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didn’t have to get special permission every time she wanted to leave the mission to go to work in town. Without it, if they seen her on the streets at night, the police would pick her up and throw her in the slammer ’til mornin’. She’d walk the four miles from the mission each day, get treated like shit as a cleaner and get paid about half what the whites got doing the same yakka, then she’d walk home again at night carrying the groceries she’d bought.’
    There was silence all round, then Tiger Anderson said quietly, ‘Why didn’t she bugger off, I mean, go somewhere else?’
    â€˜Couldn’t,’ Gordon replied, ‘it was against the law to leave the mission.’
    I was finding all this hard to believe. People who couldn’t leave, go where they wanted like other Australians, was an entirely new idea to me. I wondered for a moment if Johnny was conning us, but he didn’t seem the sort of bloke who’d bullshit for a bit of gratuitous sympathy.
    â€˜Your grandad, where was he?’ Jason Matthews asked.
    â€˜Dead, when I was a little kid. He was a TPI – totally and permanently incapacitated, something he got in the First World War, my gran never said. He coughed a lot, probably his lungs were buggered from the gas. He fought with the Light Horse in the Middle East. I reckon he must have been a pretty good soldier – he was mentioned in dispatches twice.’ Johnny Gordon then gave a bitter little laugh. ‘On Anzac Day my granny would arrive at the ceremony wearing Grandad’s medals and for that one day a year she was treated like a whitey. “Mrs Gordon, would you like a cup of tea? Do have a scone.” I get real agro when I think about it, but my gran glowed with pride.’ He took a pull from his beer, and continued. ‘Next day they crossed the street to avoid her. To them she was a twenty-four-hour once-a-year white and then, at the stroke of midnight, she magically turned into a dirty black lubra again.’
    We were all silent – I wanted to ask if his mother died from the polio, but I mean there wasn’t a whole lot you could say. I reckoned we’d asked enough personal questions.
    Then Rick Stackman spoke up.
    â€˜That’s pretty crook, but it don’t explain why you joined up for World War II, Gordie.’
    Gordon grinned. ‘What do you reckon, mate? Anything to get away from bloody Condabri! You join the army and they gave you an exemption certificate.’
    â€˜Yeah, exemption to get your balls shot off!’ Rick Stackman joked.
    Johnny Gordon lifted his glass. ‘The army was a different world for a blackfella like me, for the first time in my life I was an equal. I remember writing home to Granny saying how we’d wear each other’s shirts, eat from the same plate, wash in the same water, shit in the same toilet – wonders would never bloody cease!’ Johnny laughed, recalling. ‘She wrote back and said that was very nice but if I ever used a word like that again she’d take a stick to me.’
    We all laughed. ‘Righto, Gordie, from now on we’re gunna treat you like a boong so you don’t get too bloody uppity with us white guys!’ Rick Stackman jested. He was the one among us who always had a wisecrack at the ready.
    Rick’s joke seemed to clear the air a bit. ‘Yeah, them were the bad old days, all right. Must have been a bit different though when you got back, you know, from the war?’ John Lazarou suggested a bit clumsily; Lazarou had been made a lance corporal only because everyone else had refused the job and he was too dumb to work out that as a lance corporal he’d end up being everyone’s dogsbody. Predictably enough he was known as ‘Lazy’, which wasn’t a bad sobriquet for a bloke who was by nature energy deficient among other things of a dilatory nature, but who had been stupid enough to be elected