Remembered By Heart: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing by Sally Morgan Page B

waitress, we got to work with the two whitefellas. Get everything, set the table and things, get all the food ready for them before we go out. All the rest of the women go out with the food, but we got to wait till we set the table, and when they’re sitting down eating, then we get our meal, take them down. We might go home and come back; we clean up the table, wash the dishes and everything. By eight o’clock we finished for the night.
    And all the granny and grandfathers, they get a ration, and we used to make a camp fire and cook for them. Walter Smith used to look after all the old people. He used to give all the old people rations free, from the homestead store every Sunday. A little bit of flour, sugar, tea; justfrom Sunday to next Sunday. Jam, treacle, honey, for the old people. He treated them like that. That’s why all the people from the other places come there — they know they get everything free.
    They wait till we fellas come, the old people. Sometime if we got any left over from the men’s, we used to give it to them. We don’t have to cook it then. We used to have big billy like a bucket, boiling: cup of tea all the time. And damper, sometimes we baked it in the camp oven, and sometimes we buried it in the hot sand. Fireplace just in the ground there. Make a fire just in the ground, but you’ve got to get a special wood so you haven’t got ashes, so that meat can be cooked nice and brown. We used to get snakewood — that’s really good to cook everything. Nice taste, too. Every morning clean the fireplace. When we finish cooking we bury it in the sand. In the morning we clean it and put a new lot of wood in, and then start cooking again. For sleeping, we had separate fires, near the camp where you go to sleep. We didn’t sleep by the cooking fire. You had to make a little fire each side, for sleeping.
    The Smiths were very good people. Soon as someone tell them that Welfare coming, he used to tell us to go down the river now, stay in the bush when the Native Welfare coming round, because they going getting all the children, the half-caste kids, take them to Perth. He used to tell us to go bush for a day. We used to be lucky we had a good boss — he don’t want we fellas taken away from the mum, fromthe country. We used to be hiding in the river. He used to go, ‘Come on, take it bush.’ ‘That flash car still there?’ ‘No, that’s gone.’ Hamersley and Mulga Downs, all the kids gone. That was about 1930s, that’s when it started.
    Those days we was very scared about the policeman. We know what sort of policeman been early days, see, when the first Aborigine people and the whitefellas met up about 1870 or 1880, they was fighting. They used to take them away to Rottnest Island, over spearing the whitefellas and things like that. That’s what happened before, long time ago, before I born. We still got that in the mind. We know what the families been go through, all the old people, early days. If we do the wrong thing we know the policeman pick us up and take him lockup. We think the policeman pick them up, take them for good, see.
    Holiday time, we used to go out bush, and we used to do our own way, Aborigine way. About four or five mile away from the station, where the holiday camp belong to the old people, we used to go. No windmill around; we were near the Beasley River, where the water is, and sometimes a rockhole. The proper name for that river is Maliwartu. They know, old people; they goes make a camp there. Now, we’re living in Roebourne, we’re staying here forever. But the old people used to keep moving. Wherever the meeting, they go to the meeting, and all the tribe meet up there, different ones.
    We took a spring-cart and a camel; when it’s getting late we leave the camel and the spring-cart, we make a fire, geta kangaroo, cook him. Catching the wild food, and doing cooking in that grinding stone. We