A day or so later I was walking towards my car parked in front of the house, when I was approached by the father of the little girl. He apologised for his wife’s behaviour—and, yes, they had since found the missing gold. The little girl had put them in her own slippers in her wardrobe, or perhaps, he said, they had just fallen into them while she was playing, and she had forgotten what she had done with them.
I continued to choke over this classically racist episode. If anything goes missing, and a Black family lives in the street, blame them. Instead of going to work, I walked across the street to Liz who made me a cup of coffee to help settle me down. She was used to dealing with traumatised people, and we chatted idly for a while until I relaxed before we examined the whole issue. Liz, who had grown up in New Zealand, was acutely aware of the manifestations of racism, and this was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that I was able to confide in her. This gave me the support and energy I needed to just keep going. I was very glad to have such a friend.
About a year after I had received the letter from Harvard advising me that my admission had been deferred, I received a follow-up letter inquiring if I was coming for this academic year. Late at night, when my literary juices were flowing, I replied to the school. I wrote a long letter explaining my circumstances and why it was not possible for me to do so. I had no idea who would eventually read this screed apart from the signatory at the bottom of their letter, no clue that a whole admissions committee existed to whom all the correspondence was circulated, so my letter was very chatty, as if I were writing to a friend. In it, I weighed up the pros and cons, and shared the fact that I was full of wonder at their offer, but didn’t know where their university was or what I could expect if I was ever in a position to take it up.
The idea had rested, for the year, very lightly on my mind. In fact, I rather thought it likely that in a big institution like a university, an offer of a placement made to a small person like me, so far away on the other side of the world, would have fallen through the cracks by this time. So I had been enormously surprised when their second missive arrived.
I mentioned this to MumShirl, and explained how it had come about and how long I’d been sitting on their original invitation. She did not appear overly impressed, probably because, like me, she had no idea where the university was or where this could lead.
Life went on.
I received a phone call one day from a man who asked me to give a presentation at the police academy which, at the time, was in Redfern. He was a psychologist whom the Police Service had hired to help with training recruits. His plan was to bring in people from the groups which had been negatively categorised and targeted by police, as reflected in their arrest rates. Homosexuals, long-haired demonstrators, those who carried placards to stop development and save the environment, and, of course, Blacks—we were all to be given an opportunity to present ourselves as people, to humanise ourselves in the eyes of the recruits, with a view to changing their perception of us.
By this time, I was a veteran at giving presentations—a regular lecturer at community nursing training programs, as well as the various casual posts I held in tertiary institutions. Nevertheless, I was concerned about addressing this particular audience. I figured the class would be all male, reflecting the composition of the Police Force at that time, and, as recruits, have a mean age of about eighteen with a maturity level to match, and with limited life experience.
I was worried about what to wear. I thought my blue jeans were too stereotypical, and I only owned two dresses, both of them more than ten years old. Eventually I settled on wearing one of the dresses, although I was concerned that the sight of my skinny legs on view to these young guys might distract from the substance of my talk—and at the outset, I wasn’t wrong.
About thirty pairs of eyes zeroed in on my knee-length skirt as I came through the door in the company of the psychologist, and I felt flushed with embarrassment. I realised I could not afford any informality here, as I sometimes could in other settings, and I set up hopefully to alter forever their views on the Black community.
I gave them the usual—mortality and morbidity statistics, history of educational, employment, social and political deprivation stemming from the non-citizen status of Aborigines which had been relaxed less than ten years earlier, as well as a great deal of anecdotal evidence from the observations I had made through my role at the Health Commission. I did not share with them my own experiences with the hostility of police, how frequently I was pursued by their sirens as I drove through country towns in the Health Commission vehicles, stopped and questioned in front of crowds who then automatically assumed I had done something wrong. Instead, I held my tongue, and presented only information about which I could provide references.
Towards the end, I called for questions to give the recruits an opportunity to raise their own concerns. The first few queries demonstrated that the inquirer felt that Aborigines could change their own situations, if only they would make an effort. I talked then about reserves and missions that were without water, electricity, transport, a public phone, where the man of the house, where there was one, could find work only as a seasonal fruit-picker or cotton-chipper. Then I asked how they thought a family in these circumstances could even begin to change their situation.
A young man rose to his feet and said that he had been given a placement in Bourke, as part of his training. He had had the opportunity to see country conditions first hand, the reserve outside the levees, the poverty of the people, and he sounded quite upset. The officer in charge at Bourke had driven him past the reserve and told him that the government had given the families there houses in town, but they had all moved back to live in the shanties ‘because they got free meals’. He wanted to know why they did that.
I had been to Bourke many times, and I realised we could both visualise conditions there, so instead of answering to the class, I spoke directly to the man.
‘You saw the tiny shacks sprinkled around there, on the reserve?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘And you saw the little demountable Health Commission clinic sitting up there on its own levee?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Did you see a big hall?’
‘No. There’s no big hall.’
‘That’s right. There’s no big hall. I wonder where the people go to eat their “free meals” then?’
‘Well, I don’t know.’
‘Hmm. Do the white people in town cook these free meals and take them out to the reserve, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ He sounded doubtful, and the other cadets were now giving him their full attention.
‘Well, do the Aboriginal people cook these “free meals” for themselves, perhaps?’
It was slowly dawning on all in the class, including the young man, that there were no ‘free meals’.
He shook his head and banged his hand on his desk. ‘Well, why did the sergeant tell me that?’
‘I’ve no idea—but when anybody tells you anything, you’ve got to make sure it’s feasible before you believe it. you’re all going to be policemen in the very near future, and you’ve got a responsibility to only deal in facts.’
The next week I received another phone call from the psychologist. He had been sacked and was very distraught. He said he’d been told that he had overstepped the line by bringing me in. We both agreed that I hadn’t said anything particularly controversial, and I felt badly for him.
A few weeks later the Aboriginal Section of the Health Commission received a request from his replacement for an employee to go to the police academy to give a talk. Joe Mallie and I concluded that the police were unaware I was a senior employee at the Health Commission, but decided that it might be too provocative and consequently counter-productive for me to go again. We decided that a group should attend instead.
Betty Little, daughter of the well-known singer, Jimmy Little, was a member of that group and she spoke
to me about it afterwards.
‘I had to laugh,’ she said, with more than a trace of pride in her voice, ‘because at the end, one of the recruits said to me, “you’re as bad as Bobbi Sykes”.’
Unlike me, Betty was quite a laid back person, more musician than politician, so it was amusing that we’d be bundled together like that. Our subliminal message, however—that Blacks were being treated unjustly—was the same whichever way one looked at it. Perhaps it was on this basis that we both caused ire.
Harold Hunt, alcohol counsellor for the Health Commission and another member of the group, also spoke to me about his concerns. He was alarmed that, with the attitudes he had heard expressed at the meeting, these young recruits were going to be put out on the streets in uniforms, armed and dangerous.
On another occasion, I was asked to give a joint presentation at the University of New South Wales Medical School. The doctor with whom I was to share the podium on the day came up with an idea. He would speak for about five minutes before passing the floor over to me. We were to rotate our presentations, if everything went well.
He began: ‘The subject we are talking about today is Aboriginal health. It is no wonder Aboriginals have poor health. We stole the land, we poisoned the water-holes and distributed poison flour, we took the children away from their mothers. We brought diseases, and then we withheld from them the cures and treatments for the diseases we had brought.’
A hush fell over the audience of final year medical students, and the air was charged with mea culpa. They sat alert, waiting to hear what they were expected to do about it. The doctor continued with a few current health statistics before inviting me to take the microphone.
Reading from the page he had given me, I said: ‘The subject we are talking about today is Aboriginal health. It is no wonder Aboriginals have poor health. You stole the land, poisoned the waterholes and distributed poison flour. You took the children away from their mothers—’
That’s about as far as I got before pandemonium broke out. There was no mea culpa this time. Few students, if any, realised that I was merely repeating, in the accusative, the words with which they had earlier agreed. The doctor leapt up to defend me and pointed out to them the experiment which had just occurred. When several of them refused to settle down, he just talked over them using the microphone, then dimmed the lights in the hall and began to show a series of very graphic slides until silence was restored.
We later talked about the difference in the reactions we had received. The doctor was very concerned that I might have been upset by the furore.
‘No,’ I assured him, ‘hopefully some learning went on in there today. Sometimes people don’t know their own attitudes until they’re confronted by them.’
The Aboriginal Medical Service had been nominated for an award, and MumShirl and I, and two others, were to attend the dinner presentation. The other two, Aboriginal men, failed to turn up, later explaining they did not have the money to hire suits to wear.
MumShirl and I sat side by side at a table with perhaps six others, all white men, members of the civic club that was making the awards. The AMS did not win but received an honourable mention. After the dinner, MumShirl sat talking with the man on her right, while I chatted with the fellow on my left. At events of this nature, MumShirl was sometimes a bit of a braggart, and I became aware of her voice rising.
After some conversation I heard her say, ‘and my daughter’, nudging me savagely with her elbow to get my attention, ‘has been invited to’ and turning to me, she continued, ‘what’s that place you’ve been invited to?’
I shook my head, unwilling to buy into this and feeling quite embarrassed at having been made the centre of her conversation with this man.
‘No, go on, tell him,’ she ordered. I actually couldn’t see around her so I leaned forward to speak to a large man with a florid complexion. He was looking at me quizzically, so I said, ‘Harvard.’
‘No.’ He banged his closed fist on the table, rudely and emphatically, and I could tell my answer displeased him. ‘You mean Howard.’
I had, I am sorry to say now, never heard of Howard University, a Black tertiary institution with a long history and solid academic reputation. At that time, though, until I had received their letters and handbook, I hadn’t really known much about Harvard University either. Still, I was not so illiterate as to have confused the name on the materials they had sent me. I felt very insulted and turned my back on him.
MumShirl, on the other hand, took it to heart. On leaving soon after, she said to me, ‘This university must be really important if that man doesn’t want you to be going there. So—when are you going to go?’
From that point on, MumShirl was on my back almost every time we spoke, and seemed determined to drive me to go. Once, during dinner at my house, she threatened me. ‘When we go out to the schools and you talk to those Aboriginal kids, you’re always telling them what a big chance they’re getting. “Now you’ve got an opportunity”, you tell them, “go for it!’” She was repeating my own words back at me and using my own inflection to boot.
‘Well, the next time we go out and I hear you saying that, I’m going to yell out “Hypocrite”. Do you understand me? You’ve got the chance to do something over at that university over there, get an education, and instead you’re always making excuses why you can’t go.’
I knew she’d do it, too. When I thought about it I realised that, while I did still have some outstanding things I wanted to do, I probably could organise to be away for the nine months I had been assured that it would take to complete my Master’s degree. Some of the real reasons for my procrastination were fear, funds, and more fear. I had put my son’s need to have a stable home during his HSC before my own educational opportunity, but now he was attending university and, well on his way towards independence, was supplementing his meagre study allowance by lining himself up work for when he wasn’t studying.
I had trained members of the Aboriginal Skills Development Scheme to publish the Black community newspaper, which I had been concerned about leaving previously. At the Health Commission I had brought in as many innovations as I’d been capable of up to that point. Although I knew I could keep doing valuable work there, it would, to a large extent, just be the same work in which I had already demonstrated my capability. I’d be giving much the same lectures to different faces every year, the thought of which was not particularly attractive and would not have been mentally challenging. I had always been scornful of people who claim to have twenty years experience in a job, but in reality only have the one year multiplied by twenty, that is, the same year over and over. So, I felt I had gone as far in the Health Commission as I could go without the input of fresh ideas.
I discussed the possibility of going to Harvard with my children. Russel would have to stay, continue his studies and take responsibility for the house. Naomi would need to come with me. She would turn twelve by the time we were likely to depart and was still in a critical stage of her development. Russel was sombre—no doubt perplexed that, at an age where he might consider flying the coop, his mother instead was considering the very same thing—but agreeable. To Naomi, the idea seemed both romantic and remote, and her main concerns were whether she would be able to go to Disneyland and who would look after her beloved pet, Catso, if we went.
Work had kept me so busy, I soon realised as I began to mentally prepare myself to go, that there’d been no time at all to reflect, to step back and look at the big picture.
At the time I was also emotionally involved with an Aboriginal man whom MumShirl had introduced me to. However, she and I had discovered, too late, that he was a chronic liar and a cheat. This was part of his manifestation of the emotional deprivation he had suffered as a baby when he had been removed from his mother and fostered out to a white family. I think MumShirl felt a bit guilty about having brought us together. Encouraging—or perhaps forcing—me to go away for a while may have been part of her strategy for deali
ng with this guilt.
Though all these thoughts percolated in my mind, I rarely had time to do anything but think about them.
I was at home one morning when the real estate agent, Richard Hookey, through whom I thought I had been negotiating the purchase of the house in which we lived, knocked on the door and handed me a notice to quit the premises. This was my first indication that the long legal battle over the ownership of the property had come to an end. In the interim, house prices had increased and now the owners wanted me out so they could sell it for a higher price.
Initially quite shocked, I soon became livid. With two young children I had struggled along for years in that decrepit building in the belief that, once the court case was finished, we could buy it. One of the owners lived just a few houses away and she drove past my front door every day. This woman and her husband were aware of the enormous discomforts we had tolerated, thinking we were just waiting for the sale to go through. Now I felt both deceived and cheated, which made me determined to see justice for myself and my kids.
I still had the deposit I had saved up so desperately, although Mum had borrowed some of it from time to time. She had sold all her little cottages in Townsville, and much of the money she’d received had been drained away by Arthur’s vices and excesses. He continued to get into trouble with the police and the courts, as well as with the Taxation Department, for various scams and rorts. When he was threatened with imprisonment, Mum, fearing she’d have no one to drive her around, would bail him out. She had always made a point of repaying me as soon as she could though, and my house deposit remained safe and sound.
I went to see my solicitor, Eric Strasser, still a firm friend after so many years. He was concerned that the passage of time may have somehow negated my claim to purchase the house. He consulted colleagues and I contacted a friend at the University of New South Wales Law School, and between us we came up with a plan of action.
The agreement to purchase had never reached the stage where the owners and myself had signed a contract, but they had allowed me and my children to move in on a rental basis ‘for a few weeks’ until their legal situation had been sorted out. When the few weeks stretched into months, and I was having to pay bank fees to hold the bank loan I had negotiated, the owners agreed they would pay these fees because the delay was on their part and not mine, and they did so for some time. According to law, this meant that the sellers had acted—part-performance—on our verbal contract, which made it binding.
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