Snake Circle
Roberta Sykes
ALLEN & UNWIN
First published in 2000
Copyright © Roberta Sykes 2000
All photographs are from the author’s personal collection except that on p. 115 which is published with permission of the Fairfax Photo Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
First published in 2000 by
Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Sykes, Roberta B.
Snake circle.
ISBN 1 86508 335 6.
eISBN 978 1 74269 681 2
1. Sykes, Roberta B. 2. Authors, Australian—Biography. 3. Aborigines, Australian—Civil rights. 4. Aborigines, Australian—Land tenure. 5. Afro-Americans—Australia—Biography. 6. Afro-American women—Australia—Biography. I. Title. (Series: Sykes, Roberta B. Snake dreaming; v. 3).
920.00926073
DR ROBERTA SYKES was born in the 1940s in Townsville, North Queensland, and is one of Australia’s best known activists for Black rights. In the 1980s she received both her Master and Doctorate of Education from Harvard University. She has been a consultant to a wide range of government departments, including the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the NSW Department of Corrective Services, and was Chairperson of the Promotion Appeals Tribunal at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. A guest lecturer at universities and tertiary institutions throughout Australia, and in demand as an international speaker, she is also the author of seven books, including Eclipse (1996) and Murawina: Australian Women of High Achievement (1994), as well as having written, contributed to or co-authored numerous publications, journal articles and conference papers. In 1994 she was awarded Australia's highest humanitarian award, the Australian Human Rights Medal. She lives in Redfern, Sydney.
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling yourself BLACK. You’re not BLACK.’
I’m surprised that this white woman would think I should take her wish-list on board, as if I have no wishes of my own.
‘So—am I white?’ My question is rhetorical, my dark skin and hair a brazen confrontation.
‘Well, no. You’re not black and you’re not white. You’re perhaps sort of somewhere in between.’
Yes, perhaps sort of somewhere in between.
1
‘How can this be happening to me? Not to me!’ This question is a burning sensation coursing through my whole body, every nerve ending affected. I feel limp with anguish and expectation, knees so weak that I’m glad I’m sitting and will not be expected to stand for quite some time.
Exhausted, I visualise the journey that I have made, how I have laboured long and hard, over torturous terrain, for too many years to recall, starving and sweating, to reach this mountain peak where the air is so thin I can barely draw breath. Now I am confronted with a precipice, a drop so sheer I can see nothing at the bottom, no outcrop along the way to grasp if I should fall.
This is a personal plateau, and I’m so afraid. But I can’t let anyone see just how afraid I really am. My hands are wet, so wet, though I’ve waved them around a bit and run them discreetly along my slacks to dry them many times. I hang on tightly to the armrests to stop my hands from shaking, keep them steady.
I sneak a quick glance at my daughter, Naomi, sitting beside me. She has caught my anxiety. Her face looks strained and pinched, and she is dabbing at the tears in her eyes with a tissue. Though just twelve years old, she senses, rather than understands, the gravity and enormity of my situation, but her innocence also allows her to translate this into the beginning of a huge adventure. She is sitting beside her mum, and no harm has ever come to her there. Mum, she thinks, will look out for the both of us—which serves to make my own burden heavier.
Muted voices and the rustle of movement break into my consciousness. The soft tinkle of muzak adds to the incongruity. A quick scan around confirms my suspicion that my daughter and I are the only two Black people here.
I turn my face towards the window, so that those seated near me can see only the back of my head, and lean my forehead against the pane, pretending I’m peering outside. I feel the fear overwhelm me. My eyes begin to sting and tears well to overflowing, making their way slowly down my cheeks.
I have succumbed to the tension of the past few days, weeks, months, perhaps years. Embarrassingly, a shudder, a deep sob, tugs at my shoulders for a moment before I regain my self-control. I worm around in my seat, my face still averted, hoping anyone looking won’t see my distress.
The question forms in my mind once more: How can this be happening to me?
Static interrupts the muzak.
‘Please, ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seat belts for take-off.’ The deep male voice crackles over the speakers. As he speaks, the jet engines begin to rev and throb. We are preparing to leave, to leave Australia, the home I hold so dear, and heaven alone knows what lies in store for me. I feel that I am stepping onto that big global stage now, and should I stumble or fall, heaven alone knows how many people may be watching me.
My primary job, as Education/Liaison Officer with the New South Wales Health Commission, keeps my waking hours very busy, and it’s a real effort to find time to fit in the other part-time work I do around it. Still, I have two children to support and they want to eat every day, and there is no one to help me. It helps to stay focused on my work, the needs of the children, our extremely derelict house, and the enormous tangled growth we jocularly refer to as the ‘back garden’.
For a large part of my job, I crisscross New South Wales almost constantly, mostly alone in my unmarked Health Commission car. My mission is to visit Aboriginal communities, listen to people, and search for solutions to the overwhelming host of problems which become obvious to me. It’s dangerous to be out on these backroads, a woman alone. I put in a request to the Department for a rifle for my protection and, although everyone agrees I need one, it never appears.
These journeys are, in themselves, exciting. Travelling along country roads in the early mornings and at dusk, I often see kangaroos and wallabies, occasionally in mobs but mostly just one or a pair. Driving on dusty, unsealed and corrugated roads, often little more than glorified tracks, with occasional signs to reassure travellers that they are still heading in the right direction, I spot these majestic creatures grazing in the distance, a joey or two around. They turn their heads sombrely to watch the car as it rattles by, sometimes abruptly bounding away at the sound. On bitumen roads, it’s quite a different story. They seem lured to the macadam by the dew which collects there, and are reluctant to leave until the car is almost upon them. At night, I catch the flash of their eyes in the headlights and hit the brakes, long before I can make out the shape of their erect, watching bodies.
From time to time, the flash of eyes turns out to be that of wandering stock. I loudly smack the side of the car with my hand in an effort to get these beasts to disperse as I inch a
path through them. Kangaroos invariably leap off at the sound but cattle turn and give me a withering look. Once, very late on a pitch black night, on a particularly narrow backroad enclosed on each side by fields of thick tall millet, I was forced to creep along at cows’ pace for almost an hour. The half dozen or so large beasts before me merely ambled along, at times unable and obviously unwilling, to leave the road, pausing to throw disdainful glances in my direction. From experience I knew better than to try blowing the horn, because the sudden noise can startle them, and then there’s no knowing what they might do. A tonne or more of wild beast lumbering at speed towards a vehicle can do almost as much damage as if I had hit it, rather than that it had hit me.
Smaller native creatures, plump wombats, possums and even koalas, can be seen along the roads at almost any hour, but especially at night. I seem to have my own internal radar, my foot automatically lifts from the accelerator long before these animals come into view. I pride myself on never having run into or over a creature of the bush. Even snakes have continued their graceful and leisurely slither across my path without harm. A quick red-eye flash and a disappearing tail is usually all the notice I get of having passed a dingo in the night. Goannas and other reptiles watch me as I carefully watch them.
I am constantly horrified and distressed by the conditions at most of the Aboriginal reserves and missions. People are living with so little in the way of material possessions in often appallingly unsanitary environments. It is 1977, ten years since the Referendum which acknowledged Aboriginal citizenship, but what’s changed? Not much. People remain in pockets of misery, ten or fifteen miles along a dirt track, away from the main roads, outside the town levees, separated by distance and poverty from the nearest store, hospital and phone. The few possessions they own, mostly second-hand clothes and some pots and pans, blackened from cooking over their open fires, are washed away with each flood. In the city between visits I routinely beg replacements and try to carry boxes of things people might need when I travel.
Women tell me of the valuables they have lost in these floods—a photograph, a treasured memory, of the child who died of gastro two years earlier; a copy of an old magazine, New Dawn, which published pictures of people in the old days, showing a grandfather, a great aunt, even a lost sister, brother or child. Their eyes brim with tears at these recitals, and I am helpless. These are not things I can beg in the city and replace.
I am happy to walk around the reserves, to have the women point things out to me. What looks from the distance like a surly group of dark tattered figures sitting in the dirt behind the rudimentary sheet-iron ablutions block is actually a lively card game. When we approach, the game slows. The players do not like anyone standing behind them, perhaps we can see what’s in their hands. ‘Sit down and join in—or move on.’
Sometimes I carry Ebony magazines I have brought from home. The colourful pictures of American Blacks—entertainers, models and sportsfolk—decked in finery and standing beside sleek modern cars or in front of solid mansions, with their slick well-dressed children and salon-groomed pets, are a million miles away from the lives of the similarly dark-skinned people who steal the magazines from my car if I don’t offer them. Not just the young girls, either. One time I gave a lift to three old ladies, and when the two women sitting in the back seat got out, so did the magazines. They weren’t carrying bags so I could only imagine that they’d stuck them down their dresses. Strange though this may seem, I was quite pleased by this because our transaction, such as it was, had been carried out without the need for words. I would like to have offered the women the magazines to keep, but was too shy and thought they may have been offended to accept, to be seen to condone the flamboyant clothes and glossy makeup of the women in the photos. The old women, of course, were also far too shy to ask, but the need for something, anything, to confirm their prayer that there were Black people like themselves somewhere in the world whose lives were not squalid was overwhelming. I was just a messenger carrying a small symbol of hope. The women looked back and smiled as they walked away. In my mind’s eye I could see them later, devouring each page, sharing them with their friends and relations, making sure all the young people realised the possibility of a life beyond poverty, a life they could reach for, perhaps study towards.
I gave presentations at conferences, sometimes in Sydney, at other times in country regions. For some of the Aboriginal Health Workers, this was their first job, and for others, the first position they had held which wasn’t domestic or menial. Quite a lot of the Health Workers spoke of their fear of the paperwork and record-keeping involved, even though the work had been tailored to minimise these requirements and to maximise the skills they brought with them, their cultural knowledge, the status they carried in their own communities. They were able to bring health education and assistance into homes where the most experienced white professionals would never have been allowed inside the door—even if they had been prepared to go, which many were not.
Their greatest bugbear, I learned early on, was not the crucial work they had been entrusted to perform, or even the fairly minor paperwork requirements of the Department, such as petrol and vehicle records, but the terror many had of the Taxation Department. Although I didn’t think any one of these people actually knew someone who had been imprisoned for not filing income tax returns, a rumour had spread like bushfire that this could happen. The Health Workers, mainly women, the majority being senior women, that is, mothers and grandmothers, were law-abiding and highly respected in their own communities. In some cases, their Health Worker positions gave them an additional status. However, they shared with their communities not only the traumatic events of the past, but also the legacy of past policies of exclusion which had left them with insufficient education to perform basic literacy and numeracy tasks. Their accommodations, too, were often of the same standard as their clients’, that is, run-down, overcrowded and, at times, without electricity or hot running water and subject to floods. The idea that they could keep a full year’s worth of receipts for work-related expenses, sorted and held in one safe place, was ludicrous. They feared imprisonment by the Taxation Department as a consequence of holding down a job—even a job which saved lives and was so important and highly skilled that no one else could do it.
I don’t think there was a single Aboriginal Health Worker’s family untouched by the prison system, so the Health Workers’ fear of imprisonment was awesome. They recognised the benefits that flow, over time, from having a regular income that was higher than the dole or the deserted wife’s or widow’s pension, such as being able to buy a generator, fridge or television on hire purchase. Also, they were enormously pleased to learn new information which they could share with their communities. However, they were also very concerned that their efforts to do good might instead end up with them behind bars. Even though their wages were taxed at source, they feared the Income Tax Department and its annual requirement. Although I was loath to report it to the Commission at the time, I learned of a few new employees who abandoned their positions for this reason.
I made up my own travelling rules, such as never to drink the water in country towns unless it had been boiled. I broke this rule accidentally just once, in Wilcannia. I was reporting my whereabouts to Head Office on an Aboriginal organisation’s telephone and absent-mindedly accepted a cup of lukewarm tea from a young girl who worked there. I reflected on the source when, a few hours later, I was doubled up with stomach pains. I’d been allocated a room at the nurses’ quarters of the hospital, and spent the next day either in bed or losing bodily fluids at both ends in one of the toilets. There was no doctor at the hospital and no local chemist, the nearest medico coming in just once or twice a week from Broken Hill, many miles away, and I felt too weak to drive there. I wondered how local Aboriginal families coped, drinking polluted water all the time, and without cars to drive to Broken Hill if anyone became ill.
Two white nurses, twin sisters, worked at the hospital. When I had
sufficiently recovered from my gastro bout to sit around in the lounge, one of the twins joined me and wanted to talk. She told me that she and her sister went to Fiji each year for their holidays because men in Fiji like big women, and both she and her sister were indeed big women. I thought her indiscreet for sharing this aspect of her life with me and wondered if she realised the sharp contrast between her attitude to these annual pleasure jaunts and the condescending manner she maintained towards the local Black population. Still, I held my tongue.
In the countryside, I often learned terrible truths through dramatic experiences. Once more in Wilcannia, I was walking to the petrol station in the main street for a cool drink, when I was joined by a group of five or six young Aboriginal girls from the nearby camp. They walked along with me and chatted. As the camp had no electricity and therefore no refrigeration, camp residents ambled towards the petrol station or the sprinkling of shops several times a day for basic provisions and cool drinks. The temperature was often almost 40° Celsius, and the air still, dry and dust-filled from clouds of parched soil stirred by the cars and semitrailers that passed through on this main highway to and from the west.
A police wagon slowly came around the corner and one of the girls suddenly ran onto the road and began hurling abuse at its lone male occupant. As the wagon slowed, I saw the policeman smirk at her, then raise his eyes and catch sight of me standing with her group of friends. He drove off.
‘He been rape me,’ she said angrily, by way of explanation for her actions. ‘In the cells, he been rape me.’ I was shocked by her candour.
‘Yeah, he rooted all of us,’ one of her friends piped up. Horrified, I looked around at their pinched little faces, dark eyes swimming with anger and frustrated indignation, not one of them yet sixteen years old, and I felt sick to my stomach.
‘When?’
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