Bob Ellis

by Ellis, Bob; Brooksbank, Anne;

  Their songs enlarge them. Ours makes us feel, however slightly, like dickheads. Though ‘I Am, You Are, We Are Australian’ brings us to tears of pride, especially when sung by children, ‘Advance Australia Fair’ makes us cringe. And when we stand up for it, we are usually, inwardly, lying.

  Every one of the first six lines rings false. We are not young. We are not free. Our soil is not golden. Wealth does not come from toil here, but from birth or short-selling or real estate. And though we are ‘girt by sea’, so are all islands, and we are an island, and this is scarcely worth noting. And our land does not ‘abound with precious gifts’, it is two-thirds desert. Unless you count uranium, I suppose, and the immensity of coal that is currently choking the planet, it does not abound; it is a desert waste.

  The very first line, ‘Australians all, let us rejoice’, rings as false as ‘I did but see her passing by’ or ‘tough but humane’. In real life you rejoice or you do not, you cannot be asked to rejoice. You can be asked to give thanks, for that is a form of words. You can be asked to bow your head in prayer. You cannot be asked to rejoice, for that is a spontaneous emotion, and you have it or not. When Mrs Thatcher said ‘I say unto you: rejoice’ at the end of the needless Falklands War, she was as falsely tuned as we are when we are called upon to fill with joy at the thought of the oldest and driest land with one of the cruellest colonial histories, of poisoned flour and Stolen Children, and not one Indigenous person or immigrant Vietnamese, or Sudanese, or Palestinian in our Senate or House of Representatives, and give vent to our pleasured excitement. This is a problem to work on, not a victory to rejoice in.

  The second verse – ‘For those who come across the seas / We’ve boundless wealth to share’ – is an especially big lie. Our wealth is not boundless, and BHP Billiton does not like to share it. And boat people coming here across the sea, if detected, are towed back to Indonesia, or, until quite recently, imprisoned in Woomera, Baxter, Port Hedland, Villawood or Nauru. The image of easy prosperity, true for some who buy their way in for a million dollars, is not, however, true for those Kosovans who fled here from ethnic cleansing and were soon sent back to the neighbourhoods their families were killed in. Nor those Hazaras fleeing the Taliban who were accused of being Taliban themselves, and charged a million dollars for their incarceration.

  A national anthem should above all not lie to us; not lie to us clumsily, or even smoothly. It can avoid certain historical subjects, for we all have ugly national secrets, but it should not say things that are not true. ‘Young and free’ was not true of Aborigines for our first one hundred and eighty-nine years and it is not widely true of them now. Outback squalor, infantile deafness, poor education, child-betrothals, incest, wife-beating, frequent gaolings and Third World levels of health outcomes, do not add up to freedom. Nor can the world’s oldest continuing cultural traditions, forty or fifty thousand years of them, be called young. This country is only young if we ethnically cleanse from our national memory our original people, and the half million we murdered or brought through trauma and grief to death by kidnapping, alcohol, unjust imprisonment and centuries of mockery.

  Canada has a history as abominable as ours but has a good national anthem that does not slither into lying. ‘O Canada’ (it says),

  Our home and native land!

  True patriot love in all thy sons command.

  With glowing hearts we see thee rise,

  The True North strong and free!

  From far and wide, O Canada,

  We stand on guard for thee.

  And so, in a more rousing way, does (amazingly) New Zealand.

  God of nations! at Thy feet

  In the bonds of love we meet,

  Hear our voices, we entreat,

  God defend our Free Land.

  Guard Pacific’s triple star,

  From the shafts of strife and war,

  Make her praises heard afar,

  God defend New Zealand.

  Men of every creed and race

  Gather here before Thy face,

  Asking Thee to bless this place,

  God defend our Free Land.

  From dissension, envy, hate,

  And corruption guard our State,

  Make our country good and great,

  God defend New Zealand.

  Ours, alas, is very different and, on most grand occasions, dismaying. What should we do about this bear-trap of denial, untruth, bad poetry and poor music?

  Well, Gough Whitlam had a National Anthem Competition in 1973 – and I, not that it matters, was one of the six finalists – a competition which was abandoned after the Musicians’ Union demanded payment every time the new song was broadcast. But it wasn’t, inherently, a bad idea, and we could do the same thing now, and get Bill Shorten to negotiate with the relevant union thugs.

  New words to our best tune, ‘The Song of Australia’, wouldn’t hurt. Or ‘I Still Call Australia Home’. Or ‘Waltzing Matilda’ (‘Sing for Australia, work for Australia, pray for Australia at sunset and dawn,’ and so on.) Or we could ask Bruce Woodley, as he did for the Marysville fires, to rewrite or condense the words of ‘I Am, You Are, We Are Australian’. Or simply sing it as it is, a celebration of our multiculture, our convict past, our Aboriginal heritage. There is no law that says a national anthem can’t be three minutes long. An orchestral truncation of it would suffice at the Olympic Games when we win gold medals. But at football games, and cricket tests, and state funerals and parliament openings, it could be sung in full, with the crowd joining in the chorus, and stir us, as an anthem should, to love of country, pride in ourselves, community forgiveness, an extended hand across differences. I can’t see any argument against this, can you? Or perhaps you’d prefer to stand up for the rest of your life singing ‘girt by sea’. It’s not healthy, I think, to give roaring voice at public events to a pack of lies. Or perhaps you disagree.

  One Hundred Days of Summer (first published in Unleashed)

  7.

  SAYING SORRY

  A PREAMBLE TO THE CONSTITUTION

  We, the Australian people, hereby acknowledge that, like many others, our nation was built on theft, murder, unequal conquest, miscegenation, environmental atrocity, the slaughter of harmless animals and the rape, enslavement and brutalisation by forced adoption of Indigenous peoples and that, uniquely, it was founded on a prison population, many of whom were transported for trivial offences and some of whom, once here, were hanged for lesser ones. We acknowledge therefore that our civilisation derives from tyranny, error, human folly and abominable superstition, and we ask what ghosts remain of our cruel, culpable and almost unthinkable past for some understanding of our ancestors’ ignorance and the shocking pressures they were under.

  We vow henceforth to do better, to strive in a world that may be elsewhere insane to school our youth and tend our sick and comfort our old and praise our gifted and sow what seeds of happiness we can in our less than gifted, to do justly, walk proudly and be a beacon of decent kindness and ordinary commonsense in a darkling world that is more and more in need of a good example.

  Let that example be ours.

  POISONED WATERHOLES, A SPEECH, 1997

  On the matter of poisoned waterholes, I wrote in my book Goodbye Jerusalem, a year ago, of hearing on radio, out of the past, the voice of Dame Mary Gilmore tell of going once as a little girl with her mother by horse and sulky to visit a killing ground.

  ‘The waterhole was poisoned,’ she said, ‘and of course everyone that drank of the water was dead. I recollect my mother saying she wanted to see where they were, and we drove along a little bush track, and by the side of the waterhole there was the father lying dead, the mother beside him, and the baby, about eighteen months or two years old, on his hands and knees dead from drinking the milk of his mother. All through the bush, all around, were dead bodies.’

  All around. I went on to say in my book that the Big Lie of our culture was that there weren’t many Aborigines here, not really, after one hundr
ed and twenty thousand years of occupation and procreation, not more than a million, really, and so not many killed. In a country the size of China, which had two hundred million in 1788, after only twenty thousand years of occupation, not so many Aborigines here, and not so many killed. Not the five million Noel Butlin said there were here. No way. Nothing like it. Impossible.

  Don’t think about it. Relaxed and comfortable. Put your feet up. Watch the Home Shopping Channel. Don’t think about it.

  I have thought about it since, and of the time span of Aboriginal occupation here, and the time span of my white tribe’s occupation here, of one hundred and twenty thousand years versus two hundred years, a ratio of only six hundred to one, which means that if the human habitation of this land had been twenty-four hours, from midnight to midnight, my tribe would have got here at two and a half minutes to midnight. And yet we have all these rights. And they, miraculously, have none.

  And I thought about those babies poisoned by their mother’s milk by the infected waterholes and I numbered them in my mind in tens of thousands and tried to conjure up their suckling faces as their lives were extinguished and their traditions, and I went walking by Pittwater with my dogs this morning and I wrote on the back of an envelope this fumbled beginning of a credo, and it is this.

  I do not hold that land acquired by the murder of men and children is mine by right of any law that is just, when that land was got in a war that was undeclared and followed by no signed surrender. I do not hold that the Sultan of Brunei, whatever his billions, has rights to that land that are greater than those who have lived and worshipped there since a hundred and fifteen thousand years before Moses came to Israel.

  I do not hold that the slaughter of children, by land or poisoned mother’s milk or ethnic cleansing pogrom, in Rwanda or Yugoslavia or Oodnadatta, is justifiable before any court, reducible in its manifest evil by any repaid amount, or erasable of its horror by any confected apology by any craven politician withering in the glare of the Gallup Polls. And yet I believe words must be found.

  Nor do I hold to the myth of the hardworking, white landowning pioneer, Dad Rudd, and his brood of jovial yokels, when so many of them, thousands of them, connived at or committed or covered up in classic whitewash the murder of their neighbours, and in any case were involved on a daily basis in the murder of their trusting friends the cows and sheep.

  And I am not, by God, too pleased with the pseudo-democratic notion, in this democracy that is only two hundred years old, that the half-million killed or fatally infected Aborigines, and their four or eight million unborn descendants, and the hundreds of thousands humiliated into alcoholic poisoning or nooses in filthy gaols, have no right, just because they are dead, to a vote, or a voice, and no claim on our sympathies as ghosts beyond the grave. I hold that we are involved, and still involved, in their fate, as England is still involved in the Potato Famine of Ireland and the killing there by starvation of half a million children who did no harm. And the words must be found.

  And I am not too pleased myself to have benefited from this carnage, to have a block of land with wondrous water views that other eyes looked out from, a hundred thousand years before the pharaohs came to Egypt, and spoke of legends already ancient then, and held corroborees and planned their sacred year.

  And I do not hold there is any right of conquest in the modern world, but a right of negotiation, a right to reasoned arbitration, a right to justice or some ghost of it after a trial by a jury of our peers, a right to plead and campaign and publicise, to organise and harass and threaten, and, oh yes, a right to vote. I do not believe Tim Fischer has more right to these rights than I or you, nor his ally the Sultan of Brunei, nor his political fancy woman Pauline Hanson.

  And I hold as well that in a hundred years the present colonial occupiers of Chechnya and West Jerusalem and Alice Springs and Wounded Knee will be the pariahs of history and herded in the public mind with the crusaders and the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Evil in history’s eyes is easily known, as easily as we now see the ignorant patronising evil of the present government, those crab lice on the body politic, sucking all decency from its bloodstream and reducing to suppurating sores a once adequate Australian ethic of a fair go, who will not and cannot see what is before them, which is future shame. And yet words must be found.

  And I guess there is in the world no shame that is greater than the murder of children, unless it is, as happened here in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s and ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, and happened to Lois O’Donoghue, the thieving of their souls.

  And I am involved in this shame, because I knew of it, and thought little of it, and did not speak, in fifty years, as I speak now of the moral obscenity that this ignominious prime minister, this itching haemorrhoid in the body politic, has decided is not worth a penny in recompense, or a word of official apology – unlike the billions that have gone to the private health funds and the gun owners and the fuel rebate freaks and the removal men that brought him back safe to Kirribilli that he might have more often a water view and the company of his unstolen children and his servants and silver plate and the little, continuing, shrivelled world of inner Wollstonecraft that is his mind.

  And though I am involved, and I am guilty too, I cannot apologise, for I have not the authority and the electoral mandate; I can only articulate my shame. My country, my shame. And words must be found.

  Speech to the Mosman RSL, September 1997, So It Goes

  THE WALK ACROSS THE BRIDGE, MAY 2000

  The walk of two hundred thousand people across the Bridge on May 28th – a greater number than walked with Martin Luther King to the hill where he said ‘I have a dream’ – was a snapshot of an Australia that our media down the years has mostly, culpably, hidden from us. North Shore solicitors, accountants, dentists, inner-city academics, Balmain bohemians, Kogarah bricklayers, teachers from far-off country towns, school children, undergraduates, TAFE students, widowed pensioners, old soldiers, nurses, proclaimed a nation that was much more interesting – and interested – than the sub-racist, post-colonial backwater that John Howard had us almost convinced it was, the Alabama or Southern Rhodesia of the 1990s. It’s a nation that buys more books than any other, votes more thoughtfully than any other – apart from, possibly, Canada – and has been educated, mostly by the ABC, and by unsung thousands of tireless, heckled schoolteachers, into a state of public awareness that, were it reflected in America back then, would have seen two and a half million cheering King on that famous morning. Ten times as many Australians, proportionally, turned out for a similar day of racial healing as turned out for black American liberty in 1963. Think about that …

  We scrub up pretty well, you’d think, as an alert, reactive modern democracy, or we should. Why then do we have of late this worldwide reputation as a punishing, white-trash tyranny, whose health care, schoolrooms, job contracts, prison sentences, race relations, greenhouse emissions, youth jobless figures, youth suicide rates, drug programs, old-age care and pointless persecution of refugees are now pushing us off the map of ordinary decent mercy in the civilised world? Why are Australians travelling overseas now afraid, or a little shy, of confessing to foreigners their nation of origin?

  The answer (of course, of course, of course) is John Howard – though not by any means the entirety of his party, who oft have shown a stricken, blushful tenderness on social issues – Chris Gallus in particular, Peter Collins in particular – and our growing shame before the world. And as well the cloud of unknowing that envelops and cushions our Prime Miniature wherever he goes.

  For John Howard is a bland and maddening mystery, a public man these twenty-three years famous whom still we know almost nothing about. Do we know, as an instance, what book he read last? No. Do we know if he’s read a book since high school that was not on his university law course? No. Do we know if he’s ever been to a play, or what that play was? No. Do we know if he’s lately, or ever, seen a film? No. Do we know if he’s ever heard a symphony orchest
ra play Mahler, a diva sing La Bohème? No.

  Does he pray? We don’t know. Does he believe in the resurrection of the body? We don’t know. Does he think that God has called him to a special purpose on this earth? We don’t know. We do know that he admires Don Bradman, thinks income tax too high, and Australian history an honourable, mild-mannered chronicle we should all relax about. We know that he liked, or said he liked, Bob Dylan, ‘the tunes but not the words’. We know that he has not in his forty adult years on earth entertained an Aboriginal person in his home. We don’t know much more.

  And this mysterious, clenched little fellow refused to walk across the Bridge on Sunday, May 28th, and threatened his deputy with sacking – or so it is reported – if he dared then walk with history among friendly multitudes on that proud, particular national day. And on Monday 29th he again refused to say sorry, and told John Laws a treaty with Aborigines would be ‘divisive’. Division’s most constant, unyielding spokesman thus warned against divisiveness …

  And is it possible Howard could be so wrong about heartland Australia, the Australia that in his cloud of unknowing he has not yet noticed all around him walking, marching, humming friendly anthems and engaging the future in ways that he never dreamt? Is it possible that he has greatly annoyed that new Australia – and his watchful, largely Chinese electorate – by his deeds and words and attitudes, and oblivion awaits him, and the scorn of history? We’ll see.

  Previously unpublished

  THE TAKEN