Little Golden
Books (C) Devika Brendon 2017
I used to feel it a lot, when I was
younger. The sense of bitumen, laid smoothly over something so much wilder, and
more complex. The awareness of what exists, past the
boundaries of the nature strip.
It is a great country, you know. The
imposition of imported demarcations. The controlled clearing, the pushing back
of what was there before the projection and provision of what is convenient and
effective has been successful, and efficient.
But it is strange, to be so cut off:
to find oneself continuously moving across this pre-arrayed sequence of
neatened surfaces. The strangest thing is how normal it mostly all feels, here,
in the present day.
The settlers chose safety. They
recreated what made them feel at home, and laid it down, with ordinances and
sub clauses and admirably calm reliance on the Rule of Law.
And everything is pretty clean. And
everything works.
But, at times, the neatness and
convenience is repulsive. It shuts us out. As if the buildings are
inaccessible, and the constructions have no aperture.
In this country, the bins have
liners. There are signs which prompt and alert us to the outlying hazards and
dangers.
I teach Higher School Certificate
English, in Sydney, and one of the poems set for study this year is Robert
Gray's 'Flames And Dangling Wire'. I think of its images today, as I look at
the City through the filter of my mind's eye. As he noted, it all appears from
a distance like stencilled shapes in a smoky haze. The sandstone, and the glass
and steel towers, and the domes, sometimes seem as if they are all about to
evaporate.
The lightly muscled waters, sleek
and tense and coiled, warily in wait. The layers of covering seem like a
patina, and the modern discourses we engage in proliferate, like hastily
scribbled annotations on an older, less legible manuscript.
Have you heard the invocations of
the original custodians of the land, at each public gathering? Do we know what
we are collectively treading on? Under the carpet and the stone and the poured
concrete?
A few months ago, on a jewelled day
in winter, I was at High Tea in Curzon Hall, where - years ago - my Anglican
Girls' School had its Year 12 Formal. This occasion, sumptuous, replete and
complete, with sandwiches and choux pastries and bubbly, was probably named
'The Heritage Afternoon Tea Package'.
The soaring ceilings, the crystal
fountain. The heritage. Well brought up, older Anglo Australians, so beautifully
put together, so elegant and composed and refined and enclosed. Celebrating 200
years of the life of Jane Austen, in The Regency Room.
An avuncular older gentleman
at my table, making conversation. Proffering platters of gourmet sandwiches,
salmon slices and avocado. The refinements and courtesies.
Every faux velvet chair with a
cushion, each with its own cushion cover.
And he was wondering what I was
doing there. Politely, of course.
Perhaps it is that generation.
Modelling themselves on what they hold dear. One evening, at the Opera House,
in the interval of a performance of 'Rigoletto', I
think it was, my friend and I were sitting in the foyer with our charged
glasses. And an elderly lady asked me, politely, where I was from. Did she
mean, how long had I been in Australia?
'I grew up here', I replied, with a
smile. She seemed surprised. That I could speak English? That my Korean friend
and I were enjoying the opera? An Italian opera, with English subtitles? I got
the sense that she felt that we were invading her space. That she found it
offensive that we were so much at ease. Strange though that seems. A brown
skinned girl, and a golden boy, in faultless evening dress, observing the
cultural codes, in a white building with its structures like sails, on a dark
sea that predates all immigration.
So I conversed, with this older
gentleman, my High Tea companion, in Curzon Hall, in the acceptable way, of how
long I had studied and taught English Literature. He seemed really interested,
in what I had to say.
And somehow it came up that I was
born on Australia Day. Celebration of settlement. Tall ships, and fireworks and
drunken outpourings of bonhomie.
And he said, 'They are wanting to
change the day of national celebration, you know. Change the name of it. To
Invasion Day'.
'They?', I courteously enquired,
with all the color and heat of fireworks inside me, on interior display.
What did he call them, amongst his
own kind? Abos? Boongs? Coons? But to me, in The Regency Room, amidst the
rituals of the 200 year Celebration High Tea, under the soaring ceilings, in
the sandstone building wrought by Empire, of course, he uses proper names:
Original Australians, Indigenous People.
He does not use the word 'native',
with me looking at him, with my big, dark eyes. Good choice.
And stray sparks from the interior
fireworks display lights up a little bit of the vast unexplored landscape, cut
off inside.
And so I say, 'Well, it's pretty
easy to understand where they are coming from on this issue, isn't it? I mean,
they were invaded, their culture destroyed, etc. etc. So many ways of erasing
them have been tried. Why would they want to celebrate that? Seen in that way,
to expect them to participate in celebrating that event, is to expect them to
swallow a pretty unforgivable insult. Is it not?'
He smiled, a little uneasily. I
think he wanted to say, 'Come on, young lady, it's not that bad. No need to
take that tone'.
And so I say, 'It's a fact, isn't
it? Generally agreed on? Universally acknowledged? It's happened a lot, all
over the world. Thriving 21st century economies, First World nations, built
fair and square - on genocide? And everything was founded on that, right from
first contact.'
Rule of Law, built on fundamental
beliefs and deeply venerated truths, of supremacy and hierarchy and
assumptions, like his. Consensus.
And when he took his leave, at the
end of the occasion, he thanked me and said I was a breath of fresh air.
He was not an unkind man. Just a
person profoundly unaware of what lay beyond the pale.
