Imagine that. Imagine claiming a whole vast and fast continent was empty, naming it Terra Nullius. The land of nothing. Imagine thinking you could fill it up with people you had no use for, people who had stolen, who had committed crimes. Imagine emptying your prison ships squalling on the Thames into big boats and sending those off far away south. And then you let your people starve, too proud and stupid to ask advice of the local native people, to ask them, “So what do you eat?” Imagine giving blankets out as donations, as a kindness, that had been seeded with deadly smallpox virus. Imagine poisoning waterholes. You steal their children and rape women and enslave women and men. You classify them as animals in the first Constitution, flora and fauna. You won’t let them out at night and Australia is crosshatched with Boundary Streets and Boundary Roads. You torment and torture men and women who have not paid a fine or who are drunk and disorderly and allow malicious racist police to murder them in cells. Imagine tolerating the suffering of a longstanding people who contract in their remote communities Dickensian diseases. Imagine ignoring the wisdom and courage of this oldest continual culture on all the earth, while you set fire to the continent you have stolen and then plundered. A billion native animals die. You won’t help and you won’t be helped. A coup arrives, a coup de grace, a shaft of insight in the form of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, written so graciously and with such courage and truth, and all the 3% of our population who have survived ongoing genocide ask for is just to be heard and to have some say in the running of the place, imagine just that, and you turn it down, call it division instead of progress, spit in the mouth of everything real and lasting, imagine currying the No vote and seeding doubt and calling it selfish and mean, imagine turning down this very small and modest and ambitious and generous-minded offer: we will help you run the place. We will bring our warriors and our mind. We’ll bring our heart back into the nation. Imagine turning down all of that. Inglorious, short-breathed, and stupid, and stale. Australia this is a referendum on our truthfulness and kindness. We are not enough.
Tag: Indigenous
-
stay with me
Once an Islander man stepped out onto the pavement as I was passing. We both stopped and stood facing one another. My heart was beating very fast. He had intricate ranking tattoos all over his face and his eyes were very dark. ‘Don’t go,’ he said, ‘stay with me for a while.’
-
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.
-
wake in flight
In my dream I was in this amazing cafe taking five floors of an abandoned building in Brisbane. Right at the top was a little terrace looking out only on treetops. There was a waitress dressed up in a robot suit she could not see out of which blinded her from doing her work, she struggled cutely from table to table and her colleagues were laughing gamely but I thought: how annoying. A boy who wanted to move to Scotland the next day & was saying farewell said to me, that is the thing about Brisbane! just when you leave something incredible opens up in the trees. Then I was talking with this man who lived on a remote island where he showed me how to find my way to his camp and said, this is where the olds are doing a lot of planning to take their Country back. Then he came in to wake me up pulling up the dense shutters and the sound of the dog snuffling and squeaking outside the door and it is time we went to the markets, we direly need vegetables and the birds are teeming life is like a dream, only people have chilly creaking jackets and their hug is cold because they have been sitting outside scented with coffee and the wind is icy although the sun is warm.
-
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.
-
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.
-
better to have loved and won
The guy I adore has conversations with birds. These appear to be actual reciprocal chats, where the bird says something and he answers. After he has mimicked what the bird has to say, the bird often answers again. Again he responds, using a sound palette of his own devising: whistles, chirrups and chirps, clucks of the tongue, and little spoken fragments that remake in our alphabet what the bird’s liquidity of throat has offered out into the air. He has a dozen ways of answering and the bird has endless spurls of its own devil-may-care. To me the birds as I hear them relating to him out on our verandah of a morning often sound rather curious and questioning. They sound like they like being answered, albeit clunkily, in translation.
This is mostly magpies and butcher birds, sometimes a noisy mynah: though he is more wary of them after they chased onto the four-lane road a nestling we found, on Australia Day when we had been in the country only five weeks. He scooped up the fledgling in his long hands and carried it down to Kurilpa Hall, where John Pilger’s excoriating film was being shown.
Australia Day, Invasion Day. Utopia, Utopia.
He was so worried about his baby bird that he couldn’t concentrate on the film we’d come to see. I was mortified. What could be more important than the showing in this community of this film, why should two white people with their tiny adopted bird get to disrupt the long-awaited screening. I sent him outside with his orphan and sat alone through the shaming, ennobling, uplifting film. It was crowded, it was hot. I wasn’t the only one crying. Afterwards we all filed out in silence and I found the two of them sitting outside in a folding chair under a tarp, surrounded by elders who were sipping their cups of tea and offering advice. My long-legged monster had taken off his beanie and had filled it with tufts of grass for a little nest, and the bird was perched on his lap and he had worked out a way to feed it droplets of water by dipping a long grass stem into a paper cup. “I’m going to call him Harry,” he said.
We walked home after the barbecue, after dark, it was a long walk which took us nearly two hours of hill-climbing. The little bird rode on his outstretched finger and, unbelievably, snuggled down into its own self and grew drowsy. To see this Berliner, new to Australia, carrying home a tiny fig bird on his finger and to see the bird trust him enough to fall asleep and ride asleep, this wild creature, this orphaned unnested one, was incredible to me. I said, I think he seems more like a Clarence. I think you’re right, he said, lifting the bird very gently to peer at him as we turned down to walk home along the river.
He spent the next weeks reading up about fig birds and their habits and habitats, mixing up revolting pulps and stews which Clarence wolfed down avidly, talking to him in whistles and purrs, evading the cat. Whenever the bird really liked something he would trill his little scaly wings by instinct, as though keeping himself hovering in the air in front of a favourite fruit or flower. His eyes were big and round and his neck was moulted of its baby fluff and bare of feathers. He was the funniest little guy you could imagine. The two of them sat at the computer for hours, working, and Clarence rode about the house on his friend’s shoulder. After a while there were flying lessons in the leafy backyard, a long arm held up high and swooping suddenly downwards to give Clarence the idea that he could take off, he could fly. Unmistakeably they were two best buds. We hid our smiles. They were inseparable.
Heartache came when we called the wildlife rescue people and were told you’re not, ahem, allowed to keep a wild bird in your home. My soft-hearted Berliner shed tears. He had arrived from so many miles away, from the snow, and made himself a root to fasten down into the soil by falling helplessly in love with this little halfclad chirping cute and ugly barely airborne birdie. On the day the two of them were due to meet the wildlife carer and try to put Clarence back in the same tree he had fallen from – “They’re unusual,” she said, “they’ll actually take them back” – a pall hung over the house. And even now, 10 months on, sometimes a fig bird comes to visit our mango tree and sings its song and this Berliner always cranes his neck: “Maybe it’s Clarence!”
-
bar none
Seems to me when you have yourself a brow bar (they only do eyebrows), a blow-dry bar (they only dry hair), and a tanning salon (they brown people) in the one block, it could be your locality is suffering what we might call First World Problems Syndrome. Meanwhile, in Arnhem Land…