From the issue dated December 20, 1996
NOTES FROM ACADEME
Australian Writer Embodies Pressures Facing Aborigines
By Peter Monaghan
Perth, Australia -- Mudrooroo, Australia's most accomplished Aboriginal writer, tosses back his head and rocks with laughter.
He has just been asked whether he knew that the old colonial prison in Fremantle, where he spent two years as a young man, is now billed as Western Australia's"premier cultural-heritage site."
More than 30 years after his release, Mudrooroo is far removed from that bleak place. He has published seven novels, four books of poetry, and studies of Aboriginal literature, identity, and politics. He pioneered the now-thriving field of Aboriginal studies at four institutions, including Murdoch University, in this city's southern suburbs, where he has just completed a 10-year stay. He is about to move to an island across the continent, off the coast of Queensland, where he will live with his fourth wife and concentrate on writing.
What is it that so amuses him about the question?
Mudrooroo explains: While imprisoned, he predicted that one day state officials, out of some urge to fetishize a brutal colonial history, would turn the prison into, say, an arts center or a tourist attraction."And they did!"
It turns out that the place is now both an arts center and a tourist attraction.
The lanky man laughs again, but his keen eyes darken."You see," he says,"this is what happens. They don't feel the pain congealed in the bricks and mortar there."
The topic of incarceration is not, to be sure, an easy one for a white Australian visitor to raise with a leading Aboriginal intellectual, because Aborigines make up a far higher proportion of the prison population than of the general population -- and the proportion of Aborigines who die in custody is far higher than that of their fellow prisoners.
In any case, asking Mudrooroo about anything is something that informed journalists approach gingerly. He tells few of them anything. Today, however -- apparently because he is confident that he deserves internationally the recognition that he sometimes gets only grudgingly at home -- he agrees to an interview in his office at Murdoch on a typically sunny day.
He turns out to be cannily humorous and disarmingly humble as he relates how he ended up in"Freo," the former prison.
Actually, Mudrooroo notes, he was locked up in Fremantle twice. That detail is important. It took both doses to persuade him that he should not submit to life as a jailbird, the fate of many Aboriginal youths. As he tells his story, it becomes clear that he embodies the pressures and paradoxes of being an Aborigine in Australia today.
He grew up as Colin Johnson, a mixed-race boy in Beverley, a one-street town in the arid, sparsely populated western interior. Beverley was 95-per-cent white."When I went to school," he recalls,"all of us black kids were put in seats all by ourselves."
Did he play with white children?
"A couple of them, but I don't think their parents liked them mixing with us."
Did he have contact with tribal people?"I doubt there was any organized tribal society left, even in those days. It was just Nyoongah people." He uses the term with which most Aborigines in the west -- urban, rural, or bush -- refer to themselves.
He isn't particularly dark-skinned, but white people defined who was white -- and he wasn't."There was always that divide in these country towns," he says.
In fact, Mudrooroo is unsure of his ancestry -- whether his dark skin stems from Aboriginal forebears or from a black American grandfather who came to Australia in the 19th century. He does not recall much of his family life, because it ended when he was 9 and was caught pilfering from a store.
Government officials took him from his mother, who had always feared that this would happen. Incarceration or forced adoption was, he says, almost"preordained" for Aboriginal children.
He spent his youth in a reformatory run by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic lay order."It was pretty horrific," he says. His face, youthful for 57, is hard to read. He breaks the tension:"I was beaten up rather than brought up." Again he is overtaken by laughter. Then he stops."You have to get over those things," he says."Or they're a millstone around your neck."
As soon as he got out, he adopted the style of the"bodgie," an Australian equivalent of the James Dean renegade, only more garishly attired. Similar characters, with slicked hair, pegged pants, black shirts, and the snazzy loafers known as "brothel creepers" figure in his novel Wild Cat Falling. Published in 1965, it describes the troubled search for identity of an Aboriginal youth. It made Mudrooroo the first published Aboriginal novelist.
Echoing his own early life as it does, the book takes readers back to Mudrooroo's time in Fremantle Prison, in the port city not far from here. Innumerable Aboriginal youths suffered life in the tiny cells of the limestone penitentiary, built by the British and Irish convicts brought to western Australia in the 1850s.
Mudrooroo, at age 17, ended up in one of those cells after he was convicted on charges of breaking into a store in search of food. He refused to swear on the Bible in court -- his experiences with the Christian Brothers had taught him to suspect it.
In prison he read voraciously, and he gardened. That was the task reserved for Aboriginal convicts, who, as non-citizens at the time, were held in separate areas and exercise yards.
The prison library held a copy of The Stranger, the book by Albert Camus. That work, and the fiction of Jean-Paul Sartre, would greatly influence Mudrooroo's early writing.
Wild Cat Falling made him a little money. He traveled. He lived for seven years in India. Fascinated by the tribal element of Tantric Buddhism, he spent three years as a monk. Later he spent time in London and San Francisco, where he embraced the Black Power movement and the avant-garde jazz of the day: Dolphy, Mingus, Coltrane. He also lists among his influences the Beat writers, French New Wave film, Bob Marley, Karl Marx, and the Dalai Lama.
His strongest fiction reimagines Australia's colonial era. In Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, the title character, a Tasmanian Aboriginal medicine man with a singular wit, sees the world's end foreshadowed by the arrival of Europeans who kill, rape, and enslave the native people.
The genocide of Tasmania's tribes is well documented. But Mudrooroo revises official history by depicting the British colonizers as bumblers, hard-pressed to crush the island's rich, age-old, but largely defenseless culture."History is just a gigantic whitewash after all," he explains,"and we shouldn't accept it."
In Mudrooroo: A Critical Study, Adam Shoemaker, a lecturer in Australian studies at the Queensland University of Technology, calls his subject"the wildcat striker of Aboriginal literature: solitary, unpredictable and constantly testing the boundaries of resistance."
Mudrooroo talks about his and other writers' contributions to Aboriginal letters in his own 1990 study, Writing From the Fringe. He concludes that much of this work, including his own, is lacking --"scarred by assimilation."
His search for a more authentic identity led him, in 1988, to take his one-word name, in keeping with Aboriginal tradition. Mudrooroo means"paperbark," a native Australian tree.
That was also his way of making a statement about Australia's sumptuous bicentennial celebrations. He considers surnames, like official histories, to be a European imposition. Still, he confides, just to be contrarious, he may go back to Colin Johnson.
That thought, too, triggers the wildcat laughter.
Copyright © 1996 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
