The Best Australian Essays 2014 (27 page)
Read The Best Australian Essays 2014 Online
Authors: Robert Manne
It probably required a Briton to face this matter squarely. We might want to discuss the legacy bequeathed to subsequent pre-and post-Federation Australian governments and the colonists who were protagonists in and inheritors of this history, but Lawson's first point is that the destruction of the Tasmanians occurred in a British colony governed by the British Crown:
This was a British genocide, carried out on the other side of the world by British men, articulating British ideas, discussed in British newspapers and ultimately embedded in British history and remembered in British museums.
This is Lawson's account of how an island population of several thousand was reduced to an official figure of seventeen inhabitants in fifty years:
Some indigenous people in Tasmania died at the hands of settlers who wished to exterminate them. Some died in the process of being removed from land that settlers wished to develop. Some died in the process of being removed from the land and âcivilised' into Europeans. Some died from warfare between the island's nations that was promoted by their declining resource bases, a result of British presence. Some died of imported diseases. And, of course, some survived, but with little or no access to a culture that the British considered worthless and had attempted to destroy. This happened over the course of a colonisation played out during more than 50 years.
It is not Lawson's contention that there was a state project aimed at genocide â âclearly there was no state project of extermination in either Tasmania or continental Australia' â but rather that the colonial project itself had a fatal logic â âgenocide was the inevitable outcome of a set of British policies, however apparently benign they appeared to their authors' â because âeven those aimed at protection ⦠ultimately envisaged no future whatsoever for the original peoples of the island'.
And this is the point that Lawson makes which is so compelling to me, and which is so important to grasp: indigenous Tasmanians were nearly extinguished between the Scylla of extermination and the Charybdis of protection.
These two pincers served the same ends: the preservation and continued prosecution of the colonial enterprise without relent, with sparing pity, but with no pause to the destruction it was so obviously causing the native peoples of the land being colonised, and of which the colonial authorities were acutely conscious long before the bitter end was reached.
This is how Lawson puts it:
the British government knew explicitly that it had unleashed a destructive process that would eradicate those societies. Its representatives disavowed, and indeed even regretted, the exterminatory impacts of their presence, yet they never faltered, never sought to roll back colonial development. Indeed, they even developed an understanding of the world that saw as inevitable the dying out of âinferior' indigenous races.
Coming to terms with the past
Lawson's is a perspective-shifting analysis for me: that frontier destruction and protection served the same colonial logic. A logic that envisaged
no future
for the native peoples, whose homelands were to be usurped and societies swept aside by the expanding colonies. Which, in the case of the Tasmanians, led to utter destruction.
Of course, I have always understood that protection worked in concert with frontier dispossession, and facilitated it. It is just that protection seemed to be, if not pulling in an opposite direction, then at least divergent â ameliorating the harshness of frontier colonisation. Instead, protection pulled in the same direction as the frontier â which is what Lawson shows so powerfully in the case of its conception and inception in Tasmania.
I am a third-generation legatee of mission protection. The Lutheran mission at Cape Bedford started in 1886 was the initiative of Johann Flierl, a Bavarian missionary en route to German New Guinea. Waylaid in Cooktown, he started the mission after seeing the devastation of the Guugu Yimidhirr peoples in the wake of the Cooktown gold rush of 1873. The following year his successor, George Schwarz, took up Flierl's mission. The mission was an initiative of its society back at Neuendettelsau, not of the colonial government of Queensland, but following the
Aboriginals Protection Act 1897
(later replaced by the
Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act 1939)
the mission and the Queensland state became entwined. Pursuant to these laws, in 1910 my grandfather was removed from the bush as a boy. Dispossession on the frontier and the state's protection apparatus â native police âdispersing' the frontier tribes, protectors removing children to the missions, and Aboriginal reserves â led to what would be called the stolen generations. Protection provided new souls for the mission. What began in the 1880s as a safe haven for young women and an enticement for young men wanting partners, from 1900 turned into a receiving station for masses of huddled young, separated from their families.
Protection and preservation were not there for nothing. For the other side of Queensland's frontier had been and still was a charnel house: consisting of moments when the pitiless logic of colonialism ended in genocidal doom for some groups. As Queensland lacks the defining sea boundaries of the Vandemonian island, the annihilation of tribes on the frontier is more obscure. But there is a wide consensus in Aboriginal histories that the fiction of
terra nullius
was turned into the remorseless fact of
homo nullius
in some parts of Queensland.
As inheritors of the mission's religion and traditions, people like me necessarily hold complex perspectives on this history. The missionaries' kindnesses and humanity were mixed with the racialism of the time, and their objection to and support for various aspects of the colonial enterprise does not tell a simple story.
This dialectic has been part of my life and identity. The dingoes and sheep of my own exploration of our mission history as a student at Sydney University spoke to this historical and spiritual turmoil.
I will not get into the permutations of the protection regimes that emerged across the Australian mainland following George Augustus Robinson. The Tasmanian model was ameliorated with the setting aside of Aboriginal reserves in other states and the Northern Territory. The attitudes of the churches towards indigenous cultures, languages and heritage â and the conviction and vigour with which they sought to deracinate their charges â varied widely, according to the proclivities of particular denominations, individual missions within denominations, the personalities of key missionary figures, and the period of history. Therefore, while many missions and government settlements destroyed indigenous cultures and languages, others actively preserved them, and unofficially (and later sometimes officially) allowed Christianity to coexist with native religious beliefs. The language of the Guugu Yimidhirr survived because of Missionary Schwarz's conviction that their mother tongue best conveyed the Gospels to their hearts. Robinson's prototype house of confinement at Wybalena, Flinders Island, might have been the most extreme example, but its original logic remained at the core of all subsequent protection regimes.
So how is this to be dealt with? I cannot let Lawson's thesis on the Tasmanian genocide be set aside, and I also know that without the Lutherans my people would have perished on the Cooktown frontier. It is for me no longer an ambivalence; it is a clear understanding of the good and bad in the past. Yes, it is often said that history has many shades of grey, but this appreciation of complexity and nuance should not provide refuge from the truth that our nation's history includes times of unequivocal evil and times of redeeming goodness.
Whatever the ideological and symbolic villainy he represents to Aboriginal people, there is no mistaking Captain James Cook's extraordinary courage and stature as a seafaring explorer. Indeed, it is ridiculous to dispute it. For me, it is the same with Schwarz. I still cleave to my testimonial to the old man, published in the
Australian
on the eve of the parliamentary apology to the stolen generations:
The nineteen-year-old Bavarian missionary who came to the year-old Lutheran mission at Cape Bedford in Cape York Peninsula in 1887, and who would spend more than fifty years of his life underwriting the future of the Guugu Yimidhirr people, cannot but be a hero to me and to my people. We owe an unrepayable debt to Georg Heinrich Schwarz and to the white people who supported my grandparents and countless others to rebuild their lives after they arrived at the mission as young children in 1910. My grandfather Ngulunhdhul came in from the local bush to the Aboriginal reserve that was created to facilitate the mission. My great-grandfather Arrimi would remain in the bush in the Cooktown district, constantly evading police attempts to incarcerate him at Palm Island and remaining in contact with his son Ngulunhdhul, and later his grandson, my father. My grandmother was torn away from her family near Chillagoe, to the west of Cairns, and she would lose her own language and culture in favour of the local Guugu Yimidhirr language and culture of her new home. Indeed, it was the creation of reserves and the establishment of missions that enabled Aboriginal cultures and languages to survive throughout Cape York Peninsula. Today, those two young children who met at the mission have scores of descendants who owe their existence to their determination to survive in the teeth of hardship and loss. Schwarz embodied all of the strengths, weaknesses and contradictions that one would expect of a man who placed himself in the crucible of history. Would that we were judged by history in the way we might be tempted to judge Schwarz â we are not a bootlace on the courage and achievement of such people.
My childhood home was on the first street on the northernmost side of the village, named after Flierl. Next is the main street named Muni, a rendering of Schwarz's Guugu Yimidhirr name. These parallel streets name the key figures of our mission history in succession. The third is named after Wilhelm Poland, who, supporting Schwarz, raised a young family in the earliest years of the mission. A prolific writer and translator, he gave an account of the capture by troopers in July 1888 of Didegal, one of the Guugu Yimidhirr still living in the bush, who was suspected of killing a white man three months before. Didegal was treated as an outlaw, like my great-grandfather. Arrimi eluded police all his life, but Didegal did not:
But, this time, Didegal's fate was sealed; he was the victim of his own treachery. On the following morning, his pursuers had little difficulty in tracing the clear imprint of his footsteps through soot and ash, and had completed their mission before midday. The man who was still planning mischief 24 hours previously now stood before us in irons, but with that characteristic look of sneering disdain still dominating his dark features. I must admit, I felt a certain compassion towards him. Was he not, after all, a poor, misguided heathen?
After a short break, the troopers saddled their horses, shouldered their guns, indicated to the captive that he was to follow them, and made their way back into the privacy and secrecy of the bush.
No one ever saw Didegal again. Some distance from the beaten track the party was ordered to a halt, a shot was fired, and Didegal was dispatched for good. He was, after all, only a black fellow.
This is what I mean by the casual parsimony of killing on the frontier. Anonymous, extrajudicial, unreported, mundane. Like eradicating vermin. Or inferior beings of human likeness.
A Rightful Place
Burning Men: An American Triptych
Guy Rundle
Pete Seeger
There are people who die at a great age, and it seems impossible they were still alive. When the writer Edward Upward, a quintessentially 1930s writer, Berlin and cabbage soup and railways, died in 2009, amid Facebook and convenience stores, it seemed like a sort of trick of the century. That is not the case with Pete Seeger, the musician and activist, whose passing at the age of ninety-four marks the end of a long continuity.
Last year he was playing at gatherings at the tail-end of the Occupy movement; he did the first of these in the late '30s, a tall young man of ferocious energy, wielding a five-string banjo, the then somewhat obscure instrument he'd heard played at a square dance in North Carolina. Before the guitar went electric, the banjo was electrifying, its sharp strings and hard shell giving it an urgent intensity. Seeger sang and played it for strike parties, union benefits, hunger marches, peace rallies; later, for civil rights rallies, antiwar rallies, counterculture gatherings, anti-nuclear concerts, the global anti-capitalist movement, Iraq War rallies, and Occupy. He played protest songs and old folk ballads, songs of war and love, and thousands of children's songs. He revived and sharpened âWe Shall Overcome', wrote âWhere Have All the Flowers Gone', âTurn! Turn! Turn!' and dozens more, made famous âThe Lion Sleeps Tonight' and dozens more.
He was the straight and continent man to Woody Guthrie's tempestuous, tormented â and tormenting â short existence, and the carrier of much of his memory to new generations. He was part of a vast undertaking, a movement as wide as the century, and his name stands for thousands less well known, or not at all. But he was also a leader, a regrouper, someone who pulled people together and sent things in a certain direction.
In the '40s, he organised the Almanac Singers, and then the Weavers, groups that took folk into the mainstream. Much of that music, smoothed out for commercial use, seems anodyne today â the Seekers, as the name maybe suggests, were pretty much a mildly rocked-up copy of the Weavers â but it introduced folk into the bloodstream of American culture. The Weavers' reunion concert at Carnegie Hall in 1955 â after they had been blacklisted from TV and radio for several years â and the album that came from it marks the start of the folk boom that would explode in, and in part shape, the '60s.
But Seeger was as much an activist pure and simple as a musician who did benefit gigs. His politics were initially hard-Left. Coming from a prosperous liberal family â he was at that North Carolina square dance because his father was taping the music there, in the manner of many at a time when genuine folk cultures were falling victim to highways, cities and radio â he went into the Communist Party in the late '30s, at a time when Communism seemed to many to be the only movement capable of resisting Fascism. That he stayed it in through its peregrinations in the '40s â playing anti-war songs in the period of the NaziâSoviet pact, and then Leftist patriotic ones after the USSR was invaded â was something he would later be rueful about. His seven years or so with the party will doubtless form the nub of much right-wing commentary. But retrospect is kind. Just as everyone who does past-life regression discovers themselves to be Cleopatra or Caesar, everyone who judges decades past imagines they would have been Orwell. Since there was only one of him, and not many more others like him, it is a rather self-serving delusion.
Feted in the anti-Fascist '40s, Seeger rapidly became a target of the blacklist. The process was altogether more brutal than it is often represented to be, since the intent was not merely to bar people from media access, but also to deny them employment and destroy them psychologically. Families were targeted, and even extended families. The numerous resulting suicides were really homicides.
Yet many at the time bore this and other dangers â beatings, and worse, at civil rights rallies â and stayed upright, and Seeger was one of them. After being jailed for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was banned from TV and many venues until the late 1960s. He began playing at colleges, effectively sparking off the college entertainment circuit, and writing and publishing musical how-to books. In the '50s, he and his wife, Toshi, who died last year after seventy years of marriage, built a cabin up the Hudson River and began campaigning for the clean-up of what had become an outfall pipe. Their campaign of sailing the river and raising awareness was an early model of a localised, site-specific campaign with a global message. He also created children's music organisations for ghettoised urban kids to get to sing and play, funded by the royalties that came in from recordings that were adaptations of traditional songs.
In that respect, as much as being a radical, he was a conserving, conservative figure â a reminder that a section of the Left, over this century, did the work that many conservatives contributed little to, allied as they were with a nihilistic modernising liberalism. We conserved the cities, the buildings, the habitats, the folk culture and the commitment to serious art that the Right were happy to see swept away by market forces. Seeger was an essential part of that, because he and others saw the way in which the disappearance of a folk culture â dying from the late nineteenth century onwards, crowded out by an industrially produced culture â was theft, an alienation of our lives, of the immediate simplicity that such a culture offers. The effort to reintroduce it was part of a great cultural renewal in the 1960s, when we began to push back against the creation of monolithic suburbs, the destruction of living cities, the imposition of a drab and conformist lifestyle.
Too successful, perhaps; the folk revolution changed, above all, the way we do early schooling, the songs we learnt, the stories we heard, the forms of organised play. It fused itself with a philosophical search for authenticity in a commodified world and became, through a transformed popular music, the voice of that search.
It was inevitable that that would come to be the thing we would flee from, whether through Bob Dylan's turn to electric music or the punk rendering in which the authentic was necessarily the pessimistic â or now, through our simple distancing from it, via a movie like
Inside Llewyn Davis,
which treats the era that Seeger helped create as one as distant as the Pharaohs. But by now, the historical work of its content has been done. We regained a dimension of life we had lost, even if endless primary school singalongs or
Sesame Street
rejigs make it impossible to now hear the rawness and exuberance that âIf I Had a Hammer' or âGuantanamera' had on first hearing, among the lush and overproduced lounge music of the'50s.
Seeger was dubbed âMr Saint' by those around him. Unquestionably, it was not a simple compliment, but neither was it purely sarcastic. He left the Weavers when they decided to do a cigarette commercial; he donated his fees on âThe Lion Sleeps Tonight' back to the composer, Solomon Linda, when he found out it was not a traditional song (the song's US publishers stole the fees back again). Like many who live long and are famous in this game, he was quite possibly impossible and imperious at times, and may well have got credit due to someone else.
The dust-bowl aesthetic he took on â never as stagily as Guthrie â was no doubt as irritating to his contemporaries as Bruce Springsteen's born-again fauxletarianism was in the'70s. Time has elided the fact that he was the private schoolâeducated son of a New England, New Deal family. Black-and-white film has done its work, rendering the past authentic in a way that we feel we have lost. But of course that is a little true: Seeger and Guthrie and others were not trying on a new image, they were committing to a movement and a world; that world took them on and changed them, and Seeger at least lived long enough to be part of the years when everything turned, turned. That may be an occasion for nostalgia, but it can also be one for self-renewal.
In an era when the gains are small and the scope for change has become modest, it is easy to take refuge in a pessimism, a paranoia, an idea of permanent dissidence that aims for no more than to make known its refusal of consent. Pete Seeger's long life reminds us to think otherwise. When he began, at the tail-end of the Depression and the beginning of a total war, black people were being hanged from trees on a harsh word, on mistaken identity, on a whim; the world was carved up into a number of European and American empires; a casual and near universal anti-Semitism girded and protected its violent and vicious expression in Germany and Eastern Europe; a woman could be sacked from her half-pay job for getting married, for kicking back against a sexual shakedown; a child could die because no one could afford the price of a doctor. In whole areas of the world now, these things do not happen, not as a matter of course, and when they do it is an exception, not a rule, and the word goes out worldwide. When a gay man is killed in Idaho or a woman pack-raped in India, a synagogue attacked or a footballer abused, there is outcry.
Some of it, maybe much of it, is self-serving and hypocritical, or silly, or feeds a sense of self-satisfaction. Some of it is used to obscure other acts that it is inconvenient to note: the burning and bombing of mosques, for example. Some things go backwards at a rapid clip. But the world where such things could get no more than a shrug of the shoulders is fading fast to sepia. If it feels sometimes that a radical spirit has departed the place, that is because we live after a great surge towards that new time, the period from World War II to the end of the'60s, to be seen properly as a single unified period, a great social revolution.
If it often seems like we missed the best of it, well, we missed the worst of it, too, both the delusional pursuits of utopia â as such things are often portrayed â and the grim choice between armed camps, as they more often were. And if it looks like the one thing we did not achieve was a greater economic equality, some sort of democratic control over the means of how we live, then it's worth remembering how poor poverty was for many, and how threadbare of opportunity was even prosperity; if it feels like we have exchanged those limits for a plenty that is immersing us in a culture of glut, surplus, waste, atomisation and spiritual damage, well, that is the next battle to be won, the next thing to make visible. If the struggle to stop lunatics from torching the planet feels like playing on defence, it isn't â this battle was always going to come, not simply to restrain a bunch of criminals and psychopaths, but to reassert the global ownership of the shared resources of a finite existence.
All this is encompassed by Pete Seeger's long life â all that, and the thousands, less well known or not at all, who worked with him, influenced him, taught him. There are times when the image of someone like Pete Seeger â standing ramrod-tall, singing defiance, before a crowd over six decades, all over YouTube â seems impossible to live up to. But the example is there, not to allow us to reproach ourselves for the time when the strength or the vision fails; it is there to encourage us to stand back up again when we have fallen or been knocked down, with as much spine as we can muster. No one can ask more of us or themselves than that; we cannot give more than that because that is all that is in our power to give.
That is what I take from Pete Seeger's life, and we shall overcome, someday.
True Detective
âSomeone once said to me, “Time is a flat circle.”' Leaning back in the plastic chair in the untidy interview room, the interrogatee, scrawny, mustachioed, wild-haired, is waxing philosophical to two bemused cops questioning him. âSo Death invented time to grow the things it wanted to kill.' âYou boys ever heard of the M-brane universe?'
What else could this be but
True Detective,
the latest greatest-ever television series from HBO, eight one-hour episodes ostensibly centred around a single crime, focused on a detective duo, Marty and Rust (Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey), one a family man, apparently uncomplicated, the other single, driven, dark. Based in the hinterland of Louisiana, a mid-range American no-space, swampy land, boxy towns, car parks, low-slung houses, trailers, broken-down gas stations,
TD
starts with the discovery of a murdered girl's body, ritually arranged, antlers attached to her body, in some form of ritual killing.
Twenty years ago, it's the sort of murder no one would put in a TV show; now, thanks to fourteen seasons of
Law and Order: SVU,
it's a commonplace, almost a little below par. What, only a ritual satanic murder in the Bayou? Will this really sustain eight hours? But
TD
quickly moves into a more complex mode, split across past and present â and then more than that. The story itself is coming out of the recent past, recounted by both Marty and Rust separately, in long police interviews. Maybe a decade, maybe fifteen years separates the two times.
Marty wears a better suit, has grown chunky, having clearly ridden up the chain of command; Rust is the wildman, with the frontier hair and the powerful thirst. Something, in the interim, happened, and not just to him. What, we don't know. We don't know why they are being questioned, whether it relates to the case that unfolds through their recounting, or something that happened between those two events, how past/present/future connect. Soon we have more dimensions to deal with. Rust, it transpires, has joined the Louisiana PD after years undercover in Texas, an extended âmission' as a drifting minor drug dealer, elements of which come roaring back into the âpresent' of the core story. Yet at episode five, after the pair triumphantly bust a neo-Nazi meth outfit with a sideline in child rape, the story lurches forwards, six years, to the early 2000s.
The partnership, having had years of coexistence, has started to collapse inwardly. Marty is content to work cases as they come, and maintain a fragile relationship with the wife he had humiliated by serial infidelity six years earlier; Rust has continued to pursue a line of inquiry that takes in lost children, fundamentalist preachers, swamp people, the police department and much else. But it all comes apart when Marty's wife fucks Rust, out for revenge after Marty's lapse into infidelity â with a woman he had tried to rescue when she was a child prostitute. They half kill each other, Rust departs, is gone for a decade, and the questioning occurs after he has returned. The story closes up, and the present becomes an excavation of the past.
