Wild Cat Falling (15 page)

What I have termed the life story is an important genre of Aboriginal writing and I seek to continue this genre, though because of certain criticisms leveled as to the truth or otherwise of such writings I use Henry Miller's idea of fictional autobiography believing that the truth lies in the discourse, rather than in the content and even outright lies may be part of that truth which can be discussed in close or counter reading methodology.

I was born over seventy years ago on the night of the 21
^st
August 1938 and given the name Colin Thomas Johnson. Colin referred to the name of a play mate of my brother, Frank; Thomas my father's name and Johnson of course his surname. For a long time I thought that I had been born in the town of Narrogin, but later I learnt that I was born on a farm in the district of Cuballing Later when I sought to trace my family roots things began to get muddy. I was one of nine children and my dad Thomas Patrick Johnson was supposed to be the son of an African-American from the state of North Carolina. When I first heard this I was happy in that I might be related to the famous blues singer Robert Johnson and there might even be material for a great book. I rushed off to North Carolina to find my father's family. Alas no Johnson family existed in the official records. It was then that I remembered my mother saying dad was from the state of Victoria. My mother's name was Elizabeth Barron and the Barron family came from County Clare, Ireland and she was an Australian born and bred.

My eldest sister, Betty rightly claimed Mum was a direct descendant of one of the first British families to arrive on the shores of Western Australia in 1829. Edmund Barron was a sergeant in the army and his wife ran the first tavern in the new Swan River settlement of Perth. At that time many people made money, but not Edmund and his wife, I suggest that they drank the proceeds. He received a land grant from the government, but doesn't seem to have made much of a go of it as he became a police constable. The Barrons have been described as a well off pastoral family, but this is open to doubt, as they never seemed to achieve a respectable position in the colony. Their grant came about because the British government took over the land and doled it out without a thought for the original owners that continued to occupy it. Indeed they had nowhere else to go.

They shared the land with the white families and provided labor which was short in the colony. Women too were in short supply and liaisons began between white men and black women so that many of the first settler families fathered a counter black one. Even the Western Australian hero, John Forest, whose statue can be seen in Perth fathered children from Aboriginal women. Vic Forest is one of his Aboriginal descendents. There is also the fact that Aboriginal families gained surnames from living on the same land as white families. Indeed there was a tribe called Durack from the Durack family. It is from such events and facts that I feel that the Black Barron family is Aboriginal. Indeed, my mother never claimed that she belonged to the white Barron family at all. It was a matter of pride to Betty and surely it would have been the same for mum if it had been true. During her life she had nothing to do with the family at all which I find very strange indeed.

In my research into early Western Australian history and the Barron family I checked out my mother's family but did not follow it down to the present as I had not the time or did I meet any of them. Betty also it seems never got in touch with any of the Barron family. If Mum was indeed a Barron there must have been sisters that knew her or their children and Betty should have met and talked with them as a family member. There is a problem with mum's conception and birth which I will not go into here as it is painful to me. As for my paternal grandfather being from North Carolina. I found no birth records. He may have hidden his tracks well and as he couldn't write, replied ‘North Carolina' when asked where he was born, and they wrote it down in Sydney when he married there. In this only written record there is no name of a town or county. If there had been it would have been easier for me to check him out as in North Carolina births were recorded at county level; but then he was black and if a slave...

My mother died in Fremantle hospital on 15 September 1989 at the age of ninety-one when I was far from Perth and before that my father Thomas died in Narrogin on 7 June 1938, six weeks before my birth. Many years later I went to Narrogin cemetery to try and locate his grave. I learnt from the burial record book that even in death Aborigines were segregated from whites. I searched through the records which went back beyond 1938 but there was no record of a Thomas Johnson. It was as if dad had never existed and I might have shared the same fate except I have escaped the Aborigine dilemma by becoming a writer and a Buddhist and now an African American. It is my religion and my work that gives me a sense of identity and worth and well I love African American culture.

For the first nine years of my life I lived in the small town of Beverley with mum and my sister. No one would talk to us because we were dark and Aboriginal. When my father died, my brother and six sisters were taken away and put into institutions as they were too much for my mother to handle. I never got to know them and only met them a few times. Mum was left with a daughter, Shirley, and baby me in a dilapidated house. The first years of my life were spent with Shirley and I think we became the terrors of the town. Our escapades ended with both of us being taken from our mother and placed in orphanages in Perth. I was going on nine when I was taken away. Mum wasn't left alone because in 1940 she had had another child, Margaret who remained close to her all through her life and when I met her said that she had always thought that mum was aborigine.

I was placed in Clontarf Boys' Town, an orphanage run by the Christian Brothers. With them life was hard and tough, but they did give me an education up to the Junior Certificate as well as a thirst for religion. I think they would find it strange indeed that one of their boys has become a Buddhist and now says his prayers regularly to Lord Buddha just as when he was with them he had to say his prayers to Jesus. In Wild Cat Falling, my first novel, I wrote a bit about how my character coped with institutional life. Hard indeed were the blows, but hard indeed were our souls – perhaps?

In those days poor wayward children were made wards of the state until their eighteenth birthday. In my case until August 1956, but two years before the Catholic Welfare had gotten me a clerical job which I loathed and abandoned for a life on the streets. I became what was termed a Bodgie, a juvenile delinquent with a taste for juke boxes and rock'n'roll. Life would have been, as it was for many young Aborigines then and even now, a roller coaster ride to the bottom of the social pile, but I was fortunate in meeting Dame Mary Durack, a rich Australian writer who helped those she thought gifted enough to be helped. I got on well with her, and let the welfare group with which she was associated send me off to Melbourne.

In Perth in those days going east was the dream and I was able to fulfill the dream of many a young man. I was met in Melbourne by Stan Davies of the Aboriginal Advancement League and was found a job as a clerk in the Victorian Public Service at the Motor Registration Branch. Things might have fallen apart for me if I hadn't met the Bohemian poet, Adrian Rawlins who introduced me to the writings of the Beat Generation as well as the artists and writers of Melbourne. I was inspired by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and even more by the spontaneous prose of the novelist Jack Kerouac to sit down and write Wild Cat Falling which was published in 1965. This novel was well received by critics. In this first book I used my experiences of life and so what was Wild Cat Falling about but a young Aboriginal man facing the racist world of Western Australia and failing to cope with it. It was to be a large sprawling narrative filled with madness, sadness and incarceration, but when I sent it to Mary Durack she edited it down into the short text it is today.

I'm not one to leave a book unfinished and years later I returned to add two further parts, Wildcat Screaming and Doin Wildcat. These were published as separate novels but really the Wildcat books belong together and should be read as a consistent whole. They show what it was like to be Aboriginal in Western Australia and the changes that occurred over the years. Wild Cat Falling includes a foreword by Mary Durack (which has since become an afterword) that I treasure as it is the only piece of writing by someone who knew me as I then was so many years ago now. Many people have put it down as being racist, but then Western Australia was racist and I was glad to escape that awful scene for many years at least.

Melbourne was so good for me that when I came to write the second volume of my autobiography I titled it The Sweet Life. In that city I met writers and poets such as Leo Cash and Deidre Olsen and even got married after Wild Cat Falling was published in 1965. I loved Jennie Katinas, a refugee from Lithuania who really introduced me to European women with their style and fashion. In return I introduced her to the Beatnik life of on the road or if you will, the life of a nomad or pilgrim. With the advance royalties in my pocket and after reading The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac I took off for foreign parts.

A cheap passage on an Italian ship got us to Singapore and from there we made our way north through Malaysia to Thailand and Laos and then west to Bangladesh and finally Nepal where marihuana was legal. From Nepal to India and then to London where I was shipwrecked on such things as twilight and got up when it was night so that we often missed the day, but then night time was the time for living and so it wasn't all that bad. Indeed it was swinging London, but Jennie decided to go home and I followed her going through Calcutta and Bangkok before returning to Melbourne where the hip life of the Sixties was raging and rock'n'roll was king. I dug it but yearned for India. It had become my spiritual home. I needed to live there and get to know her.

Wild Cat Falling was good to me. Penguin Books bought the paperback rights and I received enough money to hit the road again and return to India with my wife in 1967. Jennie only spent a year with me in Calcutta and Darjeeling. In that hill station I met my guru Lama Kalu Rinpoche and studied with him as well as receiving initiations. I had met a beautiful holy man at last and he became my teacher forever and ever. Later we travelled right across India to Dharamsala where we met His Holiness the Dalai Lama. After this, Jennie decided that she missed her family and returned to Australia. I stayed on to eventually become a Buddhist Monk. I spent the next six years in India wandering as a Bhikshu from temple to temple and finally met up with an interesting meditation teacher with a sonorous chanting voice. He was a business man that had studied Vipassana meditation in Burma. Sri S.N. Goenka wandered India like a Buddha giving meditation camps and I followed him. Although a powerful teacher, he had remained a layman and I began thinking about whether it was better to return to lay life with my robe about my heart instead of my body. I returned to Melbourne in August 1974 just before my 36
^th
birthday to find that the hippie days were over. After so long in India I found myself in a strange rich world, but under the Whitlam government money was somewhat easy to come by.

Al Katinas, my ex-brother in law, then a film maker suggested that I apply for a grant to write a cinematic treatment of Wild Cat Falling. I decided that I needed to write it in Perth and the film board selected the documentary film maker, Guy Baskin to help me. In Perth digging life on the streets again in Northbridge, I began to write a novel Long Live Sandawara . During this period I met a Spanish American girl, Elena Castaneda and fell in love. She left for America and unable to live without her, I followed her to California and San Francisco where I did a pilgrimage to North Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookshop.. He had first published Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, Howl and copies were still for sale. I went to the sad Haight Ashbury where nothing remained of the hippies at all. California at the time was the home of counter therapies and I followed Elena into doing primal therapy. Strapped for cash most of the time I lived on the streets and eventually ended up in the Salvation Army workshop which cared for such homeless ones in exchange for their work.

After six or so months in California which felt like six years as life was so hectic, I finished off my novel, Long Live Sandawara, before returning to Melbourne where I met the Aboriginal activist, Harry Penrith (later Burnam Burnam) and through him became active in Aboriginal Affairs. He took me to Monash University where I got work at the Aboriginal Research Centre then headed by Colin Bourke. With him I did a short introduction into Aboriginal Life called Before the Invasion. Under his direction I also began writing Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World and went to Tasmania to research the book. A Tasmanian Aboriginal, a Mansell elder, took me over the island telling me stories about an old bloke called King Billy and also introduced me to mutton birding. Back in Melbourne Colin Bourke suggested that I do a university course. I accepted his advice and began a B.A. (Hons.) course at Melbourne University. I met Bruce McGuinness then head of the Victoria Aboriginal Health Service. He had set up Koorie College to teach a health course for Aboriginal students based on the bare foot doctors' approach to medicine as then practiced in China. He wanted me to teach an Aboriginal course on culture and I accepted.

The novel I had finished in California, Long Live Sandawara lay about until by chance I met Anne Godden of Hyland House who accepted it for publication. In those days I didn't worry overmuch about what happened to my writings. Most of the stuff I had written in India had been lost. There was a detective novel, St Francis and the Detective and another The Valley of the Blessed Virgins, a long novel set in India with a large cast of characters. Only a few articles in the Maha Bodhi Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society survive from this period.