by Stan Grant
And when British people looked at us, they saw something sub-human, and if we were human at all, we occupied the lowest rung on civilisation’s ladder. We were fly-blown, stone-age savages and that was the language that was used. Charles Dickens, the great writer of the age, when referring to the noble savage of which we were counted among, said, ‘It would be better that they be wiped off the face of the earth.’
Captain Arthur Phillip, a man of enlightenment, a man who was instructed to make peace with the so-called natives in a matter of years, was sending out raiding parties with the instruction, ‘Bring back the severed heads of the black troublemakers.’
My people were rounded up and put on missions from where, if you escaped, you were hunted down, you were roped and tied and dragged back, and it happened here. It happened on the mission that my grandmother and my great-grandmother are from, the Warangesda on the Darlington Point of the Murrumbidgee River.
Read about it. It happened.
By 1901 when we became a nation, when we federated the colonies, we were nowhere. We’re not in the constitution, save for ‘race provisions’ which have allowed for laws to be made that would take our children, that would invade our privacy, that would tell us who we could marry and tell us where we could live.
The Australian Dream.
By 1963, the year of my birth, the dispossession was continuing. Police came at gunpoint under cover of darkness to Mapoon, an Aboriginal community in Queensland, and they ordered people from their homes and they burned those homes to the ground and they gave the land to a bauxite mining company. And today those people remember that as the ‘Night of the Burning’.
In 1963, when I was born, I was counted among the flora and fauna, not among the citizens of this country.
Now, you will hear things tonight. You will hear people say, ‘But you’ve done well.’ Yes, I have and I’m proud of it, and why have I done well? I’ve done well because of who has come before me. My father, who lost the tips of three fingers working in sawmills to put food on our table because he was denied an education. My grandfather, who served to fight wars for this country when he was not yet a citizen and came back to a segregated land where he couldn’t even share a drink with his digger mates in the pub because he was black.
My great-grandfather, who was jailed for speaking his language to his grandson (my father). Jailed for it! My grandfather on my mother’s side, who married a white woman, who reached out to Australia, lived on the fringes of town until the police came, put a gun to his head, bulldozed his tin humpy and ran over the graves of the three children he buried there.
That’s the Australian Dream.
I have succeeded in spite of the Australian Dream, not because of it, and I’ve succeeded because of those people.
You might hear tonight, ‘But you have white blood in you.’ And if the white blood in me was here tonight, my grandmother, she would tell you of how she was turned away from a hospital giving birth to her first child because she was giving birth to the child of a black person.
The Australian Dream.
We’re better than this. I have seen the worst of the world as a reporter. I spent a decade in war zones from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are an extraordinary country. We are in so many respects the envy of the world. If I was sitting here where my friends are tonight, I would be arguing passionately for this country. But I stand here with my ancestors, and the view looks very different from where I stand.
The Australian Dream.
We have our heroes. Albert Namatjira painted the soul of this nation. Vincent Lingiari put his hand out for Gough Whitlam to pour the sand of his country through his fingers and say, ‘This is my country.’ Cathy Freeman lit the torch of the Olympic Games.
But every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country’s history.
Of course racism is destroying the Australian Dream. It is self-evident that it’s destroying the Australian Dream. But we are better than that.
The people who stood up and supported Adam Goodes and said, ‘No more’, they are better than that.
The people who marched across the bridge for reconciliation, they are better than that.
The people who supported Kevin Rudd when he said sorry to the Stolen Generations, they are better than that.
My children and their non-Indigenous friends are better than that. My wife, who is not Indigenous, is better than that.
And one day, I want to stand here and be able to say as proudly and sing as loudly as anyone else in this room, Australians all, let us rejoice.
Thank you.
*
The speech was first broadcast as the opening address of a debate, and attracted little comment, but then, in January 2016, the Ethics Centre posted the footage on its website. The reaction to and praise for the speech was – all modesty aside – far more than it deserved. It was an accident of timing: it coincided with Australia Day, amid the reflection and celebration, sadness and anger. The broadcaster and journalist Mike Carlton took to social media to give my speech an extra push. He called it a ‘Martin Luther King moment’, referring to the speeches of the American civil rights leader.
Noel Pearson, the Indigenous lawyer and activist, in an address to the National Press Club, called my speech a ‘tour de force’. He said it did for black Australia what Prime Minister Paul Keating’s Redfern speech did for white Australia in 1992, when Keating laid bare Australia’s dark history of frontier wars and stolen children. But the stakes were higher for Keating than for me. Never before had a prime minister spoken with such force and clarity about our history; he was taking Australians to the other side of the frontier. How many times had I heard that old political adage: there are no votes in blacks. But that speech changed Australia; his words that day led all the way to Kevin Rudd’s ‘sorry’ in 2007 and now to me.
Pearson also reminded us that there was nothing in my speech ‘unfamiliar to blackfellas’. He was right. Pearson himself has spoken powerfully about our history, notably two decades earlier, in a speech to the 1997 Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne:
It is a troubling business coming to terms with Australian history, both for Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people. For our people it is a troubling business because there is the imperative of never allowing anyone to forget the truths of the past but to be able as a community to rise above its demoralising legacy . . . but it’s also a challenge for non-Aboriginal Australia, a challenge to understand that in the same way that they urge pride in Gallipoli and in Kokoda . . . can we as a community and a nation also acknowledge the shameful aspects of that same past.
There is, in fact, a long and distinguished history of courage and oratory among Indigenous people. Jack Patten, the first president of the Aborigines Progressive Association, inaugurated a day of mourning at the Australian Hall on Elizabeth Street in Sydney on Australia Day, 1938:
On this day the white people are rejoicing, but we, as Aborigines, have no reason to rejoice on Australia’s 150th birthday . . . this land belonged to our forefathers . . . give us the chance! We do not wish to be left behind in Australia’s march to progress . . . we do not wish to be herded like cattle.
Charles Perkins, Gary Foley, Chicka Dixon, Marcia Langton, Jackie Huggins, Noel Pearson, Michael Mansell and so many others have demanded to be heard in a country that for so long did not want to listen. They have argued for the recognition of Indigenous rights, of title to land and the need for self-determination. Far from being Martin Luther King, I stood on the shoulders of generations of giants.
Nevertheless, I have lived these past years with the weight of those words. My speech seemingly became all things to all people. Many Indigenous people felt that in telling my family’s story, I had told their own. Other Australians seized on my belief that we are better than our worst. To some I may have let white people off the hook; too readily absolved them of their sins. Yet I believe it is possible to speak to a country’s shame and still hav
e love for that country. I can no more deny the greatness of Australia as a peaceful, cohesive, prosperous society than my fellow countrymen and women can deny the legacy of neglect and bigotry and injustice that traps so many Indigenous brothers and sisters still.
Those words have sent me on a journey into my country’s past, into the history of my family and what has put me here – although in truth I have been on this journey my entire life, always looking out, always wondering, who am I? Why am I here, now at this time in this place? I have always felt hemmed in somehow; searching for a freedom in other places yet always dragging my history along with me. Because that is it, it is history that I have sought escape from.
This is what happens when you are told you are doomed, that your existence – who you are – must be erased. It is what leads a young boy to scrub his skin red raw to remove the stain of colour. I was not good enough, that was what I was told over and over again. Why wouldn’t I believe it? And the escape was so easy; just run, deny it all. And I have run far, to more than seventy countries. But always it was there; always lurking in the background; this question of where I belonged. Could I find a home in the only true home I could ever have?
That speech – not even ten minutes out of a lifetime – changed everything. I said more than I realised. Here was my home, somewhere between invasion and settlement, between terra nullius and Mabo, between Federation and the Tent Embassy. Here was the truth, for me at least. I was not one thing or another, I could not claim to be black and not white; being Aboriginal – Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi – did not mean I was not also Australian.
There are those who seek certainty; who divide the world up and take sides. I don’t trust certainty; I know that in certainty, ignorance and deceit lie. Give me questions more than answers. Those Indigenous people who crave certainty see in me someone unthreatening, too diplomatic. But if Australians listen to me at all it is because I don’t threaten them. I get that. I know that.
Australia has historically had trouble seeing people like me except in its own image. I am known to Australians. I live and work among them and my face is ambiguous enough to blend in; another dark skin in a rainbow nation. But this is who I am. This is the life I have created. I have moved from the fringes to the centre. I don’t want to live in a country fractured by its history. I want to share in a sense of the possibilities of our nation. But I don’t want to live in a country that shrouds its past in silence. I don’t want to live in a country where the people who share my heritage, whose ancestry connects to the first footprints on our continent, too often live in misery.
To me the most important line in my speech was the last: ‘And one day, I want to stand here and be able to say as proudly and sing as loudly as anyone else in this room, Australians all, let us rejoice.’
*
Now, in 2018, here I was in Hong Kong, on another Australia Day, preparing to give another speech while back home other Indigenous people were marching in anger. I felt like I was at war with myself. How can the souls of my ancestors’ rest when our national day is a day of shame? Should we change the date from 26 January? That has never seemed to me the right question. Instead, we should be asking: Why should Australia Day be moved? What is it about this day? What does it tell us about ourselves? Can we so easily deny a day that forever altered the story of this land?
The British fleet came, and it brought human cargo and a new tradition; it brought democracy; new laws and new ways of seeing the world. It came at the pinnacle of empire. It came with Enlightenment. The view from the ship was of a new land for a new beginning; a colony that would become a nation. For some this land was a prison from which they would never escape but would in time call home. My story begins on that ship.
The view from shore was of strangers. They had come before and then departed. Now they were back; land would be cleared, buildings erected; this time they were here to stay. They spoke a different language, their bodies were fully clothed, they brought the whip and they brought alcohol. Soon would come disease and violence. In a few short years so many of those on the shore would be gone. The population of the local people was ravaged. In time the survivors would take on new names, their skin would become lighter, they would lose their language for English. My story begins on that shore.
The story of Australia begins on that shore, when a people of steam and steel met a people of flint and bone and wood. A people of Enlightenment met a people of Dreaming. They danced, briefly, on that shore. It is a long-overlooked moment of Australian history, but in those first few months they danced hand in hand on the beach, swapping songs under the moonlight. It is a story told by the late historian, Inga Clendinnen, in her book Dancing with Strangers; how these two peoples ‘took each other hand in hand like children at a picnic’. Soon the frontier wars would ignite: the years of killing would begin. Between the dance and the destruction is the Australian dream. It is here I find myself. I live between the dance and the destruction. I live between the ship and the shore. It is here that the dream remains unrealised. In this troubled space we all live our lives.
PART 1
HOME
THE VANISHING PLACE
I know a place where Australia disappears: it vanishes. Yes, the vanishing place; that’s what this is. A place where we go and don’t come back. It scares us, this place. It mocks us. We think we have tamed this country with our cities and our towns; our roads and train tracks. We farm it and fence it. Sometimes, I think all we do is lock ourselves in to keep it out. ‘I love a sunburned country; a land of sweeping plains.’ Do we? Really? We love the idea of it, but the truth is if we get too close it’s as though we can’t breathe; we seem to get our oxygen from each other. We squeeze ourselves into the tightest spaces, and suck in car fumes. That’s what we do in terra nullius – in emptiness – we build things and call them ours. Carl Jung once said, ‘land assimilates its conqueror’; it certainly changes us; in time we become part of it. But here in the vanishing place it is eternity I feel, not belonging. This place reminds me of our impermanence. Two hundred years, 65,000 years: this place was here before us and will remain after. We can call this place home but it remains just out of reach. It is a place of mystery. In the vanishing place I feel as though the land itself takes its revenge; this place has the last laugh.
There is a myth about the outback: beyond here be monsters; if the animals don’t get you the blacks will. Out here you die of thirst. Out here you walk for days to go nowhere.
It is buried deep within us, a myth from the earliest days of the frontier. Out here was danger. Australia? The word itself can’t contain all this place is. This place is older than that. I can kick up the dirt here and let thousands of years settle gently all over me. Australia? What is Australia? A map? Lines marking the separation of states and territories? Is it history? Is it our laws? Is it politics? Do we define ourselves by what we have earned? All of this is how we mark time; that’s how a land becomes a nation: it is in the stories we tell. But not here. It is just this place. It is this dirt, these trees and rocks. It is a song, sung over and over and over until it seeps into the ground.
In this place, there is no sign; no border; no line in the sand. There is nothing here really that tells us from where we have come, or to point to where we may yet go. In this place there is stillness and silence and forever: forever existing now as it always has.
The stars above me are the stars that have always been here, in a place where time collapses. What was dead is alive: stars long faded whose light lives on, moving through time to brighten my sky. The stars are like the people of this place. They are people long gone, who have left their footprint, whose energy is alive here and now. I can stub my toe on ten thousand years here. A sharpened stone, a piece of charcoal, tell me that this was a living place. It is a living place.
It was a place of story and lore. It was where people fished and hunted and shared the warmth of a campfire. It was where traditions were passed on and over time a collection of people becam
e a culture and society. Our new country, our cities and towns, circle places like this. Just an hour’s drive away is a thriving country centre: cinemas and pubs and schools and shops. But here it all falls away. There is nothing to break the flow of people and place.
Nothing. There is nothing here that divides then and now. The measure of time feels futile. The ticking of my watch can mark off the seconds in a day. But what does that matter when the days here bleed seamlessly into each other? Time is a trick. It fools us. There is no time, just what we make of it. I have spoken to the physicist, Carlo Rovelli, about this. Time is a lie, he says, just like the flat earth. There is memory, there is no past. Time passes differently depending on where we are: the higher we are the more quickly does time pass. In a laboratory we can see life at its tiniest: we can see the universe at its most pure and see that it makes no sense. The world of quantum physics is the world of weird science, where things coexist and by mere observation change their shape and nature. At its purest, there is chaos.
Perhaps that’s what makes me dizzy here. It is science, it is time, it is memory; there is something in my DNA, something old and something very new that unnerves me. All around me there is openness, not even a fence to hem the horizon. My mind and heartbeat are racing to a rhythm set by the city. Yesterday, I was on a crowded train platform then a plane to bring me here. Now, it seems I have lost my balance: I walk around and around trying to find just the right pace, but I can’t settle.
I am here with people who share my own blood. Our family connects us to this place. This is Barkandji, Ngiyampaa and Mutthi Mutthi ancestral country; but it cuts across Wiradjuri country too. My great-grandfather spoke all of these languages; his family was scattered among these other peoples. People for whom we struggle to find words: clan, tribe, nation. None of this fits, just like Australia doesn’t fit comfortably within Australia: the Australian story has often been about erasure, about disappearance. And so we mark the ground to give us certainty; state boundaries tell us who we are. Now I am in New South Wales, close to the Victorian border. But I am a world away, lost in the murmur of ancient languages and the embers of old fires and water that no longer flows.