White me
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 31: Ways of Seeing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Robert Hillman
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IN the course of an average Australian lifetime, a white lifetime, face-to-face communication with Indigenous Australians might be fairly limited. In my own case, five fairly talkative decades have yielded only three brief conversations. The first was with a sister and brother, Esther and Terry, students at an outer-Melbourne high school where I taught in the 1980s. They must have thought my earlier attempts at engagement a bit tedious because they rolled their eyes when I approached them in the playground. I spoke about the need to eat something a little more nourishing than lollies for lunch. ‘Like what?’ said Terry. ‘Like a salad roll, maybe.’ ‘We did.’ ‘Oh. Well, that’s good.’ Esther offered me a jelly snake and off they hurried, wishing to be where I was not.
The second conversation took place in the early 1990s outside the supermarket in Smith Street, Fitzroy, when a man by the name of Mickey with a fabulous sense of entitlement demanded a hundred dollars for his autograph, which I hadn’t requested. I said no. Mickey said, ‘Better idea. Buy me a flagon. Can yuh?’ I bought him a flagon of Seppelts from the supermarket’s bottle shop and he sauntered away singing the chorus of ‘The Gambler’, his trademark tune.
The third conversation, on a St Kilda tram, was more protracted; was, in fact, five conversations, but since the entire five employed the same words, the same questions, the same responses, I think of them as just the one. At that time, the mid1990s, a group of Aborigines had established a type of tent embassy in Cleve Gardens, at the intersection of Fitzroy Street and Beaconsfield Parade, right beside the route of the number 16 tram and not far from St Kilda Beach. The park was dominated by a number of ancient Moreton Bay Figs, and under these trees a construction of cardboard, orange blankets and black plastic sheeting was reassembled after each episode of windy weather. It was the contention of those occupying the little park that the Moreton Bay Figs rightfully belonged to the Wurundjeri people, as did all of the land on which the City of St Kilda stood. The High Court decision in the case of Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2) was only four years old, and the Native Title Act still younger, but the Cleve Garden Aborigines apparently felt that their moral right to the little park should at least be advertised.
I caught the number 16 tram on the Esplanade above Luna Park at 3.20 each weekday afternoon. At 3.24, the tram made its scheduled stop opposite Koori Park, as the Moreton Bay Fig plantation had come to be called. For five consecutive days, a guy I came to know as Danny in an unravelling Rasta snood, an Everlast tracksuit and French Star sneakers sprinted from the park, jumped aboard the tram, travelled three stops to St Kilda Junction, then jumped off. Why he needed to board the tram and travel a kilometre at 3.24 each day I never discovered. The tram was rarely full and Danny was always able to find his way to where I sat reading EP Thomson’s The Making of the English Working Class in an impressive edition with a bright red cover. Our conversation went like this.
Danny: You like readin’?
Me: Yep.
Danny: Name’s Danny.
Me: Robert. [Handshake]
Danny: Got a place back there.
Me: In the park?
Danny: S’good. Close to the beach.
Me: Ah!
Danny: Saw yuh yesterday, didn’t I?
Me: Yep.
Danny: Got any spare change? [Danny pronounced this as one word, ‘sparechain’]
Me: Sure. [I handed over a couple of two-dollar coins.]
Danny: On ya, bro. Gotta get off. See yuh!
Me: See yuh!
These few conversations, and no more. Aborigines do not come to the parties I’m invited to; do not eat at the restaurants I frequent; do not appear at any of the professional gatherings of writers I attend; do not sit beside me at the cricket or the football; do not live next door to me in Carlton; do not enter the supermarkets at which I shop, nor any other venue of commerce familiar to me; do not share a class with my children; do not date me, marry me, bear my children; do not send me emails about books I’ve written; do not telephone me. If an official Australian version of apartheid were in force that restricted contact between white me and black them, it could hardly be more effective in its mission than this accidental apartheid that makes me no more than a blur to the original inhabitants of my native land, and they so unfamiliar to me.
This needn’t bother me, this lack of contact with Aborigines, but it does. It bothers others, too. If you have a native land, best strive to know its complexity; what it gets right, what it fucks up; its fears, frenzies, phobias; its rewards. There are a number of muddled stories of my native land that I’ve known since I was a kid - gold in the topsoil here and there, sheep everywhere, a man in a metal suit with a six-shooter, men in slouch hats dying in droves in the North Aegean - that alter over the years but remain engaging. But the story of the black men was always a shambles for white me. The black men were here when the ships came, but in a way they were not; they were pissed off, but patchily, never forming a magnificent army of national resistance; they lived in the desert and understood things that a white man could barely fathom, but the things they knew - the path taken by an escaped convict who had left no tracks at all, where to find water where there was no water - were fascinating, yes, but not fantastic. A teacher in my high school in rural Victoria told the class that the North American Indians were more advanced than the Australian Aborigines because the Indians rode horses and used bows and arrows. I shot up my hand. ‘What about the boomerang?’ The teacher replied, ‘A boomerang is a stick.’ His retort set a tone of mild denigration that has troubled me ever since. It seemed wrong that our teacher had not taken the opportunity to make the black men more vivid to us.What became more vivid was not the black men themselves, but the injustice that burdened them: the land from which the Aborigines had harvested such bounty had, by a process that blended insinuation and armed robbery, been gathered up by a determined people even more advanced than the North American Indians. Dispossessed, abused, humiliated, demoralised, they became the people I was unable to know or understand other than in the context of argument. My politics took over as the governing reference of my commitment to fathoming Aborigines. But allowing my politics to fashion the questions I asked had shortcomings. ‘Injustice’ became a slogan. Everything I read about Aborigines had to find its home under a heading. A sequence of slogans is not a narrative.
AT AROUND THE time of John Howard’s dismissal of any obligation to issue an apology to Indigenous Australians for a couple of centuries of abuse, I was living with a woman who spoke with Aborigines every working day of the year. She ran an outreach agency in Collingwood where the majority of her clients were homeless blacks, and before that she’d managed an Aboriginal community in Western Australia. Her clients adored her, but on a bad day might still toss about terms like ‘stupid white cunt’ and threaten to have her kneecapped. The abuse didn’t bother her; the more inventive insults delighted her. She said, ‘It’s just the dope,’ or, ‘It’s the piss.’ What I knew about Aborigines remained a mess, but I was feeling my way towards a Pearsonian model of tough love. I thought her forbearance left her open to exploitation and felt offended on her behalf. She told me once that she’d spent months looking for a house for a black couple and their baby, only to have the family wander off in a week.
‘In a week! Don’t they care how much trouble you took? Doesn’t that drive you nuts?’
‘No. Stop talking about it.’
She came to wince at my responses to incidents like that. They made me seem impatient and ignorant, and it was at that time important to her that she should like me. I was a version of the concerned white man who wants Indigenous Australians to prosper, but who quickly becomes exasperated when they don’t. When my friend said, ‘Stop talking about it,’ what she wanted me to understand was that my goodwill was an easily exhausted resource, and unreliable. Her own way of thinking about Indigenous Australians had nothing to do with mere goodwill. She had overcome the temptation to place Aborigines in a category of the marginalised, or in a category of any sort. They were, to my friend, as various in character as non-Aboriginals, but burdened in a way remote to the experience of non-Aboriginals.
In each of us there is a neglected graveyard of the convictions that once excited us, convictions interred with the questions that expressed the liveliness of our interest. One of the overgrown headstones in my personal graveyard reads, ‘The Inevitable Victory of the Proletariat!’ and another, ‘You Can Live on Lentils!’ But we retain our original enthusiasm for maybe two or three early convictions, and return to them, in a struggling way, again and again. The predicament of Indigenous Australians vexes me. I think for some time I have wished Aborigines to flourish by being more like me. I’ve wanted them to buy houses in the shining place where I live, and hail me at the supermarket, join me on the sofa at parties and say, after a genial howdy, ‘Global warming, fuck me, what do you do?’ In spite of all that I know of their burden, all that I’ve read, I seem to have an irreducible conviction that it will all be okay if more Aborigines would only read Kant and Hume and Sartre and maybe a selection of contemporary writers of fiction I’d like to foist on them. My criticism of the federal and state programs (well intentioned, some of them generous) that are supposed to benefit Aborigines has been that they are unimaginative, but my own schemes for Aboriginal advancement are just as unimaginative, although in a more imaginative way.