There’s not a racist bone in my entire body!
Honestly, there’s not.
I know that because …. oh, fuck it, who am I trying to kid?
I’m a white Australian in his 70s and whose maternal bloodline is a mob of hard-working-class north Queenslanders, A?
With that lineage and despite efforts over a long time to be a better person, there must still be some racism floating through my veins and brain? Surely?
Don’t get me wrong. Those north Queensland rellies included some amazing uncles, aunties and cousins, none of whom ever said racist things as far as I can remember. But there was one prick of an uncle, and by that I mean this bull of a man named Cliff who was my real Auntie Dorie’s husband, who was the exception to the rule.
I took my future bride and mother-to-be of my children to norf Queensland way back in another life and this Ross River meatworks forklift driver leant across the table, waved a fork in her general direction the very first meal we shared together at their Oonoonba home, and he said calmly: “There’s only one thing wrong with north Queensland, Christine…”
I stopped chewing on my mouthful of corned beef and salad and knew instinctively the basic homespun philosophy he was about to impart with a final unmistakable flourish.
“….the Darkies!”
Oh, dear. So, did that make my Uncle Cliff a dreadful racist? Probably. But please bear in mind that we’re talking Queensland here, a place run for far too long by that hillbilly dictator Bjelke-Petersen who didn’t raise the slightest of blushes when he said something along the lines of “I’ve got nothing against Aborigines but would you want to live next door to one!’
Uncle Cliff clearly had something against Aboriginals, the word we now use, because, yes, unlike Bjelke-Petersen, he had to live next door to them. Well, across the road anyway.
Now I can understand why Uncle Cliff who worked hard all his simple, unexceptional life, might have been pissed off by the sight of a whole mob across the street drinking heavily, and playing guitars all day long on the steps of their highset Queenslander, except for when they headed into and out of town in taxis for “supplies”. Back then, I might have nodded agreement with him.
My interactions with our First Nations people while growing up were much like that.
I close my eyes and another incident springs to mind: crossing the railway line in Gordonvale around dusk with my cousin Lynnie and this amazing specimen of a full-blooded Aboriginal faced us, urinating unashamedly onto the tracks with a silly grin on his face. Some sort of welcome to country, perhaps?
Lynnie snorted and we swung quickly around him and hurried on our way, giggling hysterically.
They were some of my childhood visions: a people on the fringe of society, generally jobless and often pissed.
It was the stuff I was raised on. Heard all the time. You can’t give an Abo a job; it’ll last a week and he’ll go walkabout. Build them a house and they’ll wreck it. Or burn it. Throwing money at them is such a waste. Those black buggers wouldn’t work in an iron lung!
They were images and opinions reinforced in my years as a Queensland Country Life journalist in the early 1970s watching our country’s original inhabitants only allowed to buy grog at a town pub’s back door. Living in squalid communities on town outskirts.
And one night during those QCL years in the early 70s, sitting up on Machinery Hill watching the late night Ekka rodeo and when a little black bull came hurtling out of the gates during the campdrafting, hearing the announcer up in the booth say: “We’ll be lucky to get any work out of him!” to general laughter from the crowd.
It wasn’t that night but somewhere in my early 20s, I decided I needed to become a better person.
I started to learn something about the amazing 50,000 year journey of our First Nations people; their wonderful culture and beliefs, the tragedies that beset them the moment James Cook finished his circumnavigation of Australia and his First Fleet landed in Sydney in 1788. I had a lot to learn.
I stopped taking part in Abo jokes and voiced my dislike of them. I began to argue in impolite society that there were plenty of white people around Australia out of work or unwilling to work and on the piss but by the simple nature of things, they were nowhere near as public and as visible as our First Nations people. And they had had far better chances at a good, productive, life anyway.
I’ve tried to rid myself completely of racism and while I’m totally committed to the Voice to Parliament as a logical and sensible way of closing the gap between indigenous and other Australians in a number of life’s key markets such as lifespan, health, wealth and employment opportunities – an advisory Voice to Parliament with the basic aim of ensuring public money is spent more wisely in the future seems an absolute no-brainer to me and you’d have to be as dumb as Tony Abbott not to see that – I don’t think I’ve been totally successful.
Still, any residual racism I possess helps me understand why the No campaigners appear to be winning the referendum war with their racist lies and their general selfish, self-centred, mind-numbing racist nonsense.
And make no mistake: the No folk are kicking some solid goals right now. They’ve got other stupid, ignorant, people in their sights and the polls suggest there’s plenty of them out there.
To be continued….
Don Gordon-Brown
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