Stolen

1988 in Australia. What a year. Full of pomp and ceremony, festivity and celebration. Gaiety. I’m lucky. Lucky to be nine years old, middle class and pretty. I’m easy, breezy and carefree. The way an Aussie should be.

I love school. It’s fun and I’m popular. I’ve become that way because I’m good at French. Not the language, the kissing. I realised over a few games of catch and kiss that the cute boys ran after me, so I slowed down a bit, took it at a jog. But it’s marble season now. I’m not much chop at marbles, which means I’m no good at it. I always lose. Lost a whole bag of twenty at recess - more than a marble a minute. But now I’ve worked out a way to get them back. I charge for kisses and marbles are my currency. A peck costs a small and a pash costs a large. I got a beautiful, big, dark oily the other day from Hayden. It looks like oil that’s been spilt on the road. I’ll never play it. I keep it in my special things box at home.

On Wednesday we have assemblies. At the beginning we sing the national anthem. We stand tall and keep our shoulders straight; sing as loud as we can. Just the first verse - ‘cause that’s all we know. That’s the important one. It has all the stuff about being young and free and having wealth. There’s nowhere that you can see that more than in the national capital. Canberra is bright and gleaming with wealth.

Today’s assembly is really important. One of the ministers is coming from the new parliament house and our teacher Mrs Watson says there’s a surprise at the end.

The minister can’t be that important though because I’ve never seen him on the news; he’s not Bob, but at least he’s ‘on the right side’ as my Dad’s always saying. Being on the right side means that you fight for the little bloke.

After the ministers speech we all cheer. I’m not sure what he said because while he spoke, I’ve been trying to catch Luke looking at me without him seeing that I’m looking. Wendy leans over and asks ‘What’s a Bicentenary?’ I hunch my shoulders up to my ears. Beats me. But at the end of assembly we find out. It’s what all this years’ celebrations are for. It’s about all the old guys from years ago, who sailed on their boats from England and found Australia. And now just because of them the minister gives us a big, shiny, silver coin. It’s been made right here in Canberra. In the mint. And every Australian school kid will get one. Gosh! We must really have wealth for toil. I’m going to put it in my special things box, right next to the oily marble.

On the way back to class I see the Aboriginal kids looking at their coins. Tom, the eldest, throws his in the bin. He makes the younger kids do it too. They don’t want to but he makes them. He tells them that they are stolen. I look at my coin. Stolen? Nah, that can’t be right. The government wouldn’t steal anything.

The Aboriginal kids keep to themselves, mostly. Wendy and Jess get to play with them sometimes but not me. I don’t understand why. Shelley says it’s because of my skin but mine’s the same as Wendy’s and I’m darker than Jess. I tell Shelley that she’s just jealous because we have beautiful olive skin and she doesn’t. She says that she wouldn’t want to be a darkie and doesn’t know why I want to play with them anyway! I dunno why either. I just want to.

Later that week Luke sends a friend to ask if I’ll ‘go out’ with him. I say I’ll think about it over the weekend. On Monday I send a note in class saying ‘yeah okay’ and when Luke gets it he fist pumps the air. After school I go to the oval and watch him at rugby practice. We don’t speak to each other.

The next day I’m lying on the oval at lunch. I’m pressing down on the closed lids of my eyes trying to make the little coloured spots appear. I hear someone calling my name. It’s Josh, he’s running up the hill from the school building. I get up and walk over to meet him. ‘Luke’s in a fight on the quad,’ he says, puffing. I take off. My mum won sprinting trophies at school and I’m almost as fast when I put in the effort.

As I approach I see Luke. His chest is puffed out. He’s picked a fight alright. A year six boy who’s bigger and taller. It’s Tom, the Aboriginal boy.

I shove my body between the two of them. I don’t know what the fight is about, how it started but I say, ‘If you’ve got a problem with Tom, you’ve got a problem with me! I’m Aboriginal too.’ Luke’s mouth drops open and he takes a step back. Tom and I stay standing together as Luke saunters off. Tom doesn’t say anything as he picks his bag up off the asphalt.

I expect Luke to drop me but he doesn’t. He sends apology notes in class but the sheen has worn off. I dump him and ask out Josh. He’s just as cute and he’s tall.

It felt good standing up for Tom but I feel rotten about the lie. I’m not Aboriginal. Tom knew but he didn’t say anything.

It’s 2008 and I sit in the passenger’s seat as my partner drives through South Australia on our way home to Naarm, or as most folk know it, Melbourne; where I’ve lived for close to ten years. We approach the western side of Mount Gambier. I gaze keenly out. I’ve never travelled through this part of the country.

‘Have you seen the Blue Lake?’ My partner asks.

‘Never,’ I say. ‘Is it really blue?’

The summer sun radiates warmth through the glass but I feel chilly. We don’t pass through town, we skim the top and come out on the eastern side. Pine plantations line the highway.

I have to get out! ‘Stop the car,’ I say. He looks at me quizzically, keeps driving. ‘Stop the car!’ I say again, almost yelling. He’s concerned now. He pulls over and I wrench open the door before the car completely halts. I stagger farther toward the forest and sink to my knees. I put my hands in the dirt and bring a clump of it to my face. That smell. The sky.

The trunks of the pines are tall and straight. Reaching. They have replaced the native trees. They creak in the wind.

‘You okay?’ My partner calls. He’s watching me, worried. I rise to my feet, drop the dirt. I feel like there is something within the forest watching me and my skin quivers. I run back to the car, buckle in. We continue on but that feeling remains as part of my being

Six years pass and I get a call from my sister, which is nothing unusual, she calls most days but she

sounds shaken and asks ‘Can you come over?’ I bristle. ‘Are you okay?’

She answers the door with tears in her eyes. ‘What’s going on?’ I ask. In reply she hands me an email from our cousin in Canberra who, for fifteen years, has been documenting our family tree. The Swedish trail had run all the way back to the fifteenth century but for the last five years, the search for our Spanish lineage had not returned a single document.

I don’t fathom the email at first. I begin again. My sister looks at me eagerly, awaiting my response. Tears fall from my eyes. Underneath, we knew. The Willy wagtails’ song, the beseeching of the crows perched on the fence, the bogon moths clambering at my sister’s flyscreen door and the reason I wanted to play with the Aboriginal children at school.

When I get home, I fish my special things box out of its packed away place in the garage. As I open it the light catches the shiny coin that celebrates 200 years of British rule in Australia. I take it out and throw it in the bin. I should have done it many years before because I’ve long understood what Tom was teaching those little ones all those years ago, I feel it now. That it’s stolen. Not the coin. The land.

I wait nervously on the foreshore. Another three years have passed since we discovered who we really are; where we come from. It’s windy. I can smell the sea. He pulls up in his Ute, hops out and casually strolls over. ‘Well look at you’ he calls out. I hear an acceptance in his voice that until that moment I had never known I had been longing for. My nerves fade. I’m home.

His name is Uncle Ken Jones. He is a Boandik elder. An elder of my mob. He’s welcoming me on to country for the first time. For the next few hours I take my first lesson on our language and culture. After more than 70,000 years, it’s still alive. I recount to Uncle the experience I had on Mount Schank, once the camp of my ancestors. I describe the swarm of butterflies that surrounded me, trailed me, as I walked to the crater. He smiles. ‘That’s the old fellas welcoming you home.’ Tears gather in my eyes. ‘Have you seen the blue lake yet?’ Uncle asks. All I manage is a nod. We continue to walk, barefoot, across the grass.

Too soon it’s time to leave Berrin and knowing I’ll return doesn’t make leaving easier. I buckle my two children into the car. My husband drives. We laugh as we pass the pine plantations heading east, he’s gently teasing about the time I leapt out of the car.

The map marks that land as Caroline forest. Caroline. The Christian name given to a woman whose real name was Mingboram. Mingboram. A Boandik woman who became stuck between two cultures. The ancient one of her people and that of the colonising English. Mingboram. Who left her home on Mount Schank and went to work in the kitchen of Compton, a sheep station owned by Evelyn Sturt. Mingboram, who took her two toddling children into the bush to live off of the land because it was the only way to protect them from those who refused to accept their blended skin. Mingboram. Who would return a few years later, dying from grog or poisoned food, to give her children to a Scottish missionary. The only way to ensure their survival.

On the day Mingboram died, Maria and Annie were stripped of their mother, their language and their culture. Stripped, one can assume, of their Boandik names. They were taught to be ‘civilised’ Christian ladies. They were taught to be white.

Mingboram. My great, great, great, grandmother. Whose culture, language and peoples were almost eradicated a mere forty years after white settlement and whose death set up a trajectory that would see me grow up without the songlines and the Dreaming of my people. Mingboram. Whose most welcome emergence has seemed to cause a rip in the fabric of time that means history repeats.

In the year 2020 I sit in that rip. In the gap between cultures. The whiteness and privilege of my upbringing clashes with the deep inner knowing and connection that I feel. The knowledge of what happened to my family, my Mob and how First Nations peoples are still being treated at the hands of the occupiers is an open wound. But I didn’t grow up in culture. Am I allowed to call myself Aboriginal?

I never had a chance to grow nestled in the knowledge and respect of my culture. That chance was stolen from me and I’m clamouring to get it back so that my children won’t be on the outside looking in, wondering why they don’t get to play with the Aboriginal kids in the playground.