At the beginning of the twentieth century, the separate colonies that made up Australia federated into one nation. It was a big moment in our brief history.
The Australian government marked the occasion of the Centenary of Federation in many ways. There were re-enactments: of the arrival of the First Fleet, of the opening of the first Parliament. All over Australia, country towns strung up bunting and had parades in period costume. And in London there was to be a showcase of Australian culture in June 2000. There’d be wine and dance, paintings and theatre. And writers, a dozen of us, giving readings and talks on the South Bank.
One of the writers was a young Aboriginal woman I’d met once before, Melissa Lucashenko.
We first met at a literary festival—the writer David Foster introduced us. Since then I’d read some of her fiction and essays. She is a terrific writer and a thought-provoking essayist.
Like many white Australians, I’d never really known any Aboriginal people. I’d met the poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and the actor and dancer David Gulpilil. In my long-ago days as a film editor I’d worked on a couple of documentary films on Aboriginal subjects and I’d met the people involved. But I’d never had a sit-down conversation with an Aboriginal person. (Not knowingly, anyway: I’d probably met plenty of Aboriginal people without being aware of their ancestry.)
So when we arrived in London for the Centenary of Federation, and I spotted Melissa having lunch in a café near the hotel, I asked if I could join her.
Rather to my surprise, she remembered our meeting, and made space beside her at the table. We hadn’t been talking long before she asked, ‘Where’s your family from?’
I stared at her, could feel my mouth open trying to find an answer. She watched me and waited.
At the next table a man crouched over his plate of pie and chips as if afraid someone might snatch it away. Along from him two women pursed their lips towards their thick cups of tea at the same moment, like synchronised swimmers.
In my mind Melissa’s question was unfolding into other questions. What family do you mean, me and my brothers and parents? Or family in the sense of grandfathers and great-grandfathers? What do you mean from? From Sydney, where I live now? From Gunnedah, in northern New South Wales, where my mother was born? From London, where my great-great-great grandfather was born?
I had no answer, and turned the question back to her. It turned out not to be simple for her, either. Her father’s family was Ukrainian, her mother’s family were Bundjalung people. She lived in Brisbane, but her country—Bundjalung country— was the far north coast of New South Wales. That was where she was from.
I was surprised by a sudden savage envy. In spite of all the damage that had been done to indigenous families and their connection to their country, she could go to a particular spot on the planet and say, this is where I’m from. So could all those English people around us: that man feeding chips into his mouth as if it were a shredder, the synchronised sippers, now both sliding the cups onto their saucers. If you asked them, they’d probably be able to tell you about some village in Cheshire or Yorkshire or Wales where their ancestors were buried. That would be where they were from.
So I sat gawping at Melissa, who was waiting for me to work out a response to the simplest question in the world. By way of answer, I told her a bit of the Wiseman story. ‘My great-great-great grandfather was born in London…’ I began. I got to the bit about ‘he was freed and took up land on the Hawkesbury’.
‘What do you mean “took up”?’ she said. ‘He took.’
He took up land on the Hawkesbury. They were the words from the family story: a formula, unquestionable. I’d been repeating them for years.
Took up: you took up something that was lying around. You took up something that was on offer. You took up hobbies and sports.
Took had many more possibilities. You took something because it was there, like a coin on the ground. You took offence or flight or a bath. Or you took something away from someone else.
The words took up were standing in for some set of actions. The words weren’t the thing itself, they only pointed towards it. The thing itself lay behind the words, an object behind a screen. Of course I’d always known that. But the lack of fit between a word and the thing it stood for had never before come to me like a punch in the stomach.
Took up—suddenly it felt like a trick.
The trick itself was bad enough. The fact that I’d let myself be taken in by it was worse. Melissa and I had exchanged such small and harmless words. Family. From. Took up. But they were turning out to be grenades.
Twenty-five years earlier, I’d arrived in London on a working holiday visa. For my generation, it was what you did: you went to Britain, because Britain was what you knew. I’d grown up learning by heart the Kings and Queens of England, the Principal Industries of Nottingham and Sheffield. I knew all about daffodils and cuckoos, about Biggles and the Battle of Britain. The cultural landscape of my generation was almost wholly British. It made for an awkward lack of fit between the cultural landscape—so vividly real in your head—and the one outside the window.
So it was a relief, twenty-five years ago, to be in the place where they matched. I saw daffodils fluttering and dancing in the breeze, I heard my first cuckoo of spring, I felt the dread as a sunless English winter closed in.
It felt that I’d come home.
I bought English clothes and an ancient English bicycle, heard myself acquiring something of an English accent. Would rather have died than go to see the changing of the Guard, the way mere tourists did. Would rather walk for miles, getting more and more lost, than stand on a street corner with a map in my hand. My day was made if someone mistook me for a local and asked me the way.
I eked out my visa with all kinds of casual jobs: I wrote captions for the illustrations in textbooks, edited documentary films, worked as a typist for companies that made soft drinks, computer printers, sheet music. I wasn’t looking forward to the day my visa would run out and I’d have to go back to Australia.
Eventually, though, I came home. I’d changed, but so had Australia. Migration from all around the world had transformed an outpost of Britain into something more complex. The national anthem no longer began ‘God save our gracious Queen’ but ‘Australians all, let us rejoice’. We were writing books, making music and doing paintings that were something other than imitations of what was happening in Britain. No one seemed to have heard of Biggles any more.
I was glad to be part of this new thing that was happening. I got on with work and family and made a good life. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
So being back in London after a quarter of a century was an odd and complicated feeling. I met my earlier self around every corner—that person who’d felt like a stranger in her own country, who wouldn’t acknowledge that she was really a foreigner here, in England.
I’d told Melissa about this feeling and said that I was planning to do some research into family history while I was here. After our conversation, it felt even more important to find out more about that shadowy man, Solomon Wiseman.