The Simplest Words

by Alex Miller

  In Hamburg I also met and made friends with a number of German academics, most of whom were young people of my children’s generation, but a few of whom, especially the professors, were of my own generation, men and women born just before the Second World War, as I was, and who had lived through it and could remember it. I was able to speak openly with the young academics about the conflict in Australia between the European settlers and the Indigenous people and its unresolved legacy of shame, guilt, denial and dispossession in our contemporary society.

  In return, these young Germans were keen to talk to me about their feelings about the Nazi regime, which their grandparents and parents had lived through. For these young people, the Nazi period was obviously a source of enormous curiosity, and they were anxious to know the whole truth of their families’ participation in those events. Many had never raised the issue with their own parents, who, they explained, still suffered from a terrible sense of guilt and shame by association with the horrifying deeds of their parents’ generation. Those one or two who had begun to question their fathers spoke to me with emotion about the conversations they’d had. My own father fought with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in northern France against the last desperate divisions of the SS, who defended themselves to the bitter end around the city of Caen. My father was wounded physically and emotionally by those events, and our lives were changed by them forever. I felt a direct sense of association, and even of kinship, with the parents of these young people.

  When I tried to talk about their fathers’ involvement in the war to Germans of my own age—the sons and daughters of those who fought for the Third Reich—I found them reluctant to engage. When I pressed them, a few even began to articulate a kind of wild, nervous and historical defence of what had happened. I realised that the reactions of the two generations to the war were deeply divided, and I began to see, too, that the depth of silence in Germany about the Nazi period among my own generation was akin to the depth of our silence in Australia about the Stolen Generations.

  I have listened to intelligent and well-informed Australians of great moral probity make the claim that they did not know about the Stolen Generations until the publication in April 1997 of Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. When we consider the vast army of lawyers, government officials, legislators and administrators, and the families and acquaintances of all those thousands of people involved in the active policy of stealing Aboriginal children from their parents over a period of seventy years—indeed, until well into the 1960s—it makes the claim ‘I didn’t know about it’ implausible.

  Deep silence of this kind—a feeling that we don’t know about something when the evidence for it has been all around us—is a psychic and cultural phenomenon common to the experience of many individuals and countries. It is. To be in denial in this way about historical and family trauma is a well-known psychological condition among the perpetrators of the trauma and their victims. There was an incident in my own childhood about which we, as a family, never spoke, and when I tried to get my father to talk to me about it when he was an old man he wept and could not speak. So I knew about deep silence and the way we use it to cover our sins. And I knew how it can warp and disfigure lives. I knew how difficult it is for us to say, ‘I knew and yet I did nothing,’ and how much easier it is for us to say, ‘I didn’t know.’

  I was sitting one afternoon reading in my vast, half-empty room in the hotel in Schluterstrasse in Hamburg, looking out of the enormous bay window at the horse chestnut trees, which were just turning towards autumn, when I began to think about the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre and how its historical relationship to my Murri friends in Queensland was of a similar order, but a further generation removed, to the relationship of Germans of my own generation and the events of the Second World War.

  I am one of those who believes the Holocaust to be unique, and that there are no comparisons to it in history. The Holocaust is not my sacred ground and I was never going to write about it. It was not the inspiration for this book, but nevertheless it always stood behind me, as it stands behind my generation and the generation of my parents, a great dark mass that will remain with us until the end. The shock of the Holocaust still poses for us the biggest question about the nature of humanity and ourselves, and we know there will never be an answer to this question that will satisfy us, except if we are prepared to concede that humanity is at heart a pack of wolves, as my friend Jacob Rosenberg said at our last meeting before he died. Jacob was a survivor of Auschwitz. There is nothing we can compare to the Holocaust that will make either moral or emotional sense to us. The Holocaust is so terrible it reaches way beyond us and within us and we will never be rid of it. We will always doubt the goodness of humanity and the worthiness of the human project because of it. When Hilary McPhee writes, referring to Landscape of Farewell, ‘Massacre is the blockage in the Australian imagination, in our sense of ourselves in this place …’ what I hear is, ‘Massacre is the blockage in the human imagination, in our sense of ourselves in this place.’

  My fiction of the retired German professor of history Max Otto writing his own fictional account of the massacre at Cullin-la-Ringo is a celebration of my real-life experience of writing my first published short story, ‘Comrade Pawel’. From 1968 to 1973 I lived alone on fifteen hundred acres in the Araluen Valley in New South Wales. My closest friend at that time was Max Blatt. Max was older than me; a highly educated and deeply humane man, he was a German Jew from Upper Silesia who had barely survived torture by the Nazis.

  Max used to visit me regularly at Araluen from Melbourne and we would smoke our cigarettes and sit by the open fire and talk far into the nights. At weekends friends often came down from Canberra and joined us—journalists, academics and, in those days before Whitlam’s triumph, out-of-office Labor politicians. We sat around the big old table in the kitchen and drank red wine and ate salami and discussed the issues of the day and the woes of the world. After one of these evenings, during which the discussion had been about anti-Semitism, and when the guests had all driven back to Canberra, Max and I were sitting alone in front of the fire having a final cup of tea before turning in. Max had said nothing during the earlier discussion. He turned to me now and said, ‘Would you like to know what anti-Semitism is?’ He then told me, in a few sentences, the story of how a Polish comrade had first saved his life then turned on him for being a Jew.

  Earlier that weekend Max had finished reading a draft of a novel I was writing and, on finishing it, had thrown it down on the table in disgust, saying, ‘Why don’t you write about something you love!’ I loved Max and I recognised the enormous value in the truth of what he had said to me as a writer. That night I wrote my imaginary re-enactment of the story he had told me about the comrade who had first saved him then betrayed him. I called the story ‘Comrade Pawel’. In the morning I gave it to Max to read. He read, as he always read (and as he listened to music), without saying a word and without giving away his feelings. When he finished he looked at me and I saw that he was moved. He said, ‘You could have been there.’ It was the moment when I first began to believe I could write and from that moment on I have always written about what I love. When Dougald says to Max Otto after he has read Max’s fiction, Massacre, in Landscape of Farewell, ‘You could have been there,’ it is for me the expression of one of the most important moments in my life and is a private tribute to my friend and mentor Max Blatt.

  So, even there, the connection is made. But it is a hidden connection. A connection that works in the soul and not in the lyrics of the song. It is surely the test of the authenticity of all serious literature that the one who knows intimately the subject of the work feels, as he or she reads it, that the author could have been there too.

  It is a great privilege, and an even greater responsibility, to have the freedom of the artist to make it up. The result of what exactly one makes up, however, can ne
ver be gratuitous or haphazard, but must be, so I fervently believe, authentic to the moment and to the lives and experiences of the characters. The novel is not just, or merely, entertainment, but is also responsible for reflecting with accuracy the temper of the age in which it is written. If the people one writes about cannot recognise themselves in one’s work, then the work fails, no matter how successful it might be commercially. All my novels have been written because I believe in the moral force of the human imagination, and am convinced that art can play its part in the conceptual work we need if we are to understand ourselves. That is what I strive to do. Whether or not I succeed is measured for me in the response to my work of those I write about.

  For Australians of my generation some things are inescapable. They pervade our emotions, our attitudes and the way we experience art and life. The Holocaust is one of these things, and the confusion of childhood feelings of guilt and shame that we associate with it will never leave us. Another is the terrible price Australian Indigenous people have been required to pay for the prosperity and the opportunities enjoyed by people such as myself. As a novelist, it is not possible for me to write as if these things are not part of my life, embedded deeply in my experience and my psyche. I believe it to be at least part of the job of novelists to bear witness to the emotional and moral questions that haunt our lives, and to deal with the consequences for us of there being no resolution, nor any redemption, from questions such as the ones I have mentioned here.

  So I write about what I love. But as my friend Max Blatt first taught me all those years ago with the story of his ‘comrade’ Pawel, human love can be a terrible thing as well as something of infinite beauty. I am not a polemicist, but write of the intimate in our lives. It would shame me to remain silent, however, about those questions that make me doubt my faith in the decency of humanity and the civilising project in which we like to believe ourselves to be involved, a belief that encourages in us the dangerous and comforting illusion that we have made moral progress, and which encourages us to believe the lie of those who say, It can never happen again.

  2008

  EXCERPT FROM

  Landscape of Farewell

  The touch of Dougald’s hand to my shoulder startled me and I straightened and stared at him. He withdrew his hand from my sweating skin and stood looking at me. My chest heaved and the sweat cascaded down my face, the reaping hook gripped in my hand as if it were the weapon of a berserker. He held my journal and looked at me. The air thickened in my throat and a terrible prickling dryness threatened to choke me.

  With a solemn and grave astonishment, he said, ‘You could have been there, Max.’

  Joy and relief swept through me—a little tsunami it was. And I wanted to repeat his words aloud—I heard them repeated aloud in my head. ‘Oh, you like it then?’ I said, my tone surprisingly conversational. A rush of wellbeing raced through my blood.

  He stepped up to me and embraced me and held me strongly against his body, pinioning my arms to my sides. The point of the reaping hook was digging into my leg.

  He released me and stepped away. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  I saw that he was greatly moved by what I had done for him. I wiped at the wet hairs sticking to my face and grinned at him foolishly. ‘I’m glad you like it,’ I said. ‘So, it’s okay then? That’s good. I’m glad.’

  ‘Oh yes, old mate,’ he said, and he laid his open hand on the cover of my journal. ‘It’s all here.’

  I said, ‘Your approval means a great deal to me. I was afraid you might be offended by it.’

  He smiled and reached out to put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a small shake, as if he forgave my foolishness and uncertainty. ‘As soon as that ankle of yours is up to it, we’ll take a drive down there to my country and pay the old Gnapun a visit.’

  I said carefully, ‘But of course he is no longer with us.’

  ‘Gnapun’s still with us, old mate.’ He brandished my journal. ‘His story’s not over yet. We’ll go up to that cave of his in the escarpment.’ He was almost jubilant. Something real had happened. He had his wish. His precious story was preserved.

  ‘Will you be able to find your way there?’ I said. ‘I mean, after all this time?’

  He touched his chest with the tips of his fingers, just the way I had imagined Gnapun touching himself when he told the leader of the strangers his name. ‘There’s a map of my country in here.’

  2007

  Australia Today

  There was a time when you needed to be a convicted felon to get a permit to enter Australia on any kind of long-term basis. Being a prison guard was another occupation that would qualify. Now that genealogy is all the rage, Australians are delighted to find a convict in their ancestral family mix, or even better an Indigenous forebear. There have been countless waves of immigration since the days of transportation, each contributing its own peculiar enrichment to what we know today as our distinctive Australian culture. As my friend Frank Budby, a Barada Elder, says whenever he hears people speak of the dispossession, ‘The story’s not over yet, old mate.’ And of course Frank’s right. The story of the making of Australia’s culture is an ongoing process, each generation encountering and creating change, some of which sticks to the ribs of the country and a great deal that looks good for a minute or two then falls away.

  Ridiculously, when you think of it, I’ve always prided myself not on being a sixth-generation Australian but on being an exemplary outsider. I’ve even been called an outsider by native-born white Australians: an outsider, a foreigner, a low-profile ten-pound Pom, and various other amusing and well-meant little jibes from a time now long past. The currency of Australia’s contemporary culture struggles to bear these terms with any sense of authenticity. They are part of the detritus that is falling away and losing its meaning as we experience the realities of a fast-moving digital world that redesigns itself overnight. My own claim to being an exemplary outsider, which for some existential reason I thought was a wonderful thing for a writer to be, was itself knocked on the head recently when my sister sent me the results of her Ancestry.com researches. Ancestry was something I had never taken any interest in. My sister said in her letter, This will get your interest, Al! It did. I learned that a great-great-great-aunt of mine was married in Castlemaine in 1870 and proceeded to produce a generation of Millers. This town where I live is now crawling with Millers and Millars. So it turned out that by sneaking away from the metropolis thirteen years ago to live the perfect life of the outsider in Castlemaine I’d really only been coming home.

  If we live long enough, everything we learned when we were children is reversed and there comes a time when instead of knowing everything, as our wise elders once did, we know almost nothing at all and must rely on our children for accurate information about our own society and how it works. I will make only one prediction about the future—for we all know that, no matter how tempting it is, predicting the future is a fool’s game. My one prediction is that Australia tomorrow will not be the Australia of today, any more than the Australia of today is the same as that old white Australia of yesterday. If we hang on to our steady old verities we end up talking to ourselves and a few stodgy old mates just like ourselves and no one else, because everyone else has moved on. Friends visiting me from overseas often ask me if the Aborigines are ever going to make a comeback. My answer is, Go north, young woman, and see for yourself. The Aboriginal comeback is well underway and it is only a matter of a generation at most before Aborigines are in control of the north the way the Native Americans are in control of the beautiful city of Santa Fe.

  The economic historians tell me we’ve had twenty years of a consistent increase in the net wealth of individuals in this country and that this is a record that makes us the leading country in the world for consistent net increase of wealth. Which all means, I suppose, that we are, or most of us are, worth a lot more today in real terms than we were twenty years ago. We are rich, it seems, by any world standard. Once upon a
time, in fact a good deal more than twenty years ago, when we were a lot less rich than we are today, we threw open our borders to thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodian people who were seeking refuge from tyrannies. Although we were poorer in those days, we nevertheless seemed to feel we had enough to share around. And no one today, looking at the cultural enrichment that followed from this act of neighbourly largesse, would suggest we were mistaken in making these people welcome among us back then; people who have, of course, since then become ‘us’. That arrival of thousands of Asian people into Australia turned out to be one of the great modern movements of immigration into this country, a movement from which they and their descendants, and this country as a whole, are still reaping the benefits. It was cultural change on a grand scale.

  It was a good thing to do and we did it well back then. There wasn’t a lot of opposition to it. We felt some responsibility for those people and their needs. My dear friend Jacob Rosenberg, a hero of our time and a great Australian writer, was himself, along with his darling wife, Esther, a refugee from tyranny when he first found a home and a welcome here—to have called him a foreigner would have been to insult him. Jacob always remembered the generosity of Australians, the openness and the comradely spirit of the people he met and who made him welcome. And Jacob and Esther often said they had never encountered any sign of anti-Semitism in this country. This was something that made us all feel proud to be Australians. And our pride in this, I believe, was justified. Thinking about such things, and remembering the extraordinary openness and generosity of people to me when I arrived here alone as a boy of sixteen, always made me feel that in choosing to spend my life doing my best to make a contribution to the culture of this country I had chosen a good life that was worth something. Whenever I received an award for my writing which in its citation contained the words For an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life I felt confirmed in the rightness of my decision to commit my life to this ongoing story of Australia’s immigrant culture, and I was happy to know myself a part of it.