The Atlas

THE STREET OF STARES

No, no, I did not go all the way to Blacktown (and in Launces-ton a disgusted cab driver said: Have you heard the latest? In your country the schoolchildren have to sing Baa, baa, green sheep in order to avoid offending the niggers. Next thing you know some do-gooder will say the name "Blacktown's" not good enough for them!); I did not go all the way to Blacktown, because Redfern was closer, and because a waiter had proudly related: I took a girl to Redfern and she went white as a sheet! She didn't know we had neighborhoods like that in Australia. — Being already as white as a sheet myself, in part due to birth, in part to illness, I figured that no red fern or black town or green sheep could make me seem any whiter. The NEXT TRAIN sign said BLACKTOWN but I did not go there; I rode between the grim-grimed pillars and arches with steel on top, was carried out past bulldozers gnawing gravel and then in again. NO THOROUGHFARE. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. That was what you saw if you tried to exit the wrong way at Redfern Station. The wide-gravelled channels of railway beds beset me with brick walls. The train went on to Black-town, and a man with a pole came and slammed Blacktown away to bring up another destination.

Under the sign, another man stood drinking V.B. He held the can very tightly in his hand. He did not quite reek as some drunks do but he was beery enough. He looked into my face. They called him black and that was what he sometimes called himself, but actually his skin was more reddish, almost Venetian red like that of the brown-haired aboriginal girl on the train who'd looked at me with such big searching brown eyes, working her plump, kissable lips as if to say something that she'd never said; this man opened his mouth and said: Buy me another, mate? How 'bout it? — Then he fell down. That was Redfern Station.

Outside there was a street, and across the street was a wall with a giant snake painted on it in aboriginal style, with the words 40,000 YEARS IS A LONG TIME. . 40,000 YEARS STILL ON MY MIND. Turning the corner of this street, at the Redfern Aboriginal Cooperative, I found myself looking down a narrow street where right away a fat woman with a beer in her hand said: Excuse me. Could you spare a smoke? and the wall went on down that street, muraled with silhouettes who had white-dotted skeletons; and I saw grimy rainbows and dot-painted flowers and then the street narrowed further, sloping down into shady house-walls where people sat on their porches listening to radios, drinking, smoking and staring out. This was the Street of Stares. I had the feeling of coming into a place where I did not belong. White shoes and socks glowed on dark and shaded bodies, all lining the way and watching me. Second storeys gaped doorlessly like the bomb-burned flats I'd seen in Sarajevo; sky shone through one such hole; the others were dank and dirty and grafhti'd, coolly unfriendly like the eyes of the watchers, or so it seemed to me as I went on, remembering times when I'd come into certain black neighborhoods in my own country and found myself immediately hated, but then a man nodded back at me and said: G'day, mate! and I was comfortable again, which might have been stupid, because Snake, who that day became my wise uncle, told me: I'm not allowed to go out at night. My woman don't let me. Lotsa fights. I tell you now, don't walk around here. — That was Snake, and his woman was Sadie, and then there were Ruthie and Rob, all of whom lived together farther down that narrow street which smelled in places like airplane glue, not as far as the very end where thick gratings and brick mirrors greeted the next highway, across which lay the stinking pub where I bought the case of Victoria Bitters so that Rob would like me and take me in to Ruthie, Sadie and Snake behind that wall built less of grimy brick than of stares.

Originally we was from up the bush, Snake said, opening the first V.B. North coast. We came just visiting here. Then we stayed.

Tell you something about Redfern, the younger man cut in. They got a different attitude here. A bad attitude.

So why did you come visiting then? I asked.

Well, really there wasn't nothing up there, said Snake. Not enough to do. More opportunity in the city than in the country. That's why we're here.

Yeah, look at him talk, laughed Rob as he took out a beer. What kinda opportunity have you found, Snake? What kinda opportunity's anybody got in this town?

A lot of people playin' the numbers just to pass the time, Snake admitted. Really can't go anywhere. I'm only just visitin'. Wanna go back, huntin' and fishin'. And my woman, she's from the snow country, the table lands.

I miss the trees, the mountains, the grass, agreed Sadie wearily, sipping at her V.B.

All we needed up there was a tent, said Snake. Like, you could go to the river and get everything. I can kill anything with a stone that big. I could take two men out. I done it before.

Maybe someday I'll go somewhere, said Ruthie. Because they always stare. If I was sittin' on a train, I look out the window so they don't bother me. Some people don't have no respect. Oh, how they stare!

Shall we speak of stares? I myself seldom fail to gaze into other faces as they come to me. Looking is a natural act, and if Ruthie had come to my notice on a bus I would have looked at her because she was beautiful, but Ruthie would not have known that I was looking at her for that reason. That afternoon she said to me: When you get in a bus, the first thing people do is look you up and down, see if you're black. — I guess that was how it was for me, that first time I came into Redfern. They were all gazing at me — all of them! — and I was not their color. Maybe each gazed at me for his own reasons, but because they all gazed I had to assume a single reason, the same one that Ruthie assumed in her bitter anger. So perhaps the way to discover people's lusts and angers is not to fish behind their peering eyes but to read what they write on the walls of their public toilets. In a men's room at the Sydney airport I came across this profundity:

KILL ALL ABO'S I HATE COONS HA HA FUCKEM

which another soul had seconded as follows:

ABO'S WILL RUIN AUSSIE LAND

— a remarkable reversal of fact which took my breath away so that I almost did not appreciate the remarks of the third sage who had weighed and balanced and urinated and concluded: GOOKS ARE WORSE. — What exactly does it mean for land to become Aussified? Let me introduce a retired farmer I met in Tasmania, where the exterminations of the last century enjoyed great success: there are no fullblooded Tasmanian aborigines anymore. Horses bowed in the whitish and yellowish grass where this farmer had lived his years out, and huge cylindrical bales stood upon the fields like gateposts for the low blue sea-wave of mountains to the west. Age parted him from his farm, but his heart lived there yet; I think he was homesick for his peppermint gum trees. — The wildlife around here is a tremendous problem, he told me. You clear a field here and the animals will come from miles around, just strip it, clean it out, particularly kangaroos and wallabies. — He was the son of pioneers whose hard work had justified them to themselves. The land belonged to them. The kangaroos had no right to it. I requested his views on those strange, dark, barrel-shaped marsupials called Tasmanian devils, and he said: People in fat lamb areas could have experienced a lot more problems with them than I did. On my two hundred and fifty acres, while I did see them, they were never in sufficient numbers to cause a problem. — Their foreseeable extinction could not grieve him. Maybe he was even glad. It is not for me to hold him blameworthy. He paid allegiance to the laws he believed in, and lived quietly. If some native plant or animal caused "trouble" or a "problem" then he resolutely defended his interests; otherwise he kept neutral. He didn't kill venomous snakes, for instance, unless he found them close to the house. This philosophy, so conveniently practical with its tiny cabinets of self sameness, had come with a drawer to fit native people in also. — The whites have just about had enough of free handouts to the blacks, he explained. A few educated aboriginals tend to cause a bit of trouble. The uneducated black, he don't expect so much.

Snake, Sadie, Ruthie and Rob did not expect very much, I guess, maybe because they knew that Redfern was Aussie land. — This used to be a white community, Snake said, opening another V.B. Before the blackfellas moved in. The whitefellas want it back. They want to put a carpark in.

I'll tell you something else about this place, said Snake. They got no respect for the elders. The young fellas have got to keep the respect they got for the elders. The mother and father, they're not strict. And the old ones look out for us. You see, I call 'em all uncles and aunties.

That's what I noticed when I came down here, Rob mumbled, leaning back, closing his eyes, and raising the can of V.B. to his lips as his other wrist relaxed, his fingers falling and opening. (The case was already more than half gone.) — I call everyone brother and sister, but here they just pass on.

That's right, Snake, it's about respect, said Ruthie. No respect anywhere. I'm glad I haven't got no kids. They'd just get raised up in this shit. The average white person hates us, except for ferals and hips.* And the bikers, too. They back us up. But the others. . Especially the police. I saw one man last week, they made 'im strip down to 'is skin. Happened right outside this house. That's their aim, to strip us of our dignity.

You tell your magazine how there's always police, Sadie said. Blackfellas want peace; the police always wanna teach us a lesson.

(And here I have to say that the second time I went to Redfern, which was at night, I saw the police slam people down, but 1 also have to say that those people were wretched drunks who were hurting each other.)

Snake pointed. — Police got a camera there on the street. For surveillance.

Always watchin' us. Since we was kids. Always movin' us here and there. My man here, he got took, said Ruthie. He got took, I got took when I was seven, and put into institutions where we got the religion. The gubbers✝ did it.

What did they do that for? I said.

We was just sittin' around at home, said Rob, opening another beer. But they see us in our family and they say you're poor. You run around naked, barefoot. So you get took.

Where did they take you?

I can't really remember, but it comes to me in bits and pieces.

* "Ferals are the people who stand up against the loggers," Rob had told me.

"Hips are the people who deal [drugs]."

✝ "Governors: " white men.

Rob, who'd met his wife at the rehabilitation center, called himself a blackfella but he was pale golden in color, like any Caucasian surfer in Sydney or Honolulu or Santa Barbara. In 1688 William Dampier had described the aborigines he met as "coal black like. . the Negroes of Guinea." The people Captain Cook found were dark brown. Maybe there is no such thing as race now, not really; so many Greenland Eskimos I met were blond and blue-eyed like their Danish fathers; my goodhearted D. is Thai but Thais sometimes think her black African; it seems to me that the most that can be said is that there are loose racial types which some people conform to and others live in between. I wish that I could bring back to life the juryman who addressed the press after acquitting seven whites of shooting and mutilating twenty-eight aborigines at Myall Creek in 1838: I look on the blacks as a set of monkeys and the sooner they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better. I would never consent to hang a white man for a black one. I know well they were guilty of murder, but I for one would never see a white man suffer for shooting a black. What would this man have made of Rob? The only way he could have known that Rob was black would have been if Rob had told him so.

They shanghaied him an' his wife, Sadie explained, they brought 'em from here to there.

'Cause once they take you to the institutions, they drum it all out of you, said Ruthie.

The language, it wasn't taught in our schools, said Sadie, drinking. And my grandmother, she wouldn't teach me, because it all ends in the white man's… — She trailed off.

So you don't remember anything from before?

Me an' him, we're still hunters, said Snake. Sit up in the tree, yes, you sit up in the trees waiting, then you jump off and catch that wallaby. An' cobra's good to eat. Good fish bait, too. Go to the river, look for the right kind of log. There's stinkin' logs and good ones. Willow logs and gum tree logs, those are the good ones. Dive down, cut off the log, you can smell the snake inside. Cobras is musky tasting. They taste like the tree they live in. Smell the leaf of the tree, smell the cobra.

Tell him about that time you saw the snake, said Ruthie to her husband.

Oh, said Rob. (Paint was peeling from the bricks behind him where Ruthie's chair nudged the wall between their house and the next house along the Street of Stares.) — Well, one time I was out in the bush an' I run into a big lizard. An' I seen his eyeballs, an' I saw his red, and then I knew it wasn't a lizard, but a fifteen-foot-long snake, an' it chased me. It chased me 'til dark, when I got on the road. Once they feel that hot tar, they can't go no more.

I watched the other three listen to this small story, which they had surely heard before, and saw how it seemed to bring them alive for a moment. Ruthie leaned back laughing with her arms across her belly. There is a connection between native people and animals which never seems to be lost. What do they see; what do they know? This is something that those of us who do not have native blood will never understand. (There are many intuitive secrets like this. Rob, for instance, was a dot painter. I asked him how he'd learned. — It's not teach yourself, he said, it's in there. I can tell straight away if a Koorie* fella's done it or some whitefella.) Something of this nature was occurring when Rob told the story of the snake. I have seen that same alertness and happiness enter the eyes of Canadian Inuit office managers, Ojibway prostitutes and Sioux panhandlers when somebody mentions a caribou, a beaver, a coyote, even an insect, and when I see it I envy those people because I do not have it. This was what Ruthie wanted to keep. — One time this big king cricket came in, she began. It was this big! It was lookin' at Rob.

An' she tell me to kill it, he said sourly.

Thank God we didn't kill it, because it was very rare.

That was the whole story, and then Sadie talked about how good wallabies tasted and Ruthie drank another V.B. and got sad again and said: Once they started feedin' the people on flour and treacle, we started gettin' fat. Before that there was no such thing as a fat aboriginal woman.

I got all that knocked out of me, said Rob with satisfaction. Eatin' all that junk food. They beat it right out of me. Now it don't tempt me.

Course we can't hunt what we want, either, said Ruthie. Like wallabies. Even though the government is killing those animals as pests, we get prevented.

It was about then that I understood that Ruthie with her pretty, mobile face was an ideologue, a militant. Everything she said was hard and inflexibly generalized. Oppression often seems to forge such people. Because the world they exist in is hostile, whatever analysis of their condition they build cannot be the graceful and perhaps unsound tower of the intellectual, who has the leisure and means to rebuild should some chance wind of malice or objective truth bring it down. People like Ruthie make fortresses of their convictions. They build guardedly, of heavy thoughts quarried from local reality. Her pure young face suffused itself with passion and sadness. She tried to sell me her T-shirt which said STOP BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY, but I didn't have any money left.

* Aboriginal.

So when you get up in the morning, what do you do? I said. Snake finished his V.B. and got the next. — Get up, he said, say hello to everyone, thank God we're still alive, that the pigs didn't kill us in our sleep.

The cops call it crime, said Ruthie. We call it survival. Well, look, I said. (I was getting a little tired of her.) If things could be different, how would you want them to be?

Don't ask us that! cried Ruthie, leaping to her feet. We just want what belongs to us!

We never signed no treaty, man, said Rob, sitting there with his beer clasped between his parted knees, tanned, bearded and grim. And they just took our land. Once we can get our land back, maybe we can get something. Whatever we get, it's better than nothing.

What land will they give you back? my friend Jenny asked naively.

Whatever they don't want.

We want land, said Ruthie greedily. We'd make money just like the fuckin' white people. Make us a million off that land.

Sadie smiled a little. — I'd buy a house, a car, and plant a big crop.*

I'd buy half a mountain and a river, said her husband quietly.

Why not just give us the mountain and the river? Ruthie shouted. It's ours.

She took the last V.B. in the case and popped it open. Then she whispered: They're gonna kill us, too. Just like everything else. We're gonna go extinct. Just like the animals.

No one said anything, and she drank half her beer in one go. Then she said: We don't come from monkeys. We're just here. We always were here, always will be.

After that, she poured the rest of the can down her throat.

So I walked up the Street of Stares, back toward Redfern Station where the sign said DANGER: LIVE WIRE ABOVE, and they watched me. (See how they visit and talk to each other here, Snake had said. In the rest of Sydney they can't sit and talk.) — They'd given me presents to remember them: a boomerang pulled off their. wall, and a catalogue of a dot painting exhibition in which they'd inscribed their names for me. Below hers Sadie wrote TRUE BLUE KOORIE. Then Snake wrote AUSTRALIANS ABORIGINAL. — I followed the wall that was muraled with boomerangs and suns and dot-painted flowers, that long wall that led away from the Street of Stares, riddled with forests of muraled meaning, inscribed with swooping lines like the long furrows that ran down Snake's arm at the hilt of his blade of bony muscle. That was the wall that now hid me from all the addicts who tried to sell me boomerangs, from Sadie, who'd shown me a dot painting with its snakes and snails and coils, from Rob, now disappeared to get high, from Snake and Ruthie who sat looking at the empty case of beer.

* Of marijuana.