A THUS FAR UNPRODUCED SCREENPLAY BASED ON THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL INQUIRY INTO THE SEPARATION OF ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER CHILDREN FROM THEIR FAMILIES.
An Aboriginal woman in her seventies wearing a grey scarf is on the stand. The Commisioners, Sir Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodds, attend closely to what she is saying. A younger assistant, Karen, part Aboriginal herself, sits to one side, her pain growing as she listens.
OLD WOMAN: Every morning our people’d crush charcoal and mix that with animal fat and smother that all over us. So when the police came they could only see black children in the distance. We were told to be on the alert and run in the bush or run and stand behind trees as stiff as a poker. If they were real quick, our mums’d stuff us into flour bags and pretend we weren’t there. We were told not to sneeze. We knew if we sneezed and they knew we were in there bundled up, we’d be taken off and away from the area.
An Aboriginal man in his sixties, with the face of a battered boxer, is saying:
SIXTYISH MAN: I wasn’t allowed to go to the same school where my … natural siblings were attending school. I knew my siblings’ names, but I didn’t know what they looked like. I was told not to contact my natural family, because they weren’t … (He looks up, puzzled) … any good.
An Aboriginal woman in her fifties is saying:
FIFTYISH WOMAN: One thing that really, really sticks in my mind is being put there in this cold bed with white starchy sheets and having to sleep on my own, and looking down the row and just seeing rows of beds, and not knowing where my brothers and sister were.
A woman in her thirties, undereducated, possibly a drinker, is testifying:
THIRTYISH WOMAN: Mum was kidnapped. My grandfather was out working, and he came home and found that his kids had been taken away, and he didn’t know nothing about it. Four years later he died of a broken heart. He had a breakdown and was sent to Townsville hospital. He was buried in a pauper’s grave and on his death certificate he died of malnutrition, ulcers and plus he had bed sores. He was fifty-one.
A woman in her forties, articulate, working class, is saying:
FORTYISH WOMAN: My grandparents waited for me to come home and I never came home. My grandfather died in 1978 and my grandmother died in 1979. I came home in 1980.
A man in his fifties is saying:
FIFTYISH MAN: I wish I was blacker. I wish I had language. I wish I had my culture.
There is a silence. We see the drained faces of the investigators. Mick is fairly calm, Sir Ron inscrutable, Karen plainly upset. In the college dining hall, a man called William, who is in his late forties, is halfway through his life story to Sir Ron and Mick Dodds. Telling it is costing him a lot.
WILLIAM: When the orphanage closed, they sent us out to different places. My brother and I went to a Mrs Raymond. And she greeted us at the door, and we went into this room, and I’d never seen a room like it. It was … big, and my brother and I were going to share it. We put our bags down on the floor. We thought, this is wonderful. As soon as the Welfare Officer left, Mrs Raymond took us outside that room and put us in a two-bed caravan out the back.
The camera moves slowly towards him.
WILLIAM: I was sleeping in the caravan. I was only a little boy then. In the middle of the night someone came to the caravan and raped me. (His eyes show the pain of this experience.) That person raped me and raped me. I could feel the pain going through me. I cried and cried and they stuffed my head in the pillow. And I had nobody to talk to. And night after night it happened. This was the Bogey Man, I thought. This was him … I still can’t go to sleep at night. I just feel that pain. My kids ask why I get up in the middle of the night and I can’t explain it, I can’t tell it to them – shamed.
SORRY DAY
WEDNESDAY, 13 FEBRUARY 2008, NOON
In their thousands the old black women – with curly copper hair, in red and multicoloured scarves and blue jeans and tan trousers – made their way up the hill; in lesser numbers the old black men in pork-pie hats, their coffee-coloured sons in caps; and like so many burnt matchsticks moved about and settled on the plastic chairs on the green lawn under the drab grey sky. So many had come, as they do, come to watch and listen, some from thousands of miles, from countries away, like their darker, thinner forebears who travelled years to Uluru to have conference thousands of years before Moses moved the Children of Israel to a better place, a land of milk and honey in the dusty hills of Judea. There was a feeling of Promised Land here too, in the elderly women with endured pain etched in their faces, who had buried, I guess, two children each on average and four grandchildren and a husband long ago …
How does it feel to be the daughter, the granddaughter, the great-great-granddaughter of white rape, I wondered? Or all of the above? How do you feel hope then? How do you speak of pride? And yet we are where we are, as Shorten would say. And things must be said. Things long overdue. Questions must be asked, and answers endured. On the big screens in fogged and spotty images, like a dementia-sufferer’s remembrance of inexplicable happier times, the chosen representatives of the dispossessed, the broken, the put-together-again, the deserted, the wife-beaten, the bereaved, the orphaned, with their black-mahogany faces and their coffee-coloured faces and their near-white faces with liver spots, broad-nosed, bead-necklaced, leant forward as the prime minister stood and began:
Mr Speaker, I move that today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations – this blemished chapter in our nation’s history. The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians …
On the lawn near us there was applause and cheering, tears from the old girls, startled approval from old, decayed, bearded lefties down for the day. They didn’t think Rudd would be this good. It was going well.
We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country. For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry. We the parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation. For the future we take heart, resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written …
Rudd’s crisp mild voice was the perfect instrument for such a homily. It was an ABC voice, both classless and educated, the sort of voice you trusted when it read the news. It had none of the baggage of the English upper-class or the Australian working-class, like Downer’s or Latham’s, or of the racetrack urger like Hawke’s, or the creepy accountant like Howard’s. It was the voice of a lifelong adviser, a family lawyer or doctor, who would not let you down …
*
And, then, finally:
Mr Speaker, today the parliament has come together to right a great wrong. We have come together to deal with the past so that we might fully embrace the future. We have had sufficient audacity of faith to advance a pathway to that future, with arms extended rather than with fists still clenched. So let us seize the day. Let us take it with both hands. First Australians, First Fleeters, and those who first took the oath of allegiance just a few weeks ago, let’s grasp this opportunity to craft a new future for this great land: Australia. I commend the motion to the House …
The standing applause on the lawns, in the House, in scores of town squares before big screens across the country, a
cross the nation, was evidence of the surprise felt everywhere that it was real, it was earnest, it was fair and decent and honest and he had brought it off. Obama was evoked in comparison, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Bobby Kennedy on Martin King’s death, and the applause grew.
And So It Went
8.
THE WIDER WORLD
UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
It is therefore Death alone that can suddenly make a man know himself. He tells the proud and insolent that they are but abject, and humbles them at the instant, makes them cry, complain and repent, yes even to hate their forepast happiness.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH, HISTORY OF THE WORLD, 1610
APRIL 1983
In turbulence over Oodnadatta, with Australia below me, red, vast, uninhabited, like the plains of Mars … I thought again of death, and the nightmares of the last few nights that rose up out of my very marrow. In one, an arm came up from under the bed and dragged me down and out into a floating darkness I knew was death. In another, Death came at me with a distinct, frozen middle European face behind the wheel of a taxi, very fast. In another, I woke up to find my little daughter Jenny, lately asleep beside me, gone, and gone forever. The turbulence increased …
I remembered John Clark’s account of his aeroplane journey to England, which met first a hurricane and then shellfire. To avoid the hurricane – ‘We are now in the eye of the hurricane,’ the pilot announced, ‘which is not quite as placid a place as you might think’ – the plane was rerouted over wartime Vietnam, and the bones of ninety-seven passengers were broken, and seventeen, including John, were left curiously unscathed. He thereafter needed whisky, and lots of it, even to contemplate flight – and so did I, after having being flown into and out of an erupting volcano in the New Hebrides by a cheerful young Australian maniac, feeling in one single definitive moment I was going to simultaneously throw up, shit myself and fall into a volcano. But now I was jumbo-bound for England, and sauced to the gills, to witness, I hoped, Thatcher’s downfall …
MAY 1983, THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
… ‘I could understand,’ came an undaunted voice in a London accent from the Labour front row, ‘if you were saying the General Belgrano was sunk in order to force the Argentinian navy back into port as a deterrent. But I cannot understand what possible threat there was to the task force when the Belgrano was one and a half hours sailing time – forty-five nautical miles – from the exclusion zone and, according to your own written reply, six hours sailing time from striking distance of elements of the task force.’
Thatcher then pounced and, in the most remarkable moment of the campaign, raising her voice dangerously and widening her tired eyes, said, ‘Only six hours sailing time from striking elements of the task force! Six hours is a danger!’ This assertion, exclaimed in tones alarmingly reminiscent of Lord Olivier in Richard III, held the press room riveted. Had she gone mad? … ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said, ‘but we lived through this (unlike some, I inwardly interjected) and I think it’s utterly astonishing that your only allegation against me is that I in fact changed rules of engagement – with the consent of the war cabinet – changed the rules of engagement to enable a ship which was a danger to our task force to be sunk. Now,’ she said sweetly, ‘are there any more questions?’
… Lieutenant David Tinker, who died of burns on the HMS Glamorgan fifty-one weeks before, had written in A Message from the Falklands (1982):
She has become a complete dictator, ordering war without consulting Parliament, and she is dragging the masses, shouting and cheering behind her. The newspapers just see it as a real-life ‘War Mag’, and even have drawings of battles, and made-up descriptions, entirely from their own imagination. If some of the horrible ways that people have died occurred in their offices, maybe they would change their tone. Let’s hope it ends quickly.
No such ghostly thoughts appeared to have troubled the hunched and furious prime minister of the day once she was in her stride. She knew she had been right, no matter how many further weapons her treasury was now financing for Argentina to aim at her frozen soldiers on the other side of the world. No matter how much it cost the old and the sick of Britain in run-down health services and crumbling council flats to keep vigil on a few bleak rocks in the South Atlantic round Ernest Shackleton’s grave. No matter how right Tony Benn was in saying that it would have been cheaper to pay each Falklander two million pounds to move to New Zealand, where the ruling junta would be delighted to have them. No: her course was set, and correct, and noble, and to question it was a kind of treason, and in her limited mind, where a light gleamed like the pearly gates at the end of a long, long tunnel, there could be no other message under heaven …
I sat amazed a few feet away from her blue-edged banner saying ‘A Britain Strong and Free’. How would she have felt, I wondered, if the Argentinians had now laid claim to the Orkneys and had sent a task force across the world to regain them for the motherland? Or if North Korea had laid claim to Tasmania, and had fought and conquered it, and flown out fresh water daily to maintain its troops on Australia’s doorstep? What mad fools, we would have thought. And yet this bloodstained nonsense was being sold to the British people as necessary to democracy, along with the sale of arms to its enemies, and worth no end of sacrifice in bread and blood and armaments. The British people were buying it. Journalism could sell you anything. It was the dream-life chosen for you by your betters; such dreams as you couldn’t resist.
*
We pulled up outside an old stone church in a paddock, outside which, in dim rain, old ladies in scarves were holding up signs. ‘Maggie’s Magic’, they said. ‘Put Your Foot Down, Maggie’. One, in a wheelchair, getting wet, smiled gamely for the cameras …
In due course her helicopter appeared, descended sedately into the wrong field, descended again, nearly flattened a BBC truck, aborted, rose, circled and landed far from the crowd, axle-deep in slush, at a distance inconvenient to all concerned. A giant farm cart hung with posters lumbered at a funereal pace through the rain towards the remote bedraggled helicopter, while the prime minister, according to her daughter, cursed and changed boots.
The open farm cart, with Thatcher, Denis, Carol and local dignitaries, all shivering under umbrellas, then lumbered away from rather than towards the crowd to avoid getting bogged. The rain-staticked loud speakers blared out a choral version of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, the Labour anthem, as the farm cart finally approached down the country lane. The old ladies sang blithely along until an argument in the sound truck resulted, after further static, in the Dam Busters’ theme, and Thatcher, her cold eyes furious, hove into sight waving triumphantly, determined that heads would roll.
The cart stopped, and a fawning Sikh, holding her hand, made a lengthy appreciative speech of all she had done for his people – I did but see her passing by, and yet I’ll love her till I die – and gave her a garland which she wore while exuding her version of the Tilbury speech of Elizabeth I – though I have the body etc. – just as my tape recorder packed up. She stood against the grey sky, and one distant proud tree, looking beautiful, resolute, heroic, invoking ‘the prize for which we must pay any price’ …
I got into the bus to take notes, found to my horror that it was Thatcher’s private bus, mine having been moved, and was politely told by several wallopers to piss off, lad, or die …
JUNE 1993
Thatcher’s great moment occurred around one o’clock. She had by prearrangement a video camera in her official Rolls Royce, and we looked at her glowing close-up as she rode towards her destiny. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Her dazed and smiling expression was the same as every small-town girl who had made it in the movies.
‘Tell Mr de Mille,’ said Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, her eyes wide, ‘I am ready for my close-up.’
*
I walked back over Waterloo Bridge under a sickle moon and a bright star. All around me the Houses of Parliament, and Whitehall, and the National Theatre were lit up in the o
range glow of their lights. I thought of all the other lives I might have had – growing up here in the Blitz or settling here in the ’60s, becoming a beloved colonial pest, or like so many others of my time a failure and a suicide. Then I realised how impossible it is to imagine a life that is other than the one you have, by whatever accident, finally lived and how wrong it is therefore, in Christ’s words, finally to judge lest you be judged. I knew I hated the human beings in charge of this blessed country and hated the way they saw things, but psychological imperfection does not always count in the judgement of history and maybe they were right. Maybe what was needed was a purge of the communal sentimentalities and a dismantling brick by brick of the dream of Blake’s Jerusalem. I doubted it that night. I doubt it now. But, as the man said, I know now there is no one thing that is true. It is all true.
Two Weeks in Another Country:
A Journal of the 1993 British Election and also The Inessential Ellis
BACK IN THE USSR, 1988
I spent eleven days in October with my old friend Roy Masters, the prominent football coach, in the Soviet Union for reasons not clear to either of us, and had a good, clarifying time hanging round Odessa, Yalta, Kiev, Leningrad, Moscow. Like most people I felt illuminated by the experience, astounded at what I saw and anxious to go back very soon, in my case to write a film set in Kiev, which is close to Chernobyl – sixty, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and eighty kilometres or ‘twelve hours on the train’ depending on which nervous patriot you believed …
I want to return to Russia a little less than I want to return to the west coast of Ireland and the West End of London, but not by very much. Russia fills up your mind with questions and leaves you deeply angry, not at the propaganda that you heard, but at how much you believed. We constantly met busloads of puzzled, admiring Americans, often in their sixties.
Bob Ellis Page 20