pdf download - Westerly Magazine
pdf download - Westerly Magazine pdf download - Westerly Magazine
QMNQMNQMNeasy because you don't belong to any castes. But you are most likely to haveyour own caste so there is no effect, and it's very easy to live in India becauseof this, but your behaviour is more or less how your caste behaves.What about when you came back to Australia, did you find it difficult afterseven years to settle into Australian society?I remember getting off at the airport at Melbourne, because that is whereI was living at the time, and settling back into one of these modern cars andthinking it's so luxurious man, and then that it was a different world thenbecause since I was away from Australia for seven years things had reallychanged, and in India they had an old Ambassador car which was a MorrisMajor or something, which is a sort of rattle trap type car. So this was ataste of lUXUry and then it was hot water and things like that. But what reallyhit me was the overwhelming materialism of Australia. Like you go into asupermarket and if you have been out of the environment for a while it issort of a physical shock - you have six brands of baked beans. How doyou choose which brand of baked beans you want because in India you eitherhad one brand of baked beans and usually you could not afford western foodanyway, and so I used to run out of supermarkets, I couldn't go in, only Ihad a wife then, my first wife, and she was sort of an angry lady and sheforced me into these situations, otherwise I wouldn't have ventured in thesefor the rest of my life, so it was a definite culture shock.In hindsight what was the most striking image you retain in your mind aboutyour travels and religious instruction in India?I think it was my contact with my Tibetan teacher and I will never forgethim, also the Tibetan people who I consider had one of the best culturesin the world and one of their major exports, for example, were books, andthen again the materialism wasn't very much there at all. Also, society wasnot so open to oppression and power hungry people as other societies are,and Tibetan people were reasonably very happy and this was the case in mostBuddhist countries. So I think Buddhism sort of has a beneficial influenceon societies such as Burma, Thailand and so on, and this is seen in that onceupon a time people were happy, but the Western influence came in and theyusually destroyed very quickly.As an Aboriginal writer in a largely white literary world, did you feel thatyou were ever placed on a patronising show piece pedestal by critics andacademics?Well there is a problem, if you are an Aboriginal writer, that you never knowhow good you are because either you are being patronised by someone oryou are being put down by other ones, so you are caught in between, andthis gives a certain kind of stress in, say, your writing, especially if you arecritical, that you have to sort of judge how good your work is. There wasa problem with the Song Circle of Jacky when it had a readers report fromthe Aboriginal Arts Board, and there was quite a few criticism there, andI think they were invalid, in fact. Certain adjectives were going to be deleted,like to the idealistic spinning wheel which refers to the congress party in Indiaand also Gandhian philosophy, so that work idealistic had to remain,otherwise it didn't make sense and these are comments I didn't accept at all.But then again Dr Wooreddie, my third novel, which has been praised bylots of people, I dislike, but people tell me they like it best.And again, academically, they always want the token Aborigine around,anyway, and so I think you more or less have to accept that position if youare going to do any good, and use the tokenism aspect of it seeing theAborigines are sort of hunters to survive, and get ahead and make other people86 WESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989
get ahead too. So Aboriginals have to enter this token situation and try touse this as best they can.Q Has your writing ever been the cause, or contributed. to problems of conflictin your own personal life?MN Well, recently I was trying to write at night and also to teach during the day,and my social life suffered to a great extent. The other week I was talkingto a group of Aboriginal students and one of the questions asked was do youmix with Aboriginal people, and I was sitting there and was really seriousand saying no. It's the problem of pressure of work, and so usually I can'tmix with people socially, I have lots of friends and so this is the problem- this is the main problem.Q Do you have a major group of projects be it prose or poetry on the drawingboard at the moment?MN Well I had mentioned before about re-writing Wild Cat Falling, which hasturned into a different project entirely, although there is still a certain degree,of intellectuality there and references back to Wild Cat Falling and also piecestaken out of it, but what has happened it's now called Novel Cooree Script,and it went from sort of doing 'Wild Cat'to doing movie pictures and nowit's Novel Cooree Script, and it refers back to when I wrote a .script of WildCat Falling, and the person I wrote it for was trying to flog it, and said itwas not good and all the rest of it, and so I started thinking about how Iwould like to see Wild Cat Falling be done as a film. So I decided to writea novel about it. Since I was at the Aboriginal Theatre Conference I haveall these different characters to draw and so it makes an interesting complexplot. At one stage I was thinking about using Creole script but then I decidedthat not very many people can read the Creole script anyway, so I mightas well stick to standard English script and drop out the h's and n's and g'sand so on, so it could more or less be read by more than people who couldread Creole.Q Do you see any more poetry coming from yourself, maybe a sequel to theSong Circle of Jacky?MN Well, I wrote the Song Circle of Jackie more or less to sum up one part ofmy life. The poems extended to the early 1970s, so they sum up what I wasfeeling up to 1984. Mter that I wrote Dalwurra, a long poem, which is aboutforty pages long and that is a step forward; and then after that I had to goto Edinburgh for the Commonwealth Literary Conference, and going backto England was like a death trip for me, as I hope you realise.At that time I was reading and listening to Jabig series of songs from theNorthern Territory, so I used one song as a starting point from this and wrotea series of poems in Singapore, India and Edinburgh and so on, and the poemI used was Dalwurra, who is an Ancestral Dream bird. It's a Black Bittern,so he more or less flies out of England and back again and has adventures.It's very interesting that once you do get back into your Aboriginality, onceyou do start using Aboriginal motifs and totems and so on, you have a newoutlook on the world and are interested in the world in a different way. You,more or less become that bird and you enter into other peoples mythology,like the Woggle and the Scottish Loch Ness Monster.Q Land rights, are they a recurring theme in your prose and poetry? What doAboriginal people really expect from land rights, in particular urbanAboriginals?MN Well what we want is acknowledgement that we own the whole of Australia,an acknowledgement of our sovereignty over Australia. From this sort ofnegotiating position, we want all Aboriginal lands which have traditionalWESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989 87
- Page 38 and 39: Esson attended some rehearsals of T
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- Page 48 and 49: "When we started our little theatre
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- Page 52 and 53: VINCENT O'SULLIVANSinging Mastery:
- Page 54 and 55: flighty relation in most statements
- Page 56 and 57: living and the dead; that places hi
- Page 58 and 59: quite diverse traditions towards th
- Page 60 and 61: WARRICK WYNNEThe Wetlands (for Liam
- Page 62 and 63: JAN OWENSmileOur mother aimed the b
- Page 64 and 65: RICHARD KELLY TIPPINGOlympic Airway
- Page 66 and 67: DAVID REITERBear by the Jasper Road
- Page 68 and 69: (At twenty eight you did not bother
- Page 70 and 71: left, would have risen and walked o
- Page 72 and 73: He had hair like mine used to be, t
- Page 74 and 75: OLIVE PELLThe QuestionTell me how t
- Page 76 and 77: BRIAN MOONANAT 515: MASS LECTURE Th
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- Page 80 and 81: JOHN WINTERThe Bird ManIn wooded, p
- Page 82 and 83: KNUTE SKINNERAugust 15There's a lig
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- Page 92 and 93: GEOFF GOODFELLOWToo MuchDianne is 1
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- Page 96 and 97: JEAN KENTWaiting Out the DroughtWai
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- Page 100 and 101: SIMON BROWNBlue Hole, Santothe colo
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- Page 118 and 119: VINCENT O'SULLIVAN - is one of New
get ahead too. So Aboriginals have to enter this token situation and try touse this as best they can.Q Has your writing ever been the cause, or contributed. to problems of conflictin your own personal life?MN Well, recently I was trying to write at night and also to teach during the day,and my social life suffered to a great extent. The other week I was talkingto a group of Aboriginal students and one of the questions asked was do youmix with Aboriginal people, and I was sitting there and was really seriousand saying no. It's the problem of pressure of work, and so usually I can'tmix with people socially, I have lots of friends and so this is the problem- this is the main problem.Q Do you have a major group of projects be it prose or poetry on the drawingboard at the moment?MN Well I had mentioned before about re-writing Wild Cat Falling, which hasturned into a different project entirely, although there is still a certain degree,of intellectuality there and references back to Wild Cat Falling and also piecestaken out of it, but what has happened it's now called Novel Cooree Script,and it went from sort of doing 'Wild Cat'to doing movie pictures and nowit's Novel Cooree Script, and it refers back to when I wrote a .script of WildCat Falling, and the person I wrote it for was trying to flog it, and said itwas not good and all the rest of it, and so I started thinking about how Iwould like to see Wild Cat Falling be done as a film. So I decided to writea novel about it. Since I was at the Aboriginal Theatre Conference I haveall these different characters to draw and so it makes an interesting complexplot. At one stage I was thinking about using Creole script but then I decidedthat not very many people can read the Creole script anyway, so I mightas well stick to standard English script and drop out the h's and n's and g'sand so on, so it could more or less be read by more than people who couldread Creole.Q Do you see any more poetry coming from yourself, maybe a sequel to theSong Circle of Jacky?MN Well, I wrote the Song Circle of Jackie more or less to sum up one part ofmy life. The poems extended to the early 1970s, so they sum up what I wasfeeling up to 1984. Mter that I wrote Dalwurra, a long poem, which is aboutforty pages long and that is a step forward; and then after that I had to goto Edinburgh for the Commonwealth Literary Conference, and going backto England was like a death trip for me, as I hope you realise.At that time I was reading and listening to Jabig series of songs from theNorthern Territory, so I used one song as a starting point from this and wrotea series of poems in Singapore, India and Edinburgh and so on, and the poemI used was Dalwurra, who is an Ancestral Dream bird. It's a Black Bittern,so he more or less flies out of England and back again and has adventures.It's very interesting that once you do get back into your Aboriginality, onceyou do start using Aboriginal motifs and totems and so on, you have a newoutlook on the world and are interested in the world in a different way. You,more or less become that bird and you enter into other peoples mythology,like the Woggle and the Scottish Loch Ness Monster.Q Land rights, are they a recurring theme in your prose and poetry? What doAboriginal people really expect from land rights, in particular urbanAboriginals?MN Well what we want is acknowledgement that we own the whole of Australia,an acknowledgement of our sovereignty over Australia. From this sort ofnegotiating position, we want all Aboriginal lands which have traditionalWESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989 87
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