The Mind of a Thief

by Patti Miller

  ‘That’s no good.’

  Rose shrugged.

  ‘So you live in Sydney these days?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. I’ve been there for about three years. Before that I was in the Blue Mountains. I haven’t lived in Wellington since I was eighteen. I like the country, but . . .’ I didn’t want to say not much cultural life out here, so I changed tack. ‘It’s a bit quiet for me.’

  ‘No cultural life here. We’re lucky if we get a play every three years.’

  I nodded. I didn’t have her measure but she certainly had mine, despite looking and sounding as if she’d had the stuffing knocked out of her.

  ‘So, you grew up in this house?’

  ‘It was my grandmother’s house. We lived across the road.’

  ‘Your grandmother was Tillie Bell?’

  ‘Yeah. Whereabouts in Sydney do you live?’

  ‘Kings Cross.’

  ‘Oh, I used to work near there,’ Rose exclaimed, showing the first sign of liveliness. ‘Billyard Avenue. I was a mother’s help in one of those big houses there.’ She mentioned the name of a well-known Sydney family. ‘The older son is a Park Avenue lawyer now. New York.’

  ‘Better not say anything about him then?’

  She grinned.

  ‘So you went to Sydney when you were sixteen?’

  ‘I fell in love with Sydney. Well, I was a bit lonely at first, but then I found a job as a nurse’s aide and made lots of friends. I loved walking around Sydney. And I liked looking after old people. Then I was the mother’s help at Billyard Avenue, then a nurse’s aide again, then a nursing domestic.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’

  ‘It was getting expensive to live in Sydney and in 1986 we came up to Wellington for a bit of a break and decided to stay. We rented a house on a farm out on the Yeovil Road.’

  ‘Really? That’s where our farm was. Out towards Yeovil. Did you turn off at Fingerpost?’

  ‘No, we kept going. Opposite Bishop’s property’

  ‘That would be Curra Creek. I was at Suntop school so we had school sports with Curra Creek.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Curra Creek. It was good out there. Best nine years of my life. We had a beautiful garden. You shoulda seen our garden.’

  ‘You’re a good gardener?’

  ‘We both are. My husband does the digging, I do the weeding.’

  We were establishing our ground, checking that we really were locals. We knew this place, both of us. We knew who owned what property along a road that only a handful of people knew or cared about.

  ‘So what started it all then? I mean, why did you get up one morning and decide you wanted to claim back the Common?’

  ‘Well, it started with getting up one morning and reading the Wellington Times.’ Her tone was dry, ironic.

  ‘As you do,’ I said.

  ‘As you do.’ She grinned again. We both got it, the mundane recording of country town life. ‘And the headline said “The Common Up For Grabs”. I thought, what’s this? And I read on and it said the government was considering options for various bits of Crown land, and the Wellington Common was one of them. And I thought, they can’t do that, that’s our land.’

  ‘So, when was that?’

  ‘Late eighties, I think. I’ve been going on this a lot longer than the thirteen years they say in the papers. I wrote to the premier, who was it then? I said, give it to us.’

  ‘That was the Town Common Committee?’

  ‘Well, it didn’t exist right away, but then we had the committee and we put a . . .’ She seemed to have lost the thread. She sat leaning on one elbow, her tankard of tea in the other hand, eyes unfocused, drifting as if she had forgotten there was a sentence to finish.

  ‘A claim, a land rights claim,’ I suggested.

  ‘That’s what I was looking for.’ She didn’t seem bothered by her sudden vagueness, as if it was something she accepted. She continued on wearily. ‘We put a land rights claim in to the New South Wales government in 1991 and then Eddie Mabo came along. We hadn’t heard of him before, he was from the islands, you know, and three months later we put in our Native Title claim. The first one after Eddie Mabo.’

  I had heard it all already but hearing it from Rose and seeing her great weariness I was beginning to feel some shame. I shouldn’t have judged against her on the strength of other people’s stories. And I hadn’t confessed that I had arrived already implicated, aligned with the other side. Neither of us had even mentioned the other side yet.

  ‘So what has kept you going all this time?’

  She looked suddenly much more weary, almost beaten. She shrugged and grimaced as if she had actually been defeated. ‘Just the land,’ she said. ‘It kept me going. The land.’

  It was there outside the tin hut. The land all around us. Just river flats and low hills, soil and rye grass and clover and Bathurst burrs and gum trees. It was real and ordinary like earth anywhere, but it was also history and personal memory and identity as much for Rose as anyone else.

  ‘So why did you leave here in the first place? You just wanted to go to Sydney? The bright lights?’

  She leaned back and put her tea down. She was wearing a loose, ochre-coloured cotton dress and every now and then as we talked she leaned back and sighed in the heat and lifted her breasts with both hands to let the air under them. The unselfconsciousness of the breast-lifting rendered it a normal movement – of course you would lift heavy breasts in the heat to let the air cool and dry the sweat. We both sat there, a damp gleam coating our bodies, our only exertion drinking tea and cutting cake. Rose leaned forward again.

  ‘We were moved off the Common. I was born here and I was thrown off. Certain people who said they were elders had something to do with that.’ Her voice had an edge to it suddenly. ‘People at Nanima who were the eyes and hands of the police and the government. And then they turn around a few years later and want your respect. Huh,’ she scoffed bitterly.

  I waited. It looked like she might tell me her version of where all the conflict had come from. She sat there drinking her tea then looked up. ‘Anyway, I’ll tell you more about it another time. We’re just having a cup of tea today.’

  ‘Okay, so you moved into Nanima after you were kicked off the Common?’

  ‘Other people did. And some went into town. We went out to Mumbil. My dad got a job on the dam.’

  Mumbil was a small village that housed workers on Burrendong Dam, built during the sixties on the Macquarie River upstream from Wellington to regulate floods and provide a steady water supply. It drowned some of the historic gold-mining and Aboriginal sites, and Joyce and Lee both said the local fish and mussels disappeared because they couldn’t live in the cold water released from the dam.

  ‘One day my mother went to Sydney to visit my sister, she was in hospital. And then my mother suddenly had a heart attack and died. And the next day my sister died. A week later my grandmother died.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’ I flushed, feeling as inadequate as I ever had.

  She was sitting heavily, and didn’t respond. There was something damaged about her. She must have been only fourteen or fifteen when she lost her mother, sister and grandmother. The fish hook twisted a little.

  ‘How old was your mum when she died?’ I asked.

  ‘She was fifty-six. All my life I have been frightened of turning fifty-six. I thought I wouldn’t get past it myself.’ Her lips started to tremble and tears shone in her eyes. ‘When I was coming up to it, I was terrified. I was so scared. I thought I was going to die. I thought . . .’ Her mouth wobbled uncontrollably and she stopped speaking.

  ‘I know, that happens,’ I said uselessly.

  ‘I was so scared,’ she said again, her voice soft and shaky. Her mouth slipped. She tried to hold it together but her whole face wa
vered then crumpled and she started to cry.

  I sat awkwardly in the heat, unnerved. I put my cup of tea down. It wasn’t that I was unused to tears, old sorrows often spring unexpectedly in life writing classes. But Rose’s tears came from mortal terror, nothing to do with what I had come to ask her about. It wasn’t any of my business. She sat at the table, her soft sturdy body shaking. I put my hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Well, you’ve made it through. You’re still here.’

  My heart was thumping too loudly to think. Of course it was my business. Fear of non-existence is the dark thread connecting us all; tugging gently or fiercely, it is always there under each day.

  She nodded, still crying. ‘I was so frightened.’

  She stared for a moment, directly ahead, then straightened and stood up heavily. Her facial muscles were still trembling and her skin was wet. She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. ‘That’s what happens when you start stirring up memories. You get sentimental.’

  She knew it wasn’t sentiment. It was the heart knowing for certain that it would stop beating and that the whole shimmering world would disappear completely and forever, but who could say that over a cup of tea? The world was only solid while we believed it was. I took my hand away.

  ‘But you’re here now. On this beautiful piece of land. You have succeeded in what you set out to do.’

  ‘I think it might have nearly done me in. The conflict.’

  That was the second time she had brought it up. I decided to plunge in. ‘I’ve heard a few things about that, the conflict. I’ve read some things. People have told me all sorts of things.’

  Rose sat down again, heavily.

  ‘There were people, are people, going around saying they are elders. Wanting you to respect them.’

  ‘And you didn’t think they deserved respect?’

  ‘People treat you badly, treat your family badly. They get you thrown off your land, they break up your community – and then twenty years later they say they’re elders and you should respect them. Sorry, I can’t do that.’ Her voice was flat and scathing.

  So that’s what it was about. An old wound that had never healed. She still hadn’t named any names though. She was being justifiably careful.

  ‘So the conflict between the two sides really started back in the sixties when your family was thrown off the Common?’

  ‘It was already like that. Bill Riley, horrible man. He ran Nanima. He was a standover man.’ She flashed me a look, knowing she had given me something. ‘I know you talked to him all those years ago. You said in that first phone call. That’s why I wouldn’t talk to you then.’

  Other people on the Traditional Families side had said the same thing about Bill Riley, but I had nothing against him. He had helped me with some good stories.

  ‘I know, other people have said. But you know, he was nice to me.’

  ‘Of course he was nice to you. A young woman writer, wanting to know about Aboriginal life? Of course he was nice to you.’

  ‘So why did Bill Riley want you off the Common in the first place?’

  Rose gave me another look that said, can’t you work that one out. ‘Because on the Common we were outside his jurisdiction,’ she said flatly. ‘He wanted everyone living at Nanima so he could have us under his rule.’

  ‘So you reckon it was about personal power?’ King of the castle, I suddenly thought.

  ‘And there’s Joycie Williams. Says she’s an elder. She went round thinking she was better than everyone else, looking down her nose at us. Now Joycie says she’s an elder and we have to look up to her. No thank you. I couldn’t do that. No-one could do that and keep their dignity.’

  I felt acutely uncomfortable and didn’t know what to say. I liked Joyce and felt loyal to her, not to mention that I might be related. I didn’t like the way Rose said ‘Joycie’, the tone of contempt. But this was Rose’s side of the story and it had been the reason for the years of fighting over a few hectares of land and the splitting of the Aboriginal community. None of the story would have happened without her side of it. It was her reality and she felt hurt and angry and worn out. I had to listen.

  ‘So what did Joyce do?’

  ‘Thought she was better than us. Driving her car past us. Not stopping for nobody. Horrible woman.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘Thought she was too good for Aboriginal people.’

  ‘But she is Aboriginal.’

  Rose made a scoffing sound. ‘Joycie’d drive past her own grandchildren. Horrible woman. Her and her brother.’

  ‘Why though?’

  ‘She thought she was above us. Because Joycie was married to a white man.’

  I knew Rose’s husband was a white Englishman so that couldn’t be the real reason for her dislike of Joyce. I realised I didn’t want to hear any more. The conflict between Rose’s mob and Joyce’s mob was an antagonism born out of ill-considered government policy, but the conflict had become personal, a series of slights and hurts and insults built up over the years like a nasty midden. The midden wasn’t the cause, it was the result. Grubbing through it only distorted the real issues of Native Title and Land Rights and gave ammunition to those who would deny them respect and acknowledgement.

  Rose’s family and many of the families on the Common were there because the Aboriginal Protection Board had closed their reserves and dispersed them to other places. They had nowhere to go and had ended up on local Wiradjuri land and were treated like interlopers. It was the same everywhere in the world, I thought; the newcomers are always resented through no fault of their own.

  The forced relocation of Aborigines had happened because the government didn’t know or care who belonged where, but for Rose, it was about feeling belittled where she was born. She and her family were made to feel like outsiders. And then she had lost her mother and her sister and her grandmother all within a week. Life had to feel fragile. She couldn’t care less about proving a continuous connection back to white settlement; she just wanted to be on the land where she was born, back where she’d lived as a child when everyone was still alive.

  I started gathering up my things. ‘Can I just ask about the future – what you plan to do here? Then I’ll leave you alone.’

  ‘Yeah, I do need to get on with some watering.’

  Rose cut herself another piece of Madeira. She had eaten three-quarters of the cake as we talked – and finished it off completely before we were done – carefully cutting the icing off each slice and putting it on the side of her plate. She told me about the work she had done so far, the trees she had planted, the restoration of the humpy and then her plans for a village – a whole village – on the Common, and a Cultural Centre, which Aborigines and non-Aborigines could come to from all over Australia. She said it would cost about three million dollars, although later she said, with all the things she had planned, she wouldn’t have much change out of twenty million.

  ‘You’d better buy a Lotto,’ I said. From what I had read in various articles, there was no funding available from either State or Federal governments now that the land was freehold.

  She smiled tiredly. ‘There’s a few places we can ask. And I want to build a Keeping Place. The Australian Museum in Sydney, they have some of our stuff. They would give that back to us if we had a Keeping Place.’

  I hadn’t asked about anything much on my list of questions: the town tip on the other side of the Common on Pine Hill; or the Traditional Families’ plans for the same kind of cultural centre and Keeping Place at the old convict site; or the accusation of misappropriation of government funds; or the taunts that she had done it all for the money and would sell the land in five years’ time so she and her committee could make a killing. These were all serious matters but I felt constrained.

  Thinking about it now, I can understan
d why the mediation judge, ‘the skinny sort of a little fella’, didn’t press Rose when she cried. Despite being a sturdy-looking woman, intelligent and perceptive, she had the air of a wounded, tired child who didn’t want to be hurt anymore. Perhaps it was manipulative, as Wayne said, but I didn’t think so. If it was, it was unconscious, and I didn’t want to be the one who tested it.

  Rose and I stood up and I cast another look around the little hut. There was a lean-to off the main room, a bedroom by the look of it, and another door, opening, I guessed, to a bathroom. I would have liked a proper look around but it’s not what you do when you have a cup of tea. We went outside into the blinding heat and light, several degrees hotter than when we went in. It must have been forty-five degrees, the kind of heat that literally stops you in your tracks.

  Ahead was a small portable building I hadn’t noticed as I came in.

  ‘The committee office,’ Rose explained. Then she pointed out a smart-looking car under a carport next to the office. ‘I bought that when they let me go at the hospital after thirteen years. Twenty thousand dollars I got, so I bought that car.’ She was obviously well aware of what Joyce and Wayne were saying about her – and what might have flickered through my mind.

  We walked slowly in that dream-like state extreme heat induces. When we reached the gate by the peppertree, I made one last effort to ask a question about her real intentions, her real motivation.

  ‘So, do you reckon you will stay here long?’

  ‘I’ll leave here in a pine box,’ she said, quick as a flash.

  I nodded. So she wasn’t going to sell the land, or at least didn’t want anyone to think she would.

  Or she didn’t think she had long to go. So weary, leaning on the gate post.

  ‘Then I’ll come back and sit in one of them trees. Top of that gum tree.’

  ‘What as?’ I asked. I thought of the Wiradjuri totems, eaglehawk and crow.

  ‘An eaglehawk.’

  ‘Oh, yes, eaglehawks. I like them. I don’t like crows.’

  When I was a child standing on top of Baron Rock, I saw an eaglehawk hovering only a few metres away, watching intensely and waiting, its wings a blur.