So I grew up in the 1980s in one of the outermost southern suburbs of Brisbane. I remember trampolines, thunderstorms, the sound of Mr Whippy vans in summer, and the smell of kerosene heaters in winter. I remember VHS and cassette tapes and broken TV aerials, holidays that were effectively road trips to visit family for weddings, funerals and birthdays. I remember the Joh days, or at least the talk of it in our home, the days of police brutality and corruption, not to mention Joh’s ban on the right to assemble, which appeared particularly egregious, at least according to the register of my father’s voice. Not that my family was politically active; my dad was a truck driver and he worked, a lot. As workers, he would insist that we be members of the union, despite him never being afforded any actual protection as a Black subbie on the receiving end of a daily kind of racial violence over the years.
I remember things always being tight and tough, yet strangely safe and certain. We lived in the same home all of our lives with Mum and Dad married until death did them part. It was a union that fell slightly short of forty years, owing to Dad dying of untreatable lung cancer. Their union, that of a Black man and white woman, was remarkable as it was the first time on either side of their families in which there had been a marriage between Black and white. I remember the stories they would tell, of disapproving family members, of Mum being the one to negotiate with real estate agents to secure a home, of Dad’s car being turned inside out by police while transporting my mum from work at night through the city via West End. I remember them recalling the officer’s words to my white mother, ‘Do your parents know you are with him?’
It is not a borderline, being-on-the-margins kind of place; it is a supposed belonging-to-nowhere kind of place.
The products of this relationship, us kids, were placed in what some might see as an in-between place – never white and nowhere near as Black as our father. This position was not so much like the veil that WEB Du Bois the great African- American scholar and intellectual spoke of, but a clear line that our bodies in their being had transgressed; like that of Boundary Street in West End that my parents transgressed each night. Boundary Street was once the boundary that marked the city limit within which Aboriginal people were excluded after dark and on Sundays entirely. This boundary was a very real signifier of the marginal status that had been assigned Aboriginal people in the colony. It was more than just a street name, and the police would crack stockwhips along the perimeter to keep Aboriginal people out. Long after the law waned, they continued to police this boundary. Boundary Street represents a location in which my body is situated, the parameters defined in such a way that my body could never be located within them. It is not a borderline, being-on-the-margins kind of place; it is a supposed belonging-to-nowhere kind of place. But I want to speak of my body in terms of location because despite not meeting the criteria by which they deem it capable of existing, it exists precisely through its relationship to place. Perhaps I insist on speaking of the location of my body because it can no longer contend with those colonial assertions that it has lost its way.
I remember occupying multiple supposed in-between spaces growing up, so much so that it didn’t register as discomfort or displacement. We lived across from the foundry, a train station and four lanes of traffic, which reminded us of how distant we were from the city that long excluded Black presence; even though we were not far from the boundaries of my father’s traditional country as a Yugambeh man. Despite the proximity, we were not on it, much like we weren’t in the city of Brisbane despite occupying the same postcode prefix. There was this strange sense of being rendered out of place, in a place that we had always been in, and from.
We were not poor in an absolute sense but we lived with an everyday urgency around not wasting things out of economic necessity. Both of my parents worked hard, their earnings not matching their outputs. Our house didn’t look like other people’s houses did with its mismatched mostly second-hand furniture. We were not living among our Black family and cousins who were situated to the south in Tweed Heads and to the north in Bowen, and while our white family lived in closer proximity, they never stayed in our home like our Black family members would over the years.
While our white family lived in closer proximity, they never stayed in our home like our Black family members would.
I remember those moments when I discovered that I was simultaneously an Aborigine but also never a real one. It truly is something, to experience something only to discover that you don’t meet the criteria for how such a thing has become known – particularly by those who claim authority despite never being in relationship with that which they claim to know. It is something to discover that you belong to a category that you never knew had a name, let alone a social meaning divorced from your experience of it. To forever be evading those categorical definitions is disorienting, dispossessing even. Perhaps.
I remember the moment that I discovered I was poor, and that such a label meant that there was something lacking morally within our family home. The irony here was that if there was one thing certain in our childhood, it was the strong moral compass of my father which centred upon us being better people, rather than wealthier ones. I also remember other people (and by other people, I mean non-Aboriginal people) discovering my Aboriginal ancestry only to insist to me it was lacking culturally. It struck me, I think, because at our kitchen table, Blackness and low socioeconomic status were never talked about in terms of a product of our lack. We were to be proud of our working-poor status; it was in my father’s eyes, where the real work was done. Similarly, our Blackness was not a source of shame but a source of pride because of our strength even amid struggle. It was not like we were told this as reassurance in times of crisis, when our identity came into question; it was the terms of reference from which we operated in our home.
Throughout my life I experienced these disjunctures between how I had come to know myself with those who claimed authority to know, but this disjuncture was not an experience of a different account of things; it was an embodiment of difference, or unbelonging, assigned to my body which it every day refused to accept. Some call this ‘walking in two worlds’. But there is only one world that the Black body must occupy – ours.
This piece is an extract from Another Day in the Colony, the new release by Chelsea Watego. Another Day in the Colony is out .
