Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Aboriginal

  • for you, now that you no longer need it

    My friend has died. She was very courageous and had cancer. She was a photographer, a maker of exquisite works. She was Dutch and chose euthanasia when the pain she was suffering became, after months, too unbearable. Now her partner is left alone to garden.

    She was wise and quiet in her mind, an insightful, shrewd, kind, passionate person. I just adored her. The world since I’ve known her has felt illuminated by her presence. The sense of her presence among us: you know, those so rare people.

    Tonight we are making a chicken curry very slowly and brewing up a panful of chai masala and my kitchen, where my friend and her partner once sat with me, smells of spices. My throat aches for her. I am crossing to the machinery in the next room to play Gurrumul Yunupingu’s song Bapa four times over; finally my companion without a word gets up and sets it to continuous loop. Thinking of the songwriter, who also could have died this week. Thinking on his experience in the Royal Darwin Hospital and of my friend, can she really be gone utterly, and of how we treat each other, can she really just – be gone, thinking of the Aboriginal belief that our soul goes into the soil, into the stones and trees, into the earth where we got born. Sometimes a mother rubs her newborn child in the red dirt, or in the ashes from the fire, to teach its soul – I think – where to come home to. It seems to me a woman who lived all her life in the one civil, intelligently run, beautiful city might be a beneficiary of this cool, loving, compassionate, scientifically realistic and empathic prophecy.

    The dead. Now we outnumber them for the first time it seems to me we must be particularly tender and respectful of the world they have left us, which their bodies have built, which their bones and blood constitute. I miss you, I miss you, I am crying out over the sink for you and you’re gone now and I miss you, I miss your company, your voice and your eyes, your dear creatureliness.

  • antiquities vs the antiquated: Abbott’s true agenda

    Ok listen up. Abbott wants to forcibly shut down outback Indigenous communities in remote areas of Western Australia that just happen to coincide with a bunch of mining exploration leases. Our government – whom we as a people elected and are responsible for – are about to move off their immemorial lands a people who have been caring for and cared for by this Country of theirs for longer than any other peoples on earth. They are the oldest living civilisation and have survived genocidal intrusion, deliberate and mass kidnappings of their kids and jailings of their men. What is happening is the most ancient traditions on Earth are being shoved aside to make way for a depleting, exploitative mining industry that is rapidly falling into obsolescence. That is, the world’s oldest living cultures are to be replaced by technologies which are merely outdated. Now is the time we all need to be Idle No More. Make yourself heard.

  • white trash-talking

    The term “white trash” is so racist and offensive I cannot believe people ever use it. Like “female doctor” it has built into it the assumption that the norm for trash (for doctors) has been subverted here: that surely the usual condition of trashiness is blackness. It disgusts me that people use this term with almost a smug feeling, it seems, as though they are holding up a sign Look How Broad-Minded Am I, That I Can See How Even White People Can Be Human Trash, Too.

  • unAustralian Day

    The aspects of Australianness I feel most dearly attached to, and which are also the aspects Germans, Americans, other people seem most intensely curious to hear reports of whenever I’m travel outside Australia, are these:

    1. the land (the shape of the land, like an upside-down heart); the surf, the rock formations, the desert, the landscapes.

    2. the creatures we tyrannize and extinguish and who seem to threaten us

    3. the peoples whose cultures, whose survival and quietude makes them an irresistible secret, beloved of every thinking person, a guide to what we are generally doing wrong and where we might go right

    Survival Day: a clue to the changes we are making too slowly to survive, all of us, aboard our beloved earth. Unfold the new flag, raise up our fresher songs, institute a Council of Advisory Elders to put a check on our Parliaments. I want government by tribal elders and old women. I want pride and humility to be our standards.

    [-O-]

  • alles ganz frisch

    No Murdoch press and the sun has come out! How much fresher can Germany get. We have eaten a breakfast of thinly sliced things rolled on platters served with other, slightly more thickly sliced dark and chewy breads. My companion sinks into his first cup of filter coffee with condensed milk, “Aaahhh.” The familiar is sweet. He makes me smell its unmistakeable scent but I hand it back, unimpressed: “That is not the coffee to make me forget my vow.”

    Instead of The Australian and The Courier-Mail, with their perpetual racist beat-ups and photos of women murdered by their husbands who are described invariably as “decent blokes” who simply “got pushed too far” (by the serially battered victim, presumably), instead of a cover photo of some actor who happens to have dark hair and “swarthy” skin staged in an “ISIS” pose like some deranged hip hop artist, there are four pages of literature and art events with listings – in the plural – each day of readings and book signings. Some are in bookshops I recognise, one is in the genteelly decaying place round the corner where in the week I was first in Berlin alone I took my own book and asked would they sell it. They did. Its sole purchaser was a tall beautiful man whom I approached as he was turning over novels in the English language section, saying, “You should read this one, I wrote it.” “Alright,” he said, and bought it. That man was a bookshop and cafe owner in gorgeous Copenhagen and is now one of my dearest friends. He told me, before I ever thought to visit, his little shop sells “three of my favourite things – coffee, books, and records.”

    Much though I applaud the ferocious independence and gall of the newly established Saturday Paper back home, it feels wonderfully civilized to have a wide choice of newspapers all run by different owners and all presenting a variety of views. The Tagesspiegel, “mirror of the day”, has a long, two-page article titled “Wie Besser Helfen.” How you can better help: it details the “lonely elderly neighbour,” the “fallen person selling Motz” (a homelessness fundraiser similar to the Big Issue), the “prostituted girl”, and the “belaestigtes Maedchen” – I don’t know the word and wonder what kind of needing-help girl this could be: my partner, in labouring to describe it to me, reveals that he has heard the recently much-used word “cat-calling” as “scat-calling.” I want to go out into the streets of Berlin and feel the frigid sun on my face and get scat-called by traffic that stops and starts like a jazz composition on the right-hand side of the road. I want never to hear the name Rupert Murdoch or Tony Abbott again. I read the stories of “alcoholic apprentices” and lonely elderly neighbours, followed by short, pragmatic paragraphs contributed by people who know how best to offer help – social workers, for example – and I think how a country’s press can shape its social life. My partner reads out an article on an American novelist we met at the University of Queensland, who dropped his head when I asked a question from the audience and tore in a deep breath when I mentioned how Australia, “to our shame, leads the world in child suicide rates among Indigenous young people.” Last night we passed a synagogue with a police officer standing outside stamping in the cold, he had a little hut with Polizei written on it. Every Jewish gathering place in Germany is thus guarded, my partner says, and has been since 1949, “because we are guilty for a thousand years.” I suggest to him that there have been times when a German police guard would, to a Jew, not be very comforting. Like the escort offered in my homeland to its Indigenous people whenever they are picked up for not paying a fine, or for being drunk: a one-way train that leads to nowhere but the ironic and ferocious hell whose gates are tiled with good and insufferably pious intentions. The Murderochracy.

  • wizened neighbour from the woods

    I have here this neighbour whose skin is dark and seamy and white hairs sprout from him like surprise. He is beautiful, he sits quietly, often under a tree in his back yard on the besser block low wall with sometimes a friend sitting by him, sometimes a fat swollen silver bladder of wine from a box of wine lying between them quietly. They are talking and their voices rumble and I had an operation recently, quite recently, which involved a scary general anaesthetic and I remember thinking, when I woke up that morning and the light had sliced the curtains open: if I could do this procedure just lying on his chest, I would feel safe, I would be sure I would survive it.

    I survived it. The man who is my neighbour downhill has survived much more, maybe forty years more than I. He likes his tree. He likes the day. He accepts it I think. I like when his eyes rest on me and he lets me rest his eyes on him and as I pass, trotting down the hill carrying my milk can or that is, my empty coffee mug with curling horns of handles, he says always the same thing every day, slowly: “You should be running down that hill!” When I come back leaning into the slope my coffee steaming in one hand and face gazing down into the asphalt of our very steep hill he says, squeezing a wheezing laugh, “It’s all very well coming down the hill…” Every time I answer him the same. “I should be somersaulting!” “Yeah, it’s the climbing that’s hard.” He said to me one morning, “Girl, what you eating there?” and I opened my hand to show him, crossing the road, holding them out pink and stainy: “Lillypilly. Would you like some?” But the little fruits are gone now, partly because season and partly because greedy girl moved in to the house on the high hill and has had a feed of them, every morning, on her way to buy caffeine.

  • buy a smoke

    I went and sat in a church for an hour. Outside and around us the traffic and screaming world swirled. I sat limply, examining nothing, letting my gaze rest like butter on the high colour windows and glowing long pews. God was there for me, the god who is not grand but great and not distant, proclaimed by all the world’s most dangerous people and who doesn’t really exist, I think, but to whom I somehow cry out in moments of deep joy and crushing down grief. I gazed at the flowers, the candles, the keys of the lovely old organ. Afterwards trailing up the street with a frangipani tucked in my bag I smiled at two celebrating ladies, with their backs to a wall of constructing industry, all the ingredients of their afternoon laid out: smokes, supermarket catalogue, bottle of a possibly mixed fizzing drink. “You look beautiful!” said the younger one; I nearly fell over with surprise. I mean, I tripped. I went into the post office. “Has this got a battery?” she said. “It’ll go by road but not by air.” “Ok,” I said. I paid for the parcel. In the Chinese grocer’s I brushed my knuckles across all the fronds of the barrel of brush brooms to choose by the feel which I would carry home. Paid four dollars and balanced it across my arms like a bayonet. The Aboriginal man who spends his afternoon by a tree on the hillside said, How are you. His mate, a red-faced white man with a spreading lap, said, judgelessly, “Saw you eating something off them bushes there.” “Lillypilly,” I said, “you want one?” And uncurled my hand to show a pink-stained palm lumpy with fruits. The first man reached across himself for a pocket. “Buy a smoke off you,” he said. I said, as I always do, “I finally quit! Sorry ~” and spread my hands, because my first thought is not to make a smoker who’s not yet quit (every smoker) feel bad in their still smoking cave. Around us the afternoon was fresh and untamed. Up the hill little houses crept, clutching their gardens. The two old men had a bag of wine plump between them like a jellyfish beached and slowly dying in the sun. I went on up the hill and behind me another climber approached, this time a man in a suit, already reaching into his breast pocket as the old man sang out, “Hey, Michael!” “Heya, Marty.” “Buy a smoke off ya?”

  • The Saturday Paper

    Bought The Saturday Paper, the one not owned by a misanthrope sadist. Carried it into my favourite weekend cafe and sat down. They were playing the Rolling Stones: bloke music. The first sentence that caught my eye was: “Trying to explain why fiction matters, novelist Ian McEwan put it simply. ‘Cruelty,’ he said, ‘is a failure of imagination.’”

    Common-sense headlines followed: “The real budget emergencies: households around the nation face genuine hardship, with terrible consequences.” “European austerity breeds far-Right support.”

    The article titled Failure of Imagination was by Sean Kelly. He explored the reaction to Hockey’s budget and said, what he is hearing is not only individuals lamenting their own losses in this new deal, but a nation of people who worry about the impact on their fellow citizens, “imagining,” for example, “the everyday obstacle course imposed by disability.” He said, “There is harder work ahead, work many of us have still largely failed to do because what we are being asked to imagine is too far removed from our own experiences.”

    A whole album of Mick Jagger’s plaintive lope later, paying for breakfast I joyfully brandished the new enterprise to the cafe owner, standing at his till. “Finally you can buy this locally!” I said. “What is it?” he said. He had not heard it’s happened. I showed him. Staff clustered round. “Can I take a photo of that?” “Can I too?” Careful pictures of the back-page subscription form disappeared into several phone cameras. They jostled behind him to leaf over pages, pointing, reading. The guy in the cap covered in little Lionel Ritchies levelled his finger at me, the bearer of better bad tidings. “This is genius!” he said. The owner said, it hurts to buy five copies of The Courier-Mail and five copies of The Australian every Saturday. I said, you will love this. It’s full of interesting points of view. Over his shoulder the tall barista said, “There’s no Sports!” The cafe owner flicked the paper open at the back. “Yes there is,” I told him. “You just didn’t recognise it because it has a photo of a woman athlete.”

    Reading the paper had left me filled with an unholy rage, but without the sick feeling I get from Murdoch’s certainties, a deep fury empowered rather than overwhelmed. “This isn’t us,” I felt, “this isn’t right.” The cafe owner and I talked it over in a few despairing sentences. “Every morning this week it’s been all about the State of Origin,” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “cos nothing else is happening in the world. Nobody’s struggling, nobody’s suffering…” “People read it,” he said, “people buy it, but I can’t believe they like it.”

    I said, “I just read this from end to end. Not one photo of an Indigenous person saying how their low income and premature death rate are really their own fault. They should work harder.” We both had tears in our eyes. “It’s really good to see you,” he said, “really good.” “Thanks for your halloumi,” I said. “Thanks for your hospitality.” Afterwards I cried all the way home. My Berlin companion, who his first weeks in Brisbane had worried he would not be able to live in a country where every morning this kind of crackling cruelty unfolded over the breakfast table and whispered from every headline its slimy innuendo, asked, What is it. I said, bursting, People don’t want this! This is not us! I can’t believe in their real hearts Australians are so racist and greedy and selfish and cruel. “Our country has fallen into the hands of thieves.” I remembered pelting across Berlin on my bicycle to vote at the Australian embassy, the sense of resolution and purpose in the room, mostly young people, filling the forms in, voting. I remembered keeping an appointment the next week with a shiatsu masseuse I had fallen in like with, who said when I showed up, “You look pale. What’s the matter, are you ok?” And I said, “Something terrible has happened in my c~, in my country,” my voice broke and I sat on her futon and sobbed. Who could have guessed then how terrible it was. The vengeance on anyone vulnerable and poor. The vindication of everyone landed and privileged. The silencing of anyone who is not white, in a country built on burnt rich black and red soil. My belief in life is that people are kind, it is only our damage and pain that makes us take out more damage and pain on each other. Tony Abbott’s government feeds to that a small, poison doubt, telling and insidious: Maybe not all people are only cruel because hurting. Maybe there are some, walking amongst us but psychopaths, who seem functional and believe in themselves but who gain satisfaction from inflicting suffering. Satisfaction, pleasure, and release.

  • til the day I die

    This morning carrying coffee I walked past the hostel where an old Aboriginal man, gold-chocolate skinned and with a round white beard, sometimes sits in a folding chair under the trees waking up slowly. He and I like each other and we often say g’day. “Might get some rain,” he said, and I said, “Feels like it, doesn’t it?” Above our heads the murky trees were cacophonous with bird squabble. These are the rainbow lorikeets who yesterday dumped a couple twigs on my head when I passed them by underneath. “Those birds’ve got something to say about it, too,” I said. Later in the day I was crying in the car, having had some unexpected news. It’s ok. The radio was spurling some country song I had never heard before, the lyrics masculine and earnest. That’s because I listen to Murri Country, 4AAA. Every time they replay their station tag, “Murri Country,” meaning, Aboriginal, Indigenous Country, I think: yeah, a good thing, too. I think of it like a drip drip on the stone that slowly might wear a hole. So the blood can come out, the more justice and kindness. The singer said something that made me laugh, a kind of watery giggle. “I’m not going to stop loving you,” he sang, “until the day I die.” Immediately I saw him in his death bed, primly folded in the neatly pressed hospital sheets, flapping his hand to get rid of the wife who has not realised this means, “but, girl – on that day you are on your own.” “You,” he says calmly, “get lost.” She says, “But we had a contract! You promised! You were gunna love me until the day…” He says, his voice gravelier now but the same voice still, “Yeah, love – actually you misread that.”

  • great barrier grief

    I feel so ashamed and disgusted and frightened at what’s happening in my country. The inhuman way the world’s oldest civilization are treated. The lack of generosity towards people needing help who arrive on our shores. The decision to dump dredging waste from the expansion of a coal port within the National Park created to protect the world’s largest living organism, the Great Barrier Reef. The carte blanche offered to quick-buck miners who gouge what they can from our ancient resources – I’m including forest-strippers and tree-pulpers here as ‘miners’ – at the cost of sacred sites, irreplaceable rock art, and whole mountains which have withstood millenia but crumble before the dreary dollar. The cars stoked with air conditioning in which we transfer ourselves from one over-stuffed mansion to the next. Malls filled with landfill. Food which is hardly food, young people’s beauty marred by the treacherous marbling fat that comes from addiction to additives and inactivity, trans fats and sugar. We are so rare and beautiful and our earth, on whose surface we are still a minority, exquisite beyond words. There is more microbial life in a teaspoon of soil than there are humans who have ever lived, all counted together. My heart is sick and heavy and I don’t know how to drag us to the point where how we live remembers that.