Narratives of trauma

My fire story

Local author Jarrah Dundler reflects upon his new project helping communities come to terms with the trauma of the 2019 bushfires.

It was November 2019, smoke from bushfires burning across the Northern Rivers blanketed our town, and I was on the phone talking to my partner about socks. ‘Socks? What socks?’

‘The random ones,’ she almost shouted. ‘Under the laundry sink. Fill them with sand. If a fire starts on Fairymount chuck them in the downpipes and fill the gutters with water from the hose.’ I got to it, not 100 per cent sure if I was doing the right thing. We’d lived in Kyogle half our lives but had never faced the threat of bushfires before. I don’t know how real the threat was, but with all that smoke and the bush behind our house so brown and dry, it looked like a tiny spark would make the whole thing go ka-boom, it certainly felt real. Thankfully, the fires didn’t come to us on that day, or at all during Black Summer. Now, almost two years on from what feels like my ‘fire story’, I’ve just begun working on a project with Kyogle Family Support Services putting together a book on the experiences of people who were impacted by those fires. Firefighters who faced unprecedented conditions. People who lost their homes. Volunteers who looked after injured wildlife. Over the last two years, professionally, I’ve worn two hats. One, my writing hat, and the other, my community services hat, holding part-time jobs in mental health, disability, drug harm-min, and emergency services. And as I started off on this project, I slapped on my writing hat and started reading up on the fires, taking notes, talking to people, and lining up interviews. An idea of the final product, the book, started shaping in my mind. A weave of interviews, stats and facts and figures. Not so much academic, but weighty. But, every now and then a question would arise. How could I make sure people involved were supported through the process, that it didn’t re-traumatise them? Could being involved be of actual benefit to people and their recovery? Whose story was this anyway? Searching for answers to these questions lead me to discover and learn about a growing practice called creative recovery, where arts are used to help people come to terms with natural disasters. To help people make sense of what they’ve been through, provide a catalyst for conversations to occur, and maybe even reframe stories and see them through a different light. I read up about projects happening all over the country, and connected with artists and community workers delivering creative recovery projects across the Northern Rivers. A songwriting workshop for isolated men impacted by the fires. The Lismore Floods Stories project, where participants chucked on a raincoat and gumboots and walked around town with an iPod listening to people’s stories of the 2017 flood. A poetry evening, part of the Rappville Creative project, where locals orated the anecdotes and stories of towns’ rich history, while a bush poet scribbled down notes to weave into a community poem. What all these projects had in common, and for other successful projects I read about from around the country, was the emphasis placed on process. It was viewed equal to, if not more important than, the final product: the exhibition, the book, or the song. The projects all provided opportunities for genuine engagement with people, for people to come together to share their experiences, to heal, to connect. Now, when I’m thinking about the project, I’m thinking more about the process of getting there. Of community storytelling events, writing workshops, call-outs for submissions of photos and writing from community members. And when I picture the end product, the book, it’s more scrapbook, a collation of all these things from community members. And so, as I venture out in this next phase of these projects, I know more often than not, I’m going to be wearing my community services hat, and leaving my writing hat at the door.

This article was originally published by Arts Northern Rivers at artsnorthernrivers.com.au

Shaky foundations

Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement

By Henry Reynolds

Review by Jenny Bird

Henry Reynolds turned eighty-three this year. An elder statesman of what critics call the ‘black armband’ view of Australian history, his unapologetic response has been ‘better a black armband than a white blindfold’.

Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement was released in early 2021, Reynolds’ seventeenth book on the history of Australia’s frontier wars, race relations and sovereignty. Despite being thoroughly reviewed at the time, in the ensuing months it has not garnered the level of public attention and debate that, say, Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu has. Yet its subject – the legal (or not) foundations of colonised Australia, and the opportunity that the Uluru Statement from the Heart offers for reconciliation – could not be more important. It underpins the wounds and dilemmas that Australia still faces as a nation.

Truth-Telling reads as a book that Reynolds has been writing towards for forty years – a book that strikes at the very heart of the legal and moral foundations of colonised Australia. It’s not a pretty story, and it makes for uncomfortable reading, but it is revelatory and compelling. It rips off another blindfold and deserves to be kept alive in our public discourse. The core questions that Reynolds asks us to consider in Truth Telling are these: did Britain ever actually gain sovereignty over Australia? If they did, how and when did it happen, and when did First Nations peoples lose it? Did they lose it? Did the British see First Nations people as subjects of the British Crown or were they enemies of the state? In their eyes, were the frontier wars legitimate wars or extrajudicial massacres? What are some of the modern-day consequences and challenges that result? What role can the Uluru Statement with its claims for Voice, Truth and Treaty play in reconciling our past? Critics of Reynolds claim that he applies modern-day legal and moral standards to judge events of the past, and that this is unfair. Truth-Telling is a purposeful response to that criticism. It is a detailed analysis of the legal, political and philosophical thinking in 17th-19th century Europe and Britain. It shows how European colonial empires defined sovereignty, and the ‘just and proper’ terms for its transfer under colonial expansion. He locates the colonisation of Australia within the legal and moral norms of the time and compares what happened here with what happened in other colonies like New Zealand, Canada and the United States of America.

Reynolds says, quite simply, that ‘the British messed up the colonisation of Australia’. He leaves the question of whether there is any such thing as a ‘good’ way to colonise an inhabited country for others to debate, and has been criticised for it. In the first half of Truth-Telling he lays out the evidence that the manner in which Australia was colonised was an exception and contravened eighteenth-century international law, the moral codes of the time, and colonisation practices in other parts of the world. What happened here did not go unnoticed by the humanitarian and the antislavery abolitionist movement of the early nineteenth century. Philosopher, jurist and social reformer Jeremy Bentham warned the British government about Australia: ‘because there were no treaties there is a fundamental flaw that will never go away.’ Yet the British government’s nothing-to-see-here response

created a legal and moral vacuum around the question of sovereignty. Reynolds reminds us that history is made in small moments and so often swings on the character and foibles of particular individuals. He takes us back to London in 1785 when Joseph Banks, the botanist and aristocrat who had sailed with Cook along the east coast of Australia in 1770, gave evidence to the Commons Committee on Transportation. Britain had lost the American War of Independence just two years earlier and needed to find new territory for their penal colonies. Banks, who could only make short coastal botanical field trips on foot from the Endeavour, ‘took the liberty to conjecture’ that the inland of Australia was uninhabited. In his opinion, without having seen it, it could not sustain life. Reynolds describes this as a ‘truly portentous assumption’, upon which the British government proceeded to draw up its instructions for Arthur Phillip to claim the whole eastern half of the continent in the name of the British Crown. Then, from the moment that the First Fleet arrived and for the next 50-70 years, the Colonial Office ignored every report to the contrary that arrived from the colony. There were people – both on the coast and inland. They had distinct territories which they fought to defend. They spoke many different languages and had clear lines of authority, governance and social organisation. But the shaky foundations upon which Australia sits were laid, and all its tragic consequences unfurled. In Part Two of Truth-Telling Reynolds pulls his lens back to the present to a set of issues that are direct consequences of the history laid out in Part One. He tackles the Australia Day debate that grows and divides every year and will not go away. He asks the question, ‘was the colonisation of Australia a settlement, a conquest or something else?’ For colonisers there are only two courses of action through which to establish sovereignty – conquest through warfare (to which the laws of war apply) or treaty-making with the nations that were being colonised. In Australia neither happened. He asks why we are unable to memorialise and commemorate the heroism and loss of life of the frontier wars as we do for the ANZACs. He highlights the particularly brutal story of Queensland and asks how it is that someone like Samuel Walker Griffith, whose decades of political life in Queensland spanned the worst crimes of its frontier history, could have an electorate, a suburb, a university and a respected journal named after him. He asks the same questions about the legacies of Sir John Forrest in Western Australia and Sir John Downer in South Australia. And he explains how and why the landmark Mabo decision focused necessarily on land, not sovereignty. Reynolds considers The Uluru Statement from the Heart to be the most important constitutional statement of our time, an ‘eloquent and thoroughly memorable document – an offer to white Australia to come to terms with the past.’ Whilst slow progress is currently being made on a voice to parliament, and the Victorian government has established the first truth-telling process in the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, on the deepest question of sovereignty there is a great silence. Reynolds believes that despite its casual dismissal by the federal government, ‘we haven’t heard the end’ of The Uluru Statement from the Heart.