In late 2012, I was partying with friends at the Imperial in the Sydney suburb of Erskineville. The pub-turned-club was an icon of the city’s drag scene and served as the opening venue for Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, a film that I loved but which was nonetheless my only natural enemy as a teenager in country Queensland.
There was nothing special happening that night but it was a Saturday and two friends and I were looking to get smashed and dance. No use pretending to a higher cause.
I was drinking rum and coke like it was water and, back then at least, could stay out all night without the need for performance-enhancing drugs. The caffeine alone could have restarted a dead buffalo. Eventually, the other two grew tired and asked if I wanted to leave. I didn’t but it was also unusual for me to stay out anywhere on my own.
The idea of being the sad bloke in his mid-twenties drunk and dancing at a club was repulsive to me, but the little widget that regulates such disgust in the human body, the anterior insula, was at that point swimming in two litres of cola and spirits. So I stayed.
There was one man I’d had my eye on. He was slightly older than me, handsome and appeared to be with a friend. I couldn’t have done anything about it, though. This was during a stage of my extremely delayed development. My making any kind of move at all would have been as graceful as a cruise liner doing a three-point turn on a motorway, so I did nothing.
This might explain my stunning pliability when the man came over to me and started chatting. The rest of the evening at the Imperial is a fractured mess of memory. I remember snatches, but nothing that could constitute a reliable narrative. I do remember being propositioned to leave, though, and getting into a car with the man, his friend and another ring-in: a lad from the country who had fallen in with this small group of strangers. I recall being surprised that the cute guy was able to drive and gave the situation a cursory thought – hope they don’t crash – but said nothing.
In fact, nothing was a feature of my response that night. I fell into the slipstream of other people and let my self end up where it may. The guy from the country was in a state when we arrived at the nondescript apartment block. He was solidly built and reminded me of people from my past who chewed grass, checked rain gauges with silent concern and kept themselves emotionally hidden in order to survive.
‘I don’t wanna be gay,’ he kept yelling in a mournful, drawn-out howl. We were in a lift heading up to the apartment of the two strangers and I was haunted then, as I am now, by this bloke’s distress.
When we got inside, the other two men quickly disappeared and I sat with the country fella on a bed in another room and, through increasingly slurred speech, attempted to give him some gay wisdom.
I had not much to give. I had come out three years earlier and had only kissed a single person in that time. I knew what he was feeling because I still felt it, only he was clearly in his thirties and time had eaten away at him more than it had me. The grief I felt for him in that moment was also my own.
We tried kissing, though it was difficult for both of us. My body became increasingly paralysed and floppy and eventually I lay back on the bed wondering what it was I was even doing there.
That is when the two other men came into the room. What happened next was fast and purposeful and my response was only the faintest of recognition. Within seconds one of the men, the cute one I first spied in the club, had removed my pants and the other one was standing over my head. He shoved his dick in my mouth while the other one began raping me.
Here’s what I need you to know about that moment. Right then, I felt mild surprise and nothing more. The next morning I told a friend I’d ‘lost my virginity in a foursome’ and made mirth of it. There was no sign of anyone when I woke up that morning. The sun was high in the sky already and the apartment silent. I gathered my things in a stupor and called a cab after looking for the address on Google Maps. I still can’t remember the suburb.
I have no memory, either, of telling my friend that the men had given me ketamine, the horse tranquilliser party drug famous for the near-paralysis ‘ket-hole’ it can induce. There is not even a whisper of recall in my mind, certainly not of actually taking it.
And that is how I thought that story would end, as a self-deprecating humorous anecdote about this awkward sexless young adult who somehow stumbled into an orgy the first time he ever ‘had sex’.
Somewhere below the choppy waters of my conscious mind I knew this wasn’t true. Spinning it as a voluntary, enjoyable encounter had resulted in an obstruction of my being. I came to understand it was doing me harm. It was barely a register, at first. I was still telling new friends in 2017 the story as an in-joke, laughing with them until they asked for details on how it happened.
I watched their faces grow unsure with each new reveal until eventually I stopped, not wanting to unsettle anyone else at the table. Maybe I didn’t want to unsettle myself, either, though the truth of it is that I didn’t care.
One of the defining characteristics of the person who has survived some form of developmental trauma is that it usually takes a lot of convincing for them to know – really know – they are loved or even worthy of its graces.
The thing that should have shaken me on that night I instead understood as the normal consequence of life for someone like me: that bad things would happen to me and they would be right to happen because that had been the enduring lesson of my years to that point.
I joked about being raped, and struggled, when I was alone, to even see it for what it was, because the evidence of my worth had been arranged in such a way for so long that other conclusions were unavailable.
When I was trying to find the right words to articulate this sensation, I came across an interview the actor Thandie Newton did with Vulture about the pernicious effect the entertainment industry’s racism had on her own sense of value.
‘It just made me super-vulnerable to predators,’ she told the publication. ‘That’s the truth. Because there’s so much about not having a sense of my value. I suffered quite badly for a couple of years from anorexia, and it all feeds into this. Just wanting to disappear. What happened for me was I had a very complicated relationship with . . . I never chose. I let other people do the choosing for me. That saddens me.’
That last line about outsourcing the very act of choosing sent a bolt of recognition through me. I was like, hey, who took this photograph of me?
When abuse takes place within a family, researchers have found that the trauma is made all the worse by a betrayal of trust. The same goes for other places where children are supposed to trust adults: schools, religious institutions, sporting clubs.
Researchers Wei-May Su and Louise Stone write in the July 2020 issue of the Australian Journal of General Practice:
In betrayal trauma, symptoms are more likely to be severe, and survivors often lose their capacity to detect unsafe behaviours into adulthood. For this reason, they are more likely to stay in unsafe relationships.
On that night back in 2012, even while pickled in Bundy and coke, there were so many red flags. The ‘cute’ guy I kept looking at was sketchy as hell, he drove wasted, the vibe was totally off.
There is a tendency to think the abused child in adulthood has a sense of innocence – why else would they go with a suspicious stranger into the night and take on such a risk? This misses the point, though. In most cases, myself included, it’s not that we are naive. Truly, we’ve seen more than we should ever have. Instead, our behaviour flows from a violation of trust that infects everything else. We seek to reinforce a view of our worth that has already been so degraded.
And there is the shame.
‘If a child is abused at a young age, they tend to believe they deserve it,’ Su and Stone write in their journal paper. ‘This pervasive sense of shame can be difficult to shift.’
Outward appearances mean nothing here, as Su and Stone say. The survivor of such a fundamental betrayal can be highly regarded, loved and otherwise doing well in life and still their minds and bodies succumb to shame.
These all exist on a spectrum. I did not languish in a Romanian orphanage, for example, but I have been betrayed at a crucial moment of my development in a way that made temples of hurt in later life. Part of the reason the rape was so confusing for me is that it did not feel how I expected it would, psychologically. It bubbled away in memory and attached itself to feelings of disgust and shame but, ultimately, could never rival in intensity the prototypical hurt of my childhood.
They call these risky behaviours maladaptive. It is an unwieldy word that essentially means not helping.
I am writing this now to regain some of that agency.
It is not as simple as changing your thinking. Anyone who tells you that, especially if you suffer the physiological consequences of cumulative emotional battles, is a bit of a fuck. And I say that with empathy, for haven’t we all been that person?
I’m detailing this story now because it is important to correct my own thinking. Of course, it’s private and in some ways embarrassing. The ordinary day-to-day fear response in my brain that is meant to protect me from getting mugged or raped is curiously atrophied, yet on the other hand this has allowed me a strange bravado in writing about such things, too. At a certain point, you realise no one else can ever make you feel worse about yourself than you do, which is a kind of win.
I’m not doing this for the fun of it, though. I had to tell this story so that what follows has any meaning at all.
I forgive my rapists.
It has been eight years since I was on that bed, drugged and largely non-responsive. I’m not even sure if these men used a condom, which was the most unsettling part of the experience. It was my first time. There wouldn’t be another for six years. They stole something from me that night that will never be replaced.
Yet I forgive them.
If this could have been done any earlier I’d have been glad for it, though that isn’t how any of this works. Forgiveness is not itself a resource that can be marshalled; it is an emergent phenomenon that springs from its parts. Empathy, kindness and understanding all play their role here, but they do it in concert with due scepticism and restraint.
Put it this way: just saying ‘I forgive you’ is not going to cut it. Sure, for the recipient of that phrase it might be enough to send them on their merry way. But for the wronged, offering forgiveness is not simply a phrase.
Forgiveness is a garden in bloom. You are never guaranteed the beauty of those flowers, though your best chance is and has always been to tend to them nonetheless. We practise true absolution when we have tended to the parts of the whole.
I don’t know the men who assaulted me. It will never be clear to me whether they simply wanted something they saw no need to ask for or whether their intent was more predatory even than that. There is no map of their histories; who they are when they are not in that room of my mind – nor in that room itself with me – remains a mystery.
The room on the night is like a theatre stage in my head. Its walls were white and featureless. The apartment was modern but in the way cheap new developments often are.
Across the floorboards of this proscenium stage trod the three men and myself, playing our roles in the production of my abuse. This is dissociation in action. I am watching the four players as if from the stalls, a theatre critic alone in the dark trying to parse the drama for meaning.
In truth, I didn’t say no that night because I didn’t love myself enough to think it an option. The responsibility for abuse lies with the abuser, always, though I can’t escape the idea that being able to forgive them came only after I was able to forgive myself.
I have known mercy.
It can fall on a person the way a single drop of rain overwhelms a beetle on the concourse of the earth; suddenly, like a flood. It can leave you gasping for air.
There is love in that ministry of forgiveness, though it does not travel the way we think. When we love ourselves first, we can then forgive others. There is a recognition that to do otherwise would be to stoke the coals of hate, which is itself an abuse against existing hurt. Hate is oxygen to the fires of pain. It is both source and sustenance.
To understand the physics of forgiveness, we must start with the wound itself.
The wound is real. Whether it is physical, emotional or psychic: the wound is real and so is the hurt. Accept this.
It has happened. The thing cannot be undone, in the same way an egg cannot be unscrambled, nor the bread unbaked. The thing cannot be reversed.
But as the writer and poet David Whyte writes in his book Consolations, forgiveness can change our relationship to it.
Forgiveness is a heartache and difficult to achieve because, strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source.
To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to reimagine our relation to it.
Many are the times I have needed forgiveness but greater are the times I have needed to forgive.
In the 1930s, Swiss psychologist and child development researcher Jean Piaget attempted to build a scaffold for forgiveness as a moral good. He noted that children, before they became teenagers, rejected the idea of an ‘eye for eye’. In one example, when Piaget asked a ten-year-old boy why he did not strike back another child who had just hit him, the boy replied: ‘Because there is no end to revenge.’
It is easy to impart a sense of wisdom on to children, though of course they are all different. Still, left to their own devices and without the interference of our own learned inadequacies, I have found them wiser than adults in the realm of intuition.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the children’s classic The Little Prince, asks any child ‘who may read this book to forgive me for dedicating it to a grown-up’. He says, ‘All grown-ups started off as children (though few remember).’
What did that ten-year-old boy understand at a deeper level about his reflex against revenge? That it has such potential to extinguish the person who has wronged – an appealing notion if they are particularly odious or cruel – but that the flames of vengeance are not so easily contained to one person.
They burn more widely.
In the late 1980s, psychologist Robert Enright developed a model of forgiveness – and how to measure it – which broke the concept into six stages, five of them containing conditions that are imposed on the person who is being forgiven. Only the last stage promotes a ‘true sense of love’.
‘Because I must truly care for each person, a hurtful act on his or her part does not alter that sense of love,’ Enright says. ‘This kind of relationship keeps open the possibility of reconciliation and closes the door on revenge. Forgiveness is no longer dependent on a social context. The forgiver does not control the other by forgiving, but releases him or her.’
I don’t want anything from my abusers and I have not forgiven them because, for instance, a religious code demands it; one of the conditions in Enright’s hierarchy. There has been no social pressure brought to bear on my thinking, so the forgiveness I offer is not in deference to society at large.
It is an unconditional gift, an act of love.
‘Forgiveness as an expression of abstract identity welcomes offenders into the human community, perhaps like no other moral concept,’ Enright says in a 1994 paper in the journal Human Development. ‘It fosters the belief that offenders are of considerable worth, a part of our human community.’
I think there is considerable value in forgiveness if you can realise it at a personal level, though the literature on its value for people who have suffered significant trauma is mixed. There should be no forced expectation of it and, where there is, people who have said the words but only out of a sense of duty can be hurt even more by the giving of it.
And what of mass atrocities?
In 1998, after South Africa established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) following decades of violent apartheid, the commission’s chair Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu said this:
Forgiveness is an absolute necessity for continued human existence.
The reality of those hearings – which required confession, forgiveness in the form of legal amnesty decided by a committee, and restitution – is far more complex of course.
Cape Town’s Institute for Justice and Reconciliation executive director Stan Henkeman has said the TRC did a ‘sterling job’, but conceded it could never have been a silver bullet. Any move towards peace must start with acknowledgement but, more than two decades after the commission began, many have become stuck in a new cycle of despair. The process has been criticised for making the guilty parties feel better about their crimes while requiring little in the way of enduring behavioural change. This isn’t a violation of the stages of forgiveness because in these cases the abuse is still going.
‘If we look at the young people today, especially black, young people who are still experiencing the struggles of poverty, unemployment, and exclusion that their parents went through, they are extremely critical of the TRC,’ Henkeman told Public Radio International’s The World in June 2020. ‘In fact, they call the TRC a whitewash of white atrocities.’
McMaster University Professor of History and Global Human Rights Bonny Ibhawoh noted in The Conversation that, since the 1980s, truth and reconciliation structures have been used in countries like Chile, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, the Philippines and South Korea. Despite the limitations of the model, South Africa’s is considered the gold standard.
In his article in The Conversation, Ibhawoh quoted from Dag Hammarskjöld, who had been the secretary general of the United Nations in the 1950s. Criticised over the limitations of the UN, Hammarskjöld had once said the UN was ‘not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell’.
Ibhawoh likened South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the UN, arguing its purpose was not to turn South Africa into an ‘idyllic utopia’, as that would have been unrealistic following ‘a century of colonialism and apartheid’. Its purpose, he said, was ‘to save South Africa, then a nuclear power, from an implosion – one that many feared would trigger a wider international war’. He determined: ‘To the extent that the commission saved South Africa from hell, I think it was successful. Is it a low benchmark? Perhaps, but it did its work.’
I like this concept of forgiveness as a detour around personal hell. The truth-telling part, if we are to move on from anything, is ground zero.
We’ve had no such acknowledgement in Australia and, really, no attempt at it from those in power. And it’s not for lack of effort by First Peoples, either.
Indigenous people in Australia have had such truth-telling customs in their culture long before overseas governments first tried them in the 1980s. Like, tens of thousands of years before. I know, right?
In Yolngu-Matha language the process of healing that begins with truth-telling is called Makarrata and it has been proposed as a reconciliation policy solution in Australia since the late 1970s. In 2017, the bid for constitutional recognition of First Nations people through the Uluru Statement of the Heart process coincided with growing calls for the establishment of a Makarrata Commission.
The omission in our own history is just as harmful as the alternative, sanitised stories we have told in its place.
I didn’t learn much about the intricacies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture in school. Oh, there was much about the First Fleet and the penal colony and occasional spotlights on figures like Neville Bonner and Truganini (though I knew nothing of the horrors she endured until I went looking for penguins on Bruny Island with my mum and came across a lonely sign in her honour).
But there was nothing substantial in that education that alluded to what non-Indigenous Australians did. In high-school English we watched the film Rabbit-Proof Fence, and discussions ranged into the fertile territory of dispossession and attempted genocide. (I would learn nothing of the Frontier Wars until my mid-twenties.)
Institutionally at least, there was always the sense that Indigenous people were standing in the way of an overwhelmingly white narrative of progress and conquest.
I had more reason than most to know at least a little bit about what came before white settlement: my father and his ancestors had grown up side by side with Aboriginal people on the edge of the Simpson Desert. Though these relationships were always by their very nature unequal, the two groups adopted much from the other.
I could not distinguish between the peculiar accent of my dad and the Indigenous people in that corner of far-west Queensland that runs into the emptiness of South Australia; they were one and the same.
These were superficial observations, however, and I would go through life painfully unaware of anything more than that.
In early 2020 an internet acquaintance of mine – it’s a big world out there – messaged me on social media with a screenshot from a new book about the Coniston massacre by Michael Bradley. The passage contained a single reference to a ‘Nugget’ Morton. My friend asked: ‘Any relation?’
I had never heard the name before, though my general rule of thumb in life was to assume that any Morton west of Dalby in Queensland and into South Australia and the Northern Territory must have been a relation.
My father’s family had settled on the Birdsville Track by the turn of the twentieth century and then ruled it with malice and blunt cunning for a century. Everyone knew that name and everyone knew the violent echoes of their bloodline.
I was immediately intrigued and began weeks of searching through ancestry records and old newspaper clippings on Trove, that gem of a platform hosted by the National Library of Australia.
In 1984, the year my brother, Toby, was born, the Canberra Times ran the second in its series of excerpts from the book The Killing Times by John Cribbin, a fictionalised account of the massacre of the Warlpiri people. Thanks to Trove, I was able to read the extracts and, as I moved my eyes through the archived newsprint, a feeling of dreadful recognition coursed through my body.
Nugget Morton was a ‘frontiersman’ who had moved into the harsh landscape of central Australia ‘prepared to shape it to his purpose’. As Cribbin tells it, Morton was in his mid-forties at the time. Although a cattleman for most his life, his venture to establish a holding along the Lander River with a mob of cattle driven south across the desert was a bold one. There were no fences, nor any buildings. In fact there was nothing there at all to announce to the world proper that Nugget Morton had claimed this land as Broadmeadows Station.
‘It was a raw tract of open bush where the stock were allowed to forage free,’ Cribbin writes. ‘Broadmeadow offered the most primitive subsistence to those who settled it but, in a sense, this suited Morton for beneath the exterior of this 20th century white [fella] was a most primitive man.’
Sure, he was a man of immense proportions; nearly as wide as he was tall. His arms looked like other man’s legs, as if they didn’t belong on his enormous shoulders. ‘But the primitive man showed most clearly in his face,’ Cribbin writes, ‘broad fat features, the nose hammered across it, the skin made leathery by the sun, and small primeval eyes which held the world under incessant, angry surveillance.’
Cribbins’s account was a creative retelling of the events, though it matches historical records, including firsthand interviews with and diaries of both Warlpiri people from the time as well as Nugget and his contemporaries.
Nugget’s appraisal here was also an eerily precise description of almost every man in the Morton family going back as far as I knew, with only the rare one or two – my father and great-grandfather – turning into drought foals, lean and undersized. In my first book I called my forebears ‘barrels with legs’ and have, to a smaller degree, inherited some of their flat-footed gracelessness.
Now, of course, I had to know if this man was a distant relative. The similarities were uncanny, both physically and in his character.
Bryan Bowman, who later became the owner of the titular Coniston Station, called Nugget the ‘cruellest’ human being he had ever known. He said Nugget rode about the land with a gun always within reach and trailed by two particularly savage dogs, Nero and Tiger, who did his bidding.
If terror could manifest as physical forms, it might look much like Nugget stalking across his leaseholding.
Although the key events of this tale took place in 1928, an ‘uncommon insight’ into the man can be found via the personal diaries of T.G.H. Strehlow, an Aboriginal affairs patrol officer in the then Commonwealth-controlled territory, who had been sent in 1937 to investigate Morton’s suspected breaches of the Aboriginal protectionist legislation. Strehlow wrote:
Nugget Morton was keeping a Western Australian lubra [woman] there for his stockwork: she had tried to run away – as well as some of the girl victims mentioned below – but Morton had got her back (and the other two) each time and inflicted a severe hiding as a deterrent against further attempts to run away.
Nugget was since employing as ‘stockmen’ (he has no male abos. working for him) one or two other little native girls, 9 or 10 years of age, whom he had raped. Another little girl he had given to his nephew ‘Shrimp’, who was about 17 years of age.
Ben Nicker, who was working for Nugget, was similarly using a little girl, and both Ben and the girl were suffering from gonorrhoea.
The entries are considerably detailed, furnished with derogatory terms common for the time, and somewhat matter-of-fact. That the depravity of these acts should still leap off the page is testament to the horrors inflicted on Indigenous people, horrors that would march on through time and become harder to hide.
I’ve written elsewhere about the amorphous secret involving my grandfather George Morton’s abuse of an Aboriginal woman. Whether it was above-average violence or sexual assault or rape is unclear, but the extended family do know my grandmother provided a false alibi as leverage to secure an education for her seven children. Until that moment, these Aboriginal women and girls had been kept as quasi-prisoners for free labour on the 6600-square-kilometre Pandie Pandie cattle station south of Birdsville.
On my father’s side of the family, they were not just witnesses to colonial violence. They embodied it.
It was Nugget’s use of ‘lubras’ – Aboriginal women stolen from their people by white men, for domestic work and rape – that was contributing to rising tensions in the Coniston area in the late 1920s. He also treated the local Warlpiri and any visitors with total contempt. He beat them savagely, often breaking their bones for being ‘cheeky’ and flailing them with a whip.
‘Nugget was an immensely powerful man. He showed his disdain for Aborigines by always sitting with his back to them in any camp,’ historian Dick Kimber writes in his twelve-part recreation of the events surrounding the Coniston massacre.
One of those Aboriginal men so disdained by Nugget was Alex Wilson, who worked for the old man when he first arrived in the Centre. Wilson had his wife, an Indigenous woman from Halls Creek, summarily taken from him by Nugget and was flogged mercilessly with the cattleman’s stock whip when he protested. The whipping left open wounds from shoulder to waist.
Kimber writes:
Fifty years later Alex . . . lifted his shirt to show me the huge scar. Alex had no reason ever to respect Nugget, but every reason to fear him – as did most of the local Warlpiri people.
Around the same time, the region had been hit by the worst drought in three decades. Cattle brought into the interior by pastoralists were drinking waterholes dry and competing with native animals for food.
‘The old ni—ers reckoned we were sitting down in their country,’ Nugget Morton told Strehlow during an interview in 1932, ‘and they started frightening our stock boys by telling them that they’d start shoving spears into them if they didn’t go back to their own country and take their cattle too. They reckoned that there wasn’t enough grass or water in the country for our cattle and their damn kangaroos.’
It is unclear if any specific thing triggered the attack on Nugget’s neighbour Fred Brooks, but certainly it was born in this environment of fear and torment. Brooks was set upon and killed by a group of Warlpiri men and women in the first week of August 1928. His body was stuffed in a rabbit hole, with one leg sticking out into the open air. Weeks later, on 28 August, it was Nugget’s turn to face the consequences of his brutal reign.
Nugget was camping out on the Lander River. Accounts of what happened next agree to a startling extent. The oral history of the Warlpiri people accords almost entirely with the version of events given by Nugget who escaped – just – with his life.
The group of fifteen men that had ringed Nugget’s camp at dawn sent in three of their quickest, and youngest, to lead the attack under the cover of asking the whitefella for food. Nugget was unusual among white settlers in the area in that he knew a number of Indigenous languages well enough for basic conversation. The best account of the ensuing fracas comes from Nugget himself as he gave it to authorities at the time. It is corroborated by Indigenous oral history from the time.
After sunrise the next morning [28 August] I was having breakfast when three natives walked to my fire. I knew them, some by name. I told them to go back and sit down.
Immediately one blackfellow walked to my fire again and said he was hungry and wanted beef. He spoke in his own lingo which I can speak and understand. Without looking up I handed him a piece of beef from the dish. He immediately seized my wrist my right wrist, swung behind me and caught the other arm behind me. The other two were on me in an instant. While endeavouring to throw them off I saw a mob of blacks rush out of the titree in front of me.
The only thing I could do was make for the revolver that was in my swag. The three who were holding me hit me with their closed fists, anywhere they could get a hit on me. On gaining my revolver I was belted over the head with a nulla nulla.
I don’t remember how many hits I got, but I got more than one. The hits on the head put me in a very dazed condition. One big Aboriginal was standing over me with a nulla nulla going to bash me over the head. I was then standing up wrestling with the other fellow who had hold of me. I shot the Aboriginal who was standing over me, in the head. The others were still belting me.
Nugget was belted with a nulla nulla, or hunting stick, on the chin, face and head and had his thumb broken clean as he reached for the revolver.
I held my left arm up to save my head and was just about all in when they left. After I tied up the cuts on my head from which I was losing a lot of blood and suffering great pain I got my horses and made my way back to my main camp which I reached in a very weak state from bruises and loss of blood.
I hesitated to include these details here because, to a certain eye, they make Nugget look heroic. But the fact is, he was a violent man whose history caught up with him. And he would descend into weak rage alongside the mounted policeman William George Murray, long considered the leader of the Coniston massacre.
Between 14 August and 18 October 1928, at least thirty-one members of the Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye people were killed in a series of ranging executions led first by Murray and subsequently by Nugget. The real death toll may never be known but it is likely to be as high as two hundred.
The agreed version of events between Murray and Nugget, told at the official inquiry in January 1929, is suspicious on more than a number of fronts. Still, Murray and Nugget admitted to killing fourteen people between them at Tomahawk Waterhole, the nearby Circle Well and on the Hanson River, which runs alongside the Lander. Nugget claimed he recognised the ‘blacks’ who set upon him at each attack.
Kimber makes an interesting point here about the Tomahawk killings. By this point in Murray’s telling of the events he had dismounted his horse and been attacked on ‘probably’ ten different occasions. As with previous attacks on whitefellas, had these things happened as Murray claimed, he would certainly have been struck with waddies, boomerangs and yam-sticks. He might also have been knifed, speared or tomahawked dozens of times over.
‘And yet there is no evidence that he needed the slightest bit of medical attention or bandaging. This is truly remarkable. His luck held in the next attack too,’ Kimber says.
Remarkable, too, that another police patrol happening at the same time as this one managed to arrest twenty men, not kill them.
Film-maker Bob Plasto, who directed the documentary A Shifting Dreaming and the dramatised film The Killing Times, once interviewed a very old Alex Wilson, the young Indigenous man who had escaped Nugget Morton’s violent rule only to find himself stuck in the murder party.
Bob asked him: ‘Did they shoot in self-defence?’
Wilson was adamant in his reply. ‘No! They shot ’em like a dog.’
Wilson told a friend of Dick Kimber long after the events of 1928: ‘They never got off their horses. They shot them down in cold blood.’
Wilson was not asked to give his account at the offical inquiry by virtue of being ‘half-caste’ and illiterate, two facts which somehow rendered his testimony unreliable.
What are we to do with such a painful truth?
Bear in mind, this massacre happened almost a decade after Australian soldiers, including Indigenous men, finished fighting in World War One. Many went and some returned, having now established what millions still today consider the values of a fledgling nation. For most of the country and its people, this was no longer some lawless colonial experiment. It was a functioning democracy with a constitution and a criminal code; it had citizens who thought themselves proper and law-abiding. To the extent that these manners and customs were assumed by most of the white population, even in the interior of the continent, they never quite applied to First Peoples. In many ways, despite the modern appearance of legal oversight and appeals to justice, these rights afforded the non-Indigenous were still mere suggestions for those whose ancestors date back 70,000 years on this land.
We don’t need a Nugget Morton in the family tree to find the current state of affairs abhorrent, though I find the idea that I might be related to him particularly troubling. Confusion creeps in because it’s understood that this particular Morton had moved from Anningie station to Amaroo by the early 1930s.
Nugget and his wife were still on Amaroo (apparently it is spelled interchangeably with one ‘m’ or two, depending on the source) by 1949, but within four years it would be owned by C.C. Morton and Sons. Celcus Charles Morton is my great-grandfather.
I can find only one glancing reference to the change of ownership buried in the records, which says the surnames are entirely coincidental. The 14 April 1950 edition of the Northern Standard notes in a section called ‘Around the Territory’:
Mr. and Mrs. W. ‘Nugget’ Morton and Terry seen in AS [Alice Springs]. They spent a busy time bidding their many friends farewell. They plan to live in Victoria. Strange coincidence that the new owners of Ammaroo Station should also possess the name of Morton.
Nugget had made his way to the interior from Melbourne decades before my extended family moved to the Birdsville Track in the late 1800s. Nugget Morton is not related, per this single newspaper clipping, to my great-grandfather.
The Morton name is everywhere in the region, spanning many decades. There are stories about Banjo Morton and Milly Kemarre Morton; Nigel Morton is the chair of a Northern Territory health service. But these are Aboriginal people and my family is not. For years and years, I assumed there had been marriages (I was naive, and possibly still am) or close connections. My great-grandmother’s closest friend was an Indigenous woman called Ethel, I am told.
But their surname, Morton, did not come from my line.
In my frenzied searching to find out whether I was related to Nugget, I came across the website of the Short St. Gallery, which represents an accomplished artist by the name of Milly Kemarre Morton. She is an Alyawarre woman and her bio on the website was illuminating.
Milly grew up on her mother’s Country, Aherrenge. She was born in the bush, with no walls around her and has very strong ties to country and is amongst the best hunters in the community. Milly’s father worked fencing the boundaries of Amaroo station, this is where the family was led and as was common they took the surname Morton, being the station owner.
They took their name from a murderer: Nugget Morton. There was no choice in it. Choice, for most people who weren’t white landholders, was a degraded and famished thing.
It is not my place to make a case for forgiveness on such a broad acreage of violence and genocide. This hurt is not mine.
The concept of Makarrata gives non-Indigenous Australians like myself a place to start. Merrikiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs is a Gumatj woman and principal of Arnhem Land’s Yirrkala School. In 2017 she told the ABC the word is a layered thing which literally means a spear penetrating a person, usually the thigh, as a form of justice ‘to calm them down’.
‘It can be a negotiation of peace, or a negotiation and an agreement where both parties agree to one thing so that there is no dispute or no other bad feeling,’ she said.
We cannot agree that which we do not admit.
Scrolling through Twitter, where I unfortunately spend most of my life, I came across a surprisingly civil argument about how to deal with racists. The discussion was between two people who would have experienced racism, though one was proposing cutting racists more slack and bringing them into the fold. The other, lawyer Nyadol Nyuon, who was born in an Ethiopian refugee camp after her family fled the second Sudanese civil war, was unconvinced.
‘This is a deeply personal choice,’ she said. ‘It shouldn’t be an expectation or a demand. If I can’t give my forgiveness willingly, if there is a pressure to seem reasonable, to forgive, to be the better man, then that is also not improvement in “race relations”.’
Nyuon’s considered analysis, something I particularly love about her presence in the Australian media scene, gets to the heart of the matter. Forgiveness cannot be forced; it is more like an essence that flows when the necessary work has been done, either on yourself or when it has been offered by the other party.
Personally, I did my time carrying hate around with me. It was a closed fist inside my chest. There was so much of it that it poured out through my fingertips during the nascent years of blogging. It filled my pockets, and my boots. I hated religion, my father, not having enough money to live, everyone else who had enough money to live. I loathed people who were well dressed (because I wanted to be) and I scorned those who seemed to be able to have fun – real, joyous fun – without drinking a bottle of rum first. There was vitriol reserved for people whose parents sent them money or chipped in for home loans, and resentment not for my mum but the social and economics forces that meant I had to do those things for her. It broke her spirit and mine. Oh, it was a time totally soaked with animus. I kept my distance from other gay and lesbian people because I did not want to be ‘associated’ with them. I didn’t want to be like them. I was like them, but that was kind of the point.
I had many good friends but I also made friends with people who did not treat me well, and whose own poisoned outlook on things came to infect mine even more. I was the Cheryl Sandberg of hating things – I leaned into it because, well, what else was there to do?
Above all, I hated myself. I was not loved because I was gay. This kernel of truth, as I saw it, became the source of every other wild fantasy of anger. The boy who felt these things was so wounded and so fragile that the force of rage sent outward was the only thing holding his constituent pieces together.
Look, I know I’m not the first person to have a moody teenager phase, even if mine didn’t arrive until my early twenties and then outstayed its welcome. It didn’t stem from some overarching philosophy of nihilism or performative disdain.
I was hurt, and hurting. There was not enough life in me then to know all that hating was making me sick. If someone had told me in those years that forgiveness was an option I might consider, I would have scorched the earth with my fury. I would have said something like, If you think that is a possibility then you clearly haven’t suffered enough to know otherwise.
Let me say this now, as someone who has largely shed this self-inflicted violence: it was cell-bustingly exhausting. Around the same time, my friend Bridie used to quote something to me, a line taken from some place I’ve long since forgotten.
‘I hate so many things I have to get up four hours early just to fit them all in,’ she would say, and I would laugh.
But here’s the thing. It was fucking true.
You won’t find me sidling up to some tortured soul like a door-to-door tout and asking them if they’ve tried forgiveness. That’s just not how any of this works. But I think even the smallest part of me then needed desperately to know that, when the work was done, it might be possible to feel kindness and mercy for those around me. More important still, I needed to at least believe some version of myself in the future could step into the weightlessness of that same grace.
As far as clear thinking goes, I’ve had more relapses than the Betty Ford Center has had patients. I will fail or forget my own advice. So don’t think of this as some gospel I found at the top of a mountain. Think of this more as a messy, living document. A thing that does not presage perfection so much as encourage progress.
In May 2020, during yet another of my sinking attacks of past trauma, I was sitting in my therapist’s office in suburban Sydney. He had a large canvas picture leaning against a wall that said:
Mistakes are proof that you are trying.
I wanted to push that poster out into a lake on a little boat made of wood and then set fire to it. Motivational posters have never done it for me, but on that day, I found that one particularly offensive. Platitudes always miss the person, I thought.
During our usual back-and-forth, the psychologist said something to me that I had not heard from any of his predecessors. (Psychologists in my life are like characters on The Bold and the Beautiful or Neighbours – they disappear from the show for months or years at a time and then come back when the scriptwriters need them.)
‘You are not that seven-year-old boy anymore,’ he said to me in his pleasant, anodyne room. ‘You have to let him go.’
I wasn’t prepared for those words spoken in that order, and nor was I in the kind of mood where I thought tears were on the cards.
And then the sobbing started. It was one of those ugly cries, where you look like the victim of a workplace accident at the Clag Glue factory. Bubbling snot, eyelashes matted together, that sort of thing.
In time, there may be better ways to describe what that felt like. But for now it seems appropriate to say it struck me as absolution.
It’s not that the adult me hated the child who had to endure what he did, though there was a significant stretch of blame that spanned the time and space between age seven and age thirty-three. That child did the best he knew how with the frankly embarrassing amount of resources available to him at the time.
I pardoned that little boy then, in that moment. And I hope he knows that I love him and that, perhaps, I always did.