My mum was an undemanding sort of a person who couldn’t say no to people. She used to always do things for others, like washing, cooking and house cleaning. If somebody came to the door who needed her help it was never too much trouble. That’s probably the way she was brought up, to go and do things for other people, for white people, you know, because they used to train Aboriginal girls to be domestic servants in those days. Mum was taken away from her family when she was two years old, so I suppose she didn’t know any different. When you’re that young you don’t ask what happened to your mother or your father or even wonder how your life is going to turn out.
So Mum was bought up by people who weren’t her family. When she was fourteen, she was farmed out from Moore River Settlement to a place called Petworth Park in Moora, where she worked as a farm girl. I have some photos of her sitting there on the farm. She was a nanny to the kids and also helped with the cooking. That was the fate of many young Aboriginal girls and that was the kind of work she did on and off till the day she died.
Mum was a wonderful mother. She was very good with her hands and great at making jams and cakes. Every time we had the school fete they would send down and ask her to make a cake to raffle. On rainy days she’d entertain me by making little dolls out of stockings — we didn’t have any money to buy toys. She also showed me and my two brothers how to paint; she was a great artist herself. She knitted our clothes and she taught me how to knit and crochet and I was quite good at it. Since I was the only girl in the family, she liked to teach me homemaking things so we were real cobbers.
When I was young I didn’t know where Mum came from or who her people were. Mum didn’t know herself, but my dad was a Nyungar man. He was Phillip Heath from Katanning, and he was the one who kept us three kids in line.
The Chief Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville, had been very angry when Mum married Dad, because at that time a woman was supposed to marry someone lighter in colour than she was. The Aborigines Department was trying to breed out our colour so we wouldn’t exist anymore. That’s what White Australia was all about. Probably Neville was angry too because Mum had worked for him as a housegirl then gone and married someone he wouldn’t approve of behind his back. The Native Welfare controlled every aspect of your life in those days. It was very hard for Aboriginal people then and I learned very young that I’d have to be determined if I wanted to get anywhere.
It’s funny the things you learn in childhood. I remember an annual work picnic for Dad’s work that we attended once as a family, I learned a valuable lesson there. I was a fast runner so I entered the open race and won. I was really excited and ran over to my parents, shouting, ‘I won! I won!’ I couldn’t believe it! The prize was an electroplated nickel sugar bowl, which was a big thing in those days. The next thing though — they were running the race again. Well, that was it! I wasn’t going to be beaten by anyone, so I lined up again and I won again, only this time by an even bigger margin. I’ve still got that sugar bowl, but nothing before or since has more graphically signified to me the uphill road that we have as Aboriginal people in competing in Australian society.
I loved my mother very much, but I lost her when I was only twelve going on thirteen. With no sisters to talk to I really felt it deeply. It was a terrible blow. She was still with our family in spirit for quite a while though, which wasn’t unusual because as Nyungar people we are used to living with spirits. I grew up talking about gennarks and other sorts of spiritual things. After Mum died though, the spiritual world came a lot closer to me.
Not long after she passed away, I was sitting in the dining room doing some mending when suddenly I felt a bit strange. There was something at the back of my neck and it made me look up. There was Mum, standing in the passageway, as clear as day. Well, I nearly died of shock! My brain told me she was dead, but there she was, standing there. And she wasn’t just like a flimsy bit of white smoke that people sometimes describe when they say they’ve seen a ghost, she was a real person. I didn’t know what to do, so I rushed outside, jumped on my pushbike and started riding, all the time thinking, ‘I’m not going home because Mum is supposed to be dead.’ I rode until around six o’clock at night, it was getting dark by then and I started to worry. If we weren’t home by five Dad used to give us the father of a hiding, so I ended up going home.
‘Well,’ Dad said when he saw me. ‘Where were you?’
‘Oh Dad don’t touch me! I saw Mum and I got a fright and ran out.’
Luckily he understood about spirits so everything was all right. In Dad’s family whenever anyone died his dead mother came and knocked on the window to let them know someone close had gone. Every time he saw his mother knock on the window he knew another member of the family had gone, so he understood what had happened to me.
In fact, after Mum died he used to go down to the backyard with a lantern every night after tea to talk to her. When he returned he’d say, ‘I’ve just been talking to your mother and she is worried about you kids because she doesn’t think I can look after you.’ We would look at him as if he was a bit funny, then we’d go into the bedroom and bounce up and down on the beds and throw pillows at each other and say, ‘Dad is going mad, the old man is going mad.’
Then there was our old dog Dale, he was as bad as Dad because he really missed Mum. Our place was one house down from the corner and Dale used to wait up there in the long grass for her to come home from work. The only time he would plod down the road was to get something to eat, then he would plod back up again and sit in this little nest he’d made and wait. So there were the two of them, the dog on the corner waiting for Mum and Dad down the backyard talking to Mum about us kids every evening. This went on for three months, until finally Dad came back one night and said, ‘That’s it, your mother is gone now. She’s happy that I can look after you kids, so now she’s gone.’ He didn’t go down the backyard with the lantern any more and the dog came back from waiting at the corner.
Things settled down then, but there was always a big gap in my life from losing Mum so young. She was only in her early forties when she died. There was another gap too, from not knowing who her people were. Poor old Mum never even knew her family name and she never had the chance to touch base with her people while she was still on this earth. It breaks my heart to think about it, but everything worked out later.
After Mum died I learned to stand alone. I had one older brother and one younger brother and I was expected to take over the complete running of the household. Dad worked at the gasworks and his clothes got very gritty; there was no washing machine so I had to learn in a hurry how to do things well. It was hard, but it stood me in good stead for later life. I learned to be self-reliant and self-disciplined. I learned other things too. With Dad you had to think before you put up any of your ideas, otherwise they’d just be wiped away. So I learned to think a lot and to listen to what others were saying before I spoke up.
One day I was making watery stew when a kid from down the street said to me. ‘What are ya doing?’
‘Just making stew for tea,’ I told him.
‘Why don’t ya put some flour and water in it to make it thick?’
‘Why don’t you?’ I replied.
So he did. He made a stew and it was just like Mum used to make. I learned a valuable lesson from that. When someone knows what they’re talking about, listen.
Abridged from Speaking from the Heart
edited by Sally Morgan, Tjalaminu Mia and Blaze Kwaymullina, 2007.