State of Origin

State of Origin David Kelly BA (Hons) MA Doctor of Philosophy September 2011 Faculty of Education and Arts School of Humanities and Social Science University of Newcastle Statement of Originality: This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to this copy of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library**, being made available for loan and photocopying subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. **Unless an Embargo has been approved for a determined period. Signed.................................................. Acknowledgements: I’d like to thank my supervisors: Dr. Keri Glastonbury and Dr. Brooke Collins-Gearing, staff of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences: Dr. Jean Harkins, Dr. Kim Cheng Boey, Dr. Ros Smith, Dr. Patricia Pender, and readers of drafts of this manuscript: Helen Garner, Michael Sala and Loma Bridge. I also thank my family for letting me tell these stories. Finally, I dedicate this work to my partner Jason. Note: While this is an autobiographical narrative I have changed the names of my family members, and those people named in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody extract, beginning on page 9, to protect the identities of those involved. Table of Contents: Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Abstract v State of Origin: a memoir 1 Critical Exegesis: Women in the Water 182 Introduction 183 Essay One: “Who asked you to write about Aboriginal people?” 199 Essay Two: a black metal tank 219 Essay Three: I subsume the girl’s story into my own 242 Conclusion 262 Works Cited 268 Abstract: State of Origin is about my search for my Indigenous foster brothers, both of whom ran away from home on the same night in 1980. While all the children in this memoir are either fostered or adopted, the word ‘foster’ can here be read as a euphemism for ‘Stolen’. This memoir explores our shared childhood where backyard games dealt with our sometimes frantic search for individual identities. The games described mainly focus on my fantasies, that being adopted, I was descended from the Russian Royal Family; the Romanovs, and how, bit by bit, I became disabused of this notion. The idea of royal blood is further explored with the introduction of the actual blood sister of my two foster brothers, a girl who could have been fostered into our family but wasn’t, and who went on a hunger strike to force the authorities to arrange a reunion with her siblings. I make connections and comparisons between this heroic moment in her short life and the supposedly tragic romance of Anastasia Romanov. State of Origin is a belated coming of age story which re-considers the myths of my childhood, while instigating a reconnection to the place of my birth: Queensland. A critical and reflective exegesis Women in the Water follows the creative component. This work explores the ethics of writing about the Indigenous people involved in this story. v Phone Calls “Murgon…” The woman’s answer isn’t expected and I’m thrown off-guard. “Hello, this is a long shot, I’m looking for my foster brother Errol Rebato. His last known place of residence was in Cherbourg, Queensland.” “You should ring the Cherbourg Police Station.” “I did ring the Cherbourg Police Station. I was put straight through by Directory Assistance.” “If there’s no one at that station the call comes through to Murgon Police Station.” The woman sighs as if it’s a daily mantra. “We’re the next town.” Murgon. The name sounds like a brand of processed meat. “Ring Cherbourg tomorrow at lunchtime. This is another number.” The woman gives me the time to locate a pen and all of a sudden I have the Cherbourg Police Station phone number in front of me, and I’m where I should have been at the beginning. I thank her and say I’ll ring back the next day. I hang up and my eyes meet those of two ornamental Aboriginal boys I have sitting on the bookshelf next to the photo of Jason and me on holidays. The plaster of Paris boys have been painted with a tan wash, their heads, arms and shoulders made to look as if they’re emerging out of the same lump of ochre rock. The boys are modelled on the type of trouble-free kids photographed laughing and leaping into outback billabongs and reproduced in thousands of picture books to attract European migrants to Australia during the fifties and sixties. Both kids are fat cheeked, broad-nosed, with wide expressive mouths. 1 Apart from some photos this ornament is all I have left from our dead mother’s estate. This ornament sat on every dressing table in every home our mother lived in since she stepped off the boat from Wales when she was seventeen. Before she emigrated on the Fairsky, our mother worked part-time in a bookshop in Cardiff. She dealt personally with picture books showing off Australia. She told her parents she didn’t want to leave Cardiff, but they insisted. She was too young to stay in Wales alone. She may have thought, when gazing at one of these pretty billabong pictures, that coming to such a happy land wouldn’t be so bad. There is no way she could have known that within twelve years of descending the gangplank over the mud-brown Brisbane River she would take ownership of six children, four white and two Aboriginal, but none from her own womb. Except for a small chip to one of the curls of hair, Mum’s plaster of Paris boys have stayed safe in the family. Mum’s two real live Aboriginal boys, now men in their forties, are missing. Murgon is named after a type of waterlily that used to grow in the town’s dried- out waterhole. In my Guide to Australian Places it says Cherbourg was built on land set aside for an Aboriginal settlement in 1904. The inhabitants worked for rations until the 1960s, before becoming waged. The first emu farm in Queensland opened in Cherbourg in 1989 where carved emu eggs and other items of interest are for sale. The guide is a watered-down history. Cherbourg is a name most Queenslanders would recognise but few would have visited the place. A place mired in white imaginations as a troubled place: a contentious zone, which the Aboriginal inhabitants once needed permits to leave. I can’t imagine today’s inhabitants looking kindly on whites walking in willy-nilly asking questions about one of their own. 2 I decide I’ll visit the emu farm where visitors are encouraged and question the employees to see if they know someone called Errol. I’ll go in under the cover of tourist. I wonder if Errol would be scared if he had to enter all the gay bars on Oxford Street looking for me. I think he would be. After this I don’t feel so bad. Half an hour later, after an eight minute bike ride into Newcastle’s city centre, I’m plugged into a different phone wearing a Madonna-style headset answering questions people have about their health insurance. “Welcome to Physician Health Funds. My name is David. How can I help you?” Nine calls an hour is the target, but calls can range from simple address changes to helping members who have just discovered they need a major operation and want to know if they have the appropriate cover. These latter calls flip the targets out the window. My first question is to ask whether the member has a medical item number from which I can tell if the member is covered for that particular procedure or not. Due to privacy concerns I’m not supposed to be able to tell the nature of the operation though it’s simply a matter of pulling up the Medicare website for the description. The worst part of the job is telling a member that their policy fails to cover the required operation, and if they change their cover to suit then they’ll have a year to wait. People cry, rail, and wave figurative fists, but Physician Health has bulletproof glass doors in case they really mean it when they say they are coming to blow us all away. If the member is thinking of terminating their membership it’s my job to remind them of the public hospital waiting lists and the mayhem of an overcrowded public hospital system. Nine times out of ten the member opts to stay in Physician Health Funds and my job is done. My calls are sometimes taped by my supervisor and played back to highlight the areas where I can improve my customer service. I’m required to 3 hear my own voice – wheedling, adenoidal – building up scenarios of potential disaster, and I can never for the life of me imagine doing any better. The only part I enjoy about working in a call centre is listening to all the background noise in people’s homes. The most common noise is their television sets. I can pick the channels people are watching from the shows playing. Between six and six- thirty the majority watch The Simpsons. Then there’s the sound of dinner being made, of china plates being balanced one-handed from cupboards to counter-tops, of the hunt for kitchen implements in the second drawer, and the sounds of hair and lips pressed too close to the receiver.

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