The funny thing about Australia, is that the gum trees still grow through the cracks in the concrete.

My Father’s father crossed the vast seas dividing Italy and Australia by boat. When he stood upon deck it was for months at a time that he would stare across the dividing liquid wastelands, crystal blue and lapping at the hull – an expanse that can sink this ship but does not sink this ship. I was raised in a family that loved me. Really, truly, madly, deliriously. So much so that I saw the far reaches of this world, long before I was near old enough to know what they meant. We boarded the ship that would carry us off the coast of Queensland, so we could cruise between the Pacific Islands, I would stand between the hot tubs, or perhaps under the wide screen TV’s, or sink into some forgotten corner of balcony space. I would look out over that same barren wasteland and think how it might be possible that we have as little means of survival at sea as we do in our hot deserts, yet we are fool enough to claim them opposites. My grandfather does not think like this.

My mother and I can’t watch the Olympics, in particular the Winter Olympics, the AFL (Australian Football League) Grand Final and most reality TV show finales, without crying. By chance we both work for the Australian government, and I say by chance to mean not by some intrinsic patriotic design. During the coverage of the Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, I would walk into the government tea-room and see the Australian faces on screen. Conversations on their accomplishments echoed around the room as they chanted in the foreground of pristine snow-capped mountains, before elegantly executed montages, hurling themselves skies or snowboard first, over timber ramps and into murky dam water. The falling white snow of PyeongChang is lost to the Australian hillsides, the gum trees sending them wild and green and ethereal. The land sunburnt and breathing. I hear other people do not think like this.

Of all the journeys he has taken, in all the time he has had to think and plan and decided on the consequences of his actions, my Grandfather asks me, if I thought I might become a secretary in a big company someday. I responded that I felt it a bit unambitious, but he heard, ambitious, and completely understands my reservations. He has no more capacity to understand what he did when he first set foot on that boat, before any piece of his legacy breathed air. He does not know how he has changed the course of my life, the operations of my existence, it does not cross into his consciousness. It is the divide between Australia and Italy, the longest journey his mind will take.

One lonely night in Siberia my Mother’s mother’s country broke out in revolution. I have known before the intricacies of this uprising. When I was young my hand settled to the page many times trying to reconcile the relationship between myself and the country that abandoned my family. Crawling through tunnels, taking hands, eating promises for hope and sustenance as the blood meandered through the cobblestones. She followed its path to China, still steady in hubs rooted in Russian ancestry that would hold her safe and loved just long enough to see that affection waiver. When her heart fell into human hands, it was near both of their destructions, and their family’s hearts turned cold in disapproval. The doors shut on a world where he was too good, and she was not good enough and yet both pairs of feet settled on the deck of the ship that carried them to Australia.

How sad it is, how seminal the moment in white Australian culture when you realise you don’t have any Indigenous friends. That you feed the narrative that feeds the narrative that you are taught, and convinced, and coaxed into believing you are breaking. How piercing are the moments when you sit there in museums on dark leather couches and black walls, so the light of the projector reflects in the wells in your eyes, as your people, looked to your people, and saw the erratic need for destruction and did not see the magnificence, in open ranges, in the dark valleys, deserts lands and technicolour swamps from space. Who did not see lands uninhabitable yet inhabited, through minds who could not foster the notion of ecological harmony, through its complexity and indifference. I am nine years old. No one else is crying.

Sometimes, I think it a crime to love Australia. How does one look to wars, blind and unblind themselves through their glorification? To put down the Anzac biscuits and see the evil, the lack of necessity, the lies and the sacrifice. To then abandon that seething resentment so it morphs through the eyes and souls of a people, who fell into the illusion of freedom, and who died by its side. My Grandfathers feet were too big for the war, and his brothers too young, and his father already gone before the first gun shots rang. But it is in his town, that held the border between Austria and Italy. It was our family, that did not breathe enough into record or memory, who stood at the division of two worlds and were told to preserve it at all costs. Facing danger from both sides they found themselves caught between death and death masquerading as courage and cowardice in opposition. We live by their sacrifice. We are grateful to the divine powers that shielded our direct bloodline from the brunt of the force. We are moved by the actions of men, who felt the impulse to run, and who turned home to find home against them, a country shedding its own blood dawning in its hypocrisy. Men who were pushed over the hills into certain death, despite reluctance, despite knowledge of futility and senselessness. To keep appearance of glory. The veil that had so violently and effortlessly fallen, has risen again.

The blood seeps across the oceans. It came with my grandfather on his ship and it comes with me as I wash up again on these shores. No one can see clearly through the red; it covers our hands so that it marrs any structures we try to rebuild. I have heard that tears can wash away blood, but no one is crying, not near enough. Still bound are we to the mythical state of other, still wedded to our guilt, still we find ourselves incapable of reconciliation in the hollow absence beyond fleeting acknowledgement of wrong done and wrongdoing. Perpetrators turn to the intricacies of their creation. How frantically they try to unravel the ropes which they have tied. How plainly they miss the threads that would unfurl it all, send it rippling to the ground. How excruciating it is, to see those who have studied the patterns in the years that they have been left entangled within them, who’s knowledge falls to capable hands and deaf ears.

There is a beast within us. It retracts back into the caves from which it came, with meat pies and sausage rolls clambering between its jaws whenever it arises requiring pacification. It burrows itself deep into the heart of this country so it can snack and seethe, until the hunger arises again, and it returns to the surface. Petrified and delusional we sway with the creature as its clampers over the buildings we have drawn up from the ignorance barren ground. The saliva from its gums seep down into the stone streets, so they become lethargic to trudge through. We find our arms weighted as might alert someone to their presence in dreams. We are not dreaming.

There is nothing I can do to shield myself when comes the unbridled recollection of the atrocities committed on the lands that have moulded me. Perhaps I exist in some diluted way, to aid the recollection of the effects of our criminality as they filter down through the generations. My father is not one to cry, but in this moment the flames that burn me provide a heat so totalising, to maintain any real resemblance of composure is a feat so insurmountable it circumvents the hills that have divided us. The ships drift by our vision. They carry with them, the stockyards of pain in memory, and the embers are reflected in the seas where they float.

There is a scar just above my knee which stays adamant in its refusal to fade. It became puffed and swelled after I tried to conceal it with a band aid. I did not tell my parents about it until it was already festering and infected and they became overcome with that strange kind of concern governed anger. A suffocating kind of love that makes you box away something so important that you cut off its oxygen supply. My mother’s brother had once tripped in soccer practice leaving his lower leg dishevelled and mangled. The lacerations in my leg imbedded in the same place yet his injury existed far beyond reaches of severity to which I would compare mine. In the same embarrassment I knew, he hid the disease, and when my Grandmother heard the news it would need to be amputated singed into her mind were the words, no son of mine. In steadfast efforts to subdue his thrashing and wailing he was tied down to the bed so she could tirelessly scrape the dead flesh from the bone until emerging all bloodied and sweating in decay. Some forty years later I collapsed at the site of his lifeless body in an open casket. I learnt tears can still stream in the absence of explanation or understanding. He still had his leg.

These were only mere fractions of the worlds which my grandmother could draw up from the ground. How foreign were their gardens, the curing yogurt hanging in muslin clothes from roofs. Life in Russia and China had engineered them for survival, but it was in Australia that the pressure lifts. The air clean and warm and breathable. Here they lived. We love Russia, we do, but Australia saved us.

And everything is always better by the water. My grandfather lasted only a few months on the train tracks before he caught wind that the union was offering more lucrative jobs on the wharf. “It was good work”, he tells me, “I would load the storage into the hulls of the ships, and I was happy to do it when my body was young and strong and capable”. His mind cannot always recall the cargo that was loaded into the hull. Their destination only decipherable by the inscriptions on the sides of the ships. The only knowledge, in which to find unfaltering solace was that on some other far reach of the world, pairs of hands not unlike his, are waiting.

How happy he is to tell me of the moment he had enough money to buy a home with a garden. Where he could instead be young and strong and capable for the figs I would stand on stumps to retrieve from the low hanging branches. My little teeth sinking into the soft spongey flesh. I remember the mosquitos would hurl themselves to their death in the bathtubs he left outside to collect the rain. In the waters reflection you could see him flinging pickaxes into the air drawing potatoes from the dirt. Each one adds layers on my waist and kept me warm through the Australian winter. He is not young and strong and capable anymore. The gardens have melted back into the earth. Startling is contrast between his skin and mine when our hands become entangled. His, flaking away in wrinkles and craters and blood bubbles, through years of laborious, god-fearing ammunition. Intricate and lifelong incisions in his landscape, in mine have not yet been made. He often speaks of how he would like to die soon, to be swallowed up by the earth and drift away in his sleep, and he often speaks of how he would like to live, just not like this. I ask him where he might wish to be buried. He says Australia.

Reflection

John Conway O’Brien, in his article for the International Journal of Social Economics, in which he discusses the aims and principles of Marxist ideology, posits, as its central thesis, the notion of alienation (O’Brien 1992). Alienation is understood as the severing of the unique relationship between the worker, the product which they create, the personal skills in which they use to create the product and the person who consumes said product, so that all sociality and humanity surrounding the process becomes mere sociability with the objective products themselves (Schweitzer 1991). This renders individuals in a fundamental loss or separation from their own humanity, as cogs in an overarching capitalist machine with which they have no meaningful relation (Barry 2017). The whole totalising process characterised as reification (Barry 2017), from which, the fundamental goal of Marxism is to break away (Schweitzer 1991).

When my grandfather referred to his own physical agility as something which he was happy to expend as part of the overarching operations of the wharf it was apparent to me that he had fundamentally undergone this process. Simultaneously he also exerted characteristics of cultural hegemony, in the illusion of choice he expressed between working the railroads and the wharf (Foley 2002). However, he simultaneously proved to subvert these ideas in only seeing the value in the money made through its assistance to buy are house with a garden big enough for him to grow a veggie patch in which he could use his physical strength to regained his individual humanity, and retrieve that sociability in bonding with me.

As Peter Barry champions W. B. Yeats’s post-colonial perspective in its duality as “both coloniser and colonised” (2017, p. 197), the same validity may be posited on my own perspective as both white Australian and descendent of minority immigrant families, as well as representing these two families being from two separate and unique cultures, being Russia and Italy. It then became important to represents my Grandparents own devotion to Australia in order to provide a wholly complete perspective of my unique relationship to the country, especially when other immigrant families find themselves at best capable of likening Australia to an arranged marriage, where they can only just find themselves grateful to their spouse (Jacobowitz 2016).

In exploring to pit falls of Kate Grenville's The Secret River as a post-colonial text Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, investigates the white Australian notion of delegitimising Indigenous history and sovereignty in post-colonial writing. Collingwood-Whittick posits the idea that Grenville, in her inability accept the guilt which she has come to experience in learning about the genocidal truths from which she descends, has created a body of work which masquerades as piece of colonial criticism when in fact fundamentally still undermines Indigenous rights and uphold empathy towards white Australian violence (Collingwood-Whittick 2013). Although The Secret River appears still open to investigation by post-colonial criticism, in its representations of the foreign ‘Other’, or even the hybridity of identity which it explores (Collingwood-Whittick 2013), it would likely be attacked for its inability to appropriately address matters concerned with colonisation (Barry 2017). Seeing the dismissive nature of a work which remains silent on these matters, I still adopted the post-colonial characteristic of the ‘Other’(2017, p. 196), and tension between the two cultures but used this instead to address and reconcile my own guilt, in recognition of my absence of Indigenous friends, or the meat pie eating monster representing our colonial past, in order to produce a work the strove to evade Grenville’s failings. 

References

Barry, P 2017, ‘Marxist criticism’, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 4th edn, Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK pp. 159-173.

Barry, P 2017, ‘Postcolonial criticism’, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 4th edn, Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK pp. 194-203.

Collingwood-Whittick, S 2013, ‘Discursive Manipulations of Names and Naming in Kate Grenville's The Secret River’, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 9-20.

Foley, B 2002, ‘Ten propositions on the role played by Marxism in working-class studies’, Rethinking Marxism, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 28-31,141.

Jacobowitz, S 2016, ‘Reffos, Wogs and Dagoes: The Immigration Experience in Post-world War II Australia’ Ilha do Desterro, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 77-84.

O’Brien, J. C. 1992, ‘Marxism and the Instauration of Man’, International Journal of Social Economics, vol. 19, no. 3-5, pp. 107.

Schweitzer, D 1991, ‘Marxist Theories of Alienation and Reification: The Response to Capitalism, State Socialism and the Advent of Postmodernity’, The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 11, no. 6-8, pp. 27.

Bibliography

Davidson, A 2007, ‘Antonio Gramsci and Australia’, Rethinking Marxism, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 159-168,289.

Grossman, M 2013, ‘Unsettling Subjects: Critical Perspectives on Selves in Writing and Writing Selves’, Cross/Cultures, no. 158, pp. 1-41.