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by Bruce Pascoe


  The plants Aboriginal people domesticated are, of course, Australian, and have prospered within the confines of Australia’s soil moisture levels. All are adapted to Australia’s environment, so require little or no water, no fertiliser or pesticides. In a drying climate – and at a time when many people accept that excessive chemical use is harming the planet, and constant ploughing is releasing too much carbon into the atmosphere – these plants could be good for the environment and excellent for the economy. Surely we have to let go of the colonial propaganda about Aboriginal land practice in order to contribute more responsibly to environmental protection and our own financial welfare? Perhaps we might even admit a truer reflection of the nation’s history into our schools and the national conversation.

  I spent the last few days before 26 January working with Aboriginal people to celebrate our culture and then, while travelling home, listening to Australians whinge about the Change the Date campaign. My skin is so light I often hear what mainstream Australia really thinks – and it is a scary revelation. There is incomprehension, bitterness, vindictiveness, but, most importantly of all, an impoverished understanding of the national history.

  This encapsulation of ignorance is preventing our full embrace of the land. If we could understand the brilliance of the Australian agricultural mind we would meet our carbon-emission reduction targets easily. The domesticated Aboriginal grains and tubers are mostly perennial, so their cultivation requires far fewer tractor hours, thus saving the soil from compaction and the air from pollution.

  The ability of these plants to flourish in our climate and soils will save us billions of dollars. The yields will not always be as great as the plants we have introduced from overseas, but can be grown over greater areas and at far less expense. Why aren’t we using them? Because they question our assumption of scientific superiority and the very occupation of the continent? Well, as John Howard said, get over it.

  The world is in too precarious a state to allow us to hide our heads in the sand any longer. For the sake of the country and our economy, we have to embrace the nature of the continent and the knowledge of our people, gathered over aeons as old as speech. Be proud rather than angry: this is the real nature of the land we all say we love.

  CHOOSING

  Her shape had become indeterminate. When shopping, the cost of extra material had been offset by economies of tailoring. She was not a large woman – in fact she was quite short – but all curves had merged. It was the brightness and intelligence of the face that captured your attention after the first moment of observation. True, she’d dyed her hair the colour of a black enamel kettle, and part of the scalp could be seen through the thinning strands, but you knew she wasn’t going to give up on coiffure easily.

  Her board advertised three different kinds of gluten-free toasted sandwiches for those who visited the third-last café in Tasmania. The railway that ran through five acres of rainforest was her idea. She could make sandwiches and coffee and sell tickets for the tourist train at the same time. An unusual woman. Person. Palmer imagined her politely haranguing council safety inspectors with the tourism prospects of a train that utilised the old timber-mill tramway. She probably did the canteen for the footy team over winter. Led the Landcare mob replanting rainforest trees. Hosted all the historical society meetings. Hard person to deter with bluster and by-laws.

  She didn’t get too many calling for gluten-free, but never mind, you just picked the slices out of the freezer. He could tell the scrubwren of her wanted to meet him, bright eye to bright eye. Inquiring. In a sentence about rainfall and the coming tourist season she found out why he preferred gluten-free and then explained about the severity of her grandniece’s gluten intolerance. And what a smart child she was. And how Scrubwren had introduced her to Dickens and Tolstoy and Melville and Baynton.

  ‘Twelve?’ he asked, a little alarmed.

  ‘Oh yes, but she devours books, and we talk about them all. She can’t get out much, you see. Can’t go to school. She’s quite ill so the books are her world. And we can share it, you see.’ She gave him that quick, bright look, not staring, not judging, just interested. She had him tabbed as a schoolteacher or something. And she was almost right.

  ‘Palmers?’ she said, after his enquiry about his family. You could see her brain whistling with the speed of her thought. ‘Palmers.’ That bright look again. The slight hesitation. ‘You’ll need coffee,’ she said suddenly, and bustled off to get it.

  There was no espresso machine so he’d resigned himself to Maxwell House. He could hear the thump of the kettle, the clink of cups, and let his gaze rove the tourist posters and brochures. Old photos. Trains in rainforest glens. Sleeper cutters leaning on adzes. Bogged bullock wagons. An old football team. Sepia with age. Or race.

  When she returned, the coffee had been brewed and she had two cups and a plate of sultana-and-ginger slice. He could see the shreds of ginger in it.

  ‘Now, I’m a Faulkner, you see, and my mother was an Anderson,

  and her mother was a Doran. You need to know that because you’ll be related to them as well.’

  As well as what?

  ‘Some of your family are a little reluctant to meet strangers. Even family, see. There’s been a lot of … unpleasantness. A lot of people want to know about the old days. For various reasons. You’ll understand when you meet them. Mrs Arnott is the person you’ll have to talk to, the oldest, you see, green house behind the old mill, but it’s Biddy Cowland, her sister, who will give you the most information. Out by the tennis court. Seven Grange Street.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Not at all, but when you come back we’ll have another chat.’

  They drank their coffee and dabbed at crumbs of cake. He wondered how she could be so sure he’d be back. She just wondered. Speculatively, as good scrubwrens do.

  Garden ornaments were not his thing, but what other people did in their gardens was none of his business. Even so, stepping through the door in the house behind the old mill was a shock. Every flat surface was the throne for an overdressed doll. Except for the bench, where a fish tank quietly slimed and myopic fish peered from within the gloom. Two walls were honeycombed with little crypts where more dolls sat like extras in a horror film, all flaxen hair and petticoats.

  It took his breath away, or at least that part he had reserved to talk about Aborigines. His family. Palmer found himself perched on the hard wing chair, startled out of the ability to sit back within its embrace of velvet. Dark blue. To sit back would cause twilight to begin at eleven in the morning.

  The conversation touched briefly on the reasons for his strait crossing but got clipped of any intimacy when he caught the stare of a blonde doll. Which meant he couldn’t look at two walls or the fish tank or any of the myriad occasional tables and the watchful repose of the little person throned upon it.

  He was forced to look at Mrs Arnott and notice that her Kmart tracksuit had breakfast down its front. Not stains. Bits. She was smiling and bunching her lips in rhythm with a song only the dolls could dance to. She was out of it.

  Her husband didn’t bother to take part in either the introductions or the conversation. He was in and out of the flywire door, off to do important things. Which couldn’t wait. And then he’d clap back in and let the kettle drop onto the stove, slamming like a cell door.

  He hates me already, Palmer realised. I’m not working. I’m poncing around looking for family when I should be repairing a lawnmower. In a state I hate.

  Finally the serious mechanic stood in the doorway with a cup of tea Palmer knew he wasn’t going to be offered, and stared. Interview with Lady Gaga over. He’d seen enough mainland wannabes trawling for the bounty of island heritage. The fuckwits.

  But an airline ticket is an airline ticket, Palmer thought, and I won’t be able to afford it again soon. May as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.

  ‘Mr Arnott, your family is Aboriginal too, isn’t it?’ Palmer had never planned to ask a
question as bald as this, of any geriatric aunt or mechanic uncle, but he could feel he was about to be kicked out so had to get things straight.

  ‘So they say,’ Arnott said, and he turned and left. Just like that. Slap of flywire and gone.

  Palmer looked at Mrs Arnott, but she was smiling while her lips gently mumbled a tune, a rhapsody for porcelain.

  He let himself out and walked the concrete path, with its edge of embedded shells, past the rubber swan, deftly disgorged from an old tractor tyre by hands fascinated by their ingenuity, and glanced into the garage. No surprise there: full of tools. But then he looked again. A poster of a boxer. On paper gone ochre. Dave Sands, Aboriginal boxer. From an era when Mr Arnott was a young man and had heroes.

  Palmer slid into the hire car and swallowed with the relief of steering away.

  Of course, more time would have allowed for a more relaxed exchange. Leaning on the bonnet of an old Toyota ute, say, or slipping a few quiet ones down at the local, but he didn’t have the time for bush languor – he had to get on a plane the next day. And anyway, she was his aunt. He had some rights to attention. A lot of old people loved talking to lost nephews. Not these old people, it seemed.

  Who was he to judge those who had chosen to be white? It happened more often than not. For those who could. And for terrific reasons. To live being the most important of them. He’d heard the stories his uncle told, and those of cousins he’d had to track down through the phonebook, about the decisions people had to make when they could no longer feed their children. Unemployed because of one single nasty inclusion on their CV.

  And who was he to choose black? Was Arnott’s poster of Sands a lesser allegiance? Who was blackest? Who was best and fairest?

  Yes, he knew all the soiled confusion, had read the letters to the editor scoffing at the choosers, as if there had never been a war, just a transfer of title. His uncle’s revelation had scared him into reading the whole sorry history, the ground opening between the black and white feet like a quaking of the earth. Of course the reality demanded adjustments, but was the only response a house of dolls and an oil rag?

  He travelled over the ridge and paused halfway back to the estuary to photograph the gate of the house built by a white great-grandfather, and later the orchard, the only remaining evidence of the house of the Aboriginal side. The black Cowlands.

  It wasn’t as though he was ignorant or even unsympathetic, but the pains and humiliations of his parents had set his teeth grinding on the grit of his country’s history. That’s what he’d come for, to find the point where the families and colours intersected.

  ‘Knew you’d be back today. Bart saw your car coming down the mountain. Got the bread out of the freezer already. And I made some of that cake, too. Got a tin for you to take back to Victoria, unless it’s a prohibited import over there.’

  This was the kind of warmth and humour Palmer had been hoping to have with his own family. The imagined conversations, chuckling over family characteristics; photos of Christmases long gone, big fish caught, the cousin who played cricket for Tasmania. He could cry for his desolation.

  Turning away from the rubber swan and onto the road down the mountain, he’d bound himself in such a rigid girdle he only remembered to breathe when he found himself wobbling at the wheel. All the planning. All the country romance. All the reminiscence. All the love.

  ‘They’re a bit funny, I know, but they do get a lot of professors bossing them around about the past.’

  ‘I’m not a professor.’

  ‘I know, my dear, but they’re the same questions, aren’t they? They think people are having a go at them or trying —’

  ‘To get something?’

  ‘Well, that’s how they think. They’ve had it hard, that family. Your family. And I know you’re not trying to take advantage, but it’s how they are, they’re defensive. Anyone would be. It doesn’t help you … But you haven’t told me your name?’

  ‘Thomas.’

  ‘Well, of course. It’s a family name, isn’t it? Yes, your great-grandfather’s name in fact.’

  He was too tired and brittle to revive hope of cheerful conversations.

  ‘Now, Thomas, you mustn’t feel too disappointed. Give them time. Come back and stay a few days. You can sleep in our cabin if you like. The train doesn’t start running until nine. Then you can see all the family. In their own time. Mrs Arnott is a bit quiet, but Mrs Cowland will show you all the photos, the family tree, she’ll take you out to all the spots where your family lived, I’m sure. Biddy and I play golf together, Thomas. Well, we don’t actually play much golf, we do a lot of walking and looking for the ball, but we talk … our two families have seen it all. There’s so much to talk about. You’d be surprised.’

  ‘And you haven’t told me your name.’

  ‘Of course, but you looked like you didn’t care. I’m Elizabeth Garland. My great-grandfather shot your great-grandfather.’

  TRUE HUNTERS

  The psychology of land use is fundamental to the understanding of any civilisation. Even more important is the nation’s relationship with the native fauna. That relationship, as many philosophers have said, defines the very nature of humanity.

  Our relationship with the kangaroo is as emblematic of us as the roo is of the national crest. That the kangaroo is mown down daily by road transport, tangled in farm fences and its habitat whittled away hardly impacts on the public consciousness, but should someone suggest a cull of a roo population on an army base, the nation begins an episode of shallow breathing.

  The wholesale destruction of koala habitat barely rates a mention in the press, but when koalas eat out a remnant forest on an Aboriginal reserve at Framlingham the Kirrae wurrong are accused of mismanagement and the issue features several times on national television with never a question about why there is only one remnant of this forest type in the area.

  Deer were introduced, along with foxes and pheasants, in colonial Australia because there is something altogether more gentlemanly about a ritualised British fox hunt than shooting kangaroos in an open plain. The thrill of killing a kangaroo is absent because all the iconic symbolism in the European sensibility is tied up in the rituals of fox hunting, princely falconers and gentlemanly fly fishers. To illustrate the lingering fetish with the Old World blood sports you need look no further than the logo of gentlemen’s country fashion label Rodd and Gunn, which bears the image of an English quail dog. The fishing retailer The Compleat Fisherman is as British as its logo of the gentleman fly fisher decked out in plaid shooting cap and plus fours.

  Australian blackfish and garfish are probably superior eating but they don’t take a fly, and gentlemen use flies. The whole psychology of the Englishman is wound up in the romance and dignity of tie flying and deer stalking. So to be a gentleman in Australia you have to import the game so enmeshed in your psyche. Otherwise you’re just a native-born oaf slugging around the bush in jeans and Blundstones.

  The single greatest distinguishing characteristic of the non-Indigenous hunter of any land is the emphasis on sport and leisure rather than hunting for the provision of food. Even more significant is the emphasis on size, quantity and type.

  The real Australian hunter is after the biggest barramundi he can get, or the biggest trout or salmon. To my taste the ocean salmon is one of the least palatable of Australian fishes, but it fights like the blazes, can be caught in the surf and often in great numbers, using massive surf rods. The same fishermen on the same beach scorn the delectable dart. They’re slight little fishes, the fillets are fine, but they fry up like garfish, one of the best eating sensations in the world. The gar doesn’t fight much either – he’s a small fish and gives up his life with little complaint. There’s almost no achievement to catching one, unless of course your aim is to provide your family with one of the finest meals the world can offer.

  Indigenous fishing parties rarely took fish in roe. It was subsistence fishing, a responsibility to provide food for the community
. Of course, modern refrigeration enables more fish to be caught for future meals, but only true hunters seem to count their catch by the meal; most believe they are in some kind of competition to prove their manhood.

  When my family toured Australia in 1993 we provided ourselves with whiting, squid, crayfish, dart, bream, bluebone, mud crab, garfish, herring, abalone, mussels, razor clam, yabbies, bass, mackerel or zebrafish four or five nights a week. Travelling in a minute fold-up caravan, more akin to a deck chair than a home, it was our pleasure and need to provide the next meal for our table. We looked forward to ingesting the food of the country we were in, paying homage to the country and the ancestor fishers who had preceded us.

  We fished with Bunjulung, Murri, Yolngu, Jaru, Nyoonga and others, eating the food of the country, learning about places and people as we went. It was our pleasure but also our introduction to country and its tempo, rules and requirements. It taught us how to behave in the country of other people.

  So we were dismayed whenever we entered a new camping spot to be assailed by sport fishermen offering us a wad of poorly refrigerated flathead or whiting, fish they had wasted in their search for their real hunter selves.

  My son and I would look at each other and sigh with resignation because our delight was taken from us while we ate these surplus fish. Time and again we were overwhelmed by the stench from caravan park rubbish bins where buckets of unwanted fish were dumped by trophy fishermen.

 

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