Question 7, page 15
We, like many other Tasmanian families, have Aboriginal relatives. But even if our cousin’s story were true we would not be Aboriginal. We were not brought up in the Aboriginal culture or an Aboriginal community, far less known the profound racism Aboriginal people endure. But who, then, are we? Why are we? For we, like so many other Tasmanian families, live in the shade of old stories that remain with us along with the new ones that accrue.
Why had our father, nicknamed Nugget as a child after the boot polish label because he was dark, not taken issue with those who accused him as an adult of being ‘half-caste’? Where had his spiritual beliefs, highly unusual in a man born in 1914, come from?
Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life.
9
It is little noted that Franz Kafka remains unrecognised as the leading writer of Tasmania. In his short story ‘In the Penal Colony’, a traveller arrives in an unnamed colony. There the condemned are found guilty without being told what their crime is and given no opportunity to defend themselves. Their punishment is to be chained, gagged and laid in the Harrow—an ingenious machine mounted in glass so that the punishment can be observed from above by a large audience looking down. The bound body of the condemned rotates as their unspoken crime is slowly inscribed by needles working ever deeper into their flesh until in their final agony the condemned realise their crime and die.
I read this story with the shock of horrified recognition.
‘White Australians still struggle to come to terms with their colonial past,’ the English Independent—a Martian newspaper—declared in 2009, its Harrow needles beginning their work, inescapable as a man trap, as if the genocide was our invention and not theirs, as though the totalitarian slave system was our choice and not their gulag. How marvellous, to have an empire, reap its robbed riches, and yet etch its colonial failings on the colonised, to write on our bodies that we were the vulgar arriviste, the barbarian, the savage, that their judgement was our crime.
The sorry truth is that the extermination was a Martian project. The sorry truth is that the totalitarian slave system was a Martian project. It’s as if the Thousand Year Reich had prevailed and 150 years later blamed the Holocaust on the Jewish survivors. As William Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times and father of leading English Tory politician Jacob Rees-Mogg, put it in 1998, ‘The genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginals . . . was also part of an historic record which brought the benefits of civilisation to a quarter of the world.’
If I weary of the enormous Martian condescension, the endless Martian capacity for patronising, the unquestioned Martian superiority, the unending Martian arrogance that is always founded in an equal Martian stupidity and an unrivalled Martian ignorance, it is not because I think they alone are uniquely guilty.
It is because they cannot conceive—as Kafka could—that we all are.
10
The whole truth, the terrible truth, is that the Martians created the System (as it was eerily known and capitalised) in which we as convicts were made to be our own convict-constable, our own convict-flagellator, our own convict-spy and our own convict-hangman, all these posts and positions being filled by convicts. We acted as our own convict-clerks and own convict-archivists of the System, recording our own suffering in neatly compiled volume after volume of letters, memoranda, and reports written in our own elegant longhand, in the process creating the first complete bureaucratic record of a totalitarian state that was Van Diemen’s Land. We were the convict-stockmen and the convict-shepherds in remote huts who murdered Aboriginal people and were murdered by Aboriginal people who were also us. We took our own convict-children away and sent our own convict-mothers back to wet nurse the free settlers’ children when not being raped by the free settlers. We were, we are, we will and no one is exempt from the guilt: for we as Aboriginal people were our own blacktracker hunting down Musquito who had in turn hunted down others. Were, are, will be Black Mary Cockerill who—under God knows what forms suffering took in 1818 when as a heavily pregnant black woman she was interrogated by white soldiers—betrayed her lover, Michael Howe, the last of the feared Van Diemonian banditti who fled the grazier he had been assigned to as a convict, declaring that ‘having served the King, he would be no man’s slave’, and we are Michael Howe, the bushranger, who shot Black Mary when the red jackets advanced on him using her as their guide, or so said the red jackets, and we are Michael Howe’s severed head, black-bearded and bobbing in a gunny sack being carried back to Hobart Town to be shoved on a spike on Hunter Street for birds to peck at and the mob to spit on, and it is our spittle dribbling down into his eyeless sockets.
And thereafter it was we who bore the inescapable, ineradicable shame that was not ours and which would always be ours.
And of Michael Howe’s fabled lost book of dreams and garden plans that he wrote in kangaroo blood and neatly bound with kangaroo gut? We are that too. He wrote, is writing, will write, waiting for us to become a new, better story.
11
My first Oxford supervisor, a celebrated left-wing historian, on learning I had published a book of Australian history, asked what history has Australia, what culture. He was smiling. It was a statement, not a question, the implication clear. Not a block away stood a long house full of one of the biggest collections of stolen heads in the world, the Pitt Rivers Museum, among which were Tasmanian heads.
‘Women smell like slime, don’t you think,’ a fellow student told me, also not a question. Women had only been admitted to my college the year before I arrived. In an Indian restaurant on the Broad, they confidently called for service: ‘Hey, Paki—oi! You filthy black cunt, here!’ ‘Go home to the colonies, convict,’ my second Oxford supervisor wrote at the bottom of one of my essays. ‘This is feminism gone lunatic.’
I worried it was me, a failing I could not name, some absence, something fundamental I did not have and which those all around me who were so assured, did. Perhaps it was so, I thought. Perhaps I was less.
12
I searched for what might sustain me. That proved not to be London, which I found an alluring promise often made but rarely kept. I sought some wild country to escape the claustrophobia, some larger world.
There was nothing. The rivers were sewers no one found unusual, the sky a haze of fine smog no one any longer saw obscuring the mid and far distance. There was a long-ago poisoned land, domesticated and dead, full of the sounds of diesel and the odour of chemicals, that people nevertheless regarded as bucolic and Edenic. Agri-business, highways, signs, industrial noise, a weeping urban sore metastasising into something that brought on only the impulse to flee.
There was no light there, no largeness.
No one noticed anything because no one any longer knew all that was irretrievably lost. No one saw that the paintings of Turner used a different palette for the sun to depict its original light in its lemon yellows and delicate hues of pink and coral in a time before that too was lost, refracted through the growing pollution into apocalyptic reds. A general numbness prevailed. The world there was grey, the world seemed petrified by its own collapse, at once dreary and dispirited, rectangle after warehouse after polytube, its cultivated and domesticated symmetries endless.
13
At my Oxford college, where mediocrity was a virtue called tradition, there was a law don regarded as uncharacteristically brilliant. I had assumed from his implausible upper-class accent, all Germanic ho-kay ya and choppy rhythms, to his baggy cords and tweeds and old fogeyish deportment, that he too was a Martian. But they knew who he really was. They had always known. They called him what he was, his torment, his inescapable origin, for he was, as everyone said without rancour behind his back, as the matter of fact and truth it undoubtedly was to them: the dirty little East End Jew. He would have been better with no home and two bags always packed, ready to leave for the next country.
It was what was celebrated as a sense of humour, as wit, it always was and always would be and its name was Oxford, it was a destroyer of worlds and always was and it always would be. The more the law don modelled himself on them the greater the gulf grew between their status and his origins, and the more he cultivated them the more they despised him.
14
Meanwhile, the Bullers wandered the Oxford streets, dressed absurdly as themselves or offensively as Nazis and after dinner had the whores in. The Buller B— who would be prime minister wanted me to be his wingman when he ran a second time for Oxford Union president, one more whore. I told him I couldn’t stand the Union, that I wasn’t even a member, and why, in any case, would I bother? B— said when I ran he would help me if I helped him and so I repeated my original answer and B— fif-faf-fuddled because he really had no answer, no one did, he was charming and you couldn’t believe a thing he said, it was good, it was the best, it was inescapable: I could play the Australian berserk, or I could pretend to be a Martian—but, of course, the Martians always knew who you really were. It was their method. It was their penal colony. I can see now that they were also, in their incomprehensible, terrifying certainty that was so pure it was almost a form of innocence, true Martians.
15
And so the moment always returned, the man trap was always waiting and the Harrow closing, blood runnels ready, and all I could do was write another sentence, another paragraph. Write and hope and write some more in order to squeeze out the hate that for too long consumed me. I would write a million words to forget, to escape, to be free. To learn I was no less than they. But for the longest time the humiliation remained.
I would say nothing for years and decades and wonder why I was silent, would, when asked about Oxford, say something using the supposed language of Oxford, something subtle, witty, epigrammatic, balanced, and immediately regret it.
For that was not the language of Oxford.
Dirty little East End Jew. Go home to the colonies, convict. Women smell of slime, don’t you think. Hey, Paki— oi! Fif-faf-fuddle!
That was the true language of Oxford, its necessary language of hate.
16
Many years after the story in which question 7 features, Chekhov wrote another called ‘A Case History’. A doctor is summoned to visit the sick adult daughter of a factory owner. The factory is an oppressive, polluted place. The factory owner’s daughter, who lives a life of privilege, is ill, which the doctor senses is the result of a no less awful oppression than that of the factory workers. He sees in her wealth the source of her unhappiness. He understands that the strong inevitably oppressing the weak is a natural law, an idea that the doctor knows exists in newspapers and textbooks. But he now wonders if it is a law at all, and not rather a logical absurdity, ‘when both the strong and the weak fall victim to their own relationships with one another and both are compelled to surrender to a mysterious power standing beyond human life, alien to man’.
For a moment the doctor senses the tragedy in which all are enmeshed and from which none can escape. But he cannot find the words he needs to convey his insight to the factory owner’s daughter.
In the hands of a lesser writer the story would end at this moment of epiphany. But not with Chekhov. For the doctor glimpses this truth only for it to then slip away from him. As he leaves, he hears the church bells pealing and the larks trilling, and he immediately forgets the factory and its wretched workers and the sick owner’s daughter, and instead he thinks ‘how nice it was, on such a morning, in springtime, to ride in a good carriage with a troika and bask in the sunshine’.
Chekhov’s line that ‘both the strong and the weak fall victim to their own relationships with one another’ has the ring of forbidden truth. Who would dare write such a line like that today? Who would dare even think it?
Chekhov’s terrifying pity is also the truth of who we are. His doctor is the why behind Kafka’s Harrow and, with it, the truth of the spectators as well as the victim, the factory owner’s daughter as well as the factory workers, the tragedy of the Martians as well as all those they destroy. And when the story ends we are left with a further why behind that why—the unexpected forgetting that is both forgiveness and vengeance, failure and freedom.
When I imagine Chekhov, I see him in his final days, dying of tuberculosis, goatee bearded and pince-nezzed, standing on a cliff top edge in Crimea. Then he topples and is falling and we with him, at once free and light, and for a moment aware of everything.
17
We cannot be what we cannot dream. And sometimes we discover that we live in the dreams and nightmares of others and we dream anew. I only write this book that you are now reading, no more than a love note to my parents and my island home, a world that has vanished, because over a century ago another writer wrote a book that decades later seized another mind with such force that it became a reality that reshaped the world. It was a story of horror that was his fear of love, complete love without measure or boundary, and he created in its place an idea of destruction without limit. In this way, the world begat a book that would in turn beget the world.
Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them.
Ten
1
At first I thought I would escape easily. I was twenty-one, in a kayak, guiding a party of rafters down the Franklin River. The river had come up overnight. After a few mishaps upriver with some of the rafters flipping their boats, I was intent on shepherding the party safely away from a threatening drop mid-river and towards the far right of a rapid where there was a clear, deep chute.
That’s when I made my first mistake.
I let myself be caught in a sluggish current gathering above the drop. Warning others away from it, I drifted ever closer to the drop’s lip. Not until I was almost at the fall did I try to escape the current and make for the clear chute on the right. It was too late. Confident in my ability to find a way through the ugly snarl of boulders the river smashed into below I spun the kayak around, straightening it to parallel with the river as I dropped over the fall’s lip.
That was my second mistake.
The kayak’s pointed nose slammed under a rock ledge at the fall’s base and I was flung forward as the boat stalled mid-drop. Wedged in the rapid, a wild river rushing all round me, thinking the water would flush the boat free or, at worst, that I would be able to extricate the bow while staying in the boat, I now made my third mistake.
I stayed in the kayak instead of getting the hell out.
2
I tossed my body to and fro sideways to wiggle the kayak nose loose. But this only drove the kayak nose deeper into its stony socket. My rocking turned more desperate until my spray deck—the neoprene cockpit cover that seals the kayak interior from flooding—popped. The river flooded into the kayak, filling it in seconds with the force of tons of rushing water. I sensed the fibreglass behind my seat cracking as the kayak began sagging beneath me. It was folding in half. As the front half of the boat sank to the riverbed dragging me down with it, I felt myself disappearing beneath the rapid. Behind my back the broken stern splayed upwards towards the air, braced by the drop’s ledge, jamming the kayak in the rapid. The kayak’s rounded front deck flattened onto my legs from the river’s force, trapping my knees behind the moulded thigh grips. The overwhelming power of the water against my back pushed my torso up off the kayak seat so that I wasn’t sitting but hovering above it, fixed in place by my jammed, crushed legs.
The river was now rolling over me, a black plume above my head that transformed into a cascading flume of aerated white water beyond it, a small air pocket forming in front of my face, all that would keep me alive for several hours.
I quickly discovered that if I allowed the river-pour pushing at my back and head to press me too far forward, the river would slam me face-first onto the deck of my flattened kayak, my air pocket would vanish, and if I was unable to get back upright I would drown. But if I leant too far back the river would similarly slam me face-up into its flow and I would drown that way.
Bracing my torso against the torrent at my back, unable to lean backwards or forwards, unable to rest, I focused my being on balancing and riding the river’s ceaseless power as best I could, keeping my body tensed at the angle best balancing its strength with the river’s force while trying to avoid any energy wasting movement, trying too not to think of the pain beginning to course through my trapped legs where the cockpit moulding cut into my thighs.
Maintaining such an artificial posture against such power quickly became exhausting. It required all my strength to defy the river with my body as if I was a boulder forcing the river to divert around me. But I wasn’t a boulder. I was like one of those bowing, thrumming sticks you sometimes see stuck just below the surface of running water, vibrating violently until it abruptly breaks and vanishes into a small vortex.
I tried to weigh my rapidly worsening options.
Except I couldn’t think of any.
Young and stupid as I was, I knew my strength was finite. The river was not.
3
I had to abandon the boat. I frantically tried to pull the kayak’s collapsed deck up a fraction, so that I might free my knees and legs and thereby escape. It was impossible. I felt myself quickening—my thoughts, my breathing, my muscles, my senses as my mind and body tautened—ripe for some explosion of energy I could find no opportunity to detonate. It was no longer clear to me how I might escape. Only after every physical contortion was tried and then tried again and found to be hopeless did it dawn on me.
