The poet Kath Walker, as she then was, visited China from 12 September to 3 October 1984 in a delegation comprising Caroline Turner, as leader, Eric Tan, Rob Adams and Manning Clark. The delegation was organised by the Australia–China Council (acc), under the auspices of the Department of Foreign Affairs, in response to an invitation from the Shanghai People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, an arm of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. In the composition of the delegation, with its broadly cultural focus, you can perhaps see the hand of Geoffrey Blainey, the acc’s first Chairman, and Jocelyn Chey, then executive director, who must have enjoyed advising the Shanghai authorities that Oodgeroo’s ‘father was of Noonuccle Tribe, Carpet Snake totem’. Caroline Turner, Deputy Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, was an acc member, as was Perth surgeon Eric Tan. Rob Adams represented the Australia Council. Manning Clark had the distinction of having his Short History of Australia published in China in 1973, for internal distribution in government circles only, with the warning ‘the author is a bourgeois historian. Many of his opinions are not in line with Marxism’.
The visit came at a rosy time in Australia–China relations. China’s ‘economic reforms’ and ‘open-door policy’ were well underway and the devastating extremities of the Cultural Revolution were being firmly repudiated. From the Australian point of view, China had been identified as a regional and trading partner to be cultivated. The acc, along with other Australian organisations, was implementing a vigorous program of activities designed to extend people-to-people as well as official ties. The 1984 cultural delegation was a highwater mark in this process, a happy and well-managed visit that pushed back the boundaries of what was possible and resulted in enduring recommendations and initiatives. To look back after ten years is to discover, perhaps with some surprise, the long-term effectiveness of cultural relations in enabling insights and contacts that can be built on in the future. A whole range of training exchanges for young people developed from the delegation’s recommendations, for example, with medical students from the University of Western Australia spending part of their course in Chinese hospitals, and Australian students of Chinese language being placed in organisations in China for work experience. A vigorous sister relationship was established between Shanghai and Queensland, which has facilitated the exhibition of treasures from the Shanghai Museum in Australia, and Shanghai’s representation in the first Asia-Pacific Triennial of contemporary art at Queensland Art Gallery in 1993. There are many more such flow-on benefits.
Part of the agenda came from the Shanghai authorities, who in 1984 were keen to establish in the minds of Australian administrators that a whole range of activities was possible with Shanghai, more or less independently of Peking’s control. Thus a lasting message was sent about devolution (and rivalry) in China, as the monolith of centralised power fissured. Australia identified the need to develop polyvalent relationships with China. The delegation’s visit took place in the wake of the short-lived, but chilling, Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983, a conservative backlash against liberalisation, pluralism and Westernisation in the ideological sphere, which set the critical parameters of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would handle the consequences of social change and modernisation. The policy of Australian governments, then and now, has been to support liberalising and reforming elements in Chinese society, and the distinguished cultural delegation’s visit in September–October 1984 can be seen against this wider diplomatic background. The delegation’s official host, Mr Li Shoubao, held the post of Vice-President of the Shanghai Friendship Association, among his other designations, and has proved over the years a highly effective servant of his government’s interests. At the October First National Day banquet in Canton, the delegation met Mayor Ye Xuanping (son of revolutionary Field Marshall Ye Jianying) and Provincial Party Secretary Xie Fei, both of whose reformist stars continued rising during the 1980s. Meanwhile, back home, Geoffrey Blainey’s cautionary analysis of Asian immigration to Australia was causing a local variant of an anti-spiritual pollution campaign as his academic colleagues widely denounced him, and the debate became ‘something of a catalyst’, Caroline Turner recalls, for the travellers’ sense of themselves as Australians while in China.
Their itinerary was mostly a standard one, combining historic and scenic sites with cultural visits: Peking and the Great Wall, Xian and the Entombed Warriors, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guilin and a cruise down the Li River, and finally Canton. A highlight of the meetings arranged for the group was a lively seminar with staff and students of the Australian Studies Centre at Peking Foreign Studies University.
Manning Clark, who had undergone major surgery a year earlier, was thrilled to stand atop the Great Wall. Dr Tan advised him to take it easy. Manning’s fear that he might have cancer (he didn’t) heightened his experiences during the visit. He wrote later: ‘We were all very excited. We were all like human beings who had fallen in love at first sight’.
In Xian the group visited Huxian, where the famous peasant painting movement began in the 1950s. They were fascinated by the lively work, with its blend of folk exuberance and contemporary socialist realism, and by the management of a movement that, with a modicum of intervention, allowed working people to give seemingly spontaneous expression to their lives in a form that could also succeed in the marketplace. During a meeting with the artists, Kath Walker passed Rob Adams a Qantas postcard on which she had scrawled: ‘If you love me, you’ll pinch that painting off the wall for me’. There are parallels between the Chinese peasant painting movement, which by the 1970s was seen by some outsiders as a representative achievement of Maoist cultural policy, and the development of Aboriginal art in Australia from the 1970s. Perhaps, at Huxian, Oodgeroo saw in action some of the possibilities she was working towards in her own community cultural centre, Moongalba, on Stradbroke Island.
In Xian, Kath and Manning sang Waltzing Matilda to a group of Young Pioneers, the CCP’s cubs and brownies. In Shanghai, preparations for the National Day celebrations were underway when the group visited the Shanghai Municipal Children’s Palace, and this time Kath talked to the children about Aboriginal art, while Manning danced with them. The group was in Canton when October the First arrived, and they watched on television the military parade through Tiananmen Square that marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. It was the first such parade since 1959, and, according to an official spokesperson, ‘was not intended as a show of force, but as a display of defensive strength’, boosting the morale of the People’s Liberation Army, which was unhappy about aspects of the country’s modernisation drive and now, under Communist Party leadership, was well on the way to becoming a sophisticated fighting force. There was another reason for celebrating, which would not have been lost on the citizens of Canton. The joint declaration between Britain and China confirming the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 had been signed across the border in Hong Kong only a few days before, on 26 September 1984.
I can only speculate on how the members of the Australian cultural delegation responded to the momentous events going on around them, to their encounters with China, or to their sense of themselves as representatives of Australia, which they were invited to articulate at meeting after meeting. Accounts of the trip exude euphoria, perhaps not an unusual response for first-time China visitors (all except Tan), but enhanced here by the determined optimism of China in 1984 and by the personal chemistry of the group. Clark claimed it was the happiest such trip he’d ever been on. The delegation members developed friendships with each other that were to endure. In writing and conversation they convey a great sense of warmth towards each other and towards the China they experienced together.
The central element in the group dynamic was the relationship between Kath and Manning. While she had tremendous respect for her old friend, Kath was not overawed by him. When Manning gave a panoramic picture of Australian history, Kath was not afraid to present a different version, emphasising the white man’s invasion of the country and blood in the streets. Oodgeroo saw herself as an ambassador for Aboriginal culture. It amused the Chinese that one black woman would dare to differ from the great historian. A photo taken, of all places, at Chiang Kai-shek’s villa, shows Kath cheekily resting her head on Manning’s knee, as he looks sternly at the camera, in an ironic tableau that might be captioned ‘the Patriarch and the Piccaninny’. At first Kath may have been overwhelmed by the impact of Chinese culture, acknowledging the contrast between its achievements and the fate of her own comparably ancient culture. She was homesick, and the tug of home led her to relate China always back to her own cultural heritage, which she had a tremendous capacity to share with the people she met. In this way Oodgeroo connected herself with China too.
Within the group, and within Oodgeroo herself, a momentous event of another kind was taking place. She had written no poetry for six years before her trip to China. Her life was extraordinarily busy, activist and public. She had private problems to deal with too. She had an established literary reputation. But for any writer, not to write, however easily explained, is an uncomfortable condition. One morning Kath said to Manning, ‘I’m pregnant again.’ She meant she had started to write poetry. During her three weeks in China she produced a suite of sixteen poems. The first one, published as ‘China … Woman’ was inspired, if I have reconstructed the circumstances correctly, by a tour of the Forbidden City (‘in a word overwhelming’ according to Caroline Turner) in Peking on 17 September 1984 and written over the next few days. By 19 September the travellers had flown to Xian, which was where Rob Adams photographed Kath sitting on a step outside the Wild Goose Pagoda apparently writing the first poem of the series.
‘China … Woman’ is general and synoptic, giving voice to the affinities Oodgeroo found with China. As an Aboriginal she compares the Great Wall to the Rainbow Serpent; as a woman she conceives China as dignified and fecund; as a revolutionary she registers the weight of the past, the struggle for change and also, in a sharp image of Beihai, the once-imperial park, some of the ironies of the present:
High peaked mountains
Stand out against the sky-line.
The great Wall
Twines itself
Around and over them,
Like my Rainbow Serpent,
Groaning her way,
Through ancient rocks …
China, the woman
Stands tall,
Breasts heavy
With the milk of her labours,
Pregnant with expectation.
The people of China
Are now the custodians of palaces.
The wise old
Lotus plants,
Nod their heads
In agreement.
In their published form, in sequence, the poems offer a journal of the trip, and, as befits diary entries, they are informal, spontaneous, catching fleeting pictures and unresolved thoughts, tied to the specific evanescent occurrences of the visit. They are not without a sense of comedy at the situations in which the visitors find themselves:
Manning and I
Offered to sing
Waltzing Matilda for them.
I think they liked it,
Or, maybe, they were
Showing us,
How polite they can be.
Then, they sang a song for us.
A song of the young pioneers.
We liked it too
And before we left,
We cupped our hands, and called for them
Our
Australian coo-ee.
Elsewhere there is a sense of the irony of scale, as the travellers find their own personal connections with, or reactions to, what is laid before them.
We are shown the pavilion,
Where they caught
Chiang Kai-shek.
It’s halfway up the mountain
Of the black horse.
Later … I sketched a pearl shell
and gave it to Caroline.
Impromptu and seemingly effortless, the poems enact an open, fluid, wry and insightful response to China, in straightforward terms, aware too of sadness on the other side of hope:
We saw a giant panda
At the zoo.
He wasn’t very happy,
He was sick.
China hands say that if you go to China for a month you write a book, for six months maybe an article, but if you go for a year or more you will never write anything, as the ever-increasing complexity of your knowledge reduces you to silence. Short-term visitors are faced with a barrage of bewildering, often incomprehensible impressions and, under the pressure of journeying through a hugely different world, they struggle with exhilaration and exhaustion to formulate reactions. Oodgeroo’s response, in her effusion of poetic fragments, sidesteps the need to reach conclusions, while registering with sensitivity the wonder that she experienced. The underswell is the personal reference back to herself and what she knows. In the ‘Reed Flute Cave at Guilin’, for instance, she writes:
I shall return home,
And I’m glad I came.
Tell me, My Rainbow Spirit
Was there just one of you?
Perhaps, now I have time to think,
Perhaps, you are but one of many guardians
Of earth’s people …
The China poems are less public, less oratorical than her more familiar work. In their free, spare, elliptical immediacy, they have an imitation-Chinese quality, reminiscent at times of Maoist revolutionary verse.
Oodgeroo may have been relieved to escape for a while from her public role in Australia. She enjoyed herself in China. She took the toasts at banquets while others piked out, and Eric Tan and Rob Adams had the job of sourcing the liquor for after-hours. She let her creativity flow. Throughout the trip she made pastel drawings, and, after Eric Tan bought her Chinese brushes and inks, she experimented with Chinese painting. She copied out her freshly composed poems and decorated them with snakes and other personal emblems and presented them to people she met. She was less impressed by great historic sites and occasions than by the direct experience of place, people and lived history. She enjoyed walking round markets and countryside, for example, or meeting students with whom she engaged as the sparkiest sort of teacher. She was happy spending time with children – partly because they took her back to her own grandson and the children who visited her on Stradbroke Island. As Caroline Turner recalls, Oodgeroo ‘grew in energy all the time throughout the visit … She had a marvellous intuitive sense of place which came in part from a poet’s sensitivity and in part out of her Aboriginality but also from her acute intelligence and ability to respond to people’.
Oodgeroo was happy to go home, but she came to China gladly. She remembered Chinese sailors who had come to Stradbroke Island and mixed with her local people. Chinese, through Macassans, were trading sea slug in Australian tropical waters from the late seventeenth century, as Oodgeroo seems to know when she writes a caption to her drawing of a Stradbroke Island sea slug:
There are many different types of sea slug. The sea slug that the Chinese people like to eat, is very very different; it’s very hard and it hasn’t got any pipes. It’s what people call a sea cucumber.
She was also aware of the international communist role in opposing racism and oppression of indigenous peoples. An important memory of Kath Walker’s youth was of the public stance taken by the Communist Party of Australia in exposing a racist incident in Queensland. China under Mao had styled itself the leader and advocate of developing peoples and the Third World. In 1974, Gary Foley, the first Aboriginal person to visit the People’s Republic of China, had brought back ideas about people’s communes.
By the 1980s, however, China’s credentials in this regard were wearing thin, as relationships with the developed world took priority over support for developing countries. China had more interest in trade than aid. China’s treatment of her own minority peoples had come under scrutiny, and China’s occupation of Tibet was an issue on the global agenda. China’s sensitivity on these issues led to the propaganda use of a ‘pot calling the kettle black’ approach to other countries. In the case of Australia, the Chinese government focused on the plight of Australian Aboriginal peoples as part of a larger indictment of capitalism. There was some hypocrisy in this concern. Chinese xenophobia can take particularly repellent forms in relation to black people: even at its most benign it delights in the strangeness, the ‘colour and movement’, of black cultures.
Many Chinese have shown an excited curiosity about Aboriginal culture, with an appreciation of its antiquity and distinctiveness, sometimes even recognising similarities with ancient Chinese culture, at other times mainly savouring it for its perceived exotic and primitive qualities. Since 1984, different kinds of Aboriginal art have been exhibited and favourably received in China. There have been further Aboriginal delegation visits. One included Aboriginal photographers who were retracing the links between the Rainbow Serpent and the Great Wall.
Oodgeroo went into this complex environment in 1984 and no doubt she saw it all for what it was. I don’t imagine it changed the view expressed in the first poem of My People, ‘All One Race’ (illustrated, incidentally, with a caricature of a pigtailed Chinaman):
Black tribe, yellow tribe, red, white or brown,
From where the sun jumps up to where it goes down …
I’m for all humankind, not colour gibes;
I’m international, and never mind tribes.
But there were some awkward moments. The seminar at the Shanghai Foreign Languages Institute was less dynamic than the counterpart occasion in Peking. ‘The students and audience in Shanghai seemed confused by many of the things we said,’ comments the report. This may have been because the students were insufficiently informed about Australia. It may have been because of internal resistance at the institute to the development of an Australian Studies Centre (it subsequently transferred to East China Normal University, Shanghai). Or it may have been because the imposing official Shanghainese presence intimidated the Chinese participants, causing open inquiry to become entangled with diplomatic façadism. The audience seems to have been uncomfortable about the delegation’s frank criticism of aspects of Australia. In the wake of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign’s repression of intellectuals, the audience must have hoped that the visiting intellectuals would identify Australia with pluralist and humanist values. Students may have been puzzled to hear Manning Clark speak of China as a beacon to Western intellectuals. Sinologist Geremie Barmé was in the audience as an uninvited guest, and recalls it as a distasteful occasion. Regulations were in force at the time to prevent ‘unattached foreigners’ from mixing with the local populace. Barmé’s independent presence in Shanghai – as against the carefully managed presence of the delegation – meant that he came under secret police surveillance. It seemed to him that his fellow Australians were irresponsible not to consider how their remarks might be taken or used in the local context. He remembers feeling a sense of ‘national betrayal’ that led him to question his sense of himself as an Australian who was nonetheless deeply committed to understanding China.
By the time the travellers reached Guilin, they were aware that there had been virtually no contact with China’s so-called minority nationalities. In Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the area around Guilin, the ‘minorities’ make up seventy per cent of the population. The group was joined by Roger Brown, then Australian Consul General in Shanghai, who, with Eric Tan, sought to rectify the omission in the program. Oodgeroo was interested, although it was not something she pushed for. In the event the delegation met some official representatives of the Zhuang people, but there was recognition by this late stage of the trip that the program had been filtered. ‘We were keen to meet with minority people, and thanks to the admirable Mr Fu [of Shanghai Friendship Association] this was done. However, we felt our local hosts in Guilin could have arranged a one-day trip to visit the minority people considering the time we had available in Guilin,’ notes the report. The minorities in the field would not have presented as smartly as their official representatives.
Among the many results of the visit was a proposal to publish the poems that Oodgeroo had written during the trip in a bilingual edition, as a joint venture between Jacaranda Press in Brisbane and the International Culture Publishing Corporation of China. The proposal was brought to fruition by Jacaranda’s John Collins, thanks to his well-established contacts with Chinese publishers, notably Mr Xu Liyu, then Vice-President of the Chinese Publishers Association. The suite of China poems was published in 1988 as Kath Walker in China. It included an enthusiastic foreword by Manning Clark and evocative photographs of the trip taken mainly by Rob Adams. The Chinese translations by Gu Zixin are accurate, although inevitably with minor differences. The lines about the sick panda, for example, become: ‘He wasn’t very happy because he was sick’. This slightly shifts the directness of Oodgeroo’s sympathy for the (highly symbolic) giant panda’s plight.
The book is unique in many ways. As far as I can establish, it contains the first Aboriginal writing published in China. It is the first single volume of an Australian poet’s work published in China, male or female, and the first joint literary publication. 2000 copies were taken for distribution in China, the remaining 850–1000 sent to Australia. They arrived in Brisbane not long after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 3–4 June 1989. Witnessing Tiananmen Square at a happier time, Oodgeroo had written on 18 September 1984:
The big square
Welcomes
Her sons and daughters …
The tragic, and potentially embarrassing, irony of these lines would not be lost on Australians. A new dustjacket was printed, incorporating on the back cover a new poem, ‘Requiem’, condemning the male politicians everywhere who ‘Derive new ways, To uphold ignorance, To keep slavery alive’.
In Tiananmen Square
History repeats itself.
This final poem lacks the subtle freshness of the China poems of Oodgeroo’s late fruition in September–October 1984. It brings her back to the harsh public world of political struggle.
Perhaps because of its peculiar publishing history, Kath Walker in China seems to have dropped from sight. The book is not widely known, and the poems have not been given much of a place in Oodgeroo’s oeuvre. This is a pity. The poems document the kind of excited progress through China that so many thousands of Australians, from prime ministers to package tourists, made in the 1980s. They also give utterance to the continuation of a long faint thread of Aboriginal Australian–Chinese relationship. Furthermore, they show a face of Oodgeroo that would not otherwise be seen. Oodgeroo in China may have been ‘pregnant’, and a little hysterically so, but her condition proved more fertile than any ‘hysterical pregnancy’.
Kath Walker in China shows Oodgeroo as a poet in her response to an extraordinary world. That is an especially valuable and lasting result of the 1984 cultural delegation. Judith Wright wrote to Oodgeroo in 1975, after Kath had sent her the poem ‘Sister Poet’, encouraging her to go on writing, whatever else she did. ‘Keep writing,’ urged Judith Wright, ‘it reaches more people than you’d think and we’ve only got one Kathy Walker’.
1994