Australia Day

by Stan Grant

  If I am connected here in some way, I am also a stranger. That’s what unnerves me the most. I know Australia: Australia the nation, the people. As much as I may sometimes bristle against it, I have some grasp on what it is all the same. But here? There’s a thought that doesn’t leave me: what is it to belong? Why is it we talk of ownership? I ask one of my cousins: who can say who owns this? I wonder, if the prime minister, leader of this country, was here, what could he point to and say: I rule that. He holds power because a measure of us have put him there and when we take it away he will be stripped bare, just another one of us. But here, there is another power: it isn’t the power of nations, it is the power of place.

  We have a name for this place, we call it Lake Mungo. Strange, because it ceased to be anything we would recognise as a lake many thousands of years ago. Now, it looks like the surface of the moon: dry and cracked. Life that was here remains buried and fossilised. This is a place of old ceremonies; old rituals; old fires and stories.

  There are old bones here, the oldest bones on this continent. Mungo Man, we call him: 42,000 years old, his bones found resting just below the surface in 1974. A rainstorm loosened the earth and there he was. Who knows what else waits to be found in the parched lakebed.

  Bones and stones, that’s what the old man I am out here with says; bones and stones, that’s what people come looking for. He reckons Mungo Man came back to tell us about himself and his people. Mungo Man has been studied and written about, kept for decades in a box in a drawer in a museum, finally returned to his home in 2018. What he has told us has helped connect another link in the chain of human migration that spread from Africa more than a hundred thousand years ago. All of us, set adrift on an open sea on an endless journey to find each other.

  There’s a dead tree in the distance and a stark, dry branch pokes out at just the right angle. This was once a high-water mark, where I am standing now would have been the shoreline. There are old discarded implements everywhere – stone tools – jagged, sharp rocks honed to a fine point. They would have been used to slit open and scale fresh fish. There are ancient middens and petrified charcoal from long-extinguished fires and all of it just here, all around me – no past, just now – all of it, me and Mungo, here now. I walk over to the tree and nestle into the branch. It is just my size, I can stretch along its length and my head rests where the branch meets the trunk and there I fall asleep: the sleep of tens of thousands of years.

  It has that effect, the old man says. He’s brought people here before. They cry sometimes, he says; they lie on the ground or sit in the dirt. It is like they want to get as close as they can; to feel it, as though it will tell them something. The old man says, there’s too much talk about bones and stones; this is a living place.

  Lake Mungo is one of the scary places: the places we – Australians – don’t go. These are the places where we disappear. Here, we enter terra nullius, described by academic Elspeth Tilley in her book White Vanishing, as the ‘disruptive, disturbing, chaotic, uncanny space’. This is fixed in our memory; we tell stories of this: nothing, it seems, rattles us more than those who vanish. I am drawn to something writer Beth Spencer once said, that the Beaumont children, Harold Holt, Azaria Chamberlain, and on and on, inhabit ‘this Other space in Australian memory’. There’s a suspicion among us that they strayed too far ‘off the cultural map and disappeared into thin air’.

  This disturbs me too. I feel as though here I too could disappear. It isn’t supposed to be like this; I am meant to embrace it all, to reconnect to some severed part of me. Here I am meant to become whole; to be at one with my ancestors. The old man has started to bring boys here to be initiated; put through the law, cut and marked as men. This is renewal: a people reclaiming culture and practice that had long ago ceased. I understand that need to reconnect. I need it too; but there’s a thought I can’t shake: have I come here looking for certainty, for authenticity or purity? Being Aboriginal is not something I can perform and I cannot pretend that I have an unbroken connection to a deep spiritual past. Being here is like entering what Celtic mythology calls the ‘otherworld’; it is a space in-between; the space that makes me who I am.

  Out here, in this vanishing place, I know what unbalances me: I am an Australian.

  *

  Watching the documentary Palace of Memories on ABC television one night, I was drawn into an eerie world of loss and memory; a world familiar and yet strange. A world vanished, but not gone. I thought again of Carl Jung and how he saw enduring power in energy: ‘energy never vanishes . . . [it] does not cease to exist when it disappears from consciousness’.

  In 2016, Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones recreated a part of Australia lost, and reclaimed it as sacred space. He reimagined this world back into being. He reinterpreted the past as he reassembled it and he gave us a new way of seeing the possibilities of reconciliation. He called it barrangal dyara (skin and bones), a vast work of sculpture that stretched across 20,000 square metres of the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney. This has been described as a work of ‘immense loss’, a lament for the destruction of culture. But it was more than that; it was a work of healing and survival.

  This was a synthesis of white and black, and it spoke to the futility of trying to dominate a place when our presence can so easily be erased. This wasn’t simply Indigenous space, Jones opened a tear in our universe that would allow us all to find new meaning in what it is to belong.

  Palace of Memories followed Jones as he exhumed what was once a nineteenth-century palace on the shore of Sydney Harbour. I had no idea it had even existed. It seemed so incongruous; just a century earlier this was a place undisturbed. But in the early 1880s this palace dominated all around it. Nature yielded to this new enormous man-made presence. It grew out of a need of a people, just a few generations old on this land, to claim ownership; to boast of conquest. Henry Parkes, who would become the Father of Federation, commissioned it. The ‘Garden Palace’ would announce this new nation to the world.

  I went in search of this place and found a newspaper article, ‘The Most Beautiful Building You’ve Never Heard Of’. It was modelled on London’s Crystal Palace and was built in 1879 for the Sydney International Exhibition. It was designed by colonial architect, James Barnet, and was said to be the length of two football fields. Searching out images of it, I was stunned. It was breathtaking, redolent of the great buildings of Europe. The Sydney Morning Herald at the time said it reminded one ‘of the fabled palace of Aladdin in the Arabian Nights’. At its centre was a dome, 65 metres high. Two thousand men had worked day and night over eight months to complete it.

  The exhibition was a showcase of this country to the world. It celebrated Australia’s burgeoning exports of wool, wheat and gold. There were pieces of machinery and the finest porcelain. The exhibition opened to a song specially composed for the occasion, with the refrain, ‘How Like England We Can Be?’ But this exhibition also connected people to a much older history. It displayed the artefacts of the First People, so many of whom by now had been scattered from the shores of Sydney. There were weapons and shields: a reminder that people had lived here, had traded and fought here well before Europeans arrived.

  Then, just three years later, at dawn on a September day in 1882, it burned to the ground. Flames roared so high into the sky and the heat was so intense that windows cracked in nearby streets. Thousands of people lined the streets to stand and watch. The Evening News reported: ‘Many were lamenting and regretting the inevitable destruction of what had given so much pleasure to them, and had carried the name and doings of the people of this country into the Empires and most distant countries.’

  White and black Australians were joined in this destruction. Everything can be lost, so easily. The fire was a reminder that nothing lasts and all can be taken away. But what is left? Jonathan Jones used thousands of bleached white shields to symbolise the rubble of the palace and the bones of Aboriginal people who had perished – been destroyed – that this nation
could be born. Jones reconstructed the site using the shields to mark the boundaries, covering the spaces with coarse Kangaroo grass that grows in dense tufts, and he filled the silence with Indigenous languages presumed to be lost. Jones asked the question: If a nation can so easily erase such a building from its memory, what else can it forget? He explored how we live with absence and how it informs us anyway. The absent really isn’t absent at all. The artist drew on the power of land and our place in it – all of us. This was history – ours, black and white – now given new meaning: an Australian story; a story of how the past is always with us and how we live with our loss.

  Jonathan Jones says the ‘rise and demise of the Garden Palace was part of the whole nation’s identity at the time’, and that by recreating the Palace he was providing ‘a highway to nationhood’. He was reminding us that possession is fleeting and that place is all that remains. Jones provided a window into the missing piece of our national narrative. It wasn’t a story of politics, it was deeper than that. What was it the Scottish politician and writer Andrew Fletcher said? ‘If I could write all the songs, I would not care who wrote the laws.’ Jonathan Jones doesn’t seem to care for politics, his is a song for a country.

  He is a gentle soul, Jonathan. Like me he draws his heritage from the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi peoples. But, like me, he is also from the other side of the frontier. Like me, he is as white as he is black. I am sure that to look at him, most people would be oblivious to his heritage. He is not someone we would see as recognisably black. But what is that anyway? White, black: they are words, categories, that cannot possibly hold us.

  Jonathan has grown close to my father; he has learned the Wiradjuri language from Dad. My father helped revive the language of his forebears, a language that was fast being lost. I remember something he said once: language doesn’t tell you who you are, but where you are. Language is place. That is Jonathan’s journey, to breathe in this place, to speak it and return it to us all. Indigenous people have many leaders who seek meaningful political change, but the artist reminds us that first we need also a story that binds us all to this land.

  Australian writers, film-makers and artists have long grappled with this sense of place. The European presence here is fundamentally haunted by the act of invasion and dispossession. It is unsettled by the myth of terra nullius, a legal fiction (later overturned by the High Court Mabo ruling) that this was an empty land free for the taking.

  Australian scholar David Tacey sees our nation as immature, inauthentic, although ‘the land itself is ancient and powerful’. ‘This spirit of place,’ he writes, ‘is not mystical, it is social and geo-political.’ He points to the film Picnic at Hanging Rock – a story of vanishing into land – as creating a ‘grinding tension between the colonial overlay of society and the unconscious substratum of ancient and denied realities’.

  Picnic at Hanging Rock and Palace of Memories are each a meditation on what scholars Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs have dubbed ‘Uncanny Australia’. In the book of the same name, published in the late 1990s, they posed questions about how ‘Aboriginal sacredness manifests itself in the public domain of the modern nation’.

  They saw Australia as ‘unsettled’, disturbed by the recognition of the ‘Aboriginal sacred’. The acknowledgment of native title after the Mabo decision raised questions about ‘who is marginal – who is empowered enough to claim to represent the nation, and who feels as if the nation has disdained them’.

  Gelder and Jacobs noted the unease of pastoralists and miners who, in a reversal of fortune, suddenly felt themselves dispossessed and embattled. Even the majorities, they wrote, could ‘feel that they are precariously placed’.

  ‘Home’ was turned upside down, into ‘something else, something less familiar and less settled’. This is the essence of the uncanny, a concept drawn from Freud, meaning ‘to be at the same time in place and out of place’.

  This is what Jonathan Jones sought to capture in his art. A building once designed to showcase Australia to the world, to capture within it Indigenous objects and thus Indigenous people, burned to the ground and forgotten, and into this space the possibility of imagining ourselves again – of rethinking our spirit of place. Jones was inviting us all to ponder how our stories connect, the ancient and the new.

  In the documentary we are told Jones is an artist who refuses categorisation. Yes, Indigenous, but also through his work questioning and redefining what that is and inviting all people on this land to imagine a deep sense of belonging.

  This doesn’t mean we all become Indigenous or that we become more homogeneous but we can dwell in this ‘uncanny’. We can as psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva says discover our ‘incoherences and abysses’ to come to terms with the ‘stranger in ourselves’.

  The stranger in ourselves.

  That’s what I was coming to terms with at Lake Mungo; it is what has drawn me to the work of Jonathan Jones: not my Aboriginal ancestry or my European heritage, something else, something more elusive that can’t easily be measured in DNA. It is that part of me where black and white meet and how what has happened here between us, has happened on this land. This is our home: unsettled and uncanny.

  THE STORY OF US

  I was about fifteen when I saw the film Picnic at Hanging Rock. My aunt – my dad’s sister – took me to the cinema in Griffith. I could probably have counted on one hand how many times I had been to a movie; there was never any money spare for luxuries like this. I don’t know why she took me and I don’t know why to this film. But it was a rare treat, Jaffas and all. Beyond that was the film itself, and how it reached inside me and left me pondering questions that I have spent a lifetime trying to answer.

  It was the music that grabbed me first, those pan pipes eerily floating over that parched Australian landscape. The film seeped into my consciousness. It was as much a dream as a film; it unnerved me. I didn’t make the connection at the time – not intellectually at least – but I was left feeling as if the world itself had turned. This was about who we are as Australians; who we are in a place that is profoundly unsettled.

  I can see now what I could not see then: this is a dreaming story – not white, not black – it is a dreaming for an Australia still becoming. This is a story of initiation: a profound rite of passage. It is a haunting meditation on place, with the vanishing girls seemingly swallowed by the land itself. Remember the voice over of one of the doomed girls: ‘What we see and what we seem are but a dream . . . a dream within a dream.’

  The girls, when they disappeared, became part of the rock itself. There is something deeply Hegelian about it all. How strange that the dreaming in an ancient land could connect with a nineteenth-century German philosopher. But Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel spoke of becoming: he spoke of man ‘not being at home in the world’. Picnic at Hanging Rock has always struck me as a film about what Hegel would have seen as our inevitable process of change. Hegel believed in a three-stage process, what he called a dialectic, in which we move from thesis to antithesis to synthesis: an unceasing quest for freedom and recognition. This, he believed, was the engine of history; a quest for an absolute spirit. And that’s how I see Picnic at Hanging Rock: the thesis of Britishness set against the antithesis of terra nullius – an empty land for the taking. Those who emerge from the disappearance of the girls are forever changed: the synthesis of a new people in a new place.

  Peter Weir’s film, perhaps even more than Joan Lindsay’s novel, revealed the incongruity of imposed Britishness on a harsh, hot, foreboding place: Europeans trying to tame an untameable country. Weir’s camera focuses on an army of ants, or dwells on the light peering through the branches of a tree. He allows the wind and birdsong to punctuate the silence. In this way he grapples with the themes of alienation and belonging.

  The Indigenous presence is felt more than seen: the land itself represented as blackness.

  This is what shook me at Lake Mungo, that ancient place of old bones; it is what haunts me when I go back home
and stand by the Murrumbidgee River, gazing at the stars. It is emptiness and being all at once. It is terra nullius and my deep need to fill the unfilled space. This is Freud’s uncanny: when home suddenly becomes very strange.

  It is a strangeness that lies out of the reach of science. I like to think that I am a man of reason; I prefer to put my faith in what I can test and see, what I can measure. But there are things beyond our grasp. Science can tell us what is, but it can’t tell us what we feel. As Freud spoke of the uncanny, his one-time friend and later rival, Carl Jung, looked to the metaphysical. To Jung we had become cut off from nature. In turn we have become cut off from each other.

  In film and literature and poetry and art we reach for those deeper connections. We want to know we are not alone. But the things we do to each other on this earth keep us that far apart. Story: it is the essence of being.

  The British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie once said of the importance of stories: ‘Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts.’

  As our world spins around us, consumed as we are by political upheaval, economic uncertainty, terrorism and war, I have wondered about this thing: story and its importance. What is this great story of us? What captures this thing of life? This transcendence; this beauty and terror; this hope and despair; this fleeting performance measured in minutes before the curtain falls and we fade into the black and others mount the stage.