Black Swan: A Koorie Woman's Life

Black

Swan

Black

Swan

A KOORIE WOMAN’S LIFE

CAROLYN LANDON

& EILEEN HARRISON

First published in 2011

Copyright © Carolyn Landon and Eileen Harrison 2011

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 publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

Email: info@allenandunwin.com

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

from the National Library of Australia

www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74237 553 3

Internal design by Ruth Grüner

Set in 10.25/15 pt Sabon Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my dear departed brother, Roderick, who encouraged me to tell this story. He kept reminding me that it was ‘my story’.

Eileen Harrison

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PROLOGUE

THE WHITE DRESS

PART I

INNOCENCE

Routines

Freedom

Black Swan

Bung Yarnda

PART II

CHANGE COMING

Whitefella Lessons

Miss Binny

Politics

Leaving Lake Tyers

Ararat

PART III

EXPERIENCE

Layers of Events

Work

Nothin’ But a Black Gin

Escape

Runaway

PART IV

GATHERING THE PIECES

That Piece of Paper

They’ve Taken My Babies!

Cedric and Maria

What’s the Use?

PART V

AWAKENING

Out of the Shadows

Jenny

Koorie Culture Day

EPILOGUE

FORTY THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD SOUL

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ALL OF MY SISTERS supported me in telling the events of our lives. Viv, Helen, Leila and Margaret gave me their memories, their own written stories and records to use as I needed. I love them all and thank them.

Gwynda Matthews, family friend and helper from the time we were young, remembers many things about all of us Harrison kids and our mum and dad. She helped and encouraged me to speak my story.

Eileen Harrison

I WOULD LIKE TO acknowledge the considerable help given to Eileen and me by the staff at the Public Records Office Victoria, where the Victorian Aboriginal section of the National Archives of Australia is kept. Simon Flagg, Koorie Reference Officer, was particularly accommodating in searching out records from Lake Tyers relating to Eileen’s life there. Because these records are closed, requiring privileged access, we have not listed them in footnotes, but they were invaluable in our endeavour.

Both Eileen and I are grateful for the support given to us by the Koorie Heritage Trust in Melbourne, and by Peter Corser and the Koorie Unit at Central Gippsland TAFE.

Carolyn Landon

PROLOGUE

THE WHITE DRESS

I FIRST BECAME AWARE of Eileen Harrison when she walked into the art room at the secondary school in Warragul, Victoria, one of a group of Koorie artists who were going to participate in a workshop the art teacher was organising. It was 1998. Out of the group of five, Eileen was the most distinctive. She was elegant and graceful, dressed in tasteful city clothes—a dress and suit jacket—while the others with her were slouching in jeans and windcheaters or flannel shirts, as usually seen in this part of rural Victoria. She seemed relaxed, but at the same time very alert and interested. When the art teacher began to welcome everyone and explain the project she had in mind, Eileen looked intently at her and nodded her head responsively. She was bright-eyed and attentive while the others—all except Eileen’s friend Jenny—would barely lift their gaze off the ground and seemed ready to bolt at the drop of a hat.

Of course, it didn’t really matter how any of these people looked or reacted. As far as I knew, they were all respected artists and had come to the art room to do a job they were willing to do. But, because Eileen’s difference made her stand out, I immediately made assumptions about her professionalism, her confidence, her talent, her knowledge, her position in the group. I thought she was the leader and that they all deferred to her.

Several years later I told her of my first impressions and she laughed. Of course, I knew by then what I hadn’t noticed at first: that she was deaf, that she looked different from the others in the group partly because, contrary to Indigenous custom, she looked directly at those who spoke to her in order to lip-read. Eileen said that rather than feeling confident and ready to work, she had been feeling shy, embarrassed and out of her depth.

‘When I came up to that school with Jenny, I had only ever painted one picture,’ she said. ‘I was wondering how my friend had managed to talk me into coming up with her in the first place.’ She told me that the meeting in that classroom had been the beginning of a journey for her that would allow her to express herself as an artist and find her identity as a Kurnai.

I was amazed. I thought she had been painting for years. Ever since our first meeting, I had watched out for Eileen’s work in exhibitions and galleries. I had the idea that art was the one thing the Mission managers and policy-makers had never been able to take from the First Victorians and I wanted a part of it. Especially the part Eileen was making. And she was prolific. I found her pictures dynamic and ever changing. Her designs seemed to come from a deep place, and over time they grew in sophistication and complexity, yet remained naïve and always connected to Victorian Indigenous traditions.

When I met her at exhibitions, we greeted each other as friends, but our conversation was only ever the polite small talk of acquaintances until one day she asked me to help her with a story. She wanted us to write a children’s story together about a black swan at Lake Tyers, an incident she remembered from her childhood. Her vision was that I would write the story and she would illustrate it with her paintings. We agreed that she would come to my house to talk over her idea.

So it came about that at my kitchen table she told me a wonderful magical story, but when the swan story seemed to be finished she didn’t stop talking. She didn’t mean it to, but a larger story of a whole life experience began to spill out of her heart. When she finally came to the end and stopped talking, she was exhausted and I was stunned.

I remember we sat and looked at each other in silence. It was clear to me the black swan she had talked about in the kids’ story represented the trajectory of Eileen’s life, but I wasn’t sure I should say that to her. Finally, she said, ‘That black swan is important to me. It means something I am not sure of, but I think it is me. I think that swan is me.’ I knew then that she realised, just as I did, that we had a monumental project on our hands, something that would be more powerful than a children’s book. It would be a Life and it would be informed by Eileen’s paintings, which come directly from her experience in a way, I learned later, that she was only just beginning to understand. We agreed that I would start by coming to her house on a regular basis.

So, here we are sitting in her kitchen. Spread out on the table before us are old photographs of her family going back to her grandmother, Thelma Carter, and the old days at Lake Tyers Mission Station. There are some history books opened at photographs of groups of people whom Eileen knows and is related to. There are many documents from the National Archives naming her relatives and how she is connected to them. Included are some letters written by Mission managers to the Board¹ asking permission on behalf of her father to travel between Lake Tyers, where he lived near his wife’s family, and Ebenezer in Central Western Victoria between Antwerp and Dimboola, where his own people were. There is also a handwritten assessment by a manager or schoolteacher of one of her cousins or uncles that describes his competence in very degrading terms, to my way of thinking. Most importantly there is a stack of photos of Eileen’s paintings, many of which have been sold leaving these images as the only record she has of them. As an artist, Eileen can’t paint fast enough to fill the demand for her work. Two of her works have been hung in the new Indigenous Gallery in the Victorian Parliament building and she was invited to attend its official opening. This growing recognition is rewarding and exciting yet exhausting.

Eileen has decided that she must have been thinking for a long time about telling her story or she wouldn’t have blurted it all out the way she did. She thinks it’s best not to put it off any longer, that it will be okay to tell what she has to tell, that it will be good for her to come to terms with her life. But, now that we have started, she is finding it a more difficult task than she imagined. She doesn’t want to censor herself when talking to me, but she knows she does. Her life has not been a bed of roses and she doesn’t know anymore if she wants to go down this path. She can feel, as she tells me things, that her own idea of herself is changing. She has told many people stories about her life—anthropologists or story-collectors connected with the Koorie Heritage Trust gathering information for the Koorie Oral History Program, for instance—but this is the first time she has uttered these words for herself. She is amazed to find it changes what she says and how she says it. Even though she has asked a white woman to help her, it’s still her own project, for herself and her family and her people.

Over the next weeks and months I ask questions to draw her out, but she decides how to answer. She is surprised at the memories that begin to emerge as we work together. There are sometimes memories that seem not to be attached to anything, but Eileen has a mind that finds significance in all aspects of her life. For instance, right now, as we are talking over how to arrange the stories she will tell, there is a scene that keeps jumping out from all the clutter in her mind, and she begins to tell me about it. I pick up the cherished fountain pen I use for important work and begin to write down all she says in my notebook. She sees me writing but it doesn’t bother her as the digital recorder did during the first few sessions we had. The recording device, even though it is small and unobtrusive, was putting her off and making her reluctant to say some things. So now I use only the pen and notebook. Later, as she begins to trust her own ability to tell her story, I will reintroduce the recorder. I want as much of her story as possible to be in her own words.

Eileen is telling me how the vividness of this new memory amazes her. She believes she has never remembered it before. It is something from when she was very small, she thinks. She knows, but she doesn’t know how she knows, that it is something that happened up in the Wimmera near her father’s Country. Near Horsham or Dimboola. She and her older sister, Viv, are walking with their father alongside a dray that is being pulled by a plodding old Clydesdale. Her heavily pregnant mother is riding in the dray holding a baby. The road is dusty and there are ferns—they must have been bracken in that dry place—as tall as Eileen on either side of the road. She looks up at her father and then at her mother. That’s all she can remember. She tries to work out the context of the memory. She says her mother had her sister, Helen, in Horsham. She knows that her mother and father and her older sister had left Lake Tyers temporarily to go live in her father’s Country where many of his aunts and uncles still lived.

Eileen goes on with her memory. She thinks the baby cradled in her mother’s lap in the dray must have been Thelma. That means she would have been no more than two-and-a-half years old when she was walking along with her sister and her father. While she is explaining this she suddenly remembers another detail she has forgotten to include—the most important detail, it turns out: that she had on a white dress with a white lacy collar and puffed-up sleeves, ‘like a fairy princess wears,’ she says. She laughs, ‘Isn’t it amazing I can remember that, when I was only two!’

I wonder why she remembers the scene. Was she feeling particularly happy then? Secure? Excited? Was her mother going to the hospital, perhaps, to have her new little sister? Were her mother and father pleased with each other that a new one was on the way or was there tension between them? Horsham is not so close to Dimboola and Ebenezer, the old mission station where her father’s people would have once lived. Was the little family headed for the train to take them to Horsham? Where did the horse and dray come from? Was her father working for someone? Eileen doesn’t know.

‘Mum met my father at Lake Tyers. They stayed there long enough to get married and have me. Mum already had Viv before she met my father. Then they left to live in my father’s Country, Wotjabaluk Country. I recently found out he was a Djardwa-jali man. But, anyway, they didn’t stay away from the Mission for long. They would have had to get permission to travel between missions. Between Lake Tyers and Ebenezer, for instance. You had to carry your papers.’

Eileen continues to talk it out while I listen to this suddenly articulate woman working through her thoughts. She knows the facts behind this memory, but doesn’t remember them for herself. Until she remembered this scene, she didn’t think she remembered anything about her sister’s birth or their living in the Wimmera. It is important for her that she does remember this because it indicates how essential the process of telling her story is going to be for her. This memory about her walking innocently in her father’s Country—walking her father’s Country—is about her becoming who she is. For so long she didn’t know who she was or wanted to be. In the last ten years, since she became an artist and now that she is articulating her story, she is realising it is her life’s work to explore that sense of self, that identity that is slowly emerging and is so deeply connected with Country and culture—Country and culture she ignored and even denied for so long.

When she reaches her conclusion, I look up at her sitting across the table from me to see if she has more to say. Although there is a great rush of feeling playing across her face she remains silent. I put my pen down and stretch my fingers. She grins and reaches up to pull her long, thick and very curly black hair into a ponytail. She lets her hands drop to her lap and we sit smiling at each other trying to take in the meaning of the story that has just been told. We don’t speak, but I wonder if Eileen is thinking about painting a picture of this scene. It is through her art that her expression of self is most vivid, but she wants to tell her story in words and have it written down to get more of these memories back. I guess right now she is thinking about how the process is working and how it is giving her ideas for her art.

I am also thinking about the scene she has described. The image of the white dress worn by a little girl on a dusty track near Dimboola in 1950 is confusing, partly because she called it a ‘fairy princess’ dress. I wonder, in her imagination, what a fairy princess is. Is it the same as in my imagination? A miniature, pale, blue-eyed beauty with gossamer wings? It would have to be, I think. A fairy princess comes out of an English mind not an Aboriginal one. Did Eileen make a cultural shift and see herself as a fairy princess when she wore the dress? It is my job to ask these questions and clarify my understanding. And so I ask her, only to find out that the words fairy princess in relation to the dress are nothing more than words to her, whitefella words that she uses to get me to know what kind of dress she is talking about.

‘No, no,’ Eileen says. ‘No blue eyes. I had no image in my mind of a fairy princess out of books. There was no image like that really. I would have seen myself as a little black girl dressed nice, in a bush paddock, barefooted. I always felt I needed to be tidy.’

The following week, Eileen brings up the memory again: ‘That white dress, the image of that white dress sticks in my memory. I like the picture of it. I told that story of my memory to some kids the other day and I drew it on a big piece of paper as I told it.’

She gets up to find the folded butcher’s paper that she has put away so she won’t lose it. As she’s trying to remember where she put it, I tell her about Arthur Boyd’s series of bride paintings with a bride in a white dress placed incongruously in the bush. In one of the pictures she is the stake being played for by gambling shearers in a shed and in another she is floating over a dam.

‘What does incongruous mean?’ Eileen asks.

Her expression is guileless. Looking at her, I find I am not sure anymore if Boyd’s bride in her white dress is incongruous and, therefore, somehow tragic. I realise that’s how I have been seeing Eileen in her white dress, but it is not how she sees herself.

‘I’ll have to see those paintings,’ she says and comes back to the table with a large piece of folded paper.

She unfolds it to show me her picture of the memory, sketched in front of school children on butcher’s paper in charcoal. There is no little girl in a pretty dress holding her father’s hand as I was imagining it would be. It is a bird’s-eye view of the scene. On the top and bottom are rows of leaves representing the bracken fern. In the middle is the road with two parallel lines drawn across the page to indicate the tracks of the dray, and in between them are two pairs of footprints: those of Eileen’s father and herself. Later, when Eileen completes the painting and shows it to me, I see she has used ochre, yellow, black and white—the traditional colours of Victorian Indigenous art—and the painting has become a dreaming or life journey. It has nothing to do with fairy princesses or white dresses. I am astonished and doubly aware of how careful I must be with this woman. At the same time, I am relieved that my imaginings do not seem to influence the powerful intuitions of this artist.

Over the weeks, Eileen and I discuss many things on and off topic as we work. While these discussions deepen our friendship, they also give her a new view into what she is telling me. Even while she speaks, she watches my face, noting my unconscious reactions to her, which possibly give her a new idea of the meaning of her stories. She can tell that I find some things that she has always taken for granted fascinating and that sometimes I seem to pass over other things she has always considered significant. I am aware of it, too, and I try very hard not to let my reactions influence her story, but it is an inevitable part of the process of telling, listening and writing we are involved in. I don’t mind if it is the other way around and she influences me. I know already that Eileen’s view of her world is opening up new ways of seeing for me.

Not long ago she and I walked along the beach at Cape Paterson on the Bunurong Coast. She told me as we walked that she had previously discovered a midden along this coast near Powlett River. She said she notices things wherever she goes. On the day we were walking together, she was fascinated with the rocks and the patterns the tide and wind had made on them over the millennia. She recognised the patterns and I became aware that she was seeing shapes her people had been seeing and using in their art for thousands of years. They were the very shapes she uses in her own work. I began looking more closely and I became fascinated myself. Eileen’s delight at the beach was palpable.

Now, here in this kitchen at the end of our session together, we are remembering the visit to the cape.

‘In this story of your life we are writing together,’ I say, ‘you must tell about what you see and how you see it and why you see it that way.’

‘I have to do it,’ she says.

PART I

INNOCENCE

The black swan mates for life, and those swans who are born on Lake Tyers never leave, for the black swan stays forever where it is hatched.Those