Maybe someday I'll go somewhere, said Ruthie. Because they always stare. If I was sittin' on a train, I look out the window so they don't bother me. Some people don't have no respect. Oh, how they stare!
Shall we speak of stares? I myself seldom fail to gaze into other faces as they come to me. Looking is a natural act, and if Ruthie had come to my notice on a bus I would have looked at her because she was beautiful, but Ruthie would not have known that I was looking at her for that reason. That afternoon she said to me: When you get in a bus, the first thing people do is look you up and down, see if you're black. — I guess that was how it was for me, that first time I came into Redfern. They were all gazing at me — all of them! — and I was not their color. Maybe each gazed at me for his own reasons, but because they all gazed I had to assume a single reason, the same one that Ruthie assumed in her bitter anger. So perhaps the way to discover people's lusts and angers is not to fish behind their peering eyes but to read what they write on the walls of their public toilets. In a men's room at the Sydney airport I came across this profundity:
KILL ALL ABO'S I HATE COONS HA HA FUCKEM
which another soul had seconded as follows:
ABO'S WILL RUIN AUSSIE LAND
— a remarkable reversal of fact which took my breath away so that I almost did not appreciate the remarks of the third sage who had weighed and balanced and urinated and concluded: GOOKS ARE WORSE. — What exactly does it mean for land to become Aussified? Let me introduce a retired farmer I met in Tasmania, where the exterminations of the last century enjoyed great success: there are no fullblooded Tasmanian aborigines anymore. Horses bowed in the whitish and yellowish grass where this farmer had lived his years out, and huge cylindrical bales stood upon the fields like gateposts for the low blue sea-wave of mountains to the west. Age parted him from his farm, but his heart lived there yet; I think he was homesick for his peppermint gum trees. — The wildlife around here is a tremendous problem, he told me. You clear a field here and the animals will come from miles around, just strip it, clean it out, particularly kangaroos and wallabies. — He was the son of pioneers whose hard work had justified them to themselves. The land belonged to them. The kangaroos had no right to it. I requested his views on those strange, dark, barrel-shaped marsupials called Tasmanian devils, and he said: People in fat lamb areas could have experienced a lot more problems with them than I did. On my two hundred and fifty acres, while I did see them, they were never in sufficient numbers to cause a problem. — Their foreseeable extinction could not grieve him. Maybe he was even glad. It is not for me to hold him blameworthy. He paid allegiance to the laws he believed in, and lived quietly. If some native plant or animal caused "trouble" or a "problem" then he resolutely defended his interests; otherwise he kept neutral. He didn't kill venomous snakes, for instance, unless he found them close to the house. This philosophy, so conveniently practical with its tiny cabinets of self sameness, had come with a drawer to fit native people in also. — The whites have just about had enough of free handouts to the blacks, he explained. A few educated aboriginals tend to cause a bit of trouble. The uneducated black, he don't expect so much.
Snake, Sadie, Ruthie and Rob did not expect very much, I guess, maybe because they knew that Redfern was Aussie land. — This used to be a white community, Snake said, opening another V.B. Before the blackfellas moved in. The whitefellas want it back. They want to put a carpark in.
I'll tell you something else about this place, said Snake. They got no respect for the elders. The young fellas have got to keep the respect they got for the elders. The mother and father, they're not strict. And the old ones look out for us. You see, I call 'em all uncles and aunties.
That's what I noticed when I came down here, Rob mumbled, leaning back, closing his eyes, and raising the can of V.B. to his lips as his other wrist relaxed, his fingers falling and opening. (The case was already more than half gone.) — I call everyone brother and sister, but here they just pass on.
That's right, Snake, it's about respect, said Ruthie. No respect anywhere. I'm glad I haven't got no kids. They'd just get raised up in this shit. The average white person hates us, except for ferals and hips.* And the bikers, too. They back us up. But the others. . Especially the police. I saw one man last week, they made 'im strip down to 'is skin. Happened right outside this house. That's their aim, to strip us of our dignity.
You tell your magazine how there's always police, Sadie said. Blackfellas want peace; the police always wanna teach us a lesson.
