Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms

by Anita Heiss

  ‘At least the Japs get fed well,’ George, another Aboriginal builder, says. ‘They’re not on rations, are they? They get more than sugar, flour and tea. I’d rather be in that camp than ours.’

  The men stop work and listen. Even Fat Bobbo, who’s already tired from two swings of the hammer.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Banjo asks.

  ‘Jim told me. And apparently most of them are fatter than when they arrived. And the Japs, they get rice with most meals and their fish is from New Zealand. Our fish from the Lachlan isn’t even good enough for them.’

  ‘So they are treated too good then!’ Fat Bobbo says. ‘They should be on rations too.’

  ‘No one should be on rations!’ Banjo is furious and forms a fist that he wants to put into Fat Bobbo’s head. ‘Everyone, including the prisoners of war, should be treated like human beings.’

  ‘But look how they treat our men!’ Fat Bobbo yells.

  ‘I know what you’re saying about our POWs, but you’re missing my point, Bobbo! My argument is about how we are treated like prisoners too, at Erambie. We shouldn’t be on rations. We should all be paid the same for the same work and have enough money to buy food for our families – not just flour, tea and sugar rations and whatever we can hunt or manage to grow. It’s not fair for anyone. The prisoners of war are just like us.’

  ‘There used to be heaps of camps around town when I was young,’ George says. ‘The football ground in West Cowra was a camp. So was Taragala and there was another in North Cowra.’

  The other workers – except for Fat Bobbo – nod in acknowledgement; they all know the truth, they just don’t talk about it much.

  ‘And then Erambie was created, to round up all the Blacks together.’

  ‘Oh, come on, it’s not all bad,’ Fat Bobbo says. ‘I thought you liked living together.’

  The truth is they do. And people follow other family members to Erambie to live together.

  ‘The thing is, Bobbo, Erambie was my family home before we had to live under a Manager. My grandparents were born in Brungle but my parents were born here. This was home for them before it was turned into a reserve twenty years ago. It’s home for me, it always will be. Even if we are trapped by the Manager.’

  ‘What the hell are you saying, Banjo?’ Johnno asks. ‘Sometimes you speak in riddles.’

  ‘I’m saying that this government treats its prisoners better than it treats us and so we should be angry at the government, not the Japanese POWs. These fellas are just doing their duty to their country, like Aussie soldiers are. War is not any soldier’s fault.’

  ‘We get rations given to us out of an old horse stable and what gets handed out is very little,’ George adds.

  ‘It was only a few years ago that Erambie was overcrowded with over two hundred people living on thirty-two acres.’ Banjo is rubbing his lower back, which is sore from being hunched over, sanding. ‘Our life is different to places like Cummeragunga; they had the same number of people living on a twenty-seven-hundred acre station.’

  Fat Bobbo, obviously bored with Banjo’s history lesson and the Blacks complaining generally, changes the topic. ‘Did you hear the story about Walter Weir’s missus at their farmhouse at Rosedale?’

  ‘Nah, what happened?’ Johnno asks, equally disinterested in Banjo talking about Erambie’s history, or Erambie anything, for that matter.

  ‘Apparently she offered some of the escaped prisoners fresh scones and tea, while their daughter Margaret went to alert the cops.’ Fat Bobbo speaks as though the words leave a bitter taste in his mouth.

  Banjo keeps listening, knowing that his wife would’ve provided the same hospitality, was providing the hospitality, and sending their daughter to provide food, not to dob anyone in.

  Johnno jumps in with, ‘That’s nothing, I heard Alf Bourke and his son found a group of six Japs while they were out on a rabbiting trip near Claremont. Reckons he shot two dead in self-defence.’

  Fat Bobbo pretends to fire a gun. ‘I reckon he shot them dead cos he hates the Japanese bastards.’

  The site supervisor walks over to see where things are up to and the men stop talking immediately. Johnno starts whistling and Fat Bobbo says, ‘I’m off for a piss, when’s smoko?’

  ‘When I say so,’ the supervisor says angrily, having been watching them from afar.

  5

  21 August 1944

  When Mary takes the paper home from the Smiths’ she has already decided that she won’t tell her parents that twice as many voters in Cowra were against the proposed referendum changes than for them. She’s fairly sure they won’t care about the result – it will only start another distressing discussion about how Aboriginal people don’t have the right to vote. As she walks across the mission to home, she sees a group of kids huddled around something and squealing. She starts to walk faster. When she realises Jessie is throwing up across the way, she starts to run towards her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Mary asks, bending down and pulling the child’s hair back. She smells the vomit before she sees it all over Jessie’s clothes. Jessie has tears streaming down her face and when Mary wipes them away, she notices her sister is burning up. ‘What’s she been eating?’ she asks Dottie and Betty frantically.

  Dottie shrugs. ‘Dunno,’ she says.

  ‘She ate too many of those nuts from the pine trees,’ Betty dobs. ‘She’s probably sick because she didn’t want to share.’ She bends down and whispers in her sister’s ear, ‘Mum always says to share. See what happens when you’re a greedy guts?’

  ‘Stop it, Betty. Let’s get her home.’ Mary picks her young sister up, demonstrating a physical strength she didn’t even know she had.

  ‘Mum, Jessie’s chucking uuuupppp,’ Betty screams at the top of her lungs and Joan, walking back from the church where she’s spent the morning cleaning, starts to run, trying not to drop the clothes Father Patrick has given her for the goothas and an old pair of pants he was throwing out. She intends to mend the hole in the bottom of them and give them to Hiroshi, who has been in the same clothes for over two weeks.

  By this time there is a circle of kids making vomiting noises and laughing, and a few of the teenage boys have appeared at their hut too.

  ‘Go find your Uncle Banjo, and tell him we’re taking Jessie to the hospital,’ Joan instructs Claude Williams, and he takes off with his mates in tow. He runs as fast as his legs will carry him.

  ‘You can wait in here,’ a short, round nurse says to Joan with a frown when she arrives at the hospital with Jessie.

  Joan looks around. It’s the linen room. She knows they isolate the Blacks at Cowra Hospital, but she’s never been put in the linen room before. Once when Mary got sick at the Cowra Show they just put her in a separate room at the back of the hospital. But this is a new kind of segregation and Joan’s worried about how Banjo will react when he arrives.

  Jessie is asleep in her mother’s arms when the doctor finally walks in to offer his services. Blacks are also the last to be seen, it seems. He takes the child’s temperature and says very little before mumbling to a nurse by his side.

  Joan feels like she is invisible, and asks, ‘Will she be all right?’

  ‘Temperature’s down, and she hasn’t vomited for –’ he looks at the chart, ‘– two hours, so yes, I think the worst has passed.’ The doctor turns to the nurse and offers instructions. ‘She will bring something for the child, and you can stay here till the morning, just in case.’

  Just in case what? Joan worries to herself but says nothing. All she needs to know is that the worst has passed.

  Hiroshi starts to panic when Mary misses an evening visit. Is it all over? Have they changed their minds about protecting him? Are they planning to hand him over? Should he try to escape and, if so, where would he go now? He is still no better off than he was when he first left the POW camp. He has torturous hunger pangs and he spends hours pacing the small space. He loses count of how many sit-ups he does just to keep moving. He trie
s to do push-ups but his arms are weak from lack of nutrition and only eggs for protein. He stretches out his entire body, sore from no real exercise since the night he ran here.

  When he hears the sheet of iron above move, his feelings are a mix of relief and fear. As Mary’s legs appear on the ladder, his heart lifts, glad that she has returned.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, handing him some damper and a jar of water. ‘Jessie was very sick at the hospital and I had to stay with the other goothas.’

  Hiroshi frowns.

  ‘Oh, children, goothas means children. I had to stay with them and couldn’t come down last night. You must be starving.’

  Hiroshi unwraps the damper and eats it instantly. The water disappears quickly too.

  ‘I’m sorry Jessie was sick. What was wrong?’

  ‘She had poisoning. She ate some nuts off a pine tree and you’re not supposed to eat them. She had to stay in the hospital, which is never a good experience for Aboriginal people. Mum said they made her wait in the cupboard with all the linen – the sheets and blankets.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound right.’

  ‘It gets worse,’ Mary says. ‘At the Cowra hospital there’s a ward out the back for the Black people, that’s where they put the Aboriginal women if they come in to have babies. My Aunt said that when she was there it had the word “ABO” written in capital letters on the sheets and the towels. It’s so they don’t accidentally give them to white people to use.’

  ‘No!’ Hiroshi exclaims in disbelief. ‘This is how Australians treat other Australians?’

  Mary gets the newspaper out of her waistband. ‘I nearly forgot, here’s the paper.’

  Hiroshi takes it, eyes wide, always grateful. He flicks through it quickly while Mary is still there and stops.

  ‘What is this?’ Hiroshi asks Mary, pointing to the headline COWRA V. CANOWINDRA.

  ‘Oh, that’s a story about football,’ she says. ‘It talks about my dad’s cousin Doug Williams.’

  Hiroshi starts reading, ‘“He chased down an opposition player, bringing him down in a flying tackle.”’

  ‘Yes, that means he ran after the man with the ball and grabbed him, pushing him to the ground. That’s a tackle.’ Mary moves like she is going to tackle an invisible footballer. Hiroshi chuckles at the dramatics.

  ‘The Black Diamonds are from here, Erambie,’ she says proudly. ‘They’re legends across the region. Everyone knows about Dicky McGuinness, Viney Murray, Archie Bamblett, Harold Carberry and Doug Williams. They’re our local heroes, and we’re all related in some way, either by blood or by marriage, and always by this land around here.’

  Hiroshi just nods, still trying to understand how everyone can be related. He thinks Mary has a very big family.

  ‘Here in Cowra, football – footy – is very popular.’ Mary loves her football as much as the others at Erambie. It’s a time when all the community can have some fun, although the men are very competitive and sometimes the women too, and on occasion there’s fisticuffs, as her dad calls it. ‘We don’t have much money here, but one ball can keep us entertained for hours.’

  ‘Football,’ Hiroshi says the word for the first time.

  ‘Footy.’

  ‘Footy. I like the sound of football,’ Hiroshi says, then corrects himself, ‘Footy.’

  They both grin widely.

  Mary wants to tell Hiroshi more about the Erambie Allblacks, who played their last game in 1940, and that it’s the new players that are known as the Black Diamonds. But she doesn’t have time to go into the history of football and simply says, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Ashita mata,’ Hiroshi replies. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  ‘There’s the bell,’ Joan sings out to her children two days later. ‘School’s on!’

  The kids all stagger out of their bedroom, whining about having to go to school. It’s only across the mission but the Williams kids drag their feet every time. The kitchen is warm and the air smells sweet and that’s where they’d rather stay.

  ‘Here’s some porridge, eat it quickly and then be off,’ Joan says.

  Mary hopes her mother has managed to pick the weevils out of the oats. She tries her best but sometimes she doesn’t have enough time and the goothas start up about it. This morning they are too concerned about having to go to school, which isn’t an everyday occurrence.

  ‘I like the days when Mr Smith is too busy for school,’ Dottie says.

  ‘Me too, the days when the bell doesn’t ring are the best!’ Jessie agrees, having fully recovered from her hospital visit.

  ‘Just finish your breakfast and go,’ Joan says, trying to get around with James stuck to her leg. ‘And be polite!’ she instructs. Joan doesn’t have much faith in the mission school, it’s hit and miss and she believes it’s second-rate teaching. ‘The government must think it’s good enough for the Black kids,’ she’s been known to say when the kids are at home for days on end.

  ‘It’s a waste of time, we don’t learn anything. Mary would be a better teacher than Mr Smith or his wife,’ Betty grumbles as she ushers her younger sisters out the door. She isn’t a fan of the school and some days when she goes home for lunch, she convinces her mother to let her stay home and help clean.

  Mary crosses the mission to the Manager’s house. It’s a blue-sky day but the cold wind stings her face; she had some porridge but it wasn’t enough to warm her properly. She sees a magpie and stops in her tracks. She recalls the saying that Uncle Kevin has taught her, has taught them all: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for girls, four for boys, five for silver, six for gold, seven for stories that have never been told.

  She knows she has to see another magpie quickly so that there is joy, not sorrow. She spends the whole day looking out the window as often as she can to see a second magpie, hoping there won’t be any bad news about Hiroshi being found, or anyone she knows getting sick, or worse, dying.

  As she finishes washing the dishes that night there is a knock on the Smiths’ door. It’s a young Murray fella, her second cousin about the same age as Betty, who is usually very quiet. He’s been crying and is breathing heavily when Mr Smith opens the door.

  ‘What is it then?’ Smith says coldly, not acknowledging the lad’s distress.

  ‘My mum had a baby,’ the boy sobs, ‘but it died.’ And he pushes himself into the belly of the Manager for comfort.

  Mary drops the metal bowl she’s drying. ‘One for sorrow,’ she says out loud. She knows she will be the one to break the news to her parents when she goes home.

  Smith puts one hand on the boy’s shoulder momentarily and then steps back.

  The next day the community is in mourning. A stillbirth is something difficult for people to fathom, but there is no decent medical help for pregnant women at Erambie. Many of them don’t go to the hospital to give birth, and most babies are born in the huts. There is a funeral at the Baptist church on the mission and everyone is solemn, even the kids who are usually boisterous and noisy are behaving themselves. Joan hasn’t stopped crying since Mary broke the news.

  ‘We had a funeral today, a little baby girl, who never got to breathe at all. She was born dead,’ Mary tells Hiroshi when she goes to see him. A single tear drops from her eye.

  ‘In the hospital?’ Hiroshi asks. ‘Was it the hospital’s fault, because they don’t treat your family properly?’

  ‘No, we really only go to the hospital if it’s an emergency, like when Jessie was poisoned,’ Mary says softly. ‘It is so very sad, but I knew something bad was going to happen. We have ways of knowing things will happen. We have messengers, animals. There is a small bird called a willy wagtail, it’s black with a white belly. They usually have white eyebrows and little white whiskers too. It always wags its tail, that’s where it got its name from. We believe if you see one of these willy wagtails, if it comes and sits on the fence, for example, then it usually brings bad news. That we will get bad news.’

  ‘And did you see this bird?�
� Hiroshi asked.

  ‘No, I saw another bird, it’s called a magpie, and it has a lot of meanings. It can bring different messages. There is a saying: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for girls, four for boys, five for silver, six for gold, seven for stories that have never been told.’ Mary breaks down, sobbing.

  Hiroshi doesn’t quite know what to do. It has been a long time since he saw a woman cry, not since he said goodbye to Benika, and that was completely different. He could comfort Benika, put his arms around her. He cannot do this with Mary. He stands awkwardly, waiting for her tears to stop. When they do, he talks about the magpies back in Japan.

  ‘In my country we have a story about magpies as well. It is related to the Star Festival, the Tanabata, and it celebrates the meeting of two stars. It is the story of the Weaver Girl and the Cow Herder. There is a weaving princess, she is the daughter of the sky, and her name is Orihime. She weaves beautiful clothes, she worked very hard to weave and her father loved her work. But then she was sad because she worked so hard and never had time to meet anyone, so her father arranged for her to meet a cow herder by the name of Hikobishi, who lived on the other side of the Amanogawa River from her. They fell in love instantly and married quickly.

  ‘But Orihime stopped weaving and Hikobishi let his cows roam all over, so the weaving princess’s father separated them back to opposite sides of the river. Orihime cried so much her father said that if she worked hard enough he would let the two meet on the seventh day of the seventh month. But there was no bridge to cross for them to meet. This is where the magpies come into it. A flock of magpies knew that Orihime kept crying so they decided to use their wings to make a bridge across the river, and then she could cross and be with her love. Legend has it that if the weather is bad on Tanabata, if there is too much rain, then the magpies won’t come and the two lovers must wait for another year to see each other.’

  Mary is crying again by the end of the story. ‘That is really beautiful,’ she says. She cannot believe that a man who has been to war, who has been a prisoner in the camp in Cowra, who is living in the dark under the ground, is also capable of telling such a beautiful story. Mary loves Hiroshi’s magpie story. She imagines she and Hiroshi are like two magpies connecting worlds and wishes she could sit and listen to his stories all night. Mary knows Hiroshi has been through so many terrible things and yet he knew just what to say to make her feel better.