by Stan Grant
Australia looks different from afar. I spent nearly two decades away from my homeland, living in London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Abu Dhabi, Dubai. To me it was liberating. I could breathe. I didn’t have to fight old battles, I wasn’t braced for the next stupid remark, moment of ignorance or just plain racism. Other Indigenous people have said the same thing: so this is what freedom feels like. It feels good. It feels like being a person, a human being in my own right, not a product of history or a projection of identity. Australia is tiring; I always felt the adrenalin of survival was slowly wearing me down. Don’t think for a moment I was somehow immune; yes, I was what most people would judge successful, I had an interesting career, was financially comfortable, but Australia could still lay me low. Too many people in my family died young, too many had their ambitions denied, too many locked away, too many lost to drugs or alcohol. I know what put them there: they were born into it; born into a history hung like a dead weight over their lives. Success had bought me distance; I could escape but not truly be free.
Now, I watched these scenes playing out on television as I prepared to speak on this day – a world away, yes, but Australia Day still – a day that those I would claim as my own called a day of invasion.
You can call it what you want
but it just don’t mean a thing
I had punched the air and sung along with the song by A.B. Original. Their hit ‘January 26’, touched something deep in me. It was a witty, brutal put-down of flag-waving Aussie jingoism. I have always winced at overt displays of patriotism; flags and face paint often barely obscuring a deeper menace. Knowing what we know, knowing how this country was taken, knowing what became of a people who had lived here for 65,000 years at least, knowing about children taken from their families, about people segregated, about deaths in cells; knowing all of that, waving a flag seemed like mockery, like the final insult.
And yet . . . and yet. What disturbed me so? Yes, A.B. Original spoke to my heart but my head said something else. My head was unconvinced by this strident rejection of Australia. Who made that song a hit? Who paid for it and played it loud? Australians. Yes, those same Australians lampooned and sneered at: ‘Fuck that, homie’. Yes, those Australians: they were prepared to look at themselves and question their history. They marched for reconciliation and protested about injustice. Those Australians, were they to be condemned? Those Australians whose taxes funded programs to better educate Indigenous kids, to improve health, to build houses: billions of dollars a year. Did I hope their Australia burned to the ground? No.
In Hong Kong we caught up with dear friends. Our children had grown up together, we had spent hours at the beach together, we had shared Christmases and birthdays and countless dinners. We were bonded as expats in a foreign land, but we were also bonded as Australians. We shared the same accent, we knew the same TV shows, we sang the same songs, we knew what it was like to fill the days of a long hot Aussie summer holiday. We knew caravan parks and the outback and public pools. Did it matter that I was Aboriginal and they were white? Not in the least. To be honest we rarely talked about it. We talked politics and history and we swapped books and shared ideas and laughed. They were Australian and I was Australian. In Hong Kong, a long way from home, in our new home, being Australian was just a lot easier. Would I hope that their Australia burned to the ground? No.
Forget for a minute that I am an Aboriginal person. How would this look to me, these protesters, damning Australia to hell? Australia is a paradise, so many people have told me that. So had the years I spent working in the hellholes of the world, reporting on victims of circumstance, from the refugees in camps in war-torn Afghanistan, to the weeping mothers at terrorist bombings, to children blinded by trachoma in remote villages in China, to the hunched-over, malnourished, vacant-eyed farmers I gazed at from my slow train across North Korea – any one of them would have risked everything for a shot at a new life in Australia. Should their dream of Australia be burned to the ground? No.
Watching the protests on my television, I can’t help but see them through different eyes. The fact that people are free to protest at all is remarkable. Ours is a country where we have the right to take to the streets – to burn our flag if we wish. I had spent the best part of a decade reporting in China, where protests like this would be shut down. I had reported from Baghdad and Kabul and Islamabad where a public gathering like this could easily end in disaster, a suicide bomb tearing people limb from limb. Here, the police cleared the path and kept the peace. For all of the vitriol, there would be no violence. This is how democracy works; we have the right to shake a fist at power. Societies like ours are no accident. They are hard earned. We build nations like ours on sweat and trust. I have seen countries lurch into revolution, I have seen democracy subverted by coups and uniformed strongmen claim power at the barrel of a gun. I wonder, do the protesters on this day realise that they are railing against a country whose people had fought and died in foreign wars for freedoms just like this. Do they want this Australia to burn to the ground?
This Australia, the Australia of my friends, the Australia of my birth, the Australia that held our stories, our history, our laws: this was my Australia as much as anyone’s. This Australia, that shone like a beacon for those around the world seeking a new beginning: this was my Australia too. Australia did look different from afar. It had always left its mark on me; its hills, its rivers, its plains, its valleys and deserts had all shaped me. When I thought of home that is what I pictured. But I had sought escape from another Australia, an Australia that had shut me out. This was an Australia whose constitution was written so that we did not count. I had lived between the Australia of my head and the Australia of my heart. Australia did look different from afar. The years away had changed me and changed how I saw my country. I looked at it with new eyes. Now I was watching, again from far away as people – my people – hoped that it would burn to the ground.
What I was seeing was really bigger than Australia; bigger than the struggle of Indigenous people. This was another front in a global battle for recognition; a desire for people to be heard; to be seen. It has uprooted politics as we know it: it is a scream from the fringes; a blowback against what we are told is the modern world; a globalised future of universal values, free trade and open borders.
This was the promise of the End of History, Francis Fukuyama’s bold phrase for the post-Cold War world where liberal democracy reigned supreme. But Fukuyama, an American political scientist, had also warned of a ‘nostalgia for the time when history existed’. History indeed is back. Nationalism, tribalism, sectarianism: we walk dangerous fault lines. Everywhere there are demagogues and populists, feeding on anxiety, fear, racism and xenophobia. They are the most successful politicians of our time and they understand one essential thing: identity matters. That was what I was seeing, this was identity. A people told they were doomed for extinction; for whom the dying pillow was being smoothed, now saying, ‘We are here and we won’t be silenced.’
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I remember another Australia Day, just two years earlier. I had been in Washington, DC, reporting on then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s meeting with Barack Obama. Now I was preparing to fly out, the weather forecasters telling me that Washington would soon be snowed in. This was a blizzard of record proportions. The capital was buried under two feet of snow. The mid-Atlantic states of the US had rarely seen anything like it. Television networks were covering the impact around the clock; it was now rated category 4, or a ‘crippling storm’. More than fifty people would be killed and thousands left without power or stranded. I made it out just hours before the airport was shut down. In Australia it was already tomorrow.
Just the day before, I had stood in the Oval Office at the White House, almost close enough to reach out and touch the president of the United States. This was familiar territory for me and I was in my element. I relished the long hours and irregular meals, the sleeplessness and constant anxiety of life on the road. The freezing tempe
ratures only added to the excitement. My cameraman and I were working from 7 a.m. to 4 a.m. the following day. This was the curse of the international dateline: night was day and day was night; we were always on deadline. The snow was coming down in sheets so heavy that at times I would vanish from the television screen, a voice lost in a blizzard.
The prime minister and the president were focused on China, the great foreign policy puzzle of our age. More than anything else – terrorism, Russia, economic crisis – the relationship between the superpower and its emerging rival will likely determine the course of the twenty-first century. Were the two countries on a collision course that would plunge the world into conflict? Certainly China, rich and powerful, is making its presence felt, challenging American hegemony. The flashpoints stretch from the ‘Sea of Japan’, to the South China Sea; from the North Korean border to disputed Kashmir, where China faces an old and equally rising foe in India.
Malcolm Turnbull had recently spoken of the ‘Thucydides Trap’: a warning from the Peloponnesian war that a rising Athens made conflict with Sparta inevitable. Now China and the US were in danger of repeating history. Before leaving Washington, I and other reporters quizzed the prime minister at a reception held at the home of the departing Australian Ambassador to the US, Kim Beazley.
World leaders, global events; it was a long way to come for a boy who had lived much of his early life on the road, as my family moved from town to town searching for work. We were poor, essentially homeless, relying on whatever food my father’s muscles would provide, and when that failed, whatever the churches or charities would give us. We were not just poor, we were black – Aborigines – or, as we were more likely to be called then, ‘Abos’. Now here I was flying from Washington to Sydney, clutching a book recounting the Obama presidency, relieved I had escaped the blizzard but, unbeknownst to me, about to fly into a different kind of storm. A speech I had given months earlier and promptly forgotten had suddenly ‘gone viral’.
In 2015 I had been invited by the Ethics Centre in Sydney to participate in a debate on whether ‘Racism is Destroying the Australian Dream’. For the longest time I had said no. It was a heated time in Australia; the Indigenous Australian Rules footballer Adam Goodes had been booed out of the game. For weeks on end he endured this chorus of derision from opposing fans. It wasn’t just booing a sportsman, this was something else: it came from deep inside us, from that wound in Australia that had never healed. Adam was a hero, a two-time winner of the game’s highest honour, the Brownlow Medal. He was considered one of the greatest players of his generation. But he was more than that. Adam had become a powerful voice for reconciliation; he devoted his life to trying to bring black and white together in Australia. In 2014, Adam Goodes was Australian of the Year.
But all of that turned on a day when he heard a word from the crowd. Someone had called him an ape; he turned and saw a young girl and demanded she be evicted from the ground. He had heard it too many times before; it was the taunt of the schoolyard, the insult that rang in his ears as his family moved from small town to small town. He thought – he had hoped – he was now free of that. But now, here it was again and from a young girl. Why would she say it? What bigotry or racism had shaped her? He would seek to understand that later. He would reach out to the girl, talk to her. But now he just felt anger and shame and pain. He wanted her gone. From that moment on he was a conduit for all of the pent-up anger, guilt, shame and blame in our country. To some he had crossed a line; he was no longer a sportsman, he had brought politics onto the football field. It was an unforgivable sin; a line that can’t be crossed. The back page was now front page and Adam Goodes became a symbol for a nation still struggling with its past.
I wrote an article for The Guardian newspaper, trying to bridge the divide. I didn’t want to vilify people for booing Goodes, I wanted to tell Australia how it made me feel; how it made us feel as Indigenous people. As I wrote, what we heard was not a boo, but a howl; a howl of humiliation that echoed across two centuries of injustice and exclusion. We were estranged, I said, in the land of our ancestors. But I clung to something more; I clung to the hope that for all of that we were a nation better than its worst. I clung to a hope that out of the torment of this Aboriginal man, out of the pain of Adam Goodes, we might find a new faith in ourselves.
In that one article, a thousand words or so, my life changed. I was no longer simply a journalist, someone who observed the world and wrote the stories of others, I was at the centre of a story of me, my people, my country; a story as old as this continent. The impact of that article meant what I said now mattered. I was asked to write, I was asked to give speeches, I was invited to schools and conferences. Australians wanted to hear this story and for many reasons – the moment, the time – they wanted to hear it from me. It is an unnerving thing to find your ideas, your words, are bigger than you. What I had to say was more important than who I was. I wasn’t sure I wanted this. I knew I wasn’t entirely worthy of it and that there were those with more important things to say.
When the Ethics Centre first invited me to the debate, I declined. I’m still not completely sure why I relented; they persisted and I probably ran out of excuses not to do it. I know when I took that stage I wanted to speak from my heart. I wanted to speak unrehearsed and unscripted. I wanted it to be immediate and forceful. I wanted to look the audience in the eye and hold them. I carried in my pocket something that connected me to where I was from; to my ancestors and to my country. In the weeks leading up to the debate I received a letter from an old man from Cowra in western New South Wales. He had grown up on a property that had been the traditional home of my Wiradjuri forebears. As a boy he had collected artefacts, then still scattered on the ground. He had lost them all save one, a perfectly formed stone axe. He said he didn’t feel as though it belonged to him and wanted to return it to me. It was a powerful gesture that spoke of who we are in this country, of how this land is our land – all of us. This stone axe from my ancestors, through the hands of an old farmer to me, connected us to an unbroken story. As much as anything it shaped what I wished to say that night.
I didn’t want to look away at notes. I didn’t need them for this story, which I had been told since childhood. It was a story I had reported on as a journalist in faraway countries; stories of other peoples who had felt the sting of invasion and colonisation. It was a ‘war story’, and as the Vietnamese-American writer and academic Viet Thanh Nguyen, speaking of his own turbulent history, says, ‘All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.’
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27 October 2015: City Recital Hall, Sydney, New South Wales
Thank you so much for coming along this evening and I would also like to extend my respects to my Gadigal brothers and sisters from my people, the Wiradjuri people.
In the winter of 2015, Australia turned to face itself. It looked into its soul and it had to ask this question: who are we? What sort of country do we want to be? And this happened in a place that is most holy, most sacred to Australians. It happened on the sporting field, it happened on the football field. Suddenly the front page was on the back page, it was in the grandstands.
Thousands of voices rose to hound an Indigenous man. A man who was told he wasn’t Australian. A man who was told he wasn’t Australian of the Year. And they hounded that man into submission.
I can’t speak for what lay in the hearts of the people who booed Adam Goodes. But I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos. We heard a sound that was very familiar to us.
We heard a howl. We heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival. We heard the howl of the Australian Dream and it said to us again, you’re not welcome.
The Australian Dream.
We sing of it, and we recite it in verse:
Australians all, let us rejoice for we are young and free.
My people die young in this country. We die ten ye
ars younger than average Australians and we are far from free. We are fewer than three per cent of the Australian population and yet we are twenty-five per cent, a quarter, of those Australians locked up in our prisons – and if you are a juvenile, it is worse, it is fifty per cent. An Indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school.
I love a sunburned country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges . . .
It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains. We were shot on those plains, disease ravaged us on those plains.
I come from those plains. I come from a people west of the Blue Mountains, the Wiradjuri people, where in the 1820s the soldiers and settlers waged a war of extermination against my people.
Yes, a war of extermination!
That was the language used at the time. Go to the Sydney Gazette and look it up and read about it. Martial law was declared and my people could be shot on sight.
Those rugged mountain ranges – my people, women and children, were herded over those ranges to their deaths.
The Australian Dream.
The Australian Dream is rooted in racism. It is the very foundation of the dream. It is there at the birth of the nation. It is there in terra nullius. An empty land. A land for the taking. Sixty thousand years of occupation. A people who made the first seafaring journey in the history of mankind. A people of law, a people of lore, a people of music and art and dance and politics. None of it mattered because our rights were extinguished because we were not here according to British law.
