2011 - Theses - Flinders University

Adelaide, 2001Eileen Lewis remembers 1926. She was the thirteen year old daughter of the publican at theLeigh Creek Hotel at Copley, some thirty miles west of Minerawuta, and she rememberswhen pale Rebecca Forbes and her two brown sons stayed in the first bedroom on the groundfloor north side of the Pub, next to the pantry. She remembers Mrs Forbes wearing an old-fashioned floor-length dress, and barely coming out of her room, just watching the town fromher window beneath the wide dark verandah. Eileen remembers the drip of the meat coolers,the disappointed softness of wilted vegetables, and the way her cup nearly scraped the bottomof the underground water tank when she climbed down for a drink. ‘It didn’t rain much then,’she told me. But not even she knew why Mrs Forbes was there: maybe for goods, maybe tocatch the train, maybe…?Later, as the young wife of Merton Lewis the mailman, Eileen remembers the tiny hot tinCopley post office where she worked, and the wilted and melted and boxed goods deliveredby the Marree Mixed train were sorted and packed for the next leg of their journey, east onthe rough dirt tracks. If the pub was the heart of the community, the post office was itstongue, where explanations were made if not known.Eileen and her daughter Margaret filled me in:A lot of the white men had a lot to do with Aboriginal women, but on the quiet sort ofthing, that nobody was supposed to know about. I mean there was a lot of children born toAboriginal women that were fathered by white men, but as to marry them, they didn’t dothat then. But a white woman and an Aboriginal man; that was totally different. Maybethey wouldn’t say a lot, as in saying, but they were sort of a bit shunned; wouldn’t havemixed with them properly… And she did really live their life so I suppose they got toaccept her. That was true, because she lived in the camp sort of thing, as they lived. Thatwas her intention I think when she came to Australia. Somebody said it was her intentionto marry an Aboriginal and live their life. 67Nobody else remembers Mrs Forbes leaving the Adnyamathanha camps ever, for anything.Copley, 192641