Free To Asmara by Thomas Keneally Page B

the beginning .
    I’d been averagely enraged to find that there had never been any treaty between the European Australians and the Aboriginal peoples. The tribes had been deprived of their earth without even the benefit of a compact, however flawed. Young law graduates like me might therefore spend their days working for long-established firms of solicitors, conveyancing wealth in cash or kind from one company to another, and then give their spare time free to the Aboriginal Legal Service. Work was a shadow. The two or three hours a night we spent in the airless shopfront offices of the service were the real business of the lawyer.
    My clients in the Legal Service were those who’d fled from Aboriginal reservations to the city. They lacked the profound contact their grandfathers had had with the tribal earth. They bore as well the shame of being the first generation of uninitiated men and women. They had, that is, lost their faith. The elders judged them too vitiated by booze and cars, by rock and television, by the blood of whites. The genial mysteries had not been extended to them. The old men preferred to die with those rites and procedures, that tribal physics, locked up in their brains for good.
    The dispossessed children I dealt with in the Aboriginal Legal Service courted their own deaths. They flayed themselves with the European scorpion, liquor. They hadn’t known it at all for the thousand tribal generations which came before. Now they knew it as closely as their own blood. They were frequently charged with breaking and entering and armed holdup. They were guilty of assault, generally against their own.
    I noticed a young woman with an Asian face and a workaday Australian accent coming and going in the offices of the Legal Service. She had her own office with one word— Bernadette —scrawled in black lettering across its glass door. I would hear her competent no-nonsense voice rising from discussions she held with clients or their young lawyers, who didn’t seem as clever as she was. She dressed in dutifully dowdy social worker gear: handknit black sweaters and patchwork denim coats. But she had a sumptuous air about her.
    As I got to know her I was enchanted by her history—I have a weakness for that. Her great-grandfather had been brought to Australia by a Melbourne Chinese merchant in the nineteenth century—along with thousands of other peasants from Fukien and Canton—as an indentured digger and washer of gold-bearing soil. Bernadette liked to tell of how, as a child, she had been taken by her grandfather to a basalt-covered hill in the Castlemaine gold fields and shown a perfectly dug tunnel, wide enough for two small men standing side by side to walk for a mile and a half beneath the earth. From this sap, the Chinese had plundered the hill of all its lodes.
    Bernadette’s parents were property owners and importers of cloisonné and other Asian wares. Her family, though not European like the Australian majority, had followed the pattern characteristic of new worlds—a laborer great-grandfather; a small merchant grandfather, owner of real estate in Melbourne’s Chinatown; a prosperous father, owner of real estate throughout the general community; a socially concerned, noncommercial next generation—Bernadette in this case—working for small pay in a cause more worthy to her than mere clan aggrandizement.
    We appalled our parents by living together for two years, and then maybe more so by marrying. At the wedding party in my back garden in South Melbourne, the four parents to the union had to share the feast with fourteen habitual housebreakers, seven grievous-bodily-harms, and five multiple-automobile-thefts. The Yang and Darcy parents both looked out at their foreign child-in-law with brave incomprehension.
    At the time of the marriage, I hadn’t yet thought in more than a notional sort of way about giving up my work at the well-known legal firm;