Monthly Archives: Sep 2023

Megan Davis’s Voice of Reason

Posted on 29 Sep 2023 | Leave a comment

Megan Davis, Voice of Reason: On Recognition and Renewal (Quarterly Essay 90, 2023)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 91

As we approach voting day on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, bad-faith arguments multiply and I don’t intend to add to the clamour. But I can recommend this Quarterly Essay by Megan Davis, one of the architects of the consultation process that led to the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart.

It’s short – just 66 pages. It’s personal – Ms Davis gives enough of her story that we know who she is. It’s instructive – she tells how the proposal for the Voice evolved through several official processes under several Prime Ministers. It’s respectful – it understands why some First Nations people might vote against the proposal, and argues the case with them. It has heroes and villains – John w Howard and Tony Abbott feature as wreckers; Yunupingu as a leader. It’s not into blame and rage. It has hope. And it’s utterly convincing.

If the referendum fails, as current polls suggest, this essay will bear re-reading for decades to come, though it will have to be read through tears.

You don’t have to buy a copy. At least for now you can read it on the Quarterly Essay website, beginning at this link.

My blog practice is to look a little closely at a single page. Usually it’s page 76 (my age). As there is no page 76 in this essay, here’s a little about page 47 (I was born in 1947).

In 2015, there was apparently bipartisan parliamentary support for constitutional change acknowledging that Australia was first occupied by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, recognising their continuing relationship to the lands and waters, and expressing respect for their ‘cultures, language and heritage’. That is to say, it looked like all systems go for symbolic recognition: nothing about non-discrimination, and no structural change. A group of 40 First Nations leaders met with Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Opposition leader Bill Shorten, and explained that such a change ‘would not be acceptable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ (the quote is from the Kirribilli statement). This meeting led to the consultation process that produced the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart and the proposal for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. (It also proposed a Makaratta / Treaty and a truth telling process, but those aren’t on the table just yet.)

On page 47, Megan Davis hits the pause button in her recount of the history:

The thing I could not shake from my head was watching the prime minister and Opposition leader sit at the head of the table while forty people from forty communities spoke about the structural problems their communities faced. What is it like to be the leader of a nation and encounter a polity that is profoundly unhappy?
At this time, as one of the main Indigenous lawyers working on constitutional reform, I found it difficult to understand why politicians failed to hear what First Nations leaders and community members were saying. I had a textbook idea about how political and law reform work, but none of it applied to our people.
There were two challenges I saw. One is that politicians meet with Aboriginal leaders on a myriad of issues, but often First Nations do not feel heard and politicians and advisers do not listen.
The second is the impact of telling your story over and over again and not being heard – what effect does this have on health and wellbeing?

Which comes close to being the heart of the argument for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice: it’s not that First Nations people haven’t been speaking, it’s that the necessary people haven’t been listening – because, as Megan Davis argues elsewhere in the essay, they don’t have to.

That’s just a tiny part of the essay. The whole thing is worth reading.

The correspondence in QE 91 includes some big names, in particular historians Mark McKenna and Henry Reynolds, and some brilliant fleshing out of the issues by First Nations and other writers. Megan Davis acknowledges them all as ‘worthy and inclusive commentary on the essay and on this historic moment that we are barrelling towards’. She singles out the joint contribution from Sana Naka and Daniel Bray, a Torres Strait Islander woman and a man of European heritage who write about the way their family is constantly negotiating intercultural complexity. She gives them the last word in her response. Following her lead, I’ll end the blog post with the same quote from them:

Structural injustice exists because that is how our political system is structured. We are getting exactly what the system was designed to deliver. A Voice to Parliament alone cannot specifically redress every injustice, but it will connect people to power in a way that currently does not happen. Democracy demands nothing less.

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The Confessions of Saint Augustine, third and final report

Posted on 22 Sep 2023 | 2 comments

Saint Augustine, Confessions (approx 400 CE, translated by R S Pine-Coffin 1961, Penguin Classics edition): pages 191–347 , from Book IX chapter 6 to Book XIII chapter 38

A month ago, when Augustine finally gave himself over to God, I was half expecting the remaining third of his Confessions to be pious anticlimax. I was partly right.

There’s a moving account of the death of his mother, which makes a point of her not wishing to be buried in her homeland. I wonder if this marks a point in the history of the west when people stopped seeing themselves as inextricably bound up with their place of origin, their Country – a disjunct that in the anthropocene we may be trying to reverse.

The rest of the book is given over to philosophical and theological argument – about the virtuous life, the nature of time and memory, the nature of God and eternity, the creation of the world, the meaning of faith. I let a lot of this go through to the keeper, happy to half-understand the intricate arguments. My impression is that his overarching project is to reconcile Platonist philosophy with the Christian scriptures and the doctrines of the Church – a major contribution to the development of Western thought, but not exactly a barrel of laughs.

Some bits grabbed my attention.

There’s a long passage where Augustine goes through the five senses and talks about how to best renounce the pleasures associated with them, or at least not enjoy them for their own sake (because after all you have to eat, and you can’t help but smell nice things). It’s a pretty perverse project that cast a long shadow – my own Catholic childhood and adolescence fairly bristled with notions of self-denial and discipline of the senses, and the ‘examination of conscience’ we were taught to perform from the age of seven could have been based on Augustine. I was struck by the hard intellectual work he puts into it. As he says:

I am working hard in this field, and the field of my labours is myself. I have become to myself like land that a farmer works with difficulty and with much sweat.
Ego certe, domine, laboro hic et laboro in me ipso: factus sum mihi terra difficultatis et sudoris nimii.

(10:16, pages 222–223)

I love it that he clearly had experienced the pleasures which he was renouncing. He protests a bit too much about the awfulness of sensual pleasure, but lesser pleasures can be acknowledged. For instance:

What excuse can I make for myself when often, as I sit at home, I cannot turn my eyes from the sight of a lizard catching flies or a spider entangling them as they fly into her web? Does it make any difference that these are only small animals? It is true that the sight of them inspires me to praise you for the wonders of your creation and the order in which you have disposed all things, but I am not intent upon your praises when first I begin to watch. It is one thing to rise quickly from a fall, another not to fall at all. And my life is full of such faults.
quid cum me domi sedentem stelio muscas captans vel aranea retibus suis inruentes inplicans saepe intentum me facit? num quia parva sunt animalia, ideo non res eadem geritur? pergo inde ad laudandum te, creatorem mirificum atque ordinatorem rerum omnium, sed non inde intentus esse incipio. aliud est cito surgere, aliud est non cadere. et talibus vita mea plena est

(10:35, page 243)

It’s interesting, by the way that where the translation has ‘such faults’ at the end there, the Latin has ‘such things’, leaving the possibility open that it may not be a fault at all.

Possibly because I’m currently doing an online course in modern and contemporary American poetry (‘ModPo‘) which has a focus on close reading, I’m fascinated by Augustine’s extended discussion of the first verses of the book of Genesis. Some readings, he argues – probably against his former companions the Manichees – are just wrong. But there is room for different interpretations: the text is open, as the ModPo teachers would say, and it’s impossible for anyone to know what was in the mind of the human author (whom he takes to be Moses). There’s something wonderfully modernist about this, for example:

For my part I declare resolutely and with all my heart that if I were called upon to write a book which was to be vested with the highest authority, I should prefer to write it in such a way that a reader could find re-echoed in my words whatever truths he was able to apprehend. I would rather write in this way than impose a single true meaning so explicitly that it would exclude all others, even though they contained no falsehood that could give me offence.
ego certe, quod intrepidus de meo corde pronuntio, si ad culmen auctoritatis aliquid scriberem, sic mallem scribere, ut, quod veri quisque de his rebus capere posset, mea verba resonarent, quam ut unam veram sententiam ad hoc apertius ponerem, ut excluderem ceteras, quarum falsitas me non posset offendere.

(12:31, page 308)

Mind you, quite a lot of Augustine’s readings are so tortuously allegorical as to surpass the most fanciful offerings of today’s poetry readers. He somehow manages, for instance, to make ‘God made the birds of the air’ signify something about God allowing ideas to float in humans’ minds.

It’s a shame that towards the very end he says that, although ‘in mind and rational intelligence’ women have a nature the equal of men’s (‘in mente rationabilis intellegentiae parem naturam‘), ‘in sex’ they are physically subject to men (‘sexu tamen corporis ita masculino sexui subiceretur‘). Perhaps it was a mercy to the women of his time that he chose a life of celibacy.

But I don’t want to leave on such a sour note. Here’s a passage from Book XIII chapter 9, which illustrates both the way his reasoning works and the way he presents himself:

A body inclines by its own weight towards the place that is fitting for it. Weight does not always tend towards the lowest place, but the one which suits it best, for though a stone falls, flame rises. Each thing acts according to its weight, finding is right level. If oil is poured into water, it rises to the surface, but if water is poured on to oil, it sinks below the oil. This happens because each acts according to its weight, finding its right level. When things are displaced, they are always on the move until they come to rest where they are meant to be. In my case, love is the weight by which I act. To whatever place I go, I am drawn to it by love.

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Yumna Cassab’s Australiana

Posted on 15 Sep 2023 | 2 comments

Yumna Cassab, Australiana: A Novel (Ultimo Press 2022)

I came to this book with inappropriate expectations. I had just read Dean Ashenden’s Telling Tennant’s Story and Julianne Schultz’s The Idea of Australia, and the title Australiana seemed to suggest a similar attempt to speak to the state of Australian culture – possibly, given the author’s name, from a non-Anglo perspective. If those other books hadn’t been in my mind I might have expected an ironic treatment of clichés of national identity, like kangaroos, slouch hats, or Big Things.

But neither of those expectations was met. As far as I can tell there is no attempt at a grand unifying statement about Australia, and there’s no cute wildlife or cultural kitsch. Nor is the book a novel, as proclaimed in small print on the cover (but not on the title page, which makes one suspect that it was the cover designer who added the descriptor). It’s a number of short fictions.

There are five stories, all more or less presenting grim sketches of life in rural New South Wales, up Tamworth way. The first and longest, ‘The Town’, is the most interesting. It consists of roughly 30 short pieces – ranging from half a dozen lines to seven pages in length. Most pieces pick up a detail of the previous one – a character, an action, a piece of furniture – and place it in a different story, as if the writer’s attention is caught by a detail in one story and lets it lead her (and us) where it will. What emerges is not so much a mosaic of country town life as a meander through parts of it: there’s flood, fire, and drought, so maybe a hint of a grand national panorama in the background.

In the first piece, an unnamed character has his house broken into a number of times, and on the fourth time he has a weirdly amicable chat with the intruders. Subsequent pieces introduce us to the intruders, and then to other people in their lives. The pattern repeats: asomething happens, then we see it from another perspective, and what had seemed arbitrary, weird or perhaps insane, becomes comprehensible – or vice versa. The writing is spare, and trusts the reader to make the connections – even sometimes to make them up.

If you picked the book up in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop and turned to page 76 to check it out, you would be in the midst of the section ‘The Knife and the Axe’, featuring a man consumed with anxiety when his nine-year-old daughter invites a friend home from school. The friend, we know from the previous story, has set fire to his father’s fields in reaction to something his father did that enraged him:

Would you believe it? No, he did not believe it. His own daughter was nine years old and he tried to imagine her burning their home or even the fence and he couldn’t. She would never do it. She had pigtails and ribbons and went around in a dress and polished shoes. His little Mia would never do that.

He truly believed that until she brought Jayden around after school. She told her dad that Jayden was in her class and he was afraid to go home, could he stay a while, please.

That’s all we hear about the aftermath of the boy’s arson in his own home. This story stays resolutely with the point of view of the girl’s father, and becomes a tale of parental paranoia:

He hid the matches and the lighter before they entered the house and he worried about the fireplace giving Jayden ideas. So he seated then at the dining table with their backs to where the fire could have been.

Not to spoil the episode for you, but his anxiety cranks up when the children go to Mia’s bedroom and Mia asks for a candle. ‘The Knife and the Axe’ ends with a classic horror-movie cliffhanger (I should mention that the fragments in this and the other stories move in and out of a range of genres, including fairy tale and prose poem and micro fiction), as the children, armed with a knife and an axe, come towards him demanding that he give them candles:

He turned and ran for the door but he didn’t make it that far. As he fell to the ground he thought: I never imagined my life would end like this.

(Page 79)

And the next section, ‘Lost’, picks up the story from his wife’s point of view. I won’t disclose why he failed to reach the door beyond saying that the story isn’t lacking in sardonic humour.

As befits such a set of linked episodes, the final one returns to an object that was stolen in the first.

Each of the other four stories is similarly made up of short, sometimes very short sections. Three of them are grim contemporary tales, and the fourth, ‘Captain Thunderbolt’, is a mix of narrative, verse, and reflective essays inspired by the lingering presence of the titular bushranger in the New Englandregion.

I still don’t understand the book’s title. I suppose ‘Tamworthiana’ or ‘New Englandiana’ don’t have much of a ring to them.

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If you don’t know … ask! (Really)

Posted on 11 Sep 2023 | 8 comments

Has there ever been a more infuriatingly pro-stupid slogan than ‘If you don’t know, vote no’?

I want to shout, ‘If you don’t know, find out!’ or, ‘My mother used to say that wilful ignorance is a sin!’

I’ve just trawled through nearly 20 years of posts on this blog and see that, by good luck as much as by virtue, I’ve been doing quite a lot of finding out. I haven’t read any books specifically about the Voice referendum, though Megan Davis’s Quarterly Essay, Voice of Reason, is my next cab off the rank. Not all my learning has made it onto the blog, but here – for anyone interested – is a retrospective tour. There’s a lot, and I’m pretty sure I’ve missed some.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart needs to be first named. It’s a tremendously weighty document that’s worth reading and re-reading, then reading again.

There’s a scattering of personal reminiscence about non-book learning:

  • In The Two Mrs Williamses (10 February 2006), I describe my mother’s friendship with an Aboriginal woman as I observed it as a small child. It turns out that what I thought I remembered of the contents of their conversation can’t actually have happened, but I do recall the relaxed, respectful back and forth of their talk.
  • In March 2009, discussing my niece Paula Shaw’s book, Seven Seasons in Aurukun, I reminisced about my brief time in Willowra, a Warlpiri community in the Northern Territory, and how it unsettled my sense of what it means to be Australian: Australia is not a European country, but an Aboriginal country where a European outpost was established.
  • In I didn’t go to the Vigil today … (June 2020) I recalled the March to La Perouse in 1970 on the anniversary of Cook’s landing, and the poem read on that day by Oodgeroo Noonuccal (then known as Kath Walker)

There are moments at Sydney Writers’ Festivals:

  • In 2010 the extremely charming Boori Monty Prior struck home when he said, ‘This is the only country in the world that mines a culture and sells it off to the world but doesn’t want to know about the people who produce it.’
  • in 2016 Zelda la Grange described how working for Nelson Mandela i South Africa dissolved the bubble of white privilege that had so terribly narrowed her world; and right on topic, mother and daughter Tammy and Lesley Williams described the huge undertaking it was to reclaim wages taken from Lesley under the Queensland Act
  • in 2019, Nayka Gorrie reminded a packed Sydney Town Hall that White lies about Black truths have been repeated in curriculums, literature and political speeches until they have become generally accepted as truths
  • In 2021, Tony Birch and Evelyn Araluen talked about the way language constrains the way non-Indigenous people can see and respond to Australian realities; and there was a brilliant a panel of Nayuka Gorrie, Melissa Lucashenko and Nardi Simpson, from which my takeaway was the contrast between extraction and reciprocity as ways of relating to Country
  • Again in 2021, Bruce Pascoe and Tagalaka man Victor Steffensen spoke about the danger of losing traditional First Nations knowledge that may be crucial in the age of climate change
  • This year (2023) Alexis Wright and Nardi Simpson, in separate sessions, talked about First nations ideas of time as quite different from western ideas.

I’ve blogged about non-fiction by First Nations people:

  • In Southerly Volume 74 Nº 2 (2014), Jim Everett, a plangermairreener man of north-east Tasmania, explains why he refuses to identify as an Australian citizen
  • Lesley and Tammy Williams’ Not Just Black and White (2015) tell the story of Lesley’s exploitation under the Act in Queensland: Lesley is about my age!
  • Alexis Wright, Tracker (2017) is a multi-vocal portrait of a great man
  • In Overland 230 (2018), Tony Birch’s column sheds a powerful light on the concept of Aboriginal sovereignty. Sovereignty in general, he writes, ‘is an imposed colonial concept’. Then he cites Jack Charles with a possible understanding of what true Aboriginal sovereignty might mean: ‘He could not walk by a person in need – any person in need – as an Aboriginal man claiming the right to Country.’
  • Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia (2018), a collection of essays edited by Anita Heiss, showcases a huge diversity of First Nations voices, experiences and stories
  • A swathe of articles in Overland Nº 240 amount to an impressionistic history of First Nations activism from the 1960s Referendum campaign and the Gurindji walk off from Wave Hill to Blak Lives Matter and Indigenous hip-hop
  • Chelsea Watego’s Another Day in the Colony is a powerful contribution to the conversation about First Nations relationship to institutional power in Australia
  • Ruby Langford Ginibi is best known for her memoir, Don’t Take Your Love to Town. The book I’ve read, Haunted by the Past (1999), could have been written to expand on the paragraph oof the Uluru Statement from the Heart’s paragraph on the incarceration of First Nations youth. I had the good fortune to share a table with this extraordinary woman at the 2005 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (blog post here).

I’ve read a lot of history:

  • T G H Strehlow, Journey to Horseshoe Bend (1969) is a personal account of a major incident in the life of a whiteman who spent his life working with the Arrenrnte people of Central Australia – how much settler Australians don’t understand!
  • Heather Goodall’s Invasion to Embassy (1996) spells out the long, painful process of dispossession of First nations people in New South Wales, and deafness to Aboriginal arguments up to and including the Mabo and Wik judgements
  • Kay Anderson’s Race and the Crisis of Humanism (2007) brings a coldly analytic eye to 18th and 19th century humanist European writing that set out, shockingly to our ways of thinking, to define colonised peoples as less than human
  • Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’ Drawing the Global Colour Line (2008) introduced me to the horror story of the racism around Australia’s foundation as a nation, and in particular the role Prime Minister Billy Hughes played in preventing the League of Nations from including a clause on racial equality in its covenant
  • Grace Karskens The Colony (2009) is a fabulously readable book that leaves its readers in no doubt that at its heart the settlement of New South Wales was a genocidal project, acknowledged as such at the time in all but the actual word (which wasn’t coined until more than 150 years later)
  • Mike Smith, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (2013) is full of technical discussions of dating techniques, but it gives substance to often-repeated statements about how very long people have lived in Australia, and the conditions they dealt with
  • Tom Griffiths, The Art of Time Travel (2016) tells the fascinating story of how the mainstream understanding of Australia has been transformed over the last three quarters of a century, mainly through the acknowledgement and inclusion of First Nations voices and perspectives
  • Historian Humphrey McQueen’s essay in Overland 233 (2018) it gleefully explodes the false outrage over proposals to change the date of Australia Day
  • Cassandra Pybus Truganini (2019) had my Book Group ‘staring into the abyss of our nation’s foundation story’. I also heard it discussed in a session of the 2020 Sydney Writers’s Festival, where Jakelin Troy a Ngarigu woman from south-eastern Australia offered an approving First Nations perspective on it
  • Mark McKenna Return to Uluru (2021) is a wonderful study in how the settler versions of history can be turned upside down by evidence, and no one loses from the process
  • Dean Ashenden’s Telling Tennant’s Story (2022) is history at its passionate best, written partly in response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Other non-fiction:

  • Ross Gibson Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002), a meditation on the so-called horror stretch, country north of Rockhampton in central Queensland that has a reputation as the setting for terrible events, forced my ears and eyes open to the horrific history of Native Police and enslavement of Melanesians in my North Queensland home. ‘Sooner or later,’ he writes, ‘any society that would like to know itself as “post-colonial” must confront an inevitable question: how to live with collective memories of theft and murder. Sooner or later, therefore, acknowledgement and grieving must commence before healing can ensue.’
  • Deborah Bird Rose’s Reports from a Wild Country (2004), includes this: ‘Reconciliation draws our attention to the war against Indigenous people, and shows us the legacy of conquest: this great divide on one side of which are the survivors of this undeclared and untreatied war, and on the other side of which are the descendants of those who waged the war … The project of reconciliation demands of us that we acknowledge the divide and the violence, but it simultaneously demands that we explore the entanglements of memory, connection, and commitment.’
  • Eve Vincent and Timothy Neale (editors), Unstable Relations (2016) is a collection of essays about the relationship between First Nations people and environmentalists, insisting on the complexity of forming alliances between the two groups. Monica Morgan, Yorta Yorta activist, is quoted: ‘However much non-Indigenous people say they are committed, in the long run they are committed to their society.’
  • Saltwater (2016) is Kathy McLennan’s memoir of her time as a lawyer for the Townsville and Districts Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Corporation for Legal Aid Services. More than any other book I’ve read and discussed on this blog, It has become the subject of controversy – In an article by Russell Marks in Overland 237 (2019), and then in Chelsea Watego’s Another Day in the Colony (2021)
  • Mark McKenna, Moment of Truth (Quarterly Essay 69, 2018) is one of the first sustained responses to the Uluru Statement from the Heart that I read. It’s still worth reading
  • Jess Hill See What You Made Me Do (2019) is a brilliant book about domestic abuse. One insight in particular is relevant here. She argues, with evidence, that domestic abuse was more prevalent and tolerated to a greater extent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England than in pre-invasion Australia
  • An excellent summary-essay by Jeff Sparrow, ‘That’s what drives us to fight’: labour, wilderness and the environment in Australia‘, in Overland 246 (2022) is a solid account of the relationship between settlers and First Nations people in Australia with an eye to environmentalist concerns

Of course I’ve read novels:

  • Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), The Swan Book (2013) and Praiseworthy (2023) are vast, challenging works from a First Nations perspective
  • Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance (Picador 2010). I was struck by his description of the desecration a a grave as ‘deliberate and careless all at once’. (‘If you don’t know, vote no’ is surely an exhortation to be deliberately careless.) His Taboo (2017) may be less revelatory, but it’s also a brilliant novel.
  • Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip (2018) is just wonderful.
  • Tara June winch, The Yield (2019) ends with an appeal to the reader to make the effort of hearing a First Nations word, and to say it
  • Julie Janson Benevolence (2020) brings a knockabout theatre quality to the early days of colonisation

And lots of poetry:

  • When I blogged about Lisa Bellear’s Aboriginal Country in 2019, I did a brief round-up of First Nations poets I had read, including Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Kevin Gilbert, Lionel Fogarty, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Samuel Wagan Watson and Evelyn Araluen. Since then I’ve read:
  • Two books by Ellen van Neerven – Comfort Food and Throat. For me, her poetry is solidly grounded in a common humanity, and then takes the reader with her to what is specific about her experience as a First Nations person
  • Australian Poetry Journal, Volume 10, Number 1: modern elegy has a whole section edited by Ellen van Neerven featuring the work of First Nations poets

Added a day later: As I expected, there were some big omissions in that list. The Emerging Artist reminded me of:

  • Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful (2016), which, I said in my blog post, ‘will grip anyone interested in Western Desert art, or the question of how to live awarely as a non-Indigenous Australian’.
  • Archie Roach’s warm, generous autobiography, Tell Me Why (2019)

There are sure to be others. I’d welcome your additions and recommendations in the comments section.

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