a bonobo humanity?

I recently read Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright, for a book group I belong to. At our meeting to discuss the book, a rather awkward incident occurred. One of the members, who had issues with the book, which I have to say I didn’t really understand (the issues I mean, not the book), asked, presumably in exasperation, ‘Do you think I’m being racist?’ I believe he was asking the group as a whole, but, since I’d been speaking in praise of it (it was Praiseworthy after all), I spoke up and said, sotto voce, ‘Well, yeah, a bit’, or something similar. This was unfortunate, and I owe him an apology. Anyway, he stormed off to his room (he and his partner were the hosts for the evening), and the group struggled on without him for a while, and soon dispersed.

I don’t know if I remember this rightly, episodic memory being so fraught and entangled with ego and angst and such. Anyway, what I think was bothering me wasn’t so much racism – or not at all racism – but what I perceived as a lack of recognition of a work that played with the combination of oral and written storytelling in a writer who, like all indigenous writers coming from an oral tradition, is interested in displaying the best of both worlds, with an understandable bias towards her own culture. I also found, in the writing, a certain irreverence, if that’s the right word, for the adopted language, which I’ve found in Aboriginal people I’ve spoken to or listened to. An irreverence often laced wth humour.    

It should be remembered, as I think it’s really important, that all indigenous/aboriginal/first nations people who have had their culture upended, their best land appropriated, their age-old lifestyles destroyed, are forced, in order to recover anything out of what they’ve lost, to learn and effectively use the language of the colonisers. Because it’s never going to happen the other way round. And Alexis Wright’s whole career illustrates this unfortunate but completely unsurprising fact. Wright’s white father died when she was five, and she was subsequently brought up, by her mother and grandmother, as a Waanyi woman in the highlands south of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her use of the English language, to which she was obviously exposed from an early age, is dazzlingly rich, fertile, and unconstrained in a way that I’ve encountered myself in my all too rare conversations with aboriginal people.

Now I’m going to throw caution to the wind and, just because I’ve been on a Darwin binge lately (Charles, that is, not Garamilla), I’m going to quote from The voyage of the Beagle – 

At sunset, a party of a score of the black aborigines passed by, each carrying, in their accustomed manner, a bundle of spears and other weapons. By giving a leading young man a shilling, they were easily detained, and threw their spears for my amusement. They were all partly clothed, and several could speak a little English: their countenances were good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been represented. In their own arts they are admirable. A cap being fixed at thirty yards distance, they transfixed it with a spear, delivered by the throwing-stick with the rapidity of an arrow from the bow of a practised archer. In tracking animals or men they show most wonderful sagacity, and I heard of several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness. They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them.

Charles Darwin, Voyage of  the Beagle, p 291

So, to Darwin, Australia’s ‘savages’ were kinda noble. His later description of Australia’s ‘freedmen’, those brought to the country from England due to crimes large and small, was much more cloth-eared, classist and offensive. In any case it’s unlikely that Darwin bothered to learn any of the local aboriginal lingo. But then again…

The point here is that, as Darwin’s description tells us, the first humans to make a living on this land became very adept at surviving and thriving here, and as to ‘cultivating the ground’, they had little need to, quite apart from the dubious advantages to be gained by the ‘agricultural turn’, especially as the soil wasn’t the best for growing crops, as the first fleeters discovered. These first humans too might have struggled at first – that’s something we’re unlikely to ever know – but they clearly adapted over time to what was available for hunting and fishing, as well as developing skills to replenish the natural foods they found, as the writings of Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe have shown.  

But then the Brits arrived, and they had to deal with foreign diseases, foreign weaponry, culture shock and ‘Terra Nullius’ land-grabbing on a massive scale, though plenty of those early Brits were impressed at the health and vitality of these ‘savages’. All of this makes background for Alexis Wright’s literary work, which presents us with the haze of Carpentaria under the remote overlordship of the Australian Government, and how particular individuals and families try to deal with it.  

The first thing that struck me, though, about the book, was the writing style, which I might describe as ‘colourfully rambling’, with particular individuals standing out for their more or less fantastical obsessions. It marries the oral and the literary in such a breezily nonchalant way that all the craziness, the various dreams and schemes, become convincing. And it’s all about how to deal with that oppressive foreign overlordship – every response from suicide, to get rich quick schemes (white folk stuff) to complete identity with the overlord, to retreat into private obsessions. In one memorable passage, for me at least, Aboriginal Sovereignty, the aptly named most tragic figure in the novel, is picked up while apparently trying to commit suicide in the open sea, by a boat full of refugees (Sovereignty had been marked as a paedophile by the White Powers for breaking a certain law):

One of these laws said that you cannot have sex with a minor. He had raped an underage girl. Why did that girl want to get married to her promised one? She said it was the law, their law, the old true law. She said that other people had married same way, and all their families knew that too. She said stop being a pack of hypocrites, she insisted on being married, and went right out there, and claimed her man. There was no trouble about her doing that. Everyone knew. Said it was right. Those two loved each other since they were children. They said that they would spend the rest of their entire lives with each other…

The ‘people smuggler’ in charge of the boat is given a voice – a rare thing. In fact, our former Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, described what he and so many others have termed people smugglers as ‘the scum of the Earth’, as though they were a species, like those poor maligned cane toads. So the passage dealing with Aboriginal Sovereignty’s thoughts as he floats in the open sea thinking of ‘her, only her, in his soul’, and of eternity and spirits of time, is broken by this cargo shifter, weather and time-hardened, hunger-hardened, his home washed away by a changing climate, his being shifted from shrinking land to drifting sea, and now through circumstances too wind-blown and divagating to bear in mind, he is responsible for live cargo, so that he needs not to panic, he needs to be calm for others, as time and this boat have taught him, though he too might be drifting between a formless hope and despair. 

So Aboriginal Sovereignty is rescued by this boat, this eagle-eyed scummy watcher of the sea and its flotsam, and with Wright’s language spinning its webs we are, or I’m not, sure if he’s dead or alive, and then some coastal military arrive in helicopters followed by customs patrol boats, and all is panic and noise and interpreters and the unconscious man lying on the deck is mentioned, and death is surely unconsciousness and yet… The uncertainties are perhaps deliberate or maybe I’m just being obtuse, but it seems Aboriginal Sovereignty’s ultimate demise results from the sudden brutal occupation of the boat by these officials, but of course it all began with the police and charges of paedophilia and the assimilation soothing the dying pillow wisdom touted by the Adelaide Review back in the eighties and still practised without the name. 

In any case we see where Wright’s sympathies lie throughout Praiseworthy – with people who must make the most, if they can, out of displacement and dispossession, a praiseworthy task, often misunderstood, often obstructed, and sometimes, often, something to marvel at. 

References

Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy,

Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle

Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu, 2018

Bill Gammage, The biggest estate on Earth, 2011