Image: Supplied.
My father was a bushranger. But a horseman first. Which meant that I learnt to crack a stockwhip when I was twelve years old. A skill I refined alone in the mountains of the Deua National Park. Leather in hand, I would wind up overhead with all my energy coming from deep within my stomach, along with all that I could muster from the ground through my toes. When I was ready, and the air was still enough, a sharp flick of the wrist in the counter-direction would unleash a crack from the heavens. Thunder’s brother himself. I’d do it again with my eyes closed, taken with the echo travelling from mountain to mountain. As if splitting sound was setting alight the dormant breath of the valley itself. As I write, I ask the wind if this was one of my earlier pastoralist ancestors coming forward. And if they were here to meet with my Gumbaynggirr Elders upriver. Or was it just the indiscriminate business of adolescence? Either way, it’s a gift I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.
*
As I roll towards my twenty-seventh birthday, my preoccupation with nostalgia has been at an unusually heightened stride. Something to do with Saturn returning, I hear. I’d say a factor intensifying this state is the distance between myself and the soil of my rumination. It’s been a long time since I last stood in the Deua—or on Country at all. Usually, I’d invoke Rilke and his insistence on embracing solitude, as longing affords us a deep closeness to those we love. But I’m trusting the words of dead poets less and less these days. Particularly in this economy. So, I have been tossing and turning on ideas of memory, story and life at the mouth of generational rivers.
*
My father was a bushranger. But before that, he was a NSW Corrective Services officer. By the time he was my age, in the early 90s, he worked at the infamous Long Bay gaol. I could not begin to picture the day-by-day workflows of his existence—a Blak boy from Redfern—in those years. I have only crumbs from the stories he’s shared from then. In between the rare ghost encounter from the watchtower to the dramatic courthouse chase ensuing from a mistake on transport duty, I gathered the most recurring theme of my father’s experience. It was not so much a matter of those held on the opposite side of the bars but rather a resident horror that shared the face of his colleagues and the shade of his uniform.
*
Under a new moon I am reminded of the cleverness and formless freedoms of ancestors. As they sang and danced and laughed and loved and fought and fucked to the next sunrise—and to the next, and to the next. Countless Uncles, Aunties and kin of mine have reiterated that our Old People exist as an omnipresent force in our lives. Each step of the path, gilded by the soft breath of an ancestor by one’s shoulder. A breath that may turn into words that sing out directions. Or should times of desperation call upon it, become hands that slap us awake and force us to keep walking, singing, writing or simply breathing. In her 2022 memoir Crazy Brave, Muscogee Creek writer Joy Harjo names this force ‘the knowing’, describing it as ‘a shimmer of intelligent light […] a strand of the divine, a pathway for the ancestors and teachers who love us’. That knowing breath has been hovering by my neck. It took form above my window last night in Harlem, in the call of a peregrine falcon.
*
In the early 2000s, there was an episode of Sydney Weekender that brought the curly-haired charisma of Mike Whitney to Mogo, a tiny antique town situated in a valley of Yuin Country on the south coast of NSW. The TV show celebrated the tourist attraction Old Mogo Town, a recreation of a Gold Rush colony. Mike wandered the 19th-century-themed village, pointing out all the family-friendly activities, tours, experiences and elaborate dioramas that composed Old Mogo’s mise en scène. Some of the dramatised minutiae included semi-vacant huts, staged as if their inhabitants had simply gone off to work the mines that morning. Sprawling calligraphy decorated Wanted posters and pub menus. Mannequins were positioned in homes as maids, blacksmiths and preachers. Tourists could even memorialise their visit in black and white by posing in period attire for $14.99 at the gift shop. I’m sure there was some other freaky stuff. To the majority of viewers, it is an adventure for the family, a chance to celebrate a chapter of our industrial and economic history, steeped in the daily affect of Australiana spirit and couture. Yet, wherever Mike walked, magpies and stockwhips could be heard echoing in the distance.
*
My father was a bushranger. But not the kind Australia liked. The keys to the heart of a nation belong to the storyteller, the artist, the poet and the hero-subject. In her 2009 essay ‘Make Believe’, art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty introduced the term ‘parafiction’ to understand the curatorial method—a storytelling—that resides in the space between fact and fiction. Originally an effort to drive the growth of audiences, parafictional storytelling has become a pedagogical undertaking for museums and art production predominantly across Europe. Lambert-Beatty offers that ‘in parafiction real and/or imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived’. Nestled in the imaginary of a national identity, Old Mogo Town relies on unwavering participation. As part of their visitor programming, park tour guides would lead groups around the village, turning the keys of old machinery, narrating the insides of old gold mines by lantern light and spreading whispers to the children that bushrangers still roamed these parts. They were not lying.
*
Old Mogo Town distorted linearities between time and history. On their busier tourist dates the Park would recursively stage an immersive dramatisation of a bushranger robbery. The loot was a prodigious golden nugget, stashed in a tour guide’s pocket. On horseback, a commandeering bushranger would intercept the innocent and unknowing tourist group; the staff, of course, were all in on the drama. By the end of the tour, the town trooper would have the bushranger in his custody and soon lock him in the stocks positioned in the centre of the village…
*
Memory unfurls towards us with the question: did Old Mogo Town ever really exist at all? Certainly the gold mine seemed to chart real caves dug by miners, and the grinding machines coughed real diesel and smoke, and the kegs at the old tavern smelt pretty ancient. Yet the allure of the whole show seemed all too, well, staged. Salvadoran historian Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra muses that ‘memories may be more or less accurate but are always shaped at least in part by present-day power interests’. Collective memory (how groups of people, experientially connected to an historical event or not, remember it) therefore, ‘has implications for identity, power, and justice in the present’. Through its social productions of the everyday, Old Mogo Town adorned a particular character, the settler Australian, so to exacerbate a particular version of the historical record that overlooks and disavows the sovereignty of the First Peoples. The implications for our collective memory rear its head in this nation’s generational amnesia, where certain folks are granted safety and privilege at the flooding river mouth while others are left to drown.
*
Some might wonder why people try on clothes and accents from earlier times; others are clearly busy building time machines. If not before, Old Mogo Town certainly doesn’t exist anymore. It was tragically claimed by the Black Summer Bushfires of 2019–2020, along with several homes belonging to the strong Aboriginal community on the near outskirts of Mogo. Here are communities that are kept at the periphery, punished for speaking back to history and its monsters. They flood and burn under the thick skirt of this nation. Like the flood of static at the end of a VCR recording or the black and blue gaps we surf when flicking between tele channels. There are ruptures in Australia’s prime-time offerings; where one fiction dissolves into the next, there are gaps where real people live, nursing their family stories.
*
My father was a bushranger. He wore the dress and bravado of the infamous yet fictitious outlaw Jacky Jacky. A bloodied bandana stretched across the lower half of his face. A winter flannel the colour of ash parted three buttons down from his stubbled neck. Western spurs that rattled with the thudding of his footsteps. Crowning him was a worn-in akubra and a red, black and yellow tassel swinging from its brim. Perhaps one of his ancestors coming forward? Or a conflict in spirit? In his moment of parafictional non-existence, this world must have endowed a freedom never touched or felt before. For it is in the shadows—of nationhood, memory and parafiction—where truth chooses to reside. My father is also a truthteller. ‘Blak in Blue’ will be the title of his memoir, which will tell a story of struggle against structural racism in the NSW Corrective Services. A struggle that by nature makes way for our generations to follow.
*
…and by the stocks the crowd would be gathered to judge the bushranger for his crimes against the colony. Tossing and turning in his timber shackles, he would curse Mike Whitney and his Sydney Weekender posse. Then the town trooper would summon a young boy from the crowd to let loose a few lashes to the bushranger’s Blak behind. And I knew how to crack a stockwhip.
*
Emerging from this valley was a colourful magic, one that painted my childhood view of reality with formless wonder and freedom. There we both stood, as genreless, untethered beings in a moment of in-betweenness. Me, with whip in hand, reigniting a dormant breath of the valley and carving at the echoes of its memory. My father, the correctives serviceman turned bushranger, purging the fires that burned within and before him. Finally, we had arrived at a distant purgatory place and were tending to a suppressed sense of joy on the other side. Albeit through a mode of play, those weekend performances felt emancipatory. As if we were cleansing the past and clearing the tracks of a possible future. Or perhaps just an escape from the horrors of everyday life, caught between the tangy brine of a selectively knowing and unknowing society. Either way, this was another gift that I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.
*
Our Blak bodies trouble the memory of an ostensible Australia; in fact, we emerge from the folds of its amnesia. Although it has often been the tool of our erasure, memory is the greatest ally in our resurgences. Latent notions of blood memory, ecological memory, genealogical memory and counter memory have recently surfaced at the river mouth and its discourses. They are what guides us to mountain tops and stockwhips, and to bushrangers and horsemanship. They are the stuff our dreams are made of, and the gifts our ancestors left for us. They are the reward for wading through the lingering traumas of an ongoing frontier. For those losing balance, let truth and memory be your foothold. Walk your path. One gilded by those who lived long before you, and guided by those who’ll live when you are gone.
*
My father was a bushranger. Among other things. This means I could be anything, and that history takes form in the wind. Unbounded by time, sensitivities and margins, we are but one echo moving to the next. Navigating between the shades of our past and the shapes of our future. Singing and dancing and laughing and loving and fighting and fucking to the next sunrise—and to the next, and to the next.
