by Stan Grant
In Mexico we would be known as Mestizo, or in Canada, Métis – people in-between, mixed. Mestizo comes from the Spanish word for miscegenation – the mixing of ancestries. In Mexico the Mestizo are an entirely new and distinct identity – not Spanish or wholly indigenous. The Métis trace their ancestry to the First Nations people and European settlers, usually French fur traders. The Mestizo have different and often greater legal status than indigenous people, reflecting the racial hierarchy of Spanish or Portuguese colonies. The Métis have legal recognition as among the ‘Aboriginal peoples of Canada’. In Australia at various times ‘mixed-race’ or ‘half-caste’ people have had different or greater legal status and rights than those deemed ‘Aborigines’ or ‘full-bloods’. Some were exempt from restrictive laws that banned Aboriginal people from public swimming pools, cinemas, pubs or schools. Like any government intervention these exemptions could be damaging for families, dividing or segregating people. Yet, when I look at my family in all its mixed beauty, I see that we are a distinct people: not something less ‘Indigenous’ but certainly unique and born out of the story of Australia.
Being an outsider, something other, reflects our history of exclusion and injustice. My family has suffered through generations, lived at the coalface of bigotry and poverty. I was born into a life on the margins. As I wrote in Talking to My Country, we lived in Australia and Australia was for other people. But I have grown from the boy that I was, and my country has grown from the land that it was. Can I truly see privilege as white? Is it black to suffer crippling disadvantage? If these things are true, does this not make me in the eyes of some ‘white’?
Some Indigenous people have begun to explore the impact of this Aboriginal middle class. They recognise it as a phenomenon that is met with suspicion, even hostility, by some in the Indigenous community. Lawyer and academic Professor Larissa Behrendt, in an article for The Guardian, ‘Who’s Afraid of the Indigenous Middle Class?’ sees a fracture in Aboriginal communities and politics, between an old guard forged in anger and loyal to the power of protest, and a new generation seeking to work within the system, to join the professions, participate in party politics and seek to make a change.
As she wrote, the fracture seems reflective of so many divisions in Indigenous politics, from opinions about constitutional recognition to disagreements about the nature of welfare reform. While almost everyone can agree on the problems, she writes, the solution causes deep ruptures. She poses critical questions: How does a community that has partly been defined by its exclusion, disadvantage and poverty, redefine itself? How does it increase its participation in the mainstream and not be assimilated? Behrendt ultimately argues that a person’s cultural identity should not be tied to poverty. You are not more Aboriginal if you are struggling. But still, suspicion remains. The members of this black middle class are just as likely to be viewed as ‘coconuts’ – brown on the outside, white on the inside.
In her 2012 series of Boyer Lectures, Professor Marcia Langton, one of Australia’s great scholars and an Indigenous woman, tied the growth of an Indigenous middle class to the Australian mining boom of the early 2000s. She conceded that she had had to confront the old trope of Aboriginal people as the hapless victims of a voracious and brutal mining industry. She writes:
Those of us who are successful run the risk of being subject to abuse, accused of being traitors to our people, assimilationists and a number of other crimes against the natural order of things as perceived by those who fail to understand their inherited racist worldview.
Should a university degree and a job mean that someone is no longer or less Indigenous? It is ludicrous to suggest that identity should be means tested. We are free to define ourselves and what being Indigenous means. The new black middle class is developing its own consciousness.
From the earliest days of settlement, Aboriginal people grasped their futures in this new world. A world that brought devastation, a world they met with fierce resistance and accommodation. They found a new place in the new economy, economic migrants in the land of their ancestors. I am of these people. I was the boy who spent his young years moving from town to town, as my parents looked for work. I was a part of the great migration. The descendants of these pioneers are today the new generation of doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, scientists and economists. They are plumbers and carpenters and electricians and builders. They run small businesses. They are entrepreneurs and they are redefining what it is to be an Indigenous person. They overwhelmingly live in our cities and large towns. They are people who can stand in the Dreaming, and in the Market.
Everything I am, they have made.
PART 3
RACE
LOOK, A NEGRO!
I must have been about six years old when I first became aware of colour – my colour – when I first became aware of difference. That I was marked. That I carried the indelible stain of race. It was an initiation – an innocent schoolyard initiation – into a world in which I would be seen through the eyes of others as ‘the other’. It was an incident so ordinary, so playful that if it had happened to someone else I would likely suspect it was an over-reaction. But it happened to me and I have never forgotten it. Because I was a child and the world of a child is small, and because what is ordinary can loom so large, and because what other children say matters, and because this came from somewhere, it came from adults passed down through history, and because nations are formed from this, and because people are enslaved by this, and because people are locked up by this, and because of this people have been lynched, and because people lie about this. And because I have never forgotten and I am still trying to work it out. I was damned by my DNA, I carried the gene. I had the one drop that mattered more than all the other drops.
I had a friend, Owen. He lived in the house behind me. There was only a fence between us but to me it seemed, at the time, that he lived in an entirely different world. It was a world apart from mine. He lived in a world where colour blended; where you could even say colour disappeared. It was a world of black and simultaneously of white. It was a home of great love, I remember that. He had six siblings, all of them Aboriginal and all of them adopted. His mother and father were white, the local Presbyterian minister and his wife. They had already had a family; their children were grown and now they had taken on this new brood.
We looked like each other, Owen and me. We could actually see ourselves in each other’s faces. At school the teachers would struggle to tell us apart. Perhaps it was simply because we shared the same colour skin; that was probably it. Yes, we were the closest thing to each other and that meant to everyone else we were virtually indistinguishable. Owen and I went to a little school in Coolah, New South Wales; a tiny town, the home of the fabled ‘black stump’. Beyond that was the outback, the scary Australian wilderness where people vanished. It was actually part of my ancestral home; Coolah marked the border between my father’s people, the Wiradjuri, and my mother’s, the Kamilaroi. The Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi, peoples whose names were written over, eliminated from the landscape, foreign to the people who now called this home. Funny isn’t it, that the people who lived in Coolah likely never knew that they were speaking another language, that the town took its name from the Kamilaroi word for ‘valley of the winds’. Curiously there were no Aboriginal people in the town – only my family and Owen and his siblings – and we were there by default, just another stop on our restless journey. There are old stories that it was bad country; that people fled and never came back. But it is a place that has always been special to me. My childhood memories from there are the most vivid I have.
I started school in Coolah, 1969; five years old, led up the path holding my mother’s hand into this new world; a world I was about to discover was so different from my own; a world of whiteness. Each morning we would gather in the school quadrangle and watch the flag being raised. We would recite an oath. ‘I honour my God, I serve my Queen, I salute the flag.’ It was something that even then, even s
o young, never felt right. I can still recall that feeling, it was a sense of being displaced, the feeling that I was alone or that everyone else was looking at me. I told my grandfather who lived with us, and he said, ‘Cross your fingers, it won’t count’, so that’s what I did. Up would go the flag and I’d place my hands behind me, fingers crossed, my juvenile rebellion.
I was learning the political lessons of life early; already I had a child’s sense of being somehow apart. I knew my family was looked upon differently. Aboriginal, that’s what we were. But because it was my family, because it was my whole world, I was insulated from the Australia that surrounded me. I hadn’t connected myself to the idea of race. In the schoolyard I thought I could be just any other boy. But then that changed – one day, one comment, that framed my world. Tim was one of our best mates. He was the archetypal Aussie kid, I suppose, blond, spiky hair, freckles. Tim was milky white – but then so was Australia. As a nation we were still slowly unravelling the White Australia Policy; it had only been a couple of years since Aboriginal people were finally counted among the Australian population thanks to the 1967 referendum. It has become a recurring joke since – a piece of Aboriginal satire that sounded so right it was mistaken for truth – that we must have been counted among the kangaroos and the wattle, among the flora and fauna.
On this day, Tim put his arm next to Owen’s and mine. He looked at his arm and looked again at ours and asked, ‘Why are you so black?’ Black? Were we really black at all? To be honest, our skin colour probably more resembled the light chocolate-flavoured milk we devoured with such glee each recess. Bottles of chocolate milk warmed by the sun, which we would throw down quickly so that we could get another before the bell rang to go back to class. But black? Black. It wasn’t just a colour and it certainly wasn’t just a word. No, not a word: it was a world, a world unto its own, a world apart. It was a world to which one was banished. Black was a judgment. Tim, our mate, the boy we sat with in class, kicked a football with, was now looking at us as if for the first time.
Back then, I had no way to respond. There’d be more moments like this to come. Always the feeling was the same, the blood would rush to my cheeks, there would be a flash of anger and then a deep hurt. It was the hurt of being excluded, the hurt of being cast out. And shame, a shame that I was not just different but something less. When it mattered, when all was said and done, I was not one of them. I was on the other side.
‘You stupid black prick.’ I recall that taunt from the playground.
‘Smash the black bastard.’ We heard that on the football field.
That was OK, as it went. That was kid’s stuff. We could hit back, but we knew we were outnumbered. No matter how defiant, how brave, we could never even the score. They always had reinforcements. But what was worse, what was more damaging, was the judgment from on high. It was the cruel bigotry that set the parameters of our world. It was the school headmaster who told me and some of my black mates that we would never amount to anything. I remember that like a punch in the gut. It was bewildering, even as we joked among ourselves and pretended we didn’t care. Alone, I did care, and I know my mates did too.
Tim was the first, and he knew instinctively that he sat in some position of privilege. He knew that he could say to us something we could never say to him; he could tell us we were different. Tim didn’t look at Owen and me and say of himself, ‘I am so white!’ That thought would never occur to him. It would be unthinkable for Tim to imagine that whiteness was in any way unique. To be white was normal. Everything around him was white. Look at all the kids in our class, look at the teacher. White, all of them white. Tim would never have to question himself; this was the unexamined truth of his life: white was not even a colour. White was the origin of light, from which Sir Isaac Newton divined the colour wheel, observing how the colour of light would bend as it passed through the prism. White was purity.
We raced home that day; Owen’s mother would always have something for us to eat. She was one of those big-hearted country women, kind and loving. I never thought it strange that he called her Mum. I did know she wasn’t what we then called his ‘real mum’, but she was real to him. In the politics of today, it just wouldn’t do, a white couple adopting a crew of black kids. Today, black is supposed to adopt black, to keep the culture. But back then this was a family, and Owen and his siblings were all the better for it. We stood in her kitchen that day, and Owen told her that someone at school had called us black. I didn’t say anything. I was a quiet kid, more comfortable observing than speaking. I do so clearly recall what she said next: ‘You’re not black, you have lovely olive skin.’
There it was. In one day, Owen and I had been called black and then told we were not black. Black was in the eye of the beholder, it was nothing we could own. Tim had spoken the innocence of childhood, but knew more than he realised. Owen’s mother had spoken the words of adulthood, the words of politics and power. She was protecting us. She feared what being judged black would mean; she knew that this would be our fate. This day had likely come sooner than she had thought, and if she could keep it at bay for one more day, then she would.
Patrick Wolfe, a historian who has written long and hard about race, once said, ‘On a day to day level, race penetrates the most mundane moments of life’. He said when it comes to race, ‘we live in a world of mirrors’.
Frantz Fanon, the Algerian writer, knew this all too well. ‘I am being dissected under white eyes’, he wrote, ‘the only real eyes. I am fixed.’ As he put it even more starkly: ‘Look, a Negro!’
Owen’s mum – for all her love – was trapped in the same prism of race as Tim, although Tim pointed out our difference while she sought to deny it. Olive was softer than black. Olive was a suntan. Olive was nearly white. It could never occur to her to say that yes, we were black. She had no words to tell us about our people, about our history, our great victories and triumphs. I wonder if we were Egyptian, would she have told us of the pharaohs and the pyramids? If we were Hawaiian or Tahitian, would that have been more exotic? But no, we were ‘black’, something to be denied.
This is our education. This is how we learn about race. We learn as we go. We find out about ourselves from children, from teachers, from those who wish to insult us and those who seek to protect us. From the moment a child is born, race lies in wait. It will reveal itself, that much is certain.
THE WHITE GAZE
I discovered James Baldwin when I was thirteen. I stumbled upon his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. It was the title that drew me in. I had always loved the song ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’. Like Baldwin I had a lot of religion in me. Old time religion. Like Baldwin I had been raised in the church – the black church. This was the church of fire and brimstone. This was the church of sin and redemption. We worshipped the sacrificial Jesus of the cross.
Matthew 27:46: ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ – ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’
For we were the forsaken. Ours was the King James Bible – not for us any standardised version – we wanted the sound of the word of God. We loved how the old words rolled around our tongues. My mother would spit my hair down and put me in my best shorts and shirt each Sunday to go to the mission church. My uncle – my father’s brother – was the pastor. It was an exalted position in our community – drunks would stand up straighter when he walked by; mothers would silence their kids. My uncle played his role with aplomb. I can still hear him thundering from the pulpit, a handkerchief mopping the sweat from his brow as he pointed at the congregation; we knew he was talking to us.
Luke 17:2: ‘It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.’
His words hung as heavy as the air. My nausea rising with the heat. My neck stiffening as my temples throbbed. It was all I could do not to flee the church. I knew outside the air was sweet with fruit from the orchards that bordered the mission. The fast-running current
s of the irrigation channel promised relief from the swelter, even though the channel could be a foreboding place. It had taken the lives of so many of our people who had fallen in, drunk. The channel was guarded by a blanket of sharp-edged burrs – catheads we called them – jagged vicious things that once piercing the skin would burn for hours.
Cooped in that little wooden church with my uncle’s shout and spit I would risk it all to run. But of course I couldn’t escape my mother’s eye – she would cast me sideways disapproving glances when she sensed my irritation growing.
The hymns we sang were old and forlorn.
‘The Old Rugged Cross’. ‘Amazing Grace’. ‘Shall We Gather at the River’.
Soon we’ll reach the silver river,
Soon our pilgrimage will cease,
Soon our happy hearts will quiver
With the melody of peace.
All of these songs promised a better day – because a better day was all we could hope for. These days of sermon and song prepared me for James Baldwin. Go Tell It on the Mountain was the story he had to tell. It was his life in the church. It was his life among his people. It was the story of two brothers, John and Roy, and their father the preacher – histories hidden, bodies buried and children left to untangle a family’s secrets. This was the world slavery made. It came out of the black American experience but it spoke powerfully to me.
To an Aboriginal boy moving on the margins of outback New South Wales, poor and itinerant but in love with books and words, Baldwin sounded like home. We were living in a world that could not see us and Baldwin made me visible. Before Baldwin, books were entertainment. I spent many hours with Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle. My mother would scrounge books wherever she could. I don’t recall much in the way of birthday or Christmas presents – a scooter and a bike stand out – but I devoured my most treasured gift, a book of Greek myths. I was transported to the world of Icarus and Narcissus and Zeus.