It was a promising start for those of the mainstream who felt sidelined by the Liberals: make a couple of important symbolic gestures, then put feelers out into the public arena. ‘Let’s see what you want.’ A national conversation. ‘How do you feel?’ An apology, Kyoto, a national thinktank. And for a little while this was okay. It was their first term after all, people were speaking up again after the Howard years, and it felt right, after such imposition and hardline paternalism that quite clearly favoured the liberties of power and the wallets in already-deep pockets over the less fortunate—or indeed, anyone outside of the commercial elite. For a government to finally appear to be asking the public—listening to the public! Well, it was only fair to give them a little bit of time to get things right, to work out how to implement the changes that the public had just told them we wanted. If the lack of immediate action wasn’t ideal then year or so’s delay for the right research to be conducted was forgivable, especially if it meant that reform would be solid and fair and happen.

All governments break promises. They break election promises, they water down reforms, they compromise idealism for big business because big business is big money. Juxtaposed with John Howard’s brand of polarising political snark, Rudd sounded like blessed reason in the face of zealotry, and the promise of change delivered a kind of momentum to his style. But after the kick of apparent progress wore off, so did any remaining shreds of charm, and after the breakdown of the ETS the Labor Government appeared not to be able to deliver much at all. Rudd’s style came to be perceived as somewhere between bland and smug. The Labor Party said a lot over the last six months but had nothing to show for it, and I think that by the end of last week, the electorate was pretty sure about what Kevin Rudd himself believed in, but not if the Labor Party could actually achieve anything. Rudd was tolerable as long as he was doing things, as long as he appeared to be doing things.*

But that’s the problem with politics. So much time needs to be spent on the appearance of doing things or the public gets this strange idea that the government does nothing all day except play games with each other. Part of good governing is the theatre of making sure the public knows you’re governing. The Labor Party had been failing at either one or both—the ads were just as boring as Rudd’s speeches, cynicism was high, the polling reflected that. Of course none of this says much at all about the internal politics of the issue. If a party leader is reviled by the majority of his or her own party then there is little point in him or her attempting to continue in the role, and out of the tumult of Labor Party division, floundering policy and low polling we now have Julia Gillard, our first female Prime Minister. And while it’s big symbolism—important symbolism—for Australian feminists, the fact that she’s female is a side-issue, however, because she’ll continue to be tough as all get-out whether we like her or not, so it’s time to stop talking about her hair.

* Part of me still wishes they had pushed for a double dissolution. They would have been returned to power (nobody was considering the Opposition a viable opposition at all at that stage, least of all under Abbott) they probably would have won the Senate (an idea I don’t like at all but I reckon it would have happened) and it might have given them the momentum they needed.  But apart from anything else, it would have been exciting politics—and if you’re craving dramatic change, dramatic politics bring hope.

We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.
—Werner Herzog

I read The Neverending Story when I was a teenager. I hardly remember the plot and I have only vague memories of the film (which I saw for the first time in 2009); it was the images in Michael Ende’s book that caught me—plains full of softly waving golden grass, crumbling buildings and a melting rainbow sky. There were pages and pages of this, of pure shifting shape and concept, colour, spectacle, adventure—imagination for the sake of imagination. And then, in juxtaposition, the plague of Nothing—darkness, a hollowness, sucking the colour and the joy out of the world. Sucking the world out of the world.

Artists know that the slip between reality and imagination is, in a sense, not really a slip at all. Writers know that stories exist in a way that makes the dichotomy of fact and fiction artificial. The popular fantasy genre takes as its premise that what occurs in the story exists in a world other than our own. Magical realism, on the other hand, more directly challenges our understanding of this world. ‘Normal notions about time, place, identity, matter and the like are challenged, suspended, lured away from certitude.’(1) Salman Rushdie talks about the writing of Midnight’s Children: ‘I wanted to make it as imaginatively true as I could,’ he says, ‘but imaginative truth is both honourable and suspect.’(2)  The child in Pan’s Labyrinth knows the magic is real, even if the adults have turned a blind eye. Novels like Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Gabriel García Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude merge history and fact with the fantastic to the point where it is almost impossible to tell where the real leaves off and the ‘magic’ begins. And this is precisely the point: by treating the fantastic as an inextricable part of the actual, such stories force us to question ‘the political and metaphysical definitions of the real’ in which we anchor our lives.(3)

It’s the job of the fiction writer to slide between the real and the imaginary and to put these concepts into words. To create something physical (a text) from something that is not (an idea). To create new worlds from those that already exist. To challenge. This is dangerous. Imagination is dangerous. It’s dangerous in the same way that fear is dangerous. It reminds us of our mortality, of our fallibility, of the slipperiness of our experiences, our knowledge, and the simplicity of death. But the imagination is bridled only by itself. We may allow of our imaginations what we would never allow of our realities, and in the private space of our minds, whole other worlds may exist. Every now and then they test us. Stories and ideas push us, push our realities and our understanding of the things we can touch and taste and see. By imagining the impossible we wonder about the realm of the possible. And this is dangerous.

Censorship attempts to limit the imagination. Censorship limits what is shown to be thought in order to limit what it is possible to think. It is at direct odds with the project of the artist, the writer, the creator and the innovator, because it curtails the hypothetical, the imaginary, the possibility. The role of art in a society is not to replicate the actual but to reflect it; to reinterpret it, to represent it: to re-present it. Its purpose is not just aesthetic but social and political. Aesthetics are the medium through which it draws attention to itself. ‘Culture’ is not a fringe concern; it is a representation of how a society understands and defines itself. It is the core of our existence as sentient creatures. Censorship is power recognising danger in imagination and representation, but mainly the danger presented to itself.

I am becoming afraid of being an artist in this country. I am becoming afraid of saying what I think, especially in a time when the world is becoming less and less private, and the relative safety of anonymity is crushed. Even now I struggle with the idea that I am still free to think as I like, that my mind is not shackled by anything except that with which I shackle it myself. And the more afraid I am to speak, the more important it becomes. Soon the only private spaces will be the ones in our heads, if they are not already the only ones left. And perhaps one day even that will be taken from us, because the more restrictions governments and power brokers place on our representations of ourselves and our understanding of the world—of all aspects of it, not merely the loving, the sacred and the benevolent, but also the dark, the disturbing and the profane, which are as much a part of this world as the things we hold dear—the closer we come to a time when even to think in certain ways is to commit a crime.

There are places in the world where these words would be considered dangerous enough to censor. I almost censored them myself, except I think they are too important. The mere fact that I can say them means they should be said, because there are places in the world where speaking your mind or creating art is considered dissident enough for jail, capital punishment, death. That place might be here sooner than we think. The wheels are already turning. The artists are always first.

(1) & (3) From the Introduction to Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology, David Young and Keith Hollaman (eds.), Longman Inc. : New York and London, 1984.
(2) Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism. Granta and Penguin : London, 1991.

My mother saw this first effort about three days later and said nothing. My father saw it a month later and flipped out. My mother told him to calm down. My room was tucked away in the topmost corner of the house. Nobody went past it. Nobody went into it unless they wanted to see me. ‘It can be painted over if necessary.’ My father didn’t say anything about it to me for a long time.

Throughout high school and while I was an undergraduate still living at home, those walls became the default way for me to react to the world. When I heard a song I loved, I would paint the lyrics in the colours swimming behind my eyes. When a line from a poem got stuck in my mind, I would write it over and over until I couldn’t see the words anymore. When I couldn’t sleep for anger, I would scribble near the head of my bed with the closest writing implement I could find. I made a list of initials of every person I’d kissed. I composed poetry. I ranted. I mused. I was indiscriminate about content; those walls wore my angst, they wore my joy, they wore my lust and hate and longing. They wore everything I couldn’t voice and many things I wished I’d said first. Those walls wore me.

Friends would come and sit in my bedroom and talk about which part of it they liked best. The pictures were their favourites. I painted a porthole on the wall next to my bed, through which you could see Planet Earth. I painted a tree split by lightning, shining golden where it was struck. I painted a night sky, tar-black, that faded to rainbow as it reached the carpet. While I was living in Poland, my great-aunt Patty was given my bedroom during her stay at Christmas. She told me in a letter the following week that she’d had a wonderful time lying in my bed at night examining my art, but that she possibly hadn’t got enough sleep.

When I moved out of home, my third brother, Peter, inherited my room. He was happy to leave it the way it was but the day after I’d left, my father came in with a tin of paint and before Peter or my mother or I could object, had covered all of the soul-scrawl with a pale yellow wash. All of it except for one tiny spot. On the white metal edging around the wardrobe door, about two feet from the ceiling, remains single blue painted raindrop.

I was back in Melbourne for Christmas a few weeks ago. On Christmas night, after all my friends had left, I went upstairs and found Peter lying on his bed with the lights on. We talked for a couple of minutes, but all I could think about was that one raindrop. So I picked up a pen. Underneath the noticeboard in curly drunken sister-scrawl it now says:

Fuck the system. Be a revolutionary. Write on walls.

In Year 7, a group of girls in my class passed around a petition with the instruction: ‘Sign this if you hate Stephanie.’ One of these girls I’d known since Prep. (She actually came up to me at a party in 2005, after years of my ignoring her, and said hello. I suffered through only three sentences of small talk before she said: ‘We were really mean to you at school. You were more intelligent and mature than us and we were intimidated by that. I’m sorry.’ I was so shocked and touched I forgave her on the spot.) This wasn’t an isolated incident, and it’s hard when you’re a kid, when all you want is for someone to like you, not to gravitate towards those stories that make you feel safe—that make you feel normal—and glossy magazines that purport to give you advice on what you can do to fix what’s wrong.

I credit the sheer volume of novels I read as a teenager featuring girls and women who had wit, talent, determination and resilience for getting me through high school, and my admiration and respect for those women in real life. Screw the insipid Bella Swan; Ellie Linton got shit done. Elizabeth Bennet spoke as she found. Anne Shirley may have got married and had ten children but she held up her chin, cut her hair short, stood up to bullies, came first in her classes and still found time for daydreaming and poetry. And I had a lot in common with them, despite my insecurities about the way I looked. I was the kind of girl who put her hand up in class. If I knew the answer, I had to say it. When I did the work, I had to be first to finish. I had to get everything right. In the absence of other triggers, I might have to put this down to genetics. Nobody told me to be a smartypants.

I credit Kaz Cooke’s Real Gorgeous with giving me the courage (if that’s the right word) to have flesh on my thighs and not waste money on toner or Tommy Girl—and the facts to back it up. (I read it cover to cover on Christmas Eve in 1998. I never bought a copy of Dolly magazine again.) But it took me a long time to call myself a feminist. It wasn’t until a second-year uni drama class that the issue was made plain for me. A feminist believed in social, sexual, economic and political equality for men and women. A feminist saw that the world was imbalanced thus, and that power resided mainly with men. The past tense is for the sake of readability—I found (and still find) these things self-evident, but giving myself the feminist label got me into an unexpected amount of trouble. Friends harangued me. My brothers scoffed. A family argument erupted in a restaurant one night when my uncle looked at me skepically, and said ‘Surely feminism isn’t needed now?’

(The stigma is slightly ironic because my family is bursting at the seams with tough, independent women. I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t have come up against resistance due to their sex. My grandmother ran a costuming business by herself after my grandfather had a stroke in the 60s. My mother wanted lots of children but refused to marry any man who would play push-and-pull mind games. My father’s sisters still command large salaries on their own terms. Every single one of them has a degree. Germaine Greer was taught German by my great-aunt, Sister Michael, who had ‘a face that looked like it was scrubbed hard with steel wool’. By the time I became a student at Star of the Sea, the nuns were no longer teaching and Sister Michael’s tenure as principal had been reduced to a plaque on a door in the old grey stone building, but their spirit had by no means left. Perhaps some people find it hard to see a feminist uprising in black habits—or, when I knew them, navy blue—but they obviously don’t know nuns. ‘Strong Star women,’ then-Principal Rosalie Jones used to say to us. No doubt.)

The problem is, while it might work in novels, real people expect strange things when sex is involved. Real people expect strange things when they want sex to be involved. And I’ve always had an appetite for fairy stories that compromised the good work of a lot of that literature. The law of romance says that logic and love are irreconcilable. On the contrary, I think love is extremely logical; it’s romance that muddies the water. And sometimes I feel like it’s the hardest thing in the world to reconcile staunch feminist politics with a desire to be loved. These stories of lust and death, betrayal and despair, obsession and infatuation, class and compromise—they’re compelling and ridiculous all at once. And I’ve never had such vitriol thrown at me as I have when I bring out the word ‘feminist’. Is a woman speaking her mind and standing up for herself so unpalatable even now? Is it some kind of challenge? Is the challenge to keep up or to shut her up?

What if she doesn’t shut up? What will change? Is that where the fear lies? Or is being close to a strong woman like the desire for attention—simultaneously craved and despised, fascinating and repellent? Sex is about power and power is about control, the desire for which stems from fear—at its most primal, fear of death. But we’ve also coupled sex with love, and I’m not the first of my feminist friends to wonder seriously if her politics will result in unintentional celibacy, especially alongside heterosexuality. I’m becoming increasingly aware of the strange social consensus that people like me end up alone. As though the only kind of love I could receive as a woman with these kinds of politics is from afar—someone to look up to or admire perhaps, but not someone to get close to. Or perhaps it’s more like staring at the circus freak, and there’s that odd bookish girl again with the ugly freckles and white legs. But there’s an assumption even in that term ‘ending up alone,’ that implies that a woman’s journey is necessarily about a reliance on others, as though one navigating the world under her own steam is wrong somehow. The aesthetic of the romance narrative makes women afraid to be feminists because it makes feminists look unloveable. It has rose petals on the surface and maggots at the core.

So here I am, split into three, each part curled around the other, tense, taut, tangled. The artist, craving magic, mystery and the beauty of drama; the philosopher, unravelling tapestries with painful and meticulous care, each thread weighed and measured and tested for strength; and between them both, the gawky little girl with her big imagination and pile of stories who just wants people to like her.

“Nah, no Aboriginal people up here,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Too cold for ‘em up here. Read the history.”

The ‘history’ she was referring to was a book written 100 years ago about the township, by white people, in which no Aboriginal people were mentioned.

The local Aboriginal people in the region were the Taungurong people. If you look at this map you can see their country covers roughly the area from Benalla to Bendigo, the Goulburn River and Lake Eildon. (By the way, AIATSIS sell wall maps of Aboriginal Australia. You can find details on how to buy them here.)

About 15 years ago, C and B’s mother L found a bora ring up on the Black Range. Bora rings are circles of raised ground and/or stones used for ceremony. When the February bushfires came through, they burnt away much of the undergrowth in those hills, exposing a lot more of the ground than perhaps would have been visible before. A couple of weeks ago, B and L went walking up there again and found the following:

Tools found on the Black Range, Victoria.

The rock at the top right is a grinding stone, used for crushing seeds and other tucker. The rock below it is the head of a stone axe. They’re Aboriginal tools. B and L found them very close to the location of the bora ring.

Unfortunately, the Department of Sustainability and Environment have been clearing through the Range to make way for mountain bike trails and firebreaks. B says they’ve started moving the bora stones and cutting into the ground.

I was telling this story to some friends the other day who asked why L didn’t tell the DSE or other government agencies about the bora ring. I don’t know the answer to this, but I suspect it’s not as simple as ‘tell the DSE, protect the site.’ There were also reasons why they didn’t take the tools with them, and why when B picked up the axehead to look at it more closely, she put it straight back down again in exactly the same place. Those reasons have very little to do with site preservation in whitefella terms, and everything to do with the land itself, the people who used to inhabit it and the spirits that still do.

I’m not sure what’s more depressing: that the DSE has started breaking up the site, that they probably didn’t know it existed in the first place, or that the possibility might not even have crossed their mind.

What troubles me most is an attitude of mind that could come to prevail amongst white Australians: a feeling of irritation apparently based on a conviction that we are saddled with the responsibility for problems not really of our making, and by their nature probably insoluble. (W.E.H. Stanner, 1978)

It’s the evening of Tuesday, February 12, 2008. I’m standing in the hallway of a Kilmore farmhouse while my second-cousin Phil, a giant of a man, digs through his bookshelves. They’re about as high as his knees. He’s piling my arms with books that he thinks might help me—Daly Family Languages, an ANU research paper on the mission and Peppimenarti, the Malak Malak land rights claim book, even a heavy hardcover on Top End Native Plants—but he’s looking for one in particular.

‘I’ve always found it really useful,’ he says. ‘It was written by a man I knew out on the Daly, a friend of mine. I still go back and read it when I’m confused about something—Ah! Here it is!’ He straightens up, grins at me through his beard and presents me with a very plain-looking hardback in a slightly scuffed, brown dust jacket. It’s a collection of essays by an anthropologist named W.E.H. Stanner, called White Man Got No Dreaming. ‘Start with that,’ Phil says. ‘But be gentle with it and don’t lose it—it was a present from the man himself.’

Later the same night, I’m holed up in one of Phil’s kids’ old bedrooms. I can’t sleep, so I decide to start on the Stanner book. There’s a looseleaf piece of notepaper folded inside the cover signed with Stanner’s name, thanking Phil and his wife, Willy, for their hospitality and friendship. I am careful not to crush it, and start reading.

Immediately, the four-page preface (the source of the above quote) has me scribbling notes in my journal. The opening essay, ‘The Aborigines’, completely blows my mind. I note the date it was written in incredulity: people were saying this in 1938?! I power through three and a half essays that night and wake up the next morning with my mind still buzzing. At 9am, the new Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd moves that parliament issue a formal apology to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were removed from their families as children, and all I can think is, ‘We’re only just getting to this now?!’

Three years ago, Aboriginal Australia was nowhere on my radar. I had minors in drama and history—none of it specifically Australian—philosophy and English majors, and Honours in creative writing. I had studied Germaine Greer but not Marcia Langton. I knew about the Redfern speech but not the Tent Embassy. I knew more about postcolonial India than I did about colonial Australia. Every piece of information I had about Aboriginal Australia was incidental and through a white populist filter, and it wasn’t until I was considering alternative topics for a PhD that I thought: there is something wrong with this. A year later, having suddenly found myself surrounded by anthropology, politics, Native Title legislation, political correctness, and the history wars, as someone who was looking to write a novel, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d accidentally walked into the topic through a side door. Stanner’s essays jolted me awake: this is relevant to me, I realised, I’ve seen this happen, and no wonder we’ve been getting it wrong for so many years.

A few years ago, Robert Manne tried to find a copy of White Man Got No Dreaming for sale and came up with nothing. The book had been out of print for decades. In April 2008, I was doing the same thing—hunting through secondhand stores and sending emails to every bookshop I could think of, desperately trying to dig up a copy. My university library had one—extremely aged—but it was always checked out or on reserve, and anyway, I wanted my own. I knew Stanner’s work couldn’t tell me everything there was to know about Aboriginal Australia, and that his observations came from a specific cultural milieu and political context. But he wrote ‘without condescension and without sentimentality’ (something so many other white male scholars in the field have been unable to do) and his observations about white Australia’s relationship to Aboriginal Australia still resonated so deeply half a century later—71 years in the case of the first essay—that I couldn’t believe it was so hard to find. Eventually, after a fruitless search, I got BiblioQuest onto it. It took them six weeks to call me and tell me they had found a copy, and it could be mine for $214.50. I paid.

In March 2009, Black Inc. republished most of the essays from White Man Got No Dreaming, including the highly influential Boyer lectures and a posthumously-published article on Aboriginal humour, in one paperback. It’s called The Dreaming and Other Essays and includes an introduction by Robert Manne. I found it last night in Readings and shrieked with excitement. If it was a sign of the times that Stanner’s essays had been so neglected, then perhaps their republication signals something positive—a slight shift in the wind, or a stronger push toward understanding Aboriginal Australia for its own sake. Or perhaps that’s just speculation. But for now, you can buy Stanner’s essays for $32.95—one sixth of the price I paid for them. And dammit, you should read them.

On July 1 in South Australia, new laws come into force which will allow the attorney-general to declare any group of people a criminal gang and prohibit them from associating with each other. If they communicate more than six times within a year, they face 5 years imprisonment. I presented this information to my housemate today, who said, “So? Since when do ordinary people get affected by stuff like this?”

Her nonchalance surprised me. She’d previously become quite heated about other issues in the media – the Bill Henson thing, for instance. I followed up by explaining that the police would also be able to ban the wearing of an insignia in public if they thought it compromised public safety – not beyond reasonable doubt, but on the ‘balance of probability.’

“Yeah, but this is all for bikie gangs who make drugs and stuff,” she said. “Nothing to do with the rest of the population.”

In 1972, ASIO put tabs on Helen Garner. Not for the influence of her writing – Monkey Grip, her first novel, wasn’t published until 1978 – but because she put her name on a phone list for a feminist group. I can’t help but wonder what the implications might have been for the feminist movement if the SA laws had been enacted then.

2. Vertigo.

When I was in Year 11, the first English assignment for first semester was ‘personal’ non-fiction. When asked what she expected from us, Mrs G suggested we write about our family, our friends, our social lives, our plans for the future – that sort of ‘personal’. We had a couple of weeks to complete the essay, but I waited until the last minute to do it. The redundancy of it repelled me. The way I saw it, Mrs G was just trying to get an idea of what she might expect from us without having to go through the rigmarole of actually talking to us. When I finally put words on the page, it was a minor act of rebellion. “I don’t know what you expect me to say,” I wrote. “I could tell you about my family and my friends and what I do on the weekends, but that won’t tell you anything about how I see the world or what I think it means.”

I tried to explain that it wasn’t that these things didn’t have a significance in my life; they just didn’t fit in the category of what I considered ‘personal’, and regardless of what my teacher might have wanted, making those things the focus would be skirting the point. If my teacher had wanted a truly personal piece, I thought, she would ask me to write about the ripples I get up my spine when I hear a major-minor chord cadence, or the colour of C#, or why I read in the dark, or how and when I had my first orgasm, or what I think about on the train, or why I can stomach fingernails down a blackboard but the sound of hot water being poured makes me want to scream. But these subjects aren’t the expected focus of a Year 11 assessment task, nor are you supposed to conclude a VCE English essay with a triumphant “So there.”

There’s this feeling I get when I’ve decided to break the rules a little. I’ve come to identify it as the intersection between frustration, fear, conviction and euphoria. The fear usually manifests itself after the fact: I had strong pangs of doubt after I submitted the aforementioned assignment. The wave of rebellion I rode the previous night in front of my computer seemed tacky in retrospect. I felt like I’d exposed too much of myself and that my arguments were ill-considered.

A couple of days later, as I was waiting for the final bell to ring, Mrs G pulled me aside with a pressed forehead and handed me my essay. There were no comments on it, no marks – no teacher scribble of any kind. “I read this last night,” she said. “I don’t know what to say.”

My belly did a backflip.

“I was blown away. There’s nothing I would change in it. It’s wonderful.”

3. The political is personal.

The first writing prize I won came from a story that quite bluntly attacked the pro-life campaign, organised religion, traditional concepts of femininity and, depending on your interpretation, bordered on sympathising with infanticide. The fiction component of my Honours thesis nearly lost me a couple of friends, but won me a scholarship. The ‘personal’ essay wasn’t the first time I’d issued an open challenge to the reader, but it was the first time I can remember where the provoked reaction was solely one of praise. Since then, it seems that the times I’ve walked that line have been the times I’ve produced my best work.

But there is a danger to it. While I think that every piece of art should be considered in isolation from the artist, it is also true that every time I write, I write a piece of myself. My most successful work is also the work I have felt the closest to. As someone who intends to make a living out of the creative arts, I need to walk on edge of what is socially acceptable: to challenge what people think, to push the boundaries, to dive head-first into those grey areas and reflect them back in vivid colour. Those grey areas are parts of me, just as much as they are parts of everyone else. One of hardest things for me to confront lately is that at some point, I might push it too far. At some point it may be my turn to stand up and get thrown around by the storm.

I wonder what people will think of me then.