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MumShirl. [Smith, Colleen Shirley Perry] (1987). MumShirl : an autobiography. With the assistance of Bobbi Sykes; [edited by Karen McVicker] (2nd ed.) (173 pages). Richmond, Vic. : Heinemann Educational Australia.

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umShirl an autobiography with the assistance of Bobbi Sykes

MumShirl

Shirley Smith, better known as MumShirl, tells the story of her life with vigour and clarity. She was born on Erambie Mission in Cowra and has lived and worked in Sydney for most of her life. It is rare for a book to state so matter-of-factly so many incidents of which white Australians should be ashamed. MumShirl combines great insight into human nature with sympathy for human frailty and a sense of humour. Her life as an Aboriginal, activist and social worker has been full of contrasts: 'we couldn't get served in lots of crummy places in Sydney ... but we could have lunch with the Queen'. MumShirl is the story of the effects of colonisation in Australia, and she has helped to make Australian history through her work.

Bobbi Sykes is a long-time friend and associate of MumShirl. She worked with MumShirl in an unof­ficial capacity for over ten years, driving her to court hearings, investigations and prisons. The conviction grew in both that this life and work should be remem­bered, and the idea of a book took form. Since MumShirl was first published, their friendship has continued, though they now work in different areas. Bobbi (Or Roberta) Sykes went on to Harvard and took a PhD. She is now a consultant at the Centre for Studies in Justice at Mitchell College, Bathurst. MumShirl continues her welfare work -how can she retire when she is needed1

MumShirl an autobiography with the assistance of Bobbi Sykes

Heinemann Educational Australia 178768

Heinemann Educational Australia (A division of Heinemann Publishers Australia Pry Ltd) H5 Abinger Street, Richmond Victoria 3121

©Bobbi Sykes 1981 First published 1981 Reprinted 1983 Second edition 1987

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval svstem or transmitted in any form by any means whatsoever without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Apply in writing to the publishers .

Edited by Karen McVickt:r T vpeset in Australia bv Dovatvpe in Goudy Old Stvle Printed in Singap<)re bv Ch,>ng Mnh Offset Printing Pte Ltd

Natinnal Librarv nf Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data:

MumShirl. MumShirl: an autnbiographv.

Rev. ed . ISBN ll H'i8'i<l 4064

Ill. Aborigines, Australian -- 1\:ew South Wales - Svdnev -- Public welfare. 2. Social work with minorities- New South Wales-- Svdnev. l. St>eial workers -- !'\ew South Wales- Svdnev- Biographv. I. Svkes, Bobbi. 11. Title.

"lb2 H '4<l<l I 'i ' (l<l 2 4

Contents Dedication vii

Appreciation V Ill

1 Early journeys 1

2 I discover I am different 10

3 A mad Roman Catholic 17

4 My world widens 21

5 A big wedding and a beautiful daughter 30

6 I make my own life 36

7 People in trouble 42

8 Remarkable people 56

9 People who don't feel good about themselves 63

10 Survival 72

11 My work, a way of life 76

12 Waiting for change 94

13 Working for change 100

14 Politics 110

15 A very strange life 119

16 Celebrities 13 4

17 Problems of death 146

18 Medals and pieces of paper 150

Dedication My Grandfather used to tell me, 'Colleen, first you've got to love yourself, and then you can spread it around'. I've tried to live by that all my life. I've had a lot of problems, many of which cannot be put into this book, but I've also had a lot of love heaped on me.

My Grandfather, who was a simple man, also used to tell me that man threw down wheat seeds. Then God sent just enough rain and sun and wind for it to grow. God gave man the ability to harvest it and when it got crushed up, the Aboriginal people could make bread or damper.

He said that, because of this, just the simple act of eating or sharing our bread meant that we were taking part in a miracle .

Every day is part of a miracle and I have found that to be the truth, all my life.

I would therefore like to dedicate this book to God, and to one of His miracles, who was my Grandfather (hear that, Budjarn, this one is for you), and to all the other miracles who have walked the earth, whether they live in the deserts, the reserves or missions, in the houses, in the streets, or in the prisons ...

Appreciation I would particularly like to express my appreciation to the following people , which is, of course, an incomplete list:

Eileen Lester; Mrs Muriel Merritt and her son, Robert; Captain Lewis of the Salvation Army, and Captain Norton; Fay Nelson and husband, Gordon; Bob and Kay Bellear; Dick Phillips and wife, Evonne; Ilana Doolan; Margaret Franklin; Uncle Nugget Coombs; Sister Mary Oliver; Vicky Simms; Or Ferry Grunseit; Or Paul Bowman; Pro­fessor C. Tatz; Geraldine Willesee; Grahame Williams; and also to the many doctors who have passed through the doors of the Aboriginal Medical Service, generously giving their time to the Black community.

Also to students at universities and other people who have raised and donated money to allow me, other Black people , and Black organisations, to do the work we do, hopeful for the benefit of all Black people and all Black communities.

Thank you - for holding the fort until justice comes.

Shirley C. Smith, MBE

The author is grateful to the Bardas Foundation for their assistance in the development of this book .

1 Early journeys

My full name is Colleen Shirley Perry. I am the daughter of Isabel Agnes Perry and Henry Joseph Perry of Erambie Mission, West Cowra, New South Wales. But I am better known as 'MumShirl'. This is my story.

I don't know if I had made any earlier journeys, and I have lost track of the number of journeys I have made since.

But I lay in the back of the wagonette and could see the wide strong shoulders of my Grandfather, as he guided the two horses along the stony track. His blue cotton shirt was wet with perspiration and now stuck to him like a second skin. The wagonette swayed and bumped, and from beneath came the sound of small stones being crushed to dust by the wheels as we passed over them.

Grandfather was, to me, a giant of a man. I was about four or five years old at the time. Sitting directly behind him, inside the wagonette, was Emma Sion, his wife and my Grandmother. Also nestled amongst the bedrolls which had been spread over the floor of the wagonette for comfort were my brothers, )immy, David, and Laurie, and my sister, Olga.

Grandmother Emma Sion spent her time keeping a watchful eye on us children in the back and casting her glance down the track in front, as well as passing Grand­father anything he might need such as food or water.

2

Grandmother Emma Sion was a small woman, or per­haps I only thought of her as small because Grandfather was so tall. She was a traditional woman who kept a lookout for everything; the welfare of all children, the men, other women, the countryside . In her own way, I guess she was very attached to me and cared about me, but it seemed that she was very attached to and cared about everybody.

My Grandfather was different. To him, I was special. He cared about everybody too, but he especially cared about me. It seems, looking back, that he was always there, towering over me, or watching me from the distance. I feel I lived my early years always under his watchful and loving eyes.

The wagonette rolled on. Peeping from the canvas flaps in the back, I could see the green hills rolling past us. We seemed to have followed an almost straight line, leaving the line only to find a smoother or more shallow place to cross a creek or empty water course. My Grandfather always liked to travel in a straight line . He stayed away from the white folks' roads and railway lines, for he said to follow them was the� fastest way to end up lost.

With the sun almost high in the sky, we rested. Grand­father would take the horses out of harness and let them rest too, under the shade of a tree where they would nibble at the cool green grass. Grandfather liked best to stop beside running water and we would cool down by putting our feet in the water and splashing it over our arms and faces.

We would eat the food which Grandmother Emma Sion prepared and then lie down and wait for the heat of day to pass. Grandfather always used to say, 'Get up with the sun, eat with the morning, and travel with the freshness of the day.'

Grandfather would lie quite still on the grass in the shade, close his eyes and listen to the sound of the water. He

3

always said that the sound of running water calmed the troubled soul, and even when his mind and soul were not troubled, he would find a peace in the gentle murmur of nature. Grandmother Emma Sion meantime would be clearing up after the food, lifting the flaps of the wagonette to keep it aired and cool, and generally bustling about. She was not the same serene sort of person as my Grandfather; nor was she as close to the nature of the earth.

We all climbed back into the wagonette and travelled through the fading afternoon. Just before last light we would stop and Grandfather would again unhitch the horses and make an evening camp for us.

This trip, which is the earliest I can remember, was to take us from Erambie Mission, West Cowra, to Grenfell, where my parents were working as drovers .

My parents were often away working, and also my older brothers and sometimes my older sisters . My father, who was the son of my Grandfather, was married to a lighter woman, who was my mother. Mother was the daughter of a mixed couple who between them were Aboriginal, Scotch , and Irish, so their child, my Mother, was quite fair. I didn't have much to do with my grandparents on my Mother's side. They lived at Hillston, and when they died their prop­erty was split up amongst all their family.

My father, on the other hand, was very dark . He was one of nine Black men and one Black woman, born to Grandfather and Emma Sion. Grandfather, who was called Daniel Joseph Boney, took the name of Perry from Perry' s Circus.

At this time our people still had traditional names, but they didn't fit in with the white way of things, because in the Aboriginal way people only had one name. The name they were addressed by (by other Aboriginal people) had mean­ings. For instance, Grandmother's name, Emma Sion (which is roughly the way it would have been spelt if she had

5

ever had to write it down) meant 'small and wonderful'. My Grandfather, to me, was Budjarn, which is very difficult to explain the meaning of It is a word very high in terms of affection and means the sun, rain, stars, all natural things, with togetherness. It sort of means that they all fit together, and Grandfather was my Budjarn because I fitted together with him.

However, in order to fit into the white world in any way at all we had to take other names that would fit into their way of doing things. So my Grandfather became Perry; he just 'took' the name. I don't know if anybody descended from the Perry's Circus line knows that this is how we came by their name. We know about them and sometimes I have wondered if they know about us.

But even while we took these white names to use 'out­side' , we kept on with our Aboriginal names also. Grand­mother Emma Sion, as she became older, became Ninni which, in the way of our Arradjarri people, means Grandmother.

I grew up surrounded by people and events that were both very happy and very tragic . I guess that is why now I feel that I have never been a stranger to life, or to death, or to love. They have been my constant companions since as far back as I can recall.

My parents had many children, and when you are, as I was, one of a large number of children, some die before you, which is very sad, and some are born after you, which is happy. Older brothers and sisters marry and have children, so there are always children, older people, being born, liv­ing, dying. Each and every one of these events leaves its mark on you.

I am fearful when I hear that somebody sleep-walks, for my brother Jimmy, who was the third eldest in my

Isabel Perry, MumShirl's mother

6

family, died while sleep�walking. He was a grown man already and he fell from a verandah and was impaled.

I hear people say now that only children walk in their sleep and I know it isn't true. They also say that sleep� walkers never hurt themselves; and that isn't true either. Saying things like that puts people off their guard and they don't take as much care as they need to, if somebody in their family sleep�walks.

David Norman, who was seventh in my family and the baby born just before me, was smothered by a cat lying on his face. I can barely stand to see a cat and a baby in the same room, though I must have been very young, a babe in arms, when this happened.

Milton was born, lived his short life and died, even before I was born. He was in a terrible accident, burnt in his pram. But even just hearing about it, I know a baby is safer in his mother's arms, or in the arms of an older brother or sister, than in one of these new ideas that leaves the baby completely by himself He was the fourth child in our family.

Ethel Agnes was the oldest, and she watched all of our comings and goings, until her own death, which was in June 1979. She was a fond and loving sister all her life, and my own life is somehow emptier now that she is no longer with me.

Alexander followed Ethel, and he enlisted in the Army in the First World War. His face would close over and he'd refuse to speak about it much, and I grew to hate and fear war because of him and how it affected him to the point where he couldn't talk of it.

After Jimmy and Milton, George Lawrence was born. Laurie, as he has come to be known and called, became my closest and dearest brother. He figured very much in my life as we grew older, and most of what I know now, and do now, Iowe to him.

7

Olga Sion and David followed along after Laurie, and then me, and then my sisters Wilma Fay and Harriet Patricia. Harriet Patricia was named for my Grandmother Emma Sion's sister.

Families and family names can be very confusing when you are looking into them, or attempting to read them when you don't really know the people concerned. In my family, all the children were given two names, but if the child died, then sometimes another child would be given the middle name of the child who had died. This would be to keep the memory of the child alive, as well as for the new child to have a special related spirit to care for him during his life .

Therefore, Norman Hilton, who was the youngest in our family, was named after David Norman.

When my Mother died, my Father had yet one more child, which made twelve, and this child, Joseph James, was born to Agnes Evonne Goolagong, my stepmother. Agnes Evonne was the grand,aunt to young Evonne, who is now world famous for her skill playing tennis.

White people have made up a lot of things about Abor, iginal people and about how they lived, and these things have been printed before and people have come to believe them.

But I lived and grew up with my Grandfather and Grandmother, who were both traditional people and I know that so much of what people think about us is wrong.

Grandfather was about six foot three and must have weighed about fourteen stone, though he never looked fat . He was an initiated man, and in the plan of things, he was a token runner or land marker. It was his work to travel east, west, north, and south, in the boundaries of the Arradjarri people, to choose out camping grounds and make sure that other things were alright all over our area.

No matter where the tribe might be stopped at the

8

time, they wanted to know what was happening everywhere else over their area. If trees started to die anywhere, they wanted to know, and if fish were plentiful somewhere else, they wanted to know. It would have been dangerous to move off from where there was food to somewhere where they were not sure if there would be food enough for all on arrival .

So Grandfather was a runner. He loved to travel all over his area by night, to listen to the night sounds, and he would come to know how many animals were about because they all become active at night. Most animals, kangaroos and wallabies, pass the daytime among their rocks or asleep someplace, and only when evening begins to fall do they start to come out and look for their food.

When he wasn't doing anything else, Grandfather would sit in the night. He would take me along, and he put into me a love for the night. He taught me to sit under a tree and listen to the sound of the wind in the leaves, which is a completely different sound to the wind rustling the grass. He believed in stars and would point them out to me, as well as the moon and its different sizes and shapes that it takes on over the changing seasons.

Silver clouds, brought to a shine by moonlight, took on many forms, and we would sit and watch them as they turned into animals and turned back into clouds as the wind whipped them around. Grandfather said they held messages and that you only get the messages if you watch them.

Sometimes he would leave me and walk a little distance away. He would sit, most often on a riverbank, and I could hear him murmuring in our ancient language. I didn't learn to speak the language, just words and phrases, so I never understood what he was saying to the river. But I would lie back watching the stars and the clouds and listening to the wind in the trees or the grass, and his voice, like a prayer,

9

would move around me and fill the air. If I fell asleep, he would carry me home.

I have heard, from any number of white people, that Aborigines were frightened of the dark, that they thought that bad spirits lurked in the dark , and they would huddle in groups around fires.

But from my Grandfather I learnt that the night is a time of wonder, that the beautiful colours that we can see by day turn into exciting forms by night. In the daytime, we can tell one leaf from another by the different colour, and at night, by the different shape.

I also learnt that the spirits of the night are the same spirits of the day, and if it is forbidden to go to a place , it is forbidden both day and night. Some places may only be visited at certain times of the year, and if you are a girl , as I was, then you might be totally and forever forbidden to go to some places . Men, too, do not go to other places where only women may walk.

Even though Grandfather was my Budjarn, there were certain times when I could not be with him. Men's talk meant that I had to be out of earshot, and then he and the other men of our area would gather and discuss what was happening in our world and our spiritual world.

2 I discover

I am different

It was unusual that I , a girl, should spend so much time with my Father's Father. I sort of knew it all along, but since the time spent with him was so precious to me, I didn't ask any questions . I enjoyed the relationship which existed be­tween us, and I enjoyed the fact that my brothers and sisters were jealous of all my good times.

I remember very distinctly the first time I had a real inkling that there might be something wrong with me, something so wrong that my Grandfather might have to look after me all the time. I was standing under a tree at Erambie, near the school. The other children all had to go to the school, which was taught by the wife of the Manager of the Mission. She was not a qualified teacher and all the children were taught together in one room. That was school - and everybody else had to go, but not me. I thought I was lucky.

So I was standing under this tree near the school; then suddenly I was lying on the ground. I remember a flash of darkness, and I remember when I was lying on the ground that I wondered how I got there, and also that I felt very very frightened.

Of course, within minutes, I was cradled in my Grandfather's strong arms and his handlebar moustache was stroking my skin as he moved his face alongside of mine to comfort me. He didn't say anything in answer to my

1 1

questions, and he took me to the women for care . But from then on, I became aware of their glances, of the constant watching, and eventually of the other children's attitude towards me.

I was epileptic, a 'fit-thrower '. Oh, nobody was really unkind, in fact, they made jokes, or half-jokes. The other children said I threw fits just so that I could have my Grand­father all to myself They were jealous, of course, not only about my Grandfather, but also about my freedom and not having to go to school.

But underneath there was a sort of fear. Few people wanted to be left alone with me in case I threw a fit and they couldn't call someone who would know what to do.

Being epileptic has made my life different to other people' s lives. When I knew I was epileptic, it was at a time when there was no control for these sort of things. They were called diseases, and that is just what it was. I had to live always worried about the fear of taking a fit.

If people don't have epilepsy, then they don't know how it affects the person who has got it. Imagine being worried about little things like taking a walk by yourself, in case you have a fit while you are out of the sight of somebody to help you, and worrying all the time, about things like the possibility of taking a fit and falling into a fire, or scalding yourself, or scalding other people.

You try to say to yourself that, when you do take a fit, people are just helping you, but really, every time, those people are saving your life . And when they save your life, there is no way to repay them. It leaves you with a feeling that you owe a debt to those people. And after a while, and a lot of fits, you feel you owe a lot of debts until it turns into a feeling that you owe everybody.

Mainly the people around who saved me when I had fits were my Aboriginal people, relations and friends. So I feel I have this incredibly big debt to pay to Aboriginal

12

people. Sometimes white people helped me too, and I have a debt to pay to them.

Only after a while, when I had fully grown up, I realised that, even though everybody doesn't have fits, still all people help each other at some time or another, and that everybody really owes everybody. Some of us work all our lives at paying off these debts, helping people who need help all the time. But lots of other people never seem to realise that they do have a debt, that they do have to be help­ing each other to pay back for when they took help from somebody else .

When I think back over my life, and about the awful fear I lived with about taking fits, I feel sick that some people, including myself, have to live with that sort of fear. But at the same time, I know that it must be God's way of making me really think a lot about-helping other people, to help me get into the life I lead now.

When I see the world all caught up in greed, in every­body trying to get what they can for themselves, and very few prepared to help anybody really, then I can see how lucky I was. Most of the troubles in the world, from the wars between countries right down to the little fights between neighbours or friends, are caused by not thinking about the other person, or other country.

When I was about six, something else happened to me that changed my life. My Grandfather was expelled from Erambie Mission.

I suppose I ought to explain about the Mission, because I had forgotten that most white people do not know about these things. The missions and reserves were the whole world to most Aboriginal people, yet the white people mainly do not know what they are or where they are.

When the white people first came to this country, the country of the Aboriginal people, they started to kill us. Many were shot, poisoned, and hunted down. This very

13

direct way of killing us is not part of my story, because it mainly happened before I was born, but it is part of the his­tory of me, and of every Aboriginal person in Australia, and of every white person in Australia whether they are descended from the first whites who came and killed us, or whether they have just arrived on a boat yesterday, because if the killing had not been done, then they would not be able to land here today. Certainly if the first white people had not come, or had come peacefully and gently joined their new ways with our ways instead of killing us off all over the place, it would be a very different country here today.

When there were not too many Aboriginal people left, the Government set up reserves and missions, where Abor­iginal people were supposed to be 'safe' from the killing by the whites who wanted the land. The whites put their houses and farms on the land, and Aboriginal people were supposed not to think of that land as theirs any more. But that is not the way it worked, because my Grandfather, and all the other Aboriginal people , always talked of 'our land'. Just not letting us live on it has not stopped our thinking that it is ours.

The reserves and missions, wherever they are all over Australia, were run by white people . Aboriginal people were supposed to go onto these reserves and missions to be safe and to die out quietly. The white people were supposed to help us by looking after us if we had any diseases and by giving us rations from the Government so we wouldn't be hungry and leave to go back to our own area. They were also supposed to give us other things, such as a blanket a year.

But the white people who were given these jobs were not qualified to help anybody. None of them, for instance, was a doctor. And I know that, in many instances, the Abor­iginal people did not get what the Government was paying

14

for them to get. Some white managers sold the blankets to poor white people, for instance.

The white managers and assistant managers turned out to be not people who helped us, but people who con­trolled us, tried to run our lives right down to the littlest item, like what food we put on our table. Just as you can imagine, the grown men and women of the Aboriginal fam­ilies who were used to running their own lives and families, and being responsible for themselves, did not like this treat­ment at all. But they moved their families onto these reserves and missions because of the murders of Aboriginal people who were not living on reserves and missions. They wanted their families to be safe .

But when they argued about the way they were being pushed around, or didn't do something that the Manager told them to do, they could be kicked off the reserve or mission, back into the dangerous area outside.

At the same time, in order to let Aboriginal people think they were controlling their own lives, some reserves and missions let the Aboriginal people set up a Council of men who would run the place . In the beginning, the differ­ence between a reserve or a mission was who was running it. The reserves were run by government paid people. Missions were run by church people, and I don't know if they were paid to do it by the Government or by the church, but the Government still paid for the rations.

Sometimes the church people pulled out of running the mission and a government hired person took on the job, but by that time the place was known as a mission and people kept calling it a mission even though it was by then a reserve.

On Erambie, four Aboriginal men were the Council, and my father was one of them. But they didn't really run the Mission, because they were not allowed to argue with

. the Manager, or tell any white people what they must do.

15

They were to tell the Aboriginal people what the Manager said they were to do. The Manager set up the rules, and the Council had to make sure people lived by them, although sometimes they were able to get small things done for the Aboriginal people, but that would be because the Manager had grown to know or respect or trust the Council, not because that. was the way of things.

Always the white Manager had his own way. To show how far this could go, the best example is what happened to my Grandfather. The Manager kicked him off the Mission, even though my Father was on the Council . What the Man­ager said went!

On Erambie Mission at that time, Aboriginal people lived in corrugated iron houses that were made up of only one room with a red clay tnud floor. Some of the men had built walls inside their houses, and made them into two tiny rooms, so that there could be a bit of privacy. The roof sort of jutted out, and that area was called the verandah. Granny Dolly used to describe it as a duck's beak .

Well , Grandfather moved us off the Mission, and we went to a spot of land that was known as Ryan's place, and lived there under a railway bridge . The land wasn't Crown land, so I suppose we could have been shunted off, but we weren't.

Grandfather built us a house there, a big house with three bedrooms and boards on the floor. All Grandfather's brothers jumped in and helped him build it. They could build it any wa'y they liked here, because there was no man­ager to tell them what they could or couldn't have. There was a bedroom for us girls, four of us in one room, and a room for Grandfather, Grandmother, and the baby, and a room for the boys. There was also a big room where we used to eat and have dances .

On the one hand, being chucked off the Mission was supposed to be a big shame, but on the other hand, we were

16

free. We used to have such fun. What I remember most about these days was the happiness and the laughing and the music. Uncle Lockey Ingram used to come on in and play the banjo-mandolin, and Uncle Sousy Ingram used to play the guitar or the violin, or someone would play music on gum-leaves, or blow combs. That was the sort of music we had in those days, not fancy instruments, but just any­thing that people could get a note out of, or a beat out o£ They used to play all the old-time waltzes, the Pride ofErin, Canadian Three Step, and sets, and we all used to dance, the youngest of us and the oldest. We all could dance in those days because you didn't have to throw your hip out of its socket and call that dancing.

We used to have dances for weddings and birthdays or when the Cowra footballers would win the Mark's Cup. After the end of the football season, when the Erambie All­Blacks won the Cup, there was dancing for weeks .

While I lived in this house with my Grandfather, my Father remained on Erambie, trying to get better rights for the Aboriginal people who were living there. Not that he was there much - he used to get permission to go to work on Sunday (he was working then at Wyangala Dam) and he would be away all week and come back on Friday.

During the years that we lived under the railway bridge, I was able to go to St Brigid' s School for a while. The epilepsy made sure I didn't go much, but I managed to learn most of the letters of the alphabet. I can't read and write now, as I never did learn that much, but I know most of my letters except for a couple that confuse me. I can write my own name, and I can write anybody's name if they spell out the letters, but I write it slowly, one letter at a time. I read very slowly, sounding out the letters until I get the sound of the word. Mostly my grand-children read out for me the papers or letters that arrive, but if I think they are not children's business, I struggle over each letter until I get the letter read alone.

3 An1ad

Ron1an Catholic

Erambie Mission was what would be called a Catholic -mission, although it wasn't run when I was there by a Cath­olic missionary or a priest or anything, but all the Aborigi­nal people there were Catholics if they were any religion of that sort. We were a deeply spiritual people of our own right anyway, and Catholicism didn't really have much to do with our lives.

My Grandfather must have decided that he wanted to know something about this Catholic religion because he went and got himself taught the Catechism. At this time, Aboriginal people weren't allowed to go near the front of the Convent, so Grandfather used to go around the back. There, at the wood-pile at the back of the Convent, a very wise old nun taught my Grandfather his Catechism. I sup­pose she must have seen how much it meant to him, for him to keep coming back to learn in this way.

This nun, whose name was Mother Stanislaus Nolan, was old all the time that I remember her. She was old when I was a little girl, and she was old when I grew up. I guess she must have been about ninety when she died. I remember that when I went back to Cowra, when I was grown up and pregnant with my first child, that I wanted to go back and visit with her. So I walked to the back of the Convent, and a younger nun answered my knock, and I said I wanted to see Mother Stanislaus. By this time she was blind, and she

18

could tell who people were by their walk and by their voice. After all this time, she remembered me, and her voice sailed out to me as I stood at the doorway, 'Come along, Colleen, and get up the stairs .' How happy I was to be remembered by her and recognised in this way!

My Father and Mother were Catholic too. Being Cath­olic in those days was much harder than it is now. We used to have to leave our houses in a big group on Sundays and walk into Cowra to go to Church. We were not allowed to have anything to eat or drink before we left, as we were to have Holy Communion. So that meant a long walk on an empty stomach, Mass, and a long walk back from Cowra before breakfast. Nowadays fasting is only an hour before Communion, and we can drink water, but in those days not even water was allowed to pass our lips.

My Mother was a very pious woman, as many of the women at Erambie were. They clung to the religion because there was so little that Aboriginal women could cling to. In our family, but particularly amongst the men, many of whom were not into religion like the women, my Mother was called the Mad Roman Catholic. I rather liked the sound of that, because even though they said it, there was a respect about the way they spoke.

Since I have come back to being a Catholic, when asked about my religion, I always say I'm an M.R.C. which, to me, means a Mad Roman Catholic like my Mother, or a Mad Roaming Catholic, because either of them is me.

When I have been travelling around, I have always received a lot of strength from sitting in churches, but not only Catholic churches. There is something in the air in churches, a feeling, a quiet, and many times during my life when I 've been upset or frightened, I've gone hotfoot to the nearest church to sit there until I've felt better.

But there are some churches that I have taken excep­tion to. For instance, I was told that as my Grandmother lay

19

very sick at Erambie, my Uncle George Perry jumped on a horse bareback and rode to Cowra to fetch the priest as my Grandmother had asked. But while it was alright for us to cross the river to go to Mass in his church, it was 'out of his diocese' for him to cross the river to attend to my Grand­mother. My uncle then rode in the pouring rain to fetch the priest from about 28 miles away. By the time he got back , my Grandmother was dead. It seems that the diocese cut out at the Lachlan River, which flows between Cowra and Erambie Mission.

While religion and God have always played a big part in my life, church itself has not, or at least the 'going to church on Sundays' sort of church. Even now I try never to miss Mass on a Sunday; I would go every day if I could, and I often do.

Another event that stirred me up about the Catholic Church was when I was a young woman and was in Graft on to visit the prison. As I was there over the weekend, I went to Mass and filed up to the rails to take Communion. But, to my surprise, the priest did not give me Communion, he passed right by me as though I wasn't there!

After Mass, I went to the priest to ask him why he overlooked me at the altar rails, and he said that he was not sure that I had made my First Confession or Holy Com­munion. I knew it was because I was an Aboriginal that he was able to say such a thing, so I asked him if he had got a

written guarantee from everybody else who had received Communion that day. I walked away from him then, and I walked away from the church, and it must have been four­teen or fifteen years before I ever went back to a Catholic church.

I know now that I held the actions of one priest as the actions on behalf of the Church. Over the years, the Church has given me much. The Catholic Church has given me St Martin de Pourre who, when I first heard of

20

him, was Blessed Martin, and was only later canonised. When I first heard that there was a Black saint, I was so proud and happy. Until then I had wondered why all of the spirits we prayed to were white and suddenly a whole new world was opened up to me by finding out that there was a Black saint. I have tried to find out everything I can about this Blessed man. He came from Lima, in Peru and was a Dominican Father. I carry his picture with me constantly. He prayed to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart and through him I have made Her also one of the spirits to whom I pray.

When I say 'pray' , I don't mean church-pray. Praying, to me, is talking to people, and these people are so real to me as if they were walking beside me. Many times during a day, I speak with them. There is Martin, Our Lady, and Budjarn, my Grandfather, and between them they help and advise me all through the day. I know I could never get through some of the situations that I have been in, if it were not for them.

4 My world widens

If this story about my life is jumping from one thing and place to another, that is because that's how memories are . It is as if life is a big puzzle, and we live through bits of it, and then later, from another spot in our years, we look back and that piece fits in. But while we are living it, it can't really answer all the whys and wherefores of it.

I was not concerned about politics until recently, although most Aboriginal people took a keen interest in what happened to the Kings and Queens in England, because that was the sort of thing people talked about in those days. My memory for an exact year or date of events in my life is not so good, as I am not crash hot at remember­ing figures , so I tie events together and in that way I know about what time things occurred.

For instance, when I first moved down to Sydney from Cowra it was about the time King Edward VIII abdicated; that bloke who left the throne and whose wife was a Duch­ess. We all moved down, Grandfather, and a whole lot more of the family, and we moved into a place in Caroline Street after a while. My Grandfather didn't like Sydney much, so he went back up to Cowra, and while he was there he stood up and had his photo taken in the coronation photo. How­ever, he missed us, his family, so he came back down to Syd­ney again, and died not very long after.

My Father, who was also living with us at this time,

22

stayed on in Sydney, and worked at a place we called the C.C.C. , which was some sort of company that travelled builders around, and then he worked for A.G.M. We moved to a little place in Amelia Street, Waterloo, but that place is non-existent now, it's been pulled down.

While my father was away working so much, my brother Laurie began to hang around on the streets when he couldn't find work. For a while he worked as a glass­blower with Crown Crystals Glass, but he began going out every night after work . For quite a while, he used to take me with him, because, being epileptic, I didn't get to go out much unless somebody took me. He used to whistle at girls, and we walked in the parks, and played on push-bikes and it was all good fun. My brother was terribly handsome, so it made me very happy when he would take me out with him.

Then he met a group of people that I didn't like much, and one of the girls became his first girl-friend, and after that I didn't go with him much at all . For me, a lot went out of my life then, because without him I was afraid to go out in case I took a fit . I had friends, and I sometimes went out with them, but it wasn't the same.

As i t turned out, Laurie got married, but what a sur­prise - not to the girl who was his girl-friend, but to her sister!

However, he still hung around the streets with his mates, and ended up doing things that landed him in prison. His wife, by this time, had a baby, a little girl, and they lived with us while Laurie was in gaol, or State Peniten­tiary as it was called then.

Then my Mother died, and my Father went into the bush to work on the railway. It was a very upsetting time for all of us. My brother, David, had died not long be­fore we left Cowra, and then my brother Jimmy had died

Henry Perry, MumShirl's father

24

sleep-walking. Actually Jimmy had been getting ready to get married - Aboriginal people never used the word 'engaged' for some reason - to a very dark and beautiful girl called Jean. Suddenly his Jean caught something wrong with her chest, and died. Jimmy fretted, and it was only three weeks after Jean was buried that my parents also buried Jimmy. It is not a beautiful love story about lovers following each other to the grave, it is a tragic thing that two young Black people should die when they were both just at the start of their lives.

My brother Laurie was coming home late one night and found his brother, Jimmy, stuck up on the spikes of a railing fence. A spike had gone through his leg and up through his groin. Colin Saunders, who was a friend of Laurie' s, helped Laurie take Jimmy to the hospital where he was given a blood transfusion, but he died anyway, seven­teen hours later.

My Father was working for this company where he had to go to work on Sunday and come home Friday, so my Mother and my sisters Wilma, Olga, and Harriet, and brother Norman, who was still very young, were at home a lot alone.

There were maybe about 600 or 700 Aboriginal people living around the inner suburbs of Sydney. We all knew each other, and we had little to do with white people, except that we shopped at their shops, and always had to go to them for jobs and work, but mostly we seemed to be with each other.

It is hard to explain how Laurie ended up in prison, except to say he got caught. When we lived at Cowra, like all Aboriginal people, we always used to keep an eye out for anything that was lying around, a bit of coal for the fire, or a piece of wood that might be useful, and other things that white people had thrown away. For people who lived on rations, and in a very poor way, this is the only way to get

25

any little extra things. Children were praised for finding things that made life a little easier, because life was very hard.

I suppose when we moved to Sydney and Laurie was growing up, Father was away a lot, and even though he was away so long and worked too hard, we had so little . Laurie must have felt the pressure on him. As the man of the house, he would have been looking a bit too hard and a bit too foolishly, because he got caught for breaking, entering and stealing from buildings around where we lived. I'm not trying to excuse him, but to explain. When he was caught and sentenced, our whole family was very upset. He wasn't even twenty years old and already, it seemed to us, his life was being destroyed.

It was just after this time that my sister and I were walk­ing through Redfern Park on our way home that we heard a lot of noise. There were people blowing horns on cars and whistling, and a lot of yelling and a big loud speaker on the back of a truck making noises that we could not under­stand. My sister and I became afraid and we could make out the odd word such as 'Churchill' - 'peace' - 'justice' -and 'God save the King' from that squawky loud speaker, so we asked a fellow in the park what it was about.

The fellow answered, angrily, 'Can't you hear? You're not that ignorant - we' re at war.' The only thing I can remember thinking was, 'Thank God Laurie is in gaol.'

At home, my Mother and sisters and I talked about the war, and we always felt it was somebody else's war. We were all secretly glad then that the only son in the family of age for call-up was safely in gaol and that he would not have to go to somebody else's country to die in somebody else's arms to protect this country that the white people had already taken off us anyhow._ _

Not all Aborigines felt as we did, particularly the men. My Father's brother, for instance, David Edward Perry,

26

enlisted and went all through the war. The other soldiers called him a 'Chokko Soldier', yet he received a citation as a T obruk Rat, and he came back with medals and honours. Another young Black man named Reg Saunders was also talked about a lot in the Aboriginal community because he went away and came back with medals and was very highly decorated. Then there was Sidney Williams and various other Aboriginal men from the families around here in Syd­ney, who went.

I was sixteen at the time and can remember that Black people would ask each other about any member of their family who was at the war. I can remember the cold chill that ran around my veins every time I heard, 'Oh, yes, well . . . he's dead.' My mind would go to Laurie, sitting in a cell behind iron bars, but at least safe . Some men from the gaols were trying to enlist and I used to go out and visit Laurie at Long Bay and tell him not to enlist. I remember that there were discussions between the prisoners because they thought that even if they enlisted, they could probably be punished by not getting enough training before they were put in the front lines. Everybody seemed frightened of something around this time, and there was uneasiness everywhere, but somehow I always thought of it as some­body else's war.

There were a number of other things connected with the war that stand out in my mind. The first is about Cowra when a nightmare ran loose. My sister Olga and I went up to Cowra for a visit and everybody was talking about this terrible event that had just taken place.

A few miles out from the town of Cowra there was a sort of compound, all fenced in, where the Government was keeping prisoners-of-war. We had never been allowed to go out that way but had seen the high fences from the distance. Some even said that the fences were electric, but I wouldn't know about that.

27

One night there was a disturbance out there, but the Aboriginal people didn't really know about it. The first they knew was that they were all being locked in their houses by the Manager. The Aboriginal people had had very little to do with the prisoner-of-war camp, although we had seen various people from time to time in the streets of Cowra. To us the Japanese always looked like a peaceful people and we didn't really know if the people being held in the compound were really prisoners taken at the war or Jap­anese people who already lived in Australia and who the Government thought might run off and help the Japanese side of the war. It seemed a very strange place to put these people if they really had been captured.

Piece by piece, we began to fit together what had hap­pened. Two of my uncles, Jimmy Murray and T ommy McGuinness, were both returned soldiers and had been doing some guarding out at the compound, and they had been called in on this night after it happened.

Hundreds of Japanese people had suddenly made a rush for the fences, and a lot of violence had broken out. Why they did this has always been a mystery. Some folks heard that they were all trying to commit suicide because Japanese people commit suicide if they are locked up. Others heard that they were going to escape and kill every­body in the whole area.

Whatever the truth, more than 200 people were killed, and a whole lot more wounded. My uncles said that dead Japanese lay everywhere and that other Japanese had thrown some of the dead bodies over the top of the barbed wire fences so that they could scramble over themsleves without getting cut up. This doesn't sound very much like suicide, but it is also not very likely that they were going to get into town and start killing anyone because the com­pound was so far out of the way.

My uncle had come home sick from the things he saw

28

there. He said the Japanese bodies had been hung up and used for bayonet practice.

The only other place around Cowra that had a fence around it and where people were kept in and only allowed to go out if they had a pass was Erambie Mission. So when this all happened out at the compound, the Manager, or maybe some white people, must have thought that the Aboriginal people would try to burst out too. How else to explain why our people were locked in their houses?

Maybe the white people had heard something that I only heard years later, which was that some Aboriginal people somewhere in Australia had said that they hoped the Japanese won the war - because then they would come to Australia and get rid of the white people and the Aborigines would have their country back. I never did hear any Abor­iginal people say this myself, but I can understand if some­body did say that, because white people had already proved to Aboriginal people just how badly they could treat us.

Another thing I couldn't work out was about rations and coupons. Everybody got ration tickets where we lived in Sydney, and we received the same number of coupons as white people. They were used to get everything, so many for sugar, or butter, or clothes, but if you had no coupons, you had nothing.

But while some white people were up fighting a war, a lot more back down here in the city were cheating on cou­pons, buying up other people's coupons and dealing in cou­pons. Of course, these were rich people, but coupons were for sale. My father was out selling papers, an Aboriginal newspaper for Aboriginal advancement, which was being printed by two Aboriginal men. When my father returned from selling these papers, which were 2d each at the time, he used to talk about how he could have bought coupons if he had had enough money, but Aboriginal people didn't have the money anyway to buy coupons.

29

What bothered me about this was that it didn't seem like all white people were really caring about each other, with some up on the front lines getting killed and others trying to get rich by buying illegal coupons.

The other thing that bothered me was that this whole business of cheating with coupons was called the 'black market' , and there weren't even any Blacks involved in it.

5 A big wedding and a beautiful daughter

Girls are girls, whatever their colour, and all of us Aborigi, nal girls used to go around to wherever the Aboriginal boys were. My sisters, friends and all the girls in this age bracket used to follow around and watch the men and boys play football, or go to watch the fights when they were boxing.

It was at the fights that I met the man I was to marry. Aunty Noeline, Carol and I went to Rushcutter' s Bay in Sydney to watch Uncle Jackie Carroll, who was nicknamed Uncle Chops, fight. There I met a very handsome man, who was down from the North Coast, and before I knew it we had taken up with each other.

His name was Cecil Haziel, but he fought under and was known by the name Darcy Smith. He was a professional fighter, and if I do say so myself, there wasn't a man, black, white or brindle, who was as clever and as good as my hus, band with a pair of boxing gloves on.

It wasn't long after I met him that he began staying over at the house and we decided to hurry along and get married. I loved him and he loved me and there didn't seem to be any good reason to wait. The main question people always ask about people getting married is whether a man can afford to keep his wife, and Darcy was making very good money from the fights, so we didn't have to wait to save up or anything.

We had a big wedding, and as I look back,.it was one of the high spots in my life. Laurie was out of gaol and he and

3 1

the whole family were so happy about my marriage that everybody chipped in and turned on maybe the second big­gest wedding amongst the Black community in Sydney at the time.

I laugh when I think about it now. There I was, all 'flashed up' , with stockings and gloves, at a Presbyterian church in Summer Hill, with bridesmaids and my brother Alex and sister Olga standing up for me - and the wedding gown, and everything else I had on, had been mungied (Black community word for 'stolen' ) from a local ware­house. It was six days before my seventeenth birthday.

The only thing that was a shadow on my wedding day was that I was sorry that Grandfather wasn't alive to see me get married. I could feel him there in the church, and when the Minister, Mr Witherspoon, was saying the marriage words, I wasn't really listening to him because I could hear my Grandfather speaking. He was saying, ' It 's not right ­you should have went home' , and I was surprised because I'm sure he meant that we should have been married back at Erambie, at Cowra.

As soon as we were married, we moved into a little house in Albion Way, Surry Hills, which is a little back lane. We lived in a two-bedroom house, with a little yard and kitchen, a little verandah in front and a toilet out in the back garden. I wasn't very happy about the house - well, the house was alright, but the furniture had all been picked out by my husband's manager. It didn't seem right to me, somehow, that while it was Darcy's money used to buy everything, our bed and all, I didn't get to pick out any­thing, and instead a white man had decided what we would live with.

I lived in that house for two years. It was great then, but by today's standards, it would have been considered awful. We had gas lights and a gas stove and no bathroom. Darcy used to be able to take showers where he trained and

32

I was very skinny then, so we used to heat water on the stove, light a fire in the little fireplace, and I 'd have a bath in a round galvanised tin tub. We used to pay ten bob a week for the house.

I used to get up early in the morning and tidy the house, and when Darcy left, I would either go to somebody's house, or somebody would come to visit me, because I didn't like to be alone because of the epilepsy. I would visit with Aunty Mona, who was first cousin to my mother, and Miss Foot, who was from Hillston, and who would visit me or I would visit her in Garden Street, Paddington.

Darcy's life was all fights now, and he was fighting in country areas. He won the Golden Gloves of the North Coast. My brother, Laurie, was back in gaol. He got five years for things people only get 6 to 18 months for now.

I fell pregnant. It was a baby boy, who died from suffo­cation on the labour table with me taking an epileptic fit. I went up to Kempsey to be with my husband, who was fight­ing a lot in that area and I fell pregnant once more.

My husband's people had different ways to ours. His father was not allowed to talk with his daughter-in-law, in the traditional way, and he observed this tradition almost until his death. During that time we only ever really spoke to each other once, which was just before he died.

When I knew I was pregnant, I went to the hospital in Kempsey and there I got another real shock. Blacks were not allowed in Outpatients clinic, but had to wait around outside the hospital room, to be called in when staff weren't too busy. From where I stood waiting, I could hear women screaming in labour, and when the hospital was over­crowded, Aboriginal women were put in beds in the hall­ways and out on the verandahs, whether it was spring, summer, autumn, or winter.

I decided not to risk having my baby there, so I left and

33

came back down to Sydney. Here I went to a lady doctor who was really interested in me and became like a friend to me. She saved the life of my baby on the labour table and she also talked to me later about the ways being found to help control epilepsy.

My daughter, whom I called Beatrice after my hus­band's mother, was a beautiful healthy child who was born nearly a stone in weight. I had a hard time, with stitches and all, but she was worth every minute and every pain .

..)0Due to the epilepsy, I only had miscarriages after that, and Beatrice was therefore the only child of mine to live.

Darcy was travelling around a lot, fighting and train­ing, so my sister Olga came to stay with me for a while. My aunt, who had two children of her own, was also helping me, as this was my first baby and I didn't know as much as I should. Wilma Fay, a younger sister, also came to stay with me on and off

Beatrice was a good baby and we all had such fun bath­ing her and dressing her. I used to dress her in bright colours because she wasn't born very dark and could wear bright colours. Granny Robinson, who only died a few years ago, bought a little yellow pinafore with frills and a pocket on it for Beatrice when she was only three months old. Granny Robinson' s mother, who was Granny Waters, and who was in her 60s or 70s then, went out and bought her a pair of tiny red socks that looked like they had been knitted or crocheted, and on the toe of each one was a little yellow fish.

I used to go along from Albion Way in Surry Hills to Caroline Street in Redfern, because we had lived in that street for a while when we moved to Sydney. Lots of people I knew lived there . Lalors lived in 7 Caroline Street, and a white Mrs. Smith in No. 30, and then Daisy Robinson, Granny Robinson and Granny Waters all lived in 34, 35, and 38 Caroline Street.

34

k With all of their help, I was able to take care ofBeatrice until she was nearly three years old. But the epileptic fits, and the fear of the fits, kept me from letting her be and have the sort of normal life she should have.

So when she was almost three, I took her up to her father's people in Kempsey, though it almost broke my heart. She was an active little girl and she needed the sort of life I couldn't give her. My in-laws loved her, and took great care of her, and kept me informed about her all the time. I travelled up and down from Sydney to Kempsey to see her constantly.

My mother-in-law insisted that Beatrice go to school and she helped her to learn. My husband had been spend­ing more and more time in Kempsey and less and less in Sydney and gradually we had grown apart. We didn't have an argument or anything, but he began to live up there while I lived down here in Sydney. He later began to live with another woman, but by that time we had been apart for a .number of years. Living up there, he was able to take a bigger part in bringing up Beatrice.

Kempsey has changed a lot from when I first saw it. Most of my in-laws came from Bellbrook Mission. They lived in a very big house on a very big piece of land at Greenhills . There was a saw-mill, and my father-in-law was a sleeper-cutter, and he had a four bedroom house, a big ver­andah and a big shed where he used to put the sulky and the spring cart and harness. The old man had always said that when he died, the house would go to his son, Bob, and his brother, Uncle Boysey.

Later, when I went back to Kempsey, Greenhills was covered over with Housing Commission houses and pri­vate houses, and it was all changed. I don't know how it hap­pened that all that land that the old Aboriginal man had thought was his, and that he was leaving to his sons, got

35

taken off that family. I asked my brother-in-law, Leeton Smith, what had happened there, and he said he didn't think the property could have belonged to the old man because it had not been passed on to the sons.

6 I n1ake

n1y own life

With my brother Laurie still in gaol, and my husband and daughter now living in Kempsey, I began to wonder what I was going to do with my life. I had to find work, which was difficult, because very few people want an epileptic working for them. They are worried about us taking fits and upset­ting people . I was receiving medication for epilepsy by now, but any number of things could still trigger off a fit.

Besides, I don't know whether it is the fits that turn employers off epileptics, or just the fear that we will take fits. It is certainly the fear that is harder to live with for epileptics than the actual fits themselves . Perhaps it is also that way for employers.

Half a dozen or more Black women used to work at Argents' Box Factory, so I went down there to apply for a job. The boss there, Mr Beard, was very kindly and under­standing. My brother had been shifted to Maitland and I used to go and see him regularly. The boss was very under­standing about this in particular. So I used to work there while I was in Sydney, but he knew I would leave, and go wherever I had to go to see Laurie, or to see whoever I wanted to see.

This kind white man had a better way of looking at things than most white people, and for sure most white bosses. He liked people with a free mind. 'I wish I could have a free mind, ' he used to say. 'Come and go as you

37

please. Never be frightened to come back and ask for a job when you're here. If there's a vacancy, you can have it.'

Aunty Noleen, my sister Olga and a girl called Vera M organ also used to work at his factory, so I always knew if there was a job going there and could go down and ask for it. Between the Black women in the community, the jobs were always done for him - folding the boxes and tying them into bundles. Now, we would be called process workers, but we didn't have fancy names for jobs then.

I earned twelve,and,six ( 12/6d) a week then, when I was in Sydney, which was a lot of money in those days. I lived with my sister Olga and with Auntie Mona Nyberg and was able to save up my money so that I could travel back and forth to visit Laurie.

I began also to hang around with my girlfriends now that my marriage was over. We would go to the football and watch the young Black men play. The All,Blacks team was unbeaten, and consisted of people like Mervyn Williams, Boyd Kitchener and other Black men who are now well into their lives, but who were youths at the time.

Football wasn't like it is now, as there are often brawls on the field and somebody has always got to be punching somebody else. It was a clean game, a sport, in those days. In fact, the only blues that I can remember took place amongst the girls watching the game, not the players on the field.

There were a couple of white girls who hung around with us at this time, )ill Wilson, for instance, who used to tell people that she and I were twins - except that she had been born in the daytime and I had been born in the night.

It was over football that I came close to being charged with an offence, which would later have ruined my whole life's work. A group of us, young women, had been walking along and one had made a remark about a football player playing 'dirty' , which was the quickest way to start a fight that I know of Anyway, one other girl rushed to defend her

,.

'

38

football hero, and this led to pushing and shoving, and eventually punches were thrown until the whole thing developed into a fist slogging match.

I thought I could break it up, so I jumped amongst it, and started pulling the girls off each other - but the police wagon came tearing around the corner and before we knew what was happening, we were all being carted off to Redfern Police Station. They ran us all into the cells, but when they started asking questions about what was the fight over and who did what to whom, they let me go.

However, I have to bring this up because later in my life, when the police wished to discredit me, they put around that I have a long record and many convictions from my early days. If they thought about it and if people knew about it, they would have to know that it would have to be a lie , because there is no way a person who is an epilep­tic - and before the time that there was any control on epi­lepsy - would risk doing any of those sort of things. There never was a time when I could hang around hotels, for instance, and get drunk and fall about. I would have been flirting too close to death for my liking.

But later, as I said, they were to try and use dirt like this to discredit me, and they repeated these lies to people in quite high positions, not realising perhaps that many would come right on back and tell me.

My brother was in and out of gaol. He had developed a hard attitude by now, living and learning from criminals. When he was first put in gaol, he was a young lad who really didn't know much, but inside he mixed with older and tougher men, and they didn't have education programs in gaols then, so all he could learn was how to commit crime from other men who had committed crimes.

Laurie' s talk began to get tougher, and he was a big handsome man on the street who would attract the atten­tion of the police merely because of his size. His swaggering

39

attitude didn't help any, either, and in a way, his life became a destructive game. First the police would get him locked away for something he didn't do and then when Laurie came out, he would feel he needed to do something and get away with it to make up for having copped a punishment for nothing. In this game, the police always win,. but it's hard for a young man to see that.

Laurie didn't realise what he was doing, or the example he was setting, or how he was hurting other people . I remember one time when he was in Court, Darlinghurst Criminal Quarter Sessions, and he and his friend had been charged with an offence. Mum and I were there and we knew that Laurie hadn't even been there that night, but the police were saying he was, and Laurie was also prepared to say he was, because his friend was married and having a bit of trouble at home and it wouldn't have been a good time for him to go to gaol.

Laurie also wasn't prepared to tell the police he didn't do it because that would have been putting his mate in. Anyway, as it turned out, he was found guilty and got a very heavy lagging that he wasn't expecting.

Mum was very upset, and Laurie said to her, 'Don't worry, Mum I can do it standing on my head.' But what he didn't realise was that Mum couldn't. The pain of having her boy wrenched away from her like that - no, she couldn't go through it 'standing on her head'. It took a long time for Laurie to realise that.

Inside the prison system, Laurie began to get shifted around the countryside, which made visiting him very hard at times. However, I started to realise what it meant to him to have somebody from the family stay in touch all the time and keep him up to date with what was happening, so I would make that my first priority. No matter what else was happening in my life, my visits to Laurie would have the first attention. Since neither of us could write properly and

40

all letters were read and censored by the prison authorities anyway, the only communication for us was face to face.

Over the years, I was to visit Laurie in Goulburn, Maitland (both top security gaols), and even in Grafton, which was called the 'Blood Bath'. The recent inquiry into prisons unearthed some of the things that were going on in there, but these times I'm talking about were more than thirty years ago and there was no such thing as an inquiry going then. Grafton smelt of blood, even to visit, and the prisoners had a look of horror in their eyes all the time. I hated to see my brother in places like this - it chilled my blood.

But he took it all, the bashings, the solitary, the bread and water - the gaols were very hard then. And when I went to see him, instead of asking me to do or bring some­thing for him, he would ask me to do or bring something for some other prisoner. Laurie would say, 'There is a guy in here having a hard time. His name is . . . , try to get per­mission to visit him. He needs a visitor very badly.'

At first this was almost impossible for me, particularly as I was using my father' s name then, which meant my brother and I had the same surname - Perry, after Perry's Circus. Then I started using my married name, Smith, and my second name, Shirley, where before I had been called Colleen. So from being Colleen Perry, I just called myself Shirley Smith.

At some of the gaols then, the officers didn't link up that we were related, and I could ask to see other prisoners also. I met a Salvation Army officer who always made it his business to visit people in gaols and to be a friend to people in trouble. With his help, I began to work my way around the system. I made friends within the gaols , people who looked forward to my visits almost as eagerly as my brother.

When my brother was released, I continued to visit these friends in prison.

41

Laurie came out of prison over thirty years ago. His wife and he had become separated, what with him spending so much of his time in gaol. He met and married a wonder­ful woman and he was determined not to waste any more of his life; not to let the police take any more of his time off him. He moved out of his old environment and set up a new life with his new wife , and soon with his new family, and they became so precious to him that he wouldn't do a thing to risk losing one minute with them. He became a new man.

But even as he walked away from the prison system, I had been drawn to it . Laurie, an ex-prisoner, was not allowed to visit prisons, and even on the street, hanging around with people who he had known in gaol would have got him back inside for consorting. So he just had to walk away and not look back.

All those men, and women too, who I had begun visit­�g at Laurie' s request, had come to rely on my visits. They missed me when something happened and I couldn't get there, and often I had people pull me up on the streets and say, 'So-and-so wants to see you.' In a way, Laurie couldn't understand why I continued to visit gaols even when he was no longer there, and in a way, I didn't always under­stand myself

But this was God's way of guiding me towards the work that He wanted me to do with my life , and even though it has been hard, it' s been easy.

7 People in trouble

Since such a lot of my life has been spent inside of prisons, it is important that I say something about them, about the sort of people inside them, and about what prisons do to people.

First let me say that not only prisoners come to me with problems. Outside, in what we think of as the 'free' world, lots of people also come to me when they have troubles. That mainly is the difference - a wall exists between the people inside prisons who have problems, and the people outside who have problems. And we all have problems at some stage in our lives .

Sometimes these problems are much the same. On one day a young girl came to talk to me about the problems she was having in school. The other girls called her names, and the teacher didn't take any notice that she was being made unhappy and being discriminated against. So she became very upset one day, and hit one of the other girls right in the face.

The girl was then in trouble for fighting in school and she lost some privileges . She was not yet old enough to leave school, which meant she had to be there every day whether she liked it or not. Anyway, she didn't want to stop her edu­cation because she wanted to be something like a hair· dresser and wanted to get a School Certificate.

A few hours later I was talking with a young man in

43

prison. He was being insulted by some other prisoners, and they had made him very unhappy. He, too, had taken it until he couldn't take it any more and had punched a fellow prisoner in the mouth. When I spoke to him he was in soli­tary confinement.

The problems of these two young people, and lots more, are the same. Both were the only Blacks in all-white settings, school or prison, and both had whites for teachers or wardens. Neither of them were free to leave, although I suppose they could have asked for a transfer.

In some cases, the problems of people outside of prisons can be emotionally worse than the problems inside . A young man came to me who had recently lost his job. He had only been working casually, a few weeks work here and there when he could get it. He lived in a room, and when he hadn't been able to find work for a while, he had fallen behind in his rent. Someone, the landlord or agent, had packed up his few clothes into his suitcase and taken it away. When he went back to the room after looking for work all day, his key didn't fit the lock, and he knew that it had been changed.

He hadn't really been in any job long enough to have made any real friends. He was a quiet man who could stand in a hotel, have a drink and walk out, and nobody would have spoken to him. As it was he had no one to turn to and he spent the next few days wandering trying to work out what to do, now that he had no room, no clothes and no money.

His clothes that he had on got grubbier, and although he went into men's lavatories and washed in the cold water taps there, he wasn't getting any cleaner. As he had never been so far down before, he didn't know his way around the sorts of institutions set up for people in emergencies and he was too shy to ask anyone.

Eventually he ran into another Koorie (Aboriginal

44

person) who is related to me and who brought him to the house . He hadn't eaten in four days, and was beside himself with grief.

Another young man was in prison for stealing parts of cars. He, too , was a quiet young man, who minded his own business in prison and was trying to do 'easy' time. But somehow he got off-side with some of the warders who, he said, seemed to think he was only quiet when they were around and were worried that he might be bad-mouthing them behind their backs.

He had a brother and a sister-in-law outside who were helping him by visiting and bringing him things, which he kept in his cell . Just little things that in the prison situation mean a lot - things such as toilet soap, pictures of members of the family, a guitar - not much, but they are the whole world when you are inside .

He arrived back at his cell one day to find everything he owned gone. The warder who was on duty said he didn't know where they had been taken because he had come on later and the stuff had already been taken by then. The young man became panicky, but was too timid to really push to find out what had happened to his things. Other prisoners, though, began to act up and call out about them and that upset him even more, although, he said, he tried to understand that they were worried in case their things went off next.

A week later, when I was at the prison, he still had not recovered his things and he had the same sense of grief as the young man in the outside world. A few words to the authorities tracked down his belongings and they were returned to him, but the difference in these two cases is that the young man in prison still had the basics of life, food, a shower, a bed.

No one can say that either of these young men is lucky, but I try to look at who has the basics of life, too. Of course,

45

the prisons are awake to this, too, and they can fix things up every so often so that a prisoner has to be in one place and won't get back to his normal place in time for the meal, and then he has to miss the meal altogether - just to remind him, I think, that that's the way it often is in the outside world. The young man outside misses more than just one meal, if his problems get on top of him, or he gets so far down with money that he can't start the climb up again.

I am often struck with how much the same some of these problems are, and also, in both cases, how just talking to someone can help make it easier. When a person is hungry, though, the talking is not the first answer. So I always like to have a bit of food or a few cigarettes to offer before the person can settle down to have a talk about the real problems that are bothering them.

It would be really good to be able to talk about all the things that I have seen in my life and to draw some rhyme and reason out of them, but I cannot.

Many things are told to me in confidence, and even though the person may have since died, it doesn't mean that they are not still watching me. At the moment, they are watching out for me and I like it that way, so I am not about to betray their confidence now at this late stage.

Many of the people are still alive, and they, too, have trusted me, and, I hope, will go on trusting me .

Some incidents have involved large groups of people and very high feelings, and while a good deal of time has passed, I have in mind that talking about these events will just cause bad feelings to come to the top again. I could, as has been suggested to me, try to make it sound like it was some other town somewhere else, but the people from the real town would still know, as this country is not so big really.

But without talking about any particular town, I would like to put down about something I have seen a few

46

times in a number of towns, because it has happened or could happen just about anywhere .

. Something happens involving a Black person, like a b'Q crime, maybe something's burnt down or something big stolen or somebody murdered in a horrible way. Even after the person who committed the crime has been taken away by the police, the white people in the town get down on the Blacks.

I don't want to talk about the person who gets arrested. I am deeply concerned about all the Blacks in the town who had nothing to do with the crime and about all the Black children who get such a hard time and who do not even understand what is going on.

A young boy had an uncle who got into trouble. The young boy only ever saw his uncle when he dropped by to visit, and the uncle was very fond of the boy. On his sixth birthday, the uncle came by with toys and sweets and played with him. Two days later, his uncle was arrested.

Nobody in the Aboriginal community treated the boy any different and, as a matter of fact, nobody really explained to him what had happened or what his uncle had been charged with.

But at school, it was a different matter. All the Black children at the school were given a hard time by the white children after they heard of the uncle's arrest, but particu­larly the young boy who had the same name as his uncle .

In a few weeks, the boy had changed. He had been like most other six-year-olds, playful, outgoing, trying hard to learn enough words to be able to be a bit cheeky. But some schoolground hidings later, and many hurtful and nasty names later, this boy had changed from his old self He still didn't know exactly what his uncle had been charged with, and in his mind he didn't understand about any of that any­way. He continued to ask his family when his uncle was going to come by and bring more toys and sweets, as he had

47

always done, and could not be convinced that he wasn't coming for a long time.

But the little fellow now was withdrawn into himself outside of the family. He had to be forced to go to school, and while he was there, he wouldn't play or be interested in the school work. Teachers lost patience with him, and he found himself put outside the class room often. He began to tell lies to his parents and to the teachers, mostly so that he could get out of being at school. The teacher then said to him that he was becoming more like his uncle . To the teacher, she meant it as an insult, an insult to a little boy six years old who was all mixed up. But to the little boy, he took it as a compliment and soon he began to try to walk as he remembered his uncle walking, and to talk like him. I couldn't help but wonder how long it would be before he began to understand the nature of his uncle' s crime and whether he would even try to follow in those footsteps also.

This is a story about one little boy, but it is multiplied over and over, with boys and girls . The uncle paid for his crime by going to prison, but the community also paid for it by not going to prison, and it seemed to me that the little boy - who didn't understand what was going on anyway - was made to pay for it the most.

Rape is another such crime that white people come down on the Black community for, even though through all the years very few Black men have raped white women and a great many white men have raped Black women.

Until recently, a Black woman raped by a white man, or by a Black man for that matter, would hardly ever think of going to the police .

Also until recently, it would have been very unusual for a Black man to rape a Black woman, or any woman, because it is not the Aboriginal way. In my young days, for instance, the younger men went around with the older men, who had a great deal of respect. Now, more often, I see

48

groups of young men without any older men with them and I think that is a great pity.

I remember an incident that happened after a young Black man had been arrested for rape of a white woman. The Reserve where the Aboriginal people lived was not far from the town, and the white townspeople had seen Abor­iginal people enough to not be frightened of us. They also knew that the man had already been arrested.

But that didn't stop them. Carloads of white people, many of them respectable people in town, came out to the Reserve, crawling their cars past people' s homes and yelling out things and scaring everyone.

They tried to make fights with every Black man that they saw, aged fourteen or eighty, it didn't make any differ­ence to them. They said disgusting things to the women, and many of these women were strict religious women with families. Young girls were in great danger and didn't dare to go out even in groups for months. White boys and men leaned out of cars and said filthy things to our girls, threat­ening to do to them what the young Black man had been arrested for, and worse. They let their dirty imaginations run wild and made up all horrible things to say, since they didn't know what exactly the crime had consisted of The main problem with them making those sort of threats to our girls is that they could have, and would have got away with doing it most likely, which puts a lot of fear into Black women.

Very few Black men get away with rape, but very few white men get arrested for it.

The crime that has most bothered me in my life is mur­der. It is so final and the hardest to come to grips with. In my mind, I see two people. One strikes the other, who falls down. Most times, the one who falls down gets up, but just one time, that person doesn't get up. The person is dead. All the living, loving, hating and fighting is finished for that

49

one person. For the other, a nightmare begins. Too late to say 'sorry' , often too stunned to run, and nowhere to run to really anyway.

There are other murders, of course, of people who do not know each other, or of cold�blooded hate or greed. Most of the murders, though, are not these types - they are of people who know each other, and often who love each other, which is what makes it that much harder to understand, and for them to understand.

I suppose I have really worried about this question hundreds of times in my life. Sometimes it just pops into my mind in my sleep, and other times the worry comes on me after I have had an interview with somebody who is in that position.

A few years ago, a young girl tried to explain it to me. Two young Black men had had a fight and one had ended up killing the other. Yet they had known each other and while they were not great friends or anything, it seemed unlikely that one would have killed the other.

The question in this case was not who struck the first blow, because many blows were struck over a period, each going away from the fight, but coming back determined to get the best of the other, until eventually there was murder in the air.

I had spent quite a long time trying to get the reasons why things had developed as they did, talking with wit� nesses and also the young man who was charged. I then spent a lot of time in the next few days worrying about it intensely, because it still didn't make any sense .

I spoke to this young girl about the case, and talked about how I couldn't understand it.

'MumShirl, ' she said, 'you only don't understand it because you are only looking at what happened on that night. Can't you see that, in the life of the young man who is charged, this fight was the straw that broke the camel's

50

back? His whole life has been one big putdown, he has had trouble getting jobs, he has been turned away by more employers than just about anybody else because he is so keen to get work that he fronts up to more employers than anybody else. Every time they say 'no' to him, they put a straw on his back.

'Even when he gets a job, it is a casual job, doing some­thing dirty, a dirt and mud job, and he does it because he needs the money, but he is a bright man, and he knows it is degrading to have to do this all the time.

'His wife gets depressed because they never have any money, and she gets tired of watching every cent and never having anything new, always second-hand. She puts some more straw on his back.

'He can't afford to shout the mates from time to time, more straw . . . and just this one time, just this one remark, just this one blow . . . it is like unlocking a tightly packed box and all the anger, the frustrations of his whole life, that he keeps hidden at the bottom of the box, they rise up and take hold of him.

'Yes, there is murder in the air, and the pity of it is that there is only another Black man there to bear the brunt of it. The people who didn't give him a job, the people who gave him a hard time at the unemployment agencies, per­haps even the teachers who gave him a hard time at school, and all the white people who ever called him a name, or put him down, or punched his kids and called them names . . . they are all safely in their homes! '

I have, and still do have, the opportunity in some Court trials to talk to the judge about the background of the person who is on trial. But I had never quite thought of it in the words of the young girl . Often I have talked about the hardships of the person on trial, and it has been on my mind that the judge or jury will take pity on the accused when they hear what a hard life he or she has had.

5 1

But now I know that it i s not pity that they need to have, it is understanding. They have to understand the pro­cess whereby people arrive at a point where they are capable of murder. They have to understand that it is most often not one thing that happens, but many things that just keep on happening, and that are beyond the control of the per­son who ends up being charged with murder.

Not all murders happen this way, as I said earlier, but a great many do. Far too many young Black men and women die in this way, or lose their freedom in this way, not because of something that they ended up doing, but because of the way their whole lives had been going right up to that point.

While there is definitely such a thing in prison as 'doing hard time' , I am not convinced that there is ' easy' time. Hard time is not being able to settle into the place, and to live by the rules which exist in there . It sets off a whole chain reaction which often means that this prisoner doesn't fit in, either with other prisoners or into the uneasy relationship with the warders.

Once he is getting a hard time from either or both of these groups, he can find himself being victimised in such ways as being set up by other prisoners to make it look like he has done something wrong, and then the warders step in and deal out some punishments. He can also be baited into a fight and again end up with punishments, or he can be set up by warders.

Easy time, on the other hand, means that the person doesn't make waves, doesn't get off-side with other pris­oners or the warders - but it still is not 'easy'.

Inside himself (or herself), he will eat away at his heart, missing his friends and family, wife, children, and worrying endlessly about how they are and what they are doing. Visit­ing days seem years apart and every day is a day to force yourself to live through, until the next day, which you again force yourself to live through, and again and again, until

52

perhaps a letter arrives or visiting day comes, but these breaks are far too short and do not come nearly often enough.

After a while, some men are able to begin to think of the prison as being where they live, especially if they are older men or have got quite . long sentences. Then they begin to look at the activities within the prison as their whole world, and news of what is happening outside the prison - unless it directly involves them or a close member of their family - may as well be about a country overseas, they are that uninterested.

Strangely enough, when they get to thinking that the inside of the prison is the whole world, that seems to be when the system thinks they are ' rehabilitated' and ready to live in the outside world.

Inside, they watch each other with the intense interest of a housewife in the suburbs - who is talking with whom, who is standing too close to whom, who are 'mates' , whose turn is it to be on laundry or kitchen roster - all these things become very big in their minds, and in fact, become their survival.

Outside of the work routine, the men develop many different ways of coping. Some take up a hobby, such as woodwork, or learn to play a guitar, and some teach them­selves (or other prisoners teach them) to read or write. Some of these things have only been allowed in prisons in recent years, and they have made a great deal of difference to the lives of the men inside.

It is the lonely hours when the work is finished that are the hardest to fill. All the men are different and each copes with these empty hours in their own different ways. Some want to talk and seek out men of their own background or similar interest to talk with. Some begin to seriously think and work out what they are doing here on earth, and this brings up the question of God.

53

After a while, for most men, they make some decision about God in their lives, or whether they feel there is a God for them.

My brother, Laurie, always a deeply moral man, came back to tackle the question of God while he was doing his last stint in those early days. While he felt that God was not looking after him, and that mankind was not giving him an even break compared with a lot of other people' s lives, he did feel better when he worked through how he felt about God. ,_YLaurie had a very good singing voice, deep and full.

B"Jt he had a hang-up about the Catholics, as a lot of Abor­iginal people do. It was, I think, mostly because the Cath­olics say one thing and do another. They talk about all people being equal and all being God's children, and they then go about treating Aboriginal people as though they had no rights, or as though they didn't exist. The Catholic churches, too, are built upon land that has been stolen from Aboriginal people, and that doesn't seem to bother the Catholics at all.

The Salvation Army people, though, have won a place of respect for a lot of Aboriginal people. When my Uncle Dave Perry came back from the war, he really put it into us that we were to give even our last penny to the Salvation Army people and that we were not to walk past a Salvation Army officer without trying to help them. Uncle Dave said that it was only through them that he had survived in the war.

In the gaols, too, the Salvation Army officers were very busy people. They would go into gaols and into all other places that nobody else would go, and talk to lifers or any­body who needed to talk with them. So many Aboriginal men have come in contact with the working side of the Sal­vation Army, and most Aboriginal prisoners welcome and look forward to the visits of these people .

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As it was, Laurie' s attitude to God softened and he became the first prisoner to make a broadcast from inside any prison. It was just about Christmas time, and he went on air and sang 'The Lord's Prayer' and 'Ave Maria' , and he spoke about goodwill to men. There was no television then and most people had a wireless that they listened to a lot, so many people heard this broadcast and we were all thrilled and very, very proud of Laurie .

Now, however, a good number of Aboriginal men in prisons are learning either reading or writing. The edu­cation system outside has badly neglected Aboriginal people, and trying to survive takes up so much time, but when these Black men have the chance and the time, they certainly try to do something like learn.

Some of these men are very talented, such as Bobby Merrit who wrote 'The Cakeman' , a play that has been acted in two theatres in Sydney and also shown on the tele­vision, and Kevin Gilbert, who wrote 'The Cherry-pickers' and poetry and painted pictures and became very famous for his work even while he was still inside those walls .

Vie Simms wrote a whole lot of songs and sang and accompanied himself on the guitar. He was so good that he ended up making a recording right inside the prison. The recording company went into the prison, taped it all down, and the other prisoners were the audience, and then it was put on a record and sold in shops . Other Aboriginal men are painting pictures and making art objects and they are being sold through the Ball and Chain, a shop in the Rocks in Sydney which helps prisoners.

It all makes me wonder about how far these men could have gone, without going into prison, if they had had even half a proper chance in their outside lives , and if they had been offered either education or the chance to work in the arts . I think it would have changed the course of their whole lives in most cases.

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Whether I am talking about rape, or murder, or scabies, or petty theft, or torn clothes - it doesn't seem to matter. If white people hear of it, then they think the same of all Black people.

The only thing they don't seem to think is if something good happens. Then they think it is an 'exception'.

Many people have told me that they think I am an 'exception' , but I 'm not. I have about the same as everybody else has . The difference now is they do think I am an excep­tion, which has come to mean that many times I am allowed to do things that they would not let another Aboriginal per-

;f. son do. But there are many fine Aboriginal people who, with half a chance, would be doing what I am now doing, and many of them would be able to do it better because they have an educated mind. The difference seems to me to be that they are rarely given the chance.

8 Remarkable people

One of the most remarkable Black women I met in my life was Mother Williams, who was born Muriel Coe.

Writing a book like this brings so many things into my mind, and also a lot of sorrow. It is such a terrible shame that Aboriginal people haven't been able to get educated before this, and it is not just education; it is also time and backing. You see, there could have been lots of books written about Aboriginal people , how they survived, and how great they are and were.

Kevin Gilbert and all of the young Blacks who can use a pen and paper ought to be given every help to preserve even what is left right now, but it is also sad that so much has passed, and remains only as memory for some of us who are older, and this memory might disappear in a few more generations.

Mother Williams, for instance, was related to almost every Black person right across New South Wales from border to border. She was a great woman. Her father was a drover and he had an old horse called 'Red' , who used to be able to bring him home in the dark even if he was so tired that he'd fallen asleep on the horse' s back .

Mother Williams was a great cook and her husband was what we called a 'Bible-hasher'. 'Don't matter what religion you are' , Mother Williams used to say, 'Good Fri­day is Good Friday' , and she wouldn't let anybody eat meat

57

on that day. I remember when we were all down in Griffith picking fruit and vegetables, and I was just a young person then. Mother Williams wouldn't even leave any meat in her house on the Good Friday morning, she gave it away and fed it to the dogs so there'd be none to tempt anybody. Nobody was even allowed to cook meat on Mother William's fire, that's how strict she was.

If Mother Williams could have had a book like this written down about her, all the children, her grandchildren and all the other Black children, they would have a chance to know her and about how the times were when she was alive . Mother Williams, and most of these dear old ladies, they would have loved it. They loved to talk and would stop whatever they were doing if somebody came by and just sit down and have a good talk. Mother Williams used to travel around, right up until her death; going to visit her people everywhere and telling them about how it was when she was a girl. The history got passed down, but in bits and pieces, and maybe nobody can put it together again now.

Mother Williams, I think, could feel that these things would get forgotten and that's why she would talk and talk to anybody who would listen. But me, and other young people at the time, we just never thought about these old people dying. Somehow I always thought that Mother Williams would outlast me, and I could never think about her dying and being covered over by dirt.

Mother Williams always knew, too, that I would never see her dead. We were both such travellers, and we travelled around together a lot; but looking back it seems funny now that of all the trips we ever made together, we never did make a trip back to Cowra together. We were always coming away, never going to, and that's how she knew, I think.

When she did die, I was in St Vincent's Hospital, which was in 1978, so I couldn't get back to Cowra for her funeral. But it seemed like all our lives she had known

Coronation Day, 1 2 May 1 93 7, Erambie Mission, Cowra

Key Identification and research by Robert Merritt

1 Archie Bamblett 2 Terry Carbre/Carbury 3 Dick McGuiness 4 Harry ' Muddy' Tonkin 5 Mervyn Williams 6 ••• Simpson 7 George 'Benda' Merritt 8 Bert Gray 9 Jimmy Hughs 10 'Gundy' Bamblett 1 1 Daniel Joseph Perry (MumShirl's Grandfather) 1 2 'Major' M urray 1 3 Arthur 'Nino' Williams 14 Ray Williams 1 5 Billy Tonkin 16 Doug Williams 17 John Bugg 18 • • • Murphy 19 • • • Horn 20 Harry Murray 21 Joe Moulder 22 • • • Hughs 23 Frank Broughton 24 Doolan Murray 2 5 Dave Perry 2 6 Lachlan Ingram 27 Doris Williams 28 Mrs J . Whitty 29 Mary Murray 30 Gertrude Hines 3 1 Anne Hines 3 2 Jane Murray 3 3 Horris Kennedy 34 Agnes Ryan 35 Mary Simpson 36 ••• ••• 37 Doris Kennedy 38 Thelma Bugg and baby Joyce 39 Muriel Williams 40 Mrs Ashmore 41 'Tilly' Charles 42 Bella Hughs 43 Lizzi lngram 44 Arthur 'Nino' Williams Jnr 45 Noreen Williams 46 'Sister' Bamblett 47 Beryl Whiteing 48 Ruth Tonkin 49 Roony Newton 50 Les Coe 51 Mervyn Murphy 52 Dora Williams 53 Louisa Ingram and baby Esther 54 Margaret Draper and baby Clyde 55 Alice Newton 56 Claude Murray 57 Mabel Grant 58 Micky Sowden 59 Norman Carrol 60 E. Coe 61 May Ryan with baby 62 • • • Ryan 63 • • • Bowden 64 'Tilly' Carbre/ Carbury 65 Mrs Murphy 66 Nelly Smith 67 Gertrude McGuiness with baby Ted 68 Hazel Murphy with baby brother Laurie 69 June Murray 70 Margaret Murray 7 1 Doreen Grant 72 D. McGuiness 73 Kath Wallace 74 • • • • • • 7 5 Silvia Ingram and baby 76 Joyce Wallace 77 Edna Wallace or 'Dollo' Bamblett 78 Pauline Coe 79 • • • • • • 80 Val Williams· Simpson 81 • • • Bowden 82 ••• Charles 83 •••

Whiteing 84 Edna Kennedy 85 Connie Whiteing with 86 baby 87 ••• • • • 88 Rosie Whiteing 89 Colin Bamblett 90 • • • • • • 9 1 Jimmy Wallace 9 2 • • • Carbre/Carbury 93 Laurie Newton 94 Jean Carbre/Carbury 95 Colin Newton 96 Joan Bugg 97 David Newton 98 Ken Simpson 99 Sam Simpson 1 00 Gary Draper 1 0 1 Isaac 'Lingo' Ingram 102 Philip 'Choco' 1 03 Clancy Charles Jnr 1 04 Kevin Williams 105 Bluey or Billy Williams 1 06 Harry 'Buck' Williams 1 07 • • • • • • 1 08 • • • Williams 1 09 • • • • • • • • • Identification not passible.

•

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I wouldn't anyway, and that I would never see her dead. There was also Mrs Piedy, who was married to Dick

Piedy, and they were the first people we met when we came down from Cowra. They put us up, my Father, Mother, and our whole family, living in their home which was in Regent Street, Redfern, right across from the Empress Hotel . They were both Christians and they helped people all the time. We were just one of the many Aboriginal families that they helped to get settled and started in Sydney.

There was Granny Goolagong, who was old even when I was a little girl. She had a little old shack and a big family, but she was not only taking in anyone who knocked on her door, but also going out looking for people, like kids whose mother and father might have had a row. She would take them into her place and feed them and look after them until everything was alright at home again, if it ever was. I got to know her better when I was working in the laundry at Condobolin District Hospital. She would come through the town driving an old sulky that would have so many kids in it and on it and hanging off it. She would take care of her people right through that whole damned area.

Granny Robinson, who was Daisy May Robinson, also had a big family, but she did the same thing around the inner streets around Redfern. She reared up and helped rear up so many kids; there is no way to keep count of how many.

Aunty Bunny Hinton was another who had her own big family, but always could fit in another and another. She lived in Lawson Street in Redfern and every Aboriginal, big or little , could find their way to her place.

Ellen May Boney, who we call Aunty Ellen, had no children of her own, but still managed to rear up a big fam­ily. She married and somehow became 'Mother' to so many kids. Then when her husband got killed in an accident by crossing a road, she just went to pieces and began to drink.

6i

She is stili a wonderful person, even if she drinks, and so

many people owe her so much. Nana Ping, whose own name is Jessie, lives up the

North Coast. She was rearing up two children who had no one else even before she herself married and had her ovm

children. She married a Chinese, Joseph Ping, who vras a great worker and could always keep their house with plenty of food in it. Nana Ping would make sure that every hungry person got some of that food, and her husband was helping her all the time, happy to have so many people around him.

Nana Ping reared up her own family and others, and her oldest daughter was Gwen. Then she went on to help rear up grand,children, great grand,children, and she is still rearing them up. She must be terribly happy now when she sees them all together, not that they could fit into any one house all at the same time. Some of her great grand­children are doing her very proud now, working in organis-ations to help our own Aboriginal people.

-

Granny Waters also had a big family, rearing up not only her own children but those of her sister, and her brother too. She came from the Singleton area and lived in Caroline Street in Redfern. It wasn't only Black children that she took in, either. Sometimes there were more \Vhite children who called her 'Granny' than Aboriginal chil­dren.

Granny Waters was a tiny little woman, \Vith the longest silver hair I have ever seen on anylx-xly. She was a great influence on me. I used to go around to her place and sit in her kitchen over a cup of tea and she was the first per­son who ever said to me, 'Don't just sit there feeling sorry for yourself, get up and do something about it.' She alw-ays had something to eat. I don't know how she did it. She used to give all us kids sixpence between two of us, to make sure

we could get out to the football and watch the All-Blacks play. It was only a penny to go on the tram in those days.

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All of these women, and more, were doing as much as I do and more. They never did get any medals, or recog­nition. They deserved all the rewards that could ever have been heaped upon them, but they didn't get any.

Knowing these women helped me to get my own life straight, and I know that no matter how much I do, I will never catch up with these women, and that times are easier now, while they did their work when times were really hard. There weren't any Black organisations then, and there wasn't any money around, but somehow they managed to squeeze a few pennies from somewhere to help anyone who needed help. Through it all they had the strength to smile and the time to spare to talk to anyone and talk to me.

My work, in this way, is like a way of saying 'thank you' to those people. I was so lucky for having known them.

9 People who don't feel good about thelllselves

My own life settled down into a long road of visits to prisons, watching my family grow, and trying to survive myself It is surprising how all these things run together. Money - it seems like I always needed money, and much of my life has been spent trying to get it. I don't care about money, but somebody always needs it, and it is not the money itselfbut what it can get that has become important.

The young girl with three or four children who hasn't got anywhere to live; she needs bond money, key money, money to have the electricity and gas turned on, money to buy food for the children and something to cook it in, like a saucepan or a frying pan. So straight away when I meet this girl and I'm talking to her, and she is telling me about how she got into this state of having nowhere to live, I am thinking, 'How can I get some money? '

When there were not so many Aboriginal people in Sydney who had come down here looking for work or bet� ter schools, or to be close to their men who are in prisons here, it was sometimes possible to fit one family in with another for a short while until we could find something bet� ter for them, get the money from somewhere. There was a little short breathing space of time then.

We can still do it sometimes, but rarely now. There are more of us here and already most of the houses are packed up; those that can be. The laws have come in from places

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like the real estate agents and the Housing Commission and they don't like anybody putting up other people even in desperate times, even for only a few days.

So straight away I have to think about this poor young girl and her children; where can they spend the night, can we get everything organised by nightfall, and if not, what then?

The rents and bonds and service deposits are getting right out of reach of so many people, especially young people who have nothing to start with. A young woman like this needs straight away two or three hundred dollars and she has got nothing, maybe just a few cents in her purse .

The agent is going to ask for a bond, two weeks rent in advance, and that's going to be over a hundred dollars to start with. With those children she is going to need a taxi to get there too, if one of the children is not old enough to look after the others so that she can go down alone.

If it' s winter, she is going to need some blankets; that is if she is lucky enough to have found a place that already has some beds in it. Sometimes, even when she has found a place, it has no beds, or no fridge, and organising these things, even from St Vincent de Paul or Smith Family, usually involves going down and being interviewed, which might mean yet another taxi.

A food order can be impossible to get if the girl goes, for instance, to the Redfern Office of Youth and Com­munity Services, because the person who is authorised to give them out might not be at work that day, or at a meeting, or somebody might have to take it up town to get it signed. I have seen many people go for orders and come back with nothing in their hands, just tears in their eyes. If it is a Satur­day or a Sunday, of course then there is no chance.

Sometimes it is a very long wait in these offices and the children can get so hungry or worn out that they just lie on the floor and cry, which upsets the mother even more.

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There is also no guarantee of success, because sometimes she might wait the whole day for the person who gives out the vouchers, only to be told to come back 'tomorrow'. How these people think the young girl and her children will spend the night, or where, or what she will feed them in the meantime, I have no idea, and sometimes I wonder if those questions ever cross their minds.

The Aboriginal Medical Service is better than this, if the young girl can speak up. But some shy young women just ask for the person and leave when told that she is not there. They then wander about in the streets and come back and ask again in a few hours. In this way, they miss out on having a cup of tea or coffee and sometimes even getting some food, as the A.M.S . now has a nutrition section all set up. It wasn't always like this, but I 'll get to that in another chapter further on. It is important to know though that it does exist now, and it exists by the hard work of Aboriginal people and some white people who have helped along the way.

Money is needed too for going to visit prisons, where I like to be able to take a few packets of cigarettes or some tobacco to those people who wait for it. I used to smoke for many years, and I know what it is like to be a smoker with­out a smoke. A smoker finds it very hard to sit down and have a conversation while thinking all the time, 'Is the per­son talking to me going to offer me a smoke?'

So for the sake of getting above this level of physical need, I take some packets of smokes and just put them out on the table or on the floor and the person I'm talking to can take one any time they like and the talk can then really flow without interruption.

In my lifetime I have borrowed, begged and stood over for money. I have gambled to get hold of it and I have fright­ened people into giving it to me. Sometimes I have felt great shame at the length I have had to go to get hold of it - but

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it is shame for those people who have it, and who don't give it, or don't give it easily, not shame for myself or the people who need it.

On the other hand, I have known a rare few people who, once they have been put in touch with the real needs of other humans, give until they have nothing left for themselves. These people seek no fame or reward, and receive none, except perhaps through prayers. When I am praying, these people and their gifts run through my mind, and I hope they run through other people's minds, and even when they die, they should remain alive in people's minds.

I could talk a lot about money, although it is nothing. It has given me a lot of pain in my life. What it really is is a wall between people, and sometimes it is a wall between a person and their real problem.

There was a young girl who came to me a few years ago. She had a young baby. However, she was managing and had a tiny place to live and her baby was very well cared for and growing well.

When she came to speak with me, I could feel a terrible feeling of her depression. We talked about money and how she was managing, and I felt that, while she really had very little, that she didn't think she had any immediate problems about money.

I was doing work at the time for the Aboriginal Medi­cal Service and I was involved in a lot of other things and a lot of people were looking for me to see if I could arrange any help with the things that they needed.

Somehow I knew that the other problems faced by these people, the ones who needed a flat, or bond money, or clothes, or food, were not as great as the problem which this young girl was trying to tackle all by herself

I tried to talk to her. I tried to ignore the other people. I also tried to ignore the fact that I was so tired I was almost

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falling asleep. I talked with her for hours. Then I thought she was alright and I left.

The next day I was called because she had killed her­self. She had said to me the night before, 'If anything hap­pens to me, MumShirl, my baby will be alright. Other people will look after my baby' , and I had said, 'Don't talk foolish, now' , and we hadn't spoken of it again.

I cried for months and still cry when I think of it. If only . . . if only I had not been so tired; if only there had been someone else to call who could come in and stay with this girl , this beautiful girl who was grappling with such a

big problem and who needed a friend so badly, just then. But you see everybody has their own families and they

have to go home and cook and clean for them and be there with them, and they don't know about this girl. Very few Black people have telephones, so it is not as though I could ring around and find out who was free to come in. And this young girl, right then, needed another Black person to be with her, who would maybe just sit there, follow her around and put their hand in her hand.

When I think about this, I think of the Government and how they talk about all they think they are giving to Aboriginal people. The Aboriginal people have had to fight to get money to run the Aboriginal Legal Service, the Abor­iginal Medical Service, everything. They had to fight on the streets, get arrested, get their heads kicked in by the police and get carted away in paddy-wagons - to draw attention to some of our needs, like the Aboriginal Housing Com­pany where many people had to be arrested before the Gov­ernment understood the desperation of homeless Aboriginal people .

Still they give so little . We can't run a twenty-four hour service because we can't afford to. The people who work in the Services; they have their families, too, and they have to worry about where to get enough money to pay the

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rent and their electricity bills and buy warm coats for the children.

So many Aboriginal people already do, and always have done, so much for no pay, that money doesn't enter into it even though they all have big needs too. People will and do work for nothing, so I know we could run the sort of Service that could have helped this girl and many others who get these big problems and who need somebody with them to help them sort it out. In that way, we have the people , but we do not have the money to pay for a building from which we could work, and while Aboriginal people will work for nothing, phones will not, and lights will not, and all the other things that we need to kick off such an operation do not come cheap, and we just don't have the money.

The Government puts out through the radio and the newspapers that they give Aboriginal people so many mil­lions of dollars every year. But it is like a piece of elastic, all stretched out, and when they let it go, it springs back into just being a little piece. And the Aboriginal people end up with so little that people die all the time.

This isn't the only young girl; there have been others and young men, too. When they reach out, there isn't any­body there . I can't be everywhere at once and the other people who are doing the same sorts of things; they can't be everywhere at once . We need more Black people able to do these sorts of th ings, and they need to know that their rents are taken care of, and they need strong and warm shoes and coats, so they can get out there and not have to worry about these things for themselves so they can help with the worries of other people.

So many Aboriginal people don't get jobs, can't get jobs, or the bosses won't give them jobs.

A very few, very lucky, young people are now getting on in education, and in years to come they might get jobs.

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But mainly our people are not given jobs. If the young boy who finishes school at about age fifteen doesn't get a job for four or five years, he gets used to having no job. He doesn't get used to it and like it, but he accepts that that is all he is going to get out of life .

But what does that do to him? He wants to be a man and look after first maybe his mother, or his parents and later he thinks about looking after a wife and children of his own. He plans these things and they don't happen. They look like they are never going to happen and he can't make them happen.

Even though white people say Blacks love to live on the social services, they don't. The little bit of money might keep body and soul together between jobs, but a person can't plan their l ives on the soco (social welfare). They can't plan to ask a girl to marry them; they can't plan to save up and buy a bed or a fridge, or rent a place and set up home. They can't want the normal things any man would want.

White people also say that if we have so many people on the soco, we ought to have a whole lot of people who are doing nothing and can therefore work in the organisations. This shows that they don't understand much about Blacks, or about people at all.

For instance, a Black who is on soco and can't get a job doesn't feel good about himself Apart from the little bit of money, which is never enough, they just don't feel good about getting it anyway. In order to live on that little bit of money, they have to spend so much time chasing after the cheapest everything. So they go to one supermarket and look at the price of a tin of baked beans, and then they go up the road a few blocks and look at the price there of the same tin and then they find they have to walk back to the first shop as their price was the cheapest to start with. Every little thing is that much trouble .

After a while, they get depressed about doing things

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that way and they get to the point where they don't care and then they buy the baked beans at the corner shop which is handy, doesn't wear out shoe leather and charges a lot more. When they run out of money, if they have spent enough in the corner shop the people who run it might let them book (obtain credit and pay later when they get their social wel­fare cheque). By then, they are living on their next fortnight's cheque, and have to start hoping for it to arrive on time.

A lot of their time is spent cruising around the streets, looking out for their friends and relations in the hope that some good thing might have happened to one of them; that they might have some money, or found a job, or won at the T.A.B. Then they might be able to borrow enough money, a few dollars, to get them through until their own cheque arrives in a few days or maybe even more than a week's time.

Because they are always so short of money, they can't buy the right things to eat. Oh, yes, well, we have people at Aboriginal Medical Service and at the Health Commission and other places, whose job it is to tell Blacks what it is they are supposed to be eating. I even do the same thing myself at times, telling people to eat an orange, or a piece of steak and vegetables.

But what do you do when the Black person you are talking to has no money, or very little money? How do you say to that person, 'Look, your energy is right down and you need to eat something green like a lettuce or some cabbage and something like a carrot or a piece of pumpkin' , and that person probably has enough money to buy one carrot for today, and nothing for the next two days?

Some of them will say right out, ' I have enough money to buy one orange or take the bus back to where I live' , and that's only the lucky few who are able say it, because most feel so shamed about it that they find it hard to say anything at all. So it is not realistic to ask these people, with all their

7 1

own problems, to work for free in the organisations and help other people by listening to their problems.

You've got to have a certain amount of your own secur, ity, like a place to live, food to eat and knowing your own family is looked after, as well as not too many of your own problems, before you can help anybody else with your worries.

So what happens to these young people who don't get jobs? They begin to waste away. If it is a person who is by themselves, either a boy or a girl, they can get very lonely and that kills them. If it is a young man who has a wife or a girl,friend and they can't get a job for a very long time, they just go down in themselves, often break off with their wife or girl,friend, because they can't stand the shame of seeing the other one hungry or needing things.

See these looks on people's faces long enough, or often enough, and you don't want to see them anymore. So you go down to the hotel and buy a drink, or hang around out, side until somebody you know comes by and offers to get a drink for you, and there you are, inside, with lots of people, smiling, because they have had a few drinks. The juke,box is playing and everybody is talking, warm and friendly to each other, so you want to stay there because outside there are people who are hungry, who need money, who have no smiles and no music.

How many young lives are wasting away in these places? How many young Blacks go back to their rooms and feel that they can't face another day? How many feel that there are only two ways to go - the quick way, or the long way?

10 Survival

I am lucky in that I belong to a large family. There are always people related to me living around where I am. They have their problems and they come over to see me. I help out when I can and when I have problems I go over to see them and they help out when they can.

My sister, Ethel, for instance; she became like my parents to me. She was one I could always go to with any trouble big or small. Other relations are scattered around everywhere, big families and always one of us travelling around, carrying the news from one place to another.

Even those relatives who I have arguments with, they turn around and help out when you least expect that they will. When my sister became ill and was in hospital, every­body went around to see and tell everybody else and every­one was phoning up and down the country, which costs a lot of money.

My nephew, Paul Coe, is somebody who I have had a lot of rows with. We argue about how the organisations ought to be run, or about what they call 'priorities' , and lots of other things. Sometimes these rows get so heated we don't talk to each other for a long time. Then something happens; someone gets sick or has an accident and there he is, on the phone, giving me the information and offering any help he can.

I guess a lot of families are like this, running hot and

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Actually there are a lot of differences between the Black community and the white community , and that boils down to there being a lot of differences between the Black families and the white families, and to the Black individuals and the white individuals.

In our community, and in our families, we have an awful lot of people who survive in different ways, and this is accepted by us, because we know people want to survive. Lots of these things are looked down upon by the white community and therefore we don't tell them unless we have to.

Blacks going to prison is one of the main ones. Some­body from just about every family is in prison. This would shock white people, so mostly we don't talk of it much, though sometimes we talk of statistics of Blacks in prison, but we don't let on about there being in there our uncle, or our brother. We don't not mention it because we are ashamed of it, only because we know the white people are not going to understand about it.

The Black community has got so little, to be shared between so many. Anybody who goes out there and gets a hold of a little bit more and brings it back and shares it around - you think we are going to be ashamed of that? That's survival. I am not saying as how I approve of stealing or the like; I am saying as how our people should not have to steal just to have something to eat, or somewhere to live.

Uncle Sid, now, he survived in his own particular way. He stayed with Father Ted Kennedy at the presbytery for four years, but his address was always - The Figtree, Gate of the Presbytery at Mount Carmel. He used to live under this tree, and loved to be in the outdoors. The police used to arrest him and he always gave the figtree as his address. The police used to try and twist it around; say he had no place of abode, and then one of the priests or nuns would go into Court for him and try to make the explanation.

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This constant tussle with the police went on for years. After a while, there came a time when he had to have a place of his own, in the city, and it makes me so sad now to think of it. We helped him find a room and he paid a fortnight's rent and received the balance of his pension. He did that for six weeks and then they found him dead in the room.

Uncle Sid died, I 'm sure, because ofbeing enclosed in the room. It killed him and it didn't take very long to do it. He didn't even get the chance to die the way he had always lived, out there in the open, or under the figtree. Now the Blacks, they understand about these things and would never have made him live in a room; but the white society goes on a different way and there is no one person who you can say is to blame.

What Uncle S id had all his life was freedom of choice about where he lived. He would come with us into the country, up to the farm at Araluen, or he would come back down to Sydney and get on the grog for a while and then he would go back up to the farm; he was an outdoors type of man. There are plenty of Aboriginal people like Uncle Sid, who don't want to be cooped up in the cities, or in a room, and who are denied this freedom. Everybody thinks about their own freedom, but wants everybody else to have to answer to others about whether they can come or go.

1 1 My work,

a way of life

Often when I am out speaking to a group of white people at a church meeting or similar, I am asked about how I came to be doing this work that I am doing now. In the early part of this book, I have tried to explain a little about my own life and the important influences upon it, but it doesn't really explain about everything.

Many things just follow on after each other and that's what has happened to me.

I began by visiting my brother and then by visiting people who he asked me to see. Some of these other people were very worried about the welfare of their relatives and asked if I could go around and see them and come back and tell how they were.

So at the same time as I was getting to know people on the inside, I was getting to know people on the outside . Very soon, and almost before I knew it, people were look­ing me up when they had a problem they needed to talk about, or might need some help with. It was as simple as that.

Looking out for ways to get money, clothes, food and things like that brought me in touch with another lot of people. I was soon very busy rushing from one lot of people to the other; having to remember everybody and figure out how I was going to get from place to place.

I don't drive, which means that either people have to

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drive me, or I have to take taxis. When I was younger, I used to go by bus, train, or tram and luckily there were fewer people around here in Sydney then. Now that there are more people, there are more offices, and no one office I can go to to take care of everything. Everything is split up into all these specialised little offices now and they don't seem to be anywhere near each other in any practical order, either.

There are also a lot more white people who are inter­ested in the Aboriginal community and want somebody to come out to talk to them. As these people also often chip in and help out with some of the immediate problems of some of the Black families, I do try to get out to talk with them and explain a few things. Some other Blacks also try to get around and talk to these groups, but there are too few of us and sometimes too many groups asking. Sometimes, too, the groups are just asking for someone to come and talk to them out of their own interest and not out of a desire to help. I 'm not saying that's bad; it would be nice if we could go and talk to everybody who was interested, but the truth is that there are few of us who are able to go.

In the early 1970s, for instance, when there was a lot of newspaper coverage about Aboriginal protests, there was also a lot of response from the white community, in that many groups wanted us to come out and talk to them.

Some of these groups just wanted to be told that we were not going to break out in riots, that we were not going to start carrying guns and other things like that which they seemed to fear so much. These groups would ring up and ask someone to come out from one of the organisations. Many of these meetings would be at night. The person who said they would go would often have to make family arrangements, get their children minded and make their own way out into white suburbs in the dark; suburbs where they had never been before.

The Black organisation would not be in any position

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to pay the person's expenses, much less pay them for their time. When they arrived at the group, they would likely be offered a cup of tea or coffee, but very few would offer to give them back the money they had spent on fares, or to pay them for their time. Some of our community's good speakers at this time had small families, and would get in a babysitter who they would pay a few dollars, and when they came home they would be very much out of pocket. It turned out that it was costing us a lot to tell these white people that we were not about to start any riots and that all events which were taking place were in self�defence. After a while, quite a lot of these speakers just wouldn't go any more, and they were criticised by white people who said we had become 'unfriendly'.

For many of us, however, it was not just a question of money; it was also a question of time. We could be here in our own community helping out, or out there in the white community not quite sure if our talking was helping any� body at all.

My work, and the work of the other Blacks who are doing things in a similar sort of way as I do, is very hard to talk about, probably because it is not a job, it is a way of life . We don't start at any particular time in our lives , or at any particular time of the day. If the door knocks in the middle of the night, we open it. If the phone rings, we answer it. Saturdays and Sundays run into each other. We can be up all night talking with some person who has that sort of problem, out at the prison at early morning, back at the Courts at 10 o'clock, at the Aboriginal Medical Service at mid�day, at the Children's Court in the afternoon, at a meeting to talk with some people about what we are doing in the evening, and likely as not, another meeting in the night.

Then when we get home at maybe midnight, there can be another phone message asking us to be somewhere

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urgently, or even someone sitting in the front room waiting all evening for the chance to talk . How can we say what we do?

When I first started visiting the prisons, I would ask for the person I wanted to speak with, and while most often I was allowed to speak with them, sometimes I was not. It was up to the superintendent at the prison to decide who could see who, but sometimes the warder or official behind the front desk would make the decision. When I later learnt the ropes, I learned that when the person on the desk made the decision, and when that decision meant I couldn't see the prisoner, I would ask to see the superintendent. Some­times this got decisions changed to my favour, and some­times it didn't.

However, I got to know most of the superintendents in the old days in just this way, and I had very little respect for any of them. Eventually they somehow began to think of me as some sort of welfare officer, and to say to each other, 'Let this welfare officer in to see Prisoner X' , but I wasn't a welfare officer, just an ordinary person, and not being paid by anyone.

When the State Penitentiaries, as they were then called (each being separately run by the superintendent in charge), were pulled together into the Corrective Services Department, the Department began issuing cards to people which were really passes to allow them to visit prisoners.

Through the mail, after the proper forms had been filled out, arrived this little piece of cardboard, which gave me the status of an Official Visitor. It wasn't the end of my problems of getting in and being allowed to see people, but it sure helped. I even became friendly, if you can consider only ever talking with people behind counters and desks as 'friendly' , with some of the people who worked in the Department. These cards with which we were issued were stamped to expire on a certain date each year, and we had to

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known in this way, they wanted to be able to go out alone, so I'd take them into the Department and introduce them to Mr McGeechan.

There has been a lot said about Mr McGeechan at the Royal Commission and in the newspapers, and I can only talk about how I found him. He was always most anxious to help me and he welcomed these other people who would go into prisons and try to help prisoners. It seemed to me that he really wanted to reform the prisons and that he was not getting much help from, say, the superintendents who had been in their jobs for many years. They didn't want to intro­duce changes; they had got used to the way things were run­ning and changes would mean upsetting themselves.

I also think there were people in the Department who didn't like him because he had new ideas. A lot of people would have liked to keep the prisons the way they were, with floggings and tortures, and everything secret. They tried to use the prisons to scare people into being good, but all they really did was to destroy a whole lot of people.

197 4 saw a big riot at Bathurst Prison. Those of us who were visiting the prisons at the time could feel it coming. Prisoners who before would talk about their grievances now didn't want to talk about them. Prison warders who had spoken quite cheerfully to us on our way in and out now would put their eyes down and not look at us. Some­thing bad was happening.

All the years that I had been visiting prisons, really bad things had been happening in them. Not that I ever saw much, but I was told a lot - by prisoners, ex-prisoners, and warders - and I also saw the prisoners' eyes, the pain, the fear, the shock and other things that one should never see in another human's eyes. It is also important to understand that a riot at any prison is not only a reflection on that one prison. Prisoners have generally been shuffled around in the prisons and most will have spent some time, for

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instance, at Grafton, which nobody will doubt had a very bad and cruel reputation.

Grafton, for instance, is the place where I first met Darcy Dugan, maybe twenty or twenty-five years ago. Mr Dugan was just starting to be famous as a very bad person, but I have never said anything like that about him because, to me, he was always polite, always talked very respectably, and I'd always have a laugh and joke with him, even in those very bad days of prison - which is more than I can say about many of the warders at the time.

Over the years, I became aware not only of the pris­oners but also many of the warders. In Grafton, in particu­lar, there were a number of warders who were intensely hated for their brutality and the prisoners' eyes went very strange when they were about. I don't like to talk about people as if they are animals, but many of the prisoners' eyes did remind me of animals' eyes when they are caught with their leg in a trap, terrified, like they know they are going to be very badly hurt or die.

Warders' eyes, also, tell a lot about themselves, as well as the connection between their eyes and their faces. Their mouths, for instance, can form into what they hope looks like a smile, but the eyes remain cold and hard. Not all warders, of course, but those who get a reputation for their brutality. Mad Alsatian Dog was such a warder at Grafton and another one called Boots, who got that name because he couldn't pass a prisoner without kicking him. There was only one warder up there who I felt was human and he soon left because he couldn't stand the brutality.

Prisoners were being transferred to Grafton, where they had a very bad time, and then were transferred back to other prisons. They were seeing more bashings, blood and even death inside than they had seen outside, whatever their crimes might have been.

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I know of one person, a young man, who lost his life in prison and when his mother went to visit him, she was told that he wasn't allowed to have any visitors. He was already dead, yet the warders told her only that he couldn't have visitors; he was already laid out by then.

After the Bathurst riots, I again spoke to many of the prisoners and some were transferred down here to Sydney and put into maximum security in the prison complex. During this time, I spoke to Mr McGeechan a lot and he was a very worried man. People in the prison system were doing things, and he wasn't able to find out what was being done by who and to whom. He couldn't be everywhere at once, and every reform he was trying to introduce was being resisted by the very people who worked for him.

Some very strange things happened about this time, that I was not able to ask him about, and that I had to make up my own mind about. Some prisoners, transferred down from Bathurst after the riots, were then placed in maximum security in Long Bay, and I was told by the warders when I went to visit that they had been charged with rioting. Some of these prisoners also were not nearly finished the sen­tences they were originally given.

Yet, within two months of visiting them in maximum security at Long Bay, I had noticed quite a few were now back on the streets, on parole. At first I thought that one young man I spotted outside must have escaped, but no, he told me, and then the officials backed him up, that he had received a parole. Whatever had happened to these new charges which had been laid against him, as well as the rest of his old sentence, I had no idea, and didn't want to ask in case it stirred up trouble.

Already there was talk of an inquiry and then later talk of a Royal Commission. It struck me that the prison system must have a fair bit to hide to be turning out people so that

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they couldn't be interviewed as prisoners. Those men who were still inside would feel they had very little, if anything, to lose by giving evidence, but a man outside on the street would feel that he had his freedom to lose.

In early 1976, I received a letter from Mr McGeechan asking me to come to his office. Father Allen Mithen and I went in on the appointed day and I was photographed and thumbprinted. Mr McGeechan then thanked me for all the work I had already done and presented me with this plastic card sealed into which was the coloured photo and a card giving me the status of an Accredited Visitor. He also gave me a metal shield which showed the emblem of the Depart� ment of Corrective Services for the State of New South Wales, which is the same shield that the warders wear on their hats or their clothes.

I was receiving what was known then as the 'Gold Pass' , and on the card where was written 'Expiry Date' had been typed 'N/ N for 'Not Applicable'. As Mr McGeechan explained to me, the Pass was good for the rest of my life, and would never need to be renewed again.

I am sure that, as he handed it to me in this pleasant and simple little ceremony, and as he took me and Father Allen Mithen off to lunch to celebrate, he had no idea of what would become of that badge and card, that ' lifetime' Gold Pass.

I was very proud of that shield. I carried it in a little wallet along with the card. Here I was, a Black person who can't read or write, and I had managed to work hard enough to impress a Government Department to give me recog� nition. I showed it to lots of other Blacks, hoping that it would inspire them to know that they could overcome not having any education, or hoping that those who did have some education would try and do one better.

When I went out to the prisons, I would take out this

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little wallet and show it and I would be allowed in. After a while, I began to be a little bolder. Instead of letting them take me into where I would be able to speak with a prisoner through a wire mesh, I asked if l could have a little room to speak with them in. Of course, sometimes the warder would tell me that the person I wanted to see was a lifer and that he was very very dangerous, but mostly I would not accept that for an answer and I ended up being able to speak to the person, sitting down in a room with the warder wait­ing outside .

Despite their fears, or spoken fears, for my safety, I never met any trouble in this way. In fact, we managed to have a much more human touch in this way. I could take a hold of the hand of the man I was speaking to and in that way let him know I cared about what was happening to him, and he in turn would most often then let me know what was happening to him. I could give him a smoke and we could sit and talk like two human beings, not like one of us was a caged animal in a zoo.

I could say, 'Are you sure you are telling me the truth, now, lad?' , and the man would look up and his eyes would tell me whether he was or he wasn't.

Also I would show him my badge and he would know that even though I carried the Department's badge, the very Department that was keeping him a prisoner, I was on his side, and most often these Black men would beam with pride for me and therefore for our race.

After this had worked well for a while, I began asking to see more than one prisoner at a time in a room. I was hav­ing no particular talks with Mr McGeechan at this time, but I think the warders thought maybe I was, because when I asked for things like this, they often gave them to me, even though they clucked about it and disliked doing it.

So I came then to have groups in rooms and soon went

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on to ask for all the Aboriginal prisoners to be brought together so that I could talk to them all together. There we would sit, lifers, short-timers, all having a smoke and a bit of a laugh and joke, just like anybody, and I hoped in this way that a little bit of what was normal outside would stay on them when they walked back out to the compound or their cells.

As it turned out, many prisoners when they had fin­ished their time, and I met them again outside, talked about these meetings with a lot of fondness. It also gave me the chance to find out what was happening.

Once we were all together in the room, I would ask, 'Are we all in here? ' The prisoners would look around amongst themselves for a few minutes and then say, 'No, young XYZ is not here .' Then I would go to the door and ask the warder who would be standing around outside, 'Why is XYZ not here? ' He would then find out, and give me a reasonably good explanation or he would have to go and fetch the forgotten prisoner. I can't say that they were deliberately holding back one or two men, but sometimes it would feel like they were, either to get back at me or to pun­ish the men left out.

During all this time, small changes began happening in the prisons. A few chosen prisoners were allowed out to go to places to study, which had never happened before . They weren't Aboriginal prisoners, of course, but they were pris­oners and it seemed a good time to push for some things to happen for our lads, too.

I had been lucky in arranging for some musical instru­ments to be loaned to some Aboriginal men in prisons. Sometimes they were just scrounged instruments and other times instrument shops let us have cheap or fixed up broken ones for free. Somehow, a little band was put together and they were playing very well together, too.

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It was coming up National Aborigines' Day, which is the second Friday in July every year, and I began to wonder if it might not be possible for this band to play at the National Aborigines' Day Ball in Sydney. Well, it is not the same sort of Ball as some of the grand Balls I've seen on tele� vision and the like, but Grace Brothers Auditorium along there just off Broadway had been hired for the occasion. When I put up the suggestion to the Department, I was sur� prised to find that they said 'yes'.

A few weeks before the Ball, the prisoners who were to play were brought together at Parramatta Prison; brought down from whichever prison they were in around the country, so that they were able to have rehearsals together. This was actually the first time that they could all play together as a band. The prisons wouldn't let them keep the instruments, which meant that we had to travel out to the prison every time they had a chance to practice, and take in Father Alien Mithen' s car the drums, electric guitars, ampli� fiers, speakers; the lot.

Betty Fisher, who had been a very talented Aboriginal singer who performed all the way around the country, was running the National Black Theatre in Redfern at the time. I spoke to her about what we were trying to do and she was so interested that she began coming out to the prison every time and helping them to get their act together.

I was very glad that we had been able to get all the pris� oners together at Parramatta, because I had been having some trouble with visiting at Goulburn. Goulburn had put on a big concert for the prisoners; put on their own music, and then a big auditorium was built there and the prisoners began to have their own rock concerts.

Some of the warders put on a stink and somebody reported me to the Commissioner, who was, of course, Mr McGeechan. I had gone up to Goulburn this one time with

88

two Catholic nuns and we weren't allowed in. They said I had been abusive to the warders and also that it wasn't safe for a Black woman and two nuns to be in there. That was pretty funny because I had been visiting in there for years, before even some of these young warders had been born, and all of a sudden, it was not safe for me.

I asked Mr McGeechan if I could see the report that had been sent to him about me and he just said not to worry about it; that it would blow over. He said that the nuns could go back up there and visit through the mesh grilles, but that I should stay away for a while. I 've only been back a few times since and I had a very interesting conversation with the then superintendent, Mr Jack Barry.

Mr Barry told me he couldn't possibly let me in; that he would have a strike on his hands if he did. I said, 'You are not giving me a chance to defend myself, are you? Wouldn't it be fair all round if you showed me the report and who put me on paper? ' He said that it wouldn't be worth his job. The warders would go on strike, and then everybody in the prison would suffer. I knew it for a fact that even those pris­oners who I wasn't visiting would be made to suffer if l tried to look for justice, so I just never went on with it.

At Parramatta, though, we had a different superin­tendent, a Mr Bush. He was, I thought, giving us a fair go, letting the prisoners get together for practice, and being very encouraging.

As it turned out, getting near the date when the band was to play outside, a young Black girl who was doing a fair bit of writing for the newspapers had got the attention of the band. When we suggested to them that they could have some publicity about their band and about how they were going out to play at the National Aborigine' s Day Ball, they thought it was a great idea, but wanted to be interviewed by this young Black girl.

I told her about their request and she went off to see

89

some friends of hers at the Daily Mirror. The Daily Mirror agreed to run the story, put her onto it and assigned a pho­tographer to work with her. The Daily Mirror also rang the Department of Corrective Services to get permission for a reporter and a photographer to enter Parramatta Prison to do this story.

The next day this girl and the photographer turned up at the prison and when they went up to the desk to be allowed to enter, they were told they would have to see the superintendent. It became obvious that the desk and the superintendent had been told to expect a reporter and a photographer, but had not been told that the reporter was a Black .

The superintendent took the girl and the white male photographer into his office and gave them instructions on how they could take photos and how the story would lean, but didn't try to make many restrictions, or any at all from what I could learn. They were then led by a warder into the hall where the band was to rehearse . All seemed to be going well.

I introduced them around and they were just saying 'hello' to the prisoners who were tuning up their instru· ments, when the girl was called to the front door of the hall. I looked through the window and saw her walking away from the hall with the superintendent, Mr Bush, talking to her. After a few minutes, someone else came and spoke to the photographer, asking him to also go outside for a few words. He, too, didn't come back.

We waited and waited and after a long while it began to dawn on everybody that they were not coming back and the prisoners began to shout out of the windows and be hostile to the warders passing. I had to remind them that the Ball was only a day away and that even at this late stage, they could ruin it, so they quietened down and began their rehearsal.

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Later that evening, I spoke to the young girl, who was very embarrassed by the incident. The superintendent had gone back on his word and had run her out of the gaol and then asked the photographer to leave as there was no point in his taking pictures as that girl wasn't going to be allowed to do the story.

She had gone back into the city, to the office of the Daily Mirror, who had rung the Department of Corrective Services and been told that, yes, they did have permission to be in the prison, they were sorry that they had been told to leave, but that if they went back out there, they would be allowed in.

It was, of course, too late to return to Parramatta to do the interview, write up the story, and have it to the papers in time. The photographer also was almost finished his shift. The superintendent had managed to ruin the first assign­ment that the Daily Mirror had given to a Black, and to my knowledge, they have never since offered to run a story written by a Black or give an assignment to any other Blacks .

The only saving thing in the whole episode, we learned later, was that the superintendent had told a num­ber of warders to go into the hall and tell this young Black girl to leave the prison, and they, knowing what was going on, had refused . They had kept right on refusing to the point where the superintendent himself, Mr Bush, had to come to the hall himself, and do his own dirty work which was very small consolation indeed. The Ball made history. It was the first time a band had come out of a prison at night to play like this. We hired evening suits with matching frilly shirts for the men and shoes, and we bought the other things they would need such as socks, underclothes and hankies. Father Allen Mithen and Betty Fisher both helped chase up the money for these things.

So there they were on the great occasion, being driven

9 1

down Parramatta Road in a paddy,wagon. We had been told that if we had our own people there, the Ball wouldn't be swamped with police. Well, we didn't need 'our people' there in the sense of acting like police, and instead we had as many members of the prisoners' families as we could, and also there were so many highly respected members of the Black community attending the Ball.

All the Black women and girls at the Ball looked like queens and princesses in their dresses , with their hair and eyes so shining and the hall was filled with a sense of excite, ment. When the prisoners walked in all dressed up to the nines, all eyes turned to watch them. They were very ner, vous, as this was the first time for many years that they had been in the same room with women of their own age in a social setting.

They put the equipment on,stage and tuned it, with, out too many fumbles and then began to play quiet num, hers to get the Ball moving along in the right mood. More people were arriving, amongst them the Superintendent of Parramatta Prison, Mr Bush, and his wife, and the Corn, missioner of Corrective Services, Mr McGeechan, and his wife. Once the band was playing, however, they lost all trace of their nervousness and gave themselves up to the music they were making. The band consisted of two Maori men, an Italian, two white caucasians and two Aboriginal men.

During the breaks, the men were allowed to mingle with the guests and most went to sit at the tables of their families. There were many emotional reunions, as the men were able to put their arms around and hug their own mothers, sisters and brothers, without that steel mesh grille that had always come between them during prison visits. There were a lot of wet eyes there that night.

I was very happy to see the men offer their mothers and sisters their arms and escort them onto the dance floor. Here they held them very carefully, like they were china and

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might break, and gently glided with them around the hall. Seeing how well things were going, Mr McGeechan

made a speech, and I made a speech of thanks - to the authorities, to the prisoners and to God - and not long after that, Mr McGeechan left and the music began to rock out. Now it was the young people' s turn and they danced all the latest dances and everybody had a very good time.

Of course the newspapers were critical and said that lifers shouldn't be allowed to come out and mix with people and all that. But the way everybody behaved that night would have moved even the stoniest heart if they had been there to see it.

There were no ' incidents' and at the end of the even, ing the men climbed back into the wagon and were taken back to Parramatta Prison. It was an occasion that they would talk about and re, live in their quiet hours for a long time to come.

Prisoners are people and unless they are insane (and in that case they should not be in prisons but in hospitals for sick people) they respond just the same as everybody else to the security of their own families. It is very cruel to keep young men away from their mothers, sisters, wives, year after year, until just the thought of being close enough to touch them causes them to become very very nervous.

The prison authorities could bend, and did bend. There are a lot of lessons that could be learned from this night. Women or men, Black or white - people are influ, enced by the presence of their families.

The idea of prisons shouldn't be to get men used to liv, ing in an all,male environment and what that does to them, but to get them used to acting responsibly in the world environment and this can be done by setting up the right conditions.

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We were able to prove this at the Ball and on other occasions, and we could prove it again any time - if we had to.

12 VVatting for change

For over twenty years, my life was filled up with all sorts of interesting things, but in a way, it could be said that I wasn't getting anywhere at all . I was going into prisons visiting and being called upon by quite a lot of different sorts of govern� ment people and Departments to help, and all the time I was just receiving the invalid pension.

Because of the many people in need that I was dealing with and travelling in and out to see Government Depart� ments all the time, I was always spending my own little bit of money on fares or on other people and getting into all sorts of trouble in my own life because I couldn't pay my bills .

When I was younger, I used to have to jump goods trains to get around a lot and I thought myself lucky when I had the few bob for the fare and could sit in a seat in an ordinary passenger train. My electricity was cut off so many times I 've lost count and my rent was always dragging behind and I don't like to talk about the trouble that caused me.

There was a policeman who had been in Cowra when I was young, and who had been called, up there, 'Uncle Abe'. It is very unusual for a policeman to be on familiar terms like that with the Aboriginal people in a town, but he was quite a decent bloke. He was transferred down to Sydney and after a while became Inspector Foster in charge of Newtown Police Station.

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He had known me for quite a long time then, and knew the sorts of things that I was doing. He used to encourage other police officers to call on me when there was a problem regarding the Black community, such as someone who might have a warrant out for their arrest. This would give me the chance to get in touch with the per� son, and in a lot of cases, I would go with this person to the police station when they gave themselves up.

When the person went before the Court, the fact that they had given themselves up would be brought up in the Court, and I was often called upon then to explain the person's circumstances and maybe even the circumstances of how they had surrendered themselves which goes down much better on their record. Often it wasn't that the person was trying to get away from the Law, but rather that they did not understand the Law and were frightened by it. Some� times they were not even aware that there was a warrant out for them, or even what a warrant meant.

Apart from that arrangment with the Newtown Police Station, for which they paid me in courtesy, I suppose, I also did work for the Child Welfare Department. Barbara Burgess, who was the head of the regional office in New� town and with whom I had a long association, would arrange for me to be notified if there was a problem regarding an Aboriginal child. Sometimes I would be asked to locate the parents of a child and again I often found that the parents were afraid of this Government institution, which was why they were staying away from it and not coming forward and claiming their child. The Welfare Department had a ter� rible name amongst the Aboriginal people for coming and taking children away. It was like a punishment that hap� pened to people when they were already having a hard time because they had no money.

Sometimes, though, the Child Welfare people had come by a child because its parents were in prison, or dead,

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or sick, and they wanted help in placing the child with rela­tives who might be in a position to look after it. I would look into this for them. I always lived in the Newtown/ Stanmore/Erskineville area, so they could contact me quite easily and I was also handy to look for the families as most of the Aboriginal people lived around this area too.

At the time I had no idea of reward and no idea of poli­tics. I often wished things would get better, but could see no way that this could happen. I suppose I felt that I couldn't make things better and I was waiting for white people to change things. However, the whole time I was waiting for changes to come through white people, nothing ever hap­pened and things remained the same. The Aboriginal com­munity was getting bigger and I was dealing with more and more people, but it was the same problems year after year, and often the same faces, with some new ones thrown in too.

Sometimes I thought of how lonely I was in a private sort of way, when I saw others getting married, or went to their weddings or christenings, and my sisters' and brother's families were growing, too. Oh, yes, I was sur­rounded by people and in stress I could talk to my sister Ethel, but she had her own large family to care for and there was no particular 'one' for me.

Much earlier, years after my marriage broke up, I met a nice man. He was a Fij ian and I was very much in love with him for a while. I even spoke to my brother about the possi­bility of marrying him. But even though I wasn't a practis­ing Catholic, I was a Catholic and I didn't believe in divorce, and eventually my sister, Harriet Patricia, had an argument with him in the street and told him that he was wasting his time, to get out of my life and leave me alone; that I would never divorce my husband and marry him, which ended that little affair.

I didn't really think of marrying again after that. I don't

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think anybody would have put up with me, anyway, what with the way I was now used to living. I was free to trip arou11d to the gaols, first following my brother and later just visiting all the other friends I had made in the gaols . Nobody would want a wife who was getting around the country the whole time. Of course, these were different times, before women's liberation and all that, and maybe things could be different now for another young girl who is doing the sort of work I was doing then.

The work I was doing became my whole life, and I was glad that I was on the pension because it freed me up to be able to get around and do these things. The epilepsy that I had always been so afraid of in my younger life became its own t·eward in my middle life .

After a while, I moved back into the practising Cath­olic life . I don't think I had ever moved away from God, because I prayed and talked to Him, and with St Martin de Pounes, and I was also guided by my Grandfather who spok� to me often and showed me which way to go.

So I just came back to the Church and began to go regult�.rly to Mass. When I was alone and had a problem or something worrying me, I did have somewhere to go and someone to talk to. I went to church. Once again, I began to draw great strength from my religion. I knew it wasn't what you'd say . . . pure Roman Catholic belief . . . because it was mixed up with everything my Grandfather had ever taught me, and everything else that I had come to believe, but I knew God would understand what I was about. I felt I was living His Commandments, and that He would bless me, and His Commandments were in line with the ideas that my Grandfather had also given to me.

It is not the Catholic religion that is out of plumb with Aboriginal religion, it is the way Catholics practise their religi<m, or don't practise it. That is what chases so many Blacks away from the Catholic Church. They can't get used

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to these people who preach one thing and yet do another as soon as they walk out of the church.

Of course, when I got back into the swing of going to church and mixing with Catholics again, I wasn't the same timid girl I had been in earlier times. Now, after Mass, when the priest came by me and asked, 'Is there anything I can do? ' , I would reply, 'Well, yes, Father, there is. Do you know that family around here who need . . .' and the priest would get a bit of a surprise, but we would talk about it. By that time I had developed an attitude of 'never let an oppor­tunity go past'.

For a while I had been going to the Salvation Army churches and my sister and I even used to get out on the streets and belt the tambourines with the lasses and then march down to the church. I was sort of getting used to playing a much more active role in the church life , if you can understand what I mean. The quiet time was still there, but I was also used to doing something else around churches, other than be quiet.

So coming back into the Church was not actually a quiet sort of thing for me to do either. I don't suppose I even would have come back, if it hadn't been for the prisons. I was in a prison one day and a prisoner who was having a dif­ficult time asked me what religion I was. As I always answered to this question, I said, 'M.R.C. - Mad Roman Catholic' , and the prisoner surprised me by asking me to go with him to the chapel. So there I was, kneeling beside a prisoner in the small prison chapel, after all those years, and it dawned on me that I felt like I had come home after being away a long, long time.

It is strange, though, that old habits die hard, or never die, because that is exactly what happens to me when I go back to Cowra. All over the country, I can thump up to the front door of a convent and introduce myself to the nuns or

99

the priests there and have a good talk about what is happen, ing or not happening in their area. But as soon as I hit my own old home town, I am once again the person I was when I was there before.

Since I have become well-known, the nuns feel strange about my coming to the back door of the Convent in Cowra, but I would feel strange coming the the front door after not having been allowed to, all of those early years. They have asked me to come by the front door, but I can't.

In the church in Cowra, I sit where we always sat, in the third last row at the back , because that is where we Blacks had to sit so as not to upset the white parishioners. Once we got used to it, it suited us, too, because we didn't like to be stared at in our raggedy clothes. We always had clean and ironed clothes for church; we had flat irons in those days because we didn't have electricity. We even had ribbons in our hair and so forth, but they still stared and we hated to be stared at. Cowra was, and still is, a very racist part of New South Wales. Only recently have Aboriginal people been able to get jobs there, for instance.

13 Working for change

I was never aware of politics in all my early years and I never saw how they would fit in with the Aboriginal problems, or at least the ones that I was dealing with every day.

We always knew who was Prime Minister, but it had no meaning to me. I even knew when Mr Holt was Prime Min­ister, and when he got drowned. I heard it on the news and people talked about it a little, but it wasn't connected to me in any way. Prime Ministers and the Parliament and all that; it didn't seem to have anything to do with Aboriginal people.

We did know that there was a Welfare Board, because it controlled our whole lives, and I also knew that there were Blacks who were out to tear that Welfare Board right up. I thought that that would be a very good thing, but I didn't know how they were going to do it. One such person was Faith Bandler, who I met in the early 1960s. We didn't have much of a chance to talk, as we would just run into each other at different places , like the dances that were being organised to raise money for the Aboriginal Aus­tralian Fellowship.

We met on a different level than the work which I later found out she had been doing. At the dances, we were both just trying to make sure things ran smoothly, and that everybody paid their five bob at the door and had a good time inside .

1 0 1

There were young kids who used to think that the people who were organising the dances were just putting all the money into their own pockets. One would come in and pay, and then run upstairs and chuck the ticket out the win� dow to friends waiting outside, who would then try to use the ticket to get in without paying. I had an idea about how the money was being used, because I was also needing money all the time to help people out, and I reckoned that their organisation needed the money for about the same sorts of things. Of course, I knew most of these kids very well, having met them in their families and in all other dif� ferent places, so I used to stand by the door and sort them out as they came in. I 'd know if it wasn't the same one who bought the ticket now trying to get in on it even if they were twin brothers.

I didn't know Faith well, but I ran into her in these sorts of places and we had snatches of conversations. I had a lot of respect for her.

Charlie Perkins was another one who was working in politics , but I didn't know that, either, then. I met him first in a hotel we used to call the 'Bunches' , which was in Sussex Street and had a very bad name. I was going around talking to people to find out how everyone was going and trying to locate some people I was on the lookout for, when I met Charlie, who I callc:d Mr Perkins tb.�!l, and he:W:asi_qlng ar��na

__!:al��..Q_people too. H_� w:as .tr.yin.g to ,get peorle

into the frame of mind to do somethin� about. racisllla.!:Q disci�ri'anCitalking abouuheir rights. ' - ··

Then I started running into him in other places, like the Rock and Roll , which is another hotel at Woolloomooloo where overseas Blacks who work on boats that dock in the area come to drink . Many Aboriginal youths, both boys and girls, go down there to mix with Blacks from other places, but over the years it has always had a very rough reputation, too.

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Charlie then began talking about a 'freedom ride' , and when I asked him what it meant, he told me it was to chal­lenge racism and discrimination up the North Coast. Then I didn't see him for a while and the next thing I knew, Abor­iginal people everywhere started talking about the Freedom Ride being on. Almost all of the young Blacks supported him and agreed with what he was doing, but the older Aboriginal people were very frightened. They thought he might shake things up and the white people would get vety angry and come down hard on Aborigines. They had seen these sorts of things and knew how easily it could happen. When Charlie and the Freedom Ride went to Moree and really began to open up to the public the things that were happening against Blacks there, Aborigines everywhere were talking and were very scared.

I felt very lonely for Charlie , because he was just one Black man, surrounded by white university students who didn't know really what being Black was about. These white students, when it was all over, could slip back into being nobody and move around safely in the world, but I knew that it would mark Charlie forever and that he would be the one remembered. If the racists or the police were going to get anyone, he would be the one they were after, and it wouldn't matter how much later or how much time passed.

As it turned out, that is exactly what did happen. He became a hero to a whole lot of people in the Black com­munity, and Blacks all over Australia spoke his name with pride. But while a few white people agreed with what he was trying to do, a whole lot more did not. They began to use his name as an insulting name to call any Black person who was trying to do anything for Aboriginal people. 'Do you think you are another Charlie Perk ins?' , they would sneer.

Charlie went back to the university, and when he graduated, all Black people including myself felt we had moved up a little rung of the ladder.

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I met Faith Bandler and her husband, Hans, again, this time with Gordon Bryant, a big man with white hair. I heard he was a big man in politics. Faith had been telling me about the Referendum ( 1 967), but it didn't make much sense to me.

Well, it is true that we Aboriginal people had never been allowed to vote, but apart from a few such as Jack Pattern and Bill Onus, who had been publishing a small newspaper called 'Abo News' when my Father was around, most of us had never thought about it much, or talked about it. Myself, I had never been allowed to go near a hotel, or have a drink, but it never crossed my mind that it could be any other way. As far as being a citizen, it wasn't a word I even thought about.

So there was Faith telling me that I had just become a citizen, and that now Aboriginal people could vote. I was very glad that these things had been fought for and won, but it would be quite a few years before I had the slightest inkling really of how important these things were for us.

I said to Faith, 'What, I'm becoming a citizen at my age?' , and she laughed and replied, 'Yes, well what about me . . . at my age?' If I had only known!

As we moved into the seventies, though, more and more Aboriginal people began talking about Black rights. I had heard by then that in America, Blacks were fighting in the streets, killing and being killed in the struggle to get their rights. I'd heard about America, of course, but it was so far away that what I was hearing about those Blacks over there was not connected in any way to the Blacks I knew and who were around me.

I became worried that Blacks here talking about Black rights might be mixed up by white people to think we were going to start doing the same as the Blacks in America. So, in a way, I was upset by this political talk, and in another way, I began to feel it had to happen.

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Things were not getting any better. The prison system was still eating up young Black men as soon as they reached manhood, and spitting them out years later as broken down men. Younger girls and boys were put into institutions and I was going crazy trying to keep up with where everybody was being sent.

We had heard, too, that the white reserve managers were being moved off of reserves, but they still weren't gone, and they were still controlling people; not letting families see each other, or go into town or to the doctors.

Aboriginal people were really having a terrible time, but I suppose I was so busy running around trying to take care of the little bits that I could see, that I had no time to look at the whole picture of how things were . In my own family, amongst my nieces and nephews, I began to hear very angry talk, and it was also round the hotels when I was going in there to look for people, I could feel something coming to the boil.

I had, by this time, been just about all around New South Wales and I knew that conditions for Blacks were not good anywhere . But I was always on certain jobs, and I went into places to get these jobs done. I had not much time to just look around at everything about how Aboriginal people were living.

I had also been having a bit of success in the Catholic Church, where I was by now on the Advisory Council to the Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Sydney, advising on things to do with Aboriginal people. The Catholic Church had paid my fares to fly up to Darwin, the very first trip I ever made outside of New South Wales, and this had been in the late 1960s. I had been met in Darwin and taken to Port Keats and Bathurst Island. I had seen a lot of wonder­ful things, such as full-blood tribal men who spoke thirteen or more languages. I had been very embarrassed when I

- arrived, because I had never known about the Northern

105

Territory, and about the Black people who are related to me through our Aboriginality who live there.

I was only there seven days, and it was far too short. I no sooner arrived than I was gone again. It took me a long time to connect the things up there with the things I had seen all my life in New South Wales .

I met a white woman when I was walking in the street up there in Darwin, and she said, 'Hot, isn't it?' It was hot, much hotter than what I was used to, always having lived in the south, and when I agreed with her that it was hot, she turned around and said, 'It's funny that all you coloureds can't take the heat like the natives.'

Well, I was never so insulted in my life, because if any, body is going to say I 'm not Black, and if anyone is going to put up a barrier between me and the tribal people, it might be the tribal people themselves, who never have, but it sure can't be the likes of this white woman on the street.

She had even asked me if I was 'MumShirl - that woman I saw on the TV - I thought it was you' , so she knew who she was talking to and she was just lucky I didn't haul off right then and give her a smack in the mouth.

When I thought, back in New South Wales, abeut how angry I had been at this woman, and about all the other times when I had been angry at the ignorance of white people, I understood how these young angry Blacks felt. But I didn't feel like that all the time, and it was hard to realise that they felt that way, angry, most of the time.

I began to hear white people start calling these young Black kids 'militants' and 'radicals'. I had no idea of what these words meant, but they were obviously supposed to be insults.

I was seeing the kids in another way. My nephew, Paul Coe, and Gordon Briscoe, talking about the need to get lawyers to represent Aboriginal people in Courts. Up until that time, Aboriginal people were being shuffled through._

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the Courts so fast, and they were not having lawyers, and they were too frightened to say they weren't guilty. So they ended up doing time, even when they hadn't done anything wrong, and no one was keeping a check on anything. The police were having a field day, especially in Redfern, where they would just drive in and load up paddy,wagons full of Blacks, and charge them with being drunk. Quite a lot of the people arrested like this were not only not drunk, but they didn't even drink, ever.

So these young Blacks, Paul and Gordon, Gary Williams, Gary Foley - these radicals and militants as they were being called - had started moving around trying to get some lawyers to take some cases of Aboriginal people . They had no money to pay for lawyers, so they were going to have to try to get some lawyers who would work for free.

Professor Hal Wooten who was then Dean of the Law School at New South Wales University, and the late Paul Landa who became the State Minister for Education, and other people who were working in the law, started helping to get this service underway. At first there were meetings held in offices at the university, and Blacks, lawyers, and people from Civil Liberties were going down to Redfern hotels where the police were making mass arrests of Blacks . As the whole operation grew bigger, i t moved into a build, ing at 142 Regent Street, Redfern, and was called the Abor, iginal Legal Service. From the first day it opened its doors, right up to the present, the A.L.S . has done its best to get justice for Blacks in front of the law.

This Service was no sooner underway than Gordon Briscoe said to me, after we had visited an old man who had spent all day at the hospital but had come away still not hav, ing seen a doctor and who didn't have money for either doe, tors or medicine, 'If we can do it with the law, we can do it with the medicals.'

Another meeting, but we didn't know any doctors

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either. Gordon had sent a letter to a doctor whose name he had seen in the newspapers, a New Zealand man who had gone to the Northern Territory and come back and made some statements about the bad way Aboriginals' eyes were up there, and how they could be saved.

He turned up late for the meeting and it was the first time I met him. His name was Professor F.C. Hollows, or Fred Hollows, depending on how I feel. These same young Blacks were running this meeting, and alongside of them they were helped by Ross McKenna (who gave up a little coffee shop he was running in Regent Street so that the Aboriginal Medical Service would have somewhere to start), and Gordon' s wife, Norma, a young white English girl who was the mother of his children. Sister Dulcie Flowers, an Aboriginal woman who was a theatre sister at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and Eisa Dixon, wife of Chika Dixon, were also right in there helping in these early days.

After so many years when things had been going on much the same, suddenly there were lots of things happen, ing, new changes; it was exciting and very busy. Sometimes being involved in these things would make me feel very strange, like I had been drinking champagne, things were happening that fast. White people were calling these young Blacks names, such as 'radical' and 'militant' , and hoping that they were insulting, but when they started to get things done like this, there were no names great enough to call them, I thought.

Because of all the publicity, a lot of white people came forward to help. I met some funny people at this time, and many of them later became good friends not only to me, but to many Blacks . Barbara Burgess, who I had already known for a very long time, and Barry Francis, whom I had met in Cowra also many years before (and over whom, at this first meeting, I had chucked a bucket of water - because he was a Welfare officer venturing onto Erambie Mission) were

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working as a team at Newtown Child Welfare - these two gave the first bit of money that the Aboriginal Medical Ser� vice ever received. I thanked them then, and I thank them again now, because I really feel that their donation made me know in my heart that we were going to succeed alright.

Very early in the piece, I was sitting in the A.M.S.'s tiny office, and this funny man came in and said he was a 'head� shrinker'. I had only a faint idea about what that was supposed to mean, and I thought he might also mean that anyone who was working for Blacks for free might have small heads. As it turned out, he was Doctor Harry Freeman, and he came in regularly and worked for free, week after week, month after month. He also became a close friend, and even when he moved out of Sydney, I kept wondering if he still had that motorbike that he rode into the A.M.S . on that first night.

Blacks came rushing forward to help, too. Billy Craigie, Ilana Doolan, T ony Koorie, Sol Bellear, Norma Williams, oh, so many, and they all worked for free and have never really been thanked. Gordon Briscoe, who did so much in those early days, had a little Volkswagen and was always needing money to put petrol in it. That little car drove us all around the suburbs, out to people' s homes in the middle of the night, so many midnight trips . . . .

Yes, everybody was forever having blues, and Aborigi� nal people were not yet used to working together in this way, but, my gawd, things were getting done. I don't know that anybody slept in those days. It seems we were on the streets all day and all night.

We were hustling up help and money and bandages and chairs and then beds and just about anything we could hustle up to help people. It was a very busy time. The police were not letting up, and police cars used to cruise past both the A.L.S. and the A.M.S . all day and all night, staring at us nasty out of their car windows. It is no wonder that these

1 09

young Blacks, far from sitting around and feeling good about their successes, just got angrier and angrier.

The papers were writing about us, and people started coming by with gifts of money. There have been a number of old pensioners who made a point of coming by every pension day and leaving a dollar to help us. Anonymous small donations were arriving in the mail and this allowed us to buy some of the medicines we needed for people.

-c-vent:U:aTIY the Federal Government had to give in; they had to send us some money. We could prove we were doing a good job in both these Services, and even though the people that the Government wanted to call 'radical' were running them, they had to admit we were getting medical help and legal help to people who had never had it before.

---w'ith the small money grant from the Government, we were able to start paying some of our staff a small wage. It was surprising that doctors and lawyers were willing to work for the little that we could then pay them. This made for more publicity and more members of the public sent money. It was at about this time that we got a letter from a man whose name we didn't then know, and it contained a small donation. This man, Neville Wran, went on to become Premier of New South Wales, but unfortunately it seems like he has forgotten all about the Aboriginal Medical Service from. that day on.

14 Politics

It was early in 1972 that a little handful of Blacks went up to Canberra in the middle of the night, on January 26th, Aus­tralia Day, and planted a small beach umbrella in front of Parliament House. On this they hung a sign, saying Abor­iginal Embassy, which was to mean that we were treated like strangers in our own country.

This was the beginning of a whole new and different road for me, another education, and learning about politics . If I was going to think of a sign along the road of my life that marked, for me, the beginning of militant Black Power poli­tics, that sign would have printed on it - Aboriginal Embassy.

I don't want to give the impression that these Black kids just jumped up from somewhere and started doing something. Many were related to me, and I had known them all their lives. In their own way, each had been striving to achieve something, had been fighting to find and hold down jobs, or get into something for their education. They talked about their futures and about careers, but in the main, none were open to them.

They had hung around the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs, in George Street, helping anyone they could, and trying to keep each other's morale up .

Suddenly, though, there were Aboriginal organis­ations into which they could thrust their youthful energy,

1 1 1

work to be done that would help burn up their anger and frustration. It was this working together with one purpose that was new, not their trying to do anything at all .

A lot of what was going on was beyond me. As soon as the Aboriginal Embassy went up, some of the best Black radical brains in the country started coming to Sydney and Canberra. These hothead kid!4-witb_r_a22ed_k�f!�d l(lQg�ords �n.d knew what they were talking�ved

· · them, they made me feel so proud the way they went o_n� · They had midnight meetings around the place, talking

about where the worst conditions were and what might be done about them. They tied the conditions into politics, and were able to tell me who was responsible for what, which Minister was in charge of this, or that. I could feel a whole new level developing.

I must say I was, at times, a little jealous that I could not join them in the way in which I would have liked. It was not that they kept me, or anybody, away, but rather that they talked in ways and with words I couldn't understand, and even when I sat in on meetings, I often didn't know what was being spoken about. They did always tell me what was going on, what actions were being planned.

As I said before, a � people became afraid of these young BJacks. _They would see the demonstrations on tllelr-televisions and many: of the kids now grew their hair lQDg; some wore afros and many wore red land-rights head bands.

Many organisations that had, all these years since Captain CoOl<; taken no notice of Blacks, suddenly wanted someone to come out and explain to them what was hap­pening. Blacks began addressing large meetings in halls and sometimes in the streets. Builders' labourers and the com.:­munists started tur��& �p to Ji��e�-���v�� ������et-.. ings around Redfern .

.. .. -.-----�- ..,..,.- �- - - __ ,_.;.

1 12

But many were afraid to ask these angry young Blacks to speak to them and I would go and talk to them instead. They would ask me because I didn't fit in with the image, but then many would get a shock because I now had it in my mind to back these young kids up all the way. I would do it in my own way, through the churches, and still carrying my rosary beads; but I wouldn't have what the militants called 'a soft line' or an 'Uncle Tom talk'.

I still kept visiting the prisons and telling the Black prisoners what was going on outside . Everyone began to feel like they were expecting changes. The Aboriginal Medical Service told me to give up my pension and they would pay me fifty dollars a week, which was a lot more than I was getting on the pension.

By this time, I had rented and put my name down for a few houses, in Stanmore and Erskineville, and I had my own family and groups of unmarried mothers and children living in them. Even with their pensions all pooled to help each other out, there was always money shortage, such as lump bills like gas or electricity. In winter, especially, the children would need coats and sweaters. I was trying to encourage these young ones to get on well and stay at the schools, so they needed uniforms and proper coats, not always secondhand. I told them they could become like the Black militants if they stayed on and learned their lessons. So the new money I earned was going the same way as the pensions had been going all those years.

Just as suddenly, I heard that the Embassy had been pulled down and that these young Blacks had been beaten up by the police and some of them arrested. I also heard that they were going to put it right back up again. By now the Embassy was not the same little umbrella, but had grown into a small bunch of tents. Even the tents, I knew from my trips around, were better living conditions than most Blacks had around the country, and it was no wonder they

1 14

their guts. I couldn't believe my eyes . All this was rak ing place right outside Parliament House, that great white bt-Iilding where I was told the laws were made and the coun­trY is governed. The television cameras were everywhere, bllt it didn't stop them. Amongst the Blacks hurt and car­rit!d off to hospital was my nephew, Paul, and also people who had come from Queensland and Victoria . I prayed that I ,�ould never see such a thing again in my life.

The next week, the Blacks again went back to Canberra to have another go at putting up the Embassy. They were so brave, as it was the very same people going this tirne who had been so badly beaten up the week before. Many still wore bandages and carried bruises, but this time there were many more. Even though it was the middle of a petrol strike, people pooled their petrol and travelled in one car and in buses. People came in from Queensland, Vic­toria, all around New South Wales, and a bus-load from South Australia.

But this time the Blacks tricked the police. The police had been getting very bad publicity all week and pictures of th�m belting up young Black women and men had been shown on televisions and on the front pages of the news­papers. The television cameras and the reporters from news­papers were there again, and the police were not keen to move so fast again into belting people in full public view. They will belt Blacks to an inch of their l ives in back alleys ,

but they didn't want to be photographed doing it right there. When the Blacks put the tent up, the police gave them

half an hour to take it down, and then another half an hour, and then another half an hour, and so on until it was very lat(� in the afternoon. After a while, when some of our people had left, thinking that they were going to let the tent stay up, the police just walked in, didn't punch anybody, ana since the Blacks don't hit anybody first, there was no big blue. The police took the tent down and walked away.

1 1 5

But as they were walk ing away, they looked back , and saw yet another tent up, in the same place as the one they had just taken down. The police got mad and ran back to take it down, but when they got there, they found it was just a big piece of canvas being held up by lots of Blacks, held up in the air over their heads. The Blacks laughed and laughed, and carrying the piece of canvas still over their heads, they followed after the police who were running away, laughing in their ears all the way across the street to the steps of Par­liament House.

The Blacks said it was a political victory. The tents weren't there anymore, but they were still up in people' s minds. It had been freezing cold in Canberra the last few months these tents were up, and many of the people who were running them had been in and out of hospital with colds and flu and bronchitis. One young girl said her feet and toes had been frozen for the past two months.

It was over, but it wasn't over. The Labor Party was jumping up making promises of what they could give to Blacks i

-f they got in at the elections at the end of the year.

The Liberal Party tried to smooth over. It came to me now what this 'voting' was about, and how the Referendum had been such a powerful thing.

I talked about the elections whenever I could, telling prisoners, alcoholics, unmarried mothers, everyone. I thought that the ones who were in, the Liberals, who had arranged for the Blacks to be beaten and their heads kicked in in front of Parliament House; they had to go. I talked for Labor. We were also pushing for Gordon Bryant to take over Aboriginal Affairs when Labor won.

Before the elections, I was asked to talk on the plat­form at the Opera House for Gough Whitlam. Thirty­three thousand people watching and there I was , talking on behalf of all the poor people. I would never have done it, except that I was involved with prisoners, unmarried

1 16

mothers who couldn't get anything together, pensioners, deserted wives, young Black kids in institutions. Gough Whitlam spoke on the platform, too, and it was a time when I could almost feel things happening, changes coming.

Blacks everywhere, and whites, too, were very busy talking to people, telling them we needed a change after twenty�three years of Liberals. The young educated Blacks were going out everywhere, helping Aboriginal people get themselves down for voting; the first time in their lives .

I remember the day of the elections, with all my family gathered around the television, watching the results coming on all night. I even had some Aboriginal drunks, but not drunk now, not tonight, and it was the first time ever we were interested in such things. We kept yelling out, laughing and dancing around. As Labor numbers came up, and looked like winning, we felt like we, the Blacks, were winning, too.

When the elections were over and Labor had won, I went about my usual work of helping people, feeling quite good. No matter how bad the problems of the people I was listening to, I had it in the back of my mind that they would ease up soon; things would get better soon. I wasn't waiting for any particular day, but soon . . . things will be better soon.

Meanwhile, there were prisoners to see, food vouchers to find, money for electricity bills, gas bills, rents and bonds to be found - everything was the same as before, and yet it wasn't.

Not long after the elections, I was invited to a tea party at the Lodge, which is the house that the Whitlams were living in now that Gough was Prime Minister. Mrs Whitlam was having this tea party on the lawns around the house. I was in Canberra, and I got a couple of nuns from the con� vent, where I stayed while I was there, to drive me to the Lodge.

1 1 7

I looked around the outside a bit; it was a big and fancy place, and I was curious about it. When I walked in, though, there was this big coat of arms and it didn't feel like a house at all , so I just turned around and walked right back out of there, got in the car, and went back to the place where I was staying with the nuns.

Soon after, when I was back in Sydney, a telegram arrived asking me to have a coffee with Mrs Whitlam, to thank me for being on the platform with her and her hus, band at the Opera House. I was having a very busy time, and there were lots of poor and troubled people that I wanted to see, but I made the time and went down to Centrepoint where I was to meet her, at the right time.

When I walked in this cafe, I saw Mrs Whitlam sitting there, and I had the feeling that something was wrong. I had on my old working dress and my comfortable but worn,out shoes that I wear when I have to walk about the Courts all day.

As I came through the door, there was a man standing right back, looking like he was going to walk when I walked, and I got that feeling, and as I walked towards where Mrs Whitlam was sitting, the man came up and said, 'You are MumShirl?' , and I said, 'I 'm Shirley Smith.' He said, 'And you are going to have lunch with Mrs Whitlam?'

I was close enough to Mrs Whitlam now, and instead of answering him, I said, 'Mrs Whitlam' , but I didn't look at her, I was just so embarrassed. I said, 'Mrs Whitlam, I beg your pardon, I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. I thought I was just coming for a cup of coffee or a milk shake. I'm sorry' , and I turned around and left.

As I made my way towards the door, the men started running up, and I said very quietly to one of them, 'If you point your camera at me, I ' ll wrap it around your neck.'

You see, I was wearing a long dress that one of the nuns had made for me quite a while ago, and Mrs Whitlam was all

1 18

dressed up. Even when I had spoke on the platform at the Opera House, I'd been wearing a homemade dress, but I knew it was likely to end up on televisions and in the papers, so it was a newer homemade dress.

I didn't think much of being set up in this way. I felt conned, and even now when I think about it, I feel embar� rassed. I've never been one to worry much about clothes or good things for myself, but I know how they can be used against people, and this one time I felt the most terrible feel� ing that they were being used against me. Mrs Whitlam never rang me back or contacted me again.

15 A very strange life

By this time I was living, I suppose, a very strange life . Some, times I was on television, doing programs with people like Germaine Greer, or David Frost, and then I'd be rushing to get to one of the country prisons to see people, and often cruising in the streets late at night, looking for young people who had run away from institutions or their famil, ies, and also spending a lot of time with alcoholics, trying to work out the best way to do something to help them.

By now I had quite a number of people who would help me by driving me around, and coming with me into places; people like Sister Ignatius Jenkins, a very old nun who, in her seventies, had become what they say 'radical, ised about Blacks'.

S ister Ignatius - as we call her - was with me at a very proper and ordinary meeting in the city one night when I had a call about the police raiding some houses that alcoholics and homeless people had taken over. After a lot of siHns and a lot of fights with the police, with many of our people ending up arrested, and a lot of racist people jump, ing up on television, the Whitlam Government had been buying up these old deserted houses for the homeless inner,city Blacks . They had already bought the houses when we were at this meeting and got this call . Myself and the other Blacks at the meeting jumped up and were half, way out the door when the whites at the meeting, only a

120

handful including Sister Ignatius, came running after us, saying they would come and help us.

When we arrived there, in Louis Street, Redfern, which would later become the first line of the Aboriginal Housing Company, there were police and police cars every­where. But also there was a group of militant young Blacks who were prepared to stop any of the families getting hurt by throwing their own bodies in front of the police. Then there were priests and other Christians, all in ordinary clothes, all that is, except Sister Ignatius, who was wearing her habit. She is a tiny little woman, but that didn't stop her. She pulled out this little notebook and began walk ing up and down the street, writing down all the numbers of the police cars, and also the numbers off the police uniforms; those of them who were wearing them. If you could have seen those policemen's faces! They looked like they had been struck with thunder.

I feel I probably shouldn't be writing about this, because when Sister Ignatius got back to the convent very late that night, she really couldn't tell the superiors where she had been, or what she had been doing, as it was unlikely that they would be able to understand her. But she had been doing nothing wrong; in fact, she and I both know that she had been doing right. She had been doing the Lord's work in the best way possible , getting out there amongst people who were victims and trying to stop things with her Christian calming presence.

Some of the priests were being arrested with us at this time and the Church was becoming quite disturbed about such things. It was still very very unusual and rare for a nun to be involved in such things, and especially a little nun over seventy years of age.

There were many other people involved in these things; people who I would never have dreamed would get involved, apart from the priests, nuns, and brothers.

1 2 1

Along with the militant young Blacks, there were white wives and girlfriends. White people who would come in from the suburbs to help us every now and again and quite a lot of Christian people who would come in for one look and get such a shock at what they were seeing that they would keep coming back, trying to help, until they became regular people around Redfern streets.

I would like to mention them all by name because they were part of the scene, part of all that was happening, but there were so many and I don't want anyone to think that I think less of some than of others. All the Blacks working in the area grew to know these white people, to fight with them, drink with them and cry with them. It was the first time for so many whites and blacks, that there was this close relationship, and it was all to do with politics .

I was mixing with these people every day, the Christians, the criminals, the police, the lawyers, the Courts, the sick, the doctors, the alcoholics. On some days I would be able to chase up quite a lot of money which would go into one hand and out of the other in the form of bills or rents or bonds. At the end of a long day, I would often go back to my own family's house and watch the chil­dren there eat bread and cold sausage, because it was all that there was in the house.

It was a very strange life . I was able to get back to the Northern Territory every

year for the next few years. This was so good for me; to be able to see all those proud tribal people, to get to know them and for them to get to know me.

At Port Keats, I met a very young and wonderful man, Claude Narjic, who was like a young leader amongst his people, but always respectfully taking his directions from the Elders. I loved to see the amazing respect these young people had for the Elders, a lot of which has been lost in the cities. Down here, the young people love their Elders, but

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because they know a lot more, and have education, the respect is not the same.

I met Vincent Lingiari and I also went into South Australia and Western Australia. I talked to Aboriginal people everywhere. I met Blacks who were struggling to set up organisations and many who were doing the same sort of work I was doing. I was taken to visit in prisons, both women's and men's prisons, where there were always too many Aboriginal people. It just didn't seem right anywhere.

The tribal people were living in terrible houses, bits of corrugated iron stuck up together, and nobody caring. I sat with them everywhere, in their homes or in the prisons, and even though I couldn't speak their language and they couldn't speak mine, they would take my hand and I would . know that we were brothers and sisters.

Most of the people that I met in gaols all around the country were Aboriginal people who had been given a fine for something, but didn't have the money to pay the fine. They weren't criminals; just people who had no money. The white people make it impossible for the Black person to get a job, to get money. Then some other white people arrange for them to be fined, and because they haven't got the money, they end up in gaols.

I think if the person who has done something that the law says is wrong, and if it is such a little thing that the only punishment they are given is a fine, then that person should not be put into the gaols, no matter what. Gaols are not light places to be in. They keep you away from your family. You can't see if your wife or children or your mother is sick, or take care of anyone. The gaols are also so far away from where you would normally live.

In Sydney, many Aboriginal families moved down from the reserves in the country just so that they could be near to the one member of their family who is in gaol. I

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don't think many white people recognise this. When the Aboriginal people can't read or write, and can't write letters backwards and forwards to each other in gaols like most whites do, they don't have anything else that they can do except pack up and move the lot down to where the gaol is.

Then, no sooner do they set up in Sydney, put their children into schools here and all that, than the Corrective Services Department transfers the person they have come down to be near, to Bathurst, or to Grafton, or to Milson Island, or to somewhere else outside Sydney that is very hard to get to, and costs a lot of money to get to.

I went to Western Australia for the ceremony of Father Pat Dobson, the first Aboriginal to become a Cath� olic priest. Richard Pacey came with me and put the cer� emony down on film. I also went to Tasmania and found it a very racist place. Not that they were racist to me, because they invited me and another young girl down there, but when we got there, we found we were the only two Blacks there and that the conference hadn't invited any local Blacks at all. They just wanted what they thought were big names, not the local people with problems that they might be able to do something about.

That is another thing that has struck me as I travelled about. Lots of people will ask me to talk to their groups, but they know I mostly know about Sydney, or around New South Wales. They would rather listen to these problems, that are too far away for them to be able to do anything about, than listen to the problems and the people from their own area. Maybe they are frightened that they will be called upon to actually do something, if they listen to local Blacks.

I went flying around in those little aeroplanes that they have in the Northern Territory, and travelling around on those very bad roads.

In between, I travelled around New South Wales, sometimes with nuns or Father Mithen, and sometimes

124

with Professor Hollows or other people and doctors from the Aboriginal Medical Service.

Even though Labor was in, very little had changed. In Western Australia, I went with a young girl into a cafe, after travelling a long way. They wouldn't serve us, and then after a while , they said they would serve us if we would take the food outside and sit across the street and eat it. The white people in the cafe were sitting at these little tables and chairs, but Blacks were not allowed to sit there, or to eat in the cafe.

We went down and saw the police, but the police said if they didn't want to serve us, there was nothing the police could do to make them. It was very very hot there, and we couldn't even get a milkshake. I went back to Perth and talked about it at the university, and the unions promised they would do something.

It was actually much worse than that, because by this time my health was not getting any better, and I was diabetic and having to have regular meals. When I couldn't get any­thing to eat or drink there I had to go all the way back to Perth and I was worried that I might collapse, or have a fit, or die.

Then again, in Enngonia, in New South Wales, I was travelling with Professor Hollows, and we were on a medi­cal field trip for the A.M.S . Bookings had been made in advance for us to stay at the motel there, but when we got there and they found out some of us were Black, they said we couldn't stay there, so the whites with us wouldn't stay there either. That was a very racist place. They would serve Blacks food - it was the only place in the town where any­body could buy groceries - and they would serve the Blacks these groceries, or even a drink from the hotel, through a little hatch in the back wall of the building. The Blacks would have to line up to this little hole and wait in the blazing sun for the people who were running the place

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to feel like opening it and serving them. The way they treat my people in places like this makes me feel sick.

In Cowra, another cafe refused to serve me and the company I 'was with, Aunty Violet (Carroll) and Mrs Merritt. We had just come up from the city and they told us they didn't serve Aborigines. In Wee Waa, the owners closed down the hotel rather than serve us. There were white people with us that time, Sister Beverly Dyster for the Aboriginal Medical Service and Father Alien Mithen, and they couldn't get served with because they were seen talking to us.

Another time, in Sydney, I was invited to a function with the Queen. Well, she's not my Queen, but she's the Queen of England and a very gracious lady, even if she' s not my Queen. Aboriginal people can't have a white queen who lives thousands of miles away; it wouldn't make any sense, would it?

When she is here in Australia, though, and they invite me, I feel it would be polite to go, because we are very gracious people, too, with good manners like that. I was to go but the young girl who was to go with me got the mumps, so I went alone, to St Stephen's Church of England, and after that, all the invited guests went along to Government House to have lunch with the Queen.

I was introduced and curtsied and after a while we all went into the room where the food was. There were only a few other Blacks there, maybe three of us altogether. The table was laid out very fancy, too fancy for me. There were five or six knives for every person, and a few glasses for each of the different drinks they were going to give us, and I knew that out of that lot, I would never know which one was the right one.

So I excused myself and asked where the Ladies Room was, and that way I got out the door again and just kept right on walking until I was back on the street. Outside I met

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some other Blacks, and it wasn't a big thing not to have had lunch with all that fancy equipment, so we were laughing and we were going just down the street to have a drink in a hotel and a talk .

Because we were all dressed up for this occasion, we went down the street to a big fancy hotel, which I would not like to mention, but it' s not far from Government House. When we got there, they wouldn't let us in. When we asked why not, they said they didn't serve 'ladies' in there, but when I looked through the door, there were white women sitting in there having a drink.

We went away laughing, because it all seemed so silly. We could have lunch with the Queen, if we wanted, but we couldn't get a drink in this hotel, and we couldn't get served in lots of crummy places in Sydney and all around Aus, tralia; but we could have lunch with the Queen.

What a funny way they run their places, these white people, I thought.

I was back in Canberra. Dr Coombs had often arranged for me to give lectures and talks to groups up there. I was almost at the steps at Parliament House, coming back from giving a lecture and on my way to the place where I was staying, which was at the study house of the Black Josephite nuns. As we were driving along, we stopped the car and Norman Gunston ran over (or that man comedian who plays Norman Gunston on the television and acts the fool a lot), he ran over and stuck a microphone up under my face and asked me if I had anything to say about the sacking of Gough Whitlam.

I said, 'Nobody has the sort of power to sack Mr Whitlam, he's the Prime Minister' , and I didn't know what he was talking about.

I jumped back into the car and we went back to the study house, and Mother Marie Therese and I were watching on the television the talk about the new caretaker

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government. I was so upset in the extreme that I went away and cried. I just couldn't help myself. I couldn't believe this was happening. Just when the Black people are getting into knowing something about politics, they go around and change it all.

All that talking about the Labor Party, getting our people interested in voting, getting the registrations, and also I thought about how upset Mr Whitlam and his wife would be.

The Labor Party hadn't done a lot for us while they were in power, because it is hard and long to make changes, and this is a very big country to make changes for, I was finding out as I travelled around. But they had done some very good things otherwise, giving eighteen,year,olds the vote, for instance, which I thought was right because they had been sent to the Vietnam war, under the Liberals, before they were even old enough to have a vote about who ought to make the decisions.

I went around very heavy in my heart for quite a long time after that. The next election was bad. Everybody had expected so much from Labor and hadn't got it. The Blacks felt that we had been ripped off: and then ripped off again because the one we had wanted had got the sack, even after winning. Those white eighteen,year,olds who had got the vote from Labor; they turned right around and used that ·vote against them.

I talked again with Faith Bandler, as I couldn't under, stand the politics of it, and I was hoping for understanding of it. Faith said, 'People can bite the hand that feeds them' , and I didn't know if she was talking about those eighteen, year,olds or about Mr Kerr, who Mr Whitlam had given power to, and who had turned around and used this power against him.

We had again watched these terrible elections on tele, vision, even the alcoholics; and though we had all voted

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Labor, the Liberals won and thought they were just the ant's pants.

But what had happened was that the Labor supporters, all the real Labor supporters, were shocked about what had happened, and knew it could happen again, and our hearts weren't in it. The rich white people who had voted for the Labor the first time did so because it was a trendy thing. They swung their votes around, again for a trendy thing, and voted in the Liberals . The Labor supporters couldn't stop them, because the wind had been taken out of their sails by the awful sacking. Also we thought that if Labor does get in again, the Liberals will just think up something worse to do against them next time.

Blacks had been politically active all the time the Labor Party was in. We had been going up to Canberra all the time and giving the Labor people a big push, making them remember the promises they had made. There were meet­ings and demonstrations, and young Blacks even chained themselves to the steps of Parliament House.

But somehow after the sacking, it just all stopped. We couldn't help wondering if politics were the answer anyway. For a little while it had looked as though it might be the answer. Maybe when we get through trying everything, there will be no other way except violence. I would hate to see it, but if it comes, it will mean we have tried everything. We cannot wait forever.

By this time, my health was really beginning to be quite poor. I was pleased to talk with doctors at the Aboriginal Medical Service . New ideas were coming in and some of these were to do about food; about oranges and vitamins. I had always worried about people having enough food and not being hungry, but now they were talking about 'good' food and 'bad' food. It all seemed to make a lot of sense, too.

On the reserves and missions, we had been given rations in the old days. It stands to reason that they were

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not going to give us the best. We were given flour, sugar, tea, bully beef, sometimes jam and syrup, and meat sometimes but not very often. As it turns out with all this new talk, they are the 'bad' foods. I should have guessed it. The things we weren't given, the things that the white people were keeping for themselves, they were the good foods.

Sister Mary Oliver and I started going, very early in the mornings, down to Paddy's Market to buy good food', freshest fruit and vegetables, to give to families who had nothing in the house. There were some terrific people down there, who soon got used to us trying to shortcut a bargain out of them. They would give us low prices as soon as we turned up. I guess we looked like a strange pair to be out buying at a time when mostly only greengrocers were getting their stock for their shops for the day. Sister Mary Oliver could drive a hard bargain and many of the men and women who run the markets were Italian, Catholics who respected the nun's habit when they saw it.

We started to put the bite on people for a few dollars more, so that we could buy a bit more each time. Then Black families, women with small children, started coming to the A.M.S . looking for 'the lady with the food'. It soon got too big to handle. The A.M.S. took over the small way we were running it, and turned it into a program. It was much better this way, with many people working on it, and eventually a truck and some money from Freedom From Hunger to really get things moving along.

Other programs had also started. My nephew, Paul, and some of his young radical mates, had gone up to the Wayside Chapel and talked to Rev. T ed Noffs about starting a Breakfast for Children program. Kay Edwards, who was working at the Wayside Chapel, was sent to help, and the Wayside Chapel had a caravan which they loaned. The pro� gram was started, operating in a park, and young Black chil� dren could come over to the caravan and get some hot

1 30

breakfast before they went to school. As it turned out, there were plenty of poor whites in the area, too, and often as many white children or more than Blacks would turn up for some food.

Money to buy this food was collected from everywhere again, and some companies even started to send us some of their products. It went well when the weather was fine, but when the cold began to move onto Sydney, and the chilly winds started whipping the kids when they came over, the program seemed to be almost causing kids to have colds instead of doing good for them. Many Black and white women would come in in the mornings and get things ready, and mostly the young Black men would be scouting around all day trying to drum up money for food, or food itself

It was about then that Paul brought down Germaine Greer and this young Black girl, and they found the chil­dren sitting in the rain, freezing cold, eating away at their hot breakfasts. Between these two people, they went around and found a man who had a big empty space, a ware­house, at 72 Shepherd Street, Chippendale. This man said that the Blacks could use the building rent free for a while, and then he really opened his heart and his wallet and had the building renovated, painted, new cupboards, even tiny toilets installed. He also paid for the equipment, saucepans, plates, knives and forks, and it was all too good just to use for a few hours early in the morning, so the Black women decided to run a pre-school there at the same time.

Norma Williams, Pam Hunter, Lyn Thompson, and many other young mothers moved in there and set up a mighty program, which got burnt down years later. By that time, and after a lot of fights with the Government and the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, the women had begun to build their own premises a few blocks away. They moved their pre-school into the National Black Theatre, and ran it

1 3 1

there while they waited for their own building to be fin­ished. Murawina, as it is called, which means 'Black women' , now has a good and solid building, as well as a very good program for children, which includes nutritious meals.

It is easy to see how much effort went into starting up things like this; how much hard work and how much good will. Some white people have been so generous with their money, and some with their time. I think just seeing up close how hard the Blacks are working to overcome great big problems creates an interest in them, makes them feel that they want to help, to be involved.

Of course it's not all like that. We get a lot of knock­backs, and also we get used a lot, and we have to learn all the time. Some companies, for instance, gave Murawina free tins of food, but as it turned out, some of this food was not the sort of food under-nourished children should eat. In other cases, the tins were stamped with an expiry date, and it was well past the date when they received the food. We don't know whether we are supposed to be grateful in cases like this, whether it is an accident or whether they are off­loading old stock in a way they hope will look good.

Sometimes we wondered if they were trying to poison us, as the same sort of thing had happened at the Aboriginal Medical Service, when drug companies sometimes gave us drugs that were already past the expiry date when they gave them to us. Their company men said the products were still good, but who wants to be the guinea-pigs? If their own stamp on it says it is too old to be used, shouldn't that also mean for Blacks?

Another place that had started in this same period was the National Black Theatre, which gave Blacks a place to put on plays or concerts or dances. When Betty Fisher was running it, it was going very well and she had people like Roberta Flack, who came into Redfern with her troupe and

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gave a free concert for Blacks. Young poets and playwrights were encouraged by this and began to think they could compete in the art world. There were even fashion design shows, with Blacks designing and making clothes for the fashion parade. The National Black Theatre became the centre of everything like this, dancing and the like .

However, Betty Fisher was struck down very suddenly, and everyone was so upset about her death. She was not an old woman, just a young girl really, when she died, and they said it was a heart attack . Whatever the cause, the Black Theatre didn't recover, and while things still go on there from time to time, it is not the same organised program that Betty always tried to run. There have been things like writing classes, classes for photography, and art classes and displays, but they are not so frequent now.

Some of these organisations spread out all over Aus­tralia, like the Aboriginal Legal Service, and others did not. Maybe I should say, not yet, because all over, new things keep starting as more Blacks learn how to run things. I think white people forget that Aboriginal people did not have the benefit of schooling and most of us do not know how to read and write , much less keep account books. It is a long, slow, hard way to learn how to run things and especially to start them up, when we have never had any experience like this before.

It doesn't help that we are always in trouble with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs for doing things that seem very reasonable to us, such as our organisation giving money to people who are starving. We found out many years ago, for instance, that the Aboriginal Medical Service would be in trouble if it spent any of the money that was given by the Government to run the place to buy food for families . It had to be spent on wages and furniture and phone bills and medicines, not food. On the other hand, if we got very expensive vitamins and gave them to people in

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injections, that was alright. Just giving them a few bob for a meal seemed, to us, the most reasonable thing to do.

Also offices, those organisations that work by day; in the night time they are empty. Well, it also seemed okay to have a few people sleep in those empty offices at night, keep a few mattresses in a cupboard or a back room, and let people who had no homes and were sleeping in parks, or in the streets, or out in the cold or the rain; let them sleep in these empty offices instead. You can imagine how that went down with the bureaucrats!

Well, we are a simple people and these things seem fair and square to us. However, the Government and the Department of Aboriginal Affairs still keep trying to push us the other �ay. You can think about if they are doing this to us at this level, what are they doing to us in land rights and other big ways?

16 Celebrities

I think people who have nothing all the time ought to have something at least sometimes . Lots of these things that people take for granted; lots of other people don't have them, even when they don't cost much.

For instance, often when there are shows on, I like to try and get tickets for young people who would never other­wise be able to see things like that. Sometimes I can buy the tickets, and other times I have to try to get them for free. It doesn't cost anybody anything, for instance, to have an extra four or six kids watch a show that is going ahead anyway.

These kids, poor kids, Black kids, crippled kids, they have heroes and hero worship, just like all other kids. Only a very few entertainers think about such things. Johnny Ray, many years ago used to go out to the Far West Home at Manly and see a certain little girl out there. Even when the little girl died, Johnny Ray kept going out to the Far West Home whenever he was in Sydney, Australia.

But Glen Camp bell, Shirley Bassey, Sammy Davis Jnr. ; they might do these sorts of things in their own countries, I don't know, but they come out here often enough and they make a whole stack of money when they are here. They could spare an hour or so, and make sure some poor people get some free tickets to their show. If they don't have an hour to go to see them, the poor people would come to see him or her instead.

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These have been my views for many years. I know people in wheelchairs, young people, who would love and give anything to be part of that screaming teenage audience, at just about any show that was on.

This one time I brought four kids in from Allambie Heights, a home there for spastic children who have bad disfigurements in their arms or legs or bodies. We paid the taxi fares for these children to come into town, and I was going to take them to see Neil Diamond. They were so excited. When we got there, there were no tickets left. I tried to buy some. A man came up and offered to sell me one ticket, for forty dollars .

I laughed at him. It was so sick , trying to get that much money for a ten

dollar ticket, when these little kids were so upset about not being able to see the show.

I started to talk around the door and some men were there and they listened to me. One was a disc-jockey or radio announcer. It didn't do these kids any good and after a while, we just had to get them something to eat and take them home again.

I was so bitter about that. I went on a talk-back pro­gram and talked about it.

Not long after, Rev. T ed Noffs got in touch with Father Ted Kennedy at Redfern presbytery. When I came home from Central Court in Liverpool Street, Father Kennedy said to me, 'Have you got a passport? '

As the furthest I was planning to go was to South Aus­tralia and Victoria in the next few months, I laughed and said I wouldn't need one in these States unless they had changed the laws.

Father Kennedy said1 'You're going to America, ' and I said, 'You're joking.'

At six o'clock Mass that night, Father Kennedy said that Rev. Ted Noffs wanted to talk to me. I had known him

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and spoken to him on and off for many years , so I rang him up. He first told me I would need a passport, and I asked him what for, and he said, 'To go to America.' 'What for?' I asked, and he said, 'Neil Diamond wants you to go over and be his guest.'

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather or a breath. I said, 'But I couldn't even contact him, and I couldn't get those little crippled kids into his concert.' Rev. Ted Noffs said, 'Well, here is your chance to make him pay for that.'

I didn't want to go and I asked around for someone who might go instead. Naomi Mayers, or somebody who had a better idea of words and could talk, an angry young Black, anybody.

Instead, I got caught up in the mad rush of getting ready to go somewhere, getting a passport, getting a visa, and I didn't even have a proper suitcase. I was going in two different directions at once, trying to get these things done. It was all such damned rush, as they were trying to get me there in only a few days for the American Independence Day celebrations. After running furiously around here, Passport Office, American Embassy, trying to get a suitcase and wash a few clothes to have in it and get the word to my family and make sure they had enough of everything to see them through while I was away, suddenly I was at the air­port, on the runway. The plane was taking off, my family were standing down there waving and before I knew it, I was leaving Australia.

There were reporters on the plane, going over for their television or radio stations to cover the celebrations. I didn't know any of them, though they were from the Sun and the Daily Telegraph. There were eight men and three women altogether. I talked a bit with Michael Schildberger. I am very frightened on planes and I was too frightened to go to the toilet while we were in the air.

u

1 3 7

Thank goodness we came down at Nandi, in Fiji, and they were checking passports and running up and down inside the plane spraying it with little cans of spray. At San Francisco, we all got off that plane and I was met by a lady who arranged everything for me and put me onto the other plane for Las Vegas, which is where we were going. I think it was a specially owned or hired jet, because we all got on it, the reporters and all the television equipment and me, and we took off in this big plane.

Arriving in Las Vegas, we and all the equipment were loaded onto a big bus that was more like a house on wheels. We even got served tea or coffee or a drink while we were ::m the bus. We were taken to a place called 'The Jockey's Club' , and we stayed there one night. I was so tired and my feet were very swollen from the long trip. The room that I llad been given was very large, the biggest room I ever had for myself, with a bath and a shower, or like two showers, )ne to have a shower in and you walk through the other one md it blows you with hot or cold air, instead of drying �ourself.

Michael Schildberger had a cool drink sent up to me md they wanted me to come down and join them for a meal, )Ut I was too tired. The last thing I remember was taking :he tablets I have to take in the evening, and lying down.

Next morning, I had a shower and went down to xeakfast. I didn't have to pay for anything; I was just asked :o sign this very long piece of paper. Father Kennedy had nanaged to get for me five hundred dollars in travellers' :heques, in case I needed anything and because he didn't ike the idea of my being in a strange country without two :ents to rub together in an emergency; but in Las Vegas, !verything was taken care of for me.

I went by private transport from the Jockey's Club and .vas met by Neil Diamond's confidential secretary and pub­ic relations officer, and they took me to the Aladdin' s

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Hotel. This was a very big place with a casino in it, and there was a room being opened there, the Diamond Room, Theatre for the Arts.

Here I was given not one, but three rooms. I thought they must have been expecting a whole lot of people with me, or maybe that more would move in when I was there. There was a king,size bed, the biggest bed, nearly as big as the room, and a switch that you touch and a television which came out of the wall, many telephones, mirrors everywhere, cocktail cabinets (the young girl working there told me that's what it' s called, not just a fridge or a bar, but the whole damned thing). There were switches all over the walls and they all did something different, turned the lights up or down, or made things move somewhere else. I touched one and it came out of the wall and sprayed some sort of cologne all over me.

I wondered what I was doing there. The water in America I found very awful. I learned to

clean my teeth with dry ginger ale, or what they say, soda pop. As I don't drink tea, I always had milkshakes or fruit drinks, anything but that terrible smelling water.

Outside the weather was very hot, but all indoors were cool and airconditioned. There was a circus playing on the street. Everything was very lovely, like a fairy story for me, and I could go anywhere by taxi and the young girl would fix it up.

I soon had to get down to work and start talking to people. I tried to talk to the young girl who cleaned the room. I couldn't believe that everybody around Las Vegas lived the same fairy,land sort of life. The young girl had been told not to talk to guests. She couldn't even tell me her real name. She wasn't allowed to look tired or worn,out from her work. I asked her if there were any poor areas around here, and she looked at me strangely.

Apparently these rich people who stay at places like

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this don't like to be reminded of the poor, or of ugly things, so everybody has to pretend that they don't exist.

I talked to Neil Diamond, after the official opening of the Diamond Room, which was a real big occasion, and I told him what I thought about artists and singers not mak­ing time for poorer folk. He said that he was putting on con­certs in bigger and better places, so that more and more people could attend. He said people could, and I could, go and buy a lot of tickets, and I said, 'Yes, and then sell them to other people for a lot more money than I paid for them?'

I was taken around to cocktail parties, which I didn't like, and I was on television, talking about prisons. Then, as suddenly as I arrived, I was leaving Las Vegas.

I flew back to San Francisco. I was glad to leave Las Vegas. It was a strange place to me, with people who didn't know night from day, getting up when the sun was going down and having their breakfast then, and going into the casinos and winning or losing so much money.

One time I was going up to my room to use the toilet - I couldn't find the toilet downstairs, they are hidden behind indoor trees or have things written on the doors so that I' m never sure if it's the ladies' or the men's, so it' s safer to go back to my room - so I was going up to my room in the lift. A couple were in the lift and they were having an argument.

'Arthur, how dare you lose seventeen thousand dol­lars, ' said the woman.

I nearly had a heart attack. They didn't even notice me, but I noticed them. I went halfway around the world to see people who just lose seventeen thousand dollars, more money than I will ever see in my life anywhere, and they lose it on the gambling table in a matter of hours. All it mattered to them was a little argument in the lift, and the man said, 'Oh, shush now, do be quiet . . .'

Even though I had been told that Neil Diamond was

140

taking care of my expenses, this was not the case. When I arrived in San Francisco, I was met by Father Graham Carter, who had been working with me in Sydney, and whom Father Kennedy had told that I was coming.

Father Carter made arrangements for my accommo­dation, I was to stay at a presbytery, and then he took me around to see things in San Francisco. I was shown the wharf and other main places. I had no trouble finding the poverty places here, and talking to groups around the place either. I went to Indian Welfare Centres and to many places, many of which reminded me of home because they were that poor.

I rang up San Quentin Prison and told them what I was doing in Australia, visiting prisoners and all that, and I was invited to come on out. With the little badge from the Department of Corrective Services, and with my shield, I was able to get into prisons over there without any problems.

I didn't like what I saw at San Quentin. There were a lot of Black prisoners, whose faces showed such pain and misery. I was taken also to the places where they hold terror­ist groups and minority groups, such as Blacks and Puerto Ricans.

I was walked up and down stairs, in different yards and complexes, and about on all levels. It took just about seven hours to go over the lot. At lunch time, we heard this big gong sound. We were near this big dining room, and we just went in and had a meal. Everybody sat down at the tables and I was able to talk to prisoners. It was all very open in this section. The officer who had been assigned to look after me and show me around sat with me at the table.

Then later, we made our way to the Death Cells and to Death Row. This was very scary, with very bad spirits around. There are gadgets like at the airports, which they move up and down to find out if you have any metal, any

141

guns, but they also make the prisoners strip off all their clothes . One man even had to take off his clothes while I was there, and I was so embarrassed for him that I stayed looking at the door. He was then given a pair of overalls.

I spoke to one man on Death Row, asked him, 'How long have you been here, or is that the wrong thing to ask you?' He laughed and said, 'Nearly twelve years.' He didn't sound like he thought he was about to die. They put people there on the Death Row, and they stay there, making appeals and all that, which is different from Australia. In Australia, we have ' lifers' , sentenced to spend their life in prison, but in America, they have Death Row, and these people can't call themselves 'lifers' or anything to do with life, only death.

Even though it was a long time since anybody had been killed by the death sentence there, it was a very bad place to be. The little rooms had over them ·� and 'B' , and the doors were open and they were painted bright green. The whole place, Death Row and all, is painted in very bright colours, and looks like it is painted every few months.

I talked to a few other people on Death Row, one man who was learning law, and had already finished the account­ing course, was very bright and learning to look after himself

Another Black prisoner screamed out at me for walk­ing around with a guard. 'Hey, Black sister' , he yelled, 'what the hell you doing out there? ' I started to tell him, but he started screaming and yelling and making threats about what he would do to me.

By the time we got to the Death Cells I was very afraid. Not of the prisoners, but the feeling of death everywhere. The bright colours didn't make any difference. The feeling there still reminded me of Grafton Prison, and 'Death Cell' reminded me of the room in Grafton which is called the 'Bloodbath'. I was very close to taking a fit as we passed by

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these rooms. I could feel dead people all around me, angry at me for walking on their ground. I asked the officer what all the seats were doing in the next room, and he said that they were for witnesses. Some people, he said, were so keen to · see executions that they put their names down all the time, but they were only entitled to come about once every three years or so. It was such a big deal to see people die, that they had thirty�four chairs in that room for the witnesses. You can imagine how my stomach felt then.

Outside that block, it was very different from prisons we have in Australia. There were beautiful flower gardens everywhere, which is something we don't have, and many of them were in bloom, so there were beautiful and natural splashes of colour everywhere.

They are also allowed to have their heroes . Johnny Cash and a big gold record on the wall, which was where he was when he was in prison; he was in San Quentin.

Unlike here, where the guards are called warders, and the chief is called a superintendent, there the guards are called officers, and the chief is called a warden.

A senior man at San Quentin invited me to his house for dinner. I went out there the following night. I was still staying at the presbytery, so Father Carter took me out to the house. This man, who is in charge of the Death Cell block, had the most beautiful home, wife, and children.

When he met me, he asked me, 'What sort of work do you do? ' I told him I visited people in their homes and in prisons, and he said, 'Oh, do they call you a social worker?' and I said, 'No, they call me a sticky beak .'

We talked for hours about prisons, and I learnt a lot about why things are the way they are over there . I am not convinced that they have to be that way, but it is the way they are at the moment. The wardens are very interested in making their officers feel that the prisons are a safe place to work; not a place where you get your throat cut just because

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of your job. On the other hand, they are interested in the prisoners, but it is not up to any one man to be able to change the system altogether. America is a very violent place and a lot of very violent men end up in prisons. But I wonder if the prisons and the police have to become as viol­ent as the very people they say they are trying to stop from being violent.

I took a plane to Los Angeles. When I got off the plane, I went outside and saw a police car with men and police dogs in it. They jumped out and threw some young people up against the wall with big sticks. It seemed so bad, so terrible, that I turned around and went back inside and booked myself on the next plane out of there. The lady at the ticket counter was very mixed up; she didn't know if I was coming or going. I said I was going and tried to explain to her since she knew I had just come in. She seemed to take it, the violence, as an everyday occurrence, but I couldn't handle it. I went back to San Francisco.

Back in San Francisco, I finished seeing around, taking notice particularly of the cheap food places that are run by voluntary people, serving little dishes of this and that hot food for about ten cents or twenty cents a serve.

This was really what I had come to America for, to look around and learn how things were being done in another country, to see if there were any good ideas for my own people at home. Neil Diamond didn't arrange this part for me, the only ' real' part, the good Catholic priests did, and they worried about me and made sure I had my meals and could get where I wanted to go.

I left America soon after and wasn't unhappy to go. When I arrived back in Australia, a lot of my friends and people I had been trying to help were waiting for me. They wanted to know what I had learnt on my trip, and some­body had also put it around that Neil Diamond had paid me a fabulous lot of money to go to America.

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It is true that Neil Diamond said to me that he would 'look after me' , and he also said the same sort of thing on the television program that he and I and his mother were on, which I took to mean that he would give me some help with the work I was doing, and to cope with the many needs of the people I work with everyday. I must have been mis­taken, because Neil Diamond didn't give me, or send me, any money at all, or make any help available to me or any­thing else except for flying me there and back and letting me stay free in Las Vegas.

I want to get this quite clear, not because of Neil Diamond, but because such a lot of people came to me need­ing help, and when I told them I didn't have anything to give them, they couldn't believe it. I knew they were in stages of desperation, but I found it very hard not to be believed.

Not long after this, on invitation, I went to New Zea­land. I took with me a group of kids and I paid my own fare and the fare of a young girl called Jenny. The parents of all the other kids had to come up with the money for their own tickets, but there were enough of us to be able to get cheaper tickets like a group excursion.

Rumour had it at that time that I had used money given to me by Neil Diamond to take my whole family on a holiday. It was not a holiday; it was not my whole family, and Neil Diamond had never given me any money anyway. What a bitter world we live in, and how it twists up people, even friends . . .

The kids were billeted out and stayed in homes around, about eighteen miles from Auckland. The person arranging it all was an ex-prisoner, one of the young men who had played in the band which we had managed to get out of gaol for the National Aborigines' Day Ball.

I visited two gaols around Auckland, looking at how they are run; what sorts of things they are given to do.

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There were a noticeable lot of Blacks in the gaols here, too, Fijians, Samoans, Maoris, and they made me feel so wel­come that I went back to see them three times.

They made beautiful furniture. They covered the chairs with leather and they were making them for orphan­ages and schools. The young girl whose ticket I had bought, Jenny, was from the Spastic Home at Allambie Heights, and she and all the other young kids were having a terrific time, being shown things and places that they are not likely to see again in their lives.

I met Maoris and went to a Maori celebration. Every­where I went, people were full of courtesy and treated me wonderfully. I was not too well, so I tried also to arrange to have some rest this time, and I took walks in the beautiful New Zealand countryside.

17 Problen1s of death

I came back to Australia, still tired, but determined to throw myself back into my work. Doctors who were also friends of mine began to tell me to stop working, go back on the pension, slow down, or I wouldn't live long. Well, I didn't feel sick, like I imagine sick to feel, but I had started being dizzy from time to time and falling down. I also had a few fits, brought on by shocks such as someone dying unexpectedly, or another person who had his throat slit. Once I took a fit and a cigarette fell on my dress and it blazed up and burnt all my body.

It was about this time, too, that I had an awful lot of worries about funerals. When I was younger, it had come to me to go and visit the grave of my Grandfather. I made enquiries everywhere as to where his grave might be. I looked everywhere, and searched out tombstones in cem­eteries . Try as I might, I couldn't find it. I asked the older people around, and they looked at me with sad eyes. It was other times when my Grandfather had died, and Aborigi­nes then really had no money. My Grandfather had died a pauper and had been buried in a canvas sheet. The place where he was laid down had not been marked.

This had upset me terribly. I felt guilty that I had not been able to see to it, better able to take care of my own people , especially my Grandfather, who had been all things to me all my young life .

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Whenever anyone died down here in Sydney, anyone who didn't have somebody else to take care of them, then Father Ted Kennedy and Father Alien Mithen and I would try to make sure they had a decent burial. Father Kennedy would say a beautiful Mass for them, which cost nothing in money, but the coffins did, and transporting them back to their home area cost the world.

White people don't seem to understand that Aborigi­nal people are supposed to be buried in their own areas. It is not a fashion or a fad; it is a law. The spirit should rest where the body came from. A lot of people come down to Sydney looking for work, or to stay near relatives, or to be near prisons and they die. Doesn't matter how long an Aborigi­nal person has been in Sydney, when you ask them where they are from they never say, as white people do, Glebe, or Dulwich Hill, or any other Sydney suburb. Instead they will say they are from Bourke, or Brewarrina, or the area of their birth wherever it is. Doesn't matter if they have been in Sydney twenty years.

We began sending bodies home on trains, and some­times the families would have a little money to help us, or sometimes they tried to pay it off out of their pensions or unemployment benefits, but always it costs so much. It turned out that our idea of 'act first, find out how much it costs later' nearly landed us all in gaol. When the big bills started coming in and mounting up, we just didn't have the money to pay for them. I tried not to let money worries bother me, but when you see your own close friends, like these two dear priests, who have been working with you for years, getting into trouble because of the way you are encouraging them to go, then you worry. Dribbles of money were coming in from here and there and sometimes I just paid my whole salary from the Aboriginal Medical Service to try to get the debt down.

I was living at the time in a tiny room at the back of the

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presbytery, where I could be close at hand if anything went wrong with the alcoholics who were living there also.

Even though I kept all of my things there, I was rarely able to be there myself, what with travelling around all the time, being in other towns, visiting gaols, visiting people in their homes. It is more true that I was sleeping wherever I found my head at night. I slept in convents and in homes on mattresses on the floor. I was trying to stay in touch with everybody.

I was also in a lot of trouble because people were reverse-charge calling me, whenever there was a death, or a problem, or some trouble . The phone bill had become so big that I couldn't even think about it on top of all these other problems day to day of people not having anywhere to live, people wanting to die because they were so miserable, young kids not wanting to go to school because of racists, and people in trouble with the Courts, or not having any food. It was just too much.

I had also become a bit frightened about travelling around. Professor Hollow's wife, Mary, had been driving me around up in the country. We were taking clothes and medical supplies to a mission in the central west, and Mary's daughter, Tania, was in the car. She was only about six and she was singing a song for me as we were going along. Suddenly the car ran out of control. I swung around and grabbed the little girl and pressed her to the floor. The car went off the side of the road and into a ditch, standing on its two front wheels.

They told us later that a truck driver had come along and saw these two back wheels sticking up out of the ditch. I passed out; it could have been a fit, and the ambulance came out to get us and take us to the hospital at Scone. Next day we were taken to Muswellbrook for X-rays and Mary had a broken wrist. We all had cuts and bruises and my two knees were belted up from when they had slid forward and

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smashed into the dashboard. All down my side was purple and bruised, which took many months to go away. I was worried that T ania might have been hurt, but the dear little girl popped up and said, ' I ' ll finish the song for you now, MumShirl.'

It wasn't that I was so much hurt in the accident, but that it made me think about how easy it is for everything to be alright one minute and maybe dead the next. When you start thinking like this, it slows you down. I was grateful that Mary was a good safe driver and doing a very low speed when the front tyre blew out like that, or we would have been all dead that time. Even so, it made me begin thinking about the possibility of my own death.

18 Medals and

pieces of paper

This was the sort of life I was living when, one day, a letter arrived in the mail , saying that I had been recommended for an MBE. I never did find out who recommended me, and I didn't know whether I ought to take it, or really what it would mean to me, but I asked around and the people I spoke to all urged me to take it.

I had just taken out a loan, guaranteed by one of my sister' s sons, to buy a house in Stanmore, but at the same time, I was still living in my little room at the presbytery. I had with me a couple of my nieces and their children. They were going to live with me and, instead of paying rent some­where else, help me to pay off the house.

I could feel that I was getting on in my years, and I felt that if I was ever going to have a little place to call my own, it would have to be now. I was able to borrow the money for the small deposit which was required by Aboriginal Hous­ing Loans, and pay it back out of my A.M.S . wages.

Because of the pressures of my work, I wasn't able to do much about getting ready to go on the day to collect my medal and citation. The mother of one of the nuns offered me a dress, and I went out to Maroubra and had a fitting. On the night before, I was driven out there once more; this time to pick it up.

In the morning I was trying to get dressed, and there were the usual problems with the alcoholics, some of whom

15 1

were sick. We were worrying about where to get food for the day and the other daily problems of clean clothes for all that many people who had been arrested the night before . The telephone never stopped ringing and I was running back and forwards, trying to listen to people' s problems over the phone and still get dressed on time and do up my hair. The dress was lovely, but I only owned one petticoat and one bra, and at the last minute, I couldn't find my bra.

Sister Germaine and Brother Tom were going through that tiny room at a furious rate, trying to locate that bra, running out to look on the washing line and wondering if one of the alcoholics might have taken it by accident. At last, I looked in the big handbag and found it. I could get ready; I could go.

Colin Davis, who is my sister Olga' s son, and his wife Rita, were to take me. It was such a mad rush getting there. At the ceremony, there were a couple of hundred people. It was held on the lawns of Government House, not inside as had been the Queen's lunch, and the drinks and food were spread out on tables in the open air. There was wine, sand, wiches, cakes, and not anything like stiff or formal.

Sir Roden Cutler, and his wife, Lady Cutler, who I had met quite a number of times by now, were there, and they came over and spoke to us. Ossie Cruse was also there, get, ting his citation. The press were there, lots of them, and they were buzzing around and taking photos. I received my citation and felt very strange. As it was getting close to my turn, it was flashing into my mind the numbers of places where I couldn't get served; how I had had to sit on the ground at the front of the picture theatre as a child in the roped,off section that Blacks had to sit in, white kids in Cowra running after us yelling, 'Nigger, nigger, pull the trig, ger' , the camps and shacks that Blacks were having to live in all over this country that was, after all, ours - and here I was, standing up here with all these well,dressed and

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fashionable people, waiting in turn to collect this medal which would make me a Member of the British Empire.

Through my mind flashed my Grandfather, buried now in a pauper' s grave nobody could find, and my brothers and sisters, old and broken before their time . I had to pinch my hand hard to bring me back into the present day.

It was a very nice day. Colin and Rita and I moved around, eating the food, drinking the drinks, and speaking to people, and everybody had nice clothes and nice voices.

Then they drove me back to the house at Stanmore. As I walked in, it hit me. The electricity company was threatening to turn off the power because we hadn't got the money to pay their last bill at the other house. The tele, phone company was owed so much money that I would be paying it off at a few dollars every payday from now until the end of the century. The house was bare; we had not yet been able to get any money for furniture and beds. The kids and myself, we were sleeping either on mattresses on the floor, and some were sleeping on just blankets on the floor.

In the big bag that I had carried with me to the cer, emony was my toothbrush, paste, spare dress and under, clothes , which was just one pair of bloomers. This was how I lived, in a big bag. I had to sleep wherever I could find a bed. I had nothing and my family had nothing . . . and they gave me a medal for that!

It was supposed to be a happy occasion, so I sat on the floor in the lounge and we talked about things for hours, and then I went to bed and cried. I didn't want my family to know I was crying; they were all so proud of me, so I put the little girl who was sharing a mattress with me in to sleep with the little girls on the blanket in the next room, so that I could cry without upsetting anybody.

MumShirl on the day she received her MBE, with her nephew Colin Davis and Rita Davis

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I am not one to speak of my own problems much. People have come to depend upon me, and sometimes I am their last resort and I can't take that away from them, even if all I can do is listen.

But my health was failing fast and my very good friend who is a doctor was chasing around at night, looking for me because I had been too busy to turn up at his surgery during the hours.

Bills that I was unable to pay were mounting up, and I sometimes thought that I could barely get through the day. There were high points, people who I had helped stopping me to thank me, people bringing around their brand new babies to show me, and other people piling their love and affection on me. Somehow I kept my balance.

We had managed to get a farm at St Albans, up near Wiseman's Ferry, and my brother Laurie was running it for alcohol rehabilitation. Laurie had done so well in these thirty years, bringing up his own family, and also taking in other children who had need of a home. He and Colleen were so in love all those years, and standing firmly behind each other.

I was in Sydney when I first heard that a murder had been committed up at Karuah, which is where Laurie lived. He was driving backwards and forwards between there and the Karakumba Program at Wiseman's Ferry. There had been quite a crowd around when this young Aboriginal man had been killed and everyone who was there had been pulled in by the police for questioning.

I became afraid for my brother. I knew that my brother was well on in years, and that the young man who was dead was just over twenty.

It was unlikely that there could have been anything happen between these two, over this big age gap, but I believe in premonitions and I had this knowledge that something bad was to happen out of all this .

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Laurie and I were going up to the funeral of the young man, as Laurie had since come down to Sydney to see me, and we were going to travel together to the funeral. In the car also was my brother' s solicitor, and when we were nearly there, he advised my brother that it would be foolish for him to go. My brother didn't like the idea, but he had to take the legal advice, so we went on without him and he stayed with a family friend, Father Williams, at the presby� tery at Toronto. My brother's solicitor, who is also a close friend of mine, accompanied me to the funeral.

At the funeral, the police and everybody were there, and it suddenly struck me that the only person who was not there, and who had been present when the young man was killed, was Laurie. I knew it looked bad, but it was too late to do anything about it.

A few days later, Laurie and I were at Wiseman' s Ferry, and Laurie was cooking the meal for the alcoholics, a big pot full of stew with vegetables . A young girl had driven up from Sydney to see me, bringing blankets, medical supplies for the program and flowers because it was Mother's Day. She had with her her young man.

Suddenly, as we were sitting talking in the car, an old man rushed up to us and said that the gungies (police) had taken Laurie. Looking in the rear vision mirror, we could just see the blue light that sits on the top of the paddy wagon, the rest of the vehicle hidden from view of us by the sloping hill. The young girl immediately started the car, and we took off after the police car.

At Wiseman's Ferry Police Station, I went in and saw these detectives from Sydney. They were annoyed that I had turned up before they had had time to question Laurie and they hustled him back into another police car straight away and said they were taking him to Raymond Terrace.

The young girl drove like the wind and we got to Raymond Terrace only a few minutes after the police car.

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I ran into the station. The detective was standing there and he said, 'We have just charged your brother with murder'.

I couldn't believe it. I just broke down and cried. How could they do it, when they knew he was innocent? They took Laurie out, put him into the paddy-wagon, and drove away. He looked tired and suddenly very much an old man.

The next few months were an agony, a hell. We tried for bail, but could not get it. The strange thing was that Laurie had taken in and reared up the two brothers of the young man who was killed, and even they could not believe Laurie was guilty, and they remained loyal to him. They were not children, now, but young men who could and did make up their own minds, and there is no way they would have stuck fast to a man who they even thought for one sec­ond could have murdered their brother.

Just when I thought I was at the bottom of an all-time low, another blow would be struck. I was trying to keep up with my work, while giving as much support as I could to Laurie, his wife Colleen and their kids, and my own prob­lems with my house, my bills, and the constant bad feeling that I had about this whole business with my brother. There was something really very wrong there and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I was sleeping poorly and although I was getting messages of strength from the spirits I was praying to, I didn't seem to be able to pull myself up out of this slump.

I had been taking my pills, but maybe not eating the way I am supposed to. One evening, when I was looking out for somebody, I went down to a club which is very near to my house and had a drink. Somehow a woman there began to hassle me and I became very annoyed, and next thing I knew, I was out on the footpath. Before I really had time to work out what would be the best way to handle this situ­ation, a police car rolled up, two policemen jumped out and they grabbed me.

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Actually, as they laid their hands on me, I was on my way back into the club to pick up my handbag, which was still inside . It is a big handbag, in which I carry all my stopover things, as well as my identification from the Department of Corrective Services and my shield. With­out it, I feel like I am not prepared to handle anything. These two police officers were determined not to let me go in and get it, and without it I was unable to prove that I was not up to anything.

They began making dirty remarks about Black women, and trying to drag me towards their vehicle . They were not going to give me a chance to prove anything about myself In the darkness of the street, one of them kicked out at me. My leg was suddenly in great pain and I could feel myself beginning to fall over.

I couldn't believe this was happening. They took me to the police station and charged me with a language charge, of all things. After the language I had heard coming out of their mouths and the filthy things they had been saying about Black women, they had the cheek to charge me with a language charge.

I sat out the time in the cells quietly, which was dumb, because I had been in these same cells so many times, help­ing people, talking to them, trying to make sure they were alright. When finally I got home, in the middle of the night, I rang up this young Black girl, and in the morning she came by with her friend and they both came with me to the Courts .

One of the policemen came by us as we waited for my name to be called and he said in front of the other people who were there that they 'had me this time' , and that I had something like sixty or eighty previous arrests! I would have fainted if the young girl hadn't had a quick wit, and said to the policeman, 'This lady' s name is Shirley Smith, not 'Jockey' Smith.' I guess he must have run back and checked

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up the record cards again, because he didn't say a thing like that in the Court. I was asked how I was going to plead, and I said 'Not Guilty'. There was no way I was going to let these two policemen get away with whatever it was they thought they were playing.

The young girl had raced around and tried to find out what could be done. We went in and saw the Chamber Magistrate and then went in and put charges on the two police officers; one for language and one for assault.

I should have known that it is very hard to win against the police, after all these years dealing with them. But I had spent all my adult life trying to get justice for people which is not to say that I try to get people to go free when they have done something wrong.

I was sick . I was very sick quite a lot of this time. I wasn't able to keep fooling myself, telling myself that there wasn't much wrong with me, worry about it tomorrow. When the solicitors started talking to me about 'doing a deal' with the police, that they would drop their charge against me if l would drop mine against them, I felt that this fight was just draining the little bit of energy I had left; energy which I badly needed if I was to be able to keep going, for Laurie' s sake.

When the time came for my charges against the police to be heard, I did withdraw them. Would you believe, though, that this was all carefully managed by the police and that when the time came for them to withdraw their charge against me, they did not? Instead, they said that they were not proceeding with it ' at this time' , which means that they were just going to let it hang there in the air, like some­thing hanging over my head. It was too late to put new charges on them and I couldn't think of a way to make them hear the charge against me, or make them drop it. They sure can make people get all twisted up.

Just after this, I received a letter from the Department

159

of Corrective Services. There had been a Royal Com­mission into Prisons a while before and Mr McGeechan was no longer with the Department. I had thought it was a terrible shame, because I knew he had always tried to do the best he could, and that people working in the system had not liked the way that he tried to make changes within the prisons.

When I could, which was not immediately because of all the other problems which I was dealing with in my work, and because of my health which was going down, I went into the Department. There they took away from me the card and the shield which I had worked for for so many years. They gave me a bureaucratic reason, which I knew was bullshit. The police and the Department of Corrective Services have always worked hand in glove, and now with one framing Laurie, the other was out to get me.

In a way, it just didn't feel like it could all be really hap­pening. They knew I had been going in and out of prisons for years, just helping people, talking to them, never mak­ing any trouble, and often stopping trouble before it started. I had arranged for so many young men to turn themselves in, instead of letting it go on until a confron­tation. If there was going to be a confrontation, I always thought, let it be in the Court, under the eye of the magis­trate or the judge, and not between some young Black man and a trigger-happy young policeman in a dark back alley.

The card was the Gold Pass, meant to last me a lifetime that had been given to me years before. The shield, I had had that for even longer. Now they were gone. What was happening to me now?

The many honours that I had received over the years , and even the MBE which I had worked for and earned, none of these things were any help to me now. I could hardly go about my work, but I drove myself on. Colleen, Laurie' s wife, and their children, were trying to keep the

1 60

alcoholic program going, but it was too hard over a long period of time to run it without a strong man.

I would visit Laurie in prison, and he was so down­hearted. 'If I was guilty' , he said many times, ' if l was respon­sible for taking the life of young Paul, I would be prepared to pay for it. I would pay for it in this life, and in the next. But I didn't do it . . . I'm not guilty.' 'Don't give up' , I would beg him, ' it will turn out alright at the trial.'

At the trial, the policmen who arrested Laurie (the two detectives) said that he had verbally confessed to them dur­ing that car-ride between Wiseman's Ferry and Raymond Terrace. One detective even said that he had written the confession down on a bit of paper in the dark. He said Laurie had said, 'That bastard deserved to die, and I did it.'

That told me that Laurie hadn't said it, because Laurie had a real thing against the word, 'bastard'. I never had doubted that he was innocent, but this 'confession' was the surest proof that not only had he not committed a murder, but also that he had not said, under any circumstances, that he had done so.

As a young man, Laurie had been called a bastard many time and got into many blues over it, fighting anyone who called it to him. He felt that it was not an insult to him so much as an insult towards our Mother. As a man, it was not a word that he was ever given to use.

My brother had been living a good life for over thirty­one years. Welfare officers in the area would come by his home and ask him to look after children until they could be placed. Laurie kept some of these children, fed them and looked after them as his own. He was not man who would hurt a boy, as he would have thought of young Paul in the way of a boy, as many men of his age do.

The public believed the police, and the jury found my brother guilty of manslaughter. He was given a ten-year sen­tence, with a non-parole period of five years.

1 6 1

During the time we were waiting for his trial to come up, my sister Ethel had died, in June 1979. With the per­mission of the Corrective Services, I had taken Laurie and also my nephew Archie up to the funeral at Cowra. Both Laurie and Archie were under police escort. I stood beside Ethel's grave, with two men who were both going back to prison by evening, and my loving sister cold in the ground, and I wondered how I could suffer along like this.

I was also in trouble at this time with the Aboriginal Medical Service. The Department of Aboriginal Affairs put pressure on the A.M.S . to run the place like a white institution. Sometimes they can do it and sometimes they can't do it. They wanted reports on what all the workers were doing; for instance, how many people I was seeing, where I was seeing them and all that sort of thing. They wanted me to get up in the morning, go in and punch the clock, let people know where I would be all day. I wouldn't have minded if I could tell them, but who knows when emergencies are going to come up and who wants to tell about the poor and needy people they've been trying to help keep their dignity all day.

This had been going on for a few months and I couldn't get myself together to have someone help me to even start a report. I can't read much and I can hardly sign my name. Even this book is being written down for me by this young girl from bits and pieces I have told her over the last ten years and some tapes she made about my younger years .

I went into the A.M.S . and I felt the breath going out of me as I went into the backroom. I woke up in St Vincent's Hospital and I learned later that the doctors thought I had had a heart attack. I was in a lot of pain. In the evening, my family came up to see me and they brought with them a letter that had been slipped under my door at home. The letter said that I was suspended from the A.M.S .

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staff I learned that it had been placed there by a young man who I had helped when he had been taken before the Court on a charge, and that he had been sent in to do the dirty work of the A.M.S . Council, who were really the ones who suspended me.

For weeks I lay there, going through in my mind all that had been happening. Had I, by taking the honours for instance, been too proud, and was God punishing me? No, I thought, He is not a cruel God and my family and myself have nothing; we walk around in second-hand rags. We are too busy just trying to live to be proud in the way that is a sin.

I thought about Laurie and knew that he was suffering more than me. I was feeling sorry for myself again and had to stop that. Somehow I was always working on just stop­ping the tears that sat right there behind my eyes through all those weeks, waiting for me to let my guard down, so they could run down my face .

I was pushed and poked around by the medical people who were trying to save my life. I couldn't appreciate it then, you know, but I do now. After I had been at St Vincent's for awhile, I was moved to St Margaret' s Hospital.

It was while I was here that I received the bad news that Laurie had had a heart attack. Many people had been coming to visit me, particularly Sister Ignatius , who had been such a firm and loving friend all these years . They rushed to my side and tried to find out all they could about Laurie .

It seems he had had a stroke, and a blood clot had settled on the speech centre of his brain. Laurie, my beauti­ful brother with the loud, clear voice, who loved to sing, who had raised his voice in praise of the Lord in the first radio program ever to be broadcast from inside a prison -he had now lost his power of speech.

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By the time his appeal came up, I was staying in a Cath­olic nursing home at Woollahra. Laurie was still in inten­sive care at Prince Henry Hospital, moved by now to the Annex, which is staffed by the Corrective Services Depart­ment and the Health Commission. It is a place just for sick prisoners.

The appeal was heard by three judges and defended by a barrister calledJames Gregory. James Gregory pointed out to the judges all the legal mistakes that had been made in the trial, which had been heard first in Maitland, East Maitland, and then although it had been scheduled to be heard in Newcastle, we had applied for a change of venue and it had, after all, been heard in the Supreme Court in Sydney.

The judges listened to all the evidence and read all about the trial from the transcripts . Eventually it was their turn to say something.

They said that my brother, Lawrence George Perry, should never have been charged with murder or man­slaughter on the evidence which they had before them. They said he had been unjustly accused and sentenced. The three judges acquitted Laurie.

I thanked the young barrister and the other people who had come in to hear the appeal and who had taken an interest right through the case. There were nuns, Mother Superior, and two priests, as well as other friends and relations. We then rushed off to tell Laurie the outcome of the appeal.

When we arrived at the Annex, though, we were dis­appointed not to be able to be the first to tell him. His wife, Colleen, was so excited that I thought she might burst apart. The Chief Superintendent of Long Bay had already been in touch with him and was coming over to sign his release papers. Because of his acquittal, Laurie was taken from the prison part of the hospital and put into an ordi­nary ward. It was good to see him there, with no bars on the

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windows, but the cost had been so high, for all of us. Laurie was acquitted in November, 1 979. Is it all over, now, this ter­rible time that we have been through?

I no longer work for the Aboriginal Medical Service. I would have worked there until I dropped dead, if they hadn't suspended me. I was in hospital for seven months, with ulcers that would not heal forming on my legs and body. The sugar diabetes is also a problem and I can feel that I am nowhere near as young as I used to be . I can still work and I will work, because this work is not work, it is a way of live .

I don't go down to the Aboriginal Medical Service now, and I don't think I 'm welcome. At the same time, I know they are doing so much good work and need the support of everybody. As A.M.S . s spread all over the country, they are trying to take away the sickness and pain of our people, and that's more important than just a hassle between me and them. I don't like to criticise Blacks, especially when I know they are working so hard, but sometimes they are letting themselves be pushed too much into the white way of run­ning things . In my own case, they wanted me to answer to them, so that they could answer to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. I think they, and I, should only have to answer to our people, and I 'm prepared to. But I have to be able to do it our way, the Aboriginal way, because I can't read well enough or write reports .

I am back onto receiving sickness benefits now, after a long time when I couldn't get organised enough to fill in the forms. I will probably go back onto the pension. Either way, I will not have enough money to pull myself out of the debts which I have piled up, or even to have my phone connected up again.

I am sleeping, again, in a little bed in the back of a priest 's house. I am grateful to have somewhere to sleep out of the weather, and I can use the phone here, too, which is

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a big help and lets me stay in touch with people. I can't get back into doing the same work as I was doing before, because it is much harder for me to get around. Without the money to help people when they have problems, I find it very difficult to be able to tell them, 'No, I can't help you' , when they come to me about their evictions, their having no food, or some other serious problem. I can still listen when it helps, and I do, and I can still learn, and I do that, too.

After a long time, the Department of Corrective Ser­vices gave me back my shield, only now it has had gold poured on it, and it is stuck into a piece of wood so it can look good on a wall or a dressing table . It is not the same working shield that I could carry around in my little wallet, and pull out and show people to let them know which side of the law I was on. The way it is now, it is a pretty ornament.

I would rather that the Department had dealt with me honestly, the way I have dealt with them all these years. In a letter which they wrote to some people who were trying to get my Gold Pass returned to me, they said:

The recall of Mrs Smith's gold badge was necess­ary following complaints to this department by the NSW Police Department, regarding her incorrect usage of the gold badge.

This letter, which was signed by Dr T. Vinson, was not sent to me, nor has this ever been discussed with me, and I have never been given either the opportunity to find out what is meant by it, nor the chance to defend myself, if it is necessary.

I still carry a pass from the Department of Corrective Services , which gives me entry into the gaols, because I work for the prisoners, not for the bureaucrats. When they talk about 'justice' and 'honesty' , they ought to look at their own houses, because it will be a long time before they can

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talk about justice and honesty for prisoners, if they can't deal that way themselves.

My brother is now out of hospital , at last, although he is still working with the speech therapist. He still can't talk the way he wants to, although he says words and can make himself understood within the family.

While I was in hospital, and only a few months after I was arrested and charged by those two police officers, I was awarded 'Parent of the Year'. I went from my hospital bed, along with a young Black woman who had come to collect me for the occasion, down town to collect the award. I feel I am going to end up with so many medals and pieces of paper.

They must be worth something in the end, mustn't they?