Australia Day

by Stan Grant

  Joan Lindsay wrote the book of the missing girls of Hanging Rock, and director Peter Weir fixed it in our imaginations. The land itself, a potent character in an ethereal tale of place and being.

  These are Australian stories, ancient and modern, and all efforts at recognition – a need to be seen. It is indeed a fleeting project, an attempt to capture a people – a people always changing – in a time and place. A drawing on a cave wall preserved for antiquity, to tell future people: ‘This was us.’

  It is so human, and it is essential.

  PART 2

  FAMILY

  FINDING FRANK FOSTER

  I have written often about Frank Foster; his life has mesmerised me. I have wondered at the world he saw around him; how rapidly it changed and how his life was shaped by those changes. I have been trying to find Frank Foster for half my life. He has been the missing part of me. I have felt his presence like a phantom limb; an itch I cannot scratch. Frank Foster appears in my life so briefly and from a long time past, yet had he not existed I would not be who I am.

  He is a connection to a time that is with us still, a time that defines us as a nation even as there are those who would reject it. That time we call settlement or invasion; which, we imagine, defines who we are. The past cannot be removed; it can’t be wished away. We look back on it through the eyes of our age; we see a time and a place but we lose sight of the people. They become caricatures, figures onto whom we project ourselves. We see what we want to see, we choose sides; we are on the shore or the ship.

  I think of Frank Foster as the first Australian in my family. Could there be a more English-sounding name: Frank Foster. I have no idea from whom he took the name; somewhere, at some point, there was a white man and a black woman and who they were – their DNA – lives in me. For certain, Frank’s grandparents would have been among those who saw the tall ships; who looked for the first time on the faces of these pale strangers. I have scoured the lists of the early arrivals to colony; there is no Foster in either the First or Second Fleets. But then there it is among the convicts of the Third Fleet in 1791: Samuel Foster. Could that be the man, Frank’s grandfather?

  Until recently I knew so little of Frank Foster, this man who was my great-great-grandfather. Now Frank has spoken, as if he were standing next to me. I met a man whose family history wraps around mine and has opened a window onto a past that illuminates so much of our present.

  Frank Foster emerges from the Australian frontier. He was a boy among the huddled remnants of the blacks of Sydney. Born not one hundred years since the coming of the whites. He existed on rations and wrapped himself in blankets handed out to his people, believed doomed for extinction.

  Frank and his family took shelter around Circular Quay. He lived with his father, also named Frank, and his mother Elizabeth Matto, an Aboriginal woman, and two sisters, Bella and Bessie. The blacks had taken up makeshift camps all over the Sydney shoreline, clinging to old tracks and places as a city took shape around them.

  He was ten years old when his father died and the world he knew fell. Old Frank had been visiting a nearby Aboriginal camp and his death was recorded in the Sydney Daily Telegraph of 29 April 1880. Reading the report today gives me a glimpse into a New South Wales colony in transition; a Sydney where the black past was not yet pushed from sight but rubbed embarrassingly against a people who were already taking on airs and graces.

  For some weeks past a camp has been formed at Double Bay by a few of the aborigines who are wandering about Sydney. Yesterday one of the men inhabiting the camp, a half-caste named Frank Foster, died and as no doctor had attended him an inquest will be held upon the remains today. The death was reported to the police, by whom the body was removed to the dead house, awaiting the inquest.

  Fatherless, Frank, his sisters and their mother were rounded up and sent far away to a new Aboriginal mission at Maloga on the Murray River. Here they would be hidden away, the pillow smoothed for their demise. For those who survived, here they would be ‘Christianised’ and ‘civilised’. On the mission Frank was told if he had a future at all it would be as one of the so-called ‘Half Castes’; those whose drop of white blood might open the door to their eventual disappearance into a world where all trace of the black past would be lost. Frank and his sisters were schooled by the missionaries. The records show he was a diligent and bright boy. He had ambitions to be a teacher himself.

  I can track Frank’s footprints through the official records of the day. By 1889 he had moved to the New South Wales south coast; the Aboriginal people of the coast were entwined with those of the Sydney region. His family links would have reached into these lands. He joined two people, Hugh and Ellen Anderson, who had established a bark hut school for Aboriginal kids in Kangaroo Valley. Here he realised his dream of being a teacher. Again, I find him in the government records. An education official was sent to observe one of Frank’s classes. His report describes Frank Foster as ‘an intelligent half-caste’. It says he reads and spells well and conducted a class in subtraction.

  Frank moved through the missions crisscrossing New South Wales and Victoria. The names – Cummeragunja, Warangesda – a shadow world where my people didn’t die out but regrouped and formed new families that live on today. At each stop Frank sought to teach. At Warangesda he met an Aboriginal girl named Lydia Naden and they had a daughter, Florence. I remember Florence as an old lady living on the Three Ways mission in Griffith. We called her ‘Nanny Cot’, she was my father’s grandmother. We would visit her each weekend. Her mind was slipping, the memories growing dim, but she would smile and touch our hands, connecting me to a timeless sense of belonging.

  Florence lived her life without her father. Frank was banished from Warangesda for being impudent and refusing to obey the mission managers. They would not allow him to teach and saw his demands for his people’s rights as an unwelcome disruption. From Warangesda Frank Foster’s tracks leave our family. I had known of him – just a name. The schoolteacher, my family called him. But there was nothing to give flesh to this name. At each turn the trace of him grew more faint. Until I unlocked a secret history I had always yearned for.

  I was training at the gym at Redfern’s National Centre of Indigenous Excellence. I go there not just for fitness but to be with other Aboriginal people, to be renewed by a sense of community. I began talking to a young man, Alan Daly, who I would often see. Usually we would nod and move on, but this day we stopped and over half an hour mapped our families. This is how we meet; Aboriginal people tracing our songlines, establishing our boundaries and confirming our identities.

  Alan is from La Perouse in Sydney, and I am from western New South Wales, but I told him of an old connection, of a man named Frank Foster. Alan smiled and said, ‘I know him, I have something for you.’

  Later that day he sent me a timeline, part of a community project to breathe life into people long gone, to sing the songs of old ancestors. Here were the missing chapters of Frank’s story. It told of how he wandered after Warangesda, moving from one community to another. He married several times and had more children; like so many other black men he found himself in jail, and he spent his last years as a fisherman on the south coast.

  He lived at the Aboriginal mission at Roseby Park and died in 1941. He is buried in the graveyard in the town of Berry. The funeral notice describes him as a ‘well known and respected identity . . . and a great sufferer’.

  What a life he had led, what things he had seen. A boy of the brutal frontier who carried his swag through missions and dreamed of his books and his teaching. He was born into his people, robbed of their land. He saw a new country – Australia – born and looked to find a place among it. He lost his home and searched for a new one. He loved and lost children.

  But he leaves me a deep legacy. The Fosters are a large Aboriginal family, extending from La Perouse to the New South Wales south coast. I am proud to count myself among them. But there are many thousands of Fosters throughout Australia. Somewhere t
here is a branch of this family tree – white Fosters – that shares a bloodline with me. Somewhere our paths separated. Black was black and white was white, and Frank Foster was somewhere between: a black man with a white man’s name.

  How foolish to talk of identity that divides us. We cannot say that you are that and I am this. Our history, our blood, mocks us. There are so many others on all sides of my family, black and white. Who am I supposed to embrace, who do I deny? How far back do we go? At some point, geneticists tell us we all came from one place, a place in Africa. We moved across the globe, weaving in and out of each other’s stories for tens of thousands of years, and that endless journey brought us here to this island and this is our home and we are a people.

  THE EVERYWHEN

  The ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus is said to have led a lonely life. He is typically depicted as ‘the weeping philosopher’, hands tightly clasped as he pondered the eternal question of change: what moves our universe? He is considered one of the founders of ontology, the study of being. What is it to exist? How do we account for our differences? Heraclitus is famous for his saying, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice’. In that sentence he asks us what it is to be human; it is not enough that we simply be, we are in an endless process of becoming. Heraclitus poses questions not just of the man crossing the river, but the river itself. Is what we call the river defined by the body of water? At that moment that we step from the bank, is that the river? When that water rushes by, when someone downstream also wades in, is that then the same river? We exist in a time and a place and then it is gone. A river is not simply a river, a man is not just a man; nothing is permanent, nothing is fixed.

  The German philosopher Hegel applied Heraclitus’s lesson to the movement of history. We are forever changing, driven by a quest for freedom and recognition. Thesis turns to antithesis and then to synthesis. I have written earlier of Czeslaw Milosz, he was as much philosopher as poet steeped in ideas of becoming more than being. That is not a subtle distinction; being implies something fixed or permanent, becoming is always changing, out of catastrophe we endure. We find new life beyond the crumbling ‘golden house of is’.

  This was the world that confronted my ancestors in the nineteenth century. Theirs was indeed a world of becoming. Violence and disease had wrought havoc. My great-great-grandfather Frank Foster had been moved from mission to mission, far from the land of his birth, longing for a life of learning always just out of his reach. It wasn’t just my black ancestors who were living through tumultuous change. John Grant, a seventeen-year-old rebel from Tipperary, Ireland, was banished to the colonies for life. He came in chains, his other family members executed for murder and rebellion, and would never again see his country. This was his home now. He fathered many children, had two wives, and died one of the largest landholders in New South Wales. It was said he was the wealthiest Irish Catholic in the colonies.

  John Grant lived on the land of the Wiradjuri people, west of the Blue Mountains. Here the two sides of my family come together, in the wake of a battle that lasted several years, called at the time ‘the Bathurst Wars’ – as the Sydney Gazette described it, ‘an exterminating war’. Much of the Wiradjuri population had been wiped out. When the colonial authorities handed out blankets to the survivors, among them were those with the name Grant. Within a generation, what we call Aboriginal society had been transformed. My ancestors told new stories of life in a world somewhere between black and white.

  The colonial government did not know what to do with them. In the early 1880s a special body was formed, the Aborigines Protection Board, with the intention of controlling the lives of all Aboriginal people in New South Wales. It tallied the Aboriginal population in the state at 8919 and divided it into classifications of ‘Full-Blood’ and ‘Half-Caste’. The board’s report of 1883 makes it clear that the ‘Half-Castes’, if they were to have a future, would be integrated (albeit at a menial level) into the state’s economy. The Protector, George Thornton, said:

  I maintain the opinion I have always held with regard to the half-caste portion of the aborigines viz, that they should be compelled to work in aid of their own requirements. They are well able to do so, having strength, experience and intelligence to qualify them for it; whilst I am of the opinion that the pure black should be taught, encouraged and aided in doing something for his own sustenance and comfort.

  Thornton was frustrated, describing the ‘Half-Castes’ as ‘indolent’ and ‘useless’. He wanted them put to work to fill the colony’s labour shortage. He called for the establishment of reserves, in effect migrant worker training camps, to enable them to ‘form homesteads, to cultivate grain, vegetables, fruit’. Aborigines would become farmers. On 16 May 1892 the board received an application from ‘William Grant, an Aboriginal’ for a plot of land near Cowra. They called him Bill; on the missions in the area, he was known as the ‘storyteller’. There are some old enough today to remember him and they tell me how he would keep people awake for hours around the campfire, telling stories of old times that had been handed down to him. I am told he would carry with him the stump of a ceremonial carved tree, an old artefact rescued as the land was cleared to make way for new farms. On Bill Grant’s marriage certificate are listed Father: John Grant, squatter – the old Irishman; mother: an unnamed Aboriginal woman who marked the page with an ‘x’. Bill Grant was my paternal great-grandfather.

  Change is not always ours for the choosing. Our fate is tied to the elements, to fortune, to timing and the sweep of history. The archaeological records tell us that at least 65,000 years ago, people first stepped onto this continent. They are credited with having made the first open sea journey in the history of humanity. It is a trek that leads to me today. The historians of the Irish Grant family trace their lineage back at least a thousand years, to the ninth century in Florence. The Gherardini family were one of the founding clans of the Republic of Florence. The famous ‘Mona Lisa’ is said to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini. The Gherardinis were believed to be one of the most ancient and wealthy families of the area; they were indigenous to Italy, either Etruscan or Roman. One historian described the Gherardinis of Montagliari (as they were known) as ‘instigators of disorder’.

  Otho Gherardini had been a Duke and a mercenary soldier who, according to legend, followed the caravan of King Canute of England as he passed through Florence after an audience with the Pope in Rome. Otho remained in Normandy, before eventually embarking for England with Edward the Confessor when he was called back from exile to become King of England. Otho Gherardini had a son he named Walter FitzOther; eventually that became Fitzgerald. The family story has it that some other branches of the family tree took the name Le Grand, then Le Grant until simply Grant. By the mid-eleventh century, the Grants and Fitzgeralds arrived in Ireland, the Grant family becoming the Barons of Iverk in Kilkenny. Centuries later they would be dispossessed by Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland. The late Monsignor Leo Grant, a Catholic priest in Bathurst who curated the family tree, told me that after Cromwell ‘the Grants became flotsam on the sea of Irish history, every generation being forced to move on by famine or civil unrest’.

  I remember the first time I touched the ground of Ireland. I had been sent there as a reporter to cover the annual marching season, where Protestant and Catholic would confront each other, often violently. Each was playing their part in what the Irish called ‘The Troubles’ a sectarian blood feud that stretched back centuries and so altered my family’s history. I had long been captivated by the Irish struggle, seeing in the Catholics – the blacks of Europe as they were known – a mirror of the Aboriginal fight for justice in Australia. I had read the story of Wolfe Tone, a seventeenth-century revolutionary figure who founded the Society of United Irishmen, the organisation my great-great-great-grandfather, John Grant, and his brother Jeremiah fought for. Tone was in fact a Protestant but he formed what he called a ‘brotherhood of affection’ for Catholics to throw open the doors of the Irish par
liament. He took exile, and from France convinced the French government to seek to liberate Ireland. In 1796, he accompanied a flotilla of thirty-five French ships, carrying 12,000 men. They reached the Irish coast but the wind turned against them, they were battered by rain and snow and the fleet was broken up. Eventually the invasion was aborted. The Irish historian Thomas Pakenham quipped: ‘It was a Protestant wind’.

  When I landed in Ireland, I looked for something more, something deeper, a connection to my family’s past. I stood in the streets of Belfast and willed myself to feel that I belonged. Does our DNA carry a genetic memory? Does home never really leave us, no matter how much time has elapsed? I think of those people I have met who discover a long-lost Aboriginal ancestor and construct an entirely new identity for themselves. It is what is called a Freudian history, a history of absence, a desire to find that missing part of ourselves: it is history as healing. Are they Aboriginal? If that’s what they believe then it is their choice. Was I Irish? Of course not. But it mattered to me. It helped me write a page in a family story, whose chapters remain unwritten.

  We are all of us a part of each other. We step into many rivers and are inevitably changed: a process of becoming. A Chinese friend once said to me that we are the last stop on our ancestors’ journey. What does that make me? I have been a nobleman in old Florence; part of the Norman conquest of England; an Irish baron and then a cast-out peasant farmer. I have been a Catholic rebel, striking back at the harsh hand of Protestant England. I have been a Wiradjuri warrior defending an invasion by strangers with muskets. Yet I would be today unrecognisable to my forebears; someone who doesn’t speak their languages or practise their ceremonies. I am a pinwheel of colours spinning into one; a kaleidoscope of history that came to rest on the shores of Botany Bay.