Salt

by Bruce Pascoe

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

  Many people think I’m a traitor. You’re not like the rest of them, they tell me, you’re not really Aboriginal.

  What they say has cool logic. Clinical analysis of genes says I’m more Cornish than Koorie. I hardly ever suffered racist remarks, and experienced no disadvantage, due to my heritage.

  My sister and I would never have gone to university if it hadn’t been for the then prime minister, because our parents could never have afforded it, and yet we both got that chance and the economic security and esteem it provided. So, no, I’m not like a real Aborigine, because if I’d been blacker my opportunities would probably have been curtailed. There would have been even less money in the house, the expectations of my teachers and parents may have been fewer, my job opportunities crippled. The only impediment I faced was economic. My only real struggle was with the knowledge that a whole side of our history had been deliberately painted out.

  People can’t understand why you would identify with a culture so seemingly remote. It’s a common theme in pubs and kitchens when pale Koories are discussed. Why do they do it? Are they on a lurk? These suspicions become rumours fuelled by ultra-right nationalists and discreetly fanned by the government. But we are not just the product of our parents’ house, there’s the influence of grandparents and great-grandparents and a whole history of jumbled heritage. Australians were never a pure race, as Geoffrey Blainey and co. like to think. The mix happened first on the frontier and at every national intersection since. The Anglos were mixed with the Celts, and both were changed by Indigenous genes and the country on which they ate their bread, the ground where the grain for that bread was grown.

  Since then, the mix has continued. Purity is not in race but in purpose. I just want to respect all the roads where my ancestors set foot. What made my grandmother, mother and father the extraordinary people they were?

  Australians find it upsetting, a kind of betrayal, when light-skinned people identify with their indigeneity. I can think of dozens of prominent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander politicians, activists, artists, writers, musicians, nurses, teachers and train drivers who have all suffered the charge of not being a real Aborigine. Why should they be denied what the Irish, Greek and Jewish diaspora celebrate at the drop of a baklava, Guinness or gefilte fish? Especially if you are in your own country and in touch every day with the land that breathes its soul into your nostrils each time you wake.

  It disappoints a lot of my friends and associates that I want to correct what I see as their ignorance of Australian history past and present. I’ve been abused by hoteliers, bosses, cricket crowds, and lost some friends because of it.

  Speaking of cricket crowds, I must pay homage to the president of the Lorne Football and Cricket Club. In 1997 he chastised his own supporters, who’d thought it amusing to yell out the n-word every time I faced a ball. He strode to the middle of the Lorne cricket oval, trembling with rage, and said, ‘Mate, can I go and punch those blokes in the head?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Thanks for the offer, but I’d prefer to bat all day.’

  Now, I bat like Eddie the Eagle skis, but it’s amazing what you can do when inspired.

  And anyway, mate, I didn’t see you after the game, but thanks, I’ve never forgotten it. I like to think of you as the best Australians can become. Fair. Truly accepting people for themselves, not what school they went to or the colour of their grandmother’s skin.

  But I’m afraid not everyone is as generous as the man from Lorne. I’ve made many friends through sport, half of them from the opposing sides. I’ve met the ironic wink from an opposition player in three foot of mud at Birregurra, as if to say this kind of behaviour is certifiable, don’t you reckon?

  I’ve sat yarning well after the sun has set over Hayley’s Reef at Apollo Bay discussing the finer points of fishing and cricket with blokes I’d hate to lose as friends. I’d hate for those men to think of me as a nark or a man who hated his country and countrymen. I don’t, quite the opposite; love of my country and its people hurts, it is so strong. I just can’t stand by and watch decent people fail to understand how great their country is and how great we as a people might become. Doug Lang, Warren Riches, Dennis Dare, John Gorwell, Steve Morsehead, Brian Noseda, Waldo Garner, Dave Nelson, Blondie Parker, Barry Parker, Pussy Rippon, Sparra Harrison, Merv Brady, Guy Permezel, Tommy Lloyd, John Armstrong, Gerry Menke, Curl Shaw, it’d crush me if you thought I was a nark. After all this time, all those good yarns. It’d hurt very deeply not to be able to front up with the same ease and enjoy a few beers and bit of bullshit. There are a few other names I’d like to put there too, but my brothers, you are Aboriginal. Some of you know it and deny it, some don’t care and some simply don’t know because your mother made me promise not to tell. See the gulf denial of our past has opened between us?

  If we did this properly, it could become the national celebration of our greatness rather than the slinking, suspicious pig-headed repudiation of 120,000 years of connection to this land. So many of us have a link to the world’s oldest culture and deny it. Most of the rest are within a bee’s eyebrow of admitting the crushing weight of love pressing on their chests: the massive love for the land. The only impediment to accepting the full embrace of the country’s love is our inability to look over our shoulder, our failure to shape up to our lingering dread of exposure. If we can learn history we can embrace the past, and for many it will be an embrace of family denied.

  Most Australians, however, view those who discover their Indigenous ancestry late in life like those who recover lost memories: people to be treated with circumspection, if not scorn. Both recoveries have been used by impostors, but are Australians just looking for an excuse to dismiss the discomforting fact in the same way we’ve excused our treatment of refugees? If some of them are not genuine, then we can dismiss the lot as charlatans! Too easy, my countrymen and women, unworthy of your finer inclinations.

  I would like to think that in Australia we could rest an elbow on the bar or sit at the table and crook our fingers through the handle of our teacups and discuss these matters, but it is impossible because of the incredulity with which most Australians greet the knowledge of our shared history.

  During the 2005 Eureka celebrations I listened to most of ABC Radio National’s comprehensive coverage at Ballarat and the broadcast of historical lectures: the role of women, the English–Irish conflict, the Irish–Irish conflict, rich versus poor, the democratic fervour, it was all fascinating. Aborigines? Nothing. Invisible. Nothing to do with democracy, identity or history.

  Years ago I worked as director of the Australian Studies Project of the Commonwealth Schools Commission and was awed by the bilingual publishing program at Yuendumu. They produced these stunning educational tools on an old Fordigraph machine. I went back to Canberra and prepared a shortlist of the educational programs in Australia most deserving of Commonwealth assistance. Yuendumu was at the top of the list. I sat dumbfounded during the meeting while the public servants re-shuffled the list to bring in an application by an elite Queensland school that wanted funding to add two rowing shells to the eight they possessed. Yuendumu did not get funded, and I wrote my letter of resignation as the meeting continued.

  It’s too easy to attack the conservatives in the United States or Australia for the current state of world behaviour. People bear responsibility for the moral tone of their country, and when the best-educated people in the land are blinded by ignorance of their country’s history, how can we blame politicians when they pander to our selfishness? It wouldn’t have mattered greatly if the Liberals or Humphrey Bear had won the last three federal elections.

  We are fortunate to live in a democracy where it is within our power to tell our elected representatives what we want. Why do we limit the application of pressure on Canberra to changing parliamentarians’ superannuation allowances or sacking ministers who take their lovers on overseas trips at public expense? What about a couple of polite questions when 353 des
perate people drown within sight of our surveillance aircraft? Why not ask, politely, why we can give one billion to the 2004 tsunami, and deserving of every cent, yet allow trachoma and kidney failure to remain at higher levels in Indigenous Australia than in Bangladesh?

  We have to ask those questions; it is our responsibility. Liberal, Labor? Hardly matters. I remember when Graham Richardson, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Keating government, got his photo on the front page of every daily newspaper in the country two weeks out from an election. He had his arm around the shoulders of a senior Utopia woman after promising that a Labor government would deliver running water to her community. Labor won that election, but Utopia still did not get the promised water supply. What happened, Graham? Lose the memo? Or did you just do whatever it takes to win and then move on? Footage of Senator balance-of-power Brian Harradine trying to dance with Yolgnu people was just as sickening. Don’t dance, senator, because having expressed what you think of Aboriginal people you should have been denied that opportunity. No, Senator Richard Alston, Aboriginal people didn’t invent the wheel; nor did they invent the rack, the gas chamber or tax evasion.

  It’s what we believe that counts. I’m an agnostic, but I’d quite happily settle for a country that operated exclusively according to the Ten Commandments. You couldn’t go wrong truly believing that all of us were created in God’s image and loving our neighbours as ourselves. You couldn’t go wrong with belief that strong. So how is it, politicians, that you can express such passion for the word of the Lord and enact the legislation you do?

  But it doesn’t matter what Canberra thinks. It’s us, the people, who really count – those with a chance to share a pot of beer or a cup of tea with others, the chance to seek out knowledge and promote it and to indulge the better side of our natures, the side that fervently believes in equality, that Australia’s fundamental commitment is that everyone deserves a fair go. Where is our thirst for uncompromised knowledge? Why do we encourage politicians to lie to us?

  Australians aren’t the problem. We prove time and again that we have good hearts, that we can reach out a hand to the needy. Our problem stems from our national myopia, and that arises from the history intelligent people still insist on teaching impressionable children.

  We must investigate our past with rigour, but not abuse people for the views they hold; instead we must strive to make our national education as comprehensive as possible. I’ve been to meetings of the Australian Literary Translators’ Association (ALITRA), the organisation that dispenses money for the translation of languages other than English, and been greeted with good-mannered bemusement when I requested that it spend some of its funds on Aboriginal translations. The members thought I was joking. There was only one Aboriginal language, no one spoke it, and in any case there wasn’t a literature!

  I was trying to argue the case to have some of the Walpiri and Arrente stories translated into English so they could be taught in the community schools and to all Australians. The bemusement was genuine. I had it explained to me that I must have misunderstood because the funds are for migrant languages – Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, French. The ALITRA charter does not make that distinction, but people were incredulous that I had misunderstood the intent of the charter. I knew exactly what the intent was, and it arose from the blindness that has our country stumbling in a fog of displacement and denial.

  In 2002 I was at the national linguists’ conference. Aboriginal participants were involved in sideshows to the conference while the linguists described the brilliance of their research. I wandered into a session by mistake. I was lost. I realised my mistake after a while and prepared to leave – until I realised the linguists were discussing the copyright of their material and the methods for including research as properties in a will. Bequeathing Aboriginal languages to their children!

  Not all linguists work like that, but there were plenty of greedy ears in this seminar, and the attitude has resulted in major court cases, including disputation over the ownership of Strehlow’s vault of artefacts and recordings. The linguists were surprised to hear that some found this discussion immoral. Researchers need to protect their work from predatory publishers or unethical rivals, but it is a dangerous precedent to divide other people’s cultural heritage as if it is a brick veneer in Balwyn.

  In 2004 I found myself in discussion with the inheritor of a document of 700 pages of Wathaurong language. The woman who compiled it had said she would give it to the community after her death. The son wanted copyright. He wanted to sell the language back to the people from whom it was twice taken. Ronald Biggs would have been impressed.

  Not all news is as bleak or dangerous to the national soul. In an important breakthrough in 2005, Aretha Briggs, Doris Paton, Lyn Dent and Heather Bowe sat down together and drew up a plan for the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority to introduce Indigenous Victorian languages into the Year 12 VCE curriculum, a massive effort. Aretha, Doris and Lyn are descended from a long line of wise warrior men and women; I don’t know much about Heather’s background, except that she’s a decent Australian with plenty of courage and no guilt. So, four good Australians get together to share their vision to advance Australian education by a light year. Why does it seem so confusing and treacherous for the rest of us?

  The confusion about what defines a language other than English goes right to the heart of our national identity, right to the heart of the muddled way we represent ourselves here and overseas, why we sit in awe while New Zealand rugby players, white and black, perform a haka. Do you want something to perform at the MCG, the SCG, the Gabba and the WACA? Well, it’d be slightly different in every state because it would depend on where the ground was, whose land it was on, but if we looked we’d find a warrior song for that soil. It wouldn’t have the same ferocious bellicosity of the Maori (that’s something else our country could learn), but it would say everything there was to know about the power of place and the great heroes who fought for it. It would even celebrate the famed Merri Creek mud from which the centre square of the MCG is constructed. Imagine the richness and flavour that would add to the traditional chicken lunch at the Boxing Day Test. I’m not being ironic, I’m seriously patriotic.

  I can see it now on Grand Final Day: two footy teams and a few token white representatives lining up to sing the national anthem and perform a Woiwurrung warrior song. No nation anywhere else on the face of the earth could do it; people would switch on TV sets in Berlin, Paris, London, Toronto and Los Angeles just to see this unique expression of national identity.

  We live in a seriously compromised country, but why have we let it become such a problem? We should relish the complexity, the depth, the length of the history; we should feel a tiny bit smug that we know things people from other countries don’t, things they find strange, exotic and compelling. Let’s bury the stone and steel hatchets and fall in love with our country. Let’s share the guiltless embrace of true love. It will require selflessness and reckless courage, unstinting respect for each other, time and endurance. But it’s worth it. Nations are built this way.

  HONEYPOT TWO SHOTS TWO POTS AND MISS HERMANSBERG

  I knew I was in a story the moment the gum leaf came out, and I began to worry how to tell it.

  And I was doubly convinced as soon as I saw Miss Hermansberg lean close to the Old Man and whisper in his ear. Not because she’s lewd, not because the Old Man was inviting intimacy, but because it’s how women at Hermansberg speak. Their voices can be drowned when a dove shuffles its wings.

  She might have fit the name Miss Hermansberg once. A fair sort of time ago. Before the belly and the grey roots. But the dimples in the centre of her cheeks would have been causing blokes sleepless nights, and the eyes, well, the eyes still work, and of course the grace. She walks as if she’s balancing an egg white on a beer coaster on her head.

  She leans towards the Old Man and breathes an intoxicating story in his ear. The strangest, sorriest story a country ca
n conjure, but I can’t begin it because the Old Man is the strangest, most complicated bunch of bones you would ever meet in a lifetime of London buses. Not that he’s been to London, but I’m trying to indicate his rareness, the impossibility of his talents and peculiarities.

  It’s not everyone who plays an alarming repertoire of songs on a gum leaf. He’s very good and made even more incredible by his ability – well, not ability, but predilection I suppose – to play it at the oddest times. Like today, at an art gallery in Port Hedland. Putting ‘art gallery’ and ‘Port Hedland’ within a single word of each other might seem to be testing the faith between reader and writer, but there is a gallery there, and the Old Man stood smack in the centre of the floor, bringing to a complete stop any chance the staff had to finish the installation of an exhibition of Kariyarra art and bringing to a premature close the piano rehearsal of Chopin by a teenage girl of Indian-Malay extraction. She was good, too, and beautiful, and her father waiting to take her home was handsome and urbane, but he had to wait and she had to sit with her hands spread across five octaves because, as a way of exciting the gallery to the possibilities of art, the Old Man had leapt into gum-leaf renditions of ‘Blue Bayou’, ‘Moonlight Becomes You’, ‘Numeralla Pines’, ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and ‘Streets of Old Fitzroy’. I told you it was alarming.

  But everybody stopped just where they were because with a bloody leaf pinched off a dusty, half-starved gum at the front door he hit every note as if with a diamond hammer, swept into a few glissades and tremolos, and inserted the blues into songs that had never expected to hear themselves as anything but sugared cream.

  The art gallery is a converted shed with a shitty old particle board ceiling, but the sound was fat and round and smooth. People were transfixed: holding lighting battens, clutching a large bouquet of flowers meant for a vase at the end of the hall, but on the wrong side of the Old Man so that the shortish woman kept shifting them from one side of her chest to the other so the gladioli didn’t remove her nasal polyps. The rather grand dame, caught mid-gesture in the centre of the room, directly in line for every blast of air from the leaf, will probably be grander when she’s dressed for the grand opening. She spells it ‘grande’. The artists are Aboriginal and there’s no way some of them aren’t going to turn up in check flannelette shirts and thongs; their best check shirt and thongs given a douse in the sink, but flannelette and thongs nonetheless.