After I graduated from university, I continued postgraduate studies in Psychology at the Western Australian Institute of Technology.
My brother David was also successful in completing his Leaving exams that year, and now Helen was the only one of us still at school. She was in third year high school.
Mum and I had many small conversations about the past, but they weren’t really informative, because we tended to cover the same ground. Sometimes, Mum would try and get Nan to talk. One day, I heard Nan shout, ‘You’re always goin’ on about the past these days, Glad. I’m sick of it. It makes me sick in here,’ she pointed to her chest. ‘My brain’s no good, Glad, I can’t ’member!’
Mum gave up easily. ‘She’s been like that all her life,’ she complained to me one day, ‘she’ll never change. When I was little, I used to ask about my father, but she wouldn’t tell me anything. In the end, I gave up.’
‘Who was your father?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she replied sadly, ‘Nan just said he was a white man who died when I was very small.’
I felt sad then. I promised myself that, one day, I would find out who her father was. She had a right to know.
In 1975, I gave birth to a daughter, Ambelin Star. The family was very excited, it was our first grandchild. Mum cried when she saw her, so did Nan. Now, instead of collecting antiques, Mum started buying up toys and children’s books.
I passed my course at WAIT and decided to give up study for a while and concentrate on being a wife and mother.
I continued to prompt Nan about the past, but she dug her heels in further and further. She said that I didn’t love her, that none of us had ever loved or wanted her. She maintained that Mum had never looked after her properly. In fact, she became so consistently cantankerous that she gradually drove us all away. Everyone in the family got to the stage where, if we could avoid seeing Nan, we would.
Paul and I also became fed-up with city life at this time, so we thought we’d try the country for a while. Paul’s parents were now living in Albany on a small farmlet, so we moved down to Albany for twelve months.
Jill had now left university and was helping Mum run her florist shop. She had had enough of study for a while, although she did return later and complete an Arts degree.
My brothers were now working; Bill was up North with a mining company and David in the city with a firm of auctioneers. David was also working at night and in the evenings as a musician with a rock-and-roll band.
In 1976, Helen successfully completed her Tertiary Admittance Examination. The TAE had replaced the Leaving examination.
In 1977, lack of money and poor employment prospects drove us back to Perth, where Paul began his own cleaning business. He had resigned from teaching when we moved to Albany. I became pregnant with my second child that year and was very sick, spending a number of weeks in hospital.
Because of these various factors, my search for the past seemed to have reached a standstill from 1975 to 1978.
By the time I’d had my second child, Blaze Jake, in 1978, a change was beginning to take place in our family. Nan’s brother, Arthur, began making regular visits. He was keen to see more of Nan now they were both getting older. And he was very fond of Mum.
‘Who is he?’ I asked, when I found him parked in front of the TV one day with a huge meal on his lap.
‘You remember him, Arthur, Nan’s brother. When you were little, he visited us a couple of times, remember?’
I cast my mind back and suddenly I saw him as he had been so many years before. Tall and dark, with a big smile.
‘Is he her only brother?’ I asked. ‘No other relatives hidden away in the closet?’
‘No,’ Mum laughed, ‘he’s the only one that I know of. He’s a darling old bloke, a real character. I think Nan’s jealous of him.’
‘That’d be right! Great to think they’re seeing each other after all these years.’
‘It’s wonderful,’ Mum said with tears in her eyes. ‘I’ve told him to come and stay whenever he likes.’
‘Mum,’ I said slowly, ‘you don’t think he could tell us about the past? About Nan, I mean.’
‘I think he could, if we can get him to talk. He tells some wonderful stories. Go and talk to him.’
It took a while for me to get close to Arthur. He loved Mum, but he was wary of the rest of us. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of us, and he wasn’t quite sure what we made of him. If he had known how insatiably curious we were about him and his past, he would probably have been scared off.
But on one of these early visits, he unexpectedly did provide us with a very vivid picture from the past. Some old photographs of Nan, taken in the nineteen twenties. Nan had always refused to allow any of us to take her photograph, so it was exciting to be able to see her as a young woman. Nan, however, was not impressed.
It became very obvious in a very short time that Nan and Arthur were brother and sister, because they fought like cat and dog. When Arthur was around, Nan behaved like a child. She was jealous because Mum loved him and enjoyed his company. She was also frightened of what he might tell us.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ she told us one day when he was halfway through a story about the old times, ‘he’s only a stupid old man, what would he know? He’ll tell you wrong!’
‘Is she goin’ on again?’ Arthur said to Mum. He loved pretending Nan wasn’t there. ‘You know what’s wrong with her, don’t you?’ he whispered. ‘She’s jealous.’
‘You silly old man,’ she grumbled, ‘who do you think you are?Nobody’s interested in your stories. You’re just a silly old blackfella.’
‘Aah, you’ll have to think of a better name than that to call me,’ he smiled, ‘I’m proud of bein’ a blackfella. Anyway, you’re a blackfella yourself, what do ya think of that?!’
Nan was incensed. No one had called her a blackfella for years. She bent down to him and said, ‘I may be a blackfella, but I’m not like you. I dress decent and I know the right way to do things. Look at you, a grown man and you got your pants tied up with a bit of string! You don’t see me goin’ round like that.’
‘Git out of here,’ he said as he shook his fist at her, ‘leave us alone, we want to talk.’
Nan wandered off, but she was back fifteen minutes later to check on what he was saying.
‘You’re like a bag of wind,’ she complained as she stood in the doorway of the lounge room. ‘Blow, blow, blow! Don’t you ever shut up?’
‘I feel sorry for you,’ Arthur replied sympathetically, ‘you got my pity. You don’t have a good word to say about anyone, not even your own daughter. I tell you this, this is a warning, one day I’m gunna get a young wife. I’ll bring her round here and then you won’t dare to talk to me like that.’
Nan always laughed whenever Arthur talked about getting himself a young wife to look after him in his old age. ‘No one would have you,’ she hooted. ‘Young girls are smart these days, they see you comin’ and they run like a willy-willy. Who’d want a silly old blackfella like you, you got no money.’
‘You don’t know what I got,’ Arthur replied. ‘I got all my land up in Mukinbudin, that’s more than what most blackfellas got.’
‘Your land, your land,’ Nan mimicked him. ‘I don’t want to her about your land no more. I bet all the kangaroos eat your crops.’
That was the last straw as far as Arthur was concerned. Nan’s comments had hit close to home and she knew it. He’d told her about a part of his land that he kept uncleared so the wildlife could prosper in peace, now she was using this confidence against him.
‘I’m tellin’ you nothin’ no more,’ he said. ‘We’ll ignore her. Tell her to go, Glad,’ he added to Mum. ‘We don’t want her in here. She’s been with whitefellas too long!’
‘Now, Nanna,’ Mum said in her Let’s Be Reasonable voice. ‘Arthur is your only brother, whenever he comes, you pick a fight with him. You’re both getting old, it’s time you made up. He doesn’t want to listen to your complaints all the time.’
Nan was determined to remain perverse. ‘And we don’t want to hear his stories either,’ she said forcefully. ‘He goes over and over the same old thing. He wasn’t the only one hard done by.’
‘No, he wasn’t,’ Mum replied, ‘but at least he’ll talk about it. You won’t tell us anything. Whenever we ask you about the past, you get nasty. We’re your family, we’ve got a right to know.’
‘Glad, you’re always goin’ on about the past. You and Arthur are a good pair, you don’t know what a secret is.’
‘It’s not a matter of secrets, Nan,’ Mum reasoned. ‘You seem to be ashamed of your past, I don’t know why. All my life, you’ve never told me anything, never let me belong to anyone. All my life, I’ve wanted a family, you won’t even tell me about my own grandmother. You go away and let Arthur talk, at least he tells me something.’
Nan opened her mouth to reply, but Arthur cut her off with, ‘If you don’t go, Daisy, I’ll tell them your Aboriginal name.’
Nan was furious. ‘You wouldn’t!’ she fumed.
‘Too right I will,’ said Arthur. Nan knew when she was beaten, she stormed off.
‘What is it?’ both Mum and I asked excitedly after she’d gone.
‘No, I can’t tell you,’ he said, ‘it’s not as if I wouldn’t like to, but Daisy should tell you herself. There’s a lot she could tell you, she knows more about some of our people than I do.’
‘But she won’t talk, Arthur,’ Mum replied. ‘Sometimes, I think she thinks she’s white. She’s ashamed of her family.’
‘Aah, she’s bin with whitefellas too long. They make her feel ’shamed, that’s what white people do to you. Why should we be ’shamed, we bin here longer than them. You don’t see the black man diggin’ up the land, scarrin’ it. The white man got no sense.’
I sat and listened to many conversations between Mum and Arthur after that. Whenever he turned up for a visit, Mum would ring me at home and say, ‘He’s here!’ and I would go rushing over.
On one such afternoon, I wandered out to the backyard to find Nan and Arthur under a gum tree, jabbering away in what sounded to me like a foreign language. I sat down very quietly on the steps and listened. I prayed they wouldn’t see me.
After a few minutes, Nan said, ‘My eyes aren’t that bad, Sally. I can see you there, spyin’ on us.’
‘I’m not spying,’ I defended myself. ‘Keep talking, don’t let me stop you.’
‘We’re not talkin’ no more,’ Nan said. ‘You hear that, Arthur, no more!’
Just then, Mum came out with a tray full of afternoon tea. After she’d given them their tea and cake, I followed her inside.
‘Mum,’ I said excitedly, ‘did you hear them? They were talking in their own language!’
‘What, Nanna too?’
‘Yep! And not just a few words, she was jabbering away like she always talked like that. I wouldn’t have thought she’d remember after all these years.’
‘Sally, are you sure you’re not making this up?’
‘No! Honestly Mum, I heard them!’
‘But it must be years since she used her own language. Fancy, her remembering it all this time.’
‘It’s a ray of hope, Mum,’ I said. ‘She could have easily forgotten it, a language needs to be used to be remembered. It must mean it was important to her. She might turn into a proud blackfella yet.’
‘Don’t you ever give up?’
‘Where there’s life, there’s hope, Mum.’
Over the following weeks, whenever I saw Nan, I’d bring up the topic of her language. She was very defensive at first and would lose her temper with me, but, after a while, she gradually came around. One day she said, ‘Hey, Sally, you know what goombo is?’
‘No, what,’ I grinned.
‘Wee-wee.’
Nan chuckled and walked off.
She told me many words after that, but I could never get her to say a sentence for me. It would be a long time before I would learn to be content with the little she was willing to give.