The Cherry Picker's Daughter

by Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert

  It’s down here at this same spot that we cart our water from; the pump’s just over near the trees and there’s a tap on it. We carry our water up to the house. I’m too little to carry full buckets but I gotta help Lynnie. We try to carry them between us on a stick like the Chinese do—with a stick over our shoulders and a metal bucket on each end—but that didn’t work ’cause I was too short. We gotta concentrate real hard when we’re carrying the buckets back so that we don’t spill all of our water. Otherwise, we gotta turn around and come back and do it all over again. It’s really hard yakka, and Lynnie takes big steps. When I get bigger, I can carry a full bucket home by myself.

  The bigger kids have got to reach into the river and fill the buckets up and pass them up to us littler ones. Mummy said there was no way I was to try to fill the bucket up myself. But one day, I did and slipped on the mud and fell right into that river, without even making a great big splash.

  The current took me down deep under the surface. I could see Lynnie—she had her back to me, putting her bucket down, and I was trying to swim back up to her but I couldn’t. The water was rushing all over me. My eyes were wide open and I felt I was moving in slow motion. I must’ve been splashing about because the next thing you know, Lynnie pulled me up by the hair. We didn’t tell Mummy—she would’ve been angry at us both; me for going down to the edge of the riverbank when I knew I wasn’t allowed and Lynnie for letting me. I had a lucky escape from disaster that day, for sure, but what nobody knew was that another disaster was waiting for our family, just over the horizon.

  Mummy at the age of 17 in Griffith, 1941.

  Goma, Kerry’s birth mother, when she met Kevin Gilbert in 1954.

  Kevin with the birds, Heckle and Jeckle, in Trundal, 1957.

  L to R: Kevin, Lynnie and Kerry playing marbles on the Island, 1958.

  Kerry and Kevin, Condobolin Show Day, 1961.

  Kerry holding her bride doll, 1964.

  Last Christmas dinner on the Island before the family house burnt down, 1963.

  Kevin, second row, second from right, in Condobolin, 1965.

  Kerry, far left, second row from back, wearing a serge uniform, Koorawatha, 1968.

  Mormon baptism day at Murrumbidgee River in Leeton. Back row, L to R: Lynnie, Elder Hadley and Paddy. Front row: Bobby Smith (Sam’s brother), Kevin, Kerry and their cousin Billy Bell (Uncle Paddy’s son), 1966.

  Mummy and Uncle Paddy Naden picking oranges, Leeton, 1970.

  Mummy picking cherries, Young, 1972.

  Kerry’s birth father, Kevin Gilbert, and Mummy in Kooringhat, 1976.

  Daddy and Meryl, Christmas in Cessnock, 1981.

  Kerry and her father, Kevin Gilbert, celebrating her daughter, Lesa’s 17th birthday in Ainslie, 1991.

  Kerry’s graduation day, Bachelor Adult Education majoring in Community Development and Aboriginal Education, UTS, 1995.

  Kerry and brother Kevin at Mummy’s 80th birthday in Parkes, 2004.

  Mummy on a swing in Watson, 1999.

  Mummy’s 80th birthday in Parkes. Back row, L to R: Kevin, Kerry, Paddy and Lynnie. Front row: Mummy and Meryl surrounded by great grandchildren, 2004.

  Kerry and her daughters, Lesa and Melanie, in Downer, ACT, 2015.

  Kerry and her grandchildren in Downer. Back row, L to R: Jirrima and Yarran. Front row, L to R: Tenisha, Kaylarnie and Yullara, 2015.

  15

  1964: my Island home all gone

  In February, we would head out to pick the oranges at Leeton. We had a good picking season this year and now we’re heading back home to the Island. I’m in the front of the ute with Mummy and Daddy; he’s home again and helped us pick this year. The other three kids are in the back. We pull into the town of Forbes to see our Aunty Frances and all her Mob. She’s Uncle Paddy’s first wife and her kids are Trish, who has polio, Gail and Billy. It’s been a long drive already from the orange paddocks to Forbes so all of us are happy to get out and stretch our legs.

  As soon as we get out of the car, we can tell something is dreadfully wrong because Aunty Frances runs to Mummy. She starts telling her some terrible news—that our house on the Island has burnt down while we were away working the fruits. Mummy’s sitting there in the car, just looking shell-shocked. Rounding us kids up, she tells us to hurry up and get back in the car. We gotta go straight home and find out how bad it is.

  It seems like forever, the rest of the drive to Condo. All the way, us kids don’t say nothing. We just keep hoping it’s not true. We can’t believe it. It’s just after Christmas; all our toys, our new clothes! My new doll’s cradle—I never even played with it. Mummy put it on top of the wardrobe for when we came back home from doing the oranges—we can’t take much with us picking. We only took our clothes and one favourite toy. I’m lucky I took my bride’s doll.

  This Christmas just gone, our Aunty June, Mummy’s sister, came and gave us presents, too. We don’t often see her. (I think Aunty June’s rich ’cause she gives us pocket money). This year was our best Christmas yet but now we ain’t got no house no more and we’ll never play with our new toys again, ever.

  We go straight to the Island. We go past my great aunt, Aunty Tilly Goolagong’s house where usually we’d stop and have a cup of tea. I turn around and look through the back of the car window to see if I can see my brothers and sister. They’re hiding under the tarp that goes over the back of the ute.

  I see Paddy put his head up, even though he’s supposed to be hiding so the police don’t see them in the back. I turn around and look at Mummy’s face. She’s biting her bottom lip and Daddy is clinging to the steering wheel; his knuckles are white to the bone. They’re real worried. We drive down through the gutters and the kids stand up in the back of the ute now. We’re all straining our necks to see where our house should be. Everyone’s crying, even the boys. It’s not fair. We just can’t believe we got no house anymore.

  All gone, there’s nothing left, just ashes, soot, tin and dust where our house used to be. Mummy’s head is down. I see her tears; they keep coming. She walks through the ashes, looking, kicking pieces of tin. Kicking bits and pieces of our burnt-out home around. I know she’s looking for her photographs. Her photos, they’re the most special thing to her in the world. Her heart is breaking alongside mine.

  She finds our old tea canister that has the kangaroo and emu on it—the Bushell’s tea tin. She stands over it and kicks it around with her foot, just a little. Then she picks it up, looks at it and throws it into the rest of the rubble. She heads back to the fire the boys have lit, and sitting on an old upside-down tin bucket, she looks deep into the flames.

  Us kids, we don’t know what to do. We all hurt deep down inside and none of us wants to be the first to cry again. Mummy makes the boys run and get our older brothers and sisters from where they live. She tells us we’ll have to get a tent to live in for a while. We aren’t too worried. We’ve done that heaps of times already.

  Unloading the back of the ute, the big ones pitch the tent and us girls grab out food and cooking stuff ready to use. Mummy’s cooking our dinner and the billy’s on the boil. We always have a billy boiling so that a cup of tea can be had any time. We’re cooking our tucker on the fire, too. We have stew and damper that first night which tastes real good.

  We crawl into bed exhausted. Then us kids all start whispering to each other about our toys and new clothes and our favourite things that got burnt and we’ll never see again.

  Mummy tells us to go to sleep but I gotta go to the toilet up the back. It’s made of scrap wood, tin and hessian bags, with a big deep hole and no roof on top. The hole has wood over it that’s got a big circle in the middle to sit on. Sometimes, I get scared I might fall down the hole, it’s so big. Lynnie has to take me. I giggle because I think it’s funny that she has to get outta bed when she just got in. She pulls my hair and I pretend to scream, making out she hurt me, but I close my mouth just as quickly—we don’t need no more upset for the day.

  We walk past t
he fire. Mummy, she’s just sitting doing nothing, just sitting there. We get to the toilet and I sit and dawdle, pulling my pants down real slow. I just don’t wanna go to bed yet so I take longer than usual. Lynnie’s yelling at me to hurry. Grabbing the newspaper, I rub it to make it soft before I wipe myself. Jumping off the toilet, I’m ready to go. I crawl back into bed and then I hear this crying.

  ‘Lynnie, Mummy’s crying,’ I say. She tells me to shut up and go to sleep. I start crying, too, and so does she. The boys are quiet. I whisper to them but they won’t answer; they’re not making a sound. I bet they’re crying, too.

  We’re camping in the tent now the house is gone. Uncle Paddy and Aunty Carol are off living somewhere else; they had been minding our house while we were away picking. Soon, my older brothers get some timber and tin and make a two-room hut for us to live in instead of living in the tent. One room is the kitchen and the other is our girls’ room—the one that we gotta share with Mummy. Daddy’s not around; he’s gone to work again.

  We’ve got just enough money to buy an old bus. The boys will sleep in there. My big sisters are gonna make curtains to pull across so it looks like there’s a room; so they can have some privacy. The front of the bus is gonna be the family lounge room, with the boys’ room up the back. They make it look good (not as good as our house, though—it was big and it was old). My bigger brothers and sisters don’t live at home anymore but they still help when they gotta.

  Mummy keeps the hut spotless; she’s always so tidy. We aren’t allowed to make too much of a mess and, if we do, we gotta clean it up. She’s the best cook, too. She can make the best damper and stew you could ever eat. We have no stove yet so Mummy cooks on the outside fire, but she never burnt anything, anyway. We all don’t mind living in the hut and in the bus. Mummy says, ‘We’re all still alive and that’s what matters’. Sometimes, though, I miss living in a house. I miss my bed and my dolls.

  We ain’t got no electricity in our hut but Mummy’s saving up so she can pay the council to put an electricity box in our yard. She has to save a lotta money. We live our life with fire and candles. It don’t worry us too much; we’re used to it from the paddocks and when the river floods.

  Finally, the council man is here. When he hooks our electricity box up, we have to pay one shilling (ten cents) for half an hour of electricity. We have to have lotsa coins. Soon, we have our very first television so we all sit in the lounge room in the bus watching it. Our very own TV! It’s a PYE TV, only black and white, but we don’t mind.

  16

  Too many tents, too much heartache

  The paddocks call us back every year but some years are harder than the last. Images of tents, hard dirt and camping flood my mind as I try to sort out the jumble in my mind; living on hills and paddocks surrounded by family and cousins. Playing cricket and Lynnie being knocked out by the cricket ball and being rushed to the hospital. The sound of a baby girl crying, taking its last breath as we all sit inside our own tents knowing that the baby was going to heaven. The doctor had sent her back to us to be with her family when her time comes. Morning comes and sadness grips us all; my Uncle and Aunty prepare to take her back into town. Standing at the tent flap, I raise my eyes, looking for the sun, but no sunshine shows through on this day: it’s cold and overcast. We don’t go to work. We must be respectful to the dead.

  One time, we’re all camped out in tents again picking oranges; Uncle Paddy and Aunty Carol are here with us. Mummy’s sick, real sick but I don’t know exactly what it is. She has to have a big operation, I know that much. Uncle and Aunty are looking after us kids till she comes home and they’re worried. One night, we’re all out at the fire when Uncle Paddy tells us, ‘Joyce’s real sick in hospital; it don’t look good. She might not come home.’

  Paddy, Lynnie, Kevin and me are walking away from the fire broken-hearted. We crawl into our beds in our tent, praying that God will let her get better, that she comes home. We cry and whisper to each other, making sure nobody can hear us: ‘What would we do without her? Who would take care of us?’ We know already in our hearts that we’d be split up—we wouldn’t be brothers and sisters anymore. And the fear of the Welfare grows deeper inside me every time I hear him mentioned.

  Our greatest fear is not being brothers and sisters. Years later, I find out that, when our mother died, Aunty June wanted to take me and Uncle Raymond wanted to take Kevin but Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t let them and so they took both of us themselves. And when Uncle Athol was alive, he begged Mummy that, if anything happened to him, she was to get his kids and take them. Mummy and Aunty Doris went and got Lynnie and Paddy from their mum and she didn’t mind.

  I say my prayers for Mummy to get better again, harder this time, praying that God in heaven makes her all right so she comes home to us. After a while in the hospital, she comes home and I say a thank you to God. I think maybe he might be all right after all.

  17

  What’s a State Ward?

  Lynnie and Paddy are darker than me and Kevin. People ask, ‘How can you be sisters? She’s white, you’re black.’ Lynnie tells them lots of reasons: ‘She ate too much Vegemite when she was little’ or ‘Mummy left her in the oven too long’. But I love it best when she tells them, ‘Mummy forgot to use the Persil’. We know from the ads on TV that Persil is the washing powder that ‘makes everything white’. We walk away laughing. My big sister, she’s so smart; I wanna be like her when I get bigger.

  Other times, we trick people, too: the ones who don’t know we’re brothers and sisters. Like the man at the picture theatre with the little torch who tells you where to sit. Us four kids walk in. This is in the early 60s.

  Shining his torch on Kevin and me, he says, ‘You two sit there,’ pointing to the chairs with the white people in them. Me and Kevin don’t move. Us kids don’t go nowhere without each other. Then he flashes it at Lynnie and Paddy and says, ‘You two sit there down the front in the roped-off area where the Blackfellas sit’. We all say, at the same time, ‘You can’t do that, we’re brothers and sisters’.

  He looks at us all. I reckon he knows that there’s no way he’s gonna split us up so he sends us down to the front to where all our cousins are. We don’t mind; we’re happy down there. That’s our family, too, and we’re all together. We didn’t wanna sit with them white people, anyway. And we would’ve got into big trouble with Mummy if we wouldn’t have sat together, especially Paddy and Lynnie—their job is to look after us little ones.

  Me, Kevin, Lynnie and Paddy, we’re State Wards but I don’t know what that means. I only know the awful fear that comes with those words. The fear that he could take me away from Mummy, take me away from my brothers and sisters; a fate worse than death. Lynnie says the Welfare’s supposed to help us with our school clothes and stuff like that. I don’t think that happened too often but he sent us to the dentist once to get our teeth checked.

  I ask, ‘What’s State Wards mean?’

  The other kids tell me it means, ‘He’s our boss, our legal guardian. He’s our boss till we’re all grown up, not Mummy. He tells Mummy what we can do or can’t do.’ I scream deep down inside then. Mummy’s our boss, she tells us what to do. We don’t need no Welfare man coming and telling us.

  We all talk about him. ‘He has no right telling Mummy what to do with us kids. We’re happy; we’re a good family.’ Us four kids, Paddy, Lynnie, Kevin and me, make a pact that we’ll all be good so the Welfare don’t get no excuse to take us away. We make a promise to Mummy, even though she’s not there.

  ‘We’ll be good, Mummy.’

  Our Mummy would work her heart out for us kids to make sure that the Welfare wouldn’t have an excuse to take us but I reckon if he tried, he would’ve had to kill her first. No way would she let anyone take us. No one was game even to smack us for being naughty; only she did that. Even Daddy’s never allowed to hit us, not that he would, anyway.

  I can’t understand why anyone would want to take us away, but I have a dreadful
fear in me like no other. Fear of the Welfare coming, fear of being sent to the homes (’cause that’s where they send the bad kids or kids that the parents don’t want or can’t take care of ). I promise myself I’ll never be bad for the Welfare to take me or for Mummy not to want me. It’s a horrible thing for any seven-year-old to be worrying about.

  All of us are pretending we’re brave and not scared but the terror strikes each one of us, right down deep inside our bellies. Anyway, we tell each other, ‘If he tried to take us, we’d all die first before he got us’. Thoughts of mass suicide hits us like a brick in the face even if we didn’t know what we’re talking about.

  I can see them coming to take me, trying to get me. I tell the other kids, ‘I’d run and hide. They’d never find me.’ There’s lots of hiding spots on the Island so, if they did find me, I wouldn’t go. We all say the same thing, each one of us, thinking we’re so tough and so smart.

  ‘There’s no way they’re gonna take me and give me to someone else or put me in a home for bad kids.’ I’m acting so tough as I mouth my words, but I feel my skin go clammy and cold. My face is quivering, my bottom lip trembles as I try not to let the tears come.