Red T-Shirt…
So, to begin at the end of things, a quote from Archie Roach’s well-loved lament,
This story’s right, this story’s true
I would not tell lies to you
Like the promises they did not keep
And how they fenced us in like sheep
Said to us, ‘Come take our hand
Sent us off to mission land
Taught us to read, to write and pray
Then they took the children away
I well understand, with his people and family still mourning, invoking Uncle Archie’s memory too soon may open the still raw wounds of grief, however, as is often the case with those who through their art, or their tragedy, have reached an iconic status, one from which we learn a little more about life, about love, about history, about tragedy, and hope, celebration and survival, Archie’s family have given permission for his work, his words, his songs and images to be used, “so that his legacy will continue to inspire.” I suppose in some sense this is how the now and the dreaming intersect; people’s truths live on in the extraordinary mixture of sadness and joy their songs and stories bring.
This anthem, that did so much to break the Great Australian Silence (as historian WEH Stanner back in the 60s described Australia’s practice of the historical erasure of First Nations People’s lives) in this country’s public discourse around The Stolen Generations, is also a celebration of survival. In that spirit, I offer this small reflection, from the midst of my own griefs, and my very different experience, which I hope, in my own way, is also a celebration.
One afternoon in the early nineties – I was in my early 20s, still studying at the time – my sister came home to the small brick house our family was renting in Blacktown in the west of Sydney, and said, “We’re Aboriginal.” This was a thought I’d had before – that Dad had Aboriginal heritage – given the way he looked, but it didn’t seem that significant to me. After all, even if we had some Aboriginal blood, this wasn’t something we’d been brought up with, wasn’t part of who I was, was it? But my sister had found some kind of document, I’m still not sure what, perhaps Dad’s mother’s birth certificate, when she was researching our family tree, where it said, Race: Aboriginal.
It’s strange; where that other connection had seemed tenuous, a documentary one had an immediate and powerful impact. My life, like a flood, rose up behind my eyes. A little blonde- brown woolly-headed boy in a red t-shirt; playing in creeks, and in the skeletons of newly constructed fibro houses in Coledale, across the tracks, near the old cattle yards and abandoned brickworks in Tamworth in northern New South Wales; being smashed in the face by football players, farmer’s sons, for unknown reasons; the looks of disdain of some adults; a teacher’s hard slap across the face; Mum’s family – Scots and English and Italian immigrants, cousins who called us the Hughes tribe, with a knowing smirk; Mum’s father, who I don’t remember ever saying one word to me, just a stern, a grim expression of furious disapproval; pulling me violently by the ear one day to drag me outside, a little blood and a palpable, murderous silence. Other things; there was never any connection with Dad’s side of the family, not til much later; if Mum was away, or if we asked where she’d been, Dad would say, “She’s run away with a blackfella,” with his own half-pained grin.
For a little context, this was the early 70s. Blackfellas had only been legally recognised as part of the Australian community for five years or so, since the 1967 referendum which changed the constitution. Prior to that Australia’s First Nations Peoples – the oldest continuous human culture on Earth – were in a kind of legal limbo, a status more akin to flora and fauna – in a nation in which much of the flora and fauna was considered noxious, a pest, something to be tamed, or eradicated.
Most of Australia viewed First Nations traditions and societies not as rich and vibrant cultures, but as some kind of barbarous and shameful degraded stone-age relic. Better forgotten than celebrated for what it was; a complex system of intertwining, cyclical self-sustaining land and resource management practices (see Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu for a journey through that true history), intricately and inextricably joined through story, dance, song and art with deep knowledge of astronomy, geography, and botany, as well as tales that brought a living and ever-present myth and history into the now. A culture that recalled the significance of the rise of the oceans some 20,000 years ago, compared to a culture that despite all its miraculous devices can barely accurately recall or understand what happened last week. If you destroy something, poison it, slash and burn and clear fell, insult, degrade, incarcerate, pollute, erase and genocide, you can not then point at the results of your violence and claim fair reason. The oceans are rising again, we adapt and endure.
I suppose, with my life flashing before my eyes in Blacktown that day, I must have drowned. At first I tried to embrace this me that had been stolen. Told my friends. Even talked to a Dharug/ Eora social worker at Community Services in Blacktown, and despite being readily accepted by the generous people there, for this, and many other reasons, I slowly began to lose myself.
So, I spent some years living in parks and squats and street corners. Cement floors and church lunches. A lot of it I don’t remember. Between bouts of depression, addiction and star-filled moments, occasionally writing something. Under the waves of need and loss, most of that gone like the detritus it was. Somehow I had been defined not through the experiences, traditions, culture and knowledge by which we construct our lives, our selves, our beingness, but through a knowledge that I was disallowed, that defined me as an unself.
First Nations academic Rebecca Gerrett-Magee has suggested that resistance can be active and passive, conscious and unconscious, following on from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ideas about the subaltern, the colonised, those without access to the political, cultural, academic and social spheres where power is invested, which form spheres of discourse of their own. Given that when such voices are finally given access to elite public discourse, we might ask if at that point they stop being subaltern? As to those who are neither one thing nor the other, the only discourse they can have is with the un/self. That way lies madness, or possibly poetry. Is silence, is refusal then, the last true act of resistance? Or that muttered, subvocal monologue? I should stop writing now. These are hard roads, with hard beds and hard aches in the belly. A realm populated by the mad, the doomed and the dispossessed. But at least, the sky is free. These lives ask the question, is joining the colonial, the bourgeois, the overman culture, really the heights of resistance to that culture? Which is to ask, can power ever know truth, or can power only ever serve power?
The assertion of truth in popular music can be found in songs as different as Dion’s 1961 doo wop classic, Runaround Sue and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 1988 alt-rock confessional, The Mercy Seat. In these songs it is little more than a gimmick, a trope undoubtedly borrowed from a more honest folk tradition. In a song like They Took The Children Away it re-assumes significance, where truth telling, as Professor Steve Larkin said, “is at the core of healing.”
I tend to work in symbol and image, most often in genres that compel vivid imagination. For me the deeper level of truth is always found not in overt statements but in archetypal, fundamental images. Call it a kind of animism, where meaning itself has spirit. In Red T-Shirt, Black Kite, although the elements are slightly rearranged, given (I hope) euphony, emphasis, layered, intertwined meanings, everything is true. When Mum was away, or if we asked where she’d been, the reply was always this terrible joke. I’d walk home from school, carrying cuts and scrapes, across the railway tracks to the new clapboard and fibro housing commission suburb of Coledale on the edge of Tamworth, where we lived with all the black and mixed race families. In those days grasshoppers seemed big and alien as monsters. In the story the locust represents that threat, of the hungry authority, if my father ever once admitted to his heritage, would descend with its swarms, take us away. My brothers were tall, the colours of river sand and olive trees, my sister small as a walnut, out friends and neighbours the colour of deep earth. I, still carrying injury from a nursery illness, was breathless, pale, two shades this side of sunburn. I had a black and red and yellow wing-shaped kite until one day in a bargain with the threatening sky, a thunderstorm took it. I wore a red t-shirt, so much so that a headmaster at a later school caned me and said I was a communist. I’m not sure why I wore it, was it part of a school uniform, did I just like it? Why are Aboriginal children always in red t-shirts in grainy old films and fading photographs? I don’t know. Why didn’t I understand that I was Aboriginal? I can only say that perhaps I inherited that silence from my father.
Well, jump ahead forty or fifty years. My sister died last year, at 50. Cancer. Not just cancer, cancer and that she didn’t have the will to fight it. Not because she wasn’t strong – she was defiant – but because they took her children away. I’d moved interstate years ago. Remade myself in various ways. Bookshop owner, occasional poet. No longer lost, no longer resisting, acceding to the path of least resistance. Three of her kids grew up in a foster home. She held onto her last child with a furious determination. That was where here heart lived. My parents weren’t able to deal with it. She’d argued, sold everything, ran away with her daughter to die by herself. When I talked to her she told me she was in remission. No one told me, I wasn’t able to do anything about it, until it was too late.
So I drove north to sort everything out. Met her youngest daughter for the first time. Learned from social workers that on her father’s side she was descended from Maria Lock, daughter of Yarramundi, known as the Chief of The Richmond Tribes, sister to Pemulway’s friend Colebee. She knew nothing of that heritage. I didn’t want her to grow up with that same, defining silence. So I’m trying to own that heritage, that identity, and share some of it, in pride and celebration, with her. Visiting Uncle Archie Roach’s website earlier in the year, I saw a t-shirt with Bunjil the Eagle, and Durrung the Snake.
So, I’m wearing that red t-shirt again.
Finally, perhaps there is resistance in small gestures, though I am still mostly lost, this is a small step on my own path to truth.
Black Kite
He waited while the clangour of the railway crossing warnings shook the air. The mantis figure of the cross, it’s bulbous, hooded flashing eyes. The barriers in black and white chevrons, falling like London Bridge, like an implacably descending guillotine. Black Bata Scouts too tight. Slumped grey socks, the elastic gone. Grey shorts, the elastic biting. Red T-shirt. Untucked now, creased like a hide. Thinking, I should run. Stepping from side to side to allay the ache.
As the train rumbled through, throwing grit in his face, stippling sun-prickled arms, the burned backs of his knees glowing in the hot breath of suddenly turbulent air, the vaguely intoxicating smell of wet vegetation from the drainage ditch, the raucous chatter of frogs and cicadas, were overwhelmed by the diesel and death smell of the cattle cars. Faces pressed against the slats. He wondered if the beasts understood the machinery that awaited them at the abattoir. Pens, rails, ramps and walkways. The hydraulic drone. A star between the eyes. A confused lowing for mercy.
In the still ringing silence, ducking under the still ascending barriers, he ran for home, leaping the busy brick dust mounds of bull ants, tightrope walking new cement gutters, scuffing ochre dust half heartedly from his shoes on straggling clumps of dried out grass. Like some strangely displaced sea creature, perhaps caught up in far distant tempests and dumped here in a weary and depleted downpour, it never seemed to survive.
There was a locust, green as sin, on the hooked handle of the aluminium screen door. The fly-screen mesh bowed out in places, as if in resigned exasperation. As he tentatively reached, it chirred away, he felt the brief spikiness of it lightly brush his fingers, closed, opened again, as it whirred from the shadowed alcove into the heat and unrelenting blue of afternoon.
Dad was at the kitchen table, looking for clarity in the small trapped voices inside a crème plastic transistor radio, static wheezing and loudening, the dial imprecise under his heavy hand. A disconnected earpiece in pale flesh tones sat like a maggot on next to it, like a dead thing against the melamine striated and rockmelon green. A stream of smoke poured up from the angularity of the amber glass ashtray. There was something church- like in the way golden light steepled across the table, spilled onto the newspaper, shook, as if about to vanish, settled again when he finished scraping at the racing pages with a transparent plastic biro. The asterisks and underlinings made of piecemeal lines and indentations as the ink failed. To the boy he looked like a rock, igneous and brooding.
“Where’s Mum?” the boy asked, unshouldering the book-weight of a leather satchel. She was always there, with iodine and Band-Aids. Vegemite sandwiches on stark thin triangles of white bread. Cottees cordial, funfair bright. Soft reassurances for the day’s hurts.
“Ran away with a blackfella.” Dad turned with a hard grin on his urchin face. Their eyes met, his brown, the boy’s grey-blue, nevertheless the same. The boy crumpled in consternation – not sure exactly what the joke meant. It was usually Dad who was away. “Gone to see a man about a dog,” Mum’s usual reply. The radio hissed, from the solemn and jangle of drawled refrain, to the tense, muttered hiatus of pre-race chatter. The announcement, four-forty-five from Randwick, echoing with the certitude, the finality of a prayer.
The brothers clattered in then, jostling like a scrum, cleats ricocheting on the floorboards, drumming like the weight of unexpected rain.
“Shut up you mongrels,” Dad growled. The race caller was panting now, breathless and urgent as a flood.
Tall, the colour of river sand and dust on olive trees, armoured in the grass-stained white and red of the St Joe’s team, his brothers elbowed him, whispered, “Comin’ to play footy?” More demand than invitation.
“Going to fly my kite.”
The boy levered out of his hurtful shoes. Toe-hooking the heel. Not taking the time to undo the laces. The schoolyard dust was the grey of an old man’s hand. Not the loam and umber of creek beds and bush. He wasn’t sure why, only that this dust, light as talc, filmed and stuck like sickness. He brushed it away with a few swift strokes of a shoe brush. The mohawk of bristles stippling the palm and blade of his hand with charcoal black, smudging into the lines, the grain, til has hands made a kind of map. To what country, he didn’t know. Only that, this feeling was a new kind of home. He unpeeled shorts, grey socks. Pulled on jeans. Grabbed up the kite from the bedroom, a great swinging black wing of a thing, wise red eyes, a sleek yellow keel. Ran outside, felt it pull
and leap from his hands, string unfurling from the reel, lifting with that strange, animate defiance.
Across the field, horses sleek as thunder scattered from the algaed water troughs by the old marshalling pens, circling through the scrub and wild wheat and tangled gas-flame brightness of Salvation Jane. The lowering sun fell behind onrushing clouds. With a whoop, a flurry around his ears, the sudden clamouring voices of dust devils and shaken leaves, the wind pulled and danced and blanketed. Took the kite high, and swooping, raptor fierce, the string singing. The kite hung there, small and glittering, below the face of the storm, as if the world was suddenly upside down. The bowing string, swept up, spinning from the reel in his hands, with a jolt that lifted him to his toes, hauled him along, reached its end. Who was hooked, and who was toy? He pulled, fishing with the sky. The kite was fixed as stone. The storm would not give up its toy. Mine now, the thunder split. Lightning heaved through in a great coruscating frenzy. No, thought the boy. My father gave it to me. Mine now, the storm rumbled again. Then the string parted with a jolt that shook his arms, and released him. He fell to his knees, face wet with tears, while the kite dwindled and was lost. The face of the storm rumbled something muted, something conciliatory. Began opening holes of reckless, unearthly blue.
As the rain fell, in a more prosaic deluge, the boy headed home, through the sodden scrub, through bowed draperies of rusted barbed wire. Still holding the yellow plastic reel. Quite useless now. Shrugging one shoulder, then the other, rubbed rain from his eyes on his sleeve. Wondered how much trouble he’d be in for losing the kite. The horses, necks arched down, snorted and pawed the earth.
The asphalt road, the gutter alive with its momentary stream, the distant, broken toothed chimneys, the pastel fibreboard houses, swelling with the soft welcome of evening all seemed, if not quite new, at least, different. At once smaller, and yet more comforting, like a once favourite jumper, folded in the back of a wardrobe, after some years, found again. Full of strange and familiar smells, a strange and familiar warmth.
The boy clattered up the steps, opened the door. Looked back once more. In the spilled paint of sky, the first few stars of evening. Went in. Not quite understanding the deal, but knowing, no matter how far he ran, how high he flew, under this sky, the storm promised, he was never lost.
