Free Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms by Anita Heiss

history, or Erambie anything, for that matter.
    â€˜Apparently she offered some of the escaped prisoners fresh scones and tea, while their daughter Margaret went to alert the cops.’ Fat Bobbo speaks as though the words leave a bitter taste in his mouth.
    Banjo keeps listening, knowing that his wife would’ve provided the same hospitality, was providing the hospitality, and sending their daughter to provide food, not to dob anyone in.
    Johnno jumps in with, ‘That’s nothing, I heard Alf Bourke and his son found a group of six Japs while they were out on a rabbiting trip near Claremont. Reckons he shot two dead in self-defence.’
    Fat Bobbo pretends to fire a gun. ‘I reckon he shot them dead cos he hates the Japanese bastards.’
    The site supervisor walks over to see where things are up to and the men stop talking immediately. Johnno starts whistling and Fat Bobbo says, ‘I’m off for a piss, when’s smoko?’
    â€˜When I say so,’ the supervisor says angrily, having been watching them from afar.

5
    21 August 1944
    W hen Mary takes the paper home from the Smiths’ she has already decided that she won’t tell her parents that twice as many voters in Cowra were against the proposed referendum changes than for them. She’s fairly sure they won’t care about the result – it will only start another distressing discussion about how Aboriginal people don’t have the right to vote. As she walks across the mission to home, she sees a group of kids huddled around something and squealing. She starts to walk faster. When she realises Jessie is throwing up across the way, she starts to run towards her.
    â€˜What’s wrong?’ Mary asks, bending down and pulling the child’s hair back. She smells the vomit before she sees it all over Jessie’s clothes. Jessie has tears streaming down her face and when Mary wipes them away, she notices her sister is burning up. ‘What’s she been eating?’ she asks Dottie and Betty frantically.
    Dottie shrugs. ‘Dunno,’ she says.
    â€˜She ate too many of those nuts from the pine trees,’ Betty dobs. ‘She’s probably sick because she didn’t want to share.’ She bends down and whispers in her sister’s ear, ‘Mum always says to share. See what happens when you’re a greedy guts?’
    â€˜Stop it, Betty. Let’s get her home.’ Mary picks her young sister up, demonstrating a physical strength she didn’t even know she had.
    â€˜ Mum , Jessie’s chucking uuuupppp ,’ Betty screams at the top of her lungs and Joan, walking back from the church where she’s spent the morning cleaning, starts to run, trying not to drop the clothes Father Patrick has given her for the goothas and an old pair of pants he was throwing out. She intends to mend the hole in the bottom of them and give them to Hiroshi, who has been in the same clothes for over two weeks.
    By this time there is a circle of kids making vomiting noises and laughing, and a few of the teenage boys have appeared at their hut too.
    â€˜Go find your Uncle Banjo, and tell him we’re taking Jessie to the hospital,’ Joan instructs Claude Williams, and he takes off with his mates in tow. He runs as fast as his legs will carry him.

    â€˜You can wait in here,’ a short, round nurse says to Joan with a frown when she arrives at the hospital with Jessie.
    Joan looks around. It’s the linen room. She knows they isolate the Blacks at Cowra Hospital, but she’s never beenput in the linen room before. Once when Mary got sick at the Cowra Show they just put her in a separate room at the back of the hospital. But this is a new kind of segregation and Joan’s worried about how Banjo will react when he arrives.
    Jessie is asleep in her mother’s arms when the doctor finally walks in to offer his services. Blacks are also the last to be seen, it seems. He takes the