There is a GAN, revisited

I mentioned recently that I had seen Jonathan Franzen named as the Great American Author, on a 2011 Time cover I think, and that has led me to revisit the subject of the Great Australian Novel. There is a GAN was one of my earliest posts, and on re-reading I find there is not much I wish to change, at least not in what I say, but two books I have read since then (April 2015) cry out to be included. So my top 10 Great Australian Novels are now –

Voss (1957), Patrick White

Such is Life (1903), Joseph Furphy

The Swan Book (2013), Alexis Wright (review)

Benang (1999), Kim Scott (review)

The Pea Pickers (1943), Eve Langley (review)

The Man Who Loved Children (1940), Christina Stead

The Timeless Land (1941), Eleanor Dark

The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (1930), Henry Handel Richardson

The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971), David Ireland (review)

An Australian Girl (1890), Catherine Martin (review)

The books I had to make room for were The Swan Book and Benang. Everything Alexis Wright writes is soaringly original, invested with poetry, love of language and Indigenous culture. That is true too of Benang though some of Scott’s other works are more prosaic.

And I’ve included too Eve Langley who in 2015 languished in the long list, not so much for The Pea Pickers, which I love, but for her whole body of work, 4,200 pages, largely unpublished, but samples of which Lucy Frost (ed.) used to produce Wilde Eve.

Dropped out were My Brilliant Career/My Career Goes Bung by Miles Franklin, who when young was an original, inventive, exuberant but still thoughtful writer; Loaded by Chris Tsialkos who I think is only a middle ranking author in middle age when I thought he might be much more; and The River Ophelia by Justine Ettler, a work which I still rank very highly but which perhaps is insufficiently mainstream to be one of the ‘greats’.

Voss clings to top spot. White, I get the feeling, is being treated as less and less relevant, but he was a giant of Modernism, in Australia and in the world. Each of his works on its own has substance and his body of work more so. He teaches us how to write and how to write about Australia. Coincidentally, the Voss cover comes from a SMH article Australia Day 2015: Jason Steger picks his top 10 (here).

Furphy is White’s opposite, a working man, a man of the bush, an autodidact, the author of a single work. And yet what a work! Its fiery, mad prose anticipates James Joyce by a quarter of a century.

Stead, like White has a significant body of substantial work. I’ve named The Man Who Loved Children, though my favourite is the thoroughly American Letty Fox: Her Luck (and I still have a couple of big ones left to read). Looking back at the list I see that I have largely avoided romances – just An Australian Girl at no. 10 – is that prejudice do you think? Perhaps I should have named For Love Alone.

That question applies too to Henry Handel Richardson. The Fortunes trilogy is certainly a fine work and made Richardson’s reputation but Maurice Guest is probably more thoughtful and better written.

The question for Dark is, Is The Timeless Land trilogy a great work or ‘merely’ an important one? It is such a landmark in our acknowledgement of the prior rights of Indigenous people in Australia that it is hard to judge its qualities as literature. But Dark’s qualities as a writer and early modernist were made apparent (to me) when I reviewed Waterway last year.

The Unknown Industrial Prisoner is another work important for being a landmark. Urban, industrial, postmodern, it marked a step up from pre-War social realism.

Which brings us to one of my favourites, An Australian Girl, a very C19th romance with lots of German and moral philosophy in an Australian setting.

And still I haven’t found room for Thea Astley or Elizabeth Jolley, or as Steger reminds me, Elizabeth Harrower, nor for Peter Carey whose Oscar and Lucinda at least, deserved consideration, nor for another Steger choice Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of his Natural Life.

I look around my shelves, as I often do, and realise that just as I left out Langley last time, this time I have left out (again!) Gerald Murnane. The post can stay as it is but if I were to pick one of his works it would be Border Districts, an intensely thoughtful work about memory, but again, I haven’t read them all.

The question I have in my mind though, is who among our young, and even not so young writers might challenge for inclusion on this list. Or a different/related question, after The Swan Book what is the best novel so far of the C21st? I’m inclined to say Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love. Or is it, like The River Ophelia, too narrowly focussed to be a ‘great’. And do I even read enough new releases to be able to offer an opinion. Probably not!

Taboo, Kim Scott

The biggest issues we face today are the flat-lining of the Australian and most western economies after decades of neo-liberal pro-market, anti-worker policies; and the refusal of right-wing politicians to allow even the possibility of a consensus for dealing with global warming.

Yet the biggest, the dominant issue in Australian Lit. is clearly what it means to be an Australian – Anglo, Indigenous, or otherwise – in this land we whites stole from its Indigenous inhabitants, the oldest continuing civilization on Earth. And which by the way, we continue to steal by all the artificial constraints State and Federal governments put around Native Title determinations when the graceful thing to do after the Mabo judgement would have been to declare all Crown land Indigenous and to negotiate with the traditional owners using that as the starting point.

This blog was started to investigate notions of Australianness, so I would say that, but look at who is prominent in Aust.Lit today and what books are receiving the most attention. None is about the failure of the welfare state or the casualization of work or the disappearance of free education or the obscene wealth of the very rich, and very few are about climate change. It is a subject for another post, the question of which writers at the height of their powers today, clearly stand head and shoulders above their fellows, but I would suggest three names, Kim Scott, Alexis Wright and Chris Tsialkos, and two of those are Indigenous and the third, Tsialkos is concerned to investigate Australianness from his own non-Anglo, non-straight background.

Taboo (2017) is both personal for Kim Scott and political. Personal in that it is a continuation of his exploration of his roots as a Wirlomin Noongar man, a sequel to the story he began telling in Benang (1999), and political in that he uses the return of the Wirlomin to the site of the Cocanarup Massacre and the reaction of the current (fictionalised) owners of Kocanarup Station as a metaphor for how whites of good intentions everywhere struggle to recognise the depth of the ongoing harm that they are party to.

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Noongar: those Indigenous people whose country is all the south-western portion of Western Australia (from south of Geraldton to west of Esperance).

Wirlomin: the south-easternmost of 14 language groups making up the Noongar. Their country is centred on the present-day towns of Ravensthorpe and Hopetoun.

For maps of Australian Indigenous language groups see the ‘Aboriginal Australia’ page above (or here). The AIATSIS map labels the Wirlomin region as ‘Minang’.

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And finally, that cover. I have no religion, nor any thoughts about spiritualism or life after death, and I hope that when I am dead my body is rendered into compost. But that doesn’t mean that I think images of dead people should be used as decorations on book covers. And given the enormous efforts of Indigenous people over a long period to have the bones of their ancestors returned from museums and given a proper burial, I think it is doubly inappropriate that a skull should be used in this way an the cover of this book.

In fact, despite my great age and years of long-distance truck driving, I have not only never seen a dead person, I avoid seeing people killed on film or television (I certainly don’t find it entertaining!), and have never been the first or even an early attender at a traffic accident, except of course the ones I’ve been in myself. Which is by way of a lead in to the first (and last) scene in the book: a truck loaded with grain loses its brakes at the top of the short steep hill at the eastern end of Ravensthorpe’s main street, gathers speed, missing pedestrians and cars, looks headed towards the roadhouse at the bottom of the hill before veering to the right, towards the creek where, “slowed at last by deep, coarse sand”, it falls slowly onto its side. And as grain pours from the beached tipper trailer, there appears gradually … “Something like a skeleton, but not of bone. At least, not only bone. The limbs are timber. The skull is timber too, dark and burnished, and ivory dentures …”

Except here Ravensthorpe is called Kepalup (in Benang it was Gebalup), Hopetoun 30 km south on the coast is Hopetown and Albany, the main regional centre, 300 km west along the WA south coast, is King George Town (as it was in That Deadman Dance). Other nearby towns, Esperance and Lake Grace for example, keep their names and Perth is just the City. Kocanarup is now owned by the overtly Christian Hortons – Dan, a widower and his brother Malcolm. In the 1880s, at the time of the massacre, it was owned by the Dunns (Dones in Benang).

Dan Horton’s late wife Janet had been a prime mover in the establishment of a ‘Peace Park’ at Kepalup (which may stand in for the Kukenarup Memorial which overlooks Cocanarup Station, 15 km west of Ravensthorpe). A party of Wirlomin, mostly elderly, mostly from King George Town, camp at the Hopetown caravan park by the sea for a retreat, for some of them to dry out, to prepare for the official opening of the Peace Park.

Tilly, the central character is a student at a private girls school in Perth, on scholarship. She is the daughter of a white mother and a Wirlomin father, Jim who has recently died in jail where he had been leading the revival of Wirlomin language and culture. As a baby, till reclaimed by her mother, she was the foster daughter of Dan and Janet Horton.

Tilly comes down on the bus to Lake Grace where she is met by her father’s cousins, twins Gerald and Gerrard Coolman – descendants of the Coolamons of Benang – one who had been in jail with her father and is now dry and a leader of the Wirlomin revival and one who is not, and they continue on to Kokanarup, to meet Dan Horton and to walk around the vaguely defined sites of the massacre up till now treated as taboo. After a night as guests at the Station they go on down to Hopetown and meet up with the others for the retreat.

All the people are carefully, lovingly even described and we get to know them as they tentatively reclaim the language that was forbidden to them when the older ones were sent away “to the mission” as children, and nearly lost, and as they slowly reclaim the springs and creeks and hills and stones of the massacre site. And so Tilly, by upbringing and education a stranger but still a loved family member, learns the words and sites of her people as Scott must have done too when he began the long journey whose beginning is described in Kayang and Me.

For a while, the middle section of the book, we go back. Tilly starts seeing her father, dying in jail, runs away from her mother, gets in harm’s way, is rescued. A malign presence, a large white man, is in her life, in her nightmares, in the lives of many of the people. And in the third, final section he’s in Kepalup.

Benang, in particular, was a poetic work. Taboo is much more plainly written, but that is also its power.

 

Kim Scott, Taboo, Picador, Sydney, 2017

see also:
The Cocanarup Massacre, my post based on Kim Scott’s source material (here)
Lisa at ANZLitLovers’ review of Taboo (here)
My reviews of Kim Scott’s earlier works –
True Country, 1993 (here)
Benang, 1999 (here)
Kayang and Me, 2005 (here)
That Deadman Dance, 2010 (here)

True Country, Kim Scott

I have been reading Kim Scott backwards, starting with That Deadman Dance (2010) and ending up here at his first, True Country (1993). With Benang (1999) and Kayang and Me (2005) – I haven’t read Lost (2006) – this is a fine body of work. The seven year gap back to Scott’s last work is to be filled later this year apparently with a new novel, Taboo which, according to the author, might be about a community reconnecting to its ancestral heritage, seeking healing.

Now that I have reached the beginning, it is apparent that over the course of his career as a writer Scott has been ‘growing into his skin’. Benang and Kayang and Me were accounts of his journey to document his roots as a Noongar man; and That Deadman Dance was a powerful imagining of a specific and very short time after first contact in WA when the locals, Scott’s Noongar people, held the upper hand. True Country is the story of a young man with some Indigenous heritage, who has been brought up ‘white’, feeling his way as a teacher in an Aboriginal community up north, feeling his way from idealism to a realistic appraisal of the dysfunction of a community in which the old ways are lost and the new ways are not taking, feeling his way towards beginning to internalise his own indigenous-ness.

The quality of Scott’s writing is high, as we now expect – descriptive, poetic, original – and the story is told in a number of voices. First and omniscient is a voice which might be the voice of the community:

You listen to me. We’re gunna make a story, true story. You might find it’s here you belong. A place like this.

And it is a beautiful place, this place, Call it our country, our country all ‘round here. We got river, we got sea. Got creek, rock, hill, waterfall…

Welcome to you.

Then there is Billy, just arrived to teach the secondary students with wife Liz. Billy’s narration starts out as first person but slides into third person, signifying maybe, his being outside himself, observing, as the community sucks him in. Other voices, Aboriginal, chime in through short chapters and notes.

The novel takes us through one school year, through the seasons of Australia’s tropical north – Wet, Dry, Wet – with little episodes, closely told, reminiscent, in style, of David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe (1976). There is no plot, or not at least until you look back and see what has changed.

The story’s fictional township, Karnama, is on the Kimberley coast of northern Western Australia, and consists of a Catholic mission, a government school and an Aboriginal community. So the whites are priests and nuns, another couple with an 8yo son who are also newly arrived teachers, a handyman, and a manager and a young, single woman employed by the community. Police and doctors might fly in from Derby, but are not part of the story.

Interestingly, Liz as a character is only lightly sketched, we see her pale skin and red hair but rarely hear her voice. Scott’s work is always autobiographical and I wonder if he has/had a wife he didn’t want to offend. Jasmine, the single woman, is a bomb waiting to go off, until she makes her choice late in the year. Gerrard, the manager is venal, profiteering from his position, and the other teacher couple are anxious, fearful, educating their son at home by school of the air, not allowing him to mix with the locals. But none of the whites is really observed in any depth, except Billy. This is his novel and he is most interested in his interactions with his pupils and their families.

But Who’s Tellin’ this Story?

That short teacher bloke, he bit like us, but –he Nyungar or what? Look at him, he could be. Why’s he wanna know things? He get to school proper early anyway, sun-up even …

Dry season: early morning cool, and I left the first footprints in the dew on the lawn.

The switching back and forth of the voices serves to integrate us, the reader, into the community, stops us identifying wholly with Billy.

Fatima, on older woman, tells stories which Billy transcribes from his tape recorder and reads back to his class. This is an oral culture, and even while the children are being criticised for their failure to learn from books, they are able to quote great chunks of the videos they watched the previous night. But Billy loses interest in collecting stories, why?

Gabriella is local girl made good, a uni student down south who comes back periodically to observe. Beatrice, initially bright and helpful, falls apart, is passed from doctor to doctor in Darwin and Perth, maybe she has offended the gods. Deslie, one of the older boys, is cheerful and willing but a petrol sniffer. Francis, held back by poor eyesight and broken glasses, meets a sad end.

The men, Milton, Alphonse, Raphael, Sebastian show Billy around. Billy comes back from Derby with a ute and a tinny, spends his spare time on the river fishing for barramundi. There are not many vehicles and wherever they go there are people piled in the back, tourists too if the bus is broken down.

The children are touchy feely and dismissive of boundaries. Billy and Liz accept this, sometimes of course grudgingly, but often with pleasure:

One hot afternoon Billy, Liz, the high school kids, they all went for a swim …  The group moved in two major clusters, divided according to sex. The girls grouped around Liz and Jasmine, with Jasmine the main focus … They laughed, they shrieked, they studied her earrings and hair. They asked the two women about boyfriends, husbands. ‘Mr Storey [Billy] hit you ever? What he like when he drunk?’ … The girls held their guests’ hands and put their arms around their shoulders…

Imagine, again, seeing all this from above … The kids are mostly tight in around those teachers. Black skin looks good in the sun, shiny. Then nearly at High Diving, the kids break away and start to race to the river. They shed clothes on the run. They dive. They spear the water…

As we progress, the mood gets darker, Billy and Liz feel their openness is being taken advantage of. Karnama is a, theoretically, dry community but the whites drink and are observed drinking. The mail plane brings in alcohol. Builders working on new housing don’t employ locals, live in a men’s camp, drink and are visited by the women. Raphael is a bad drunk, beats his wives. The wives seek refuge with Billy and Liz.

A trip to Broome goes badly. The year draws to an end.

True Country is a stunningly well written book and I hope I have given you some sense of that, but it is also a brave book. Kim Scott, through Billy, confronts his fears and prejudices, the packs of half wild dogs which protect each house, the violence, the lack of purpose and the squalor. And, somehow, at the end he finds himself beginning to belong: “See? Now it is done. Now you know. True Country… We are serious. We are grinning. Welcome to you.”

 

Kim Scott, True Country, Fremantle Press, Perth, 1993

My reviews of Kim Scott’s other works –
Benang, 1999 (here)
Kayang and Me, 2005 (here)
That Deadman Dance, 2010 (here)
Taboo, 2017 (here)

The Cocanarup Massacre

Kukenarup Memorial (photo, Kim Scott)

It is central to Kim Scott’s Benang (1999) that in the early years of white settlement around ‘Gebalup’ (Ravensthorpe, WA) the matriarch Fanny (Benang) and her white husband Sandy Mason witness a massacre of Fanny’s people gathered around the homestead of the ‘Done’ family.

Not far from the homestead Fanny – cautiously peering from the load, peeking over bales – saw a small group of men women children, running and falling before station men on horseback. (1999, p.174)

… [Sandy] could see figures leaping to their feet, helping one another up, running. And there were voices calling, calling. People fell, were shot. Were shot….

Flames and explosions leapt from beyond the outstretched arms of a man beside him. A Winchester, almost the very latest thing. The man bent over the bodies, lunging and hacking, faceless in the grim darkness.

‘They understand this.’ (1999, p.186)

The knowledge of the deaths and the scattered bones creates an ‘exclusion zone’ to which the narrator is taken by Fanny’s grandsons many years later.

Scott wrote Benang, a fictionalised account of his search for his Noongar ancestry, from bits and pieces of stories and official records. In Kayang & Me (2005), which he co-wrote with Noongar elder, Hazel Brown, he recounts how Benang was just about done when he met Aunty Hazel, and how they turned out to be related, both descendants of Fanny Mason’s family. Of the massacre, Aunty Hazel writes:

Most of my grandmother Monkey’s family were massacred some time after 1880 by white people at a place called Cocanarup , a few miles from the Ravensthorpe townsite. (2005, p.10)

Cocanarup was a property taken up by the Dunn brothers in 1872 as a sheep run. In 1880 John Dunn was killed by spearing, by Granny Monkey’s brother, Yandawalla, for his part in raping a 13 yo Noongar girl. Yandawalla (aka Yangalla) was subsequently tried for murder and acquitted. There was trouble over the next couple of years as Noongars raided the property for sheep and the Dunn’s retaliated. It seems they eventually got a permit “to kill the seventeen people that were residents of that place.” However, unknownst to them there was a meeting of Noongars nearby from the surrounding districts of Hopetoun and Jerdacuttup, to discuss initiations and marriages and so “there was over thirty people that were killed down there.” (2005, p.65)

The oral history passed down to Aunty Hazel is backed up by white histories. Scott reports Marion Brockway as writing in The Dunns of Cocaranup, Early Days (1970):

Terrible stories abound, but cannot be verified, of the vengeance exacted by John’s brothers on the Nyungars. One story is that a number of Aborigines were killed and buried in a mass grave near John’s grave, the site being marked by a circle of posts. The rest of the Nyungars in the vicinity were chased eastward, the Dunns poisoning the waterholes on the way back, to prevent them returning. (2005, p.70).

And Cleve Hassell in his 1973 memoir of his own well-known early settler family “mentions that the three remaining Dunn brothers ‘declared war’ and took it in turns to go shooting Noongars while one was left at home with their sister. He writes that a great many natives were shot.” (2005, p.71)

I got in touch with Professor Scott (Kim Scott is Professor of Writing at Curtin Uni.) and he was kind enough to send me some extra material, photos and extracts from newspapers. These included a full account of Yangalla’s trial, but this summary from the South Australian Register of 26 Nov., 1881 will suffice: “The native Yangala, tried recently for the murder of Mr. John Dunn, has been acquitted owing to the unsatisfactory manner in which the evidence of the black witness was interpreted.” I have commented previously that colonial officialdom often had a much more enlightened attitude towards Aborigines than did settlers at the ‘frontier’. In the trial –presumably in the Perth Supreme Court – His Honour (not named) was pretty sharp with the police over the way they took ‘voluntary’ statements and the Attorney General was quick to withdraw the evidence so obtained.

The following year, in the West Australian of 30 May, 1882 their Albany correspondent reports:

Great dissatisfaction is being expressed by the settlers to the Eastward, more especially by the Messrs. Dunn Bros., as to the want of proper police protection. Most of your readers will remember the painful circumstances of Mr. John Dunn’s death, and the acquittal of the supposed murderers. Since that time it has transpired that the natives did not intend to murder Mr. J. Dunn, but another brother… it is now believed that they still intend to murder the other brother when an opportunity arises, which benevolent intention they will probably carry out if some steps are not taken to prevent them.

In the same paper, three years later on 25 Sept., 1885 it is reported that James Dunn had been attacked on the 15^th and on the following day Robert Dunn “went out to ascertain the intentions and strength of the natives. He met forty blacks coming towards the station who immediately attacked him.” Dunn fired, killing one, the Noongars retreated pursued by Dunn who “killed one and wounded several.”

There’s an interview with Robert Dunn, many years later, in the (Perth) Sunday Times of 20 May 1928 but it’s mostly ‘nigger’ this and ‘nigger’ that and doesn’t add much to the account.

Finally, the following appeared in the Western Mail of 17 Oct 1935 under the heading The Skull at Carracarrup, ‘eight miles SSW of Ravensthorpe’ by WIPECO of Leonora who ‘was told the story by Mr. Walter Dunn (now deceased)’:

[After John Dunn’s death] The remaining members on the station were then granted licence to shoot the natives for a period of one month, during which time the fullest advantage was taken of the privilege. Natives were shot from the station through Lime Kiln Flat, Manjitup and down to where Ravensthorpe is now situated. In the course of their guerrilla warfare, the whites arrived one day at the Carracarrup Rock Hole, and, knowing it was a watering place for the blacks, they crept quietly over the hill until they could peer down into the hole. There they saw two natives who had just risen from drinking. Two shots broke the stillness of the gorge and two dusky souls were sent home to their Maker. The bodies were left lying at the rock hole where they dropped as a grim reminder to the rest of the tribe of the white man’s retribution.

Cocanarup from Kukenarup memorial (photo, Graham Barker)

The Kukenarup memorial, on the South Coast Highway 15 km west of Ravensthorpe overlooks to the south the Cocanarup homestead and massacre site. The memorial, representing Noongar totems, Wedge Tailed Eagles and Mallee Fowl, includes the words:

This area of country has a harsh, complex and sometimes contradictory history. Many Noongar people were killed here, and all that death and the apartheid-like 20^th century legislation meant many of our families were never able to return and reconcile themselves to what had happened.

The fiction of Terra Nullius has meant that the Cocanarup and similar massacres, not to mention all the deaths of Indigenous people from mistreatment and deprivation of resources, have too often been whitewashed out of official histories. We can only hope our wilful forgetting is at long last in the process of being reversed, for without knowledge and then acknowledgement, there cannot be Reconciliation.

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See also: Bob Howard, Noongar Resistance on the South Coast 1830-1890 (here)

For further information you should search on ‘Cocanarup’, ‘Kukenarup’, Kocanarup’ and ‘Ravensthorpe Massacre’.
Google Map (here)
Nov. 2019: Massacre Map updated to include WA (here)

My reviews of Kim Scott’s novels:
True Country, 1993 (here)
Benang, 1999 (here)
Kayang and Me, 2005 (here)
That Deadman Dance, 2010 (here)
Taboo, 2017 (here)

My posts:
Australian Genocide, Sydney NSW, 1779 (here)
The ‘Battle’ of Pinjarra, Pinjarra WA, 1834 (here)
Wardandi Massacre, Wonnerup/Lake Mininup WA, 1841 (here)
Cocanarup (Kukenarup) Massacre, Cocanarup Station, Ravensthorpe WA, 1880s (here)
Kimberley Massacres, 1886-1924 (here)
also in WA:
Flying Foam Massacre, in the Pilbara, 1868 (here)
Forrest River massacres, 1926 (Wiki here)

Kayang & Me, Kim Scott and Hazel Brown

Kim Scott’s writing over a number of books is a voyage of discovery of his antecedents as a Noongar man, that is of the Indigenous people of Western Australia’s South-West. The Wilomin, to whom Scott has found he belongs, are the eastern-most sub-group of the Noongar, occupying sandy, mallee country along the south coast between Bremer Bay and Esperance and inland around Ravensthorpe, the territory covered by his much awarded novel, Benang (1999). His later novel That Deadman Dance (2010) was set further west, around Albany and the jarrah forested Stirling Ranges, although characters and geography overlap between the two novels, even if the names they are given differ.

In Kayang & Me Scott and his Aunty Hazel alternate in telling stories around Scott’s Noongar heritage. Different fonts are used so it is always clear who is talking. Kayang, by the way, has the meanings ‘Aunty’ and ‘Elder’. Scott says:

Most of Aunty Hazel’s writing in this book comes from transcriptions of tape-recordings we did together. That method created some difficult decisions for us, most of which could be reduced to the particular problem of how to capture the distinctive nature of her speech while allowing it to be relatively smooth to read on the page.

Aunty Hazel, Hazel Brown “was born on the ninth of November 1925, at a place called Kendenup [north of Albany]… I was born in an old packing shed. Years ago no women had their babies in hospital, you weren’t allowed to.” Her mother, Nellie, who had a white father, had been taken from her home at Marble Bar and sent 2,000 km south to Carrolup Native Settlement where, perhaps to cure her running away, she was made to marry a Wiloman man, Yiller, who died when Hazel was 5. Nellie, who by then also had a son, Lenny, then married Yiller’s brother, Fred Tjinjel Roberts, and Hazel grew up with her brothers and sisters and her father’s “full blood relations”, living a relatively traditional life in the Ravensthorpe/Wilomin region, while her father worked as a farm-hand and shearer.

My father’s father was called Bob Roberts (also known as Pirrup) and his mother was known as Monkey… Most of my grandmother Monkey’s family were massacred* some time after 1880 by white people at place called Cocanarup, a few miles from Ravensthorpe.

Kim Scott (1957- ) writes “my father, Tommy Scott, was the only surviving child to an Aboriginal woman who died when he was ten years old, after which his Aboriginal grandmother continued to raise him until his Scottish father arranged boarding schools …”. He died young, in his thirties. Scott remembers him telling him to be proud of his ‘Aboriginal descent’. Growing up, in Albany, Scott knew very few of his extended indigenous family, and only some of those identified as Noongar, but he was aware that his father’s mother and grandmother had lived around Ravensthorpe and Hopetoun.

As an adult enquiring after his family he was told, “go see Aunty Hazel. They reckoned Hazel Brown knew everyone who lived around Ravensthorpe.” And so it turned out, her husband and Scott’s father had been drinking buddies. “Your father was my cousin, she told me.” Scott had already put in a great deal of research to come up with the material that underlies Benang, now Aunty Hazel was able to flesh it out. The starting point from Scott’s notes was his great grandmother Granny (Fanny) Winnery, who Hazel remembered as Pirrup’s sister, having often visited her in Ravensthorpe as a young girl. Granny Winnery and Pirrup’s father, Old Bob Roberts, appears to be the ‘Bob’ recorded as guiding Surveyor General JS Roe along the south coast in 1849, and who ended up as a hated ‘black tracker’.

Hazel has stories of Old Bob and his brothers and sisters, who married whom, working for early settlers the Hassells, shepherding and on the wagons running from the coast to Balladonia 300 km inland. All of which Scott must reconcile with scanty written accounts.

Old Fanny Winnery, she had two daughters, didn’t she? She had two daughters. That’s right! Married Coleman twins. And after that one of their girls married the Scott.

Fanny Winnery is recorded as having given birth to a daughter at a camp east of Esperance, the father’s name given as John Mason. Mason had been a sailor and Scott finds an account, by a settler, of a marriage between a ‘Jack Tar’ who is shepherding for him, and an Aboriginal woman who was probably Fanny. More information comes from the records of the Chief Protector, enquiring after a John Mason who served in the First World War. He is the son of Jack Mason and Fanny ‘Pinyan’. Fanny died in 1913, in the house of her son in law Daniel Coleman, and she and Jack were buried together in Ravensthorpe. These names of course are all familiar to us from Benang.

Scott goes down to Ravensthorpe with Hazel’s brother, Lomas Roberts who is documenting a Native Title claim, to visit long time resident, Mrs Cox –

‘And you must have known Kimmy’s father’, Uncle Lomas said.

‘Oh yes’, she said, bursting into a smile, ‘I went to school with Tommy Scott.’

She remembered my grandmother too.

That was Harriette Coleman, daughter of Fanny, and mother of Scott’s Uncle Will. You can see the problem though – Fanny Winnery was dead before Aunty Hazel was born, so the Granny ‘Winnery’ she remembers seeing must have been Harriette. Reconciling Hazel’s oral genealogy with his ‘scraps of paper’ became a problem for Scott and held up the writing of this book. In the meanwhile we learn a great deal about the history of White/Noongar relations from both Scott and from Aunty Hazel, the murders, the imprisonments on Rottnest and other islands, the apartheid-like impact of the 1905 Aborigines Act, the ‘colour bar’ in country towns, the deaths caused by doctors refusing to treat black children.

But Aunty Hazel is a woman who knows her own mind, she and her husband had friends in the white community, and not all her stories are dark. At one time in the thirties a very young Hazel and her family were walking along a track between Ravensthorpe and Esperance –

Now these people came along. They had an old black motor and I don’t know … it was like a square top and it had a funny little front. It was like a little ute. … She was a woman that was going through to Esperance, and she was going to South Australia, and in some way she was connected to Daisy Bates. … she started sending Mummy the funny little magazine that Daisy Bates made.

Scott doesn’t speculate as to who this might have been. Ernestine Hill went from WA at this time to meet Bates, but by train. And she did her trans-Nularbor road trip with Henrietta Drake-Brockman in 1947 when Hazel would have been 22.

Aunty Hazel lectures Scott on truth in story telling, even when it’s told different each time: “We don’t wanna bore people, unna? We wanna tell a good story. You should know that better than me, you s’posed to be the writer.” This is a fascinating book, of genealogical enquiry, of the details of an almost forgotten way of life, of Scott’s attempts to interpret and interrogate his Noongar heritage. Aunty Hazel is a wonderful story teller and of course Scott is one of our finest writers.

Here is Scott’s (confronting) conclusion, which I think ties in with what I’ve be I’ve been trying to say about leaving space for Indigenous writers –

In order to strengthen Indigenous communities – and that’s the only means by which an Australian nation-state will have any chance of grafting onto Indigenous roots – we need some sort of ‘gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous societies, a moratorium, a time of exclusion to allow communities to consolidate their heritages. After that, exchange and interaction from relatively equal positions should be possible, because that’s how cultural forms are tested and grow.

Kim Scott and Hazel Brown, Kayang & Me, Fremantle Press, Fremantle, 2005

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*I have not said any more about the Cocanarup massacre because there is too much to say. The authors provide pages of recollections, but as Scott says there is very little documentation.  A search on Google brings up nothing and on Trove, one account of an expedition to the Goldfields in 1890. If I can I may put up more in a separate post at a later date. I have overcome these difficulties (with some assistance) and will put up a post on the massacre in a few days.

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see also:
The return of the Dwoort Baal Kaat songline (The Conversation, October 19, 2022)
The Cocanarup Massacre, my post based on Kim Scott’s source material (here)
My reviews of Kim Scott’s other works –
True Country, 1993 (here)
Benang, 1999 (here)
That Deadman Dance, 2010 (here)
Taboo, 2017 (here)

Benang, Kim Scott

Benang is a great, swirling, discursive voyage of discovery; of a young man brought up White uniting the documentary evidence collated by his White grandfather with the family histories revealed to him over the course of the novel by his Black uncles; of a family raped and pillaged, figuratively and literally, by white settlers, by racism institutionalised by the 1905 Aborigines Act*, and by the infamous Western Australian Chief Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville.

Kim Scott (1957- ) is an Indigenous Australian, of mixed Black and White heritage, which this novel explores; a Nyoongar, which is to say, of those people whose country is the south-western portion of Western Australia (from south of Geraldton to west of Esperance); and of the Wirlomin, the south-easternmost of 14 language groups making up the Nyoongar.

The towns at the centre of Benang – Wirlup Haven on the coast and Gebalup 50 km inland – correspond to the towns of Hopetoun and Ravensthorpe in the heart of Wirlomin country. Other towns mentioned, Kylie Bay and Frederickstown, seem to correspond to Bremer Bay and Albany. The land, these days largely cleared for cropping, is sandy, semi-arid and the native vegetation is mostly low scrub. As you go west, towards Albany and the Stirling Range, the climate is wetter and the country more heavily treed.

As ‘I’ – the protagonist’s name, Harley, is only mentioned two or three times through all the 500 pages – explores and has related to him the stories of his family’s ancestry, we range back in time to the middle of the 1800s, not long after first white settlement, when Sandy One Mason, a near-drowned survivor from a capsized sealing boat is cast ashore near Kylie Bay and is taken up by a young Aboriginal woman, given the name Fanny, but whom we learn towards the end of this epic tale has the name amongst her own people of Benang (Sandy and Benang appear again, as Jak Tar and Binyan, in Scott’s later work That Deadman Dance). And although ‘I’ is the conductor of this story and in some ways all that we learn is mediated through him, the heart of the novel is Fanny, the matriarch of her people.

We, the readers, are given the material in the order that ‘I’ receives it and as a lot of what he learns is out of order, doesn’t make sense till later in the book, not all of it is retained, not even by a reviewer taking notes. I’m sure that when I re-read it in the future, as I certainly will, much more will be revealed to me.

As the first-born-successfully-white-man-in-the-family-line I awoke to a terrible pressure, particularly on my nose and forehead, and thought I was blind.

So we learn two things: that ‘I’ is born out of of A.O. Neville’s terrible determination to breed the ‘Black’ out the Aborigines; and that he is, as we learn, effectively weightless – his face is pressed against the ceiling – and possibly crippled, following an accident in which he is instrumental in the death of his father.

When I was seven years old my father gave me to his own father to raise.

My grandfather owned and managed a gentleman’s boarding house.

Granddad – Ernest Solomon Scat – had come out from Scotland and found employment with his ‘cousin’ A.O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines from 1915-1940, with complete control over the Indigenous population – where they lived, who they could work for and who they could live with. Neville was excessively (obsessively!) concerned with degrees of blackness, believing and writing that the child of an ‘octoroon’ and a white person might be regarded as white. Over and over in this novel Scott’s characters face the dilemma that if they are to be regarded as white, or nearly white – and Neville has the power to issue them with, or deny them permits – then they must stop associating with their darker relatives.

In the course of his work Scat finds his way to Gebalup, an isolated mining town, more than 100 km from the nearest point on the rail network connecting farming communities in WA’s south west, but with its own ‘orphan’ line to the port at Wirlup Haven, and there he decides to stay. Benang commences near the end of Scat’s life. He has had a stroke and is dependent on ‘I’ who is being introduced to his Aboriginal heritage by his uncles Will and Jack and is in turn incorporating this with the material accumulated by Scat, extracts from the 1905 Aborigines Act and from the writings of A.O. Neville, into a family history from which he reads as we go along.

To make a linear summary of a very non-linear narrative, Sandy One and Fanny have 3 children, Sandy Two, Harriette and Dinah. Sandy One makes his living as a teamster, delivering supplies brought in by sea to Wirlup Haven, to as far afield as the Kalgoorlie goldfields, dependent on Fanny’s ability to locate water, edible plants and game. Harriette and Dinah partner (white) twins Daniel and Pat Coolamon. Harriette and Daniel settle in Gebalup where they have children Will and a number of girls who are all, eventually, married off to white men. Pat and Dinah have Kathleen and Jack Chatalong. Pat doesn’t hang around. Dinah is raped by sealers, left for dead on the beach and found by Sandy One and Fanny. Kathleen and Jack Chatalong are brought up in Daniel and Harriette’s compound in Gebalup – Noongars are tolerated in town if they keep out of sight – but Dinah is sent off to the reservation at Mogumber (Moore River), north of Perth, so hundreds of kilometres away.

White settlers rape and massacre a large part of the indigenous population in the Gebalup, Wirlup Haven, Kylie Bay area. Most of the remainder are confined to a ‘camp’ between the Gebalup tip and night soil pits.

Ernest Scat takes Kathleen as his wife but also has indigenous girls as servants who are periodically moved along as they get pregnant. The story of Tommy, ‘I’s father, comes out in bits and pieces only slowly through the course of the novel.

The first strength of Scott’s writing is its poetry (Sandy Two is driving a sulky):

Sandy was alone. The clouds in the sky.

He felt it was almost like sailing. He sailed on a breath of trust toward new country. But the land was not like the sea in that it slowed you, dragged you down to it. It was slow moving.

He read the road. Hooves, wheels, snake.

The gentle jingle jangle of draw bars in their steel rings, clinking of chains, creaking of wagon timbers; the murmuring of iron tyres along a sandy track.

A horse can follow the way and it swings along easily.

Clouds. Sand. Disturbed stones.

It is hard to stay awake.

The footprint of a bird.

And the second strength is the deadpan description of the indignities, the crimes inflicted on Fanny/Benang, her people and her descendants. All the power, all the reader’s indignation, comes from the contrast between the language used, white man’s language, and the actual, often only implied, consequences. So, for instance, a ‘spree’ is for white men a bit of fun after drinking, but for the People whose stories we are hearing these same ‘sprees’ generally involve their rape or murder.

In the end we circle back to the beginning, to Fanny.

Fanny Benang Mason saw her people fall; saw them trembling, nervous, darting glances all about them. Some became swollen, felt themselves burning up. Their skin – too hot to touch – erupted in various forms of sores. People itched, and scratched the skin away, and writhed on the ground with their arses sore from so much shitting, until eventually that ceased and there was only an ooze of mucus and blood.

And always, again and again, even in Granddad’s sources, but never underlined. They shot a lot.

Children, becoming white, gathering at the woodheap, learned to work for indifferent and earnest fathers.

There is much, much more in this novel than I have even touched on. It is a difficult, magical, scarifying work and should be read by every literate Australian. Read it for yourself and see.

 

Kim Scott, Benang, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, N.Fremantle, 1999

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*”The sixty years from 1881 to the 1940s can be divided into two by the passage of the 1905 Aboriginal Act, which resulted in institutionalised racism and created what amounted to Aboriginal “concentration camps” in which the Aboriginal people were to be confined until the race became extinct.” (Wiki)

Western Australia Aborigines Act 1905 (pdf)

* Noongar account of the impacts of 1905 Act (here). Note: Scott uses the spelling “Nyoongar” and others use other phonetic spellings.

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see also:
The Cocanarup Massacre, my post based on Kim Scott’s source material (here)
The Pinjarra Massacre (here)
Lisa at ANZLL posted her impressions on first reading Benang (here)
My reviews of Kim Scott’s other works –
True Country, 1993 (here)
Kayang and Me, 2005 (here)
That Deadman Dance, 2010 (here)
Taboo, 2017 (here)

If you have come to me from ANZ LitLover’s Indigenous Literature Week, coinciding with NAIDOC Week, 3-10 July 2016, then you might want to see other posts I have done in the area of Australian Indigenous Literature over the past year: –

Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis, Pictures From My Memory (here) – Autobiography
Anita Heiss, Dhuuluu-Yala (here) – Who should write Indigenous stories?
Ellen van Neerven, Heat and Light (here) – Short stories
and from Michelle at Adventures in Biography –
Larissa Behrendt, Finding Eliza  (here) – How histories of White/Black interaction are framed to reinforce White privilege.

That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott

Well, it’s taken me a while to get to Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010), but it was worth it and his earlier Benang is beside me in the TBR so now I suppose I must read that too. In fact I listened, rather than read, to the mellifluous tones of Humphrey Bower who, for audio book fans, is the voice of so many Australian books.

This is a historical novel, of first contact. Scott, I think, is at pains, subtly, to emphasise ‘novel’ rather than ‘historical’ with place names King George Town and Cygnet River alluding to the initial white settlements in WA at Albany (on King George Sound) and subsequently at Swan River. Reviewers were quick to point out similarities with The Secret River (2005), Kate Grenville but of course the novel’s real precursor is Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land (1941), a serious first attempt by the dominant white culture to understand both sides of the consequences of first contact at Botany Bay.

Kim Scott grew up on the south coast of Western Australia. As a descendant of those who first created human society along that edge of the ocean, he is proud to be one among those who call themselves Noongar. (Inside cover, Picador 2011 ed.)

So this is the first serious attempt to portray first contact from the other side, the losing side. And yet it is not ‘losing’ that Scott portrays. Rather, it is the attempts of the Noongar to deal with the numerically inferior whites fairly and in accord with custom. And, until the devastating last paragraph, it is an optimistic portrayal. The commonplaces of first contact, rape and murder and even the displacement of the original inhabitants, are largely mentioned obliquely, as happening to someone else and not to the principal (indigenous) characters.

Scott’s style of writing is engaging. He writes in the third person, and in the voice of each person, focusing on a number of characters, settler and Noongar, but circling back repeatedly to Bobby, Wabalanginy to his own people, a baby by his own estimation when the first ship comes in 1826, and who we see grow, but eccentrically, as Scott also circles around in time using the future to illustrate the present and the past.

Scott starts with Bobby practising his letters, but soon introduces Chaine who will become the principal merchant and entrepreneur of the new settlement, and at this point I thought “this is just another whiteman story set in the C19th”. And I was wrong. Scott has the gift of speaking in one voice for the settlers and another, entirely “other” voice for the Noongar. Every time we circle back to Bobby we swoop and swirl with his joy in being alive. In this example Bobby is at sea:

Oh imagine sailing on one of those very fine days on the ocean. Clear sky, sun and bright air, foam and bubbles at bow and wake, and taut, swelling sails, Bobby felt like a bird, rising on a sweep of air; he felt like a dolphin slipping easily in and out of the wave face.

The deck tilted mostly one way, and its regular beat at that angle put a rhythm to Bobby’s step, a walking uphill-downhill thing that, even with no music and no one singing out loud, made him want to dance (p.32)

The optimism of this story, of Bobby’s cooperation with, or cooption into, Chaine’s bustling enterprise, or of the happy marriage of Bobby’s sister Binyan and the white whaler cum shepherd, Jak Tar, is at odds with what we think we know of settler history. And with mostly male protagonists there is an absence too of sexual tension, and so, for a while, there is little narrative drive, but subtly – and there’s that word again- we are made aware that, in the background, there has been change. Bobby and Chaine’s daughter Christine, for many years playmates, are now distant. Bobby as an adult has responsibilities with his people and Christine is to marry the “Governor’s” son (I’m not sure why Scott invented a “governor” for Albany) but when they meet there is a charge between them. Likewise, the easy relationship between Bobby and Chaine evolves without us really noticing until, near the end, Bobby is using his familiarity with Chaine’s farms to raid them for food which Chaine is no longer willing to share, and as the Noongar had shared with the settlers in the past, and Chaine has grown with prosperity into pomposity and inflexibility.

I read recently that The Secret River is now the book most often set as a school text (ahead of My Brilliant Career). If we are serious about Reconciliation then I trust that one day soon that place will be taken by That Deadman Dance.

 

Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance, Picador 2010 and on Bolinda Audio, read by Humphrey Bower

See also reviews by:
Whispering Gums, ANZ Lit Lovers , The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

My reviews of Kim Scott’s other works –
True Country, 1993 (here)
Benang, 1999 (here)
Kayang and Me, 2005 (here)
Taboo, 2017 (here)

The Cocanarup Massacre, my post based on Kim Scott’s source material (here)
The Pinjarra Massacre (here)