Monday, 5 January 2026

The Pennants


       Archived 2016        


The General Store [side view, the centenary mural] 
This tweetyarn is an installment in my online series ...
 'An Outsider: Yarns from the fringe' ... 28 June - 5 July 2014, updated daily.
'The Pennants'
All rights reserved.















[-o-]


        I really enjoyed this yarn and I'll tell you why.

A year and a half ago, I was finding my feet on social media. 

I'd turned to Twitter and blogging because I just didn't fit in to any literary groups and I needed to find an outlet that suited my need for freedom of expression and creativity, and also was in urgent need of a means of promoting my work.

I'm the type of person who needs to work things out for my self - and against all advice I decided to start writing online, unedited (though I've always tried to keep it neat and tidy) and build a body of work that I could point to and say that is all mine.

Anyone who has experienced a major disappointment and had to start again, would know how that feels. 

My influences have always been the distinctive sound of the bush from the only place I know - my home. I purposely didn't look to see what other people were doing - online and on the page.

If you are an artist - the reason for being is for your own work, and copying another's creativity is as bad as taking credit for another artist's work. It's not just unethical - it's actually skin crawlingly awful if you value art, or specifically writing which in any medium, is what I do.

Early on I realised the number one rule of social media is everyone has their own style. It's near impossible to copy someone else convincingly because what works best is  revealing the unique personality behind the social media presence.

Much the same as any writing is all about the writer's voice.

If I had any advice for anyone - and I am often asked, 'but how do you make a story out of thin air' - I'd say concentrate on engaging people and work on your technical skills (and get yourself a computer that isn't prone to the black screen of death, not blue, black....) and just like any writing, I think you will develop a style of your own. 

The first time I was approached to have a tweet yarn published - Maisie May - was a surprise and an intriguing development. It had never occurred to me that anyone would want to do that, especially as by their very nature, tweetyarns are already published to a world wide audience.  

I'm keen to continue experimenting with multi media platforms  in the same way that got me here - alone and independent - but I am very excited to come across an opportunity to produce content for a work that will be the first of it's kind. (December 2014)

None of my body of work - the social media, the blogging, the writing in any form - would have been possible if I'd stuck with existing networks, and their more traditional routes for emerging writers. 

Tonight's tweetyarn emerged after a day of tweet chats around the pastoral industry - starting with interaction with the day's ABC Radio National show Bush Telegraph and continuing over the following ten hours, with tweeps sharing family histories, personal anecdotes and in one case - and what I hope to continue, a spontaneous collaboration. 

This was always my intention of what a tweetyarn is - it's a continuation of a conversation, a work, a story, across platforms. 

The Aboriginal station workers, the domestics, the shearers and the drovers all made an incalculable and significant contribution to Australia's prosperity. They were not fully compensated for their labour, and they were working on lands that they had been dispossessed of, and then up till the middle of the last century, in many cases, forced to work and, among other controls, denied freedom to leave.


It is a deep sadness for me personally and for my family, but these days, I take some comfort in knowing that this history and their legacy is slowly becoming more common knowledge. Righting the wrong that is Stolen Wages will continue to be a challenge and a necessity if fairness and mateship is truly valued.

But for now - I hope you enjoy my tweetyarn and please feel free to find me on Twitter.

And thanks to Rhianna Patrick - talented and clever host of Awaye! for the opportunity for me to promote my work.  

There are new writers, new genres, new platforms, and an opportunity for artists like me - who are only artists for the freedom it brings - to follow our ambitions. 

And like all my commissions to date - please feel free to contact me directly via my About page or on Twitter.
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Joey




JOEY
by Siv Parker
Archived 2016

It was the talk of the town when they split up and he took up with me. I didn’t care. He didn’t care. So everyone had something to talk about. A good six months later they were still talking.

Some of the young ones had followed me down the street – friends of hers – and I just gave them my best fawk off face and went about my business. So they’d sit in the park and watch the house. Don’t know what they thought they’d see from there. Sometimes they’d get hold of a car and they’d come stickybeaking as I pottered around. Driving real slow to conserve fuel.

Turns out I knew him before any of them. Ask an older person and they’d tell you that. ‘Oh, no, those two…that’s been going on for a long time.’ Before time. And after time. The slow rolling sticky beaking female tagalongs would have needed a hell of lot more miles under them to understand that.

It was the kind of town where there weren’t many cares. We slept with the doors unlocked. I don’t think there was a lock on the front door. Everyone could see the front door so no need to secure the entrance even if you’d left town to go six weeks cotton chipping.

My aunt said for a long time that she was going to go chippin’ around Wee Waa and save all her money and buy a new dress and go to the rugby final in Sydney. So one year she jumped in the motor car that was leaving the black soil, to work the season and that was big news.


She lasted till just after lunch, that first day out at the fields, then retired her hoe and spent the rest of the day laying on the back seat of that motor car listening to Kenny Rogers and fanning flies with one of her little lace hankies.

‘Fawk the grand final, I’ll watch the karnt on tv’.

We all loved that story. Her sisters were still in the field and she was calling out for any cold drink. Every time my Aunty Flo tells the story she’ll tell you that bit about five times. But she wont talk about her sister’s funeral. There’s a few she wont mention, just clamps her lips together, and then sings your name like a sigh.

Bit by bit a few of the mob decided to stay on in Wee Waa. It was a bigger place, and you might of met someone you were sweet on, or you liked the look of the place with it’s big river and web of streets so extensive a person could go for weeks and not see anyone they knew, if that was what you wanted.

And then people got a better education and got jobs and cars and houses and the pilgrimage to Wee Waa cotton fields stopped because people were going to city universities and Canberra and New York.

But one thing that didn’t change in our little bush town was most of us were still sleeping on mattresses on the lounge room floor.

This yarn now, there was me and him, and about four kids. One of the kids, don’t ask me why, but I’d wake up and his hands would be in my hair. Sound asleep but he’d somehow get at least one caught. Even if I tucked my hair under the pillow, he’d find it.

That’s if I’d had a pillow. This time I didn’t. We had a house full because a lot of mob had driven over for Aunty Jay's funeral. You have families the size we all did out that way, all the funerals are big. Everyone was coming back to town, but no one was expecting any trouble. It was a funeral, didn’t matter how broken up people might have been about being forced into a single life.

He’d come to town with no blankets. Some times you’ve just got to travel that way. Like if you split up and have got to leave town in a hurry. But that blackfella, that was how he lived.

Nurragah.

I’ll call him Joey because I knew him when he was a little thing, long bony legs for a baby and real big eyes, he just shot up in his late teens and then spent ten years being told every day you’d see him, ‘gee Joey, you growing overnight?’

Happy go lucky, was Joey. And make you laugh, he didn’t have a care in the world. Both his parents died young and he was their only one, so Joey was everyone’s boy. He’d drifted to Wee Waa for work and that’s where’d he’d been for a while before we saw him again.

We were on the front verandah watching the motorcars driving into town in the rain. So many cars some of them even had to move from the central line so two could pass each other on the narrow tar. That’s how the little green car full up like a roo pouch with long arms poking out of every window, came to slide clean off and end up in the watery ditch.

It gunned the engine a few times but it wasn’t leaving that ditch, so all the men came to take a corner and Joey took the place no one wants in the mud, and got on the back bumper. We’re all watching them push until one of the strongest who’d been hanging back out of the mud, announced ‘fawk this, that back axle aint moving’, with a laugh and strode across the road straight into the ditch, got two hands under and lifted the little green car clear up and back out onto the road.

That’s how he got his name. Little kids now will ask you, ‘how did Uncle Back get his name’, and be told it’s short for Back Axle.

Joey was covered in mud so he wasn’t getting back in the little green car so that’s how he came to be camping with us. He was distantly related and close to everyone’s heart. Just walked in through the little gate and started hosing himself down in the rain.

Like you’d expect she would to a motherless child, Aunty Midge called out in her sorry business voice as she pulled up across the road and walked the planks with a chicken curry across the muddy ditch.

‘You not wet enough, Joey?’

Joey just grinned that grin he had, to tell you he had a reason and maybe he looked foolish, but what did it matter? Funeral or not, his place was gentle in this world.

And after a long day of watching the street and yarning and cooking up all the meat in the house, my cousin and his young wife and babies were already gone to bed in the big bedroom and the rest of the kids were half asleep from jumping all over Joey, and it was time to turn the lights out.

Joey was a three seater man laying on a busted two seater lounge with my pillow and I told him ‘hey take that blanket there and you can have the bed down the hall there’.

‘You sure Aunt’ said the child in a man.

‘You’re right, Joey’, watching as he disappeared down the dark way with my pillow under his arm and a thin blanket over his shoulder. We all knew Joey did not like the dark so I kept talking to him while he sorted himself out…

‘You right now…’

‘Yeah..’, and I just knew without seeing him he was checking there was nothing in the wardrobe or under the bed. There was a tiny dresser in the room, an attempt at a bedroom setting, and I bet he opened both drawers too.

‘You warm there Joey…’ softly over the sleeping children.

‘Yes Aunty, snug as a bug’, a man's voice in the dark.

We were all fast asleep when the front door smashed open. It was so loud I would have been on my feet before I was even fully awake if I hadn’t had two child sized hands entangled in my hair.

Seven o’clock in the morning of a funeral and she’d decided this was the time she wanted to come round for a bit of a yarn about the break up. It had been some months since she lived there, but she still knew the way.

I’m trying to gently uncoil my hair that was wrapped around the wrist of someone’s sleeping child, and there’s two blokes at full alert towering above me, and one of them was Joey. He could see in an instant, like he saw everything, he was the third wheel and backed down the hallway as my mane pulled free and I decided to shift paddock, and leave the kids sleeping inside.

Outside the scene filled in, in front of my eyes. Standing in the driveway was the slow rolling sticky beaking tag alongs pulled up with the front door standing open, and they were full on staring this time.

Anyone in ear shot was full on staring, from next door, across the road and even a couple of houses down, having heard the front door nearly bounce of it’s industrial strength community housing hinges as it slammed and echoed, off the fibro wall in our barely furnished over crowded love nest.

The tagalongs sunk down in their lambswool seat covers, eyes on stalks barely hovering above the car doors as collectively they tried to scrape up some of their business. It had scattered with their sense that would have reminded them it was the day of a funeral.

The exit scene was the car leaving in shame with contents restored, with the backseat urging fawkmedead Vanessa to go a little fawking faster.

When Uncle Gee came in off the station for the service some hours later, the air was still crackling. He’d always start any conversation with ‘what’s going on’ but that time he meant why is everyone distracted by something that obviously isn’t about the funeral, and I can’t help but notice that there is a big fawking hole in the wall behind the front door.

Joey had the final no fuss word….’Aunty Claudie came home’.

When he died a few years later, remembering that was the only thing that could bring a smile. For a young man he has a big grave. They needed to put that much dirt on him to have somewhere to put all the flowers. Not many went to the trial to see the group of men who caught him alone in the dark, walk free on a technicality, but it was a massive funeral, the proper way.

Alone…he would have had that big smile…he would have tried to talk his way out of it….he would have known…he would have seen….why was he on his own?….we left him alone. He always had our back. Shame.


 Thanks for reading.

 @SivParker
OnDusk

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Sunday, 4 January 2026

Dark Times

Dark Times

by Siv Parker


 You can not be involved in any grass roots campaign without knowing about child sexual assault in Aboriginal communities.  You can’t be a feminist without knowing about physical, mental and financial abuse of Aboriginal women. 

You can’t call yourself an Aboriginal leader if you haven’t faced these issues head on.

You can’t be a suicide prevention advocate without considering the link between abuse and violence to the high rates of suicide in adults of all ages and children under ten years old.

You can’t be a black politician without being aware what runs deep in your community.  

You can’t be a perpetrator without people in your own community – your own family – being aware of your behaviour.

Despite the recently reported findings in Queensland,  it is still not bad enough for a commitment to act outside of comfort zones, to agree to extend ourselves to caring for the most vulnerable in our community.  What is comfortable about this current situation? 

What is acceptable about violent sexual assault, and places where child prostitution is a common practice?  Where some people will tell you, ‘the kids are bad’.



- Extract -

A place rotten to the core, I lived for a while in an outback town not much different from hundreds of others with large Indigenous populations. The kind of place where child sexual assault happens inside and outside the home.  I hadn't been aware just how much it happened locally, when I took up responsibility for running a youth centre.

On a warm night, stars out and perfect for a stroll, I walked down to the bowling club to get a packet of cigarettes.  Three or four boys were sitting on the kerb between the parked cars.  Young boys, all under ten years old.  Very small boys, with bare knees and their feet in the gutter.

I said hello and didn’t think much of it until I scanned the patrons inside the club.  There were no parents or even family to any of the small boys outside. 

I’d have been surprised to see Aboriginal people drinking in the club.  It would take a job to have the option of having a few quiet ones mid week at the club.  White* men sat on the stools, fingering their keno stubs and watching the sports playing on the big screen.

I was more to the point when I walked back down the ramp, ‘What are you boys doing here?’

‘Nothing, just…sitting.’ 

Something about their aimless sitting late at night outside a bowling club caught my attention, especially when one said, ‘seeya’ and waved me away.  A little man directing me to leave. 

I headed back across the well-lit public park, past the gazebo and disappeared from view before turning back and making use of a stump to sit in the darkness and watch.

It didn’t take long.  One by one, the club emptied of men each carrying a large bottle of soft drink and a packet of chips.

The boys, single or in pairs, climbed into cars and I could see their silhouettes taking big swigs of soft drink as the cars drove away.  I knew most of the boys and where they lived.  Where were they going just shy of midnight with middle aged white men towards the other end of town?

This kind of child prostitution has been in practice for a very long time. Older children had other after-dark haunts, all as well known as the town bowling club sitting in its meticulously pruned gardens.  Conversations with the police ACLO and the police themselves confirmed just how much they already knew.

The dark stretch opposite the 24 hour roadhouse was a convenient pick up point.  The town council had decided the area needed to be rezoned.  Previously residential with houses that lined both sides of the thoroughfare, the kids had been known to throw stones at passing traffic before slipping away, impossible to identify, find and punish.  Now the bleak stretch with its smashed street lights and overgrown trees turning shadows into pitch night was used by truck drivers to pull over for a sleep spot, and for passing vehicles to cruise. 

Makes me wonder why the kids were throwing stones in the first place.

The convenience of having a car to collect kids who most likely came from a home that had never and probably would never have a family car, for the purposes of prostitution was sickening.  
Two old men, real salt of the earth types were memorable.  
I was laughing and joking with a group of teens on the pavement one day, and in front of my eyes, these old men, brothers, pulled up in their small ute and beckoned one of the girls over.  She snarled back at them, the driver laughed, before holding a twenty dollar note out the window. The other kids started to snigger and ‘T’, a 15 year old started to swear at the ute and its grinning elderly occupants.  They gave a cheery wave and promised to ‘catch up with you later’.

Some days later, so the story went, he announced to a public bar during the Friday night rugby that he [paraphrased] had just had sex with a under age girl.  The movement of throwing his chest out caused his shorts to slip down and they landed around his ankles.  An elderly man naked from the waist down, in a stained t-shirt laughed heartily and dragged his filthy shorts back up his pale veiny legs.  Friday night at the pub.  I have no idea if any observers reported this announcement.

And then there is the abuse within the community.   I could guess at what was hidden from me, and then there was one case that was right in my face.

He was known as an Aboriginal community leader. I have no doubt that the media would continue to call him a leader without hesitation. He was prominent on every local board and committee and had been for years. 

I didn’t realize the extent of his interactions with young girls until one of my teenagers turned up to the youth centre with black eyes, swollen face and a torn and crusted lip.

The story gives a glimpse of the extent of the problem.  She (17) and her sister (15) had been collected from the street by the Leader (50s) and taken down a bush track on the outskirts of town. As they explained to me, they like to go in pairs, as a form of protection. I think it’s a rule but this is only a guess, that local Aboriginal men would not negotiate sex for payment with their own relatives.  All three were well known to each other.

Shortly after they arrived, another car pulled up beside them.  It was a small town. If a person had it in mind, they could find and follow people fairly easily.

And the driver of the second car, ‘BM’, wife of Leader, had intended to follow them.  She proceeded to beat both girls, the one inside her husband’s car with far more severity than the sister who had been sitting outside on a mound of dirt.

BM then warned them to ‘leave my man alone’, before both cars departed, leaving the two girls, one bleeding heavily from her nose, to walk back to town.

And this is where the first responsible adult stepped in.  The girls went home to wash their faces and change their ripped clothes, and were confronted by their mother.  She then matched both girls down to the local police to report BM for beating up her daughters.  

I have no idea what she thought of the prostitution.  

I met her once - she told me how angry she was that BM had flogged her daughters.  She spoke very softly and I think it would have taken a mighty effort to get as involved as she did. 

The matter involved three large families, with two well known adults both facing significant charges. They both drove to the courthouse.  BM would patrol the court house halls and stand outside on the pavement with no detectable shame. The girls’ family didn’t have a car, they had no adult to accompany them.  Their mother just couldn’t do it.

Proceedings were protracted and frequently delayed.  Long days spent waiting on a narrow bench, on the wide front steps, or in the park across the road while BM glowered at us.  Only to be told it would be another week, or a month or sometime in the future, they’d be in contact.  In the meantime, all of these people continued to live in the same small community. 

And then the yarns around town started to get bigger. 

Melbourne Cup, and there is a big crowd at the pub.

I walked in and happened to be closely followed by the loving couple.  Like any old country pub, the women drifted into the salon while the men were thick in the public bar. 
BM was dressed to the nines and her voice was as loud as usual. She told anyone who turned an ear – and we all did – that she had made a deal with the husband. He had to pay her $5000 or she would tell the police that she had caught him in the act with an underage girl.  The money and threat was a means of keeping him on a short leash. And if he was convicted, maybe even went to jail, it was a nest egg. 

I was finding her saloon oration hard to follow.  It turned out I wasn’t able to watch the Melbourne Cup - I was forced to leave due to a sudden attack of profound disgust.   

And this is where people ask – were the accusers threatened?  Not exactly.  Not directly.  But the general feeling that the girls were somehow at fault followed them.  They were a bit of a nuisance, bunging it on a bit, considering so many of the girls were getting around town doing the same thing.

I would stare down anyone who was tempted to ask me why I was bothering.  I found it best to be blunt and straight to the point when a person would ask, ‘how do you stand the kids?’  My response: it's the adults that are the problem.

Some eight months later I transferred out of that town as I’d long planned, and have no idea of the outcome.  I can guess.  The man involved continued in his positions.  If it was ever discussed, was the decision made that he could continue in his employment - he didn’t actually work with kids, after all?  And when he was part of this working group, and that regional committee for justice reinvestment, and cultural heritage, and community safety either people had short memories or turned a blind eye?

I have no idea how he explained himself or if his wife continued to re-enact her double fisted lunge to drag an undersized girl from the backseat of a car, as some kind of party trick.

I can still picture them.  His expression, bemused mostly, and her defiance with it’s implied warning.  I wondered about the age difference between BM and Leader.  He was much older.  I did the sums.  Was BM under-aged when she struck up a relationship with a much older man?  Did she beat up a girl she regarded as her competition?
~~~

Alcohol and drugs are enablers, it numbs and disguises the depravity.  It turns it into a party of the twisted kind.

If a child safety and family support task force came to town and said, 'ok, we need some input, some ideas' – who would they talk to?   What process identifies those who are able and willing to make a difference?

What is the solution?  These towns are a world unto their own, disconnected with what happens 100kms down the road, let alone further away in the cities and the national capital.  They are not following Indigenous politics unless it impacts on their payments and access to alcohol and drugs.  

There are not enough houses.  Overcrowding and homelessness are both grave problems.  People circulate between homes.  Imagine if you had a revolving door of visitors, eating your food, turning the beds into communal sleeping pods.  And where they have mental health issues, bringing that into the home, self medicating or paying their board by ‘shouting a party’. 

Picture Christmas, your house full of family and other visitors.  Imagine if that lasted 365 days.

In rural and remote areas especially, there are no jobs. Mentoring, training, every other word that translates into support pays the trainers and mentors for their career, while the black people they ‘support’ remain in poverty for their life. 

Young people want dance parties at the youth centre, free entry to the town pool, BBQs down at the oval, trips to far places, and visit the cities to see how other people live with all their choices and wonder how they don’t have the same. 
These are things that can allow kids to be kids, while they live in poverty with no hope of local jobs and watch the old white men and their children and grand children take all the jobs, live in the big houses in the well lit part of town and drive past them in their cars. 

To call the town’s establishment figures out on their suspected racism or to demand they promote ‘empowerment of Aboriginal men’ or teach ‘self respect’ to children is the limpest of responses.  

Efforts to protect and nurture children continue to stall while people are unable to admit ‘we have a problem.  We have had this problem for a very long time.’ 
If Aboriginal people are unable to confront what is broken inside, they have no capacity to negotiate with governments on any level.

There have been exposés of two Prime Ministers in the past three years, both suspected of failing to manage their power in a responsible way.  There has been months of hearings for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse telling us that child abuse is everywhere.  

And the reason is not racism, poverty or colonisation in all cases.  How can child removal be the blanket solution when we continue to hear that children are not safe and better off in these placements?


The fear that exposing violent sexual abuse of children and young people dehumanizes Aboriginal men, and risks Intervention-style bureaucratic top-down disasters is misplaced.   Sacrificing children and decimating families dehumanises us all.

@SivParker

 OnDusk
Note
* 'white' denotes non-Indigenous people. In larger townships and cities, the divide between white and black is not so clear cut.  In a country town, labels are for life and come loaded with generations of baggage.  Based on figures from Census and other data collection, over 70% of Indigenous people have non-Indigenous partners, so applying 'white' becomes more problematic every year, and is used for want of a more accurate word.

This includes an extract from a longer piece of work, soon to be published that provides additional background to the location, and further account of my experience supporting families, and working with other agencies on community safety projects. 

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