by Ryan O'Neill
Gayle did not return to Alice Springs until January 1954, when his father died of internal injuries after being crushed against a truck by a bull. Gayle had not seen his father for more than a decade, and felt nothing as he watched his coffin being covered with dirt, but he comforted Katie, who sobbed throughout the service. Without being asked, Katie told him she had not heard from Alice in months. After the funeral Gayle stayed on for a few days to put his father’s affairs in order. On the desk in his father’s study he came across the King James Bible from which he had been taught to read. When he opened it, Gayle found an old, yellowed letter serving as a marker for Proverbs 6:32, “Whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding: he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul.” The letter, dated April 1928, was from Gayle’s mother, Rowena, to his father, reprimanding him for his shameless relations with “that sluttish gin” Katie Gurnabil. It described the humiliation and shame Rowena felt at seeing “her condition” shared by the cook, and begged Theodore to send Katie away somewhere so that she would not have to endure the sight of her husband’s half-caste bastard running around the farm with her own child. After reading the letter, Gayle went for a long walk around the property. At twilight, he came upon a broken-down wooden structure, the remains of one of the dozens of cubbies he and Alice had cobbled together during their childhood. He kicked it down. The next morning he left the property early, without speaking to anyone. Before the funeral, Gayle had told the Aboriginal men and women who had worked for his father that they could stay on with full pay for six months before he would sell the farm. But on the way to the airport, he stopped at the property agent’s office in Alice Springs and instructed him to clear off the lot of them and put the place on the market. At the airport, Gayle read a note that the solicitor had given him when his father’s will was read out. In it, Theodore Gayle asked his son to ensure Katie was looked after in her old age. Theodore had evidently been too embarrassed to leave Katie any formal bequest. Edward Gayle tore up the letter, and Katie was left with nothing.
Gayle’s return to Sydney after his father’s death marked a new phase in his academic life. Previously, his research had been sound but half-hearted; now he threw all his energy and time into it. There were no more trips to search for Alice. His published work on the early settlers became less critical and more celebratory in tone, as reflected in articles such as “The Taming of Tasmania” (1955) and “A Desert for Every Purpose: The Settlement of the Hunter Valley” (1956). Where once he had attempted, haltingly and clumsily, to include Aboriginal people in his work, now he either did not mention them at all, or emphasised the benefits European civilisation had brought them. From publishing only a couple of articles a year before 1954, he now published fifteen or twenty. His students noticed a change in Gayle, and some complained about his attitude; he had become impatient, dismissive and hostile to new ideas. In 1956 he published his first book, Australian Colonial Agriculture, which won praise for the clarity and beauty of its prose, but drew criticism for its outdated methodologies and conservative bias. The book was favourably reviewed in Quarter, the right-wing literary journal recently founded by Rand Washington, who invited Gayle to submit work. Over the next two years, a number of Gayle’s essays appeared in Quarter, on a range of literary and historical themes, including “Addison Tiller: Holding a Mirror to the Past”, “The Literary and Political Crimes of Francis X. McVeigh” and “Myth and Mistake: The Absurdity of the Aboriginal Dreamtime”, in which Gayle made satirical use of the sacred knowledge Alice had taught him years before. Washington and Gayle became friends, with Gayle a regular guest at Washington’s home. Washington dedicated The Dark Hordes of Cor (1958) to Gayle and in 1960 offered him the editorship of Quarter. With Gayle at the helm, the magazine enjoyed a renaissance, publishing writing of a noticeably higher quality than under Washington’s tenure, and also becoming pronouncedly more conservative. Gayle introduced a new motto for the journal: Damus Parci, or “We give no quarter.”
Promotion followed hard at the heels of Gayle’s move towards the right. In 1964 he was made an associate professor and deputy head of the history department at the University of Sydney. Despite this new responsibility and his continuing work for Quarter, he produced a substantial body of research in the next few years, though of an increasingly divisive nature. Gayle’s detractors argued that he was allowing his political views to distort his historical judgments, but this did not prevent his rise. In 1968 he was appointed professor and head of history at Sydney, in the same month that eminent anthropologist Professor W.E.H. Stanner gave the Boyer Lecture in which he coined the term “the Great Australian Silence”. Stanner argued that Australian historians had chosen to ignore the violence inflicted on the Aboriginal population by European settlers in the nineteenth century, and continued to disregard the presence of the country’s Indigenous peoples in their histories, essentially practising a “cult of forgetfulness”.
Gayle was present at Stanner’s lecture, and within three weeks had responded with a lecture of his own. “The Great Australian Licence: W.E.H. Stanner’s Disdain for the Facts” forcefully argued against each of the points Stanner had raised, concluding that the advent of European rule had ended “a prehistory of barbarity and ignorance” in Australia. The lecture was widely reported in the press and reprinted in the November 1968 issue of Quarter. This was to be the last of Gayle’s work to appear in the journal for some time; he continued as editor until October 1969, when he resigned in protest against his publisher’s insistence that Quarter provide space to advertise the newly revealed religion of Transvoidism.
Throughout the 1970s Gayle wrote a number of increasingly partisan articles for newspapers and academic journals, and a trio of books on the question of the British settlement of Australia, often in response to the work of Manning Clark. In 1976 two articles he submitted to journals on this topic were rejected after peer review on the basis of their selective and cavalier attitude to primary sources. In response Gayle wrote Abhorigines: The Manufacturing of Racism in Australia (1977), which was published by Berkeley & Hunt after being rejected by every university press in the country. In this book Gayle argued that there was no racism or discrimination against Indigenous Australians and there never had been; in complicity with the left, the idea had been invented in order to extract more handouts from the government. In the following furore other historians wrote dozens of articles exposing the fallacies and inaccuracies in Gayle’s book, and in all his published work after 1954. Gayle’s professional reputation suffered severe damage, which was compounded by the events of 1980.
When confronted by his critics with the undeniable evidence of many massacres of Indigenous Australians throughout the nineteenth century, including the infamous slaughter at Myall Creek in June 1838, Gayle responded with Murder or Self-Murder: A Theory on the Nineteenth-Century European “Atrocities” (1980). No publisher in Australia would consider this work; it was finally serialised in History and Thought, a far-right magazine published in Chile. In Murder or Self-Murder, Gayle asserted the “more than likely possibility, indeed, the high probability” that massacres of Indigenous Australians in the colonial era were in fact mass suicides provoked by the “existential despair of the primitive Aboriginal culture on encountering a civilisation superior to it in every way”. Gayle argued that pity should be reserved for the Europeans who were present at these “orgies of self-destruction, when crazed Aboriginal men, women and children, with malice aforethought, skewered themselves on the swords of horrified settlers”. In conclusion, Gale urged the government to pardon the seven colonists who had been wrongly convicted and hanged for their part in the “so-called” Myall Creek massacre, and to raise a memorial in their honour.
A year passed before Murder or Self-Murder was taken note of in Australia, when it was broadly denounced for its outrageous, racist claims, claims that were quickly analysed by other historians and found to be entirely without foundation. Indeed, Gayle was accused of fabricating the piti
fully few shreds of evidence he had used to bolster his “theory”. There were calls for his dismissal and Gayle’s office at the university was picketed by hundreds of students. Amid rumours that his sacking was imminent, Gayle released a statement that he was taking early retirement, after writing a bitter article for Quarter about the “leftist witch-hunt” he had had to endure. Then he fell silent, remaining out of the public eye until March 1986, when he again appeared on the front page of newspapers, this time after his arrest for soliciting a prostitute. Gayle told the press he had only approached the woman to ask what people she came from; he was conducting research for a scholarly article on urban Aboriginality. Gayle’s defence was accepted by the court, the charges were dismissed, and the historian disappeared back into anonymity.
Gayle’s exile ended with the election of the conservative Howard government in 1996, and the firing of the first shots in the so-called “History Wars”. Gayle was an enthusiastic advocate of the prime minister’s view that too many historians had adopted a “black armband” view of Australian history, painting the country’s past in an overwhelmingly negative light. Gayle was inspired by Howard to write his first essay in years, “On the Many Uses of a Black Armband”, which elaborated on the prime minister’s analogy. In the essay, Gayle claimed that left-wing historians also wore the armband as a blindfold, to hide their eyes from the truth, and to fight unfairly, by using it to tie the hands of their opponents behind their backs. At Gayle’s re-emergence into historical debate, opponents resurrected his entirely discredited claims about the Myall Creek massacre, but nevertheless Gayle was embraced by the right as a fearless iconoclast. Emboldened by this support, in 1998 he weighed into the Stolen Generations debate with “The Stolen Inspiration”, an incendiary article in Quarter, in which he claimed that there was no empirical evidence whatsoever for the Stolen Generations, and that “it was all nothing more than a concoction by the Aboriginal Industry”. This was followed by Terror Nullius: How the Left’s Intimidation and Lies Distort Australian History (1999), in which Gayle reprinted and rebutted the attacks made on him in the previous year by journalists and academics.
In 2000 Gayle’s long association with Quarter came to an end. His last published article, “The Washington Consensus”, a tribute to the recently deceased Rand Washington, appeared in the journal’s April issue. The next essay Gayle submitted, “A New Timeline of Australian History”, suggested that Indigenous Australians, rather than being present in this country for forty thousand years before the landing of Europeans, had arrived “at most, a month before the First Fleet”. Gayle offered no sources to validate this peculiar claim and the editor of Quarter regretfully informed him that, much as they respected his work, they could not publish his latest submission. The rejection caused Gayle to break with Quarter for good, though the journal devoted a special issue to his life and work when Gayle was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his service to Australian history on Australia Day 2001.
Gayle’s final work, Truth Goes Walkabout: The Great Aboriginal Lie, an expanded version of his rejected Quarter article, was published by a vanity press in a run of three hundred copies and released on 1 April 2001. The book was badly written, almost nonsensically so for large sections, as Gayle repeatedly lost and painstakingly retrieved the thread of his thesis from a morass of conjecture, bias and invention – his argument being that Aboriginal people had no claim whatsoever to Australia. The leftist journal Overground published a gleeful twelve-page analysis of the book, made up of equal parts derision and disbelief, and announced that the right had fired the last shot of the History Wars, into its own foot. Amid the uproar, Gayle was nowhere to be seen. Quarter launched an energetic counterattack, declaring in an editorial that Truth Goes Walkabout was a laughably obvious forgery, part of a Marxist conspiracy designed to destroy Professor Gayle’s reputation. Even Gayle’s most vehement opponents, they said, had always conceded the suppleness and gracefulness of his prose, while Truth Goes Walkabout appeared to have been written by someone who had only recently started taking English language lessons. Quarter also pointed to the publication date, April the first, as a sure sign of a tasteless practical joke.
The controversy raged on until June, when Edward Gayle reappeared in public. He called a press conference to explain that he had spent the last two months in Alice Springs working on his memoirs, and had been unaware of the war of words his book had provoked. In a lengthy, rambling statement he told reporters that the book was indeed his, and he stood by every word. In July, only a few months after the special issue celebrating Gayle’s achievements, Quarter featured essays denouncing the historian “more in sorrow than in anger” and lamenting the decline of a once powerful intellect. Gayle was unabashed by the publicity, and the petitions demanding that he be stripped of his Medal of the Order of Australia. The initial small print run of Truth Goes Walkabout sold out, and the book was reprinted three times throughout the year, eventually selling over two thousand copies. This was more than the circulation of Quarter, Gayle noted, and a sign that ordinary Australians were more open-minded than the city’s elites.
Gayle’s foremost critic since his return to public life in 1996 had been Professor Adam Kingston, Chair in Australian History at the University of Newcastle and himself an Indigenous Australian. In a long series of articles published in academic journals and in Overground, he had spent hundreds of pages demolishing the false premises, lies, misrepresentations and inaccuracies that riddled Gayle’s work. At the height of the Truth Goes Walkabout debacle, Kingston challenged Gayle to a public debate on not only the claims Gayle made in his latest book, but also Murder or Self-Murder, a work which Gayle had never repudiated, despite all of its central contentions being proven, unequivocally, to be false. Gayle accepted Kingston’s challenge and the debate was scheduled to take place in the Great Hall of the University of Newcastle on the evening of 19 August 2001.
At seven o’clock, the scheduled time for the debate, Kingston stood on the stage alone. Gayle finally arrived twenty minutes late. He appeared flustered; his shoelaces were undone, as were the top two buttons of his shirt, and his tie was askew. Gayle slowly climbed the stairs to the stage, passing Kingston as he went to his podium. He ignored Kingston’s proffered hand and looked around confusedly when the crowd booed him. With difficulty, the moderator restored order, and after a short introduction Professor Gayle was invited to outline his views on Australian history, specifically those concerning the country’s Indigenous inhabitants. Gayle began, in an unsteady voice, by saying he had significantly revised his conclusions since the publication of Truth Goes Walkabout. This prompted scattered applause from the audience, who believed Gayle was about to apologise for and retract his offensive thesis. After waiting for quiet, Gayle continued; having weighed all the evidence, he had come to the conclusion that he had been gravely mistaken in his beliefs that Aboriginals had arrived in Australia a short time before Europeans, and that the massacres of the nineteenth century were mass suicides. He was mistaken, he went on, because Aboriginals did not exist. They had not been massacred because they had never been in Australia at all.
There was silence in the auditorium as Gayle explained his recent realisation that Aboriginal people were nothing more than a figment of the imagination, like Father Christmas or the Easter Bunny. Here, Professor Kingston tried to interrupt him, but Gayle spoke over him, citing as evidence for his claim the fact that there was supposed to be an Aboriginal beside him here tonight, but as everyone could see, Gayle was on the stage alone. Kingston walked over to Gayle and stood directly in front of him. The old man looked through him, his voice trailing as he presented his proofs that the Indigenous population of Australia was nothing more than a collective hallucination. The crowd began to jeer, and Kingston turned to them to ask for their forbearance; Professor Gayle was obviously very unwell. Gayle went on speaking for another moment before lapsing into unintelligibility. Kingston called for an ambulance just before Gayle collapsed on
the stage. He was taken to the John Hunter Hospital, where he was diagnosed as having suffered a stroke, as well as being in the late stages of dementia.
In October 2001, Gayle was released from hospital and moved to a nursing home in Sydney, where he would spend the rest of his life. He required constant care, having been paralysed down his left side by the stroke, and made bewildered and often angry as his dementia progressed. In his last years Gayle was to have only one visitor. In June 2004 an elderly Aboriginal woman came to see him. According to one of the nurses, she remained in his room for two hours, sitting by his bed and holding his hand. Gayle was asleep for most of this time, but when he opened his eyes once, the woman leaned over and whispered something in his ear. Gayle showed no sign that he heard her. Finally, she kissed him on the cheek and left.
Edward Gayle died on 26 May 2008.
Vivian Darkbloom, with husband Peter, circa 1936
(1901–1976)
… the bare shoulders of a hawk-like black-haired strikingly tall woman …
From Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
VIVIAN DARKBLOOM, NOVELIST AND SELF-PROCLAIMED MUSE, was born in Parramatta, New South Wales, on 13 March 1901. Her father was the editor and publisher Lloyd Allenby, founder of Allenby & Godwin, Australia’s foremost publishing house from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. Her mother, Thalia, died giving birth to Vivian and the girl was brought up by her father, who never remarried. Vivian’s childhood was an extraordinarily happy one. Her father doted on her, as did the writers drawn to his sumptuous Point Piper home, including Banjo Paterson, Barbara Baynton and Sydney Steele, Vivian’s godfather, who composed many poems in Vivian’s honour, now sadly lost.