True Stories: History, Politics, Aboriginality (1999 Boyer Lectures) by Inga Clendinnen

Author:Inga Clendinnen [Clendinnen, Inga]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781921799150
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2010-05-16T03:00:00+00:00

Oberdoo was writing in 1980.

The Jesuits arrived on the Daly in 1887, only three years after the so-called Copper Mine murders, when the killing of four white men unleashed a series of punitive expeditions which decimated the native people and left the survivors shellshocked. The new mission afforded them some badly needed physical protection. The Jesuits’ stay also left a few material traces—the great mango tree they planted in a corner of their garden, and a mob of feral pigs. These days we understand as they did not the impact of sharp-hoofed animals on fragile environments. So the pigs ploughed up the land along the river—land which was at once the Aborigines’ history, their cathedral, and their larder. We glimpse that complicated tragedy only in outline, and outlines notoriously obliterate both physical and the mental anguish of the afflicted individuals.

I came across just one mental trace of that brief Jesuit presence. It had been left on the mind of an old man who had been a boy on the mission, and who told Ronald Berndt in the 1930s what he could remember of what he had been taught.

He began with the tale of Adam and ‘Riva’ (Eve) being thrown out of the garden by a furious Father-God because they had dared to pick and eat that damned apple. Thereafter, they would be given no cultivated garden food. They would have to hunt and to forage in the bush, like the outcast blackfellows they were now unequivocally identified as being.

Then came another familiar bible story. Jesus had a big garden in which he grew many vegetables and fruits. Twelve white men helped him in the garden. (There were usually twelve Jesuits at the Mission; they worked in the mission garden.) Jesus gave them an apple to share in a ritual meal, and later, when they grew some wheat, he made a big damper which again he shared out between his twelve helpers. Then he put away the remains to be kept for later— not at all the Aboriginal way of dealing with surplus food.

Here is the key passage as the old man told it:

And the Father talked to Jesus: ‘All this is for white men— they will have iron, houses and everything.’ [Remember this is the 1930s; he is updating.] Thus the Father put motorcars, aeroplanes, houses, horses and so on for all the white people; he also made rifles, guns, pannikins and knives, and the Father spoke to Christ: ‘That is the Dreaming of all you lot.’

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