Growing Up Aussie , White or Wong: A Rememberance.
“And the bush hath friends to meet him,
and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of their breezes
And the river on its bars.
And he sees the vision splendid
Of the sunlit plains extended
And at night the wond’rous glory
Of the everlasting stars”.
[Clancy of the Overflow, by Banjo Paterson]
My formative years of the 1950s were in Australia- in the white working class northern suburbs of Melbourne. Let’s remember that earlier in the century , one of the first acts of the first Australian Government was the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. It ended the employment of Pacific Islanders and was part of what was widely known as the White Australia Policy. More than 40 years later, our Minister of Immigration could still utter the stunning remark that “2 Wongs don’t make a white ”. In his opposition to Asian immigration Arthur Calwell warned white Australians that we had to “populate or perish”.
It was symptomatic of White Australian hostility to Chinese and other Asians that went all the way back to the gold rush of the mid- 19th century.
100 years later, in the mid 20th century, I went to school with kids and teachers who looked and sounded like me - white. In the same way that it is quite possible today for an American student to live in a town and go to a school where they will have little or no contact with Hispanics or African Americans - it was possible for me to spend my school days among an almost exclusively white student population. We knew there were aboriginal people but we didn’t know any, didn’t know anyone who did know any- except for the stars- the celebrities. We all knew them. They were the ones we were told who were “a credit to their race”.
Evonne Goolagong was a tennis superstar before the word was invented. Lionel Rose was a boxing champion. Albert Namatjira was a painter of outback desert landscapes. His ghost gums was part of our suburban décor. They were of course the exception rather than the rule. But that was the 60s, the era of television - my formative years were the 1950s.
These were simple times. The milk was delivered daily by a horse-drawn cart. Our daily [ white ] bread also came in a horse- drawn wagon. Remember I am describing life in the suburbs- not some lonely rural outpost. In those days we lacked the simple appliances that people today take for granted. In my early childhood we had no refrigerator, no washing machine, no telephone, no television, and certainly no air conditioning. This was not considered going without; none of my friends had them.
In the 1950s and 60s our melting pot consisted of what we termed “new Australians”. The slurs of course were there- the : “wogs”, “dagoes”, “wops” and “spags”. But my experience – my memory is that they were more likely to be used by those of my parents generation. As kids we found soccer and other school yard games to bring us together, though I can of course never know how much Cedric, or Spiro or Jimmy or the others did, or did not feel like outsiders.
My father was a strong and stubborn man. Raised by an Irish patriarch who went on to become president of a union, and a member of federal parliament- he had a strong dose of authoritarianism in his approach to parenthood – an approach that did not sit well with me in the rebellious 60s. But before those troubled teens, came the quieter years. In fact, despite the fact that he never understood my work, my father may well have contributed to my interest in media. He was an aircraft mechanic for TAA [ Trans Australia Airlines ].
At some point in my childhood , he graced the cover of the airline magazine - holding an airplane aloft in one hand. Now I knew my father’s capacities. As a small boy I had gone to work with him, perched precariously on the handlebars of what in those days we called a “pushbike”. I looked at this image of my father on the cover of this magazine and had a real sense of the difference between illusion and reality. It may well have been the moment when I first became interested in media and its power to shape the way we see the world.
It is of course, not the only photo I have from that era. When I look at the school photos from those years - with classes sometimes consisting of more than 40 students, I see white faces: only white faces. In high school that would change ever so slightly. Cedric from Ceylon would join us. A decade later when I had become a teacher , the faces still had changed very little. There was one Asian boy and yes his parents owned the local Chinese restaurant. There were now also 2 dark skinned boys - Eric and Bernard from Mauritius. But white was still right.
In my childhood Australia was governed by conservatives oddly enough called The Liberal Party. Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies told us the sun would never set on the British Empire but it did. Not enough for me. I still hope to see an end to the Queen and her offspring. I hope by my death, that Australia has at last become a republic.
After Menzies , we turned out attention to the U.S., to the flawed domino theory and joined President Johnson’s war killing and being killed by Vietnamese. As Prime Minister Holt saw it, “all the way with LBJ”. Today we remain committed to America. Australians fight with the American cause in the Middle East- though the public might be more supportive of that increasingly unpopular cause if President Bush had actually managed to thank Australian, rather “Austrian troops” as he did during a speech in Sydney in summer 2007. In many ways and certainly to my chagrin, we are also a Coca Colacolony in terms not just of a fawning foreign policy, but in terms of the pervasive presence of American popular culture – that intrudes upon and distorts the emergence and maintenance of an authentic national identity.
Once described as a white island in a brown sea - Australia is now a dynamic mix of races- something one would never know if your idea of Australia is based on The Thornbirds, Crocodile Dundee or Qantas ads.
In fact, while Americans and other outsiders see the wide open spaces, the bush, the outback, back-of-beyond , that vision is more about the popular imagination and Russell Ward’s, Bush Legend, than it is about the daily realty of Australian life. As Donald Horne pointed out in his classic study, The Lucky Country, Australia may well have been the first suburban nation.
The bush may actually have shaped the psychology of the suburbs and the cities much in the same way that Frederick Jackson Turner has explained the impact of the American frontier on American consciousness and rugged individualism. And our Australian classroom and curriculum at least in the 1950s and 60s celebrated our rural heritage; everything from Merino sheep to the poem we all committed to heart:
‘I love a sunburnt country
a land of sweeping plains
of rugged mountain ranges
of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her jeweled horizon
I love her far sea.
Her beauty and her terror.
The wide brown land for me”.
[My Country, Dorothea M. Mackellar].
In the process of instilling patriotism and love for the land. the classrooms and curriculum neatly excluded the experience of the original inhabitants - the Aboriginals who we had disposed of much in the same way as our American cousins had removed their Native American population.
In 1986 the Ministry of Education in my state, Victoria, republished a special commemorative edition of the readers children in the state used for their 6 years of elementary school. These were the reading materials, the focus of the stories and narratives we read as impressionable children. I still have a copy on my desk but I need not. My Country and the other poems and stories we read in those six years are deeply ingrained in my memory and need no prompt from a commemorative volume.
These books were full of British or European narratives- William Tell, Robin Hood, Robinson Crusoe. They were about British gallantry in far off lands, often fighting enemies who did not look like us . When the stories did address the Australian experience they were rural, romantic- so we had ‘Sunrise in the Blue Mountains”, or “Clancy of the Overflow” or “The Drovers Wife”. The whole experience was through the eyes of the white newcomers. The 5th grade reader included a story called “An Adventure with the Blacks”. Reported through the eyes of a 9 year-old white boy it told how he and his father narrowly escaped their encounter with hundreds of “bloodthirsty”, “savage faces”, wielding spears. Of course we were all relieved when our heroes survived.
What we did not talk about- what we were not taught about, was to think or question or even consider, how and why we came to occupy the land and what happened to those who were there before us. Nor indeed did the commemorative edition note this bias. Packaging for the special edition declared that:
“what young readers would have found
was material that depicted a society of well-defined
social and cultural patterns; a country proud of its
achievements and optimistic of its future, firmly liked to Britain, unashamedly nationalistic …”
And not a mention of the genocide, racism or intolerance, all hidden beneath the obfuscation of this self-congratulatory edition. 10 years later, the Oxford Book of Australian Schooldays would take a more critical stance. The introduction to the anthology notes that, “while multicultural influences have been much more pervasive in Australian schooling and Australian society generally, over the last half century , they have not eroded the values, prejudices and rituals that characterized the Anglo-Australian monculture of previous time”. .
60 years after these books formed my elementary school curriculum, the American textbook industry and many of our schools in this nation also marginalize the past and a sense of who came before us and what happened to them. Carl Grant and Christine Sleeter have provided an interesting and valuable insight into how textbook representations construct our awareness and understanding of elements such as race, class, gender and disability.
Media Literacy would caution us not to conclude that students believe everything they find in their textbooks; that as the principles of media literacy state, audiences negotiate meaning. Michael Apple writes that “students bring their own classed, raced, gendered and sexual biographies with them.. they selectively accept reinterpret and reject what counts as legitimate knowledge”. Nonetheless our students are presented with cumulative dominant perceptions of the world and even if they reject it , finding alternative truths- other texts on which to base their beliefs, is not always easy within formal schooling where so much of the curriculum and the means of its distribution and dissemination are about conservatism and compromise.
Michael Apple’s, Politics of the Textbook, examines this economic and ideological production of standardized textbooks, which reflect the dominant discourse while “incorporating the knowledge and perspectives of the less powerful” by the process of “mentioning”.
Today, in my own state of North Carolina, teachers will find little in their state standards or their adopted textbooks to chronicle the infamous and tragic Trail of Tears. Inquiring minds will find no difficulty finding this information in other sources, but school knowledge, what Michael Apple has called “official knowledge” has other priorities.
It should also be pointed out that the term multicultural is not synonymous with race. It can equally refer to class or socio-economic status. Victoria Purcell Gates offers a fascinating insight into the world of urban Appalachians in her study, Other People’s Words. Here , we find low-income, rural whites as the victims of urban education. As individuals in the Gate’s study put it: “those people don’t care about education, or are genetically unfit , or cannot even speak correctly , much less learn to read and write standard English.”. Gates adds, “from the level of policymaking to the individual classroom, such deficit-ridden views of children whom come from poor and minority homes Continue to have an impact on the education they are exposed to”. They become prisoners of other people’s perceptions and prejudice.
I heard this prejudice first hand when visiting an area close to the location of the Gate’s study. I was speaking in different schools in the district and the county office had appointed someone to drive me from school to school. Along the way I got a commentary about some of the kids and their families. For the most part it consisted of 2 words; “white trash”.
Even when teachers are receptive to multicultural education, as Christine Sleeter has documented in Multiculturalism as Social Activisim, they emphasize “individuality and success within the existing social system ”. They do not concept conceive of it as “a collective social movement aimed at redistributing resources across groups”. In other words while some teachers may embrace teaching a broader more accurate history of America and relations across races, classes and gender-this is not ultimately related to teaching or learning for that matter, that might be called transformational- that might seek to challenge or change the status quo.
It is ironic that American schools espouse the rhetoric of a democracy at the same time that in both policy and practice they are often undemocratic organizations. As Apple has written, there is a need to “transform our institutions so that caring and social justice are not just slogans but realities”. That is a difficult role indeed when our classrooms and our curriculum close their eyes to inequality, whether individual, or institutionalized, whether in the past or the present. As our student population becomes increasingly diverse and our teaching population remains largely white and female- a crisis of credibility may well be approaching; a crisis that does not need to be but that may become inevitable if a change of consciousness does not occur. |
