Is your history my history?
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Cameron Muir
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Cameron Muir's biography and other articles by this writer
I never met my grandfather, but we keep his skull on the top shelf of the hutch, behind two Toby mugs, an insulator from the old telegraph system and a soccer trophy awarded "For Participation 1990". I reach over this dusty clutter and touch the thin leather and cardboard box in which the skull is housed. My grandfather was not the original owner of the skull – if, indeed, it can be said he "owned" it. Of the man whose brain once sat in it, I know little save that he was Aboriginal.
Over the past few years, museums have publicly been returning artefacts and remains of indigenous people to the families and tribal groups from which they were taken. It is easy to empathise with this. It is not usually a matter of dispute; bones do not have the same economic value as land. Yet this skull is the only material link to a past I can only know through the memory of others. My parents, too, feel they have some claim to it. My mother's father gave it to my father (knowledge is a male domain) and he has kept it – it has become an heirloom. Even though it has been with the family for eighty years at least, and has emotional and symbolic significance for us, this is not a convincing argument to keep it.
I decide it must be returned. But to whom? Even if I say am returning this skull as part of "reconciliation" – a process which is supposed to involve indigenous and non-indigenous people – that doesn't mean I can write about it however I wish. The chance for misunderstanding and misrepresentation remains.
For me to start representing indigenous experience or Aboriginality runs the risk of getting it wrong. Professor A.P. Elkin was, for a time, the leading anthropologist in Australia, and one of the first to do serious, detailed studies of indigenous people. While considered a pioneer in the field – a humanist – he was, as Koori activist Gary Foley wrote ironically, a "great friend of the Aborigines". Much of what he said is almost the opposite of what is known now. The interaction between his research and the desire for land and labour enabled governments to justify policies of forced migration and child removal. Elkin's misrepresentation and misunderstanding had devastating consequences.
A young writer, unsure of the ground on which he is tentatively treading, can only approach this complex subject by starting at a small and local level. Sitting at our dining table, staring at a box holding the skull of an Aboriginal man, I cannot presume to understand what his life was like, or the pain and outrage this would cause his family. I wonder how he ended up in this box, how many children he had, whether he worked on a farm, where he lived. The box smells like books inherited from dead relatives and I'm apprehensive about opening it. I wonder if any attempt to write about this will be a failed pursuit. I am alert to the historian Heather Goodall's critique: "Constructions of history as indigenous history and non-indigenous history, as completely separate narratives, are inadequate; the only way is to approach it with a concept of ‘shared history'."
The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR), which operated for a decade from 1991, set eight key issues for reconciliation. Number four was "Sharing History: A sense for all Australians of a shared ownership of their history". This reflected the recognition that colonisation of Australia was not peaceful settlement, but a violent process of exploitation and dispossession. Stories from indigenous people about the process were being heard clearly and loudly for the first time. The Council suggested that both histories could be shared in a reconciliation process.
The result was a construction of two seemingly separate histories in which, as Heather Goodall wrote in 2002, "The stories and voices previously unheard could be regarded as additional facts, separate from the facts presently included in the dominant accounts, but able to be added up to create a new, joint and coherent account. What was far less evident was the recognition of entangled, interacting pasts and of contested interpretations of the same events."
Goodall's emphasis on contested and intersecting experience, of "interaction between indigenous and non-indigenous people on a personal and collective level over the full 200 years of colonisation", is important when considering my mission to return the skull and write about it. To learn more about the significance of this skull, to whom it should be returned, my family's role in colonisation, and how to write about it, I decided to pursue such a "shared history".
I ALREADY KNEW THAT MY GRANDFATHER, Ian Doull, came from Scotland to Australia as a child in 1905. He lived in Sydney where he became a dentist, practising in the then rural suburb of Longueville. He divorced his first wife and in 1936 moved his surgery to Dubbo, where he met the manageress of the Coles Variety Store, who later became my grandmother. I know his parents and grandparents witnessed the enclosures and dispossession of Scottish peasants from their lands, and I wonder whether this had an impact on his desire to acquire land in Dubbo.
I want to locate the records of his land purchases. These documents aren't kept at the Dubbo Public Library, so I drive a few hundred metres up the road to the concrete and tinted glass council building. I'm not allowed to search the archives myself, but an employee will do it for a fee. After a few minutes of haggling, and explaining that I'm only after the history of one particular house in Fitzroy Street, the man agrees to do the search. In the afternoon he calls and I return to pick up photocopies and notes. From this I gather that my grandfather bought the land in 1942, and the council resumed it twenty-one years later for less than he'd paid for it, after accounting for inflation.
The next day I visit my grandmother, who lives a ten-minute drive from my father's house. I want to find out more than the scant council records. The red brick house is on a corner block of a suburban street with old square, high cement gutters. She opens the front door and, before I've even finished greeting her, she's off to get cups of tea. I don't like tea but, for as long as I can remember, anyone who visits my grandmother has had tea with her. She is so bent over, her spine so brittle, that as she enters the lounge room it looks as though the two cups she is carrying will tip her forward.
I'd never asked my grandmother about her past, and I realised the council records were a good place to start. Three cups of tea later and my grandmother is still talking. She's covering her left eye with her hand – it seems to be weeping – but her voice is stronger than I've heard it for some time.
"Lots of trouble with the council, your grandfather had, love," she is saying, with a scornful look.
My grandfather decided to buy the land with the intention of subdividing it once the town's population grew. A century earlier, the occupation of the land was justified under the notion of terra nullius, in which ownership was constituted according to Lockean concepts of property. "As much Land as a man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his Property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the common," Locke wrote in 1690. Yet my grandfather was doing none of these things with the land; he bought it to sell for more money than he had paid.
When my grandfather approached the farmer who owned the land, they struck a deal. The condition was the relocation of the Aboriginal family who worked on the property. The farmer liked this idea, and obtained approval to subdivide the land himself. My grandfather settled for a smaller portion, and the Aboriginal family was moved to the Talbragar Mission, nine kilometres away. My grandmother is sure it was the best thing for them. I ask about the family, not really expecting her to know much but hoping I might find where the skull came from.
"Oh they were scoundrels," she says, leaning back in her chair with a grin. "Birch was their name, I think. Cheeky fellows always coming all the way back out here, just for ... I don't know what business. One came right up to the front door and asked if there was any work needed doing, while his friends were down the back shed trying to steal your grandfather's tools."
I let this pass and spend the rest of the day listening to my grandmother complain about how the council ruined my grandfather.