Some moments come to you as a gift. On a visit to Mudgee at the weekend I found a café tucked away in a courtyard behind one of the main streets. As in most Australian country towns, the shops were closed on Saturday afternoon, so the café was quiet. A middle-aged woman sat alone, reading her Kindle, on one of a suite of faded armchairs arranged around a low table which effectively formed the centrepiece of the outdoor seating area. I took a side table next to the door of the café interior, close to a speaker that relayed a tasteful selection of modern country blues. The staff – all women – were friendly and I ordered a large flat white and a slice of fruit loaf. Sparrows pecked at the uneven cobbles and flew up to perch on the bare vines that hung overhead, watching for the next opportunity to snatch a crumb. I waited for them to pounce.

“Look at you, enjoying the peace and quiet,” said the waitress as she set down my coffee.

“It’s an oasis,” I said. “And I love the music.”

Mudgee is a typical Australian country town of wide streets and low colonial buildings where church spires are still the tallest structures you can see, until your eye wanders to the blond-green hills beyond them. The old rural and gold-mining economy of the surrounding area has been replaced by vineyards and olive groves, and wine bars and restaurants specialising in local produce alternate with older, less glamorous businesses such as pubs, Thai massage parlours and thrift shops. In the quieter enclaves, several retail premises stand empty.

Old Telegraph Station and Post Office, Mudgee

On this afternoon, Saturday or not, the main street had a lively atmosphere, thanks mainly to the al fresco winers and diners. At one end of the street, close to where the Cudgegong river cuts through the town, a saddlery stood opposite a wine bar offering live music. The shop was open and I wandered in, drawn by the wholesome smell of leather.

Cudgegong River, Mudgee

“Where you from, mate?” Behind the counter an old lady sat hunched over a sewing machine, rapid-fire strafing a horse blanket with needle and thread.  Her red leathery skin made her hair seem whiter than it really was.

“Sydney.”

She nodded, as if to say, “Thought so.”

“I’m normally closed at this time, but I’ve got so much to do.”

At the other end of the street, and at what seemed to be the far end of the town’s cultural spectrum, I found the Mudgee Art House, run by a painter called Warwick Behr. He signs himself Warbehr. I bought a print of his painting of a black cockatoo—a mysterious and iconic Australian bird, reimagined as a splash of psychedelic colour.

Black Cockatoo on Mustard, by Warbehr

Australia Day means different things to different people: for Anglo Australians, it marks the beginning of European settlement and the transformation of a pristine wilderness into a modern democratic nation state; for many indigenous Australians, it’s “Invasion Day”, the beginning of the end of their traditional way of life and the source of their present-day difficulties.

In my case it was the date in 1991 when, with my pregnant wife and young family, I left the UK to make our home here.

After a 24-hour flight and the adjustment of our watches, we arrived on January 28 to find that the area of Sydney where we were to spend our first few weeks had been devastated by a cyclone. Just two weeks later my wife went into premature labour. She was hospitalised. The baby – the longed-for sister for our two sons – was born two months later but survived only a few hours.

Welcome to Australia. Source: The Daily Telegraph

Our personal history has much in common with that of other migrants and, indeed, the history of modern Australia: a fresh start, hope, crushing disappointment, resilience and survival. We have our third child: he’s a fine, strapping young man, just like his elder siblings. Not only that, but we have just welcomed our first grandchild (another boy!) into the world. Life doesn’t get much better.

So, when I think of Australia Day, I think of a lot of things, good and bad.

Consequently, it’s not hard for me to imagine that Australia Day is good for some people, less good for others. I’m not a fan of the black arm-band view of history and I love this country unreservedly, but I’m not blind to its faults. I have no first-hand experience of the kind of deprivation suffered by many indigenous Australians, but I’ve seen enough of it to know that it’s real and to understand why Australia Day is alienating for many of our first people.

So, let’s change the date; and let’s not.

Peter Nicholson, The Australian

I’m conciliatory rather than combative by nature, and the heated – and, all too often, overheated – debate about whether to change the date and what the new date should be doesn’t float my boat. So much of it is little more than grandstanding; no-one appears to be seriously committed to finding a solution. For what it’s worth, here’s my suggestion.

In the interests of acknowledging our history, both the good bits and the bad, and celebrating our achievements, let’s keep Australia Day on January 26. And let’s choose an entirely different day as “New Australia Day”.

That’s right – two Australia Days, if you like, each with a different but complementary purpose. While January 26 would still look at our past, and at our present in the context of that past, New Australia Day would challenge us to look to the future as one people. While January 26 would still celebrate what we have been and what we have become, New Australia Day should inspire us to embrace our potential to become something bigger and better – more egalitarian, more inclusive, more open-minded and open-hearted…more Australian, in the best sense.

Naturally, only one of these days would be a public holiday, and I think it should be New Australia Day. The change would be an acknowledgement that Australia has moved beyond (but not forgotten) its British and European roots and is maturing as a multi-cultural society which values its shared traditions, including those of indigenous people, and the opportunity they represent to create a richer and fairer future for everyone.

Mark Kenny recently argued in the Sydney Morning Herald for changing Australia Day to May 9. His reasons for choosing that date were good, but I think it would be a better New Australia Day.

C’mon Aussies, let’s end this pointless bickering and meet each other halfway with a double-barrelled national celebration which, while admittedly a compromise, is still symbolically meaningful: an acceptance of our past together on one day, followed at a later date by a new imaginative space in our national life in which we can come together and pool our strength, hopes and visions for the future.

Not that anybody cares, but there’s been a long interval since the last post. That’s because Rody and I have been focusing on “Rody and The stranger”, the novel based loosely on Rody’s life and times (not that anybody cares about them, either). Anyway, we thought it would be nice to include another, shorter, passage from the work-in-progress about one of Rody’s favourite Australian animals, the black cockatoo, which, like so much wildlife these days, is under pressure from environmental degradation.

It began with a single, plaintive note that curved through the air, strange and familiar, like a sound you know you’ve heard before, perhaps in childhood, but can’t remember where or when. As I looked up, a breeze washed through the clearing and the high branches began to sway. A second gust turned the canopies inside out and the shade they had provided disappeared in a shellburst of silver, green, gold and blue as the sunlight broke between the leaves and through them, followed by fragments of sky. Then between the branches shapes descended which might have been birds or, because they were so black, the shadows of birds; it was only when each one landed on a branch—and, with a final flare of its wings, resolved itself into a momentary stillness—that it was possible to be certain that they were black cockatoos. There were about a dozen of them; in the early days after moving to World’s End, we used to see thirty or so at a time; not any more. Apart from a glimpse of yellow in their tails and behind their beaks, they were quite black. No, they were more than black; they radiated darkness, and rode upon the floating branches like pulsing beacons of night on a deceptively calm sea.

Text © 2015 Simon Jones; Picture © Jim Clarke

This week (July 5-12) Australia celebrates its indigenous people, and does so against a background of continuing controversy over the constitutional status of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. In recognition of the event and the complexities that continuously challenge our original inhabitants, I’m offering below an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, “Rody and The Stranger”, which touches (in an admittedly fleeting and indirect way) on some of these issues.

We were just about to turn up the hill that leads to the village when our next-door neighbour, Colin, wearing overalls and gloves, appeared from among the trees. Sophie beeped at him and waved. When he recognized us, he flagged us down; he seemed excited.
“Oh God, we’re going to be late,” murmured Sophie as she pulled over and lowered the window, leaving the engine running.
“Come and have a look at this,” said Colin.
“What is it?” I asked, but he had already turned and was walking briskly back to the bush, waving at us to follow him. “I’d better go see.”
“Christ,” said Sophie, slapping the top of the steering wheel with both hands.
“He might need help.”
“If you’re not back in two minutes I’m going without you.”
I jumped out of the car and followed Colin across the road.
“Can we come?” asked Rory.
“No!” roared the thundercloud.
A narrow, twisting and very uneven path led through eucalypts and she-oaks to a clearing where Colin and half a dozen others were standing in a semicircle around a large, flat expanse of rock surrounded by piles of freshly cut lantana.
“We just cleared this,” said Colin. “Look what we found.”
I made my way to the front of the group, nodding and smiling at Colin’s wife Brigette and others I knew, all volunteers on the community bush regeneration programme. It took me a moment to figure out what I was looking at and then a shape emerged.
Down the centre of the rock and taking up most of the space was a long, straggly outline of a man with a melon-shaped head that was far too large for his body. His eyes were like twin full moons and his lower half seemed to morph into a sort of tripod. The penny dropped and, not for the first time, I cursed the naivety that my sheltered Welsh Methodist upbringing had ingrained in me.
“Impressive middle wicket,” I said.
“The girls have told us to order more Viagra,” said Tony the plumber. Everyone laughed.
“Probably some kind of fertility symbol,” observed David, a schoolteacher.
“How old do you think it is?”
“Who knows?” said Colin. “Aborigines have been here more than 40,000 years.”
“Well, the other one can only be a couple of hundred years old at most,” said Brigette, pointing above and to the right of the figure’s head.
Again, it took me a moment to discern the shape. It was smaller and less impressive than the man-figure in terms of artistic conception, but it made my heart skip a beat: a three-master, complete with bowsprit and a few lines to suggest rigging, riding at anchor in the Sydney sandstone. To say I felt time stand still would be a cliché, but so what? It was as though someone had frozen a moment in history, thawed it and served it up to me on the spot: an Aborigine’s first encounter with European civilisation. For him (her?) the wooden floating object would have appeared strange, perhaps unearthly, while the medium in which he recorded it was natural and familiar; for me the object I was looking at was familiar from movies and illustrated history books, but I was seeing it in a new and alien way. I imagined the artist and me to be two observers at different points in time momentarily sharing a sense of being jarred out of our respective contexts.
And then there was the contrast between the subject matter of the two engravings, and the clash it could be said to represent between modern and ancient, dreamtime and real time, one culture and another. Oh, don’t get me started….

I was still thinking of the engraving of the ship. I fantasized that the original might have been the mother vessel of Captain Phillip’s expedition, witnessed by some Durag people from the banks of the Hawkesbury. I further fantasized that the process of engraving would have been a way for the artist to come to terms with this extraordinary encounter, by re-ordering his personal experience into something which, aesthetically at least, was definitive and, therefore, something he could own and control. I knew, of course, that I was imposing my own conceptions and assumptions—if not my own psychological needs—on experiences and processes that I could only imagine and not fully understand. No doubt the reality, as usual, was infinitely more prosaic and complex.
“Watch your speed, darling.”
“We’re late.”
“Let’s just make sure we get there in one piece, yeah?”
I remembered from my reading of local history how a party of Aborigines had attempted to board a settler’s boat on the Hawkesbury in 1873. The passage quoted a contemporary account from The Sydney Morning Herald which said the settler had aimed a pistol at the leader and “dispatched him to the shades”; the other raiders fell back, discouraged. It was only later that I learned the phrase was from Ovid. To the writer and his readers the allusion was probably no more than a stroke of rhetorical colour in a report that was fair and balanced, about an incident of which the rights and wrongs were clear-cut.

© Simon Jones 2015

It might be appropriate here to mention “Shadows in a Landscape”, Rody’s song about Albert Namatjira, which he wrote about on January 26, Australia Day (scroll down for article and link to song).

It’s Australia Day weekend and there’s plenty to celebrate. Plenty to think about, too. My mind goes back to an outback trek that my good friend Steve Banks and I did with our respective families way back in 1999. One of many highlights was a stopover in Alice Springs, where I first heard the life story of Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira and saw on the streets a level of disadvantage among indigenous people that I hadn’t previously witnessed. The experience made an impression that stayed with me long after I returned to Sydney and led to my writing a song, Shadows in a Landscape. You can hear a demo here, with Steve on vocals and guitar and yours truly on piano.

I think of it as exploring two kinds of alienation—that of black people from white, and white people from themselves (and each other).

Portrait of Namatjira by Alfred Herbert Cook

Namatjira (1902–1959) cuts a lonely figure in Australian history. He set himself apart from other Aboriginal artists by painting (brilliantly) landscapes in a European/Western style. He earned genuine appreciation among the white art cognoscenti of the day and popular acclaim—although one suspects that the latter was tinged with condescension and a feeling that Namatjira was proof that the black man could be “civilised” and assimilated. He became an Australian citizen.

——

Central Australian Landscape by Albert Namatjira

The fame and relative wealth he achieved brought the cultural ambiguities of his situation to a head. His status obliged him to look after his kinfolk and led to his supplying alcohol to members of his extended family. This was illegal, and Namatjira was jailed. He was a proud man and the experience profoundly affected him; he died a year or two after his release. More details here.

So that’s the black/white alienation story behind the song; the white/white alienation is (in my view) implied in the journey through the desert in the last verse, the driver leaving his normal life behind, finding some escape but no ultimate refuge in the landscape around him. One of my favourite memories from our trek is that of standing in the Simpson Desert, looking at the horizon and seeing the curvature of the earth. The sense of personal insignificance in all that vastness was oddly liberating.

Namatjira is no longer fashionable among the cognoscenti. The cultural shift from the White Australia policy that ended in 1973 to today’s multiculturalism means that our urban elites regard Namatjira as the symbol of a discredited era. They prefer traditional Aboriginal dot painting. This is an ironic reversal of the polarities of Namatjira’s situation, but is really no more than the same old black/white alienation in an updated form.

Happy Australia Day.

Ever been to Alice Springs? If you have, and if you’re the kind of person who walks around with your eyes and mind open, you’re likely to agree that this small city in the dead heart of Australia can change not only your understanding of the country and its people but also your view of yourself, wherever you’re from. Somewhere in the Universal Stranger back catalogue there’s a song called “Shadows In a Landscape” written by yours truly and recorded by the legendary Steve Banks. It was one of five songs that emerged from a three-week trip we did with our respective families to the Outback, including Alice, many years ago. It’s about alienation – the alienation between black and white Australians, and between white Australians and the land – and much of it turns on the story of the brilliant, unfashionable and in many ways still controversial indigenous artist Albert Namatjira. I wrote it after we day-tripped from Alice to the tiny Lutheran mission of Hermannsburg, where Namatjira and his family had lived.

All this came flooding back yesterday when I stumbled upon a story on the ABC Alice Springs website about indigenous artists who are creating a mural for a local shopping centre. Those who haven’t been to Alice will probably think the story is a little cheesy; those who have been will understand that it’s a fragment of a larger, richer and more profound and complex truth. A number of the artists involved are descendants of Namatjira; below is an ABC pic of Peter Taylor – like Namatjira, a watercolourist – who designed the mural.

Peter Taylor; pic by Alice Moldovan, ABC Local

Banksie’s demo of “Shadows” will be uploaded in due course; it’s one of a couple of songs currently bogged down in the copyright registration process.

Ah, Canberra: Australia’s national capital suburb, described in the early 1990s by the now long-out-of-print CountyNatwest Glossary of Financial Terms as “…a city of monuments and roundabouts, where the mind is so highly prized it is exempt from any meaningful activity”. I could never quite get to the bottom of why that now defunct investment bank had a grudge against the Jewel of the Limestone Plains. Perhaps it had been knocked back on an advisory mandate for some Federal Government privatisation project or other? Whatever; that fascinating little entry in an otherwise arid tome was excluded in subsequent editions after Fairfax Media began publishing it. But I digress.

Earlier today I visited the National Portrait Gallery and, for the first time, came face-to-face with Guy Maestri’s stunning portrait of singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. In a space hung with many excellent works, it stood out. The picture is a close-up and intense study of Gurrumul’s face; looking at it, however, I felt I was meeting the whole man with a sense of completeness and immediacy that none of the other portraits conveyed of their respective subjects. The key, I think, lies in the perfect balance Maestri achieves between the darkness of the blind Gurrumul’s eyes and the radiance of his face. The symbolism may be obvious – a man who can’t see brings light into the world through his artistry – but it works.

The portrait won the 2009 Archibald prize. Maestri gives an interesting account of how he worked on it on this Art Gallery of NSW page.

This is crazy. According to the ABC Far North Queensland website, a new report has found that youth unemployment of between 20 and 40 per cent could become common in parts of Australia by 2016.

Executive director of The Brotherhood of St Laurence, Tony Nicholson, said far north Queensland and some suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney were areas of real concern. “If nothing changes over the next two years and nothing is done about it, youth unemployment rates of between 20 and 40 per cent will become quite commonplace.”

Not that it makes any difference, but yours truly wrote a song about youth unemployment a while back and recorded it with bad boy of the fundraiser circuit, Steve Banks. If only we could change the world one song at a time. Here it is: DSS Blues by Hogan and Banks….