Australia Day

by Stan Grant

  In a world

  full of

  temporary things you are

  a perpetual feeling

  The Indian poet Sanober Khan speaks of our need to find solace in nostalgia; to create the everlasting from fleeting moments. She says, ‘the magic fades too fast . . . but nothing remains . . . nothing lasts.’

  I contemplate that now as I think of us: people from all points tossed together here on this island to become a people, a country: a nation. Nothing remains . . . nothing lasts. Yet, despite this impermanence, we struggle as human beings to make sense of ourselves and our place on this earth. When all passes, all too soon, what is left is the fact of our humanity and how we embraced it; the time we had and how it was spent. Each age asks much of us: we have been tested by war, and horror unimaginable except that our imaginations are what gave rise to it; we have endured disaster, collapse, tyranny, poverty, and above it all we endure. As Sanober Khan tells us, we ‘create the everlasting from fleeting moments’.

  The greatest story of us? For me it isn’t written or spoken; for me it is a painting on a ceiling in a world far from my own. My epiphany came in the Sistine Chapel. There, in a throng of tourists crammed into the Vatican, I gazed at our eternal struggle. Michelangelo laboured four years to produce this, his depiction of Genesis. Here is the outstretched hand of Adam, reaching for the hand of God. They extend but they do not touch. Between them is all of us: all we want to be; all we fail to be; all our ambiguity. Between them is the very spark of life – not in the fact of existence but the act of striving.

  It is twenty years since I gazed on Michelangelo’s masterpiece, and I have never ceased pondering that distance – what is it that separates us, even as we reach for each other? To me it has always seemed that we live in that small, empty space, reaching for that connection, between the certainty of ourselves and the possibilities of togetherness. How do we fill that space? We fill it with history, identity, hate, myth, longing, love, resentment, memory. We reach for each other and yet we don’t touch. Hegel would see it as the struggle for our freedom – that space, the essence of our being and non-being.

  I glimpse that in Michelangelo’s Adam and God – a vision of endless possibility. World history, wrote Hegel, is the ‘interpretation of spirit in time’. The Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz wondered about this journey of time and people, this quest of the spirit. In his poem ‘The Spirit of History’, from A Treatise of Poetry, he writes:

  Amid thunder, the golden house of is

  Collapses, and the word becoming ascends.

  He sees a world beyond certainty, and ahead, possibility and change: inevitable, unrelenting change. As Milosz writes:

  You without beginning, you always between . . .

  Always between . . . that is me. For much of my life I saw that as an uncomfortable place to be; a place without rest. Without certainty. But I have no need of certainty now. In that space of becoming and between is a world of possibility. It is a world where I can write my story free of the constraints that others may put upon me. I can live here with the unresolved, the irreconcilable. The world need not make sense, any more sense than the crazy mix of DNA that makes me who I am. This is me, all of it; all of that contradiction mocks the idea of permanent, essential, unchanging identity.

  I have come to be suspicious of that word, identity. It is true that we all seek identity: which communities we belong to; which football club we follow; what music we like; how we dress; where we live; religion; race; culture. All of this gives us a sense of who we are, somewhere to belong. But there is a darker side to identity, a stifling conformity; an us and them; identity that pits us against each other. It keeps returning me to that question: am I Australian? Am I Aboriginal? Can those things be the same?

  I am an Australian – yet my history tells me that my sense of citizenship and belonging is fragile and fraught. I belong to a nation; I belong to family and a people and yet I am an individual free to determine for myself who and what I wish to be. Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanaian-British philosopher who has spent a lifetime exploring the vexed questions of identity. Like me he has walked the line between race and history, in much of his writing I hear my own thoughts. He once wrote ‘the shaping of my life is up to me’.

  But how do I do that? I am an individual – I value that fiercely. John Stuart Mill said the value of the individual is the cornerstone of liberty – only people who are free can fully command their lives. As Mill once wrote, ‘He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.’ Yet the freedom to choose was taken from me when Australia had already settled on what I was: black, a half-caste, an outcast; I was not born into Australia. My identity was already determined and I have spent a lifetime working my way free.

  Appiah says identities make ethical claims – we live our lives as gay or straight or male or female, black or white (sometimes those categories themselves are blurred) – less certain. Appiah asks, do identities curb our autonomy or provide its contours? To be Aboriginal must I reject Australia? To be Australian must I put aside history? Must I forget? History and justice, these are ideas that in the past years I have returned to again and again.

  This is not my story alone, it is the story of Australia. It is what our great storytellers have wrestled with; how can we belong in a place so foreign, so strange? When a nation is founded in a great injustice – and a great injustice it remains, taking someone else’s country – how do we find rest? How do we find peace? The Australian novelist Eleanor Dark captures that impermanence in her great trilogy ‘The Timeless Land’. She explores the birth pains of modern Australia, and the upheaval for the First Peoples. She begins by imagining the moment of the coming of the whites. The boy Bennilong [sic] has come to the shore with his father. Only six years old, he is expected to act as a man.

  He was conscious of the world, and conscious of himself as a part of it, fitting into it, belonging to it, drawing strength and joy and existence from it, like a bee in the frothing yellow opulence of the wattle.

  Dark imagines a blue cloudless sky, the sea a ‘silver line’, the surf breaking on the rocks. Bennilong was tired but his father did not notice; he kept his eyes peeled for the ‘boat with wings’. He had been looking year after year, after that strange morning when a ‘magic boat had flown into their harbour’. It had ‘folded its wings like a seagull’ and come to rest. From the boat came ‘mysterious beings with faces pale as bones’. Bennilong had been told this story in corroboree: how these strangers came, and left just as suddenly.

  It was long ago and for most people the memory of the ‘magic boat’ had faded, but Bennilong’s father kept the story alive in his son, and so they came to stand on the rock and watch and wait for the white faces’ eventual return. So vivid is Dark’s recreation that I feel as though I am the young boy himself, standing with his father, his head filled with old stories and imagining, dreaming and becoming.

  Bennilong stared at it. The unending water. He looked up at his father’s lean figure, still motionless, still watching for the boat with wings, and there was born in him a conviction which all through his boyhood was to tease him now and then – that the water was not really unending after all; that somewhere, far, far away there lay another land; that someday he, Bennilong, not in a bark canoe but in a boat with wings, would go in search of it.

  I don’t think any writer has captured more eloquently or deeply the essence of becoming Australian than Eleanor Dark. I say becoming because that’s what she imagined, not endings but something new – beginnings. She was a writer who embraced uncertainty. When I read her I don’t read a white story or a black story but a story of place; it is a timeless land not a timeless people she seeks. Dark is telling us that if we are to call this place home, then we must make our peace with the land itself. Her trilogy deals with the birth of this new nation; how two peoples so different, separated by skin and language and culture – yet for all that intensely, recognisably human – meet and find ea
ch other. In her books, the First Peoples are alive, they lose the stilted quality, the remoteness and distance of so much historical writing.

  Too often in our history Indigenous people are people being done unto, not doing. They are curiosities or a conundrum. Of course for much of our history, the story of what happened here was silenced. Aboriginal people melted from the frontier. Even in later histories that looked to revise our nation’s story, Aboriginal people were depicted as victims, at the mercy of the brutality of settlers. But they were doing things, they were working and trading and having children, often with the newcomers. They were reading the Bible and they were surviving. Eleanor Dark captures the inner lives of two peoples – white and black – on the most remote corner of the world: this timeless land.

  Land. It is land that holds them, that shapes them. The first book in the trilogy, also named The Timeless Land, traces the lives of Bennilong, his wife Barangaroo, the first governor, Arthur Phillip, and the runaway convict, Prentice. She pictures Phillip, lying awake at night, ‘his light still burning by his bedside, his tired mind wrestling with a thousand cares’. He felt ‘the utter strangeness of this land in which he found himself, and he remembered the name given to it by earlier explorers, and he said under his breath, looking at the gaunt still branches of a gum-tree outlined against the sky: “Terra Australis Incognita”.’ Dark’s Phillip ‘felt a power which was even stronger than the power of his race, an influence of the land itself – the strange land, the terra incognita.’

  The entire book is a meditation on place. Each character struggles with their sense of self, when all certainty has been removed. For Prentice, this country represents a chance at freedom, to slip his chains and escape. He leaves the camp and strikes out for the distant mountains, that no one thought could be crossed. He is changed by the country. He meets an Aboriginal woman, together they have a child. It is not a loving relationship, he is too brutal and brutalised, but it is so human. Their child is a new type of Australian, something becoming: a synthesis. Prentice is gripped with fear by this place, the only home he will now ever know. Dark writes:

  It was as if this land, whose silence had always baffled him, had become articulate at last . . . The land had taken him, used him, fashioned new life from him; his blood and his breath, were now, even when he died, a part of it forever.

  As Phillip prepared to leave for England, his job here done, Dark depicts him as a ghost. England, his home, felt more than distant: it felt unreal. It was as if it had never existed. He no longer shared its stars or its seasons. This land, he said wearily, ‘would settle in its own time’. Dark has Phillip pondering again the harshness of this country and the fate of those who would now never return to England:

  How long would it be, he asked himself wonderingly, before the people of his race could know it as their own? As aliens they had come to it, and as aliens they would die in it. Would it admit their children? Or their children’s children?

  Why am I so captivated by Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land? For the same reason that Inga Clendinnen’s metaphor of dancing on the beach speaks so powerfully to me. It is the possibility of the space between us. Many have written of the white experience or the black, as if that is all we are and all we will ever be, when in fact we were changing; changed by this land and by each other. I am reminded of something the Australian poet Robert Wood has said, that we must find our own dead. It is as if my voice can only be the voice of all of my ancestors.

  A generation after Eleanor Dark, another Australian writer, Thomas Keneally, in his book The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, imagines a scene long after the whites have come. For Keneally’s Jimmie Blacksmith, the golden house of is indeed has collapsed, and Blacksmith emerges as a new type of being, a creation possible only here. The bone-pale face of the white stranger has darkened, and the curly hair of Dark’s Bennilong has straightened. This is the Australian synthesis: Blacksmith born of black and white – from ancient and new – Australian in a way that no other can be.

  As Keneally writes, half-breed Jimmie had resulted from a visit some white man made to Brentwood blacks’ camp in 1878.

  Keneally’s Blacksmith was based on a historical figure, Jimmy Governor. The real Jimmy was a mixed-race Wiradjuri man who, like his fictional equivalent, married a white woman and searched for a place in this new country, on the eve of Federation. Governor found instead derision and rejection, his wife endured humiliation, and Jimmy – aided by his brother and an uncle – responded with a violent rampage that ended with nine people dead and sparked the biggest manhunt in Australian history.

  Keneally sees his Jimmie as the man between, finding a place in neither the white nor black world. He is a potent symbol of a country in transition; what has been and what is to come. In one scene Keneally depicts two office clerks debating Federation as Jimmie looks on, awaiting an instructional pamphlet on what wood to use for fencing. The clerks fall into a discussion about the American Civil War.

  ‘It’d never happen here. Could yer imagine Australians shooting at Australians?’

  ‘. . . And you seem to forget, my friend, that there’s no such thing as an Australian . . .’

  They eventually notice Jimmie.

  ‘Jacko?’ he called. ‘He’s an honest poor bastard but he’s nearly extinct.’

  ‘And, surprisingly, that is the work of those you so fancifully call Australians.’

  Keneally grapples with this emerging nation, a people in a process of ‘becoming’. His Jimmie Blacksmith is as much a part of this transformation as the two arguing clerks. Rejected, he massacres the Australians who would tell him he was not one of them. However this nation was founded, whatever the injustice and brutality of British settlement, Jimmie is tied inexorably to its fate even as he is mocked, excluded and doomed. Even as he so violently rejects it.

  In film and art and song and literature we have sought to make sense of what it is to be this thing called an Australian. Eleanor Dark, Tom Keneally and Peter Weir: they have tried to tell the story of us – of our place. They set us in an ancient continuum ruptured by a cataclysmic clash of culture and civilisation. Out of destruction we are born anew: uncertain perhaps of our place, but with no other place to call our own. Whiteness must struggle with its blackness; it is in the land itself, it is in the memory of the people displaced. And it is there in our blood: hidden blackness, or blackness denied.

  Those of us who identify as Indigenous, as First Peoples, we too grapple with our whiteness. It is there in our skin; no longer black but lighter now. Sometimes, we are indistinguishable from any other white person. For us it is about fashioning or refashioning what it is to belong, when the very essence of belonging has been ruptured and the certainty of heritage blurred. Jimmy Governor (Jimmie Blacksmith) is part white, married white and yet is rejected for being black. What it is to be Indigenous has become a puzzle not easily explained, nor simple to comprehend. These are questions I am left to ponder as well.

  The young Indigenous writer Ellen van Neerven, in her book of short stories, Heat and Light – a dazzling collection that crunches genre and gender, where plants speak as people and the past and future collide – grapples with ambiguity and the fluidity of identity and belonging. Van Neerven is of Aboriginal and Dutch heritage, and many of these stories are tales of living in-between.

  ‘So much is in what we make of things,’ she writes. ‘The stories we construct about our place in our families are essential to our lives.’ In the story of a girl looking for herself in the image of a grandmother she never knew, van Neerven writes, ‘If I didn’t know my grandmother, then how could I know myself?’

  These storytellers I have been drawn to – these Australian storytellers – they are not Indigenous or non-Indigenous, they are not black or white; that’s not how I see them. To me they are a connection, an unbroken tradition that begins when humans first speak and carve drawings on a cave wall. There are writers who cannot get past politics; who use words to settle scores. But politic
s favours certainty and we don’t live our lives in straight lines. Politics needs an enemy, but for me at least, the ‘enemy’ lives in me.

  Storytellers work with and against history. In history we find difference and conflict, yet the storyteller must find us in each other. As Robert Wood says, ‘I is one of the most misleading words’ in our language, it ‘means you to so some degree because it is in Others that we see ourselves’. Wood is someone who could be identified as ‘mixed race’, his mother’s family from Asia, but as he says he has ‘passed as a white man for most of my life’. In his poetry he looks beyond the clichés of identity, ‘there has always been a little bit of curry in Scotland, always a little bit of whiskey in Kerala . . . We are in one world still, even if we code switch at will.’

  Wood, like myself, eschews certainty for ambiguity. It is that space – that elusive but luring in-between – the ship and the shore – that entices him as it entices me. Nothing stands still. ‘Historically, Australia is a colony,’ he writes, ‘but the sands are shifting.’ In those shifting sands we find loss, emptiness, place, home; we find each other.

  The French historian Michel de Certeau says we live with a history of absence. We use stories to fill the void. What we call history he saw as a collection of artefacts we assemble to try to make sense of ourselves. Here is the crux of recognition, constructed out of a past reimagined, history written and history denied. As a nation, we struggle to reconcile ourselves to our past and our place. Always there is story.

  The story of Australia speaks to us from the dry shores of Lake Mungo. Forty thousand years ago, the waters were full, sustaining a thriving community. Here a man was laid to rest with full ceremony, his body smeared in ochre. In all of humanity this was rare, among the earliest examples of such ritual. The mourners sang a song in language now lost.

  As modern Australia celebrated its birth at Federation in 1901, the historical inspiration for Jimmie Blacksmith, the real Jimmy Governor, sat in a Darlinghurst jail cell, alternating between singing songs in his traditional Wiradjuri language and reading the Bible – the synthesis of the old and new worlds that collided here so violently, given form in a man soon for the gallows. It is a synthesis Keneally saw as contradiction; and yet it is the essence of being Australian.