Open Writing

Recently, I came across a book edited by historian Peter Goldsworthy called True Blue: on being Australian. A similar book is, The Australians: Insiders & Outsiders on the National Character since 1770 by historian John Hirst.

These books have a rich collection of stories and reflections that give insight into the Australian national identity; elusive as that may be. Over the next few issues, I intend to explore what these books have to say about 'being Australian'.

Hirst says that Germaine Greer in Whitefella Jump Up (2003) and Inga Clendinnen in Dancing with Strangers (2002) make the bold claim there is an essential similarity between Aboriginal and settler humour. Both writers maintain that Aboriginal culture has had a profound effect on the people who came after them.

Mosquito was an Aboriginal man in New South Wales who agreed to hunt bushrangers in Tasmania to escape being incarcerated on Norfolk Island. Later, he joined a band of Aborigines in the bush and was sentenced to death for shooting a settler. As an example of Aboriginal humour, the following exchange occurred in a Hobart jail:

Mosquito: 'Hanging no good for blackfellow.'

Jailer: 'Why not as good for a blackfellow as for a whitefellow, if he kills a man?'

Mosquito: 'It's good for whitefellow, because he is used to it'.

James Morrill (1824-65) was an Essex seaman on the Peruvian that was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef in 1846. Morrill survived and lived with the Bindal people near Townsville in North Queensland for seventeen years before he rejoined white society in 1863.

Morrill's record of his experience The Story of James Morrill was published in 1863. Morrill tells how on steamy summer afternoons the young men would roll around the camp in fits of laughter at his attempts to speak their language.

Hirst cites historian Russell Ward from his The Australian Legend of 1958. Ward wrote of the influence Aborigines had on drovers, shearers and stockmen who lived a semi-nomadic life on pastoral runs. These often proclaimed themselves to be 'true' Australians because they identified with an ethos of mastery of the bush: tracking, finding water, or surviving on bush food. In so doing, they acknowledged their Aboriginal mentors for the skills they acquired.

In practice, black trackers were called out when a white person was lost in the bush. One Night the Moon is a poignant film based on events that took place in 1932 when a young girl went missing on the night of a full moon. Though her family was desperate to find her, they refused to engage the skills of a local tracker because of their racial prejudice. Later, the child was found dead of thirst.

Hirst says that by the end of the nineteenth century, while whites continued to be scornful of Indigenous people, there was an underlying feeling of respect for the first Australians, often in the same person, because of their achievement in becoming one with a hard and uncompromising land.

I have found similar attitudes in my travels into outback Australia. Some speak with respect of elders of the past while they refer to modern-day Aborigines with derision. I believe this contempt is a mask for the guilt people feel about the treatment of Aborigines, especially in relation to land.

In northern Australia of the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, pastoralists allowed local tribespeople to live in security on their ancestral land while they used them as a pool of cheap labour. The people's value as stockmen and women and their knowledge of the country helped the pastoral industry survive through years of drought.

At Christmas on Lammermoor Station in North Queensland in the 1860s, pastoralist Robert Christison gave the local people rations and a horse and cart so they could go on a month's 'walkabout' to their sacred places. In their turn, the people cheered wildly when the station won prizes at the Hughenden Show.

It is this spontaneity that Greer believes sets Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, apart from others—they shout a lot and they are not obsessed by class distinction. Greer believes the Australian national character derives from the influence of Aboriginal people whose dogged resistance to an imported and inappropriate culture has influenced Australian culture far more than is understood.

In the early years, colonial authorities expressed fear that settler Australians would degenerate and go native. In many ways, they did. Clendinnen concludes, 'Here, in this place, I think we are all Australians now.'

© Paul Newbury

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Paul writes for Bonzer magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au