A Secret Country Read online

  I am this land and this land is me.

  I am Australia.

  The Australian story, centred upon the original Australians, remains white Australia’s secret. Fragments are known, of course, even taught in schools, and their legacies command headlines in newspapers and the attention of official commissions of enquiry. Some Australians claim to know more, but their confidence is frequently found to be unjustified. For these people, perhaps for the majority, the link between events in the uncharted past and today remains elusive or, as the historian Henry Reynolds has described it, ‘a whispering in our hearts’.

  ‘The barriers which for so long kept Aboriginal experience out of our history books’, wrote Reynolds in his modern classic, The Other Side of the Frontier, ‘were not principally those of source material’, which had been ‘available to scholars for a century or more. But black cries of anger and anguish were out of place in works that celebrated national achievement or catalogued peaceful progress in a quiet continent, while deft scholarly feet avoided the embarrassment of bloodied billabongs.’10

  With the Aborigines written out, the Australian story seems apolitical, a faintly heroic tale of white man against Nature, of ‘national achievement’ devoid of blacks, women and other complicating factors. With the Aborigines in it, the story is completely different. It is a story of theft, dispossession and warfare, of massacre and resistance. It is a story every bit as rapacious as that of the United States, Spanish America, and colonial Africa and Asia. It is, above all, a political story.

  Aborigines have been telling this political story for much of the past two hundred years. But few outsiders have seemed able to comprehend the enormity of what was done and is still being done. Australia was far from Europe and the Aborigines were relatively few in number. Unlike other indigenous peoples – the Indians of North America, the Maoris of New Zealand – they had no pact that acknowledged their rights as human beings. And although the anti-slavery movement showed interest in them, and an Aborigines Protection Society was formed in London, Aborigines appeared only fleetingly in the chronicles of the day. Few seemed to care that within days of the English landing in Australia the Aboriginal dreamtime ended and a nightmare began.

  William Dampier, the first English navigator and explorer to ‘discover’ Australia, shot dead an Aborigine as he came ashore.11 When the invasion began in earnest on January 26, 1788, the invaders were unlike anything the Aborigines had experienced. The Australians had enjoyed close trading relations with the Macassarmen of Indonesia; but the English showed no interest in trade or friendship.12 They brought men and women in chains, whose crimes were related to poverty and politics, and they were led by Christian gentlemen imbued with a sense of racial superiority and imperial mission. This transplanted society of masters and slaves puzzled the first Australians, who had not known servility. They were bemused by the beardless, frock-coated Englishmen and even wondered what sex they were. They were curious, not hostile; they led the strangers to water and waited patiently for them to leave.

  But they did not leave, and they brought death; and decimation was swift. Aboriginal blood carried no resistance to common European diseases, such as measles and colds. Within two years a smallpox epidemic had killed half the Aborigines living around Botany Bay and the coastal area north of what is now Sydney. Lieutenant Bradley, Royal Marines, reported in 1789, that ‘from the great number of dead natives found in every part of the harbour, it appears that the smallpox has made dreadful havoc among them’.13

  By 1795 Aboriginal guerrilla resistance was growing. Open warfare had broken out along the great river north of Sydney, known to the Aborigines as Deerubbin and re-named the Hawkesbury by the English. Troops were sent along its banks ‘with instructions to destroy as many [Aborigines] as they could meet . . . and, in hope of striking terror, to erect gibbets in different places, whereupon the bodies of all they might kill were to be hung’.14

  The Hawkesbury is as wide as the Mississippi in places, and is today a lush resource for the people of Sydney and the towns around Broken Bay. During the 1930s my father built a weekend house on the bay at Patonga, where the forest grows at the water’s edge. We did not know then that our retreat had been a place of bloodshed, one of several battlefields on which an epic war had raged for twenty-two years between the English and the Dharug people. Governor Lachlan Macquarie, whose ‘civilising influence’ is emphasised in Australian textbooks, proclaimed that any unarmed group of Aborigines of more than six in number could be shot legally, and that this would also apply to any Aborigine found within a mile of white habitation. Women and children were not excluded.15 The Dharug fought like lions; but they had no guns, and were defeated. The survivors were held in concentration camps near the town of Windsor, their children sent to ‘special schools’ to learn the way of the invaders.

  A pattern of genocide and guerrilla warfare was now established. Neither the degree of slaughter, nor the flair and bravery with which the first Australians fought back, was acknowledged until recent years. By the 1820s troops had orders to wipe out the resistance with a strategy similar to that of ‘pacification’ and ‘body count’ deployed by the Americans in Vietnam. A rare court record of 1838 refers to twenty-eight Aborigines taken from the hut of a friendly white stockman, tied up and slaughtered. On December 14, 1838 the Sydney Monitor reported that ‘it was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter’.16

  In the island state of Tasmania, the bloodletting continued for more than half a century. On May 3, 1804 the 102nd Regiment shot dead fifty people at Risdon Cove, including women and children. The Tasmanians had approached unarmed and with green boughs in their hands, a sign of peace. The commanding officer remarked afterwards that he did not ‘apprehend’ that these people would have been ‘any use’ to the English.17 In 1830 martial law was declared in Tasmania and the ‘Black War’ was said to be a final solution, with 5,000 Europeans assembled to drive the remaining 2,000 Aborigines into the Tasman peninsula. Twenty years later the fabric of Tasmanian Aboriginal life had all but unravelled; and only a few survived.

  Where the army could not defeat the Australians, chemicals were used. The Sydney Monitor commented that mass poisoning by strychnine, phosphorus and arsenic ‘is much safer’.18 A Queensland Government report described the effect: ‘The niggers [were given] . . . something really startling to keep them quiet . . . the rations contained about as much strychnine as anything and not one of the mob escaped . . . more than a hundred blacks were stretched out by this ruse of the owner of Long Lagoon.’19

  The principal killing fields were in Queensland, where a specially formed colonial army, the Native Mounted Cavalry, used Snider rifles whose wide bore tore people apart. This force operated as ‘extermination squads of 6–12 personnel sent in to “pacify”’.20 Historian Andrew Markus has likened them to Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen, the elite stormtroopers assigned to exterminate Jews in the invaded areas.21

  The Kalkadoons were a tall Queensland people with exceptional warrior skills who managed to secure much of the Cloncurry region against encircling troops. But the cost to them was high. In 1884, after most of their women, children and old people were trapped and slaughtered in Skull Gorge, the Kalkadoons heroically faced gunfire with spears and axes. Eventually they were reduced by disease and dislocation to a few. Although statistics of the period are unreliable, it has been estimated that more Australians died on the Queensland battlefields than were killed in the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

  Indeed, in a land strewn with cenotaphs which honour the memory of Australian servicemen who have died in almost every corner of the earth, not one stands for those who fought and fell in defence of their own country.

  You fought here for your country.

  Where are your monuments?

  You resisted the invader as best you knew how.

  Where are your songs of those days?

  When you were captured you were not prisoners-of-war.

  That would
have been awkward.

  You had the misfortune of occupying ‘unoccupied land’.

  You had to correct your gross error.

  There was a pioneer tradition waiting to be unfolded.

  Tales resilient as ironbark.

  Your share in them was minimal and negative.

  You were rather slow to understand this.

  The bush and the stone and the stream.

  The tree. The plain.

  The special green. The faded calico blue,

  They were your last line of resistance.

  You fought here for your country.

  Where are your monuments?

  The difficulties we have in belonging

  – these, these are your cenotaph.

  Bruce Dawe, ‘For the Other Fallen’

  At the 1988 Remembrance Day service in Sydney an Aboriginal man attempted to place flowers on the Cenotaph during the playing of the Last Post. He was stopped and led away. ‘I have a right to lay a wreath for my people,’ he said. ‘I represent the Aborigines who died defending their land, our land.’

  During the 1960s, I spent much time travelling in the Americas, Africa, India and the Pacific. I began to set the experience of these societies against my own, and this was something of a revelation. In Africa I had seen sufferers of the ancient eye disease, trachoma, which, if left untreated, scars the eyelids and causes ulcers and eventual blindness. Trachoma is found only in the impoverished, overcrowded conditions of the ‘developing world’, with one exception: Australia. A United Nations doctor in Malawi told me this. We were standing in a camp full of children sent blind from trachoma. Here, I saw again the ‘squinting’ children of La Perouse.

  In South Africa I was greeted warmly by white people, mostly of English origin, who spoke about ‘good old Aussie’ and cricket and beer drinking. They alluded cautiously, wistfully, to a land without blacks. What they meant was a land with ‘perfect blacks’ – blacks who were there but who were reckoned not to be there.

  These English South Africans believed themselves to be liberal people, proud of their distinction from the ‘uncivilised’ Afrikaners on the veld, bullwhips behind their backs. Most of these liberal people had not seen, or had not wished to see, the fringes of their towns and cities, where people lived in cardboard houses without running water and behind barbed wire and watchtowers.

  I took the train to Soweto, and saw the urban dust bowl which ran to caramel in the rain, and the red eyes and yellow teeth, melon bellies and stick legs, and the aura of decay and despair. Back in Johannesburg and Capetown, I told the liberal people what I had seen, and they stood around the barbecue and listened respectfully, shaking their heads. They might well have been on the other side of the Indian Ocean. I had glimpsed my own country in theirs.

  I was banned from South Africa in 1967 and shortly afterwards returned to Australia. The day of my return, a national referendum was held, producing a remarkable result. More than 90 per cent of the Australian electorate voted to give the Australian Government the constitutional right to legislate justice for the Aboriginal people. No referendum anywhere in modern times had produced such an overwhelming, positive result. Aborigines were then at the mercy of State governments and institutions, which had much in common with their counterparts in Pretoria and Alabama. Now the Federal Government had an ‘historic mandate’ to intervene. This made Australia appear different from South Africa, and newspaper editorials underlined this point with pride.

  The flight to Alice Springs had plenty of empty seats. In 1967 outback Australia was a land without conga-line tourism. When the plane had refuelled and headed back to Sydney, the airport fell silent. At the tea and coffee bar stood silent men wearing shorts and long socks and carrying attaché cases. On the counter lace covered a jug of milk. The lace was covered with flies. On the wall a display of tea-towels with Aboriginal motifs was black with flies. The hands of the men wearing shorts and long socks moved like windscreen wipers against a storm of flies. Silence and flies: then, with dusk, a light that burnished the earth.

  Everything in the ‘red centre’ of Australia is imbued with this light. The walls of the Macdonnell Ranges, which stand behind Alice Springs like an amphitheatre, glow with it, as if the source is within the stone itself. The ghost gums that rivet heaven and earth glisten with it. Shadows seem only fleeting. The horizon is a line of fire, which is snuffed and consumed by a deep night with stars like ice. This is a place of artists.

  The Papunya people now survive by their art, whose complex abstract dot design is recognised in the world as a unique form. For many years they kept it secret; it was said to be the expression of black paganism or it was dismissed as ‘ashtray art’.

  Albert Namatjira’s art, on the other hand, followed a European form and was not suppressed. But the artist died.

  Above the reception desk of my hotel in Alice Springs was a print of a Namatjira watercolour, ‘Jay Creek Country’. That the artist was accepted was indicated by the beer mats thoughtfully tacked around its frame: an expression of the local culture. According to one estimate, people living in the Northern Territory are the third greatest consumers of alcohol in the world and are said to drink twenty-one litres of pure alcohol per person every year.22

  Waiting at the hotel reception, I became aware that my shoes were sinking into a carpet sodden with beer and disinfectant. In the public bar, through plastic curtains, white buddhas in shorts and ‘flip flops’ (rubber sandals) consumed glasses, cans and jugs of beer. A face appeared through the curtains and said, ‘Sign yourself in, mate. We’re renovating. Put down what grog you want after hours.’ Around the corner was another bar, where everyone was black. On the floor was an unconscious man. Outside, on the bonnet of a car, a woman was retching.

  The next morning the Namatjira painting was different. The deep blue of the mountains had softened. The rocks had lost their burnish. The ghost gum had yellowed. Later in the day the painting seemed to change again, as if the shadows in it had receded.

  Oscar Namatjira sat in the shade of a shed at a camp site a few miles from town. Oscar was the second son of Albert and Rubina, who had seven children. He was around fifty years old, a lean version of his father, with the same craggy forehead, the same melancholy eyes. With his two brothers, Oscar had followed his father and become a watercolourist. When I met him, he was completing a painting similar to one of Albert’s most famous landscapes, ‘Palm Valley’. Palm Valley was a place beloved by the Namatjiras. ‘That’s our country,’ said Oscar. ‘We should be living out there, not in a place like this.’

  The conditions imposed upon the family of one of Australia’s most celebrated artists were typical of what most Aborigines could expect. There was one trickling water tap and no ‘ablution block’. Children sat in the brown dirt, with the infamous ‘squint’ and ‘H’, several of them coughing incessantly. This coughing, which is more like hacking, is caused by respiratory illnesses that plague the Aboriginal young. A few years earlier one of the first demographic studies of the Northern Territory found that in central Australia ‘the registered infant mortality rate was 208 per 1,000 live births, which must be among the highest infant mortality rates in the world’.23

  The children sat alongside dogs, picking beer cans from newly acquired garbage. The eldest flattened each can with a blunt tomahawk, missing once and hitting a dog, which squealed but did not move. The flattened cans, explained Oscar, would be an additional wall for the shed, which was open to all weathers.

  In 1951, at the peak of his fame, Albert Namatjira had tried to buy a block of land in Alice Springs, in the heartland of where his people, the Aranda, had lived for 35,000 years. The sale was denied him because he was an Aborigine. He then took his family to nearby Morris Soak, which had no facilities and soon became a slum.

  When ‘development’ was planned there, the Namatjiras were moved on, and on again. After Albert died, they found a place overlooking a green valley; but it was not long before the new white suburbs of Al
ice Springs reached this valley, and there were complaints. They were moved on again, now into the dry bed of the Todd River, a place of boozing and violence.

  ‘There was a war between whites and blacks a long time ago,’ said Oscar, ‘and the whites won. And I suppose the blacks, you know, just have to accept they lost. What I don’t get is the whites wanting the war to go on.’ Albert Namatjira was a victim of that one-sided war. He was born and grew up at a Lutheran mission, Hermannsburg. Baptised a Christian, he carried the wounds of a man torn between two lives. And when the white world, which embraced his talent, then betrayed him, he was defenceless.

  Albert had only two months’ tuition in watercolour technique. As a ‘camel boy’ in 1936, he met and travelled with a white watercolourist, Rex Battarbee, whose work he watched intently. Within two years he had held his own exhibition of some forty watercolours, all of which were sold. The public appreciated his work, although many critics did not and some expressed disdain. Perhaps they did not see, or want to see, the changing light in a Namatjira landscape, which was its ‘Aboriginality’.

  During the Second World War, with paper in short supply, Albert used panels of beanwood joined together. More exhibitions and acclaim followed. He was visited in the bush by the Governor-General and his wife, the English Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. He met the Queen in Canberra and was given the ‘Coronation Medal’. His portrait won for its white artist prestige and prize money. To the Anglocentric establishment, he was the model of their ‘assimilationist’ policies, in which Aborigines who embraced white idioms were encouraged and elevated, while others who tried and failed, continued not to exist.

  Albert Namatjira also failed. Far from his patrons in Sydney and Melbourne, he remained ‘just another Abo’, unwelcome in the white enclaves of the Northern Territory. Not only was he refused permission to build a house in Alice Springs, he was denied a grazing lease, and a court dismissed his appeal. In his Aboriginal world, it was taken for granted that the money he received from his paintings would be shared, as everything material was shared. Money of the kind he could earn had never been seen before. People signing themselves ‘Namatjira’ painted for the white trade. The taxation authorities took an interest and demanded large sums. Albert, who had never touched alcohol, began to drink. But it was illegal for an Aborigine to drink and he was arrested and spent a night in Alice Springs gaol, from where he emerged in despair.