Sydney Writers' Festival 2022 opening address - and Marcia Langton & Julianne Schultz
It’s been a while! - nine months to be precise - since I last blogged here. I spent the summer working on my essay My mother’s silence, my nation’s shame, which was published in Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning last month. The first bookish thing I did after that was head straight to the Sydney Writers’ Festival. It was the first time I’d been able to go since 2018.
The opening night address in the Town Hall with its wildly applauding crowd and standing ovation set the tone for this excellent festival. That night three acclaimed First Nations artists - Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jackie Huggins and Nardi Simpson - spoke to the festival’s theme ‘change my mind’, reflecting on the changed, changing and changeable nature of their minds.
It was dark in the Town Hall for the opening address, I didn’t have a notebook and pen, and I was so stunned and excited to be at the SWF for the first time since 2018, it didn’t occur to me to take notes. But here’s my recollection of the opening night, followed by the notes I took from a brilliant conversation two days later between Professor Marcia Langton and Professor Julianne Schultz, chaired by acclaimed historian Clare Wright.
The atmosphere in the Town Hall was electric. Fire and passion when Jackie Huggins then Ali Cobby Eckermann spoke. Then Yuwaalaraay musician and author Nardi Simpson took the mic and filled the hall with her sweet, soft, mesmerising voice.
Simpson addressed her teenage son Luke, sitting in the front row. She said she didn’t usually ask him to come to listen to his mother, but she did tonight. Speaking directly to him, she recalled an event at this same festival 10 years earlier, when she’d been an introductory act. That night 10 years ago she’d been there to sing. She’d felt like a token Indigenous woman, a sideline to the main event - and she vowed that night that one day she’d be back speaking at the Sydney Writers’ Festival centre stage, the main act. And here she was, doing exactly that.
Since that night 10 years ago, Simpson had actively transformed herself from being a singer songwriter into a writer: back then her music had began to fade, her audiences to shrink, so she’d decided to reinvent herself as a writer. Several years later, in 2020, she published first novel, the widely acclaimed Song of the Crocodile.
Rather than speaking about change, Simpson spoke about time, about abiding, continuity. About long, long time. Time immemorial. The 2,000 generations of Aboriginal people who’ve lived, sung and loved on this continent.
She told a story about working on her novel and becoming a writer. After reading the first draft, her mentor and editor, Grace, had gently opened to question Simpson’s belief that to become a writer meant that she had to leave her old, musical self behind.
Grace asked: How would you feel if I asked you where the music was in this paragraph?
It was a perfect question. It went straight to Simpson’s heart. Music - this was a language she understood in her bones. Suddenly she understood that her music belonged in her writing: she had to bring her whole self forward to become a writer, leave no trace behind. Everything belonged. All her good, all her bad. Everything.
And she realised that’s what’s been happening on this continent for 2,000 generations: every First Nations person has been bringing their whole self forward, bringing everything they are and everything that came before them, and offering it all, their whole being, to the next generation. To the children - to the future, she said, turning her head to speak straight to her son.
Simpson stepped back, picked up her guitar and began to sing.
Stunned silence. Tears. Wild applause.
Marcia Langton and Julianne Schultz, Thursday 19 May 2022
On Thursday I heard two towering intellectuals of the public and political sphere - Marcia Langton and Julianne Schultz - talk about ‘Australia’ with historian Clare Wright. Their conversation was drawn from their new books: Langton’s bestselling Marcia Langton: Welcome to Country and Schultz’s The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation.
Wright opened by noting that the welcome to Wurundjeri country where she lives in Narrm (Melbourne), is translated as ‘Welcome – what is your purpose?’ Our ‘purpose’, our intent when we’re on country, is critical.
She then asked both writers to speak about their days at the University of Queensland (UQ).
Langton: UQ was a turning point. There were protests against the Vietnam War and ‘feminism was a newly minted word’. Queensland was the hatching place of many Australian intellectuals because Joh Bjelke-Petersen ran a fascist state: racist, misogynist, homophobic. On campus there was a fabulous group of people who wanted to change the world. Queensland was an apartheid state until 1984, the last state to desegregate.
Schultz, the co-editor of the university student paper, called Queensland ‘a slapdash autocracy’ – an absolute autocracy but shambolic. If you live through those periods of repression and abuse of power, and it changes you, you learn that things can change. You don’t have to put up with it.
Wright: Marcia’s book Welcome to Country: welcome implicitly challenges national narrative about who’s host and who’s guest in this country.
Langton: Aboriginal elders feel tremendous responsibility about people coming to country because country is very powerful. It’s a sentient being and the elders tell country to treat strangers well – ‘this person’s my friend, don’t hurt this person’ – and strangers have a reciprocal obligation to treat country kindly, especially the children. She thinks many welcomes to country are boring and debase Aboriginal cultural heritage. It’s become a bit of a cottage industry. She’s very fussy about which elders she asks to do the welcome, which elders are genuine.
Wright: When did you first start retracing the steps of this nation?
Schultz: Australia has been my subject all my life. The starting point came when Hansen’s vociferous racist closed-mindedness was no longer rejected in the national discourse. When she first appeared in the mid 1990s, her rhetoric was rejected, it was at the margin of the racist thinking from 1901 that had become outdated. But now it’s shaping mainstream debate. Ever since Howard went softly on her message.
This is a very different Australia from the one Julianne saw emerge from the 1970s. If you want to know why something is playing out now, why this insular racism is resonating, you need to look back to see why these tropes activated by Pauline Hanson are so persistent, so powerful in Australia’s colonial history.
Wright: Have we ever truly eradicated racism from this country?
Langton: No. I’ve experienced so many white people now, I don’t know if they’re being racist or just being white people. Australia deliberately created a white ethnographic state. It’s recorded in constitutional debates from before 1901 that they excluded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, Maori and coloured people from the Census in Section 52 because they hadn’t finished wiping them out in Queensland, the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.
The first act of the new parliament was to deport Pacific Islanders, hoping to get rid of the problem, following the new United States procedure.
Wright: What does ‘Voice’ mean to you and why is it so important?
Langton: I do think that decent Australians understand that what they pass on to their children is very important, more than a house, money and so on. As you get older you think about what you leave your children: the climate crisis, the problem of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the nation. How will they be seen two generations on?
What it means to be Australian must be fixed. It must be repaired. I’ve met Australians who convey to me the sense of shame they feel.
Schultz: What we’ve seen over the last 10 years (since 2012) is the greatest experiment in democracy in the world. That’s led to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Working from the bottom up to refine the idea of the Voice – intellectually and politically it’s been a big exercise, challenging.
Langton: A referendum on the Uluru Statement from the Heart is a great idea, but we mustn’t be rushed into it before we’re ready. People like Adam Goodes, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Grace Tame are shifting the shame, flipping it back onto those who attempt to obstruct them.
Wright: The issue of ‘voice’ is just as critical in gender issues as well as race etc. Staying silent is no longer an option. The new focus on women’s voices - is this new?
Schultz: There have been strong women’s voices always in this land. They’ve been important in shaping this country – then they’re silenced and made to disappear. The architecture of silence is so well developed in this country it’s become bureaucratic, records and papers are hidden away. The architecture of silence, the making of things invisible, is part of the process of occupying this land.
Wright: What is your one big blue sky dreaming thing?
Langton: That we address climate change. All our debates are irrelevant unless we tackle climate change because by 2050 the world’s biodiversity is finished if we don’t. We have to change our way of life. We’re heading to the end of times unless we change our ways.
Schultz: Equality becoming real. All equality: education, money, race, gender, as Rose Scott identified in 1901. Covid confining us to our 5 kilometre zones has been powerful in creating new enforced community and localisation.
Next up, Seeing ourselves in trees with Jazz Money, Ashley Hay, Sophie Cunningham and Tony Birch - then Torrey Peters with Detransition, Baby.
Clare Wright, Julianne Schultz and Marcia Langton