The Gum Tree

It’s Saturday in the Summer of 1992. I live in a tiny Christian town in regional New South Wales. My mum has left me at home while she goes out shopping for groceries. I go outside to play.

There’s a brown-skinned man up a gum tree. He’s in the neighbour’s yard, next door. No one knows what nationality he is because nobody ever asks. Some call him Aboriginal, others say he's Macedonian or Mexican or Maltese. One person says he’s the house boy who assists the woman with the 2 adopted children from South Korea.

He’s screaming and crying out in a foreign language and in between sobs he sucks on a cigarette and clutches an old black and white photograph in his hand. I look up at him.

“Who am I?”

He screams out in English this time, to no one in particular, but for everyone to hear.

Terrified of him seeing me, I duck and weave away from the tree. I find a spot where I can keep watching him from the shadows, near the roof by the garage outside. My heart is pounding so fast I can feel it in my throat. Suddenly what I think is a spitfire caterpillar hits my lip. I swipe it off. My lip stings and starts to blister up. It’s not a spitfire. It’s the man’s cigarette butt. It bounces off my lip and hits the ground next to me. The dry grass starts to smoke. I pick up the butt and snuff it out on the sole of my eight-year-old foot. I don't feel anything. I just worry. Worry that the cigarette butt will start a fire and that the neighbours will call the cops on the man up the tree.

The man screams out again.

I run inside the house, down the hall towards my parent’s bedroom. I go in and get mum’s tortoiseshell plastic sunglasses from off the wooden dresser. I put them on. I run back outside.

The man is still screaming and crying. He calls out again in his native tongue,

“Who am I?”

He's moaning like he’s in pain.

My little brother emerges from the house. He stands next to me and looks up at the man in the tree. My little brother calls out to the man,

“I know who you are.”

My head drops and my heart sinks as my little brother goes on.

“You’re our dad.”

Our disguise is blown. I push my brother over and leave him to cry as I walk out the side gate and head towards the middle of the road. I knew this was coming.

I stand in the middle of the road out the front of our house. There are no cars. Only children who come to question and threaten me with messages from their parents who avoid eye contact and conversation with me. They push them out of their front yards.

I give them the spiel that I’ll go on using throughout my life. Never realising the full weight of it until years later, when I leave home and start to understand my father’s heartbreak and confusion of being taken away from his family and brought into a new country and culture without them.

My father was taken away from his family when he was 9 years old, adopted and brought to Australia from Macau, which is near Hong Kong. He is of Portuguese-Chinese heritage. To this day he still keeps the old black-and-white photograph of his mum with him everywhere he goes. 🔥