The Best Australian Essays 2014 (25 page)

‘You know, we did good work in the Warumpi Band. We made the country take notice. And we had the best fun.'

George struggled to get up, the emotion rising in him. ‘You, me and Sammy. Warumpi Band was the first—'

That's all he could say. He stayed half-standing, leaning forward, staring at the ground, his hands clutching the chair's arms, his mouth agape as if puzzled why his body would not respond.

Out front a Toyota was waiting to take me to the airstrip, where a return flight was booked. I clasped hands with regal old Matjuwi Burarrwanga, George's father, slim, tall, long grey-white hair, a straggly beard. Nearly blind and confined mostly to a wheelchair, his intellect, authority and spiritual strength were intact. I had lost my father; now Matjuwi was losing a son. As I bid Matjuwi goodbye I hoped to convey my gratitude and respect for him as my kinship father, and for having known his son.

Everybody came out to see me off – but seeing George there surprised me. He could not stand unaided but he was showing me his spirit was buoyant. Same as it ever was. Climbing into the Toyota, I turned to him.

‘Goodbye,' I said.

‘Goodnight,' he said – a parting quip.

From out the Cessna's window I stared blankly while we accelerated along the asphalt before lurching into the air, a slab of turquoise sea opening up beneath the plane's wings, and as we swung left over the community I tried, in vain, to pinpoint George or his family's house before they were swallowed by the scrub, then the shore.

*

In a studio in east Balmain, where I was recording my second solo album in 1991, I had a visitor one evening – not unusual, musos were always dropping in, generally to see one of the producers, either Mark Moffatt or Jim Moginie. This muso was different. He was Yolngu. And he was blind.

Gurrumul entered and stood quietly, an interested smile on his attentive face as he listened to the studio sounds. I remembered seeing him play with Yothu Yindi. I knew he was gifted. We touched hands briefly, softly, and I sensed respect and admiration, also connection – via my long-time association with one of his countrymen, George. I hoped to reciprocate the same feelings to him. We didn't engage in conversation. He was pleased just to say hello and soak up the studio ambience. I had the distinct feeling this was where he wanted to be: in a recording studio, so he could paint the colours of the sounds in his head. The next time we shook hands he would be a multi-platinum artist.

*

The last song of Paul Kelly's set at a 1993 gig I played with him in Dee Why was a moving ballad called ‘Took the Children Away' – written, he announced, by Archie Roach. Afterwards PK asked if I'd heard of him. Archie was originally from Framlingham in south-west Victoria, less than an hour's drive from where I was born and raised, but of course I couldn't possibly have known him: Archie was taken away, aged three. In my local district Aboriginal people were absent, or at least not conspicuous. Somehow I formed the idea they were all up north and set a course for the Northern Territory. Paradoxically, it was only by going to Papunya that I came to realise what had been lost in my home country – and what could be gained.

When Archie and I finally met at the Annandale Hotel that same year he said straight off: ‘We like the Warumpi Band – that George, he's really something.' I told him I was from the Lake Bolac district. ‘It's funny,' said Archie, ‘how a lot of us from western Victoria got into music.' Amy Saunders, Shane, Damian and Marcia Howard, Rose Bygrave, Richard Frankland, Dave Steel, Brett Clarke, Lee Morgan … Discovering that Archie and others came from where I came from became a cumulative influence on my decision to return.

At first I was desperate to get close to Archie. But he was reclusive, and not forthcoming about confiding in anyone beyond his partner Ruby and immediate family. I began to realise he was struggling with his own stuff. I have since learnt a lot more when we have shared a stage, where he readily opens himself up to a live audience. He has humbled me with some generous remarks, saying my songs and writing taught him an important truth: you don't have to be Aboriginal to have a connection and spirituality with the land. When I first mentioned Archie to Sammy and George I told them, proudly, that he was my countryman.

*

Kev Carmody is from a Queensland droving family and it was Joh Bjelke-Petersen's Queensland, it seems to me, that put the fire in his belly. Kev's mission is to expose, in song, hypocrisy and truth. For someone who writes such weighty, powerful material he is jovial company. We did some music workshops in jails, and at one particular maximum-security centre in Lithgow – where indigenous inmates were grossly over-represented, just like in all the other jails – the female warden was leading us through security barrier after barrier. As we paused in a confined space before a heavily fortified door, the one that would finally get us inside, I had in my head the doors-opening-and-closing title sequence from
Get Smart.

‘You know,' said the warden, ‘we've got the worst of the worst in here.'

‘Oh, really, what are the inmates like?'

Kev was quick.

*

I only heard Brian Murphy after he was gone. A Tennant Creek producer and engineer, Jeff McLaughlin, kept pushing into my hands, twice in two years, a CD of Brian's songs. ‘You gotta hear this,' he'd say.

People are always giving me CDs. They wave them in my face. I gotta take them. They want me to take them. I don't know why. They must think I can make something happen for them. I'm flat out making something happen for myself. Even if the stuff is good, I say, what am I gonna do? I'm not a record company. I'm not a publisher.

Back in Tennant Creek the next time Jeff was still talking about Brian – telling me of the occasion at Winanjjikari Studio when Brian turned up unannounced in a taxi with a bunch of elderly grandmothers and said, ‘We're recording now.' Jeff barely had time to get the leads plugged in. Brian launched into an acoustic-driven lament, in Warlpiri, while the grandmothers fired up a traditional chant around him. It was a one-take only.

On the drive back to Alice I put on that track – ‘Jipirunpa' – the final song on Brian's 2009 album
Freedom Road,
released by Winanjjikari Music through Barkly Arts. It sounds chaotic, random even, Brian alone on an acoustic guitar, and after a while he starts singing low, a melancholic refrain, and suddenly a bunch of old women erupt with a traditional chant except this chant of theirs has a totally different structure. The piece turns and repeats on itself, compelling you to take in the cyclical melody, it's enchanting, Brian's world-weary vocal rising and falling with the tough grit of the grandmothers until – finally I'm forced to concede to Jeff – it makes powerful emotional sense. ‘I have heard nothing like it,' I say. ‘I love it.'

Maybe I'd met Brian years ago, briefly, somewhere? Maybe at a Warumpi Band gig? We played in Tennant many times. Maybe he watched us from the shadows? Maybe I shook his hand? I would never know. Why is Brian dead?

Brian Murphy was born in Tennant Creek and raised in Ali Curung. He was of Warlpiri and Warumungu parentage. He had – as far as can be known – a normal indigenous-community childhood. His father Albert played guitar. One day Brian wagged school and stayed home to play that guitar. His father admonished him for that. In general, Brian was too smart for school and was mucking up.

Were the school or Brian's parents or Brian looking for opportunities outside Ali Curung? For when Brian was fourteen or fifteen a fateful decision was made. Somehow it was arranged for Brian to go – indeed, he went willingly – to Darwin, to a white man. In 1987 the man took Brian to Papua New Guinea. Brian's family thought Brian was in boarding school. For four years Brian was the victim of sexual abuse and exploitation. He poured himself into music, learning all he could. At nineteen, and presumably too old for the man (who had ‘adopted' another, younger boy), Brian was sent back to Tennant Creek.

When Brian returned he brought with him dozens of cassettes. Songs were burning in his chest. He formed Band Nomadic, one of the Barkly region's top bands of the late '80s and early '90s. Brian's voice was deep, fearless, heartfelt. It was the authentic voice of painful lived experience yet capable of great tenderness. His songs – stunning lyrically and melodically – expressed the anguish, pain, loss and love in his own life and his people's lives. He had a grasp of Western song structure far ahead of his peers. One song, ‘The Rock', about the 1985 handback of Uluru to its traditional owners, was recorded by popular Top End band Blekbala Mujik. Brian received no acknowledgement or royalties.

He found it difficult to resettle and cope with family pressures in Tennant Creek. Alcohol and drug abuse went hand in hand with petty crimes that escalated to him spending time in and out of prison. Jasmin Afianos, editor of the
Tennant & District Times,
was one who knew him well. ‘Brian emerged from his childhood experiences so very torn,' she says. ‘Torn between two cultures, heterosexuality and homosexuality, success and failure, love and hate, and good and evil. He often tumbled from the tightrope into a dark, raging, angry void, surfacing only to the sounds of music.'

When in jail Brian continued to write and record; Jeff has dozens of recordings made in prison. When out of jail he often took off interstate. He made a living busking around Flinders Street Station and jammed with musicians such as Joe Camilleri. Jeff, trying doggedly to complete the recording of many of Brian's songs, tracked him down in Melbourne. They recorded a vocal take live onto a laptop beside the Yarra River. Afterwards, Jeff recalls, Brian passed out in a bar.

With warrants out for his arrest, Brian kept ahead of the police. He went to Adelaide. He had family there. He busked around Hindley Street and Rundle Street mall but was always falling in with unsavoury types. And alcohol, drugs and hard living were taking their toll. He succumbed to serious illness, ending up in an Adelaide hospital, where he died in June 2010. His body was flown home and buried in Tennant Creek. That August, Brian was posthumously inducted into the Northern Territory Music Hall of Fame.

All we have are the songs he left us, which ring resonant, clear and irresistible to all those who seek them. If royalties ever eventuate his family want to erect a headstone for him.

*

It happened in the Gulf Country. I was booked to do a gig at a mine where a lot of local indigenous people were employed. They knew me from decades ago with the Warumpi Band, and they also knew that with the passing of the lead singer that band was no more. When I got the phone call to come and play I was incredulous.

‘You sure you want me? I'm not in the pop charts. I'm not even in the mainstream.'

‘We're not in the mainstream either, bro. We want you.'

I didn't need a publicist. Blackfellas don't forget you. Later we were having a few post-gig beers in the warm night air, insects chucking themselves at the yellow lights blazing above the accommodation dongas, and me being introduced to some indigenous men I'd never met but who seemed keen to meet me. Some were near my age, most were younger. Gig organisers Patrick Wheeler and Alec Doomadgee were doing the introductions. One young man, waiting patiently in the shadows, came forward when it was his turn and clasped my hand in his.

‘If not for your music, I wouldn't be alive now.'

The other blokes nodded. They must have known the lad's history. Suddenly the decades of struggle, sacrifice and hardship in the music game mattered naught.

‘Brother,' I said, ‘that is the best thing I've ever heard. Thanks for telling me.' I glanced around. ‘And what about this mine? Is it a good thing?'

‘If we had our way,' said Alec, ‘we'd say fill in the hole, put it back the way it was. But what can you do? We got no right of veto, only to negotiate. If we don't negotiate they gonna dig it up anyway. So we try to make the best of a bad situation.'

The Best Music Writing Under the Australian Sun

The War of the Worlds

Noel Pearson

A personal quadrant of the Australian landscape

I came upon this foreword some years ago when sharing an enthusiasm of my youth for H.G. Wells's
The War of the Worlds
with my young son. Even as he makes his way through his own all-consuming passions of boyhood – Thomas, the Crocodile Hunter,
Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings,
Minecraft and now Harry Potter – I indulge my own nostalgia by sharing those things that possessed me when I was a boy. We've done
Richard III,
to which we will doubtless return. We've read Charles Portis's masterpiece
True Grit,
and watched the original John Wayne film and the Coen brothers' remake a hundred times. We've acted out the shoot-out scenes; he's always Rooster. We are yet to get to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
His younger sister and I have started
Great Expectations.

First turned on by Jeff Wayne's musical version of
The War of the Worlds
in early high school, aware of Orson Welles's radio hoax and having read the Wells book, I was stunned to have been unaware of the inspiration for the idea of a Martian invasion of England – its origin in what was called the ‘extirpation' of the original Tasmanians. I was disquieted that the source of this extraordinary production in world culture was unknown to me. I knew it was likely unknown to everyone around me, and to almost all of my fellow Australians. How come?

H.G. Wells knew of the original Tasmanians, but that did not mean he felt empathy for the fate of this ‘inferior race' at the hands of the British. Instead he subscribed to the scientific racism of his era, believing them ‘Palaeolithic', and writing, ‘The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants.'

In
The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania
(2014), the English historian Tom Lawson shows how the destruction of the Tasmanians played out in British culture. We will return to Lawson's contribution to the debate on genocide in Tasmania soon, after we lift the scales from our eyes concerning some of the most revered figures of that culture in the nineteenth century.

The novelist Anthony Trollope, in his emigration guide
Australia and New Zealand
, demanded his British readers squarely face the fact that colonisation involved the theft of land and the destruction of its original owners – which fact was not morally wrong but an advancement of civilisation. Lawson writes that Trollope cannot be taken as other than calling for genocide when he wrote: ‘of the Australian black man we may say certainly that he has to go. That he should perish without unnecessary suffering should be the aim of all who are concerned in this matter.'

Charles Darwin, the century's greatest scientist (whom Lawson calls ‘a self-conscious liberal humanitarian'), while opposing polygenist theories that various races were distinct species, nevertheless proposed culture as the basis of inferiority and superiority (Lawson: ‘indigenous Tasmanians in Darwin's formulation had been swept aside by a more culturally developed, more civilised people'). Lawson writes:
‘The Descent of Man
was Darwin's answer to that new political context, in which he asserted that while biologically the human race
was
singular there were in effect cultural differences that allowed for some form of racial hierarchy. The Tasmanians appeared at the bottom of this hierarchy.'

Darwin wrote:

Of course, the deformation of Darwin's theory of natural selection into social Darwinism and the scientific racism of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth was the source of much misery for indigenes throughout the colonial world. Darwin was not entirely innocent of this conflation of biology and culture, which gave scientific authority to an ideology of inevitability about the demise of the Tasmanians and others of their ilk in the face of European superiority.

I expected Charles Darwin. But I didn't expect Charles Dickens.

Of the century's greatest English novelist, the author of
Great Expectations
and an immortal canon, Lawson writes, ‘Dickens famously attacked … the humanitarian idealisation of the “noble savage” in June 1853, in a furious denunciation that amounts, to use modern-day language, to a call for genocide.'

Dickens wrote:

I am yet to work out whether, how and when to tell my girl that the creator of Pip, Pumblechook and that convict wretch Magwitch may have wished her namesake great-great-grandmother off the face of the earth.

Ironically, when one's identification with the magnificent literary treasures of England turns out so, there is a Dickensian pathos to the crestfallen scene. One is acutely conscious of what Robert Hughes called ‘anachronistic moralising', but the bridge between our contemporary values and those of Dickens's time should surely be a universal and timeless humanity – but alas not.

I don't know whether it is hard for all Aborigines, but it certainly is for me, to read this history with a historian's dispassionate objectivity and without the emotional convulsions of identification and memory. As a child, I loved my mother's mother most in the world; her humour, generosity and ill-temper I often detect in myself and in the various countenances of my children. An irascible, pipe-smoking, bush-born lady, she bustled with her portmanteau on perambulations to her numerous grandchildren growing up in the Daintree and Bloomfield missions, and the Hope Vale Mission of my childhood. She could have been Truganini, but less travelled and from a smaller rainforest world than the nineteenth-century Tasmanian whose passing in 1876 was a world-historical event, marking the assumed extinction of a race. It was a reverberation I would feel when I learnt her name in primary school and the awful meaning of her distinction.

How many Australians born in the 138 years since Truganini's death learnt her legend and scarcely thought deeper about the enormity of the loss she represented, and the history that led to it? Her spirit casts a long shadow over Australian history, but we have nearly all of us found a way to avert our eyes from its meaning.

That small item in the primary-school curriculum of my childhood would have been learnt by all my generation. Maybe it wasn't a formal part of any syllabus, but it was one of those salient facts of Australian society that every child absorbed, like Don Bradman's batting average and Phar Lap's outsized heart. It would have been learnt by John Howard and Paul Keating. By Gough Whitlam and Robert Menzies. I don't know if they teach kids about Truganini today.

As a student of history but not a historian, I am as well read as many, but I too have skirted this history. Learning later in life of the descendants of the original Tasmanians, and the offence of the assumption of extinction, seemed to lessen the imperative to face the question of Truganini's moral legacy. Maybe the scale of the horror diminished as the country accepted the fact of the continued survival of Tasmania's Aboriginal community. But surely the fact of the descendants' survival does not in any way alter or diminish the profundity of what happened to their ancestors.

In his 1968 Boyer Lecture, W.E.H. Stanner spoke of the ‘Great Australian Silence':

This excluded quadrant of the landscape was not just a national phenomenon: it was personal. Forgetfulness was not just a cult: it was resorted to by individual Australians, descendants of both the invading Europeans and the Aborigines. Australians who, like me, struggle to work out how we might deal with the past.

The cult of forgetfulness

I had hoped to avoid the past – for sheerly political reasons. In this essay I seek to make a case for constitutional reform recognising indigenous Australians. This must by definition be a unifying cause. If we don't have an argument that can persuade 90 per cent of the nation, then the cause of constitutional reform is lost. Any successful case must transcend the natural political and cultural polarities of Australian society, and seek and seize political bipartisanship. This can only happen if Australians faced with a constitutional proposition are led by the better angels of our nature.

The risk with history is that it may provoke partisanship and division, both among the cultural and political tribes of the nation at large, and between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

We witnessed this in the History Wars of the 1990s and 2000s, when the ‘black armband' historians and political leaders were pitted against the ‘white blindfold' historians and political leaders. Led by Keith Windschuttle on the one hand and Robert Manne and Henry Reynolds on the other, the wars were a bitter and not always illuminating affair.

But the wars were unavoidable.

Following the Great Australian Silence at the end of the 1960s, from the '70s through to the '90s there was a burgeoning of Aboriginal history, led by scholars such as Reynolds. In hindsight, given the intense relationship between indigenous policy and politics and the representation and interpretation of the nation's history, the rise of a counter-narrative in the form of Windschuttle's
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History
(Volume 1, 2002), was inevitable. No discourse can lean one way for long. No wind can blow from one direction without restraint.

The public contributions of the doyen of conservative historians, Geoffrey Blainey, were the first indications of the discomfort of those who held the settler Australian narrative. Blainey would have been better qualified to steady the ship of the nation's narrative had he done so as a historian. Instead he did so as a polemicist. His caricaturing of the new frontier history as the ‘black armband' view made for a tribal fight in the public square, rather than a debate within the discipline of history. Blainey's commendable record on Aboriginal history was obscured in the ensuing debate: he was not contemptuous of the Aborigines; he wanted to defend settler traditions. It was most unfortunate that Blainey made his case in this manner. A serious point in an unserious way.

Over the past three decades, I have read Henry Reynolds's numerous books, and I well understand the grounds upon which conservative and nationalist readers of his histories baulk at his interpretations. It seems to me that Reynolds's lifelong contribution has been a liberal pursuit of a shared history for the nation. He has been about finding grace for the nation by breaking the silence on Aboriginal history and all the time being faithful to Australia.

But there are two problems with Reynolds's project. First, he comes to the case from a patently political background. His wife, Margaret, was a Labor senator for Queensland during the Hawke years, and the couple came at politics and indigenous issues from a certain Labor left perspective. There is a strongly Fabian tone to his arguments, and trenchant advocacy frames his books. In the acknowledgements of
An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australian History
(2001), Reynolds tellingly reveals: ‘My family – Margaret, John, Anna and Rebecca – have been, as ever, supportive and have frequently reinforced my commitment to progress along the often difficult road of human rights advocacy.' Which, for his critics, raises the question whether he was primarily engaged in academic history or human rights advocacy, and perhaps suggests that more dispassion and less politics might have better enabled Reynolds to secure a shared history for his fellow Australians.

I will say at this point that I am at one with Henry and Margaret Reynolds on the human rights side of the equation, but at odds with them on the responsibilities side. They have been and are mute on the social crisis of Aboriginal Australia; indeed, I have observed that the policies needed to tackle indigenous misery – economic integration, social order and welfare reform – have been championed by the right, and in 2006 noted that ‘Windschuttle and [Gary] Johns are more attuned to many of the necessary policies than the progressives'.