Women of a Certain Age

by Jodie Moffat

  Then, not so long ago, an email arrived in my inbox asking me if I was the same Anne Aly who had lived in Chipping Norton and had a brother named Sam. It was from Tracey’s brother, who’d managed to track me down after seeing me interviewed on television. I had a thousand questions for him. What had become of my dear friend? Did Tracey become a vet like she always said she would? Marriage? Kids? Pets? What about horses? She always loved horses. And what of their parents? Were they still around?

  Tracey’s brother’s reply came back immediately. He told me that he was sorry to hear my father had died, and that he and Tracey had always felt safe and loved at our house. But it was his next lines that stopped me cold. He wrote that their own father was in jail: he had been convicted as a paedophile, who had abused Tracey from when she was five until she was seventeen.

  I cried for days. I cried for my friend and her lost innocence, and I cried for my own ignorance. I cried for the time I was seven years old and a stranger came into the bathroom with his pants down and his erection in his hand like a loaded gun, calling my name and trying to drag me close to him. I cried with relief and guilt for being spared the torment Tracey had endured. I cried because the new burden of my knowledge could never be as immense as the burden my friend had to carry all her life.

  In retrospect, my greatest teenage challenges had revolved around straightening my curly hair, bleaching my upper lip and containing my burgeoning breasts. I can take some comfort in the fact that my family – the family I complained about constantly, that I wished could be more normal and less ethnic – gave Tracey and her brother a haven. I take comfort knowing that they felt loved and safe with us. And yet, the pettiness of my early teen obsessions still fills me with shame and hurts my heart. I’d had a secret life as a teenager, where I was working out the kind of woman I wanted to become. But it had never occurred to me, in my self-absorption, that Tracey might have had a secret life too.

  Black boxes — Jeanine Leane

  Whitefellas never can decide what kind of Blackfella they want. The bar is always shifting. But whatever kind of Blackfella they want – it’s never me.

  Once, in the 1960s, when I was a child, they wanted us to look white, or at least whiter, and exhibit no obvious signs of our Blackness irrespective of what we may carry in our hearts. As long as they couldn’t see it, we could gather, store and carry what we wanted on the inside. They didn’t want us speaking language either – only English, the language of power. But English always did a different dance when it rolled off our tongue – one that was a bit out of step with the power-dance. Back then, they said we should try and succeed in western education, learn their culture, their history, and then we’d get ahead, and move to cities too, because they are the heartland of high white culture.

  Now, we get to the twenty-first century and they want us to look Black – the blacker the better. Any obvious signs of culture worn externally are great. If you come from a former mission, or a remote community – that’s of great interest now, to whitefellas. If you came through an alternative access program especially designed for Indigenous people post-1980 – even better. And if you are young and meet all the criteria above, you’ll be a prize for any White Department of History or Anthropology at a university because it will mean that whitefellas didn’t really get rid of all the real ones – they saved some of us for this current exhibit. They’ve decided they like grassroots Aborigines now – as long as the grass is growing on the right side of the fence.

  I am middle-aged, have olive skin, and was not born at a remote community or on an archaeological site that whitefellas might make a film or write a book about. My family escaped the mission system and I was fortunate enough not to be stolen. I cannot speak any Aboriginal language, nor do I pretend to. While weathering many uninformed, ignorant and sometimes blatantly racist comments from both teachers and peers, I mastered the western education system through the 60s and 70s, gaining outstanding results in English literature and European history – even getting a prize from my school and two nice bright stars on my brand new High School Certificate because I scored in the top ten per cent of the state.

  I was encouraged to ‘go out into the world’ by my Aunties – they worked hard to put me though school, convincing and cajoling me all the way through some difficult times on the strength of the hope that my generation would make a difference. So, I went to university with the whitestream because I got in too, along with all the other first-generation working class kids in the late 70s and early 80s who got there – thank you, Gough Whitlam. We made many of our professors cringe and squirm because most of them were meeting the plebs for the first time.

  I made it. By the time I graduated, I was speaking and reading English better than the average whitefella. At school and, later, university, I got used to being outside the square. Back then I was often the only Aboriginal student in the class and I was never like the ones in the textbooks or the ones some of my lecturers had done PhDs on. I was young and easily dismissed as inauthentic in those days – I was obviously delusional, as I quite clearly exhibited none of the necessary outward displays of cultural reference points.

  ‘Aboriginal descent!’ one of my lecturers corrected me when I told her after the lecture (or tried) that I was Wiradjuri from the Murrumbidgee River. She had written a book on Aborigines for all first-year history students.

  ‘Des-cent!’ She was adamant. ‘The area was colonised so early that the Wiradjuri clans were cleared out by the 1880s.’

  My family wasn’t ‘cleared out’ – neither were the other Wiradjuri families who lived and worked around the Tumut and Gundagai areas. But we weren’t in the textbook either.

  Teaching high school in Canberra through the 80s was no different. There were no boxes to tick back then. If colleagues asked about my cultural background at all it was usually: ‘Are you Italian, Spanish – French maybe?’

  ‘No, I have no European ancestry at all. I’m Aboriginal.’

  ‘Oh you don’t look it! Not both your parents?’

  ‘My father was Irish.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you say you’re half Irish?’

  ‘Because I didn’t really know him – it was my mother’s family who influenced my life.’

  Noses wrinkled, eyes narrowed, brows rose – I read disbelief on their faces. ‘But you’re not really!’ Some would add: ‘Not fully.’ Others just gave me the blank two hundred year stare of un-seeing before they walked away.

  So that was the 80s – outside the box and inauthentic. For the first half of the 90s, I was having babies and raising children. It was towards the end of the 90s when I was enrolling my children in local schools and looking to return to the workforce myself that the box first appeared. Since then it has been around with a vengeance. And while life outside the metaphorical box that existed in the heads of white academics meant inauthenticity, I was about to learn about a new way of life at the dawn of the twenty-first century: life inside the box.

  Quite by accident I landed a job in the tertiary sector in 2000 in an Indigenous Higher Education Centre. I had to fill in a form for the new Department of Education when I was applying to go back into the workforce. There was a box that simply asked: Are you Aboriginal? And I ticked it.

  It might seem like a small box – a couple of millimeters perhaps – you’d think at first you’d barely fit a tick or a cross within its boundaries. Yet once inside, with just one flick of a pen, you’re trapped forever. Within this tiny space is the mindset of settler Australia: the perceptions, permissions, expectations and limitations of what Blackness is to Whiteness in twenty-first century.

  Each straight-lined side is as inflexible as a cell wall – it’s impossible to escape this square. The empty expanse between the right angles is Arctic tundra – a white wasteland; and, you’ll wonder, as I do, how something that once looked so small could become such an unbridgeable chasm, an unsurpassable gap. A blackfella like me can spend their whole life running round in one of those black bo
xes. Those fine black lines that seem so flimsy are impenetrable. But I didn’t know that then, the first time I ticked that box.

  The university was ‘Indigenising’ its space and embedding Indigenous perspectives across the curriculum – this is what I was told as the reason for my name being put forward as a qualified secondary teacher who was Aboriginal. Emerging back into the workforce after ten years of motherhood to the brave new world of the twenty-first century, I was officially Aboriginal, not just ‘part’ or ‘descent’, but inside a black box now.

  ‘The university is transitioning,’ the dean told me when I signed the contract after I ticked the box. ‘Your challenge,’ he went on, ‘will be to prepare Indigenous students in pre-tertiary programs for tertiary entry.’

  But my real challenge was educating the whitestream. The average settler academic knew next to nothing about twenty-first century Aboriginality. Preparing students who are already bright, keen, enthusiastic and most of all, fully cognisant of the hard road our ancestors walked and the battles fought to get us the right to equal education in the first place, was easy. The real challenge was explaining behind the scenes to whitestream teachers why we all look the way we do now – which is very different to what is expected; why we speak the way we speak – mainly Aboriginal English; why we live where we live – mainly in cities and larger regional centres. Why don’t we all speak a language? Why can’t we all tell a ‘Dreamtime story’, as the whitefellas call our creation stories? Why do some of us not want to study ourselves, anthropologically, historically or sociologically, in the white academy?

  The demands of that small box became vast. Many of my white colleagues spent a good deal of time lamenting the ‘loss of our traditional culture’ when our contemporary culture was all around – we simultaneously confused, confounded, surprised and disappointed the majority of our white colleagues.

  I was the most disappointing of all. I don’t play sport or even follow it; I hate rugby league and its sanctioned violence, hype, crowds and cheerleaders; I can dance, but only ballet or to 70s and 80s dance music; I play some instruments, but none of them typically Aboriginal; I can’t explain the meaning of a central desert songline, nor should I try without proper knowledge; I don’t have the Aboriginal word for every place in Australia; and I don’t have the answer for the ‘Aboriginal problems’ that my colleagues saw and frequently expressed concern about in the media.

  I found myself in an institutional time-warp where a great deal of energy was spent with questions and concern about the lost past and the problematic, dysfunctional present that they know is out there – the stuff inside the box we tick that makes the whitefella on the other side of the desk, an authority on you.

  In 2002, I was encouraged by a non-Indigenous colleague to write and present a research paper at an Indigenous Researchers Forum in Perth. Their idea was that I would present something on my work in Indigenous education – working with Indigenous people in pre-tertiary programs and supporting students through undergraduate degrees – helping my people swim up the whitestream.

  But I wanted to swim back down the whitestream of consciousness to the genesis of these literary representations of us that still make waves further upstream in the present; those that still batter us and leave many of us stranded. And then, swim back up that stream again to take the journey through the evolution of us in the white literary imagination – a lonely journey of discovery where I would see my self netted many times before I arrived back in the whirlpool of the present where the representations are still coming.

  ‘A bit out of the box!’ said my colleague, when I showed them the paper. ‘Well-written of course, but not really to do with Indigenous education and what you’re doing.’

  The aim of the forum was to bring together the research and experiences of Indigenous people working in universities with the view to forming networks, encouraging further Indigenous-led research and entry into higher degrees by research. Blackfellas with higher degrees by research were scarce as hen’s teeth in the early 2000s and for the most part the professors and senior researchers were whitefellas who were working with blackfellas to ‘indigenise the curriculum’.

  For the most part, my colleague back in Canberra was right. The topic of my paper was too outside the box.

  ‘Commendable scholarship,’ said one academic with a long track record of working with Aboriginal anthropology and a more recent one of working with the descendants of the subjects of that fieldwork, ‘but most Aboriginal students don’t study literature in my experience – not beyond high school anyway, so would they really be affected by what authors said about them last century?’

  ‘Impressive knowledge of Australian literature, but I can’t see how this kind of research relates to the wider Indigenous community at all,’ said another, more dismissively.

  But there was one person who got it; someone who had spent a great deal of his life under the influence of the ‘findings’ and representations of an 1861 Cambridge expedition to his part of the world to observe ‘primitive people in their natural state’. On this day the spirits were with me and I had the good luck to find one of the few Indigenous professors among us – the only person present who had a background in humanities. And it only takes one person to believe in you.

  I left that university thinking about the enduring legacies of representation: the textbooks I wasn’t in; the anthropologists, archaeologists and historians that didn’t study me; the authors who wrote about the Aborigine. With those thoughts in mind, I walked almost accidentally into a PhD with the representations of us in the settler imagination still on my mind.

  I finished my PhD when I was fifty. I was coming to the end of a fixed-term contract and about to relocate to New York from Australia. My PhD focused on whitefellas’ obsession with blackfellas in literature. I called it literary history and cultural literacy – how do you read a book that whitefellas wrote about blackfellas that really says more about whitefellas?

  Pretty much everyone except my Indigenous supervisor thought it was unusual, but I was obsessed with Katharine Susannah Prichard, Xavier Herbert, Patrick White and a long line-up of nationally and internationally acclaimed authors who depicted Aboriginal characters, playing literary chess with blackfellas and our stories – using us as pawns in their chequerboard nation. These people are, after all, part of the reason why whitefellas are ‘experts’ on Aborigines.

  ‘Really?’ my son’s primary school teacher said when she asked about my doctorate. ‘Patrick White – not something Indigenous?’

  She didn’t wait for my explanation.

  I weathered lots of questions about my PhD because deconstructing the representations absorbed me – and I thought someone might want to read about cultural literacy sometime.

  Others enquired why I was so preoccupied with the dead white ghosts.

  ‘Nobody reads them anymore do they? – except maybe a handful of academics; they don’t have much bearing on the lives of the average person.’

  Or: ‘They’re not really that influential anymore are they – the dead white literati?’

  Dead or alive, their works still speak in Australian curricula. Only whitefellas think that the dead cannot speak.

  I was in New York in the northern summer of 2011, excited with my brand new PhD, when I fronted up to a New York University on the recommendation of an Australian scholar from home. I was hopeful as I made my way through Alphabet City up the gridded, numbered streets past avenues D, C, B and A, from the Lower East Side to the West Village. It was a sunny day and I paused under the shadow of the victory arch outside Washington Square Park before I headed down Fifth for my interview at the Center for Australian Indigenous Studies.

  I was going to meet two professors there, Zara and Zed, a husband and wife team – both of whom I was told had a long-term relationship with Australian Aboriginal people. One had spent time in Australia researching Indigenous art practices and the other through cinema, working with Indigenous and non-Indig
enous Australian filmmakers to produce films on Aboriginal culture.

  Did I think because I had a PhD now I’d be dealing with a different mindset? Did I think because the centre had the word ‘Indigenous’ as part of its branding that it might be a haven of enlightenment – a centre of twenty-first century epiphanies? I suffer from chronic incurable optimism.

  Professors Zed and Zara had expressed an interest to their colleague in Australia about the possibility of providing space in their department for research and to network with the handful of Australian blackfellas living in New York and other scholars working in the field. I thought it might be a good opportunity to find a space to finish the research fellowship in a university environment and meet other people.

  So I made my way to the top of the vertical campus and down a long corridor through some plush-looking decor with a vast array of Aboriginal canvases adorning the walls. As I made my way past the smorgasbord of traditional Aboriginal art from all over my Country I began to hear alarm bells in my head. But my unyielding optimism drowned them out.

  I opened the door at the end of the corridor where a silver-haired, spectacled man sat absorbed in paperwork. I stood for a moment in the doorway – I was a little early but thought that might look impressive. He didn’t look up so I knocked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said still fixated on the papers before him.

  ‘I’m Jeanine,’ I said, stepping in, hand extended.

  ‘Oh,’ he stepped out from behind his desk and met my handshake, ‘from Aus-tra-lia.’ He stared intently and continued to shake.

  ‘Yes, my friend and colleague, Luke from the Research Institute rec–’

  ‘Ahhh…’ he let go of my hand, turned and picked up the papers from his desk, ‘you mean the Wirr … Wir-rid-jer-ee woman from the Murrum … Murrum-bid-gee River near Gundag …’