The Stolen ...By JENNIFER CRAWLEYIt’s been four years since I left Wugularr ... Four years since my daughter would run into the clinic after school just about everyday and yell breathlessly, “I’m going down the billabong, Mum!” and run out again. A couple of hours later I’d walk down and stand silently, watching the screaming, laughing kids fall out of half submerged canoes in the shimmering gold water fringed by gigantic paperbark trees. As the sun slowly disappeared the kids would light small fires and huddle close, their shivering, skinny, shiny black bodies eclipsing my flaxen-haired, milky white, tubby five year old. My boy would climb his favourite tree down on the river, another giant paperbark bent almost double over the muddy, swirling water and do backflips into the water along with all the other brave and fearless eight year-olds. One thing Wugularr taught my kids was they could live in a world without fear. My husband would drive the old people out bush, usually four or five women and one old man. The old women would collect pandanus and ‘colour’, (roots, leaves and flowers of different plants) to dye the pandanus they weaved into beautiful circular mats, dilly bags and baskets. While the women gathered, a very special relationship developed between my husband and the old man. Sitting on a rock, in the stillness of top-end bush, he would tell him stories of his first encounters with whitefellas and then more precious, older stories of the time before the whitefella came. Some of my precious memories are of driving back to the community after an evacuation late at night or in the early hours of morning. Too tired to drive, I’d fall asleep slumped against the window, waking every now and then to hear a story being told. Other times I’d be wide-awake listening to the soft gentle voices of my workmates telling me their stories. Stories of relationship, relationship between each other and relationship to the land. There was no separation between the people and the land. Everything and everyone was connected. Just because you were human did not mean you were somehow separate or different. Your shape was different, that was all. One night, Selina, a very experienced health worker came to my door. Dry mouthed and shaking she told me an old woman had been stabbed. For Selina to show such fear I knew we were in trouble. We rushed to the house in the clinic troopy. Drunk people shouting, yelling at others to get out of the way, they lead us to a room. I remember running down an unlit hallway, past a room where a child lay asleep on a mattress oblivious to the screaming next door, under the glare of a bare light bulb, At first we couldn’t find the old lady, then selina noticed a foot sticking out from under the bed. She had crawled under there. Gently we pulled her out. Moaning softly, her old body shaking uncontrollably, we rolled her over to examine the wound. She had been struck across the lower part of her back, (with a hatchet we discovered later). Her skin had split open revealing a deep wide chasm of red flesh and seeping blood. (Later I would think of Rwanda when I remembered her wound). Silence for one brief second, then organised mayhem again. No mention was made of her assailant. A blanket was used to lift her into the back of the troopy with drunk and sober people shouting instructions to anyone who would listen; “Get a torch, lift her slowly, get out of the fucken way, drive this way, drive this way” Unlike emergency rooms in city hospitals, a bush clinic doesn’t have rules about who can come in and who can't. Everyone comes in, everybody helps, and she is, without saying, related to everyone. A pressure bandage is applied, observations taken, I.V. inserted and pain relief injected, while everyone watches, crowding around the bed, gently touching and reassuring the old woman. I remember saying, “She needs to be kept warm.” Within minutes she is covered with a mountain of blankets, her head just poking out at the top. She is evacuated to Katherine. After six weeks of recovery and painful rehabilitation, she returns to the community. Her assailant, a young man who had ceased taking his medication to control schizophrenia. That night he had been smoking ganja and thought he heard the old girl insult him. He picked up his father's axe and walked up to her as she sat on the ground. He leant over her and struck her across her back. Attempted suicide, domestic violence, pneumonia, trauma, wound infections, malnutrition, mental illness and chronic disease are the most common reasons for evac. The common denominator in all of these presentations is, unfailingly, alcohol. On the rare occasion it isn’t alcohol it’s another substance or combination of substances, like ganja, alcohol and ganja, petrol, petrol and alcohol, ganja and petrol. Sometimes it’s aerosol deodorant cans. After two years in Wugularr it becomes increasingly difficult not to be cynical and jaundiced in my relationship as nurse to these people. One night I am shaving the head of a man so I can suture a jagged wound left by his wife with an iron bar. I have sutured his head and face several times in the past. Clumps of wiry black hair, thick with congealed blood, litter the floor. I feel nothing. No compassion, no respect, no revulsion ... I am shocked at my lack of feeling. I could no longer reconcile the two ways of life in this community. One where my children are free and safe to wander the bush always cared for and loved by, it seemed, everyone. And the other drunken, snarling, abusive, violent community where family members killed and maimed each other. It was time for me to leave. We come to Tasmania. The second or third week I wander into Bentleys’ bookshop in Huonville. Every room is crammed from floor to ceiling with books. I find ‘Two At Daly Waters’ published in 1945 by Elizabeth George. It tells the story of Mrs. Henriette Pearce, the first white woman to set up camp with her husband at Maranboy, N.T.; about 15 ks from where I had just come from. In chapter 23, ‘A Little Boy Lost’, Henriette describes ‘Micky’, an aboriginal man who works for her husband, the ‘boss’. After many years Micky takes a ‘promised’ wife from a distant tribe, 16-year-old Nancy. She helps with the cooking and cleaning at the Pearces' house. About four weeks after she arrives she gives birth to a baby boy. Both Nancy and Micky are full blood aboriginal people yet the baby is pale. According to Mrs Pearce; “…. a half-caste. Micky adored the baby from the first and he and Nancy were slaves to the thin wailing voice.” The baby was named Leslie and it wasn’t only Micky and Nancy who were devoted to the baby. Everyone loved him. But it was Micky who was the most devoted and the baby grew loved and “very winsome” into a happy, contented, cheeky four year old. Then a representative of the Australian Government stepped in. “One night the police came out to the camp to take away a half-caste child, as is the custom, to be placed in the care of a government department and brought up in civilised ways in a children’s hostel at Darwin or Alice Springs. There was an older half-caste boy in the camp and Leslie was only four, but the police boy had been told to bring back a half-caste and he took the first one he saw”. Leslie was never seen or heard of again. Mrs. Pearce describes the ‘wailing and lamentation in the camp’ that continued for many days and how ‘Nancy…would not be comforted’. Micky is worse affected. “Micky fretted silently and his face looked thin and worn. I shall always believe that he undermined his constitution fretting for Leslie, so that when illness came later he did not have sufficient resistance to stand against it”. In the final chapter she describes Mickey’s illness, pneumonia and death. This story, published in 1945, told long before the term ‘stolen generation’ was invented, is a simple story of the unspeakable pain and grief and consequences of the forcible removal of children from their families. I have been witness to an ancient culture torn apart by alcohol, drug abuse, chronic illness and violence. A hefty price for dispossession, colonization and stolen children. The pain I felt on leaving Wugularr could not match the pain of staying.
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