by Stan Grant
I return again to that image so beloved of Inga Clendinnen – Aboriginal people and the British, dancing hand in hand on the beach. It was painted by Lieutenant William Bradley, an officer on the First Fleet, who would leave many such images depicting the early days of contact between two such different peoples. Clendinnen’s is a romantic view: a dream of what could have been more than what was. Those people dancing with the white strangers would soon be ravaged by disease and violence. Clendinnen was accused of glossing over ‘the wrongs of colonisation’. Others have pointed out that the same painting reveals red-coated soldiers armed, their guns at the ready. But that is Australia; it is still those who meet with open hands and those who stare with clenched fists.
I wonder now, when I write about this Australia, what others might think; how my words may so easily be hijacked by the culture warriors on all sides of politics. On the one hand there are those defenders of the empire who would brook no criticism of colonisation, who see only the benevolence of British settlement and the unquestionable glory of all that has been created here; on the other are those who see only invasion and misery, whose identity is tied to grievance. No doubt to them I would be a traitor, an ‘Uncle Tom’, a ‘coconut’. So be it. I am not them; I don’t stand apart from the world, I cannot condemn Australia without acknowledging too that I am an Australian: its failings are mine and to change it I must embrace it; embrace it all.
I think of those protesters I saw on the television in Hong Kong and the anger on their faces. I have never been one much for protests – necessary as some may be I have always been wary of the voice of the mob. Slogans always sound too harsh – too simplistic – for me. When the placards and the flags have been put away, when the streets have been cleared, how do we go forward? How do we build a country for all? Who are we? That’s what I ask. For others it is, ‘What side are you on?’ Later that day, in a place thousands of kilometres from my homeland, I gave thanks for my country. In the acknowledgment of country I paid respects to my ancestors – those people of the first sunrise on our continent – and I spoke too of my family who came here in chains, bound to convict ships.
Where is Australia? I have looked everywhere for her. Is she in Lake Mungo, that vanishing place where time turns in on itself? Is she in the boy Bennelong standing on a rock looking out to sea, waiting for the boats with wings to return? Is she in Captain Arthur Phillip whose world was turned upside down, who lost his sense of England and yet wondered if this land would ever open to welcome him? She is in the lost girls of Hanging Rock. She is in the doomed figure of Keneally’s Jimmie Blacksmith, a man caught violently between black and white. We have painted her. We have sung songs to her. We have written her. We have shed our blood on her. We have shed blood for her.
Tim Winton wrote, ‘This country leans in on you. It weighs down hard, like family. To my way of thinking, it is family.’ Yes Tim, it is. Australia is in me. I have left and returned and I am still looking.
Should we move Australia Day? Perhaps someday we will. Perhaps someday we will have settled our ‘unfinished business’; but then, nations are forever unfinished; we write our stories in the margins. For now, 26 January is all that we are. It is all that we are not. Australia lives in that tension; when we seek to neutralise that tension, we deny ourselves. Some have said we should commemorate 25 and 26 January; we should mark the before and after. It is a poignant and poetic idea, but it marks an ending and a beginning and I don’t believe in that; we see what became before and what came after. I do not exist on 25 January. What happened on that day when the boats came to stay, that’s what has made me. I live with it all.
*
In Australia we are presented with a challenge to our nation, one that stems from history itself. The idea of Indigenous recognition seeks restoration in an exercise of reconciliation. But recognition walks a national fault line: history, race. These are things that can divide, yet cannot be ignored. Recognition itself challenges us to make good on the past, yet live free of its chains – to remember in order to forget. Ernest Renan told us a nation demands it of us:
Man is a slave neither of his race, his language, his religion, the course of his rivers, nor the direction of his mountain ranges. A great aggregation of men, in sane mind and warm heart, created a moral conscience that calls itself a nation.
Recognition is the struggle for our moral conscience. It is also a test of how we are governed. Can our constitution satisfy the demands of what Canadian philosopher James Tully calls our ‘strange multiplicity’? Tully says we find ourselves locked in intractable conflicts of nationalism and federalism, linguistic and ethnic minorities, feminism and multiculturalism and the demands of Indigenous rights. He writes: ‘The question is whether a constitution can give recognition to the legitimate demands of the members of diverse cultures that renders everyone their due . . .’
Our constitution – our founding document – must respect what came before: it must acknowledge the place of the First Peoples. Others have described it as our nation’s rule book. It is a rule book that still carries the illegitimacy and stain of race, so it surely needs amendment. This land’s First Peoples have felt the sting of exclusion and discrimination. It is the challenge of a nation to rise above its past. Can our constitution meet the aspirations of those locked out at the nation’s birth? Will the First Peoples be given full voice to shape our destinies and complete our union with our fellow Australians?
These things need not be incompatible. The First Peoples do not have special rights, but inherent rights. It diminishes no one to acknowledge and protect that unique status, in keeping with the spirit and limits of our constitutional democracy. In this way we ensure allegiance. In this way we narrow our differences and strengthen our bonds. In this way we are all set free.
We need to write a new declaration: a Declaration of Country. It does not speak only to Indigenous people, it does not speak to Britain or the homelands of those migrants who have made their way to these shores. It speaks first to this land, this place here before any human footprint, this place that is our home.
A nation is not just a set of laws. A nation is above all a story, a never-ending story of us. It is the story of a land steeped in time, awaiting people from many other lands, who in time will call themselves Australians. It begins with the first footsteps taken tens of millennia ago, and continues in the newest-born child of this land. It will live on in those still to come. A Declaration of our Country must speak to us all. It should speak to our sense of place: our home. It should be the work of poets. It should stand alone, apart from the constitution. Its words should be carved in monuments to fall from the lips of children not yet born.
When the political debates of our age are past, there will always be our country. Our challenge – all of us – is to live here and call it home; our nation this thing of the soul.
A Declaration of Country must tell the story of Eleanor Dark’s Bennilong and the story of Peter Weir’s missing white girls. It must tell the story of a man called Wongamar, my Wiradjuri forebear, and the story of an Irishman, John Grant. A Declaration of Country should speak to who we have been and allow for who we may become.
*
I imagine another Australia Day, a day some time in our future when I rise at dawn and pause to remember that moment when the people of the first sunrise on this land met the people who came in the tall ships. I will fall silent for those whose lives were lost, as I do on Anzac Day and Remembrance Day. I will think of all of those who have put me here, their sacrifice, their struggles, their pain and their dreams.
I will remember, but I will also put it aside – forget if you like – for it is in forgetting that I can find peace.
This future Australia Day will still likely be a day of protest, a day of sadness, and a day of joy and thanks. We are all of those things.
On this day I will repeat to myself words I have written for my country.
The first people touched this land as our continent was be
ing formed.
They came in boats when humanity had yet to cross an open sea. Here they formed a civilisation that continues to this day.
Their birthright has never been ceded.
Those people live still in their descendants.
We enter into their heritage and respect their traditions.
We honour too those who have come from other lands and carry with them their cultures and faiths.
Though our bonds may strain, we seek to live together in harmony. Though we may disagree, we find no enemy among us.
We cherish the foundations of our nation, and our rule of law and democracy.
We abide by the will of the majority but defend the rights of the minority.
We are all equal in dignity.
Opportunity is for all.
Worth should be measured not in privilege.
By our efforts we prosper. In a land of plenty, we care for those without.
From the first footsteps to the most recent arrival, this land is our home.
Here, together, we form a new people bound not by the chains of history but committed to a future forged together.
This is my Declaration of Country, my song of this country. For that is what lasts.
EPILOGUE
Australia Day 2019: I was just so ineffably sad. It catches me by surprise, this sadness. I thought I no longer had it in me. I thought I had made my peace with this place; but then it hit me and I knew just where it came from; it came from memory: memory handed down, memory that is the breath of life. Just when the day was almost done, a picture-perfect day of cloudless blue sky and burning sun, my sadness overwhelmed me. I had spent the day working and then at lunch with friends at a magnificent house overlooking Sydney Harbour. They are good people, Australian people, white people – in fact, all of them white – we talked and laughed and ate and our host toasted Australia and gave thanks for the blessings of our country. I toasted Australia too, proudly. But even there surrounded by all that is good, among familiar faces, among Australians I could call my own, I felt apart.
The same thought kept returning: all of this privilege comes from loss. All of this was built on what had been taken; this country was taken and here I was among the wealthy and the good and basking in our good fortune in a land where black children still kill themselves and black mothers are beaten and black men are too often emotionally castrated, hollowed out and ground down. Then I knew, I knew that all of my efforts to understand this all; to rationalise it; to intellectualise it; all this talk of nation and forgetting and belonging and identity; all this talk about liberalism and Enlightenment; all of the books of philosophy I had studied; right there, right then it all felt so useless, so pointless, so inadequate because what had happened here was just so, so sad.
If you are not Indigenous, it is impossible to really know what it is to carry this history in our bones, to live with the memory of wounds. I don’t say that to apportion blame or shame. I love Australia and I love Australians and I am Australian but there’s still that bit of me that can’t truly cross the river, that lives on the other side in a bark gunyah around a fire, looking up at old stars and hearing ancient chants. I can’t shake this; I am Wiradjuri, I am Kamilaroi; I come from this land; my ancestors called this their home; all of their stories, all of their songs, their art, it was all created here; they drew life from this soil. This was never empty – terra nullius was the lie that haunts us still. This is what puts people on the streets; this is where that anger comes from.
I don’t share that anger anymore – that is gone and I am better for it. But sadness, deep, enduring sadness like a chasm in my soul: that I fear will never, never leave me.
I walked through the centre of Sydney and I saw people in T-shirts that said ‘survival’, ‘invasion’, that reminded passers-by that ‘white Australia has a black history’; I locked eyes with these people and I knew – instinctively and profoundly – that I belonged. They were making their way back from protests and a festival that celebrated not Australia, but our endurance, our resilience and our pride. We smiled as we passed each other, the easy nod of recognition, a look that says, yes I know you. It is a look I can find nowhere else on earth; it is a look that says, ‘come home brother’; it is a look that pulls me in and tells me that among these people I am safe. In their eyes I saw what I felt; I saw sadness, a look of people who have been so terribly hurt and have nothing left with which to strike back.
In their faces I saw something that I don’t want to see but something I cannot deny; we are still strangers here. That space between the ship and the shore; that space where my ancestors black and white met; that space we still can’t quite fill. We can love in that space; we can talk and we can dance and we can laugh; and maybe that space is big enough to hold a nation. If we are smart enough and generous enough and forgiving enough we can write our laws and our stories and we can make a place of peace there in the space between us. But we cannot squeeze 65,000 years into two hundred; time hasn’t worked its healing yet.
Maybe at some time – some time so far away – when my bones are as old as the bones of Lake Mungo none of this will matter; someone will dig me up and wonder who it was that lived here.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is about my journey into my country and it would not have been possible without those I have shared the journey with. I want to thank my grandparents, my parents, my siblings, my uncles and aunties and cousins who have all walked this road together. My dear lifelong mate Richard ‘Ditchie’ Bamblett – it has been a long way from school in Griffith and you’re still doing heroic work for our people. Marcia Langton, thank you for lighting a fire in my mind and inspiring me still. Noel Pearson, Megan Davis, Pat Anderson: what warriors you are. Hugh Riminton, John Vause, Farhad Shadravan, Brad Olson, Steve Jiang, Tim Schwarz, my compadres on the adventure of journalism. Peter Ford, thanks for our conversations. Richard Flanagan, the writer I wish to be. Mark Bannerman, my friend and soul brother, thanks for opening up a world of music and words for me. As always my deep gratitude and thanks to all HarperCollins, my editor Nicola Robinson who made this a better book, Tara Wynne my agent and the team at Curtis Brown. To Tracey, my love and my life, and my children, my love and my hope.
SELECTED SOURCES
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007.
Thomas Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Amery and the Refusal to Forgive, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2008.
Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2011.
Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land, Macmillan, Sydney, 1941.
Megan Davis & Marcia Langton (Ed.), It’s Our Country: Indigenous Arguments for Meaningful Constitutional Recognition and Reform, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2016.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Restless Books, New York City, 2017.
Catriona Elder, Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2007.
Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism – The Life of an Idea, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2018.
Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2015.
Barbara J. Fields & Karen Elsie Fields, Racecraft – The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Verso, New York City, 2014.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press, New York City, 1992.
Ken Gelder & Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994.
Sue Grand & Jill Salberg (Ed.), The Wounds of History – Repair and Resilience in the Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma, Routledge, Abingdon, 2017.
Stan Grant, The Australian Dream: Blood, History and Becoming, Quarterly Essay Issue 64, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2016.
John N. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, Routledge, Abingdon, 1995.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Ro
ads to Modernity, Vintage Books, New York City, 2008.
Duncan Ivison, Postcolonial Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.
Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton & Will Sanders, Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.
Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche – An Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997.
Elliot L. Jurist, Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000.
Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995.
Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, HarperCollins, New York City, 2017.
Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, New York Review of Books, New York City, 2016.
Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: A Critique of Racial Liberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017.
Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1953.
Nicolas Peterson & Will Sanders (Ed.), Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998.
Terry Pinkard, Does History Make Sense?, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2017.
Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition, Duke University Press, Durham, 2002.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999.
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004.
David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2016.
Tommie Shelby, We Who are Dark, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2005.
Steven B. Smith, Modernity and Its Discontents, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2016.
