A daughter’s love
I tell Mummy that I love her and how lucky I am that she decided to take us home. She says, ‘No, Babe, it was Ned, too’. (Ned is Daddy’s real name.) ‘We kept you and Kevin because of him as well.’ Mummy had told him she was worried about how they was gonna keep us all. It was already hard for them as a family; they had everyone else to take care of. Mummy knew it would be much harder with an extra two but Daddy said, ‘We can’t let these two little kids be split up’.
‘June wanted to take you and Raymond wanted Kevin. We both wouldn’t let you be split up. You had to stay together. That’s what families do.’
I say a silent ‘thank you’ to Daddy. I don’t and can’t think of having any family other than the one I have. I thank Biamie1 for giving me them.
Mummy tells me why she had to make us four younger ones State Wards. They couldn’t afford all the kids, money was hard to come by. They didn’t know when or where the work would be. She tells the story of how her and Aunty Doris would walk for miles to fell some trees, getting paid almost nothing—one shilling and threepence—so that they could buy food to feed both families. And that’s all it bought; there was never any money for anything more.
I picture these two women walking for miles, leaving us younger kids with the older kids to look after us. Swinging an axe in the same way a man does with sweat dripping off them, muscles rippling in their arms as they work non-stop to earn that meagre money. I see them trudging their way home exhausted, the sun shining down on their backs, too tired to talk to each other, preserving their energy to go home and then be mothers to a tribe of kids. I feel tears well up as I wish that maybe, if I hadn’t been born, it would have been easier for them.
Mummy talks about when her own parents died. She was young, just seventeen, when the Welfare took my father and Aunty Flora away; and Mummy got them back and tried to raise them. How the paddocks was their only hope for work—picking cherries, oranges—anything that would provide food for everyone’s mouth. How Aunty Doris tried to help keep the family together. How, without each other, they would’ve been lost. These two old women would never have coped without each other to help raise their families.
When Mummy and me go driving anywhere, I would often ask her about my grandparents, about what she used to do as a kid growing up in Condo and Three Ways. What had life been like for her and my father’s generation?
After the years of silence or just hearing odd snippets, Mummy would now tell me great stories. Like how my father was the baby, how he was spoilt just like me and about what they all used to do in those times. How they used to ride the horses through the paddocks when they were picking the oranges. How they all looked after the animals out in the bush and how my father had a kangaroo for a pet but she can’t remember its name now.
She tells me how him, Aunty June and Aunty Flora used to give the neighbours heaps by picking their fruit. She laughs as she tells each yarn but the pain and heartache crackles her voice as she remembers. She talks about her own mother, this wonderful and gentle woman who loved them all but was also tough on them, too. She talks about her Dad, a proud man, who loved his family and loved his wife. She tells me they sang a lot at their home. (Mummy sounds like Sharon when she sings, real soulful, just like the country and western stars that we used to listen to on the wireless.)
I gently swing the talk around now to us, me and Kevin. I say to her, ‘Mummy, it must have been so hard for you all those times. Travelling doing the fruits with all us kids and outrunning the Welfare all the time.’
She tells me a secret. ‘It was, Babe; and it wasn’t just that, running away from the Welfare all the time, trying to make a living. We had to run as soon as anyone found out we were the Gilberts. As soon as they found out what happened in the family, they persecuted us. I was so scared for you kids. I had to get youse out of there so youse wouldn’t be hurt no more. You all have been hurt enough as it was.’
I’m sitting and crying deep inside for this woman. This amazing Aboriginal woman who is my mother, who has only shown strength and dignity; strength to keep her kids and her brother’s kids safe; to stop the world’s cruelty towards four innocent children who did nothing, and who tried to protect her other kids from the poverty and the hurt as well.
The sound of gunfire
One day, me and Mummy are driving to Condo to see family when, at long last, Mummy talks about the night of the murder; not how it happened or why but what happened afterwards. My father turns up at her door crying in the middle of the night. It’s January 1957 and I’m three months old. He tells Mummy, his sister, what he’s done. He has the gun in his hand. She tells him he has three choices: to give her the gun; to hand himself in; or to go and turn the gun on himself.
My father gives her the gun. They get me and Kevin inside the house and then my father hands himself in to the police in Parkes.
Hearing this story at sixteen, it dawns on me. Mummy had probably seen my mother’s body in the van where she had been shot dead. Mummy would have seen the blood that my one-and-a-half-year-old brother, Kevin, had seen. I cry for them both, and of course, for this man who is my father. I cry for Kevin and myself, surrounded or covered by the blood of our mother as she lay in the car with us.
Mummy blames herself. I can see it on her face. Her next words I hear loud and clear.
‘If only I’d had enough beds to go around for everyone. But there was only enough as it was. If only they would have stayed that night…’
If only. If only. How do I tell her that it wasn’t her fault? I can’t because I know that nothing I could say would make a difference.
1 Biamie is our Creator, the great spiritual being.