Volume 39 Nº 1: March 2003

We are one and we are many: rewriting Australian national stories for young people

Maureen Nimon

'... narrative is a world-making as well as a world-disclosing process...' (Kearney 2002, p. 145)

In a recent article in Access (2002), Freida French raised issues of perennial importance to all those in schools and libraries as well as the wider community. These were:.

1. in what sense can stories be said to belong to a particular group of people, even though the stories cannot be confined to that group?
2. what rights does this ownership give in regard to the stories?

Whose story?

French began her article by drawing attention to the 'outrage' of the Aboriginal community depicted in the film, Australian Rules, at the way it was portrayed. She noted that this reaction had revitalised 'the debate about the depiction of Aboriginality in Australian children's literature [which] has been in progress since the middle of the seventies...'(p. 16). Basing her remarks on the work of Aboriginal commentators, she pointed out that:

Aboriginal people have codes of behaviour which govern the telling of stories that include strict rules of custodianship as opposed to the Western concept of ownership. Implicit in the term custodianship is guardianship and care, and the storyteller as custodian has a responsibility to care for and guard the traditional culture of his community. An important aspect of Aboriginal stories is that they are based on the oral tradition. This means that the storyteller knows his audience and has control over who can listen and who cannot, and which stories are for everybody and, perhaps even more importantly, what stories are not to be retold, or to have a restricted audience (p. 17).

Most Australians would have no difficulty in accepting that Aboriginal people have rights to indigenous stories which are part of their traditional culture. Aboriginal people should be able to determine the form in which the stories are narrated and the audiences to which they are told. But the stories of Deadly Unna (Gwynne 1998) and Australian Rules are not indigenous stories in that sense. They are stories of the clashes and stresses at the intersection of the lives of Australians of different backgrounds and cultures. Philip Gwynne has said publicly that he now believes he should have done more to disguise the town in which he set his novel. But given that he also stated that Deadly Unna is 'his own story, based on real events that happened in Port Pearce where he lived as a child' (French 2002, p. 16), one wonders what the point of such concealment might be. The Aboriginal people who were part of the real events which are the groundrock of Gwynne's book cannot hold exclusive rights to the story of them. Gwynne was as much a participant in what happened as they were and he has a story to tell, for there are as many potential stories as there were participants. What they can ask and have every right to expect is that the story is respectful of the community it portrays, especially given that it can be readily identified.

However, in practice, respecting the community about which you are writing a fictional story based on actual events is a challenge that will almost certainly result in controversy no matter who the author or the community involved. People who recognise the events of the plot because they were part of them will have their own viewpoints on how they should unfold, and will often be dissatisfied, even when the author stays close to real events. When the author injects invention into the tale, the more uneasy and offended some will be. Reading someone else's fictionalising of events that were part of your life is not likely to be a comfortable experience, let alone a satisfying one. It is difficult to write the history of contemporary occurrences where participants and witnesses are still alive and ready to debate whether the historian has gathered the right data and interpreted it in reasonable ways. The author who sets out to write a story based on, but not exactly like, actual events multiplies the reasons why those who were participants in the sources of his invention must, like Gwynne, be prepared to bear criticism, even hostility.

Yet, whatever responsibilities authors have in these matters, we as readers must recognise our responsibility for how we read a story. In approaching a book like Deadly Unna, it is up to us to acknowledge whose story is being told and that, should someone else write of the same events, a different, if similar account would emerge that was not necessarily less true than the first, even where different. For even when stories are written as history, according to guidelines designed to ensure as accurate and true a story as possible, no single account can encompass all truth, but only a part of it, since history is composed of myriads of fragmented events and personal experiences. 'Each retelling of history is part of a continuing conflict of interpretations' (Kearney 2002, p. 83).

Instead of seeking certainty, we should be prepared to learn from the disagreements between them, as well as from the matters on which they agree. The articles, reports and broadcasts of the Kulat bombing over the month of October 2002 built into a mosaic, each piece of which deepened our understanding of the experiences of the many people affected, whether victims, relatives or rescuers. None on its own was complete. Thus when reading books based on real events, we as readers must ask ourselves whose story we are reading and consider how that person's viewpoint shapes the story itself. We should also accept that since significant events in life can rarely be reduced to a few bare facts, intelligent, responsible readers must be prepared to accept that contentious issues will not necessarily be resolved by more information and that some matters may have to be left open-ended.

Which stories?

Telling stories of our past informs others of who we are since our identity is composed of our experiences and the galaxy of cultural events and concepts by which we interpret them and give them meaning. Which stories we choose to tell is equally revealing. Out of the millions of individual momentary occurrences in any one year, which are those we will remember and which are those will we want to tell others about?

These are important questions for ourselves, embodying as they do our own understanding of who we are. They are equally important for the community of which we are part. It used to be that geographical location was a critical factor in defining community, if not the exclusive determinant. Small groups in isolated locations could still be riven by religious and political conflicts so that they could not be considered communities. Today, however, modern travel and communication reduces the importance of geographical location and heightens the function of mutual acceptance of political and social and cultural values as the key unifying and identifying factors for a community. Nations, like people, need stories of their past, expressive of the values that bind them, and which stories are told and how they are told needs to change to reflect changes in the nation itself.

This can be demonstrated by a brief discussion of four books for young Australians written to tell them of their nation's past. The books are The Australia Book by Eve Pownall, published in 1952, Marsden and Tan's The Rabbits (1998), and Soldier Boy (2001) and Young Digger (2002) by Anthony Hill.

The Australia Book was written by Pownall 'because she felt that such a book was necessary in order to show and teach young Australians how their country grew'. It was described as 'an outstanding publication, dedicated to the boys and girls of to-day who will play their part in the world of to-morrow', implicitly by behaving in that future as their forefathers had in the past. While these comments were recorded in the blurb on the flyleaf of the book, they were in accord with the text of the book itself which concluded:

The Map has been filled in. Planes travel the skies where Cook looked up to find the stars, and the land which lay so long unknown today is part of the world.

Perhaps some day you may see all Australia for yourself: its timberlands and beaches, its vineyards and its gold; wild flowers in the bushland, coloured fish in tropic waters, sheep and cattle stringing out over wide spaces, wheat bending before the wind.

You will remember the sailors who found this land, the pioneers who settled it. They wrote the first pages of Australia's story. Today, the story goes on. Like you, it is living and growing. (p. 45).

The beliefs expressed in The Australia Book received official endorsement through the award of 'the Australian Book Society's Prize for the best manuscript for a children's book' (flyleaf). It distilled the foundation story of our nation as an epic achievement of European explorers and settlers in a remote and hostile environment. It celebrated the courage and endurance of individuals such as Cook, a man whose remarkable life's work is often claimed to be grossly undervalued. As Anthony Sampson asked recently, 'why is ... Cook so much less celebrated and remembered than Nelson, or even Scott of the Antarctic...? ...Cook did more than any other 18th century traveller to change our perceptions of the globe...' (Sampson 2002, p. 17).

However, The Australia Book was not so Anglo-centric as to begin with Cook's voyage to the east coast, significant though that was in its consequences. Rather it opened with the original inhabitants, though its acknowledgment of their presence was shaped by the European belief that Australian Aborigines migrated from elsewhere, a concept not accepted in Aboriginal tradition. 'The first Australians had been in the land so long that no man, not even the oldest, could say how they first came here' (p. 7). After a generalised description of Aboriginal life that would be considered patronising if not racist today though not then, the text moved on to mention the Spanish and Dutch explorers before mentioning Cook.

In a total of 45 illustrated pages, Pownall gave a brief overview of events in Australian history, concluding with, appropriately for the publication date, reference to the immigrants then flooding into the country. 'Some do not speak English. Some come from countries where life is very different from ours' (p. 43). Observing that 'every country is now close to every other country', Pownall predicted that 'when atomic power is used for everyday things, we will all be closer still' (p. 43). Her story was one that was grounded in the tradition of British imperial expansion as an extension of civilisation, but implicit in it was the assumption that the society which had then developed in Australia had the capacity to absorb many people from many lands and that this process would result in a better life for those who took the opportunities offered. 'There is still plenty of room in Australia, and there are many things to do' (p. 44).

What strikes the contemporary reader is the exclusion of the 'first Australians' from the narrative after the first page and the unbridled confidence of the author, from her early 1950s perspective, that further development of the country by European technology would be unproblematic. Forty six years later, these omissions are the very ones addressed by Marsden and Tan. Pownall dealt with the displacement of Aboriginal Australians by ignoring it. She must have been aware of the suffering caused by the forced removal or murder of indigenous people, but seemingly she did not consider it an appropriate subject for a book for young people.

The Marsden and Tan approach to national story telling could not be more opposed to that of Pownall in style as well as content. While those well versed in children's literature recognise The Rabbits as an allegory best suited to the reflective, informed and mature reader in high school or beyond, the choice by author and illustrator of the picture book format and the marketing of the title in bookshops alongside titles for preschoolers confounds many. Certainly, reading The Rabbits is a discomforting experience. Marsden and Tan cry in the wilderness of an apocalyptic landscape. The written text echoes the declamatory chant of the Greek chorus of tragedy. The sombre images subtly shape-change the familiar into the nightmarish; in the manner of Hieronymous Bosch, Tan creates an Australian vision of Hell.

This is national story telling, but it is not history as historians tell it. It is a story told through techniques of art and literature that contains elements of truth needed to redress but not replace earlier stories. The history presented jointly by The Australia Book and The Rabbits to the thoughtful reader, who weighs each independently for what it is, is a more informative one than that offered by one title or the other alone. Today new national stories are being written to stand alongside those produced in the past.

New national stories

Postmodernist ideologies have been particularly trenchant in their criticism of stories of imperial expansion and settler colonies that displaced or absorbed indigenous peoples. These ideologies have proved useful in forcing a re-examination of the self-congratulatory tones of early settler histories which rightly celebrated some aspects of colonial growth but which, like Pownall, implied that any casualties or failures were the price paid (by others) for progress. They are not, though, the only influences which elicit new stories by which contemporary young Australians can learn who they are. One major factor is demographic change.

Shifts in the composition of Australian society help explain why a national history springing from British roots does not have the unifying force that it once had. Since 1970, the country which was once more than 85% British in its origins has been transformed beyond recognition. In the year 2000, population estimates identified 24 % of the population as overseas born (nearly one quarter of the nation). And 27% of people born in the country had at least one parent born overseas. (Year Book Australia 2002, pp. 96-7). Observers state that this represents the biggest social reconstitution of a county in history that has been undertaken peacefully and with the consent of those affected in so short a time span. Consequently, while the earlier national story remains institutionalised in our political and social structures, and the immigrant experience is common to all but the indigenous, there are now many stories of origin told in many languages and according to a diversity of customs. Therefore new forms of national history are now being forged out of two principal elements, that of migration and that of war, since many who have migrated have been displaced by war.

Migration and war do not at first seem promising concepts around which to build a national identity that fosters social harmony and a respect for human rights. Yet all of us interested in narrative and its power know the key to its outcome lies in what is told and how. There is no scope in a brief article to trace the shift in the stories of immigration across the years as told in Australia. Tales of triumphant imperialism have long since disappeared. They were only ever representative of a very few. From the beginning, many immigrants, from convicts and indentured labourers onwards, arrived under schemes of assisted passage designed to import the poor as cheap labour. In recent years, migration stories have focussed on the determination of the displaced and desperate to journey into the unknown to build a new life for their families, and more and more of the latter are enriching the current range of books available to Australian young people today. It can also be noted in passing that images of flight from oppressive bureaucracies, desperate ploys to prevent family separation, loss, which permeate today's migration stories also have the capacity to encompass stories of the stolen generation, as in Anthony Hill's The Burnt Stick (1994).

The promotion of images of war rightly disturbs sensible people. Few today can entertain the notion that war is inherently glorious or exciting when its grossness is shown daily on our television screens. But from the time of World War I, stories of Australians at war have been central to our national identity. In turn, the key to their suitability as national stories lies in their focus on how ordinary people, men and women, faced up to the worst that life could ask of them and did their best for those they loved and what they believed in. In these stories, war itself is not heroic; it is merely the most extreme of challenges. In these stories, it is not military success or victory that counts. As an undergraduate at Adelaide University decades ago, I heard K. S. Inglis point out that Australians were the only people on earth whose primary national day, Anzac Day, was the celebration of a disastrous defeat. Inglis has since published his study of the role of war in Australian national stories in Sacred Places (1998).

Something of the difference between our traditions of war and those of others is illustrated in a newspaper item published at the time of the release of the film, Blackhawk Down, and written with the purpose not only of promoting the film but also a local sense of pride in 'our' part in it. It reported that Eric Bana, the Australian actor who had been in Hollywood 'the equivalent of about five seconds', was already 'calling the shots'. Bana was reported as going:

head-to-head with ...director Ridley Scott over a scene ...and came up trumps. Bana ... wanted his lines changed in his ode-to-the-battleground speech near the end of the film. He wanted it less sentimental, less patriotic, more truthful to the soldiers he ...had met...

Bana had the words 'duty and honour' removed and 'it's about the man next to you' inserted (Advertiser 8/1/02, p. 20).

In short, the writer claimed Bana gave the speech an emphasis on ordinary men supporting each other, 'mateship', rather than on patriotism of a more nationalist kind, a twist towards a position more familiar to Australians.

Anthony Hill has published two books which retell stories of Australians at war which exemplify how such tales may serve not only to illustrate admirable characteristics of the real people involved, but how an author may meticulously structure a text so as to encourage its readers to assess for themselves the evidence it offers in a logical manner. His earlier title, Soldier Boy (2001), explored the motivation of a fourteen-year-old Victorian who volunteered for Gallipoli, then choose to stay there until his death, though he could have returned at any time by telling an officer his real age. I discussed this book in an article in Orana (37: 3, pp. 4-7).

Now, in Young Digger (2002), Hill tells how 'No. 4 Squadron of the Australian Flying Corps smuggled home their boy mascot Henri Hemene Tovell, called Young Digger...' (unpaged). Inevitably Young Digger reveals more than the saga of how members of the squadron carried the child aboard in a sack and concealed him on the long sea voyage home. It encompasses the orphan's experiences before he becomes a mascot, and in that process, outlines the fate of many children at war. It continues after his arrival in Australia to show something of the dislocation to the lives of returned servicemen when they returned to find their old occupations filled by others, and the problems which even a more fortunate displaced person like Henri had to build a life out of the mixture of elements available to him.

However, this book is particularly important for what it offers young readers through Hill's scholarly detailing of the evidence he had and how he used it. At every step the reader is told what data support the tale as told and what deductions the author drew from them and why. The Author's Note before the main text sets out the key sources and advises readers that 'this is a biographical novel' (unpaged), alerting them to the necessity for the author to imagine what some parts of the story may have been or how they may have taken place. The Epilogue carries the story on briefly beyond Henri's death in a way that places his life in a perspective anchored by the facts of the lives of others significant in his own. The appendices provide some pieces of the evidence that Hill used for the readers to scrutinise for themselves. Finally, in the section, Endnotes, Hill provides further pointers as to why he made the decisions he did.

An author cannot do more to move the responsibility from himself to the reader for the conclusions that they may draw. For example, there is on page 239, Henri's own account of his discovery as a stowaway aboard the Kaisar-I-Hind that does not agree with Hill's description of the incident on pages 186-187, or of related events, such as on page 200. Readers who note these discrepancies must judge for themselves what the probable sequence of events was, though they will need to persist to page 263 in the Endnotes to find Hill's reasoning in regard to the matter and will therefore have already had to wrestle with explaining it themselves.

What we can note here is that in recent notable Australian children's books about war, Memorial (Crew 1999), In Flanders Fields ( Jorgensen and Harrison-Lever 2002), Soldier Boy and Young Digger, war is the challenge but the story is how the lives of ordinary Australians and others were shaped by it. In this way, national stories derived from the experiences of ordinary people may indeed be inclusive enough to encompass something of each Australian's story, no matter from where he or she originally came. Equally importantly, the careful way in which these stories have been constructed encourages their readers to be thoughtful and responsible readers of them, making them singularly appropriate as new stories for the nation.

References

Comic has His Way in Script Change, Advertiser, 8th January, 2002, p. 20.

Crew, Gary, Illus. Shaun Tan, (1990) Memorial. Port Melbourne, Vic.: Lothian.

French, Freida, (2002) Telling Stories in Australia: the Depiction of Aboriginal People in Contemporary Young Adult Literature, ACCESS, 16 (3) pp. 16-19.

Gwynne, Phillip, (1998) Deadly Unna? Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin.

Hill, Anthony, (2001) Soldier Boy: the True Story of Jim Martin the Youngest Anzac. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin.

Hill, Anthony, Illus. Mark Sofilas, (1994) The Burnt Stick. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking.

Hill, Anthony, (2002) Young Digger. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin.

Inglis, K.S. (1998) Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. Carlton Sth., Vic.: M.U.P.

Kearney, Richard, (2002) On Stories. London: Routledge.

Jorgensen, Norman, Harrison-Lever, Brian, (2002) In Flanders Fields. Fremantle, W.A.: Sandcastle Books.

Marsden, John, Illus. Shaun Tan, (1998) The Rabbits. Port Melbourne, Vic.: Lothian.

Pownall, Eve, Illus. Margaret Senior, (1952) The Australia Book. Sydney: John Sands.

Sampson, Anthony, (2002) In the Wake of a Great Navigator, The Guardian Weekly, Sept 26-Oct 2, p. 17.

Year Book Australia 2002 (No. 84) (2002) Canberra: A.B.S.

Dr Maureen Nimon is a member of the School of Communication, Information and New Media, of the University of South Australia. Her primary interest in children's literature is in the social function of books for children and young people.