Wild Cat Falling

by Mudrooroo

  I now agree with you about repetition. It does get boring except where skilfully used for some deliberate effect. But you know about muddled sentences — I dote on them, but I realize that no one else will. I like your last sentence and must quote it some time: “Contradictions are all right so long as the reader does not suspect it is the writer’s mind that is in a stew.”

  These extracts indicate the seriousness with which Colin had come to regard the writer’s craft and the extraordinary patience and tenacity with which he was applying himself to it. His life apart from the job to which he soon returned, continued meanwhile as a persistent search for a personal truth among the religions, cults and arts of East and West. Curiosity led him inevitably into so many odd associations that I wondered at times whether after all his Mara might win the day. His letters were disturbingly frank and to the point, but I need not have feared for him. He emerged from each new experience with another set of questions and a further mental horizon:

  Does merging with the infinite result in identity or loss of identity? Is identity equal to personality or to something else? In all my reading I find that the words used to express this thing are much the same, with minor differences due to differing cultural groups and languages. I have yet myself to find a meaning in life. At the moment it seems to have nothing to offer me, except perhaps records. . . .I spend my wages on jazz, folksong and blues and my time reading science fiction, poetry, Hindu philosophy and plays . . . .

  His attraction to Buddhism and Indian philosophy may have been some equation of Eastern mysticism to that of the Aboriginal Dreaming in which he became increasingly interested.

  “I now find myself oriented to the Aboriginal people,” he wrote, “and am for the first time definitely committed to a race.”

  He attended meetings concerned with Aboriginal advancement and collected signatures for a petition for the removal of discriminatory clauses from the law. He also became implicated with a dance group “. . .formed for the purpose of bringing Aboriginal culture — mainly dancing — before an audience and thus laying the foundation for a purely Australian art form.”

  When the Aborigines, collected from goodness knows where, “went to jail or wandered away”, Colin and his associates in the venture planned to gather a number of tribal-living natives from Western Australia and set them up in Melbourne as “professors” of a true Australian culture. This foredoomed experiment, however, soon died a natural death.

  He began moving in left-wing political circles, attending ban-the-bomb meetings and adopting “a Marxist attitude to society”, but he does not seem to have got very deeply involved. Before long he wrote:

  Can’t stand the middle class, the workers, or the Beatniks any more. Went to a working class party and drank and nothing else. Was flung out of a lower middle class party for sneering. Went to a Beatnik party and drank a bit and talked, which was somewhat better. . . . If one works with and knows people one has to drink with them or snub them — especially around Christmas time. . . .I have now taken up learning the guitar, the first really new interest I have had in ages. . . .

  During this period he wrote me that he had become acquainted with the author Criena Rohan who encouraged his writing and whose untimely death, after the publication of her novel The Delinquents, deprived him of one of the few people with whom he could discuss his work.

  In the meantime he had sent me his completed M.S. which I showed to my friend, the writer and literary critic, Florence James, then on a visit to Australia. She agreed with me that it was a first novel of unusual promise and significance, but that it was still in need of some organization. We had both been engaged to talk at a writers’ school in Adelaide, so Cohn hitch-hiked from Melbourne to join us there and to discuss final editing. By this time, however, he was more interested in talking over ideas for further books and seemed to regard Wild Cat Falling somewhat in the light of an exercise or a proof of staying power — a deflection, perhaps, of the pointed bone of his Aboriginal heritage.

  To his surprise, but not to ours, we soon found a publisher who believed with us that the book was important, both for its literary quality and as the first attempt by someone of Aboriginal blood to express himself in this form. The writer’s use of the first person and the realism of his portrayal should not lead the reader to identify him with the details of his story. The book should be read as a work of fiction by a young man who, although open to the degenerate influences of native camps and milk bar gangs, has been strong enough to set himself a positive goal requiring detachment and discipline. The honesty of his approach floodlights a sinister and dangerously expanding area of the postwar world that few outsiders can begin to understand. His “make-believe-they-are-alive-kids”, convinced that they have plumbed experience and added up the sum of life, haunt a jukebox limbo of abysmal boredom, their only aim to flout accepted morals and behaviour and to provide themselves by theft and violence with the ritual trappings of their cult. The author has allowed himself no sentimentality; he has made no overt attempt to enlist the reader’s sympathy for the “mock-hero” who baffles and exasperates even those most concerned for his welfare. None the less, the story is an unconscious appeal and an imperative challenge to the society that breeds his kind.

  MARY DURACK

  Western Australia, 1964

  NOTES:

  1 The Child Artists of the Australian Bush: Harrap.

  2 By the middle of 1964 major citizenship rights, including the franchise and the freedom to drink alcohol, were granted to all natives in every State except Queensland, where legislation is still under review.

  Appendix II

  ME - I AM ME!

  By MUDROOROO

  ‘No fun at all. Ugly, reprehensible, disappointing.

  Being lied about in print, you wouldn’t like it.

  And I don’t either.’

  (Salman Rushdie, Guardian News & Media, 2010)

  I have been described as one of the most enigmatic literary figures of Australia perhaps because until recently I lived in an exploded village in Nepal and was to a great extent forgotten in Australia. If I was remembered it was as a person assuming a false identity; a Jacky if you will without clear title to his Aboriginality. I am a writer of many books, articles and poems. Some years ago I was considered an Aboriginal writer who set the key to what might be considered an Australian Aboriginal text; an “authentic,” decolonized black text; but I now consider that in this globalised era there are no more “authentic” texts, only pastiches that are named from subject matter rather than form. Thus content determines form and this may be my final word on the authenticity of any text. My writings have been translated into quite a few languages, Italian, French, German, Russian, Hindi and Chinese as well as Polish. My poetry continues to be anthologized in Australia and Wild Cat Falling has been in print since it was first published 50 years ago. It is a modern classic.

  Since Wild Cat Falling I have worked to expose some of the contradictions inherent in Australian culture and life. Owing to my love of Aboriginal culture and storytelling I sought to develop an orality of style, a sort of brief spurt of action or reaction spoken out in a story. An example of this was my short dramatic piece “Me” which was staged in Perth at the Subiaco Play House. My story telling continued when I was blessed with a son who demanded that I tell him stories and not read from books. In Nepal I began writing my autobiography, three volumes finished and three more in the pipeline. In these I seek the strength of the spoken rather than the written word.

  What I have termed the life story is an important genre of Aboriginal writing and I seek to continue this genre, though because of certain criticisms leveled as to the truth or otherwise of such writings I use Henry Miller’s idea of fictional autobiography believing that the truth lies in the discourse, rather than in the content and even outright lies may be part of that truth which can be discussed in close or counter reading methodology.

  I was born over seventy years ago on the night of the 21
st August 1938 and given the name Colin Thomas Johnson. Colin referred to the name of a play mate of my brother, Frank; Thomas my father’s name and Johnson of course his surname. For a long time I thought that I had been born in the town of Narrogin, but later I learnt that I was born on a farm in the district of Cuballing Later when I sought to trace my family roots things began to get muddy. I was one of nine children and my dad Thomas Patrick Johnson was supposed to be the son of an African-American from the state of North Carolina. When I first heard this I was happy in that I might be related to the famous blues singer Robert Johnson and there might even be material for a great book. I rushed off to North Carolina to find my father’s family. Alas no Johnson family existed in the official records. It was then that I remembered my mother saying dad was from the state of Victoria. My mother’s name was Elizabeth Barron and the Barron family came from County Clare, Ireland and she was an Australian born and bred.

  My eldest sister, Betty rightly claimed Mum was a direct descendant of one of the first British families to arrive on the shores of Western Australia in 1829. Edmund Barron was a sergeant in the army and his wife ran the first tavern in the new Swan River settlement of Perth. At that time many people made money, but not Edmund and his wife, I suggest that they drank the proceeds. He received a land grant from the government, but doesn’t seem to have made much of a go of it as he became a police constable. The Barrons have been described as a well off pastoral family, but this is open to doubt, as they never seemed to achieve a respectable position in the colony. Their grant came about because the British government took over the land and doled it out without a thought for the original owners that continued to occupy it. Indeed they had nowhere else to go.

  They shared the land with the white families and provided labor which was short in the colony. Women too were in short supply and liaisons began between white men and black women so that many of the first settler families fathered a counter black one. Even the Western Australian hero, John Forest, whose statue can be seen in Perth fathered children from Aboriginal women. Vic Forest is one of his Aboriginal descendents. There is also the fact that Aboriginal families gained surnames from living on the same land as white families. Indeed there was a tribe called Durack from the Durack family. It is from such events and facts that I feel that the Black Barron family is Aboriginal. Indeed, my mother never claimed that she belonged to the white Barron family at all. It was a matter of pride to Betty and surely it would have been the same for mum if it had been true. During her life she had nothing to do with the family at all which I find very strange indeed.

  In my research into early Western Australian history and the Barron family I checked out my mother’s family but did not follow it down to the present as I had not the time or did I meet any of them. Betty also it seems never got in touch with any of the Barron family. If Mum was indeed a Barron there must have been sisters that knew her or their children and Betty should have met and talked with them as a family member. There is a problem with mum’s conception and birth which I will not go into here as it is painful to me. As for my paternal grandfather being from North Carolina. I found no birth records. He may have hidden his tracks well and as he couldn’t write, replied ‘North Carolina’ when asked where he was born, and they wrote it down in Sydney when he married there. In this only written record there is no name of a town or county. If there had been it would have been easier for me to check him out as in North Carolina births were recorded at county level; but then he was black and if a slave...

  My mother died in Fremantle hospital on 15 September 1989 at the age of ninety-one when I was far from Perth and before that my father Thomas died in Narrogin on 7 June 1938, six weeks before my birth. Many years later I went to Narrogin cemetery to try and locate his grave. I learnt from the burial record book that even in death Aborigines were segregated from whites. I searched through the records which went back beyond 1938 but there was no record of a Thomas Johnson. It was as if dad had never existed and I might have shared the same fate except I have escaped the Aborigine dilemma by becoming a writer and a Buddhist and now an African American. It is my religion and my work that gives me a sense of identity and worth and well I love African American culture.

  For the first nine years of my life I lived in the small town of Beverley with mum and my sister. No one would talk to us because we were dark and Aboriginal. When my father died, my brother and six sisters were taken away and put into institutions as they were too much for my mother to handle. I never got to know them and only met them a few times. Mum was left with a daughter, Shirley, and baby me in a dilapidated house. The first years of my life were spent with Shirley and I think we became the terrors of the town. Our escapades ended with both of us being taken from our mother and placed in orphanages in Perth. I was going on nine when I was taken away. Mum wasn’t left alone because in 1940 she had had another child, Margaret who remained close to her all through her life and when I met her said that she had always thought that mum was aborigine.

  I was placed in Clontarf Boys’ Town, an orphanage run by the Christian Brothers. With them life was hard and tough, but they did give me an education up to the Junior Certificate as well as a thirst for religion. I think they would find it strange indeed that one of their boys has become a Buddhist and now says his prayers regularly to Lord Buddha just as when he was with them he had to say his prayers to Jesus. In Wild Cat Falling, my first novel, I wrote a bit about how my character coped with institutional life. Hard indeed were the blows, but hard indeed were our souls – perhaps?

  In those days poor wayward children were made wards of the state until their eighteenth birthday. In my case until August 1956, but two years before the Catholic Welfare had gotten me a clerical job which I loathed and abandoned for a life on the streets. I became what was termed a Bodgie, a juvenile delinquent with a taste for juke boxes and rock’n’roll. Life would have been, as it was for many young Aborigines then and even now, a roller coaster ride to the bottom of the social pile, but I was fortunate in meeting Dame Mary Durack, a rich Australian writer who helped those she thought gifted enough to be helped. I got on well with her, and let the welfare group with which she was associated send me off to Melbourne.

  In Perth in those days going east was the dream and I was able to fulfill the dream of many a young man. I was met in Melbourne by Stan Davies of the Aboriginal Advancement League and was found a job as a clerk in the Victorian Public Service at the Motor Registration Branch. Things might have fallen apart for me if I hadn’t met the Bohemian poet, Adrian Rawlins who introduced me to the writings of the Beat Generation as well as the artists and writers of Melbourne. I was inspired by the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and even more by the spontaneous prose of the novelist Jack Kerouac to sit down and write Wild Cat Falling which was published in 1965. This novel was well received by critics. In this first book I used my experiences of life and so what was Wild Cat Falling about but a young Aboriginal man facing the racist world of Western Australia and failing to cope with it. It was to be a large sprawling narrative filled with madness, sadness and incarceration, but when I sent it to Mary Durack she edited it down into the short text it is today.

  I’m not one to leave a book unfinished and years later I returned to add two further parts, Wildcat Screaming and Doin Wildcat. These were published as separate novels but really the Wildcat books belong together and should be read as a consistent whole. They show what it was like to be Aboriginal in Western Australia and the changes that occurred over the years. Wild Cat Falling includes a foreword by Mary Durack (which has since become an afterword) that I treasure as it is the only piece of writing by someone who knew me as I then was so many years ago now. Many people have put it down as being racist, but then Western Australia was racist and I was glad to escape that awful scene for many years at least.

  Melbourne was so good for me that when I came to write the second volume of my autobiography I titled it The Sweet Life. In that city I met writers and poets su
ch as Leo Cash and Deidre Olsen and even got married after Wild Cat Falling was published in 1965. I loved Jennie Katinas, a refugee from Lithuania who really introduced me to European women with their style and fashion. In return I introduced her to the Beatnik life of on the road or if you will, the life of a nomad or pilgrim. With the advance royalties in my pocket and after reading The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac I took off for foreign parts.

  A cheap passage on an Italian ship got us to Singapore and from there we made our way north through Malaysia to Thailand and Laos and then west to Bangladesh and finally Nepal where marihuana was legal. From Nepal to India and then to London where I was shipwrecked on such things as twilight and got up when it was night so that we often missed the day, but then night time was the time for living and so it wasn’t all that bad. Indeed it was swinging London, but Jennie decided to go home and I followed her going through Calcutta and Bangkok before returning to Melbourne where the hip life of the Sixties was raging and rock’n’roll was king. I dug it but yearned for India. It had become my spiritual home. I needed to live there and get to know her.

  Wild Cat Falling was good to me. Penguin Books bought the paperback rights and I received enough money to hit the road again and return to India with my wife in 1967. Jennie only spent a year with me in Calcutta and Darjeeling. In that hill station I met my guru Lama Kalu Rinpoche and studied with him as well as receiving initiations. I had met a beautiful holy man at last and he became my teacher forever and ever. Later we travelled right across India to Dharamsala where we met His Holiness the Dalai Lama. After this, Jennie decided that she missed her family and returned to Australia. I stayed on to eventually become a Buddhist Monk. I spent the next six years in India wandering as a Bhikshu from temple to temple and finally met up with an interesting meditation teacher with a sonorous chanting voice. He was a business man that had studied Vipassana meditation in Burma. Sri S.N. Goenka wandered India like a Buddha giving meditation camps and I followed him. Although a powerful teacher, he had remained a layman and I began thinking about whether it was better to return to lay life with my robe about my heart instead of my body. I returned to Melbourne in August 1974 just before my 36th birthday to find that the hippie days were over. After so long in India I found myself in a strange rich world, but under the Whitlam government money was somewhat easy to come by.