‘It would be easier not to know’: Kate Grenville’s eye-opening road trip

This story is part of the March 22 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

The first Aboriginal person I met was a couple of months old. She was a baby in the back of the car of my favourite high school teacher – Mrs X had just picked her up from wherever she’d adopted her. Why had she brought her to school during the lunch break? I don’t know, but she was pleased to show her to us older girls.

This was 1967 or so, and my high school, in a middle-class suburb, had no Aboriginal students. I’d never knowingly met an Aboriginal person and knew almost nothing about what had gone on between white and black over the previous 200 years.

One of us asked why she was put up for adoption. Oh, Mrs X said, her parents weren’t able to look after her. We all nodded; that sounded reasonable. But the question stirred up a little dust of unease. There were no more questions about what circumstances had led to that baby starting life as the adopted black child of a white woman.

The author as a high-schooler, when she met her first Aboriginal person – an adopted baby.Credit: Courtesy of Kate Grenville

Now I wonder whether she could have been part of what today we know as the stolen generations. What was the real story about her family?

It’s easy enough to say that none of us girls knew anything about child removals in 1967. We’d never been taught the dark side of what had happened when the British colonised Australia. But we knew enough to join the dots if we’d wanted to. When the British arrived, Aboriginal people were living in every corner of the country. Now, as far as our experience was concerned, they were gone. If we’d joined the dots, we’d have seen that whatever had happened between them being here and them being apparently gone can’t have been good.

I think the real reason why none of us asked any more questions was that at some level, in some way, without quite knowing, we had joined the dots. We did know. But we couldn’t find a way to think about it. We were enclosed in a little bubble of knowing-and-not-knowing.

That moment must have been stored away, a vivid visual image in my memory because a while ago, it spurted out unbidden. What uncorked it – and a whole lot of other thoughts – was the Voice referendum.

I’d handed out YES leaflets before the referendum, and what I’d seen wasn’t so much people’s racism (though there was some of that), as how little most of them knew about our history. But something else struck me as I stood with the leaflets flapping in my hand. Like us girls clustered around Mrs X’s baby, these people coming to vote didn’t exactly know, but then again, they sort of did. And it was making them uncomfortable. There was a tension in the way they walked and an uncertain expression – something like sheepish – on their faces.

In handing out leaflets supporting the Yes campaign, Grenville experienced a “mortifying moment”.Credit: Bloomberg

Except for the woman who strode in through the gate on the second afternoon. She grabbed a NO leaflet and then marched over to where I was standing. She faced right up to me and eyeballed me from close up. Planted her feet wide, stuck her elbows out, hands on hips, and threw out her challenge: “OK, convince me!

I judged I had 10 or 15 seconds. And I blew it. I fumbled and dithered and couldn’t do any better than bleat out a few worthy sentiments. She snorted, a kind of laugh-snort, and strode into the school. I can imagine the big confident mark she’d have made next to NO.

In every place my ancestors had arrived to ‘take up’ land, Aboriginal people would already have been there.

It was a mortifying moment, but one that told me something useful: that I wasn’t as sure of my ground as I should have been. I was skating along the surface of good intentions. There was some sense in which I hadn’t done the hard work of really looking, really knowing. The Voice was rejected, of course, but all the debates and disagreements about it had an effect: they cracked open the smooth surface of some old thought-habits. Things emerged that hadn’t been visible before.

I found myself revisiting some of my mental furniture – memories and things learnt. Mrs X’s long-ago baby was one. What was the story there?

Then there were the family stories that my mother had told me. They started in 1806, with our convict ancestor. He’d been a lighterman on the Thames who’d pinched some timber, been transported, and then “taken up” land – as the family story had it – near Sydney. Along the way he might have murdered his wife. Or maybe she fell down the stairs by accident. After that came the next generations of my English and Irish forebears, each one pushing out further into tempting land, north and west as far as Guyra and Gunnedah.

As the dust settled from the referendum, I found myself thinking about the fact that in every place my ancestors had arrived to “take up” land, Aboriginal people would already have been there. It wasn’t “taking up” as much as plain old “taking”. Yet there was only one family story that even mentioned them, and that was in such a muffled way I’d managed never to really think about it, no matter how many times Mum told me the story.

Scenes from the Voice referendum.Credit: Getty Images

My early forebears were small-scale farmers of little education. Their individual lives and doings weren’t recorded other than in those scraps of family history, so it wasn’t a matter of finding out the details of exactly how they’d interacted with Aboriginal people.

When that woman demanded to be convinced, and I’d come up short, I could see that it was because I’d leapfrogged to the worthy sentiments without having done some kind of hard thinking before that.

I decided to do a road trip – or, as I thought of it in my more high-flown moments, a pilgrimage – to all the places mentioned in the family stories. I’d rerun the stories in my mind one more time, but this time I’d be standing where they happened – right on the land that was taken – and I’d widen the frame to include the people who were there when my forebears took it. I’d try to take in the whole picture and understand what it meant. Not to condemn, not to accuse. And not to wallow in guilt. Just to look and be prepared to see.

Grenville’s convict ancestor had “taken up” land in Wiseman’s Ferry (left) in 1806. Right: a long-ago uncle had won land in a government ballot on Anaiwan land in Guyra.

It was a lot of dusty miles. I started at Wisemans Ferry, where that Thames lighterman had made his life on Dharug ground. It ended at Guyra, where a long-ago uncle had gone in a government ballot and won a block of Anaiwan land. All the threads of thought and feeling finally led me to the Myall Creek massacre memorial on Gomeroi land. Not that my forebears had anything to do with that. But it’s one of the few places where a non-Indigenous person can go if she wants to think about what it means for her to be here.

That journey released me from the spell of knowing-and-not-knowing. It let me acknowledge the things I know – truths that it would be easier not to know. It also showed me how much I don’t know, that I should.

Treaty, for example. I’d seen “Treaty now!” on a hundred banners, but it seemed too hard and complicated an issue for me to engage with. But doing that journey into other hard and complicated thoughts – the ones about my place here – made me see that turning away was just another kind of wilful not-knowing.

A place to reflect: a memorial site at Myall Creek, where settlers massacred about 30 Wirrayaraay people in 1838.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

Turns out, a treaty is nothing more than a negotiated agreement. You don’t have to be at war to have one – a peace treaty is only one kind of treaty. That was the first surprise. The other was that the British made treaties in virtually all their other colonies – Canada, the US, New Zealand and in Africa. That’s because they recognised – even if only theoretically – the authority and rights of the people already there.

Those treaties were often unjust and often ignored. They did little to protect the people whose lands the British were colonising. But they established the principle that negotiation was necessary. That’s why they could later be revisited, as is happening now in New Zealand and Canada. Even an imperfect treaty gives you a place to start. A negotiated agreement doesn’t fix everything, but without one it’s hard to fix anything.

The First Nations in our country weren’t recognised in any way. There was no agreement, no negotiation of any kind. The British simply moved in. Of course, they knew there were people already here, but somehow they let themselves ignore that fact. Those years were the start of the long knowing-and-not-knowing, and they’ve left us where we are now, resistant to looking back and unable to move forward.

That baby in Mrs X’s car would now be a woman of 58 or so. She’ll have seen policy and legislation about First Nations issues change, sometimes for the better. But she might also be seeing smaller shifts too, less visible but just as powerful, down at the level of individuals. I’m not the only person to be working on a kind of home-made truth-telling. We can see that something different needs to happen. That bubble of knowing-and-not-knowing hasn’t popped yet, but it’s wobbling.

Kate Grenville’s Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place (Black Inc., $37) is out April 1.

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