I picture these two women walking for miles, leaving us younger kids with the older kids to look after us. Swinging an axe in the same way a man does with sweat dripping off them, muscles rippling in their arms as they work non-stop to earn that meagre money. I see them trudging their way home exhausted, the sun shining down on their backs, too tired to talk to each other, preserving their energy to go home and then be mothers to a tribe of kids. I feel tears well up as I wish that maybe, if I hadn’t been born, it would have been easier for them.
Mummy talks about when her own parents died. She was young, just seventeen, when the Welfare took my father and Aunty Flora away; and Mummy got them back and tried to raise them. How the paddocks was their only hope for work—picking cherries, oranges—anything that would provide food for everyone’s mouth. How Aunty Doris tried to help keep the family together. How, without each other, they would’ve been lost. These two old women would never have coped without each other to help raise their families.
When Mummy and me go driving anywhere, I would often ask her about my grandparents, about what she used to do as a kid growing up in Condo and Three Ways. What had life been like for her and my father’s generation?
After the years of silence or just hearing odd snippets, Mummy would now tell me great stories. Like how my father was the baby, how he was spoilt just like me and about what they all used to do in those times. How they used to ride the horses through the paddocks when they were picking the oranges. How they all looked after the animals out in the bush and how my father had a kangaroo for a pet but she can’t remember its name now.
She tells me how him, Aunty June and Aunty Flora used to give the neighbours heaps by picking their fruit. She laughs as she tells each yarn but the pain and heartache crackles her voice as she remembers. She talks about her own mother, this wonderful and gentle woman who loved them all but was also tough on them, too. She talks about her Dad, a proud man, who loved his family and loved his wife. She tells me they sang a lot at their home. (Mummy sounds like Sharon when she sings, real soulful, just like the country and western stars that we used to listen to on the wireless.)
I gently swing the talk around now to us, me and Kevin. I say to her, ‘Mummy, it must have been so hard for you all those times. Travelling doing the fruits with all us kids and outrunning the Welfare all the time.’
She tells me a secret. ‘It was, Babe; and it wasn’t just that, running away from the Welfare all the time, trying to make a living. We had to run as soon as anyone found out we were the Gilberts. As soon as they found out what happened in the family, they persecuted us. I was so scared for you kids. I had to get youse out of there so youse wouldn’t be hurt no more. You all have been hurt enough as it was.’
I’m sitting and crying deep inside for this woman. This amazing Aboriginal woman who is my mother, who has only shown strength and dignity; strength to keep her kids and her brother’s kids safe; to stop the world’s cruelty towards four innocent children who did nothing, and who tried to protect her other kids from the poverty and the hurt as well.
The sound of gunfire
One day, me and Mummy are driving to Condo to see family when, at long last, Mummy talks about the night of the murder; not how it happened or why but what happened afterwards. My father turns up at her door crying in the middle of the night. It’s January 1957 and I’m three months old. He tells Mummy, his sister, what he’s done. He has the gun in his hand. She tells him he has three choices: to give her the gun; to hand himself in; or to go and turn the gun on himself.
My father gives her the gun. They get me and Kevin inside the house and then my father hands himself in to the police in Parkes.
Hearing this story at sixteen, it dawns on me. Mummy had probably seen my mother’s body in the van where she had been shot dead. Mummy would have seen the blood that my one-and-a-half-year-old brother, Kevin, had seen. I cry for them both, and of course, for this man who is my father. I cry for Kevin and myself, surrounded or covered by the blood of our mother as she lay in the car with us.
Mummy blames herself. I can see it on her face. Her next words I hear loud and clear.
‘If only I’d had enough beds to go around for everyone. But there was only enough as it was. If only they would have stayed that night…’
If only. If only. How do I tell her that it wasn’t her fault? I can’t because I know that nothing I could say would make a difference.
* * *
1 Biamie is our Creator, the great spiritual being.
41
Motorbikes and life
In 1973, I get my School Certificate and I’m still in love with John. Even though Mummy has threatened to shoot him with the shotgun, he’s still hanging around.
Mummy and me are heading to the opal fields to go opal mining. It’s been a dream for both of us. The car is already packed when Mummy gets a phone call (yes, we’ve finally got the phone on!): Kevin’s had a motorbike accident. They pulled him out from under a truck in Wagga. They thought they were gonna pull out a body, not a person. He’s hurt bad.
Mummy’s knees buckle as she takes the call. I stand beside her, waiting to catch her if she falls. I know something’s wrong but I don’t know what yet. She hangs the phone up, sobbing. She tells me it’s Kevin. We get in the car and drive to Wagga. He’s bad; he’s in the hospital and has plaster all over his body but he’s alive and that’s the most important thing.
Back in Koora, I have a Kawasaki 100 that I normally fly around on. Mummy tells me I’m not allowed to have the bike anymore; I might have an accident and not be as lucky as Kevin. I don’t argue. I seen the pain in her heart when she was on the phone and in the hospital but I figure that I’ll wait for my chance to talk her out of that when we get home—I had no intention of giving up my bike. Anyway, I have no choice. When we come back from Wagga, she takes a hammer and goes and smashes my bike up, first the battery, then the bike. Tears roll down her cheeks as she does it.
And so life goes on for all of us. We still work in the paddocks. Our family has grown over the years and I have a lot more nieces and nephews. Lynnie has a little boy named Willie but he’s more mine than hers, we share him. Kevin still lives with Maureen in Wagga ’cause Sam’s in the army. Meryl drives the preschool bus for the Erambie Mission in Cowra.
42
Writing in Ghent, New York
It is 2006 and I’m sitting here, thousands of miles from home in Ghent, New York, at an Artist’s Retreat called Art Omi. As I write, I’m thinking how my father must have felt in Grafton Jail when he saw his two children for the first time in seven years. I wonder how often he thought about us growing up, being kids, laughing in the sunshine or crying when we fell over and hurt ourselves. We was living in a world totally different to the one he was in—one surrounded by thick walls and metal bars.
Apart from the few visits in the fourteen-and-a-half years he spent in jail, my father only knew us through photographs. He only read about us in letters and had only seen us in real life three times. Mummy had always written to him all those years, telling him about us and sending him photographs, baby photos and school photos. I have these photos with me now. My heart breaks when I look at the picture of me and Kevin playing marbles with the other kids and I turn the photo over and read the words on the back. They are the same as what Mummy had written to Nanna and Pop.
Kerry (in front) and Kevin (2nd on right) playing marbles.
‘To our Daddy with love, Love Kevin and Kerry xxxx’
Kerry, aged one: ‘To my Daddy with love, Love Kerry xxx’
I imagine the letters that Mummy would have written to him in Long Bay and Grafton Jails, and Morisset Hospital.
Dear Kevin,
Just a quick note to say all is well. Kevin and Kerry are real good. Kerry is getting bigger now and so is Kevin; they are both good kids. They send you their love. All the family is well… We’ll be heading to Orange to do the cherries in a couple of weeks. Hopefully, soon you’ll be able to come home
. Take care of yourself…
God bless
Your loving sister
Joyce and family xxxxx
P.S. Sending you photos of the kids
Mummy always says ‘God bless’ as you hang up the phone and I say it back to her, even though I don’t believe in God. How could God have given my family the life that he had given them when they are good people and didn’t deserve the hardship?
I ask myself: How hard was it when all he would have wanted was to reach out and touch us, to cuddle us? How hard was it for him knowing that a wall with iron bars stopped him from touching, from loving his children? How must he have felt when he watched us walk away from him, not knowing when he would see us again?
He knew that we was fruit pickers ’cause he was one, too. He knew that money was hard to come by.
He would’ve known that, sometimes, Mummy went without tucker to feed her kids, his kids. He would have understood that we couldn’t see him a real lot. He would have been happy that we were with Mummy, that the Welfare never got us or that me and Kevin weren’t separated from each other. When he saw us in jail, did he hope or think that, one day, he might be able to hold us as a father? That he’d be able to pick his little girl and his son up and feel their arms around him?
How did he cope deep down in his heart, fearing that he might never get outta jail ’cause he was sentenced to life for the murder of our mother? Did he know that, by the time he was released, we would no longer be children but teenagers?
How much did his heart break when he knew he still told a lie about my mother and me when they made that show on television thirteen years later?
In his book Living Black, my father writes his memory of seeing me, aged seven, and Kevin, and how he felt seeing his daughter who looked like him.
I sit and think of Mummy. How hard it was for her: so many hungry kids; always working, making sure we always had a feed. She could make good tucker from just a bit of mince, a potato and an onion. I wonder now how many meals she went without, making sure that her kids were fed. No. I don’t wonder, I know. Memories come back to me of sitting at the kitchen table on the Island and she doesn’t sit down with us. She tells us she has already eaten. No thought was in my child’s mind that she was going without.
How must she have cried to herself so many times? How often did she feel responsible for the heartache that was in the family? Feeling that, somehow, if she could have done more, maybe she could have prevented what life dished out to us. I know she always felt responsible for the things she had no control of. Would she have whispered the words to her own mother that she didn’t mean to let her down? She tried hard to keep her promise to keep the family together. In her whispers to her, did she tell her she did the best she could?
I see Mummy so clearly as I read my father’s words. I have seen her that way every time we walked into a paddock, a dirty, dusty paddock. Every time we had to climb a ladder or sling it over our shoulders to carry it to the next tree, I see her. The sweat dripping off her, an old torn hat on her head, a man’s flannelette shirt on, trying to protect her skin. I see her and I see me and each and every member of my family right down to my own children because that’s where we come from, the paddocks. That has been our life. I’m a fruit picker by trade. I say those words with pride in my heart because that is who I am, that is my family. I am Joyce’s girl, the cherry picker’s daughter.
The End
The Cherry Picker's Daughter Page 15
