‘And the Aboriginal people haven’t been understood?’
‘There have been different phases, different policies. I belong to the forcibly urbanised generation. After the Second World War the authorities considered they had to change earlier policies and try to assimilate rather than isolate Indigenous inhabitants. They tried to do that by controlling where we lived and even who we married. Many were sent to towns to adapt to European urban culture. The results were catastrophic. Within a very short time we topped all the wrong statistics: alcoholism, unemployment, marital break-ups, prostitution, criminality, violence, drugs – you name it, we were there. Aboriginals were and have always been Australia’s social losers.’
‘And Andrew?’
‘Andrew was born before the war. At that time the authorities’ policy was to “protect” us as though we were some kind of endangered species. Therefore opportunities for owning land or looking for work were limited. But the most bizarre legislation was the law allowing authorities to remove a child from an Aboriginal mother if there was a suspicion that the father was not Aboriginal. I may not have the world’s most pleasant story about my origins, but at least I have one. Andrew has nothing. He has never seen his parents. When he was born the authorities collected him and put him in a children’s home. All he knows is that after they had robbed his mother, she was found dead in a bus shelter in Bankstown, fifty kilometres north of the children’s home, and no one knew how she had got there or what the causes of her death were. The white father’s name was withheld until Andrew no longer cared.’
Harry struggled to absorb all of this. ‘Was that really legal? What about the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?’
‘None of that came until after the war. And don’t forget that Aboriginal politics had the best of intentions. The goal was to preserve the culture, not to destroy it.’
‘What happened to Andrew then?’
‘They realised he was academic and sent him to a private school in England.’
‘I thought Australia was too egalitarian to send children to private schools.’
‘All this was administered and paid for by the authorities. I suppose the intention was that Andrew should stand as a shining example of a political experiment that had otherwise caused so much pain and so many human tragedies. On his return, he went to Sydney University. That was when they started to lose control of him. He ended up in trouble, had a reputation for being violent and his grades suffered. My understanding is there was an unhappy love affair somewhere in the picture, a white woman who left him because her family was not very enthusiastic, but Andrew has never shown much interest in talking about it. It was, nevertheless, a difficult period in his life, and it could easily have been worse than it was. While he was in England he learned to box – he claimed that was how he had survived boarding school. In Sydney he took up boxing again and when he was offered the chance to travel with Jim Chivers he dropped out of university and got away for a while.’
‘I’ve just seen him box,’ Harry said. ‘He hasn’t forgotten much.’
‘In fact, he’d only thought of boxing as a break from his studies, but he was successful with Chivers, the press began to show some interest and he carried on. When he boxed his way through to the final of the Australian championships, there were even a couple of professional agents from the USA over to have a look at him. However, something happened in Melbourne the night before the final. They were at a restaurant, and it was claimed that Andrew tried it on with the girlfriend of the other finalist. His name was Campbell, and he was with a nice-looking North Sydney girl who later became Miss New South Wales. There was a fight in the kitchen and everyone there, Andrew, Campbell’s trainer, the agent and another bloke, smashed everything in sight.
‘They found Andrew hanging over the washbasin with a split lip, cuts to his forehead and a sprained wrist. No one was reported – that’s probably why the rumour spread he’d made a pass at Campbell’s girlfriend. At all events, Andrew had to withdraw from the final, and afterwards his boxing career seemed to flag. To be fair, he did knock out a couple of good boxers in some tournaments, but the press had lost interest and the professional agents never showed up again.
‘Bit by bit he stopped boxing at tournaments – another rumour had it he had started drinking, and after one tournament on the west coast he was asked to leave the Chivers team, apparently because he had inflicted serious injuries on some amateurs. After that he disappeared. It’s been difficult to get out of him exactly what he was doing, but at any rate he was drifting aimlessly around Australia for a couple of years until he went back to university.’