Anybody Home?

Remember those great Michener novels, that began not with the birth of the protagonist but with the birth of the land itself? Those novels that read more like a geologic version of the Bible, with “In the beginning…” followed by hundreds of pages of description of volcanoes forming islands rising from the sea or mountain ranges pushed upward by chapters of continents grinding together? If I were to be Michenerian in this Australian blog,  it would be a very long time until I got to this week or two that Bill and I have been doodling around a very small part of this continent/country. Australia is an ancient land, which is evident in its rock formations honed by millennia of natural forces, by its thin top coat of top soil – all that remains after eons of blowing away or washing out to sea, by its peculiar fauna which have evolved in isolation since Gondwana’s  pieces split and inched away from each other 55 million years ago.

Dingo, Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary

Australia is so old that the dingo, which landed on Australia’s shores 5,000 years ago in Asian trading ships, is considered an arriviste and can stir up arguments about whether it’s a native animal. Try not to let the questions that come to mind when learning of Asian traders plying the ocean between Australia and home get in the way: Why didn’t Asians claim other lands as their own, as Europeans did? What did the Aboriginals have to trade, and what did they get from the Asians? And why were the Asians carrying an Asian wolf, which is what the dingoes were, on their ships? Like the Polynesians carrying rats in their canoes, it makes me think the committees deciding what to pack and what to leave behind had unique senses of humor.

The question of who is native and who belongs surfaces again when you look at the human settlement of the continent. Although some scientists say that the Aboriginals have lived on this land for 40 to 60 thousand years, when the British dumped their convicts in Sydney Harbor they declared the land Terra Nullis. Where Americans warred with, then signed bogus treaties with the natives -- or simply handed them smallpox-infected blankets – the British had a simpler answer: just say there’s no one home, then move in. Until the mid-seventies – that’s the mid nineteen 70’s—white Australians took Aboriginal children, especially mixed-race Aboriginal children—away from their families and either adopted them out to white people (who often used them as servants) or shipped them to missions. The plan was to breed the blackness out of the race. The effect was to dislocate a culture to whom the land was life, history, and family. It was only three years ago that Kevin Rudd issued an apology to the Stolen Generation. In the 15 years since we last visited Australia, signs have begun to appear in parks and scenic overlooks acknowledging the indigenous populations linked to that land, finally admitting that the terra was not nullis when the convicts came ashore. But we talked with people, on this trip in 2011,  who claimed that the policy of taking children away from their parents resulted in better lives for the children, in that same anecdotal way that Reagan used to use to cloud the issue of the larger effect of government policies. And much like readers of Gone With the Wind will recognize: we too wanted to believe in the happy slave myth to avoid confronting ourselves in the mirror.

GOR between Wye River & Lorne --signs that wouldn't have been here 20 years ago

As we watch the dismantling of the American education system with funding cuts, union breaking, and Texan textbooks, we might take a cautionary tale from Down Under. The people I’ve talked with, aged 35 and up, know more about British history than their own. Cultural cringe was real here until just a few decades ago – even their gardening books were imported from Britain, and everyone accepted they just had to add 6 months to the recommended planting times—so few white Australians knew they had descended from convicts (except for those living in South Australia who proudly, and accurately, proclaimed that they were not) and fewer still knew anything about aboriginal history or government policy toward indigenous people. It is hard to make good public policy based on cultural myth rather than historical fact.

For years Australia wanted only British immigrants – witness the “Ten Pound Pom” policy after WWII, offering ten pound sea tickets to British families relocating to Australia. Was it a way of underlining their invented definition of who had been here long enough to claim the land? And now that Australia has relaxed its immigration policy to grow its economy, the Asians have returned, as have other non-British ethnicities who believe that life would be better here on the fringes of an ancient continent. It’s unclear how long it will take for them to be considered Australian – perhaps less than 5,000 years.

 Koalas on road to Cape Otway Lighthouse, GOR