What was it I could detect in their faces as they examined us a bit more closely than they needed to?

Cows wandered along the verges of those roads, and Mum stopped every time we drove past a cow-pat that didn’t look too wet. She’d get out and pick it up and put it in the sugar-bag that was always in the back of the car. I slid further down in the seat. ‘Don’t be silly, lovey,’ she said. ‘It’s not dirty, only grass, wonderful for the garden.’

At last we found the graveyard. In my memory it’s a blur of trees and grey headstones until I got up close. Then I could see where the stonemason had ruled guide-lines in the stone: exactly like the lines I drew myself, when I had to do a heading in my Social Studies exercise book, except that I rubbed them out when I’d done the words. But these chiselled lines were still sharp. The letters themselves were a mixture of ‘little’ and ‘big’, the way I’d written when I was in Infants. Some of the words were spelled oddly: did ‘Henery’ mean ‘Henry’? Now and then the stonemason had left out a letter by mistake and had to put it in above the word, with an upside-down v to show where it should go.

‘They probably couldn’t read or write,’ Mum said. ‘Copying it off a bit of paper. You’d get it wrong, you wouldn’t know.’

From that day at Wiseman’s Ferry, that’s all I remember. The steepness of the stairs, the labour of the picks, and the mis- spelled names of the dead. The past: another country. Nothing to do with me. A day that was too hot and steamy, the smell of cow manure ripening in the car.

It was forty years before I went back.

2
Walking for Reconciliation

May in Sydney is a cold windy month, and the morning of 28 May 2000 was colder and windier than usual. On that day, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was closed to traffic and, along with 200,000 other people in beanies and scarves, I walked across it to show that I supported the idea of reconciliation between black and white Australians.

I’d have been hard pressed to say exactly what I thought reconciliation meant. It had something to do with what had gone on in Australia over the last 200 years: the violence, the taking-away of Aboriginal children from their parents, the fact that we descendants of Europeans lived on land that had once belonged to other people. Beyond that it was all uncertain: should we feel guilty, should we be talking compensation, what about treaties and land rights?

The Bridge straddles Sydney Harbour, its northern foot a short walk from the house where I’d grown up, its southern foot beside Sydney Cove where the city itself had begun. In 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip, in charge of a fleet of ships full of convicts, had dropped anchor in that cove, run the Union Jack up a flagpole, and declared Britain the owner of the whole lot.