Maralinga Jones page four, and a reminiscence wherein the story is given a context, of sorts.

2007-09-29T08:23:00.000-07:00

Bernard Caleo, my friend, who is always working on one project or another, gathered some people in his living room to talk about a project he had in mind to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Batman. There were comic book artists and some Melbourne historians. The idea was to do comic strips on the founding of Melbourne, blow them up, and stick them on hoardings and in alleys around the city. A city commenting on its own beginnings, for the anniversary of those beginnings, and Batman.

At the meeting one of the historians said that even well into the nineteen twenties, white people in Melbourne were still afraid that Aborigines might organise a big attack party and come into Melbourne on the war path. Massacre by angry natives was a possibility still alive in the minds of Melbournians as recently as that.

Conversation naturally turned to the way Aboriginal people are viewed by whites today. Of course everyone in the room was sympathetic. I think some of the people were even part aboriginal. There were concerns about correcting the official colonial history, that most general public weren't aware of just how much massacre of aboriginal people went on. The stolen generation came up, how terrible it was, how the white people at the time probably thought they were doing the right thing, and how the present government's refusal to apologise for it made reconciliation impossible. These sentiments were unanimous among those in Bernard's living room; indeed they are among all the people I know.

However, it is my habit to imagine the opposite of any opinion, especially one so widely held within my own circle, and regardless of how stupid or ill-considered that opposite opinion may come out I cannot help but cherish it and give it as much weight as possible, if only for balance' sake.

So I imagine a Northern Territory police officer, or a small-business owner in North Queensland, who are surrounded daily by aboriginal people who do no work, who sit in the dirt most of the day, hopeless drunks, whose young can be seen sniffing plastic containers of petrol or sucking plastic bags with chrome, and as families are always getting into domestic fights, which frequently become violent.

The policeman sees bad citizens, who seem hopelessly destined to keep breaking the law; the small-business owner, struggling herself, sees her tax dollars wasted on welfare for hopeless slobs. These imaginary people might acknowledge the Aboriginals around them are victims of their past, possibly even that current government policies contribute to their situation. But this acknowledgement is tempered and, ultimately, outweighed by a natural feeling of disgust, the same feeling one has before anyone so dissipated.

Thinks the shop-owner: my mother taught me to be diligent; to work hard and keep a positive attitude. That God helps those who help themselves and the devil finds work for idle hands.

Thinks the officer: my father taught me to take responsibility for my actions. He taught me the virtue of patience, and temperance; that to over-indulge was dangerous, particularly to over-indulge one's emotions.

I might have gone on in ultra-conservative reverie but my attention was returned to the living room by coffee and biscuits.

Surrounded by the well-meaning once again it occurred to me that perhaps the N.T. Police officer and the Nth Queensland shop owner were not such opposite company after all. Their disgust had something in common with the historians' and comic-book artists' sympathy.

(In the scramble for an idea, who knows which thought comes first, and which follows to qualify it, or even whether ad-hoc reasoning employs sequence in thoughts at all, or instead plucks something out of a simultaneous chaos? No matter, for on the page we have to put one sentence after another.)

Whether through laziness and weakness of character or through completely external factors and no fault of one's own, a person who is incapable of helping themselves has something pathetic about them. Neither disgust nor sympathy leads to admiration. It occurred to me that if sympathy and disgust are two sides of the same coin - heads for pathos, tails for pathetic - then the real opposite here was something different again, something which people hadn't felt about Aboriginals since the twenties. Fear.

An enemy, formidable enough to really be feared, demands our respect and admiration more than anyone we feel sorry for.

2007-09-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

Maralinga Jones

page three

2007-09-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

Maralinga Jones

page two

2007-09-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

Maralinga Jones
page one

maralinga jones

Maralinga Jones page four, and a reminiscence wherein the story is given a context, of sorts.