Talking To My Country: Stan Grant - Born in the time of "The Great Australian Silence"- an articulated cry of pain

Harper Collins 2016. 225 pages

Stan Grant is the son of a Wiradjuri man and Kamilaroi woman. He has had a lot of media coverage as of late. He spoke out on the response too Adam Goodes when Adam called out a young girl in an AFL game who called him an ape. All the usual shite was thrown-can't he take a joke, its just sports why bring politics/race into it? The poor girl was only thirteen! What was Adam thinking of. Etc. Stan Grant wrote a passionate and personal response to this in which he reminded the greater (white) Australian community that for indigenous people being on the receiving end of racial abuse and vilification kind of wears the person down and then having to explain and justify why this is, is well...depressing.  But here is Stan Grant providing a window for Australians into his own personal story of being indigenous but successful in the Australian mainstream-in fact a bit of a celebrity having reached the pinnacle of journalism (foreign correspondent). (p219 "I found a path through education that led to journalism. A love of knowledge and an inquisitiveness that has shot me through with anger. A deeper understanding of history, of politics, of economics, leaving me resentful of our suffering.")

In the title Mr Grant is talking both to Australia and in his relationship with the dirt, rock, waterhole, bone and sinew of his origins, his people. And for that we should be grateful as this is a considered and heartfelt treatise. About self identity he writes "You called us Aborigines: a word that meant nothing to my people. And in that one word you erased our true identities...Soon we would lose our names; names unique, inherited from our forefathers. Then our languages silenced. Soon children would be gone. This is how we disappear. Now Australians pay their respects to the elders of the nations of which they have no idea."

And we do not acknowledge the genocide or slaughter of people of the land that the European settlement of Australia generated. Surprisingly it is not part of or mentioned on Australia Day. In this context Mr Grant provides examples from the history of his own people in place names. Poison Waterholes Creek and Murdering Island (in the middle of the Murrumbidgee River) both examples of massacres conducted in the 1830s by early settlers on the Wiradjuri people. Poisoning a waterhole used by nomadic people for thousands of years is an atrocity but then to leave the bodies there to rot as a "warning" is like hanging feral cats on a fence line. Inhumane. Then to pursue the surviving remnants and massacre them on their own land is what this country has been founded on. Why should we modern Australians not be prepared to reflect on this and consider its implication for the first people? I don't get it.

Stan Grant has not come from a privileged background but found a path through education to succeed in Australia (as Adam Goode has done through AFL). Stan Grant's family moved following work and his father's and mother's stories are equally as important as his own. Both hard workers and strong supporters of raising their family in the best way they could. His father, a skilled labourer in his working life, in later life helped compile a Wiradjuri dictionary for which he was awarded an honorary doctorate. His parents forged him in ways he did not understand at the time as did the casual racism he encountered through his early life and sadly which still persists. Stan Grant tells the story of one of his sons leaning against the family car when a passing motorist slows and tells the boy to move away from the car- assuming he the boy has no right to be where he is. We are all guilty of assuming the worse of first people. The media fires this perception telling us the bad stories of dysfunction, violence. Rarely do we get the "Living Black" stories about success and self determination. Yet these are the majority stories. Or read Anita Heiss's 1998 poem "My Best Friend's White*" that starts "I'm not a racist...I like white people...My best friend's White". And think what if the boot of generalisation and assumption was on the other foot.

We owe it to the children being born now to make Australia a better, more inclusive and not assimilated country. We do not want Australia to be harsher, more unsustainable and unequal society where shit like the Patriotic Front has more voice than our first people. And the born in the great Australian silence. Stan Grant says he was born in the time when we did not debate and discuss these issues. It is not something we can afford to return to. That is the rotten core of Reclaim Australia and its fellow travellers-the racists and fascists.


This is a individual and powerful testimony. But it is important to acknowledge this is Stan Grant's story. But as a story it is not unique. Many indigenous writers and social activists are telling variations of the same. But do we listen, do we hear? Some we dismiss because they have a troubled pass (jail and such like). But in these days of the rise of white supremacists using the guise of Reclaim Australia we need to be paying attention and being open to education around the issues which if we cannot solve will continue to leach resource and spirit from our society. We will be poorer in economy, spirituality and identity because of this. In this book Stan Grant asks that as a country still forging its identity we keep the discussion going. We keep asking who we are, where we have come from and where we want to go in the future and in particular; the Australia we bequeath our children. Important to this is an accurate telling of the history of the first people, no matter how uncomfortable or challenging, as they are the core and foundation of who we are.

Ken Canning standing for Senate for Socialist Alliance and worth our vote

* From Anita Heiss - Token Koori Curing Communications 1998