by Stan Grant
What a chain of events Otho Gherardini started when he set out from Florence. His descendants would sit with kings and eventually be clapped in chains and sent in a convict ship to a penal colony in New South Wales, on a continent where people had lived for tens of thousands of years. A branch of the Fitzgerald family would find themselves in America and marry into a family named Kennedy. John Fitzgerald Kennedy would sit in the White House as the thirty-fifth president of the United States. The Gherardinis are still a prominent family in Florence, and an Italian newspaper has written of the links between the Gherardini and Kennedy families. Myth, legend, secrets, names lost and changed, how much is truth? Such is the mystery of any family. What is undeniable is that none of us is from one place; our families’ arteries are infused with the blood of countless and varied ancestors. The golden house of is collapses, and the word becoming ascends.
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Why do we imagine that Indigenous people are somehow static, unchanging? Why does the arrival of the British signify an end to something and not a new beginning? It is remarkable that a people who had lived and adapted to the harshest, driest land on earth for countless thousands of generations would be thought to perish at the mere touch of modernity. It is clear from my own family that in fewer than fifty years we were transformed. We had new names, we read the Bible and spoke English. We were fishermen and farmers. Yet, by the twentieth century, a new generation of scholars studying Indigenous communities fixed a narrative that we were hapless victims of European expansion. We were a relic, a lost world of ‘noble savages’: a people for whom there was no more dreaming.
W.E.H. Stanner, the Australian anthropologist, was a remarkable man and writer who studied Aboriginal society up close and despaired at what he saw as its destruction. Stanner, in the 1960s, wondered where this ancient culture would sit in a world marked more by the trade of currency than ancient ceremony. Stanner believed that Aboriginal culture sat uncomfortably with Western notions of economy:
. . . The Dreaming and The Market are mutually exclusive. What is the Market? In its most general sense it is a variable locus in space and time at which values – the values of anything – are redetermined as human needs make themselves felt from time to time. The Dreaming is a set of doctrines about values – the value of everything – which were determined once and for all in the past.
Stanner conceived of the Dreaming as ‘an heroic time of the indefinitely remote past’. He coined the analogism ‘everywhen’ – something so old as to be timeless. He wrote, it ‘has for them an unchallengeable sacred authority’. Determined once and for all? Unchallengeable authority? How is this any different from the stifling papal doctrine of fifteenth-century Europe that led eventually to the Reformation, the Thirty Years War and the creation of a new political order? How is Indigenous society somehow immune from the great philosophical revolution of the Enlightenment, which rejected superstition for reason and science? Were Aboriginal people forever fixed in this ‘everywhen’, condemned to perish as the world turned around them?
Stanner explores this clash of cultures – dreaming and market – in his captivating essay ‘Durmugam: A Nangiomeri’. It traces Stanner’s encounters with a man – Durmugam – from Daly River in the Northern Territory. The anthropologist meets him ‘one wintry afternoon in 1932’. Durmugam is painted with earth pigment and brandishing weapons for a large-scale fight. ‘The struggle could be seen to resolve itself into discontinuous phases of duels . . . my eyes were drawn and held by an Aboriginal of striking physique and superb carriage.’ The Europeans called Durmugam ‘Smiler,’ an ironic nickname for a man widely feared and believed to be ‘the most murderous black in the region’.
Stanner’s essay spans the course of Durmugam’s life and laments the decline of both the once-proud warrior and the traditions and beliefs that nurtured and sustained him. ‘The High Culture had not prospered; many of the young men openly derided the secret life.’ What Stanner observed was the transformation and decay that had begun after penetration of the region by foreigners in the 1870s. Aboriginal people had become ‘more familiar with Europeans and more dependent on their goods’. He describes how the people began to ‘wander elsewhere to look for new goods and excitement’. They developed a taste for European goods: tobacco, sugar, tea. Stanner describes their fascination with houses, vehicles and firearms.
The Nangiomeri were a people in transition, their numbers depleted, ravaged by disease, frontier violence and grog. Stanner describes survivors regrouping, separate clans forming new affiliations, old borders dissolving: ‘some of the small tribes . . . had ceased to exist’. Stanner describes them as migrants, like migrants everywhere propelled by upheaval into an uncertain future. Durmugam worked in mining, construction, and cutting sleepers for the new rail lines. He clung to his traditions even as he blended into this new economy.
To Stanner this was devastating. ‘The Aborigines were in chains,’ he wrote, ‘they could not bear to be without the narcotic tobacco and the stimulating tea; any woman could be bought for a fingernail of one or a spoonful of the other.’ These people, he said, were ‘as distant from the European as it was possible to be . . . inescapably connected to suffering’.
Through Stanner’s eyes, Aboriginal people were not merely a people without a concept of ‘time’ or ‘history’ but an ahistorical people. They were indeed changeless. Stanner equated change with assimilation, assuming Aboriginal people would vanish, dissolved into European life. Stanner finally met Durmugam again as a ‘white-haired’ man of fifty-seven, with ‘failing eyesight, but still erect and still a tall striking figure of a man’. The old warrior had lived in two worlds: his body was no longer painted with the earth, and the weapons of battle were laid down.
The blacks were on wages and very money conscious; all had European clothes and in their camps . . . one could find gramophones, torches, kitchenware, even bicycles; some of the younger people, though unable to read, were fond of looking at comic papers and illustrated magazines.
Stanner failed to see synthesis or adaptation, he saw instead tradition crushed, ‘culture was on its last legs’. No one personified this more than the once fearsome Durmugam; prestige gone, his family scattered, he was personally humiliated when his favourite wife ran off with the son of his first wife. He told Stanner he ‘would be better off dead’.
Change, wherever it occurs, is often accompanied by tragedy. Think of the refugee setting out on a leaky boat, leaving behind her land and family, likely never to see them again. Think of the convict in chains, sent to a land he’d never heard of, with no prospect of return. This is the story of our world; there is not a people on our planet who have not at some time endured revolution, war, invasion or persecution. It is happening in our time, as we see the greatest forced movement of people since the end of World War Two. Yet we don’t imagine them fixed in time. The Greek word telos speaks of an end or purpose, that history itself is progressive. Stanner saw a people without telos.
Stanner’s essay has helped set Indigenous people in the Australian imagination: a people for whom change spells doom. It has all the hallmarks of the ‘noble savage’, the European ideal of a people unsullied by ‘progress’. Stanner – for all his good intentions and empathy – robbed Aboriginal people of a future. His idea of people caught between the dreaming and the market exerted a powerful hold on policy makers as they sought to find the balance between economy and identity; between what is ‘mainstream’ and what is ‘Indigenous’. It has helped shape ideas of identity, some Indigenous people embracing the idea of timelessness and rejecting of what is seen as modernity.
This has never been my story. My family and countless other Aboriginal families have navigated this new world, blending with it and forming part of the mosaic of a new Australia. Another anthropologist, Gaynor Macdonald, has studied my family’s people, the Wiradjuri of New South Wales. She has rejected Stanner’s assumptions. She says he underestimated the desire and ability of the Aboriginal people to chan
ge and develop because his own beliefs blinded him to their creativity and resilience. He saw only destruction and loss. Had he desired, he would have been able to see these transformations around him in many parts of Australia, including New South Wales in the 1950s. He was not looking for change. But because he did not see it, did not mean it was not happening.
FROM MISSIONS TO MIGRANTS
My paternal grandfather, Cecil Grant, was a man born in the first decade of the twentieth century onto the fringes of the frontier, a man whose life embodies the shift of Aboriginal people from outcasts on the edges of society, to take up a place in Australia. I have only faint memories of him; he died when I was only six years old. But he loomed large in my life; he was a tough man, a man of discipline and character. A man of deep Christian faith, and an enduring pride in being a Wiradjuri man – and those things were never in conflict.
He was at times a shearer, a rodeo bull rider, a rabbit trapper, a fruit picker and a soldier; his personal journey in a black migration from mission to town: a distance measured in miles but a trek measured in justice. He was a friend of Doug Nicholls, a famous footballer, then pastor, and later Sir Doug, Governor of South Australia. Doug Nicholls was a pivotal figure in the campaign for the 1967 referendum that had as its theme, ‘Vote yes for Aborigines: they want to be Australians too.’ My grandfather was also close to another seminal Aboriginal leader, Bill Ferguson, and together they campaigned for full citizenship for their people.
This was a time of great upheaval. The era of segregation was passing and now it was assumed Aboriginal people would be ‘absorbed into the Commonwealth’. That was the phrase of the time, the thinking behind a policy of assimilation – something that is a dirty word now, akin to an ethnic cleansing, an attempt to make black people white. It is true that assimilation was often coercive, the fate of families determined by government officials, some given a ‘pass’ into white Australia, a home uptown, access to schools, while others remained in choking, oppressive missions. Children were removed from families with the intention of preparing them for the white world. There is a photograph that sticks in my mind. It is of three generations of one family, from a dark-skinned grandmother, to her lighter daughter, to her daughter’s blond, blue-eyed son; an assimilationist’s view of the Australian Dream.
Yet, there is another story here, a story of people who saw an open door and walked through; people like my grandfather. Listen to their voices. I can read about them in the magazine Dawn, published from the 1950s to the 1970s by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board. I have no doubt they were carefully curated, yet they speak powerfully still. Most of them speak of their Christianity and economic empowerment. They call for fishing and economic cooperatives, for Aboriginal reserves to be turned into farms. As one wrote: ‘If we can work farms for white men, we can do it for ourselves.’
They talk of their people needing to shoulder responsibility for their plight, and don’t we hear that echoed today. All of the men stressed their work ethic, and their desire to find a place in modern Australia.
Another says: ‘I’ve held numerous jobs from farmhand, fisherman, mill hand, factory worker, sewerage ganger, miner, to my present position and according to all reports, I am accepted everywhere.’
These are the powerful voices of Aboriginal economic migration. I have written about these people in a Quarterly Essay – ‘The Australian Dream: Blood, History and Becoming’. I know these people, they are the people of my childhood who walked with a straight-backed dignity, and were unstinting in their demand for their rights. They didn’t just demand equality. They assumed it. When I see them, I see individuals with choice, shaped by their world, as they in turn shaped the world around them. They were alive to the possibilities of life in an Australia whose economy was often booming.
They looked at the post-war migrant influx and hitched a ride, becoming economic migrants themselves. The meagre pay and menial work didn’t dissuade them, as by their own admission they (often in desperation) fought to provide for their families. A dynamic and diverse Aboriginal population was emerging from these people in transition.
A decade ago the late academic Maria Lane probed this migration and the world it has created. She observed two diverging Indigenous populations. An Aboriginal woman, Lane was drawn to the emergence of a fledgling open society, as she called it. It was opportunity-, effort- and outcome-oriented, contrasting with what she called an embedded society, which was risk averse-, welfare- and security-oriented.
The two populations, she said, are linked through kinship and continuing interaction, but the course of their lives was set by the great Aboriginal economic migration. It was a slow grind but, she said, a new paradigm was surely emerging. These were the people on the move in the 1940s to the 1970s, leaving the settlements and throwing off the heavy hand of government control. Their journeys I’ve already traced through my family. The timing was crucial. Their movement coincided with periods of economic growth that increased their opportunity. As Lane said, it was a risky move into the unknown. But one that for most, paid off, just as it did for other economic migrants, drawn from the far-flung corners of the earth.
Lane picked up their story when the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these pioneers were exploding into higher education. Focusing on South Australia, she found that in less than a decade, from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, the number of Indigenous students entering the last year of high school doubled, and of those, the number gaining good university entrance scores had likely tripled. These kids, Lane says, were part of both white and black worlds, redefining what identity – indeed identities – meant for them.
At the same time, she pointed out, there was a parallel Aboriginal universe, an embedded shadow world of choking poverty, rivers of grog, frightening rates of violence, overcrowded housing and intergenerational unemployment. While the children of Lane’s open society were graduating high school, their embedded society cousins were committing suicide at rates ten times higher than the rest of the Australian population. They were graduating, not from high school, but from juvenile detention to adult prisons.
In the embedded society were those who were left behind. Maria Lane mapped their journey too. Many had never left the settlements. Many had ventured into small towns and had then returned.
Many had simply missed the economic cycle and failed to grasp the full range of opportunities. Instead they became locked in cycles of welfare dependency and social decay. They became embedded.
There is great community and enduring bonds of family found in Lane’s embedded society. I know these people. This is also my family. I know that they can be generous, loving and loyal, and life in the open society for us can be lonely, alienating. Even the most successful Indigenous peoples are not immune to random or hurtful racism.
Lane sometimes was guilty of ascribing too much of the fate of these two populations to the vagaries of personal choice, when in fact history, economy, timing and luck have often been far more decisive. Besides, no broad social sketch can be entirely accurate. Individuals are too unpredictable and there is a risk sometimes of caricature and stereotype. Yet she did identify a schism in our population, and it punctures the lazy and convenient assumption of a homogeneous Aboriginal society, where we are all the same. We are, in fact, like all other communities: lacerated by class, gender, geography. Our lives are shaped by fortune and resilience. Identity itself is never fixed.
Maria Lane left us a great gift, she breathed life into Aboriginal lives; dynamic, resourceful, courageous people striking out into a new world. This is the community I was raised in. Lane demolishes the idea that Indigenous people are forever trapped between the Dreaming and the Market. These pioneers were prepared to privilege economy over culture. They were open to change, they moved and they formed new communities as people the world over have done for millennia. They were closing the gap, before bureaucrats had ever coined the phrase, and inspired generations that came after them.
Between 1996 and 2006 the Indigenous community in Australia was transformed. Numbers of educated well-paid professionals exploded. In just a decade, they increased by nearly 75 per cent. That was more than double the increase in the non-Indigenous middle class. By 2006 more than 14,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders between the ages of 20 and 64 were employed in professional occupations. That’s 13 per cent of the total Indigenous workforce.
Dr Julie Lahn, from the Australian National University, looked at this phenomenon in her paper ‘Aboriginal Professionals: Work, Class and Culture’. She said that Aboriginal professionals in urban centres remain largely overlooked. Dr Lahn saw this as a major shortcoming, impeding understanding of a transformation that is increasingly evident to Aboriginal people themselves. We see this in our universities. There are around 30,000 Indigenous university graduates in Australia. In 1991 there were fewer than 4000. That number is likely to double in the decade to come. We are now seeing a second generation of Indigenous PhDs. The emergence of this middle class, of which I am assuredly a part, presents new questions for identity.
That I am an Indigenous person is a fact of birth. That is who I am, but that is not all I am. The reality is more ambiguous, it defies easy definition, even as I may try to cloak it in a veil of certainty. To borrow from Franz Kafka, identity can be a cage in search of a bird. I was born into that ‘half-caste’ community that emerged from the Australian frontier; a hybrid society formed out of the clash of old and new. In that society they married each other, repopulated in the harsh segregated settlements designed to Christianise and civilise us.