Home, by Larissa Behrendt, UQP, 2004
Reviewed by Joe Blake
About 5 years ago, right-wing columnist Andrew Bolt wrote a series of articles focussing on nine Aboriginal people, all of whom are highly successful in their fields. These people, he wrote, used their Aboriginality to win grants, prizes and career advancement, despite their apparently fair skin and mixed heritage. The nine brought a class action against Bolt and the Herald and Weekly Times, claiming a breach of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Not surprisingly, they won.
This case had a thunderous effect on the Liberal Party, who were determined to change the law to allow their favourite cheerleader to attack at will. ”People do have a right to be bigots, you know” proclaimed the Attorney-General. Equally thunderous was the reaction from vulnerable minorities, who saw the prospects of floodgates of abuse opening against them as never before. The law never got changed.
After all that noise, you have to wonder how the articles came to be written in the first place. Did Bolt really believe that the subjects of his article had never suffered because of their ethnic background? If only he’d talked to some of them first, he might have got a different idea. If talking was too difficult, he at least should have read this brilliant novel by Larissa Behrendt. By the way, she’s had a few other successes in her 36 years. After graduating in law in Sydney, she studied at Harvard, gaining a Master of Laws and a Doctor of Juridical Science, becoming the first indigenous Australian to graduate from Harvard Law School.
This amazing book starts and ends in the present, but spends most of its life tracing the story of one family, the Boneys. The grandmother, Garibooli (or Elizabeth, to give her whitefella name) is a very happy Aboriginal child living with her extended family on Dungalear Station in outback New South Wales. Although there have been massacres in the past, that sort of threat seems to be over. She has a loving mother and brother, as well as a host of aunts, uncles and cousins. One day when she is just 12, the unimaginable happens: she’s stolen by white authorities and delivered hundreds of miles by train to work in a rich person’s home. It’s tough there; not only is the work exhausting but she’s continually reminded that her skin colour makes her less than rubbish. She has only one friend, a Chinese girl who’s similarly an outsider.
Things change dramatically for Elizabeth when she turns 16 and the boss cocky sexually abuses her nightly. She’s horrified and terrified by this unwanted attention, but there’s worse to come. When it’s realised that she’s pregnant, she’s almost completely shunned by the other staff. The mistress of the house has a different tack: she decides to keep the girl on, as a constant reminder to her hated husband that he’s betrayed her. Naïve Elizabeth thinks the baby will be allowed to stay too, but he’s snatched away from her even before she’s had a chance to see him.
Devastated by this, Elizabeth has no choice but to return to the house, but finally escapes when she meets Grigor, a German communist who’s come to live in Australia. They marry, move to the Blue Mountains and she has six more children. Grigor is emotionally distant from the children, but Elizabeth is happy living at home with them, even though she wishes she could see her own family and her first child again.
The youngest child is just four when the family is hit with the hardest luck imaginable: Elizabeth dies, and Grigor, shattered by inconsolable grief, allows the three smallest to be taken to a home. The middle one, Bob, lighter in colour than the other two, survives as best he can, but the others are treated terribly: both Daisy and Danny suffer racist taunting and exclusion because of their background, and Danny is sexually abused. Bob is aware of their struggles, but tries to keep himself out of any conflict.
Eventually, when they reach school leaving age, Patricia, the oldest sister, gets Bob, then Daisy and Danny out of the home, providing a place under her roof and getting them jobs. Although self-conscious about his ethnicity, Bob fits into the society, but the others are too damaged to succeed in the outside world. While Daisy and Danny leave the story for a while, Bob and Patricia both marry and have kids. Unfortunately both have the same heart problem that killed their mother; Patricia suffers her fate, leaving behind three youngsters, but Bob is operated on and fixed.
While recuperating, Bob suffers a crisis brought on by the treatment he’s received as an Aboriginal person. Like his father, he’s always been emotionally distant with his children and overbearing with his wife. He leaves them and goes off to find himself, discovering information that leads him back to Dungalear Station and his relatives, who welcome him with open arms. It’s a wonderful thing for him, and he is transformed into a loving husband and father, and gets a job in Aboriginal Affairs. Both his children survive the problems of growing up with these problems, as well as abuse about their skin colour, and grow up to become lawyers working in the field of Native Title and Land Claims.
The end of the story all sounds a bit like a fairy tale, except for one thing: it’s almost a carbon copy of Larissa Behrendt’s family story. How could you not be affected by a history like that?
Post Script: Larissa Behrendt launched Lionel Fogarty’s latest anthology Eelhroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Möbö-Möbö (Future) Vagabond Press 2014, last December.