Time to fly the flag, Carnarvon

Tracy_Deb_Jetty_early_70sFor me, the word Carnarvon is a sensation with a myriad elements: the smell of crackling desert dawn, the roar of the Indian Ocean, stars hanging low in the sky. It’s a billy boiling on glowing coals, fish sizzling in a pan, my young parents endlessly outdoors in a world of water, spray, sand and dust. It’s a quality of light and air that exists only there, only in that place. I wasn’t born there, but I got there early enough for it to take hold of my soul. I will not be five, six, or seven years old anywhere else on earth. Or fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Carnarvon has all of those years.

But Carnarvon is also the place I was desperate to leave when I was a teenager serving buckets of hot chips at Delmonica’s Deli next door to the book exchange. Life was elsewhere, and I couldn’t wait to go find it. For quite a few years I barely looked back. And then, the undercurrent, pulling me back.

In recent years I’ve been a member of a Facebook group called I Grew Up in Carnarvon, a virtual town in cyberspace. People will post announcements of deaths and funerals, or pictures of what places in Carnarvon look like now. Both current residents and those of us long gone live companionably there. We are united online by the things we knew intimately offline: the dry crunch of the Gascoyne River, the creaking of the boards of the One Mile Jetty, the smell of prawns and mangos, the palm trees dotting a seawall known as The Fascine, the giant dish of the radio telescope looking over the town from its perch on a red sand dune. If you’re on Facebook, a certain bittersweet nostalgia is never more than a couple of clicks away.

But then a few days ago, blasting into the middle of this nostalgic idyll, an urgent posting:

OMFG can you be serious!!!!!! I’m listening to the ABC news and the Shire of Carnarvon is refusing to fly the Aboriginal Flag during NAIDOC week!!!!!! Shame on you Carnarvon Shire!

And then it was on. The comments rolled on and on.  “Disgrace!” “Shame!” and so on.

For my international reader*, a bit of background: NAIDOC stands for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee. During NAIDOC Week, held in the first week of July, most local government offices fly the striking black, red and yellow Aboriginal flag. It symbolises respect for, and celebration of, the oldest living culture on earth. For forty thousand years (some say sixty thousand) before invasion and settlement by European powers, Aboriginal people had been sitting by firelight under low-hanging stars, listening to the crashing of the Indian Ocean or the buzzing of insects on the red earth inland from the coast, singing the songs and telling the stories of the place we know now as Carnarvon.

But the shire of Carnarvon has just decided that it will not fly the Aboriginal flag for NAIDOC week in July.  The shire president insists that the Australian flag – the Union Jack plus the stars of the Southern Cross – represents all residents of Carnarvon equally, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. But local Aboriginal people are feeling it as a personal snub. For a radio interview this morning, I called someone who’d been in my sister’s class at school and asked what local Aboriginal people were feeling. Rage and despair, she said.

Why is it so hard for some Australians to look history squarely in the face? The land was wrested from Aboriginal people against their will. Dispossession was a long, drawn out and often bloody process. It stands to reason, then, that our the national flag carries traces of these meanings. It does not represent the whole story of this country; it represents a part of it. In recent years, as a nation, we have begun to recognise this and to reach out to the country’s first peoples. Sadly, Carnarvon shire appears determined to stick to a 1950s vision, one that is wilfully blind to the history and lived experience of many of its residents.

Carnarvon is an extraordinary place in an ancient and beautiful landscape. It deserves an Aboriginal flag flying freely over the Shire chambers. Let’s hope the shire councillors change their minds before NAIDOC week in July.

*Jane

A special birthday

Keith_Dawn_May_2016_webThis weekend, I’ve been celebrating the 90th birthday of Keith McEwan, father of my dear friend Dawn. We gathered in the community hall at his retirement village in Canberra to toast the life of this veteran campaigner for social justice. Keith grew up in the shadow of Pentridge Prison in Melbourne. He loved reading and thinking and in other circumstances might have had a career in any number of fields. But his family was dirt-poor – his childhood coincided with the Great Depression, and his father was unemployed from 1930 to 1941.
Keith had to give up school early to help contribute to household income.  From the age of 14 he worked in a sheet metal factory and a series of other unskilled jobs. He gravitated to left wing politics and joined the  Communist Party at the age of 21.

His work in the party took him into the heart of union and cold war political struggles of the 1950s. He was a committed comrade for many years, before his sincerity and desire for genuine democracy within the party saw him leave in disillusionment.

Afterwards, eventually, he became a real estate agent and settled into life as father, grandfather and, more recently, great-grandfather. While he left party politics behind, he never stopped supporting progressive causes or quietly supporting those about him who were struggling.  He visited prisoners, supported land rights, campaigned for the rights of the Stolen Generation, civil liberties, marriage equality and voluntary euthanasia. He is well-known in Canberra for his letters to the editor of the Canberra Times on all of these issues and many others.

So, on Saturday, family and friends from all over the country gathered in the hall and toasted Keith. Keith mostly sat in his motorised wheelchair, but stood up from time to time, very tall, and received all his well-wishers with his customary wit and warmth. Afterwards, we went back to Dawn’s place to continue the celebrations without Keith, because by now he was pretty tired and needed an early night. The evening turned into a good old fashioned soiree, with banjo playing, magic tricks and people reading from a giant book of the poetry and short stories of Henry Lawson.  As I listened to a reading of The Loaded Dog, I felt a direct connection to an all-but-vanished Australia, the Australia of mateship, solidarity and tall-tales hilarity that really did exist before it was refashioned to fit the empty, ignorant jingoism of more recent years.

But it hasn’t entirely vanished. Keith is still with us, and there are still people working towards the sort of world that Keith was thinking about all those years ago in the sheet metal factory before the second world war: a world of equality and respect for all.

In October 2012, I recorded a long interview with Keith at his home in Castlemaine, Victoria. His life is quite well documented, both through his own writing (including the book, Once a Jolly Comrade) and through other projects, such as an oral history kept by the National Library but I had always wanted to get some of the stories down on video. We got Keith talking for about three hours, almost non-stop, and even then we were just scratching the surface of the stories of this long and interesting life. After that, editing the footage properly became and outstanding item on my To Do list. Now that Keith has turned 90, I’ve decided to simply upload a chunk of the interview to YouTube as is, without any editing, because it’s material that is better going out into the world than sitting in a drawer in my study waiting for me to get a moment. It’s a big file (it’s only 6% loaded at this point) but eventually it should be available for viewing at this link:

https://youtu.be/US3XGiYpr18

How to fail at everything and die of cancer

If you take your eyes off it, it grows.

The mighty dieffenbachia

Okay, now I have your attention, I’ll hasten to add that I have not had a cancer setback; my numbers are still excellent. I’m still in hearty, robust remission, and long may it continue. No, what’s happened is that I’ve failed to even get an interview for the full time version of a job I’ve been doing as a casual for nine years. People often tell me how well I do this job. Not even an interview.

So what I’m experiencing now is a fit of pique, an imaginative foray into spitting the dummy, a brooding, repetitive thought pattern that circles like a plane unable to land. The landing place is, of course, the city of Disappointment in the country of Humiliation. I must check in, once more, to Heartbreak Hotel. I must wander Disappointment’s crepuscular streets. I step over the body of a young man who has died of lítost. Lítost is a Czech word, defined by Milan Kundera as “a state of torment” brought about by “the realisation of one’s inadequacy or misery”. The young man has jumped from the high window above, but nobody has come to take his body back to his hometown because everyone else is dealing with their own lítost and there’s no energy to do the paperwork.  A doleful waitress – she might have been a star – doles out a plate of comfort food, beige and yellow. We exchange a rueful glance.

But then I think of the dieffenbachia in my living room. This is a plant that laps up being indoors and doesn’t mind long stretches without water. I would certainly never pot it up, fertilise it or change the soil. For ten years it has grown vigorously and fulsomely, shooting straight for the ceiling. It has produced two sturdy daughter plants. This plant knows nothing of failure. It is successful, and because it lives in my house, I can claim its success as my own. Look at the plant I’ve grown!

And I think of my friend Sue. We started treatment together, finished treatment together. My cancer didn’t come back, but hers did.  She’s in deep trouble. She has four children, three of them still teenagers at school. I could claim success in this vile race for survival but even my black humour can’t go quite that black.

Success is real, failure is real, but it’s clear that these are not, and never have been, fair. Okay, I’m not casting aspersions on my selection committee (although it is tempting in these hours of pique) but the bigger picture reminds us that it’s all bullshit, really. Some people are dieffenbachias. They sit there with their vegetable success and congratulate themselves. Others – like the ten year old Indigenous girl who committed suicide in Western Australia – are struggling to secure the basic requirements of a life worth living, and blame themselves.

Google has no idea about this, though. If you ask Google for advice – as we must, because Google seems to hold the Wisdom of the Ages, and because Google is always there, and we are lazy – you will get this:

– Why success always starts with failure
– 50 famously successful people who failed at first
– Failure Is Feedback: How 5 Billionaires had To Fail To Succeed

Note how we could only come up with five billionaires? Compared to how many people living on earth? The fact is that most of us are – and must be, by Google’s definition – losers. It’s a horrible word to apply to your aunt, your partner, your children, the waitress at your local cafe, the neighbour who checks your mail when you’re on holiday, the unpublished novelist, the bedroom singer-songwriter, the swimmer who came second, the Aboriginal kid living in the remote community next to the iron ore mine making billions for one of those five billionaires.

Oh the chip! The chip on my shoulder! I’m actually laughing at myself. Could be time for a third cup of instant and to finish reading Sarah Bakewell’s exquisite new book The Existentialist Cafe, dotted through with some exceedingly consoling crochet.