Salt

by Bruce Pascoe

  Fallon is appalled that the birth of a white child is used as a device to ‘dispel the ghosts of the black dead and despatch them to oblivion’. So desperate is Australia to make some reparation for our history that we cling to anyone who can tell us that it’s alright that the cat is dead, it was just an accident, or the sort of misbehaviour that children are likely to engage in. Children grow out of it, don’t they? Certainly. But the cat doesn’t.

  Fallon thinks Cloudstreet is popular because it ‘delivers on John Howard’s promise to make Australians feel comfortable and relaxed again’. That is a chilling comment on Australian letters, considering that the book was a clear winner in the Australian Book Review’s Favourite Australian Novel poll of 2010. Even since then, Australia can’t get enough of the blockbuster novel, and the stage play and film it spawned. Critic Fiona Scott Norman remarked that in the reception of the play, ‘every interview, every article speaks of this giant, lumbering beast of a show with wonder, joy and proud surprise’. Australia saved at last from its own history!

  Perhaps the crowd of readers and reviewers should have asked a black person what she thought. At the Aboriginal Writers and Educators Conference at Wollongong in May 2011, a panel examined Winton’s ingenuous excuses and that yearning Australia has to see itself in the best possible light – a nation of knockabout larrikin mates who don’t take themselves too seriously and are not prepared to chew the rag of regret. Winton’s great get-out-of-jail card was that all the black characters are dead. You don’t have to depict them as realistic individuals, it’s sufficient to re-invent their dreams!

  The panellists did not heap scorn on Winton – some referred to their love of most of his books – but they were stunned by Australia’s inability to notice his sleight of hand when it came to colonial history. Sleight of hand, after all, is just an entertaining form of deceit and theft.

  The conversation moved on almost reluctantly to Kate Grenville’s The Secret River. The panellists had grown up with Grenville’s Joan Makes History and you could feel their disinclination to be critical of a feminist writer. But it has to be said that while the blacks in The Secret River are more alive than in Cloudstreet, their personalities have been cut from cardboard. On one of the few occasions a black man speaks, he uses the word ‘hereabouts’, which makes a linguistic first in my experience. At the end of the novel, the hero, Thornhill, peers across the valley to the cliffs and hopes to see a black man there, but they are gone and Thornhill has done the goneing. Thornhill is a much more nuanced character than Winton’s Sam Pickles and acknowledges that he built his wealth on the backs of dead black people; he acknowledges it, but that’s the only thing that separates him from the banality and crude intelligence of Sam Pickles. It is as if our most famous novels are trying to smooth the pillow of the dying race.

  In the discussion, David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon was compared to The Secret River because its tone of regret is prominent, but I was alarmed that I couldn’t recollect much about Aboriginal people in the novel. As soon as I got home I read it again. It was a much better book than I remembered, but the ‘black’ character is not black at all but a ‘lost’ white sailor. Malouf makes an attempt at colonial analysis, but not one Aboriginal person speaks in the entire length of the text.

  One of Malouf’s heroines muses on the lack of ghosts in Australia, and a character believes that one day Australia will become one of God’s gardens, that colonisation can have a divine purpose. The characters are reflective and serious, and their inability to ‘see’ the country is an irony, but the ‘blacks’ are absent, and no amount of musing on the delicious dusk described on the last page can bring them back.

  The Wiradjuri educator and academic Jeanine Leane thinks that both Patrick White and David Malouf ‘created white Indigenes … which allows Aboriginality to be read as a “state” which can be achieved by settlers … and then the “stealing” becomes a non-issue’. The white man usurps the black once again. Remembering Babylon might be a better book than I remembered, but it is not about black Australia or even, in any convincing way, Australian history.

  I thought it was time I re-read Patrick White. I wrote in my book Convincing Ground of the dreadful pastiche of Aboriginal life in A Fringe of Leaves, but thought I should take another look at Voss, which had received a fair old serve in Wollongong.

  You don’t have to read too far. The black characters are fascinated by and covetous of brass buttons, they sulk rather than think, they are all inarticulate and suspicious, they speak gibberish, they are devious and untrustworthy and don’t deserve a capital for Aboriginal.

  Voss believes he must rule over his black subjects and notices that they aren’t as awed and reverential of comets as white people. Some of these observations are made in Voss’s delirium, but earlier descriptions of Aborigines offer no hope that White thought any differently. These characters are simply placed in the novel, not as figures of influence, but in order for White to use otherness to discuss the intellectualism of Europeans.

  Rodney Hall’s Yandilli Trilogy has blackfellas standing around on one leg, but they are there to allow for white analysis. Hall is a good writer and not ‘against’ Aboriginal Australia; it is just that his fascination lies elsewhere. White is like that too: he uses Aboriginal characters to shine light on European eminences. When speaking of black Australia he imagines the Aboriginal world rather than knows it. ‘Such unimpaired innocence could only be the most devoted,’ Voss muses on observing his black retainer. But there is never an attempt to explain why the black character stays with Voss on the doomed expedition; it is simply not important to White’s story. The book is a determined allegory on man’s search for meaning, but it is a European search for meaning with which White is concerned.

  Riders in the Chariot was one of my favourite novels when I first read it, but on re-reading I noticed that the character of Alf Dubbo is given an Aboriginal heritage for narrative convenience. He is not a believable black character; he is purely a vehicle for White’s theory of the outsider, which allows the mostly white Alf to have mystical thoughts and travel into the dark spaces of Australian geography.

  For White and Voss, and most Australians for that matter, the desert is ‘a devilish country’, but the same desert that Voss (based on explorer Friedrich ‘Ludwig’ Leichhardt) traversed is where the almost dying explorer Charles Sturt was revived by Aborigines who fed him duck and offered him water from an eighty-foot well. This area is only a desert in so far as Australians view any country that can’t grow wheat or mineralise iron oxide as worthless.

  The Wollongong conference became strained as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal wrestled with the literature of our shared country. When a comment from the floor offered the view that some of Patrick White’s best friends were black, it was greeted with scarifying levity. There was no nastiness in the mirth; it is just that Aboriginal people have learned to fear most white Australians who claim Aboriginals as ‘some of their best friends’ or that they ‘grew up with Aborigines and know how they think’.

  When Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo was published in 1929, left-wing commentators hailed it as a landmark text on black–white relations. Prichard was the first novelist to attempt the characterisation of an Aboriginal individual – but Coonardoo is a hapless woman who cannot think for herself, and she pales in comparison to the strong, white characters wrestling with their anxiety, their responsibility for blacks, their destiny.

  Left-wing critics also loved Eve Langley’s The Pea Pickers without seeming to realise that pea picking in southern Australia was dominated by poor Aboriginal families. In Langley’s novel the pea paddock is a stage for European labourers to practise equality and for women to demand it. Despite the real history of the industry, only a few lines refer to Aboriginal people, and those lines drip with contempt.

  Nino Culotta’s (John O’Grady’s) They’re a Weird Mob sold 130,000 copies in its first year of publication, 1957, and eventually sold more than one million
copies in a country with a population of fifteen million. What was the attraction? It told the story of an Italian migrant assimilating into Australian society who urged his fellow migrants to do the same. They’re a weird mob, but they’re terrific blokes! (Women hardly rated a mention in the book.)

  Australians loved the book because they loved the representation of themselves as humorous, knockabout, generous blokes who were kind to the new arrivals. It’s a pretty telling profile of Australians in the 1950s and 1960s that such a book was wildly popular. The danger of such books is that they airbrush the national portrait and paper over the cracks with images that could have been taken from Ken Done and Pro Hart: innocent pictures of beaches and palms, yachts with colourful sails, quaintly rickety sheds and hardened Aussie bush folk who are tanned and not black.

  As a youth I yearned for a national literature that was truly about Australia, and before I found Patrick White I got all whimsical about the poetry of Henry Kendall and Charles Harpur, simply because they mentioned bellbirds and blackfellas. I’d almost forgotten about that teenage love affair until Jeanine Leane explained that Harpur would don blackface to read his poetry to gushing audiences.

  As a student and later a teacher of literature, I continued to search for a novel that could get within a southern swampland of William Faulkner’s unabashed love of country and its people. By the 1970s Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country came closest to Faulknerite depth and scope, but on re-reading I found the book was dominated by conversations between numerous white characters and that the protagonist, a wandering chemist, was much like Herbert himself. The Aboriginal people are drawn in greater depth than in many other novels of the time, but these characters are incapable of taking positive action to defend themselves without the intervention of an imbibing chemist. In Herbert’s later novel, Capricornia, the mixed-blood son of a white man is a stain on the character of the protagonist, and the unsuitability of the dark stain is reinforced throughout the book.

  Barbara Baynton’s coruscating stories have true depth, but she had given up on Aboriginal Australia. At least she was honest about her opinion. On the other hand, Mary Durack’s epic Kings in Grass Castles is among the worst apologies for European atrocities this country has seen, but is still regarded by many as fair-minded towards Aboriginal peoples. Perhaps any Australian writer who simply mentions Aboriginal Australia is deemed to have been generous.

  When I read Patrick White’s The Tree of Man in 1964, it was the first time I recognised the bush of my childhood. Alan Marshall’s love of the bush was obvious, and Henry Lawson’s yearning for the misty blue ranges of loneliness infected my soul, but it was White’s majestic use of language that unfurled the scrolled bark of the land where I lived. White taught me that there was a reputable Australian literature to compare with the works of Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner and Leo Tolstoy. And so, after finishing all White’s novels and plays, I turned to Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land and saw there a grander story and a deeper love of the land and was drawn into its tale.

  But when I picked it up again a few years back, I was left wanting for descriptions of Aboriginal Australians other than as remote figures on the horizon. Indigenous figures weren’t always standing on one leg, but while their story was told with resignation and regret, it wasn’t told from the Aboriginal point of view. Maybe that’s because one of the great Australian claims for innocence is that many among the white population pretend not to know any Aboriginals. We maintain this myth as an explanation for our bemused sorrow, and yet if you passed two hundred people in Sydney’s Pitt Street or Melbourne’s Bourke Street this morning, it is likely that six of them would have been Aboriginal. Australia doesn’t recognise the Aboriginal past or the Aboriginal face.

  Do all countries have such a conflicted relationship with their history, and do all countries want nations around the world to love them as desperately as does Australia? I suspect the Americans are blinded by stars and stripes. The Italians, with former heads of state such as Silvio Berlusconi, have surely gone beyond expecting respect. And countries such as Israel and Iran are so involved with the preservation of their authority that they have learnt not to trust the world’s opinion.

  Colonial countries all rewrite their history, but not all forget it entirely. William Faulkner took the scalpel to the culture and society of America’s Deep South, but it’s interesting that he had very little to say about Native Americans. Peter Mathieson spent his best words on the relationship between America and its freed slaves, as did the mighty John Steinbeck. Only in Australia has avoidance of any unpleasantness become a major literary theme. As a result we end up painting beach scenes in miniature; nice little Rupert Bunnys.

  Australians do not want to be perceived as racist thieves – who would? – but we yearn with frustrated desperation for respectability, and so we are doomed to choose as our public symbols only those things untainted by the past: Don Bradman and Fred Hollows, Mary McKillop and the Drover’s Wife. It is inevitable that in this fog of identity we make icons of the novels that persuade us we have ‘dealt’ with our colonial history and overcome it.

  We also contort ourselves in every national conversation on the subject. Australian pioneers had to forget about the theft and murder if they wanted to remain good Christian blokes, but the current generation has invented new forms of self-deceit to avoid contemplation of the real national story. We had to intervene. We had to employ the methods we know failed in 1880. And today: we have to save them from their debased selves.

  Like the child rationalising the dead cat, in the panic to explain ourselves and our history, we often point the finger at other naughty children – like those ‘black’ others who are pointing the finger at us. We deflect attention from our sins. The people asking us to revisit our history are not ‘real’ Aborigines, the argument goes; they are members of the guilt industry, or simply cut from a lesser intellectual cloth.

  The time when we could survive as an intelligent nation while believing the Little Golden Book of our history has passed. We consider it an unthinkable cruelty to bind the feet of women to restrict and imprison them, but it is no less cruel to bind and blind the mind to the obvious truths of our heritage. The national heart is compressed, and its generosity coldly selective. It is natural to want to belong to good, honest parents and a good, honest country, it is natural to want to be considered moral – in fact, it is our saving grace – but we cannot build our individual and national castle on the sands of a fabricated history.

  Any nation’s artists and thinkers set the tone and breadth of national conversations. Politicians only choose the electable catchphrase: ‘stop the boats’ or ‘save the little children’. It is up to the thinkers and artists if we are to develop a deep, respectful, enduring and fully aware love of our country.

  There is much to learn about the past, but Australia tore those pages from our history books because they mention the broken commandments of our Lord. We all have to bite the bullet of our history or we will be condemned to self-congratulation for the rest of our lives – a nation without modesty, without compassion, a spoilt and selfish people forever chortling about goodness and mateship. It is infantile for an adult to keep rearranging the dead cat and blaming it for our sin. One can feign incomprehension of, and memory loss about, the past for only so long before it becomes a national characteristic for which we will be continually judged. If Australia cannot learn about the past and the descendants of those who once owned the land, it is doomed to a shallow, friable national intelligence. Where there is sand, there is little rock.

  SEA WOLVES

  Three hours before dawn, twenty-five naked men crouched and shivered in the blasted heath of Baran Guba, an island off the south coast of New South Wales. The massive granite plinths of Guruwul, the whale, and Narangga, the shark, loomed against the black sky and the sea wolves howled.

  Wedge-tailed shearwaters blundered through the heath, colliding with the men who, locked in darkness, had no idea
what spirits were assailing them. And they were spirits – spirits of gadu, the ocean. Their voices began at four a.m., at first as tentative contact calls: way coo, way coo; I am here, so am I, me too, way coo, way coo. Then they projected their voices in long wails, an ancient ululation exactly like the howl of a wolf, a sound preparing the birds for their day coursing the crests of waves in hunt for small fish skipping and darting on the surface of gadu. But first they had to gain momentum before launching themselves into the darkness, and collision with crouching Yuin men was the least of their concerns; they were seeking the wind’s clear air and the cushion it provided between them and the ocean’s surface. They glided and curved against that cushion for the entire day, and when they leave these shores they will ride it for months.

  I could see my son’s head as he crouched in that heath and I knew he had no idea what awaited him, but it was too late to wonder. He was about to become a man.

  I didn’t cry. I had done that the day before, when I told him who he was in relation to the whale. Before he was born, his parents stood in a cave above a Bass Strait bay sheltering from the rain, and a rock appeared in the sea where none had been before. Barnacles crusted the mass and the surge of gadu swept over it, but suddenly she reared eight metres above the waves and presented herself to us: Guruwul the whale. For two hours we watched that whale as she swam in a giant ellipse to the horizon, and back into the shallows of the Parker River with her half-sized companion. She was teaching her calf to swim.

  I put my hand on the woman’s belly and felt my son roll like a miniature leviathan. He was Guruwul, and the day before the sea wolves moaned in the pre-dawn pitch he had received that name. No wonder I doubled over and tears sprang from my eyes; the great circle of the whale along the coast was complete.