Dancing with June

Mount Isa

June was taller than most of the other girls in our class. Her dark eyes and curly, jet black hair set her apart, as did her black skin. An Aboriginal. She had more right to being called Australian than any of the rest of us.

Why did we treat her as an outcast? Square dancing was the culprit. Each week we would troop downstairs. Mr Amos, our teacher, would drag out a gray speaker, plug it into an outlet on a wall and out would come music: magic. High tech wonders of the time. We would jump around changing partners, two lines moving in opposite directions—boys in one, girls in the other.

The problem was, when it came to June’s turn. One of the boys refused to dance with her. Maybe emboldened, the next boy in the line also ignored her. June broke down in tears. Mr Amos shouted. He pulled the chord out of the plug. The music stopped. June, who had moved back from the circle of girls, stood — alone and weeping — behind one of the wooden posts that held up the school.

Mr Amos glared at us. We froze. We had been laughing, following the lead of who knows which boy. All of us had kept the game going.  The game? Ignore the black girl.

He walked over to June. He put his arm round her shoulders and led her back to the group.

We began to shuffle in embarrassment. We could all see her weeping. None of us worried that he had his arm around June. These days, he would be charged with assault. In those days, it was both common and often necessary. Perhaps there were cases of abuse.

‘Why?’

Slowly, he walked around our crestfallen circle. Fixing each boy with his glare. Our bullying game? Our bravado? It melted.

Alby and Robin had also followed the lead. They, too, squirmed under the eyes of our teacher.

‘You two as well,’ shouted Mr Amos as he reached them. ‘I am disgusted’.

Robin and Alby were popular. Both were excellent sportsmen. No one considered them anything but mates. Aboriginals. Racists are made, not born. But nothing is ever as simple as that.

We lived in a multi-racial society: our class was made up of Slavs, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Chinese, Norwegians, Irish, Poms. That racial mish mash made Mount Isa a forerunner in cultural diversity in a country that now prides itself on its multi culturalism but ignores the racist underbelly that still thrives.  

We knew nothing about our Government’s official policy. Until the 1967 referendum altered the Australian constitution to include all Australians as enfranchised citizens, Aboriginal people were regulated by the Flora and Fauna Act. Horrendous, but true. That was the legal framework. Did it excuse what we did? Why? The Australian white patriarchal state seemed to think that something was wrong with Aboriginal families and culture. In Mount Isa, the attitudes of some were of distaste bordering on contempt.

Our religion told us that was wrong. Our religion? The folly of our birth. The churches pushed for a policy of saving those with white blood who were forced to live with full bloods. The policy of both church and state was: racist.

Over the years since I lived in Mount Isa, Australians have heard much about the Stolen Generation. That arose from the Christian faith-inspired belief that what the Aboriginal people had was not good enough: whites were superior. What to do?  Let’s take the from their mothers and teach them what it is like to be white all the time reminding them that they are not.

I wish I had then then that the Queensland government, at the urging of the churches, promulgated the forcible theft of Indigenous children. They created legislation that determined that 'any child born of an Aboriginal or half-cast mother' was 'a neglected child', and ‘any person 'of Aboriginal descent' (except mixed-race males over 16 years and living as Europeans) should became ‘ward(s) of the state'. They took them away from their families. They placed them in dormitories in mission stations, reserves, homes and reformatories.

How could you take a child away from its mother? What was wrong with an Aboriginal mother? Was an Aboriginal mother a bad mother? If so, why did so many stations have aboriginal nannies to care for white children? If that was allowable, why not let them look after their own children?

Was Aboriginal culture so distasteful? Was it inhuman? What did you call it? Remember that this was a time when aboriginal art was ‘in’. Owning a Namatjira water colour was de rigueur. Why? Was it that whites were surprised? Even we had a painting hanging from a nail hammered into our fibro wall.

Mum would sometimes opine that being negative towards Aboriginals was wrong. She stood by that her whole life and I admire her for her that. When a new family moved next door, she was pleased. Mrs Watson was half-caste.

One of Dad’s mates had an aboriginal wife. We loved going there. They lived out of town past the old airport along the road to Duchess. Huge, dark and cool: at the end of a little used dirt track on the river bank: a wondrous place. Away from disapproving eyes perhaps?

In Mount Isa in the 1950s, we used the terms half caste, quarter caste? KKK without the hoods? Apartheid without the baggage that term implies?

Mum was happy that I spent time chatting with my aboriginal friend, Robin. We played together after school.  He told me many stories about how he would go back to his people’s tribal home near Urandangie.  He loved talking about when his grandfather would take him hunting for food.

‘He teaches us how to pick the right food: roots, plums and lots of other fruit. When the family goes, we are happy. Mount Isa doesn't let us do that and that makes me wish I was there, not here.

I liked Robin. He was quiet. He studied hard. Alby I also liked but for different reasons. Alby was happy go lucky: a good footy player.

Robin was different. Robin was much taller than I. He was two years older. Dark skinned, flashing eyes, curly black hair: we could hardly have been more dissimilar.

On one occasion early in our friendship — in fact the catalyst for it — he intervened when I was dragged behind the school toilet block and roughed up for being a friend with an abo. Bullying. Ever present.

Apart from my friendship with Robin, I was lonely at school. I was shy: painfully so. Have I changed? Hmmm.

No one ever picked me for their team in sports. I played in the school fife band: the only boy in the band apart from the Headmaster’s son, David Lane, who played drums. Sissies got bullied.

Robin found that disagreeable. He stormed into the group: three boys. He yanked at their hair. He biffed them and shoved them round.  He sent them off yelling at them to leave his friend alone. After he left school, he went off the rails. He became a drunkard. He died in a car crash at 29. I named my son after him. My son, too, died at 29.

Interested in the issue of aboriginals I took out a library book from the town library: Australia’s early history. I asked Mr Amos about the first British fleet. Was it settlement or invasion? I had in mind the images of white soldiers shooting kangaroos. And blacks. Mr Amos simply said: ‘you could look at it that way’.

The class gasped.

Robin frowned. ‘My mum says that they murdered our people,’ he said.

The gasps turned to shock. Mr Amos looked at Robin. He seemed to want to say something more, but there were limits.

‘I wish we had time to talk about all of this, but don’t. Perhaps another time. Take out your slates. Time for maths’.

Several weeks later, the headmaster (Mr Lane) came in to announce that Mr Amos had been transferred. He would take our class till the replacement arrived. We missed him: so did June and Robin: I’m not sure about Alby.

What was the truth? Justice Michael Kirby, a man I admired for his stance in East Timor, wrote:

‘… the relationship between the Australian system post-1788 and the Indigenous Aboriginal people of the continent is that it is a tale of indifference and neglect. … it represents a cruel assertion of power ... resulting in the destruction of Aboriginal culture, unparalleled rates of criminal conviction and imprisonment and massive, deprivation of property and land.

Nation-building led to laws, policies, and practices that subjected Aboriginal people to the most atrocious policing, regulating, and surveilling practices in an all-out attempt to eradicate the Indigenous races’.[1]

         Somehow, despite protestations of enlightenment, many Mount Isans felt that being Aboriginal meant being at best somehow neglectful; at worst, subhuman. One Sunday at Sunday School I asked my Sunday School teacher: ’Why are there no Aboriginals at our church?’

‘What sort of question is that?’

Many do not see things this way. Is it deliberate myopia? No. It is a view that reflects their own reality. How could people not be aware of drunken black men outside the town‘s pubs? (Did we see drunken whites?) Yes. But that was different. Why?

Did people visit the gunyas and camps on the river? Were they concerned when Aboriginal stockmen had to sleep in the creek at the Isa Rodeo while their white counterparts were granted tents and caravans?

That was why you didn’t want to dance with June.

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[1] In Kayleen M. Hazelhurst (ed.), Ivory Scales: Black Australia and the Law, Sydney, New South Wales University Press, 1987, p. 15.