First Nations Australia literature

Alexis Wright, Carpentaria

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Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Award in 2007 and I read it back around then but it’s a book that keeps coming back to me so I thought it was time I shared why. This won’t be my usual review, but rather random comments on the ideas that float around my head.

First though, you do need a bit of an idea of what it’s about. It’s a wild novel and the plot is complex with its interwoven stories of the inhabitants of a fictional town called Desperance (great name!) in northwest Queensland. The local Indigenous people, the Pricklebush mob, are engaged in a number of disputes – amongst themselves (the Westend and Eastend groups) and with various non-Indigenous people and groups including local police, government officials, and the large multinational mining company operating on their sacred land. But it’s also about personal soul-searching as some of the main characters work to resolve their place in the world. There’s a large array of colourful characters, including Normal Phantom (the ruler of the family), Mozzie Fishman (religious zealot), Will Phantom (activist and Norm’s son, who undertakes a spiritual journey with Fishman), Elias Smith (mysterious outcast saviour), Bruiser (by-name-and-nature town mayor), to name just a few.

It is fundamentally, but not only, about black-white relations in a small town. It doesn’t polarise the issue the way books dealing with this topic often do. The whites are presented pretty negatively, but the Indigenous people are not painted as saints either. They are flawed, and have conflicts within their own community as well as with the white occupants of the town. I like the honesty of this. Some of the problems within the Indigenous population are due to the European invasion and the impact of dispossession, but some are clearly just because they are human with all the normal arguments, jealousies, power plays etc that are found in any family or community. Wright is most interested in conveying the complexity of black culture: its struggles to cope with the colonisation, and the conflict within black communities about how to respond. Consequently, the novel touches on many contemporary issues – land rights, deaths in custody, mining rights, boat people, petrol sniffing to name just a few. It could almost be seen as the contemporary corollary of Kim Scott‘s That deadman dance.

Towards the end of the novel comes this:

Old stories circulating around the Pricklebush were full of the utmost intrigues concerning the world. Legends of the sea were told in instalments every time you walked in the door of some old person’s house. Stories lasted months on end, and if you did not visit often, you would never know how the story ended.

It’s from Will who is sitting on top of the pub, waiting for the cyclone to do its damage. I like it because it rather describes the way the novel is told – circularly more than linearly, and certainly rather disconnectedly. I am always interested in structure, and structure is one of the main challenges of the book. I suspect the structure has something to do with the Aboriginal world view and way of seeing stories – and that understanding this structure better might help better understand the book. It’s both circular and multilayered.

The centre or heart of the novel comprises Elias’ burial at sea and Norm’s being tested. The notion of ‘trespass’ is introduced specifically here. It’s a critical notion in Christian religion. It also alludes to European civilisation trespassing on Indigenous land and culture. And, of course, Indigenous people have their own sense of trespass. In some (many?) ways, trespass is a core theme of the book:

Pausing momentarily, he [Norm] tried again to recite the prayer, before stopping to linger once more on the perplexing word trespass. Trespass had been a big word in his life. It protected black men’s Law and it protected white men. It breathed life for fighters; it sequestered people. The word was weightless, but had caused enough jealousies, fights, injuries, killings, the cost could never be weighed. It maintained untold wars over untold centuries – trespass.

What makes the book special is its language, which is often playful. I chuckled many times as I read it: the wordplay, and the comic set pieces in particular were well done. The set pieces include Angel Day’s retrieval of a Virgin Mary statue from the town dump, and Elias Smith’s emergence from the sea. Popular culture and language (such as clichés) are incorporated, both through allusions and simply as part of the rather colloquial text. Added to this, is the mix of biblical (parting of the waters/mist, big flood, feeding with fish) and traditional imagery and symbolism. I don’t completely understand the meaning of the traditional imagery/symbolism, but it’s there, and can be felt even if it can’t be fully articulated by us who are not part of the culture: water (sea, lagoons, rivers), fire, fish, birds (seagulls, pelicans and others), serpents, land, music, and so on. It’s interesting how many of these images work in both cultures. The novel teems with imagery, most of it worthy of further exploration.

And while I’m talking of language, the names are highly evocative: Desperance, Uptown and Pricklebush, Normal Phantom, Angel Day (Agnus Dei?), Truthful (the cop), Bruiser (the town mayor), Mozzie Fishman, Joseph Midnight, Will (a very wilful young man), and Hope.

There is also surrealism (or is it magical realism?) mixed with the real, which adds to the challenge and fun of reading this book: it is sometimes hard to tell what is ‘real’ and what is ‘dream’ or ‘myth’ or ‘imaginings’. Much of this aspect of the novel explores connections between Indigenous and Christian religions and cultures, which makes sense given the strong role missionaries played in the first century or more of contact.

This is one of those novels that begs comparison with others and yet it is so itself that any comparison does neither it nor the other book justice. However, I’m going to throw a couple of ideas out there anyhow: Tim Winton‘s Cloudstreet, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One hundred years of solitude. All three deal with family on an epic scale and with a level of inventiveness that can make you high.

Without giving the conclusion away, I will say it ends on a positive image for Indigenous people, on the idea of “singing the country afresh”. There is no simple solution, and many unanswered questions are left hanging, but there is hope – which is just about how a book like this should end.

Alexis Wright
Carpentaria
Melbourne: Giramodo, 2006
519pp.
ISBN: 9781920882174

How’s this for a description of reading?

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I was going to make this post another Delicious Descriptions, but decided it needed a more direct heading. It’s another quote from Kim Scott‘s That deadman dance and has been used by several reviewers of the book. But I think it needs a post of its own:

When Bobby Wabalaginy told the story, perhaps more than his own lifetime later, nearly all of his listeners knew of books and the language in them. But not, as we do, that you can dive deep into a book and not know just how deep until you return gasping to the surface, and are surprised at yourself, your new and so very sensitive skin. As if you’re someone else altogether, some new self trying on new words.

… and new ideas, emotions, ways of being, eh?

What say you to this? Do you you have a favourite description of reading?

 

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Kim Scott on indigenous connection with the land

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A short Delicious Description today from Kim Scott‘s That deadman dance, but an important one because it attempts to convey to we non-indigenous people just how closely indigenous people relate to their environment. It comes from the same expedition as my previous Delicious Descriptions post:

Sometimes Wooral addressed the bush as if he were walking through a crowd of diverse personalities, his tone variously playful, scolding, reverential, affectionate.

It was most confusing. Did he see something else?

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Kim Scott on confronting the new

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Banksia

Candlestick-shaped flowers aka Banksia

Here is the first of two or more (depending on how the spirit moves me) Delicious Descriptions from Kim Scott‘s book That deadman dance.

My first one presents two excerpts which describe people confronting the new. First, the British settlers during their expedition to find land:

They found a path, rocky and scattered with fine pebbles that at one point wound through dense, low vegetation but mostly led them through what, Chaine said, seemed a gnarled and spiky forest. Leaves were like needles, or small saws. Candlestick-shaped flowers blossomed, or were dry and wooden. Tiny flowers clung to trees by thin tendrils, and wound their way through the shrubbery, along clefts in rock. Bark hung in long strips. Flowering spears thrust upward from the centre of shimmering fountains of green which, on closer inspection, bristled with spikes.

Modern-day Aussies would recognise most if not all of these plants, but I can imagine how strange they would have been to people who came from the soft landscapes of England and Ireland.

By contrast, here is Wunyeran describing his experience on a ship to an elder:

It was hard to describe the food, he said. Some of them had tasted it before on ships, but other tastes too and … all very strange. There were many things … He tried to explain the tube you looked through that brought you close; the scratched markings one of the men made on something like leaves. Book, Journal, they said.

They gave him a good koitj, he said, and showed his people the smooth axe…

Throughout the book we to and fro between the British and indigenous ways of doing, being and seeing … but I particularly loved these two concrete descriptions of people reacting to new sights and experiences.

Kim Scott, That deadman dance

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Kim Scott That Deadman Dance
(Image courtesy Picador Australia)

About a third of the way into Kim Scott‘s novel That deadman dance is this:

We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar and tea and blankets that we’d lose everything of ours. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours.

And, it just about says it all. In fact, I could almost finish the post here … but I won’t.

That deadman dance is the first Indigenous Australian novel I’ve read about the first contact between indigenous people and the British settlers. I’ve read non-Indigenous Australian authors on early contact, such as Kate Grenville‘s The secret river, and I’ve read Indigenous authors on other aspects of indigenous experience such as Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria and Marie Munkara’s Every secret thing. Kim Scott adds another perspective … and does it oh so cleverly.

The plot is pretty straightforward. There are the Noongar, the original inhabitants of southwest Western Australia, and into their home/land/country arrive the British. First, the sensitive and respectful Dr Cross, and then a motley group including the entrepreneurial Chaine and his family, the ex-Sergeant Killam, the soon-to-be-free convict Skelly, the escaped sailor Jak Tar, and Governor Spender and his family. The novel tracks the first years of this little colony, from 1826 to 1844.

That sounds straightforward doesn’t it? And it is, but it’s the telling that is clever. The point of view shifts fluidly from person to person, though there is one main voice, and that is the young Noongar boy (later man), Bobby Wabalanginy. The chronology also shifts somewhat. The novel starts with a prologue (in Bobby’s voice) and then progresses through four parts: Part 1, 1833-1836; Part 2, 1826-1830; Part 3, 1836-1838; and Part 4, 1841-44. And within this not quite straight chronology are some foreshadowings which mix up the chronology just that little bit more. The foreshadowings remind us that this is an historical novel: the ending is not going to be fairytale and the Indigenous people will end up the losers. But they don’t spoil the story because the characters are strong and, while you know (essentially) what will happen, you want to know how the story pans out and why it pans out that way.

What I found really clever – and beautiful – about the book is the language and how Scott plays with words and images to tell a story about land, place and home, and what it means for the various characters. His language clues us immediately into the cross-cultural theme underpinning the book. Take, for example, the words “roze a wail” on the first page:

“Boby Wablngn” wrote “roze a wail”.
But there was no whale. Bobby was remembering …
“Rite wail”.
Bobby already knew what it was to  be up close beside a right whale …

Whoa, I thought, there’s a lot going on here and I think I’m going to enjoy it. Although Bobby’s is not the only perspective we hear in the book, he is our guide. He is lively and intelligent, and crosses the two cultures with relative ease: just right for readers venturing into unfamiliar territory. He’s a great mimic, and creates dances and songs. The Dead Man Dance is the prime example. It’s inspired by the first white people (the “horizon people”) and evokes their regimented drills with rifles and their stiff-legged marching. There’s an irony to this dance of course: its name foretells while the dance itself conveys the willingness of the Noongar to incorporate (and enjoy) new ideas into their culture.

In fact there’s a lot of irony in the novel. Here is ex-Sergeant Killam:

Mr Killam was learning what it was to have someone move in on what you thought was your very own home. He thought that was the last straw. The very last.

And who was taking his land? Not the Noongar of course, but the Governor … and so power, as usual, wins.

The novel reiterates throughout the willingness – a willingness supported, I understand, by historical texts – of the Noongar to cooperate and adapt to new things in their land:

Bobby’s family knew one story of this place, and as deep as it is, it can accept such variations.

But, in the time-old story of colonisation, it was not to be. Even the respectful Dr Cross had his blinkers – “I’ve taken this land, Cross said. My land”. And so as the colony grew, women were taken, men were shot, kangaroos killed, waters fouled, whales whaled out, and so on. You know the story. When the Noongar took something in return such as flour, sheep, sugar, they were chased away, imprisoned, and worse.

I’d love to share some of the gorgeous descriptions in the book but I’ve probably written enough for now. You will, though, see some Delicious Descriptions in coming weeks from this book. I’ll finish with one final example of how Scott shows – without telling – cultural difference. It comes from a scene during an expedition led by Chaine to find land. They come across evidence of a campsite:

You could see where people camped – there was an old fire, diggings, even a faint path. Bobby was glad they’d left; he didn’t want to come across them without signalling their own presence first, but Chaine said, No, if we meet them we’ll deal with them, but no need to attract attention yet.

Need I say more*?

The book has garnered several awards and some excellent reviews, including those from my favourite Aussie bloggers: Lisa (ANZLitLovers), the Resident Judge, the Literary Dilettante, and Matt (A Novel Approach). Our reviews differ in approach – we are students, teachers, historians, and librarian/archivists – but we all agree that this is a book that’s a must to read.

Kim Scott
That deadman dance
Sydney: Picador, 2010
400pp.
ISBN:  9780330404235

* I should add, in case I have misled, that for all the truths this novel conveys about colonisation, it is not without vision and hope. It’s all in the way you read it.

Winners of the 2011 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

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National Library of Australia, photo taken by ...

NLA, 2004 (Image courtesy John Conway, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Brought to you straight from the afternoon presentation with Caroline Baum in the National Library of Australia Theatre:

  • Fiction: Traitor, by Stephen Daisley
  • Non-fiction: The hard light of day, by Rod Moss
  • Young adult fiction: Graffiti moon, by Cath Crowley
  • Children’s fiction: Shake a leg, by Boori Monty Pryor and Jan Ormerod

This afternoon’s panel discussion followed the formal announcement and presentation of the awards this morning. The afternoon session, chaired by journalist and broadcaster Caroline Baum, involved a panel of three winning authors (Stephen Daisley, Rod Moss and Boori Monty Pryor) and one shortlisted author (Laura Buzo).

Baum led off her discussion with a question to the authors about their use of technology. It turned out that they were generally a conservative lot though Pryor did admit to having, and using, a laptop. A later question from the audience brought the response from Moss that while he did not use technology in a sophisticated way he was happy for publishers to apply whatever technology they saw fit to get the works out there. Our audience member was wanting more though. Perhaps aware of the recent apps for TS Eliot’s The waste land and Jack Kerouac’s On the road, he was hoping the authors were thinking more imaginatively about using technology in the creative process rather than for distribution after the fact … but these authors were not quite there yet it seemed.

Another question Baum asked was to Stephen Daisley on writing about place. She said that roughly 50% of authors writing about foreign places say they must visit a place to write about it, while the other half argue that visiting the place isn’t necessary. Daisley admitted that he had not visited all the places he’d written about in his novel Traitor, which of course led Baum to ask how one can write about a place without going to it. Daisley’s answer? One word: Google!

I won’t summarise the full discussion, but will mention one other issue Baum raised, and that was to do with indigenous Australians and the problems they – and we – are facing. Pryor (an indigenous Australian) and Moss (whose book is about his experience as an artist working amongst indigenous Australians) answered along similar lines. Moss suggested that he had no “answer” but that what is missing is “genuine friendship” between black and white Australians. Pryor said that it was up to each person to make their own journey but that a true recognition of the special nature and importance of indigenous language, land, art and storytelling would have a ripple effect. In other words, what I “heard” them both saying – and what I’ve heard others say – is that more important than such things as health and education programs is, simply, the showing (or, should I say, feeling of) real respect. Not lip service, not a “send them here, send them there” attitude, but a true respect for the people and their culture. From that all else should logically flow. A sobering but not negative conclusion to what was a fascinating hour or so spent in the company of some very thoughtful people.

Postscript: Some interesting changes are occurring in the literary prize community. This year the Miles Franklin award and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards included prize money for the shortlisted books too. This is, don’t you think, a great step, recognising, if in a small way, that such awards do have a strong subjective element. So, in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards the overall prize money remains the same in 2011 as it was last year: $100,000 for each of the four categories. But this year the winning book in each category will win a tax-free prize of $80,000, and each short-listed book (to a maximum of four in each) will receive $5000. I do hope the winners are happy with their reduced purse!

Monday musings on Australian literature: Indigenous Australian autobiographies

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When I was a child my father told me to be proud I was of “aboriginal descent”. Perhaps it was the silence surrounding his words that made them resonate as they did; I’d certainly heard no such thing anywhere else in my life, certainly not in my reading or schooling. There didn’t seem much in the way of empirical evidence to support my father’s words. A child, and unable to either calibrate injustice and racism or identify its cause, I sensed the legacy of oppression. (Kim Scott in Kayang and me)

Indigenous autobiographies are finally, I think, starting to make their mark in mainstream Australian publishing. The first so-called indigenous autobiography I read was Douglas Lockwood‘s I, the aboriginal. It sounds like an autobiography but in fact it was written about an indigenous man, Phillip Roberts (Wailpuldanya of Alawa tribe), by a white writer. It was published in 1962 – though I read it later in the 1960s – and it introduced me to a world I knew little of but recognised as important to my life as an Australian.

Through the 1970s I read various books about indigenous Australians, but it was the poetry of Oodgeroo Noonuccal, which most conveyed to me the experience of being an Aboriginal Australian. And then, in 1988, came the hugely successful Sally Morgan’s My place which was, I think, the first “real” indigenous Australian autobiography I read. Unlike Kim Scott, Sally was not told to be proud of her “Aboriginal descent”. Rather, it was hidden from her – or, at least, she was oblivious of it though, as I recollect, her sister had cottoned on to something of their derivation. Her family did not promote their background – for obvious reasons in a society where, as Scott says, there was (is) a “legacy of oppression” – but Sally worked her way through it to find her own place as an indigenous woman, writer and artist in Australia.

One of the first posts on this blog was on Boori (Monty) Pryor’s autobiography Maybe tomorrow. It’s a short autobiography by a man who has geared his life towards educating young people – white and indigenous – about what being indigenous means. His aim is twofold – to encourage pride in indigenous people and understanding and respect in white people. In a later post, I referred to Leah Purcell‘s Black chicks talking which tells the lives of a number of indigenous women in Australia. They are written by Purcell but are based on interviews she conducted with the women. Her goal is similar to Pryor’s: she sees her women subjects as role models for young indigenous Australians but also wants white Australians to recognise and understand the lives and achievements of indigenous women. Both books are good reads.

Rabbit-proof fence

Rabbit-proof fence, including the route taken by the three young girls (Courtesy Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The Stolen Generation – that is, the generation/s of Aboriginal people in Australia affected by the government practice of taking mixed-race children away from their families – has resulted in pretty much a whole new genre of indigenous autobiography. The Stolen Generation report itself contained many stories (or case studies) to prove its case. For white Australians, though, the best known Stolen Generation story is Doris Pilkington‘s Following the Rabbit Proof Fence (which was also made into a film). It tells the story of three young girls who, in 1931, escaped the settlement they were taken to, well over 1500kms from their home, and followed the rabbit-proof fence to return to their families. Doris is the daughter of one of the girls – and she, too, like her mother was stolen.

I have only recently come across Hazel Brown and Kim Scott’s 2005 book Kayang and me. Kim Scott is an award-winning Western Australian indigenous novelist and Hazel is his aunty. Together they have written this story of the Wilomin Noongar people in southwest Western Australia. I have only started it, but it is the book that inspired me to write this post. It describes a region of Australia I know little about, so I look forward to making its acquaintance!

I am aware that I have barely scraped the surface of a genre of writing that I would like to delve more into. This will not, I hope, be the last I write on this topic – but, in the meantime, I’d love to hear comments and recommendations from you on the topic.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writers from our north

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David Malouf picture at book meeting. (Taken b...

David Malouf, 2006. (Courtesy: Dariusz Peczek, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Queensland is the state of my birth, and that makes it special to me! It is a large state and one of our most geographically diverse, ranging from the tropical north to the arid west, from the subtropical south to the temperate inland southeast. It has one of Australia’s most popular tourist destinations, the Great Barrier Reef, and our best-known commercial tourist (and, retirement) mecca, the Gold Coast. It is unlikely, though, to be the first state people think of when asked about Australian writers …

Nonetheless, many significant writers have come from Queensland, including the indigenous poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Of our contemporary writers, though, the best known Queenslander has to be David Malouf. Like most Queenslanders, he “emigrated” from there long ago and has lived in England and Tuscany as well as Sydney, but that doesn’t mean that his ties aren’t strong. Johnno, his first novel and the first one I read, is, like so many first novels, somewhat autobiographical. It describes a young boy growing up in Brisbane in the 1940s and 1950s and, as I recollect, evokes the place and time well. One of my favourite novels of his, Fly away Peter, is partly set in the (above-mentioned) Gold Coast and partly on the Western Front during World War 1. It’s a beautiful novella which explores friendship, love and life, not only against the challenges of war but also of class. And, while his most recent novel, Ransom, re-explores the story of Priam and Achilles, it was inspired by his introduction to the story of Troy in his schoolboy days. It seems, with Malouf, that you can take the boy out of Queensland but you can’t take Queensland out of the boy!

Like Malouf, Janette Turner Hospital left Queensland in early adulthood, and has spent most of her life in the United States and Canada, though she does return down under occasionally. She’s a writer who’s not afraid to take risks, and can push metaphors, sometimes to their limits (as in Charades and Borderline). Her novels range over the countries in which she’s lived, including for example, southern India in The ivory swing. Due preparations for the plague is one of those post 9/11 novels that deals with terrorism, and Orpheus lost also explores what happens when people get caught up, inadvertently for the most part, in political action. Few of her novels are set in Australia, but there’s often an Australian character.

By contrast, Andrew McGahan has remained in Australia, even if not in Queensland. He currently lives in Melbourne (I believe). His first two books, Praise and 1988, are the only books I’ve read in the “grunge” style – and I liked them. His Gen X characters are pretty aimless, and were an eye-opener for baby-boomer me. They are primarily set in Queensland. His novel The white earth won the Miles Franklin award, and is set in the Darling Downs of Queensland. It’s a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist is caught between his (white) uncle’s obsession with land and his growing awareness of indigenous people’s connection to land.

And this brings me to Alexis Wright, an indigenous Queensland writer whose larger-than-life wild-ride of a novel Carpentaria also won the Miles Franklin award. It deals with indigenous disenfranchisement, with how disconnection from the land results not only in conflict with white society but also within indigenous groups. Wright cleverly marries tragedy with comedy, and tosses in a little surrealism and magic, to demonstrate just how complex the situation is. The following excerpt captures something of the tone of the novel:

Old stories circulating around the Pricklebush were full of the utmost intrigues concerning the world. Legends of the sea were told in instalments every time you walked in the door of some old person’s house. Stories lasted months on end, and if you did not visit often, you would never know how the story ended.

That’s probably enough really, except I can’t finish without briefly mentioning two writers who were not born in Queensland but have strong associations with it. One is Thea Astley who wrote several novels set in Queensland including The multiple effects of rainshadow which I reviewed some time ago, and the poet Judith Wright about whom I must post in future. Wright used poetry not only to celebrate the landscapes she loved, but to promote issues of concern to her, including indigenous rights and environmental degradation.

Have you noticed the high proportion of women writers in this post? Queensland is often the butt of jokes in Australia for being conservative and yet, without design, I have come up with more women than men to represent writing in this state. Go figure (as they say)!

Marie Munkara, Every secret thing

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They all nodded, not knowing what the hell curry* was but getting gist of the story all the same.

Marie Munkara leads us a merry dance with Every secret thing, her first book, which won the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander writer. What exactly is this “thing” she presents to us? A novel? A short story collection? Well, I think it’s a bit of both. It looks like stand-alone short stories, and can probably be read that way. But, the same characters keep reappearing in the stories and there is a chronological thrust to it with a conclusion of sorts in the final story, so I’d call it connected short stories.

Form, though, is not the only way in which she leads us a merry dance. This is a genuinely funny book – sometimes slapstick or ribald, sometimes more bitter, satiric and/or ironic, but pretty well always funny. However, her subject matter is desperately serious – the destruction of indigenous culture through contact with white culture, specifically in this book through contact with missions and missionaries.

Bathurst Island (Tiwi Islands)
Approaching beautiful Bathurst Island (Tiwi Islands)

Marie Munkara was born in Arnhem Land and spent the first few years of her life on Bathurst Island in the Tiwi Islands. She left there when she was 3 years old, and didn’t return until she was 28. These stories, she says, are drawn from those told to her by friends and family, and are set, I think, in the early to mid twentieth century. She explores a wide range of issues reflective of indigenous-white contact at that time, including education and religion, the stolen generation, sexual abuse, the introduction of alcohol and disease, and anthropological research.

Munkara sees humour in everything (more or less) but her more biting humour is reserved for the “mission mob” because, of course, it is they who wield the power over the “bush mob”. The “bush mob” are shown to be intelligent and resourceful but no match for the power of the muruntawi (white people). Her language draws on a wide range of traditions – including indigenous storytelling, biblical, common clichés – and from these she tells stories that are only too believable. Here she tells us about one of the Brothers:

And so time passed and the natural progression of things came to be and the bullied became the bully, and the bully became the misogynist, and the misogynist became a Brother in a Catholic mission in a remote place in the Northern Territory… (“The sound of music”)

A too familiar story, told in a biblical tone. There is a funny story in which the “bush mob” tries to lead an anthropologist astray by feeding him incorrect information (such as obscene or silly names for ordinary objects), but their victory is Pyrrhic, as the end of the story conveys:

And after all, it was difficult sometimes to tell the difference between the missionaries and the madmen and the mercenaries because their eyes all looked the same and their tongues all spoke the same language of greed. If it wasn’t your soul they wanted, it was something else. Until it became an automatic response whenever a strange muruntani appeared to put out your hand for the specimen bottle to piss into or extend your arm for a blood sample to be taken or for the ungracious thought to pass through their mind that here was yet another who had come to take but as always gave nothing in return. (“Wurruwataka”)

Her stories about the stolen generations are particularly bitter, but again she uses humour. She tells the story of Marigold (née Tapalinga) who’d returned “home” after years away, only to find that she no longer fit, but:

Nor did Mrs Jones want the hussy back as their servant having sprung the little slut underneath Mr Jones in the spare room. The poor man was still traumatised by the ordeal. This wasn’t the first time she’d raped him, he claimed. (“Marigold”)

Only an indigenous writer could write something so patently ridiculous on this topic – and so drive the point home!

Munkara neatly tracks the Bishop’s behaviour and impact on his flock by constantly changing her epithet for him. In the first story, “The Bishop”, he is introduced as “his Most Distinguished” but is then referred to by various names including “his Most Garrulous”, “his Most Impatient” and “his Most Impious”. This changing of names for the Bishop is rather unsubtle humour but it carries a sly comment on the “mission mob’s” disrespect for indigenous culture by insisting on naming indigenous people, completely ignoring the fact that they have their own names. And so, in the first story, we are introduced to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, to Epiphany, Lazarus, and John the Baptist, to name just a few of the cast of characters populating the book.

Another technique Munkara uses is to pepper her stories with white culture sayings and clichés, such as, “misery loves company alright”, “looking on the bright side”, “but you just can’t please everyone”, and this one:

And so it came to be that for the first time ever, the mission mob found themselves sitting where they’d never sat before – between a rock called ‘you didn’t see that one coming did you’ and a hard place called ‘bush mob’s indifference’. (“The good doctor”)

Overall, this is deceptively simple but clever writing that sets up and undermines its premises every step of the way. First “the mission mob” seems to be winning, and then “the bush mob”. However, while it could be said that “the bush mob” were “clever individuals who had learnt to sit on the wobbly fence of cultural evolution without falling off”, the real truth is that

They didn’t have to die to go to hell because the mission had happily brought that with them when they’d arrived unasked on the fateful shores of the place that was their heaven all those years ago. (“The movies”)

A spoonful of sugar, they say, makes the medicine go down, and that’s certainly true of this book. The sugar is not so strong though that you miss the medicine. Munkara makes sure of that – and the end result is a very funny but also very sobering book. I suspect and hope that Munkara has more … because the missions are only one facet of the history of contact in Australia. There is plenty for her to sink her teeth into.

Musings of a Literary Dilettante and Resident Judge have also reviewed this book.

Marie Munkara
Every secret thing
St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2009
181pp.
ISBN: 9780702237195

* Reference to the colloquialism “giving them curry”.

Ah, sweet synchronicity of life!

/ Whispering Gums / 4 Comments

NFSA exterior

Exterior of my previous home-away-from-home (Courtesy: Bidgee, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Ok, I know that “synchronicity” doesn’t really scan with “mystery” but it just felt right.

Last night, wearing one of my hats, I attended the National Film and Sound Archive‘s event, Coo-ee: Sound Day: Sounds of Australia 2010. (Phew, that’s a mouthful isn’t it?). Sounds of Australia is an NFSA initiative aimed at creating a register of recorded sounds that Australians deem significant. These sounds can be songs, speeches, jingles, sporting announcements, and so on. Anyone can nominate, and the final selection for each year’s additions is made by a judging panel.

Well, I was astonished (but pleased) to find that one of this year’s additions is Oodgeroo Noonuccal reading one of her most famous poems, We are going. This poem appeared in her first 1964 anthology as well as in My people which I listed in this week’s Monday Musings post. It was one of the poems that I remembered from my youth and considered using in that post. You can hear her, clear and strong, online at the Sounds of 2010 website – scroll down to 1986. Here are the last lines of the poem:

The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.
The eagle is gone, the emu and kangaroo are gone from this place.
The bora ring is gone.
The corroboree is gone.
And we are going.

See why I like her? Simple but powerful.