Salt

by Bruce Pascoe

Australians haven’t learnt to love their country, still being obsessed with what they can extract from it, be it unseemly riches or inflated ego. We need to encourage the True Hunter, and I meet quite a few of them but, sadly, they are a tiny minority of those who hunt.

  I have a friend who goes duck shooting for thirty minutes every duck season. He hunts on two separate Sundays for fifteen minutes, during which he shoots two or three ducks. He takes them home and salivates as he laves each of them with a loving preparation before roasting them one at a time in his wood oven. It is one of the joys of his life to provide this meal for his family. In between times the ducks get fat on his bottom pasture.

  One True Hunter used to catch three or four large blue yabbies from a little stream no more than ankle deep, but the location was special to her. The creek was overhung with paperbark and tree fern, and it was a place for contemplation as well as hunting. Indeed, in the True Hunter the two are wedded. This great hunter would take the yabbies home and sit by her stove while they boiled to a cherry red in the pot, cracking a chilled bottle of Abbots Lager and drinking every damn drop whether she wanted it all or not. This was her pleasure, her ritual, her religion.

  An aunt requests a crayfish for her birthday each year and celebrates her age by savouring the firm, sweet flesh she remembers from her youth, and she too likes a beer or a wine, for her health you understand, and then she likes to dance, doesn’t matter what the music; she’s found she can dance to anything, and why not at her age.

  I had the good fortune recently to fish for two days with a remote country bushman. Two days of quiet, sporadic conversation: but every bird noticed and named, every stealthy approach by an animal observed, every minute alteration in the river’s behaviour analysed, the history of every abandoned cottage intimate. Slowly the pages of that country were turned and revealed, a graceful, passionate recitation of country.

  It was very Aboriginal in style and intent, the direction Germaine Greer believes is inevitable for Australia’s true birth into nationhood. All of us True Hunters.

  That man’s brother, a saw miller by trade, was the gentlest, most kindly man I have ever known. He was not Aboriginal either but he taught me so much about country, about decency and respect. He’d notice some rare bird or tiny creature and he’d sneak a look at you with a child-like smile of delight on his lips. He was deeply, passionately in love with his country. Not for Alex the aluminium Hornet Trophy with 100-horsepower motor – no, Alex liked to lie on his guts beneath a paperbark and spin out line from a hand reel. ‘They can’t see ya like this, can’t hear ya either, they’re finicky, fish.’ He liked to use toredo as bait too, the transculent worm that grows in submerged tree limbs, and he taught me how to eat it the way he’d been shown, blackfella way.

  Australians need to love their country, love their countrymen and women and love the food our country gives. We should salivate at the thought of cooking our country’s fish and fowl, not slaughtering them in some kind of game show where most is best. If the colonists had followed the example of the Indigenous True Hunters, they wouldn’t have drained the Sandringham swamps, and today we’d still be eating Magpie geese and Cape Barren geese for our birthdays and Christmases. But in those days draining wetlands was the surest way to get a knighthood; shooting geese for dog food or just for the fun of slaughter was seen as good, manly sport.

  The Americans shot out the buffalo in a decade, destroying one of the world’s most massive migratory herds. While much of the slaughter was to clear the land for domesticated stock and to drive out the Native Americans, part of the motivation was male posturing through sport: trophy hunting.

  That temperament, that psychological imperative, separates you from the country. It allows you to live there but it never allows you to feel at home; you’re always so hell bent on changing the landscape, forcing it to do your bidding. It prevents Australians feeling love of country because we never approach it without a weapon.

  You might think this has nothing to do with history, that fish and fowl mean nothing in terms of nationhood, but our reaction to our country has a mighty impact on our use of country: the introduction of animals and plants to salve nostalgia drastically affected the value of agriculture, the careless, indeed prideful removal of habitat, eliminating resources that would be of great utility and inspiration to us in the future.

  Eating is a fundamental determinant of history. When the squatters arrived at the Colac lakes they found the land teeming with pigeons, ducks, emu and bustards, while the kangaroos were sighted in countless numbers. So numerous were the ducks that if, after a two-hour absence, the shooter did not return with twelve to fifteen fine black mallards, they thought the supplies must be falling off to an alarming extent.

  Today some of these same lakes are rendered completely sterile by dairy effluent. For decades waste milk products and sewage were pumped directly into the lakes. The fine little smelt the first Colac squatters stole from the fishing nets in 1836 have all but disappeared. What goes on in the mind of man when he sees a body of water like that and dumps his waste in it, shits in his water supply? The Colijon never did that – like all Aboriginal people, they were meticulous in the disposal of their waste. They’d never even camp right on the river bank lest they foul it.

  Very few colonial reports ever refer to the beauty of the land other than the delight of the waving grasslands to their eyes. But they were destroying it. And the man in the plaid cap or the hunting hat, with all his stupidities and vanities, was one of them.

  TEMPER DEMOCRATIC, BIAS AUSTRALIAN

  As late as 2006, the then deputy leader of the Liberal Party, Julie Bishop, supported the idea that Aboriginal children should not be taught their own culture and language because it would retard them. Her fellow ministers and advisers weighed in with the opinion that Aboriginal culture was flawed because we hadn’t invented the wheel or done anything useful with the land. Some went so far as to say child abuse was one of our cultural traits.

  There is nothing postcolonial about Australia. It still has a Raj mentality and a vindictive adherence to colonial myth. Our country has never really investigated the colonial legacy, preferring to express horror at the inadequacy of the Indigenous population and the need to control their destiny and band-aid the wounds. If a crisis in health and education is perceived, it is better to send in the army rather than teachers and doctors.

  Taking the land from people as the spoils of religious wars, made more efficient and lethal by the creation of great ships, allowed the Europeans to extend their influence to all continents. That the Chinese visited many of those continents before the Europeans but chose to socialise and trade with the inhabitants rather than murder them and steal from them is another story and another psychology.

  The European brain was so intrigued by its own superiority that it rendered every other civilisation encountered as savage. It didn’t matter that the First Nations people of Vancouver built two-storey houses, that the Pueblo had advanced cities, that the Aztec and Mayan were as wealthy as any other nation on earth, that the Australians invented bread and society. Yes, society, for the world’s oldest town – and oldest by many thousands of years – is found in western New South Wales. Of course, Australians refuse to visit the fount of civilisation because it questions every myth we make about ourselves.

  For Christians to remain Christian and worthy of their religion, the people they kill must be asking for it, and the land they steal must be handed to them like a windapple. But the church had a way of helping the Christian conscience sleep at night in dreams of civilised excellence. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI decreed a papal bull called the Doctrine of Discovery. In response to the voyages of Columbus, the Pope decided the church must explain and ratify the attacks on Indigenous peoples and the theft of their lands.

  The rationale went like this. If a people did not recognise the name of Jesus Christ – and you’ll be surprised how many on different continents did not – it was the duty of the Christian to take
their land and bring them into the light. Most of those brought into the light had that light extinguished immediately by Christian swords. Many Christians still yearn for the same solution. As do many Muslims.

  The poverty of the European spirit and the devilry of its intelligence created a massively unequal world, and that inequality was blamed on indigenous peoples instead of on the nature of the European mind. In Australia that meant crushing the oldest civilisation on earth and the creators of bread, language, society and democracy.

  Almost no Australians know anything about the Aboriginal civilisation because our educators, emboldened by historians, politicians and the clergy, have refused to mention it for 230 years. Think for a moment about the extent of that fraud. Imagine the excellence of the advocacy required to get our most intelligent people today to believe it. Imagine the organisation required in the publishing industry to fail to mention Aboriginal agriculture, science and diplomacy. Don’t blame Pauline Hanson, don’t blame Geoff Blainey and Keith Windschuttle, blame Manning Clark, Gough Whitlam and every editor of Meanjin and Overland, for they too were guilty of that omission.

  What omission? Well, let’s look at what the explorers reported of the Aboriginal agricultural economy and see if you can remember any priest, parent or professor alluding to it. Lieutenant Grey in his 1839 ‘exploration’ of parts of Western Australia, so far unseen by Europeans, saw yam gardens more than five kilometres wide and extending a distance past the horizon, and because the land had been so deeply tilled he could not walk across it. Sir Thomas Mitchell, in the country that is now the Queensland–New South Wales border area, rode through 17 kilometres of stooked grain that his fellows described as like an English field of harvest.

  Mitchell saw these yam fields stretching as far as he could see near Gariwerd (the Grampians). He extolled the beauty of these plains, assuming that God had made them so that he could ‘discover’ them, not once thinking how peculiar it was for the best soil in the country to have almost no trees. This was a managed field of harvest. George Augustus Robinson saw women stretched across those same fields of horticulture in the process of harvesting the tubers.

  E.M. Curr noticed that as he brought the first vehicle into the plains south of Echuca, his cart wheels ‘turned up bushels of tubers’. Once again, some of Australia’s best soils were almost bereft of trees, the plains having been horticulturally altered to provide permanent harvests of tubers. Unlike Mitchell’s self-indulgent congratulations, Curr was aware who had produced this productivity and later recognised it was his sheep that destroyed it.

  James Kirby is one of the first two Europeans in the country of the Wati Wati, near Swan Hill. He passes gigantic mounds of bulrushes stacked up and steaming and wonders about the vast enterprise but never thinks about the productivity of that plant. Aboriginal people were harvesting the base of the stem as a delicious salad vegetable and making mounds of the leaves to process starch, just one more source of baking flour.

  Kirby notices a man fishing on a weir his fellows have built across the river. Well, Kirby assumes with great reluctance that blacks built it, but only because he knows he is the first white man to see it. The construction of the dam includes small apertures at the bottom so that water and fish movements can be controlled. Kirby describes the operation:

  [A] black would sit near the opening and just behind him a tough stick about ten feet long was stuck in the ground with the thick end down. To the thin end of this rod was attached a line with a noose at the other end; a wooden peg was fixed under the water at the opening in the fence to which this noose was caught, and when the fish made a dart to go through the opening he was caught by the gills. His force undid the loop from the peg, and the spring of the stick threw the fish over the head of the black, who would then in a most lazy manner reach back his hand, undo the fish, and set the loop again around the peg.

  The man refuses to look at Kirby even though he knows Kirby is watching. Already the Wati Wati have decided interaction with Europeans is not to their advantage, but he seems proud of his technique. You could say his manner is insouciant.

  But how does Kirby explain the operation? He writes, ‘I have often heard of the indolence of the blacks and soon came to the conclusion after watching a blackfellow fish in such a lazy way, that what I had heard was perfectly true.’ So Kirby renders weirs and constructions, machinery and productivity, as laziness. Wasn’t he describing an operation that would fit neatly into any description of European inventiveness and industry?

  Now, for reasons that are almost impossible to explain, I recently found myself at the meetings of two different universities where staff were asked to beam with excitement because their university had been ranked twenty-third (the first) and seventeenth (the second) in the world for a particular area of scholastic endeavour. The first ten horses at the Melbourne Cup win something; I think the tenth horse gets a biscuit of hay and the jockey a wallet that Uncle Alec knocked back last Christmas. And I’ve seen underage soccer teams where every child got a trophy. But twenty-third and seventeenth: isn’t that a bit like every toddler getting a Kinder Surprise?

  We seem desperate for the world to acknowledge our excellence but unable to investigate our own history. We have had 230 years of scholarship in Australia from more than twenty-five universities, but no scholar has wondered about the Aboriginal domestication of plants and the vast fields of agriculture witnessed by the explorers, the so-called unchallengeable founts of knowledge of Australian history.

  We stab out our eyes rather than regard Aboriginal achievement in this country. Our best citizens go to extraordinary and understandable lengths to protect innocent refugees from persecution, but we still allow First Australians to have their money quarantined for crimes that have never been tested by our courts.

  The reason for the national apathy to racial politics in this country stems, I believe, from the national ignorance of Aboriginal culture and economy, and that ignorance has to be laid in part at the feet of our learning institutions. A legion of professors and other academics at our universities decided it would be unnecessary for our golden youth to know what the explorers witnessed of Aboriginal excellence.

  We seemed bemused when the over-ploughed soils of the Wimmera blew about our heads in Melbourne in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Today we wring our hands because the Darling River stops flowing in January; we wonder why we cannot get a second yield of hybrid blue gum from the forests of Tasmania, Western Australia and Victoria, so in apparent wrath at the vagaries of nature we poison that weedling second crop. We have ruined the soil but blame greenies for crop failure and unemployment rather than poor science and the massive and soil-destroying machinery.

  But like the baker’s blinkered horse, we cannot look behind, we cannot admit that First Nations land management, finely tuned over 120,000 years, might have the ability to clear fog from our brains. Even today our agricultural scientists seem surprised when the Aboriginal domesticates thrive in the soils and climate to which they were born.

  Oh, we love to talk about bush tomato, lemon myrtle and wattle seed because they fit our venal understanding of hunting and gathering, but when asked to consider the virtues of agricultural products grown on fields so wide the explorers could see neither their beginning nor their end, we become flummoxed and querulous. These crops are perennial; they were staples of Aboriginal diet and economy. The word ‘staple’ suggests permanence and utility, and both the latter were the sole basis for the application of terra nullius.

  I don’t mean to berate, but the hour is late. Aboriginal health and education continue to fall far below the national average, and the incarceration rate of Aboriginal Australians should be the shame of the nation instead of a prickly nuisance. Australia seems to wash its hands of this state of affairs, never seeming to wonder how dispossession and our fabricated pre-colonial and postcolonial histories works on the psyche of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people alike.

  If we are to make a nation rather th
an a mere economy, we have to absorb the history. Aboriginal people don’t need to worry about how we got here, because archaeology seems to be proving our own belief that we’ve always been here. The issue is how the rest of the population got here … and who to thank.

  Australia is a drying continent. World and national inaction on the human contribution to climate change is leading to a situation where we will soon be growing mangoes in Canberra. Aboriginal domesticates do not require any more moisture than the Australian climate provides. These plants are an environmental boon to the nation, apart from the fact that, as they are all perennial, with the large root masses of plants adapted to dry conditions, they sequester carbon. If we dedicated only 5 per cent of our current agricultural lands to these plants, we would go a long way towards meeting our carbon-emission reduction targets.

  The biggest opportunity Australia has is the chance to begin a conversation with Aboriginal Australia about the real politics of our history. Forget the gnashing of teeth and the gushes of tears over the current state of affairs, let’s get down to tin tacks. We can and will provide employment for remote Aboriginal communities, we can and will provide health and education professionals in these communities, we can and will enjoy the improvement in national wellbeing, and we will do it as a public because the political system is failing us.

  We know politicians will refuse to consider anything that challenges their control. Parliamentary vision is dead. When any prime minister wrings their hands and sheds tears of remorse, you know at the first drop of moisture that they intend to do nothing. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people meet at Uluru and despite the diversity of opinion, the frustration, the old human enmities, they thrash out a statement so modest, so considerate of reality that many Indigenous people are appalled that something so vague and general can be the product of such long consideration. And the prime minister of the time, Malcolm Turnbull, dismisses it as too ambitious.