Salt

by Bruce Pascoe

  The old man behind me on that day had been initiated by a man whose father did not have an English name. Of course, the ‘settlers’ shot that man, and his wife and forty others of his family. Only the boy remained, and he was ‘taken’ by a man called Hammond, who had been involved in the incident. The son of that boy, Muns Hammond, lived to be 115 years old, and so the men crouched in the heath of Baran Guba received a cultural legacy handed down in an unbroken line from way before European occupation of the continent.

  I am related to that old man in the convoluted way typical of the massive disruption of Aboriginal families, and the survival of such a small number since the colonial period means that most Aboriginal people of the south coast are descended from fewer than sixty or so individuals.

  Despite that disruption, however, the culture has survived and remembers all the incidents of our dispossession. Australian Aboriginal culture has not been ‘washed away by the tide of history’ but remains vivid in black minds and acts as the locus for our lives.

  Many Australians pretend they have never met an Aboriginal person despite Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders comprising 3 per cent of the population. It’s not that we are scarce but that Australians do not recognise an Aboriginal face. Perhaps that face is unremarkable because a large number of Australians share it as a result of the absence of white women in the early years of colonisation.

  In a commentary in The Age, Waleed Aly wondered about Australia’s vicious response to the most polite suggestion that our nation was invaded rather than settled. Intelligent people contort their thinking to construct sophist arguments to reassure Australia that it has an innocent, even heroic, history.

  There was a war for possession of the soil. Aboriginal people lost it. Aboriginal people did engage in primary production and sophisticated models of government. Australians turned their backs on this evidence in the colonial era and deny it today. An inconvenient truth for a Christian country devoted to the idea of the Ten Commandments rather than their application to political life and private rumination.

  This history is incredibly close to us, not a remote and hazy confusion but a real and palpable fact. We can still see the foundations of large houses burnt down as a routine policy by settlers anxious to gild their land grab with legitimacy. We can still see the massive canal systems cut through stone to farm eels. We can still see the dams built by Aboriginal people even if we have to remove the extensions added by Europeans. We can still see the arms of ancient fish traps on tourist beaches, and we can still see the four pieces of the massive granite spire that proclaimed to the entire Bega Valley that Baiame was looking over them.

  The history has not gone away – we just choose not to see it.

  When I was researching Convincing Ground and Dark Emu, I was told by senior historians that every primary document in the Australian history trove had been thoroughly examined; there was nothing new to be discovered. I wondered about that confidence as I sat in the State Library of Victoria and cut the pages of a memoir that had never been opened. I wondered about contemporary historians’ belief that Aboriginal residents of Cape Otway numbered no more than eight when a local resident informed me that his grandfather’s letters and diaries recounted one of the massacres in the region as accounting for twenty Aboriginal lives.

  As a guide at Cape Otway Lighthouse, I was always delighted to talk with French, German, Italian and Vietnamese tourists. They could never believe Australia’s accepted version of history and were hungry for information about the colonial war and Aboriginal culture. They needed it to make sense of the country. Australians, on the other hand, were jittery at the mere mention of the land war, and scornful when shown the delicate stone tools of the Gadubanud. One stone, and I hope it is still there, served as a needle-sharpening device, a thread cutter and a measure. It is smaller than a matchbox but serves a multitude of purposes. Overseas tourists understand its significance immediately, while many Australians express scorn. Just looks like a rock to me. Why didn’t they invent the wheel?

  Perhaps the people who invented egalitarian government and practised it for 120,000 years didn’t have the imagination to devise a transportation device for cannons. Perhaps the people who invented bread were looking at life from a different perspective.

  Thirty-six thousand years ago a woman collected a handful of seeds and looked at them. Maybe she lay awake that night, pondering the potential of the little grains. Whatever she did, once she had confirmed her suspicions she added water and heat to the flour and invented bread. It’s probable that the invention is much older than 36,000 years but we’re not sure because we’ve only expended the intellectual effort to DNA-test one grinding dish from Cuddie Springs.

  What we do know about that woman is that she conducted this alchemy 17,000 years before the next woman on earth who tried it. That other woman lived in Egypt, where we still send our best and brightest archaeologists to investigate the pyramids, a task as important as one more critical text on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Our best engineers are engaged in plans for the construction of freeways and coal-fired power stations that will never be built, while the four parts of the Biamanga Mountain monolith still lie on the ground, where they fell after the explosion that paved the way for the ugly asbestos hut housing a radio transmitter that has long since ceased operation.

  I dream of finding a million dollars to airlift those pieces back into place so that Baiame might again declare his vision of peace for the entire south-eastern corner of Australia. I dream of finding $4000 to scrape the sand away from the Bermagui fish trap so that Aboriginal people can utilise its efficiency to secure their economic future.

  These are not big sums of money. They are dwarfed by the bribes Leighton Holdings paid to secure contracts in the oilfields of Iraq, a country our then prime minister insisted had to be invaded because it had weapons of mass destruction.

  Afghanistan, Palestine, Sudan, Ethiopia, Georgia, the Amazon and Costa Rica could all use the pacification wrought by sensitive government based on fairness rather than religious bigotry or greed. Australia had that form of government and refuses to acknowledge this for the peevish reason that it requires us to reflect on how we came to possess the soil.

  Those old Aboriginal people must have anguished over their social design. Here we are in a dry continent, they must have thought. How can we ensure that it provides sufficient food for all? How can we ensure everyone has enough to eat, a house, care when aged or if handicapped, an education that gives every child a chance to learn about her world? I know those ideas are revolutionary and today would be treated as some kind of communist plot, but they worked. The only firm basis on which to condemn them is to conclude that an elite minority deserve a million times more food and wealth than the majority.

  I have visited the world’s finest galleries and churches. I have sat beneath golden domes, passed through the gem-studded doors of grand mansions. I have walked slowly past the world’s most famous art and pondered the swords, the boiling oil, the rack, the torture of infidels, the glorification of paedophile priests and kings, and never failed to be transported back to my own culture, where instead of men ruling the world with violence, women are central; where men cannot speak without first saying the words Bingyadyan gnallu birrung nudjarn jungarung: we arise from the mother’s heartbeat. It’s a declaration of the primacy of women.

  Instead of rampant lions and elephants, kings dripping in jewels and holding aloft golden swords, our people see the powerbrokers of the world as the blue wren and the emu wren. The Ganai people of East Gippsland play football with those two birds emblazoned on their jumpers. Come on, the Wrens! The Yuin see the black duck as pivotal to their life, gaze upon the representation of its form in Wallaga Lake and feel secure.

  There are depictions in Aboriginal art of the killer boomerang and the spear in association with imprecations about the importance of keeping the lore, but the dominant images are gentle: a row of bats hanging from a tree to teach us about the imp
ortance of family; fish and kangaroos to teach us about conservation; beings floating in space with their legs folded back at the knee to impress upon us the importance of dream and the wonders it reveals.

  Our culture’s reliance on agriculture is even displayed in the names we give ourselves. The people of the interior often called themselves Panara or derivatives of that word because it means grass; that is, we are the people who harvest grass seed. The Darug of western Sydney called themselves after the name of the yam, the staple of their diet.

  Aboriginal song is replete with the importance of preparing and sharing food. Women of the centre dance with a repetitive action representing the broadcast of seed, women south and east of the Great Dividing Range dance with their yam sticks.

  Young people today clamour to be allowed to join those dances. There was a time when the church and state repressed that cultural ambition, but it is alive today, and I attend every performance I can where the Djajawan dancers appear, simply to see older women dance with three generations of their womenfolk.

  I have danced where the oldest participant was eighty-three and the youngest was thirteen. We danced for the shark, the black duck, the whale and the lyrebird. As we entered one cultural precinct, the clapsticks announced the arrival of every of the twenty-nine individuals. The lyrebird immediately repeated the sound and tempo perfectly. Twenty-nine times. All twenty-nine of us burst into laughter conjured by the irony of a bird honouring our culture.

  The lyrebird imitates other birds and animals, machines, cameras and whistling kettles, and passes those songs down to each generation. One lyrebird in the Macedon Ranges is still repeating the sound of a camera shutter, which it probably hasn’t heard for fifteen years. The lyrebird’s default call is this: clapsticks. It has remembered the rituals of our old people and continues to entertain itself and prospective partners with that sound. On Gulaga Mountain there’s a lyrebird that has begun to hear that sound again and launches into its repetition every time it hears the sticks being played. It has a brother on Biamanga Mountain who does the same thing, seemingly delighted to hear again what it previously had to guard as a cultural memory.

  Lyrebirds remember and respect our culture, even if most Australians do not.

  While I was writing this, I was aware of the nostalgia bordering on sorrow that I was tapping onto the board, but in reality it is the mildest of griefs because I must be among the most fortunate of men, if you consider the sorrow, misfortune and pain the majority on earth have to survive. But there is nostalgia and there is grief nonetheless.

  On that island I was teaching young men how to knap stone to make blades and chisels. Fortunately none of them had any greater skills than my sketchy ones, but we struggled away, compared techniques and results, and edged towards a method of some utility. We were conscious that beside us on the rock were remnants of stone manufacture that must have been at least 200 years old, and some that we knew were only four years old. We were on a vast granite slab that Yuin men had used over a longer time than the duration of any human construction on earth. We mused on the antiquity of this heritage, aware that we, no matter the relative crudeness of our craft, were continuing it.

  I left the men on the rock to retrieve a tool from the camp and was immediately transfixed by the activity there. A group were fashioning wooden implements with a mixture of stone and steel tools. One young man was teaching an even younger man dance steps. Two other men were cooking fish they’d caught off the rocks, and two old men reclined in the shade, talking about the next stage of cultural teaching. Somewhere else, a man was learning a song while another accompanied him on clapsticks he’d made himself. I didn’t stop my progress through the camp, but I was shaken by the cultural pulse.

  The previous day I’d gone chasing my son so we could dive together, to repeat a habit that we’d indulged in for most of our lives, but when I couldn’t find the cove where he was fishing with other Gurandgi I swam in the first likely bay and was joined by two seals who must have learned to associate men with fish.

  It was a glorious and tranquil swim, and I left the water refreshed but pensive. I trudged back along a grassy island lane, and at an intersection I met four other Gurandgi who had been to the far side of the island to inspect cultural sites. We looked at each other and became still, each of us conscious of our state. This must have been what it was always like. Men, because women never visited that island, of a camp engaged in the multifarious tasks of the cultural economy, meeting as they returned to camp. It seemed so natural, so ancient, even if one of the near-naked men wore a watch and another carried a plastic mask and snorkel and a nylon mesh bag full of shellfish.

  That mood of pensive wonder stayed with me for five days, until I nearly stepped into the path of a car on Merimbula’s main street on Easter Monday. It wasn’t sadness, not even morbid nostalgia, that had rendered me so insensible to the ‘real’ world, but mere surprise at the quickness with which we could revert to the tempo of that old life.

  You might think that ‘Stone Age’ skills are less than useful in the information age, but it is the investigation of those old skills that teaches us more than the ‘quaint’ technology of the past. We learnt about a living tempo and recognised elements of the cultural stories that were rooted in just that rhythm and the contemplation for which it allowed room. And the springboard for that learning was the country itself. No page in any library can provide comparable stimulation. Every morning on the island I woke at 4.00 a.m. to the sea wolves making contact with one another, way coo, way coo, yowooocroo ow, and knew that the old people had woken to the same sound at this time of the year, and some of the songs and words they had left us were designed to describe that eerie pre-dawn ritual: members of an avian clan greeting one another.

  This might sound mournful and tinged with grief, but really there was a kind of wild joy in the realisation that we were still able to enter that old and infinitely gentle culture.

  The riches of the oldest human culture on earth are available to Australians; very little of it is prohibited to the uninitiated or to those of a different race. Most of it can become the reassuringly comfortable garb of all Australians. We’re not inviting a second dispossession of our culture but an awakening of the nation to the land itself. We can all love it and care for it; we can love and care for each other. This is not a return to Rousseauian gloom but an awareness of our country and its needs and ours. We need non-Aboriginal Australians to love the land. We must not quell the impulse to see the bush and the beaches as any Australian’s heritage because without that identification with the soil, those questing souls remain restless and dangerous spirits, uncommitted to the protection of the continent.

  Any Australian can climb Gulaga Mountain and visit the seven chapters of Yuin lore. Women can walk to the summit if they wish, but men can go no higher than the gallery of granite tors. It is on the walk through those tors that the gentleness of Aboriginal culture is most apparent. You enter by the forms of Nyaardi, the woman; you pass Tunku, the man, who is second, and then you pass the pregnant woman, and it is culturally appropriate to rub her swollen belly. The next chapter is the baby being carried on its mother’s back. Look at that child’s eyes and, if you are a parent, allow yourself to be engulfed by the memory of your own children’s births. Where are the swords and war machines, where are the gilded halls of selfish men, where are the severed heads of people who disagreed with the king? On Gulaga Mountain you are invited to rub the belly of a pregnant woman.

  I never fail to be moved by the gentleness of my culture and never fail to wish that the directionless among the men of our people could muster the energy to climb the mountain barefoot to absorb the profound respect our old people had for women. This is not just a lesson for Aboriginal men but for men across the planet. Do not climb the mountain if you want to revisit a quaint and forgotten culture – but if you want to contemplate a world without war, that sees women as the centre of civilisation, this is the place to go. You can be guide
d to it by Yuin men and women who share the lineage of those who insisted that this was the destiny of humans and saw that story writ in stone. It will cost you less than a speeding fine.

  That gentleness extends beyond women to the land itself, and surely now we can see that respect and care for our soil and waters is in our own selfish interests.

  We can keep our computers, and for at least another twenty years we can keep our cars, but we can also contemplate the Murray River and the outlandish idea that it is within our capacity to make sure there is water in it. We can contemplate the Biamanga granite spire and the petroglyphic ‘bible’ at Burrup Peninsula and realise we can enjoy a rich standard of living and keep these representations of the human spirit at its profound and elegant best.

  You don’t have to be Aboriginal to understand Burrup art or listen to the sea wolf shearwaters, but it would serve you well to understand Aboriginal philosophy if you wanted to save them and the land on which they exist. We cannot leave such momentous decisions to the craven and vindictive legion of red and blue politicians fascinated by the prospect of their own survival. We are Australians; it is we who have the power. And the philosophy required to generate that power already exists in this land, and is available to us should we decide to embrace it rather than the swamis and gurus of India or the chanting and floating flowers of Buddhist temples. All we need to do is to acknowledge its existence, and that, of course, is through history.

  TOO UPSETTING

  One hundred and thirty dollars buys you a six-hour World Heritage Cruise – including a ‘sumptuous’ lunch – out of the west Tasmanian town of Strahan, across Macquarie Harbour and along the Gordon River.

  The tour commentary is constant, about Bob Hawke and Bob Brown’s fight to save the Franklin River from the hydro-electricity engineers, about the high quality of the salmon produced in the local fish farms (and their owners’ fortunes), about the domestic details of the prisoners and guards at the Sarah Island convict settlement, even about an officer’s indiscretion with a very attractive goat.