The Best Australian Essays 2017

by Anna Goldsworthy

  A generation later, another Australian writer, Thomas Keneally, in his book The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, imagines a scene long after the whites have come. For Keneally’s Jimmie Blacksmith, the golden house of is indeed has collapsed, and Blacksmith emerges as a new type of being, a creation possible only here.

  The bone-pale face of the white stranger has darkened, and the curly hair of Dark’s Bennilong has straightened. This is the Australian synthesis: Blacksmith born of black and white – from ancient and new – Australian in a way that no other can be.

  Half breed Jimmie had resulted from a visit some white man had made to Brentwood blacks’ camp in 1878. The missionaries – who had never been told the higher things of Wibbera – had made it clear that if you had pale children it was because you’d been rolled by white men. They’d not been told that it was Emu-Wren, the tribal totem, who’d quickened the womb.

  Keneally’s Blacksmith was based on a historical figure, Jimmy Governor. The real Jimmy was a mixed-race Wiradjuri man who, like his fictional equivalent, married a white woman and searched for a place in this new country, on the eve of Federation. Governor found instead derision and rejection, his wife endured humiliation, and Jimmy – aided by his brother and an uncle – responded with a violent rampage that ended with nine people dead and sparked the biggest manhunt in Australian history.

  Keneally sees his Jimmie as the man between: finding a place in neither the white nor the black world. He is a potent symbol of a country in transition: what has been and what is to come. In one scene Keneally depicts two office clerks debating Federation as Jimmie looks on, awaiting an instructional pamphlet on what wood to use for fencing. The clerks fall into a discussion about the American Civil War.

  ‘Wouldn’t happen here. Could yer imagine Australians shooting Australians?

  ‘… And you seem to forget, my friend, that there’s no such thing as an Australian …’

  They eventually notice Jimmie.

  ‘Jacko?’ he called. ‘He’s an honest poor bastard but he’s nearly extinct.’

  ‘And, surprisingly, that is the work of those you so fancifully call Australians.’

  Keneally grapples with this emerging nation: a people – as Hegel would have said – in a process of ‘becoming’. His Jimmie Blacksmith is as much a part of this transformation as the two arguing clerks. Rejected, he massacres the Australians who would tell him he was not one of them. However this nation was founded, whatever the injustice and brutality of British settlement, Jimmie is tied inexorably to its fate even as he is mocked, excluded and doomed, and even as he so violently rejects it.

  In film and art and song and literature we have sought to make sense of what it is to be this thing called an Australian. I recall the film Picnic at Hanging Rock. I saw it on a very rare visit to the cinema as a young teenager. The memory has never left me, and I have returned to it time and again. It is a haunting meditation on place, with the vanishing girls seemingly swallowed by the land itself. Remember the voice over of the doomed girl, Miranda: ‘What we see and what we seem are but a dream … a dream within a dream.’

  The use of that word dream, spoken by the whitest of white girls, symbolically connects us to the dreaming, in that place – the rock – that stood for an eternity just waiting for them. Their disappearance would become part of the dreaming story itself. Picnic at Hanging Rock has always struck me as a film about the thesis of Britishness set against the antithesis of terra nullius – an empty land for the taking. Those who emerge from the disappearance of the girls are forever changed: the synthesis of a new people in a new place. The girls lost have become a part of this place, initiated: a mystery now part of an even greater mystery of this old land.

  One scene has always captivated me. As the girls arrive for their picnic, an obviously British family are having their own gathering. They are overly and stuffily dressed, sweltering yet making no concession to the heat, their basket of food laid out before them. As they eat, ants swarm over the meal, and there is a plague of flies. Here was the incongruity of imposed Britishness on a harsh, hot, foreboding place: Europeans trying to tame an untameable country. As the search for the missing girls continues day after day, the family return for their ritual picnic. In this way, the film’s director, Peter Weir, grapples with the themes of alienation and belonging. The Indigenous presence is felt more than seen: the land itself represented as blackness.

  Eleanor Dark, Tom Keneally and Peter Weir: they have tried to tell the story of us – of our place. They set us in an ancient continuum ruptured by a cataclysmic clash of culture and civilisation. Out of destruction we are born anew: uncertain perhaps of our place, but with no other place to call our own. Whiteness must struggle with its blackness: it is in the land itself, it is in the memory of the people displaced, and it is there in blood – hidden blackness, or blackness denied.

  For the First Peoples, it is a fashioning or refashioning of belonging when the very essence of belonging itself has been ruptured and the certainty of heritage blurred. Jimmy Governor (Jimmie Blacksmith) is part white, married white and yet is rejected for being black. What it is to be Indigenous has become a puzzle not easily explained, nor simple to comprehend.

  The young Indigenous writer Ellen van Neerven, in her book of short stories, Heat and Light – a dazzling collection that crunches genre and gender, where plants speak as people and the past and future collide – grapples with ambiguity and the fluidity of identity and belonging. Van Neerven is of Aboriginal and Dutch heritage, and many of these stories are tales of ambiguity.

  ‘So much is in what we make of things,’ she writes. ‘The stories we construct about our place in our families are essential to our lives.’ In this story of a girl looking for herself in the image of a grandmother she never knew, Van Neerven writes: ‘If I didn’t know my grandmother, then how could I know myself.’

  The French historian Michel de Certeau says we live with a history of absence. We use stories to fill the void. What we call history he saw as a collection of artefacts we assemble to try to make sense of ourselves. Here is the crux of recognition, constructed out of a past reimagined, history written and history denied. As a nation, we struggle to reconcile ourselves to our past and our place. Always there is story.

  The story of Australia speaks to us from the dry shores of Lake Mungo. Forty thousand years ago, the waters were full, sustaining a thriving community. Here a man was laid to rest with full ceremony, his body smeared in ochre. In all of humanity this was rare, among the earliest examples of such ritual. The mourners sang a song in language now lost. As modern Australia celebrated its birth at Federation in 1901, the historical inspiration for Jimmie Blacksmith, the real Jimmy Governor, sat in a Darlinghurst jail cell, alternating between singing songs in his traditional Wiradjuri language and reading the Bible – the synthesis of the old and new worlds that collided here so violently, given form in a man soon for the gallows. It is a synthesis Keneally saw as contradiction, and yet the essence of being Australian. 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 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.

  While story grapples with timelessness, with ambivalence and ambiguity, we live in a land of laws, and the law demands certainty. If the First Peoples are to have justice, it must truly be acknowledged at law. It must reside in our nation’s founding document. But I would argue that we seek something more, that we write a declaration of our nation – a Makarrata Declaration of Country – that speaks beyond race or history. In the United States this is captured in the Declaration of Independence, a poetic document that res
onates beyond the American Constitution: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness …’

  Never before in human history had that noble sentiment been so explicitly set down. The Declaration of Independence pledged a government as the right of the people. The people were then considered to be white: equality did not extend to those in bondage. Yet far into the nation’s future – beyond the imaginings of the American founding fathers – a black man would occupy the White House. The new American nation pledged ‘to each other our lives’. Through Civil War, assassination, disgrace and protest, it seeks to hold to that pledge.

  The very idea of nation sits uneasily in a world of fractured, contending loyalties, a world of blood feuds. How can it hold us all? Globalisation is testing the limits of sovereignty – of identity. I return to the words of French philosopher Ernest Renan. Writing in 1882, he pondered that which made a nation. ‘A nation is a soul,’ he wrote, ‘a spiritual principle.’ For Renan, we draw from the past to live in the future: ‘the nation, like the individual, is the outcome of a long past of efforts, sacrifices, and devotions.’ Yet he counselled against clinging to memory, to grievance or division: ‘Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.’

  In Australia we are presented with a challenge to our nation, one that stems from history itself; its unfinished business. The idea of Indigenous recognition seeks restoration in an exercise of reconciliation. But recognition walks a national faultline: history, race. These 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. 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 reflect 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. Without meaningful, substantial recognition of the status of the First Peoples, a Declaration of Country will ring hollow. But with it we are free.

  A nation is not just a set of laws. Above all, it is 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 Makarrata Declaration, 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.

  The bones of my ancestors are buried in this land. They are the bones of black and white. They are dust, the very land itself. 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. The work is undone to make a nation, this thing of the soul.

  A Makarrata Declaration 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, whose name I carry, a man who came here clasped in irons with no hope of return. This would be his home. A Makarrata Declaration should speak to who we have been and allow for who we may become.

  A preamble could read:

  The first people touched this land as our continent was being 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.

  When I think of a Makarrata Declaration, a Declaration of our Country, I think of the Scottish poet Rabbie Burns, who said: ‘If I could write all the songs I would not care who wrote the laws.’ A Makarrata Declaration should be the song of our country.

  Uluru Statement from the Heart

  We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:

  Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.

  This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and coexists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

  How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?

  With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

  Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our
youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.

  We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

  We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.

  Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination.

  We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.

  In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.

  The Tamarind Is Always Sour

  Keane Shum

  If you crouch and hug your knees to your chest, and feel the skin of a man’s arm peeling against your own, and the sweat collecting on your nose drips onto the back of another man hunched over in front of you; if slices of light sift through the wooden slats a foot above your head, and your stomach feels like it is grinding stones, your throat clenches against swallowing each waft of urine and vomit, and the sting from a gash torn through your thigh by a rubber gear belt swung at you like a mace burns like the entire limb is being ripped off, like the chilli powder a filthy hand ground into your eyes; if you and the hundreds in the hold with you have been like this for twenty days, the gentle but maddeningly offbeat rocking of the sea pierced only by the occasional screams of women above deck, and you don’t know when it will end, and even when it ends you don’t know how every day after that will end, if you will be in bed with your wife or in jail, as confined to a cell as you were to the village your grandparents built a thousand miles from here, where you had a house but no quarter, land but no country, time but no future; if you do not exist on paper, anywhere, if no-one will take you in, and you are drifting, always, then you know what that means. You know the tamarind is always sour.