In Sydney recently I caught up with an old friend visiting from South Africa who I hadn’t seen in fourteen years.
Of course much has changed in fourteen years in both our countries.
South Africa had the rise and rise of the black bourgeoisie where a few people became very wealthy, but not much happened to fill the huge gap between the rich and the poor and a leader in Mbeki who engaged in AIDS denial.
In Australia our gap widened through a range of policies, which favoured the rich and we had a leader in Howard who engaged in racism denial while inadvertently condoning it by saying of the Cronulla rioters: “I would never condemn people for wearing the Australian flag.”
My friend, Luke, hails from an upper class white South African family, but he rejected that and threw himself from a young age into the fight against apartheid.
He is a patriot and at times I found his identification with his country and continent disconcerting.
He is of Irish descent, bearing a striking resemblance to a young Richard Harris, but he refers to himself as an African man.
When I think of African men, I think of black Africans as in Zulu, Maasai, the Ashanti, men who look like Harry O’Brien.
I don’t think of white people. To me they are the colonisers, the intruders.
However, the truth is he is a third generation South African and as someone who put his life on the line for the seminal political cause of our generation, he is proud to be South African. And who can deny him?
So I was surprised when he took issue with my identification of my Greek cultural heritage. But you are Australian, he would say.
I expected that he of all people would understand respect for cultural diversity, but he struggled with my lack of affinity with Australia, my lack of pride for this country.
I concluded that while the issue of racism for him was black and white, he spoke like someone very much from a dominant culture who isn’t used to seeing the world from the position of the ‘other.’
He took offence to this, saying that his whole life had been a rejection of the dominant culture and, in a way, he is right.
It was in this irreconcilable mood, overlaid with sexual tension, that we took ourselves one bright morning, to see the Ricky Maynard exhibition, Portraits of a Distant Land at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The first photographs I saw were from Tasmania: green fields that were sites of a massacre, unmarked graves, war memorials of indigenous men who had died in the two world wars and a picture of Vanisttart Island where white men went digging for skeletons of indigenous people at the turn of the century.
The photos all denote absence. Absence of any sign or mark that these places carry this history and suffering of indigenous people at the hands of the colonisers. And I find this absence fitting of my own experience of indigenous Australia.
As a girl who grew up in the white bread suburb of Essendon in Melbourne, there were no people, no sign posts, no markings of what came before the British.
It wasn’t until I watched the First Australians’ episode on Victoria that I grasped the full horror of the plight of Victoria’s indigenous people and the struggle of Simon Wonga to achieve self determination for his people.
I didn’t even know until last week that Wonga Park is named after him.
But I’ve known for as long as I can remember that the suburb of Byron in Athens is named after Lord Byron, the English poet who fought in the Greek War of Independence.
In the next room of the exhibition, are Maynard’s portraits of Wik elders. The photos, powerful close ups depicting determined individuals, their faces lined with pain that has not beaten them, reduce me to tears.
On the wall, Maynard is telling us that:
“It’s my wish that viewers identify in these pictures the existence of struggle below the surface to see things that are not immediately visible and to see that what things mean has more to do with you, the observer. To know the meaning of a culture you must recognize the limits and meaning of your own. You can see the facts, but you cannot see its meaning.”
Luke appears next to me as I read these words and I am thinking of his questioning in a new light.
Why is it that I know the history of Greece, Ancient and Modern inside out and yet still remain fairly ignorant of the history of the place of my birth?
Do I recognise the meaning and limits of my own culture? Which is what exactly?
As an outsider, I’ve always regarded myself as having a different position on the British occupation from the mainstream.
I have no historical, racial or cultural stake in that heritage and all that repression, denial and guilt surrounding that history is not my problem.
I have even believed that I share a sensibility with indigenous people in their attitude to their colonisers.
Looking at this exhibition, reading his words, I have to be honest and say this is a fanciful notion. I have absolutely no idea.
I can only watch, listen and learn.
All my life, I have struggled to come to terms with Australia. The white milestones of this country leave me cold: Australia Day, the Queen’s Birthday, the Melbourne Cup – a bloody horse race.
I can’t relate and it leads me to wonder have I excluded myself or have I been excluded? I have always argued the latter, but Luke challenges me to think it might be the former.
In the lift, leaving the exhibition, we meet an employee of the museum and I tell her how moving I found Maynard’s exhibition. She says it’s great that I was able to stay and watch it.
“Most people find it hard to take.”
Luke is dumbfounded. Out in Circular Quay, he lights a cigarette and observes the crowd.
“What do they find hard to take? The truth?”
I nod. It’s exactly that.
“I understand a little better where you’re coming from,” he says.
I want to tell him the same thing.
It seems Ricky Maynard has reconciled us and we are now asking different questions of each other and ourselves.
Jeana Vithoulkas is a freelance journalist and a published author.