Not Just Black and White

by Lesley Williams

  ‘Come see if anything there?’ she’d ask, scratching her own scalp.

  It was generally one of us older girls who’d comb through her thick, snow-white hair, but never to find a single nit. I reckon she must’ve had the cleanest scalp in the Camp with all of this preening! We’d continue to massage Granny’s scalp as she’d close her eyes and nod off to sleep in front of the wood-stove fire. This was one of the few luxuries in life she enjoyed, offering a short break from the never-ending chores that waited. Yet, at the time, I didn’t think about that. Instead, for a bit of fun we’d sometimes sprinkle sugar into her hair and let her believe she had an outbreak of head lice by cracking the sugar crystals between our fingernails and pretending it was the lice.

  ‘Gee it’s bad!’ she’d say, surprised that her hair was infested. ‘Didn’t think them munyus were that bad.’

  Without Pa and Grandfather around to protect us, my brothers and sisters and I had become an easy target for predatory men in the settlement. Sexual abuse wasn’t openly discussed and as children we didn’t ask many questions; we had to rely on our own instincts and observe what was happening around us. Although I didn’t understand or know all the facts, I could see that when young Aboriginal women were sent away from Cherbourg to work as domestics, some returned home pregnant and joined the other women living in the single mothers’ quarters. After the birth, they’d be sent away to work again but without their babies. It was obvious that many of these children had a fairer complexion, lighter coloured hair and didn’t look like their other siblings. Yet nothing was ever said about this, and I suppose it didn’t matter, because as far as everyone else was concerned, they were ‘family’ and loved as such.

  Granny knew we were vulnerable and kept a close eye on us. However, she couldn’t always be there to protect us. My grade six teacher was Old Murphy, as we used to call him behind his back. He was a tall, scrawny man with a pronounced Adam’s apple, which bobbed up and down when he yelled. He would prowl the classroom looking for students who’d made a mistake and then use all sorts of barbaric methods to punish them. After being in his class, the stutter I had became worse. Once, the old bastard suspended a child from the ceiling’s beam with rope, and then dangled another upside-down, holding the child by the ankles, from the window of our high-set school building – to ‘teach them a lesson’.

  One day, Old Murphy stood with his back to the blackboard and surveyed the class. I put my head down to avoid his sight, as all day he’d been looking at me in a strange and uncomfortable way.

  ‘Who lives closest to the store?’

  ‘Lesley,’ the class replied in chorus, eager to be seen to obey their teacher. I couldn’t believe he needed to ask. We all knew where everyone else lived – the settlement was that bloody small. The bell rang and the class began packing up their desks.

  ‘I want you to stay back after class,’ he said to me. ‘I’ve got a special job for you.’

  I slunk down onto the stool, wishing I were walking out of the classroom with the other children. When just the two of us were alone in the room, he told me to come up to his desk. He opened a drawer and pulled out a tobacco tin sealed with sticky tape. Inside, he said, was a note and some money. ‘Give this to the store keeper, and then bring the groceries down to my house.’

  I took the tin and headed to the store. Why did Old Murphy need me to fetch his groceries? He lived by himself near the sawmill and walked past the government retail store every day on his way to work. Thinking about the cruel things he did to children while in front of an entire class, I wondered what the old turd was capable of if you were alone with him. I had to find someone who’d come with me. As I walked out of the store with the groceries, I noticed a classmate standing nearby.

  ‘Come for a walk with me,’ I said casually, trying to disguise my fear. ‘I-I-I’ve got to take these groceries to Old Murphy’s house.’

  My friend wasn’t keen to venture into the out-of-bounds white officials’ area and risk being punished by the superintendent, so I had to come up with an incentive to make the trip worthwhile.

  ‘Y-y-you know, he’ll probably give us some vegetables – like them c-c-carrots and tomatoes he had at school today.’

  The thought of having something nice to eat was enough for my friend to walk with me down the hill towards Old Murphy’s home. From a distance I could see him standing at his front door waiting for me to arrive, and he was surprised to see someone with me. He met me at the gate and snatched the bag of groceries from my hands without any thanks.

  ‘Get!’ he snapped and swung a tea towel at us, as if he was shooing away two annoying flies. I immediately took off up the hill and ran home.

  ‘What about them vegetables you said we’d get?’ my friend sang out from behind me.

  I didn’t answer and kept on running. No friggin’ carrot was ever going to be enough to entice me anywhere near Old Murphy’s house again.

  Chapter 5

  Lesley

  I’m not sure if it was because I was getting older and starting to see things differently or if I was feeling hard done by because of my family’s circumstances, but the difference between our lives in the Camp and that of the white officials was becoming glaringly obvious. For instance, while the camp people waited outside the butcher shop on meat-ration days to collect whatever bundle of meat and bones were pushed out the serving window to them, the white officials could breeze through a side door and choose from the premium cuts of meat reserved on a table. Going without and watching others who had things I didn’t have, made me jealous and bitter with resentment. It wasn’t necessarily the flash things I wanted, like a new toy or dress – just the basics, like more food to eat.

  While I was focused on what we weren’t receiving, Granny was trying to figure out how on earth she was going to feed us. The weekly food rations weren’t enough, especially as the boys were getting bigger and seemed always to be hanging around the kitchen looking for something extra to eat. Other families in the Camp, although they may have wanted to help, were also struggling to provide meals for their own. We were desperate enough to accept the leftovers from the dormitory boys’ evening meal, secretly given to us by Granny’s nephew Uncle Jack O’Chin and his wife Aunty Nellie, who had been appointed house-parents.

  It wasn’t that long before that I had felt sorry for the white officials’ children for not having many friends to play with. Now I envied them and their carefree lifestyle. Why were we treated so differently? We all lived on the same settlement but they lived in different houses, ate different foods and even went to different schools. The government organised a mini-bus to arrive every morning and transport the white officials’ children to school in the nearby town of Murgon, while all of us black kids were left behind in Cherbourg. Even though it was called ‘school’, we didn’t receive the same standard of education as those who studied in town. It was the principal and teachers, not the Education Department, who determined and controlled what we learned on the settlement.

  We were taught a mishmash of activities and lessons, aimed at teaching us basic reading and writing skills and how to do simple maths calculations – just enough so we weren’t illiterate and could function in the roles for which we were destined in the world outside Cherbourg. Old Murphy taught us that, before the great explorers ‘discovered’ Australia, it was inhabited by ‘miserable dark-skinned natives who had nothing of value to trade’, as the textbook described us. To prove just how wretched and primitive these natives were, he showed us a photograph of a near-naked Aboriginal man brandishing a spear. If this is what an Aboriginal looks like, I wondered, then who are we?

  I thought about what those of us living on the Camp looked like and how we lived. We weren’t whitefullas; we didn’t have the same skin colour – or the same privileges. The officials called us ‘natives’. Did that mean we were Aboriginal like the man with the spear? But, unlike the man in the photo, it s
eemed the only time we were allowed to hold a spear or throw a boomerang was when the government bigwigs or dignitaries visited, and we were told to put on a show. Then the white officials gave us permission to make traditional artefacts like boomerangs, fashioned from the roots of the black wattle tree, and which were seen as simple ornaments. These cultural objects were not valued for what they meant to us, but to be sold or given away by the officials to tourists as souvenirs.

  Occasionally we were allowed to compete in sports against other schools in the district. It was a way to learn how to socialise and interact with ‘other’ children our own age. On the one hand I loved the opportunity of being away from the settlement, but on the other I hated it. I recall the other children moving away as we walked by, to avoid their skin from touching ours. What made matters worse was the embarrassment of our transport.

  Unlike the other school groups, we didn’t have a bus arranged to bring us in. Instead, we’d travel to the district sports days on the back of an old settlement work truck, which was also used to cart firewood or bring carcasses down to the butcher shop from the slaughter yards. To stop us from falling off the back, four rows of long wooden seats were bolted to the tray, and an iron-and-wooden frame was attached to the sides, with a small canopy to protect us from the elements. As we arrived at the sports oval, some of the schoolchildren would wait at the gate – pointing, laughing and making rude sounds as we drove past. At first I wasn’t sure what the children were saying because the loud revs of the old clapped-out truck muffled the sounds. But as we moved closer it soon became obvious.

  ‘Moo-moo,’ mocked one child, and all of her friends laughed hysterically.

  ‘Oink-oink,’ snorted another.

  To them we looked like animals being carted off to market. Sometimes that’s just how I felt.

  Tammy

  My mother’s memories of encounters at school trigger my own. Although she had not told me about her experiences then, I was frightened of the idea of primary school long before I was enrolled. In the years before I started grade one, in 1984, I would go with my mother in the afternoons to collect my brothers from school – on the occasions they didn’t catch the bus home. Mum and I would wait either outside the front gate or around the back, near the Adventure Playground area.

  Mum would warn me not to wander any closer to the classrooms, but to stay near her side, because ‘we weren’t allowed any further’. There we remained until the bell rang and the boys found us at the end of their school day. From then on I thought of school as a place where I wouldn’t be welcome. Fear of ‘the other’ was becoming a family legacy.

  Lesley

  At the settlement school in Cherbourg, our parents never ventured inside the school’s boundary. School was considered a place of authority. The white officials and teachers were the only ones in the settlement with an education. This meant it was them, and not parents, who knew what was best for children. So without a role, our parents weren’t ever included in our learning. It wasn’t until many years later, when I became a mother of school-aged children, I realised that I, too, had a vital role to play in their education.

  Chapter 6

  Lesley

  By 1962 I had completed eight years of schooling on the settlement. Most girls had to then complete a year of domestic-science training, while the boys attended either the rural school, the training farm or worked as junior stockmen around Cherbourg.

  A select few students had been chosen to sit an exam for further education, and I had been part of that group. Before I had an opportunity to sit for it I overheard another girl saying about me, ‘I don’t know why she has been selected, she’s dumb.’ In the past I’d tried to shrug off Old Murphy calling me a ‘useless left hander’, but my confidence was so shaken when I heard this from my own classmates that I began to think I must be too dumb to receive an education and make something of myself. So I gave up. I saw myself as only good for being a servant.

  The domestic-science classes and farm training for Aboriginal youth at Cherbourg, as on every other Aboriginal settlement in the state, readied some thirty or so workers each year for work on mostly rural properties. With no choice in the matter, these teenagers were added to the vast pool of Indigenous labourers and servants, totalling thousands, already being managed by the Queensland Government. Aboriginal servants were highly sought after by landowners and businesses because they didn’t have to be paid as much as white workers. Female Aboriginal domestic servants were paid roughly one-third of the award wage. The demand for this cheap labour was so great it outstripped the supply.

  The government had difficulty filling the orders for Indigenous labourers and servants for another reason too: the high death rates among them from the flu and other infectious diseases. The authorities realised that more Aboriginal women, especially single mothers, would be available to work if their children were removed from them – so the white officials placed some in dormitories and adopted others out. Granny feared this would happen to my sister Honor’s eldest son.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Granny reassured Honor immediately after the birth, ‘I’ll take care of the baby’.

  Honor was given only a week or two to be with her newborn before the white officials ordered her back to work, away from Cherbourg. Our house in the Camp was by now bursting at the seams and there wasn’t room for another bed – everyone was already sharing, except Granny. So the officials reluctantly gave Honor permission to purchase, out of her savings account, a king single bed. This was where Granny slept, alongside her great grandson.

  By 1962, some four years had passed since Pa, and then later Ma, had been placed in quarantine to treat their illnesses. There had been no word from the Department of Native Affairs about when they’d return home. The white officials had already sent Sandra, who was eighteen, to work on a large cattle station in western Queensland. I knew it wouldn’t be long until I’d be forced to leave Cherbourg too. The compulsory twelve-month domestic-science training was all that stood between me and being sent away to work as cheap Aboriginal labour like my sisters.

  *

  The layout of the domestic-science building was similar to the kind of house in which those ‘on the outside’ lived. Students like me honed their cleaning skills on its display furniture, and in the kitchen we were taught how to cook. We had to be deemed good enough at all these kinds of things before the white officials would send us out to work.

  In the kitchen we learned how to bake cakes, biscuits and scones. The sight and smell of freshly baked food teased our ever-present hunger. It was made worse by our domestic-science teacher, Miss Elder, who only allowed us to have a small sample or nibble before she took the cakes and gave them to the other teachers for morning tea. This made my classmates and I wonder if she had a crush on one of the male teachers. There was no truth to this, just schoolyard gossip, but it made us feel better and helped remove the bitter taste of missing out on enjoying our own cooking.

  Like some of the others on the settlement, Miss Elder was given a nickname. She was only about fifty or so, but we called her ‘Old Spinster’. Of course we didn’t dare call her this to her face. With the benefit of hindsight and maturity, I can see that Miss Elder was nice enough – she wasn’t as bad as Old Murphy – but her teaching style was far from gentle and nurturing. If we didn’t cook or clean to her standard, we were yelled at. If we didn’t follow instructions or if we made a mistake, we were yelled at. Sometimes I wondered if it was actually possible for her to talk without having to yell.

  By this stage, after fifteen years of living on the settlement, I was used to being chastised. I had learned not to show emotion. I pretended it didn’t hurt, but it always did. I’d cope by joking and laughing the pain away, in the privacy of home.

  During one typical domestic-science class, Miss Elder told me it was my turn to practise making the bed. I walked into the display bedroom and started smoothing out the sheet.
I took care to neatly tuck the fabric beneath the mattress, just as Granny and Ma were taught, and they in turn had shown me.

  ‘That’s not how you fold the corners of the bed,’ Miss Elder snapped.

  I rolled my eyes, not surprised that Old Spinster complained. From the moment I started making the bed I knew she’d have something to say. Nothing we did was ever good enough. So I started to refold the corners as she’d instructed, when a white hand appeared from behind me and ripped the linen off the mattress. ‘Now do it properly!’

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ I mumbled, reshuffling the pile of bed linen in front of me. But she didn’t hear me. She’d already moved on to her next victim in another room.

  As I remade the bed and fluffed the pillows, I took joy in imagining the different ways I could get my revenge on her. My chance came later that afternoon when she toddled off down the road to the main part of the school.

  ‘Follow me, girls,’ I signalled to my friend Nevada and some classmates, as soon as she had gone. They hesitated, not wishing to be led astray into the display bedroom. When the room wasn’t in use, Miss Elder kept her handbag and large straw hat on the bed. To the gasps of my friends I jumped on top of the floral bedspread, grabbed the handbag, plonked the hat onto my head and began to mock our teacher. I paraded up and down on the nicely made bed, pretending to be Old Spinster flirting with the white male officials. Each time, I’d exaggerate the wiggle of my bum. The more my audience laughed, the more it egged me on.

  Acting like a clown, and making fun of the officials behind their backs, was the only way I had of retaliating. With a stutter like mine I could never be as outspoken as my sister Alex and the other, more confident girls in the camp. Not even in my wildest dreams would I be able to tell Old Spinster or the superintendent what I thought of them and their bloody rules. I went for my final strut and at the top of the bed I did a half twirl and flicked the hair off my shoulder.