Remembering forgetting at Gleebooks



Last night we went to a fun event at Gleebooks, a conversation about Chris Healy's book Forgetting Aborigines. According to the publishers:
Forgetting Aborigines explores a central paradox in Australian history: Aborigines are often remembered as absent in the face of a continuing and actual indigenous historical presence. Chris Healy argues that in the ways we remember our history, Aborigines keep disappearing. They are present and central at certain moments but then fade from memory. Aboriginal issues can be on the front page for weeks prompting white Australians to ask questions like ‘why weren’t we told?’ and then recede again. The book examines ways in which we can stop this dishonest and destructive cycle.

I still want to read the book, but sadly the conversation didn't really shed a lot of light on it. In fact, if you were to accept my companion's version of the evening, the book is probably a disingenuous self-regarding w*nk, bering little or no relation to the above description. The difficulty is that Chris Healy, a likeable chap from Melbourne, didn't actually read anything to us, focusing instead on his motives for writing it and his way of approaching it, so we were left guessing.

But I wasn't being ironic when I said it was a fun evening. There was much to entertain. In his opening sentence, Chris announced that rather than following the usual Question and Answer format, we would have what in Melbourne with its Italian influence is known as a conversazione. That's a good way, I thought, to get people on the qui vive: start out with a hint that we tinsel-city hedonists were about to be treated to a Melburnian dialogue so sophisticated it had to be named in the language of Gramsci. The conversation (you can pronounce that in French if you like) was initially between Healy and Meaghan Morris, a 'figure of world stature in the field of Cultural Studies' whom I think of as an old Glebe identity and who sports an impressive head of dark hair which owes nothing to the dye bottle, and an intellect you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley (that's a compliment). The audience was small compared to the one that turned out for, say, Judith Lucy, and I got the impression that Chris and Meaghan knew most people in the room – at least, when it came to question time, Meaghan seemed to address just about every questioner by her/his first name. Vicki Grieves was there, and added a formidable Aboriginal voice to the conversation. Sylvia Lawson reminded us of children's books from her childhood in which Aboriginal people were portrayed as vanishing quietly into oblivion, which prompted Meaghan to reminiscence tellingly about reading such stories in the classroom in Tenterfield while sitting next to actual Aboriginal fellow-students. Jack the Anarchist spoke at length about an oral history project he did in Kuranda decades ago. One or two people seemed keen to reassure us that they'd noticed that almost everyone in the room was non-Indigenous, and that this was something that should be critically noted. Anyone who actually talked about the book apologised for not having read it all, which was odd given that the idea of the event was to prompt us to buy a copy.

My companion and I had dinner a few doors down and argued heatedly about whether the book would be worth reading or not. We had certainly gleaned very different impressions of its contents. We both agreed we wanted to get hold of Marcia Langton's 1993 essay 'Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television', which both Meaghan and Chris agreed was a real breakthrough in thinking about Aboriginality as something constructed by non-Indigenous Australians.

Posted: Thu - October 23, 2008 at 10:08 AM           |

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