GROWING UP IN COUNTRY AUSTRALIA

Rick Morton (ed.)

Black Inc, $29.99

In the latest instalment of Black Inc’s Growing Up series, memoir, character portrait and childhood reminiscence feature prominently. The past, though, is the anthology’s main character. Often the country is narrated as a place of growing up – of transit, rather than of permanence. The land is never quite present; it exists largely in the rear-view. As Samantha Leung observes, “Geraldton was a place where you got stuck, and I, for one, couldn’t wait to leave.”

Promoting the book, Black Inc. has referred to the contributors’ “wide range of backgrounds”, noting that this includes “First Nations and new migrants”. It’s not clear why these two categories should be placed together or referred to almost as a parenthetical aside, but it does speak to some of the ways the Growing Up series is framed. Its premise, which focuses on marginal identities, is based on the concept of celebrating “own voices”. Notwithstanding that such voices are always having to explain themselves anyway – we can be confident there will never be a “growing up white and middle-class in Australia” – it reinstates, on some level, the idea that Australia, and Australian writing, is white. According to this view, First Nations and “new migrants” – a term which recalls the critical interventions of authors like Ania Walwicz, Sneja Gunew and many more – exist mostly as a kind of ponderous side-hustle.

As Tom Plevey writes, pace this view, “The Chinese side of my family has been kicking around this wide, brown, occasionally on-fire land in some fashion for decades”. Plevey is not a lone voice here; many contributors, with insight and skill, interrogate taken-for-granted ideas about race and class, unwilling to assume the neutrality or straightforwardness of ideas like “country”.Australia is all “country”, each square metre belonging to particular languages, cultures, histories. The idea of country which this anthology refers to recalls Raymond Williams’ seminal study, The Country and the City, in which Williams explored how England conceived of its urban areas as existing separately from the regions. Contributor Angus Thompson, adopting the sort of imagery Williams analysed, describes the country as “a place of songbirds and earthy palettes far away from the urban cacophony”. This view of country as demarcated and separate, if not wholly inscrutable, runs counter to that of First Nations, something Melinda Mann touches upon when she remarks, “many barely acknowledge whose lands the towns are built on.”

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What does it mean, then, to live in a continent where colonial amnesia and white supremacy condition the work of nation-building? The idea of the country as a place of explicit apartheid and racism recurs frequently throughout the collection: arriving in Geraldton, Samantha Leung notes that “Almost everyone in my year was white and, for the first time, I noticed”. Bridie Jabour tells the anecdote of her Lebanese grandfather buying wine for a Bundjalung man banned from the main bar of Grafton’s Post Office Hotel, recalling the local man’s memory of the camaraderie they shared. There are also those contributions, like Lech Blaine’s and Michael Winkler’s – whose contribution ‘Bob’ is written with great empathy – which seek to explore the interventions of death, loss and bullying that can occur in remote areas. Some writers, on the other hand – Plevey among them – remember experiencing othering and marginalisation only after leaving the country.