The Pain of Belonging

Xavier Pons

University of Toulouse

The title of my paper is of course a not-so-subtle

take on Germaine Greer’s phrase “the pain of unbelonging,”

which gives its title to the collection of essays edited by

Sheila Collingwood-Whittick,1 to which our host Sue Ryan

contributed. It refers to the sense of alienation,

dislocation and bewilderment experienced by the European

colonists of Australia—what Sheila Collingwood-Whittick

called “the colonizer’s absolute unfamiliarity with the

alien space of the colony … their overwhelming sense of

estrangement…”2 It is an experience that has often been

highlighted by writers and critics—two examples that come

to mind are John Carroll’s collection of essays Intruders in

the Bush 3 (a title that epitomizes the book’s argument) and

Les Murray’s assertion, in his poem “Noonday Axeman”, that

1 Collingwood-Whittick, Sheila (ed.). The Pain of Unbelonging.Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.2 ibid., xv.3 Carroll, John (ed.). Intruders in the Bush. Melbourne: OUP, 1982.

1

It will

be centuries

Before many men are truly at home in this country.4

The non-indigenous population of Australia is as it were

doomed to grope its way, sometimes in a most painful

manner, towards a sense of belonging, achieving which is

rightly regarded as “a consummation devoutly to be wished”,

though it may be permanently out of reach if Greer is

correct in saying that “For a gubba [white] in Australia

there can be no belonging.”5

By the same token, it is often assumed that the

Aboriginal population suffers no such pangs, secure as they

are in their indigenous identity, in their millennia-old

connection with the land of Australia, to which they are

spiritually and materially wedded. This is suggested for

instance by Eleanor Dark in The Timeless Land as she evokes

the child Bennilong (sic) : “He was conscious of the world,

and conscious of himself as a part of it, fitting into it,

belonging to it, drawing strength and joy and existence

from it, like a bee in the frothing opulence of the4 Murray, Les. “Noonday Axeman”. Collected Poems. London: Minerva, 1992,6.5 Collingwood-Wittick, Sheila. op. cit., x.

2

wattle.”6 It can also be seen, in more oblique fashion, in

some white men’s desire to identify with the Aborigines in

order to feel at one with their surroundings, as with the

character Guy Randawha in Stephen Gray’s novel The Artist is a

Thief .7 The desire of some non-indigenous artists to look

to Aboriginal culture for inspiration and become “white

Aborigines”, as Ian McLean put it,8 is an instance of a

similar drive. Supposedly, then, to be Aboriginal is to

belong, and therefore to be spared the existential malaise

that migrants and their descendants, whether Anglo-Celtic

or not, are inescapably heir to.9 For all the appalling

material conditions that prevail in many Aboriginal

communities it is sometimes believed, almost as Captain

Cook contended some two hundred and fifty years ago, that

the Aborigines, secure in their sense of belonging, are in

this respect “far more happier than we Europeans.”10

This is far from being the general case today.

Admittedly, the Aboriginal experience in pre-colonial days

6 Dark, Eleanor. The Timeless Land. Sydney: Collins, 1966 [1941], 15.7 Gray, Stephen. The Artist is a Thief. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001.8 McLean, Ian. White Aborigines. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge UP, 1998.9 Though it could be argued that the malaise felt by Anglo-Celticmigrants is significantly different from that of subsequent wavesof migrants.10 <http://southseas.nla.gov.au/journals/cook_remarks/092.html>

3

may have been one of enviable fullness, but colonisation

has destroyed much of the harmony that existed between

Indigenous Australians and their environment. It has

uprooted and marginalised individuals as well as

communities, grievously damaged the traditional culture and

turned the issue of Aboriginal identity into a painfully

complex conundrum. The sense of belonging that Aborigines

experience is almost inevitably stamped by loss,

frustration and suffering. As Greer noted, “Unbelonging

hurts, but the pain is salutary. Belonging hurts, too, when

what you belong to and what belongs to you is being

withheld, exploited, undermined and destroyed. That pain is

entirely destructive, toxic, relentless, maddening.”11

There are all too many reasons behind Aboriginal

musician Archie Roach’s lament “We cry the Native Born.”12

Most of them have to do with the tragic legacy of white

Australia’s policy of forced assimilation, and the related

problems that plague indigenous communities—unemployment,

poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, suicide

11 Collingwood-Wittick, Sheila. op. cit., xi.12 Roach, Archie. “Native Born”. Charcoal Lane. Aurora, 1990.

4

and illness—the sorry list goes on and on and is in itself

reason enough to cry. But perhaps the most corrosive effect

of colonisation has been on the Aborigines’ sense of who

they are and what is their place in contemporary Australia.

Anita Heiss has argued that, since the emergence of

Oodgeroo13 as a significant figure on Australia’s literary

stage in the 1960s, “we Aboriginal writers have been using

our literature as a means of defining ourselves, as well as

a tool to defend our right to our identity.”14 It is clear

that Aboriginal literature could hardly be other than

militant, and a major aspect of this militancy has to do

with what it means to be Aboriginal in twenty-first century

Australia. Perhaps the keenest spiritual and psychological

pain inflicted by colonisation is the denial of an

authentic indigenous identity to individuals and

communities who insist they are Aboriginal but whom whites

are apt to label fakes, in a process which has been

described as “the historical exclusion of Aboriginal people

13 Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993), formerly known as Kath Walker,was an Australian poet and activist. She was the first AboriginalAustralian to publish a book of verse (We Are Going, 1964).14 Heiss, Anita. “Writing Aboriginality: Authors ‘BeingAboriginal’” in Birns, Nicholas and Rebecca McNeer (eds). ACompanion to Australian Literature since 1900. Rochester, NY: Camden House,2007, 41.

5

from determining the dominant definitions of

Aboriginality.”15 It is not uncommon for people to

associate ethnic identity and phenotype and to subsume the

former into the latter—if you don’t look the part, then you

can’t be the real thing, and should therefore be rejected.

This essentialization of ethnic identity—“the mistaken

assumption that Aboriginality is defined by colour”, as

Maureen Perkins16 summarised it—is reinforced by cultural

clichés which prescribe certain modes of being—in terms of

clothes, ornamentation, behaviour, etc.—as being a

necessary component of an authentic indigeneity. Such

views, which fail to recognize that “Much more culturally

than biologically conceptualized, Aboriginal identity is

about ‘belonging’ in Australia and having a right to

Indigenous knowledges and perspectives,”17 as Perkins also

wrote, have a profoundly destabilising effect on those

individuals who do not fit the model, whether urban

Aborigines or part-Aborigines. Quoting from one of the case

studies in the report of Royal Commission into Aboriginal15 Gumillya Baker, Ali and Gus Worby, “Aboriginality since Mabo:Writing, Politics and Art” in Birns, Nicholas & Rebecca McNeer(eds). op. cit., 17.16 Perkins, Maureen. “Australian Mixed Race”. European Journal ofCultural Studies. 2004, 7, 179.17 ibid.,

6

Deaths in Custody, novelist Kim Scott provides us with an

illuminating insight into the destructive impact that

“authentic identity” discourse can have on young Indigenous

Australians:

A young man found that he was of Aboriginal descent. The case

notes said that in the days before his death he'd made a

boomerang, and someone had seen him standing in front of a mirror

in a one legged stance, with one foot resting on the thigh of the

other leg. You know, like the image on tea towels. He must have

been wondering. Wondering who he was, trying on personas.18

The impossibility of coinciding with a tea towel cliché was

so traumatic that suicide was the only issue. Even when the

outcome is less tragic, the denial of authenticity often

visited on part-Aborigines is an enduring hurt.

This denial often comes from white people who tend to

consider that to be authentically Aboriginal one should be

black, wear nothing but a loincloth and, spear or boomerang

in hand, run after kangaroos… An alternative view, no less

misguided and no less destructive, has to do with the way

Aborigines fit into contemporary Australian society : as

18 Scott, Kim. “What it means to be Australian & Aboriginal”. TheAge. 15 May 2001.

7

Adele Horin put it, “It is now the norm for an indigenous

Australian to have a job in the mainstream economy. Yet I

would wager most non-indigenous Australians imagine the

‘typical’ Aborigine is unemployed and, possibly, sitting on

a river bank or under a tree passing the flagon”19. Any

deviation from these normative and derogatory fantasies is

taken to signal that one is dealing with a fake, a “white

Aborigine” as it is put in The Artist is a Thief.20 Thus, right-

wing columnist Andrew Bolt denied the Aboriginality of a

number of prominent, fair-skinned activists such as Larissa

Behrendt or Geoff Clark, and claimed they were simply

riding the gravy train.21 Revisionist historian Keith

Windschuttle wrote in Quadrant that “certain white-skinned

people identified themselves as Aborigines and were

representative of a whole new fashion in academia, the arts

and professional activism … For many of these fair

Aborigines, the choice to be Aboriginal can seem almost

19 Horin, Adele. “Respect helps to bridge the gap”. National Times. 16July 2011.

20 Gray, Stephen. op. cit., 88.21 Cf. David Marr, ‘In black and white, Andrew Bolt trifled withthe facts’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 September 2011http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/in-black-and-white-andrew-bolt-trifled-with-the-facts-20110928-1kxba.html.

8

arbitrary and intensely political.”22 Of course the choice

to identify as Aboriginal when one could pass for white is

political, and properly so—but is it arbitrary as well? The

fact that some people have indeed faked an Aboriginal

identity (Windschuttle reports the case of a group of

people of Sri Lankan origin who tried to pass themselves

off as Aborigines so as to enjoy the benefits of Native

Title) does not mean that all those whose looks don’t fit

the part are phoneys. Even though many whites do not

subscribe to them, those accusations hurt quite badly those

on the receiving end of them. They are forced to defend and

justify themselves, and thus prompted to hit back, as Anita

Heiss does in her poem “Identity”:

Why do you always question my identity?

Ask about my “relationship with the land”?

Try to trace my ancestry to work out what “breed” I am? […]

My descent is from the Wiradjuri nation,

         a proud people.

My identity is of an Aboriginal woman,

Tired of trying to fit your

22.Windschuttle, Keith. “The Trials of Andrew Bolt”. Quadrant. vol.54, n° 12, December 2010, 20.

9

Uneducated and limited

         definition of who I,

         your view of what,

           an Aboriginal person,

              should be.23

Heiss angrily rejects inappropriate, stereotypical “white”

notions of Indigenous identity but pointedly refuses to

suggest alternative criteria other than descent.

Aboriginality is not a matter of shibboleths – it is a way

of being in the world, an existential reality.

Aboriginal writers and activists have by now gained

enough self-confidence to dismiss white attempts to lay

down the law in respect of their identity, and do not

hesitate to challenge their “right to dissect and define

Aboriginalities”, as Ian Anderson put it.24 Perhaps more

hurtful to people of mixed descent, however, is the

rejection that comes from Aborigines themselves, even

though they tend to profess that, in line with the official

definition of Aboriginality, there’s no such thing as a

23 Heiss, Anita. “Identity”. Token Koori. Sydney: CurringaCommunications, 1998, 9.24 Anderson, Ian. “I, the ‘hybrid’ Aborigine”. Australian AboriginalStudies. n°1, 1997, 4.

10

part-Aborigine—those who are descended from an Aboriginal

ancestor, no matter how distant, are themselves

Aborigines,25 and terms such as “half-caste” are nothing but

insults. The reality on the ground can be a little

different, though, and rejection does happen. Sometimes, as

with whites, physical appearance is the cause of that

rejection, as Kim Scott experienced:

I have knocked on the doors of people who don't know me, and the

doors have not been opened. “Wadjila” (a white person), “Wadjila,”

the voices on the other side of the door say. And you can't trust

wadjilas.26

At other times, it is the individual’s experience, and his

or her way of reporting it which is questioned by

Aborigines and held to be inauthentic, as in Jackie

Huggins’s take on Sally Morgan and her life story My Place.

In her article “Always was, always will be”, Huggins denied

Morgan’s Aboriginality :

I read the first three chapters and thought I was reading the life

of a middle-class Anglo woman. I could not identify anything which

told me Morgan was an Aboriginal person except the part about our

25 That is, if they choose to define themselves as such, and areaccepted as such by an indigenous community.26 Scott, Kim. op. cit.

11

common Aboriginal Study Grant. From my perspective, instead of a

“Who Dun It?” it is a “Who Are You?”… Overall there is little

which indicates the writing and story of an Aboriginal...27

Disputes among Aborigines about this or that person’s claim

to be truly indigenous can be incredibly bitter.28 Being

rejected by the very people to whom you feel you belong is

a terrible blow to one’s sense of self-worth. For all the

inclusiveness of Aboriginal society, the people who are not

seen to be a hundred per cent indigenous are apt to

experience prejudice, especially in traditional Northern

Territory communities. In Ali Cobby Eckermann’s story,

“Them Half-Caste Bastards : They Cause All the Trouble”

(the very title is fairly explicit…), Vaughn, who is

undisputably Aboriginal,29 hurts Shauna, the daughter of a

Stolen Child who’s gone back to Alice Springs in search of

her family, by saying that people like her should need a

permit to visit Aboriginal land, which implies she’s not

27 quoted in Windschuttle, op. cit.28 cf. poet Coralie Cassady’s brutal rejection of ReconciliationAmbassador Evelyn Scott in Heiss, Anita. “Writing Aboriginality”.Birns, Nicholas & R. McNeer. A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900,53.29 “Vaughn had always known both his parents’ families, even theTraditional mob that lived out bush…” (Cobby Eckermann, Ali. “ThemHalf-Caste Bastards : They Cause All the Trouble”. NorthernTerritory Literary Awards - Dymocks Aboriginal and Torres StraitIslander Writers Awards, 2007, 31).

12

Aboriginal herself and should have none of the associated

rights. Shauna deplores the mistrust she encounters from

her own people: “Why do I always feel I have to prove

myself every step of the way?’30 The so-called half-castes

are left to envy their dark-skinned fellows, as Shauna does

Vaughn: “He was so lucky, his Grandfather used to take him

hunting out bush and everything. But it made me a bit sad

too. Mum, sometimes I feel you and me, we missed out on so

much!”31

Black rejection of blacks (or those blacks who are

also partly white) is profoundly destabilising. Indigenous

people of mixed descent may also feel themselves to be

envious of (and thus, arguably, less “authentic” than)

those with darker skins. An example of this can be found in

Larissa Behrendt’s novel Home, where the light-skinned

narrator is part Aboriginal and part Welsh and sometimes

people think she’s Italian or Spanish while her brother

Kingsley has dark skin: “No one will mistake him as an

exotic southern European. I feel guilt about the way I can

slip in and out, but I also have a deep envy of Kingsley

30 ibid., 33.31 ibid., 34.

13

when dark hands shake his in greeting while darting eyes

flit over me with unspoken suspicion.”32 She is even more

envious of her full-blood grandmother who she thinks has,

as an Aborigine, a uniquely meaningful relationship with

her environment, and thus experiences a harmony and a

fullness which are forever out of her reach: “I watch her

and imagine that the landscape must sing to her with

memories—joyful and secret, sinister and sacred.”33 Many

part-Aborigines feel culturally alienated, cut off from a

culture that should be their birthright but which the

processes of colonisation have driven tantalisingly out of

reach. This extends to attitudes towards family and

children, as Behrendt shows in the scene where the narrator

talks to Danielle, who is part-Aboriginal too but darker

and more traditional. At age 25, Danielle has three kids,

which she regards as the norm whereas the narrator, who is

the same age, has none: “’Oh. Oh, well.’ Danielle pauses

before adding, consolingly, ‘Diff’rent strokes for

diff’rent folks.’ It isn’t often that I feel as inadequate

as her sympathy makes me feel at this moment.”34

32 Behrendt, Larissa. Home. St Lucia: UQP. 2004, 7.33 ibid., 21.34 ibid., 22.

14

Many part-Aborigines have had their indigenous

identity stolen from them as a result of Australia’s

assimilation policy. Thus little Euroke, the narrator’s

uncle in Home, has been adopted out into a white family,

renamed Neil, and has grown up believing he was Irish:

His father’s tales [of Ireland] conjured for Neil a mystical land

of mythical ancestors… They nourished within Neil a sense of

place and a sense of self: real, in Gladesville, and imaginary,

in the green velvet land at the end of the sea.35

This sense of Irishness is of course inauthentic but has

something appropriate about it all the same, since like the

Aborigines the Irish were the victims of English

colonialism and faced quite similar issues. This appears

from what his adoptive father says: “…the bind for us Irish

was that you were less than nothing if you were one of us,

but if you tried to be anything like the English, they’d

cut you down. Made people ashamed of who they were, it

did.”36 One can substitute “Aborigines” for “Irish” without

in any way diminishing the truth of the assertion. White

35 ibid., 140.36 ibid., 142.

15

discourse characterized Aboriginality as a sign of

abnormality and inferiority—a stain, as suggested in

Behrendt’s Home,37 thereby putting pressure on part-

Aborigines to discard the black part of their soul, to deny

a fundamental aspect of their identity.38 All traces of

Aboriginality had to be erased, as recounted by Sally

Morgan’s mother Gladys in My Place :

When I was little, Mum had always pinched my nose and said, “Pull

your nose, Gladdie, pull it hard. You don’t want to end up with a

big nose like mine.” She was always pulling the kids’ noses, too.

She wanted them to grow up to look like white people.39

Such psychological, physical and spiritual manipulations

were supposed to result in the individual’s elevation to

the higher plane of whiteness—a hollow promise if ever

there was one. The whites claimed that by enforcing

assimilation they were doing the Aborigines a favour. In

37 “people not stained with black like him [Bob]”,ibid., 173. cf.also Munkara, Marie. “The Garden of Eden”. Every Secret Thing. StLucia: UQP, 2009, 79: “The bush mob […] looked at each other’sblack skins with shame. None of them had ever been made to feelthis worthless before [...] they just hung their heads indespair.”38 cf. Fink, Ruth. “The Caste Barrier”. Oceania 28.2, December1957, 101: “The status conscious coloured person is forced toprove that he does not in any way belong to the coloured group”.39 Morgan, Sally. My Place. London: Virago, 1988 [1987], 305.

16

Behrendt’s Home, Mr Symonds is quite earnest when he tells

Daisy: “Your skin is so light, you can hardly tell that you

are a half-caste. It is truly a gift from God that you can

pass.”40 It would seem that God Himself has decreed that

white is preferable to black… However, as Xavier Herbert

pointed out, the point of assimilation was to solve

Australia’s so-called coloured problem through a form of

genocide:

Were [half-castes] to flourish and be incorporated into the life

of the Nation the problem of miscegenation would become great.

The prudes who ruled the Nation were afraid of that. To prevent

it, they would rather wipe out the Aborigines—wipe out a race!41

Small wonder that, for the indigenous population,

assimilation proved far more destructive than constructive.

The political and cultural appropriation of Australia

by the British colonisers has had such a severe impact on

the Aborigines that they sometimes feel out of place in

their own country. This is pointed out in Behrendt’s Home

40 Behrendt, Larissa. op. cit., 195.41 Herbert, Xavier. Capricornia. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972[1937], 164.

17

in the course of a conversation between Elizabeth, the

narrator’s Aboriginal grandmother and Grigor, the young

German who marries her: ”’We are outsiders, you and I,’

Grigor would say, his mind far away, as hers was, but in a

different realm, a different geography. Both longing for

somewhere else.”42 This identification of a foreigner and

an indigenous person through their similar sense of exile

in Australia also occurs in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage,

where the half-Chinese narrator notices an Aboriginal woman

on a train and reflects: “The native and the foreigner:

there was something of both in us.”43 The paradoxical exile

of Aborigines in a country they have inhabited for tens of

thousands of years testifies to the destructiveness of

colonisation, made more hurtful by the specific and

intimate connection between Aborigines and their country.

Indeed, as Pat Dodson argues, Indigenous Australians’

feelings of alienation are all the more acute because of

the specific and intimate connection with their country

they have traditionally enjoyed : “When you take an

Aboriginal man from his land, you take him from the spirit

42 Behrendt, Larissa. op. cit. 102.43 Castro, Brian. Birds of Passage. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983, 59.

18

that is giving him life; that spirit cannot be regenerated

in some other place. So you end up with shells of human

beings, living in other people’s countries.”44

Colonisation may have eroded or perverted the sense of

Aboriginality but it hasn’t managed to wipe it out. Many

Aboriginal writers proudly proclaim their distinctive

identity, like poet Stephen Clayton:

The Dreaming is my creation, I am at home when I die

I own no land for the land owns me

That’s the way it has been, how it always will be

For I am what I am—I am—Aborigine.45

This new-found pride in being Aboriginal has on occasion

been taken too far in the sense that some of the authors

who have asserted and displayed their Aboriginality, like

Mudrooroo or Archie Weller, turned out not to be in fact

indigenous (I’m not talking here of non-indigenous

individuals, like Leon Carmen, who faked an Aboriginal

44 quoted in Collingwood-Whittick, Sheila. The Pain of Unbelonging.xxxi.45 ‹http://www.dreamtime.auz.net/default.asp?PageID=73&n=I+Am+2D+Aborigine›

19

identity for profit but of what might be called “honest

mistakes”).46

In asserting their Aboriginality, writers sometimes

defiantly challenge the polite conventions of white

culture, depicting themselves in what the whites tend to

see as a negative light, like Lionel Fogarty in “Mad

Souls”:

I am a moody Murri

my temper as black as me.

I am a moody Murri

drink and smoke.

[…].

Yes, I’m a moody Murri

I live to swear

and shit anywhere.

I am the moody Murri

don’t like Aussies

don’t like Asians.

You’d love to meet me.47

46 The issue of who really qualifies as Aboriginal, and on whatcriteria, is a very complex one and requires more development thanthis paper offers scope for. Here I just want to draw attention tosome of the relevant controversies.47 ‹http://www.poetryinternational.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=19000›

20

This in-your-face stance is an understandable response to

decades of oppression and discrimination, and shows that

there is still something painful in the Aboriginal sense of

identity—it inescapably involves trauma, even though the

sense of being doomed (as in Oodgeroo’s poem “We Are

Going”)48 has now been exorcised. Andrew Lattas and Gillian

Cowlishaw have argued that the anti-social behaviour of

some Aboriginal individuals—their public drunkenness, their

swearing and fighting, their defiance of the police—

actually amounted to a form of political resistance.49

Whether or not there is a genuine political dimension to

attitudes that many observers find counterproductive and

ultimately self-destructive, it is clear that they express

a suffering—the pain of belonging to an underprivileged,

48 We are the shadow-ghosts creeping back as the camp fires burn low. We are nature and the past, all the old ways Gone now and scattered. The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter. The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from thisplace. The bora ring is gone. The corroboree is gone. And we are going. <http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/oodgeroo_noonuccal/poems/4601>

49 Lattas, Andrew. "Essentialism, memory and resistance:Aboriginality and the politics of authenticity." Oceania 63.3(1993): 240+. Academic OneFile. Web. 24 Nov. 2010.

21

downtrodden community which finds it hard to come to terms

with the loss of its erstwhile sovereignty. It is this pain

that Fogarty gives voice to in his poem. The last line

(“You’d love to meet me”) may sound rather threatening but

its ironical phrasing above all expresses the distress of

being forced into confrontational relationships by a white-

dominated society which takes little account of Aboriginal

belonging and turns this belonging into a source of sorrow.

How can the pain of belonging be eased? Being proud of

one’s Aboriginal heritage, instead of being ashamed, is

clearly a step in the right direction, and it is heartening

to see many indigenous writers proclaim their pride like B.

Smith:

If your skin is white or your skin is black,

When faced with racism don’t step back.

Stand your ground and speak out loud.

“I’m a Koori and I’m proud.”50

50 Reed-Gilbert, Kerry (ed.). Message Stick: Contemporary Aboriginal Writing.Alice Springs: Jukurrpa Books, 1997, 76.

22

Bearing the brunt of white racism, Aborigines had to cope

with derogatory images of themselves that proclaimed their

ugliness and their inferiority, like Jack and Kathleen in

Kim Scott’s Benang : “They considered their noses, lips,

skin, wondered at the lesser brain capacity—according to

what they read—allowed by their skulls.”51 In increasing

numbers, Aborigines of mixed descent choose to proclaim

their Aboriginality, putting it first in spite of

assimilationist pressures. This is the case of Sally Morgan

and also, in Benang, of Harvey who, though “raised to carry

on one heritage, and ignore another”52, has resolved to

frustrate his grandfather’s “ultimatum” : “Be a white man

or nothing.”53 He will resist the conditioning to which his

upbringing subjected him and emerge an Aborigine.

Perhaps not everyone needs to feel proud of his or her

ethnicity. The Greek narrator of Tsiolkas’s Loaded is a

case in point. When Ariadne asks him “Are you proud of

being Greek?” he says “The question makes no sense to me.

I’m glad I’m Greek, I answer, but I’m not proud of it. I

51 Scott, Kim. Benang. Fremantle : FACP, 1999, 138.52 ibid., 19.53 ibid., 426.

23

had nothing to do with it…”54 But for people who have been

consistently looked down upon, and their achievements no

less consistently underrated, the restoration of pride and

dignity is essential if the pain of belonging (especially

of being seen to belong to an inferior race) is to go

away.55 This is precisely the process that can be seen at

work among contemporary Aboriginal authors. It often

involves taking the arrogant whites down a peg or two and

suggesting or asserting indigenous superiority over their

erstwhile conquerors. Thus Anita Heiss, in response to

those who question her “pedigree”, has this disdainful

comeback:

My origins are not to be found in

         STD stained hulks

         or at the hands of thieves. 56

In less aggressive manner, in her collection of short

stories Every Secret Thing, Marie Munkara decribes the white

missionaries who attempt to “civilise” the Top End blacks

54 Tsiolkas, Christos. Loaded. Sydney: Vintage, 1998 [1995], p. 72.55 cf. the Aboriginal website http://shareourpride.org.au/56 Heiss, Anita. “Identity.” Token Koori. Sydney: CurringaCommunications, 1998, p. 9.

24

as pompous idiots whom their charges have no trouble

fooling. They are on a “papally-sanctioned quest to strip

[Aborigines] of every vestige of their culture” but the

author’s irony makes it clear that, despite the whites’

sense of superiority, this culture is actually far more

appropriate to the environment. Munkara pokes fun at the

whites’ way of life when she reports the suggestion that

“the humbler mission fare of flour and sugar was a highly

nourishing replacement for the fresh wallaby and fish that

the girl had originally been forced to endure when she

lived in the camp”57 or notes that one of the converts “had

been saved from a life of misery in the camp with his

family and given a wonderful new culture called Catholicism

to embrace.”58 The whites’ behaviour implies that the blacks

are an inferior life form which needs to be improved : they

have to be taught “how to stop acting like a black person”

and this will give them “the ability to become rational,

thinking human beings.”59 The narrator’s good-natured irony

57 Munkara, ‘Marie. “The Bishop”. Every Secret Thing. St Lucia: UQP,2009, p. 2; cf. also the story “Wurruwataka” in which a haplesswhite anthropologist is merrily led up the garden path by amischievous native informant.58 ibid., p. 5.59 ibid., p. 6.

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turns the tables on those pretensions, allowing the

Aborigines to have a good laugh at the whites’ expense.

For many part-Aborigines, however, acknowledging and

making sense of their indigenous ancestry is no simple

task. Sally Morgan had to peel back the layers of reticence

and obfuscation which her family had accumulated over the

years, mostly for self-protection, before she uncovered her

true ancestry. In similar fashion Mary, Ivy’s fostered-out

daughter in Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise, finds it quite

hard to reconnect with her people: “Her father was unknown.

Her real mother was Aboriginal—but her birth certificate

stated that her stepparents were her real parents. Somehow,

all traces of her past had been removed.”60 Not only does

she have to make endless enquiries, but her new-found

Aboriginal identity does not come easy—she has to “learn

[…] to become Aboriginal.”61 On top of everything, because

of her physical appearance she faces the scepticism of her

fellow-Aborigines about her belonging: “She perceived a

denial by Aboriginal people wherever she worked to accept

60 Wright, Alexis. Plains of Promise. St Lucia: UQP, 1997, p. 209.61 ibid., p. 210.

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her Aboriginality.”62 Even her Aboriginal partner Buddy

thinks that Mary is “just hooked on the romance of it.”63

Reclaiming one’s Aboriginality is not the easy path to

prosperity and respect that hard-line conservatives like

Andrew Bolt claim. It is a constant struggle, a hard row to

hoe. But it is the only hope of easing the pain of being

estranged from one’s own people and one’s own country, the

pain of belonging and being denied. The pitfall would be to

become fixated on a type of Aboriginality—that of the

traditional hunter-gatherer—that is no longer available to

most Indigenous people. Like Marie Munkara’s characters,

Aborigines of mixed descent have to learn “to sit on the

wobbly fence of cultural evolution without falling off.”64

Blackness should not be fetishized in the way whiteness was

by the British colonists. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot has

suggested that women who experience the anguished fear of

not being perfect mothers for their children should settle

for being “good enough.” In the same way, it would be wise

for those individuals who embark on a quest to find their

62 ibid., p. 240.63 ibid., p. 227.64 Munkara, Marie. op. cit., p. 158.

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Aboriginal self to settle for being Aboriginal enough. They

might thus achieve belonging without the attendant pain.

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