The boldest claim in the long business of assessing the Australian character is that Aboriginal culture has had a profound effect on the culture of the people who invaded their country. At the conclusion of her book Dancing with Strangers (2003) Inga Clendinnen wrote, ‘Through processes I do not yet understand, we are now more like each other than we are like any other people.’ These extracts deal with the coming together of two cultures.
LEARNING BUSH SKILLS
Russel Ward in The Australian Legend (1958) identified an Aboriginal influence on the bushmen (‘the nomad tribe’ of pastoral workers) at a time when Aborigines were usually not mentioned in the history books.
Finally, in proportion as the later bushmen felt themselves to be the ‘true Australians’, there are hints that they felt too some indebtedness to the Aborigines. This is not to say that the remaining black men in the 1880s and 1890s were admitted to the ranks of the nomad tribe, but simply that many bushmen felt themselves to be, in some sense, the heirs to important parts of Aboriginal culture. After all, no white man has ever been the equal of the Aborigines in essential bush skills, in tracking, finding water, living on bush food, and so on. And it is doubtful whether white men have ever equalled Aborigines in some purely European-derived arts, such as horse-breaking or cattle-mustering. In the early days many a lost white man, and child, owed his life to the charity of the dark people, and even now they are still called upon whenever a white man is lost in the bush. If, as has been argued, the bushman’s esprit de corps sprang largely from his adaptation to, and mastery of, the outback environment, then the Aborigine was his master and mentor.
There is, of course, overwhelming evidence that the usual overt attitude to the Aborigines continued to be almost as brutal and contemptuous at the end of the nineteenth century as it had been earlier, but underlying this attitude and qualifying it, there grew up, often in the same person, an awareness of indebtedness to the first nomads who had come to terms with the difficult land. There are some hints, in the ballads and elsewhere, that after the Aborigines had ceased to be dangerous to even the loneliest swagman, folk-memory tended to acknowledge, perhaps to sentimentalize, this indebtedness which, like so many other components of the upcountry outlook, has since become a commonplace attitude in Australian literary work.
Hemmed in by the vertical sandstone cliffs of the Blue Mountains on the floor of the valley of Mangrove Creek, there live to-day descendants of earlier Australians, both black and white. The two races have inter-married and along ‘the Crick’ men distinguish one family from another by speaking of the white or black Smiths, Joneses or Hogans, but all alike talk respectfully at times of ‘the Old People’ whose paintings may still be seen on the walls of lonely caves which, tradition says, were later used by bushrangers and cattle-duffers.
The feeling is reflected faithfully in ‘The Stockman’s Last Bed’, one of the most continually popular bush ballads of the last century, and one of the few possessing traces of genuine poetic power. Vance Palmer’s version of the relevant stanza reads:
His whip is silent, his dogs they do mourn,
His nag looks in vain for his master’s return:
No friend to bemoan him, unheeded he dies,
Save Australia’s dark children none knows where he lies.
THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN GAME
Australian Rules Football is a local invention, first played in Melbourne in the late 1850s. There has been a long argument over whether the Aborigines had an influence on the distinctive style of the game. The consensus is that they did not, but David Thompson, a young scholar, has recently strengthened the claim for Aboriginal influence in ‘Origins of the Aus tralian Football Code’ (2005). Two important shapers of the early Melbourne rules, Tom Wills and Henry Harrison, had close connections with Aborigines.
Indigenous Australians traditionally played football. Although there were regional variations of the sport, usually a contest was played between two teams and often each team had a leader. The people of one locality would play another or the people belonging to a particular totem would contend against those belonging to another. Interestingly two common totems were eagle and crow – the eagles have been playing against the crows for hundreds if not thousands of years. Many people participated though numbers varied, presumably depending on the availability of players. Up to 200 people played a single ball game near Swan Hill. In western Victoria a round ball was made from possum pelts with the fur on the outside wrapped around crushed charcoal, which gave the ball weight. In Gippsland the Kurnai made the ball from a kangaroo scrotum stuffed with grass. At Coranderrk near Healesville, the ball was made of ‘twine formed of the twisted hair of the opossum’. A game could last many hours and the contenders played with sense of fun rather than competitive spirit, though in western Victoria the best player earned the honour of ‘burying the ball in the ground’ until later required.
According to the nineteenth-century amateur anthropologist James Dawson, allied and akin Aboriginal groups in western Victoria played a traditional form of football in which:
Each side endeavours to keep possession of the ball, which is tossed a short distance by hand, and then kicked in any direction. The side which kicks it oftenest and furthest gains the game. The person who sends it highest is considered the best player.
Reverend Bulmer observed a traditional game played by the Kurnai in which the ball was ‘thrown, or kicked up with the foot. Whoever catches the ball oftenest, wins the game’. The Kaurna around Adelaide played Parndo, taken from the name of the ‘flattish’ possum skin that served as the ball. If the ball fell to the ground a player lifted it up and passed it to another player who then kicked the parndo into the air to be caught. The Kulin of central and southern Victoria played Marngrook. A player did not throw the ball ‘as a white man might do, but drops it and at the same time kicks it with his foot, using the instep for that purpose’ which describes a punt-like kicking action.
The first games of Australian football were being played while Aboriginal people continued to play indigenous football only a few kilometres away. According to McFarlane and Roberts’ Collingwood at Victoria Park, as late as 1862 the Wurundjeri were:
often seen … in their possum skin coats, armed with spears, and retreating mainly to the unsold hill north of Collingwood where they camped with their dogs, played football with a possum-skin ball and fought with other Aborigines.
Apparently many Melburnians had the opportunity to witness indigenous football. The Aborigines at Coranderrk near Healesville also played football during the 1860s which Europeans witnessed. Considering the vast region of south-east Australia where indigenous football was played, it is possible that many early footballers observed Aboriginal games.
An Aboriginal team maintained possession by kicking, catching and throwing the ball. The Melbourne rules encouraged possession by allowing a free kick for a fair catch and ‘a succession of good well-directed kicks, to the hands of those the ball was intended for’. Indigenous and early Australian football both permitted the ball to be kicked in any direction to team-mates. The Victorians had a preference for punt and drop kicks; punt-style kicks predominated in indigenous football. Aboriginal players leaped high in the air to catch the ball from a kick and high marking featured in Australian football no later than 1862. In England soccer-style kicking was preferred and ball catching restricted. The evidence suggests it is possible, even likely that some early footballers, impressed with the indigenous game may have experimented with local skills, in particular jumping high into the air to catch the ball. There is also strong evidence that Wills was introduced to the indigenous game. If he was influenced by indigenous football it would help explain why the rules encouraged the kicking and catching game, why offside was ignored and why jumping high in the air featured early in the game. Later Harrison, who had also been friendly with Aboriginal people, helped revise the rules, the code maintaining the key features of the Melbourne club game under his authority.
AN A BORIGINAL NATION
Germaine Greer, the Australian feminist, suggested in Whitefella Jump Up (2003) that ‘the shortest way to nationhood’ for Australians was for them to imagine themselves as Aborigines, which was not, she claimed, so outlandish a proposition because there were already great similarities between the two peoples.
The common perception from within the country is that white Australians and black Australians are very different. Outsiders are rarely in a position to assess the family resemblance between the two groups, but I for one am struck by the degree of influence exerted by Aboriginal people on the formation of the Australian character and way of life. Australians, despite the official policy of multiculturalism, aren’t genuinely cosmopolitan, but they aren’t British either. They exhibit neither British manners nor British values. If Australians should doubt this, they have only to travel to England, where they will feel less at home than they would in any other part of the world. Their gestures are too ample, their voices too loud, their approach too direct and their spontaneity embarrassing. Their lack of class consciousness mystifies the English who are obsessed by calculations of relative status, and inordinately anxious to avoid the kind of gaffe that would betray inferiority. Australians are amused by the number of times English people will say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ either, when ‘gibbit’ will do. Even Australians who gradually learn to mute their responses and respect the Englishman’s desperate need to believe that he is alone in the midst of a crowd will not succeed in passing as British; after thirty years’ residence in the country, I am still startled by taxi-drivers and their ilk asking me how long I’ve been over there and when I am going home. People who should know better ask me whether I think the way I do because I come from barbarous and backward Australia. And I probably do, but I’m damned if I’ll give them the pleasure of hearing me say it.
Australians cannot be confused with any other Commonwealth peoples; they behave differently from Canadians, South Africans and even New Zealanders. It is my contention, diffidently offered, that the Australian national character derives from the influence of the Aborigines whose dogged resistance to an imported and inappropriate culture has affected our culture more deeply than is usually recognised. From the beginning of colonisation, the authorities’ deepest fear was that settlers would degenerate and go native. In many subtle and largely unexplored ways they did just that.
In the way we behave, the way we speak, the way we feel about lots of things, white Australians exhibit the effects of the gentle but insistent and pervasive influence of black Australia, passed down through our culture as surely as white genes passed into the black genome. The more we try to deny it, the more the inextricability of black and white will become obvious, if not to Australians themselves then certainly to outsiders. This is our badge of hope; we should wear it with pride.
THE LAND MAKES US ONE
In his best-selling book The Future Eaters (1994), a history of Australia through deep time, Tim Flannery considers how the harsh land influenced both the peoples who have lived on it.
It is easy for contemporary, urban Australians to forget the importance of the social bonds inherent in the ideal of mateship. After all, most of the time people are busy trying to live their lives away from the scrutiny of their near neighbours and to avoid the petty conflicts that arise as a result of living in such close proximity. But the Australian environment will not permit even urban Australians to escape indefinitely from the difficulties faced by the pioneers. The Sydney bushfires of January 1994 are a good example, but ENSO-spawned flood and fire have, at one time or another, devastated parts of virtually every major Australian city. In such circumstances, mateship suddenly re-emerges en masse in the suburban wilderness and people do extraordinary things to help those whose lives have been affected.
During the Sydney bushfires I witnessed one such event. Real estate agents are not often known for their sense of morality, but on the morning following the fire I saw an agent locate a new flat to rent, for a single mother who had lost everything, and give her $1300 in open cheques to cover her initial costs. The Commonwealth Bank – another institution not usually known for its generosity – opened its doors over the weekend, suspending housing repayments, arranging emergency funding and acting as a depot for donations. Neighbours, many of whom rarely spoke to each other, were working side by side to help clean up. Others were discreetly handing over cash to those more drastically affected than themselves. So many opened their homes to those whose houses had been burned that there was no shortage of accommodation. As a result – in contrast to the aftermath of the Los Angeles earthquake of 19 January 1994 – there was no tent city, indeed not a single tent in Sydney following the fires. For the people of places like Jannali, the prospect of a tent city housing their neighbours would have been a deep insult to their sense of mateship. They would have done anything in order to avoid it.
I find it both intriguing and heartening that European Australians should seize upon the ideal of mateship so quickly after colonising their new home. That it should persist for so long in an environment as adverse as the sprawling Australian suburbs is little short of a miracle. Such caring is the very sweetest of the uses of adversity. Perhaps there is something quite fundamental about such social obligations that makes them indispensable in the Australian environment. There is no doubt that Aboriginal culture, particularly as it existed in the more hostile environments, had this sense of sharing. Aborigines had, and indeed still have, social obligations which link people over thousands of kilometres. In times of crisis, these social obligations could see people sharing their few resources with visitors from even more severely affected areas. It is perhaps a tribute to the harshness of Australian environments that these two human groups, which are so different in many other ways, should both develop and maintain such an onerous system of social obligation and sharing.
ABORIGINAL HUMOUR
Germaine Greer in Whitefella Jump Up and Inga Clendinnen in Dancing with Strangers both claimed that there is a similarity in Aboriginal and settler Australian humour. Here are two Aboriginal jokes.
Mosquito was an Aborigine in New South Wales who agreed to hunt bushrangers in Tasmania to escape imprisonment on Norfolk Island. He eventually joined up with Tasmanian Aborigines in the bush and was condemned to death for shooting a settler. This exchange occurred in Hobart gaol.
MOSQUITO: Hanging no good for blackfellow.
GAOLER: Why not as good for a blackfellow as for whitefellow if he kills a man?
MOSQUITO: Very good for white fellow, for he used to it.
In the 1930s Depression it was a common saying that ‘We should give the land back to the blacks.’ This was one response of the Aborigines, as recorded by Richard Broome in Aboriginal Victorians (2005).
White boy he now pays all taxes
Keep Jacky Jacky in clothes and food
He don’t care what becomes of the country
White boy’s tucker him pretty good
CHORUS
Clicketa Boobilah wildy maah
Billying etcha gingerry wah
Now the country’s short of money
Jacky sits and laughs all day
White boy wants to give it back to Jacky
No fear, Jacky won’t have it that way