Now I was being assured that, despite not having either secondary or undergraduate experience, I could succeed in postgraduate work. It was all very confusing.
My son passed his HSC at Crows Nest Boys High School in 1978 and entered the University of New South Wales in 1979. He was seventeen and I was terribly proud of him. Although he had shown aptitude for maths and his teachers had encouraged him to think about accountancy as a career, he had taken an elective in Psychology at high school and become fascinated with human behaviours. He said he hated the idea of being stuck at a desk with just lists of numbers for company. The training for psychology has a significant component of maths, percentages and graphs, so he felt well equipped to link up his two areas of interest. Prior to starting his university studies, we had a talk.
‘You know it’s very hard for me to be the sole breadwinner here, Russel, so if you start at the university, you have to finish.’
‘You want me to go to work?’ I knew that he had a lot of concerns about going to work without qualifications. Some of his school friends had found the going hard, unless their families had a business—and, of course, we did not.
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying. I want you to go to university and get a degree, but if there’s any likelihood that you’ll just go for a year or two and drop out, then I’m not prepared to help you. Do you understand me? We’re not a rich family that can afford a playboy son.’
‘Okay. I understand. You help me, Mum, and I’ll stay the distance.’
His earnest young face was reassuring. Apart from the secret surrounding his birth, which I had constantly evaluated and decided he had not yet had sufficient life experience to deal with, our relationship had always been based on directness and truth. I knew when he gave his word, he would keep it.
For his seventeenth birthday, my mother bought Russel a very old, very tiny car. She told me that if he broke no road rules and carried no more than one passenger at a time for one year, she intended to buy him a new car when he turned eighteen. She was very worried that the profile of males killed on the road was that they were young and inexperienced, driving powerful cars, and often being egged on by a carload of their mates.
During his term vacation, he went up to Tweed Heads at her bidding, and together they went to a new car dealer. They wandered around the display area alone, this tall young dark man with this poorly dressed little old lady. The salesmen didn’t bother giving any attention to this unlikely pair. However, they stayed so long, with Russel opening and closing doors and so on, that eventually one salesman sauntered out of the office towards them.
‘Uh, can I help you at all, mate?’
‘Do you have this Gemini panel van in that green?’ Russel asked, choosing the car of his birth sign, and indicating the bright grasshopper colour on another vehicle.
‘We don’t have it, but we could get it,’ the salesman replied, his voice loaded with scepticism.
‘Is that the one you want, Russel?’ my mother piped up. ‘If the man can get it in green?’
When Russel nodded, Mum spoke to the salesman. ‘We’ll take it. How long before you can get it delivered?’
‘How would you like to pay for it?’ the dubious salesman responded.
‘Oh, cash. How much will it be, with registration and delivery and everything?’
Mum had worked, scrimped and saved for years towards this big moment, when she would buy the apple of her eye a new car. That day she had gone to the bank and withdrawn her savings which she was carrying now in her old purse.
She told me the salesman was absolutely flabbergasted when, at last, he invited them into the office, and she pulled out this roll of cash and started counting out her bills on his desk!
When Russel’s car arrived, we nicknamed it ‘the grasshopper’, and, like most young men, I suppose, he lavished his every attention upon it. No one was allowed to eat in the car, no one was permitted to drive it but him, and he made up so many other rules that I declined even to get in it. When it was brand new, he even carried a dust rag to wipe over the seats when anyone got out.
Next time Mum was in Sydney, though, she and I had a row. Not only had my mother never bought me a car, but although she saw me working so hard, apart from looking after the children during school holidays, she had never offered me any help. The house we lived in was so derelict as to be disgusting, and I had not been able to afford to buy myself anything new, not so much as a lipstick, for many years.
Mum, no doubt subscribing to the theory that the best means of defence is attack, was in the habit of using every opportunity to berate me about the poverty she seemed to think I brought upon myself. She erroneously equated fame with riches, and since I was often quoted in the press and appeared on television, she seemed to believe I deliberately eschewed payment for this work. She was unable to reconcile that those who spoke out about the Black community’s struggle for justice were penalised, not paid, for doing so. And, as though I needed her reminder, she frequently held up to me that Naomi’s father, William, contributed nothing to her upkeep. William, with his new wife, was in the habit of visiting Mum occasionally, and she knew it was well within his means to support his child.
‘My girl,’ Mum said flippantly in her own defence, ‘if you don’t like the way you are living, find a husband and get married. I don’t want my grandson walking around in this area where he could be a target for white boys.’
There had been a spate of incidents, bashings and vandalism, in the northern suburbs committed by wealthy young men which could only have been recreational violence. I shared her concern. However, it did not seem to dawn on her that not only was the protection of a car something that she had never offered me, and my life had been almost destroyed by that, but she also had no intention of buying a car for any other of the grandchildren, even the girls who should have been considered to be of equal, if not greater, risk. My words fell on deaf ears.
‘When Naomi’s old enough, she’s good-looking, boys will give her a lift home. She won’t have to walk home after social events.’
I despaired, as I had often had cause to, at this sort of reverse sexism which seemed deeply ingrained in so many of her generation.
Mum stood up, indicating any discussion on the subject was reaching its end.
‘All my other grandchildren have fathers, and their fathers can buy them cars if they want. Russel is the only child with no father. He only has me. And if you want a car, or someone to help you fix the house, my girl, you should get married and let someone buy these things for you.’
How absolutely unreasonable, I fumed as Mum stalked off. What sort of short memory did she have! My father had not even owned up to me, much less bought me a car. Her current boyfriend never bought anything for her, in fact the reverse was true. She was constantly dipping into her purse to keep him out of jail and buy and repair cars for him.
I tried hard to be happy at Russel’s good fortune, because, in my mind, getting a car from your grandma was almost like winning the lottery. Often, though, I found myself swimming in tears at my own lack of comfort. This feeling was exacerbated at times by the presence of the car and the fact that Russel did not yet have the maturity to recognise the situation for what it was and appreciate how much I was hurt by my mother’s good intentions directed only ever towards him.
The first year at university was a severe blow to, and a learning experience for, Russel. He had assumed universities were places that encouraged thought and welcomed new ideas, new ways of looking at things. But when he discovered that he was merely expected to parrot back in class and repeat again in essays whatever his lecturers had said, he was dismayed. He found this out the hard way, by having his work marked down and he was failed in one course.
One of the courses he took was Aboriginal Studies. After receiving his marks for this subject he came home and sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.
‘Mum, it’s just not possible for these white boys to have studied book
s for ten weeks and know more than I know about being Black. MumShirl almost lives here, Elders from everywhere come here. I’ve been reading—and you’ve been writing—on the subject for years. Even most of the Koori writers have been sitting here in our house, talking about their lives and what they think and write. For the course we were set a handful of readings by whites, and we had to take notes on what the white lecturer told us. Now the results are in, I find most of the white students in the class got higher marks than me. No one wants to know what it is to be Black, we’ve just got to learn what whites think about Blacks.’
Russel had learned a tough lesson: Just listen to what the teachers have to say and spout it back to them, even when you know it’s wrong. Years later I would hear the same complaint from Geraldine Willesee when she went to university after being a political journalist for decades. Books on the Middle East conflict and troubles in some African countries, used in subjects she was taking, had been written by academics who had never been in the countries concerned. Gēraldine, who had covered those conflicts on the ground for newspapers as a reporter at the time at which they occurred, despaired when she was expected to express no opinion other than what was in those books.
Russel, by this time, had grown into a tall, handsome young man, keen on sport and physical exercise. Also, perhaps because he had spent his life mainly in the company of women—his mother, sister and grandmother—he was wary of the responsibilities he saw flowing from relationships with the opposite sex. Consequently, although he was courteous and respectful to women, he had not yet ventured into dating. He found some of the white women at university, expressing their newfound sexual freedoms perhaps, extremely aggressive and often very racist in their approaches to him. So, at just eighteen, he was doing all in his power to avoid them.
I quite simply adored him. Years before, a friend had said to me, ‘What women ought to do if they don’t have a good man in the family—is grow their own.’ Without consciously thinking about this advice, I realised I had done just that. Russel was a good cook, did his own washing, ironing, even neatly patching his own jeans and replacing buttons, kept the lawn mowed, helped take care of his sister, who was eleven, and train her in the right direction, and he would turn his hand to anything on request. A non-smoker and keen sports enthusiast, he enjoyed body building and running in the City to Surf and other marathon races.
Naomi was by far the more gregarious of the two, always had been. She was also what I regarded as a classic Taurus and, once she planted her feet on an idea, couldn’t be pushed or pulled in any direction. In another word, obstinate. As our family unit could only function with a great deal of inter-dependence and flexibility, to allow me to earn a living for us all and not fold up under the burden, I sometimes felt the only reason I hadn’t ended up strangling her was because she was ‘my child’. I often had to remind myself that I was ‘her mother/adult’ in the relationship. It was a blessing that Russel had incredible patience with her, though she was able to reduce him to her level with her teasing when the mood took her.
At times, I would hear them arguing in the kitchen.
‘Naomi, you chucked out the last of the bread, and now we have no bread for sandwiches for your lunch in the morning.’
‘I’m allowed to.’
‘You’re not “allowed to”. Why did you do it?’
‘It smelled funny.’
‘It was fresh bread, Mum only bought it yesterday. It didn’t smell funny.’
‘Yes, it did.’
‘No, it didn’t.’
‘Did so, did so’.
‘Did not, did not’.
I put my hands over my ears when their conversation descended to this childish banter. Naomi was always trying to ‘get over’ on Russel, and Russel, being the eldest, often got the blame. Rushing down the hall to stop the rising crescendo of ‘dids’ and ‘did nots’ in the kitchen before the neighbours called the police, I would hoe into Russel and try to make him see that he was responsible and that the din was interrupting my work. Meanwhile, Naomi would scuttle around to stand behind me smirking, pleased that her brother seemed to be the one in a spot of bother—for something she had initiated. When I caught sight of her from the corner of my eye, she’d be doing something juvenile, such as pulling faces at him, and the temptation to give her a good wallop would rise in my breast. Naomi, always canny and able to sense my pulse rate accelerate from across the room, would disappear in a flash, through the house and out into the street. By the time I reached the front door she’d be doing cartwheels in the park opposite in the company of Liz Milne’s young son, Matthew, who, at about four years old, doted on her—a setting so playful and serene that I’d be smitten with guilt about the damage I had been about to inflict on her.
There were other times when Russel’s maturity of approach towards Naomi’s development was enormously insightful and protective. I came home from work one day and he sat with me at the kitchen table and dropped a bombshell. Knowing how I regarded the link that often existed between young kids hanging around certain milkbars and the increased likelihood of them falling into mischief (on the basis that ‘the devil finds work for idle hands’), he had taken Naomi right around the area in which we lived to show her every corner shop and milkbar that had a pin-ball machine.
‘Now why in heaven’s name would you do a thing like that?’ I asked, appalled.
‘She’s reaching the age where she’s going to start finding them herself anyway. I wanted her to know I’ll always know where she is, and I’ll always come and haul her out!’
From quite early on, Naomi loitered on her way home from school. She was the sort of little child who couldn’t resist stopping to look at everything wonderful in the world—puppies, chrysalises, two goats that ate the grass down on craggy land at the nearby tennis courts—anything, and she was always caught up in the moment and arriving home late. We’re laugh about it—‘born ten days late and she’s been late ever since’—though not when I was out chasing over hill and dale anxiously looking for her. I did not want to give her my negative view about the depravity I knew to exist, but when I found her, dawdling along and chatting at a street corner with two men who were repairing the traffic lights, I came down on her hard.
‘It’s alright, Mum,’ she replied breezily, ‘I knew they weren’t the “bad strangers”. They were wearing uniforms.’
How do you convince a child that ‘bad strangers’ can wear uniforms too?
Still, her first major upset came not from strangers but from much closer to home, right next door to be exact. On one side, in a well-kept little weatherboard house, lived an older couple. Initally they had regarded a Black family moving into the street with a good deal of suspicion, but they had grown accustomed to us and were very helpful to us in many ways. While I think they continued to consider me a bit eccentric, they took particular pleasure in letting me know every time they saw me on a television program. On the other side, in a much fancier brick house with an in-ground swimming pool in the backyard, was a young couple who, as I recall at the time, had only one child, a little girl. I always had far too much to do to spend any great length of time socialising with the neighbours, but I spoke to anyone if I was digging or watering in the frontyard when they passed by.
I came home from work one day to find Naomi trembling and crying.
‘Mum, she told me not to tell you, but I’ve got to. I don’t know what else to do.’
‘Who? What’s the matter, child.’ She was still young enough for me to take her on my lap, but she was too distraught to be comforted in this way, and instead stood, shuffling her feet and moving her slender weight from one thin bird’s leg to the other.
‘The lady next door—she said I’ve stolen her gold, and if I don’t give it back she’s going to call the police and they’ll take me away.’
I had tried to discourage Naomi from going inside the houses of people in the street generally, except for Liz Milne’s house where we were always welcome. B
ut the woman next door had often called Naomi in to play with her small daughter who may have been lonely. I particularly didn’t like Naomi going anywhere that I felt I couldn’t follow, and I’d never been inside their house, had never been invited.
So I was cross with Naomi for having, once again, been into their house against my frequently expressed orders, and now I would have to deal with some problem which had arisen which sounded particularly nasty.
What ‘gold’ was my daughter being accused of stealing? Naomi was still at the age where a yellow plastic ring from Woolworths was ‘gold’ and the coloured piece at the top was ‘a diamond’. The little girl next door, I was soon to learn, had been given genuine gold bracelets and chains as gifts, and allowed to keep them in her own bedroom. Naomi had been playing with the little girl in the room, the gold chains were missing, ergo Naomi had stolen them.
I stormed over to their house and, barely able to contain my anger, demanded to know what was missing. The woman was stern-faced while she recited a list of her daughter’s missing valuables. When I asked why she, a mother herself, had told Naomi not to tell her own mother about what was going on and instead scared her witless by threatening to call the police, she said, a bit embarrassed, that she thought this would frighten Naomi into bringing them back. Then that would be the end of the matter and there’d be no need for me to know.
I was outraged. Naomi, quite simply, did not have the missing items. Our family were not thieves. To make the matter worse, Naomi was to leave the next day to spend the school holidays in Tweed Heads with my mother, and I could see that she was anxious because the whole thing was unresolved.
Snake Circle Page 7
