I’m listening to the Audible version of The Hate Race and the reference to a hotel called ‘Man Friday’ is some kind of warped introduction to Australia for ‘new’ Australians Bordeaux and Cleopatra Clarke, circa 1976. As Beneba Clarke documents her parents’ migration story, I imagine them, appalled at the idea of checking into a hotel that bore the surviving vestiges of a would-be outdated colonial mindset. I’m also thinking of Beneba Clarke’s collection ‘Foreign Soil’ and I’m seeing the fragments of autobiography in stories such as Railton Road and Shu Yi. At the beginning of the ‘Hate Race’, a confronting encounter with an abusive driver who tells Maxine to go back to where she comes from, becomes a thread that spins its way through anecdotes of a childhood where the brownness of a little girl’s skin denotes her foreignness. Now I’m thinking of ‘Our Last Great Hope’ by George Packer, an adjunct to a podcast episode of The Minefield with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens. And although ‘Our Last Great Hope’ is the story of America, I see in it, us too. But the ‘us’ is a collective that is exclusive and ‘us’ and ‘our’ shatters when Sybylla Melvyn, our ‘My Brilliant Career’ heroine opines on the egalitarianism of an emerging Australia, exposing in her veneration of the idea, its exclusiveness.
And now I’m thinking of the publication of ‘The Hate Race’ and its place in the mainstream VCE curriculum. The knowledge that the stories of under-represented Australians are now being studied, is an affirming development in Australia’s story of migration. But then I am back in time, three years ago, when the Melbourne Writer’s Festival was a festival of people and ideas and conversations, held in physical locations, where school students could listen to and meet the authors of the books that we were studying. And we had arrived on a V-Line train that morning, after a three-hour journey, abuzz with the energy of a waking up city. We had made our way uncertainly to Parliament Station and the nearby lecture theatre where our event was to be held. I was sure, based on my previous experience at Federation Square where a congregation of gatherers filled an auditorium to listen to the magic of John Marsden, that the feature event, a gathering of diaspora writers interviewed by no other than Maxine Beneba Clarke, would be a sell-out. We were early. We entered the theatre and sat behind Melbourne Girls High students who had walked half a block to join us. Good seats I thought and congratulated myself on our promptness. But our good fortune was not a result of our timeliness. The fact is, no one turned up. We were there. Sure. But where were the others? I pondered this question as I compared the stadium filled memory of the John Marsden address, with the physical proof of empty unbumfilled seats behind me, and I knew the answer.
I wonder now, about the conversations I am having with my Literature students about racism and the underbelly of an Australia where externalised projections of tolerance conceal a more troubling truth about who we are. Echoes of Stan Grant’s speech, of Adam Goode’s story, of a radio conversation between Eddie McGuire and Luke Darcy about Goodsy coming down from Sydney to perform in a production of King Kong, become one obfuscated memory of a time not long past. I am again, caught in a web of bewilderment, the staggering content, intruding momentarily upon the heavy silence that exists at the end of hope, as I drive a dying mother home from a cancer appointment in the city. And I am hearing again, the blunder of a Collingwood Football Club President who should have known better, my shame also Luke Darcy’s shame as he tries to rewind time and start all over again. But it is too late, the private is public and no amount of sycophantic fawning can undo what has been done. And what was done was what I heard, what I continue to hear, as I sit on the rough-hewn base of a felled red-gum tree, swallowing slowly, mouthfuls of egg and lettuce sandwich and listening to my friends talk about Aboriginal people. It’s Adam Goode’s howl of ‘you’re not welcome.’ Us and them. Ours and theirs. Yours and mine. One minute Aboriginal people are taking all of our jobs, then in a bizarre pivot, in the next sentence, they are welfare-dependent pariahs who wouldn’t work in an iron lung. And I chew and swallow and think of the things I like about my friends, members of the Hate Race who are old and white, and men, and bushies, and I think of all of the things that I don’t like about them being old and white and hating women who play professional sport and hating Abogirinal people who are taking their land and who, more than two hundred years ago were the ungrateful recipients of a better way of living. It is then that I wonder why it is that I am silent and why it is that they have the right to articulate in this amphitheatre of trees and bulrushes and cicadas here on this riverbank, Yorta Yorta country, things so openly, that I find deeply offensive and hurtful.
Then I am back to Maxine Beneba Clarke again and she is waiting to be nominated for student of the week, an honor that will afford her the opportunity of telling her class, who she is. She is silenced, she is erased in a classroom that sees her as other. Finally, she is given the accolade and makes her way to the front of the class, and begins her narrative, only to be cut-off midway through her story, by a censoring teacher. Imploring her to tell the class where she comes from, her uncertainty about a question, loaded with its presumptuous certainty, is interpreted as insolence by a teacher who does not believe her little girl claims. Her mother is not an actress and her parents are not from Britain. The story is erased and rewritten in a primary school classroom and played out all over the country, over and over again. I am putting together the dots from a Literature class just taught, about postcolonial theory and eurocentrism and I see it so clearly, this act of silencing. But it is more than that, and I talk to my class about words like silence, erase, marginalise. We talk about the Stolen Generations (plural) and word choices such as ‘stolen’ rather than ‘lost’ and how euphemisms function to de-centre and eliminate the stories of the marginalised. And whilst I cheer a little when Maxine begins the telling of her story to a class that doesn’t know who she is, I also know how this is going to play out, for it is the Hate Race after all, and predictably, Maxine is shut down mid-sentence. I wonder what’s worse – to be invalidated or to be disbelieved. But she is validated, she is believed, by one lone student in that class, and it is the words of the little girl Jenny that Maxine tears from the sheet of paper of affirmations that affirm nothing but the things that Maxine Beneba Clarke is not, that makes a little girl who has a story, feel important. She is also believed by me. And I know that my students will believe her too. And I don’t want to shut down the story. I don’t want to do what the publisher in ‘Sukiyaki Bookclub’ does in writing a rejection letter, the stinging backhander erasing all that is said about writing that is so beautiful. Praise of writing that is ‘genuinely astonishing’ is coupled with the apologetic assertion that Australian readers are not ready for the characters that inhabit Beneba Clarke’s stories, invalidating once more, the identity of a woman whose voice we need to be ready to hear, and whose astonishing prose we want to read.
