Heartsick for Country

by Sally Morgan

  Brave and stalwart men had tried before and failed at the goal Cook hoped to achieve. In earlier times, some had even set sail with visions of this mystical land being a lost Garden of Eden. There were some very old tales, passed down from one crafty grandmother to another, which said the Garden lay in the south. But when the Garden eluded their beseeching prayers, they decided that God must have hidden it from the greedy eyes of humankind until the coming of a Chosen One. In the history of humankind saviours have always been few and far between, and while ale was plentiful in dockside inns and taverns, sober seafarers with a sense of their own spiritual destiny were not. Even if one were found, some captains considered such a man would be a dubious asset. A tirade about the Fires of Hell would spook any crew in a lightning storm. In the seventeenth century though, over one hundred and sixty years before Cook set sail, a Portuguese sailor announced that he had been anointed to find the missing Southland. Fernandez Quiros was passionately religious, wearing rough goat’s-hair shirts to ward off the temptations of the flesh and keep his thoughts holy. He impressed the King of Spain and Pope Clement VIII with his colourful tales of endless riches and his heart-rending warnings about the fate of millions of lost souls in the South Seas if the Protestants reached them first. In 1605, with the mutual support and blessing of these men of power, he set sail. Along with him went a small gift from the Pope, a woodchip from Christ’s cross to ensure the success of his journey. There was an ancient story which claimed Christ’s cross had been carved from a tree which had once had its roots deep in the soil of the Garden of Eden, so perhaps the woodchip was meant to be a talisman of some kind, or even a homing beacon.

  Quiros searched in vain, but when he finally landed on a large lush island in a group of islands later named by James Cook as the New Hebrides, he convinced himself he had found God’s own country and named it the Southland of the Holy Spirit, claiming it for Spain and the Church. Here he meant to build a new Jerusalem and use it as a base to convert the whole southern hemisphere to Catholicism. The owners of the island where he built his small wooden church were suspicious of the bearded strangers who sang religious songs while pointing muskets and cannons at them from the beach. Open warfare soon broke out and Quiros’s crew, whom he had dubbed the ‘Knights of the Holy Ghost’, turned out to be a bloodthirsty lot. In the end Quiros decided to leave. Three young boys were kidnapped with the intention of whisking them away to Spain, where they would learn the Spanish language and be trained in Spanish ways; then they would be returned and used to infiltrate their own people in order to spy out the coveted location of any secret treasure. Sadly, the boys died en route to Europe and when Quiros arrived home empty handed, he plunged from the dizzying heights of spiritual tall poppy to religious nutter. Within ten years of setting out to find Terra Australis he was dead, but not before he managed to utter a final deathbed prophecy. The Southland, he warned the true believers gathered around his bedside as his life was going out on the tide, would one day fall into great evil.

  Perhaps in a strangely ironic and perverse way, it did—at least in Quiros’s eyes. When Britain eventually committed to a colony on the east coast of this Southland, King George III banned Catholic priests from sailing with the First Fleet to Botany Bay, so Protestants could get a head start in the land down under. But if the passionate Quiros ever looked down from heaven he would have drawn consolation from the fact that the first Protestant preacher to alight on our shores was more adept at growing pumpkins and cabbages than harvesting the souls of humankind; and for many years the Catholic Church in Australia faithfully taught that the Southland of the Holy Spirit was actually located in Queensland, and therefore a devout Catholic and not a heretic Protestant deserved the glory of ‘discovery’.

  First contact

  When James Cook at last brought the turbulent winds of change to our shores, they beat down upon us with bewildering speed. Cook never walked in the west, it was only in the east that he cast his shadow; but even here he remains a poignant symbol of a conflicted past steeped in layered denial. My people were lucky in the sense that we were able to hold onto our country longer than many others. The north-west of Western Australia remained free of the intrusion of pastoral stations until the 1860s, and it wasn’t until the 1890s, when gold was discovered, that the population of men seeking their fortunes swelled dramatically. For many of our old people, the distant past is not so distant, and over the decades I have been honoured to spend time with some who marvelled at all the changes, both small and large, their families had seen. These conversations were always both funny and sad. Humour has made us great survivors.

  ‘Straight lines, they were something new. If you see a straight line, then you know it’s not our line. We follow the rivers and the hills and the curves of the land. And Western Australia, that never used to be here either.’

  ‘Oh, there are a lot of silly things now. There’s a place further inland where I can stand with my big toe in the Northern Territory and my heel here.’

  ‘My old aunty told me when she first saw a man on a horse she thought it was a devil kicking up dust. The first horse, imagine that.’

  ‘Oh, those early days were terrible times. I was lucky, I was born in my own country, but it was still on a sheep station.’

  ‘Hmph, stations! They breed secrets more than they breed sheep and cattle!’

  ‘True. My old granny told me a story once. It was just before early dawn, still cool, with the sun only just peeking over the hill, so there was a chill in the air when her boy went out with the boss. She had a funny feeling, like something real bad was going to happen, so she watched. When the boss came back she went looking. That poor boy was dead in scrub. Oh yeah, a lotta people died of lead poisoning in those days.’

  This was not an unusual story. Many deaths, both of individuals and of groups, went unrecorded in regional Australia. In some places, the land still holds the memory, so the sadness and heaviness remain. If you unwittingly come upon such a place, the sense of what happened can still be felt, and conversations with the old people who know that area will soon reveal what occurred. These are not good places to stay overnight. An old uncle told me once how, when exhausted, he camped in such a place, only to be woken in the night by a terrible crying. He never went back to sleep. He kept the campfire burning.

  ‘The birds and animals will tell you what’s going on,’ he advised me. ‘Watch them. Your dog, is he right? What’s he doing? Where’s he looking? Is his tail up or down? My dog didn’t like that place, but I was too tired to listen properly to what he was telling me.’

  Change. Incomprehensible, often lacking in compassion and commonsense, and frequently brutal. But over two hundred years later, the hearts of our people, especially our older people, still lie within and long for country. Inside ourselves, we still feel sad for country, sorry, happy, worried, joyous, fearful and sick for country. This is because our country is alive, and no matter where we go or are forced to go, our country never leaves us. When we experience that deep longing inside ourselves, then we know our country is calling us back. It is time to go home, even if only for a short while. This is because country is far more than what can be seen with physical eyes. Our country is the home of our ancestral spirits, the place of our belonging. The core of our humanity. We recognise the connectedness of all things in our country, both seen and unseen, breathing and not breathing. Our feelings encompass everything that country is and includes the water and stars, the plants and animals, the Creator ancestors and all the spiritual beings tied to our country; the songs, dances, pictures, stories, dreams, visions and experiences of country; and everything on every level and in every dimension that has a life in our country. And this is the great Australian conflict: conflict over country; who it belongs to, what it is, what it means, and how it should be valued. (Image 14.2)

  Image 14.2: Another Story Courtesy Sally Morgan

  James Cook might have set sail on his first voyage of exploration in 1768, but I never met
him until the 1960s when, as an awkward and troubled teenager, I sat glued to my family’s black-and-white television set watching the adventures of Captain James Kirk, of the USS Starship Enterprise. From then on, I was an avid fan of science fiction shows and films, but I was unaware at that time in my life that the Star Trek series drew inspiration from the life and adventures of the famous Lieutenant James Cook, of the HMS Endeavour. I remember though, that I wanted Captain Kirk to play fair when first contact with another planet was made. I wanted him to keep secret the location of any peoples who might be vulnerable because human explorers, no matter how genuine they seemed, couldn’t be trusted. And I wanted him to be humane, to choose defiance of his Federation superiors over condoning harm to different races or other forms of life. But all heroes are flawed, and Kirk, like the man from whom he was cloned, often stumbled his way through the galaxy with little thought of the consequences that might follow in his wake.

  Later, when I briefly read that a couple of Americans had been on board the Endeavour in 1768, I wondered whether it was a sign of things to come. In the future, astronauts from the United States of America would utilise space as a highway to distant places in the same way Cook had used the oceans as a freeway to distant beaches. When those first astronauts landed on the moon, they flew their nation’s flag, like Cook had flown the British flag on our eastern shore. And like Cook, who left behind a carving of ownership in a giant gum tree facing out to sea, they left behind a carving on a plaque facing out to the universe. Not on behalf of a single nation, or so they said, but on behalf of an entire planet. The plaque read: Here men from Planet Earth set foot upon the moon. We came in peace for all mankind. [98] In 1992, they honoured James Cook by naming a space shuttle after the Endeavour and sending it winging its way to the stars with a woodchip from the original ship on board. Coincidentally, that same year, the High Court of Australia finally recognised the rights of Indigenous peoples, leaving the door open to a form of native title over country.

  So one hot summer’s night, when my grandfather and I were sitting outside looking up at the stars, I told him about Cook’s spaceship and we talked about it’s significance and what it might mean to anyone living happily on another planet, unaware that the spirit of James Cook and his new spaceship was about to descend on them. He laughed and said. ‘Those poor buggers in the stars, do you think they’ll get stuck with Native title too?’ Perhaps they will. The sky is full of unclaimed real estate. And though the United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty reserves space for the good of all humankind, land on the cosmic frontier is already pulling in big money here on Planet Earth. The Head of the Lunar Embassy, an American who claims to own the moon, has been selling off plots for years, and another American company wants to mine it. NASA has been sued for landing on someone else’s asteroid and the Milky Way is up for grabs to pioneering space speculators, who are offering celestial bodies for sale at bargain prices. In 2007, an individual filed a claim to Venus, but indicated he was willing to share it as long as any inhabitants lived within the spirit of the planet’s motto, which was ‘love reigns eternally’. [99] Modern thinkers are already predicting war in what some Indigenous peoples call the sky country.

  When James Cook set out to ‘explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man had gone before’, his own view of country was simple. Land was a means to wealth, a resource that God had ordained to be tamed and utilised by ‘superior’ nations. Born into a blue-blooded society where your social rank and likely future were determined by your birth, Cook knew that in order to get on in the world he would have to seek wealth by any means available to him and, if at all possible, do something extraordinary. This was the only way to gain the valuable patronage he needed to rise high; the only way to guarantee greater comfort in his old age than the miserably cold stone cottage his own father had ended up with. It was ambition that drove Cook to travel farther than any man before him. Being willing to head out into a vast watery unknown and possibly never return was an amazing and exciting thing to do in eighteenth century England. And Cook did it well. In a period of less than ten years he commanded three major voyages of discovery, gaining incredible fame and winning for himself various flattering titles like ‘The World’s Greatest Navigator’, ‘Explorer Extraordinaire’, and ‘King of the Pacific’.

  Over the centuries his character has remained almost saintlike to many writers and historians; what my mum once described as the Mills and Boon version of history, where James Cook’s own story opens with ‘Once upon a time in a land far away, a bold handsome man rowed into Botany Bay.’ Despite his increasingly irrational and violent behaviour, especially on his third and final voyage of exploration, his reputation for being humane has followed him like a bright light into the twenty first century. In 2002, in a book titled Cook: Obsession and Betrayal in the New World, the author wrote:

  But as significant as all his discoveries was his attitude towards the indigenous groups he met. Defying the colonial zeal of the day, he treated them with a decency that shattered all convention—and taught his men to do the same. This is the real legacy of James Cook, the enlightened explorer. [100]

  Yet when this ‘enlightened explorer’ arrived on the east coast of this continent in the wet autumn of 1770, he willingly chose to deploy a weapon which, as a science fiction fan, I think is best described as the philosophical equivalent of the Death Star in the first movie of the Star Wars trilogy, Star Wars. Terra Nullius was a legal fiction which, when activated, emptied this continent of her first peoples as quickly as God emptied the Garden of Eden in Adam and Eve’s time. And like the Death Star, it was as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. [101] Everything that has happened to our peoples and our countries since begins and ends with terra nullius, the lie which said that it was fine for men like Cook to claim the lands of peoples like mine because it was like claiming empty land. Today, its seductive whisper blocks Australian courts from moving forward in any dynamic or progressive manner. The Mabo decision, in which the High Court recognised the existence of Aboriginal rights to land in the form of ‘Native title’, was hailed as a landmark victory for Aboriginal peoples. Unfortunately, subsequent judicial decisions and legislation have seen our peoples burdened with a legal approach focusing on an over-specific, Westernised notion of ‘traditional laws and customs’, which has made a mockery of the spirit of the process. Indigenous peoples are penalised for events over which they had no control. This includes no longer living in the country from which they were forcibly dispossessed; not practising ‘traditional’ law; not being able to speak the language they were banned from speaking; proving genealogies going back multiple generations where much of this ‘proving’ has to be based on records not of their own making—records whose telling silences embrace a story no court wants to hear. In other words:

  Indigenous peoples are being placed in the position of having to demonstrate, not simply what Aboriginal culture is, but continuity with a Western interpretation of the minutiae of what it was at some point in the distant past. Rights to land—and future uses of land—are being constrained by a reductionist perspective that locates culture in a multitude of specific past activities, rather than looking at the holistic nature of Indigenous relationships with country. [102]

  The exasperation and anger this engenders led my mother to complain to lawyers at one Native Title meeting that, ‘This process is so stupid that even if it was 1770 and Captain Cook had just landed here, we still wouldn’t be able to prove our connections to our own country!’

  For Native Title claimants this situation is further complicated by gross under resourcing. The Native title process is so poorly funded that some of the lawyers who represent claimants have their salaries paid for from a fund contributed to by the industry groups with which they are supposed to be negotiating. Native Title meetings are often hastily called and poorly run. They begin early, finish late, force-feed participant
s with large amounts of information, some of it often highly technical, and frequently press for quick decisions on matters requiring thoughtful consideration or involving serious heritage issues. Then there is the silent prioritising of claims. The unspoken rule, usually denied, is this: resources are allocated to those groups whose claims are most likely to be winnable in court. This means that for many groups it’s a struggle to find funding for important community meetings, and no anthropologist or historian is made available to do any sustained work on researching the claim. In the meantime, important old people slowly pass away and their wisdom and knowledge of the land remain unrecorded.

  We want to protect the places where our grandmothers and grandfathers walked and talked and lived with their families. Our country is a living library, a place where the part, present and future come together in one continuing creation. There are grinding patches near the waterways—granite worn flat and smooth where the old women used to grind the spinifex seeds into flour for damper. There are standing-stone arrangements far older than anything found in Europe. And there are thousands of beautiful rock engravings; for men, for women, for families. Some of them made, according to one of our Elders who has since passed on, ‘before people were walking around’. Made by our spirit ancestors who are still watching over us and helping us to be strong because we always have been and always will be their people. What a tremendous roller-coaster of emotion it is; loss, grief, anger, sadness, rage and all of it threaded with humour and the will to survive. People find the courage to keep hope alive by reconnecting with the past and with lost family members and by talking about what is happening in our country now and what we can do about it. Largely through our own efforts, our severed family trees are slowly pieced together and the group as a whole begins to understand how, when and where the lives of our people became so shattered. We have our differences, of course, but our lives are underpinned by the need to be formally and legally acknowledged as the traditional owners of our particular area of country. We carry the wounds still. When you look at us, you can see what’s been done to our country.