A collection of essays is a strange beast. In Australia’s relatively circumscribed literary/commentary scene most essays seem to orbit around a small number of journals: Griffith Review, The Monthly, Meanjin, ABR. Nine of the essays in this collection have appeared in such journals between 2007 and 2019, and this is Mahood’s third book. The first, Craft for a Dry Lake (2000) was written in the wake of her father’s death and the second Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes and Memories (2016) covered similar material to that found in several of these essays.
‘To essay’, as her very first sentence announces:
means to try, to endeavour, to attempt. It implies risk and failure. It is also the only way to find out whether something is possible. These essays are a sort of written equivalent of hunting and gathering with intent. They are the product of my own wandering among the conundrums and contradictions of the cross cultural world I’ve chosen to inhabit, and of my intent to understand and honour it.
She is aware of the perils of a white woman writing about her engagement with the black world.
The essays in this collection were written over a period of more than fifteen years, during which time the attitudes and sensitivities around who has the right to speak and write about Indigenous issues have become increasingly charged and complex. This has left me wondering about what the implications of cancel culture and identity politics might be for me. Some of the previously published essays would likely not make it into print in today’s cultural climate, but I have chosen not to edit out what might now cause offence and attract criticism. To do so would be disingenuous, and a betrayal of my endeavour to understand and communicate as honestly as I can, something of the unique cultural interface I’ve been enmeshed in and witness to for much of my life…. That I exercise cultural privilege when writing about desert Aboriginal people is a given. The question is whether I exercise this privilege in a way that can be justified. I have been grappling with this conundrum since I began writing, and it never gets any easier.
It this humility and honesty about her own limitations and the ‘conundrums and contradictions’ that bestows on her an authority to speak from the position she is standing on, not pretending to be more than she is. She grew up on a pastoral station in the 1960s- a situation in the pre-WalkOff days that evokes the depiction of outback pastoral life in Ann McGrath’s Born in the Cattle – and she grew up with Aboriginal children. In the essay ‘Flowers for Evelyn’ she attends the funeral of Evelyn, whose brother worked as a stockman on their station back in the 1960s. Although part of the white pastoralist’s family, for the aboriginal people gathered there, “I am family and this is something I have to do” and she is asked to speak first. The funeral, and the people attending it, are all familiar to her and yet she is on the edge as well. At another funeral, she hesitates to speak, and she can feel the waves of disapproval – another whitefella has let them down again.
For me, the stand-out essay of the collection is ‘Kardiya are like Toyotas: white workers on Australia’s cultural frontier’, an essay that ended up being included in the induction material of many indigenous organizations. She calls it straight. As she points out, a new worker heading to Antartica would undergo physical or psychological assessment of their ability to stand up to the stresses of isolation, the extreme environment and intense proximity to other people. Yet there is no criteria to weed out the “mad, bad and incompetent who prowl the grey zone of Indigenous service delivery”. Like the ubiquitous white Toyota ute provided to organizations, white workers (kardiyas) break down, are abandoned and in the fullness of time another one will be delivered to commence the cycle again.
There are many reasons why kardiya break down. Some break themselves, bringing with them baggage lugged from other lives, investing in the people they’ve come to help with qualities that are projections of their own anxieties and ideals. Eager and needy, they are prime material for white slavery, rushing to meet demands that increase in direct proportion to their willingness to respond to them. They create a legacy of expectation and dependency, coupled with one of failure and disappointment.
This is heightened by the constant and demanding interaction with Aboriginal people themselves, and fact that ‘blaming the kardiya is the lubricant that smooths the volatile frictions of community life.”
There are the good people, who are overworked and undervalued; and there are the sociopaths, the borderline criminals, the self-righteous bullies and the mentally unhinged, who gravitate to the positions that no one else wants, entrench themselves, and contribute in no small degree to the malaise that haunts Indigenous communities….The famous quip about mercenaries, missionaries and misfits has a lot of truth to it, and each type covers a spectrum, from highly functional through incompetent to downright destructive.
It’s interesting that she writes this chapter in the third person, whereas many of the other essays are written in the first person. She tells a fable of New Kardiya who is taken in hand by one or more friendly Aboriginal people, given a skin name, regaled with stories of the incompetence of the first kardiya, co-opted into becoming driver to take people hunting in the ubiquitous Toyota or troop carrier, becomes romantically involved with another worker, ends up being assaulted by a community member and finally terminated, only for another to take her place. Or the fable of Super Kardiya and his Super Nyupa, he a self-righteous bully and she a self-righteous protector of the helpless Aborigines. It’s interesting that she stands outside observing this when we often see her at the wheel of the troop-carrier, or frantically trying to appease a key player in a consultation over a project in which she is involved in ‘Trapped in the Gap’. However, when she moves into working on a project with urban community groups, she finds herself out of place and uncertain how to proceed.
She is largely sidelined from capital-letter Aboriginal Politics, beyond noting that the revelations about child sexual abuse provided an opportunity to “speak aound truths that would previously have seen the speakers branded as racist and their voices neutralized”. She criticizes the Northern Territory Invention which she claims
…exposes the government’s unerring capacity for wrong action under pressure, and its default response of coercive control
Based on Emma Kowal’s academic work in ‘Trapped in the Gap: doing good work in Indigenous Australia’, she dares to raise the tendency of ‘white anti-racists’ (i.e. white, left-wing middle-class professionals who work in indigenous affairs) to identify structural rather than cultural issues as the cause for any of the string of ‘problems’- poor health, poor education, unemployment, high crime rate domestic violence etc. etc. This sets up a dilemma for white professional health workers (although it could be extended to any of the other ‘problems’:
That Aboriginal people might not want the things that will make them healthier throws into question the purpose of the work the white professional is doing. It also raises the spectre of differences that run much deeper and are cultural rather than structural in their origins. And if the difference is cultural, and achieving better health outcomes means changing cultural attitudes, the white health professionals must participate in social engineering, which is the antithesis of what they believe in. Kowal’s protagonists are confronted with the irreconcilable contradiction that, in order for the frequently cited ‘gap’ to be closed, Aboriginal people must surrender or dilute their aboriginality, thus relinquishing or diminishing their power and their identity. This is their crippling moral dilemma: in their attempt to do good, they may in fact be doing home. In a situation desperate for resources and support, the most highly skilled and scrupulous people are paralysed by the effects of this contradiction.
Much of her own work in the community involved map-making. In ‘Where Words Don’t Have Edges’ she describes facilitating a writing workshop among participants many of whom were illiterate and for whom standard English was a second language. She describes a national museum exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters in which she was heavily involved, and gives a far more sexualized account of the Seven Sisters songline than I was aware of! In other projects she is drawing out traditional stories of the land, many of which map closely to multi-layered digital maps. I found some of these chapters a bit repetitive- in fact, I’m sure that some paragraphs appeared more than once- and I find myself allergic to ‘gallery catalogue’ art-speak with its tendency to complicate everything with words. As it happens, I’m reading quite a bit about AI and Large Language Models at the moment, and these chapters about indigenous ways of knowing, shorn of their ‘gallery speak’, give some hope that there is still knowledge that can’t be hoovered into a LLM because it does not exist in words. Juxtaposed against this is her chapter ‘Lost and Found in Translation’ where she discusses the literary attempts by Australian writers to capture ‘country’.
And as a bird-watcher myself, who could resist chapters on the Night Parrot?
While reading all these chapters, I was interested, but did not feel particularly emotionally invested in the author herself. It was only in the last chapters, most particularly ‘Looking for Mushrooms’ that I gained some sense of her own life-story, and that of her mother. From what I have read, it seems that this third book balances out her first one, where she looked back at her father and his story, by taking her mother’s writing and holding it up against the mother she remembered- that some mother to whom she dedicates the book. Why did she wait so long to bring her own story forward because it is her life story and experience that gives her the authority (author-ity) to write the way she does? I’ve since realized that the chapters are more or less chronological in order of publication, but I think that this is an editorial choice that mis-fired.
Nor did I do myself (or the author) any favours in reading the book through Libby, the library app for borrowed books. In this case, I needed to know how far through I was, or how long this essay was going to be, and although I could work that out, it was clunky. This forced me to read it on my tablet rather than my Kobo which I find better approximates the experience of reading a book, and hence my inability to locate any of the quotes I have used on a designated page, not altered by the size of font I have chosen. I’ve enjoyed the book even more dipping back into it while writing this review, supplemented by an excellent discussion at the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.
My rating: 8.5 (an increase, on re-reading for this review, on what I would have given it previously)
Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection for July.
Sourced from: Libby via YPRL.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 