by Bruce Pascoe
‘Hey fellas, old Jack reckons he’s seen a Tasmanian tiger out by the river,’ Bob Ridgeway turned his big, red face over his shoulder to yell to the other blokes.
‘Bull,’ said Arnold Carter. ‘Old Jack’s been on the white lightning again.’
Old Jack didn’t like Carter, so he shut up.
‘He just said so,’ persisted Ridgeway. ‘Didn’t yer, Jack; while you was settin’ traps.’
Jack didn’t speak. His eyes gave an affirmative, but his shoulders looked as if hoping the head’s bloody mouth would stay shut.
‘Keep the cork in the kero bottle, Jack,’ said Carter, who knew how to use words like the whipping end of a roll of barbed wire. Jack flinched. ‘Anyone else seen a Tasmanian tiger?’ Carter let the last words leer. No one spoke. Douglas shuffled the last few dance tickets, and the group began chuckling and slapping broad shoulders. Jack slipped out into the moonlight, back to his camp. No one noticed. Silly old Jack, seein’ bloody tigers now. Poor old coot. Trust bloody Arnold to stick in the boot, eh!
The last Palma Waltz bleated to a close. As the hall was being packed up, Douglas cast an eye over the sheet music on the piano, but this new bloke didn’t use the same stuff that the other pianist had. Whatever happened to the other fella, Douglas wondered. Some blokes just disappear. Always a bit strange, that fella. Always quiet, never quite met your eyes. Except, every now and then while he was playing, he’d look up, and you’d catch him, and wonder what he was thinking. Not about the Pride of Erin, that’s for sure. Douglas wondered what non, je ne regrette rien had meant. Could foreign words tell you anything more about a man?
With the new moon, the chooks began to disappear again. Sometimes Douglas would wait for the tiger in the bush. He would crouch beside the river until the dog high-stepped through the shallows to hide its track. ‘Hello, Thylacine. I saw you again.’ But he couldn’t tramp around the bush every moonlit night pretending to track a chicken thief. Clarrie’d get sick of it.
In bed, Douglas would think of the tiger, those swift glances they had shared.
They had gotten to know each other. Douglas could see the dog’s frustration in the glances now: ‘Here’s that man again.’ It was almost like tipping your hat. The man would greet the beast with its name, and the beast would recognise the man, recognise the voice long before even the instant it took to find the eyes above the voice. The man became an annoyance, like a new-fallen log across a path, an owl that snatches the bandicoot you’ve tracked all the way from the creek. To the tiger, the man became just another night animal, and the man knew it and revelled in that pride.
Douglas lay in bed with the moon on his face, the pillow like a field of snow. Yes, it was as though the beast no longer thought of him as a man, but as an animal of the night, a clever one that would sometimes appear. Not an enemy but an equal, and, strangely, Douglas’s heart strained with a feeling like … His throat went tight. The animal was proud, but it was more than that. It was almost like …
The blast of the shotgun rattled the window pane by Douglas’s face. He sat up in bed, with that strange cry still with its hooks at his chest. He saw Clarrie with the shotgun. Clarrie turned and looked up at Douglas’s moon-white face at the window.
‘I just shot at a wild dog. It won’t get far. There’s enough blood over here to fill a bucket.’ Clarrie came over to the window holding up a finger dipped in blood. ‘Thought I’d better do somethin’ to stop you trampin’ around the bush every night.’
Douglas stared at the blood on Clarrie’s finger and felt the hairs prickling under his pyjama shirt. The claw of the beast’s cry slowly released, but now there was another sensation.
Moonlight nights were terrible after that. Douglas lay in bed, and the words of poems crept across his mind, trying to close up a wound with the soft stitches of the sounds and rhythms. If, in the eleven books the brothers owned, he’d found ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,’ he would have read it aloud and hoped that the words would heal.
But he didn’t know those words, and his mind sought for words that it didn’t, couldn’t, know. If they’d had the seventh-grade reader, he would have found it in there, but he didn’t get to reach seventh grade. He was just a bushman.
THE IMPERIAL MIND
It is a common vanity among humans that our ascent is an exponential trajectory applauded by God. Abrahamic religions encourage us to believe that God has never seen anything as beautiful, dutiful and intelligent as we. These religions also insist that as the devout are closest to God’s hem, all others need assistance to reach that plane. The imperialist mindset, so linked with religion, suggests that realising the true destiny of humans involves reaching a certain level of social and economic, and so spiritual, development.
The magnificent vanity to assume that a god had chosen you to rule over all others. Of course, if you create that god yourself, he is likely to approve of you or face the sack. Or at least a reformation.
The planet, however, has a history of blind cul-de-sacs. The dinosaur, the dodo, the Phoenician, the Roman, the Nazi – well, not sure about the dodo and the dinosaur, but the others thought they were chosen, that their magnificence had been sanctioned by a higher force.
Hierarchies of privilege were entrenched as standard social practice during the long period of colonial hubris. Kings and priests were appointed as a means of protecting the privileges of rank, property and religion. The kings grew ambitious and the priests saw advantages in courting that ambition. Eventually, this led to kings fighting kings to extend their influence and increase their access to the riches of the world. China and certain countries in Europe fought countless wars against their neighbours to maintain or advance their position in the world hierarchy. Whole armies and entire populations were butchered, cities were sacked and peoples enslaved so that the greed and bloodlust of kings and emperors could be sated, and the flocks and coffers of the priests burgeon.
When sailing vessels were constructed of a size and stability to endure ocean crossings, the kings were quick to see further opportunities to satisfy their greed, while the priests saw opportunities to spread the influence of their creeds.
The Chinese were interested in trade, and ventured across the Pacific in search of new and exotic goods. Their communications with the new worlds were often benign, and mutually profitable in both a commercial and a social sense. The Europeans, on the other hand, sought conquest. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI introduced a papal bull, the Doctrine of Discovery, that declared when Christians discovered a new land they had the responsibility to take the land away from those they judged as heathens – that is, those with a different god. If the people resisted, they had the right to take the land by force.
For Christians, this application of theft and violence required some sophistry so that it could be squared with the Ten Commandments. The logic went that murder and dispossession could be labelled ‘just wars’ and applied for the benefit of the murdered and dispossessed.
According to Robert J. Miller in Discovering Indigenous Lands, the Spanish priest Franciscus de Victoria argued that the fact that ‘Indigenous peoples were bound by European definitions of the natural law rights of the Spanish’ was ‘an ample excuse to dominate, defraud and then engage in “just wars” against any native nations that dared to stop the Spanish from doing whatever they wished’. The sham of natural law meant Spain’s rights were seen as ‘naturally’ superior to native rights, based solely on the papal belief in the superiority of their conception of god.
Robert A. Williams Jnr described this assumption in his book The American Indian in Western Legal Thought:
The West has sought to impose its vision of truth on non-Western people since the Middle Ages … sustained by a central idea: the West’s religion, civilisation and knowledge are superior to the religions, civilisations and knowledge of non-Western peoples. This superiority in turn is the redemptive source of the West’s presumed mandate to impose its vision of truth on non-Western peoples.
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bsp; This passage was never more vivid in my mind than when I visited the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver some years ago. I stepped through the door and stared up at a two-storey façade of a First Nation house, one of the most beautiful pieces of wooden art and architecture I have ever seen. I studied the story depicted on the columns and slumped onto a seat, depressed by the idea that anyone could declare the builders of this structure ‘savage’.
The story told of the world being supported on the back of a turtle, and that turtle being supported by another turtle, and that second turtle being supported by a third, and so on to infinity – had anyone seen the turtle? No, they had imagined the turtle, just as Christians imagine haloes, harp-playing angels and God himself. To imagine a god and then proceed to the conclusion that yours is the only one is a staggering feat of illogic that bedevils the world to this day. Much violence can be attributed to the hubris of those who cling to the sacred garment of their imagined god.
To question the European presumption of an architectural hierarchy, that the built environment defines civilisation, is simply to highlight the West’s arrogance, its refusal to see excellence in the work of the peoples of the lands they plundered. In fact, we must resist glorifying the edifice and making the hallmarks of success sustainability and longevity. Over aeons Australian Aboriginal people adopted the lore from one generation to the next, not without refinements and adaptation, but without moving away from the central ethic that insisted all should receive equal access to housing, food, culture and education. That insistence on sharing the benefits of life may have precluded raising architectural monuments for the sake of priests and kings. Of course, that is a long bow, but our world seems never to have considered the greatness of modesty, falling into the trap of lording the edifices of the greedy few and the enslavement of the majority to erect them.
Robert J. Miller argues the root of the Doctrine of Discovery goes as far back as the fifth century AD, when
the Roman Catholic Church and various popes began establishing the idea of a worldwide papal jurisdiction that placed responsibility on the Church to work for a universal Christian commonwealth. This papal responsibility, and especially the Crusades to recover the Holy Lands in 1096–1271, led to the idea of justified holy war by Christians against infidels to enforce the Church’s vision of truth on all peoples.
Miller writes that Pope Innocent IV decreed in 1240 that the Christian had a right to dispossess indigenous peoples because of the ‘papacy’s divine mandate to care for the entire world … [and] to intervene even in the secular affairs of infidels when they violated natural law. Natural law was, of course, defined by Europeans and the Church.’ The Teutonic Knights at the Council of Constance in the fifteenth century argued that land could be taken from heathens with impunity.
Justified holy war and the identification of ‘infidels’ highlights the intellectual and spiritual vanity of the Christian, and explains how indigenous peoples on four continents and several oceans could have their cultures attacked for not believing in the same sequence of gods and angels. Christian-derived definitions also mandated the correct way to use the soil, and those who did not use it in a fashion understood by the European legal system were deemed not to have the same human and natural rights as the Christian.
The term ‘terra nullius’, or empty land, arose directly from the Doctrine as one arm of the justification in breaking the Ten Commandments. Lest the Christian population see through the ruse and rebel against the ruling of the clergy, in the nineteenth century the church adopted the Peaceable Kingdom paintings of Edward Hicks, in which the savage animals were led into the Christian light by an innocent child. The paintings were displayed in most schools, churches, homes and government buildings, and were purportedly necessary to show indigenous peoples how to live properly. Or, as was the case for most, how to die properly.
Over centuries the Doctrine was invoked to deny any challenge to the validity of those invasions, and allowed politicians and priests to picture all indigenous peoples as savages who would fall away before the force of superior intellect and belief. Thomas Jefferson’s Native American negotiator felt so superior to those to whom he was supposed to dispense some land justice that he called them children.
In 1793, George Washington described this outcome as ‘the Savage as the Wolf’. Washington assumed the Native American lands would fall to the United States as their inhabitants shrank away from superior beings in the same manner as the wolf avoiding contact with humans.
This conceit was first used to try to intimidate the Mongols. The whole basis of the ruse was that the Christian religion is derived by the operation of the Holy Spirit and is therefore beyond the realm of men. As a result, it is incontestable.
The imposition of the West’s superiority is still alive today. It was made explicit in 2007, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by a vote of 143 to 4. Who were the four dissenting nations? The United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia: the colonial governments who have most to lose if rights are extended to the indigenous peoples of these lands.
All four nations used the Doctrine of Discovery as their authority to dispossess local populations, even though, in each case, the British Crown had urged a more conciliatory and caring approach. James Cook’s instructions in Australia were to ‘cultivate friendship and alliance’ while seeking ‘the consent of the natives’. These sentiments seem to have been little more than tokenistic for parliamentary liberals, as such an approach was never a firm policy on the ground.
The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was drafted by dozens of countries over a period of twenty years, but only four countries in the world saw it as a threat. This was a moment of shame for Western colonial societies. Self-interest plunged these four into an alliance of denial. Hand-wringing about ‘closing the gap’ appeared just a smokescreen to obscure Australia’s real intention: to perpetuate the dispossession and justify it with the Intervention.
One of the most important tasks of the imperial colonist is to ensure that the previous occupiers of the land are expunged from memory. Colonial southern Africa politician Cecil Rhodes made it a criminal offence for anyone to refer to the city of Great Zimbabwe, built by the Shona people in the south-east of Zimbabwe in the eleventh century. It was important to construct and embed a story of the hopeless savage so that European occupation would seem a necessary part of God’s design.
In Australia, where Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom tropes were employed as part of colonial tactics, educators, politicians and clergymen were relentless in their depiction of Australian Aboriginals as helpless savages. Their efforts proved successful because the true descriptions of the Aboriginal culture and economy were completely erased from the public conscience and, amazingly, from the public record.
Much of the material about European explorers’ first contact and observation of Aboriginal Australians and their culture has been excised from textbooks, so historians, scholars, educators and nation-builders have never read it. This process has continued through each generation of scholars and educators for the past 230 years. It is an epic achievement of conniving censorship: racist in intent, and deliberate and calculated in performance.
Those early scholars, and the legions who have followed, would have read that explorer Sir George Grey, the first Englishman in parts of Western Australia, saw many, many fields of the tuber Dioscorea hastifolia stretching to the horizon. He was never able to calculate the length of the fields because they were so deeply cultivated that it was impossible for him to walk across them. Each field had well-established roads and irrigation points, and substantial villages where the cultivators lived.
Charles Sturt was saved from death in the very heart of Australia by people who were cultivating, harvesting and milling grain to make the bread that the explorer said was the lightest and sweetest he had ever tasted. Not only does this information never appear in an educational or histo
rical text, it doesn’t even make it onto our cooking shows, where we drool over other countries’ recipes when we have on record several explorers who refer to Indigenous foods as the most flavourful they had ever eaten.
Thomas Mitchell rode through nine miles of stooked grain on what is now the New South Wales–Queensland border. The word ‘stook’ should alarm anyone who claims to know Australian history. A stook is a bundle of grain that has been harvested, gathered into sheaves and stood on end to ripen. No Australian should leave primary school without knowing this – but in fact all of us do. And, most of us, secondary school, and university. It is a horrible manipulation of history that two and a half centuries of good Australians have died not knowing a fact that would transform their understanding of their country, their culture and their soil.
Isaac Batey noticed that the hillsides of Melbourne had been terraced by the cultivation of murrnong grass, Microseris lanceolata. Due to this agricultural practice, the soil had such a light tilth that you could run your fingers through it. Twelve months after the introduction of sheep, the murrnong had been eliminated and the soil compacted into a hard, impenetrable pan, so hard that rain ran off the surface immediately and caused the first floods the local Kulin clans had ever seen. The accepted Australian history revels in the pastoral deeds of pioneers, and we all learnt that the Australian economy rode on the sheep’s back. Such is the pervasive Australian silence, however, that we have never learnt that the soil was destroyed by sheep’s hooves.
As Australia has an ongoing debate about the date of its national holiday, I wonder if this new intelligence will liberate us sufficiently to search for the real Australian culture.
Chefs have been excited by bush tomato, saltbush, lemon myrtle and bush raisin for a decade or more, and laud the virtues of ‘bush tucker’, which makes it all the more surprising that the nutritional and economic staples of grains and tubers, the bread and potatoes of Indigenous people, have been ignored. Or is it that ‘bush tucker’ reinforces an image of First Nation peoples as wanderers, opportunistic hunters and gatherers, people who it could be claimed did not own or make utility of the land? I believe this selective reference to the Aboriginal economy is part of the colonial process. Unfortunately, it has robbed us of important agricultural and environmental information.
