Free Legacy by Larissa Behrendt Page A

them and her favourite was an old Aboriginal man named Murray Simms.
    During her visits he would tell her about his time growing up, of going to find pippies with his father and steaming them in a big tin over a fire on the beach, his time working on the fishing boats up and down the south coast, about his wife from Cowra, and their search to find the family she had been taken from as a child, her too early death from cancer and, Beth Ann’s favourite part, the stories his grandmother told him about the life before white people came, before the struggle over their land. He introduced her to the poems of Kath Walker and Jack Davis. Beth Ann read him the novels of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway.
    While she read, Murray seemed to drift off and Beth Ann would wonder whether he was caught up in the story or back with his memories. She, in return, was given a new way of looking at the world around her, became aware of a history that she had not learned in school but that inhabited the same landscape she did.
    Murray’s stories also made her realise that there was something shameful about the way Aboriginal people had been treated, an injustice that had been swept under the carpet. He told her about the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families, of forcibly being moved from their land, of going hungry, of mission managers, of kids not being able to finish school. He also taught her about dignity and patience, of spirited optimism not being crushed by bigotry and indifference. Murray passed away, dying peacefully in his sleep, the summer before Beth Ann’s last year of high school but the memory of him and his stories, and the way he had opened her eyes about the silent history, stayed with her forever.
    Her two older sisters had left home as soon as they could - Helen, the oldest, marrying her boyfriend the day she turned eighteen and Pamela, her other sister, moving to Wollongong and sharing a flat with her friends. Left alone, Beth Ann still felt she was in their shadow, especially with the leering from men who assumed she had the same morals as her sisters. And without her sisters’ fussing and bickering, the lack of warmth in the house was even more apparent. And with Murray gone, there seemed nothing to hold her to Stanwell Park.
    When she finished high school, she wanted to escape the house that was so empty of affection. She was accepted to go to veterinary school and intended to move to Sydney at the end of February when her course started. Just after Australia Day, she read in the newspapers about the Tent Embassy that had begun in Canberra, started by just a handful of Aboriginal people but whose numbers were rapidly swelling. She thought of Murray Simms and recalled how after hearing his stories she had felt something was profoundly wrong, unjust, but she did not know what to do to make a difference. This, she thought, might be one way to show that she cared.
    So in the heat of a late January afternoon, while her parents were in the midst of a screaming match, Beth Ann had packed a bag and walked out the door, hitching a ride to Wollongong and then across the mountains and inland to Canberra. The sense of liberation, that thumping in her heart, the giddiness as she set out was a feeling she never forgot.
    â€˜Such a long time ago,’ Beth Ann whispered to herself, ‘but I guess it takes a long time to realise that belief and love have faded.’

12
    â€˜What have I got on today?’ Tony asked.
    â€˜Something your wife didn’t check before you left the house,’ Carol smiled.
    She checked the appointments calendar on her computer. ‘There’s that Darren Brown at nine thirty. He’s a nice-looking kid. Seems smart. Don’t know why he keeps wanting to see you.’
    â€˜Yeah, thought you’d like him. And he wants to keep seeing me because he is interested in my life, in my achievements.’
    â€˜If he was only interested in your achievements