Polenta and Goanna

Foreword by Stephen Bennetts

FOREWORD

Polenta and Goanna and the history of AustraliaStephen Bennetts

Polenta and Goanna describes a previously unknown aspect of Western Australia’s colonial history: the outback meeting and inter-marriage in the early twentieth century between traditional Western Desert Aboriginal people and Italian migrants in the State’s remote and inhospitable Northwest Goldfields region. Although the novel recalls conventional colonial narratives of ‘first contact’ on the frontier, it also adds the distinctly contemporary themes of anti-racism and the gradual and tentative establishment of bonds of intimacy and kinship between two different groups of people from radically different cultures.

As highlighted in historian Peter FitzSimons’ 2015 SBS TV documentary series The Great Australian Race Riot1 the Coolgardie anti-Italian riots during the 1934 Australia Day weekend depicted in Polenta and Goanna are by no means a one-off, and in fact recall the more recent 2005 Cronulla riots, in which inebriated Anglo-Australian youths brandishing cricket bats and draped in Australian flags converged on a Sydney beach to attack members of Australia’s Lebanese community. Although some Australian politicians were quick to denounce this event in the new demagogic jargon as ‘un-Australian’, the 1930 Coolgardie anti-immigrant riots and the 1861 Lambing Flat anti-Chinese riots on the NSW Goldfields tend to suggest that such events are as Australian as the meat pie.

Australia Day commemorates the declaration of the first British settlement in Australia at Sydney Cove on January 26, 1788. Because of the atmosphere of jingoistic inebriation and public disorder with which the event has come to be associated, the Perth City Council was forced in 2010 to ban alcohol consumption at Perth’s main Australia Day event. ‘Shame Day’ or ‘Invasion Day’ is largely boycotted by Aboriginal people, who instead celebrate their continued survival in their own land in alternative (and alcohol free) events in each capital city known as ‘Survival Day’. More recently, many Aboriginal people have begun to campaign to change the date on which Australia Day is celebrated, in order to decouple the national day from what they consider to be the foundational act of European colonisation and Aboriginal dispossession. Following discussions with members of the local Noongar Aboriginal community, Perth’s harbour city of Fremantle in 2016 announced a decision to ‘change the day’, declaring that the Fremantle City Council:

wanted to celebrate being Australian in a way that included all Australians, and we believe moving away from this date was more culturally inclusive…[by] offering another alternative event that celebrates the diversity of Australians…that…Aboriginal people in Fremantle are more comfortable with than January 26.2

On first reading Polenta and Goanna in Italian in Fremantle in 2001, I was immediately fascinated by this fictionalised account of a strange encounter between Italian miners and traditional Aboriginal people, two groups I knew well. I had long been engaged with Italy and its people, but had also worked as an anthropologist with Western Desert Aboriginal people near Wiluna where the novel is set. I felt this little known aspect of Western Australian history deserved to be more widely known, by ensuring it was translated into English.

I initially sought funding for a translation from Italian business organisations in Perth, but soon realised that a book whose principal theme was frontier relations between Aboriginal women and Italian miners was unlikely to attract much enthusiasm from that quarter. Some of the subject matter of Polenta and Goanna was deeply troubling to Aboriginal people too, although for entirely different reasons. One local publisher was unwilling to take the risk of publishing a book in which the representation of Aboriginal people by a non-Aboriginal writer might be seen as too contentious. I felt however that the book reflected an honest and sincere attempt by an Italian writer to imaginatively explore the experience of intimacy and love between members of two radically different cultures.

Emilio Gabbrielli is not the first Australian novelist to run into difficulties by exploring similarly sensitive subject matter. Xavier Herbert’s 1938 novel Capricornia (set in the Northern Territory during the same interwar period as Polenta and Goanna) also focused on what was known in the language of the time as ‘comboism’; s****l relations between white frontiersmen and Aboriginal women, and the social abyss into which children of mixed descent from these unions inevitably fell. Like Capricornia, Polenta and Goanna is a brave and unflinching portrayal of a controversial and highly sensitive topic.

Frontier violence and the s****l exploitation of Aboriginal women is a well known theme within Australian colonial history. However, a less familiar and more positive side of the encounter between indigenous and non-indigenous people through shared, loving and stable family lives has been explored less often, yet is unquestionably a significant element in our national history. In the 1929 novel Coonardoo, Communist writer Katherine Susannah Pritchard controversially portrayed the tragedy of denied love between a white pastoralist and the novel’s Aboriginal heroine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, while Thomas Kenneally’s devastating novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith depicts the social ostracism faced by an Aboriginal man and his white wife in rural New South Wales in the early 1900s. Jackson’s Track: Memoir of a Dreamtime Place3 is a moving account of the marriage between Anglo-Australian timber worker Daryl Tonkin and local Aboriginal woman Euphie in the Gippsland region of Victoria in the 1930s.

Unfortunately, Polenta and Goanna does accurately reflect the disturbing realities of frontier race relations throughout much of Australia’s colonial history. Anthropologist Professor Bob Tonkinson has worked since the 1960s with the Mardu people, whose traditional country lies just to the north of Wiluna. His description of the Mardu first contact and subsequent interaction with white settlers tallies with the account given in the novel:

First contacts between Mardu groups and the early pioneers were mostly brief and non-lethal, but some Aboriginal people suffered violence at the hands of the parties of whites who between 1906 and 1909 surveyed and built the Canning Stock Route. This thousand mile chain of wells connected the northern pastoral area to the railhead at Wiluna… The route itself subsequently became a kind of funnel for their north-south movement and eventually for an exodus to settled fringe areas. There was no forced removal of Aborigines, but the erosion of their freedom to choose whether or not they wished to initiate or maintain contact with the whites was begun, and the invasion of the desert by introduced animals which must have begun affecting their food resources… In hard times the attraction of the whites’ food and water must have been strong. Among some of the last immigrants, fear of Aboriginal revenge expeditions was cited as a motivating factor [for leaving the desert]

…A few outlying pastoral leases were situated along the most traveled route in from the desert. At these places, the initial contact pattern was of periodic brief sojourns, followed by a return to the old nomadic life; but it was eventually reversed to a more settled existence punctuated by brief returns to the desert heart-lands. This major transition was caused by a subtle process whose implications could never have been seen by the Mardu: the link between increasing involvement with, and growing dependence on, an alien economy. They had rapidly acquired a strong desire for tea, flour, twist tobacco and sugar - as several Mardu have described it, ‘we were captured by flour and sugar’… Also eagerly sought were iron and steel tools, flints and other useful and portable material items. In exchange for such objects and foodstuffs, the Mardu had their labor potential and s****l access to their women to offer the frontiersmen, who, as bachelors living in lonely isolation, had strong desires for both…

... Wherever it was still possible, Aborigines supplemented European foods by hunting game and collecting bush foods. Men mastered the skills of stock work and did menial tasks such as wood chopping. Many young women became domestics, whose privileged access to the homestead and intimate relationships with white pastoralists advantaged them in unprecedented ways. Many became better English speakers than their men folk and came to occupy a mediating role between the two groups of men. s****l use of Mardu women was common, but a***e provoked risks of retaliation by their male kin and the loss of the Aboriginal labor force at that station.4

Being desert country, Mardu territory was of little value to white settlers until the advent of the 1960s mining boom. By leaving the desert later than many other Aboriginal groups, the Mardu probably escaped some of the worst excesses of the white colonial repression which has been meted out to Aboriginal people ever since Europeans first settled Australia in 1788. The last major well-documented Aboriginal m******e took place at Coniston in Central Australia in 1928, when at least 31 (and probably many more) Aboriginal men, women and children were killed by a posse of local whites in retaliation for the murder of a white prospector after a dispute over an Aboriginal woman.

Some non-Australian readers may only be familiar with the traditional Western Desert Aboriginal culture and society depicted in Polenta and Goanna from American writer Marlo Morgan’s completely bogus New Age hoax, Mutant Message Down Under: the European myth of the noble savage dies hard.5

In the novel, Doris and her Aboriginal family speak one of the many dialects of the Western Desert Language, which to this day has more speakers than any other Australian Aboriginal language, across an area spanning a huge one fifth of the surface area of Australia, ranging from Port Augusta on the southern coast, east to Finke on the Northern Territory/South Australian border, north as far as Uluru (or Ayers Rock as white settlers called it) and Papunya (of dot painting fame), northwest into the Kimberley and to the coast south of Port Hedland, and southwest into the Kalgoorlie area.

Although it is not clear from the novel exactly which specific group Doris’ family belongs to, the details are consistent with those of the Putijarra sub-group of the Mardu, many of whom moved south along the Canning Stock Route to the Wiluna area, and later into Goldfields towns further south such as Menzies, Leonora and Laverton. Much of Central Australia was afflicted in the thirties by several years of severe drought which forced many Aboriginal groups out of the desert towards more settled areas in search of food and water.

Polenta and Goanna reflects the experience of Aboriginal people in the 1930s, but other Aboriginal people stayed out in more remote areas of the desert until much later. In the celebrated ‘Last of the Nomads’ case, an elderly couple from the Manyjilyjarra group were located in 1977, still living in a remote desert area east of Wiluna.6

Several decades before, Warri and Yatungka had formed a relationship considered seriously incestuous under the highly prescriptive traditional Aboriginal classificatory kin system. They had therefore eloped together into the Gibson Desert, and successfully evaded Mudjon, a Manyjilyjarra man who was dispatched by Aboriginal elders to hunt them down and execute them for this serious infraction of Aboriginal Law. At the height of a severe drought in 1977, Mudjon and their family members (who had long since moved into Wiluna) became concerned about their welfare, and persuaded Dr Bill Peasley to mount a major expedition into the desert heartland to relocate them. After a six week expedition, the couple were found near death from the drought, and were subsequently reunited with their families in Wiluna. In 1984, a small Pintubi family group were found still living in the desert near Kiwirrkurra Aboriginal community in the Great Sandy Desert, the last documented case of ‘first contact’ with traditional Aboriginal people in Australia.

Some aspects of traditional Aboriginal Law presented in Polenta and Goanna may seem harsh to readers, yet the physical and social survival of Aboriginal groups in the desert depended on a strict social code developed over thousands of years and imposed by Aboriginal elders like Doris’ grandfather in the novel. Through the rigorous male initiation process supervised by older men, Aboriginal youths were trained to be able to withstand some of the harshest conditions on earth and prepared for their role in providing food for their extended family groups.

As with indigenous communities throughout the world, contact with Anglo-Australian settler society (and especially its introduced and all-pervasive d**g of choice, alcohol) has inevitably devastated Aboriginal people’s society, culture and health.7 Yet initiations, ceremonies and other traditional cultural forms are strongly maintained to this day throughout the Western Desert regions of Australia, including in Wiluna, which is a major regional initiation centre. In many remote Aboriginal communities like Jigalong to the north, Aboriginal councils have completely banned alcohol, and have also been able to negotiate a degree of cultural autonomy which allows them to interact with the white world more on their own terms.

Traditional Aboriginal cultural identity received a huge boost in the 1970s with the advent of the land rights and associated outstation movements, in which many traditionally-oriented Aboriginal people moved back to their tribal country, including in the Wiluna area. Aboriginal traditional owners for the Wiluna area lodged native title claims in 1998 and 2000 asserting their property rights to the area under both traditional Aboriginal Law and Australia’s Native Title Act 1993. The claimants successfully settled these claims with the WA State Government in 2013.

Polenta and Goanna is of course set mainly in the very different era of the White Australia Policy (1901-1973), dominated by colonial notions of social Darwinism and the supremacy of the white Anglo-Saxon race. As a British settler society close to Asia which also faced the task of addressing the social chaos created by the wholesale dispossession of the country’s original indigenous inhabitants, there was immense paranoia that Australia might be taken over by Asians, or that the national gene pool might be contaminated by the exploding population of ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal children born from frontier unions between ‘full blood’ Aboriginal women and ‘Europeans of the lower type’ (such as those depicted in Polenta and Goanna). It was assumed (with spectacular inaccuracy) that traditional full blood Aboriginal people were inevitably destined to die out through a process of ‘natural selection’.

The Australian Government’s solution to the so-called ‘half caste problem’ was two-fold: the rapid increase in the mixed descent Aboriginal population would be halted by outlawing s****l relations between white men and Aboriginal women, except where marriages were approved by the State’s Chief Protector of Aborigines. As for the large number of children of mixed descent, they were to be abducted by police from their Aboriginal mothers and assimilated in native welfare institutions into European ways, thus becoming the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’. This situation has been dramatised in the 2002 film Rabbit Proof Fence,8 the remarkable true story of how three young mixed descent Aboriginal girls incarcerated in the Moore River native welfare institution north of Perth managed to escape, and then navigated their way alone across more than 1000 km of wild bush country back to their families in Jigalong, just north of Wiluna. On 13 February 2008, as the first item of business on his recently elected Government’s parliamentary agenda, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a public apology in Federal Parliament on behalf of the Australian Government to members of the Stolen Generations who had been removed from their families under previous Government policies.

Some Aboriginal people (like Doris and her son in the novel) were forced to make difficult choices about whether to continue traditional practices such as initiation, or abandon them for a more European lifestyle. Others, like the mixed descent Aboriginal grandmothers of two well known Australian writers, Sally Morgan and historian Henry Reynolds, even managed to successfully pass themselves and their families off as non-indigenous, to avoid the stigma of Aboriginality.

Sally Morgan’s fictionalised autobiography My Place is the classic account of an urban Aboriginal woman’s search to recover her hidden Aboriginal identity.9 In Polenta and Goanna, a similar theme is given a deeply unusual twist in the novel’s fictionalised account of an Italian writer’s search in outback Australia to recover a lost Italian-Aboriginal identity.

Historian Henry Reynolds has almost single-handedly created our current historical understanding of Australia’s frontier race relations, as well as providing the necessary research which made possible the landmark 1992 Mabo case, in which Aboriginal prior ownership of Australia was finally recognised by the High Court. With the White People10 explores the huge contribution which Aboriginal people made to the settlement of Australia (another historical element emphasised in Polenta and Goanna), while Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia’s Identity11 is a detailed account of the way in which dubious racial theories shaped Australian government policy for decades, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal people (including Reynolds’ own grandmother).

It is frequently assumed that Italian migration to Western Australia began only in the post-war period, and that it comprised solely immigrants from Southern Italy. Polenta and Goanna highlights a tradition of Italian settlement in the Western Australia going back to the late nineteenth century, and strongly associated with Western Australia’s port city of Fremantle. Although Southern Italian fishermen from Sicily and the Aeolian Islands were some of the earliest to arrive in Fremantle, there is a strong tradition of migration from Northern Italy as well, especially from the Veneto and the Valtellina, the region bordering the Swiss Alps from which the novel’s two main Italian characters come.12

Stephen Bennetts is an anthropologist who carried out research for the Martu native title claim to an area to the north of Wiluna in 2000-2001 and doctoral research in Italy in 2002-3 on the revival of Southern Italian popular folk traditions.