep body and soul together. I poured a glass of wine and heated up my frozen Thai curry in the microwave, which my mother thought was too newfangled to use.

  As I ate we watched the television news together. Afterwards, I carefully withdrew a notebook from my bag. I had a plan. I wanted to ask my mother to tell me as much of her family background as she could remember. I tried to sound nonchalant. She looked at me directly. I hadn’t said before it was too late but she knew, there was never any fooling my mild-mannered mother, and the unspoken phrase hung uncomfortably in the air.

  I’ve always preferred my mother’s side of the family. By the time I was a teenager I had got it into my head – perhaps my mother put it there – that her side of the family was more interesting. I had the idea that they were a bit arty and brainy in a low-key sort of way; her mother’s family that is, the Reidys and Kennedys, not her father’s, the Whitehouses.

  Mum’s paternal grandfather, Abel Whitehouse, had become a fundamentalist Christian in New Zealand and her grandmother, Elanora Isbister, had left him and her young children, including Jack who became Mum’s father, and gone to Australia. When he turned seventeen, young Jack followed his mother to Sydney and bore her no ill will for leaving him as a child, saying, according to Mum, ‘no-one could live with the bloody old man’. Jack became a house-painter and an accompanist at the silent movies and, said my mother, played the sweetest trumpet anyone ever heard. He was a man of sharp wit and thoughtful politics who couldn’t stand small-mindedness and gossip – and he was an alcoholic. My mother adored her father and modelled herself on him, except that she has never touched alcohol. I never met Jack as he died the year I was born. He came late to the town, arriving around 1920, and by then the Wiradjuri origins of various families had already been forgotten, at least by the whites.

  The Kennedy–Reidy family he married into had arrived much earlier from Ireland. The Kennedys were from Queens County and the Reidys from Limerick. There were also O’Meara and Quain ancestors – among thousands of Irish immigrants arriving in Wellington and the central west in the mid nineteenth century. As far as I know, Patrick Reidy was my first Irish ancestor to arrive in the Wellington Valley. He named his property on the banks of Curra Creek Sarsfield after the renowned Limerick rebel leader, one of thousands of names of European heroes and beloved home towns transplanted to Australia. He buried his infant son on the bank of Curra Creek in 1850 and some years later donated this land to the Catholic Church for a cemetery. Today there is a whole tribe of Reidys buried there as well as my father. I don’t look at his headstone because when she ordered it, my mother asked the stonemason to leave a space for her name on it. I don’t want to see the blank that will have to be filled one day.

  I thought of Patrick as ‘a wild Irishman’ because the only story I had about him was that he raced his horse along the bed of Curra Creek in front of a roaring flood. It wasn’t a story my mother told me, but one I found in an odd little photocopied history of land ownership in the Wellington district. I imagined him galloping recklessly along the sandy bed of the creek, simply for the hell of it, the brown water rushing and swirling behind his horse’s hooves. Patrick must have remained a lover of his own homeland, not just because he named his property after an Irish independence leader, but because on his tombstone, beautifully carved with threaded shamrocks, are the words Native of Co. Limerick, which suggests that his birthplace was the truest thing about him.

  More than a hundred years after Patrick, my sisters and brothers and I were brought up ‘Australian’, but under my mother’s guidance, having a stronger identification with the Irish rather than the English or long-ago Germans of our father’s side. It was a class loyalty as well – the English were more likely to be toffs. The Kennedys and Reidys were proud, however, of the fact that all their ancestors had freely chosen to come to Australia; none of them were convicts. By the time of my grandmother’s generation they were respectable publicans and would have been reasonably well off, my mother said, if John Reidy hadn’t had a heart attack and died after defending someone in a scuffle outside the pub.

  My grandmother, Linda Reidy, and her five sisters and pregnant mother had to survive on their own in genteel poverty, doing sewing, giving piano lessons and teaching at the local convent. According to my mother they loved literature, playing and listening to music, having political discussions and generally living a life of the mind, and so they gained in my mind the status of intellectuals and artists, or at least as good a claim as my family could make to that territory.

  I couldn’t find any Wiradjuri connections to my moth
er’s side of the family. The Irish ancestors were, it appeared, simply part of the infinite patterning of chance that created this ordinary country town in the middle of another people’s homeland. In the strange way the world works, months after the conversation with my mother that night, I found out that it was, in fact, Patrick Reidy who connected me most directly to the Native Title claim.

  Since I had aligned myself with the Reidys and Kennedys, while I was living in Paris it was natural to travel to Ireland. I set out with Anthony, wondering whether there would be any sense of recognition, any sense of homecoming. I don’t think memory and history can be genetically coded, although neuro-physiological research has revealed long-term memory is chemically stored in our cells, so perhaps it was not so far-fetched to think such complex chemistry could stain and colour genes. Perhaps I had inherited an Irish sensibility.

  We flew in from Paris, and after staying a few nights in Dublin, drove down through the middle of Ireland, around the Ring of Kerry and then up to Limerick. It was June, the beginning of summer, and everywhere, just as I had been taught to imagine, there were the emerald fields dotted with castles and abbeys and stony villages held close under damp grey skies.

  It was also the time of the local council elections and on every oak, yew and chestnut tree – and almost every electricity pole and fence post – there were election posters bearing the candidates’ names and portraits. Oddly, in this foreign country, all the names were familiar. It was like driving through a list of names from my childhood: Reidy and Kennedy, of course, and Agnew, Burke, Brennan, Daley, Devine, Ryan, O’Brien, O’Rourke, Hughes, Knowles, Kelly, Keeley, Lynch, Munn, McCarthy, Nolan, Knuckey, Sheridan, Spargo, Shannon, Quirk, Quain – almost every name echoed in a Wellington family, the familiar chant repeating for hundreds of miles. I had not realised how many of the town’s families had originally come from Ireland, had not even thought about it before, but it made me curious to know why so many had left this romantic green place for a dry wilderness. The first time I went back to Wellington afterwards, I visited the cemetery with my mother and it didn’t take much comparing of the earliest dates of Irish names to realise most of them must have come out during or just after the Great Potato Famine of 1845.

  Anthony and I drove on, drinking in the romantic dream of the auld country. In the churches and abbeys and Celtic crosses it was easy to see the controlling story of religion, but stronger than that, more influential it struck me, was the landscape itself; the rocky outcrops, the cliffs, the wild high stony places, even after thousands of years of settlement didn’t seem tamed. This must have been what Patrick Reidy yearned for under the hot sky of Australia.

  Finally, we drove over the county border into Limerick and parked by the side of the road. I waited for the damp green country to speak to me. I got out of the car and walked through the sodden grass on the verge to lean on a stone wall and breathe in the coolness. My boots were already darkened with wet, the fine misty air moistened my hair and cheeks. It felt fresh and welcoming.

  ‘It suits you, this climate,’ Anthony said.

  ‘I always knew it would.’

  There was a derelict stone cottage by the side of the road, roof tiles broken, windows gone. It was a bleak little house, isolated in a bleak flat landscape along what would have been a muddy lane. There were no trees and no evidence of there ever having been a garden, no stone wall to give the cottage any kind of distinction. I thought of the cold and the poverty and grey skies and the lack of food and education. I got back in the car and we drove along the cold-looking inlet towards the city of Limerick, but as we skirted around the suburban edges I decided not to stay. I might have looked at home but it didn’t feel like my place after all.

  I had inherited Irish red hair from my ancestors, and an Irish love of words and storytelling, but the landscape did not know me. If I stayed longer I might have begun to see through the drizzle and over the emerald fields and it might recognise me, but as it was, I was an outsider. This place was the home of my ancestors, not mine.

  I thought of Patrick Reidy lying in the cemetery under the dry grass at Wellington and wondered if he ever felt at home in the hot harsh country he had ended up in. I come from transplanted people, I suddenly realised. It might mean we always grow a little crooked and ill at ease.

  18

  Gold

  I had been in Wellington for several days, talking to Joyce and seeing my mother, and was ready to return to the city. Despite the fresh morning air an odd desolateness had crept up on me, the return of a feeling of being caught there, the base note of my teenage years. There was only a morning to spend in the local library – which was now housed in the old bowling club – and then I could leave.

  I knew that after the missionaries and farmers had arrived, gold was found near Wellington and I wondered how its discovery had affected the Wiradjuri and my ancestors. There was no record of either my convict or Irish ancestors rushing to search for gold in Wellington, although Gran Miller’s father was a gold-panner on the Bathurst goldfields along the Turon River. Perhaps they had already had enough excitement coming from the other side of the world and were happy to supply the food to the hundreds of people who began flooding into Wellington and nearby villages of Bodangara and Iron Bark, where gold seams had been found in the 1850s.

  When I told him about my search, the librarian plied me with local history books and articles and promised to send me more. I settled down at one of the desks with the light streaming in and began with an illustrated history of the search for gold.

  As I had imagined, the goldfields were often quite violent places. There were a number of accounts of bushrangers’ attacks around Wellington; a particularly tragic one happened on the goldfields in 1863 when two masked men held up Mr John Lake’s store in broad daylight. As Mr Lake rushed forward to stop them he trod on and killed his own sleeping baby son. I thought of Mr Lake, and then, Mrs Lake, how neither of them would ever have been able to forget the image of a heavy boot coming down on a tiny, beloved body. When I read this account, history disappeared and the pain was here in the present, 150 years after it happened.

  Some of the bushranging attacks occurred even before the gold rush; one at Bushrangers Creek, which obviously earned it its name. When I was a child, Bushrangers Creek Road was the ‘other’ way home to the farm. Instead of turning left at the Showground – once owned by Patrick Reidy – occasionally my father would drive straight ahead and there would be a buzz in the car; we were going Bushrangers Creek way! Even such a small deviation from the usual was something to be relished.

  The dirt road went up through the bush-covered hills, past a collection of tin shacks, which I later learned was the remains of an Aboriginal settlement, past the turn-off to Mount Arthur, which had a panoramic view of the town, and past the old town reservoir surrounded by desolate scrub. This road was more lonely and strange altogether, less comforting but more thrilling. The uninhabited hills felt like they didn’t want anyone living there and they seemed to only reluctantly allow anyone to even drive through. When the bush finally cleared into the rolling paddocks there was a sense of relief that we had got through safely once again. Something dreadful could easily happen Bushrangers Creek way and yet it was the way we longed to go.

  What happened there was not so dreadful. Two bushrangers, Jacky-Jacky and Redcap, whose names suggest they were Aboriginal, had escaped from Bathurst jail. They were going to kill a Mr Piggins, but he hid among his cattle while the bushrangers walked into his house where his wife had just given birth. They decently left, unaware that the resourceful Mrs Piggins had £200 hidden under her birthing pillow. Several days later, the outlaws were captured at Bushrangers Creek – but not before Redcap had fired a shot at Sergeant Sheedy, taking off his whiskers and grazing his jaw. Though it matters little now, and although Mr Piggins’s actions resulted in his child living and Mr Lake’s in his child dying, I could not help feelin
g disdain for Mr Piggins crouching among the cows, and a painful, desperate admiration for Mr Lake, who could never rest again.

  During the gold rush the Chinese first arrived in Wellington. Many arrived after the 1861 anti-Chinese riots on the goldfields at Lambing Flat and set up camp along gold-bearing rivers and creeks. Hundreds worked the alluvial deposits along Mookerawa Creek and built a mile-long water race out of stone, which was much admired and envied. The Celestials, as they were called, lived in tents on the goldfields and in town at the bottom of Ward Street where they had opium dens, strange-smelling herbs, paper lanterns and ‘berry-brown’ children. In Ward Street now there is the town swimming pool and a few ordinary houses, nothing that hints at an exotic past.

  While Europeans worked individually, many of the Chinese gold seekers worked in large extended family groups, apparently more similar to Wiradjuri than colonial society. Still, others were coolies working for ‘mandarins’ who wore red sashes and rode around on horses strictly supervising the workers. In the evenings the coolies gambled, smoked opium and drank sujo. The local history books say that because they worked harder than Europeans and found gold where others didn’t, and they kept to themselves and sent their gold home to China, there was jealously and ill-feeling towards them. But it seems the Chinese did not keep entirely to themselves, or at least later on they mixed more, because there are Aboriginal–Chinese in Wellington. I remember the Ah Sees and Loosicks; I saw them around town, but I didn’t know them. Even in a small town there weren’t a lot of reasons to cross fine degrees of social difference.