Australia Day

by Stan Grant

  Memory is the foundation of what has been called the invention of tradition. People the world over do this, blending history and politics into culture and identity. The Irish Grants – the white descendants of convict John Grant – are still said to sing rebel songs at family reunions. The Irish are not dissimilar to Indigenous Australians, indeed people like me of Irish and Aboriginal heritage are sometimes referred to as shamrock Aborigines. David Rieff wrote his book In Praise of Forgetting while living in Dublin. He says, ‘the mythical Ireland still to be found in the frozen republicanism of a declining portion of the Irish diaspora’. As I was raised on the stories of the oppression of my black forebears, generations of Irish have been raised on the story of the persecution of Catholics, the pillage of Oliver Cromwell. Rieff quotes Irish historian John M. Regan, who saw this foundation myth as ‘the immemorial struggle against English misrule . . . eulogised physical force and honoured the pieties of separatist republican-nationalism’.

  In the 1970s a new generation of Aboriginal activists embraced a burgeoning black nationalism. As a boy entering his teens, I was captivated by this radicalism: the Tent Embassy and Land Rights marches. I read about Black Power, black nationalist movements of the United States. It was a political awakening for me, I can see now I was naive and misguided but I have a lingering affection for that youthful me; he was curious, willing to think new thoughts. I see my younger self in the righteous anger of Indigenous protesters today, burning Australian flags and denouncing Australia Day. Perhaps there was a time I might have been among them, but years as a reporter, wading through bloodshed, seeing how historical grievance can pit people against each other, how history filtered through memory can distort our view of the world, I am more inclined to the suggestion of Irish literary critic Edna Longley: perhaps we should raise a monument to amnesia, and forget where we put it.

  *

  French philosopher and writer Albert Camus said, ‘All revolutionaries finally aspire to world unity and act as though they believed that history were dead.’ The story of modern times is humanity’s struggle with history. History has been buried so many times . . . and history always returns. In fact, when it comes to history, I am reminded of the words of the playwright Eugene O’Neill, who wrote, ‘There is no present or future – only the past, happening over and over again – now.’

  When I look at our world today I wonder, are we locked in some never-ending cycle – a death spiral from which we cannot pull out? The embers of old wars are flaring again: North Korea has enough nuclear weapons to turn our region into a sea of fire. It has the missile capability to deliver its payload as far away as the United States or Australia. The world’s two biggest nuclear-armed states, Russia and the United States, are threatening a new Cold War. In 2017, old foes India and China – the most populous nations on the planet – eyeballed each other over disputed territory on their borders. Troops on both sides readied for battle; we came so close to a war with unthinkable consequences.

  In the Middle East the Syrian conflict rages on. Refugee camps are full. People are risking all to pile onto boats and hope to reach safety on whatever far shore will take them.

  In Yemen the two biggest powers in the Muslim world, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are locked in a deadly proxy war – pitting Shi’a Houthi rebels backed by Tehran against the Yemeni government. As many as 85,000 children under the age of five are thought to have starved to death in Yemen in the past three years. Take a look at the images of the emaciated children, eyes bulging, loose skin, exposed rib cages – precisely the sort of images we saw out of Ethiopia in the 1980s, when the world’s music stars rallied in aid concerts and records, and governments stepped up and we all swore never again. But as I write, Yemen is facing the greatest humanitarian disaster of the twenty-first century – 14 million people are at risk and it is all so preventable, if only the Saudis would lift their blockade of the border that is strangling civilian access to food, fuel and desperately needed aid.

  A war on terrorism that began – officially at least – after the attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, rages on. It is the longest war America has fought; it is the longest war in Australia’s history. Nowhere is safe. Terrorists have struck in London, Brussels, Nairobi, Jakarta, Sydney and Melbourne. Russia stares down Ukraine. Pakistan and India remain locked in a nuclear-armed existential stand-off. All of this, happening during what is considered to be the longest period of global peace in human history. It hardly feels like it.

  But there is an even greater fear: a war between the two biggest powers on the globe, the United States and China. The battle plans are already being drawn up. Any clash between the US and China is potentially catastrophic, but as much as we may try to wish it away, right now military strategists in Beijing and Washington are preparing for just such an eventuality. In 2015 global think-tank the Rand Corporation prepared a report for the American military. Its title could not have been more direct: War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. It concluded that China would suffer greater casualties than the US if war was to break out now. However, it cautioned that as China’s military muscle increased so would the prospect of a prolonged destructive war.

  This is the world I have reported on. In thirty years of journalism the theme I have returned to again and again is history: the role it plays in our lives; how tightly we cling to it; how it defines us; how easy it is to twist and bend the story of the past into an unending narrative of resentment. History is the weapon of choice of authoritarians and demagogues. Everywhere there is resurgent populism, nationalism, sectarianism, tribalism. All of it feeds on history.

  I see these same forces playing out in my own country, among people I would call my own. The narrative of historical loss, of humiliation, has helped shape my sense of myself as it has for other Indigenous people. As the Chinese remember their humiliation by foreign powers, as Russians lament the end of the Soviet empire, as Shi’a and Sunni Muslims set themselves against each other in a conflict rooted in the past, so memory defines identity; it cannot be divorced from history. It is what Czeslaw Milosz called ‘the memory of wounds’.

  *

  ‘I just want to know how to sleep at night.’

  The old man had come in from the bush to Alice Springs for a suicide prevention conference I was due to speak at. He had lost a nephew and a grandson to suicide. Like so many Indigenous people across this country he was mourning another lost generation. He was not alone. Brothers, sisters, sons and daughters had all gone before their time. This is a story so common to Indigenous families it links us in a shared sadness that stretches across the centuries.

  ‘I just want to know how to sleep at night.’

  The old man wasn’t speaking just of suicide; he spoke to the sleeplessness of a people who are struggling to hold themselves against the world; to keep out the memories of wounds.

  The memory of wounds, Indigenous people know are their memories. These are the memories far too many are born into. Memories of loss and sadness; memories of grief. This is an inheritance of grief. These memories are not just carried within; these memories seep deep into the soil. The very land itself can feel heavy with despair – the rolling hills, the jagged mountains, the deserts and plains – all of it can feel so terribly sad. I have felt it on those times when I am sitting alone or driving. I have felt it sitting beside our waterholes and rivers.

  The memory of wounds. For some Indigenous people, pain is how they recognise themselves. For some – for me at times – it has been easier to live in sadness than to embrace joy. Sadness is so familiar that happiness can be suspect; sadness has come to tell us who we are. It is the well from which we draw our identities. Happiness can feel like surrender, like letting go of the memory of wounds – memories that keep our families, our past alive.

  It is something common to people living with a traumatic history the world over. The Jewish-American writer Elizabeth Rosner has reckoned with the memory of wounds in her book Survivor Café. Her parents
were Holocaust survivors and her identity was framed around a legacy of pain. As she wrote, ‘I am more afraid of forgetting my parents’ stories than I am of forgetting my own.’ Elizabeth Rosner says we are all ‘trapped in our nightmares’.

  I have spoken and written about my own family’s history; our own nightmares. In 2016, after publishing Talking to My Country, I was invited to speak at the National Press Club and chose as my theme ‘The Weight of History’.

  In the 1940s a man named Budyaan spoke this same language to his grandson in the main street of his hometown. Police overheard him, he was arrested and taken to jail. Budyaan, was also known as Wilfred Johnson, my great-grandfather. The boy he spoke to that day was my father, Stan Grant senior. Budyaan and his grandson were living under the weight of our history.

  In 1894, Lydia Naden was a frightened young girl, living on a mission called Warangesda, at Darlington Point on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River. Lydia was hiding out in one of the mission huts. Girls were being rounded up and forced into a dormitory where they would be separated from their families and trained to become domestic servants. Lydia’s resistance was in vain, she was discovered, taken to the dormitory where she not only lost her liberty but was starved as a punishment. The mission records show her food ration was cut.

  Lydia Naden was living with the weight of history.

  Lydia eventually married a man named Frank Foster, who as a boy in the 1880s was snatched from his birthplace in Sydney and taken to the newly created Aboriginal mission at Maloga on the Murray River. In turn he was sent to Warangesda until he was banished for being insolent and impudent, for daring to challenge authority. He spent his days wandering the state looking for a home, turning up in reports from the Protector of Aborigines until his death in 1940. Lydia Naden and Frank Foster had a daughter, who in turn would have a daughter of her own, who she named Josie. She became my paternal grandmother: born into the burden of the weight of our history.

  I have a photograph of a group of Aboriginal girls standing in line outside the notorious welfare home in Cootamundra. None of them are smiling and I am drawn to the eyes of one young girl, staring blankly ahead. She is known by a number: number 658. This girl – number 658 – was recommended for removal from her family by the manager of the Aboriginal station at Cowra. Number 658 was just one of so many of what have been called ‘the Stolen Generations’: children separated from their loved ones.

  Many were forever lost, never to find their way back home. Number 658 was eventually sent to work as a maid for wealthy squatter families. Her life was controlled by the state. She had to seek approval and permission to marry the man she loved and eventually to live on an Aboriginal mission at Condobolin in western New South Wales, alongside her long-lost brother. Number 658 would die a young woman, only thirty-seven years old, from rheumatic fever she first contracted in the girls home. She left behind six young orphaned children: lives weighed down by our history. Number 658 had a name; a name taken from her, Eunice Josephine Grant. She was my great-aunt, the sister of my grandfather.

  I am the sum of these lives. The stories of Budyaan, Lydia, Frank and Eunice inform who I am as surely as their blood courses through my veins. This is part of my inheritance: I bear the burden and pride and the responsibility of the weight of this history.

  For a people shaped by the darkest forces of our world, forgetting can be a troubling idea. It can feel like betrayal. Here is the big test of forgetting: are we prepared to sacrifice justice for peace? Think about that: we can pursue justice, we can litigate the past in an endless Nuremberg trial, or we can choose peace and put the bones of our ancestors to rest and know that their struggle and their suffering released us from their burden; delivered us a new day.

  That was the choice facing South Africa at the end of Apartheid. Justice or peace – it was that simple. They could pursue the crimes of apartheid and prosecute the perpetrators or they could let truth set them free. Listen again to the words of Desmond Tutu: forgiveness and reconciliation are the ‘only truly viable alternatives to revenge, retribution and reprisal’.

  ‘Without forgiveness’ – he said – ‘there is no future.’

  Archbishop Tutu headed a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’ not a ‘truth and justice commission’. Justice perhaps would have been easier and it would have electrified the blood of a people with every cause for vengeance. By choosing peace, Tutu set South African people a more Godly task:

  Forgiveness is not facile or cheap. It is a costly business that makes those who are willing to forgive even more extraordinary.

  Forgetting is essential for forgiveness, we cannot truly forgive while we hold onto the wrong; but forgetting is not ‘getting over it’. How often do we hear that: Why can’t you move on? That is the demand of the politician who thinks sorry is enough; who grows impatient when the victims do not fully embrace their former tormentors. That is politics. Forgetting is not political; it is something stronger than politics: it is love.

  I spent enough time as a boy in the black church of the Aboriginal mission of my childhood, where we would return time and again – enough hours fidgeting and wishing I was swimming in the river – enough time listening to my uncle, the spit and thunder, fire and brimstone preacher – to remember the lesson of Corinthians in the rolling cadence of the King James Bible:

  And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these three is charity.

  You don’t have to be a believer – to accept all the orthodoxy of the church – to be in awe of the Jesus on the cross who disavows vengeance:

  Father forgive them for they know not what they do.

  *

  But are there crimes so monstrous they cannot be forgiven – are their sins so heinous that they cannot be moved from history to mere memory? The Austrian philosopher Jean Amery refused to let go of the horrors of the Holocaust . . . he refused to forget what he had seen. He railed against what he called ‘the hollow, thoughtless, utterly false conciliatoriness or the pathos of forgiveness and reconciliation’. His anger was as righteous as Desmond Tutu’s love. Amery’s words are chilling:

  What happened, happened. But that it happened cannot be so easily accepted. I rebel: against my past, against history, and against a present that places the incomprehensible in the cold storage of history.

  Jean Amery was born as Hans Meier in 1912 – his father Jewish but his mother Catholic. Under new laws passed in 1935, he became legally recognised as Jewish and that would in time become a death sentence. In 1938 he fled to Belgium but by 1943 he was caught and tortured by the Gestapo. He was eventually sent to Auschwitz. He arrived with 655 others – 417 of whom were immediately killed. He saw the brutality of the Nazis, how they imposed their views of Aryan supremacy, and wrote that ‘the world always dies where the claim of some reality is total’.

  Jean Amery never relinquished his resentment – he thought it a betrayal. For him there would be no place for war monuments acknowledging the Nazi shame or the Jewish suffering – ‘to be a victim alone is not an honour’, he said. You can read his words in his extraordinary book Beyond Guilt and Atonement. I hear Amery and I admit that as someone whose people have suffered in Australia, it touches me profoundly. But in the end I listen to others – to Desmond Tutu – to those lessons in that old black church of my childhood.

  And I read the words of Albert Camus: ‘Resentment is always resentment against oneself’; resentment turns inward until vengeance destroys us.

  Jean Amery who was Hans Meier survived the Nazi death camps – refused to relent in his burning resentment – took his own life at the age of sixty-six in a hotel room in Salzburg.

  Jean Amery is Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Ressentiment Man’. He is a prisoner of his past, defined by historical grievance and driven by hatred and desire for revenge. Where Hegel saw history as progress, the quest for recognition and freedom, ‘Ressentiment Man’ is caught in a time warp, returning always to the source of injustice that he cannot fix
and does not want to fix. History, for him, is a festering wound, to be picked at over and over, never allowed to heal. His suffering is his strength; his weakness the greatest weapon he has over his oppressor. Nietzsche saw this as the morality of the slave, an inversion of power where the downtrodden emerge triumphant. But to Nietzsche ‘Ressentiment Man’ is a loathsome character.

  His soul squints; his mind loves hidden crannies, tortuous paths and backdoors, everything secret appeals to him as his world, his safety, his balm; he is past master in silence, in not forgetting . . .

  ‘Ressentiment Man’ plays the psychology of blame; he is a ‘whisperer’ and ‘counterfeiter’, whose misery is a favour or a blessing, something that will one day be compensated. Forgiveness is the highest virtue and without it there can be no reconciliation but can we really expect time to heal all wounds? Are the angry protesters on Australia Day not right to hold Australia to account?

  These are the questions philosopher Thomas Brudholm, explores in his book Resentment’s Virtue. He challenges what he calls the ‘boosters of reconciliation’, arguing it may be more moral to refuse to forgive. He confronts Archbishop Tutu, who, he writes, nowhere ‘seriously discusses the possibility that the preservation of resentment or refusing to forgive might be justifiable on moral grounds’. He says the Truth and Reconciliation Commission put a premium on forgiveness when it ‘ought to have been obliged to acknowledge the legitimacy of anger and the demands for redistributive justice’. Brudholm sees strength in ‘Ressentiment Man’, where Nietzsche saw weakness and vanity.