My Place (41 page)

I'd sit for hours under that peppermint tree, watching the water gurgle over the rocks and listening to the birds. After a while, the peace of that place would reach inside of me and I wouldn't feel sad any more. Instead, I'd start counting the numerous rainbow-coloured dragonflies that skimmed across the surface of the water. After that, I'd fall asleep. When I finally did walk back to the Home, I felt very content.

Saturday night was spent getting our clothes ready for church on Sunday. We ironed everything with those heavy flatirons you heated up on the stove. It was hard work, especially if you were little. Our clothes were always starched and ironed. We had to iron and iron until not one crease showed, it took ages.

I remember one night, I went racing into the kitchen just as Miss Moore was coming through the door with a red-hot iron. It hit straight into my arm. I must have passed out, because when I woke up, I was in the Home Hospital with my arm all bandaged up and the Matron sitting beside me.

They'd got the old doctor who serviced the Mundaring district
to come and look at me. He only came to the Home in emergencies. When he took the bandage off my arm, all I could see was raw meat, the skin had gone.

The kept me in hospital for four days. I was very lonely, no one else was sick. I think they felt sorry for me, because they let me sit out on the verandah with my arm in a sling. The other kids would sneak over and talk to me. The hospital was out of bounds, so they had to crawl through the big field of green peas opposite. I used to get cross with them because they used to take so long to crawl through that field. I knew they were all lying on their backs, eating the peas, and had forgotten about me.

I was lucky that I didn't get seriously ill too often. You didn't get on very well at Parkerville if you had something wrong with you and you couldn't take care of yourself. All the weaker kids got stood over, older kids picked on them. There were a lot of kids at the Home that were crippled with polio. I felt sorry for them. And you had to be dying not to go to school. If you stopped home, they gave you a dose of salts or castor oil. It cured everything, in those days.

One of the lowest points of my childhood was the time they took me to Princess Margaret Hospital to remove my tonsils. I was so frightened. I was all alone and I thought I was going to die.

I had to wear a nightie with the back all open. Everything smelt of carbolic soap, even the sheets. I hated that smell. They put me in a high iron bed and hardly anyone spoke to me. It was like being in a morgue.

I was very sick after the operation. I had no one to talk to, I cried and cried. I couldn't understand why my mother hadn't been to visit me, I thought perhaps they hadn't told her I was sick. She told me later that she couldn't get time off work and she couldn't come at night because of the curfew, which prevented Aboriginal people travelling after dark.

It was hard for her then, and hard for me too. Even when I was sick, I belonged to the Native Welfare Department. I wasn't even allowed to have the comfort of my own mother.

But just after this, something happened that really cheered me up. My Uncle Arthur visited. He'd come to see me once before at Parkerville when I was only very small. The memory I had of him was only dim, but it was important. I did love him and I knew he loved me. I also knew that if he could have taken me from there, he would. He was very important to me. He reminded me of my mother and home. Sometimes, I used to think that if he and Mum could live together, then I'd have a family. It wasn't to be.

He came and saw me once more after that, then never again. He was too busy trying to make a living for himself and his own family.

On Sunday afternoons, visitors were allowed to come. We used to wait and wait, we knew it was a long, uphill walk from the station, and we never knew whether someone was coming for us or not. That was the worst part. You hoped right up to the very last minute. I used to think, well, Mum will be here soon, I'll just wait a little bit longer. She'll be cross if she doesn't see me standing here, waiting for her. I remember some years when I only saw her twice at the Home.

If no one came, you put on a brave face and didn't cry. You pretended you didn't care, you just shrugged your shoulders and walked away. If one of your friends got visitors, you'd be so jealous. Of course, if you saw someone coming over the hill for you, you'd get so excited you'd just run.

A lot of kids at Parkerville had parents. Some had mothers, some had fathers. You'd do anything for kids like that, because you always hoped that they might ask you to come along and share their visitors.

It was hardest for the Aboriginal kids. We didn't have anyone. Some of the kids there had been taken from families that lived hundreds of miles away. It was too far for anyone to come and see them. And anyway, Aboriginal people had to get permits to travel. Sometimes, they wouldn't give them a permit. They didn't care that they wanted to see their kids.

Each time Mum came and saw me, she always had a bit of
paper with her that said she was allowed to travel. A policeman could stop her any time and ask to look at that paper, if she didn't have it on her, she was in big trouble.

When Mum didn't visit me for a long time, I used to wonder if she'd forgotten me. But the only day she had any time off was on Sunday, and then she had to cook the roast first. She never had any annual holidays, like some of the other servants did. I remember quite a few times when she told me she hadn't come because she couldn't afford the train fare. The only time she had the whole Sunday off was if the Drake-Brockmans went visiting for the day.

When I was still quite young, Sister Kate
*
left Parkerville and took a lot of Aboriginal children with her. I was very sad, because I lost a lot of my friends. There were a few lightly coloured Aboriginal boys left and they kept an eye on me. I don't know why I wasn't sent with Sister Kate, maybe it was because of the Drake-Brockmans, I don't know.

I think Alice Drake-Brockman thought she was doing a good thing sending me to Parkerville. Sometimes, she'd come up and bring Judy, June and Dick with her for a picnic. That was always in the spring, when the wildflowers were out. Dick and I got on well, we were very close. He treated me like his sister.

I loved it when they all came up, because the other kids were so envious. There was a lot of status in knowing someone who had a car. I thought I'd burst for joy when I saw the black Chev creep up the hill and drive slowly down the road, to halt at George Turner. All the other kids would crowd up close, hoping I'd take one of them with me. I'd jump down from the wooden fence we sat on while we waited and hoped for visitors and I'd walk slowly towards the car. I felt very shy, but I was also conscious of the
envy of the others still sitting on the fence behind me. It was a feeling of importance that would last me the whole of the following week. I always promised the other kids that next time, I might take one of them. It made me king until the following Sunday, when someone might get a visitor who brought a box of cakes. Even so, cakes weren't as important as a car ride, because it was very hard to make a cake last a full week.

I often prayed for God to give me a family. I used to pretend I had a mother and a father and brothers and sisters. I pretended I lived in a big flash house like Ivanhoe and I went to St Hilda's School for Girls, like Judy and June.

It was very important to me to have a father then. Whenever I asked Mum about my father, she'd just say, ‘You don't want to know about him, he died when you were very small, but he loved you very much.' She sensed I needed to belong, but she didn't know about all the teasing I used to get because I didn't have a father, nor the comments that I used to hear about bad girls having babies. I knew it was connected to me, but I was too young to understand

I had a large scar on my chest where my mother said my father had dropped his cigar ash. I tried to picture him nursing me, with a large cigar in his mouth. I always imagined him looking like a film star, like one of the pictures the big girls had.

The scar made me feel I must have had a real father, after all. I'd look at it and feel quite pleased. It wasn't until I was older that I realised it was an initiation scar. My mother had given it to me for protection.

***

We used to have quite a few outings at the Home. We went to the pictures and put on concerts at different places to raise money.

One morning, we were all very excited because we'd been told
we were going to the zoo. I really needed something to get excited about then, because I hadn't seen my mother for ages and I felt very sad. Actually, it wasn't only me. Hardly any of the kids had had visitors, they all felt down. There hadn't even been people looking for kids to adopt.

People often came to the Home to look kids over for adoption. I don't think they realised how upsetting it could be for everyone. We all got excited, we wondered who'd be the lucky one to get a mother and a father. The visits usually came to nothing, the kids would end up being turned down and they'd cry themselves to sleep at night.

A friend of mine did get adopted. Everyone was surprised, because usually, once you'd reached the age of eight or nine, no one wanted you. This girl was eight, she was very pretty with blonde hair. A wealthy family took her, we thought she was very lucky. She'd only been gone a couple of years when she died. There was a big court case about it. She died of arsenic poisoning. None of us wanted to be adopted after that.

Going to the zoo gave everyone a lift. After breakfast we marched to the station. When the old steam engine came chugging in, we were all so frightened we'd be left behind that we ignored the screams of our House Mothers and jumped on while the train was still going. If you were first on, you always saved a seat for your mates and everyone hoped that their little group would end up in a carriage without a House Mother. That way, you could scream as loud as you liked when you went through the tunnel at Swanview.

The zoo was really exciting, especially the elephants. I'd seen pictures of elephants dressed up in gold, with Indian princes sitting on their backs. I could imagine myself doing that. I always remembered to smile at the elephants, because I'd read in a book that they never forgot, and there was a story about a man who was cruel to them so they'd trampled him to death. I believed in playing it safe.

I felt a lot happier after my day with the animals. When we
marched back to the ferry, we passed a house near the river where I knew old Aunty Mary and Uncle Ted lived. I'd been to visit them on the Christmas holidays with my mother, and, for some reason, it suddenly made me feel close to her.

We all settled down on the ferry and were soon chugging back across the Swan River. I had a seat right up near the water and I watched as the ripples came out from under the boat and slowly faded away.

Then I noticed another ferry coming across from the other side, so I leaned over to look to see how close it was going to come to our boat. To my surprise, I saw my mother sitting on the ferry, as pretty as ever in her blue suit. I couldn't believe it. I called out to her, I shouted and waved my arms. She must have known I was going to the zoo, I thought, but she's got the wrong time, she's going to miss me. She might go to see me at the zoo and I won't be there. I jumped up and down and called and called. My mother sat upright on the ferry, she never even turned her head in my direction.

Within minutes, our boats had passed, and I realised she hadn't heard me calling.

I sat back on the wooden seat and slumped into a corner. The other kids just looked at me, they never said anything. I forgot all about the elephants and bears and lions. All I could think about was my mother. The sadness inside me was so great I couldn't even cry.

***

By the time I'd been in George Turner a couple of years, I began to get as adventurous as the other kids. I became a bit of a leader and had my own little gang.

Also, I wasn't scared at night any more. I actually came to love that part of the night when all the wild horses raced through. There were a lot of them in the hills, in those days. When we heard them coming, we'd lean over the verandah and call out.
They were so beautiful; some silver, some white, some black and brown. They were going down to the grassy paddocks on the other side of the hill. I suppose they were a bit like us kids in a way, they didn't belong to anyone.

They'd been featuring a run of Tom Mix films on Friday nights and we'd all gotten interested in the Wild West. Sometimes, we'd pretend the Home's dunny cart was an old chuck wagon. We all had great imaginations.

Our enthusiasm for the Wild West led to a new interest in the wild brumbies. We decided that if we were really going to be like the cowboys, we needed a horse, so we thought we'd lasso one when they went through at night. There was one catch, we had no rope.

The only rope that we knew of was on the flag the school hoisted every Anzac Day. We knew what cupboard the flag was kept in, so we drew sticks to see who would steal it. This was a practice we used to solve most of our problems. If you drew the long stick, you just accepted your fate, even though you were scared stiff.

Harry lost. Poor Harry, he was always getting into strife. It was just his luck.

After Harry had sneaked over to the school and pinched the rope off the flag, we all leant over the verandah railings and waited in the dark for the horses to come through. We were very excited. Unfortunately, they always came through late, near midnight, so a lot of the smaller kids fell asleep over the verandah railings.

Round about eleven thirty, we heard the rumble of their hooves and we knew they were on their way. Harry leapt up onto the railings and got his lasso ready. When the brumbies came flying past, he flung the rope out as high and as far as he could, but when the rope disappeared, so did Harry. We watched in awe as he sailed over the railings, screaming. Once the horses had passed, we all ran down and found him lying in the dirt with his arm broken. We grabbed the rope and hid it, then we went and woke Miss Moore.