Fragments

Christina Lee

Once in a while, my mother would bring out her treasures. They were wrapped in balls of cotton wool that had been pulled and folded over like dumplings, and were secured in padded silk pouches: a jade bracelet, a gold chain, a red and white peacock brooch studded with diamantes. She rarely wore them as they seemed too ostentatious for a mining town in the Pilbara, with its population of seven hundred people. And they were much too impractical for a housewife whose days were spent caring for two small children. As well, valuable items were likely to be lost in the communal bathrooms we shared with the rest of the residents who lived at our end of town.

My older sister, Josephine, and I carefully studied how our mother kept her jewellery. Often, we would show her, wrapped in layers of tissue paper, green and clear bottle fragments. ‘Diamonds!’, we would say. ‘Look, we found diamonds!’ Then, my mother would nod and examine our finds. Each sharp edge was worn down by shoes that had ground them into the coarse soil, which was a mixture of red dirt and purple iron ore dust that had drifted across from the open pit mine. The fragments themselves were perhaps remnants of someone’s night of drunken revelry, the relief after a sweltering afternoon shift in the mines, or shattered glass after a cyclone. Now, they were objects of wonder; delicate things cupped in the hands of my sister and I, then four and three years old.

As an adult I realised that these moments of contemplation were rare for my mother. And that the pieces she kept were tangible reminders of what she had left behind as a migrant several times over. She had moved to Christmas Island with my father after they married. They met in Singapore, but her native country was China, which she left at the age of seven after she was given to a couple whose own child had passed away. We do not speak much about the past in my family. The weight of personal histories, with stillborn siblings, separations from immediate family, and the upheaval of a Cultural Revolution, did not make for easy segues into conversations that were preoccupied by the events of the everyday. I waited for my mother to initiate any discussion on the subject of her childhood, and when she did, I treated my questions like I was handling those treasures when I was three.

Our family arrived in Australia in 1977 during the third wave of immigration, where we stayed at Graylands Migrants Hostel in Perth for a few months before relocating to a town that would become home. According to the Australian Heritage Database, ‘The Graylands site does not appear to have value to the wider community of Graylands, however it does have considerable value to the migrants who passed through there.’1 Situated in the affluent area of Perth that is now dubbed the Golden Triangle, the hostel was shut down in 1987, and the site redeveloped into a ‘prestigious’ residential village for wealthy retirees who I picture wearing golf caps and cashmere twinsets. Passing by St John’s Wood, Mount Claremont today, one would hardly know the place and people that were there before.

I scoured the internet for details on Graylands Migrants Hostel and the people who were temporarily housed there during the 1970s, but the information was scant and the photographs that surfaced featured mostly families of European descent. I magnified the few images with faces like mine in the hope of finding my family, only to be disappointed. And so random, seemingly inconsequential memories would come to fill a void. It became a ritual for my parents to recount the story of my delinquent one-and-a-half-year old self crawling under the tables in the dining hall during meal times, as if it was my own private play area. My mother would censure me, as if I was knowingly a nuisance whose actions reflected poorly on their child-rearing skills and our second-class-ness as new arrivals. The deep folds that appeared on her brow were accompanied by an audible ‘Aiya’ – the universal catch-cry of the exasperated Asian parent – with the second syllable drawn out for dramatic emphasis. Not one for talking openly of emotions and feelings, I recognised this as a poorly disguised act of affection. Each time the narrative was told, my father would laugh and my mother would perform her disapproval, which made him laugh harder until his eyes watered. And each time I would respond with amusement and surprise, as if hearing the story for the first time. Tell me…again

Our life proper in this foreign country began in a remote mining town called Goldsworthy, approximately 1,700 kilometres north of Perth. I suppose the assuredness of the place and our recollections of it were in part due to the many souvenirs we had of the settlement, particularly photographs that were arranged in albums with adhesive cardboard pages and flimsy film coverings that no-one really uses anymore. My parents proudly displayed the first home they owned in one of the albums: a caravan bought for two thousand dollars. A canvas awning extended the living space, creating a shaded area for play and visitations from neighbours. A fence provided some privacy, and there was a neat and tidy vegetable patch with spring onions and the like that could both withstand and thrive in the hot and dry conditions. In one picture, Josephine and I were photographed outside, near the entrance of our house on wheels. I was seated on a table, with a towel underneath to prevent the heat of a thirty-five-degree day burning my short, stumpy legs, and my sister stood beside me. Even though she was only one year older, she towered over.

As with so many of our earliest photographs, our mouths were stretched but not quite reaching that moment of bared teeth. It reminded me of those old-fashioned sepia-toned portraits, with the deliberate positioning of family members and air of respectability that had no place for toothy grins and cheeks inflated like balloons that make eyes disappear. It was a picture that could be sent to relatives far away of a new life, a good life. And yet, despite the degradation of the colours over time and the serious expressions on our faces, that image conjures a home and childhood mischief that I can see only in technicolour.

I vividly remember our weekly Doctor Who viewings in that little caravan. Perched on a cushioned bench opposite the television set, and wrapped tightly in a blanket with only my eyes visible as if it afforded some sort of protection, I was transfixed by the Doctor’s escapades with his human companion and mechanical canine. I am unable to separate my early years from the deep impression left by the man with the booming voice, eyes that looked like they had been set slightly too far apart, the wild hair, and a striped scarf that extended nearly all the way to his shoes. Josephine would peer out from behind me during the broadcasts, as if I were her human shield.

‘You were scared to death. But you both kept watching,’ my mother would repeat this narrative to us as we were growing up, and even as adults. Her tone was one of admiration of our bravery, but also of frustration at the stubbornness of her young daughters who would later have nightmares and require comforting by wearied parents.

Years later, when I was in a store in New York City, I bought a multicoloured, four-metre long scarf. It was not particularly practical as it required looping around my neck several times to prevent it from dragging on the floor, and it failed epically at the one thing it was supposed to do – provide warmth. But like the blanket, it offered a secret protection. However, this time it was against forgetting.

‘We were one of the first families in the caravan park to buy a colour television. Other people’s were black and white,’ my mother said. The purchase was a momentous occasion. ‘We saved our money. Someone drove us to RetraVision in South Hedland to buy it because we didn’t have a car then.’

By the time we retired that television set, it had served our family more than thirty years. The bulbous body would be swapped for a sleeker upgrade. The loud tack-tack of the channel dials and knobs would be replaced with the soundless keys on a remote control. If objects retained an impression and memory of every encounter, that box would have archived countless hours of rocket ships that told the time, cartoons full of intergalactic explorers and robots, game shows and variety programs that were watched as a family, Aussie Rules football matches and, later, serials where suburban neighbours became good friends.

Like the television set, the caravan, too, is gone.

My mother cannot recall if they sold it after we moved into a demountable house a few streets over just before my brother was born, or if it blew away along with half of the caravan park when a severe tropical cyclone swept through the town. Close to the coastline, the region was prone to such activity that could decimate whole settlements. Low pressure systems would form over the warm ocean waters that would carry the awesome power of the sea inland. The winds picked up the dirt and covered the landscape in a rust-coloured filter that darkened the sky. When a Category 5 cyclone passed through the town, we sheltered under the roof of a friend’s house that provided greater security, or in the geodesic dome that was our civic centre where other families also gathered; biding time until the buildings stopped shuddering and the windowpanes ceased chattering in their aluminium frames. In archival photographs following Cyclone Amy in 1980, where wind gusts exceeded

200 kilometres per hour, some residents were picking through what was left of their belongings and clearing away the debris after their homes were destroyed. Parts of their lives were now scattered across the Pilbara.

‘The Dome’ does not exist anymore. In fact, the entire township of Goldsworthy has vanished. It was erased from maps, and its ‘6723’ postcode was deleted from the telephone directory.

The town was spared from a natural disaster, but could not avoid the inevitability of time and progress. After the iron ore pit was emptied, BHP Billiton saw no reason to maintain the settlement that had been home to many for decades. Goldsworthy was closed down in 1992, and the following year it was demolished. All built structures were removed, the foundations ripped up, and the last of the people moved on. The environment was relandscaped, and the open pit mine was transformed into a cobalt blue lake. But even the most fastidious of decommissioning crews and rehabilitation programs could not clear away every thing.

Sociologist and geographer Kevin Hetherington wrote that ‘the absent is only ever moved along and is never fully gotten rid of.’2 Traces of the past persist in material remnants, and in rituals and repeated stories. I imagine construction material, furnishings and abandoned items entangled in spinifex clumps and slowly deteriorating in the red earth. It is an amalgam of things that originated locally and from far away; the latter carried in suitcases and on the hopes of those seeking new beginnings. As I try to piece together my mother’s past, I rely on the fragments of accounts and objects, some now long gone, that she reveals in quiet, small moments that form the stuff and granularity of a life. Glass shards, tufts of cotton wool, a broken jade bracelet, plastic parts from a kid’s toy, a snapped-off television antenna, an aged photograph, narratives retold, subtle gestures, the memory of a man in a blue telephone box. Pointless stuff to the unknowing, but totems and treasures to those who understand the loss.

1 Australian Government. Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment (nd). ‘Australian Heritage Database: Graylands Migrant Reception and Training Centre (former), Lantana Av, Mount Claremont, WA, Australia,’ Place ID 100635. Sourced at: http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/ahdb/search. pl?mode=place_detail;place_id=100635.

2 Kevin Hetherington (2004). ‘Secondhandedness: consumption, disposal, and absent presence,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1: 162.

Author’s note

I was inspired by Lyn Nixon’s photographic series Fragments (2019) that was part of the Alternative Archive exhibition (2021). By inviting locals to respond creatively to wood boards from the decommissioned Mandurah Bridge, Nixon’s artwork became an archive of place and a portrait of a community. I was drawn to the idea of everyday objects, particularly those that many would dismiss as detritus or insignificant, being powerful totems and memory triggers for people. My work explores the quiet intrigue around such objects, and how fragments – of things, of time – coalesce into a personal archive of family, community and home.

Christina Lee is a senior lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at Curtin University. Her areas of research include cultural memory, the migrant experience, spaces of spectrality and imagination, fandom and popular culture. Christina’s latest book is a co-edited anthology called Living with Precariousness (I.B. Tauris, 2023).