ABOUT LENI

Leni is a Wotjobaluk woman who was born in 1968, adopted into a
non-indigenous farming family and raised in the Wimmera.
She was reunited with her natural mother and extended family at the age of 17.

Leni has worked in nursing, retail, secretarial and hospitality roles.
She has expressed her creativity through writing for many years and
has recently taken up painting with a passion over the past twelve months.

Leni believes her art is inspired strongly by her cross cultural heritage and
her constant journey of learning incorporating both her past and present.

Leni lives in Ballarat with her husband and two children.

--leni

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I am not an artist.
I am not a boxer, a spy or a tattooist.
Being any of the above would be astounding, my short list of best career gets,
though they are not who I have been or now am.

A dishwasher, a uni student, a dole bludger, a secretary, a factory worker, a mistress, a nurse,
an orphan, a checkout chick, a mother. These are definitions of me.

Nothing, but nothing, has come to me so easily without effort or expectation, guilt or goading,
desperation or desire, fear or fantasy, dreaming or deviation as does what I do now.

For this reason alone I will take whatever it is that gifts me this moment for it is not of me but
through me and who knows when it will take itself back.
Like me, if it sits in your soul, you should get hold of it while you can.

-- leni

WHITE BREAD
-- leni

We threw boomerangs today

Really

Yeah

What was it like

It was like throwing boomerangs is

Well how did you feel about it

What do you mean how did I feel about it, it was throwing boomerangs

Who did you do it with

Some Abo culture group or something

Really – did you like them

What!

Did you think it was good

It was OK – it got us out of maths

What else did you do with them

Listened to a few songs and watched a few dances

Really – was that interesting

So-so – whats the big deal

What do you mean

With all the questions, why does it matter so much

Well your mother was an Aboriginal …

It’s a small world.

It’s just shrunk. I’ve just shrunk. Life has just compacted into nothing more than this precise minute.
Every other hour, day, week or year has become extinct by proportion to now.
I can’t remember what I was thinking of two minutes before and I sure as hell have no rational
thought I can comprehend after. What happens to your world when it stops being what it
always was and becomes something you could never have imagined.

She’s lying.

She’s joking.

She’s possessed.

My mother is so God loving, so strict, so disciplined, so straight that I realise this could be
nothing more than it is – nothing other than truth. I want to dispute her, slap her, hear her
piss herself laughing. I want to wind back this moment, this day, that sentence and then I don’t.
I’m not sure what would be better or worse. There isn’t a certainty in my heart
about anything anymore – that’s all I know for sure.

How is throwing boomerangs? How is it really? Is it the same for me as you?
Is it the same for everyone who has never balanced their weight or held their grip?

Possibly.
Probably.
Most definitely. After all it’s a piece of bent wood that could come back or most likely won’t.
I’m sure it doesn’t light up and sound out bells in order to recognise native title via palm print or grip type.

Its not like I saw sparks of genius fly from my wrist. Not even the only black bloke in the school stood out from the crowd.

Is it a genetic conditional ability? Should I have felt the natural urge flow through my body?
Should I have spun an incredible arc without effort and my watch soul soar in its wake?
Should the songs and dances have meant more? Should they have entered into me cracking open my deceiving heart?
Were they pumping to the same beat? When the didge started to hum its ancient tune the vibrations certainly triggered my senses.
How could it not. Its sorrowful moan echoed, unconstructed and hypnotic, swelling all around.
Soaking us. I loved its calm strength. I loved being anywhere other than in maths.

Had I found myself experiencing the entire event in a totally different way to the others?
My others, my cultural group. I can’t recall. Then. Now. I don’t remember.

We probably didn’t even have any ongoing discussion following the event, structured or otherwise.
A quick hit on our senses from another world and then the lid slammed shut again.
How did it not leave my Pandora’s box even ajar? If I’d been able to seize the moment and join the dancing
it would have flung the lid off its hinges. Everyone would have looked on as if mesmerised by amazing
untapped ability and I would have been discovered – outed. It would have been as if a shroud of shadow had
fallen over me and clung to me like a second skin and they would have instantly recognised me for what I am.
And so would have I. Instead there was nothing.

I don’t know. I could never know the response I was looking for. I couldn’t have. It wasn’t what I was.
I was elsewhere. An onlooker not a star performer. Someone over here watching something over there.
So distant from the reality of the culture as to only see it blurred. I hadn’t recognised anything and for that
I was disappointed. I felt cheated. I felt my pulse pounding hard in my temples. Taunt with angry, impotent,
purposeless rage. But I’m fourteen and I don’t recognise any of this clearly.

I was deathly quiet. So unnatural for loud, offensive, independent me. Yet at that moment even my
breathing seemed assisted. The familiar kitchen in which my mother worked daily swathed in stainless steel
swamped around me, a vast sterile stage. I stood in the middle of it unsure of my next line or my audience’s response.
I was totally lost.

Then laughter, lots of it. Finger pointing, followed by more laughter. But not from Mum.
She stands firm and constant, not even a slight smirk on her face. She seems a little stunned herself
as though she had no idea that she was going to let such a mongrel cat out of the obviously
extremely deep and until now well secured bag.

I couldn’t breathe. A what? I couldn’t have been more floored if Mum had said my biological mother had been a cow.
It was unthinkable. Idiotic. Impossible. I was blonde. I was white. I was pink cheeked. I was plump.
I was me. I was everything other than an Aboriginal.

That was my sister. Her. The one laughing. She was the one. She was the black fella.
Ebony haired, brown skinned, super thin, long toed, good runner…. Mum was terribly confused.

My sister laughed on. It echoed around in my head, her and my mother’s words. Sweet revenge.
For years, years, in the thick of bitchy sister rivalry I resorted to nigger, to coon, to black bitch.
It was my trump card. It was my club to thump her with, hard and often. It was gone. I think I left.
I think I walked to the house. Home. To my room. I stared hard in the mirror waiting to see my
real self emerge. I still do on occasion. Its not always as plain as the nose on my face unfortunately.

I wonder if I cried at this point. I don’t think so. I was mostly relieved. It was the difference.
It was what I had needed. It was the reason for all the things I had never been able to label before.
An awkward but necessary partnership between comfort and crisis.

The initial impact had such a vital timeless clarity that everything else around it was insipid in relation.
Especially the time frames and actions which surrounded my next few days. I did not think of much else.
And if I did it would rocket back to me in a heartbeat as though it were a terminal illness I’d forgotten but
which had taken control of my being. Filling my head with a dreadful hysteria and curious wonder.
I began to imagine what I would do with this information. I knew it was no longer mine. Women knew.
Mum, my sister, me. It was not ever going to remain a conversation unheard or unspoken.
Such is the animal. I had to plan my attack. Plan my defence. Plan my revelation.

Fancy imagining that all the world would even care.

But then, as do all seemingly insurmountable lifetime issues, it slowly sunk deep below the grind of getting over it,
growing up and going on. Yet I was marked in the most unobvious way … I felt pocked, unmercifully and
deeply, into an interesting yet extremely unimpressive creation both physically and mentally.
Things changed for me then, as they rarely do, without choice or exertion. I was both immediately
free and included though I was conscious of neither. Everything took on a slightly sharper sensation
as though I’d been cracked out of an all body cast and felt the air on my skin as a newborn, wet and shiny.
Jokes were never the same again.