In a recent essay, Outback Gothic, I tried to define a new genre, one that lives outside what critics call Australian Gothic.
Originally from the Pilbara and Kimberley, the unintended arrogance of that title has jarred with me all my life. Australian Gothic, from what I can gather, means desolation: cool weather with occasional heat, towns abandoned to urban flight, colonial guilt, rusted fence lines and nostalgia.
That is nothing like the world I knew.
Every two years we’d get new teachers in our little town. As cheeky little ratbags, we called them ‘jungles’, because we thought they were green and dense. They spoke wistfully of ‘the frontier’ as if it were some vanished legend. By the second month they realised the frontier began where the town limits ended. You could fit whole European countries in the vacant space between the last house and civilisation. In fact, Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and South Australia together cover a land mass larger than Western Europe.
For most of my childhood the road to Perth still included several hundred miles of dirt. The heat perched on your shoulders like an entity, and to this day I walk looking down, which I’m told comes off as shyness. It’s not. It’s a habit to avoid stepping on snakes. They don’t like it.
In the Pilbara we have bungarras, not the little ‘sand monitor’ lizards Google thinks we have. These are goannas second only to the Komodo dragon in size. They scare the daylights out of you, and I’ve been chased by more than one. We were told as kids never to stand still or they’d climb you like a tree. To this day, I’ve never seen one in a tree; I think it was the adults’ little joke to make sure we kept moving. Story has it they’ve all come out of hiding now that Steve Irwin isn’t around to pick them up and tell them they’re beautiful.
The Voice campaign made it starkly clear that, like Washington DC and Richmond, Virginia 150 years ago, nearly two centuries have produced two distinct civilisational groups. Kids from the Pacific Southeast often grew up hanging out at shopping centres. I grew up trying to lie about setting a spinifex fire with my eyebrows singed off.
In my world, Aboriginal men still bear arm and chest initiation scars. I’ve met more than one young bloke who had passed through ritual initiations, the wince they give when they mention it still gives me a wry laugh. When they mess up, their own people deal with it and no one says anything. If you’re running a small police station in Fitzroy Crossing, the last thing you want is 50 angry tribal men storming the police station with nulla-nullas.
Throughout the campaign they spoke to people from the desert maybe once, to the ones I’d call ‘my people’, the multicoloured assortment of ratbags and rebels from the outback, not the bush, there’s a difference. I had wondered what the people I knew in Kiwikurra could bring to the national debate, aside from a distinct lack of interest. The truth was, nobody even cared.
That’s when it got my ire up. People claiming descendancy, largely urban, were taking resources from people I knew, resources they genuinely needed.
In the urban centres, Aboriginal people are different to those of the outback northwest. It appears that they’ve conflated descendancy with heritage and imposed an ethical regime on everyone as a result.
Again, we’re being governed by rules born in the wake of southeast settlement, not in the context of the frontier continent we actually live in.
Many Aboriginal groups in Western Australia only came into contact with outsiders in the past century, some like the Pintupi Nine, the world’s last nomads, as late as 1984.
They didn’t know they were on an island. Many people in the northern outback still aren’t entirely sure. Most had never seen an ocean, some still haven’t, and I used to be one of them.
Aside from flying over it, I’ve seen the Pacific coast maybe five times in my life, which is still more than many. To me, it is absurd to be governed from the Pacific Southeast when they don’t even know us, let alone understand us.
The great historic brag is that Canberra was halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. So what? To me it’s meaningless. Put the capital in The Alice, that’s halfway between all of us now. In our world, Southeast Asia are neighbours, not an international stopover. When there used to be a coup in Thailand, or South Korea, or when Malaysia’s Mahathir would rant at us, it was a very real concern. And when refugee boats sink, their bodies turn up on our Indian Ocean shore, not just on our news bulletins.
This is why I bristle at the term Australian Gothic. Even Southern Gothic doesn’t take into account the realities of South Australia or southwest Wester Australia. I don’t know your land, understand your urban flight, or share your guilt. It’s just not my world. It’s Gothic of the Pacific southeast at best, a literature of guilt and distance.
Outback Gothic is heat that doesn’t forgive, snakes that don’t warn, endurance that isn’t optional, and silence that speaks louder than Parliament.
