The Unlucky Australians, page 1
FRANK HARDY
THE UNLUCKY AUSTRALIANS
About Untapped
Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.
See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.
Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
The Impact Of The Ancient Land
Maybe They’ve Got A Quota
Why Don’t You Let My People Fight?
You Have To Show People What You Are
We Help Oursel’ Now
They Have To Stand On Their Own Feet
If Necessary Alone
The Match Is In The Spinifex
How The Wave Hill Strike Started
Tom Pisher Bin Rubbin’ Him Head
All This Is Gurindji Country
Down South It’s A Lot Different
Give The Aborigines Their Heads
All The Rains Fall And We Wait
To The Aborigines, Welfare Is A Dirty Word
All Together At Wattie Creek
No White Man Can Be Free
‘Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.’
‘However there are blind sides in Australian kindness to underdogs; for instance, lack of imagination and curiosity blinded them to the misfortunes of the aborigines … ‘There is no doubt that given the affluence, skills, and professions of humanitarianism and fraternalism in Australian society, modern Australians have made a mess of restoring the aborigines to the human race.’
‘As Peter Coleman put it in the Observer: “Despite official claims our policy towards the aborigines has in one fundamental respect never changed. Once the idea was to kill them off; then the more humane programme was to let them die out peacefully and meanwhile to smooth their dying pillow; now the policy is to assimilate them. But as far as the aborigines themselves are concerned the result in each case is the same. Assimilation ultimately means absorption and that means extinction. As a ‘nation’ with its own way of life and even as a race the aborigines are still destined to disappear … It is one of the ironies of our history that the only recompense we seem to be able to give this race for what we have done to it is to help it disappear.”’
DONALD HORNE
Quotations from The Lucky Country
FOREWORD
The day Gough Whitlam poured the red soil of Gurindji country into Vincent Lingiari’s hand in 1975 was a momentous day in the history of Land Rights in this country. It was also one of the proudest moments in our father’s life. To help this remarkable group of people win back their own land was one of his greatest achievements.
The Gurindji took on the might of Lord Vestey and the Australian government. They were dogged in their determination to live on the land of their dreaming; their traditional land.
Their story is an important part of Australia’s history. It is a story that was played out years before Eddie Mabo began his fight for recognition of the traditional owners of his country.
Almost 10 years after the Gurindji walked away from Wave Hill their battle was won. The town of Dagaragu was built on the banks of Wattie Creek. The Gurindji finally had a home.
Our father spent many months with the Gurindji over the years. His love for these people and his resolve to see an end to the injustice took him away from his family in Sydney. It was something he did willingly and something we tried hard to understand at the time.
The Gurindji believe that our father’s spirit is with them in their dreaming place.
He would be happy there; with the people he loved and helped achieve something so important—their freedom.
Alan Hardy
Shirley Hardy-Rix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Publishers thank Mr Donald Horne (Estate) and Penguin Books Australia Ltd for permission to reprint extracts from The Lucky Country.
Thanks are also due to Mr Frank S. Stevens, Department of Economic History, The Australian National University, Canberra, for permission to print quotations from Aboriginal Labour in North Australia and Some Notes on Aboriginal Labour in the Northern Territory.
Line Drawings by Frank Hardy.
I’m going on a journey shortly across and around Australia to try to rediscover Australia, to think about what I’m going to write next, to have a look inside myself …
I want to have another look at Australia, to get some strength out of the earth. Just to wander into some out-of-the-way place and hope it is not standardised by mass media as Sydney tends to be, to hope that this terrible middle-class apathy hasn’t fallen over the land …
Of course, I’ll be there when I arrive at my destination. I know I can’t escape from myself …
FRANK HARDY during an interview on the TV programme Spectrum
THE IMPACT OF THE ANCIENT LAND
We didn’t talk much. If he spoke at all it was about trucks, traffic policemen, transport officials, truck drivers unhitching willing women hitch-hikers. Once he bemoaned being back on the long haul after eighteen months’ driving around Sydney. He didn’t know who I was, didn’t ask any questions. And I resisted the life-long habit of a geniality that holds back the essential self, the ready friendliness that makes it easy to know a man a little and impossible to know him well—the Australian gregariousness that leads a man to a loneliness where he knows everyone yet no one.
The refrigerated truck complained of its empty belly, roaring like a hungry monster across the land in search of its fill of kangaroo meat. The truckie steered it across the Blue Mountains on to the Bathurst plains with a patience born of a million miles.
I sat in the shuddering rubber seat watching through the windscreen the un-Australian lush green of the rain forests, and the tree on which the explorers carved their names when the white man didn’t know what lay beyond—for the land has always held something in reserve and imposed its habit on the black man then the white.
The lights of isolated houses peered through the mist like feverish eyes but I repelled the old guessing game of ‘who lives there?’—a man who doesn’t know himself has no right to speculate on shadows behind curtains.
On the plains, the groping headlights read the testimonial of several trucks outside a cafe; we ate steak and eggs in silence, then drove through the night until the small hours. The truckie announced that he would snatch a bit of sleep on the bed at the rear of the cabin. He had nearly met his death once through going to sleep at the wheel. I wrapped myself in a blanket and tried to sleep sitting up, forgetting that I’d lost the art of sleeping without tablets.
So I waited for the impact of the ancient land to shatter my self-doubt—the loneliness that might penetrate the outer shells in which my being had become encrusted. Cares so menacing only a day before—the shame of the gambling debt, the hunch-back of the want to write but can’t, the reluctance of the bank manager, the corrosive regret of the neglected love, the moral confrontation of the commitment—seemed unimportant.
Silence of the engine frosting the glass, the haunches sore, the feet chilled … The truckie suddenly awoke like a weary soldier at the front, grasping the wheel to attack again the imponderable distance. My mind measured only the thawing of the bones by the warmth of the engine until dawn rose with a lurid promise of heat.
In contrast to the green rain forest we travelled now through a land of dusty leaves, spindly trees bending to support the pale corpses of dead comrades, the primitive ugly Australian bush, brown and grey, aloof as an Aborigine.
And shimmering in the midday heat we found Bourke. The corrugated iron of the old town was blemished by a juke box milk bar, the modern facade of the Bank of New South Wales and the blasphemy of the spireless, abstract church.
Bourke meant memories of Henry Lawson, and the Union burying its dead. The years tracing Lawson’s history—the cards, the cuttings and notebooks—had ended in doubt and blank paper. You cannot understand the living, how can you say of the dead: ‘That is how it was with Henry Lawson’? Now there remained only interest in the man and the fascination of old times and places.
Perhaps this is what I am seeking from the land: Lawson and the days when the world was wide. I began to tell the truckie about Lawson’s time in Bourke and Watty’s pub. He wasn’t drinking this trip, he said. He didn’t seem to have heard of Lawson.
The Ca
‘Lawson?’ he said in reply to my query. ‘Can’t place the name. He was never here in my time and I’ve been here fifty-five years. What did he do for a crust?’
‘He was a poet, Henry Lawson.’
‘Ah, yes, a good poet, too. He’d be dead by now, I reckon.’
Such is fame. Such is posterity.
I downed my beer and went through the yard for a Jerry Riddle. As I came back an old aboriginal woman, drunk and flabby, came out of the Ladies. She flounced into a chair beside a round table in the yard, mumbling. In her eyes dwelt the mystery and the defeat—and a dozen flies. She sat forlorn and disgusting—a symbol of white Australia’s guilt.
I turned away and went to meet the truck. My curiosity about Watty’s pub had blurred behind the vision of the aboriginal woman, but as I passed the likely two-storied building, I turned to ask the footsteps behind me: ‘Excuse me, mate, could you tell me if that building was ever a hotel?’
It was a young Aborigine dressed in a check shirt. He halted in his tracks and stepped back a pace: ‘I couldn’t tell you, sir. I don’t know, sir.’
Sir! Why the pace away—surprise, shock, shyness, inferiority, distrust and fear of the white man?
The road became corrugated gravel as we headed for the Queensland border, the steering wheel shuddering. On either side the country was dying of thirst. Not a blade of grass, not a green leaf, not even the mulga or spinifex had survived. Only dust and the animals dead and dying—sheep, bullocks, horses, kangaroos. And skeletons white amid the red dust as in a Drysdale painting.
But the black people who had once mastered this pitiless land impinged … not the two in Bourke, but the many in Mataranka twenty-three years before. They had been brought in a truck each day from the blacks’ camp, standing or squatting on the back in the heat and dust. They laughed a great deal although they seemed to have little to laugh about. The soldiers treated them with good-natured indifference and they remained aloof, reserving their opinion of the strange white men. Perhaps they wondered why we had come, as they had wondered why the others had come, ‘long time ago’. The others had worked the cattle or dug in the ground for stones; we did nothing, only marched in lines of four in the merciless heat, fired guns at paper targets and guarded the camp against ourselves. They dug latrines slowly, resting when the white man turned his back, and sat under a tree playing a card game the rules of which no white man could learn.
One of them was an educated man from the mission, who stood aside from them and lived in the white man’s camp. He worked with me in the tool shed at Two Sub-Depot. The new CO came and spoke to him in bad pidgin: ‘Where that Corporal belonga this shed? Him bin hide ’em, not workin’?’
‘I presume you mean Corporal Hardy,’ came the reply. ‘Well, he has gone over to headquarters and will be back in half an hour.’
He liked to show off his refined speech to the white man and take him down a peg, but he wanted to escape from his own people who spoke only pidgin and the ancient language of the Roper River people.
The one I remembered best of all was the lithe, lean fellow who worked with me painting the iron stakes which fringed the new gravel road that curved through the camp from the highway. Working on that job was a kind of punishment for my part in the Mataranka shirt revolution, so we drew closer as inferior people. We laughed a lot, didn’t work too hard (reckoned if we did one black and one white stripe before lunch the Army had had its pound of flesh), and we talked about ‘our country’. Mine was Melbourne which he found difficult to visualise; his was a place vaguely north-east where the weather was never too hot, or wet, or dry, like it often was in Mataranka. I called him The Sergeant; he called me Judardy.
We had got our names by accident. He liked to think himself a member of the Australian Army, so I obliged by stealing a set of Sergeant’s stripes, boots, puckarees, shirt and shorts—and some wag, not the first to patronise the Aborigine with a humorous name expressing the white man’s contempt, dubbed him The Sergeant. Soon after my arrival in Mataranka some Judge Hardy films starring Lewis Stone and Micky Rooney were screened in the camp—so I became Judge Hardy.
The Sergeant was the best turned out soldier in the camp and taught himself to drill, sloping, porting, about-turning and generally carrying on like a militaristic white man. But he had to sleep in the blacks’ camp. He told me that the ration sergeant brought their supplies once a week and threw them off the truck at their feet.
‘What do you eat over there?’
‘Sal’ beef and bread, tea and sugar. All them white fellas bin the same, longa time they come here an’ they bin feed ’em native people sal’ beef and bread. Them cattlemen and Missions all bin the same—sal’ beef and bread.’
Mostly he talked about his lubra, Peggy, who was still at home in his country. ‘That Peggy proper good woman, good cook, that lubra sew buttons, anything. Him my proper tribal wife. That Peggy proper lubly sheila. You bin write ʼem letter to Peggy from me, eh, Judardy?’
‘You tell me what to put, Sarge, and I’ll write a proper letter to Peggy.’ Did she ever get those letters, in your country? I mean would they deliver letters to a woman who couldn’t read? Would a white man’s Government want the aboriginal men to communicate with the lubras when they had separated the sexes for the duration as part of a deliberate policy to let the people die out?
‘That not right, Judardy, them lubras left up there and we mob down here. That not right.’
For a moment, as the truck pressed on through the shimmering heat toward Hungerford, I thought of The Sergeant and wondered if he had ever seen Peggy again.
But the preoccupation with self pushed him out of range and I thought of what I might write while in the North. At least I might be able to complete some of the unfinished works.
And all the time I was vaguely aware that the land might offer me some straw to grasp at, some interest outside myself to quiet the inner turmoil.
A monotony of dusty spinifex, heat burning in the cabin, red road rattling. Nothing to grasp; the heart of the country is dead.
Try to regain the art, long practised but buried under the landslide of lost love, besmirched with useless regret, polluted with politics, gambled into bookmakers’ bags; the quality of being able to write or plan writing anywhere at any time, beside a newborn baby’s cries, in the love beds after sex, amid the traffic’s roar, the race-track’s fever, the disc jockey’s distant yak-yak …
The suitcase bouncing alone in the sealed trailer behind is near full of manuscripts and notes—no room for luggage. What did I pack? The Lawson? No, I left Uncle Henry in Sydney Town. ‘They eat their babies in Russia?’ ‘Maybe they do, comrade, but they are building socialism.’ A dubious story breeds a dubious title. A song, maybe: I won’t see your face through all the tears between—and that is for sure. Time-consuming, bad for the nerves, watching the charts—an excuse to evade the long haul. The Ringbolter? A good title over a bad play. ‘His cell is the size of the world … if he heard laughter, then what would he do … if he heard singing and a language he knew?’ Stow it away; hope it bounces out of the case. The life novel? ‘I will take my epoch upon my shoulders and answer for it—this day and for ever’—Sartre. Which of the three versions? The past as it happened, the past as it is remembered. The vision of life; the past and present are one time … Two time levels needed … Only the third version is packed.
Up the Garbos! There’s a publisher for that if you can get it right. Satire without fear or favour, Left, Right and centre. Arbitration, Union officials, politicians, cunning Councillors, even the Party. It displeased everybody. The Establishment publishers said it was Communist propaganda, the Left said it was a slander on the militant working class.
