Question 7, page 14
13
When I went to leave he made a show of presenting me with an envelope of money to give to my father. It was yen to the value of twenty dollars. As if in a dream I stared at it unable to move. I felt so many things but above all I felt powerless. For what good was done, what wrong righted, what dead man resurrected, by giving offence? And so I accepted the gift politely, knowing I would never give it to my father nor tell my father about it, feeling that I had somehow traded away something invaluable and beyond any price. I hated the feel of that envelope, the deep sense of complicity and shame it summoned up in me. I threw it in a bin as soon as I left, fearing it had some power over me, some magical hold, but the feelings were not so easily disposed of. The unwelcome sense of shared guilt. I felt as if covered in filth.
14
Japan was on its knees by August 1945, its people close to starvation. The villagers around my father’s camp were reduced to living on little more than roots. For the slave labourers there was even less. The winter had been exceptionally cold. My father lost the belief he would survive. His condition grew so pitiful that even among the pitiful he was for a time excused from work in the coal mine. He was put on light duties carrying the human waste from the toilet trenches to a vegetable garden up the hill—called yama in Japanese—heavy buckets of filth slung on a bamboo pole carried by two men. The task was known as carrying shit up the yama.
One day an English POW refused to carry his end of the bamboo pole on the grounds he wouldn’t lower himself to work with a half-caste such as my father. Here, at the end of their world, a nonsensical distinction between slaves still mattered to the Englishman. To the end of his days, that memory of the Englishman refusing to carry shit up the yama with him still made my father smile.
Among the many fated to die in any invasion were the 32,000 Allied POWs who had been transported to Japan as a slave labour force. It was widely expected that the POWs would be mass murdered on invasion or, at best, used as human shields.
None of this is an argument for the bombing of Hiroshima. All of it is an argument against war, an argument that can never be won but must never stop being made. Tragedy is sometimes understood as the conflict of one good against another. A more nuanced form of this idea is that tragedy is the conflict between what is perceived to be a lesser evil against what is perceived to be a greater evil. Tragedy exerts its hold upon our imaginations because it reminds us that justice is an illusion. Hiroshima is the great tragedy of our age from which we continue to seek understanding and yet can never understand.
‘Bomb away!’ Thomas Ferebee said, the silverplated B-29 banked up and away and shortly after he fell asleep and slept the rest of the twelve-hour flight back to their airbase on Tinian Island. In his retirement he liked growing roses. ‘Bomb away!’ Thomas Ferebee said and Thomas Ferebee is about to say and Thomas Ferebee is forever saying, his body perennially glowing with all the innumerable innocent forever passing through him.
15
My father, who wasn’t a man for such things, rang within a few hours of my returning home from Japan. He wanted to know what had happened. He was ninety-seven, frail, but his mind was still good. I told him how the Japanese people had been unfailingly kind and generous, and how, amazingly, I had met with some guards who had been at his camps, including the Lizard.
And what did they say? he asked.
I thought of the earthquake. Of Mr Sato curling inwards. Of the near empty hostess bar. Of Lee Hak-rae gripping a table as the world rolled around him.
I said that they talked in detail about all of their lives except the camps where details seemed to elude them, but that I felt nevertheless that they carried shame, and how each one had expressed their sorrow and apologies for what had happened and asked me to pass them on to my father. That much was true. It was also probably untrue. And yet it was as much as I could say with any honesty.
Of Australians being dirty I said nothing. Of Lee Hak-rae’s twenty dollars of yen I said nothing.
My father stopped talking. After some time, he said he had to go, and hung up.
Later that day, my father lost all memory of his time in the POW camps. Before I had left for Japan he had lost memory of the violence. Then he had lost memory of the mud which had so tormented them all during the hell of the Speedo. Now, though, everything had gone. He knew in an abstract way—as you know you have been in the womb—that he had been in the camps, but no memory of those years remained. And yet his memory before and after the camps remained strong.
It was as though he were finally free.
In the end all that remained to him was an idea of love. He had spent a lifetime pondering that short, terrible period of his life and through some slow reduction had distilled it down to one idea, one emotion, one truth: love.
And I realise writing this that memory is as much an act of creation as it is of testimony, and that one without the other is a tree without its trunk, wings without a bird, a book without its story.
16
I wrote a novel seeking to understand these things. To resolve them. For the time I spent writing it I felt that the writing was a way of divining the undivinable. Only when I finished I realised I understood nothing.
17
Who loves longer?
18
My father was ill, and I was with him early that morning. How’s the book going? he asked. I told him it was finally done. That night he died.
Nine
1
After the great success of The Time Machine in 1895, the young H. G. Wells turned out in astonishingly quick succession five ‘scientific romances’—as science fiction was then called—in three years, culminating in 1898 in perhaps his most enduring work, The War of the Worlds, in which an ancient civilisation of octopus-like creatures from Mars invades Earth with extreme violence. The War of the Worlds is science fiction’s great ur-story.
Wells’s novel combined a fashion for ‘invasion’ stories with inventions of such startling originality that it became the bedrock of much of twentieth-century popular culture. His tale of an extra-terrestrial army, the motives of which are as incomprehensible as its technology is fatal, popularised the idea of superior non-human civilisations from other planets with a term that became commonplace for such an alien life form: Martians.
2
‘But where are they?’ Enrico Fermi asked a table of fellow physicists half a century later when chatting about the now much-discussed possibility of intelligent life from other planets. Fermi, the architect of the atomic bomb, next asked a question that became celebrated as the Fermi Paradox: if aliens were so likely to exist given the infinite plenitude of planets, why had no compelling evidence ever been found in the universe for any form of higher life?
Leo Szilard had the answer.
‘They are among us,’ he replied, ‘but they are called Hungarians.’
Szilard’s joke led to a label for a phenomenon: he and four other Jewish-Hungarian scientists—renowned for such inexplicable brilliance as to seem otherworldly, speaking an incomprehensible native tongue and an oddly accented English—became known as the Martians.
The joke was adopted by the five—Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, pointing out that his initials also stood for extra-terrestrial. Soon enough they even had a foundation story: three years after the publication of Wells’s masterpiece, Martians were said to have come to Earth, not violently to Woking, Surrey, as in Wells’s novel, but quietly to Budapest, Hungary, as an advance scout force. When Earth proved unsuitable for colonisation they departed, leaving behind five children conceived with local women. The Martians’ children grew up and became brilliant scientists who would, among much else, be in no small part responsible for inventing the atom bomb, with one central to its creation: Leo Szilard.
3
The War of the Worlds had its genesis in the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In a 1920 interview with Strand magazine, H. G. Wells attributed the idea of the book to a remark of his brother Frank, to whom he dedicated the novel. They had been talking ‘of the discovery of Tasmania by the Europeans—a very frightful disaster for the native Tasmanians’. ‘We were walking together through some particularly peaceful Surrey scenery. “Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly,” said he, “and begin laying about them here!”’
In the first chapter of The War of the Worlds, Wells makes the connection explicit—‘Before we judge them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?’
4
For a time the pale invaders must have seemed to the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as ephemeral as they had at first thought, ghosts revisiting their one-time world, as annoying and as trivial and transitory as distant visiting relatives. But they didn’t leave. They kept coming. More and more of them. When the Aboriginal people found themselves being destroyed by simple musket balls and complex disease, by butchery and by treachery, they may have felt, nevertheless, that their verities, their cosmos, their understanding of this world and their place within would endure this murderous nonsense and prevail as it had for forty millennia before.
That wasn’t what happened though.
The handful of Tasmanian Aboriginal people who survived the Black War—at most a few hundred—found themselves living in a world that, as well as being intolerable, must have also quickly become unreadable and thus absurd to them. For millennia on millennia, their stories wrote the land and the land wrote them. Whatever ideas, whatever knowledge the first Tasmanians had about the way meaning was bound into the material world of rock and river and sea and fish and tree and grass and bird and animal now meant nothing to the conquerors. Wherever the surviving Aboriginal people went there had once been words, names, practices, ideas, spirits, laws, songs, dances and stories but these were now deemed irrelevant. But if the extermination was not complete, nor was the cataclysm total. Much was lost, but some things endured.
Their island was stolen by the English but, in so doing, the English also stole and destroyed what was sacred. Looked at this way, the temple was the island and the English temple robbers. The word sacrilege derives from the same word in Latin, in which it means to steal sacred things. The invasion was a sacrilegious act. Perhaps the gaping absence that haunts contemporary Tasmania is the loss of that sacred world. For we cannot imagine it. If it were imaginable we could not be Australia today. The ensuing enforcement of the great silence, no matter the pain; the violent rage that feels the need over and over in Tasmania to destroy what is unique and beautiful, no matter the loss; all this comes from something deep within us, for which the word guilt is inadequate and perhaps even wrong. Could it be that it is the unbearable, intolerable knowledge that a sacred world was profaned? And that what remains of it must be obliterated so no memory remains?
The English invaders frequently noted the great love the first Tasmanians had of their country without understanding its profound roots. They saw this love as the motivation that made their guerrilla war against overwhelming odds so ferocious, effective and long lasting. They did not understand that this love was to prove not so easily vanquished, nor so readily extinguished.
5
The Martian John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians of his age, attributed the Martian phenomenon to the Austro-Hungarian mix of liberalism and feudalism that allowed Jews some avenues for success while keeping them away from power. This provoked ‘a feeling of extreme insecurity’, von Neumann said, making him and his fellow Martians believe that they needed ‘to produce the unusual or face extinction’. Perhaps, for the same reason, Szilard never owned a house and always kept two bags packed, ever ready to flee to the next country.
The Jewish Martians weren’t really Martians at all: they were just one more people the real Martians exterminated.
6
If the destruction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people was apocalyptic it was not total: a few survived that war of extermination (as Wells correctly named it and as colonists at the time called it), and today 30,000 claim descent from a handful of survivors.
But the genocide was not exactly, as Wells had it in his social-Darwinian way, what a species did unto itself. Rather, it was British government policy pursued with determined intent to secure the fertile grassland for the burgeoning business of sheep, the wool of which was a key commodity fuelling Britain’s industrial revolution. As in Thomas More’s Utopia, sheep once more were eating people—though with the aid of muskets, pistols, soldiers, roaming death squads, disease and systematic military organisation committed to their destruction. Looked at this way, the effect was little different from a nuclear explosion because the intent was the same: obliteration. The distance between The War of the Worlds and The World Set Free is not so great.
The invasion was at once a war of genocide and the creation of a totalitarian slave society in the newly emptied lands. And it was as just such a slave labourer on just such a sheep farm that my great-great-grandfather Thomas Flanagan began his life in Van Diemen’s Land, on a plantation called Brickendon on the outskirts of a village called Longford, formerly the kangaroo hunting grounds of the Panniher people.
Less than a mile from where Thomas Flanagan arrived as a convict slave and 110 years later, in the short time between the publication of The Voice of the Dolphins and the detonation of Tsar Bomba, I was born on a misty winter’s morning. My mother, already dealing with four children, her demanding mother and her sick husband, wept on learning she was pregnant with me, while my father dreamt of watching from inside his coffin the streets of Longford and its staring people pass by him.
7
Tasmania does not begin with a monolithic group of Martians invading and Europeans uniformly benefiting from the conquest. The Martians were the rulers and everyone else the ruled. The term settler-colonial society is lazy thinking that hides the inequality on which the new Martian world was built and the pathologies that flow from it, which run deep to this day.
Contemporary observers often commented on the way convictism was another name for slavery. The Tasmanian Aboriginal people understood the social distinction perhaps better than the slaves themselves: they liked to point out that even defeated in war they remained a free people and of a status above that of the convicts, whom they looked down upon as the unfree. That manumission was the likely but not necessary end of a Van Diemonian convict’s sentence did not mean it was any less a slave system than that of Rome. That a freed slave might rise did not mean the society was any less unfree. Nor did the shared horror of convict and Aboriginal necessarily lead to solidarity: when in 1832 a group of Aboriginal people was temporarily housed on the floor below convicts in the Macquarie Island penitentiary, the convicts pissed onto them between the floorboards.
On manumission the emancipated convicts were not allowed to return to their homelands but had to stay in the colonies. It was widely observed that they evaded the cities where the authorities ruled, preferring to find a new life in the bush where their ways often came to resemble that of the Aboriginal people with whom they sometimes had children, and these too were hidden from the authorities, their origins obscured and kept secret from the broader world. Some began to eat and live and even dress like Tasmanian Aboriginal people. A 40,000-year-old culture proved itself not so easily destroyed, nor was its ongoing influence restricted only to Aboriginal people. It reformed and reshaped and, over time, as much as there was a process of colonisation, another river, a far older river, kept flowing, and a reverse process of what we might call indigenisation also occurred, in which the freed convicts and their families and their descendants took on some of the values and mentality of Aboriginal people.
They were becoming something else, though what that something else was none knew because no one named it. They turned it into sly jokes and long stories, they felt it when they made their way through the bush, they heard it in the unique sound the wind makes passing through she-oak groves, they tasted it in the wallaby and crayfish and abalone and scallops they ate, they sensed it in the laughter and griefs of their clannish families, in the way they thought about time and land and home. But no one named it and no one could say it, and everyone claimed to be a Martian though almost no one was.
It was as if it were all finally a matter of question 7, of who loves longer, for white people had begun in some ways to think like black people. Despite themselves, they had begun living in the circles of time with which the Tasmanian Aboriginal people had once marked their island. They were not Aboriginal. Over time many became racist. But nor were they any longer European.
8
By the time he died at the age of ninety-eight my father had few material possessions left other than an armchair, chair and desk in which he had collected various writings precious to him over the years: poems, sayings, quotes, a few pieces he had written, some correspondence. Among these papers my elder sister found a letter from a now-dead cousin on his mother’s side written years before about how when they were growing up they were told over and over never to mention outside of the home that their family had black blood. The implication was that our grandmother was of Aboriginal descent.
My father loved discussing interesting letters with his family. He never discussed this letter. The story of covering up Aboriginal pasts was a common one in Tasmania where such behaviour was for some a form of survival. There is no documentation to prove my father’s cousin’s story is true, but that doesn’t make it untrue. It leaves the story as an unanswerable question mark over my family.
