reviews | Barry Dickins

THE FIRST POET OF HIS PEOPLE

• Bruce Pascoe: Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country (Aboriginal Studies Press, ISBN 9780855755492, $39.95)

Bruce Pascoe must wonder if he shall lose friends by writing a brilliant study of the rip-off that means settlement. He discovered his own Aboriginality not long ago and that has to be more like an epiphany than any revelation.
     He writes with the surest touch and touchingly, and is good at describing businessmen and colonists two hundred rip-offs ago. “It’s only twelve months since the arrival of the colonists and yet it’s a matter of conversation, among men meeting for the first time, how to eliminate the annoying insistence of the Indigenes to protect their land.” The Kulin Nation received a couple of pairs of scissors and a broken grotty mirror for their history, their turf, their everything; and the ancestors of contemporary real estate agents acquired Punt Road.
     As you weave through this heartfelt account of opportunism you reel from nausea to vertigo that this thieving happened. The work is vast like its topic, the suffering of its recorder has to be likewise. It is the gluttony of the uninvited for the undeserved – the putting to rights of lamentable anguish and an overdue correcting of the white blokes’ sins. In the chapter entitled ‘Don’t Mention The War’, the writing becomes bitter, as it should:

Historical documents can be read in a number of ways, that is the stuff of history, but to rely only on certain documents and not others is not a good history and worse than that it sours the whole discourse between the survivors of history, allowing no room for reconciliation between two points of view. Black evidence and claims made by the public are not better than the official police evidence but they deserve credence. Some will be found wanting but much of what people observe in war is crystal clear in their mind, and you never forget when your parents or children are killed in front of you.

     The delivery is so overdue it is redemptive. Pascoe has scoured libraries and archived and listened and chatted and thought and noted and notated and re-read and swatted up upon Social Darwinism, and like a good black ghost he has carted all the woe back to writing’s old water-hole, and set the whole thing out on the table.
     Bruce Pascoe also tells of racism that he has experienced firsthand, such as the story of the white crowd that chanted “Nigger!” at him as he played cricket for Lorne. Not just the once, but every single time he faced a ball. The president of the club came out on the ground fuming with rage, offering to have a go at those pathetic racists, but Pascoe politely thanked him and dug in with even more spittle to long-handle a few over the club house.
     The writing is silky, but thorny also. The anecdotes are to die for, as literally many black people did, and the ordinary white reader, the loyal honest member of the local public library, the nice clean unsophisticated reader who adores learning, may turn these honest clean pages and it shall be their turn to do the never-ending-wailing.
     What truly succeeds here is the generous response to old trespass and the writer’s understanding that grinding racism and grinding hurt and fantastic idiocy on behalf of Whitey still bloom, to the author’s cost, and his friends’ cost, but here is a new fresh history with a great olive branch for its ample bookmark.
     It is the result of study and insight. It gives its reader the rare chance to understand hundreds of years of harm and a million longings. Many years back I saw Bruce Pascoe portray Christ in a play performed in Carlton, and the agony there was unconvincing and embarrassing, with the very best intentions in this or the next white man’s world. Here the sense of place is real and convincing as well as refreshingly penned. It feels that the creator of this healing work of gorgeous words in several languages no longer languishes between Heaven and Hell, but as a Wathaurong man is the first poet of his people.

Barry Dickins is a playwright, novelist and columnist.

© Barry Dickins

Overland 189 – summer 2007, p.88.

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