MacMaster pilfered pictures, created online dating profiles, and forged friendships and romantic relationships over the internet to support his persona. He stated later, after the hoax had been uncovered, that all he had tried to do was ‘illuminate’ events in Syria for a Western audience, and had created ‘an important voice’ for issues that he felt ‘strongly’ about. Graber, on the other hand, argued that his motivation had been the discrimination he’d seen his lesbian friends fall victim to, and wanted to do something about it. Except: ‘I thought people wouldn’t take [the site] seriously, me being a straight man,’ he said.

There are reasons for this.

Graber’s comments speak directly to the issues of identity politics, one of the chief concerns of which is to draw attention to how privilege informs (or alters) perspective. This is a reaction by oppressed groups of people to what are often long histories of demonisation and misrepresentation at the hands of those with power and privilege. MacMaster, too, found his own voice met with disdain and scepticism because as a white American male he is speaking from one of the most privileged positions in contemporary global culture, with cultural clout that far outweighs that of a gay, Syrian-American woman living in Damascus. If people reacted with scepticism to his voice on those matters it’s because they were aware that privilege and distance creates blind spots. In acknowledging those blind spots and attempting to open them up, a lot of progress can be made.

Part of that process is acknowledging that a history of oppression exists – that such oppression comes with an inability to speak for oneself or represent oneself, and a failure for attempts to do so to be taken seriously. People identify as members of minority groups partly because society has constructed those categories for them, and partly as a reaction to the marginalisation that those categories are used to justify. That sense of unity between people who are similarly oppressed is the first step towards overthrowing that oppression. But it’s also problematic, because one of the inherent difficulties of the concept of racial/social/cultural authenticity is its tendency towards homogeneity. Necessarily premised on generalisations, calls for ‘authentic’ representation of marginalised minority groups in public discourse often denies individuals who identify as part of those categories the right to an owned sense of self, to the complexities and idiosyncrasies that come from plurality.

However, a married American man based in Scotland is not a Syrian-American lesbian living in Damascus. A straight married man is not a deaf lesbian woman. These personalities were created to speak for those marginalised groups because the men who created them thought that their own voices – white, male, straight, American – weren’t carrying enough weight in the debate. They acknowledged that their own sociocultural positioning impacted on how people received their views and opinions, but not how that positioning helped to form those opinions in the first place. And by creating hoaxes, they acted on a very real failure to acknowledge why it might be problematic to attempt to speak for the Other – in this case, the Others being right at the intersection between race, sexuality and gender. It doesn’t matter how good their intentions were – impersonation directly undermines the project of self-determination, and through their failure to acknowledge this, these writers effectively reinscribed the cultural status quo. Indeed, as one commentator put it, ‘It’s hard to imagine a more Orientalist project than a married, male, American writer masquerading as a Syrian lesbian’.

Yesterday MacMaster issued a lengthy, actual apology that acknowledged widespread hurt and a betrayal of trust, and the fact that his hoax had become a distraction from the ‘real issues’. Some of those ‘real issues’ included huge amounts of time and energy spent by aid organisations and activists in searching for the supposedly missing blogger in a highly volatile political situation that would have been much more fruitfully employed elsewhere, as well as the betrayal of individuals who had emotionally invested in the wellbeing of this non-existent person. Another ‘real issue’ is that this is precisely the kind of scandal that prevents people from attempting to engage with oppressed or marginalised groups in constructive ways. In Australia for example, conservative polemics and right-wing agitators use previous local hoaxes (and instances which were arguably not hoaxes, but where people caught between cultural and racial monoliths sought some sense of belonging and were persecuted for it) as support for outright racist political agendas.

It is worth noting that MacMaster explains himself by saying he’d always wanted to write fiction, and that ‘Amina’ grew out of attempts to teach himself to write different characters and from different perspectives. This is a sticky thing to say, and fiction has always been a convenient place to start a messy argument about truth and representation, precisely because it is, by definition, an exercise of the imagination. I argue that fiction is both a legitimate – and crucial – avenue for engaging with alternative perspectives and experiences, including crossing boundaries between gender, race, culture, etc. and it can be a highly effective political tool for doing so. But the first very important part of this is the implied contract that writers of fiction make with their audience through the classification of their work as imaginative. It’s not just an instruction on where to shelve a book but also a guide as to how the content is to be read. The second – which can be seen as both a burden and an opportunity – is awareness that fiction isn’t isolated from the context in which it is written or read. It can and does have very real social and political consequences for many people, both things MacMaster apparently failed to take into account.

Perhaps it’s cause for minor celebration that a straight white man is no longer automatically considered by everyone to be authority on matters of concern to lesbian women, nationality notwithstanding. But it seems to me this double-hoax does little more than illuminate yet again that politically, our culture is mired in a kind of confused, stagnant, speaking-rights-and-authenticity-based swamp, and we’re struggling to climb out of it.

Clichés rendered by the deft literary hand of David Malouf must inevitably be far more eloquent than those bashed out by the average typing monkey, but it doesn’t mean they have changed in substance. In the first Quarterly Essay for 2011, David Malouf looks at happiness – The Happy Life to be precise – and the clichés are right there in the first paragraph:

There can be no one, however miserable the conditions of their daily existence, who has not at some time felt the joy of being alive in the moment; in the love of another, or the closeness of friends or fellow workers; in a baby’s smile, the satisfaction of a job well done or the first green in a winter furrow; or more simply still, bird-song or the touch of sunlight.

For all that the title implies, ‘the search for contentment in the modern world’ in Malouf’s hands is more of a meditative retrospective – a search for the meaning of contentment as drawn from the expression of it in art and literature of the past. Beginning with ‘The Character of a Happy Life’, Malouf intersects examination of the concept of what he calls the ‘good life’ – ideal material comfort and enjoyment – with what he sees as the reality of the everyday. He then delves into an exploration on the pursuit of happiness, beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s use of the phrase and what that phrase might have meant in practical terms – for Jefferson and for the future generations of Americans. This is followed up with discussion on the concept of unrest, of the representations of desire and physical pleasure in the art of Rembrandt and the poetry of Ovid, among others, and how all of these things might be reflected in ‘The Way We Live Now’. It’s trademark Malouf prose, clichés notwithstanding – precise, expressive, always with a lofty turn, contemplative and employing subtle poetics that result in perfectly balanced sentences and beautiful turns of phrase.

However, running through the entire meditation is a narrative of human social and cultural development that I find unsettling. It is this assumption of progress – not a change in the passage of time but the implication that there is a single linear trajectory for human social and intellectual change, that implies not only a beginning but a necessary and ideal end, that posits all human societies somewhere along this route. ‘The truth is,’ he writes, ‘that though we are all alive on the planet in the same moment, we are not all living in the same century.’ This not only implies a concept of human perfection that is, I think, both culturally embedded and socially problematic, but serves to anchor Malouf’s discussion on the nature of happiness in a specific frame of reference and social positioning. The we of this piece are the upper-middle-class: we, educated in a certain way; we, the ones who find Montaigne accessible and have been exposed to the details of Renaissance art. This is not to discount the obvious worth of time spent with the classics, or even solely to the exposure that Malouf gives them in this piece. But there is a class gap as well as generational gap here, I think, that says much about the audience who will find the most to relate to in The Happy Life:

We do complain, of course, but our complaints are trivial, mostly ritual. Our politicians lack vision, interest rates are too high, the pace of modern living is too hectic; the young have no sense of duty, family values are in decline.

To a certain extent I think it is inevitable that an essay on happiness as seen through the eyes of the author with a disposition so rooted in classical literature and philosophy is going to approach the concept through these filters. By the same token, conception of happiness is an individual matter. But in a way, the individual nature of the concept dooms the topic from the start. Any essay on it is guaranteed, almost by necessity, to be bookended by clichés (and the subsequent deconstruction of them, which is itself a bit of a cliché) to devote a certain amount of time to semantics (although to be fair there is less of that going on in The Happy Life than might be expected, and more analysis of the concept), and to inevitably be caught in the tension that comes from attempting to conflate the definition of a very individual and personal experience and ideal with a collective experience. Any attempt to illustrate the general is going to pull it right back to the intimate and specific. In this way, The Happy Life represents precisely the problem that it is grappling with: the impossibility of explaining first how a generic ‘happy life’ might present itself, and secondly, how to achieve it if it doesn’t.

Inevitable as it might be that Malouf’s treatise on happiness will focus on classical sources, it is perhaps likewise inevitable that a member of a generation that grew up with the internet, that can more easily analyse an action film than a seventeenth-century painting, that takes notes on their laptop more often than she does with a pen – ‘I happen to have set that sentence down in the old, slow way by hand’ Malouf makes a point of noting – may not feel that this essay is particularly conversant to their experience. Malouf writes like he isn’t sure what to do with this world, as though he is distrustful of technology, of new media, of contemporary forms of expression and art and their sociocultural functions. Passing, almost obligatory references to contemporary technology and our negotiation of it – ‘in a century of iPods, mobile phones, multitasking; of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter; of news bites, 24-hour news cycles, jump-cut video clips; and the stimulation of our senses at every moment’ – serve more to frame the discussion of a concept of happiness that is somehow incompatible with this context, rather than to discuss how it might be presented or achieved within it.

Finally, The Happy Life begins and ends with the image of a ‘happy’ worker in a Soviet Gulag, as represented by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich:

Shukhov went off to sleep, and he was completely content. Fate had been kind to him in many ways that day: he hadn’t been put in the cells, the gang had not been sent to the Socialist Community Centre, he’d fiddled himself an extra bowl of porridge for dinner, the gang-leader had fixed a good percentage, he’d been happy building that wall…

Bookended thus, it’s hard not to see the thrust of the piece being that one should just, well, suck it up: that you should make happiness out of what you’ve got, and that to strive for change or ‘something better’ is counter to the very concept. Fair call, I suppose, but there’s something pretty fatalistic about that.

I knew this particular establishment it for its trashy music and not-so-subtle clientele, and I warned the girls before we went that it wasn’t the classiest of places. Sure enough, we hadn’t even been there for ten minutes before some blokes sauntered up and asked if they could sit with us.

Too polite (or perhaps not drunk enough) to tell them to get lost, we assented. The conversation that followed was that kind of awkward, reluctant exchange that is always made more ridiculous by the fact that you have to speak louder than usual to be heard over Rihanna and Eminem – and to compensate for the fact that the people you’re talking to are actually quite drunk. There were three of them and they were in their late twenties. It was their office Christmas party and they were at the pub with a larger group of people, most of whom were milling around some tables about 10ft away, heads together, throwing us occasional glances. It wasn’t long before a couple more blokes wandered over, one of them receiving more of a welcome than the other as the guy directly across from me threw his arm around his friend and slapped him on the chest.

‘This is our mate,’ he said, in the tone of someone about to say something that he thinks is really funny. ‘We call him “Abo” because he’s got a little bit of Aboriginal blood in him!’
Cadie, Kimberlee and I exchanged glances. ‘We’d prefer you didn’t call him that around us, thanks.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because we find it offensive.’
‘Yeah, but he doesn’t care!’
‘We do, though.’
‘Why?’
Cadie: ‘Because it’s a racist term. It’s derogatory.’
Me: ‘It’s used by white people to belittle and abuse Indigenous people.’
Kimberlee: ‘We just don’t want to hear it, okay? That should be enough for you.’
‘Yeah, but he’s not offended, so why are you offended?’

This went on for a couple more minutes. By the time Cadie busted out with ‘Let me drop some knowledge on you,’ the tone of the exchange had gone from tense to heated, and people at tables nearby were turning to look at us. The bloke upon whom they’d bestowed the nickname held up his hands, said ‘I’m out of here,’ and returned to the other group. About 30 seconds later I felt something crack against my collarbone, breaking the skin. The rest of the group was throwing ice at us from across the room.

One way of telling this story would be to describe my friends’ physical features in order to justify why these men didn’t realise they were sitting with two Aboriginal women, except that to do so would be beside the point. These men didn’t even consider that they might be in the company of Aboriginal people, and telling them that they were didn’t mitigate their behaviour. They were offended that we were offended by them doing something that they knew was offensive. When I came back from the bar with the manager they were launching a full-scale attack, first on Cadie and Kimberlee for being so ‘soft’, and then on me for being offended when I was ‘obviously’ white. We’d ruined their ‘fun’. It was ruined even more when we got the whole lot of them kicked out of the pub for ‘racially motivated violence’. (That was, admittedly, a sweet moment.)

It’s times like this, though, when I think the biggest obstacle to Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations is the mentality that Indigenous Australia is elsewhere. It’s always absent, out of the room, talked about but rarely talked to and certainly not talked with. It’s a classic symptom of Othering, of condescension, of dehumanisation.

This passage by Stephen Muecke always springs to mind:

You are a white Australian. Aborigines first appear in your discourse in pronouns of the third person plural and according to a politics of case-marking: You talk about them (not with them); the third person plural is here both objective (accusative) and beneficiary: you do things to them, and for them. This is not a pronoun of passive action (by them) or location (to them, or with, next to, beside them); you might be vigilant over them and you are never under them in any metaphoric displacement of your position.

As does this, from the late W.E.H. Stanner:

The ‘Aboriginal problem’ is, indeed, very far away and unreal to the urban and near-urban populations of Australia, and to their leaders. Few of them have ever seen a blackfellow. The disappearance of the tribes is not commonly regarded as a present and continuing tragedy, but (for some curious reason) rather as something which took place a long time ago, in the very early days, and so is no longer a real complication.

Stanner was writing in 1938, but how many of us could say in good conscience that there is much difference in attitude today? And yet Indigenous dispossession is not merely a historical fact, it’s a continuing, continually-performed act.

Even though for some people (as evidenced above) it won’t change anything, I think it’s a good rule of thumb to assume that there is an Indigenous person (or an Islamic person, a Sudanese person – pick your marginalised minority) present in every conversation. Because if racial slurs still slip out easily, or using terms like ‘Invasion Day’ still jars, it’s because Anglo-Australian sensibility doesn’t incorporate Indigenous perspectives – it doesn’t even provide space for them. To be expected to do so offends the tenets around which white Western privilege is built, and the ingrained assumption that the ideal cultural landscape is one that has the appearance of Anglo-Judeo-Christianity, even if it lacks the substance. And when journalists are still painting white-out pictures of black Australia that appear to be little more than attempts to further their partner’s political objectives, when radio stations hire a swathe of right-wing polemics in anticipation of a community changing ‘ethnically’, when we’re debating the cost of compassion or when out-and-out bigots are given platforms on nationally televised debates, it just legitimises xenophobia and racism as a political nexus all over again.

Finally, I think of this, an image of which was floating around Twitter the other day:

If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

You know you’re still thinking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’ if it stings.

Stephen Muecke, Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies (Sydney: NSW University Press, 1992). p. 23

W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938-1973 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979). p. 4

I pull my professional face into order.

A speech.
A postcard to the next Left,
a matter of some delicacy.
The nakedly commercial and haphazard nature of the literary enterprise
is clear.
Where will this take us?
Access to such a rich store of information
that is continuously changing and evolving through ongoing debate
lowered the barriers to participation,
opportunity too, in the tsunami of material
the seeds for non-abstracted, compassionate, grass-roots politics.
Where will this take us?
Politics has a tendency of being refracted.
As a country we are profoundly deluded—
whose views does it represent?
They locked us out, remember?
We expect more than this from our government.
The old monkey suit doesn’t fit like it used to
&
we need to go beyond thinking
that the struggle for liberation follows a linear
path.
Cultural creativity comes in all shapes and sizes.
The real work of transformation
is being born in our households, in sharehouses, in neighbourhood projects.

Overland was launched in 1954—
an extraordinary career

and you need to nurture those glimmering ideas
the source of our dissension.
Writing can capture the evanescent spirit of an age
in a way few other mediums can

by an alchemy never quite explained—

its arms outstretched in majesty,
immediate, vivid, authentic,
animated to voyage on a discovery of self-awareness.

It’s a good thing you’re around.

Each line of this piece is a fragment taken verbatim from OL 198, 199 or 200. With thanks (and apologies) to Mungo McCallum, Raewyn Connell, Lizzie O’Shea, Miriam Sved, Simon Sellars, Brian Walters, Phillip Tang, Kevin Foster, Cate Kennedy, Michael Hyde, Sean Scalmer & Jackie Dickinson, Tad Tietze, Carmel Bird, John McLaren, Jeff Sparrow, Michelle Carmody, Sophie Cunningham, Marion Rankine, Bruce Mutard, Clive Hamilton and Chris Graham.

2.
Looking inwards is inevitable, natural, expected, required for a writer – writing being an essentially meditative activity. But prolonged navel-gazing is a selfish waste of time if it doesn’t translate into actions that make the world a better place. However, that says more about what I value and the standards I set for myself than it does about how I expect the rest of the world to behave.

Sometimes I feel like art is standing on the in-between: realism / idealism. Reality / imagination. Tradition / experimentation. Art can make the world a better place simply by being beautiful, but I’d like at least some of that beauty to be accompanied by meaning.

3.
I am in my third year of a PhD in Creative Writing by research at Monash University. I’m not in an academic institution because I thought having a PhD would make me better qualified to write fiction; I’m in one because I knew when I decided I wanted to write that new writers, young writers, ‘emerging’ writers, make very little money from their work. I am on an Australian Postgraduate Award, a living allowance paid in fortnightly instalments. I am effectively getting a salary from the Federal Government to write my first novel, even if in the end nobody wants to turn it into a commercial product – copy it, mass-produce it, sell it, profit financially from it. Even if nobody wants to read it.

I’d like both of those things to happen because I feel like I have important things to say, but there’s no guarantee of anything post-doctorate except the opportunity to wear a stupid hat and a gown for 15 seconds on a stage. But the institution, the scholarship and the degree itself are tools at my disposal. I can eat and pay rent, and I do my best to make what’s available work for me as I attempt to juggle the practicalities of living in this society while trying to critique it, change it, make it better – however clumsily.

That’s not to say that it isn’t a fight. I am frustrated by what I see as the dampening and anaesthetising of crackling-new ideas, energy and enthusiasm for change by bureaucracy and over-administration driven by concerns of money and power. I am angry that people’s lives are dismissed so easily in favour of trivialities.

4.
Last night I dreamt of an apocalyptic tempest, rust-red storm clouds snaking down from the sky, sending feelers across the earth towards a bellowing ocean. We were stuck in a cage, halfway up a tower at the mouth of a river, surrounded by a raging torrent. The only way out, you said, was to jump in.

5.
I had students for a while. I told them that their fiction ought to change the reader in some way. A shift in mood. An altered perspective. A better understanding. A different understanding. Growth. I told them that fiction should be transformative, because that’s what I believe.

I told them I wanted them to put feelers out into the world and let them snag the rough spots and the corners and the cracks and the sharp edges, because I think if you’re serious about fiction you have to be serious about living, and if you’re serious about living then you pay attention to the world and what’s going on in it. That means paying attention to politics – politics as your own understanding of the world manifests itself in morals and agendas, but also politics as the systems of negotiation and argument that result in changes to the social fabric.

But that doesn’t mean politics are the point of fiction. The point is, surely, to make life richer – emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically – for as many people as possible. Isn’t it?

I read this book while embodying the bush cliche – lurching between cattle stations and floodplains, rainforest and thick scrub, dipping into the stories by the light of campfires and fading torch batteries. Given these unexpectedly apt settings I suppose I could have found myself in good company with a book of colonial romance fiction. But the truth is, I’m not sure how much of it I actually enjoyed.

Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver offer the reader a selection of short stories dealing with love, marriage, money, deception, despair and the development of female identity through the eyes of the colonist. The earliest, Hal’s ‘The Desolate Homestead’, is dated 1866, while Rosa Praed’s 1909 offering ‘The Bushman’s Love Story’ is the latest. Bush properties, cattle stations and small country towns are the most common locations, although the passage from England also features quite regularly, ships apparently being considered fertile ground for romance and drama to blossom.

In the interests of full disclosure, Austen and Heyer aside, I am not a great reader of romance fiction; in fact, I generally find it rather insipid and insulting. To wit, I spent a good deal of this book wondering how I was supposed to feel, not just about the stories individually but about the collection as a whole. Henry Lawson’s offerings ‘A Love Story’ and ‘An Unfinished Love Story’, and Francis Adams’ ‘A Bush Girl’ aside, I found it difficult to just read a story and embrace it for what it was. The critical eye of the postcolonial/feminist literary scholar kept peeping open, insisting on some form of deconstruction, character analysis and exploration of the underlying presumptions about class and race that inform the stories.

Given that they are between 100 and 150 years old, applying contemporary literary standards to them is probably a bit unfair. And there were certainly stories in which the dramatic tension was tightly wound (‘Victims of Circe’, ‘Cross Currents’) and the characters multidimensional and believable. However, I couldn’t help but feel that in some cases (‘Barren Love’, ‘The Larrikin of Diamond Creek’, ‘Miss Jackson’) the voices were patchy, the characters thin and the drama contrived. Aboriginal Australia is all but absent in these texts, save for ‘The Inside Station’ in which Aboriginal people are posited only as ruthless antagonists whose massacre of an entire homestead is the catalyst for the development of white romance. This is a pity because I feel there is something rather large at play between the very brutal nature of colonialism and the development of colonial romance, and I would have liked to see more exploration of that.

Gelder and Weaver frame their anthology by discussing the exploration of the image of the Australian girl (not so much the Australian woman). There is an awkward tension embodied by the archetype, which is perhaps best described by one of the characters themselves (quoted also by the editors in their introduction):

Whoever else goes under, she will always come out on top. And not a bit because she sticks out for what she supposes are her rights. She don’t care about rights… There’s nothing she can’t do – ride as well as any stockman, sit a buckjumper and cut out a scrubber on a cattle camp. And she can cook a dinner that you’d enjoy eating, and make her frocks—and look stunning in them too. And as for brains. Why, she’s taken her M.A. degree in Sydney University, and now she’s training herself to deal with the Woman Question…

A sense of this conflict surfaces in the narrative development of many of these stories: more traditional Western gender roles are embodied in the Australian bush only with great difficulty and so the role of the female (before marriage, especially) is altered. It is telling, perhaps, that the story which is most faithful to prescribed social roles (and the expectations, perhaps, of a regular reader of the romance genre) is the syrupy ‘Lorna Travis: A Christmas Story’, set in Toorak. Comparison between Australian girls and English/American girls occurs regularly: ‘There was something lazy and languishing about these ample, pale-faced girls with their second-rate “English society” airs.’ The resultant altering of traditional femininity comes into conflict with the typical romance narrative, however, which relies on stereotype and social expectations for much of its charm and plot development. Because of this discord, stories often begin with a sense of refreshing difference (much like their heroines) and a feeling that they might step right out of the boundaries of the genre. In most cases they never quite make it over the edge, and by the denouement have fallen right back into old tropes and familiar narrative grooves.

Still, and perhaps this is an issue of semantics, I feel like the term ‘romance fiction’ implies a much more generic model of storytelling than what is offered here. These are stories that deal with love and marriage, but I think it would be misguided to approach them as fodder for wish-fulfilment. And it’s good to have stories like this in an easily accessible form, for posterity’s sake if nothing else. But a seasoned reader of romance would probably be more amorous towards them as recreational reading than I am. As a collection of historical texts I found them interesting and educational, but rather infuriating all the same. The variety of stories is to the anthology’s credit, I think, but I found it difficult to get a handle on the tone of the collection, and came away from it all feeling rather unsettled. But perhaps I’m just too political.

The panel was made up of one Indigenous and three non-Indigenous writers. Hannah Rachel Bell opened with a brief talk about Storymen – ‘an excavation of converging world views exposed through personal memoir, letters, paintings and conversations’ – which meditates on her relationship with Ngarinyin lawman Bungal Mowaljarlai, the fiction and philosophies of Tim Winton, and the relationships between land, story, and male rites of passage.

Art lecturer and painter Rod Moss followed up with a discussion of how he came to write The Hard Light of Day over twenty years after he first made friends with the Aboriginal families camping near his house in Alice Springs. He talked about how his art, particularly his portraiture, was part of the currency with which he forged cross-cultural relationships, and how the journals that he’d kept throughout that time provided the basis for his memoir.

Archaeologist and historian Gary Presland’s book on the Kulin nation, First People, was launched at the festival. It is a revised edition of what was originally Aboriginal Melbourne: the lost land of the Kulin, and Presland discussed the difficulties he had in writing it and updating the material. Representing Indigenous people and history has become a matter of contention, he said. History, of course, cannot be experienced directly, and the biases and prejudices that pervades a lot of past writing about Indigenous Australia have to be picked apart. Presland also spent a few mornings leading small groups of festival-goers along the bank of the Yarra to the MCG, inviting them to imagine the landscape as it was before the arrival of Europeans, explaining various landmarks and describing some ways in which the area was significant to the traditional owners.

Finally there was Marie Munkara, 2010 winner of the Northern Territory Book of the Year and the 2008 David Unaipon Award. Her collection of short stories, Every Secret Thing, had its roots in the stories her family used to tell about life on the mission. It was the laughter and vivacity in these stories, Munkara said, that drove her to write them down. ‘I don’t write for cultural reasons,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to. I’m lucky like that, I guess.’

I felt the discussion suffered a little from the same problems that plague a lot of festival sessions like this. When it’s anything but totally full of people, BMW Edge becomes an awkward space – it feels empty easily. Most writers are not natural performers and no matter how interesting what they have to say is, if they can’t fill that space with their personalities, the session feels flat. This isn’t entirely their fault, and I wonder whether the festival overall might not benefit from taking this into further consideration.

Despite the technical issues, I keep coming back to comments made by Bell at the beginning of the session. There is a common misconception that Indigenous people have stopped evolving, she said; that development of humankind is linear and traditional Indigenous culture is ‘stuck’ somewhere at the back of the line. Much writing about Indigenous Australia is predicated on this fallacy. It is part of the reason why Indigenous Australia often finds itself with ‘no legitimate political or academic voice’.

Her comments reminded me of a conversation I had with a very conservative, white-bread friend a couple of years ago. We were talking about my PhD. Smothering my surprise (and excitement) at the fact that he was even remotely interested, I remember trying clumsily to explain how deep the differences between Anglo-Western and Aboriginal cultures ran. ‘Western culture is built on an exchange of labour for goods, and on an artificial currency,’ I said by way of an example. ‘We think of work – performing a task for remuneration – as a responsibility, as a kind of duty. But traditional Indigenous culture is tied directly to the land itself. Duties and responsibilities stem from kinship and country, not from the market.’

‘But is that because of a lack of evolution though?’ he asked. It was a genuine question. It stuck in my mind, not just because of what I believed to be the (mostly) unconscious racism that underpinned it, but because of the look of clear bewilderment on his face. It was a genuine question and he was genuinely confused.

‘Blackfellas show us whitefellas ourselves.’ I can’t remember which member of the panel offered up this quote but it resonated with me, I think it resonates with any Anglo-Australian who’s ever tried to engage meaningfully with Indigenous Australia. Blackfellas show us whitefellas ourselves and that is always, always scary.

I’m angry because the best you can offer me is another three years of conservative mediocrity and stagnation. Stagnation is not progress, it’s a fucking insult. I’m offended because you think I’m not worth the risk. I’m disgusted because you talk to me like I’m a child and it’s not okay – it’s never been okay – but you hardly make sense now anyway. This language that used to belong to us both gets bent up and mangled in your mouth: forward means backwards, liberal means conservative, atheism means indoctrination, freedom means war, love means immorality, art means conformity, sustainable means racist. I can’t say what I mean anymore without running up against your roadblocks, so I’m forced to find words that you haven’t yet stolen – snowdrop, velutinous, mellifluous, fumarole – just to remember where the ground is. Just to remember what it means to have meaning.

I’m angry because there are rats behind the wall and they are coming closer, and I’m tired from staying awake at night hoping there are enough of us to keep them at bay. Don’t call me an alarmist with that look in your eye like you think therapy and pills might make me less belligerent. Don’t call me a communist because I don’t care about money. Don’t call me a hippie because I believe in equality. Don’t use the word feminist with the vitriol dripping off that curl in your lip because you’re afraid I might be smarter than you. Don’t tell me I don’t understand like you can make what I have to say redundant by labelling me, like everyone else you failed to listen to, as though we’ll all fit neatly together in a box and you can lock the lid. Your definition is a misappropriation. Your enthusiasm was a miscommunication.

I’m angry because you tell us you care, and you don’t. I’m angry because you tell us you’ll change, and you won’t. I’m angry because I want politicians I can look up to, who don’t outsource their opinions, who don’t hide behind sports metaphors, who don’t assume I have nothing practical to say. I want politicians who embrace nuance, detail and difference, not middle-of-the-road personality pantomimes. I’m tired of promises and pussyfooting protestation – I want to hear oratory that makes my soul sing. I want to see faces lit up in earnest. I want to watch debates where people bristle and bellow and burn. I want leaders who aren’t afraid of fire. I want leaders who inspire me. Inspire me! I’m begging you! An election should be so much more than this! The country needs more than this!

My heart needs more than this.

He shrugs. ‘It’s all I’ve ever known.’

I watch the cattle kick up dust as they’re moved into the pound and I think about how different this feels from home. The cities are saturated with the product of rural Australia, but they are hardly watching cows get drafted for market, dipped for travel below quarantine lines, dehorned, castrated, spayed, branded, immunised, milked, taught to follow a fenceline, being treated by a vet, fed molasses when they’re sick, or charging at a ringer who gets in their way. There are also cars to fix, tyres to change, trailers to wash down, fences to mend, bores to cover, employees to feed, buyers to source, bank managers to impress. There are helicopters, light planes, motorbikes, vegetable gardens, and supply sheds. There are stock camps, hay camps, weaner camps, horses, abandoned calves, pigs, dogs. And I think about the animals themselves and everything they provide for Western society: not just meat but also milk, cheese, clothing, luggage, shoes, jewellery…

It’s easy to ignore the visceral reality of food when it comes to you disembodied and prettied up, and while that can inspire revulsion in some people, it’s also easy from a position of privilege – from a position of choice, of opportunity, of multiplicity – to say there are other options, to have other options. Being so far removed from the source of a product makes it easy to dismiss. If you’re going to swim against the tide – and the meat and livestock industry is a big tide – you will find it easier in the city, because it’s hard to find options when you have to drive an hour and a half for the nearest nurse. When you have to pay over $20 for a bottle of sunscreen in the only supermarket on a 300km stretch of road. When you’re lucky if the newspaper you’re reading is three days old. When this is home. When this is all you’ve ever known. When what else are you going to do? What else are you going to eat? How else are you going to pay for it?

Death is up close in the country. There is blood and dirt and shit on my boots, under my fingernails, in my hair. That’s the way it is. Everything feeds on everything else. Animal feeds animal feeds vegetable feeds mineral. Without making any assertions on how things ought to be, or arguing on the ethics of farming or food: that’s the way it is. And I want to know and experience the nature of things before I pass judgement on them. I want to understand the forces that drive people to choose before I decide how to characterise their choices, and what I should learn from them. Because the more I experience out here, the more people I speak to, the more stories I hear, the more I realise that ‘yes’ and ‘no’ do not automatically correlate with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – that absolutes are works of fiction, that choices are made by balancing possibility and priority, both of which are shaped just as much by the dirt we’re standing in as they are by the things that are burning up our hearts.

I grew up in a Catholic household. Before dinner every night my father would insist we say grace – Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts – and my brothers and I would mouth the words for ritual’s sake without ever thinking about why it was considered important – not to give thanks to God, but to be grateful for food. And these days, with my religious affiliation dwindling to non-existence, to talk about sacrifice in relation to food has uncomfortable connotations in my head. But out here the feeling that rises to the top most prominently is, unexpectedly, gratitude – for the people, for the work, for the animals themselves, for sacrifice. At the very least, I can’t take it for granted anymore. For that, I am grateful.

For years, the only house that existed was that of the superintendent. The Aboriginal people lived in humpies. In the town, there was strict segregation between black and white. The Aboriginal children were put in dormitories off limits to the rest of their families. Aboriginal people who walked down the main street of the town without permission were put in jail – 20 days on bread and water. If they left the town without permission, they were arrested and put in jail. Corroboree was permitted but speaking in language wasn’t, effectively making the former permission redundant. If Aboriginal people spoke in language, they were put in jail. Often that meant being sent to Palm Island. Strict curfews were employed. Bells rang for wake up time, go to work time, get off the street time, go to sleep time. Regular parades were held in which all residents were required to line up and salute the flag. Punishment for missing parade was also 20 days in jail. If an Aboriginal person attempted to run away and was captured, they were required to pay for their own capture. That is, if they had a bank account.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that the town was handed over to the locally elected Woorabinda Community Council. They were expected, after a century of systematic oppression and paternalism and with little in the way of formal training to equip them for the responsibility, to be able run their own community in the manner of their white ‘protectors’ within three years.

Dogs roam the streets here like they own them, as do horses. I’ve never seen horses wandering through a town like this before. They’re well-fed and relatively healthy but a bit on the wild side. The locals like them. A bunch of kids were riling up a Staffy in the street a few days ago, a game which involved hurtling over the fence outside the police station to get away from it when it retaliated.

A mongrel by the name of Girl has taken to accompanying us when we go for a run. She trots along beside us, to the second cattle grid and back again, occasionally dashing off into the grass and scrub for a dip in a puddle-pond or to chase a cane toad. Ida doesn’t like the dogs following her. She says Girl once took out a full-size kangaroo, solo.

I can’t tell whether it’s my pale skin and freckles that attracts stares and murmurs, or our newness. Probably both. Even Cadie isn’t immune. In the general store we find a DVD, a community-produced documentary on the history of the town. It looks very different now to the old black-and-white pictures. There is a well-equipped health centre, a state primary school and a private high school, a housing office, and apparently a swimming pool. There is also graffiti, vandalism, alcohol and drug abuse. These things are tragic, but they are not new.

Woorabinda is a dry community. At the Baralaba pub, a 25-minute drive away, a group of young blokes, building contractors working on the extensions to Woorabinda State Primary School, rope me and Cadie into a few rounds of pool. They are holed up in the Baralaba caravan park for the duration of their tenure, and ask us where we are staying. When we tell them, they are clearly astonished.

‘Woorabinda?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Actually in the town?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What, in a compound?’
‘No,’ Cadie scoffs.
‘In the nurses’ quarters, next to the hospital,’ I say.
‘But it’s like, fully gated, isn’t it?’
‘There’s a gate and a fence if that’s what you mean.’ Like every other house in the town, the fence is high enough to keep the dogs and horses out – theoretically. The animals themselves have other ideas.
‘It’s secure, but it’s not South Africa,’ snaps Cadie.
‘Why would you want to stay there, though?’ another asks.
‘Why not?’
‘Well!’ he says, in a tone which implies there are a hundred reasons why staying in Woorabinda ought to be unpalatable – and clearly we shouldn’t need to be told.
‘All those black people running around, you mean?’ says Cadie. ‘Of course it must be dangerous.’

Their attitude is distressingly familiar, and it’s easy when you’re cushioned by racial and class privilege, when people have told you all your life that you have choices, that you are free, to unconsciously regard those who have been systematically abused and disenfranchised as lazy, as untrustworthy, as dangerous. To see their problems as their problems, not yours too. To keep away, because keeping away makes it easier to forget. To turn away, even when spending every day for months in a space where the line between history and the present is drawn so stark, so bold, so clearly visible to anyone who cares enough to simply look.

Nanna Frances, one of the five permanent residents of the nursing home, an auxiliary wing of the health clinic, has dementia. She’s one of the oldest people in the community. The nurses estimate that she’s about 96, but nobody knows for sure. The second time we visited her, we were lucky enough to hear her sing. Then she shook our hands and said, ‘Birri Gubba! Birri Gubba! Birri Gubba, that my country!’ And then she started to cry.

In one sense, they are right. Formalities that aren’t backed up by conviction and action will always look like tokenism, because, well, that’s what they become. But the problem is not in the act of formal recognition but in the assumption that lip service is all there is to it. The truth is, there is a disconnect between political symbolism and action on Indigenous issues in Australia. The recognition of traditional owners, the welcome to country, is essential if only because it draws attention to this disconnect. It reminds the non-Indigenous listener of the fact of their colonial heritage, of the continued existence of Indigenous people and culture, and their direct relationship to everyone who calls themselves Australian. Or at least, it should.

Mick Gooda, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner for the Australian Human Rights Commission, puts it this way:

The High Court of Australia in the Mabo decision recognised the fact that Australia was occupied when the British came here and that the land (and the seas) continued to be cared for, occupied, utilised and identified as the land of different tribal groups, operating in accordance with their customary laws and traditions.

…

It was more than 200 years before the courts finally recognised this fact in 1992 and it, along with the National Apology to the Stolen Generations, has steered us along the reconciliation path that we are still travelling on. Acknowledging Traditional Owners is a contemporary and practical way of enshrining the High Court decision in Mabo.

The problem is that when comments such as those first mentioned come from notoriously conservative members of the Liberal Party, whose track record on Indigenous affairs has been half-hearted and reactionary at best, they don’t sound like a call to arms for Indigenous rights; they sound like thinly veiled racism. This isn’t helped when ‘Old Ironbar’ Tuckey says things like ‘I have never thanked anyone for the right to be on the soil that is Australian.’ Comments such as these serve only to highlight the continued rift between cultures and in particular, the profound lack of understanding of Indigenous cultures and traditions that plagues mainstream non-Indigenous society. Continued recognition of traditional owners also offends a sense of Australian identity that takes its cues from an ingrained notion of Western superiority – a perspective that considers Indigenous culture for its aesthetic value only (when it considers it at all) and sees ‘progress’ as a matter of becoming ‘white’. This perspective is far more prevalent in small-l liberal non-Indigenous Australian society than perhaps we would like to admit.

If the mere act of speaking recognition has become tired, perhaps that is because we are no longer paying attention to what we are saying. It doesn’t follow, however, that the act of speaking should be omitted. Formal recognition is a sign of respect for Indigenous people, their cultures and their status as first Australians. It should be seen as an important step, but only one of many towards mainstream recognition of the complexity and breadth of Australian history and identity, and ultimately, reconciliation.