by Mudrooroo
Al Katinas, my ex-brother in law, then a film maker suggested that I apply for a grant to write a cinematic treatment of Wild Cat Falling. I decided that I needed to write it in Perth and the film board selected the documentary film maker, Guy Baskin to help me. In Perth digging life on the streets again in Northbridge, I began to write a novel Long Live Sandawara . During this period I met a Spanish American girl, Elena Castaneda and fell in love. She left for America and unable to live without her, I followed her to California and San Francisco where I did a pilgrimage to North Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookshop.. He had first published Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem, Howl and copies were still for sale. I went to the sad Haight Ashbury where nothing remained of the hippies at all. California at the time was the home of counter therapies and I followed Elena into doing primal therapy. Strapped for cash most of the time I lived on the streets and eventually ended up in the Salvation Army workshop which cared for such homeless ones in exchange for their work.
After six or so months in California which felt like six years as life was so hectic, I finished off my novel, Long Live Sandawara, before returning to Melbourne where I met the Aboriginal activist, Harry Penrith (later Burnam Burnam) and through him became active in Aboriginal Affairs. He took me to Monash University where I got work at the Aboriginal Research Centre then headed by Colin Bourke. With him I did a short introduction into Aboriginal Life called Before the Invasion. Under his direction I also began writing Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World and went to Tasmania to research the book. A Tasmanian Aboriginal, a Mansell elder, took me over the island telling me stories about an old bloke called King Billy and also introduced me to mutton birding. Back in Melbourne Colin Bourke suggested that I do a university course. I accepted his advice and began a B.A. (Hons.) course at Melbourne University. I met Bruce McGuinness then head of the Victoria Aboriginal Health Service. He had set up Koorie College to teach a health course for Aboriginal students based on the bare foot doctors’ approach to medicine as then practiced in China. He wanted me to teach an Aboriginal course on culture and I accepted.
The novel I had finished in California, Long Live Sandawara lay about until by chance I met Anne Godden of Hyland House who accepted it for publication. In those days I didn’t worry overmuch about what happened to my writings. Most of the stuff I had written in India had been lost. There was a detective novel, St Francis and the Detective and another The Valley of the Blessed Virgins, a long novel set in India with a large cast of characters. Only a few articles in the Maha Bodhi Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society survive from this period.
In Long Live Sandawara I had attempted to bring together past events and characters to fertilise the present. I choose an Aboriginal epic hero, Pigeon from the Western Australia of the late 19th century. I talked the idea over with Mary Durack who had written an article about him. She gave me Outlaws of the Leopolds (1952), by Ion L. Idriess. This was a quasi-historical account of the armed resistance of Pigeon against the British taking over the land, the Kimberley region of Western Australia. I took the book to California with me and used it as my main source. Much later after I travelled through the Kimberley and learnt about the massacres of the Aboriginal people there, I decided that Pigeon’s resistance had been used as an excuse to thin out the Aboriginal population by outright slaughter. Indeed Pigeon’s Bunaba people had been so decimated that there were only a few survivors left. This gave me a new awareness of how resistance and armed struggle might be used legitimately to completely pacify a people. To advocate armed resistance is too often to issue an invitation for massacre.
Four years later my Tasmanian historical novel, Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983) was published. I wasn’t all that happy about it as I felt that it was too conventional and decided that I’d do it over when I had the time. It had been fully researched. I had walked over Tasmania with the Mansell elder and seen the sites that I discussed, described and set the action in. It was in Tasmania that I discovered the do-gooder and doer for self, George Augustus Robinson who pushed himself forward as the savior of the Tasmanian Aborigines. He certainly wasn’t, even though he received the official post of Conciliator and Protector of Aborigines and set up an isolated settlement on Flinder’s island in the windy Bass Strait where most of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people he put there perished. My main character was the custodian of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, Dr. Wooreddy, he of the many names and attempts at surviving who ended his life on a ship off the northern coast of Tasmania. He was taken ashore and buried on a lonely island and with his life ended my book.
In 1980 I married Julie Whiting, a university librarian. She proved a better enemy than a lover though we had a son, Kalu born in 1985 and a daughter, Malika Clare born in 1988. 1988 was a special time for me as I sought to get into my Aboriginal culture. It was a time of Aboriginal uprising in Australia during which I hit the road to visit different Aboriginal settlements to find out how my people lived. It was in 1988 that I legally changed my name to Mudrooroo (adding Nyoongah later when I returned to my South Eastern Australian land and needed a second name to change my name legally by deed poll) after talking it over with Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Custodian of the Land of Minjerribah who looked after me when I went to Queensland, The name Mudrooroo meant “paperbark” (an Australian tree) in the Noongar language of south-western Australia. Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal was a great influence on my work adding to my cultural awareness as she took me over her land Stradbroke Island passing over to me the Aboriginality of the land just as the Mansell elder had done in Tasmania. It was through her that I began taking poetry seriously again and she helped me to put my Song Circle of Jacky (published in 1986) together. It was late in 1988 that I decided to go bush and live on the land in Bungawalbyn, the Aboriginal writer Ruby Ginibi’s country in Northern New South Wales. In my plans there was no room for Julie and our marriage ended that year. Indeed our separation had been long coming and I had taken her back to Queensland so that she could be closer to her parents and have their support when the break came.
My collection of poetry Dalwarra: The Black Bittern was published in 1989 by the University of Western Australia which had money remaining over from the Celebration of a Nation. I had been against any Aboriginal participation in the so-called Bicentenary and had dashed off a piece of spontaneous verse and prose, ‘Sunlight Spreadeagles Perth in Blackness’, which has never been published. In it I introduced an old Aboriginal elder based on one I knew in Perth and how he saw things. By 1988 I had helped to organized two Aboriginal Literature conferences and knew what I was writing about. Then when I attended the First Aboriginal Theatre conference held in Canberra which was more like a celebration than a conventional conference I returned to my first novel to write the third part. Doin Wildcat: A Novel Koori Script as Constructed by Mudrooroo which appeared some twenty-three years after Wild Cat Falling. Maybe a long time, but I had always known that the original Wild Cat Falling had to be resurrected, though it had changed its direction into a reflection on that early piece of writing. The wild cat goes over that past time and queries parts of the narrative. It is his book after all.
Anne Godden of Hyland House told me that it was the best thing I had written and it surely is with a swinging prose you can read aloud or think aloud. It was an Aboriginal book coming directly from the structure of that theatre conference where there were lots and lots of jokes and a constant refrain “why don’t you fellows write like this” – and I did. Doin Wildcat seeks to describe or bring out the feeling and “soul” of that Aboriginal conference which included the white director and his camera crew and how they weren’t getting on all that well together. It is filled by Black fellow humour. Of course it is more than that in that it invokes incarceration as a memory and how prison was nothing special to many Aborigines of W.A. Indeed the year it was published a Royal Commission was formed to investigate the causes behind the continuing high number
of deaths among Aboriginal people held in custody in the gaols of Australia. The Commission never concluded that the hopelessness and patheticness of too many Aboriginal young people often resulted in a deep depression in which it was better to die than to suffer on.
I had switched from the University of Melbourne to Murdoch University in Perth to finish my B.A. (Hons) which involved writing a thesis. This was published as Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature in Australia in 1990. This work was criticized for being too harsh and dictatorial. It may have been because I had decided on straightness rather than crookedness. What I said was what I wanted to say, though it was open for discussion. No book contains the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
About that time Uncle Jack Davis, poet and playwright from W.A., Stephen Muecke, academic, Adam Shoemaker, friend and academic and I put together Paperbark, a motley collection of Aboriginal writings in which I added my novella, Struggling, that I had loosely based on a Bengali novel, by Sunil Gangopadhyay. During my stay in Calcutta (Kolkatha) I had entered into the culture of Bengal and came to love the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. He has remaineded an influence on my poetry to this day. In 1991 the volume of poetry, The Garden of Gesthemane, was published. The poetry had been written on Stradbroke Island and even in some of the parks and supermarkets of Brisbane. By then I had come across the poems of the Murri poet, Lionel Fogarty and was impressed by them so much that I attempted to follow his style using words I found in the world around me. Most of the verse didn’t work and I flung it away, but a few I liked and kept. One was ‘Happy Birthday Australia’. In 1992 this volume won two Western Australian Premier’s book awards.
In 1992 I began writing another section of my Wild Cat opus, Wildcat Screaming. With this I accomplished what I had set out to do with my first novel long ago. It was about this time that I learnt about Einstein’s United Field Theory and became so taken by it that I thought of unifying all my novels into such a field through my characters, especially Dr. Watson Holmes Jackamara who had been featured in Wild Cat Screaming. I later used him in The Kwinkin, (1993) a novel set in Fiji which I wrote after meeting the Samoan writer, Albert Wendt who enlightened me about these so-called South Sea Island paradises. Dr. Holmes Watson Jackamara was becoming my favourite creation with the ability through his acute mind to examine and see into the wiles of Australia.
The Master of the Ghost Dreaming (1991) was based on Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World. I sought to transform the conventional historical narrative into a Maban (Shaman) text of magic realism. It became my favourite book. I had written it in Bungawalbyn away from civilization on a hundred acres of solitude. This had started out as a screen play but then became a novel which would later develop into a series and then be abandoned after four volumes. In Northern New South Wales I also put together the poems in the collection Pacific Highway Boo-Blooz (1996). I found the region a fabulous country in which people actually could hear the spirits of Aborigines singing and dancing. On those magic acres I went back as far as I could into the Aboriginal past roaming about freely without clothing. It was really strange but even on public beaches and picnic grounds no one complained or even pointed me out. It was as if I too was a spirit. Indeed in Master of the Ghost Dreaming I sought to enter the spirit world and instead entered Sydney.
I came to that city for a meeting of the Aboriginal Arts Committee and met Gerhard Fischer, a German Professor with an idea (and funding) dating from the bi-centennial, linking together the French Revolution with the invasion of Australia in 1788. He wanted an Aboriginal text to interpenetrate with a play by the famous contemporary German dramatist Heiner Muller. Der Auftrag or The Mission interested me and I decided to do it. Gerhard became the dramaturge to keep as much of Muller in as possible. I wanted to fling out lots of Muller, he after all had created the idea of the ‘unfinished play’. This may explain the unwieldiness of the script, but not the subsequent production which I wanted to be loud and noisy much like The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade almost invariably shortened to Marat/Sade, a 1963 play by Peter Weiss which made a greater impression on me that did The Mission by Muller. As my ideas developed I decided that the actors should wear masks. White actors playing Aborigines under black masks would add to the drama. It would have given it more depth, but like the Republic of Australia this never happened.
I was put in a house of the University of Sydney to do the play and given access to the library with the result I did a lot of reading on Victorian sexuality and discovered the brokenbacked woman. Strange sexuality was a strong part of Der Auftrag akin to the type of Victorian sexuality I had discovered. Even better, in the library I came across a whole collection of Vampire books which I found to have been written in the 18th century around the time Australia was invaded and settled. The 18th century was a Gothic monster which could not be ignored for long and it wasn’t. If monsters didn’t make it into the play they entered with a rush in the last three books of the Ghost Dreaming series set during the so-called spread of settlement along the southern coast of Australia, a gothic series of events indeed. These three volumes are known as my Vampire books.
Gerhard Fischer gave me the opportunity to roam in my mind and after six weeks or so I finished a script called The Aboriginal Protestors Confront the Declaration of the Australian Republic on 26 January 2001 with the Production of The Commission by Heiner Müller. When it was finished a reading directed by the Koori director, Brian Syron was arranged. I didn’t like it at all and sat down and rewrote the whole play as I produced it in my mind with a large cast of dancers and actors and noise, noise, noise, argumentation and conflict. Gerhard published this version, but it was never put on with the excuse that it couldn’t be staged. Eventually it was edited through the energy of Gerhard and put on in Sydney after which it was taken to Germany. The director Brian Turvey told me that he loved American musicals and found experimental theatre self indulgent. I found his production okay as it was and felt lucky to be at the European festival in Weimar where there was a house in which Nietzsche had lived. It had been turned into a museum which featured a large photograph of Nietszche’s sister meeting Adolf Hitler. I found this such a compelling juxtapositioning that I can never think of Nietzsche without Hitler and I still wonder how and why Europeans glorify a philosopher who invented much that was in line with Nazi thinking including ‘the Overman’.
The remains of the concentration camp of Buchenwald where the Romany people were imprisoned and murdered was close to Weimar. During the time of the Nazis I knew that that hell hole would have been my fate if I had been living in this centre of European civilization and culture. Weimar being the centre of European and German culture held a a supreme irony in that the Nazis had built their death camp around the tree where the great writer Johaann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 – 1832) had entertained his lady lover, Charlotte von Stein in a chaste manner. To add to my interest I was given a copy of Goethe’s play, Iphigenia in Taurus which sparked my imagination and I began the first draft in Weimar of a drama in verse, Iphigenia in Buchenwald which has never been produced and is lying among my papers either in the libraries of Perth or Canberra. I showed it to Gerhard, but he made little comment except that it was difficult to get a play perhaps unsympathetic to the Jews put on in Germany. I shrugged and after revising my script a number of times, left it while I thought over the Gothic times of the 18th century; though what could be more Gothic than the sufferings of Buchenwald as told through the story of a Gypsy Jewish whore.
After finishing my commission early in 1992 I accepted the position on contract for five years as the Coordinator of the Aboriginal Studies programme at Murdoch University which might not have been the best move as my second divorced wife was living in Perth. When I arrived she took me to court for child maintenance and as I had a well paying job I gladly helped to support my two c
hildren.
A main reason for taking the job was to write a book on Aboriginal Affairs. Over the five years in the breaks between teaching I researched and wrote Us Mob—History, Culture, Struggle: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia which sold well and won the Ruth Adeney Koori Award for Aboriginal writing.
I worked hard in Perth and then my eldest sister, Betty contacted me. I met her at the old St. Joseph’s Girls’ Orphanage which was turning into a museum or something strange. When I came to her the first thing she said to me was: ‘Why do you want to be an Aborigine, they are dirty.’ I actually startled and stared at this old brown woman who looked like a Noongar woman. With her was an Irish woman who had done our genealogy somewhat carelessly. She said that I should be happy that I came from a well-off pastoral family. She didn’t know that I had already researched out this supposedly welloff pastoral family and they were nothing of the sort. Next and worse, I met my brother Frank whom I remembered meeting in Clontarf. I had treasured this meeting and now he denied that it had ever taken place. He also looked like a Noongar. I didn’t know what to make of these two and felt insulted and hurt by both of them. They weren’t my kind of folks and there was nothing in their looks to even suggest that they were descended from Afro-Americans and not Noongars. Betty reminded me of those sad dark women who when girls had spent hours scrubbing their faces in order to rub off the black. In Western Australia to be an Aborigine is the worst thing you can be and even my eldest son, Kalu, has told me that they hate Aborigines there. From recent events this still appears to be the case and I have no plans to return to my home state , though at times I do get home sick.
