{"id":3637,"date":"2007-10-28T23:20:20","date_gmt":"2007-10-28T23:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/10\/hey-whitefella-wheres-your-country\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:38:20","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:38:20","slug":"hey-whitefella-wheres-your-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/10\/hey-whitefella-wheres-your-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Hey Whitefella, where’s your country?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning I read the transcript of Marion Scrymgour’s very moving Charles Perkins address<\/a>. I was struck by the tragic story of her recently-departed father who was taken away from his parents. He passed away never without ever knowing who his mother was.
\nAs I read this transcript, I got a phonecall from my mum who asked me about whether I’m coming home for Christmas. She lives in Perth. The juxtaposition of these two things made me revisit questions I often ask myself, “Where is home and how do I know that it’s there?” A question I get all the time that I struggle with it is “Where are you from?” Sometimes here in Sydney, I’m able to give a dismissive answer, “Western Australia”, and hope that the person asking the question doesn’t realise how big WA is. But really the question is not so easily dismissed.<\/p>\n


\nMany times Aboriginal people have asked me this question as well. In recent years it seems to be getting progressively more difficult to answer. When I first went to Wadeye, I was able to say with some confidence, I’m from the Kimberley. I certainly felt like I was from the Kimberley. I still do, but the longer I stay away, the question of where I’m from becomes more difficult.
\nIn some ways I am envious of Aboriginal people. Their relationships to country are not only powerful and profound, but they’re definable. For Murriny Patha people it is the patrilineally determined conjoint responsibility for certain totemic sites within a clan’s estate that gives people the right to claim the totems as their own, the estate as their own, clan membership and with it the right to both speak and own the language. For Kija people it is a patrilineally determined link to a ‘horde’ country within the Kija speaking area that gives people the right to claim the language as their own, and define themselves accordingly as ‘Kija having’.
\nKija-pa-n=nga
\nKija_language-having-stative=1sBenefactive
\n‘I am Kija’ \/ ‘I speak Kija’
\nFor other groups like Jaru it seems the place of birth may be more important. I wouldn’t know if this is true for all the country, but for many groups people believe that their spirit comes from certain sites within the country (a ‘spirit home’) and will return their to reside after death, hopefully to be reborn into another person. That people’s spirits reside in the country surely underpins Aboriginal people’s need to remain connected with the country, even at the great personal cost of poverty and disadvantage.
\nI guess it’s in this that lies the true tragedy of the stolen generation, or part of it at least. I can’t really begin to imagine to tell you the truth, and I don’t pretend to. But the theft of children from their parents, really amounts to much more than a theft of land, language, culture and kin (as if that isn’t enough). It really amounts to a theft of identity. Not knowing who you are must be a hell of a cross to bear when you know that other Aboriginal people tend to define themselves in terms of the very things that have been stolen from you.
\nI propose the following perhaps controversial question. Could it be that it’s difficult for White Australia to come to grips with our theft of Aboriginal identity, because we don’t really know who we are ourselves? How are we supposed to define ourselves? The flipside of this might be that if we don’t try to define ourselves, will we ever come to understand those who do?
\nMy ex-wife is a whitefella who grew up in an Aboriginal town. From when she was an infant she was told stories by old Aboriginal people about country, ‘her country’ they told her. Many of those old people were and still are artists, so they talked about the country that they painted. She too is a great artist, a printmaker. The questions I’m asking are ones that we used to talk about a lot. How do you reconcile being a (knowledgeable) whitefella, in an Aboriginal town? How do you deal with the fact that knowledgeable elders have bestowed their stories upon you about their country; which they’ve also pointed out is your country, because it’s where you were born and where you have kin who are buried. What therefore are your rights and responsibilities? These are far from straightforward questions. And if you are a non-Aboriginal artist who grew up in the most incredible and inspiring country, influenced by great Aboriginal artists, how do you produce work that is your own, that is about country, that doesn’t appropriate other people’s belief systems. This is something she did particularly well, by producing what she called a ‘landscape of the soul’. It kind of tapped into a sort of universal landscape that would ring true for whoever saw it. It wasn’t identifiable as any particular tract of country yet was recognisable as ‘your’ country, no matter where ‘you’ came from.
\nHer situation is perhaps easier to define that my own. it’s not easy, but at least the question of where she comes from is not an issue. I spent the first 2 \u00bd years of my life on a central Kimberley cattle station. But 2 \u00bd years, what is that? I went to primary school on the south coast of WA, high school and uni in Perth. Then I lived in two Kimberley towns (one in the east and one in the west), before moving to Sydney to start a PhD. 2 \u00bd years in the Kimberley as an infant was enough that when I later went back some 26 years later I felt I had ‘returned’, whatever that means I don’t really know. So where is home? The Kimberley is definitely somewhere that is really special to me. But if the Kimberley is my home, where exactly? East? West? Central? I used to have a house in Broome, not any more. Gradually my friends in the towns I lived in move on, or pass away. The connection gets less and less each year. it’s always great to go back and visit, but that’s all I can do \u2013 visit. I feel like a tourist.
\nWill language help? it’s a defining characteristic for Aboriginal people’s identity, so maybe it will. I used to be able to be able to converse in a couple of East Kimberley languages but now I can hardly string a sentence together. And I know that language ownership is determined (in that area) by patrilineal descent, so that doesn’t help me. What about English? What about the fact that I say ‘bathers’ rather than ‘togs’ or ‘cossie’, will that help me work out where my home is? Ha ha ha.
\nPerhaps I can work it out from my totems? Well what are they? My motorbike???? Maybe I should get more serious about football. Football teams are supposed to have a spirit home, of sorts.
\nSometimes I think the only way I’ll be able to work out where home is, is to leave the country. Then when I’m overseas, the answer will be easy, ‘Australia’, nuff said.
\nI dunno what all this is about, but I know I’m not unique. How do other people know where their home is? Cause that’s where they live? Cause it’s where they own property? Cause it’s where their family is? Cause it’s where their mates are? Cause it’s where their job is? Cause it’s where they were born? Where your parents were born?
\nAnyway this is why I’ve decided to stay in Sydney for Christmas. Not that I’ve got big plans, I’ve just never done it before. I’ve realised that Sydney will never become my home unless I have a go at making it my home. It might not make the question of where I come from any easier to answer, but it might help me to work out where I’m at, at least for the time being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning I read the transcript of Marion Scrymgour’s very moving Charles Perkins address. I was struck by the tragic story of her recently-departed father who was taken away from his parents. He passed away never without ever knowing who his mother was. As I read this transcript, I got a phonecall from my mum … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3637"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4071,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3637\/revisions\/4071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}