Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea (4 page)

By the time my plane reaches Darwin I have convinced myself that this is all for the best, after all, I've grown up in a different world to my new family and I'd never fit in there anyway. I snatch my luggage from the Airnorth pilot-cum-baggage handler and make a beeline for the Ansett check-in counter. It's only been ten days since I was here but it feels like a lifetime. Grabbing my boarding pass I head for the bar. I've got a few hours to kill before my plane leaves and I'm determined to make up for lost time as I sink a gin and tonic in about thirty seconds. Pausing for breath as the barman makes me another I survey the other patrons. They look like the same bunch of shady characters and blackfellas as last time except there are now three women quaffing beer at the next table as well. They smile and nod amiably in my direction but I turn away.
My sister and I were brought up knowing that nice women don't drink beer. They only drink wine, or they're if feeling adventurous white spirits. By their beer drinking and attire these women are the type that the old bat would call ‘common' and ‘tarts' and although they are in all probability nice and decent people my upbringing compels me to treat them with a contempt reserved for lesser beings. I'm about to lift my ‘white spirits' to my lips when I'm struck by a rather alarming thought. If they knew where I'd spent the last ten days maybe they wouldn't be nodding pleasantly at me. Hell, that's something to think about. Then I start to wonder if a whiff of the miserable bush foods that I was forced to eat if I didn't want to starve to death has been seeping unobserved from my pores and is being wafted around the rooms by the ceiling fans. Christ, what if people can smell me? I bend my head down as if to check my shoe and have a good sniff of my armpit. I washed it with sea water that morning like my mum showed me and it actually doesn't smell that bad, but I get my Coco Chanel out of my bag and have a discreet squirt before checking the clock on the wall. I've still got an hour.

I have a window seat and as we take off I bid Darwin my fondest of farewells because I know that as interesting as it was to meet my family and see where I spent my first few years of life, I will not be coming back in a hurry. My life is in Melbourne where I can eat food that's got a label on it telling me what it is and everyone isn't
black and scary-looking. Where I can sleep with the front door shut and securely locked and where there are bottle shops aplenty.

The lady sitting next to me asks if I'm from Darwin. I'm not very fond of strangers enquiring about my business but the gin and tonics and my fragile state of mind after my recent experiences have left me vulnerable and exposed. My tongue is primed and ready for action and I blurt out the hardships of the last week and a half while she listens intently. Well, isn't that amazing, she says when I finally come up for air to wave down a stewardess for a drink. She tells me that back in the 1960s her son-in-law flew the planes from the Tiwi Islands that brought the kids in from the mission. I am astounded and digest this piece of information while my mind travels back in time to the young pilot who was flying my plane in 1963. I know before I ask the question that she is going to say yes, her son-in-law had blond hair and a beard, my gut knows that we are talking about the same man. When I ask she is surprised that I remember him at all and we marvel at life's capacity to throw coincidence into our faces so brazenly. When we disembark I ask her to pass on my good wishes to him.

I am rattled by my chance meeting with this woman because I read omens into everything, like if a crow lands on the clothesline something is going to happen to the person who owns the piece of clothing nearest to it. Or if I see a squashed animal on the road I'm going to have a shit
day. Omens are my early-warning radar system and they've never let me down. Later as I soak in the bath with a piece of takeaway pizza in my hand I think about the young pilot spiriting me away from the islands when I was small. And I don't have to think too hard about what meeting his mother-in-law portents. It means that where this pilot broke the chain all those years ago when he flew me away from the Tiwi Islands, so meeting his mother-in-law has now joined the broken link back together. It means only one thing. That I have to go back.

But now I'm home I haven't the courage to tell everyone that I'm going back because I know they'll try to talk me out of it and I know they won't understand if I tell them about the omen because only weird people do things like that. And even though I've made up my mind now and I just want to get it over and done with, I know I have to be sensible and organise things properly. But my head is in a muddle. Which suitcase will I put my fossil collection in? Will my Japanese kimono with the little patch sewn on the arse fit if I take all my Graham Greenes and Lawrence Durrells? How much wine can I squeeze into a suitcase if I leave some of my nail polish behind?

And with my head full of such things my work at the Health Department starts to languish as I shift paper around on my desk and clean up the staples that have fallen out of their box in my top drawer and try to look busy. A few days later I am grateful for the distraction of
the Indigenous Health Conference. It is full of the usual wankers talking their customary garbage about improving the health of Indigenous Australians. I watch them throwing responsibility back and forth like a hand grenade that's about to go off. I think of the clinic on Bathurst Island with the whiteboard in the waiting room that has a list of people on it who need follow-up treatment for syphilis, and the kids with candles of snot streaming down their faces and the dog shit all over the place. I think of the stagnant and stinking grey water sitting in people's yards and the garbage blowing in the wind. Are we talking about the same Indigenous health here, I wonder?

I spark up when the conference-goers meet for drinks at the bar afterwards. Apart from relieving the stress of the day it's a good opportunity to watch the wankers let down their guard while my workmate Johnno and I observe the flirtatious looks and listen to the loosened tongues and make discreet comment. Yes, ‘Boufant Hairdo' and ‘Bass Baritone' will definitely fuck each other tonight. Oh, did you hear the bit when ‘Big Arse' said ‘Small Dick' didn't know what he was talking about, like she'd know anything!

At seven o'clock we drift into the restaurant. The food is divine. Johnno is next to me at the end of the table in his wheelchair and is an extroverted bundle of energy. He is also a bit of a wine connoisseur and along with his running commentary on Australian wines and the footy scores, keeps topping up our glasses. I don't complain.

‘How do you drive your wheelchair when you get drunk?' I ask him. He laughs and just keeps pouring. I know we're getting really drunk now because the bloke opposite who has beady eyes like a crab and a mouth like a cat's arse is starting to look real good and I'm feeling the best I've felt in the two weeks since I came back.

‘How was your trip up north?' Johnno segues from our conversation about New Zealand wines, which instantly wipes the grin off my face. My stomach starts to churn and then gurgles like water going down a curly drainpipe and I silently curse him. I take a deep breath to make my guts settle but the gurgling gets worse and I know I'm in trouble. For a split second our eyes make contact and his go wide as he realises I am going to spew. He tries to back away from the table but only manages a forty-five degree turn as his colostomy bag drops onto the floor and he runs over it at precisely the same moment that I deposit my meal neatly into his lap. Within seconds the pong of the flattened colostomy bag permeates the air and the restaurant empties in one gigantic wave with my good mate bringing up the rear in his wheelchair. I hit the fresh air just as Johnno, on my heels, gags and brings up his food as well.

My boss is furious with me over my part in the melee at the dinner and the bill from the restaurant for a new carpet. But I feel his anger is unjustified. I only threw up and I wasn't responsible for the colostomy bag being flattened and releasing its contents.

‘New carpet,' I say, hoping to appeal to his budget-oriented brain. ‘That's going a bit far, isn't it?'

He gives me a look that I take to mean shut up.

The next day I find myself sitting at his desk again. I've informed him that I'm leaving my job. After all, it doesn't hold much appeal for me anymore and the sooner I get back to Nguiu to fulfil my destiny the better. There'd been a bit of chemistry between us and although nothing serious had ever happened I find myself sweating as he looks at me with imploring eyes.

‘But why?' he says. ‘What's got into you now? Why can't you just go for another holiday?'

‘I'm leaving.' I say. ‘I have to go.'

‘Look, you're pissed off because I told you off …'

‘I'm not. I'm fine with that. I just have to go, that's all.'

We both sit in deep contemplation for a few moments.

‘I'll ring you when I get there and let you know what's going on,' I say, knowing full well I won't. He knows that too. He knows that as soon as I'm out that door he'll never see me again. I get up and leave without looking back.

It kept on being easier not to tell people I was going back to Bathurst Island because my mind was in enough chaos without having to deal with other people's opinions. People just can't help themselves when it comes to dishing out opinions, so without weighing myself down with complicated goodbyes and explanations I headed back to Nguiu a few months later to carry on where I had left off. Apart from going back because I believed I had to, the other side of the continent seemed like a good place to go to get away from my white parents.

But in order to know what happened next you will need to know how I was taken from my real mum and given to this white family to be raised as their own. Some of this information was given to me by my foster mother after I came back from Nguiu the first time as she probably
realised I was going to find stuff out anyway and it would be better for her if she came clean. Some of it I found out myself, and some of it came from my family at Nguiu.

It's hard to imagine them being young because they always seemed so old, but my parents-to-be were in their late thirties when one cold Sunday morning in May of 1963 they undertook their weekly pilgrimage to mass to commune with their good mate God. Little cloudy puffs of condensation would have been coming out of that car exhaust pipe as he backed out of the driveway while, as always, she would have been whingeing and fiddling around with the car heater in an effort to defrost her frozen feet. My soon-to-be siblings, fourteen-year-old Aubrey and four-year-old Julie, would have been in that back seat looking out of the passenger windows at the bleak landscape and maybe wishing they were somewhere else. And when they arrived at the church and filed reverently down the aisle and into their pew, they wouldn't have known this was going to be a turning point in their lives. Because instead of hearing about God's usual trials and tribulations they were going to be told about the Sacred Heart Missions up north where a group of poor misconceived Aboriginal kids were waiting for the good Lord to bless them and find them a ‘good home'. And there were plenty of these kids to choose from too, so all the kindly parishioners had to do was open their hearts up just a little crack and let the light of compassion shine
right on out of there and right on into the welfare office where they could sign a few papers and change some little black kid's life forever.

My parents made their decision fairly quickly after that sermon, or rather she did. When I asked her why they wanted me, our mother revealed that her friend had a black doll when she was a kid and she had always wanted one too. She also thought their kind deed would take them nearer their God to thee. They've both passed away now so I hope that God gave them an extra gold star for their efforts, and I hope that getting a real black doll instead of a toy one helped her overcome her childhood jealousy.

They chose me from a photograph, so she said. One of the many that had been shown to them in the welfare office as they sipped their cups of tea. Each of those photographs represented a kid who had been removed from their family while strangers organised their fate and then sent them on to other strangers. They call it child-trafficking nowadays but back then it was the government's attempt at turning Australia into another Britain. By assimilating the black minority into the white population they hoped that the pesky problem of the blacks would eventually take care of itself by them either dying out or doing as they were told and relinquishing their culture and ways forever. This obviously didn't happen, but at the time there were lots of people like my foster parents eager to do their bit for the White Australia Policy.

And my parents had strict criteria for their new charge. The child had to be female, young enough to be ‘trained', light-skinned, not physically or mentally disabled and possessing features that were not too ‘broad' so as to facilitate a smoother integration into their white world. They ended up with three photographs but my age swung the odds in my favour because I was the youngest. When I look at that photograph I can tell I'm unsure of what's happening because my smile is straight and my eyes are flat and watchful, but I'm surprised I could arrange my face in a smile at all after what I eventually found out about my circumstances. The photo was taken not long after I had been placed at the Garden Point Mission for half-caste kids on Melville Island. Garden Point is now called by its Tiwi name, Pirlangimpi. A lot of kids there came from places further down in the desert country like Tennant Creek and Elliott. This was a deliberate practice carried out all over Australia so the incarcerated kids wouldn't have family living nearby to kick up a fuss and try to get them back.

But while the authorities were busily farming out black kids to all and sundry, I wonder what happened to the ones whose photos were put on the reject pile. The ones who didn't pass muster, the unbecoming, the unwanted. How did they feel? Did they feel lucky or did they resent spending the rest of their childhoods in institutions, until they turned eighteen, the age when the government no longer had any responsibility for them? Were they then
turfed out into the big world to fend for themselves? Were these the ones who, not having a family to teach them parenting and home and life skills, ended up in the parks broken and defeated with their flagons of goon? I could have been one of them if I'd been a boy or born too black or I'd had a big boong nose.

I think I spent about six months at Garden Point, and then at the tender age of three and a half boarded an old DC3 ‘Biscuit Bomber' to fly from Garden Point to Darwin. I remember looking out of the round porthole windows and watching the islands falling away behind us. Taking the nuns literally that I would be meeting my new mum and dad I supposedly proceeded up the aisle to the pilot and flung my arms around him calling him dad. The very same pilot whose mother-in-law sat beside me on the plane after leaving Nguiu for the first time when I found my real mother.

I spent a few days in Darwin being looked after by a young couple with a golden cocker spaniel while the authorities sorted whatever else there was to sort out. The dog had a dreadful habit of running around in circles chasing its stump of a tail which terrified the shit out of me and caused me no end of misery because the woman would be constantly taking my hand and trying to make me pat the damned thing.

Finally on the twentieth of August 1963 I was put onto another plane. I remember very little of that journey or
arriving at my destination but I do remember being led to a man, a woman and a small blonde-haired girl. After the faux pas with the pilot I was a bit warier this time. As the new woman reached forward to take me and the woman who was chaperoning me from Darwin extricated her hand from my sweaty little one to take her leave, I apparently let rip with a scream that nearly took off the terminal roof. My bet is that the chaperone then headed straight for the door. After the grief we kids had given her on the plane with our crying and pissing our pants and throwing up, who could blame her. In the car the screaming continued with my new mother and sister in tears by now as well while my new father drove on in silence. This was the beginning of my next life and I didn't like it one bit.