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As our conversation unfurls, some women share stories about government vehicles pulling into
their communities and officials using boiled lollies to lure kids inside vans. Some talk about the patience of the nuns; others their cruelty. Clearly, these memories still pain them.
“Where did you meet Raymond?” Eileen calls over to one of the eldest women present, Selma. Her skin is dark, the colour of ironwood, and she’s small. She wears a batik shirt that swims with an intricate pattern.
“I dunno. On the mission,” she says.
“You met Raymond on the mission?” calls Irene, Selma’s niece. Jokey and boisterous, Irene wears sparkly sandals and has a short, curly ponytail.
“Yeah, true!” says Selma before reflecting on her days at the mission.
“I don’t know how to start. Well, first things first, I missed my mum. I missed her. Some of the Tiwi ladies were there. And their mothers used to come from Bathurst Island to Garden Point. And we’d sit there and look and look and look to see if we could see our mothers. Because they were black, and our mothers were black.”
She places a piece of paper over her face and begins to whimper. Her cry is high-pitched, as if she’s been poked with something sharp. “Sorry.” The others console her, their voices low and calm. “You’re okay, Selma,” they say. “It’s okay to cry.”
Irene speaks up next. She was born in the tiny town of Ti Tree, near Alice Springs, but eventually taken to Melville Island in the Tiwis, north of Darwin. There the nuns disliked her, and she played up. As a teenager she fell pregnant to an Aboriginal man, Jock, so the missionaries quickly married them. “I didn’t even know I was getting married. There was no plan or anything. My wedding was closed-door. No one could come.”
“We didn’t know she got married!” Selma adds.
“They just made it a secret,” says Irene matter-of-factly.
Eileen pipes up, looking at me. “See where we’re coming from? Stolen generation?”
I nod. We’re worlds away from the modern realm of Tinder and the tyranny of choice. Yet on this last topic, the Elders have lots to say.
“Choice is a gift,” exclaims Bernadette, an agile Elder in faded jeans and a royal-blue T-shirt. Her trailing grey hair is fixed half-up with a comb. Round brown eyes blaze under her razor-straight fringe. “In our day, we got to an age where you met someone and you got married,” she says. “What I say to my granddaughters, now that they’re young women, is live your life first. Do all the things that you want to do, then, when the time is right, settle down and have babies.
“Don’t settle down too early. Do some travel. Live your dreams first. Because sometimes when you get into that relationship and you get married, you put yourself last. You’re always doing things for the husband and the children. Then, in later life, you’re still doing it for the grannies.”
The women use this term to refer to their grandkids as well as to their great-grandkids. When Bernadette mentions their demands, there’s a supportive chorus of approval. “Yeah,” the Elders call. “You’re doing all sorts of things for the grannies!”
“What I say to my granddaughters, now that they’re young women, is live your life first. Do all the things that you want to do, then, when the time is right, settle down and have babies.”
“When you’re in trouble, who do you call? Nanna! That’s who!” Bernadette nods, then reclaims the floor. “But you do that for love, and you live your life. And that’s where you draw a lot of your love: from your children, and from your grandchildren. But, you know, I want my granddaughters and my grandchildren to have a different experience from what I had.
“The Garden Point nuns told us, ‘You have sex, you get married. That’s it. The first one you have sex with you have to marry!’ You’ve got to live your life first … then one day that person will come along, and you will know that’s right in your heart. Don’t think ‘near enough is good enough’. Because it’s not.”
“Full stop! Yeah!” sings Eileen.
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The mood in the room is buoyant, and it’s not the date loaf and pastries fuelling the fire. It’s the heat that survival radiates – the hope for something fairer. As a result of entering marriage too soon, by choice or otherwise, the Elders’ conviction is this: young people need time to be alone, to explore, and to learn who they are without having the needs of others pressed upon them. I realise that I’ve never thought about commitment this way – that to bind your life to someone else’s means entering a world of extra demands.
Eileen leans forward, threads her fingers together and shares a story from the group’s recent past. From the 1980s up until not long ago, when their hips and knees were hardier, many of the women enjoyed an annual ritual of travelling from the tropics to the Alice Springs desert for the Masters Games. There, they’d run amok – go out on the town at 11pm, dance, and not get back until 4am. A few hours later they’d need to wake to play a game.
“What goes on on tour stays on tour!” Eileen hoots. “We had the best time. When we were there, we weren’t mothers, we weren’t grandmothers, we weren’t wives!” The room dissolves into laughter, the depth of their friendships now clear.
“So, tell us,” says Bernadette, her brown eyes twinkling in my direction. “Did you buy us sweets to get us to tell you sweet love stories?” I did, I think to myself. But these stories aren’t sweet. They’re stories about strength, as the best love stories should be, not tales steeped in eros, twists of fate and blind luck. They’re a call for a new and better generation of love stories: for smart, considered unions between those who deserve each other’s riches.
‘I want my granddaughters to have a different experience from what I had’
Source: Philippines Alive
