Koora: the little town on the railway track
Our big brothers have been trying to find another place for us to live. We need to buy a house so we can keep the Welfare from our door. One day, they tell Mummy they found us a place in a little town called Koorawatha. It’s seventeen miles from Cowra and twenty-seven miles from Young. It’s a good spot; we can pick the tomatoes one way and the cherries the other. And the prunes are close by and the tomatoes at Goolagong as well. We’ll have the paddocks surrounding us; we’ll always get work.
Mummy has worked and saved and now she goes to the bank to see if they will lend her the rest of the money to buy the house. They do and we all celebrate—our very own house again! I hear the others talking how the bank don’t lend money to women by themselves but they lent money to her. It’s a big deal for us, especially since she’s Aboriginal—she’s well-respected and liked here in Condo. We’re so lucky and so rich—a house all our own— and we’ve got the smartest and bestest Mother in the world. Daddy hasn’t been with us for a long time now. We don’t really worry; Mummy looks after us.
We’re moving. We’re gonna live in Koorawatha or Koora for short. We’ve got our house and it even has some acres to go with it! Mummy’s so proud and so are we. Now, we don’t have to travel so much to pick the fruit and the Welfare can’t get us; we’ll have our own house and he can’t say nothing. And we don’t have to live in flats no more or other people’s houses; and we got the road to play on like we did on the Island as well so it’s nearly as special as the Island was.
It’s a bit rundown but it’s gonna be a happy house; all of us are gonna be living there. Uncle Raymond comes to help us move. Him and Paddy do all the heavy lifting. Mummy helps as much as she can. We all do. Maureen’s here, too, doing her bit. They put all the furniture inside the house and our clothes are packed away.
And we have a bathtub, too, with a little heater connected to it that you light to make a fire so you can have hot water. This one’s not like the one Mummy has outside to do our washing in. That copper’s like a giant pot and she lights the fire under it and boils our sheets and things so they’re real white and clean. I love coming home and seeing our sheets blowing on our clothesline and I love my bed with nice clean sheets, too.
Uncle Raymond and my brother, Paddy, go up to the pub to have a drink after all the hard work of moving is done. It’s Paddy’s first time in a pub. Mummy let him go for one drink because he’s with Uncle Raymond and he worked so hard moving us in. We don’t have any drink at home. My older brothers are not allowed to bring drink into our house or even come home drunk. Mummy would’ve been real angry if they did.
It’s only a little while later that we hear noises and lots of yelling coming from up the main street. She sends Kevin up on his bike to see what’s happening. She must have known something was wrong because she didn’t wait for him to come back before starting to run in the direction of the noise. Maureen, who’s got a big belly— she’s six months’ pregnant—started trying to run, too, following her. They knew straight away the men were in trouble. Mummy tells us kids to stay. Not to follow ’em. We stay and wait but they don’t come back. Kevin jumps on his bike and follows them, not all the way, just to the park so he can see what’s happening. He comes back.
‘The pub—the whole pub—they’re fighting with them, with Mummy and Maureen and Uncle Raymond and Paddy!!!’
The whole pub! They’re fighting with our family! We run to help and we’re halfway there but they’re already on the way home. The men are smashed up a little bit but they say the other blokes in the pub look worse than they do.
They tell the story of how some blokes in the pub started making comments about Blacks, saying they don’t want no Blacks living in their town and they don’t want Blacks in their pub, either. They fought dirty, too. It wasn’t man-to-man; they were like a pack of dogs on heat, Uncle Raymond said. He called them gutless bastards. They even wanted to fight Mummy and Maureen.
We wonder how a pub full of grown men wanna fight two women and even one that’s gonna have a baby. We’re angry, too, about them trying to bash Paddy and Uncle. We know they can take care of themselves but not when a whole town wants to fight ’em. Uncle Raymond laughs and says, ‘Don’t worry. I had two of ’em on me at one go and I couldn’t move so I bit one man’s ear so bad he’ll probably need stitches.’
‘Serves ’em right. They’re a pack of dogs. Just like a pack of dogs on heat.’
I hope they hurt real bad. Us kids talk about it later and start laughing. Serves them right! We hope Uncle and Paddy flogged ’em really good. That’ll teach ’em for fucking with the Blacks. Us kids all talk about ’em. We can fight with each other—that’s all right—but no one else can. We hate this town already. We’ve only been here a little while, not even a day; just moved in and already they’re causing us heartache.
But it’s wonderful that we got our own house and it’s easier for Mummy, too. If she’s not working, she’s always cooking us a special treat for when we come home from school. She cooks little cakes and pies with custard, too, and I get to have two lots ’cause the other kids don’t get home from school till after me.
Us kids still help Mummy; we try to make things easier for her. Each Sunday, we have to pick a room out and clean it from top to bottom. The kitchen’s the hardest to clean; we have to empty out the food cupboards and the knife-and-fork drawer, and put new newspaper on the shelves to make it all clean and tidy.
I’m twelve now so I go to the primary school here but Lynnie and Kevin gotta travel on the big bus to high school and back again, and that’s a long way. They go twenty-nine miles each way to school and back. It’s twenty-seven miles to Young but they gotta turn off the highway after eighteen miles and go one mile up to Bendick Murrell to pick up the kids there, then travel back down to the highway and keep going to Young. Every day, all that way, fifty-eight miles to school for the round trip.