Mum didn’t stay the quiet child. She became a dynamic GP, renowned for thoughtful patient care and for calling ‘bullshit!’—it’s her favourite word, especially in conversations with my dad.
Her father died relatively young of a stroke. In slow and mangled words, he apologised to Nani on his deathbed. He should have apologised to his children too.
Nani now roams the Pacific, with on-hand medical care from her daughters at every location: Sydney, Melbourne, Nadi. ‘I’m ready to die now,’ she says with a contented smile. She’s written specific instructions: cremation, simple sari, particular prayers. Probably Sai Baba presiding. No one wants to think about it.
I remember holidays at the sugarcane farm. We grandchildren would sit on the porch while our mothers peeled mangoes from trees in the yard. I’d speak my mother tongue, badly, and they’d laugh at my Aussie accent. We ate Nani’s lamb curry and spicy fried fish on the floor in the prickly heat.
I remember the Indigenous Fijian women selling mud crabs house-to-house to Indian families. The holy Hindu man would come, beating his drum and offering blessings and ash for our foreheads. A tropical downpour might prompt us to rain-dance in the street, the fat drops pounding the potholes like happy crabs jumping. Fiji was paradise, even in storms. The hurricanes were bad, but people were resilient.
It was my family’s home, but the Indians of course were not Indigenous. When my ancestors were brought to Fiji, generations before, it had ongoing ramifications. Divisions bubbled.
While Fijian-Indian families like my own lived side-by-side with Indigenous Fijians as friends, colleagues and neighbours, there was resentment too. The population was about fifty-fifty, but the two cultures remained largely separate. The Indians ran businesses and prospered economically, probably better overall than the Indigenous Fijians. The result of the migrant work ethic, perhaps; the sugarcane labouring bred tough stock.
Under British rule, Fijian-Indians struggled to achieve fair political representation. When independence was achieved in 1970, political power was transferred mostly to select Indigenous Fijian chiefs, who had a constitutional veto over important matters. Political power remained largely with the Indigenous Fijians until 1987, when the multicultural Fiji Labour Party led by Dr Timoci Bavadra came to power by forming a coalition with the Fijian-Indian–dominated National Federation Party.
The constitutional order proved unstable. In May 1987 there was a military coup, led by Indigenous nationalist Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, which overthrew the Bavadra government. A second coup rejected Queen Elizabeth II as Fiji’s head of state and Fiji was effectively expelled from the Commonwealth. A new Constitution entrenching Fijian-Indian exclusion was enacted in 1990 and many Fijian-Indians were fleeing the discrimination.
In 1997, another new Constitution sought to balance ethnic representation, while still maintaining Indigenous Fijian dominance. It led to Fijian-Indian trade unionist Mahendra Chaudhry becoming Fiji’s first and only Fijian-Indian prime minister in 1999. But discontent among nationalist Indigenous sectors spewed into another coup in 2000, led by George Speight. Chaudhry lasted only one year in office before he was thrown out.
Chaudhry is a distant relative, something like my mum’s sister’s husband’s cousin. I remember my parents telling me about him being stuck in jail.
Through the instability, Fijian-Indians were encouraged to leave for their own safety. My own relatives, mostly educated and mobile, were luckier than others. Some stayed, many fled. The Fijian-Indian population dwindled and the economy declined. There were struggles over land, and the lease renewal on our Lovu farm was mishandled. An Indigenous Fijian family moved in. There are no more holidays back there.
In 2000, Indigenous Fijian military commander Frank Bainimarama overthrew the Speight regime in a counter-coup. In 2007, Bainimarama became prime minister. Described ironically in one headline as a ‘despot for diversity’,2 he fought to dismantle policies that discriminated against Fijian-Indians and promoted ‘multiracial meritocracy’. That same year, Bainimarama explained the political unrest of the previous years to the UN General Assembly:
Of the two major communities, indigenous Fijians were instilled with fear of dominance and dispossession by Indo-Fijians, and they desired protection of their status as the indigenous people. Indo-Fijians, on the other hand, felt alienated and marginalised, as second-class citizens in their own country, the country of their birth, Fiji.3
Fear drove division. It was ironic: fear of dispossession by the Fijian-Indians, when it was the British who had done the colonising—of both Fiji and India. Some would describe it as lateral violence: two sets of victims lashing out at each other when the real oppressor is too all-powerful and all-pervasive, and so becomes invisible. Then different brands of brown people are left to squabble among themselves.
I remember watching on TV a British-Indian journalist who dared to ask British officials, ‘What will Britain do to help Fijian-Indians being told to leave Fiji? The Crown was responsible for taking them there—shouldn’t they take responsibility now?’ From memory, there was no good answer.
In a statement broadcast on the BBC back in 1987, Queen Elizabeth II condemned ‘the illegal action’ and ‘use of force’ by Colonel Rabuka. I was seven years old, and watched the coup unfold from the comfort of Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. It was only later I was struck by the oddity of the Crown’s morally superior position, condemning the forceful usurpation of a nation’s political power. It seemed rich, coming from the world’s most successful conqueror. While Fiji had become a nation at war with itself, the former colonial power stayed prosperous and powerful in the distance, already enriched by its successful exploits in conquered lands the world over.
The Queen’s condemnation of the coups, though hypocritical, was correct. Discrimination, violence and force cannot be justified just because someone else did it before. In any case, it’s never possible to turn back time and start again as if colonisation never happened. The challenge is to find a peaceful solution that unifies rather than divides, which is just and inclusive of all parties, which addresses legitimate grievances and concerns and sets in place the fairest and most stable arrangements, given the history, politics and circumstances. Sometimes that must mean reconciliation over repudiation of colonising forces. Togetherness over separateness. Inclusive settlement over division.
Many in Fiji felt affinity with the monarchy, despite the history. ‘I’m still loyal to the Queen,’ Bainimarama reflected in 2009. ‘One of the things I’d like to do is see her restored as our monarch, to be Queen of Fiji again.’4 He got his wish in 2014, when Fiji fully reentered the Commonwealth. A new, non-discriminatory Constitution had finally been implemented in 2013, establishing equal voting rights and non-discriminatory political representation. Though Fiji remains a republic, the Queen is still decreed Fiji’s ‘paramount chief’, though with no constitutional powers. There is love, where one might expect there to be hate.
It was hard for me to make sense of it all, growing up. It would be easier to understand if things were black and white. They never are.
In Australia, the Indigenous peoples are the historically oppressed and dispossessed. In Fiji, while the Indigenous Fijians were colonised themselves by the British, they were also later the oppressors and displacers of the Fijian-Indians. Any group can be oppressed; any group can be oppressors. It depends on circumstances: environment, numbers, power, inclination. Citizens of goodwill need to look out for those excluded and unjustly disempowered, whatever their colour or creed.
Looking back on Fiji’s fraught constitutional history affirms the comparative success and stability of Australia’s Constitution, and highlights the intricate complexity of the challenge of Indigenous constitutional recognition. The appropriate solution will be balanced. The challenge for Australia is to provide recognition of Indigenous peoples in a way that unites and reconciles, that rights past wrongs and strengthens relationships—but does not divide or fracture. Australia
must find its own solution that works for us. No democracy addresses its colonial history or resolves its constitutional relationship with Indigenous peoples in the same way. As Indigenous lawyer and activist Noel Pearson observes, there is no cookie-cutter democracy. The right solution for Australia will appropriately ensure past injustices are not repeated, while retaining and indeed strengthening our robust and stable democracy and citizenship. I believe achieving such reform is possible.
Fiji initially tried to guarantee its Indigenous chiefs political dominance, including through veto powers. But attempted segregation, as is often the case, ultimately led to instability and unrest. New Zealand found more moderate ways to empower Maori people with a representative voice, creating a culture that inclusively celebrates Maori heritage as New Zealand’s heritage, while maintaining remarkable constitutional stability. Canada has instituted recognition and protection of Aboriginal rights in its constitutional system, which includes a duty to consult Aboriginal people in matters affecting their rights. And the Scandinavian countries—Norway, Sweden and Finland—are prosperous democracies that give a voice, representation and cultural recognition to Sami peoples.
Australia’s Constitution, despite its stability and success, still perpetuates a great wrong with respect to our most disadvantaged and disempowered minority—Indigenous Australians. It has not dealt with the fundamental fact of Indigenous peoples, their dispossession and prolonged discrimination against them. The Constitution imposes an unjust silence with respect to our country’s original owners. While we must be vigilant in upholding our successful constitutional system, our aim now must be to find appropriate mechanisms to embrace and include the First Peoples, and to allow the silence to be broken. The Uluru Statement from the Heart provides the way: it modestly calls for a First Nations constitutional voice in their affairs, and a Makarrata Commission to facilitate agreement-making.
The Uluru Statement is a peace offering the nation is yet to accept.
My father’s family bequeathed the name Morris. They are from Navsari, Gujarat, in north-west India. The original surname was Morriswala. Perhaps it was shortened to sound more Anglo, or perhaps there are some unknown Anglo roots (though Gujaratis are often light-skinned).
Gujaratis are renowned businesspeople, yet Dad’s beginnings in India were poor, like Mum’s. As Hindu kids he and his siblings were sent to train in anti-Muslim camps and learn the ways of hate. Indoctrination began young. Before Dad was born, his father spent a few days in jail when the organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was suspected of being part of the assassination of Gandhi. Their father later moved to Fiji for work, and was joined by Dad’s eldest brother. The family remaining in India, including my dad, were often wanting for food and basic supplies. Absent his father’s discipline, Dad lived a wild child’s life in the filthy Navsari streets. He skipped school, played cricket in the dirt and tried to piss into bus windows. His cousin had the better aim.
The rest of his family migrated to Fiji, not as indentured servants but as free migrants in search of a more successful life. They all settled in Suva, in the south-east of Viti Levu, and ran a printing business. His parents grew older. His mum chewed paan. She developed toothless red gums and secretly drank brandy, despite her husband’s disapproval. The Morris family, like my mum’s side, were obsessed with study—an Indian trait, evidently. Dad worked hard in high school and got good marks.
Mum and Dad grew up on opposite ends of the main island, and had no idea each other existed. They each left Fiji in the early 1970s, before things began to change dramatically for Fijian-Indians. After high school, both won scholarships to study medicine in Melbourne. This was to Mum’s disappointment, at first—she still wanted to become an astronaut. But Fiji didn’t need astronauts, the scholarship people said. They needed doctors. She accepted the opportunity, at just seventeen years old.
They arrived in Australia towards the end of the White Australia policy, and met each other at Monash University. Both were part of the Indian student crowd that naturally hung out together.
Theirs too was a ‘love marriage’, ironically, which they pursued against Dad’s parents’ wishes. He was supposed to have an arranged match with an unspecified Gujarati girl of the same caste. Mum was Indian, and Hindu, but she wasn’t the right type of Indian or Hindu. She didn’t speak Gujarati. She wasn’t fair-skinned: as a South Indian, her skin was darker. More squabbling between different shades of brown, leading to forbidden love across cultural divides. Dad’s family disowned him for a time. Neither his parents nor his siblings came to their wedding, held outside under a tin roof at the Lovu farm with the blessing of Mum’s more progressive family.
The initial drama of Dad’s parents’ rejection kicked off what would for decades be a tumultuous marriage. His parents wrote nasty letters disavowing the relationship for years. We lost my baby brothers after Mum’s problematic pregnancies. At six weeks old, my little brother Neeraj died in hospital, in Dad’s arms. Later, our twins were miscarried late term. Dad’s parents wrote letters, proclaiming the tragedies divine retribution for my parents’ original sin.
I was in Prep when Neeraj died. I so much wanted a little sibling and told them to keep trying. My brother Nishant was finally born when I was eleven, in Grade 5. I remember being told the news in class. He was a healthy boy, though six weeks premature, like me. To this day Nishi is the most precious thing in each of our lives: smart, kind, sensitive, concerned with refugees and Indigenous rights in Australia. Like me. Like Mum and Dad.
It is a family obsession we each come at in different ways.
Step back to view the big picture and it seems like never-ending dominoes. The British oppressed those of dark skin, utilising racism to subjugate, divide and conquer new lands. The Indigenous Fijians, already subjugated by the British, eventually deployed similar tactics against their fellow Fijian-Indians. In turn, and clearly without any thought for a strategy of solidarity, those Fijian-Indians, while being discriminated against first by the British and then by the Indigenous Fijians, also spent time and energy deploying racism among themselves: Gujaratis versus South Indians.
You can’t blame everything on the British—much is Indian bad behaviour and archaism. But if the structures of Empire shaped the societies, laws and politics of the countries they conquered, they also shaped the psychology of citizens. Indians buy ‘fairness cream’ and search for fair-skinned marriage partners for their sons and daughters. If you traverse shaadi.com, the Indian marriage website, you are asked to specify whether the candidate’s complexion is ‘dark’, ‘wheatish’ or ‘fair’. If you subscribe to such standards, there are pros to being a fair-skinned Gujarati (I’m only half one). The trade-off for Gujaratis, though, is increased body hair. South Indians are darker-skinned but comparatively hairless—such are the boring beauty dilemmas with which South Asian women, if they buy in, are faced.
My dad’s fair skin means he is semi-regularly mistaken for Greek or Italian by his patients in Melbourne. He’s been privy to some racist remarks to which he might have otherwise remained ignorant: a fair-skinned imposter in the world of white Australians. One patient complained about Indian and Asian students, suggesting they should be marked on a separate scale to the white kids. ‘All they do is study! They work so hard, it just doesn’t give the white kids a chance!’ I laughed when Dad told me, then went back to my books.
For all the sustained conflict of Mum and Dad’s relationship, theirs is a battling, enduring love. I sometimes wished they would just divorce and spare us the continual drama. But what unites them is their love for my brother and me. They dote on us. They spoil us, push us and prod us. Sometimes too hard, invoking our fury. They demand we excel and then brag about us. We are their life and pride.
I grew up in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne and lived a privileged life, the daughter of doctors. My middle-class day-to-day was a long way from the Fiji farm or the streets of India.
I was free to study and daydream. I r
ead Sweet Valley Twins and wished I was blonde. And a twin. At fourteen, in search of a more befitting identity, I cultivated an interest in American hip-hop. I did my hair in braids and, as an idiotic teenager, went to the Salt-N-Pepa concert with my mum.
I was sent to a fancy Baptist high school in Kew—the school of William Carey, a Christian missionary to India who translated the Bible into Indian languages and campaigned against sati (widows burning on their husband’s funeral pyres)—even though we were technically an unreligious kind of cultural Hindu. I didn’t convert: I found the story of a virgin pregnancy too hilarious.
My parents were rebellious to a degree. Their marriage went against the strictures of tradition, and so my upbringing was progressive for an Indian family. The social ethos was largely Western. Though we lit candles and sparklers for Diwali, the Hindu festival of light, Christmas was the bigger deal, with a tree and presents. Our food and work ethic remained largely Eastern. I studied and worked the way migrants study and work. But I also had freedom.
Returning home drunk after a party at a friend’s house one night, I went to sleep with some dry hay in my hair, and woke up to Mum handing me anti-marijuana pamphlets from the surgery, convinced the hay was weed. She was smart—just not street smart. As a lively primary schooler, Nishi started learning from me the swear words of the day, which were beyond what Mum could comprehend. ‘What’s a wanker?’ she asked me one day, full of academic curiosity. I can’t recall how I explained that one.
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