Salt

by Bruce Pascoe

  I realised I was in no mood for the polite, ruminative laments on black fate by white writers, but at the appointed time, a time my parents and aunts adored, I walked down the hill through the hub of old West End. A woman, stiffened with multiple sclerosis and hectic with need, was begging for $7.50 to restore her mobile phone to credit. Blackfellas in doorways responded to a wave with one hand while cradling a bottle in the other. The Golden Age.

  West End was being gentrified; these beggars and paupers would soon be evicted not only from their houses but also from the suburb. That’s why it could now afford a refined bookshop, refined talk and tapas.

  I tried to rally for the sisters who read their verse, and memoir, clapped the white ladies in their $500 dresses. There was not an unworthy word read nor an unkind thought in the courtyard of that benign bookshop. But the Branch bent above us all and dripped its sanctity in translucent pearls. Penn would have seen his mission vindicated, Hicks would have lifted his brush to one of the hundred versions he painted of the quieted beasts and the ring-leading child.

  For whom is the Golden Age reserved? The athletic coaches who devised a ruse no better than that of the man who buys shares at half price from old people addled with oncoming dementia? The man who bought Melbourne for a handful of beads and promised goods that were never delivered?

  Was there a time, or will there ever be such a time, when men will not be craven?

  As I trudged up Boundary Street, I was allowed safe passage by the rap-hall patrons who stepped aside to avoid the spectre of one whose age they could not comprehend.

  ‘I ain’t gunna study war no more, I ain’t gunna study war no more,’ we sang in the seventies, pleased to have rescued the lyrics from ‘Down by the Riverside’, and convinced a song would lead us into the Golden Age. But the words are from the traditional Negro rendition of Isaiah’s ‘nor will they train for war anymore’. Is it impossible for us to escape the Bible?

  Back on the verandah with the bats and palms, I stared into the darkness, heavy with tropical perfumes and stitched by the stridulations of insects. War and faith, war and faith; the Bible was full of its contest, or the use of one to justify the other.

  The tricorn hats in Hicks’ paintings had only offered the kindly hand once the war was over and the treaty bargains had been made certain. My eye roamed over the lovely architectural features of the old timber guesthouse. Octagonal turrets had been constructed in three positions on the roof above the verandah to direct cooler draughts onto the deck. A trick learned in the colonies of India and America and repeated here in our version of colonial architecture to cool the heads of governors and million-acre graziers.

  This grand old house had been one of the first mansions on this side of the Brisbane River and had housed an assortment of government officials and gentry. It was styled for those with languid grace. For years it had hosted dinners and balls for visiting British dignitaries, the machinery of colonialism – or as the Wiradjuri writer Jeanine Leane would have it, the British diaspora. You couldn’t turn a corner of the many corridors without some artistic or textual reference to the Bible. This house had once been at the heart of Britain’s triumphant victory over the savage.

  The savage who milled grain in a susurration of stone against stone, the savage who sang and laughed at the end of the day, who could design a house to reflect her personality (Mitchell believed it was the women who made the design choices), who could dine on roast duck and cake, and sip cool well water in a place we have since named Sturt’s Stony Desert.

  A publishing house charged with the study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture has been arguing with me for years about the existence of Aboriginal agricultural industries. Many of the accepted experts on Aboriginal history are spooked when the word ‘agriculture’ is used for acts that they have proclaimed, in their certainty, hunting and gathering. Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate declares that Australia was a managed Aboriginal landscape and has been very well received, so perhaps we are becoming more curious, less reflexively panicked by questions about our historical assumptions.

  Let’s hope so, but those leather-patch professors were also driven to dyspepsia by my discussion of the absence of war in Aboriginal Australia. What about the nulla-nulla, they cried, what about the killer boomerang? But I wasn’t talking about that grand old human predilection to murder, I was talking about land war, colonial war.

  The stability of Australian first languages over 120,000 years is testament not only to diplomatic restraint but also to the trans-continental agreement to live on and protect portions of the land. Remaining so long on discrete districts allowed the continuance of over 350 individual languages. If land war erupted every forty to fifty years, as it had in Europe and Asia, smaller, weaker units would have been obliterated or absorbed, and their words gobbled by the dominant language.

  If our grain harvesters, fish processors and fruit preservers had been charged with the custodianship of particular river systems and ranges, and their whirring mills had been sibilant every evening across the ages, the songs they sang at dawn and dusk would be rich with reference to their preserve, and the language would become a reflection of the environment.

  Any student of Aboriginal languages will become aware, as the speakers have always been, that each language has a distinct sound and intonation. It might resemble sister languages strung along the culturelines like beads on a necklace, but it remains distinct because of the land on which the speakers dwell and for which no other people have the same depth of knowledge or responsibility.

  Was that the Golden Age? Can it be the template for a new Golden Age? Responsibility for the land, not ownership of it or the wealth it can generate?

  Oh, Eddie Hicks, I love your oxen, I think your lambs are the cuddliest little moccasins I’ve ever seen, your chubby child could surely sell Snugglers nappies today. It would be nice if the vipers didn’t bite and the leopard never stalked; but that’s how your God made them, Eddie. I’d love to talk to you about this because the final word of any Christian I’ve discussed Creation with is that when in doubt you must have faith. I had faith in Andrew Johns, the disgraced rugby player; I had faith that Jim Cassidy just rode horses, not organised their performances with Tony Mokbel. I never had faith in Lance Armstrong but was asked to by beneficiaries of his charity. I was told to have faith and ignore the paedophile church leaders. I don’t have a good record with faith.

  I can’t see the harm in someone believing in Mohammad, someone else in Christ, another in the sanctity of cows, another in the spiritual efficacy of the sun, yet another in a little boy numerically designated as the Holy One, but when a disciple decides that one god is sillier than his own and therefore another must cede his land and life, that’s when faith deserts.

  If our religions insisted on adherence to gentle codes of behaviour and observance, we might live longer and better. The incorporation of the mysteries of the universe and life into earthly existence is one thing; to exclude and punish those whose explanation of those mysteries is fractionally different is another. And to use those explanations as an excuse to steal is a simple, transparent and abominable device.

  I am fascinated by faith. I once had the immense and accidental good fortune to be on the same train as Fred Chaney, ex-parliamentarian and former deputy leader of the Australian Liberal Party, as we travelled to visit the art galleries of Rome and Milan. Fred is a Christian intellectual. He dashed from one iconic work to the next, sharing the history of each in vivid detail. His enthusiasm for his culture was entrancing, his quiet love for his family an inspiration.

  Those couple of days taught me a lot about history and goodness, but did not loosen one brick of my faith in country. Later, wandering around a Byzantine church on Torcello, Venice, my new knowledge reinforced my belief that the Eurasian religious habit of war, rape and pillage could not justify the rich objects of its culture. A belief that requires the severing of babies’ heads and the slicing of unborn infants from womb
s by the righteous sword encourages not just bigotry and violence but also disregard for the humanity of others.

  The commercial and political ethics that produced Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the global financial crisis are all excused in the minds of the perpetrators by their right to despise others for tiny differences, or simply justified by the opportunity to inflict harm. Fragments of that intolerance can be seen in the paybacks and punishments of Aboriginal Australia, but the restraint on these traits, which are so common to the human spirit, is the land itself. Traditional, pre-colonial Aboriginal faith is embedded in the land, and the responsibility for a particular district prevents all but the most fleeting outbreaks of violence. Soon the land calls back those it has created to observe the necessary functions of custodianship: that particular piece of land and no other.

  If in all human societies there is another more likely to survive a few thousand years, it seems unknown to history or faith. I’m biased, but I yearn for that Golden Age where people stayed at home and harvested their grain in peace. And sang at dusk as they turned the bounty into cake. Artists paint those scenes today, venerating the peaceable land, but unlike Edward Hicks, they don’t need to paint a hidden miniature beneath a bridge or branch to explain how they came to own the land of others.

  That’s why I stood on the bed for so long; I was lost in wonder. Not certainty, but the calm security of doubt. Wonder is the mainspring of hope and justice, and certainty is the excuse for its murder.

  DEAR JOHN

  Dear John,

  There is nothing like being Australian.

  We take for granted that we’ll be able to fill up the car with petrol and go where we like. Few are so poor that they can’t enjoy the privilege of unfettered travel and a good meal at the end of the day. We are fortunate to have a parliamentary democracy, despite your wilful insult to its integrity. We are lucky to have such a climate, such bountiful produce, such a small population. If the mood takes us we can tow a tinpot caravan right around the country and pull up every night in a caravan park with a sea view at sunset.

  We rarely worry about being mugged, bombed or hungry. We took your advice and became relaxed, comfortable and alert. But never alarmed.

  Apart from one section of our population, the mortality rate of our children is among the lowest in the world. Most of us believe we’ll see our children grow up to be happy and wealthy.

  If the country had to be colonised – and that was inevitable – you could do worse than the British. The institutions in this country work on the assumption that they are there to serve the people, even though that assumption is being sorely eroded by the parliamentarians of both major parties. I bet you pray for Kim every night, John; it’s like having a gullible brother, isn’t it? Iraq, detention, blackfellas – you think like Siamese twins, don’t you?

  John, you worship the inheritance of British colonial government, but everything else this country counts as its fortune comes from the land itself, including a democratic and egalitarian inclination. You weren’t big on Aboriginal studies as a boy, but if you’d got your nose out of Wisden for a few minutes you would have been surprised about how democratic Aboriginal society really was. If your mate George W. read about a people who made decisions in a council of Elders, where everybody’s right to food and shelter was enshrined, where each person’s participation in society was unfettered, he’d probably boom, ‘Hey, Donald, don’t bomb those people, they must be Americans.’ But you bomb them every day, John. I can see you enjoy it.

  Our Australia today is a wealthy place. Few Australians would choose to live anywhere else, particularly places your mate George doesn’t like. But we must never take our country for granted or stand by while an equal opportunity is withheld from any of our countrymen and women. Examples of how our silence damages our democracy are as frequent and as recent as yesterday.

  You don’t know Robert Lowe, John; he’s black. Robert is an Aboriginal Elder from Warrnambool and tells a story that never fails to shock me. In a yarn about his boyhood he casually remarks that the Gunditjmara of Warrnambool were never allowed to enter the main commercial precinct of the town.

  The year was 1973. Aboriginal kids were prevented from mixing in the streets with white people. Gough Whitlam was in power, pouring sand into the hands of the Gurindji and bringing the troops home from Vietnam. In the same decade, people demonstrated against the visit of the South African Springbok rugby team and cheered Nelson Mandela, but black people couldn’t walk the streets of Warrnambool.

  Aboriginal people from New South Wales and Western Australia have shown me the tickets that were handed out by government to allow them to enter a hotel or drive a car. Blackfella in a car? Must be stolen. Blackfella in a pub? Must be drunk.

  This is recent Australian history, John, this is our heritage.

  But there is never time or excuse for despair because the majority of Australians do not believe in treating people unequally; most believe racism to be anathema. Despairing leftists tell me not to be so gullible and point to the last three federal elections, but elections don’t just test one belief or need, they record the population’s sentiment across a range of concerns. One of those concerns is always self-interest, sometimes greed, but more often than not governments are elected after scaring the people to death or crippling their natural scepticism. Most people have others to support, and few of us would remain immune to falls in income or sudden unemployment. A cunning politician will make this fear the central plank of his election strategy; few have risked the dangerous proposal of stiffening the country’s moral spine. Ring a bell, John?

  While the left bemoans its fate and blames the electorate, Robert Manne urges people to defy the politicians and act on the better part of our soul. Manne is right; there is no time for either despair or blame. Michael Long, the former AFL footballer from Essendon, hasn’t given up hope. Despite a famous letter to you expressing anger at your refusal to acknowledge the Stolen Generations, Long walked to Canberra in December 2004 in an attempt to plead the cause of justice. He wanted to draw your attention to Aboriginal issues, including the damage caused to the families of the Stolen Generations, a fate both his parents suffered. You refused to meet him until one of your Victorian minders reminded you who Michael Long was: a sportsman!

  Warren Mundine is one of the few national Aboriginal spokespeople to have accepted a position on your National Indigenous Council. Long, Noel Pearson, Mick Dodson, Pat Dodson and Paul Briggs rejected the proposal. Those who accept are responsible, successful people, but most are from the business or the sporting worlds; too few have held political positions within their community. Mundine proposes that Native Title legislation be abandoned in favour of cash payments to communities to kick-start Indigenous enterprises. There is merit in enabling direct involvement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the economy, but as Mick Dodson said in December 2004, ‘perhaps Mr Mundine doesn’t understand what land means to Indigenous people’.

  I know you would love to implement a policy to eliminate one of the last identifying characteristics of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people because it would allow your government to treat everybody equally. That is, to merge everybody into one culture: white culture.

  You take a clinical approach to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues, John, because you know most Australians skipped Australian history too. Sir, we’ve already done Aborigines. My oath you have, John. You say, We’ve spent millions on them, what are they whingeing about? Some of the Stolen Generations (although you’d never use the label) had better lives than if they’d stayed in camp with alcohol-dependent parents, what’s the problem? Well, John, the problem is that most of the children involved were taken against the wishes of their parents, did not have better lives or educations, and the damage is still sending shockwaves through the population. One woman I know cannot celebrate Mother’s Day or Christmas because it recalls the misery of a child locked in an institution throughout the y
ears when children should be with their mothers and looking forward with hopeful anticipation to Christmas.

  In most Aboriginal communities there is not one family unaffected by this issue, John. It is serious. It can be fixed – you don’t have to say sorry, you needn’t use the word ‘stolen’ if you don’t like, but we just want you to read a little history, and try someone other than Geoffrey Blainey. Blainey is a gentle and conscientious man, but he is only one man with one opinion, and he’s snow-blind. Did you read the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody? Of course you did, so you’ll have read the heartbreaking testimony of hundreds of mothers who had their children taken from them and who spent the rest of their lives looking for those children and were met with cynical and obstructive interference from most churches and government departments.

  John, I know you think that the problems besetting the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community are our own fault, that if we got jobs, stopped drinking, stopped bludging, became just like other Australians, we wouldn’t have anything to whinge about. But John, just a few facts that haven’t been included in the ABC Cricket Book: the appalling levels of health standards in the Aboriginal community are not due to indigeneity; they are shared by the poor in any country on earth. Changing the belief or skin colour of these people will not solve these problems. The only thing that can restore the living standards of Aboriginal people is equity in the land over which they were once sovereign.

  You made people fear for their clothesline and barbeque in your campaign to thwart the court’s decision to acknowledge the fact of that sovereignty, John, but I know you don’t believe that’s what Wik meant. You’ve read the court’s decision, you’ve read the Native Title legislation, you knew private land could not be compromised by these decisions, but you knew the heart of your people well, John, you knew they wouldn’t mind if you told them that, gave them a reason to kick the black bastards in the behind.