I’m Not Racist But….

by Tim Soutphommasane

New South Books

ISBN  9781742234274

Reviewed by JARNI BLAKKARLY

Discussion about race and racism has been forcing its confrontational self into Australia’s mainstream public sphere quite a bit lately. It has been so visible and tangible that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for those who would rather not discuss it to ignore the topic entirely. Adam Goodes has brought it to prime-time Footy. Low-quality videos filmed on the smartphones on public transport have brought to YouTube. A bunch of burly men with neo-Nazi tattoos violently shouting on the streets about Muslims taking over the country has brought it to our evening news. These are incidents, which most of the righteous chorus of well-meaning voices are willing, even proud, to condemn. However, for many taking the discussion one-step further is where you hit a snag. Tim Soutphommasane’s latest book I’m Not Racist But… addresses those voices.

The book, which has been published to mark the 40th anniversary of Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act (RDA), invites the reader to examine the larger story of race in Australia’s identity. With both broad strokes and fine detail Soutphommasane paints the picture beyond the news-cycle statements of Andrew Bolt and former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, beyond the superficial utterances of condemnation, which tends to consume all the space for cultural dialogue provided to the topic. With a detailed examination ranging from European invasion and the Stolen Generation, White Australia and Reclaim Australia, Soutphommasane walks a line somewhere between history, essay and think-piece.

For the most part it comes off, though there are times it feels slow as it goes through a fair amount of ‘Racism 101’ before moving into more in depth discussion. Soutphommasane leads his target audience towards better understanding the idea of an underpinning systematic racism deeply ingrained in the Australian psyche and existence; he leads slowly and gently. He also seeks to bring a broad church of people into the conversation. For example on topics such as whether Australia’s refugee policies are inherently based on racism, he quotes thinkers who agree and disagree (though he leans towards agreement). Those lost in the book shop searching for Angela Y Davis, Edward Said or Malcolm X, for more radical voices, should definitely keep looking.

‘Is Australia a racist country?’ is the question and the premise on which Soutphommasane begins his musings. It is a question he says many people ask, but is a redundant conversation. Despite starting from a simple place, Soutphommasane does move beyond it and he goes into depth and detail. His unpacking of the social and historical context surrounding the introduction of the legislation of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA), which is the focus of the book, is particularly fascinating.

The RDA is certainly an interesting focal point, not necessarily because of the protracted and abandoned, political debate that surrounded the proposed changes to section 18C of the act that would have made it legal to “insult” and “offend” on the basis of race, but because the way the RDA has become synonymous with the debate about racism in Australia in a way it had not been prior.

It would be easy for many who are following the deteriorating situation for refugees on Manus Island and Nauru or reading the statistics for Indigenous imprisonment to forget that we even have legislation that criminalises racial discrimination. It would be fair for some to scratch their head about how effective it has been.

In the legal case against Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt that brought about the discussion on 18C, Bolt’s breach resulted in a mandatory apology from the publication. However 18C and the RDA as a whole has become a rallying point for Australia’s multicultural community since it has come under attack from the Liberals. That particular clause has taken on a symbolism far beyond its legal ramifications. It provides a focus point for a broad range of Indigenous and migrant community groups that are finding new powerful ways to fight back and have their voice heard.

As Soutphommasane points out the RDA for seeking to set the national tone politically. ‘Indeed, for most of the period since Federation, Australia displayed features of what Historian George Frederickson calls an ‘overtly racist regime’,’ writes Soutpahommasane.

He argues while it is easy to be cynical and sceptical about how much change has happened to the underlying racism of the Australian national character, the outward disavowal of the ‘overt racist regime’ is a deeply persisting challenge.

He also discuss the practical outcomes brought about from the RDA legally for such situations as anti-discrimination rules in employment and housing.

Soutphommasane also points out the oxymoron that our constitution continues to allow for separate laws for different races and the conflict between the two documents. He advocates for a removal of the clause which is one of the central arguments in favour of the controversial Indigenous ‘Recognise’ campaign. The highly divisive ‘Recognise’ campaign, which itself has many prominent Indigenous supporters and critics who advocate for a Treaty instead.

He suggests a major differences between the RDA and its American equivalent, the US Civil Rights Act 1964, was the way in which it was achieved. He points to the international sphere and Australia’s signing of the International Convention on the elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination as driving factors of the RDA legislation, not domestic politics.

Whereas in the United States civil rights legislation was enacted as the culmination of a right struggle, the push for Australian racial equality was never accompanied by the emergence of a social movement, at least of the equivalent scale.

He argues this had an ongoing and lasting impacts in the way many Australians perceive race, as something to cringe about and avoid discussing at all costs. While the RDA was the symbolic and legal end to the White Australia policy he says the way in which it was done, coming from Canberra not from the streets, has also provided a barrier to the conceptualisation of a multicultural Australian identity.

The White Australia policy was inaugurated as an official statement of nationhood, but its renouncement was never granted the same moment. It was largely through sheepish embarrassment rather than proud conviction that White Australia was gradually dismantled in the 1950s and the 1970s. Its passing was not marked with any national sense of fanfare or finality…As well, there was no seminal moment for the advent of multiculturalism. The transition from White Australia to its successor national myth, in some senses, remains ongoing.

He also runs through the intense uphill battle in parliament that the legislation faced in the three failed attempts by Gough Whitlam’s first attorney-general, Senator Lionel Murphy. The successful fourth shot by Whitlam’s second attorney-general Kep Enderby was in 1975, the final year of Whitlam’s government. Soutphommasane contends that the history and achievements of the RDA which have long since been ingrained into our society are under-appreciated.

He has a very good point and one only needs look across the Pacific to how things could be much worse in terms of open and overt racial vilification in the name of ‘free-speech’. To America’s constitution which allows the public hate speech today of organisations such as the Klu Klux Klan and others.

Each chapter of the somewhat dry essays of Soutphommasane are broken up with short contributions from a ‘who’s-who’ list of prominent Australian writers. Christos Tsiolkas describes a racially charged scene at a swimming pool steam-room, Maxine Beneba Clarke recounts university anecdotes highlighting White Australians’ denial of casual racism and blindness to micro-aggressions. Alice Pung and Benjamin Law both delve into their up-bringing and Bindi Cole Chocka unpacks her layers of identity.

Soutphommasane’s book comes in the context of the 18C debate and the political scrutiny being applied by the ideological-right of the Liberal party. In part, it can be seen as a call to arms to defend what is an essential underpinning piece of legislation in Australia’s Commonwealth Law.

He is far harsher on the nation than the standard ‘let’s just celebrate multiculturalism’ narrative that is commonly heard from politicians and promoters of local council ‘culturally diverse’ food-based events. However he is also diplomatic and more balanced in his criticisms of the Australian state than those who point to Indigenous imprisonment rates, Border Force and our immigration detention system and argue we live in a state where racial systems of violence are a defining factor for non-white people on the margins.

He brings his optimism about Australian society and its potential to the forefront and marks the importance of how far we have progressed in immigration and multiculturalism since the White Australia policy. He stresses the urgent need to address Indigenous rights and also acknowledge and combat social ‘casual racism’. At times he leans on clichés and dry broad sentiments. ‘While no one law can ever eradicate the social evil of racism – no one law can ever banish hatred, ignorance and arrogance – an instrument such as the Racial Discrimination Act does make us stronger and more united,’ he writes in his conclusion. He notes that the importance of the Act, as well as its uses in society, is a constantly evolving one.

Soutphommasane is staunch and defiant on the need to protect the achievements Australia has made on multiculturalism. He ends on a hopeful note that the ability for increasingly honest and difficult discussion and work will contribute towards the building of what he sees as a better nation.

JARNI BLAKKARLY is a freelance journalist who has done work for Al Jazeera English, Griffith Review and ABC Radio National among others. You can follow him on Twitter @jarniblakkarly.

Inside My Mother

by Ali Cobby Eckermann

Giramondo

ISBN 9781922146885

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

Since the appearance of her popular first collection, Little Bit Long Time, in 2009, Aboriginal poet, Ali Cobby Eckermann, has produced five more books including a couple of verse novels, the second of which, Ruby Moonlight, won the NSW Premier’s Prize in 2013. Along with Samuel Wagan Watson and Lionel Fogarty, she is one of the most prominent Aboriginal poets writing at the moment.

According to its author, Inside my Mother, grew out of a period of mourning and overseas travel which proved therapeutic. This fourth collection has a core of powerful and moving poems — and a number of others which are a little less forceful. Eckermann’s family has been affected by the “taken away” syndrome for three generations and the impact of this is the genesis for quite a few poems. “First Born” and “The Letter” are just two of them.

In the latter a mission girl who is learning typing begins: “Dear Mother / The Mission is good. /The food is good. / I am good” before “ripp(ing) the page from the typewriter” and starting a new one which begins “Mummy / Where are you?” It’s all over in twelve lines. The narrative strategy is simple, as is the vocabulary, but the point is indelibly made. Mainstream readers who find this too simple altogether and who demand the “whitefella” sophistication of, say, Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery, are probably missing the point. Cobby Eckermann’s  poignant distillation here is just another thing that poetry can do well. There’s no need for a hierarchy.

An interesting, and relatively unusual, dimension to Inside my Mother is how Cobby Eckermann deals with the tensions within Aboriginal families and culture, not just the pressures from “outside”, as it were. “I Tell You True”, for instance, is a dramatic monologue from the viewpoint of an Aboriginal woman explaining her addiction to alcohol. It’s in a stricter form than most of the other poems and is modified by, rather than couched in, Aboriginal English.

The narrator’s reasons for despair, one in each stanza, include a daughter “burnt to death inside a car”, a sister dead who has “hung herself to stop the rapes” and a mother who has been killed, “battered down the creek” — a death for which the speaker herself is partly blamed by her own  family. “Their words have made me wild / I can’t stop drinking I tell you true / ‘Cos I was just a child”.

It’s significant that the speaker doesn’t disclose the race of the perpetrators. This is a further sign of Cobby Eckermann’s political sophistication; she doesn’t just keep on hitting easy targets. The poem also ranges more widely by implying that domestic violence like this is not unique to any one group or the product of a single cause.

There’s no doubt, however, about who the guilty are in Cobby Eckermann’s “Kulila”, a poem written entirely in Aboriginal English and voiced by one of the “old people” who still remember the massacres of an earlier century. “don’t forget ’em story / night time tell ’em to the kids / keep every story live // … sit down here real quiet way / you can hear ’em crying / all them massacre mobs “  Dramatic monologues like this one were the forte of Kevin Gilbert, the Wiradjuri poet (1933-1993). Cobby Eckermann (b. 1963) makes good use here of a strategy and linguistic  authenticity which non-Indigenous poets can employ only at some risk should they wish to ventriloquise on behalf of Aboriginal people.

Occasionally, as in the beginning of the book’s final poem, “Evacuate”, Eckermann’s language is not strong enough for its task. “today I shall relinquish / my body // I shall process my / dreams of tragedy”.  Although we have seen a number of tragedies throughout the book, the phrase “dreams of tragedy” remains unfocussed and over-explicit.

For this reader two other relatively minor shortcomings in Inside my Mother are the lack of a glossary for important words from Aboriginal languages and the poet’s abandonment, for the most part, of traditional punctuation, a strategy now a hundred years old and not as effective as its users are inclined to imagine.

The fact that punctuation is commonly foregone in much contemporary free verse does not, in itself, establish its effectiveness. The small, momentary confusions the reader often experiences through this convention can sometimes be a good thing artistically (analogous, for instance, to the clever use of enjambment) but it can also distract from the main thrust of the poem, a factor even more important when the poetry is political, as much of Cobby Eckermann’s work is.

This reminds us too that the role of politics in Aboriginal poetry has always been an inevitable and a difficult one. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920 —1993) admitted this when she once (inadequately) described her own poetry as “sloganistic, civil rightish, plain and simple”¹. Some of her best poetry was when she approached important problems indirectly. Lionel Fogarty (b. 1958), on the other hand, has often, in his idiosyncratic way, turned the language of the conquerors against themselves, using “ English against the English”². Fogarty has argued that the way Aboriginal poets “write and talk is ungrammatical, because it doesn’t have any meanings in their spirit”³. This can lead to a poetry of strong feeling (often anger) but which may not be as effective politically as it intends to be.

Ali Cobby Eckermann (and, to an even greater extent, Samuel Wagan Watson) steers between these two extremes and her poems, for the most part, tend therefore to work more effectively, both aesthetically and politically, than they might have otherwise done.

Inside my Mother is a worthy addition to Ali Cobby Eckermann’s growing body of work. It is packed with things that non-Indigenous Australians need to know or be reminded about — while, at the same time communicating effectively, I would imagine, with the still-disenfranchised Australians for whom she is increasingly a spokeswoman.
 
 
Citations
1. Kath Walker, “Aboriginal Literature” Identity 2.3 (1975) pp. 39–40
2. From Preface to New and Selected (1995) by Lionel Fogarty http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/new-and-selected-poems-0214000
3. ibid.
 
GEOFF PAGE is an Australian poet and critic. He has edited The Best Australian Poems , 2014 and The Best Australian Poems, 2015.