Remembered By Heart: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing (15 page)

I kept to the back streets, making my way from the Midland train station to my grandparents' house in Midvale, ducking
the ‘Bunjii men' and ‘rock spiders' — I think the words used now are sleazy old men and paedophiles — that prowled the streets looking to take advantage of anyone young and innocent. I'd learned the hard facts of life early, so I knew I had to protect myself. I also kept low because the police seemed to have an innate radar when it came to spotting runaways and I didn't want to get picked up before I even got to my granny's house. If I got caught too soon, it would've all been for nothing.

The trouble was, when I finally did arrive, I was made to go back again. It upset Mum and my grandparents to do that but they were worried my running away would work against my mother, as well as my younger brothers and sisters, in finally getting back together again as a family.

Mum and one of my younger aunties walked me into Midland to the police station and left me there. Mum mouthed ‘I love you,' and then she was gone. I felt so alone and angry, so I started to cheek the old police sergeant and a woman officer who were on duty. The old boy looked at me from over the rim of his glasses with a bit of a scowl on his face, but the woman officer had sorrow and sympathy in her eyes, which made me feel kaarna — real shame for my behaviour. So I stopped swinging around in the swivel chair, kept my mouth shut and just sooked quietly till they drove me back to the Home.

Matron met us on the steps and was very nice to the police and not too bad towards me either. I think they'd already decided I wouldn't be there much longer. My
punishment was to polish the long walkway in the entry hall of the turn-of-the-century mansion we lived in. It took me all night, on my hands and knees, and I still had to go to school the next day and by then I hadn't really slept for twenty-four hours.

Not long after that they let me go. I was happy to finally leave, but sad too because my two sisters weren't coming with me. They were still stuck there. When I got out I lived with a few different family members because Mum had to work away in the bush to make enough money to get a decent house and furnish it to the Welfare's standards. All that had to be done before we could all be together again as a proper family.

The kind of institutionalisation that I and my brothers and sisters experienced as children doesn't prepare you for life, it just prepares you for more institutionalisation. A lot of the kids from homes ended up as prison inmates and this included my own brothers. They graduated from the homes to stints in various institutions for youth, and finally into maximum security prison for men. They were on a treadmill of hopelessness, of feeling beaten before their lives had even begun, and that all started at Sister Kate's. They'd been deprived of basic human rights as a child, and as they grew older they were harassed by various government officials, especially the police. It wasn't easy for them to turn their lives around. I ended up in prison too, but not as a prisoner. I was one of the first Aboriginal women to
work in the prison system with our people.

It took years for my brothers to find happiness, but they are an inspiration to me now and I feel very proud of them and how they've come through all the hard times.

Abridged from
Speaking from the Heart
edited by Sally Morgan, Tjalaminu Mia and Blaze Kwaymullina, 2007.

My father, Tommy Scott, was the only surviving child to an Aboriginal woman who died when he was ten years old, after which his Aboriginal grandmother continued to raise him until his Scottish father arranged boarding schools and even a succession of stepmothers. He still occasionally saw his grandmother. Sometimes, too, an aunty or uncle looked after him.

When I was a child my father told me to be proud I was ‘of Aboriginal descent'. Perhaps it was the silence surrounding his words that made them resonate as they did; I'd certainly heard no such thing anywhere else in my life, certainly not in my reading or schooling. There didn't seem much in the way of empirical evidence to support my father's words. A child, and unable to either calibrate injustice and racism or identify its cause, I sensed the legacy of oppression.

My father and I didn't have a lot of conversations, which is probably why I remember those we did have, like when — at six or seven years old — I came home bruised and bleeding and cursing two other Noongar boys — strangers — I'd clashed with after they'd stolen my younger brother's bicycle. ‘Coons,' I was calling them.

My father shut me up. Don't talk that way, he said. People are people. And for the first time he told me to be proud I was ‘of Aboriginal descent'.

Perhaps my father's words resonated so strangely simply because, in 1960s south-western Australia, it was hard to articulate pride in Aboriginality. My father wanted me to have something more like a faith, a psychological conviction. It was not something easily put into words. He said to be proud, that was the important thing, but he lacked the vocabulary, didn't have the right stories at hand. It's a continuing problem I think, this struggle to articulate the significance and energy of a specific Indigenous heritage.

In the mid 1960s it was put to me in terms of being proud to be ‘of Aboriginal descent' and ‘part-Aboriginal', but not much more than ten years later I was a young adult living and working among Aboriginal people of south-western Australia — Noongars — who repeatedly said, ‘You can't be bit and bit. What are you, Noongar or wadjela?'

It was a political imperative about the need to commit, to align oneself with either white or black, and I felt compelled to obey. There didn't seem to be any choice, not
if I wished to be among Noongars. But even as I winced at the phrase ‘Aboriginal descent' and learned more of our shared history, our story of colonisation, I was not always confident of my acceptance by other Noongars.

My father died in his thirties. Young as he was, he was several years older than his mother had been at the time of her death.

I didn't grow up in the bush. There was no traditional upbringing of stories around the camp fire, no earnest transmission of cultural values. The floor of the first house I remember was only partially completed, and my three siblings and I, pretending we were tight-rope walkers, balanced on the floor-joists spanning the soft dirt and rubble half a metre below us.

We moved to a government house on a bitumen street with gutters running down each side, and even though the street came to an end, the slope ran on and on through patchy scrub and past the superphosphate factory, the rubbish tip, the Native Reserve.

Individuals were fined for being on the reserve, and fined for being in town. Their crime was being non-Aboriginal in the one place and Aboriginal in the other, after legislation was refined in the attempt to snare those who — as the frustrated bureaucrat put it — ‘run with the hares and hunt with the hounds' and to trip them as they moved to and fro across a dividing legislative line.

My father was mobile that way, always moving.

From the city where he'd reached adulthood, he moved back close to the country of our Noongar ancestors, and worked on the roads as ‘leading hand' in a gang of mainly Aboriginal men. Returning home after being away from us for ten days of every fortnight, he usually took us camping. He wanted to be a professional fisherman, and we rattled along the coast in a battered 4WD and trailed nets from a dinghy in the country of our countless ancestors, ‘going home' together. We kids helped with the nets, cleaned fish, and even hawked them around the neighbourhood. My mother broke up blocks of ice with the back of an axe, and we carefully layered fish and ice into crates which my father then loaded onto a train bound for the city.

One among other Noongar and wadjela children running barefoot in a suburb a skip, hop and a step from the reserve, I was only ever at the fringe of a community which showed all the signs of being under siege.

My immediate family line didn't have the experience of reserves or missions. I don't know that sort of anger, can't claim the same sense of a collective identity forged by the experience of oppression. I knew something about the shame — just from being ‘of Aboriginal descent' in the Australia I've known — and I knew something about the pride, if not how to adequately express and articulate it.

Abridged from
Kayang & Me
Kim Scott and Hazel Brown, 2005.

On the second of April 1949 a man and a woman crossed the line. One was black and one was white and they thought it would be all right.

My father was black. My mother was white. Racism was rife. It was a small country town called Tenterfield in the 1950s and times were hard. Bill Bancroft, my father, wasn't even an Australian citizen, yet he married my mother, a white woman whose name was Dorothy Moss. Who could question their courage, in particular Dorothy, who had everything to lose. It is the union of these two people that shows what is great about the human race — the desire to follow instinct. It didn't matter that one person had black skin. What mattered was they were in love. A love you can read of in fairytales — defying boundaries,
defying doubters, defying the White Australia Policy. From this partnership I was born. My name is Bronwyn Bancroft and this is my story.

Born in 1958, I was the last of seven children. My eldest brothers and sisters were not that much older than me, as my mum had one child each year for eight years, but they used to say to visitors and other family members that Mum and Dad only had me to wear out the old clothes. The earliest memories I have are of lying under the kitchen table. I would rub my eyes then look around the room. The mist of tears distorted everything I saw. The tablecloth with the interwoven shapes took life. Everywhere I looked there were patterns.

It was as if I was born in another time, another place, another family. Like my brothers and sisters though, I woke to a world of inequality. I was in Tenterfield, New South Wales. Population: 3000. I was born not black, not white — an Aboriginal Australian.

In a small country town I was either going to be very creative or a lot of trouble. My different perspective would distance me from my siblings, not only because I was the last of seven children, but also because they came across a lot more racism than I did. One brother had many fights under the bridge after school when people called him a boong or a coon. I was saved from that because they cut a path of respect that I followed, blissfully unaware at the time of their trials and tribulations. I did not have to live daily through such horrendous moments. That's not to say
I haven't experienced racism. I have, and when it happens it always sends an arrow straight into my heart. I wonder what makes a person think they have the right to speak or act in such an inhumane way. I never understand it.

I think the lack of respect afforded to my siblings by some elements of a small country town pushed them into a place where they did not want to go. Challenged as Aboriginal people, they would have preferred to be treated as Australians, but they mostly succumbed to the tweener world, where whites never accepted you and neither did blacks. You were caught in that vacuous space in between. I never wanted to be a tweener. I knew I couldn't live like that. I was Aboriginal and I was extremely proud of my dad. I embraced my Aboriginality wholeheartedly and my identity became the whole focal point for my life and for what I later taught my children.

I was fortunate in that throughout my life I had much greater social freedom than my brothers and sisters. When I was nine years old, the 1967 referendum voted in favour of including Indigenous people in the census, which effectively recognised our citizenship. When I was fourteen years old, the 1972 Tent Embassy was set up outside Parliament House, Canberra, to protest against the treatment of Indigenous Australians in this country. I was born into a generation of change and I embraced that too. I came to understand how important and meaningful my identity was for me. It was so much more than a name and a family. It was a belief, a deep sense of spirituality, a
lifestyle and it meant that I also opened my arms to my ancestral land from an early age.

I always loved going to the bush at Lionsville, where my father's family are the traditional custodians of the land. I enjoyed the sanctity of the bush kingdom and felt a freedom there like no other place. Without over-romanticising, I really felt that when I set foot on our land a weight was lifted from me. It was like that feeling you get when you arrive home after a long day at school carrying around a bag full of heavy books. Walking into your room, you fling the bag down on the floor. Without the weight you feel immediately stronger. The bed beckons. You lie down and are momentarily free from everything that weighs you down. That's how I felt in Lionsville. I even loved the drive there, crammed into the back of the old Ford with my brothers and sisters. The road from Tenterfield was mainly dirt. I remember looking out the back at the dust exploding behind us. The road took us past Tabulam, and Baryulgil, then on to this remote area called Lionsville. All of us kids were on the lookout for the three big hills. When we saw them we knew our destination was just ahead. Hill one, two, and three passed. We were here. We were excited. It was time to get to the creek.

The creek was out the back of our grandfather's place. We were so happy to arrive after being crammed together in the truck, in the heat and dust, and we would rush straight down to the creek. There were catfish in the water,
but we were careful not to disturb their nest. Diving off the fallen log into the pristine waters of the Washpool Creek — what a divine moment. Laughter and excitement and the thrill of eating fresh fish and homemade bread by nightfall.

What I felt more than anything was the sense of peace and space that this bush hideaway offered. I loved the little tin cubby nestling under the giant crepe myrtle with its own little stove and playthings. It was my retreat.