As a younger man Chapman worked as a stockman at Mount Elizabeth station, between the Barnett and Hann rivers. Dorothy was there, too. She was a cook and a domestic at the homestead and there’s a lovely photo of her in a ghostwritten memoir of those ‘pioneering’ days that captures her in all her fresh-faced beauty. Few workers would have been closer to the boss and his family than her. For her many years of service she is memorialized as ‘an Aboriginal woman’, a caption that speaks eloquently of the feudal mindset and the status of indigenous workers when adult men were known as ‘boys’. Under the old paternalism Chapman and Dorothy worked for little more than tucker and tobacco, and yet they were still close to country with its precious sustaining power, and like many indigenous veterans of that era in the Kimberley, they’re wistful about it. Those days began to come to an end in the late 1960s. When pastoralists were finally forced to pay their labourers a decent wage, Aborigines and their families were no longer welcome. That was when Rolf Harris’s 1957 song ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport’ had a weird and shameful currency, for right across the country, station owners were setting their ‘abos’ loose now that they were no longer of use.
Paternalism notwithstanding, Chapman loved that old life – the trucks and the mustering, the tucker and the hunting. He misses the horses the most, and although he doesn’t come right out and say so plainly, it seems that for all the grotesque inequalities, he also misses the relative certainty and purpose of that time.
Chapman is a countryman of the late David Mowaljarlai. He’s not as well educated in whitefella ways as that legendary statesman was, and his English is sketchy by comparison, but he’s deeply literate in his own tradition, a vital carrier of culture. This isn’t always fully appreciated by the younger generation of his clan, many of whom, he says, are ‘cheeky and wild’. They’re caught between worlds, and town life isn’t helping. At Mowanjum the youth suicide rate is unimaginable. Mowaljarlai’s vision was for the young to flourish in both traditions and this is what Chapman hopes for, but his own experience of two-way living has been a struggle. His culture is ancient and strong and it hangs on despite all odds, but the old people are few and feeble now, and he’s tired in himself these days. He’d like to get away from the disorder of Derby and the hectic life at Mowanjum and spend his last years back on country, at the outstation at Dodnun, an excision of Mount Elizabeth. But he’s not in the best of health and the nursing post up there has been shut down. The most he can look forward to is a visit now and then to charge up his spirit. He’ll be glad to see his home country and some old faces. Scotty and Jordpa will be there. We’ll collect Pansy and Morton and Dollund at Mount Barnett, he says, and be at Dodnun by dark. There’ll be a big fuss when we roll in. Some youngsters will get a fire going and we’ll make plans for a fishing trip down along the Hann River. He says it all timorously, in his husky murmur, as we ride up the blacktop. Slim Dusty comes over the radio and he sings along, all his shyness gone for a moment. He has a fine voice. When you hear him keening plaintively in his own language on Scotty Martin’s Jadmi Junba you feel the power and certainty of a voice unbowed by time and untouched by modernity.15
And then, quite suddenly, the old fellow’s spurt of energy wanes. He tucks a wad of tobacco under his lip and lapses into silence. Soon enough he’s asleep. Curled against the door he looks as serene as a child.
We jolt down off the sealed highway and hit the rugged surface of the old Gibb River Road, which is little more than a rocky track riven with potholes, gutters and jaw-rattling corrugations, and in an instant the vehicle behind us is lost in the plume of beige dust we kick up as we pound and wallow along. The troopy shudders and lurches and the coins in the ashtray begin to jingle and leap. But Chapman sleeps on, undisturbed. Across the plain, burnt acacias and spear grass tilt away as if from the force of our approach.
After an hour or so Chapman wakes. And for many kilometres he’s silent. He doesn’t sing along to the radio, not to Slim nor anyone else. He seems subdued, perhaps even a little agitated.
But at the first glimpse of the King Leopold Ranges, as gold as roo fat in the afternoon light, he jerks upright and slaps his thigh like a man who’s just won a chook raffle. The boy behind us lets out a little groan of appreciation. We’re hours away yet, but these hills mark the beginning of home and now Chapman’s laughing, telling jokes I can’t quite follow. Minute by minute he grows more animated, until he’s transformed. The beaten old wreck I collected in town is a sprightly, bright-eyed man. For him the trip is no sentimental return, it’s life support.
As we make the turn for Mount Elizabeth and Dodnun and ford the first creek, Chapman lashes the side of the Toyota as if to spur us on, and we bound up the farther bank roaring like raiders.
Only five years later, he’s gone. When I hear the news I go to the music shelf in sorrow and dig out Scotty’s CD and slip it into the machine. And as I listen to Chapman sing, high and strong with his countrymen, I remember him asleep in the soft sand of a creekbed, shaved and handsome in the dappled shade, a man restored. ‘When I’m on a high mountain looking out over country,’ Mowaljarlai used to say, ‘my Unggurr [life-force] flows out from inside my body and I fall open with happiness.’16
Paying respect
As a kid from a devout religious family I was always acutely aware of how skittish people could be about anything to do with the sacred. My neighbours and schoolmates did not exactly welcome expressions of spiritual devotion – that sort of thing made them very uncomfortable, even angry – and in this regard, despite two generations of multiculturalism, Australians haven’t changed much. We’re pretty good at maintaining a secular public space, and that’s worth celebrating, but we’re a bit tin-eared about matters of religion and anxious about using terms like ‘sacred’. This strikes me as a bit ironic, for we live on the most spiritually potent continent imaginable. But apart from family, the only thing sacred to most of us is our much-vaunted ‘way of life’. And what is that but an unspecified mixture of political, financial and spatial liberties enjoyed in sunshine at the island’s margins? Not even the confected sanctification of Anzac Day can rival it. But the recent recommissioning and deliberate sacralization of the Gallipoli myth is telling, because it suggests a spiritual vacuum, a palpable absence at our core, as if deep down, ordinary folks want to submit to something grand and sublime. But Anzac has been coarsened by the politics of nostalgic regression. It’s close to becoming the sort of nationalist death cult we revile when it appears in other places or under a different flag, and I fail to see how such a false sense of the sacred nourishes the individual or the community, because the only thing it sustains is the security of those who send our young men and women to new wars, some of which have proven every bit as pointless and wasteful as the bungled adventure in the Dardanelles in 1915.
These are not easy things to say. Several members of my family were in the 1st AIF. My grandmother’s brother died like a good Lighthorseman, watering the nags, shot dead by a Turkish airman. But I don’t feel enlarged or enlightened by his death. When I hold his bloodstained wallet with respect and awe I don’t get a sacramental, nationalistic charge – all I feel is tragedy and blind waste. I think of a boy’s life squandered for jingoistic nonsense. I think of his sister who mourned him for more than seventy years.
While it’s true that anything we really value will exact a price, that price has to be worth paying. And what’s so precious I’d lay down my life for it? Not the Crown or the state, that’s for sure. The first thing I think of as sacred is the bond between parent and child – then spouses and lovers, of course, friends and countrymen, for these are kinships that strengthen our connection to one another and enlarge our lives. To enter wholeheartedly into a relationship is to leave oneself open to being claimed, and held so in perpetuity. That’s the power of love. And also its price. No wonder people are sometimes loath to commit. Most of us are better at claiming than being claimed, and when it comes to thinking about land and home this is a hard le
sson Australians have been learning since settlement. But after two centuries of demanding and seizing, many non-indigenous Australians have finally begun to commit. Out of reverence, from love, in a spirit of kinship to the place itself. This amounts to a recognition of our settler past and a moving on from what has been an abusive, one-sided relationship in which the island continent gave and we just took. It’s a rejection of the retrospective tendency of invaders to mythologize their origins and minimize their outrages. For invasions are what they are and their consequences endure.
Whether our European forebears came in chains or in hope of a new life and fresh opportunities, their arrival was a catastrophe for Aboriginal peoples and for the land itself. Much of this damage will never be undone. Like alien cells entering an organism, newcomers have changed it forever, and we continue to affect it and are in some senses helpless to do otherwise. We are, each of us, at the mercy of what others did before we arrived. An Iraqi immigrant who settles in Australia is no more responsible for the conditions that greet her than her Aboriginal neighbours are for the chaos that caused her to flee her homeland. I feel ancestral shame for the dispossession of this country’s first peoples, shame for the despoliation of their lands and a kind of national shame, too, for the mess my nation helped create in Mesopotamia in recent years, but in none of these instances do I feel guilt. None of us is responsible for the culture and social conditions we’re born into. But that doesn’t mean we’re absolved from reflecting upon our inheritance. Neither does our good fortune give licence to mindlessly replicate the settler ethic of two centuries ago.
In so many respects – matters of religion, politics, gender, education – the attitudes of my nineteenth-century forebears are archaic and alien. So much so that I struggle sometimes to feel related – if it were possible for us to meet we’d be utter strangers, mutually incomprehensible – yet by genes, history and collective memory we are related and I feel compelled to honour this. Past or present, family will continue to make claims upon me. What should have no claim upon me is the colonial mindset bent toward annexation, enclosure, consolidation and jealous surveillance in defence of territorial gains. It breaks people and ruins places and it shackles the lives and imaginations of those who profit by it. For too long it has retarded Australians’ social and spiritual progress; to this day many influential people in business and politics are firmly in its thrall. They dissociate our enviable life of casual prosperity from the natural world that sustains it. Despite what half a century of science has taught us, regardless of the kindred reciprocity many Australians now feel with the land of their birth, these decision-makers are insufficiently mindful of the organic costs of how we live. And this is no longer a question of ignorance – they know full well what the situation is. Their refusal to change is an ideological aversion. No matter how pragmatic they sound, in their dogged attachment to a spurious economy where endless growth and consumption have no real consequences, they display a devotion to magical thinking they seem to find contemptible in others. Theirs is a cult that does not encourage reflection, a faith built on looking forward at all times, a belief system unsettled by the backward glance, because to look back is to acknowledge a trail of destruction – to ecosystems, languages, cultures, entire peoples. Moreover a citizen prospering in the present may discover that most of the sacrifices that paid for this prosperity were made by countrymen and women who were never likely to share in the spoils. Looking inward is even more troubling, because lying in wait for the captain of industry and the political insider is the anxious prospect that he, too, might eventually be required to give something up.
In the centuries since Galileo’s explosive new understanding of the cosmos first rattled our cage, humans have never quite managed to give up the idea that we are at the centre of the universe and masters of all we survey. We’re used to seeing ourselves as the pinnacle of reality. But travelling deep into landscape, paying attention to the natural world, we’re reminded of our true position in the scheme of things. Yes, we are evolutionary inheritors of immense creativity and power, a fundamental terrestrial phenomenon – perhaps, in the words of palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, ‘the fundamental phenomenon of nature’ – yet we are, in the end, tiny. Not only in the context of the cosmos, where we hardly have the status of spores, but as dwellers on an island continent like Australia where we are, whether we acknowledge it or not, mere creatures of the earth, vulnerable and dependent.
In an uncompromising landscape like ours, a person suddenly confronted with their essential smallness will often panic, become angry, disoriented, afraid. Out of reflex they’ll scramble back into the armoured shell of their pre-eminence: the airconditioned car, the helicopter, the skyscraper, the shopping mall. The quest for an open-minded engagement with nature is as challenging and uncertain for individuals as it is for corporations and communities. Ingrained habits of mind are tenacious and nature is elusive, enigmatic, at times resistant. It’s possible some of us will never feel truly at home in Australian landscapes. There are newcomers arriving every day and sadly many of them will only ever know urban Australia, with its undistinguished architecture and its monotonous replication of the same commercial franchises – the Subways and 7-Elevens and H&R Blocks – that render so many cities of the world largely interchangeable, if not entirely placeless. Whether they’re migrants or native-born, some Australians will always invest their affections in the state – Australia the Idea – for so much of contemporary life floats on abstractions and virtualities. But I meet young people all over Australia – from Timber Creek in the Northern Territory to Airlie Beach in the Whitsundays, from the Abrolhos Islands to the Great Ocean Road – who are passionate and curious about this country and who do not hesitate to have it make claims upon them. They’re enchanted by the place but they readily concede how often it puzzles them. They’re sheepish about how little they know, but then a continent like this is too big and rich and complex to be truly understood. No matter who you are it will always slip through your fingers to some extent. Sometimes I think it’s sufficient to admit you’re mystified, not just because it’s an honest response, but because it’s a suitably humble one. For all the empirical knowledge we’ve garnered, and the many generations of lived experience that resonate in our collective memory, this continent remains an enigma. It’s been a haven for humans for millennia and yet it is not humanized as other continents are. Submitting to its scale, acknowledging its irrepressible particularities, listening for its cryptic music and seeking to learn its ways enriches us. We are in a relationship with the land and the conditions of any other relationship apply. My settler ancestors who fenced and farmed what appeared to be wilderness would probably have seen themselves as proprietors and guardians of places. Their relationship to the land was sternly parental. Australians of my generation, and those younger than me, might be more likely to consider themselves children of the island and this distinction is significant. If we’ve learnt anything about living in this country it’s that we depend upon its health for our sustenance. But the land, like any parent, is large and strange and hard to read. And as the songman Neil Murray reminds us, it will always be there, awaiting our return.
Still, Australia is not completely enshrouded in obscurity. Some of those who know it best are anxious to nurture the rest of us, the new majority, through our long, tottering infancy into a state of informed responsibility. They are the bearers of a vast but now rapidly diminishing reservoir of lore, parts of which they’ve been waiting to share for many decades. These are citizens who could hardly be blamed for inhabiting and projecting only furious victimhood. Indigenous health statistics and rates of incarceration alone would justify any amount of rage. And yet many Aboriginal Australians are disarmingly stoical. Few seem to envy the lives of their non-indigenous countrymen. In fact there are some notable elders who openly pity any citizen who lacks the richness of traditional culture. They don’t see themselves as victims but as carriers of ancient and hardwon knowle
dge at once philosophically sophisticated and practical. Largely spurned by settlers, ignored by consolidating colonial successors, and either patronized, romanticized or politicized by every generation thereafter, Aboriginal wisdom is the most under-utilized intellectual and emotional resource this country has.
A good deal of Aboriginal culture is arcane and dizzyingly complex to the outsider – many things are secret-sacred and will remain so – and yet the passage of the Native Title Act of 1993 depended upon this kind of knowledge being taken seriously by the highest courts of the land. Never before had non-Aboriginal Australia granted traditional culture such intellectual weight. This shift did not come easily. Not all the outcomes have been fair, or comprehensible to those without advanced law degrees, and many first peoples had their native title recognized only in order to have it traduced, but the fact remains that ancient tradition has begun to exert a material influence on our laws, and it has altered our broader national narrative for all time. That’s no small thing. But it strikes me as tragic that this knowledge and its transformative outlook have not yet found their way more deeply into the popular mind. I’m not sure this can be explained away as the result of racism alone. To me it also smacks of the defensive, self-hating contempt some Australians still nurse for the local product. The philosophies, medicine and spritual practices of exotic cultures have been quick to gain status in recent decades. They aren’t just respectable – they’re bankable. Some of that may be because they’re sound and fruitful outlooks. Some of it is simply the glamour and allure of exotica. Perhaps the simplest and most profound lesson to be learnt from Aboriginal lawmen and women is that the relationship to country is corporeal and familial. We need a more intimate acquaintance with the facts. We need to feel them in our bodies and claim them and belong to them as if they were kin. This has political implications, of course, but it also offers an ethical and emotional deepening that may enrich the lives of millions. That was the view of the visionary Ngarinyin lawman David Banggal Mowaljarlai.