A Secret Country Read online

  Surfboards then were long, hollow, heavy and water-logged. As they picked up speed, rather like my brother’s pre-war eight-cylinder Dodge, you needed exceptional strength to control them. Once on course, pity the board rider who failed to keep the bow of the board high and clear of the water. And once the nose dipped, explained Michael Blakemore, in his fine film, A Personal History of the Australian Surf, ‘the board dived straight to the bottom where caught in the slingshot of its own buoyancy, it catapulted back into the air like a missile leaving a silo. When that happened you leapt as far clear as you could and stayed submerged until you heard the thump of splashdown. If you lost the board on a wave you were safe, but innocent inshore bathers were in mortal danger.’6

  Lightweight Malibu boards, made from balsa, were introduced during the 1950s; and bodysurfing lost many of its faithful to the ‘hot doggers’ of the surf and what was said to be ‘high-density stimulation’. There was also a new masonic way of life, not unlike that of the bikers. You rubbed lemon juice or Ajax sink cleaner into your hair to bleach it; you drove an old Volkswagen and you were never satisfied with the surf of one beach only. Alas, I was never a committed hot dogger. I love swimming and bodysurfing too much. Striking out for a wave, then touching the beach at the demise of a perfect ‘boomer’, seems incomparable; no vehicle is necessary. Or perhaps the real joy is walking the long way back up the beach, legs unsteady, chest rising and falling, and then lying face down on the hot white sand and listening to the rhythm of your heart and feeling the hot dazzle on your back. There is a photograph taken in 1937 by the celebrated Australian photographer Max Dupain, entitled ‘The Sunbaker’, which appears on the cover of this book. It is of a man of indeterminate age lying on his front on the summer sand. His arms are folded; his head rests sideways on a forearm. There are drops of the ocean on him, and a salt streak across his shoulders. His eyes are closed; I imagine he is me.

  For most Australians, who live in congested coastal cities, the foreshore, the beach, is the one link with our ancient continent, about which we know little, whose surface we have grievously disrupted and whose original people we have banished and killed. We see and understand little beyond the last of the urban red-tiled roofs, but many of us understand well the rhythm of water on sand, of wind on current. A Bondi child will know the feel of a westerly, a nor’easterly and a ‘southerly buster’. There is a grace about this life. ‘The dolphins and the whales used to come in but we didn’t worry about them,’ said Jack Platt, the Bondi shark catcher. ‘They’d come and knock the barnacles off their backs against the rocks. The porpoises still come in when they’re mating . . . hundreds of them. They come in with the westerlies, they all pick their partners and dance [and] go up in the air. It’s the most glorious thing to watch . . . just like the surfers, they ride the waves and everything. A real picture.’7

  Bondi’s secret is hidden beneath Campbell Parade on the ocean front. It was here that the first Australians built a network of workshops and armouries in which they fashioned the weapons and tools – axes, spear points and knives – by which they lived and with which they endeavoured to defend their homeland against the white-skinned invaders who landed not far from Bondi. Some of the artefacts of their beach civilisation were found early this century, but most were thereafter buried beneath tarmac and concrete. All but a few of the original people of Bondi died from diseases brought by the invaders; or they were shot or poisoned.

  The first Aborigine I ever saw used to play Country and Western songs on a battered twelve-string guitar in the great urinals that were the public bars of Billy the Pig’s at Bondi Junction and the Royal on Bondi Road. As a newspaper boy I was allowed in during the ‘Six o’Clock Swill’, when the pubs closed. I noticed that the drinkers seemed kind to the Aborigine, and threw coins into his hat. ‘The boong’s worth a zac [sixpence],’ they’d say, ‘give him a fair go.’ In return he was obsequious in his appreciation, but his eyes were opaque and not at all grateful. He was called Jackie, as all blacks were called; no one would have known him by his real name. I last saw him swigging a bottle of sherry, slumped in one of the deckchairs that faced the music bowl at the back of the Bondi Pavilion. Jazz and La Traviata were performed there, admission free. On this occasion a Salvation Army band was playing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ to an audience of a dozen or so, including an amorous couple unconcerned about the sabbath, while the rest of us seriously considered the sun.

  2

  A WHISPERING IN OUR HEARTS

  At the white man’s school, what are our children taught?

  Are they told of the battles our people fought,

  Are they told of how our people died?

  Are they told why our people cried?

  Australia’s true history is never read,

  But the blackman keeps it in his head.

  Bill Day, from Bunji, December 1971

  LA PEROUSE, 1951. It was one of those moments in childhood when you stand outside yourself, outside ‘normal’ experience. The silhouettes related to no one. They were not meant to exist. They were meant to have ‘died off’. Certainly few adults spoke of them as if they existed and, anyway, they were not counted, unlike the nation’s sheep.

  But they were not invisible.

  I would go to La Perouse and stand on the sand hills and look at them. I was not supposed to do this, although no one had said so; it was assumed. It was not that these non-existent people, who lived in fruit-box houses, were dangerous, although no one could be sure. They were simply part of the collective ‘menace’ of vagrants and alcoholics who came here for refuge and truants and teenagers for ‘no good’, such as sex, and occasionally to drown in a surf that boiled and spat. There was also rusted iron and broken glass that made the sand scabrous and slashed your feet.

  My friends and I – especially Pete who came all the way from Bondi with me – would dare ourselves to walk down the sweep of the sand towards the fruit boxes. The silhouettes then would become faces and eyes which stared. The houses, or shanties, had wire-mesh doors to keep out the squadrons of flies which came over from dumped garbage; ‘Dump it at La Perouse’ was an expression. Behind each wire door there seemed to be a woman, watching and still.

  The flies were stuck on the children’s eyelids; and this was fascinating to us. Some of the children kept one eye closed. Perhaps because everybody in Australia squinted, this did not seem odd. That some could barely see at all was not known to us. Almost all of them had what I later heard described as ‘the Abo H’: permanent lines of mucus from the nose to the upper lip. This was confirmation that they were ‘dirty’. That they were racked by preventable infection we did not know.

  The boys of my age wore ragged ‘army disposal’ shorts with multiple buckles. The girls wore dresses made from sugar bags. We would gape at each other as if through an impenetrable wall of glass. The only exchange I can recall was when Pete was told by one of them to ‘get rooted’. The only time I saw them laugh was when they were diving for pennies. A large white man, who used to sell boomerangs made into ink stands, would bring people to watch the diving. These ‘tourists’ would throw the pennies.

  Men would appear from time to time, mostly from behind the houses and often with a bottle. They wore ‘cowboy clothes’, and whenever they caught sight of us they would go back behind the house. Shouting abuse at them was acceptable behaviour.

  Some of the men would collect behind La Perouse Cable Station, which was built in the last century to link Australia and New Zealand by telephone. There they had a large, old pram, from which came the clinking noise of bottles. They would argue with each other. Once one of them smashed a bottle and put it in another’s face. This had just happened when I got off the La Perouse tram, and it was exciting to run and see the pools of blood in the grass and a cop shouting, ‘What d’yer think yer doin’, yer black bastards?’

  La Perouse was one of the few Sydney beaches not given an Aboriginal name. Nearby there were Bondi, Tamarama, Coogee and Maroubra.
But Count Jean-François Gallup de La Perouse was remembered here, on the headland to Botany Bay. In one of history’s coincidences, he had appeared with two ships in Botany Bay on January 26, 1788, just after the arrival of Britain’s ‘First Fleet’ under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip.

  At school we were invited to sympathise with the Count. Had he arrived a few days earlier he could have ‘claimed’ Australia for France, and we would be speaking French now. We would try to imagine being French, and there was general agreement that we were fortunate to have been spared this unfathomable alternative to the higher calling of being British. No one seriously considered that Australia already belonged to people who had been there for millennia, who represented hundreds of ‘nations’ speaking their own languages and living in their own countries.

  When the British invaded, they declared Australia ‘Terra Nullius’, empty land, and for the purpose of historiography, those who inhabited this ‘empty land’ did not exist. And not only was such a denial of reality and logic exclusive to the Georgian mind; subsequent generations accepted the nuance that in this ‘empty land’ the original people were ‘dying off’.

  From 1952, when I entered high school, a standard history textbook was Man Makes History: World History from the Earliest Times to the Renaissance by Russel Ward. It sold more than 200,000 copies. This is an extract:

  Boys and girls often ask, ‘What’s the use of history?’

  Answer: There are still living today in Arnhem Land people who know almost no history. They are Aboriginal tribesmen who live in practically the same way as their forefathers and ours did, tens of thousands of years ago . . . We are civilised today and they are not. History helps us to understand why this is so.1

  Similarly, the standard Australian atlas in circulation from 1939 to 1966 described white ‘exploration’ of Australia as ‘the curtain of darkness . . . being slowly rolled back’. ‘Explored’ Australia was represented as white oases in an otherwise dark continent.2

  One explanation for the notion of ‘empty land’ was that the people living in it did not count because they were not really human. They were part of the fauna. The Encyclopaedia Britannica appeared to be in no doubt about this:

  Man in Australia is an animal of prey. More ferocious than the lynx, the leopard, or the hyena, he devours his own species.3

  One of the most widely read textbooks in Queensland schools was Triumph in the Tropics. Commissioned in 1959 for the State’s Centenary celebrations, it was the work of Sir Raphael Cilento and Clem Lack. The latter was public relations adviser to the Premier of Queensland. In Part Two, entitled ‘Queensland’s Expanding Frontiers: the Story of a Century of Progress’, there is a chapter on the Aborigines. This is an extract:

  Like his own half-wild dogs, the black could be frozen into shivering immobility or put to frenzied flight by people or things that provoked impressions of terror; or moved to yelps of delight or to racing round, or striking grotesque poses, or to expressing frantic excitement by any sort of clowning when what might have been menace proved, instead, amusing or brilliantly productive. In his bushland home he lived in such insecurity that his immediate response to any situation of surprise was almost a conditioned reflex – instantaneous: to strike, to leap aside, to fall and roll. Like his dogs, too, he could be cowed by direct and confident stare into a wary armed truce, but would probably attack with fury if an opponent showed signs of fear, or ran away, or fell disabled. These are primitive reactions common to many feral jungle creatures.4

  And as animals they possessed no rights, nor any claim to morality. A 1970 reprint of The Squatting Age in Australia by Professor Stephen Roberts concluded that:

  It was quite useless to treat them [the Aborigines] fairly, since they were completely amoral and usually incapable of sincere and prolonged gratitude.5

  This was a departure for Roberts, whose History of Australian Land Settlement, regarded as a classic account, included not a single reference to Aborigines. When a chair of anthropology was endowed by the Australian Government at Sydney University, it was for research into the origins of the indigenous people of New Guinea, not the indigenous people of Australia, who had been banished into a silent absence. Indeed the first Australians suffered double dispossession: territorial and linguistic. The Australian National Dictionary refers to ‘black gentleman’, a term of irony. The verb ‘to civilise’, when used of Aborigines, meant to domesticate, that is to enslave. ‘Dispersal’ was a euphemism for mass extermination.6

  ‘They are people who know almost no history . . . We are civilised and they are not.’ Lake Mungo is far from La Perouse, deep in the Australian continent. The hills of sand rise here like breaking waves petrified. Down their line pink cockatoos fall and ascend. These are the Walls of China which have marked the desert bed of Lake Mungo since the end of the Ice Age 15,000 years ago. Before that, there was an inland sea and glaciers on snowy mountains; and it was perilously cold. The first Australians lived here and survived the convulsions of these changes. At first they collected mussels at the lake’s shore and fished for golden perch with woven barrier nets. When the heat came and the lake vanished, they adapted to seed; and they endured.

  When I went there in 1967, Lake Mungo was part of the Gol Gol Sheep Station, of which little remained. There was the cavernous woolshed, built in 1869 by Chinese labourers who had come to find gold, and there was a picture of an old Scottish church, St Mungo, which had hung in the original homestead. The distinction of Gol Gol, I was told, was that 50,000 sheep were shorn here every season. That it was one of the places where the world’s oldest civilisation had begun was known only to the legatees of this civilisation, who then did not officially exist.

  In 1969 the first discovery was made. It was a human skeleton remarkably similar to that of a contemporary person, and it was of a young woman who had been cremated in what appeared to be a religious ceremony 26,000 years ago. The most recent previous discovery was of the skeleton of a very tall man, who lived perhaps 30,000 years ago. The upper part of his body had been covered with ochre, its earliest known use, which indicated religious ritual and the cultural investments of art, dance and song that maintain Aboriginal civilisation today.7

  Until recently white Australians knew little about this.8 Guided by a profound sense of racial superiority and colonial insecurity, the white nation denied itself the knowledge that something unique had been sustained in its adopted land. In northern Australia, a great rock, the Obiri, gave up its secrets to white researchers only in the 1960s. Standing where the East Alligator River flows along the escarpment of Arnhemland, the Obiri is a cathedral of the Gagadju and Kunwinjku peoples, whose galleries of paintings are here. The significance of these paintings has been compared with the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, with which the secrets of ancient Egypt were unlocked.

  The Obiri paintings predate the pharaohs by 20,000 years. They are more sophisticated than the cave drawings at Lascaux in France, by which the European tribes have measured their civilisation. Unlike paintings at the European pre-glacial sites, the Australian pictures are dynamic portrayals of life as it was lived; and their line extends unbroken to strange stick figures in broad-brimmed hats, the British ‘settlers’ of the nineteenth century. Now included belatedly in the World Heritage List, the Obiri’s galleries of paintings are said to be ‘perhaps the oldest and most significant expression of human creativity . . . the longest record of any group of people’.9

  During their long journey, which may have begun as immigrants from Asia 120,000 years ago, the first Australians evolved a civilisation whose sophistication is barely acknowledged by a white society still tied to stereotypes of its own invention. Far from being ‘primitive’, the first Australians demonstrated skills and mores in contrast with the rigid ways of the first Europeans. They learned languages better than whites. They displayed an intimacy with their environment that produced knowledge and skills of which the whites had no concept. They used fire to manage agriculture withou
t threatening the environment, allowing them not only to increase food production but to create a mosaic, with each section at a different stage of regeneration. Their ‘dreaming tracks’ created a means of communication between people living great distances apart, which is only now matched by satellites. Moreover, they lived lives whose intrinsic value, whose ‘Aboriginality’, took for granted qualities of generosity and reciprocity and could not conceive of extremes of wealth and poverty.

  The wellspring of this was Aboriginal reverence for the land of Australia, which they equated with life itself. They were the guardians of the land, and the land was critical to the sustenance of all human identity. ‘The land is us; it is our mother,’ a Walpiri man of northern Australia told me. ‘To know the land, to know and love where you come from, and never to go out and destroy it, is being right . . . is being civilised.’ Shortly before she died, the Aboriginal author Hyllus Maris wrote:

  I am a child of the dreamtime people,

  Part of this land like the gnarled gum tree,

  I am the river softly singing,

  Chanting our Songs on the way to the sea.

  My spirit is the dust devils,

  Mirages that dance on the plains,

  I’m the snow, the wind and the falling rain,

  I’m part of the rocks and the red desert earth,

  Red as the blood that flows in my veins,

  I am eagle, crow and the snake that glides,

  Through the rain forests that cling to the mountainside.

  I awakened here when the earth was new . . .

  There was emu, wombat, kangaroo.

  No other man of a different hue!