📚 Belonging (Peter Read)

This extraordinary book explores the feelings of non-Aboriginal Australians as they articulate their sense of belonging to the land. Always acting as a counterpoint is the prior occupation and ownership by Aboriginal people and their spiritual attachment. Peter Read asks the pivotal questions: What is the meaning of places important to non-Aboriginal Australians from which the Indigenous people have already been dispossessed? How are contemporary Australians thinking through the problem of knowing that their places of attachment are also the places which Aboriginals loved — and lost? And are the sites of all our deep affections to be contested, articulated, shared, forgone or possessed absolutely? The book cleverly interweaves Read’s analysis (and personal quest for belonging) with the voices of poets, musicians, artists, historians, young people, non-European Australians, farmers and seventh-generation Australians.

Source: Belonging by Peter Read

Peter Read’s book Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership reflects upon what it means to belong in Australia. I wrote a longer piece here.

Marginalia

What is the meaning of places important to non-Aboriginal Australians from which the Indigenous people have already been dispossessed? How are contemporary Australians thinking through the problem of knowing that their places of attachment are also the places which Aboriginals loved — and lost? And are the sites of all our deep affections to be contested, articulated, shared, forgone or possessed absolutely?

Do I have the right to belong in this soul-country? Do Aboriginals belong in some deeper way than the rest of us, even though none as yet lays a Native Title claim to it? Would such a pre-emptive claim of belonging—if that is what a Native Title claim is—reduce or disqualify my own sense? If so, must it always? Considering those questions, and how non-Aboriginal Australians are grappling with them, is the subject of this book.

One hundred and thirty years after my family’s exodus from England I have nothing and nobody to return to.

‘healthy’ or ‘good’ country is one in which all the elements do their work. They all nourish each other because there is no site, no position, from which the self-interest of one can be disengaged from the interests of others in the long term. Self-interest and the interest of all of the other living components of country (the self-interest of kangaroos, barramundi, eels and so on) cannot exist independently of each other in the long term.

Maybe that’s the definition of home—a place you leave and return to.

Hang the memories? Marivic the historian and Marivic the Cuban, to whom revenge is an act of personal honour, was mystified by the position of Ida and her husband Alan. Ida was quite adamant that her appalling life scars of Redfern and the north coast of New South Wales would die with her, or the next generation would not be able psychologically to survive. Seeking an explanation, Marivic reflected that perhaps that is how human beings best live, best survive, best love,
best do anything! Aboriginals replace hatred with a deliberate instinct not to hate. The art of survival was to forget.

There has to be hard negotiating. I gave birth to a little girl on this soil. Part of it now is mine. I’m not going to do the martyr thing, just hand over the microphone and the knife and say you do with it whatever you want. The hard love, that’s when we start
talking real business. We non-Aborigines have never shed blood in Australia for anything that matters. That’s the hard politics of reconciliation.

Indeed Australia is multi-centred and Aboriginality is one of those centres.

The ultimate question of a migrant’s belonging is not where or how one belongs in a new country, but the relationship between the old and the new.

‘We can’t undo our genetic make-up. I don’t like the concept of pure and authentic.’ In answer to my proposal of the Aboriginal house in which other Australians are tenants, she replies that, though it is clearly wrong that tenants can oust the owners, the analogy itself is false. The world is full of cultural mixes. We all have to live somewhere. India has been invaded by Greeks, Persians, Moghuls as well as many Europeans including the British, wave after wave of different ethnicities and religions all superimposed on each other. Despite the divisive caste system, India has accepted communities persecuted elsewhere: the early Christians, the Jewish diaspora, Parsees, Baha’i. To establish who was indigenous to India would not only be meaningless but deeply divisive. We can’t untwist history. In Canberra Manik feels that she belongs in many ways, including as Indian, ethnic, woman, Hindu, Australian, mother and suburban dweller. Like Marivic, she holds that belonging in part turns on acceptance by those around one, from participating and contributing, raising children, paying taxes, being a good citizen. She belongs on axes of time and place, culture and culture, smells, taste, memory. She is not sentimental about India; funds permitting, she returns every four or five years.

Marivic symbolically has reclaimed her country, but urges all her fellow Australians who revere this land, first settlers, second settlers, migrants and exiles, all to assert their claim to it with a hard love.

After invasion, warfare and settlement, Aboriginals reconfigured their relationship with their own land that fashioned new entitlements. Soon there were new, experiential layers of meaning overlying the old. Aboriginals cleared the bush, farmed the land, built huts, fenced boundaries, bore children, nursed the sick, buried the dead on the reserves and stations. Old and new relationships as a consequence now unite in an Indigenous culture no longer traditional, equally valid.

True belonging for Tom Griffiths, then, demands acknowledging the past, reconciling the present and nurturing the future. I just yearn for political and ethical clarity in Australia today, and this is the role that government should be able to play. When the government stuffs up at the federal level, it affects how we proceed with local negotiations.

Still she felt herself at some distance from true belonging. I’d very much like to but I don’t think I’d ever have the courage. To the Tasmanian Whites also she felt that she remained an outsider. Lyndall feels that neither knowledge nor explanation of the past alone can provide expiation. She writes that until the Whites learn to cope with these problems and resolve them, they will remain a problem for Aborigines, that is, ‘a shallow people in constant fear not only of the people whose land they have appropriated, but of the land itself’.

The trees carry their markings, the creek flows underneath the playing field, Dennis is here with me. That’s a step to belonging.

Leave the spirits to the people who made them or were made by them. Let the rest of us find the confidence in our own physical and spiritual belonging in this land, respectful of Aboriginality but not necessarily close to it. Let’s intuit our own attachments to country independently of Aboriginals. We can belong in the landscape, on the landscape, or irrelevantly to the landscape. We don’t all have to belong to each other. To understand that is a step to belonging.

A plaque commemorating the Narrabeen site, and its destruction, will remind the visitor that Aboriginality is around us and beside us. That’s a step to mature belonging.

We need the metaphors, the connections, the songs and the art. I need the Gai-mariagal stories, I need to believe that the voices in the river will never be silent, that the land bears our mark now as well as theirs. Though the journey matters more than the arrival, I think now that I’m almost ready to belong.

We cannot fully belong in our own culturally specific fashion if that fashion excludes others from belonging within their own cultures.