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Authors: Larissa Behrendt
Larissa Behrendt is Professor of Law and Director of the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is a member of the Eualeyai/Kamilaroi nations of northâwest New South Wales. Her first novel,
Home,
was the winner of the David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writers and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (SouthâEast Asia/ Pacific region).
Other books by Larissa Behrendt
Fiction
Legacy
Nonâfiction
Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights and Australia's Future
Aboriginal Dispute Resolution: A Step Towards Self-determination and Community Autonomy
Coâauthored
Resolving Indigenous Disputes: Land Conflict and Beyond Indigenous Legal Relations in Australia Treaty
For my grandmother,
Lavinia Boney Dawson
The place where
the rivers meet
1
1995
M
Y FATHER TOLD ME that the name of the town meant âthe meeting of the rivers' in the old language. We had set out from Sydney in the fresh hours of the morning, leaving the tame quarters of suburbia, crossing over the mountains, until the landscape bled into undulating black soil plains. The afternoon crept up on us, the distant mountain formation offering a craggy, blue-haze backdrop. Barbed-wire-fenced paddocks held flocks of cotton-wool sheep, undisturbed by our passing.
It is three o'clock in the afternoon as my father parks his car in the main street, bumper pointing at the steps of the well-worn Royal Hotel. The retiring sun sparkles red and gold, the light catching in flashing opal colours. A hot wind blows across the concrete, mortar and wood packing grit in every crevice it brushes over â between bricks, the cracks of window frames, between teeth.
I decide that I will go to the post office. If I send a card today, it will reach my mother by Tuesday. Although that's the day that I'm planning to return, I can see her delivering a trim pink smile of thanks (“Oh, Candy”), and she will be pleased that I have remembered her. I can also see my father dismissing this with an “Oh, Can-deese”, as he rolls his eyes.
The air-conditioning in Dad's large sleek car â I can stretch my legs out in front and not touch anything â had protected me from the aggressive heat and light film of swirling dust. I have always preferred the feeling of warmth on my skin to controlled too-frigid temperatures. I enjoy the stifling heat that now clings to my legs, underneath my skirt, embracing my face, as I walk across searing concrete. The post office is built with old burnt-red bricks and garnished with a wide verandah and white flourishes, defying the starching weather and the stretching time.
Inside, the sails of the ceiling fans click slowly, rhythmically. I pick a faded postcard from the wire stand, disappointed that there were none more parochial, less rustic
Greetings from Big Rig Country
or a flock of sheep:
I miss Ewe)
to send on to my best friend Kate. I look over a display of books laid out on a table, publications of the local Historical Society, mostly photocopies stapled together between colourful cardboard. I decide on a collection of old newspaper articles about the area and a book of one resident family's memoirs. They arrived in 1904, the year my grandmother was bom here. I know my father will comment on my impulse-buying. I've bought something at every stop we've made today. Dad loves to dramatise how much money I spend, as though each coin is extracted from his own pocket.
On the back of my postcard of the town centre, sun-scorched and faded, I write â
Hi Mummy, Hot and dusty; lots of sheep. By the time you get this, I'll be home. Love Candy
âand take my purchases to the counter where a homely, wrinklefaced woman with curled grey hair waits.
“All this way from Sydney?” she asks. I suddenly feel conscious of my suit and my leather shoes that clip confidently across the wooden floor.
“Yes. I guess you can pick a tourist.”
“We get to know the faces in here. Are you staying a while or driving through?”
“I'm staying for the weekend.”
“Well, there's lots of interesting things to see around here. There are the fisheries down on the river and there's a pioneers' museum.”
“I'm here to visit family,” I reply.
“Really?” she answers, her interest piqued. “If they're locals, I probably know them.”
“Well, the family names are Lance and Boney.”
“Hmmm. Doesn't sound familiar to me. Do they live in town?”
“No, just outside.”
“Oh,” responds the woman, her mouth making a tight circle as she peers more carefully at me and then, quickly regaining her smile, processes my purchase with renewed efficiency. I have surprised her. She would know “just outside town” means the Aboriginal reserve. She was fooled by my light skin and has mistaken me for exotically Spanish, Brazilian or Italian. I'm used to this reaction but still it annoys me each time, like a distracting hangnail. I don't mind being mistaken for someone from somewhere else, but I mind when the realisation that the dark features are Aboriginal is met with disappointment, confusion or even disgust. I mind when the person observing me feels betrayed by my lightness.
I return to the car and sit with my door open, the stagnant heat still floating against my skin. I know my father will be in the pub for a while. Uncle Henry will convince him to have just one more drink to quench his city thirst. Dad will relish the excited welcome he'll receive as faces, known and unknown, crowd around for a free drink. Only such attention could make my father so flush with generosity.
I'm too shy to enter the bar even though I know Dad will be distracted and detained for a while. He'll be talking about his work at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and feeding everyone snippets of information about friends and relatives also living in Sydney. I suddenly feel over-dressed and self-conscious in my dark blue cotton suit, something that I would wear to court or for a meeting with a client. I've already attracted the gaze from a group of four locals relaxing on the hotel verandah. I can't be sure whether they're looking at me â so obviously not of this place â or my father's flashy new car. Perhaps both.
I open one of the books I've just bought. The page falls to the writings of a clergyman who, accompanied by a 'black boy', travelled through the area in the late 1880s. He had written:
And yet, it was a privilege to be a pioneer, for this is the life that has helped to develop characteristics that make for a real greatness. Friendships, courage, indominatable perseverance in the face of difficulties were the privileges of our pioneers.
I close the book and think about the woman in the post office and her stagnant, glazed expression that had, for just a moment, rejected me. A glance held only for a split-second, but the message so unmistakable. Perhaps she didn't know what it was that her look revealed, what it was that I saw.
My light cocoa skin wrapped around my mother's European features have allowed me to slip unnoticed into social circles, my presence never enough to make others feel guarded. Not like Kingsley, my brother, who, much darker, can never slip by. There is a price for this free access. I hear the things they assume will pass me by, things that would otherwise be said when I'm not there. I'm treated in these moments as though light skin is different, tougher than the person who wears it. “But you are not a real one,” thin pink lips will tell me, to excuse me. “You're different”.
But I keep these interactions â these looks, exclamations, excuses and hints of disgustâbottled within me. The words â “not a real one” â work into my skin like splinters, making me feel as though I have Kingsley's own dark skin wrapped around me. It is, of course, easier for me. I have these word-splinters under my flesh but Kingsley is undis-guisable, cannot be masked. No one will mistake him as an exotic southern European. I feel guilt about the way I can slip in and out, but I also have a deep envy of Kingsley when dark hands shake his in greeting while darting eyes flit over me with unspoken suspicion.
My father emerges from the pub with a cheerful Uncle Henry by his side, just like veterans on Anzac day, and I am distracted from my brooding. I rise and embrace my gravely handsome uncle, who had, in his youth, been a football player for one of the Sydney teams. Henry's athleticism, all these decades on, still clings to him.
“Ah, Bub, look at you,” he exclaims as he pulls me against his chest.
“Oh, Uncle Henry, it is so good to see you.”
“Your father's been telling me that you're causing all kinds of trouble in those law courts in Sydney. God only knows we could use your skills around here.”
“He exaggerates. I'm just plodding away,” I respond, both embarrassed and pleased by my father's boasting.
“I kept all those postcards you sent me from Paris. Showed them to everyone around here who'd listen. Proud of you, I am.”
“It's easy to see why you're my favourite uncle.” I savour the flushed feeling his attention creates in me.
He holds my arm. “It took your father too long to bring you out here,” he glances at his cousin with a reproachful eye.
“Henry is taking us out to dinner. We'll go check into the hotel and rest up before then,” my father replies sheepishly.
From the faded floral bedspread in my hotel room I listen to the air-conditioner hum and hiss its secret language. Dad and Uncle Henry have remained at the small hotel bar, which is crowded with furniture but never with people. I excused myself, despite the temptation of Uncle Henry's presence, when the conversation, blurry from alcohol, turned to the knotted web of back-stabbing and double-deal-ing that make up black politics in the city.
Uncle Henry keeps a distant eye on what is happening in Sydney. He travels there often. On these visits I steal him away for lunch or dinner at white-walled, glass-encased restaurants. I love being escorted by my tall, gentle uncle. He charms me with stories from his tin-box of memories. I listen, captivated. I notice admiring glances thrown his way from blue eyes beneath shy lashes. Other times, looks can be contemptuous, perhaps not meant to be so obvious, and once even accompanied by a shrill, unashamed remark. My uncle dismisses these incidents with a smile. I'm not so forgiving, feeling more protective of him than I do of myself.
“It's the egg trying to protect the chicken,” my father would say. You can go on too much about these incidents in the city. I've noticed a short attention span for such things.
In my pastel-flowered hotel room, I begin to sift through the papers I have brought with me. I hate to leave myself without some vestige of work nearby, even if I just carry it, keep it close. I've already redrafted the affidavits and I'm making notes about the next step for the native title claim I'm working on. I have to meet with the representative of the local Land Council on Tuesday and inform him of the progress of the case. Preparing the evidence of witnesses and anthropologists has already taken two years. I also have to make the arrangements to travel out to the peninsula to take another look at the land.
I organise my work by placing it in designated piles, one for each task. I have two more nights in town and curse myself that I haven't brought more to do. I make a mental note to ring Kingsley in the morning to organise further documents to be faxed â provided this hotel has a fax machine. I can trust my brother to be at work on a Saturday. He'll grumble that I'm imposing on him, drawing him away from his own caseload, but he'll at least respect my compulsion to do more, my inability to relax.
Kingsley's temperament has changed over the years. As a child, he was as shy as me, but was always more eager to please and more popular. Somewhere in his travels through this life he lost his amiable nature; I think it fell away once he began university, replaced by a ferocious seriousness. But we have never talked about why this was so. I doubt I could ever bring myself to ask him about it. I'm too afraid of finding out what has taken the most innocent parts of him away.
I pull myself under the stiff covers of my hotel bed and return to my post office purchases. I open the pale lemon cardboard cover and read the introduction of one of my new books, though they are more like pamphlets. It's a small piece written by a Mrs Cynthia Kerrigan-Mullins, the president of the Historical Society. Her great-grandfather owned the first general store in the town so she is well placed, she writes, to narrate the brief history of the little community. She marks the town's development with landmarks that begin with the establishment of her great-grandfather's store. Mrs Kerrigan-Mullins seems to think that the history of the town has been established from that date. It is followed by a postal service and a police station, a drought, a flood and a fire, the arrival of a train line in 1901 and the motor car in 1910. The only details added to the sketch are the refurbishment and extensions to the school and hospital in the middle of the century. In my mind, Cynthia Kerrigan-Mullins looks like the woman in the post office.
The book seems old, written with a tone from the 1950s, but when I look at the copyright date I see that it was printed in 1983; not new, but still thirty years later than I had expected. Well, it is the historical society, I think to myself as I turn to the first chapter titled 'Humble But Strong Beginnings'. This plots the battle of white men against the harsh terrain and unyielding, unsympathetic climate. As for mention of my own people, I find but one. Mrs Cynthia Kerrigan-Mullins has written:
Being troubled by the blacks and living in fear of them, a party was got together who surrounded about three hundred aborigines at the creek and shot down most of them, including men, women and piccaninnies.
I close the book, feeling the same deep chill I get when I find this kind of detached reference in history texts and contemporary media. It freezes me, like ice pressed against my flesh. I read the words, weigh them, over and over again.
“Being troubled by blacks.”
“Living in fear of them.”
“Three hundred.”
“Shot down.”
“Men, women and piccaninnies.”
Justice Lionel Murphy wrote about this history of frontier violence in the 1979 High Court case of
Coe
v.
The Commonwealth.
He referred to it as genocide and said that “the aborigines did not give up their lands peacefully, that they were killed or removed forcibly from the land by English forces or colonists in what amounted to attempted, and in Tasmania almost complete, genocide.” Genocide. It comes from the Greek
geno,
which means 'race', and from the Latin word
cida,
meaning 'killer'. The word was coined in 1944, a new word for an old concept.
These silent injustices and the unmentionable crimes stain the landscape. I remind myself that these dark happenings occurred because today people are trying to erase them. I remember the little jibes and the answers from back in my childhood. There they laughed at this killing with an innocence that was shocking and shamefulâ¦
