by Bruce Pascoe
Houses, crops, agriculture, sewing? They’ve read their explorers, they claim: Mitchell, Sturt, Giles, Eyre and Grey. They lean in closer to urge the wayward student-defendant to reconsider. These are my friends – close enough that we know each other’s families – and they have a genuine desire that I not perjure myself.
I argue that they have not read Mitchell, Sturt, Giles, Eyre and Grey; they have read about them. They’ve read what other Australians found fascinating about their discoveries, and it wasn’t anything about the Aboriginal people. If those explorers weren’t looking for inland waters and vast pastures, they were looking for gold and a line for roads and telegraph lines; they were not looking for an Aboriginal civilisation.
The story that most gets up the noses of my friends is of the crops on the Warburton River, the permanent houses, the happiness, the prosperity. Surely if this existed we would know about it, they declare – we studied the birth of Australia at university. Double majors in history, two degrees!
I had been hoping they would be delighted by the information, but it offends or embarrasses them that they have never heard it. This is neither their fault nor the fault of any single Australian. It is how we’ve grown up. We were indoctrinated with a certain view of history, believed by our parents and buttressed by our education. This is what I believed until 1981.
Older Aboriginal people listened keenly to my family story and assisted with connections where they could, but as the years went by they became frustrated with my ignorance, my acceptance of the Australian history we are taught to believe. With controlled impatience they explained what had happened to their families; they pointed to events on my own path where the history of Australia had shattered my family, shamed them, made them ‘forget’ there was ever a black aunty.
I listened in disbelief, protective of the education of which I was so proud. My cousins, sister and I had graduated from university, though we came from a family where secondary education was virtually unknown. Our grandmother revelled in our success and insisted that we treasure knowledge. We loved her, and because we were warmed by her pride we decided to find out where she came from.
I made notes and listened as patiently as I could to the Elders, but was astounded that fellow Australians could have such conflicting views of the past. I slunk off to libraries, hoping no cousin would find me checking on their mother’s story. My cheeks flushed crimson as I turned page after page of the histories, police records, genealogies, settlers’ diaries, explorers’ journals. I’d been sold a pup by the best university in the land, not just in the history classes but in education, economics, geography and science.
The history we accepted with such equanimity is unbelievable after rudimentary examination. The story with which I try to inspire my friends is from Charles Sturt’s journal of his desert expedition beginning in 1844. His second-in-command is dead, the doctor is critically ill with scurvy, and Sturt is almost blind from the same disease. Their horses can barely walk. Sturt climbs a dune and is hailed by 400 Aborigines. He is startled to find happy, healthy humans in a terrain that has claimed the lives of many white explorers and reduced his party to a tottering, vulnerable rabble.
Sturt comments on a courageous and generous act: the people have never seen a horse, but after they have sated the thirst of the stumbling explorers they turn to the strange beasts and reach out the coolamons so their fellow creatures may drink. The explorers, with teeth loose and gums inflamed from scurvy, are invited to dine on roast duck and cakes baked from the grains the Aborigines have been harvesting. In the desert! Then they are offered their choice of three new houses in the village. Houses, crops, agriculture, baking?
We can accept that the world is round and that smoking causes lung cancer, but we cannot seem to accept as true or pertinent what the explorers witnessed of Aboriginal society and economy. European science has produced marvels, and its foundation principle is curiosity. Why are we not curious that Aboriginal people could cultivate crops in the desert? Why do we pay no attention to the dams and irrigation techniques employed? When our farmers are so threatened by droughts, salinity, erosion and crop diseases, why do we not investigate the crops and farming techniques developed over thousands of years to accommodate the challenging characteristics of this continent?
Some have speculated that many colonists were so outraged by Aboriginal customs and the absence of Christian practice that they felt compelled to reject everything of Aboriginal provenance. And that unease has survived until the present day. Our understanding of quantum physics and medical science is unrecognisable to the knowledge we professed 200 years ago, and yet we continue to scoff at the prospect of an Aboriginal civilisation.
What about the unconscious? Could it be that in a Christian democratic country, the one possible justification for taking the land from the Indigenous population was that they were unworthy of its possession? Some colonists thought that positioning Aborigines in Australia was one of God’s rare mistakes.
How many charities in Australia support indigenous populations in Africa? How benign do we feel when we buy an Oxfam goat for the benighted of other countries? How niggardly are we in the provision of aid to the race we have dispossessed? At home we don’t buy goats – we send in the army.
I didn’t plan to write history. I’m a storyteller. I thought that literature, while not much use to a practical world, was the best I could do to honour my grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ legacies. But then, in telling stories, I discovered their hidden stories, and as they were already dead I had to ask other Aboriginal people. The rest is history.
There are a dozen or so Australian scholars upon whose work I rely, and I dread to think what our country might have become without their courage. These people have withstood disdain and ridicule for their opinions, for their seemingly wilful misrepresentation of the country’s soul. I’m a fiction writer, so I’m expected to be deranged, but the academics must have felt the isolation on the nation’s self-convinced campuses.
One young scholar complained to me in 2011 that he had been warned not to quote the work of the heretic Bill Gammage. Gammage had recently released a book, The Biggest Estate, and my dream is that every Australian reads it. (After reading my book Dark Emu, of course!)
I think of Gammage sitting at a lonely university café table quietly reviewing his work. He spent a lot of time in estate, anticipating the scorn of fellow academics and preparing his responses. No doubt some of his friends have leaned across tables, urging him to reconsider his heresy: houses, seeds, sewing, sowing?
Another landmark scholar has become so disaffected that he has removed himself from the campus entirely and studies alone. His books are now published in plain covers in London. What a shame to let the Old Dart do our controversial publishing and thinking on our behalf.
I love my country. I am relieved to live in a place where we can go down the street to get milk and not fear getting shot at. And yet I am surprised that in a country of such gifts and intelligence, we have edited our national history so that our children will never question our right to the soil and will learn to express surprise at the ingratitude of those we dispossessed. They will be astounded, confused and belligerent at the very mention of Aboriginal achievement. Houses, agriculture, sewing, baking!
Justice holds up the scales of judgement and wears a blindfold so that no partiality is allowed. In Australia we prefer our children to dispense with the scales of justice and make do with the blindfold. The rest of the world can see the donkey ears above our blinkers: it is only here we believe they are invisible.
BIG YENGO
He’s got a temper on him. You have to watch your Ps and Qs. Sometimes the entire alphabet. But he can cook, sing, play the guitar, set up a great camp. Bastard.
He patronised me a bit. Never had previous opportunities, so this was his time to be in charge.
‘There’s something I want to show you,’ he said. I’ve made it sound like he was looking down his nose, but he wasn’t
. Just particular about what wood went on the fire, how it was stacked, where the billy sat. That’s alright, I knew where he’d learnt it. From an expert. Damn near genius.
‘Good,’ I replied, having no idea what he thought I should see.
His job was tracking feral animals. I drove the 4WD and he ran ahead as we travelled the kilometre between each of the sand pads. Fit as a mallee bull. I was proud. He was a man in his prime; and a good one at that.
He was showing off to his father, but only a bit, just needing to convince me of his strength and capabilities. And I was convinced.
He didn’t need me there, but it was an OH&S thing to have an offsider, and his footy mates were over it or in Afghanistan. He played in Richmond, near the airforce base. Their political discussions were proscribed.
I liked that about him. No point hating people just because you disagreed. And half the flying lads knew it was a dud war. But dud wars were how they made a living, and retired early on a comfortable pension. Attractive package. If you don’t get shot.
‘It’s over there.’ He pointed towards a high ridge line just visible through the forest. ‘Look down over the whole valley from up there.’ He finished recording the tracks on the sand pads, checked the images on the movement-sensor cameras. He was after cats and foxes, but most of the visitors had been wombats and wallabies.
He shifted me out of the driver’s seat and took over for the climb up to the distant ridge. Creek crossings, switchbacks, fallen logs across the track. It was almost dusk when we arrived.
We stood on an exposed ramp of granite. ‘See them?’ he said. ‘The emu feet?’ He pointed as he walked up the sloping granite. ‘And this, where they stop, is where Baiame left the earth and went up into the sky.’
My son, telling me about Aboriginal heritage.
‘They’ve drawn – well, not drawn, chiselled – his image across there, can you see it? Same as in the Milky Way, the Dark Emu.’
We were silent, looking at these ancient marks of passage.
‘Darug mob did it.’
A third of Australia believed in Baiame as the creator, but this was his story – the Darug had shown him – and so it was his story to tell me. I was moved. Not just by Baiame’s ascension from this granite tor, but that my son should find it precious, and beautiful.
We were almost silent on the way back to camp. We’d be more animated in the morning, when we discovered a goanna had swallowed my sandshoe, but now it was dark and we concentrated on the curry, which had excelled itself while sitting in the bed of warm coals. There was a smokiness to it. He’d chosen blackwood for the fire, and its smoke imparted just the right flavour.
He handed me a beer he’d stashed in his chiller, a lovely surprise. He picked up his guitar and sang all of his blues numbers, including two I’d sung to him from the day he was born.
Black girl, black girl,
Don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun never shines
I was shiverin’ the whole night through.
We disagreed about the lyrics, but he was insistent. He’d googled them. I’d been wrong for fifty years. Except everyone had sung this song, and the lyrics changed depending on whether the singer was incarcerated, black, white, rich or poor. But not worth arguing about.
He found two more beers as the owls began to call. I let him tell me which call belonged to which species.
He strummed away and then found his way to Woody Guthrie, to another song I’d sung to him while he was still a baby. He wasn’t to know my version of the lyrics were as accurate as poor memory and deafness would allow.
Snow, snow, falling down
Falling down all over the old town,
Smothers the garbage dumps, smothers the tracks
Covers the footsteps of those who knocked me back.
I began to wonder about the man who would sing those songs to his babies, but before regret could become guilt, he was singing,
Keep a watch on the shoreline
There’s a boat that’s lost out there …
When he was a baby, one who found it difficult to sleep, we used to take him at dusk to a sandstone ledge from where we could see the Cape Otway Lighthouse begin its watch on the shoreline. It was a habit, a ritual for our tiny family, and we knew it was imprinting itself on each of us, even the dog; too lovely for even a border collie to ignore.
Any time my wife and I see a lighthouse we still call, ‘Look out, look out, there’s rocks out there,’ and look at each other wishing that period of our lives could have lasted forever …
Rubbish. He was a baby who hardly slept, and we had so little money we didn’t have two cups that matched. We can grieve for that time because of its innocence, but it’s a trick of memory. At least now we own a complete set of cutlery … even if our cups still don’t match.
I looked at his camp things. He went for the classical. Camp oven with a dished lid so you can pile the coals on to cook bread. Old-fashioned enamelled mugs, a billy as black as the inside of a dog. Classical.
The owls called for five minutes, maybe longer, but I was asleep as soon as I drew the sleeping bag up to my neck. Happy as any man the universe had created.
Next day, he waves me down as I draw the ute up beside his sand pad. ‘Something else you’d better see.’
It’s not grudging or patronising. I can tell by now that it delights him to show me something I’ve never seen. Who’s the big man now?
We sit on a grassy bank to take off our boots so we can wade across the stream to a low, broken plateau. He has to check his bearings and make corrections to our course until finally we are below the edge of the escarpment.
‘In here,’ he says, and we climb behind the boulders and up into the cave. He’s looking at me, waiting to see if I can see it. The hands. Three sets of hands, one big, one with two fingers missing, one tiny. I’m broken with grief, surprised to have been so vulnerable to the ambush of story.
We’re still only halfway through the day’s work, but I give up the driving and he doesn’t even mention the fact that I’ve left all the work to him. I have a pad and biro and grapple with both as the ute bucks and climbs and slews its path around the mountain.
REARRANGING THE DEAD CAT
Dead cats are upsetting, even if they are not yours. A public corpse is likely to make children cry, old ladies cross the street, and everyone else speculate on the cat’s mistake.
We never take responsibility for the cat’s demise. All we were doing was playing with the cat, we say. Tying its tail to the clothesline and, oops, one too many spins and it hit its head on the gully trap and died.
The family cat hanging from the clothesline is not a good look, so we try to disguise our guilt. Let’s take it down and put its head against the wall. Tell Mum and Dad it ran headlong into the bricks. No, cats don’t do that, Mum and Dad would never believe it.
Let’s immerse it in the toilet bowl and say it drowned. No, that won’t do, Mum and Dad saw the cat swim last year in Grandpa’s pool. That was our fault, too.
Let’s back over it in the car. But we’re not supposed to drive, are we?
I know, let’s say the neighbour shot it for stealing his chickens; everyone knows cats are evil little bird-killers. But we haven’t got a gun. Let’s just chuck it down the creek and say it ran away of its own accord.
It’s a problem, the dead cat, and Australians don’t want the world to condemn us for our early mistakes. In defending ourselves we usually respond by blaming the cat or claiming that we had no idea what happened to it. Christians wouldn’t kill a cat or even hurt a cow, not like those nasty Indonesians, no; it’s clear the cat must have run off with the Hare Krishnas.
Most children are good, until they want something they know is forbidden. Then they lie. Either to themselves or to their parents or to their god. Or to all three. And then, because the cat didn’t really die, they can get on wi
th being good children.
We all want to be good children. We want to be proud of our home and deserving of its love and warmth. The cat is our only problem. We glare at the mat where the cat used to sit and mythologise its disappearance. We’re good at that. We’re storytellers.
Tim Winton is one of the best. He wrote the magnificent Dirt Music, Shallows and The Riders, but he also wrote the book about the Pickles’ cat, Cloudstreet.
Australia loves Winton because he taught us how to love ourselves, to recognise our humanity and our generosity … and how to hide our great lie.
When Cloudstreet came out I was astounded to find a black ghost who encouraged Sam Pickles to the view that he belonged to the land. I waited to see if any reviewers would challenge this benign view of the grand Australian larceny. Silence.
A good example of this near-sightedness on Cloudstreet’s relationship with colonial history is a 2005 article by Robert Dixon in the journal Westerly: it comments on the black figures in the text, but in the length of its ten pages never considers that Winton might have fudged the past, or at least not presented it in its true complexity.
Eventually I received a copy of a review that Kathleen Mary Fallon had failed, after many attempts, to have published in Australia. Fallon was outraged that the most respected Australian reviewers had chosen to see Cloudstreet as our fundamental reconciliation novel.
In her unpublished review, Fallon points out that all of the novel’s black characters are dead. She notes:
Cloudstreet doesn’t want to do the hard work of struggling with ‘black’ Australia to find a shared history; it slumps back into trite ‘spiritual’ insights [such as] ‘there’s no them, only us’, rejuvenated Christianity and a feel-good, heartfelt ‘not a dry eye in the house’ ’90s version of colonialism … No apology necessary. No land rights necessary.
