When Aunty Kerry asked me to help her with her memoir of growing up as a fringe-dweller and fruit picker in the 1950s, she didn’t have to ask me twice. I retained very clear memories of sitting at Griffith University in Brisbane as a young student, soaking up the words of her father, Kevin Gilbert, in his classic, Living Black. And I vividly remembered where I was in 1988, driving in my car and hearing Uncle Kevin’s lacerating words coming over the ABC radio, ‘I am not your “Aboriginal problem”. You—and your Bicentenary—are mine’.
The idea that I might contribute in a small way to the next generation of the Gilbert family writing was as welcome as it was unexpected. As we talked over a few months, it was quickly evident that it was the lives of the fruit-picking poor which was central to Aunty Kerry’s story. I’d known Aunty Kerry in Canberra for years as a tireless advocate for Aboriginal people and Aboriginal writing. And, of course being older, I knew that she must have lived through the era of active assimilation of Aboriginal people. I was not quite prepared though, for what I read in her draft manuscript. This is Australia’s hidden history brought to light, and it is sobering to read what one Black family went through in mid-twentieth-century New South Wales. If Menzies had any forgotten Australians, these were surely them.
As young children, Kerry and her siblings lived on ‘the Island’, literally building and rebuilding their own bridge across the flooded Lachlan River so they could reach the town and school. Her Mummy took the kids along with her, following the fruit-picking seasons because that was one of the few ways for the very poor to survive. Their reality was of growing up always in makeshift housing, and constantly frightened of the hated Welfare coming to take away the kids; kids who became State Wards after the murder of Kerry’s mother. Once, living on the edge of the local cemetery, for want of drinking water. And the love and connection of the extended Koori family overriding all this dire poverty, always. Kerry writes about ‘the picking’ and about what it is to be a child whose unknown father is incarcerated, far away, for a mysterious crime. Would he ever be released, and would he come home when he was? And what about the whispered rumours she had heard— were they true?
Around the time we finished our first round of edits, Aunty Kerry told me that someone had accused her of being a ‘privileged Black’.
‘If only they knew, hey?’ she laughed. I laughed, too, for I knew that this memoir of her extraordinary life would be on the record soon enough.
This book taught me many things. First and foremost, it taught me that the fighting spirit of senior Wiradjuri women is a mighty thing. It also showed me that quiet achievers can be hiding in the most amazing stories. I hope you enjoy this window into Koori life, and the Koori world. I feel honoured to have played a small part in its coming to fruition.
Melissa Lucashenko
Meanjin-Brisbane
2018