Despite eleven years between us, Nishi and I were close. I’d drive him around, the two of us singing along to pop tunes. He’d swing his legs in the back seat and shout out raunchy lyrics. He’d camp out in my room and I’d light candles and do magic tricks, his eyes shining with wonder.
In Year 12 I got an ENTER of 98.85—I think the highest possible score was 99.95, so I figured it was a decent outcome. Dad’s reaction didn’t suggest so. ‘You would have done better if you’d worked harder,’ he said. Can’t argue with the logic. His comment was unfair, however, and I’ve never let him forget it. Turns out I can hold a grudge like my mother. Or perhaps not quite that well.
Australia gave me all the opportunity of a rich Western nation, above and beyond the three Rs of my parents’ time and place. I learned to play piano (badly), struggled with ballet (my legs can go in at 90 degrees, but barely turn out). I learned to sing jazz, pop and opera in European languages. I did plays and performed in bands and, after completing an Arts English major at Melbourne Uni, went to acting school in London then spent the decade of my twenties traversing the stage—all with my parents’ support.
I spent three years in the UK’s thriving theatre scene. I was Princess Jasmine in Aladdin and the Bharatanatyam-dancing, classical-singing ayah in the British classic The Secret Garden in Scotland. I sang and rapped and acted in children’s shows across England. After my London stint, Shakespeare in Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens became my theatre staple: I was Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Olivia in the mistaken-identity cross-dressing love triangle of Twelfth Night, and a blue-haired, bow-legged courtesan in A Comedy of Errors at the Athenaeum. I acted in an original zombie version of Macbeth called Macbeth Re-Arisen, and revelled in the luscious rhythms of Elizabethan iambic pentameter and the vivid physical expression that only the stage allows.
Performing Shakespeare’s poetry was like connecting with the ‘mother tongue of mankind’, as German philosopher Johann Herder described it. It provided an interface with a universal, higher humanity; a classical culture too often forgotten in the expediency of modern life, which leaves little room for art and memory. Herder, writing exultantly in 1773, said Shakespeare spoke ‘the language of all ages, peoples, and races of men’. Fearing the loss of this ancient high culture, Herder ruminated that ‘even this great creator of history and the world soul grows older every day’: the ‘words and customs and categories of the age wither and fall like autumnal leaves’ and ‘we are already so far removed from these great ruins of the age of chivalry’ that ‘soon perhaps, as everything becomes effaced and tends in different directions, even his drama will become quite incapable of living performance, will become the dilapidated remains of a colossus, of a pyramid, which all gaze upon with wonder and none understands’.5
Herder on Shakespeare gave voice to an existential anxiety: the fear of forgetting our ancient culture and wisdom, and losing our civilisation’s greatest achievements. As Noel Pearson would in later years convey to me, Indigenous Australians carry this same existential anxiety—but so should all Australians. For Australia’s ancient songlines, art, stories and philosophy are this continent’s equivalent of Homer, the Mahabharata of my own Hindu culture or, indeed, Shakespeare. Forgetting our Indigenous Australian culture, like forgetting Shakespeare, would be a loss not just for Australia, but for the world.
In my twenties, however, I was simply enjoying the language and limelight.
My best friend since we were ten, Arash, a geeky Iranian boy who shared both my academic nerdiness and my flamboyant creativity, was my artistic partner-in-crime. We had graduated from poems in primary school to pop songs in our youth. Inspired by Michael Jackson and to a lesser extent Janet, we harboured dreams of pop superstardom and chased a record deal for our original works, recorded in his parents’ Doncaster basement and, later, his living room. The closest we got was deploying an inappropriately raunchy album cover: me in a blue bikini top sporting bindi, bangles and big eyes. Arash, who by this stage had come out of the closet, was the photographer, and had glittered me up to the campest possible degree with body shimmer from his parents’ salon. The image got the attention of a bigwig Aussie music manager who invited me to Sydney for a meeting, commented approvingly on my ‘provocative’ ethnic look, then suggested I might do better in India before sending me on my way.
I did two small guest roles on Neighbours, the iconic Australian TV series. Three lines as Martha Jones, the Erinsborough News receptionist. Slightly more dialogue as Carli Chan, in a cafe conversation with the delightful Brett Tucker, playing Dan. It didn’t seem to matter that the actor playing Ms Chan was clearly Indian, not East Asian. I generally only got TV auditions when a specifically non-white character was written into the script, which was rarely. When Neighbours finally got a full Indian family on Ramsay Street many years later, the show copped racist abuse online for being un-Australian, and they didn’t last long, so Carli Chan’s one-episode debut might have been progressive for the time. Neighbours now is more multicultural than it was back then.
I played a Muslim woman in a hijab on Channel 10’s short-lived comedy show The Wedge—in a skit about Islamophobia, bogans and a bomb scare, which I don’t know ever made it to air. My white co-actress assumed I was authentically Muslim and had been discovered in some hidden traditional enclave; she seemed baffled to learn it was just a convincing costume and that I’d been found through my agent, just like her. Perhaps the cultural appropriation wouldn’t be acceptable today (far-right politician Pauline Hanson’s 2017 appearance in a burqa in Parliament garnered more airtime and outrage than my portrayal). But back then, only SBS and the ABC seemed to insist on ethnic authenticity—and only from their non-white performers. One time, Arash taught me Iranian phrases to use at an audition. I rocked up and spoke gibberish with conviction, the white producers nodding enthusiastically: Baccchhkatarre naamasccch! Beroooooonesch merkonnen! Didn’t get the job.
White was the unchallenged neutral in the entertainment industry, too. Brown actors were either tokenistically interchangeable in the commercial scene, or we had to be demonstrably authentic in the artsy scene, because that was more politically correct—as if brown people could only play ourselves, because being dark is a mask you can’t take off, but white skin is an artist’s blank canvas. I don’t know which approach pissed me off more.
I loved working as a performer, though. Traipsing the stage, acting the fool for others’ entertainment. Using my voice and face and body and brain to tell a story. Moving an audience. Communicating a character.
Things change, however. Over time, I got bored. The hours were tough. The money was bad. And, having nourished my inner artist for a decade, I was craving the intellectual. I went back to university, this time Monash, to study law. I opted for the Juris Doctor degree, which, with fewer contact hours, meant I could still work in shows.
I’d always been interested in power and justice. In the years to come, though I could never have predicted it, I became a scholar of Australia’s Constitution: the Constitution imposed by Australia’s colonial founding fathers on ancient Aboriginal land.
I was born in Melbourne, but there are times I have felt not completely at home. Perhaps that explains my interest in social justice and constitutional reform.
I first felt it when a room full of cross-legged four-year-olds chanted, ‘Black Shireen, black Shireen!’ at me in kindergarten. The teacher stayed silent. Even at four, I gathered that ‘black’ had derogatory connotations.
Once, a white boy approached me and demanded to know whether I spoke ‘Australian’. I only thought of the appropriate comeback—‘It’s English, dickhead’—when he’d gone. Bested by a cocky ten-year-old, at twenty-four. Pathetic.
My un-Australianness arose at a birthday party. A white family friend observed the Indian caterers adding to my throng of brown-skinned family members. ‘I feel like a stranger in my own country!’ he joked. I wondered then, as I have since, why Australia wa
s more his country than mine?
Sometimes it’s less polite. A drunk outside a nightclub in Cairns yelled out late one night to call me an attractive ‘monkey’, or a similarly perverse insult. My comeback was again too late, and went unspoken. In those moments I could almost feel the colonialist prodding my skin with his cane, holding up his magnifying glass to check me for fleas before declaring me a good specimen.
In such moments, I feel for other Australians, who have likely experienced similar things and much worse. For if our white family friend felt estranged in his own country after spending a few hours eating curry in a house full of Indians, how estranged might the Indigenous minority feel in the position of poverty and powerlessness that has, since 1788, been their lot?
Australia has a black history, and a multicultural present and future. That reality is too often denied. Though we are now, by and large, a tolerant and peaceful country, I’m convinced we can do better.
Law seemed like a good way to argue for change.
Dad told me in Year 12 that I should take up the law because he reckoned he could never win an argument with me. It’s true that I enjoy a feisty debate. In the thick of an argument is probably my favourite place.
I was in two minds about law at first, however. Lawyers are so often seen as vultures, preying on the weak. In discussions about constitutional reform, they talk about ‘lawyers’ picnics’. I imagine bloodthirsty barristers dipping crackers into the wounds of ruptured nations.
There may be lawyers who salivate over division and feed on human conflict. But lawyers are also mediators and peacemakers. If law is a tool of war and oppression, it is also a tool of reconciliation and justice. Gandhi said, ‘The true function of a lawyer is to unite parties riven asunder.’ In the end, I agreed.
I am also conscious of my privileged position as the descendant of immigrants to Australia, and aware of the opportunity and prosperity to which I’ve had access. That same opportunity has not been shared justly with the original owners of this land. It’s fair to say that immigrants have been given more of a fair go in this country than Indigenous people. How can that be a dignified state of affairs?
Take Australia’s history of voting rights. The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 in section 4 stated: ‘No aboriginal native of Australia Asia Africa or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand shall be entitled to have his name placed on an Electoral Roll unless so entitled under section forty-one of the Constitution.’
I discovered the case of a Victorian Indian man, Mitta Bullosh, who challenged his exclusion from Commonwealth voting in 1924. The Commonwealth subsequently altered the Act to allow Indian people the vote—but not Indigenous people, who didn’t get equal voting rights across the board until some four decades later. Indians got the vote before Indigenous people, in my home state of Victoria. If only Mr Bullosh had advocated for the rights of his Indigenous compatriots along with his own.
It made me realise: immigrant Australians, and their descendants, need to get behind Indigenous struggles for recognition and equality in this nation in which our families, by and large, have enjoyed much opportunity and success, yet in which we too have known discrimination and exclusion. Hindus might call it a karma argument: treat others fairly, lest you are one day reborn in their shoes. Christians would say you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In other words: have empathy. We non-white Australians must be bolder in backing up our Indigenous compatriots. They need our support.
Noel Pearson—lawyer, orator and author, founder of the Cape York Institute and eventually my boss—says an individual, like a society, is made up of layers of identity and affiliation. I’m no different. As the ogre says in Shrek in rather less elegant language, ogres are like onions. They have layers.
For seven years I worked for an Indigenous Australian leader at an Indigenous Australian organisation, as an advocate for Indigenous rights. I survive on daily cups of English Breakfast and Earl Grey tea, but am also addicted to chilli. I still get a kick out of Shakespeare: English is my language, my Fijian-Hindi is poor. I’m sometimes too obsessed with success, as if I have something to prove—I blame my immigrant parents, and the fact that brown people in this country need to be twice, three times as good as others to have impact.
I hate colonialism, but figure maybe the pomp and procedure of the monarchy has its place in our national life. Perhaps I’ve been swayed by The Crown on Netflix. I accept that Australia’s British heritage should be duly recognised. But Australia should cherish our First Nations heritage too, and equally.
I’m inspired in this regard by Pearson’s characterisation of Australia as a triune nation. He is correct: our national story is in three parts. These three stories, brought together, make us one: Australians.
There is our ancient Indigenous heritage, which is etched into our landscapes and runs in the veins of our rivers and seas. This heritage is the rightful inheritance of all Australians.
We are irrevocably shaped by our inherited British institutions: the structures of democracy and law that are fixed forever upon this land through the Australian Constitution, and commemorated in street names and structures like Melbourne’s Queen Victoria’s hospital and market, the Windsor Hotel on Spring Street, where the founders met in 1898 to finalise their draft of the Constitution, and by Federation Square. This British inheritance also endures for the benefit of all Australians: it has created our stable and prosperous democracy.
And we have been enriched by our multicultural achievement: the gifts of peoples and cultures from around the world, in which we now all share. Australians benefit from the achievements of immigrants and their descendants in the fields of medicine, science, business and the arts.
We are lucky to enjoy the fruits of multiculturalism in all corners of our continent. Australians can get dumplings in the Chinatowns of our major cities, pho in the Vietnamese precinct of Victoria Street in my local Richmond, and pizza that rivals what you get in Italy. We can traverse the colonial architecture, street names and statues that celebrate Britain. But the most ancient part of our national trilogy is still largely invisible and out of reach to most Australians. The First Nations still lack their rightful place in our contemporary life.
I remember bristling when fellow Aussie travellers in London marvelled at the ancient majesty of British historical achievements but belittled our own. ‘England has so much history!’ they proclaimed. ‘Australia is so young, we don’t have history like this.’ They were talking about castles and buildings and books. I sent urgent lyrics back to Arash in Melbourne so he could compose a piano track appropriately reflecting the melancholy of the mother country’s grey monuments, and the sadness of my country’s strange forgetting of its own ancient story. Two hundred years is far too long, to realise that we’ve all been counting wrong, I sang into the microphone back in Melbourne.
Today I wonder why there are so few statues of Indigenous warriors and leaders erected next to Macquarie and Phillip and Cook. Why do no black faces stare them down with pride and as equals, symbolising the ongoing dialogue that began with first contact and that should now be formalised through a First Nations constitutional voice? We should be building new monuments, not talking about tearing down old ones. Our national symbols should tell the full and true story of our shared country, in all its complexity—with all its bloodshed and victories, its heartbreak and success.
Australia’s best architects should be busy designing the constitutionally enshrined First Nations body, as called for by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, to be a permanent institutional embodiment of this country’s First Nations heritage in Canberra. It should stand proudly in the parliamentary triangle: a permanent Indigenous voice in our Australian democracy. As Pearson observed, the tents became demountables. The demountables should now become sandstone: a building to pay tribute to the Tent Embassy occupants and other Indigenous activists who for so long have fought for their right to be heard.
The Constitution is a
bout power, and national monuments are expressions of state power. Rather than tear down statues, institutions and constitutions, we should adapt and expand them so they include and empower the First Nations. Reconciliation over repudiation. Unity over division. We should imagine Australia anew, without forgetting the old. We should articulate a fuller expression of who we are.
This is the moral challenge of Indigenous constitutional recognition, the cause I came to take on, and that we all face.
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Discovering Cape York
I DISCOVERED CAPE YORK in late 2010. By plane. Jetstar, Melbourne to Cairns. The heat outside envelops you when you step out on the tarmac, like a heavy blanket on air-conditioned skin. Exotic and stirring. Like discovering new land.
Cook did it in 1770, by ship, after months on the high seas. His discovery was the more impressive and historic, without air conditioning or flight attendants. Without the half-sized Jetstar toasted sandwiches. But it was no less subjective than mine.
When he made his treacherous voyage south, Cook carried with him secret instructions from the British king authorising him to ‘take possession of convenient situations in the country in the name of the King of Great Britain’ but to do so ‘with the consent of the natives’. They knew people were already there.
On 22 August 1770, Cook declared possession of the east coast of Australia. He did so at Possession Island, which already bore its ancient name, Bedanug or Bedhan Lag, bestowed by the Kaurareg people who had lived there for thousands of years.
Radical Heart Page 3
