Not quite white in the head
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2: Dreams of Land
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Melissa Lucashenko
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Melissa Lucashenko's biography and other articles by this writer
Earthspeaking? You will think of it as a big story, a national story. Native Title. Salinity. Landcare. Turn the rivers backwards or find that inland sea. It's Burke and Wills, it's the Bushtucker Man, it's drought and flooding rains, but no. Stop. Pause for breath, since people in a hurry cannot feel. You say: It's a big country. I say: There isn't much room for everyone's big stories.
Things change. Down the track a bit now, some migloo might be thinking: Oh, The Land – something bigger than themselves at last. A chance to be Humble. (It's hard to be humble when you're ... not.)
Only, we are asking you, pause for breath. The Earth is not in any great hurry for your prostrations, fabrications, speculations. Take one day for looking. For one day:
Do not plough.
Do not burn.
Do not plant.
Do not clear.
Pause for breath. Remember Genesis: The land is not cursed.
I am earthspeaking, talking about this place, my home and it is first, a very small story. Tell it softly, so that someone might by chance hear you. One valley. A tree with a crooked branch where children swung with children's hands, a soft look of the pasture in the buttery afternoon light. The cold scent of dew on purple-tipped flatgrass, grass that can be stripped and played like a gumleaf if you know how. It is land with a small "l". And the people? They are off to the side somewhere. They are important, yes, but they aren't the whole story. Nothing is the whole story, by itself. Not the people and not the land either. They need each other. So gather round. This earthspeaking is a small, quiet story in a human mouth, or it is no story at all.
WE GREW IN PARADISE, LOST AND FOUND. My family lived on a hectare of land in Brisbane's bushy southern outskirts. Turrbal land, but under Jagera care during the '70s and '80s. We were poor but nobody thought to say it, and by the time I arrived, child number seven, nobody was going hungry anymore. We had land – what else mattered? Mum's green thumb made anything grow. Magpies flung themselves theatrically into the kitchen, braked as sharply as military aircraft onto the backs of empty chairs and delicately took scraps from our hands. The winter wattle and oodgeroo blossomed along the fence line each year and there were blue-speckled yabbies to be caught in the dam if you had a string and a piece of soggy gristle. My mother smiles wryly at nature shows on TV, the ones with the baby birds in the nest, screaming for food. I know just how the mother bird feels, she says every time. She means us kids, and before us, herself, growing up with wild oysters, the difference between going on and starvation.
Early part. I climbed the mulberry tree, avoided my brothers, crouched in child burrows amongst gritty lantana stems. Most of all I watched my father use a sharp, long-handled shovel to feed us. He had left the meatworks by then and become an earth scientist in the most literal sense: he gathered and mixed and sold soil to local gardeners, on a scale so tiny it was both heroic and ridiculous.
The rhythm of Dad's shovelling – the brace of the long wooden handle against the pale boomerang of his left leg, the scrape of the blade as it picked up its endless burden, the plumping of black loam into long rows of heavy plastic sacks – that rhythm is the beat and echo of my childhood. It is a slow, deliberate beating, hour upon daily hour of his labouring, and I can still hear it. Every dollar that ever came to us came on that worn shovel blade, and the phrase "the sweat of his brow" has never seemed abstract to me. If anything was less remarked on than the need to sweat in order to live, it was the value of the earth, the essential virtue and worth of the soil.
Everything that springs from the land is goodness, but we were poor and if I never see another choko, it will be too soon.
AT 10 WE WERE THE GRANDCHILDREN OF UKRAINIAN PEASANT FARMERS or White Russians who had fled the revolution or middle-class Czech refugees or ... The answer depended on whom you asked, and their state of mental health at any given moment. Dad spoke – spoke? became – Russian with certain visitors. That was not exotic to me but a given. His accent otherwise was the broadest Australian, peppered with bush lingo. That was a given too. A dark teenager in Joh's Queensland, I was quizzed constantly about where I was "from", and given careful instruction in the following mantra: Your father is Russian. Your mother is Scots, Irish and English. When I was 14 my mother confessed, lightly, as though her attention had lapsed: we were Aboriginal. In the same decade, the Government stopped removing Aboriginal babies in Queensland.
A year later I read Gone with the Wind in a night. The racism passed over me but I never forgot Scarlett's heresy: Why did the Irish make such a fuss about land, when any bit of land was the same as any other? How ridiculous, I thought, how strange these Americans are. No bit of land is ever the same as any other.
At 20 I learned that my father, Wally Lucas, opal miner, canecutter, meatworker, amateur geologist, soil bagger, had been born Vladimir Lucashenko to a battered mother and a bigamist father with another family in the United States. Uncle George had no birth certificate; Shanghai wasn't the place for them in 1926. Aunt Vicky was really Vera. My dead grandmother had been a card-carrying Communist Party member. Apparatchiks from Moscow once dined in the big house, long ago sold off to a local farmer while we seven were raised in a converted chicken shed.
If Russians are a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma, we were more Russian than any of us knew, and black to boot. So many of our stories go nowhere, double back on themselves, drift into silence. What was consistent in my life was rarely people – so prone to revolution, subjugation, assimilation and madness – but the land that fed us. Red and pungent with the iron that Mount Tamborine had spewed millennia ago, clothed in the beautiful open dry sclerophyll forest of bayside Brisbane, bone-crunchingly hard as you fell from a galloping horse or out of a jacaranda tree – the land was what I turned to, just as my Aboriginal and Ukrainian forebears had. Blood memory will have the scientists scoffing but there are ways of knowing that fall outside science, for now.
GIVE ME A YUMBA JAHLI-JAHLIBAH, A HOME AMONG the gum trees, I say, and among the black boys (Xanthorrea) and acacias too. Yet the trend for our lemming nation is to plunge ever closer to the ocean, and I, too, have washed up in a coastal village on Bundjalung land. Our six-street village is like the inadequate shop in O Brother, a geographical oddity, exactly 20 minutes too far from anywhere to usefully commute and hence full of artists, single parents and speculators driving slowly up our street with their Queensland numberplates, peering at the poor.
When I tell people where I live, they usually develop a glazed, envious smile. Byron Bay. But no, thankfully, it isn't Byron with its never-ending sun-reddened tourists, its overpriced groceries and traffic snarls. Home is another, more ragged version, where you know everyone's name or at least their dogs', and nobody locks their doors at night.
But why the smile? Where has this particular craze for the ocean as sanctuary for troubled souls come from? Has SeaChange got a lot to answer for? Or is it simply that the new international economy has deserted the cow and sheep cockies, and with that their cultural significance? Some say that with a growing knowledge of contact history, the gloss finally wore off the bush. We know – or should know – that blood has indeed stained the wattle, Henry, and the bleeding hasn't stopped yet. Maybe in the imagination of sympathetic whites, the coast was just a tentative stepping stone to later inland savagery, and remains less tainted. I'm not so convinced. The rivers of far northern New South Wales ran red with all our bloods, just as the Maranoa and the Murray did, and anyway, it's not as if so very many Australians care.
Perhaps the lust for sea air grew in the misanthropic cities, where to the descendants of convict masters other people are inevitably a menace and the quarter-acre block no longer seems empty enough. The wildness is, after all, implicit and explicit in those shark-laden waves. With the deep marine at your doorstep, you'll never be surrounded on all four sides, no matter how close the barbarians press in. The sea calls to us:
long roll the ocean, from which we all have climbed
and into which all our cliffs sink
and all our setting suns recline
long roll the ocean, that is thickened up with ships
and long live the bloody ocean, where the driftnet clogs and dips
the dark water reminds us
how shallowly we plant our feet,
the solemn water nurses the soft paradox of boating,
the water rocks and soothes us to a safe, undrowning sleep
yes, the singing of the ocean runs a ripple through my sleep, yes
I am counting on some kind of resurrection from the deep.*
Christian humanity being Bad and in need of resurrection, the rush is on. Inland blacks are left looking at the broken remnants of the pastoral industry, and the faint breath of a chance to recover their land as the defeated whites move off it. Coastal Murries and Koories take a deep breath, and dig in. We wait to be pushed out by skyrocketing real estate prices and the cries of delighted tourists.
"It's so beautiful around here, so green and quiet and lush."
"Yeah, that's why your mob stole it."
Any real estate agent worth even half a pinch of salt can tell you if we all live by the beach, life will be an eternal surfing holiday with fish and chips, and there will never be bad times or pain. But no, sorry to say, life in Byron Shire means sand on the floors and sand in your clothes and sand in your lunch, and living in the muddy rain shadow of Mount Warning, and dolphins at the beach every day except when the visitors come. It means weekends full of blow-ins from Brisbane and no decent cinema within striking range, and an annual drowning or two at the beach you've stuck on your city fridge as a postcard. It means terrible food for the poverty-stricken locals and smiling for the rich visitors in a shire where award wages are a utopian dream and everyone pays for living in paradise, one way or another. And it's green and quiet and lush, too, of course.
Clay: 1. a type of small-particled earth used in the manufacture of bricks. 2. (archaic) the material of the human body