WK: Yeah.
PC: When kids were taken or sent away to boy’s homes, they didn’t really come back till they were 18. Before him, XXXXXX and XXXXXX. XXXXXX was there, but only that one stint. XXXXXX too, and same with XXXXXX. XXXXXX had a fair bit of that boys’ home stuff. Not because they were criminal necessarily. But they became so because of it.
WK: Yeah.
PC:
Once you come back to a place like Bourke – or any place, really – from being in those boys’ homes, you’ve grown up much faster than your years. Because there’s older boys, better crims. The stories about criminality are – like the stories about the land – they’re animated. They get back home, they’re really restless, they can’t settle in. You’re already marked as a crim too. You know that people are talking about you.
With stolen generation stuff, they were taking babies off their mothers from hospital. But with those boys’ homes, you can be sentenced without telling your parents at 10 years old. Your first sexual experience is probably going to happen in those boys’ homes. Whether you want it or not. So, there’s a lot of growing up in a really quick time.
It’s horrible.
A lot of those stories about institutional violence are coming out now. Aboriginal people, and other people too, are starting to speak, people who’ve been holding this stuff – some of them for 50 years. One person I spoke to said, ‘I want an apology, that’s all I want.’
He wanted recognition. It was the first time I’d heard him talk about it in my life. The shame and the fear make the abuse very difficult to talk about.
JC: Is there room in the communities for people to talk about it?
PC: It’s such a modern thing. I don’t think we know how to.
Meanwhile, one of the Members of the New South Wales Parliament, the leader of the One Nation Party in New South Wales, announced a couple of weeks ago that there were 100 paedophile sexual assaulters in Bourke: ‘Police know about it but nothing’s been done.’
WK: ‘Walking the streets at night.’
PC: ‘Walking the streets of Bourke at night.’
I don’t know what he’s seeing and what reality he’s in, but you don’t see many people walk the streets. You do see young people, particularly in the summertime, walking the streets. They’ll be with cousins small and large. But that’s all of these towns. Most of our houses don’t have a fan, let alone air-conditioning. And the Housing Commission places are inadequate. If you’ve got five kids, and you might have a brother or sister staying there with their two kids as well, in a three-bedroom house, there’s no room. Summertime is so fuckin’ hot.
JC: Why should anybody have to justify walking around their own community at night?
PC: Because they’re black. And black is danger. ‘They’ll steal your house if you don’t put a fence up.’
I was talking with my girlfriend one night up past The Carriers Arms Hotel there, outside on the footpath, and the guy from the house comes down.
I said, ‘Are you right, mate?’
‘I’m right.’
‘Well, what are you doing?’
‘You better move on.’
‘What? I’m on the footpath.’
‘Better move on. I’ll ring the police for you.’
I started to get wild with him, and my girlfriend grabbed me by the arm.
One of the things Aboriginal people find rare is white people actually acknowledging that they are on Aboriginal country.
White property laws are very different to our forms of ownership, very different to the obligations to Country that we know.
That’s why I asked you, ‘How do you feel about returning here,’ Jen. You look very natural in this country and I think that’s probably women’s stuff. Emma Adams felt it really strongly. So did Claire when we were out on that last trip.
[To Paul Magee]
You worked on another poem on that trip.
