Snake Circle

by Roberta Sykes

  At work, I began to notice signs posted around the Commission informing employees that they had to attend seminars on superannuation. I asked what this was about, and was told that because I wasn’t a permanent employee, I wasn’t entitled to attend. None of the Aboriginal staff was entitled to attend. Like the other Black staff, I was so grateful just to have a job, a regular paypacket coming in, and so busy doing the job, that I had completely overlooked the significance of our lack of status and job security.

  Over the next couple of years, however, I gradually became aware that, while I’d often been at meetings all around the city, fighting for acknowledgement, funding and improvement in services to a range of disadvantaged people, it had never occurred to me, or apparently to any of the Black staff with whom I worked closely, to explore our own situation. We were all too outward looking.

  Once I realised this, during the short periods of time I spent in the office I began to keep my ears open to see what I could find out. The Aboriginal Health Section had been established because the mainstream services were inaccessible and culturally inappropriate to meet the needs of the Black community. But the Black community represented the largest pool of ill-health, morbidity and mortality in the country.

  Although we were therefore delivering specialist services that no one else was either able or prepared to deliver, the skills we brought to the Health Commission were not valued. A special range of employment categories had been designed for Black workers—we were not employed on a permanent basis, and the categories of our employment attracted lower remuneration than white workers doing comparable work. Indeed, in our office even much less skilled white employees were earning more than the most highly skilled Black workers.

  This situation bothered me but I was at a loss to know what to do about it, apart from writing and talking about it. And frankly, I didn’t have a lot of time. The unfairness of it all, though, simmered in my gut, adding to the burden of other problems I encountered every day, such as racism and sexism. However, it was impossible to remain focused on something so abstract when I frequently had to rush to young Black women who were putting their heads into gas ovens or trying to throw themselves under the wheels of a bus. There was still a great deal of overt racism around too, in those days before the anti-discrimination laws. People called me racist names, ‘Abo’, ‘Boong’, ‘Nigger’, and told me to ‘go back to the jungle’. As well, I worried that if I began to make waves before I had formulated a plan and enlisted the support of all the senior Black staff, I would be sacked.

  From time to time over the years, following spates of positive publicity given to activities within the Black community, including my own, people from my past began to contact me. No doubt this was because they then knew how to find me.

  Adrian Keefe, for instance, a friend who had worked at the Sound Lounge in William Street, Kings Cross, during the period when I had been dancing with snakes, contacted me quite out of the blue. I remembered him from that time as having been deep into drugs, mainly speed. I had often voiced my disapproval then, and I was curious to know how he had turned out and what he could possibly want from me now.

  Adrian had cleaned up his act, married, had a son, and his ex-wife had taken the child to live in South Africa. He said he thought that the child might become racist in that environment, an idea which worried him deeply, as did the notion that his child would associate with other members of his family. Adrian confided in me that he was trying to devise ways to rescue his son. I must say that at the time the intrigue surrounding his plans seemed fanciful, making me unwilling to assist him, not that I would have been able to do much anyway.

  Adrian had a sister, Gaye, a former nun, also living in South Africa, who married Clive Derby-Lewis. Over a decade later, his sister and brother-in-law were charged and tried, along with another white right-wing extremist, Janusz Jacub Walus, with murder, conspiracy to commit murder and illegal possession of arms and ammunition. This was following the assassination of Chris Hani, General Secretary of the Communist Party, an African National Congress leader and popular South African community organiser. I realised only then that Adrian’s fears about his son’s associations with other members of his family had not been groundless at all.

  Another ‘blast from the past’ came walking right into the Health Commission to find me.

  I looked up from my work one day to see a dishevelled, but vaguely familiar, figure making his way towards our space. An employee from another section was with him, pointing towards my desk. Pushing the employee away, the man ambled over noisily. When he was still a few feet from my desk, a question flashed through my mind. I thought I somehow ought to know who this man was, but I didn’t.

  He leaned across the desk and breathed enough beery fumes into the air to alert the entire office staff.

  ‘Hullo, sis!’

  Good grief, the ragged shape before me was Reg Mills, ex-husband of Desma. She had grown up in my mother’s house and for many years I had regarded her as a sister. After suffering years of terrible physical abuse at Reg’s hands, she had moved out with her six children and picked up with another man, Pete. Then she and Pete together had stolen from me everything I owned at the time. I’d vowed never to speak to her again, a promise I’d kept. Reg had tried to sexually molest me when I was a very young teenager, so the sight of him reeling over my desk and loudly claiming some relationship with me was quite appalling.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to get me a chair?’

  ‘No. What do you want, Reg?’

  ‘This is urgent, and it’s Health Commission business, sis. I’m sick.’

  ‘you’re sick alright. So what are you doing here?’

  Some of the other staff, alerted by Reg’s loud voice, were hovering in case I needed help. Reg looked around, saw them and whimpered. He looked more pathetic than dangerous.

  ‘I want to talk, sis. I want to tell you my troubles.’

  O, dear Heaven, I thought, how can I get out of this?

  I rose and went to speak with my colleague Bob Jones. ‘Bob, this guy used to be married to someone I once knew. He’s drunk. I’m going to take him downstairs to the cafeteria and I’d like you to come down in about fifteen minutes and interrupt. Okay?’

  Bob Jones, a six foot two inch ex-football player, was as peaceful as a lamb, but he looked quite formidable.

  As we sipped coffee, Reg laid out his long tale of misfortune. It was an alcoholic’s story, variations of which I was already awfully familiar with. He said he was living in a room in a nearby flea-bitten hotel, and that he had ‘a new lady’ whom he wanted me to meet. I shuddered. He admitted that they were both alcoholics, but that they were trying to get their lives together. He had been in and out of Callan Park Psychiatric Hospital, and knew that if he kept on with the drink he was dead meat.

  When Bob appeared, I excused myself and directed Reg back out onto the street.

  I spent so little time at my desk that I felt sure I would not run into him again. But no, hey presto, Reg began turning up and turning up. I had no idea whether this was merely his good fortune and my bad luck, or if he came by so often that he was bound to run into me. Maybe he even loitered outside, watching for my arrival. On one of these occasions he brought with him a very frumpy woman, quite short and dumpy, whose most remarkable feature was that she had no front teeth. This was Margaret.

  One day Margaret came into the office alone and in a great state. Reg was crook in bed, she couldn’t get him to wake up. I was glad that the Head of the Section, Tom Gavranic, was in the office that day. Tom was a physician, and he accompanied Margaret and me to the hotel. it seemed to be more a door on the street with a few rooms above it than what I would have thought of as a ‘hotel’. We had to step gingerly up the rotting staircase and wait outside while Margaret went in to make sure Reg was ‘decent’. Tom and I both thought it likely that he might be dead.

  He wasn’t dead, just very close to it. Tom was able to rouse him, and Reg pleaded with us
not to send for an ambulance or take him to a hospital. No doubt from experience he knew this to be an indirect path back to Callan Park. The smell in the room was overpowering and, having made the introductions and stood by for a few minutes, I took my leave. Tom stayed and later told me he would continue to monitor Reg’s condition, and that I didn’t need to worry—which I had no intention of doing anyway.

  Not long after, Margaret came into the office again. This time she wanted to know if the Health Commission would allow me to drive her to Callan Park. She had to visit Reg. I felt sorry for this foolish woman who was wasting her life. She looked so pitiful and needy that I took her to the psychiatric hospital against my better judgment. Reg, on the other hand, looked the best I had seen him—clean, sober and reasonably well. He also looked very sheepish when he saw me walk in. I left them alone to talk and was approached by a nurse.

  I don’t believe Reg knew I was coming, but he had been talking to all the nurses about his ‘famous’ sister-in-law. I quickly apprised this nurse of the truth, and told her that I had merely brought Margaret to visit. She was not about to let me go that easily. She thought she had located someone who could be made responsible for Reg so the staff could get him off their hands. Margaret, it appeared, had moved out of the hotel and was either camping with a friend or living rough. She had no address to give the hospital. No, I would not give the nurse my address, and no, Reg could not look forward to living at my house!

  Some time later a nurse phoned looking for me at the Health Commission. I was working from home that day, but had left instructions that reasonable and vetted calls could be re-directed. It seemed that a call from the psychiatric hospital was considered reasonable, as it was forwarded on to me. A nurse informed me that Reg was due to be released that afternoon, would I please come and get him? I said no.

  I prefer not to think that the nurse gave Margaret my personal and unlisted phone number, but from then on, Margaret began to ring me at home. She was always sober when she rang, but she had such a long list of woes that she kept my phone line tied up for hours when I was working. When I told her so, she started ringing at night.

  Reg had been taken away, put in Chelmsford Hospital, and Margaret was worried about him. She told me horror stories about what a zombie he was becoming. The exposé of Chelmsford was still years in the future, so I had no way of knowing whether she was telling me the truth. What could I have done anyway, and would I have wanted to do anything?

  Then she rang and told me that Reg had disappeared and urged me to do something about it. I worked at the Health Commission, it was my job to do something, she demanded. She accused the hospital of killing him and spiriting his body off somewhere. It all sounded far-fetched and I was short with her on the phone. Above all, I was in no position at the Health Commission where I could start an inquiry into a hospital. I could barely get a civil response from some of the hospitals I had to contact about any matter that had to do with an Aboriginal patient, for whom I did have some responsibility.

  I was in a deep sleep when Margaret rang again, days later, at some time after one o’clock in the morning. She couldn’t find Reg, and she had spent all her time looking and trying to force Chelmsford to give her information. If she didn’t find him, and if I wasn’t prepared to help, she was going to commit suicide. She said she couldn’t live without him.

  I was so exhausted that I laid the receiver down and let her talk while I went back to sleep. When I woke up next morning, the phone sounded as though it had been cut off. I hit the bar, got a dial tone, and decided Margaret had got the message and hung up. I never heard from her again.

  This was one of those life episodes for which there is no closure. I never knew Margaret’s surname, or where she made those calls from. I resented the way she always badgered me on the phone. I resented whoever had given her my phone number. Still, if I had not been so utterly worn out by the work I undertook each day and by looking after two children, I might have got in the car and gone to wherever she was, if only to assure myself that her threats were bluff. But were they bluff? I will ever know for sure.

  Thoughts about this woman sometimes come uninvited into my head, as well as the many other white women I have met who remind me of her. Most are alcoholics, though some are not, but they have in common a heavy sorrow about themselves. In the main, the ones I have met seem to reach out to Blacks, and from time to time I have found myself counselling them. They share unhappy and often abused—sexual, physical and emotional—childhoods, followed by a string of relationships which mirror their early life. Perhaps in their acute pain they seek solace amongst people who they know can understand pain.

  Christine Kankindji also miraculously reappeared. Christine had been my friend before my marriage to William. She had helped me prepare for our wedding and it was only with her expert culinary skills that I’d managed to feed the wedding guests. Christine, with her daughter Justine, had gone to live in Belgium, where she had married an African. Now she had a couple of small children, though her husband seemed to have abandoned her.

  Christine had a small flat in a somewhat derelict-looking building in Brougham Street, Kings Cross. She received a deserted wife’s pension and, although forced to live very frugally, she remained a generous person, readily sharing the little she had. She was something of a bower-bird, throwing away nothing and always picking things up in the street, pieces of discarded furniture, clothes, and sorting through anything anyone else had thrown away in case they had turfed out something of value. She also picked up people, particularly people in need.

  One night Christine phoned me in distress—she had noticed a young girl crying in a Kings Cross coffee shop and approached her to see if she could help. The girl, who was Lebanese, had a room in a hotel of notorious repute, which, unknown to the management it seemed, she shared with her two even younger brothers. Christine wanted me to come at once—there was something wrong with the girl, she had been in an accident of some description and needed my attention.

  The girl gave me a story, which I disbelieved, about how she had been alone in her room, washing her face in a washbowl, when she looked around and saw a man who had thrown some sort of acid at her. I went with her and saw the room, the washbasin in the corner, her few clothes strewn about over the floor and draped on the furniture. It was obvious that she worked as a prostitute, though I didn’t feel it my business to ask. There was no evidence of acid anywhere, but the girl had a very serious injury of quite mysterious origin on her little finger. The digit was completely black and numb. I made arrangements to have her seen by a friend of mine, Dr Mick Asher, who had been my physician for years.

  Mick confirmed what I already suspected, the finger was gangrenous and would have to be amputated. Left alone, it would inevitably have just fallen off, he said, but the gangrene might have spread further. He made arrangements immediately for her to go to a private hospital to have a cosmetic amputation, to minimise the visual impact later on. I thought I ought to meet her two brothers, since I had deprived them of their support by removing their sister temporarily from the streets.

  The older of the two was already street-hardened and sly, and I felt sure he would continue to survive somehow on his wits. The younger brother was a different matter, baby-faced, still naive and somehow, with his large and anxious eyes, quite pitiful. He had not yet reached compulsory school leaving age. So, concerned about what might happen to him if the police stopped him on the street, I offered him a bed at my house for a few weeks until his birthday.

  I didn’t have a spare bed, of course, but we found an old mattress and he happily slept on the floor of Russel’s room. The first night he stayed with us, he and Russel sat out in the kitchen in front of the little fireplace, putting logs on the fire and talking far into the night, while I worked on my papers in the little ‘parlour’ which served as my office. On my trips into the kitchen for coffee or to go to the bathroom, I could hear their voices, and I worried that this lad might make street-lif
e and the glitter of Kings Cross sound attractive to my teenage son.

  At almost midnight, way after Russel’s usual bedtime, he came in and said, ‘Mum, that boy’s an idiot’, his favourite expression for anyone he thought wasn’t using their brains. I breathed a deep sigh of relief.

  From the girl I had learned the tragedy of their family, how they had been preparing to flee war-torn Lebanon to start a new life in Australia when their mother died. The father, she said, had valiantly decided to bring his four children to Australia anyway, and things had gone downhill from there. The father was technically skilled and, despite his poor English, had got a job with a public utilities company, but the culture shock was enormous. As well, three of his children were growing rapidly and ate everything he could earn. Tied by the children to the little flat he rented, he had been unable to socialise and make friends outside his work. I phoned him and made an appointment to meet him in a coffee lounge in the city during his lunch hour to see if any of the family’s relationships were salvageable.

  He had one younger son, whom he showed me in a snapshot, a very chubby boy. The other siblings had told me that he was treated like a baby and was favoured by the father. Yes, he admitted, he had put locks on the fridge and on the food cupboard, but that was because the older children used to get out of bed at night to eat all the food that was supposed to be the family’s meals for the next few days. Yes, he had hit his daughter on the face and head, but that was because he found she was wearing lipstick. She sneaked out one night and he caught her coming back in at midnight. Although she said she had been out with school friends, her father accused her of being a slut and had thrown her out of the house. Within a short time, both of the older brothers had left him to go and live with their sister, but he was determined to keep the youngest child from the same fate.