The conference had been judged by the organisers, despite all the upsets, to have been very successful. When it was over we discussed the attempts made to suppress academic freedom of expression, a value we all thought to be held dear by institutions such as Harvard. We had learned, however, that it was not held equally dear by all members of the student body, and the faculty, too, was susceptible to pressure to silence discussion and debate, even on global matters.
Next day, in the Gutman Library, I was confronted by one of my students who had participated in the demonstration against the Indians the previous day.
‘How dare you invite the PLO and not the Jews? Why weren’t we allowed to speak on that panel?’ I was asked in a very loud voice, which immediately attracted the attention of the security guard who checks students’ identification as they come through on the door.
‘Me? Do you think I invited the people on the panel? I was asked to do a job at the conference by my hosts here, the Indian people, and I agreed. Who they wished to have on their panel was their own business.’
‘So you agree with them. You must, or you wouldn’t have gone along with it.’
‘Of course I agree. This is their country and they can invite anyone they like. Your people are not indigenous, to this country. You say you’re Jewish, so you’re a guest here yourself. Why can’t you respect that? The Indians don’t go to Israel and tell Israelis who they can have as visitors and who they can’t.’
‘Well, we’re an oppressed minority ourselves, we should have had equal time.’
I waved away the security guard, who was hovering in case of trouble. I am not easily put off by a lone raised voice, though I understood that in a library it was not likely to be tolerated for very long. Still, the youth had jumped up and accosted me, giving me an opportunity to at least provide him with food for thought.
‘As I understand it, no group of people that participates in this sort of forum can be both an oppressor and also claim to be an oppressed.’
‘An oppressor? The Jews are oppressing the Palestinians? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘No. I’m saying that there are whole sections of this country, America, that are under Jewish occupancy and control. Has the Jewish community here made its peace with the Native American people? When the Jewish people are prepared to hand back to the Indians those lands which they occupy and control, without the consent of the Indian people, maybe then you can talk about who they can and can’t invite. But in the meantime, you—just like me—are a guest in the land of the Indian people, and I wish you’d remember that.’
Strangely, when this young man next resumed his place in my class, he did not raise his opinion as a subject for discussion amongst the other students. Out of courtesy to him, neither did I. The event became just another part of the kaleidoscope of experiences that typified the impossibility of my coming home and making any definitive statement about the America I had found.
I had felt from the very beginning a close affinity with the Indian people whom I had met. During my first year, I had felt privileged to be asked to attend a mourning ceremony. It was held annually at Thanksgiving. While non-Indigenous Americans celebrated the arrival of the Pilgrims, their equivalent of Australia’s First Fleet, Indians from across the country gathered at Plymouth, the site the first landing, to pray to their gods and wonder in ceremony why so many people had come to take over their lands. During this event, Indians from many North American tribes related their various and different histories, and I learned a great deal. Like many of my generation, I had read Dee Brown’s monumental work, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, and knew something of The Long Walk, the butchery and battles, as well as the distribution of poisoned blankets. Although not surprised, I was saddened to realise that, just like the Black community in Australia, the pain of these events had reverberated down through the generations. It had never lost its intensity because the Indians had not been addressed or barely acknowledged by the descendants, and inheritors, of those who had perpetrated the crimes and benefited from their commission.
The following year, I tried to convince some of the Black American students that they, too, should support the Indians by travelling to Plymouth at Thanksgiving. I was gratified with my efforts when some of them joined up with us on that day. During my third year, and with the help of some of those Black students who had attended the previous year, we whipped up so much enthusiasm that a bus was hired to convey everyone who wished to participate. Now that my studies were almost completed, I worried about whether there would be anyone left on campus after my departure to try to bridge the gap I saw yawning between Blacks and Indians. I believed they had so much to offer each other by way of historical forgiveness and support.
‘What do you think about America?’ I was to be often asked on my return. Depending on the day I was having I would say ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or, mostly, a mixture of both. In the main, however, I’d plead off answering at all. Instead I would tell the inquirer that my view of America, without opportunity to travel across the land, had been limited to just the eastern corridor. I didn’t consider it fair then to make any assumptions at all. America had offered me an educational opportunity not afforded to me in my own country, and I did not want to be so rude as to come back home and relate positive, or negative, microcosmic events out of context.
13
The remaining few weeks of my last complete semester at Harvard flew by in a flurry of gleeful activity. I wrote to the Australian Council of Churches, telling them of my good fortune and giving an estimate of when I thought I would have my work completed. I decided I would contact colleagues in Australia involved in education, whose opinions I hoped to include in my thesis, when I returned home because, in my absence, people had moved around. Also there were new people working in the area. There were regions around the country where I had never been before that I hoped to explore. I wanted to visit the traditional communities I had heard about that were breaking into new frontiers as far as access to, and in some cases control of, European education were concerned.
On our return to Sydney, I purchased an economical round-Australia ticket with part of my Peter B. Livingston prize. Although prestigious, in cash terms the award was very modest, as I had come to realise when I sat down to work out my budget. It would enable me to travel to the places I wanted to go but it did not stretch to accommodation or on-ground transport. I would need the support of members of the Black community at each destination. In my heart, though, I knew this would be forthcoming. Although most of the people I knew had very little, there was such a generosity of spirit in the Black community that I felt the success of my project was assured.
The sheer length of the air-ticket I was issued proved to be a thrill. Each leg of the journey warranted a separate ticket, and they were all stapled to each other. When I held the ticket up the pages gently unfolded and reached right to the ground. Aunty Glad and Mum, who had come down to Sydney again to meet me on my arrival, laughed to see such a thing.
‘We’re coming over to your graduation,’ Mum told me gaily, very pleased with herself and her own daring. This mother who, for decades, had shunned air travel because, as she’d said, she was so old that she still remembered ‘fools jumping off chicken sheds with bits of wood strapped to their arms’, had at long last taken the plunge and been to visit Della in New Zealand while I was away. On the strength of this comparatively brief trip, she and Aunty Glad had decided they could now fly halfway across the world. Mum was almost eighty years old.
‘Mum, I’m not staying for my graduation. I plan to be back in Australia by Christmas and graduations aren’t held until June.’
‘Well, we’ll just come over to visit you then.’ Inwardly, I groaned. Such a visit would be a major interruption during the most intense part of my work, which I hoped to complete in the shortest possible time. Even more importantly Mum had absolutely no comprehension of what an arduous journey this would entail.
‘Mum, you’d be in
the air almost twenty-four hours. Do you understand what that means? I’d have to meet you both at the airport with an ambulance!’
‘But,’ she said sulkily, ‘Glad and I want to go to New York. We’ll go there first—or maybe you can even take us there.’
Opposition to any of her notions had always been the surest way to get this contrary woman fired up and even keener about the idea, so I agreed. ‘Okay, we’ll see.’
Silently I mused: first Mum says she is going to die if I go, and now she wants to come herself. Hopefully, if I don’t object but at the same time, offer no encouragement, her idea will just dwindle away.
In my absence Russel had completed the Bachelor stage of his university course, and I felt terrible. We had missed not only his birthday once more but also his graduation. I was deeply saddened to learn that he hadn’t even attended, feeling he had no family available with whom he could celebrate the occasion. This quest of mine was costing us all very dearly. I hoped that the future would enable me to make up for some of the sacrifices we had all had to endure. I was relieved to learn that he intended, the following year, to complete an Honours degree, giving me an opportunity to show him how profoundly proud of him and his achievements I was. Still, I couldn’t help but recall the old Black women in Boston who turned up at every Harvard graduation to welcome the bright new future assured by each crop of Black awardees and congratulate each one on their success. I was saddened to think that our Black community had enjoyed no such history of academic success which might have led to the community embracing Russel’s achievement. His qualifications would make him the first and only Black Australian psychologist on the entire Eastern seaboard.
I spoke to MumShirl and Brian Syron about the lack of acknowledgment of Russel’s success, and they both shared my distress.
‘Why didn’t he ring and say something?’ MumShirl demanded. ‘I’d have organised a big mob to go out to the university and see him. Don’t even worry about him—it would have been wonderful for the kids to see that one of our own has done it! They need that example.’
‘I guess he might have felt it would be too much like bragging, Mum, to ring up and ask people to come to his graduation.’
‘Yeah, but it wouldn’t have been. He’s always been a quiet achiever. So you’ve got to tell him—he’s got to share his success, he’s got to let these other Black kids know it’s not impossible for them to get in there and do it. There’s nothing else around the place going to let them know that.’
In preparation for my data collection trip, I dug into an old trunk where I had stored some of my things while I was away, and hauled out my tape-recorder, and a few summer clothes for the northern climate. Then, equipped with notebooks and pencils, I prepared to set off around the country.
Starting with the Sydney interviews, I rang Margaret Valadian, the first Aboriginal graduate, who was then running an Aboriginal adult education program in Balmain, but was told she was unavailable. Bob Morgan, then Chair of the New South Wales Aboriginal Education Consultative Group, was delighted to see me. We talked about who should be included in my interview schedule, who had moved where, and I was able to catch up on some of the many changes that had occurred during my absence. Bob agreed to be interviewed and to be a sounding board when I arrived back with my data. He was very happy to be involved in the pursuit of this first Black community doctoral degree. He supplied me with a list of current phone numbers of people around the country and, at the end of our meeting, quite uncharacteristically, gave me a warm and ecstatic hug which said much more than words. ‘Use the phones here,’ he told me. ‘Ring anyone you want. Our first doctorate, eh. Oh, yeah, right on!’
Proceeding anti-clockwise around this vast country, I flew into my home town, Townsville, first. Dr Neville Yeomans, a psychiatrist and friend from days of yore, invited me to use his home, in Belgian Gardens, as a base there. My dear friend Koiki Mabo, whom I had not seen for years, was, amongst his numerous enterprises, operating an innovative Black Community School. He was enthusiastic about his work and opinions being included in my thesis. We had a lot of catching up to do and talked for hours about his family, changes in the Townsville Black community, the state of the ongoing feuds between different family groups and their ideological positions. Then I set up my tape-recorder—only to find that I had stupidly, and in haste, placed it in storage with the batteries inside and acid had leaked out and completely ruined the entire unit.
Well, the loss of my recorder looked like it could turn my whole mission into a major disaster, and I had no funds with which to purchase another. Luckily, Neville produced one for us to use, but I remained worried about how I would cope for the rest of the trip.
Neville felt, and Koiki agreed, that I should contact the Education Department of James Cook University and let them know what I was doing. Although given short notice, I was invited out to a morning tea, and Neville offered to drive me. Both Neville and Koiki thought that the appearance of a local Black woman in the final stages of gaining a degree from Harvard University would help shatter any illusions the white university staff may have had about the inability of Blacks to succeed.
Unfortunately, this was not the case. To begin, I found myself to be the only Black person at this gathering, which, coming so soon after the academic meetings I had attended in Cambridge, heightened my sense of isolation. I felt that, even though they might not have had any Black staff, they could have invited some senior Black students to attend. Then, instead of allowing me to give a presentation to the group as a whole, staff merely wandered around the room and I found myself being required to answer the same questions many times from individuals delicately balancing their cups, saucers and cake plates.
‘What exactly are you doing?’ I was repeatedly asked.
‘Writing my doctoral thesis on Black perspectives on the white education system,’ I constantly replied.
‘Hmm, very interesting. I’ll be very happy to help you,’ came so many disconcerting replies. For a start, I wasn’t asking for their help, and, since they weren’t Black, I was not at all interested in including their perspectives. White people had historically decided, and written about, what they thought was best for Blacks in education and every other area. My thesis was to be a chance for Blacks to have their voices heard, not more of the same.
Still, I continued to be polite. ‘And what exactly are you doing?’ I, from time to time, inquired of those who came forward to question me, careful to use their same words. I wondered if any of them was working on a project similar to my own. My question, however, made them very uneasy, and it became obvious that I had forgotten the unspoken rules. Blacks, I recalled, do not question whites. At Harvard I had become used to a degree of equality which was not available to me in Townsville, not in this setting, and I realised that my new ways were not being appreciated.
I was called aside and asked if I would go outside to allow the university photographer to take some shots of me for inclusion in the campus newspaper. When I returned, Neville Yeomans was very agitated and immediately urged me to leave.
Neville could not contain himself even as we walked across the carpark.
‘As soon as you left with the photographer,’ he said, ‘they looked around the room and saw only white faces, they didn’t realise I was with you, and so they dropped their guard. They were saying the most racist things I have heard in many years. They said you don’t know what you’re doing, and there was a lot of the old “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” to imply how you are getting yourself through Harvard. I felt sick. I had to get out of there. Coming out here was a dreadful mistake.’
I couldn’t help it, I just burst out laughing. Change had hit them in the face and all they could do was resort to the same old racist and sexist reactions. Sleeping my way through Harvard? The very idea had me doubled over with hilarity. I had had about thirty teachers, the majority of them female, my thesis supervisor, Professor Courtney Cazden, was a woman. Indeed, most of the faculty and students at
the Education School, now that I came to think about it, were women. There were checks and balances all over the school which militated against the likelihood of sexual exploitation or manipulation occurring, and even against the appearance of such an event occurring. Perhaps, I thought, they are saying more about themselves than about me.
I reflected on this episode, especially in light of the lessons I had learned about racism during Chet Pierce’s classes. If I did not tell white people what I was doing, then obviously I did not know what I was doing. And white people, regardless of what I was doing, or their own level of expertise, felt that they could advise me, that I would be unable to accomplish my exercise if left to my own devices.
I travelled on to Cairns, where I stayed with my good friends Marjorie and Thommo, who had moved north. Mick Miller, a local Black community leader who had taught at the high school for seventeen years, and was then director of the North Queensland Land Council, put all his resources at my disposal. He organised a huge community barbecue in my honour on land that had recently been returned to the Aboriginal community. He was keen to contribute his experience and perspectives towards my thesis, and delighted to explain to people the implications of having one of their own attending Harvard and gaining a doctorate. He would even hail folks from across the street and in passing cars to introduce them to me and took the opportunity to make sure that everyone was aware, and felt themselves to be a part, of my undertaking.
I had known for a long time about Strelley, a community in a remote area in Western Australia which I was keen to visit. However, when I had suggested to people, both Black and white, that I would like to go there, I had been strongly advised against it. The Blacks at Strelley, I was told by those who claimed to know, were ‘hostiles’, traditional Aborigines who allowed no strangers into their area. Even Port Hedland police were only permitted to come as far as the gate, and had to conduct any business they had with the Elders at this border. Beyond the gate, everything was in the control of the Elders—policing, education, health, welfare, the works. They were unlikely to allow a strange Black from the eastern states to come in and start asking questions.
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