I returned to my desk in the Australian winter of 2010 with very different mental settings. The memories to which my vanities had been in thrall slid back; the present had claimed me, and it mattered. The effect was indeed bracing. I sat down and rewrote in the third person the manuscript that was not yet called The Mountain. Martha, no longer narrator, lost a lot of her story, most of her point of view, dropped in age by twenty years and became a character in the ensemble of characters that at last found room to stretch and breathe – and, yes, to look at each other, and look back. Ensemble, that was the word that came to me: they, all of them, not me, not ‘I’. Milton sighed a sigh of relief.
As to the result, well, it’s out there in the world, and though I probably know its faults and failures better than anyone, it’s not my job to lay them out. What I will say is that out of that period of radical doubt, the ground of my writing changed. The Mountain is a novel – at last I can say that – a character-based novel that gives voice to the predicaments underlying all I’d experienced, or seen, or known in that magnificent, heartbreaking country. It is as personal as anything I have written since Poppy, but it is not autobiographical. The ghost of people I have known may hover above it, but it is not biographical. With The Mountain I crossed the borderline from a form that might be called literary non-fiction, or life writing, into the terrain of the novel. While this move into ‘imagination’ did not disavow the ‘informed’ – on the contrary, to write of the post-colonial without having trod the post-colonial ground strikes me as ever less defensible – it did shift and change my understanding of the relationship of the words that once went together so sonorously: ‘the informed imagination’.
4.
Fiction writers often talk of empathy as the task, even the technique of fiction. Hilary Mantel talks of getting behind her characters’ eyes, and every writer who deals in lives and characters will know what she means. But Mantel also warns that we cannot proceed on the assumption that historical characters (in her case) are like ‘us’; we can’t hop behind ‘their’ eyes and look out with ‘our’ eyes. When she uses the term ‘informed imagination’ of her Thomas Cromwell novels, it is a way of saying that the research she must do as a novelist is no less onerous than the research a historian might do. While the formal demands of writing history or fiction can be, and are, very different, when it comes to writing lives, the writer of fiction and of non-fiction is faced with a similar paradox. If she is to bring life – lifeness – to the page, then she must, in a sense, get behind eyes that are radically different from hers, and that’s the paradox. She must do, or appear to do, what is not possible.
When it comes to the argument over history and fiction, the limits and nature of historical imagination that unfolded here while I was struggling with The Mountain, I don’t want to reprise a debate that has been divisive and painful, other than to say that through it I came to understand that the ‘informed imagination’ does not only mean qualifying ‘informed’ with ‘imagination’ as I had done; it also requires us to bring an informed intelligence to the nature – and limitation – of imagination itself. It would have been a grave error on my part to think that ‘I’ could sit in a village in PNG and ‘imagine’ myself into a village person. What would it be like for someone like me to be a village woman? Well if I were a village woman, I would not be the ‘I’ that writes this from the asphalted world of escalators. Even the briefest acquaintance with psychoanalysis alerts us to the deep structures of subjectivity laid down from infancy, so that while we might all bleed, our sense of ourselves and our understanding of self in relation to others and society can differ radically. This is a matter much debated by anthropologists.
My task, I came to see, was as a novelist, not as some kind of inadequate faux anthropologist. So it’s perhaps fitting that, for all my reading, the point made itself, and a certain emotional sense, when I first encountered in Ömie the image of the tree as a metaphor for the clan. Whereas in the Anglophone West we draw a family tree from the top of the page with each individual marked along horizontal generational lines, the Ömie draw their tree upwards. The roots represent the Ancestors, the trunk the members of the clan, all in together, and the branches are symbolic of the duvahe who stretch the clan into the future. This does not mean that everyone in the trunk is the same – you only have to be an hour in a village to know that – or that they think of themselves as the same. But it does mean that their taken-for-granted sense of who they are in relation to each other and their society is markedly different from the way we in the West, each with our place on our horizontal lines, take for granted the nature of self.
That is what my character Rika, who wants only to be the same, has to learn. She has to learn it in her professional life with her camera, and that is hard enough. In her personal life, in her deep love for Aaron, it is harder still coming to understand how she is seen and, in a sense, can only be seen, especially by the older members of the fjord village where Aaron was born and grew up. She might be called sister friend by his young women kin, she might refuse all difference in the name of race equality. She might wish to be the same, ache to be the same, but she is not. Her marriage to Aaron looks very different to the village than it does to the cosmopolitan young in Port Moresby celebrating the mixing of race and colour. To them their marriage can symbolise the changing tide of history, the new day coming, but to the older women in the village, the aya, whose task it is to hold the ground steady, it is a turbulence in the order of things. To the young women in the village, her sister friends who have a greater sense of the changes that are coming, Rika’s IUD – a piece of metal inside her to stop the making of babies – is as incomprehensible as it would be to a woman in contemporary Australia that there are certain springs where a woman should go if she wishes for a baby. The point here is that to dismantle the ‘other’ does not mean to replace ‘other’ with ‘same’. Like so much in life, movement between the two depends – to use the camera metaphor – on what lens you use, what focus and exposure, on who is behind the camera and which way it is turned.
It was only when I relinquished the epistemological grip of a first-person narrator that had, in my thinking until then, held the two parts of the ‘informed imagination’ together, that I (in my particularities and limitations as a writer) could bring a more polyphonic perspective to the moral predicaments in which this book had entangled me. I’m not saying it could only be done in fiction, but it was, for me, a kind of liberation to come to understand that fiction stands on different ground from history. There is scope for play along the borderlines, but there is also a ravine, to use Inga Clendinnen’s word for it, or at least a rocky valley, which we should respect. From the point of view of writing, there is, I think, an epistemological necessity for even the most literary of non-fiction writers to act as the lens through which we can trust, or evaluate, or revisit for ourselves the selection, presentation and interpretation of the lives and events put before us. The non-fiction writer might use the techniques of fiction to bring lifeness to her lives and to conjure the paradox of difference. But her pact with the reader, and her subject, returns always to the record, however patchy, however interrupted, from which she works. Fiction makes a different pact. It might contain argument, but it is not an argument; it involves interpretation, but to make it depends not on reference to the sources (important though they might be) but on perspective and patterning, voice and language, metaphor and image.
But there’s a rub. By crossing into the land of fiction, and by creating characters that do not equate in any simple way, or even at all, to myself or to the many lives I’ve bumped up against in my rich experience of PNG, I had confronted myself with a possibly greater challenge if I wanted The Mountain to be more than ‘set’ in that time, that place, that history.
For while the best of non-fiction writing also depends on the skill of the writer to conjure life on the page, and to use literary conventions without them appearing conventional, for the novelist who engages
with history as more than a set, the stakes are higher. For a novel that gestures to history but cannot breathe life into that paradox of difference has nothing in the annals to fall back on. If its characters do not move us, if we do not believe in the world it creates, if difference is not rendered tangible, the writer cannot then fall back on biographical or historical veracity and say that there really was such a tide of events, and such people swept up by it. A poor history might still tell us something worthwhile, and hand the baton on. A bad novel tells us nothing, and if it does not allow us to glimpse ‘that blue river of truth, curling somewhere’, as the critic James Wood calls it, there is little left behind.
Notes
1. Albert Wendt, Introduction to Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980, University of Hawai’i Press, 1995, p. 3.
2. Wendt, Introduction to Nuanua, p. 3.
3. Steven Winduo, Transitions and Transformations in Papua New Guinea Literature and Politics, UPNG Press and Bookshop, 2012, p. 41.
4. Colin Filer, ‘The Political Construction of a Land Grab in Papua New Guinea’, Australian National University, Pacific Discussion Paper, September 2011.
5. Janet Malcolm, Paris Review interview: The Art of Non Fiction No 4.
Meanjin
Remote Control: Ten Years of Struggle and Success in Indigenous Australia
Noel Pearson
I
I’ve been to many remote places in Australia, but this is entirely new to me. I don’t know the desert. From the air, the vastness of the rolling dunes, green after the summer rain, is beguiling, as is the mild weather when we land. But I’ve been to enough places in the north of the country to know that come October this land is harder than any place I know. I’m travelling to the Pilbara with a former Western Australian state parliamentarian, Tom Stephens, whom I invited onto the board of an organisation that supports schools with tackling literacy. Stephens was a member for electorates in the Pilbara and the Kimberley and has been travelling to remote communities for the past thirty years.
The Martu leader at Jigalong, Brian Samson, picks us up from the charter and takes us to the school. Outside the gates, we are met as if royalty. Student leaders, the principal, Shane Wilson, and members of staff are there, replete with a welcome banner. We are as excited as they are. For the next three hours, we are taken on a tour of the school, visiting every classroom. After seven weeks of the Direct Instruction approach to teaching, the Jigalong School is moving. It reminds me of three schools in Cape York that started using Direct Instruction five years ago. It is doing as well as, if not better than, we were in our first term. What strikes me about the school is the quality of its leadership and the commitment of its teachers. Armed with an instructional program that works, the teachers and students are turning a virtuous circle. Students experiencing learning success means that teachers experience teaching success.
Samson is like me. Although I am from the coast and he is from the desert, he and I could well be brothers. We share a fierce hope for these children. He brought a crew of Martu leaders and educators to Cape York last year to visit our schools, and told me the first priority of Martu’s native title organisation, the Western Desert Lands Aboriginal Corporation, is to ensure Martu children get a good education. There are more than half a dozen state and independent schools in the Pilbara region and on Martu land, which Martu children attend, more or less. Attendance levels are an obvious challenge.
Samson’s aim was to bring this eclectic bunch of schools into an alliance. Each school would adopt the Direct Instruction program. Kids who travelled between communities and shifted schools could pick up in their new school where they had left off in their old.
I look at Samson, see his weariness and the obvious ravages of a whitefella diet of flour and sugar on his giant body. He could well think the same of me. The Martu have been embroiled in various controversies concerning mining and environmental protection. I know what Samson has been going through. Leadership in our world is full of strife and controversy.
II
The big question in Indigenous affairs after these past ten years is this: ‘Are things better since the demise of ATSIC?’ I think in aggregate the show has gone backwards. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission collapsed in 2005 in a conflagration of vicious internal rivalries. By that time, a maelstrom of media allegations about corruption and wastage had emerged, driven by John Howard from his very first press conference as prime minister in March 1996. Today the name ‘ATSIC’ conjures up all that is bad and hopeless about Indigenous affairs and Indigenous people. But is this the truth?
If ATSIC failed, there were three parties to the failure. First, there was the Indigenous leadership. Second, there was the bureaucracy that supported the commission: the Australian Public Service. Third, there was the growing private industry, largely comprised of consultants, some Indigenous but mostly not, who generated most of the strategies, plans and design of programs that failed. There were three culprits, but only one was singled out for contumelious outrage.
Indigenous organisations and their leaders bore the brunt of allegations of corruption and wastage. They were the Aboriginal Industry. The public service and the private consultants escaped scot-free. Thus began a concerted scorched-earth policy on the part of the federal government to erase Indigenous organisations from the landscape. The chief means for forcing the demise of the network of community and regional organisations across the country was to cease their operational funding. Instead, organisations were increasingly required to fund operations out of service-delivery grants. These programs in turn were subject to market forces. Indigenous organisations were unable to compete with larger organisations from the mainstream that soon entered the Indigenous sphere. These large organisations had the benefit of scale, and the smaller Indigenous ones died out.
It was as if the government had developed a great allergy towards putting money into the hands of Indigenous peoples and their organisations. Of course, there were exceptions, but this was the rule. It was the rule of the past ten years.
The post-ATSIC story is one of ever-increasing passivity. Indigenous people are not even presiding over their own deathbed. Instead there is an army of white people with palliative responsibilities.
The truth is that ATSIC was not a complete failure. There were many positive features. Many Indigenous leaders from communities around the country share my assessment that at the regional level, with the regional councils, many good things had taken place in the fifteen years it operated. That was certainly the case in Cape York with the Peninsula Regional Council. In our region, the agenda constructed during the ATSIC days underpinned the decisions taken over the past twenty years, including on social and economic reform.
I was involved in the struggle to protect the 1992 Mabo High Court decision on native title from extinguishment at the hands of state governments and a hostile Hewson-led Coalition. We would never have succeeded if the Lowitja O’Donoghue–led ATSIC had not co- ordinated its defence. Under O’Donoghue, ATSIC achieved a great deal. But even she was dismayed by the internecine conflicts and power struggles of the national organisation by the time it came to its bitter end.
III
The Productivity Commission reported that Australia expended $30.3 billion on behalf of Indigenous Australians in 2012–13. This is unbelievable. The figure represents not the funding that goes directly to Indigenous Australians but the total quantum that Indigenous Australians justify as part of allocations to Commonwealth agencies and state and territory governments. So-called ‘Indigenous specific’ funding is $5.6 billion per annum. These numbers tell us several things. First, they tell us that even the funding that does go directly to Indigenous affairs is not producing the outcomes that would be expected of it. The sheer lack of social and economic productivity from this investment is plain to see. Second, the extent to which governments and their agencies receive funding that is nominally allocated because of Indigenous numbers is now transparent. T
he federation has been nominally allocating up to $30.3 billion per year in the name of Indigenous Australians and has been profoundly short-changing them. Third, the growth in Indigenous expenditures has accelerated – occasioned by the growth of the real Aboriginal Industry. This Aboriginal Industry is largely not comprised of blackfellas, but a vast parasitic industry of government and private-sector players. Indigenous budgetary allocations now support not only Indigenous organisations of varying quality and effectiveness but also an even larger non-government sector. Consultants and service providers, ranging from Work for the Dole programs and employment programs to child welfare protection organisations, have now colonised the entire Indigenous landscape. Even community development activities like mowing lawns and painting rocks have been outsourced to these organisations, both not-for-profit and for-profit.
The burgeoning of this industry has largely taken place under the radar, and without critique. Because the majority of this industry is not Indigenous, there is no controversy. There are no allegations of misuse and waste of money. There are no lurid media stories about misappropriation of funds. Bureaucracies which supervise the tendering of these programs are in cahoots with this industry. Many of the players are former public servants who have strong links with the political parties in office. When child protection organisations offer safe houses and foster-care homes for children, they can charge up to $5000 per week per child. This is a lucrative industry. Basic questions like this one are rarely asked: should a commercial operator be given a five-year contract through a national tender process to supervise a Work for the Dole program in a remote Aboriginal community, if it results in an outcome no better than when the local community organisation operated the program?
The Best Australian Essays 2015 Page 22