Riding the Black Cockatoo

by John Danalis

  As a child, I viewed Black Australia through the same smudged lens that I imagine a lot of other people looked through. It was a lens that allowed us a one-way intimacy, like those one-way windows in police line-up rooms; we gawked and scrutinised without getting up close. And if we didn’t like what we saw, or if what we saw made us uncomfortable, we could turn away, turn the page, switch the channel or change the subject. Not that the subject of Black Australia came up that often. To show too much interest in Aboriginal affairs aroused suspicion; to speak in their defence amounted to betrayal. Australians then didn’t much like do-gooders; they seemed to somehow threaten our way of life, our collective values and our right to a good time. But if do-gooders were tolerated, ‘Abo-lovers’ were despised. We appropriated the term ‘Nigger-lover’ from the Americans and re-jigged it to suit our language. And like the Americans, we used the term to keep ‘our own kind’ in line – just as a bitch nips at its young pups for straying too far from the litter. That’s how it was when I grew up.

  It’s hard to imagine just how straitjacketed by conformity most Australians were only three or four decades ago. Take beer, for instance. In the 1970s, 99 per cent of Queensland beer drinkers drank Fourex – and full strength at that. Walking into a party or barbecue with another brand like Foster’s or Carlton (there wasn’t much to choose from back then) immediately branded you an outsider. If you were visiting from overseas or had recently migrated from the southern states it was forgivable, you were let off with a mild ribbing. But if you were a local and actually preferred the taste of that southern swill to Fourex, you were immediately branded by the phalanx of men huddled around the barbecue as someone of questionable social standing – an eccentric, an academic or a poofter, and certainly not one to be trusted with the ladies. That was beer! It seems unbelievable now. So just imagine what it was like to buck the social norms governing race relations in this country. Of course there were brave souls who did, but I never met one.

  When the subject of Aboriginal Australia came up during my childhood, which was rarely, it was usually in the form of third-hand stories or jokes. The stories went like this: ‘A mate of my cousin’s works somewhere out west, and he swears that this is true; when the blackfellas run out of petrol they push their government-funded Toyotas off the side of the track and set fire to them – too lazy or too stupid to refill ’em. They just wait until they get another government vehicle and do the same thing all over again. Useless bastards, all of ’em, and we’re footin’ the bill.’

  The other men around the barbecue, bar or lunchroom would all shake their heads in disgust and utter statements like ‘Useless black pricks’.

  Then, without fail, one of the more sensitive souls in the group would roll out this chestnut: ‘Trouble is, the poor bastards are cavemen. I hate to say this, but they would’ve been better off if we’d wiped ’em all out.’

  I heard that statement many times over the years and I could never help but wonder, ‘Hang on, just how could an extinct race be better off ?’

  But of course I never asked the question out loud.

  Then there were the jokes; there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of Abo jokes doing the rounds of the schoolyards and campfires of my youth. We often brought these gags from home; and the fact that Uncle Bazza had told them around the table at Sunday lunch seemed to legitimise their craven humour. Deep down I had an inkling that something was amiss and my stomach often twisted in guilty discomfort, but it was always easier to laugh along. These jokes were never really funny and they connected with the mean streak that lurks within us all, the mean streak that left unchecked can spread like a toxic bloom. There was one particular joke that stepped beyond meanness. This joke began circulating during the 1980s Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. This was a major inquiry into the disproportionate number of Aboriginal men who were committing suicide or dying while in police watch-houses and prisons. I found this joke so disturbing that every time I heard it, the seconds seemed to slow down as I waited for an adult – anyone – to say, ‘Now listen here, that’s not funny! Those dead men have grieving mothers.’ But no one said a thing, least of all me. Another memory, another shard for my hot-air balloon.

  The joke ran like this:

  What do you call three blackfellas in a prison cell?

  A mobile.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  { 18 SEPTEMBER 2005 }

  A few days after my big announcement to the class, I called into my parents’ house to feed the cat; they had gone away for the weekend. I hadn’t been sleeping well; I’d lain awake all night obsessing about the skull and the girl in my class – her unbelieving eyes. As I stood at the kitchen sink replenishing the cat’s water bowl, I decided to look for Mary. That was the name my father had given to the skull when it was handed to him 40 years ago. Years later, a medical specialist told Dad that the cranium actually belonged to a male, but the female name stuck. The specialist also informed Dad that the ‘specimen’ had most likely died from syphilis. Syphilis, or ‘the pox’ as it was called in the days when it was common and highly feared, is a sexually transmitted disease that if left untreated eats away the organs, including the brain, and literally rots the skull from the inside out, causing agonising pain, madness and then death. This disease was just one of many that English soldiers, sailors, convicts and settlers brought to Australia. Before contact, the Indigenous population was largely free of influenza, tuberculosis, whooping cough, measles and most sexually transmitted diseases. Aboriginal people had no immunity to these alien diseases, and when they spread the local population perished – not just in ones or twos, but often by the community.

  ‘See these cracks and lesions on the temple,’ my father used to explain knowingly to curious visitors, ‘that is where the syphilis ate away at the skull. The poor wretch would have been quite insane when he died.’

  I started to poke around the mantelpiece, where Mary had always sat. When Mum and Dad started babysitting my first daughter, Bianca, I had quietly asked Mum to put Mary out of sight. She understood. It was easier approaching Mum on such a delicate matter; Dad would have responded with one of his looks, the kind that suggested in no uncertain terms that I’d gone soft in the head.

  The ‘mantelpiece’ was really a 1960s wall unit that took up an entire wall. The bottom consisted of cupboards containing Mum’s good dinner set and boxed pewter doodads – things given at births and christenings, things put aside for special occasions that never actually saw the light of day; the sorts of things that when you open them release the scent of four-decades-old air. There were photo albums here, and an enormous case of slides, a cantankerous old slide projector and a rolled-up, yellowed screen that had long forgotten what it was to be flat. The centremost cupboard had once snugly housed the television set; now, in this age of widescreen plasma, it housed Dad’s collection of football videotapes. Above the bottom cupboard level was a sort of buffet area on which sat my parents’ new TV, their stereo gear and record collection; and above that were two levels of shelves for books, framed photographs and prized pieces from Dad’s collection of curios.

  Dad had been a bush vet, a vocation which generously fed his appetite for collecting. Over the decades his profession had taken him into hundreds of the nation’s farmyards, outbuildings and machinery sheds. Amid the smell of bagged animal feed, fertiliser, diesel oil and cracked leather, his magpie eye would scan the gloom for dust-caked treasure hanging from rafters or half concealed beneath ancient tarpaulins. Over the years Dad had amassed a mind-boggling haul. He had scores of antique bottles on display around the house and many more in crates. There were convict-made bricks with the makers’ thumbprints still clearly visible; there were rusted handshears gleaned from shearing-shed walls; tobacco tins, branding irons, dingo traps, rabbit traps, and snakeskins as long as beds. He’d collected interesting pieces of stone kicked up in paddocks and cattleyards: thunder-eggs, chunks of petrified wood, clusters of quartz, even a baby-he
ad-sized lump of coal. He carted home horse-driven ploughs and pre-Federation hand tools, a grinding stone the size of a car wheel, blown-out Model-T Ford radiators, kerosene-powered refrigerators, and rusted-out milk urns. There was so much stuff. He had a double-ended timbercutter’s saw the length of a small car which was thoughtfully displayed next to the metre-long, toothy-edged nose of a sawfish (not many families had one of those!). But it wasn’t all blokey stuff, he also had an eye for the delicate: fob and pocket watches, an exquisite pair of round-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses that I liked to imagine once belonged to a Chinese spice trader, miniature scales for measuring gold dust, snuffboxes of carved bone, old pearl brooches and pins, silver matchbox holders and ladies’ pocket mirrors. At the height of my father’s mania, it was not unusual to wake up and find a horse-drawn buggy (without the horse) that he had lugged home from the bush and reassembled overnight in the front yard.

  Dad was a keen sportsman too, and there was a constantly fluctuating collection of rifles, guns and muskets. There were bayonets, a wickedly sharp Gurkha fighting knife, and an intricately inlaid samurai sword. There were the brass casings of artillery shells, and assorted bullets of every size. There were deer antlers, and the razor-sharp tusks from wild boar that he had dispatched on regular hunting trips.

  Show-and-tell days at school were never a challenge; my brother and I would just grab something – anything – from around the house. Even if we didn’t know what the object actually was, we could always make up a good story. My favourite was an old grinding iron from a flour mill; it was about the size of a cricket ball, black and mottled, and to the untrained eye looked like a small cannonball. I remember regaling my classmates with stories of how it had been used by Captain Cook’s crew to disperse ‘troublesome natives’ as they were preparing to land their longboats on the beach of Fraser Island. I told them my father had been on a fishing trip when it was washed up by a wave at his feet – all three kilos of it! No one ever bothered to ask how we knew the history of this great lump of iron; my classmates – especially the boys – were too busy turning the Fraser Island Cannonball over in their hands with the silent reverence that boys bestow on implements that kill and maim.

  Dad’s collection could be divided into three broad categories. First there was the outside stuff – artefacts that were either too large to fit in the house or so grimy and dilapidated that they couldn’t get past Mum. Then there was the downstairs stuff that filled drawers and boxes in the garage and lined the walls of the pool room. Third, there was the upstairs collection, the bits deemed special enough to live with us: the lamps, the vases, the pottery pieces, the shiny brass things, and of course Mary on the shelf above the record player. Mary sat in for every record change of my childhood. From the swinging sounds of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in the 1960s to Nirvana’s bellowing-at-the-moon through the 1990s, four decades of middle-class white music reverberated though Mary. I sometimes wonder what his spirit would have thought of it all, especially on nights when the windows rattled to Mum and Dad’s favourite, the thunderous organ prelude to Phantom of the Opera. It’s a wonder that the combined sonic assault of Andrew Lloyd Webber and modern speaker technology hadn’t reduced Mary to dust, or at the very least vibrated his teeth from their sockets.

  I worked my way through the cupboards with a detective’s touch, sneaky fingers feeling around corners, behind picnic baskets and over little boxes tied up with string. As a child, I had an almost paranormal knack for unearthing our gifts weeks before birthdays and Christmas. I peeked behind framed family photos up on the higher shelves, making sure that everything was put back just so. I said hello to my grandmamma, 20 years gone, and she smiled back at me through the dust-speckled glass from her beloved garden. In that photo, wild grey hair that she could never be bothered with blew in an eternal breeze and a green cardigan stretched across her abundant frame. How I loved her.

  I abandoned the wall unit and wandered down the hall to my old bedroom. It’s a bit of a junkroom now, a holding pen for things my mother is trying to get out of the house, and things my father is trying to hang onto. My old bedroom, once made wall-less by imagination; I saw again the Himalayan base camp on top of my wardrobe where I would sit amid clouds with my survival rations of Vegemite sandwiches. I saw again the endless shark-filled ocean over which my creaky bed rolled; I saw again the virgin, pea-green, shag-pile Amazonian forest over which my model planes floated. I looked through the window, seeking out familiar sights; the fire station tower where the hoses still hung like spaghetti strands dripping themselves dry; across the street, the young married woman’s bathroom window on which I had trained my binoculars at 7.15 each night for one wonderful year – where was she now? The bedroom walls began to close in – too many memories for such a tiny room.

  I drifted around downstairs, eyes and fingers flitting through the pool room, the workshop, my brother’s old bedroom stacked high with things that had not yet made the skip or the local auction centre. The auction centre! In a recent effort to de-clutter the house and to appease my mother, Dad had been taking stuff there by the ute-load . . . Surely not! They wouldn’t accept a human skull, would they?

  I went back into the lounge room and flopped into my father’s lounge chair. It sat dead square in front of the wall unit; the best seat in the house for watching the telly. The cat glided between my legs, her appreciative purring the only sound as I wondered out loud, ‘Where? Where could Mary be?’

  In the distance a rubbish truck emptied wheelie bins in quick, cacophonous crashes of falling beer bottles and the dull thuds of rubbish bags. ‘Oh god, not the wheelie bin, not that!’ I imagined Mary lost forever in landfill, entombed in maggoty meat scraps, festering nappies and all the never-to-break-down plastic refuse that makes up twenty-first-century waste.

  Family homes are like time machines; just the hint of an odour, the groan of a loose floorboard, the slant of morning sunshine through half-opened drapes can peel away years, even decades. I gazed down at the lounge-room floor and pictured my brother and me sprawled out on the carpet with pillows and blankets watching Saturday-morning TV. I drifted back even further, remembering Neil Armstrong’s first step into moon dust; I remember the big fuss being made by the adults in the room and being told it was too bad that I wouldn’t remember the moment. I was three years old and I remember it all. The whole world was space-crazy; perhaps that is why we were disdainful of Indigenous culture. Now we were hurtling through space, did we see boomerangs as an embarrassing reminder of our origins?

  I grew up on a cultural combo of American and Japanese cartoons and Australian children’s television drama. All the shows were great, but there was one show that every young kid rushed home from school for: Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, the hit children’s afternoon television show from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Skippy was the star of the show, but it was his partner in adventure, the gumleaf-blowing Sonny Hammond, that every little boy wanted to be. Sonny had the biggest back yard in Australia; the fictional Waratah National Park where he lived a Boy’s Own life with his park-ranger father Matt Hammond, brother Mark, and the daring chopper pilot Jerry. Sonny wasn’t even encumbered with a mother telling him to be home for dinner or rousing on him for messing up his signature red-and-white-striped shirt. Together Sonny and Skippy hopped and clambered through bushland, rafted across shark-filled inlets, and roamed through hidden valleys and into the imagination of many an Australian boy and girl. And it was in one of these hidden valleys that Sonny and Skippy stumbled upon Tara.

  Tara looked as though he’d just jumped off the two-dollar coin. He was as black as black could be, with wiry white hair and a sinewy grace. There was a lovely economy to his movements and he spoke like a sage. He was the cliché native Australian, but he was a magnificent cliché all the same. Tara was the last of a clan that had been relocated from its tribal country decades before. When Sonny and Skippy stumbled into the Hidden Valley – accessible only through a spooky secret cave – they found Tara
living as his ancestors had, in a simple humpy high on an escarpment from where he could survey the valley below; a valley that provided sustenance for his belly and his spirit. Tara’s only concession to the twentieth century was a discreet pair of red underpants – it was a children’s show after all. Sonny was besotted with Tara – and what ten-year-old wouldn’t be? The pair threw boomerangs, hunted for bush tucker and chilled out on the escarpment as fluffy white clouds rolled overhead. One lazy afternoon as the two sat enjoying the silence, Sonny turned to his friend. ‘You’re like Skippy, Tara, happy and free. You do whatever you please. I bet there are a lot of people that would like to change places with you.’

  The boy had a point – Tara’s life did have a certain Robinson Crusoe appeal to it – but in reality Sonny’s words were no more than a scriptwriter’s pipedream. In the 1970s, as now, you would have been hard pressed to find too many White Australians willing to trade places with an Aboriginal person.