Snake Cradle Read online

  Snake Cradle

  Roberta Sykes

  ALLEN & UNWIN

  Copyright © Roberta Sykes 1997

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishe

  First published in 1997 by

  Allen & Unwin

  9 Atchison Street,

  St Leonards NSW 1590 Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Web: http://www.allen-unwin.com.au

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Sykes, Roberta B.

  Snake dreaming.

  ISBN 1 86448 513 2 (v. 1).

  eISBN 978 1 74269 682 9

  1. Sykes, Roberta B. 2. Aboriginies. Australian—Biography. 3. Aboriginies. Australian—Women—Biography. 4. Authors. Australian—Biography. 5. Aboriginies. Australian—Civil rights. 6. Aboriginies, Australian—Land tenure. I. Title.

  II. Title: Snake cradle.

  920.00929915

  Dr Roberta Sykes was born in the 1940s in Townsville, North Queensland, and is one of Australia’s best known activists for Black rights. In the 1980s she received both her Master and Doctorate of Education at Harvard University. She has been a consultant to a wide range of government departments, including the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the NSW Department of Corrective Services, and was Chairperson of the Promotion Appeals Tribunal at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. A guest lecturer at universities and tertiary institutions throughout Australia, and in demand as an international speaker, she is also the author of seven books, including Eclipse (1996) and Murawina: Australian Women of High Achievement (1994), as well as having written, contributed to or co-authored numerous publications, journal articles and conference papers. In 1994 she was awarded Australia’s highest humanitarian award, the Australian Human Rights Medal. She lives in Redfern, Sydney.

  1

  My younger sister Dellie and I lay sleeping in the bed we shared when Mum’s scream interrupted my dream. Hurrying footsteps of one of the two older girls my mother cared for assured me the scream was real. Dellie barely stirred.

  I slipped from the bed and, in the warm night air, made my way in the dark to the doorway of the verandah where Mum had her bed in a corner closed off from the world by three-ply. I was wearing bloomers and singlet, our usual nightwear.

  ‘He was here. He was here.’ Mum’s voice was urgent. She tugged the bedclothes back and forth, peered under the bed, and, ridiculously, slapped at the mosquito net.

  ‘Who, Rae? Who was here?,’ asked Dessie, who’d come to her aid.

  ‘A man. I don’t know. A tall man. I didn’t see his face. He walked up to the bed and stared at me through the mosquito net.’

  ‘A dream—a nightmare. Here, I’ll give you a hand.’ Together they straightened the sheets and mosquito netting.

  ‘You, back into bed,’ Mum hissed towards the doorway where I stood, filled with fear and curiosity. I slunk off; back to the safety of my side of the bed. The night returned to normal as I listened to Dessie’s soft footfalls pad down the hallway to the room where she slept.

  But peace was short-lived as we were woken by another scream. Even though I’d quickly gone back to sleep, this time I was ready. I was the first one up. The verandah was alive with moonlight and shadows, and Mum’s eyes were wide with horror behind the mosquito netting. She struck out at me.

  ‘Get back. Get back.’ I watched her rising, gasping, sobbing. Again, she tugged the sheets and pillow from the bed, and with them bundled in her arms, used them to push me back. Suddenly there were other people, the older girls, and I stood near the wall to watch what happened next. It was all so strange to me; I was only about four years old.

  Mum said the ‘man’ had returned, walked up to her bed and was wearing some sort of hood so she couldn’t see who he was. When she screamed, he’d run ‘behind the bed’. But there was no ‘behind the bed’. The bed stood in a narrow corner, its length along the wall, the top pushed up against three-ply lining, the bottom against one of the internal walls. There was nothing on the verandah but a few pieces of old cane furniture, a low table and chair, otherwise there was nowhere for anyone to conceal themselves, but Mum would not be pacified.

  They dragged the bed out from the corner and walked around it. I was shunted away from getting under everybody’s feet. I sat down in the shadows on the floor beside the cane table, making myself small and unnoticeable so I wouldn’t be sent back to bed.

  Mum continued to insist that the man was real, that he’d come up to her bed, that he was still hanging around, somewhere. One of the older girls was sent to look around the yard. Nothing, no one. My mother kept on, fretting and anxious, and Dessie asked who she thought the man might be. They’d slotted the narrow bed back into its space, replaced the sheets and tidied the net. Mum sat on the bed, bent over, her head in her hands. ‘Old Nick,’ I heard her whisper. Old Nick—I think he’s come for me.’

  ‘Who?’ I said, brightening at the sound of a name of someone I didn’t know, wanting to learn more about our late-night visitor. Mum threw a look of aggravation towards where I sat in the shadow of the table, and one of the girls came and picked me up by the back of the singlet, shuffling me off to bed.

  They all went to the kitchen for cups of tea to settle themselves down. I lay in bed, wondering briefly, but was soon swallowed back into the deep warm sleep of childhood. When I woke in the morning it was because my mother’s stirring disturbed me. She had eased us littlies over and lain down beside us rather than return to her own bed.

  Later that morning I was at my usual pastime under our house, making mudpies from the fine sand gathered by ants, when a shrill whistle let me know someone had arrived. A boy, his leg casually over the bar of his pushbike, waited on the path outside our house, and Mum’s dog raced me to the front gate. I took the telegram and bounded up the stairs to where Mum was standing at the door, come to find out what was going on.

  Ashen-faced, she took the telegram without her usual rouse about me minding my own business. I hurtled along beside her in the hall, urging her to open it and tell me what it said. I loved telegrams, letters, visitors, anything new, anything that tied our lives into whatever went on in the big outside world. But, as usual, I was given a scrap of food and sent back to my games, while the news of the telegram was shared with an older audience. I hated being small and too young to be in the confidence of older people.

  When we littlies were called in for lunch, we got an announcement. Mum was somewhere else in the house, we could hear her rifling through clothes and bags and papers, and one of the older girls put our food on the table.

  ‘Your Gran’s dead. Your Mum’s going up to Cairns for the funeral. She’s packing now, so don’t disturb her. Don’t make noise.’

  I picked over the food with my spoon and thought about this. Dellie, two years younger, who normally took her lead from me, watched me carefully to see what our response to this news ought to be. I’d never met Mum’s mother, indeed I don’t know if it had ever crossed my mind in any serious way that she had a mother, although in the abstract way of childhood I suppose I knew it must be so.

  A far more intriguing question surfaced in my mind from the disturbances of the previous night.

  ‘Who’s Old Nick?’

  Early childhood memories are like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. Whole days, weeks and months slide by, full of mangoes and mudpies, of being banished into the yard to play, while life tic
ks over fairly uneventfully, and these days are the background pieces—the yawning sky, the forest of leaves of similar colour—of the picture. Other events stand in stark contrast, forming the hard and complex part of life’s puzzle. It is not the background to which we refer when we point to our completed picture, tedious and nit-picking though it may have been to assemble the setting.

  I remember the fact of the mudpies, and that we would commandeer any small round or shaped hollowed item to be pressed into service in our mudpie kitchens, and the highly prized fine dirt that enabled our pies to set nicely and firmly in our sunshine ‘ovens’. I remember the fact of the mangoes, the hundreds, perhaps thousands, devoured throughout our childhood. These are, without doubt, the ‘background’ days.

  Also, and again without doubt, there were incidents of great and immediate urgency—a piece of drama at that moment—which end up being nothing more than ‘background’ in the long run. A sharp knife sliced accidentally and carelessly across one’s own fingers, a piece of broken glass or tack embedded in one’s foot, the immediate flash of pain followed—often—by basking briefly in the attention of adults, and then the little flag that singled one out as having been the object of such attention and affection: the bandage or band-aid or sling. But these, too, are mainly just part of the background of life. For us, they did not occur with any great frequency. Years later, despite my panic at the time at the sight of the deep red splash of my own blood, I’m unable to attribute any particular incident to most of the small scars which pepper my soles, feet, legs and hands.

  Events which constitute the main picture are also often tiny, and some seem not to have been so dramatic when they occurred. It’s in retrospect, as they come together to form important pieces of the whole, that their weight and significance become more meaningful, that they can be seen to have contributed to, or detracted from, the essence, the central core, of life and our understanding of our world.

  So it was with Old Nick visiting Mum, and her mother dying at the hour of this visitation. Is this my earliest memory? No, not quite. But it is one of the memories that come to mind when I try to reconstruct my mother.

  Mum, who lives on still at over 90 years old, has curled back into herself, her mind completely gone. I am drawn to wonder to what extent was she ever really here.

  The physical form—the skin and bones which we, my sisters and I, discuss as ‘Mum’—is just the husk of the woman who once lived right here amongst us, the minder and nurturer whom we suspected of having eyes in the back of her head, and who was the central and most powerful influence in our early lives. But did we know her? The answer is no.

  The tables have turned. Mum’s now the one minded and nurtured. She doesn’t know her own name, much less any of ours. Trapped in the rigid confines of overwhelming memory loss, unable to recognise which bodily feelings are associated with which bodily functions, she peers out from beneath heavily wrinkled eyes at a world that must consist, for her, of truly fragmented pieces, a fearful kaleidoscope.

  But even before this complete retreat, how much of herself did she reveal? Why did she not want to be found?

  In many of my earliest memories, Mum was either the central player or a physically close bystander. This is the case even in events where hers were not the pivotal actions nor her words the source of any enlightenment. I remember Mum as always ‘being there’, although she shared little of herself.

  Memories stand, and time has given some of them a dreamlike quality, especially the memories of events which I enjoyed and from which I drew strength. Indeed, when these memories occur to me, they often begin at a point which is neither the beginning nor the end of the event, but centre on that part where the intensity of the experience burnt itself into my psyche.

  I have many such memories. In one, I’m being lifted through the air and put on top of the petrol tank of a shiny motorbike. Someone, a man, is holding me between his forearms while his hands work on the handlebars. A sudden loud noise, the engine kicks into life and we start to tremble and vibrate. I am quickly fearful.

  I look down onto chrome and pipes, and see that stones and clumps of grass are moving beneath me. A few seconds later we’re rolling and I gasp as the air hits my face and, for a moment, takes my breath away. Soon I’m having my first, and very memorable, experience of travelling faster than air. I can feel the wind in my hair, my throat, tearing at my skin and flapping my clothes. I laugh out loud with delight and the wind whips the sound and my own warm breath back onto my face.

  The ride is probably very short because almost as soon as it starts we pull up, back alongside my mother. She is reaching her arms towards me and I’m hanging onto the forearms around me, trying to prevent her lifting me. I want to do it again, feel it all again, but that’s the end. Mum wrenches me from the bike, I hurl myself onto the ground, then I can hear their voices laughing. Their laughter is brief, after which they ignore me and resume their conversation.

  At the time of this event I was less than two years old, perhaps even eighteen months. The clear, sharp memory it left with me was to play an important role in my search for my mother more than a decade later.

  The shadows of some of Mum’s friends and relatives, the few I was allowed to meet, were oft times also revealed to me in this way; they appear in my memories, but their relationship to me was never made explicit.

  We are walking along a track in the bush. My legs are short and have to walk fast to keep up with Mum, even though she’s walking slowly. Dellie is dawdling a bit behind us. Uncle George is carrying my youngest sister, Leonie, a very tiny baby wrapped up in a shawl. Mum and Aunty Maggie are talking, just big people’s talk.

  I glance at my hand to admire a little gold ring Mum had recently given me—and I realise I’ve lost it. My fingers are bare. Then I’m frightened. The ring had belonged to Mum and she’d had it cut down to fit me. We’re poor and owning a gold ring is a very big deal. Mum had told me a jeweller cut the ring down in exchange for the little fragment he’d cut out of it—that’s how precious gold was. I begin to cry because I’m too afraid to tell her it’s gone.

  Mum’s carrying a cane basket with a big check pattern tea towel over the top and tucked in around the sides. My crying is completely silent, I can feel myself sobbing inside. Tears run down my face as I struggle with this dilemma. I’ve fallen behind, almost as far back as Dellie, and Mum turns casually to check on our progress. Her sharp intake of breath at the sight of my face causes Uncle George to look, too.

  The baby and food basket are juggled around between the adults, leaving Uncle George free to scoop me from the ground. When he asks me what’s the matter I tap one hand on top of the other and blubber quietly, ‘My ring.’ Uncle George lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses my wet fingers, looking in my eyes all the while. I watch him but his outline is distorted through tears. A small smile crosses his black face, and when he relays the bad news to Mum, I feel very safe.

  A psychiatrist would probably come up with a profound explanation for why this incident remains frozen in my mind. It’s not that I don’t recall what went on before or after this event, because, to an extent, I do. It’s only that the entire episode seems to have collapsed itself neatly and tidily around this one moment. From the size of my sisters I know I was four years old at the time. Mum, almost forty when she had me, produced both my sisters in the next four years.

  Uncle George and Aunty Maggie lived in a humpy or shack beside a river outside Townsville, probably in the area now known as Upper Ross River. But this is in the Townsville of fifty years ago, when the town had only one main street and now quite central suburbs, such as Aitkenvale, didn’t even exist.

  We visited them from time to time, although I have no exact memory of how we did that. We didn’t own a car. In fact, no one we knew then had a car either. But a reliable and frequent bus system operated in Townsville and around the district throughout my young life which makes the present bus service look like a joke. We were most likely walking back
to catch a bus into town.

  I’ve no idea how, or even if, Uncle George and Aunty Maggie ever knew when we were coming. None of us had a phone; very few people did then.

  In her basket on our visits, Mum carried shop-bought goods, such as flour, tea and sugar, which were contributions to Uncle amd Aunty’s stores rather than fare to be served up at the time. Uncle George caught fish for us, sometimes crabs, and Aunty Maggie cooked, and her garden and surrounding bush yielded a rich cornucopia of vegetables and fruits. These were the things we were fed on our visits.

  Uncle George, Aunty Maggie, and the absolutely wonderful times we had out at their place, splashing in the clear, fresh, and often very cold, water and playing in the unspoilt bush, would probably have faded into obscurity amongst many other pleasant childhood memories if I hadn’t lost my ring.

  Uncle George, carrying me on one shoulder and Dellie on the other as we hurried towards the bus stop, said he thought the ring had most likely fallen into the river. The jeweller had left a little ‘growing room’, which enabled it to slip off easily and unnoticed. Although upset by its loss, Mum said she didn’t blame me, which made me greatly relieved. But there was no time to go back to look for my treasure, and with the current running so rapidly we were sure the ring had been swept away.

  That night, when Mum put us to bed, I shed a few tears for the loss of the ring, but she said sternly, ‘Forget the ring. It’s gone. George is probably on the turps already.’ My ears tickled at another new word.

  ‘What’s turps?’

  ‘Go to sleep!’

  Next morning, a faint tap on our front door woke me. I heard low murmurs, Mum talking with a deep-voiced man. After a short, whispered conversation, I heard her urge him to come in and ‘at least have a cup of tea’. I slipped out of bed, dropped my dress over my pants and singlet and bounded out. The front door was closed, Mum stood with her back leaning against it, frowning in the half light. By the time she moved out of the way and I could get through the door, the visitor had gone. I tripped down to the front gate and peered down the track which led to our house, but could see only the rapidly disappearing figure of a man as he passed over the crest of the hill in the distance.