Finding Words To Cross The Great Divide
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday January 3, 1998
THE country around St George is flat, and the scrub is low. So flat, so low, that driving through it you get the full circle of the horizon.
I was out there, in rural Queensland, at the end of November with a friend who was going to interview Camilla Cowley and Ethel Munn, the pastoralist and the Gunggari elder who have joined together in reconciliation. There was a reconciliation meeting that weekend on the banks of the river in town.
Driving through that country, at once familiar and eerily strange, I was surprised to find myself thinking less about the present than about history. As if the land itself - that stained, red earth - was making some kind of demand, or claim.
In town we stopped at the pub, as if at a gateway. Men perched on their stools moved along to make room for us, the publican asked where we were from, conversation was genial until the inevitable question: what were we doing? "We're here for the reconciliation meeting," we said. "We're going out to see the Cowleys."
The Cowleys. Faces snapped closed. There was a sigh, a breath drawn in. A long pause and then, in response to our question, Will any of you be going to the meeting? the inevit-able reply. No point in reconciliation, they said. You can't reconcile with them. They (meaning the Aborigines) are lazy, drunk, untrustworthy. Et cetera. A casually conversational racism is currency out there. So casual it's disorienting. Things that can't be said in our world are offered without self-consciousness in theirs. We might as well have been visiting from the moon.
On the way into town we'd been told stories wherever we'd stopped, and they'd been offered with dry measured voices. If they'd been given in a different tone, they'd have been a kind of credential, or a warning. Stories of parents and grandparents who'd scratched a living in a few square miles of red dust, old men who remembered brothers who had fallen from horses as boys, broken their necks and been buried where they lay. It doesn't take much to look out at that country and see it'd make hard farming.
At every turn of every story was a pervasive sense of threat. Commodity prices. Drought. Government. These were given an uncanny quality by their sheer unpredictability. The blacks, a threat of another kind, were reassuringly present. The desire for certainty, a bulwark against everything that couldn't be controlled, was funnelled into this knowable, and familiar, enemy. So the history of massacres and dispossession is denied, or grudgingly accepted as something that belonged far in someone else's past. History is being divided in the service of a divided present.
Camilla Cowley has had threats made against her. And someone had rung before we'd left Sydney and said, Are you sure you want to come? and then the joke - definitely a joke, but jokes have an edge - Are your wills in order?
Camilla Cowley and Ethel Munn are extraordinary women. Ethel Munn has a queenly stance that reminded me at once of Faith Bandler. She is about the same age, and has a similar quality of calm, a sureness of self that she puts down to having had the good fortune of not having been stolen. She grew up with her parents.
Camilla Cowley has a striking face, taut with a kind of urgent intelligence. A face that has worked in the sun. She fits that old-fashioned term a woman of elegant bearing. With the tag of Joan of North Yancho, I'd thought maybe she'd be a bit sentimental, rather high-toned. I didn't expect a woman who would be either so modest or so lovely, and I didn't expect that she'd pack such a powerful punch. Charisma is not the right word. Faith is better. She's had a conversion experience. Through Ethel Munn she has crossed the divide from the white story, and entered imaginatively into the black. If passion could solve the impasse in the bush, Camilla would have fixed it already.
"That's Camilla," Ethel said. "She wants it all done yesterday." She knows her history, and she knows that change, if it is to come, will come slow, because fear and a precarious hold on the land invite the whites to resist the version of history that doesn't shore up their interest, or their idea of their intererst, in the present.
"The destruction of the past," historian Eric Hobsbawm says, "or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century."
Camilla and her husband, Kerry, read a lot of history. Australian and Aboriginal. And also Irish, which is Kerry Cowley's background, and not unrelated.
Back in town we stopped at the pub again. This time there was a woman sitting with the men. A nuggety old woman, burned to a crisp, her broad Edinburgh accent spiced with Australian vowels. She was more garrulous than the men who had set pieces, yarns, but seemed suspicious of conversation, as if it might unman them.
Maggie wasn't afraid of talk; in fact she was looking for it. But even she came to an abrupt halt when we got to native title and Wik. A heave of hostility filled the pub. And then the same ghastly rhetoric: You can't reconcile with them. They're dirty, untrustworthy, drunk. Et cetera.
And from that Maggie would not budge. Until suddenly she said, Except Daisy. "I loved Daisy. And Daisy's children. I'd give them the last drop of blood, any of them. Oh yes," she said. "Daisy. Daisy is different."
Maggie used to run a pub out on the Goondiwindi road miles from anywhere. She was there for 47 years. Daisy was the cook.
"Where's Daisy now?" we asked.
"Here in St George; she retired."
"Would Daisy be going to the reconciliation meeting?"
"What would she want to be doing that for?" Maggie said.
But Daisy was going. In our blundering city ways, we found her. She lives in a row of houses built for the town's still-independent retired. We knocked on the first door. A white woman looked suspiciously through her locked grille. Other white faces appeared at windows, curtains moved in the afternoon heat.
Then a door was flung open and out came Thelma, curlers in her hair, and a smile of welcome.
"You ladies looking for Daisy?" she said. "Come in."
Daisy and Thelma were baking cakes for the reconciliation meeting the next afternoon. There was going to be a sausage sizzle. They were astonished we'd come from so far away. They were worried, they admitted, that no-one would come, there'd just be the organisers and all those sausages. They weren't worried about violence, they'd heard the rumours, and they knew the mood in town. But something in them dropped as they said no, they didn't think it'd come to that. Not this time.
Hanging unspoken in the air was the knowledge that all of us had, that the red land that's still being fought over had been stained, and most of the blood that had run into it was theirs, not ours. Ethel Munn has said it. Noel Pearson has said it. "At the moment," he has said, "I can beat any young Aboriginal fighter for the cause when I tell him that engagement in the legal process and. . . in the political process is the way to a result."
The next morning, before the meeting, we went round to Maggie's, intent on our own private scheme of reconciliation.
"We hear you play the accordion," we said when she invited us into her house. Daisy hadn't said that she loved Maggie, only that we should ask her to sing.
On Friday nights in the pub Maggie had played the accordion, her husband the spoons, and Daisy's husband the gum leaf. Daisy was in the kitchen cooking for the men who came from miles around. It's a bugger being black, Ethel Munn said.
"Nah," Maggie said. "Haven't played for years."
It wasn't true, and after an hour or so, and a beer or two, the accordion came out. It had been given to her brother 60 years ago when he'd fallen off his bike and been blinded. But he never quite got the knack. It took Maggie, whose life was to be grafted onto that squeezebox, years to prise it away.
She opened it up in her kitchen and, in a voice of startling purity, sang Blow The Wind Southerly and My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean.
Jackie Huggins said recently that the history, the blood, is not so divided. She has pastoralist as well as Aboriginal inheritance. Many Australians do. It's not so clear, the divide we seem to be insisting on.
So would Maggie come to the reconciliation meeting?
"My husband wouldn't like it," she said. "And my daughter wouldn't like it."
And Daisy?
"Well, maybe I'll come," she said.
But of course she didn't.
As it turned out there was a respectable crowd. About 150, plus kids. They got through all the sausages. Daisy's cakes were delicious.
Father Frank Brennan, standing on the back of a truck by the river, told stories about rivers, parables that were at once political and spiritual. Rivers flow between past and future, between one bank and the other; they can divide or they can draw people together for the essential nourishment of their water. Rivers, in a dry land, are a powerful symbol.
Maggie had told us that when she was first in St George, the blacks were driven out of town and across the river every night. She said it was shocking. She had no problem agreeing about the egregious nature of our history, but she stopped short of conclusions that would unsettle an already unsettled present. Like every other white in town, she was afraid.
There's been a steady stream of politicians and producers' organisations through rural Queensland. Why would she believe us when these are her accustomed sources of information, and authority?
Ethel Munn and Camilla Cowley both instinctively distrust the politicians. They are both frustrated by the misinformation that is rife out there. Camilla has a fiery faith in the power of talk. Leave it to the people whose lives are affected, she says, but I have my doubts when I think of those closed faces in the pubs.
Ethel Munn has a more resigned kind of hope; she's lived all her life with racism. It's not going to come from the politicians, she says. It'll have to come neighbour to neighbour.
Pat Dodson says if reconciliation is to mean how "the nation can walk into the next century with pride in having resolved the causes of division and discord", then we're going to have "some faith in something other than politicians".
Colin Dillion and Wayne Coolwell, the Aboriginal speakers at the reconciliation meeting that day, were eloquent and reassuring. It's recognition of the past they want. It's not a land grab, they said. Wayne Coolwell even apologised for the harm that has been done to the whites, which I thought was going it a bit, but then maybe he recognises our need for forgiveness better than we do ourselves.
We left town next morning. On our way out we called to say goodbye to Thelma and Daisy. They were having a post- mortem. "Wasn't it great," they said, "that so many people turned up."
Then, at the door, Daisy said, It was a shame Maggie didn't come, and Thelma said, And you worked with her all those years.
And then Daisy said, It was a shame no-one from business came. From the shops. And Thelma said, They've known us all our lives, and they didn't come.
I remembered this when the Wik bill was introduced into a shamefully empty Senate chamber. And I remembered it when I read Greg Dening's recent plea for a memorial that would be as powerful as the Vietnam Memor-ial in Washington that is set into the ground like a gash, a wound, a scar. Dening can't imagine the shape of the memorial we need, none of us can yet, though he made the point that it'd have to cut into the land as deep as our history has cut.
And he can't imagine the words on it but, whatever they are, "people should weep when they read them", he says. "They should break long silences and make those that read them ask questions that had never been asked. Readers should see their own reflection in them."
Going to St George made me think that it isn't that the past is being destroyed exactly but that it has been simplified and divided as if we are branded by our own version of it as surely as sheep are branded by their owners. And that is very eerie. We won't have the kind of reconciliation Pat Dodson talks about, or the kind of memorial Greg Dening wants, until we change the stories we are willing to hear, and claim, and live by.
Maybe it's poetry we need as much as history, words that will grow, crack the isolation of our closed hearts and reflect our own faces in the memorials of others. That kind of poetry. That kind of history.
Alan Ramsey is on leave.
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald