Australia Day Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Lowanna, John, Dylan, Jesse – my children.

  This country and this world are yours.

  EPIGRAPH

  I say we have a bitter heritage,

  but that is not to run it down.

  Randolph Stow, Tourmaline

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  The View from the Shore

  Part 1: Home

  The Vanishing Place

  The Story of Us

  Part 2: Family

  Finding Frank Foster

  The Everywhen

  From Missions to Migrants

  Part 3: Race

  Look, a Negro!

  The White Gaze

  The Australian Voice

  The Voodoo of Race

  Part 4: History

  Between Discovery and Hope

  The Owl of Minerva

  To Remember to Forget

  Nostalgia for Injustice

  Part 5: Nation

  Thirty Steps Between Us

  The Cunning of Recognition

  We Are Now One People

  The Torment of Powerlessness

  What To Us is 26 January?

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Selected Sources

  About the Author

  Also by Stan Grant

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In 2016 I took my youngest son through the law: the burrbang. That is what my Wiradjuri ancestors called initiation – a coming of age when a boy would leave childhood to become a man. Once my son’s body would have been ritually scarred as old men unlocked ancient secrets. But I took him on another journey – a journey into the secrets of Australia. I told him stories that we don’t tell – stories of the Great Australian Silence. We took a road trip back to the country of my ancestors, we passed its fields, its rocks, its rivers and streams. I had been away from Australia for many years. It was a refuge I suppose, I needed to breathe – this place can bear down hard. But now I was home, with my son, and I needed answers to questions that I had carried with me for a lifetime.

  That journey became a book, Talking to My Country. I wrote it as Australia was again torn apart by race. Each week football fans booed and hounded the Indigenous AFL player, Adam Goodes, until he walked away from a game he had loved. I wanted to tell Australia how this country could make us feel; how it could lay us so low. As I wrote then, Australia’s ‘wounds rest deep and uneasily in our soul. I am the sum of many things, but I am all history’.

  In the years since I have wondered about that: is that true – am I bound forever to my history? Is this my son’s inheritance? This is what I try to answer now. This book is my attempt to break free. What is it to be Australian? I look at land, family, race, history and nation – five things that go to my identity. This book is drawn from a collection of speeches and essays – particularly the Quarterly Essay ‘The Australian Dream: Blood, History and Becoming’, published by Black Inc. – but I have taken the licence to play around with them, join the dots and clarify some of my thoughts. Together they are a window onto my country and myself. These past years I have changed and my country has changed – but I ask that same question: who are we?

  INTRODUCTION

  I am Australian. There is no other place on earth from where I could come. Think about that: I could only have been created here. The history of this land runs through my veins. I am old and I am new. My bloodline connects me to the first footprints on this continent. Two million sunrises have put me here.

  My name – Grant – was shipped here in chains. John Grant, an Irish rebel – just a boy really – banished forever from his home, transported to this penal colony. He would never touch the soil of Tipperary again; he lies in a field under a headstone in the rich plains west of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.

  He left behind a new family: not just Aboriginal and no longer Irish, but something entirely new. We imagine that history rises and falls; we mark time by beginnings and endings. The arrival of Europeans on these shores was not the end for my Aboriginal ancestors or I wouldn’t be here. I also carry Ireland deep in me, enough to feel I’d come home when I first walked the streets of Belfast. That’s how history works; we don’t move in straight lines, we weave in and out of each other. We sail our ships and find new worlds. As novelist Richard Flanagan says, ‘We – our histories, our souls – are . . . in a process of constant decomposition and reinvention.’ This is becoming; this is what we do, humans. We are on a never-ending journey towards each other. We are strangers and then we are family. Before we even called this place Australia, an Australian family – my family – was born.

  This is my history. It lives in me.

  Australia is the name we give this place, but what is in a name? Nothing really . . . and yet everything. People have died for this place we name Australia. This is what we have built, all of us, and it is precious. It exists in us. We carry it in our stories. That’s what matters: story. A nation is nothing if not a story: memories and history.

  I am Australian. I have Australian memories: sun-scorched days at the pool; sticky orange ice blocks; backyard cricket; broken bicycle chains; hot chips and vinegar; warm milk at recess; inkwells; wet woollen jumpers; frost-cracked fingers.

  I am Australian. I have Australian history: Captain Cook; the First Fleet; convicts; Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth; Burke and Wills; Merino sheep; the Gold Rush; Gallipoli; the Great Depression; Menzies and Gough.

  I am Australian and I have other memories. Australian memories: a dirt road on the outskirts of town; mangy dogs and broken glass; my father’s wounds; my mother’s poems of stolen kids and welfare men; too many funerals.

  I am Australian and I have another history. An Australian history: Bennelong, Pemulwuy and Windradyne, who met the British on the frontier, fought, forged friendships, made peace; Truganini and the black line in Tasmania; the Appin massacre; martial law in Bathurst; segregated missions; the Day of Mourning; no blacks allowed and the Freedom Ride.

  This is me. All of it. We are all of this. It just is.

  But then, it isn’t. Now it feels like a battleground. It is as if this day – Australia Day – must pit my ancestors white and black in some conflict without end. It is a fight with myself; I can’t possibly win. What am I supposed to forget? What part of my story am I expected to embrace and what part do I reject?

  In A Poison Tree, William Blake wrote:

  I was angry with my friend;

  I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

  I was angry with my foe:

  I told it not, my wrath did grow.

  I wonder, would he write those words today? What would Blake think of social media, where our voices are amplified, yet our anger grows. What was meant to bring us together is more often a star chamber where people are put on trial by nameless, faceless trolls. It has become a battleground for ever more strident identities.

  We prize identity more than citizenship. We look to what divides us; define ourselves in opposition to each other. This is an age of grievance, and grievance is a demoralising basis for identity. It is a contest of wounds; a contest in which there can be no winner. Wounds are trumps. At its worst, these singular identities tear the world apart. This is the world I have seen; a world that straddles dangerous fault lines of race, history, religion, ideology. We never learn, it is like we are hardwired for this; we form our tribes and we go to war.

  Today, we call this the politics of identity and it is among the great perils of our time. This is identity that breeds in the swamplands of history; history as betrayal; a narrative of loss and inheritance robbed. It is history told from the losing en
d. It is feeding the resurgence of global populism, from Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ to Vladimir Putin’s lament for the Soviet empire or Xi Jinping’s reminder to the Chinese people of the hundred years of humiliation by foreign powers; and it laps against our shores too.

  It has been said that looking at history takes one’s breath away. I admit to the choking feeling of living with the burden of the past. As an Indigenous Australian I have felt torn between embracing and celebrating all that is great in our nation, living with the all too painful reality that it is not so great for everyone; and that my family, like so many other Indigenous families, has paid a terrible price for the greatness of Australia. For too long the worst of our history was denied or silenced. But no longer. As uncomfortable as it is, we are reckoning with our history. On 26 January, no Australian can really look away.

  As a nation we must ask hard questions of ourselves and there is something that gnaws at me. Yes, it is important to remember, but do we also have to let go? Is forgetting the price we must pay for peace? The history of the world is conquest and violence, nations are born in blood: revolution and war. No land is ever surrendered, but can those vanquished ever win justice? Is reconciliation the best that we can hope for? We write anthems to nations, yet we are still to find a song we can all sing. We must ask ourselves difficult questions on Australia Day. What does it mean to call ourselves a nation? As the nineteenth-century French historian Ernest Renan wrote, a nation is a ‘daily referendum’; he meant that a nation is never finished, that whatever our differences there is a collective will to live together. There are those who want the date changed from 26 January, others who wish to keep it and some who want Australia Day abolished entirely.

  Shouldn’t we first ask: who are we? The debate around our national day tests our democracy: a moral and political claim by a minority that challenges the very legitimacy and morality of the majority. Can we celebrate a day that marks the extraordinary achievements of our nation, when others see it as an insult? Whether the day is moved or not, still we must live together.

  These past years, I have travelled back into our past, untangling the crooked branches of my family tree, how they wind around each other – black and white. All of our families are planted in this soil, together we are a creole garden that we call a nation. As a boy I loved trees, I loved climbing them to escape from the world. For hours I would hide out in the big old gumtree at the back of my grandmother’s house. If anyone called for me I would stay silent, hoping to grab just a little more time on my own. I could think there and what I thought about most were those people I called my own, I thought about what put us here and I thought about getting away.

  Even then, a boy of eleven or twelve, I knew there beat in me a fierce contest for my soul. Later I would realise this was not at all unusual. I read the African-American philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois, and he felt the same ‘double consciousness’; within him, he said, beat the soul of an American and the soul of an African. Dr Du Bois looked at America and called it out. Could it live up to its creed of equality? Could it rise above its original sin of slavery? Du Bois turned to history’s greatest thinkers, he immersed himself in the ideas of liberalism that emerged from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the age of reason, the Enlightenment, that set loose in the world the promise of liberty and freedom. The idea of America would have been impossible without the Enlightenment. Yet, Du Bois knew that the founding fathers had betrayed their own faith.

  There is in me, too, a deep Aboriginal spirit and the yearning to be Australian – and I don’t wish to deny or lose either. Can I live in the Enlightenment and the Dreaming? Can I be black and white? Can liberal democracy, Australia’s founding faith – the promise of equality and justice – truly work for us all? Du Bois famously said that the problem of the twentieth century would be the ‘problem of the colour line’; that problem has carried over with me into the twenty-first century and like that little boy in the tree I wonder if I will ever escape it.

  If there is one promise of the Enlightenment, it is this: the hope of what one of its foundational thinkers, Immanuel Kant, called ‘perpetual peace’. Kant said we must put away ‘the ball and chain of permanent, everlasting, minority’; we must imagine ourselves beyond our tribes. To be tied to tribe or nation is to remain tied to the ball and chain of childhood. We would find peace when we saw ourselves in each other. It is a glorious idea, that I can be liberated from race or culture; but it is an idea whose time is yet to come. Perhaps it is beyond us. We don’t stray too far from the clan; the light of the cave draws us back and the light of a distant hill is to be feared. History reminds us time and again how we are hardwired to make war against each other.

  Yet, I believe that liberalism is our best chance; our shot at the ‘end of history’, that moment when we can put aside the things that divide us. I do not have to be a prisoner of my past or a captive of my race; I can open my life to the possibilities of the world. If there is such a thing as a cosmopolitan – a citizen of everywhere – it is me.

  Still I am drawn back here; to this somewhere. No matter where I go, I can only truly belong here. Australia is my home and it is my battleground; the place where I confront my own tribe. We are each other. In my case, it is physical: I am a part of you as you are a part of me.

  At a time when we yell from the fringes I look to the words of the great philosopher of liberty, John Stuart Mill, who looked for the elusive centre, ‘softening their extreme forms, and filling up the intervals between them’. I am the conquered and the conqueror, the coloniser and the colonised, black and white – and somewhere among all of that contradiction is an Australian and if I cannot be an Australian I am not sure I can really be anything.

  THE VIEW FROM THE SHORE

  In 2018 Australia Day turned angrier. There was spit in the air; clenched fists and tens of thousands of voices raised in what sounded like a collective snarl. Momentum had been growing to change the date; now it was approaching a tipping point. Some Australian local councils had already abandoned the celebration. Everything was up for grabs: our history, our monuments and statues, our flag. The twenty-sixth of January was now a battleground in a culture war over just what it was to be an Australian. Indeed, some of the Aboriginal protesters maintained they were not Australian at all but something else, something rooted in an ancient sovereignty never ceded. The landing of the First Fleet in 1788 did nothing to change that. What were once called tribes are now reconstituted as nations. It is a resurgence of black pride: languages almost dead are being revived; some people are reclaiming traditional names. This Australia Day was a battle over nationhood: who defined it and who belonged. The mood was captured in the acronym of the activist group Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance – WAR. Old political hardheads were reborn, like pied pipers leading a new generation of activists; they mounted podiums and seized microphones, rallying the crowds like it was 1970 again.

  The biggest protest was in Melbourne, at least 60,000 people. They chanted, ‘Always was, always will be Aboriginal land’; they carried banners calling for ‘Justice’, proclaiming a ‘day of mourning’. Onlookers celebrating, proudly waving the Australian flag, were told they should be ashamed of themselves. One protester screamed, ‘If you celebrate Australia Day, fucker, you’re celebrating the death of my ancestors.’ One of the activists, a well-known writer who identifies as Indigenous, said Australia did not deserve a day of national celebration in any capacity. Someone else was more blunt: ‘Fuck Australia, hope it burns to the ground.’

  I knew where this anger came from; I had felt it myself. At a younger age I may well have been among them. I had cursed Australia, I felt no allegiance to a country that had rejected me. As I had written in my book Talking to my Country, ‘Australia was for other people’. Australia was white. It has been a long road to becoming an Australian, first I had to leave. It was overseas that I realised just how Australian I was; all of those clichés are true: we don’t stand on ceremon
y, we are quick to laugh and we laugh loudly, we work hard and we treat people as we find them. Wherever I moved I would keep an ear open for that familiar accent. I realised for the first time, we are a people – black and white; two centuries together on a harsh isolated continent has changed us.

  Now, on 26 January 2018, I was far from home again, in another part of the world, and on this day, I was glad of it. I watched the protests on the television news in my hotel room. The Australian Chamber of Commerce had invited me to Hong Kong to give the annual Australia Day address. It is funny that I say ‘far from home’, because in so many ways Hong Kong is home to me. I lived there for several years, working for the American broadcasting giant CNN. This teeming former Chinese outpost of the British Empire is special to me. The years my family spent there were professionally and personally among the happiest of my life. Hong Kong was where we truly became a family, where we bonded most tight.

  When we had touched down the night before, all was right with the world. I always felt that way coming in to land, looking down at the water and the jagged coastlines of the dotted islands below. My wife and I caught the airport train into Hong Kong central and then a taxi to our hotel. We always laughed to ourselves in a Hong Kong cab, at how the driver could accelerate and brake seemingly at the same time; giving the car a lurching, surging quality. We hovered between whiplash and motion sickness, but it was one of the rituals of being back and it gave me comfort that some things never change.

  I wanted to overdose on Hong Kong, I wanted to breathe it all in, not waste a minute. It had been a few years since we had been back, and I was eager to taste it all again. There was a little hole-in-the-wall roast pork restaurant just around the corner from where we used to go for Buddhist meditation classes. There it was, exactly as I remembered it, the same crispy skin pork hanging in the window. Wan Chai, a busy bar strip area, was humming and we pushed our way through the crowds spilling out of the clubs and pubs. I could hear the Filipino bands and see the girls on the street luring half-drunk red-faced white men in for another drink. If we ate quickly enough, my wife and I could get a cab to the other end of the island to our old favourite foot massage place. Home is always about the small things. As an Aboriginal person I am meant to talk about my spiritual connection to my country and it is true I do feel that intensely, but Hong Kong – in its own way and for different reasons – speaks just as powerfully to my soul.