It’s May 14. Our lantern has run out of batteries, so I’m writing this in the amenities shelter in the campground at Boodjamulla (Lawn Hill) National Park. I’m writing on lined paper in a fine blue pen and I have to stop every couple of words to brush the moths off the page and pick beetles out of my hair. The fluorescent light is on a timer. After 15 minutes or so it flicks off and I am plunged into darkness again, and have to feel my way up the wall to the light switch.

Ever since we left Cairns people have been telling us to come here. It has been on our itinerary from the start, however—Cadie’s grandmother was born not far from here in Elizabeth Creek, one of the tributaries to the watercourse that flows down the Boodjamulla gorge. Her uncle Noel reckons he once found the exact spot, but no other family members have seen it. For me, the earliest memory I have is of canoeing up that same gorge with my mother and father, gazing at the sunstruck red cliff-face and dark water. I was three years old.

Algae turns the creek a shifting olive green in the sun, deepening to emerald as it stretches out and curls slowly through the shadow of the gorge. The light twists as it ripples around the lilies and water plants. It’s beautiful to look at but high levels of calcium make it no good to drink and the idea fascinates me: water that only makes you thirstier.

In spite of the crocodiles we decide to float down the gorge in nothing but tyre tubes. We are excited at first, especially after trudging up the slope in the hot mid-morning sun. The water is the perfect temperature to cool off but not cold enough to cause goosebumps, and fish suck at our calves by the jetty and scatter when we try to touch them. The cheerful tumbling of the falls initially has us in good spirits, but as the noise of them fades so does the novelty, and soon we are the only people on the water and we cannot see the bottom. We are walled in on either side for a kilometre and a half by mangrove trees and cliff-face. The water moves so slowly that foam, palm fronds and insects gather in the slightest curves in the rock wall. The wind is whispering at us through the cracks and neither of us wants to think about the fact that I’ve seen freshwater crocodiles four metres long. We try to swim as quietly as possible, our hands as paddles, our arms aching. I can feel bubbles pushing up around my waist.

Sometimes I think I’m just trying to get lost, pushing myself further and further away from what I know, taking less and less precaution. Except that the more remote I go and the less people there are around me, the clearer the world becomes. Blood and dust. Grass and sky. Rain and sun. Eat and sleep.

If you cross Boodjamulla Creek and edge your way along the shadow of the gorge you come to a rock art site called Wild Dog Dreaming. The carvings on the walls are an estimated 30,000 years old, so of course we want to see it. Cadie is lagging behind, however, and I reach the site alone. Hot afternoon sunlight angles directly at the wall where there are three sets of arches painted on the rock in yellow ochre. Sitting underneath them is a bright yellow snake. Its head is reared up, it’s halfway to strike position and it’s looking me right in the eye.

For the Waanyi people, Boodjamulla was a ceremonial place—Rainbow Serpent country. When you look at the sky in the evening, you can see it stretching from west to east—a yellow head and an orange neck, pink and purple and green along its belly, the tip of its tail a wet blue-black. And I run along the red dirt road towards it, flies on my back and sweat on my lips, wondering if I will ever be lost enough.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here.

It was late afternoon. The houses, so sprawling and airy they could hardly be considered ‘indoors’, spread in a lazy curve around the oval. Football posts peeling scabbed white paint stood in the bleached grass at either end. As I walked across the oval to the schoolhouse, the sun stretched long fingers across the floodplains in the west, lighting up the escarpment to the east that marks the border of the lands owned by the Emu Point people.

The carcass of a wild pig lay discarded in the middle of the oval, flies buzzing and crawling over it. Two crows perched on the rump, pecking at wormy flesh through coarse black hair. They flapped a few feet into the air as I drew near. It didn’t occur to me to steer clear until a shadow passed over the grass in front of me, and I looked up to see a hawk circling just metres from my head. Above it, spiralling, turning and turning in the widening gyre, were five or six more—swooping in close to the carcass one after another, looking for a chance to dig in their talons and beaks. For an unsettling moment it felt like it was me they were circling, and the jolt it gave me left my hands tingling.

In the city, death is sanitised. White sheets and chemicals strip the blood and spit and shit from death and halt decay, because we prefer instead to see quietude, composure, rest—as though the reward for a hot, quick, electric life is inertia. And when the muck of it manages to splash through, it’s unexpected. In our shock we sensationalise it, dramatise it, and talk about tragedy and grief and respect to remove ourselves from the reality of rot and disintegration. But out in remote country, those white sheets don’t exist. Death is everywhere, raw. Blood and dirt mingle and open wounds fester. Temporality feels as close as skin.

The Europeans were afraid of the bush. They tried to stifle it, to conquer it. It was a quest, a duty: man against nature. Even now, we barricade ourselves in and push the world out—hiding from sunlight, from storms, from insects, from snakes, from people, from possibility, from ourselves. How could such a passionate need for control be anything other than an acute manifestation of the fear of death? I wonder sometimes if everything—if Western culture in its entirety—can be boiled down to this.

Sometimes in the city, in the deep hours of the night, I hear birds. They don’t sing at that hour; they cry. Sometimes I think they’re crying for us, for our fear of nothingness, of not knowing, of not meaning. Sometimes I think about crying with them: so afraid, not of death, but that the weight of possibility will bury me before I’m finished.

A few months ago, I was hanging out at a pub in the High Country. I asked the publican’s wife (a good friend of my Dad’s) what she knew about the local Aboriginal people.

“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.

There’s a moment in the film Samson and Delilah where Delilah, destitute and desperate, attempts to sell a painting. She timidly proffers the canvas to people eating outside at a cafe in an Alice Springs mall. Some of them ignore her; others shake their heads dismissively and go back to their conversations. A couple of days later she tries again. This time there is purple-green bruising down one side of her face and her right eye is swollen shut. The customers at the cafe stare as she lashes out, throws the painting at them and is asked to leave.

I saw Samson and Delilah in Carlton last Monday with my mother. The Nova has become a regular haunt for us—tickets are cheaper on a Monday and the daytime crowd generally consists of about three retirees and a backpacker. So imagine our surprise when we arrived for an 11am session to find the line for the box office stretching halfway down Lygon Plaza. ‘Surely they can’t all be here for the same film?’ my mother exclaimed. Low-budget Australian directorial debuts don’t usually generate that much public interest, let alone films about Aboriginal Australia. In this case, however, apparently 5-star reviews on The Movie Show and in The Age had got people talking. So we took our seats early just to be on the safe side, and sure enough, our session was full.

The film begins in a remote community in Central Australia. Until the protagonists reach Alice Springs, the only white characters to appear in the film are a carpet-bagger and the surly owner of the local general store. Such is the power, poignancy and intimacy of the film up to this point that the audience has already well and truly fallen in love with the two teenagers, as they have fallen in love with each other. So when the cafe patrons blithely ignore Delilah, beaten and abused as she is, the audience suddenly sees themselves for the first time. Perhaps watching this movie in Lygon Street surrounded by restaurant culture and overpriced coffee gave the moment unexpected weight, but at this point, the (mostly white) patrons of the Nova shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

A few years ago, I was a passenger in a car during a serious head-on collision with a motorcyclist. As a reaction to that, I became, for a while, involuntarily hyper-aware of everything that happened on the road—every slightly overshot turn or distant flash of brake lights. A similar thing happened once I started engaging with remote Australia. I became hyper-conscious of the words I used, of the assumptions and prejudices that informed every sentence I uttered or judgement I made. I spent months second-guessing myself, constantly asking whether I had the right to write this novel, whether I had the right to think I could come up with answers or even accurately identify the problems. My biggest fear was causing offense. How and when and under what circumstances could my voice possibly be appropriate in Aboriginal affairs when the more that I learnt, the more it became obvious to me how little I actually knew?

Part of the reason people avoid having anything to do with Aboriginal Australia —part of the reason I avoided the topic for so many years—is because it’s hard. For a city-going whitefella on the south coast, remote Aboriginal Australia seems like the antithesis of everything. It’s impossible to grasp the sheer size of the issues or the depth of misunderstanding until you actually start scratching below the surface. And engaging with the issues is not just about practical problems that take commitment and passion to understand and resolve; it’s difficult on a personal level, too. That flash of self-awareness that happens halfway through Samson and Delilah is a constant state for the non-Aboriginal person learning about Aboriginal Australia. And of our English terms—self discovery, epiphany, revelation, enlightenment—not one seems to capture the clumsiness and embarrassment—the profound sense of humbling that these moments force upon us.

After the film, my mother and I wandered down Lygon Street to a restaurant with lunch specials and sat at a little street table in the sun. We talked about the film and my novel and the way that scene made us feel, and we’d just been handed our food when a woman picking dirt out from under her nails with a stick approached the table and asked me for change.

I had no idea what to do. The couple at the table next to us ignored her. My mother, going deaf, hadn’t heard her. She was looking straight at me. As tough as it is being confronted with yourself on screen, there is still a line between epiphany through art and the translation of that into real life. And awareness is nothing if it doesn’t translate into action. I knew this before the woman asked me for change, and I knew it all over again when she did. But it was disconcerting to realise that I wasn’t going to help her out, not like this, and that no matter how much good I like to think I’m doing in the world, no matter how many barriers I’d like to think I’ve torn down, I was still building this wall by choice. It was (and is) a product of class, of prejudice, of cynicism, of a blame-the-victim mentality, and ultimately, of selfishness. I had no idea how I could even begin to try to fix it.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said. I really was sorry. I tried to smile. I tried to smile genuinely.

‘Okay, have a nice day,’ she said.

‘You too,’ I replied.

She paused, briefly. ‘Thankyou,’ she said. ‘And thankyou for your manners.’