Kelly managed to forge an independent career as a ‘boss drover’, but his constant movement, in part to keep his children safe, disrupted their schooling and removed them from Country and kin. On the other hand, rural mobility also enabled men like Kelly to return to Country. In retirement, Kelly applied for exemption to obtain the old-age pension. There were advantages to exemption, but Wickes and Robinson along with other authors note that the cost – the loss of Aboriginal community, identity, and storylines – was significant. In her excellent overview of exemption policies in Australia, Ellinghaus notes the light they throw on the development of
racialised thinking. However, the conditions of exemption also illuminated the possibilities and limits of thinking about citizenship as it was understood for most of the twentieth century. Not until the final decades did recognition of the importance of Aboriginal attachment to land, culture, and identity, and new ideas about multiculturalism, enable citizenship to be reimagined as a condition that embraced difference, rather than repressing and assimilating it. g Marilyn Lake’s most recent book is Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transpacific exchange shaped American reform (Harvard University Press, 2019).
The Gift
In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchair garlanded by summer hibiscus like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche. A flowering wreath buzzes around his head – passionate red. He holds the gift of death in his lap: small, oblong, wrapped in black. He has been waiting seventeen years to open it and is impatient. When I ask how he is my father cries. His crying comes as a visitation, the body squeezing tears from his ducts tenderly as a nurse measuring drops of calamine from an amber bottle, as a teen at the car wash wringing a chamois of suds. It is a kind of miracle to see my father weeping this freely, weeping for what is owed him. How are you? I ask again because his answer depends on an instant’s microclimate, his moods bloom and retreat like an anemone as the cold currents whirl around him – crying one minute, sedate the next. But today my father is disconsolate. I’m having a bad day, he says, and tries again. I’m having a bad year. I’m having a bad decade. I hate myself for noticing his poetry – the triplet that should not be beautiful to my ear but is. Day, year, decade – scale of awful economy. I want to give him his present but it is not mine to give. We sit as if mother and son on Christmas Eve waiting for midnight to tick over, anticipating the moment we can open his present together – first my father holding it up to his ear and shaking it, then me helping him peel back the paper, the weight of his death knocking, and once the box is unwrapped it will be mine, I will carry the gift of his death endlessly, every day I will know it opening in me.
Sarah Holland-Batt Sarah Holland-Batt’s most recent collection is The Hazards (2015). This poem first appeared in the New Yorker. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021
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