Belonging: a Novel

By Anthony Hopkins

Matthew Tate finds a letter. It speaks of belonging and a mother he has never known. A semi-trailer and a freightless haul to the heart see him arrested and imprisoned in Alice Springs. Caged, haunted and alone, the 19-year-old is determined to find the truth.

Ben Fulton is a young, white lawyer from the city, working tenaciously for Aboriginal Legal Aid at the grinding coalface of the criminal (in)justice system in Central Australia. At the collision of Black and White, he too is searching.

Jordi Watts, a Warumungu woman, has no need to search. Walking lithely in two worlds, she runs the Aboriginal Legal Aid office in the alcohol-ravaged township of Tennant Creek. Jordi knows the beauty and pain of her people, holding both with the certainty of place. Matthew, Ben and Jordi come together in the violence of court and the vastness of Country, alive with the vibrating energy of its people, of culture, art, tragedy and love, as the truth of Matthew’s past is revealed. From this unravelling comes possibility ...

Profits made from the sale of this book will be donated to Country Needs People, an ACNC registered charity and non-profit in Australia supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sustainable management of land and sea. www.countryneedspeople.org.au

Early Praise for Belonging-

‘This is a beautifully written story of the ugly Black and White side of Anglo-Australian law and colonisation. The author gives the reader a rare view of law, law that forms a hard White crust of an Australia, one that covers and hides the deep vast beauty and Blackness of this ancient continent...

It is a tale of the tragedy that besets both survivors and perpetrators ... but it is also a love story: a love of justice, a love of humanity and most importantly a love of Country and all that entails.

If you dream of really sharing this continent, then do yourself a favour and read this book!’

– Asmi Wood, Professor of Law, ANU

‘Evocative ... transfixing... It is a story of the pervasive and traumatic effects of colonisation, a ‘justice’ system that indifferently churns through people, land and, above all, love. It is a story that both reaches into the past and points a hopeful path to the future.’

– Lorana Bartels, Professor of Criminology, ANU

‘A beautiful bridge between worlds, an urgent call for compassion, and an ode to different ways of knowing, told with love, respect and hope ... Read it with an open heart and an open mind and pass it on to someone who needs it.’

– Tim Hollo, Executive Director of the Green Institute

‘This is a must read for young lawyers trying to gain an understanding of how to navigate their practice when working in Aboriginal communities.’

– Antoinette Carroll, Youth Justice Advocate

‘A fine epic novel in the tradition of Xavier Herbert. I didn't want it to end.’

– Peter Read AM, Author of Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony Hopkins
• Release date: Dec 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005605735

Anthony Hopkins

ANTHONY HOPKINS is a white Australian who lives on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land in Canberra with his wife Kelli Cole, a Warumungu and Luritja woman from Central Australia and curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the National Gallery of Australia. He is the proud father of three sons who stand tall on the land of their ancestors. Anthony is an Associate Professor and the Director of Clinical and Internship Courses at the ANU College of Law, as well as a practising criminal defence barrister. He is an award-winning teacher who teaches criminal law, evidence law and clinical courses in the ACT prison and with the Aboriginal Legal Service. Anthony’s research is focused on colonialism, inequality and marginalisation, as they shape, intersect with and are compounded by the criminal justice system. This work begins with recognising the importance of listening to the experiences of those caught in that system. His journey of listening began at the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service in Alice Springs in 1997, as a law student intern, where he met Kelli, then working as an Aboriginal Field Officer, and was welcomed into her family. The journey continues and is supported by a mindfulness and compassion meditation practice.

Book preview

Belonging

A Novel

Anthony Hopkins

Belonging

A Novel

Published by

Stringybark Publishing,

PO Box 464,

HALL, ACT 2618

Australia

www.stringybarkpublishing.com.au

First published: December 2020

Smashwords Edition

Copyright: © Anthony Hopkins, 2020

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the editor, judges and the author of these stories.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cover image: © Robert Ambrose Cole 1959 – 1994 Luritja/ Warumungu peoples Spirit, 1994

Hand coloured screen print on paper, Ed:1/30

Cover design: Jonathan Vernon

Internal design: Stringybark Publishing

Bill Neidjie quote: Bill Neidjie with Keith Taylor, Story about Feeling, Magabala Books, 1989.

For Kelli, our children and all those born of the wisdom of Country

That tree now, feeling …

e blow

sit quiet, you speaking …

that tree now e speak …

that wind e blow

e can listen

– Bill Neidjie, Story About Feeling

PROLOGUE

Trucking Home

In the greying dawn the man waved him through the open gate pointing toward one of the semis, a Mack hooked to an empty trailer – empty but for the hidden contraband. He climbed onto the side runner and into the cab. The keys were waiting for him there in the ignition, just as he had been told they would be. The coil took no time to heat before the engine roared to life – deafening in the surrounding stillness of the industrial estate. He found the gear and drove the rig from its place in the line. The truck gathered momentum, leaving the yard. In the rear-view mirror, he caught sight of the attendant waving him out.

He moved through the gears smoothly the way his father had taught him. Quickly he was on the highway, alone, headed north from Adelaide to the desert – for home.

• • •

The highway straightened into the distance in the midday heat, its length apparent in the starkness of the unfiltered light as it traversed the flat, pale moonscape. Not yet the redness of his imagination or perhaps, his memory. Keyed up, without thought of sleep, he drove onward. Long-range fuel tanks bearing him toward his destination. With each passing kilometre, a stillness crept upon him – a stillness beyond that of the bare salt pans and empty plains, an internal stillness, an unknown quieting.

Slowly the redness presented itself. First a tinge, then a deepening richness. Though he had been on long hauls with his father from as early as he could remember, this road had been avoided. Only now he knew why. The letter had arrived as a herald of a life that could have been – earthbound, less fragmented. Was it too late now? The silence counselled otherwise.

The only world he had known was that of his father and his own mind. A silence of another kind. The silence of a child raised to be seen but not heard and rarely seen at that. He was always with his father in the cab of the truck. Together without intimacy. Alone with the porn mags and the shock jock radio. Alone with a father the other truckers looked up to for his roadhouse bravado – a father, but never a dad.

Of course, you look for intimacy elsewhere. Inside. In imagination. Even if that makes you certifiable.

Now he had been offered a lifeline, something solid, grounded. A life not dictated by the requirements of freight or the impersonality of his father. A life rooted in the history of the land.

How grateful he was to the faceless man who had met him and offered him this haul. A freightless haul to the heart. Without a licence – without a track record of his own – he would never have been offered a legitimate run. The man had spoken of the secret cargo, told him where to find the truck. And here he was steadily moving through the red dunes, the mulga, passing beaten-up old Falcons on both sides of the road – ageing bodies barely enclosing whole families of black faces. Open faces. Faces certain in their own place and identity.

The ranges approached. Their ancient spines shale-strewn and vibrant in the softening early evening glow. Markers of a meeting place – an old world of new promise, just through the gap. The gap. Relief. Completion. Then, sirens and flashing lights. The opening is closed.

Wrenched from the cab of the truck and pushed face down into the dirt, he finds his first communion with the desert – raw, but not without comfort, despite the hostility emanating from the officers standing around him. Officers without connection to the earth they hold him to.

• • •

Three a.m. Caught in the glare of a naked bulb. No escape, facing his interrogators. Each word recorded.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Here. I’ve got family here.’

‘What family?’

‘Aboriginal family. I’ve come home.’

‘Do you want us to contact anyone?’

‘I don’t know anyone. Mum’s dead. I only found out about her a few weeks ago.’

‘It says here that you stole the semi from a yard in Adelaide. This statement says that you just walked in and took it. The yardsman tried to wave you down but you just drove out.’

‘They would tell you that.’

‘It’s not true?’

‘He told me to take it.’

‘Why? An unloaded semi. Who told you?’

The ensuing sweaty silence continued uninterrupted until the interview was terminated by the downward pressure of the constable’s finger, ending the recording.

Part one

CALLING

Joining the Conveyor

There was something about his eyes, piercing blue, deep-set but alive, an animal blaze amidst the shadow cast by his jutting brow. The shadow almost concealed the signs of tiredness – hardly unusual for someone who had spent a night in the police cells. And yet, the eyes seemed to stare out of a background of exhaustion stretching back far beyond any recent run-in with the Northern Territory police. The darkness around his eyes was made more prominent by the paleness of his skin. To Ben Fulton, there was nothing about this man that spoke of his Aboriginality, nothing except perhaps the slight flaring of his nose. In his short six months as an employee of Aboriginal Legal Aid, Ben had learned not to jump to conclusions when it came to identity. Matthew Tate was an unknown.

• • •

The morning had started as it always did, rising with the gut-wrenching expectation of a day governed by the number of Aboriginal people locked up overnight, or arrested and driven to Alice Springs in the spine-jarring discomfort of paddy wagons from outlying towns and communities. Ben never knew the extent of the day until the numbers in custody were revealed by the cops, and then the grind would begin, panic sometimes seeping in as he struggled to juggle an armload of files – an armload of people. Interviews, bail applications, pleas of guilty, adjournments and the police didn’t stop making arrests. Throughout the day, more and more black faces were brought to the stale cells below the court – an unremitting stream of people locked in a tragedy set in train just under 220 years ago. Day in day out Ben saw the faces of a people whose strength – a strength born of many tens of thousands of years of custodianship – was ebbing away, eroded by an unstoppable white tide.

Nowhere was the opposition of black and white more evident than the court. Descending the steps to the cells beneath the court took Ben into a sad, strangely accepting world of blackness. In truth, his clients weren’t all ‘black’, but, regardless, they sure as hell weren’t white. White was a colour reserved for the world of judgment atop the stairs, the world of summary ‘justice’, where individual stories were heard, but not listened to – their significance lost in a system not prepared to examine a world outside itself.

Ben couldn’t blame the magistrates. Who wants to listen to case after case of repeat offenders drink driving or assaulting their wives, or sniffers whose lives revolve around the oblivion offered by petrol or glue? The stories were tragic. But, told by overworked junior lawyers, they were lost. If magistrates were to really focus, really imagine themselves living the lives they were listening to, depression would take them, ‘judgement’ would evade them. Easier to observe that which was superficially presented, record sentences for crimes not people – abstract, distant, only vaguely uncomfortable – six months imprisonment, a year, $1000 fine, suspended sentence, bond. A procession of outcomes – mostly grim – not people. It was no wonder the first question asked in the cells was ‘how long?’ For many, court was simply a gatehouse to the prison unless they hit the jackpot of bail.

Ben hadn’t stopped trying to paint an individual picture of each client for the magistrates. But he didn’t delude himself that the canvas he presented to the court was more than sparingly daubed

‘Your Honour, my client is a 54 year old Arrernte man ... he recalls younger days hunting on his father’s country before alcoholism and dialysis ... her parents died in a car crash when she was thirteen, she suffered abuse ... his uncle told him to drive to the funeral, and despite his intoxication, he felt compelled ... she was introduced to sniffing by a cousin visiting the camp from out bush ... her English is limited. School has failed her. Her only source of self-esteem is brazen participation in group rampages of petty theft and vandalism ... she was hungry, she supplements the family income with what she can get for paintings of her mother’s country ...’

That wasn’t who these people were. It barely touched the surface. But people from worlds colliding who do not share language, history or experience cannot learn one another’s stories, let alone tell them.

Occasionally an interpreter was able to offer Ben a bridge to the other side, but it was flimsy, the footing tenuous. Insight was rare and often shallow. The good interpreters didn’t seem to stay long. Who wants to watch your extended family get locked up? And then there was the challenge of finding an interpreter for the very many languages spoken by those brought to court from across the central desert - distinct languages, distinct nations, distinct peoples.

Ben was here out of a commitment to do something, something bigger than himself. But he could never escape the sinking feeling that he was simply oiling the wheels of a conveyor achieving nothing for the people he had come to help.

Grog, glue, petrol, crap food, illness, TV and idleness were killing these people. Killing their world. But their world remained a mystery to Ben, little more than an ideal. Ben was certain that it must be a world that contained the seeds of hope. But all he detected was stoic acceptance. Resignation. Not the raw anger born of the pain of dispossession and theft that he had expected. Not the recrimination or bitterness that would understandably be directed at an inheritor of the benefits of historical injustice.

Sometimes these emotions were apparent in the more white savvy clients, the out-of-towners, and those that the system had wrenched from their culture. Their pain, and usually their language, was more readily understandable and in your face. But for the most part, Ben’s clients, whether in Alice or in the surrounding communities, betrayed little of their feelings, leaving Ben to guess at the emotions that lay behind the shroud of language and culture.

• • •

That morning, on his way into the courtroom, Ben had been flicked the file by Jane, an energetic efficient well-dressed legal aid lawyer – whitefella legal aid.

‘He says he’s Aboriginal,’ Jane confided, her tone both disbelieving and a trifle smug as she handed over the file, happy to unburden herself. Jane’s presentation was in stark contrast to Ben’s slightly dishevelled appearance. Within six months, he had shed the suit jacket, rolled up the sleeves and unbuttoned the constriction of his collar, things you wouldn’t get away with in the city. He would like to have thought of himself as casual, dashing even, but anxiety was never far from his face.

Ben had met Jane Thurbridge at a party the day after he had arrived in Alice Springs. He’d been invited by some kindly friends of his mother, Bill and Joan, long-term resident botanists. Ben turned up at the party unmistakably reeling from culture shock – a recent arrival to a new world searching for something to anchor himself to. Jane had presented as a fellow traveller, more experienced and able to make sense of it all.

The morning before their meeting, Ben had walked along the dry bed of the Todd River for the first time, his breath a warm fog in the crispness of the June morning. Dark-skinned Aboriginal people congregated in groups in the riverbed sitting or squatting around fires, engaged in animated conversations in tongues foreign to Ben. Children emerged slowly from blankets or scampered around beneath stretching river gums close to the warmth of the fires. Their eagerness suggested that their games had only been temporarily halted by the coming of the previous night. There was nothing permanent about the campsites he passed as he followed the meandering path of the riverbed and yet he had had the unmistakable sense that these people belonged. The scenes were framed by the vibrant red of the MacDonnell Range, glowing in the early morning sun, its rocky outcrops rising into the endless blue sky. Nothing about this world was familiar to Ben, born and raised in Canberra with an Indigenous population closer to two percent. Canberra was a place you could live in without confronting the basis of your tenancy upon the land. The predominantly middle-class suburbs he had grown up in, with their liberal left-leaning schools, offered only historical learning from a page. Here in Alice, the sights and sounds all around drove home the reality of whose land he was living on. It made him cringe to recall that he had never once acknowledged the heritage of the one obviously Aboriginal girl at high school, a colour blindness leaving him unable to learn about the land he walked upon every day – her land.

Jane was the first lawyer that he had met in Alice. She spoke of the right of Aboriginal people to live free from the influence of white society, free from police oppression, in a state of nature. She spoke about lawyers providing a shield, warding off the ongoing colonial surge, each case in the court a crucial fight for independence. She offered Ben a cause to fight for. A revolution. As she spoke, Ben felt the burden of privilege lifting. Jane’s words promised him a chance to pit the good fortune of his family background, his education and existence against the enemies of Aboriginal Australia. The heady intoxication of her speech carried through into their love-making later that night. An ecstatic fling with the image Jane had created of herself.

Things were never that simple, and the hollowness of Jane’s words was revealed only too soon as Ben found himself juggling horrific cases of black on black domestic violence and steady streams of drink drivers. As it turned out, Jane didn’t even work for Aboriginal Legal Aid and though the Northern Territory Legal Aid Commission represented its fair share of Aboriginal people, it became clear from their subsequent conversations that Jane was in Alice Springs for her own personal advancement. She was working up the credentials in the rough and tumble of Central Australia, to move to the giddy heights of Sydney and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Now looking back, Ben could acknowledge his foolishness. He didn’t blame Jane. Indeed, they still had a good working relationship. In moments of reflection, Ben realised that his first meeting with Jane was a product of his own desire to find purpose.

• • •

When Ben had first started the load was overwhelming. There was never enough time to prepare. He struggled to comprehend the reverse construction of Aboriginal English and cope with the smell of campfires, grog, unwashed clothing and bodies that permeated the cell interview rooms. When it came to speaking up for his clients in court, he had often flown by the seat of his pants, at the mercy of the magistrates, simply relating his instructions to the bench and hoping for leniency. Now he knew what submissions to make, when to push straight on for a quick outcome and when to hold off, seek advice and consider.

‘It’s like an emergency room,’ his supervising lawyer had said sympathetically. ‘You decide which cases can be treated quickly and which require major surgery. They won’t stop bringing people in and if you panic you can’t help anyone.’

Ben had learned to keep the panic at bay – most of the time – and get good quick results for his clients. He had worked in private firms before, the type where no stone would be left unturned. Now there was only time to turn over one or two stones, so they had to be the right ones. There were lawyers that shuffled files, sought adjournments and faffed about, but those Ben respected cut through the paper work, the evidence and reduced a case to mental manageability almost in the time it took to walk down the steps to the cells. They didn’t overreach and they never lost sight of the gravity of their client’s situation or their client’s instructions, however limited.

A cursory look at Matthew Tate’s file disclosed no criminal record. A truck theft from South Australia, charged as unlawful use of a motor vehicle because the theft occurred beyond the jurisdiction of the Territory’s criminal courts. No damage. A skilful driver, though barely nineteen.

Ben opened and closed the interview room door, shutting out the