Back in my student days I’d known a lighting designer who called himself Mr Fogg. We lost touch over the years, but I was somehow still on the mailing list for his irregular ‘newsletter’. In the April 2003 edition, Mr Fogg told of a trip he’d made to the Kimberley in the remote north-west of Western Australia where he’d taken some photographs of a group of Aboriginal performers and artists. He’d exhibited the photos in Sydney and New York. Now he was going to take them back to the Kimberley and have some sort of exhibition there, so that the people in the photos could see themselves. Were there any sympathetic souls out there on his mailing list who’d like to join him?
I said yes.
I’d written scenes in which Thornhill deals with his Aboriginal neighbours, but I knew they weren’t working. I’d never known anyone remotely like the Aboriginal characters I was describing, not even seen them from a distance. I was inventing them out of the only resources I had: stereotype, cliché and guesswork.
I’d always known I wasn’t going to try to enter the consciousness of the Aboriginal characters. I didn’t know or understand enough, and felt I never would. They—like everything else in the book—would be seen through Thornhill’s eyes.
But Thornhill had one big advantage over his creator. He’d seen Aboriginal people, spoken to them, watched them going about their affairs. Heard them speak, seen their faces, their hands, their hair, their feet. I hadn’t.
In any other novel, if I’d had that kind of difficulty with characters, I’d have left them out and written about ones I knew something about. But that day on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, meeting the eye of that woman, I’d seen that there was an empty space in my own family story where the Aboriginal people belonged. The whole point of writing this story was to fill that space.
More than that—to place them in the story so that they were as fully alive, as complex and as individual as the settlers. I didn’t want them to be shadowy figures on the edge of the action or stereotypes.
I didn’t want to try to get inside the Aboriginal characters, but I needed to see what Thornhill would have: people of unmixed Aboriginal descent, living in traditional ways.
The Kimberley had cars and supermarkets, but it was the closest I was likely to come to seeing what he had seen.
In the end there were seven ‘sympathetic souls’ along for the ride with Mr Fogg: a minibus full of old hippies.
We arrived in Kununurra, the main town in the Kimberley, in the afternoon. We were staying out at the caravan park, so we went to the supermarket first for supplies. Waiting for the others outside, I was staring around. The light was so white, the shadows so solid. The sky so pale. Everything was new.
I wasn’t far from a group of Aboriginal people talking among themselves. Their skin was as black as the shadows. Their faces—I glanced quickly and then away—folded in on themselves, unreadable. They were talking quietly, and at first I thought that was why I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then I realised they weren’t speaking English. They were speaking a language where all the words and even the cadences were unlike anything I’d heard before.
Oh, I thought to myself, they’re speaking a foreign language.
I heard myself think that thought.
No, I realised. It’s me. I’m the one speaking the foreign language.
I was ashamed. My first reaction had been to think they were the foreigners. That was how backward I was, underneath those fine sentiments. In spite of all my good intentions and my high-minded thoughts, I didn’t understand a thing.
Now that was something I was never going to learn from a book. But I could use it. Thornhill might have reacted in just the same way.
Groups of Aboriginal people sat under the trees in the parks of Kununurra, blending into the flickering light and shade. The sounds of their laughter carried across the grass to us. They had an ability to do nothing more than sit. Even in full sun the details of their faces somehow disappeared. They always looked cross—those heavy frowning brows, those serious mouths—until they smiled. Then you could see they weren’t angry. It was just the way their faces were.
One man sat alone under a tree, so still, as if he was listening to something, tuned in to some other place. The darkness of his face made it impossible to read his expression.
Another man walked across the grass towards us, heading for the shop. He shot a quick glance our way and a spot of reflected light flicked into his eyes from a passing car. It made them so bright in the darkness of his face that it was as if they were lit from within.
When the Aboriginal people walked, it was in a way no European walked—it was leisurely, but they seemed to cover the ground fast. They were all legs: long thin legs with no bulging calf muscle, the feet big boxy shapes. Their bare feet settled down into each deliberate step, their weight somehow carried behind the hips. Even in the white glare of noon in Kununurra, when all humans became nothing more than silhouettes, it was easy to tell a white person from a black one by the way they moved.
I passed an old man sitting crosslegged on the ground, a wiry grey beard, Einstein hair, a black vest on his bare chest. ‘Hello,’ I said as I passed—it seemed rude to say nothing—and he gave a small gesture with one hand and an inclination of the head: a king acknowledging his subject.
When they looked at us what did they see? Did they think, our land, these rude people coming without asking? We might have seen them as ‘homeless’ or what a shopkeeper called ‘riffraff’— but did they regard us as people who’d walked straight into their living room without even knocking?
Nothing was disturbing or threatening about any of them, but there was a powerful sense of them as ‘other’. For a man like Thornhill, out there in the bush, a day’s boat ride from any help, that otherness might have seemed threatening. He might have been frightened, and fear might have made him do anything at all.
We met the artists at the house where they stayed when they were in town. They were old men in frayed suit jackets, flannelette shirts, bare feet. They were stern, dignified. Their faces were on a big scale. Nose, eyebrows, mouth: everything was large, serious, workmanlike.
They didn’t speak much. Their English was so accented it was almost impossible to understand. It came in clots, short bursts of sound. My Gija, however, was much worse than their English.
Even with each other they seemed to be men of few words.
One man sat on the couch on the verandah. With a long imperious finger he gestured for his cup to be refilled—a flick of the wrist, a small expressive movement of the shiny black fingers, fluid as water, as if they were equipped with extra joints.
They were cattlemen before the equal pay claim went through in 1968. Then they were all sacked by the station owners. But it meant these men knew their country, because the cattle stations were on their traditional land. That was what they painted. The canvases were simple shapes in bold colours, a few lines of dots. Some of them had terse titles. ‘Kangaroo Dreaming’. ‘Emu Dreaming’. Now and then, if pressed, they might reluctantly point to a part of the painting and say, ‘it’s a big waterhole’ or ‘where the emu went’.
You knew it was much more than a big waterhole, much more than a symbolic shape on canvas. It embodied the whole story they knew about the place. They knew the story in all its nuances, but they were only going to tell what they chose to.
They painted with total absorption. What they were seeing as they painted seemed to go far beyond the surface of the canvas. It was as if they could see every detail of the place in the eye of their mind, even though it might have been years since they’d been able to visit it. Watching them paint you could see how deep it went. They didn’t need to see it.
I felt awkward with them. Not easily sharing a language made it difficult. But it was more than that. These rigorous old men made me aware that I was living in a place I didn’t know the first thing about.
We had the show in the Kununurra library. The librarian told me the men had probably never been inside the library before. She was terribly pleased that they were there and understood that it wouldn’t have been easy for them to come. They stalked in as a group, in cowboy shirts and boots, courteous but reserved, and sat down in the plastic chairs, their faces unreadable.
An elder from their community gave a speech. She stood four-square, in a bright patterned skirt and a shirt of another bright pattern. Her face was lean, deeply grooved. Her face, her body, had nothing extraneous about them. The essential human face, the essential human body.
She told the story of a massacre of Aboriginal people that had happened on their country. A boab tree marked the spot. After the massacre the bodies were burned. She told us that there was still a big bare place on the ground. ‘The fat came out of the bodies,’ she said, very matter-of-fact. ‘So nothing grows there after that.’
The audience—mostly white—listened in silence. In this welcoming place, this room full of books, pictures, smiling librarians, this story was like a truck driving through the wall. The things she was talking about had happened just down the road. It was in the lifetime of her own grandmother. Of our own grandmothers.
Afterwards, when everyone had gone, we took down the white fabric we’d pinned up as background for the photographs and put the chairs back where they belonged. I moved the chair where one of the painters had sat, a long tall thin man with legs bowed as if from years in the saddle. On the carpet around the chair were pebbles—red chips of the stone the country was made of.
The librarian saw them too. Her eyes met mine. ‘He brought them in with him,’ she said. She was almost whispering. ‘I saw him get them out of his pocket.’ She made a secretive twisting gesture with a hand down near her hip. ‘Dropped them all around him.’
We stared at each other. Like me, she was from ‘down south’. We didn’t know what this was about, these bits of the country brought into the foreign place of the library. But we knew it was something. The gaudy shirt, the swaggering gait in the boots—all that was surface decoration, laid on top of something else.
Back in Sydney, I made some decisions. I would get rid of all the Aboriginal dialogue. It might be historically accurate to have the Aboriginal characters speaking broken English, but it made them less sympathetic, more caricatured.
Their inside story—their responses, their thoughts, their feelings—all that was for someone else to tell, someone who had the right to enter that world and the knowledge to do it properly.
I might not be able to enter the Darug consciousness, but I could make it clear that there was one. To create a hollow in the book, a space of difference that would be more eloquent than any words I might invent to explain it. To let the reader know that a story was there to be told, but not to try to tell it.
Around about the same time I began to realise that the Aboriginal people were emerging in a way I hadn’t planned: through the descriptions of landscape. The rocks, the trees, the river—I realised that I was often describing them in human terms—the golden flesh of the rocks beneath their dark skin, the trees gesturing, the bush watchful and alive. Humanising the landscape could be a way of showing the link between indigenous people and their land because, in some way that I recognised without really understanding, the country was the people.
I had one other problem in depicting the Darug: I needed the reader to be aware of things about the Aboriginal people that Thornhill wouldn’t have known—the importance of those yam daisies, for example. How was I going to convey them without intruding too obviously into Thornhill’s point of view?
Once or twice I used another character, usually Blackwood, to explain things to Thornhill. But I knew it could sound phoney to have one character explaining something to another, how it could break the trance of reading. Draft by draft I removed scenes where Blackwood held forth, and kept only a very few. Even those felt laboured, but they were so important I had to leave them.
Once or twice I let Thornhill work things out for himself, as part of the journey of his thinking. For example, after seeing the Aboriginal strategy for burning the grass to attract game, he glimpses the idea that this is a kind of farming. I could get away with this a couple of times, but more than that and Thornhill would start to be too good to be true.