37 Once Upon A Time Part 1
Amanda ventures into the long-ago, inspired by a friend’s approach to history that insists on bringing the stories of the colonial past into present day consciousness.
BE A WRITER DARLING
When I started writing about my birth family’s colonial experiences it reminded me of a long-ago moment with my mother. She had always encouraged me to write - had me lined up as the one who would trawl through old letters and documents to update the family history.
One day, late into our long relationship, after a chat along these lines, I said: ‘be careful what you wish for.’
There was a pause. I saw her really thinking about it, her face reflecting a dawning sense of horror as she clocked onto the idea of seeing my political opinions, social perspectives and love of speculating about relationships and psychological motivations trained on our illustrious ancestors. It was a moment that could have gone badly – but ended up being funny. We laughed across the divide.
Now with mum safely in her grave, although still hassling me in spirit, I am returning to the story I started years ago but with a very different idea about how to go about putting it on the page.
THE CRIDDLE EFFECT
I call it the Criddle Effect. I met George Criddle, Perth born, now living in Melbourne, at the Greenough Museum one day in 2018 researching colonial forbears. George is a radical thinker and the proud bearer of a very contemporary relationship to language, culture and land.
George recently sent me a draft of the text for the Phd, entitled Edited Summaries: First Person. It struck me as an entirely original, thrilling piece of writing. The initial diary entries form the basis of the text. These are presented as summaries extracted from the diary entries written by George and a friend. However, they have been formulated in the first person. The effect is that of an odd kind of objectivity (6/10/17-27/1/20).
Artwork, performances, conversations, readings are some of the ways George has trialled to communicate with the Criddle mob about trying to find language and perspectives that will enable them to examine families attitudes and beliefs about WA history. The diary entries record the responses and happenings sets in motion, as George and the wider family opens-up a dialogue between contemporary and ancestral Criddles.
George has learnt to sit in uncomfortable and charged spaces, intuiting how best to bring the rellies along on the journey of learning about ‘unsettling issues, like settler colonialism, whiteness, privilege and racism’.
THE CRIDDLE PLOT
An aspect of the diary is George’s engagement with an actual piece of land they call the Criddle Plot. Land currently owned by George’s parents in NSW that was part of a plantation trees scheme. George has plans to rehydrate and regenerate this plot, which becomes part of the story.
As George tackles, and I quote: ‘how to act politically and divest privilege without destroying family ties’ the Edited Summaries are cool, flat reports of the first-hand renderings of events and feelings. They read neutrally, reporting frustrations, annoyances, joys, indecision and confusion - reflecting all that unfolds over three years since the project began.
GARY FOLEY
Early in our friendship, George sent me a 5-minute video of Gary Foley, a Melbourne-based First Nation’s man addressing white supporters of the fight for Aboriginal rights. Within the context of a meeting Gary points out that white people need to educate themselves about Australian history and to sort out their own attitudes and prejudices before they try and join the struggle for Aboriginal rights.
Go and find out what we are all up against, he states… Go and find a racist, see what they reckon….In most cases you won’t have to go far. Just go home (laughter!).
He adds: If you can’t influence someone you know and love, then forget about trying to change attitudes in the wider world.
George took these words to heart. I wish I had heard – and absorbed that wisdom - decades ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw8YVBbQgNg
GEORGE COMES TO GERALDTON
Criddle is a common name up in these parts and George has travelled to Geraldton from Melbourne three times now, researching ancestors. In the text, George feels a way forward, devising ways to bring the immediate family along, always keeping an eye on all motivations as the Criddle family connected with real places, people and events of the past.
I think it is an emotionally brave story to undertake. It involves as much heart as head. One of the events George undertook was to organise a tour of the Greenough and Geraldton area with local Aboriginal elder, Derek Councillor. This was a day journey; it took in the Reserve just out of town where many Aboriginal people were compelled to live from the late 1930’s until well into the 1960s. Also, the Bootenal Springs, a freshwater oasis in Greenough, site of a massacre of local Aboriginal people in 1854 by white occupiers. Derek also took us to a cultural site on farmland east of Nabawa. The Criddle elders drove up from Perth to partake of the tour - I got to tag along.
Derek was a gracious host. Even so it was a day with uncomfortable moments, a strong reminder of aspects of WA’s history that white people tend not to dwell on and are usually easily able to avoid dwelling on. George did the work of noticing, recording and examining their own and elders’ reactions - feeding it all into writings that became a record of events and the basis of the PhD text.
George also organised to take the mob to meet local writer and elder Charmaine PaperTalk Green and shoehorned in a few cultural events on at the time courtesy of Geraldton’s Big Sky Literary Festival.
POINTING THE FINGER
For all my activism and self-education, I ran from the reality of WA’s colonial past; was complicit in what has been named The Great Australian Silence. I was aware to a degree but for decades have been stuck in ‘helping’ mode when it came to connecting with Aboriginal people. I was so ready to hear Gary Foley’s brilliant suggestion, to look within before meddling without, when it came to racism.
In my family, hard conversations to do with whiteness and privilege didn’t happen. There were things that felt too confrontational and touchy and I dodged them, let them slip by.
There were ‘skirmishes’ in the past between my elders and myself dating from my teenage years - I think of them like that, guerrilla warfare, such were my strategies within the family dynamics.
It has taken me a long time to move past that sort of micro-aggression and defensiveness, a long time to stop pointing the finger. And to stop seeing myself as a victim of unearned privilege. Avoidance. None of it helpful to First Nation’s people who are so often asked to cope with white guilt – as if they don’t have enough of their own shit to deal with.
George, early on in the process made a sculpture; a life size, pointy finger that wobbles around endearingly on the end of a spring pointing everywhichway. Funny.
In the text George explains how the sculpture represents ‘a strong repressed desire to point at things that I feel I want to call out or produce critical distance from’
Critical distance. Exactly.
In one of the diary summaries the text introduces a term, ‘gulf power’. There is a suggestion that this could be (and I quote) ‘a made-up term and could possibly relate to distance and disconnection, or the ability not to be affected by something by not listening.’ This resonated with me: It’s always good to have a punchy description for one’s own attitudes. I suspect ‘Gulf power’ is rife.
On the tour around Greenough with George and the Criddle elders, I was aware of a feeling of relief that it was not me and my elders heading off on this kind of journey. Even with all the rellies safely dead I am aware I am carrying generational stuff in my body about this issue. Shame? Fear? Coming of age in the 70’s I did not have the insight or emotional maturity to have taken this path.
George’s text displays love and sensitivity as well as a very characteristic confusion - a genuinely disarming feature of this work. It is fed by both deep research and deep feeling. For me it is a breakthrough study in contemporary white relationships with the colonial past and with the concepts of ‘whiteness’. And it is lyrical, surprising.
It also, refreshingly, doesn’t have that much ‘history’ in it. The facts, sketchy or otherwise, have taken second place to how the story of the colonial dispossession of First Nations people has been perceived by successive generations of this particular settler family. This is looking at history in terms of how it plays out in the present.
Extracted from one of the Edited Summaries are these words: I seem to want to make an artwork about my family history; I would like to change my own perception and my family’s perception of themselves, land and history. CRIDDLE p13
GENERATIONAL
In my parents and their parent’s time, Indigenous people were invisible in middle class white society. Unless you were connected to rural life in WA, my parents’ generation and First Nation’s folk usually did not meet in polite society. Aboriginal people were isolated from mainstream life in every way possible by conditions that enforced social and economic distance. Non-indigenous people then, as now, can still choose to see Aboriginal people as either ‘headlines’ or ‘celebrities’ rather than real people.
My dear Aunt Lilla, now gone, told me a story: She was in hospital and there was an Aboriginal woman in the next bed. One day the local pastor came in and went through the ward – offering solace, a prayer, whatever pastors do.
When he got to Lilla’s bed, she said no thank you, firmly, and sent him on his way. Sometime after he left, the woman in the next bed addressed Lilla:
Are you a Buddhist, then she asked? Lilla, mystified, said, no what makes you ask that? I thought you must be because you sent that Christian fella away.
Lilla was well into her 70’s when we shared this conversation. There is something so gentle and innocent in the question the woman asked. Lilla told me it was the first time she had ever spoken to a First Nation’s person and that it was a deeply interesting moment for her.
ABORIGINALS DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES
At the same time as my generation started to get a handle on the uncensored view of Australian history and began asking questions, First Nation’s people started to find their own voices and support within the wider white community so the story started to shift.
As Indigenous people push towards self-determination with new vigour, land managers are turning their systems away from extractive ecological practices to working with supporting ecological systems. As fairly new custodians of the land, whitefellas could find no better place to start than looking at how the traditional owners managed the land...With a global health and climate crisis unfolding around us, what a great time to look deeply at our own attitudes and settle in to listen to the deep local knowledge we weren’t capable of listening to a few hundred years ago.
So I didn’t end up writing a family history, in the sense that my mother suggested – but I did meet a forebear who triggered a desire to know more when I arrived in Geraldton in early 2002 to take on a position as artist-in-residence in Greenough. This tiny stone hamlet, 20 kms south of Geraldton became my entrée to a past I was finally ready to come to terms with.
There is a way to go in this story - PART 2 of “Once Upon a Time’ will be the next podcast. Thanks for listening.
The image is a chalk drawing done by Amanda of an early 1900 photograph of John Nicol Drummond (1816-1906) and his wife Mary Shaw (1825-1919). Currently on display at the Greenough Museum. (2002 Chalk, ochre, blackboard paint and snail shells on board)
ORIGINAL INTRO MUSIC by Peter Rowland
