Photos Found, Heritage Uncovered

Near the end, Gwen, one of those listening, asked the question the morning had been moving toward: that photograph of his father with his grandmother, whose face neither brother had ever seen, was that the moment he first understood? She put it twice, and Uncle Bill turned the room back to it until it was answered.

Colin’s working life began with a chance encounter. Leaving school at the end of grade ten, he went to the public service board in Sydney, where jobs were pinned along a wall on cards. He reached for fisheries inspector, because he loved boats and water, and forest ranger, because he loved the bush. Then one card caught his eye as he walked to the counter: scientific instrument maker. He loved science above every other subject. He put in for it, and got it, starting his apprenticeship on the first of April, 1969.

He has done it ever since. More than fifty years of microscopes, the precision optics of research and pathology, the instruments that let science see what the eye cannot. He worked for the University of Queensland, then for one of the largest private pathology groups in the world, and he became, in his own words, a microscope expert known well beyond this country.

But an underlying theme running through Colin’s craft is one that Uncle Bill elicited in the room. Over more than forty years, between his own hands and his employer company, Colin reckons he delivered some hundred and fifty microscopes to the developing world: Somalia, South Sudan, Vanuatu, New Guinea, and more. He keeps certificates on his wall -- not his qualifications, which sit in a cupboard -- but thanks from nurses and doctors and communities kept alive by the instruments.

One of them, from Vanuatu, marks the first cervical cancer reference hospital in the South Pacific; the only other is in Hawaii. When Uncle Bill pressed him on what these countries had in common, Colin did not hesitate. Every one of them had been colonised. Every person who benefits from those instruments has brown skin. The craft and the man had been pointing the same way all along.

There is an artefact at the centre of Colin’s story. Forty years ago, at a neighbour’s garage sale, he paid fifty dollars for a painting when everything else on the table cost five. He could not say why he had to have it, only that he did. It has been on his wall in every home since. On the back is the artist’s name, Thompson, one letter from his own, and a title: The Storytelling. Now that he knows who he is, he says, the artwork has a picture-light above it, and he stands and looks at it every night.

Uncle Bill named the thing plainly: an unconscious connection, there all along. He told of a young man who thought he was white, taken bush by an Elder to be shown bush medicines, who found he already knew the use of each plant, though he had never been in the bush in his life. “It’s inherent,” Colin said. “It’s our prehistoric brain telling us who we are.”

Some of the story has already passed to the next generation. His daughter Nadine, in the room that morning, works as a teacher’s aide with special needs children on the coast, alongside families under strain. His son Joel, a contemporary dancer who taught movement at an Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander dance centre and worked with Ballet Australia, is now with Mission Australia in Lismore and coordinates census teams across South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales, working with Elders so that First Nations people are counted and receive what follows from being counted.

The children Joel taught used to take him aside and ask the family question: What mob you be, mate?

In closing, Colin said he had come to the Yarning Circle four times before this one, his fifth. Meeting Uncle Bill, he said, was not an accident. He does not claim to know how such things work.

But the story is still unfolding: only days before, his brother had rung to tell him that ‘Paddys Flat’, a place at which Colin had camped a hundred times, was named for a Paddy Tighe, the same family line surfacing again where he least expected it. He is learning language now, and reading, and finding more of himself in each thing he turns over.

At the end, a member of the Yarning Circle gave Colin a small badge. Uncle Bill pinned it on and read it aloud: Strong, Resilient, and Indigenous. Colin, in turn, reclaimed a word often said with a sneer. There are people who call others do-gooders, he said, as though it were a fault. Everyone in the room that morning was a Do-Gooder, and he was proud to be counted among them.