The Australian Dream: Blood, History and Becoming

Stan Grant is Indigenous Affairs editor for the ABC and Chair of Indigenous Affairs at Charles Sturt University. He won the 2015 Walkley Award for coverage of Indigenous Affairs and is the author of The Tears of Strangers and Talking to My Country.  As discussion of change to the Australian Constitution to recognise Indigenous Australians gathered pace, Stan Grant addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 8 February 2017 to put his vision of the Australian dream as a successful Indigenous Australian but, as with most Indigenous Australians, one who also inherits non Indigenous DNA.

THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM: BLOOD, HISTORY AND BECOMING

STAN GRANT

Eleanor Dark’s classic Australian novel The Timeless Land, imagines the birth of modern Australia. It is a poetic, meditation on the collision of old worlds and new. She opens seeing the world through the eyes of the boy Bennilong. Dark places Bennilong (sic) with his father on cliff face looking out at the ocean, only six years old he was expected to act as a man.

He was conscious of the world, and conscious of himself as a part of it, fitting into it, belonging to it, drawing strength and joy and existence from it, like a bee in the frothing yellow opulence of the wattle.

Dark, imagines a blue cloudless sky, the sea a “silver line”, the surf breaking on the rocks. Bennilong was tired but his father did not notice, he kept his eyes peeled for the “boat with wings”. He had been looking year after year after that strange morning many seasons ago when a “magic boat had flown into their harbour” it had “folded its wings like a seagull” and come to rest. From the boat came “mysterious beings with faces pale as bones”. Bennilong had been told this story in corroboree of how these strangers came and left as suddenly.
It was long ago and the memory of the “magic boat” had faded but Bennilong’s father remembered and so they came to stand on the rock and watch and wait for the white faces’ eventual return. So vivid is Dark’s recreation, I feel as though I am the young boy himself, standing with his father, his head filled with old stories and imagining, dreaming.

Bennilong stared at it. The unending water. He looked up at his father’s lean figure, still motionless, still watching for the boat with wings, and there was born in him a conviction which all through his boyhood was to tease him now and then – that the water was not really unending after all; that somewhere, far, far away there lay another land; that some day he, Bennilong, not in a bark canoe but in a boat with wings, would go in search of it.

Eleanor Dark captures a process of becoming. It is the spark of humanity – the ability to think of worlds beyond one’s own. The philosopher Hegel saw this as the process of becoming. To Hegel, being and non-being existed at once; part of each other: being and nothing. In this we preserve difference and the difference from difference. Being is our destruction and our preservation.

For Hegel we come into being and pass out of being; we live in a process of becoming: a journey of transition where time is measured in history. We live in a succession of “nows”; a present; a before and after; a future that will in its turn become a past. To quote Hegel himself: “time appears as the very fate and necessity of spirit when it is not in itself complete”. World history – writes Hegel – is the “interpretation of spirit in time”.

The Polish Nobel Prize winning poet Czeslav Milosz wondered about this journey of time and people; this quest of the spirit. In his poem “The Spirit of History” from A Treatise of Poetry he writes:

Amid thunder the golden house of is

collapses and the process of becoming ascends   

Certainty – being – gone; and ahead, possibility and change: inevitable, unrelenting change. As Milosz writes:  “You without beginning, you always between…the anti-thesis ripening toward a thesis.”

Here is Eleanor Dark’s Bennilong. A boy becoming – a boy on a cliff face awaiting the return of the bone-pale people in the ship with wings. Bennilong would take that journey, touching a shore far from his home.

Czeslav Milosz wrote of the darkness of twentieth century Europe, a continent awash in blood where memory was “the memory of wounds”. This too was time of people becoming, forged by war and tyranny…making their new peace. As he wrote in “Elegy for N.N”:

You got used to new wet winters, 

to a villa where the blood of the German owner

was washed from the wall, and he never returned. 

I too accepted but what was possible, cities and countries.

One cannot step twice into the same lake 

on rotting alder leaves,

breaking a narrow sunstreak.

My ancestors were born into this world of new winters … accepting but what was possible – formed by it as it formed around them. Their ancestry reached deep into the story of human occupation on this continent. I am drawn from the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi of New South Wales. My story also comes from the green fields of Tipperary in Ireland. There at the dawn of the twentieth century a young man was banished – transported in chains never to see his home again. Home now would be in a land far away – a dry and parched place, brown and cracked. The blood of these people – white and black – run through me.

My personal journey mirrors the journey of this country – how to reconcile not just our history but in my case my very DNA. Each 26 January, I reflect on the history that has placed me here. So it was this Australia Day. This year, my father received an award in his hometown of Narrandera in New South Wales. It was in recognition of his work teaching Wiradjuri language – a language of his forebears that was in danger of disappearing. He has previously been awarded an Order of Australia. It is a source of great pride for a man who has lived much of his life at the coalface of poverty and bigotry. Yet, he reaches across the black-white divide, a man focussed more on what unites us.

That night I spoke to my mother – she too was proud of my dad’s achievements. Yet, she reminded me – on this day – of another history. She told me – as she has told me before – of seeing her father handcuffed and tied to a tree left all day in the blazing sun for the crime then of drinking alcohol. She told me again of her mother – a white woman – turned away from hospital when she was about to give birth to an Aboriginal man’s child. She spoke of that night when police came at gun point and a bulldozer rolled over the tin humpy on the outskirts of town that my mother and her family called home. On this Australia Day – my mother quietly said “it wouldn’t hurt if they changed the date”.

This is not a ranting flag burning protester. This is a dignified quiet woman in her 70s – who has raised her children to be proud and strong – living with the man she has shared her life with but reflecting on a country that has at times laid them low. We draw our identities from these stories. Academic Bronwyn Carlson – herself an indigenous woman – has written of this often precarious and fragile sense of identity buttressed by a sense of pan-Indigenous unity built around shared injustice, experience of racism and often a rejection of whiteness: this identity that has history at its core:

This history – she writes – is vast and varies across the country and across time periods… Encompassing Aboriginal experience from pre-colonial to colonial and subsequent periods. It is represented in the oral or recorded memories of Aboriginal people – this history is not past or done with.

I understand the anger and the sadness experienced by many indigenous people each Australia Day. I have felt it – at times I do still. In my efforts to move beyond it, I cannot ignore the plight of people whom I call my own. I have crossed our country from the biggest cities to the red centre to our most northern tip. I have confronted the brutal reality of life for far too many – in Australian towns right now children are kept awake by the cries of their mothers being beaten, their fathers locked in spirals of hopelessness, punctuated by grog and drugs – in these Australian towns to be 40 is to be old; graveyards are marked by white crosses, telling of lives gone too soon. In these Australian towns, people live 30 to a home with no more privacy than the mangy dogs who share their beds. This is Australia – it happens in our country, a fate passed from generation to generation.

Yet, I have asked myself – how does this explain me? If I am drawn from this same history – if my family has endured the same struggles – what has put me here? How do I claim an identity in common with people who suffer when I enjoy a life of privilege? As I spoke to my mother, I felt the pain of her stories but I also know that we are blessed to live in a country that is in so many ways the envy of the world. I have seen the worst of the world. In a career spanning three decades, I have seen countries torn apart by war, I have seen people struggle against political oppression, I have seen the devastation that nature can wreak. I have stood in the blood of terrorist bombings and watched mothers pick the flesh out of shrapnel holes in smouldering buildings and place it in plastic bags – all they have left of their children to bury. I am thankful that our country is safe, prosperous, democratic, imperfect yes – but committed to ideals of equality and justice.

I pondered that dissonance this past Australia Day – our blessings and the misery. I read an editorial published in one of our weekend newspapers written by an Indigenous woman who said she could not remain in Australia on Australia Day – she left to escape the “toxicity of being an Aboriginal person”. Australia Day – she wrote – was about the erasure of Aboriginal people. Far from being a part of the Australian Dream – she said – Aboriginal people aren’t allowed to have hope and freedom in this country.

It is a sentiment that may resonate for some. But it cannot possibly tell our whole story. I have always seen hope. I saw it in my grandfather who signed up to fight for this country in World War II when his full citizenship was not recognised. He came home to a segregated land where he could not share a drink with the four mates he served with, but never stopped believing in a better day. He led his family off the mission near Condobilin in Western New South Wales loaded up with all they owned and walked them 300 kilometres to the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area to look for work. He fought to get his kids into the local schools and never weakened in his resolve for justice for his people.

I have seen hope in those pioneers of the Indigenous political movement who fought for inclusion in this land and in 1967 won the most resounding referendum vote in our nation’s history to fully count us in the census and give the federal government the power to make laws for indigenous people. I saw it in Charles Perkins freedom ride of the 1960s that freed up the swimming pools and cinemas for Aboriginal people previously denied entry.

The editorial accused Australia of pretending it is still terra nullius – the doctrine of an empty land that justified the British claim to this continent. But this ignores the hope of a man named Mabo who fought all the way to the highest court in this land to overturn terra nullius. We have hope and we have freedom. It is a freedom built on those who have sacrificed before us. Brave people – locked out of a country, but looking for a way in. It is a freedom won with the love and support of those white Australians who have stood with Indigenous people, who have loved us and shared lives and had children with us, who have marched for reconciliation and shed tears when our Prime Minister said sorry.

We have the freedom today to stand for office in any election in our land. Today we have more Indigenous people in our parliaments than ever before. In Ken Wyatt, the first ever Indigenous federal minister. We have the freedom to attend university and we are graduating more people than ever before. Here’s a statistic for you – there are almost four times the number of Indigenous university graduates than there are Indigenous people in our prisons. We have our sports stars, our film stars, our music stars.

This is not to be a Pollyanna – this is not to deny that we occupy the bottom rung of every socio economic indicator; we die too young and we are far over represented in our prisons. But there is another story here – a story that doesn’t cling to the endless tale of woe. That is not rooted in a sense of victimhood. The history of dispossession can be an all too convenient explanation of what ails us. Like the editorial writer I have been guilty of perpetuating what can be a lazy narrative that obscures a more complete story of dynamism, and potential. If our very identities are chained to our histories perhaps it is time to look again at that history – to ask if clinging to grievance is doing us harm?

One of the most challenging books I have read of recent times is David Rieff’s In Praise of forgetting: Historical memory and its ironies. Rieff, like me, has been a journalist whose reporting of suffering and war has forced him to question the idea that we must hold tight to our histories. Was the philosopher George Santayana right – are those who cannot remember history condemned to repeat it? Rieff argues that we make a fetish out of the past turning it into – he says “a formula for unending grievance and vendetta”.

He writes:

This is what happened in the American south after 1865 and, while diminished is still happening today, it blighted thye former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Today it is endemic in Israel-Palestine, in Iraq and Syria, in the Hindu nationalist populism of India’s Bharatiya Janata party…jihadis and islamists…let there be no turning of a blind eye to the high price societies have paid and a re continuing to pay for the solace of remembrance.

These are tough words for me – our struggle has been to have our stories remembered at all. As the French philosopher, Paul Ricouer, once said “We have a duty to remember by remembering we stopped the dead being killed twice.” For much of our history we suffered from what the great Australian anthropologist, WEH Stanner, called “the great Australian silence” – a national amnesia he likened to a cult of forgetting. For many Aboriginal people locked in a cycle of sorry business – lives measured by the deadening drumbeat of funeral marches it is hard to let go. It is right to remember but is it also right to forget?

The French Historian Ernst Renan said “Forgetting…is an essential factor in the creation of a nation. And that is our task – to forge a nation.” And that is our task – to make a nation to knit together those frayed fibres of ourselves, and our history, and tell a story that speaks to us all yet denies none. It presents itself in a simple question – yet one that I have always asked and at times struggled with the answer: Am I an Australian?

A Greek friend of mine once asked is it easier for a migrant to be Australian than an Aboriginal person? It is a question that sits at the heart of my Quarterly Essay – “The Australian Dream – Blood, History and Becoming”. I have tried to loose the chains of my history – to puncture that victim narrative – and what was revealed was a story not unlike that of the migrants themselves.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie as he oversaw the expansion of the colonial economy – integrating free settlers and former convicts encouraged Aboriginal people to engage with the local economy. George Megalogenis in his book Australia’s Second Chance wrote that Macquarie saw the future of the dispossessed first peoples – if a future they were to have – as contributing to his new economy. Megalogenis sums up: “The locals could only be accepted on the same terms as the migrants if they became like the migrants, agreeing to work for the greater good of the colony as farmers or servants.”

Half a century later the Aborigines Protection Board report of 1883 makes it clear that the “half-castes” were to be integrated (albeit at a menial level) into the state’s economy. The Protector, George Thornton, said:

I maintain the opinion I have always held with regard to the half-caste portion of the aborigines viz, that they should be compelled to work in aid of their own requirements. They are well able to do so, having strength, experience and intelligence to qualify them for it; whilst I am of the opinion that the pure black should be taught, encouraged and aided in doing something for his own sustenance.

Thornton called for the establishment of reserves, in effect migrant worker training camps, to enable them to “form homesteads, to cultivate grain, vegetables, fruit”. Aborigines would become farmers. (As an aside, on 16 May 1892 the Board received an application from “William Grant, an Aboriginal” for a plot of land near Cowra: he was my paternal great-grandfather.)
If I fast forward to the twentieth century – the book Survival Legacies by architect Peter Kabaila follows the trail of Aboriginal economic migrants – he maps the missions and settlements of New South Wales and tracks the movement of people. His book is rich with oral histories and reminiscences. His book challenges what he says is “the continuous and persistent romanticisation of Aborigines by white people, Aborigines became urban people. We became urban by moving.” The pages of Survival Legacies are an intimate account of a mass migration:

In the 1940s some people on large pastoral stations found work shearing, droving, crutching, boundary riding, fencing and clearing…Aboriginal families provided labour for the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area at the new irrigation towns of Griffith and Leeton, where there was both fruit picking and cannery work.

This was my family’s story. What was happening in Griffith was happening elsewhere. In fact, contrary to the popular story of resistance, violence and segregation (albeit a common pattern) there was an alternative and long history of economic accommodation. Anthropologist, Ian Keen, edited a study Indigenous Participation in Australian Economies that counters “the relative invisibility of Aboriginal people…in economic histories”. Existing studies he said, had “neglected the degree of variation in both indigenous economy and indigenous participation in the colonial and national economy”. Aboriginal people could be both despised and needed. Economist Christopher Lloyd lays bare this colonial contradiction:

…indigenous people developed economic relations with settlers in some places and supplied some labour while at the same time being marginalised and impoverished due to land seizures….

The settler economy grew out of the land grabs of the nineteenth century sparking “mutual dislike, distrust and open hostility”. Despite that contentious relationship a “hybrid economy” took shape.

This was especially adaptable to the pastoral and cattle industries; Aboriginal people could work seasonally or intermittently, live on ancestral land and still maintain aspects of traditional culture. Farmers and station owners in return, get a stable and – as was often the case – cheap and exploitable labour. Not exactly a win-win; the power balance is strongly in the settlers favour but Aboriginal people are utilising and selling their knowledge and capacity as they adapt and survive.

As far back as the nineteenth century on the New South Wales south-coast. Anthropologist, John White, shows how in the decade after first contact in the 1830s, local Aborigines and settlers had formed reciprocal relationships. Aboriginal people even guided the newcomers to the land with “good grass and water”. The settlers were at times saved from starvation by Aborigines providing food: fish and oysters. They rescued survivors of wrecked ships. Aboriginal employment ebbed and flowed with the economy and changes to restrictive laws. But Aboriginal people filled the breach during the labour shortage of World War II. One study reveals that Aboriginal unemployment in the south coast region fell from more than 30 per cent to as little as four per cent. Like my family these people too were crop pickers.

The late academic Maria Lane probed this migration and the world it has created. She observed two diverging indigenous populations. An Aboriginal woman, Lane was drawn to the emergence of a fledgling “open society” – opportunity, effort and outcome oriented contrasting with an “embedded society” – risk averse, welfare and security oriented. The two populations she said, “are linked through kinship and continuing interaction”, but the course of their lives were set by the great Aboriginal migration. It was a “slow grind” but a new paradigm was slowly but surely emerging focused on:

…universal human rights, the rights to a rigorous, standard education and equal rights to a place in the Australian society and economy – recognisably a much more liberal, even bourgeois ideology, individualist and competitive.

These were the people on the move from the 1940s to the 1970s; leaving settlements and missions throwing off the heavy hand of government control. Their journeys I have already traced through my family, but timing was crucial, their movement coinciding with periods of economic growth and increased opportunity. As Lane said, “it was a risky move into the unknown, but one that for most paid off”, just like other economic migrants drawn from the far flung corners of the earth.

The comparison with the experience of migrant groups is inescapable: although migrants from Greece and Italy and Yugoslavia and Lebanon in the fifties and sixties were expected to be content with employment on factories and on farms, they also did not expect their children to follow them; very often, in the second generation, their children have gone straight into tertiary education and professional employment. I am suggesting that a high proportion of indigenous people have followed a similar path.

When Lane picked up their story, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these pioneers were exploding into higher education. She focused on South Australia and found that, in less than a decade from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the number of Indigenous students entering the last year of high school doubled and of those the number gaining good university entrance scores had likely tripled. These young, smart achievers were part of a population boom, largely attributable, Lane said, to the increase of inter-marriage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Simply, these kids were of the white and black worlds and re-defining what that meant for them.

Between 1996 and 2006, the Indigenous community was transformed. Numbers of educated, well-paid professionals exploded. In just a decade, they increased by nearly 75 per cent. That was more than double the increase in the non-Indigenous community. By 2006, more than 14,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders between 20 and 64 years old were employed in professional occupations. These people comprise 13 per cent of the total Indigenous workforce. This still lags behind the general population, where the number of professionals is nearly 22 per cent, but the gap is closing fast.Dr Julie Lahn from the Australian National University looked at this phenomenon in her paper “Aboriginal Professionals: Work, Class and Culture”. She said, “Aboriginal professionals in urban centres remain largely overlooked.” Dr Lahn thought this was a major shortcoming that impedes a fuller understanding of the “processes of transformation which are increasingly evident to Aboriginal people themselves”.

We see this in our universities – this process of transformation.

There are around 30,000 indigenous university graduates in Australia; in 1991 there were fewer than 4,000. Those students who are breaking through are crafting a new narrative of empowerment and individuality. Dr Sana Nakata is a second-generation indigenous PhD. Her father, Martin, was the first Torres Strait Islander to complete a doctorate, and his daughter finished hers in 2013. She is now teaching political theory at Melbourne University. She is part of a wave of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students earning doctoral degrees. The number has quadrupled in the past 20 years. Between 1990 and 2000, there were 55 indigenous students awarded PhDs; between 2000 and 2011, there were 219.
Speaking to The Guardian, Nakata drew the comparison with indigenous excellence in the sporting arena: “Indigenous people can make great contributions off the sporting field. I would like the intellectual potential and contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people recognised.” And she doesn’t want to be celebrated simply for being an Indigenous person. The emergence of this middle class – of which I am assuredly a part – presents new questions for identity.

That I am an Indigenous person is a fact of birth: my father is a Wiradjuri man from central and southwest New South Wales; my mother from the Kamilaroi people of the state’s northwest. That is who I am but not all I am. The reality is more ambiguous, defying easy definition even as I may prefer to cloak it in a veil of certainty. To borrow from Franz Kafka, identity is a cage in search of a bird.

I was born into the “half-caste” community that emerged from the Australian frontier; this hybrid society formed out of the clash of the first people and the new. They married each other and repopulated in segregated harsh missions and settlements designed to Christianise and “civilise” us as the pillow was being smoothed for the slow death of a people. Being an “outsider”, something other sits more simply with our history of exclusion and injustice. And my family has suffered, through generations lived at the coalface of poverty and bigotry. I was born into a life on the margins and, as I have written in Talking to My Country, “We lived in Australia and Australia was for other people.”

But I have grown from the boy I was and my country has grown from the land it was. Can I truly see privilege as “white”? Is it “black” to suffer crippling disadvantage?

There is a vigorous emerging debate within the Indigenous community, straining at such a narrowly defined identity. It can feel like a straitjacket. Yin Paradies is an example of someone with indigenous heritage but chafing at orthodox interpretations of identity. An academic of Indigenous-Anglo-Asian heritage, Paradies says he represents both “coloniser and colonised”; “black and consummately white”. He has described a “prison house of identity” that means his efforts to express a hybrid sense of himself lead to attacks on his authenticity. He says he has been called a “coconut” or “nine-to-five black” taking a job from a “real Aborigine”.

Paradies is typical of many urban Indigenous people whose circle of friends are non-Indigenous and have little contact with extended family. He doesn’t deny that Aboriginal people have suffered “a deplorable history of marginalisation, discrimination and exclusion”, but that doesn’t solely define him today.

Some Indigenous people have begun to explore the impact of this Aboriginal middle class. They recognise it is a phenomenon that is met with suspicion, even hostility, by some in the indigenous community.

It is beyond trite to suggest that a university degree and a job means someone is no longer – or less – Indigenous.

Indigenous Australia today is a complex, diverse organism. It is lacerated by class, gender, geography. Individuals seek to express themselves apart from their communities. In this way we are no different from other peoples. I am inspired by the works of philosophers like Amartya Sen and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Sen warns of the dangers of exclusive solitarist identities – that are framed around division. He believes this makes our world inflammable. As a reporter who has spent three decades walking the fault lines and trip wires of geo-politics seeing up-close how age old enmity and the politics of identity can pit catholic against protestant, sunni against shia, hutu against tutsi, muslim against hindu – I can only concur.

Appiah counsels us to look beyond our parochial ideas to a shared sense of ourselves. Difference is to be celebrated, culture and community cherished but we should remain open to all of life’s rich tapestry. His philosophy is captured in the words of the playwright Terence a man bought and sold as a slave in ancient Rome before the birth of Christ, whose words survive today. Famously he wrote: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (“I am human and nothing of that which is human is alien to me”).

This is the lesson I draw from my ancestors – people who endured that loss of certainty – who survived the Australian frontier who looked for a way in. Their struggle, our struggle continues – economically and socially Indigenous people – at least individually – are increasingly closing the gap. There are many questions still to be answered politically – questions beyond the scope of tonight – questions of constitutional recognition and treaty. Duncan Ivison – the lawyer and political philosopher – has written of a “post colonial liberalism” – that posits the struggle for indigenous rights between the poles of separatism on the one hand and assimilation on the other’. He believes Western liberal democracies can incorporate the claims of minority groups like indigenous peoples as another philosopher John Rawls has said in a way that provides for a reconciliation through public reason – where people can endorse the institutions and practices in which they live and not merely tolerate them. As John Stuart Mill once said to “soften the edges of the extreme to narrow the differences between us”.

The solutions to these challenges are complex and often contradictory. It would take another speech perhaps at another time to ponder it all. But I hear the voices of our past, when I look again on the extraordinary achievements of our forebears.

Eleanor Dark closes her remarkable novel with Bennilong now an older man. He has met the bone pale strangers and sailed in their winged boat to a far off shore. He has stood with Kings and learned of gods beyond his own. He has been speared, he is wounded. He no longer dwells in the certainty of his people. His people look on him as a stranger. He looks at his people caught between the laws of the white and laws of the black and living in none. There was no single enemy white or black; the very earth itself had played him false.

This is Bennilong in the process of becoming. As Dark imagines him, Bennilong speaks to us through the ages:

I Bennilong…I am great. I am taller than the trees and stronger than the storm; I am wiser than the fathers of our tribe…for I have been to England and I have seen the king. Now I know many things, and I will teach you what I have learned.