I used to feel it a lot when I was younger. The sense of bitumen laid smoothly over something so much wilder, and more complex. The awareness of what exists, past the boundaries of the nature strip.
It is a great country, you know. The imposition of imported demarcations. The controlled clearing, the pushing back of what was there before the projection and provision of what is convenient and effective has been successful, and efficient.
But it is strange, to be so cut off: to find oneself continuously moving across this pre-arrayed sequence of neatened surfaces. The strangest thing is how normal it mostly all feels, here, in the present day.
The settlers chose safety. They recreated what made them feel at home and laid it down, with ordinances and sub-clauses and admirably calm reliance on the Rule of Law.
And everything is pretty clean. And everything works.
But, at times, the neatness and convenience are repulsive. They shut us out. As if the buildings are inaccessible, and the constructions have no aperture.
In this country, the bins have liners. There are signs which prompt and alert us to the outlying hazards and dangers. We are protected, and certain sights are screened off, and kept from us.
I teach Higher School Certificate English, in Sydney, and one of the poems set for study this year is Robert Gray’s ‘Flames And Dangling Wire’. I think of its images today, as I look at the City through the filter of my mind’s eye. As he noted, it all appears from a distance like stencilled shapes in a smoky haze. The sandstone, and the glass and steel towers, and the domes, sometimes seem as if they are all about to evaporate.
The lightly muscled waters, sleek and tense and coiled, warily in wait. The layers of covering seem like a patina, and the modern discourses we engage in proliferate, like hastily scribbled annotations on an older, less legible manuscript.
Have you heard the invocations of the original custodians of the land, at each public gathering? Do we know what we are collectively treading on? Under the carpet and the stone and the poured concrete?
A few months ago, on a jewelled day in winter, I was at High Tea in Curzon Hall, where – years ago – my Anglican Girls’ School had its Year 12 Formal. This occasion, sumptuous, replete and complete, with sandwiches and choux pastries and bubbly, was probably named ‘The Heritage Afternoon Tea Package’.
The soaring ceilings, the crystal fountain. The heritage. Well brought up, older Anglo Australians, so beautifully put together, so elegant and composed and refined and enclosed. Celebrating 200 years of the life of Jane Austen, in The Regency Room.
An avuncular older gentleman at my table, making conversation. Proffering platters of gourmet sandwiches, salmon slices and avocado. The refinements and courtesies.
Every faux velvet chair with a cushion, each with its own cushion cover.
And he was wondering what I was doing there. Politely, of course.
Perhaps it is that generation. Modelling themselves on what they hold dear. One evening, at the Opera House, in the interval of a performance of ‘Rigoletto’, I think it was, my friend and I were sitting in the foyer with our charged glasses. And an elderly lady asked me, politely, where I was from. Did she mean, how long had I been in Australia?
‘I grew up here’, I replied, with a smile. She seemed surprised. That I could speak English? That my Korean friend and I were enjoying the opera? An Italian opera, with English subtitles? I got the sense that she felt that we were invading her space. That she found it offensive that we were so much at ease. Strange though that seems. A brown-skinned girl, and a golden boy, in faultless evening dress, observing the cultural codes, in a white building with its structures like sails, on a dark sea that predates all immigration.
So I conversed, with this older gentleman, my High Tea companion, in Curzon Hall, in the acceptable way, of how long I had studied and taught English Literature. He seemed genuinely interested, in what I had to say.
And somehow it came up that I was born on Australia Day. A celebration of settlement. Tall ships, and fireworks and drunken outpourings of bonhomie.
And he said, ‘They want to change the day of National Celebration, you know. Change the name of it. To Invasion Day’.
‘They?’, I courteously enquired, with all the colour and heat of fireworks inside me, on interior display.
What did he call them, amongst his own kind? Abos? Boongs? Coons? But to me, in The Regency Room, amidst the rituals of the 200-year Celebration High Tea, under the soaring ceilings, in the sandstone building wrought by Empire, of course, he uses proper names: Original Australians, Indigenous People.
He does not use the word ‘native’, with me looking at him, with my big, dark eyes. Good choice.
And stray sparks from the interior fireworks display lights up a little bit of the vast unexplored landscape, cut off inside.
And so I say, ‘Well, it’s pretty easy to understand where they are coming from on this issue, isn’t it? I mean, they were invaded, their culture destroyed, etc. etc. So many ways of erasing them have been tried. Why would they want to celebrate that? Seen in that way, to expect them to participate in celebrating that event, is to expect them to swallow a pretty unforgivable insult. Is it not?’
He smiled, a little uneasily. I think he wanted to say, ‘Come on, young lady, it’s not that bad. No need to take that tone’.
And so I say, ‘It’s a fact, isn’t it? Generally agreed on? Universally acknowledged? It’s happened a lot, all over the world. Thriving 21st-century economies, First World nations, built fair and square – on genocide? And everything was founded on that, right from the first contact.’
Rule of Law, built on fundamental beliefs and deeply venerated truths, of supremacy and hierarchy and assumptions, like his. Consensus.
And when he took his leave, at the end of the occasion, he thanked me and said I was a breath of fresh air.
He was not an unkind man. Just a person profoundly unaware of what lay beyond the pale.
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