Dealing With Our History.

*Now I feel I should give a trigger warning. This post contains mention of a historical massacre. I like to use humour in my writing but this post isn’t humorous. Don’t expect funny asides or tongue in cheek facetiousness This isn’t funny. The subject isn’t a laughing matter. Things are going to get heavy in the next few paragraphs, and if it offends you, I’m not particularly sorry. No festering wound ever got healed by ignoring it.

A few memorials.

I do a fair bit of travelling around this country, and if you keep your eyes, heart and mind open, it doesn’t take long to get an inkling of what’s meant by the double edged phrase, “Australia has a black history”. I’ve seen quite a few monuments and memorials to our murderous history and the concerted effort that was made to eradicate the original inhabitants of this land I love. The emotions they elicit are mixed, to say the least. This side of our past wasn’t taught to me in school and the slow revelation of it over the years has been hard. It’s not easy to face the fact we weren’t always the historical heroes. Sometimes, we were the villains and we all still benefit from those evil acts. It’s no wonder so many white Aussies have a hard time facing it. It’s not pretty.

Recently, I was travelling through the town of Gin Gin. It, like so many places in Aus, has a troubled past. It has a good example of how the narrative presented around the country is unbalanced.

In Gin Gin is a place where you can park your caravan for a night and camp for free. It has toilets, a driver reviver and toilets. The park also has three monuments, set out in a triangle like a no frills Stonehenge, and it offers a particularly one sided history of the early interactions between settlers and the local indigenous peoples. The site says more by what’s missing than by the stone memorials themselves. As they say, history is written by the victors.

One, dedicated in 1959, says a lot about the attitudes of that time. The relevant bits read, “…and commemorates the pioneer settlers of this area William Forster and Gregory Blaxland… Gregory Blaxland was murdered by hostile blacks…” Another stone memorial, erected in 1992 is dedicate to two boys, John and Peter Pegg, aged 12 and 14 “…who were speared to death by aborigines near here on the 4th of June 1849, being the first white people to die in the Kolan Shire…” It hints that attitudes hadn’t changed a great deal in the 33 years between both memorials’ erections.

The fact that no monument joins the others telling the history of the settlers indiscriminate retaliation against the locals speaks volumes. There’s nothing to commemorate the atrocity that came next. Nothing memorialising what is now referred to as the Paddy Island Massacre. No one knows exactly how many were killed but it is estimated to be at least in the hundreds. Men, women and children. Nothing is there to represent the other side of the story. No stone cairn exists expressing the idea that maybe the locals didn’t like losing their ancestral home or being driven from the land that they had walked for thousands of years.

Perhaps a monument to the massacre should be added, for balance, you know. Just saying.

Now I should stress again, Gin Gin is not alone in the sin of omission. It’s merely the latest example I’ve come across. Think of it as an allegory. An example of something amiss in the culture of our nation. Strip away the “whataboutism” and excuses, and just accept we have a problem. To paraphrase an oft used verse from the bible, The truth will set you free.

Personally, I believe it’s only by facing the past, by confronting our troubled history, that any progress can be made in the lives of our indigenous peoples and our national identity. We can’t continue to pay lip service and avoid the fact our past contains brutal darkness. The evidence is everywhere, but you have to look for it. We can’t keep turning away from it, hoping the wrongs will just go away. If we don’t confront it, we run the risk of repeating the sins of our forebears. I believe the persistence of racism in Australia and rise of far right political parties and neo-nazi groups is a direct result of this historical obfuscation.

I also believe we can be so much better than this as a nation. It won’t be easy, but with empathy, with open hearts and minds and hands, we can heal this old wound.

I hold onto this dream and hope you can join me in sharing this vision of a brighter future.

So a funny thing happened on the way to the poop bin.

So a number of people have asked how I injured myself back in December 2020. I can give you the short answer or the long answer. your choice. Both the long rambling version and the Readers Digest versions are below. Skip to the end for the short version. Be warned though: Cute puppy pictures ahead.

The Long Version.

Each day my wife and I take our dogs for a walk. Zoe, our older girl, doesn’t like to stray too far from us. Lily, our 8mth old border collie, is a working breed, so she needs to drain the batteries or risk becoming like an ADHD preteen whose just guzzled a half a dozen energy drinks. She needs an off lead area with a fenced perimeter, the larger the better. Luckily, down the road are two sports fields and the lower field’s surround by a 90cm (3ft). fence. It’s quiet most of the time and we can release the dogs.

Zoe follows us around while Lily has the whole oval to run around and work off the energy before she hits psycho puppy critical mass. Even before we get to the oval, two lapwing plovers stalk the puppy, despite her being 200 metres from their nest. It appears they’ve decided chasing and swooping her is mandatory. Now at first this was alarming, but it’s been going on for a month now, so we currently have the plovers incorporated into her hectic exercise program. They never hurt her, getting to within a metre before swooping away, left or right, while Lily does a leap for them a second or two later. She tries but hasn’t got the proverbial “Hope In Hell” of catching one. She seems to enjoy the game as much as the wildlife.

• 

  We interrupt this story with some pictures of Lily as a puppy.

• 

  You may now return to your reading pleasure.

Now being responsible pet owners, we ensure the oval is left like we were never there, if you know what I mean. So, responsible pet owner that I am, I pick up the poops in a biodegradable bag and carry the biohazard to the nearest bin, which is over the fence and 40 metres from the oval.

On this particular day, Lily managed to do a simultaneous standing back flip with a half pike whilst in mid defecation, spreading poopy pellets like an offensive machinegun. She still managed to miss the plover by 3 metres, but the aerial gymnastics was a site to behold (Pop withstanding).

So all of this I witnessed from the far side of the oval, sitting comfortably in the shelter marked “SIN BIN”. I could have left it there, like an arsehole, but let’s face it. Who wants to be responsible for some kids scarred psyche if they end up faceplanting young Lily’s faeces while playing the sports next weekend? Nor as an old fart of a particular generation, can I make the wife retrieve the offending scats. Therefore, with dragging feet, I left the comfort of the aforementioned Sin Bin and made the long walk over to the scattered crap.

Now you may be wondering what goes through a Part Time Lunatic’s mind as he bags the malodorous pellets, but if not, maybe skip the next paragraph.

It’s the big weird nature of this universe that goes through my mind at times like this, and how I see metaphors everywhere. So with biodegradable bag as a glove, hunting flung pieces of shit from the grass, I was reminded of the “Find It” game we play to distract Lily, casting food into the grass so she can scavenge for it. There’s a strange symmetry to that. Something less like metaphysics and more like Neil from the Young Ones. “Throw the treats on grass. Dog eats treats. from grass. Dog poops on grass. I pick it up off the grass… Me. The dog. The grass. We’re are all there in some sort of shitty cosmic cycle. Whoa deep.”

Yeah, that’s pretty much how my brain works.

Anyway, having bagged and tagged the shitty evidence I headed for the bin, way over yonder. Standing between me and the responsible disposal of the doggy fallout, there lies the fence. The fence has a gate where we came in, but it’s about 60 metres away and walking to it adds two sides of a triangle and 100 metres onto the quest to cast the poop into the metaphorical Mt Doom. I also lack the ability to bend time and space, and bring the gate into line with the bin. So there’s really only one other option; follow a straight line, over the fence and onwards to the bin behind the clubhouse.

Usually the aforementioned obstacle offers me the opportunity to leap over the metre high fence one handed, land lithely on the ground on the other side and prove to myself and the world that I’m not that old. While I’m no longer as agile as my 16 year old self who could leap it in a single bound, I am still as agile as my 25 year old self, surely!

The universe clearly decided it was time I put that delusion to bed.

I bent my knees and sprang. The launch was perfect, hand clutching rail and top of poop bag simultaneously, my feet sailed over the bar clearing it by a couple of inches. Now it may have been the combined fumes from the poo in the bag and the park’s adjacent, water and sewerage effluent settling ponds, or perhaps it was the ambiguous smell of fruit buns from the nearby factory, but whatever the cause, the effect was all muscle memory and regular memory of the need to bend the knees to cushion the landing was momentarily snatched away. The amnesia lasted just long enough for the awkward impact. There was no bending…There was no cushioning…

On touchdown, the full force of gravity exerted itself on my good self, the force travelling up from the ground and focusing itself right where the lower bones of my left leg, (fibula and tibia to be exact) meet the upper leg bone and shouted, quite audibly, “YOU’RE NOT BLOODY 25 ANYMORE. ACT YOUR #@©£¡&Ñß AGE.”

I bounced.

Just once.

But I swear I bounced.

I bounced like a deflated basketball, with a pitiful plffffoing, before falling flaccidly face first to ground, sprawled with a bag of foetid poop in one hand and a handful of turf in the other, my youth illusions and dignity shredded.

To add to the indignity a red meat-ant decided to latch onto my elbow while the pain of my knee fought its way upstream against the shock and humiliation to reach my brain. My lovely wife, Julie, offered me more sympathy than the maladroit fiasco deserved and took the poop bag like some shitty relay, to do the responsible disposal thing for me.

In the mean time I hobbled over to a nearby rock and sat dejectedly down to ruminate on the possible nature of the injury. ACL? Cartilage? Torn muscles? I didn’t think broken bones because I’ve never properly broken a bone before, (chipped an elbow once), so it couldn’t be that. Could it? Apparently yes, it could be exactly that.

While Julie walked home to get the car, I sat on my rock of depression, holding the dogs’ leads with two confused dogs, (Why aren’t we going anywhere?) and contemplated my life choices, facing the reality that I’m not in my 20s (or30s or 40s) anymore.

So that’s the long version.

The Short Version

I fell down and went crack.

Conclusion.

So, turns out I had two fractures, effectively rendering me immobile for a couple of months. Thanks 2020 for nothing. Don’t let the door hit you on the arse on the way out.

2020 was the worst year for pretty much everyone except those corrupt arseholes who’ve enjoyed making sterling profits off the misery of the world. I’m not going to look back on 2020 fondly, (except for the Tassie bit at the beginning.) I’m not going to look back in anger. But mostly I don’t want to look back in case it’s following me into 2021.

What mud?