Last night we were on the Coorong at Hack’s Point, with the Ngarrindjeri. There was the usual ‘bush tucker’ stuff but there was something else, a strong sense of strategic thinking. Not that the ‘old’ frameworks were far away  - a sort of leap from ‘tradition’ to the present with history – the intervening – seemingly bracketed off. I’m not sure that was how the Ngarrindjeri thought about it all. They are, after all, well aware of the history of disturbance and any notion of the pristine is hard to sustain when there’s been sheep and ploughing and sand buggies and God knows what else …

Now the land is being asked to ‘resume’ the past – somehow to take it back on board. This is a painful process and not unproblematic. It is horrible to have your own history rammed down your neck – and to be forced to ‘deal’ with it according to timing and priorities set by others.

400 plus burials. It’s too much.

Each day the wind blows, each day the waves ripple towards the shore, each day the leaves and the grasses are caught in the wind, each day the water is brought shorewards. There are processes in process. Not subtle though the effects they produce are subtle. Just what is going on.

It’s as if the land comes from the sea. The sea is present – just over there. All this quietness, all this settling light, it is a sort of illusion, a respite permitted by the sea and its great forces …

History has been shipwrecked and something is going on, I don’t quite know what. The tremendous pain I feel may not just be my own.

Abandonment is in there somewhere, this desecration that arises when every footstep is not taken with care and attention. Too much purpose. The purposeful always treads ahead of itself. It’s not quite in the soft touch to the earth.

The Ngarrindjeri seem on the surface to have learnt the language of purpose quite well. Maybe they know something they need to know, to get in first.

What would you say to the State if you could? Native Title isn’t so important for it is already in the past. They don’t have to prove anything to anybody. It would in any case be a mistake. They are building up slow alliances, they are overcoming certain difficulties one by one. They’ve been successful in creating a sort of mythology that is out in the open, and doesn’t have to be spoken about in too hushed tones. That is how I put it anyway. Not too hushed. It is good when reverence can go with openness. It creates a possibility, it assumes the naturalness of itself. It is the best possible answer to the Howards of the world. It operates with a frank-eyed ‘Of course’ …

This ‘Of course’ is the best possible answer back. Especially when it uncouples announcing from stridency. It is not an assertion. It is the best possible claim.

‘Bloody blackfellas’ someone will be saying somewhere. But when the ‘Of course’ is established they can say ‘bloody blackfellas’ all they like.

2

One of the young blokes, one of the students – he may think of himself as a bit of a card – was talking about the signal fires, how being present at one of these fires allowed him to be integrated into the main event even though he was absent, ‘over there’ – somewhere where a fire was.

Of course I’ve just been writing about disturbance – the role of clouds as markers of disturbance, unauthorized presence. Michael Riley’s photos are about this – at least for me. A cow arises in the sky: disturbance. A boomerang arises in the sky. Well we can’t just talk about disturbance – though this still static flighted thing just sitting there, not flighted at all but hovering, is undoubtedly intended to disturb, the image of it anyway. It promises a return – or a disappearance. The sky is of course artificial.  It’s a photoshop sky, a manipulated landscape [skyscape]. An artificial sky in which things appear. A too perfect boomerang. There’s something uncanny about it, the sort of disturbance that arises when things are too visible. It’s like a sign outside a service station – except instead of AMPOL or CALTEX or SHELL (with its big scallop shell) we have … Yes, the new brand names, brand names of the past brand names of the now brand names of the future.

What would I put up in the sky? Brook [Andrew] might put the statue of David. I might put … a cloud.

Michael must have been taken by those service station signs at night – and something got going to get him to put other things up on the pole, other things illuminated from within that would appear like too palpable mirages in the midst of the flat plains

A little like Ian Abdullah’s tennis courts, bright at night – or those bowling greens lit for night bowls. They become their own Hollywood Bowls of self-enactment, the mild chorus of rural life

We see what we want to see, we see what is there. If we look more intently we see what is not there.

The Ngarrindjeri are slowly erasing words: swamp, it goes; bones, they go. A bone is a bone is a bone except when it is an ancestor – one of the old people. Old people show their bones – like the countryside showing its ribs, or the ancient fish bit by bit revealing its boney presence.

Bones.

Riley has resisted the temptation to put a skull in the sky. He might put a torn flag.

We have wetlands, says the younger Rigney (Grant), these are the nurseries. Cliffs and wetlands. What is pushed up, what is swept aside allowing a watery space.

You might be wary of that word landscape, I feel like saying. While you’re at it. It’s one of those danger words, too. Landscape, nature (now there’s the biggest doozie of them all), wilderness, pristine, reconciliation!

History makes you into history. Try story. [Story is an ongoing thing. You can tell it. It’s up for telling. History flattens you, subjects you to an outside mastery or domination.] Whatever the Ngarrindjeri word is for swamp, try and get that into ordinary use. Agu pambe in Kugu Nganhtyarra except it is not a swamp, it’s any place where fresh water gathers, shallow or deep. The deep ones are livers or guts or some other body part.  Maybe here too. Like lungs – or something. Maybe not lungs but something.

3

Dismal histories, histories out of nowhere. As if everything simply ‘arises’. As if it has a mind of its own. The banality with which power shrouds itself as if truly superior.

Power is a mugs’ game.

How odd that policy should be inserted into such a barren landscape, as if nothing ever was, as if we aren’t being made, made into … Well, what?

On one side of the room there is fresh caviar; on the other side of the room there is Peck’s Paste. They give us Peck’s Paste. That is what we are being asked to witness and to condone: the Peck’s Paste version of history.  It’s a strange game – to be forced to play tiddlywinks when there’s bridge, and bridge when there is something more purposeful and interesting …

Whenever anyone names anything right they do us a tremendous service. But apart from saying it’s another case of the blind leading the blind what are we to say?

The clock of history has been undone then they find they can’t put it together again. No, there was no intention of assembling it – the only intention was to fragment it, turn it into bits and pieces and take the pretty bits and stick them on the wall in the same of something or other …

An active disabling. See, we have to remember that in the world of policy every apparent failure is a triumphant success. The wrecking ball. It’s a grotesque move. To casually turn the viable into the nothing; to create nothing where something delicate and workable – even robust in the curious way human beings are robust – operated. Destroy an economy, get rid of the very bases of it, remove its necessity, meddle in delicate webs of social patterning and say ‘But nothing was there. There was nothing there …’

Well, now there is nothing there – but it is something. No one says what it is. Odd that: the moment we turn human society into behaviour we find we have nothing to say. The moment it might be typified through the most simple observational means it is turned into nothing at all – or merely instances of something. Today’s paedophilia will be tomorrow’s …

Well, what great crime can we think of? Molesting children is as low as you can go, apparently – but surely they will come up with something … We could have a guessing competition, a national quiz. ‘What will be the great crime of the now tomorrow?’ For indeed, every attestation means something. For myself the surest sign of the present is its insistence on presenting itself as unthinkable. I see my friends withdrawing at the speed of light; yet seeking ways of inserting themselves.  There is nothing to insert oneself into …

The wolf is at the door waving a red flag but not knowing what to say. ‘You have destroyed my livelihood’, says the [W]olf, ‘I’ve eaten Little Red Riding Hood, as I was meant to, what now?’

Someone comes from the museum and makes a bid for the bit of torn cape. ‘This is history’, says the museum person, ‘this is part of the national estate.’

Visitors turn up to the museum for a day or two. The barrage of publicity is tremendous. ‘Red Riding Hood’s cape, on display now’. There are floor talks and films. Even Azaria gets a mention.

Phar Lap’s heart is forgotten. Now they’ll want Thorpie’s …

4

I write something. I set out to type it up. I intervene. Nothing is allowed to remain as it was. I rupture the topic as if that is my biggest potential gift.

Today the topic went …

Travel does that to you, it destroys topics. The topic is the play child of sedentism [the sedentary condition].

5

We were talking about the failure of policy – and its masked successes. To make something unviable gets rid of a rival – and opens the door to interference. Despite Noel’s little plaints [Noel Pearson] he’s up against it. ‘You’re up against it mate’, I feel like telling him, ‘you’ve got Buckley’s.’ Here I am in a house where my host preserves her own fruit grown on her own trees from her own orchard and plucked by her own fair hands. Self-sufficiency, she proclaims.

Self-sufficiency is the maintenance of expertise, knowledge, taste. It centres you. The consumer of elsewhere is elsewhere – somewhere inside a tin can or at the vagary of seasons that don’t appear except in punnets of strawberries and trays of miserly mangos.

California hasn’t much flavour – this year or any year.

Noel hands things over to the [S]tate: infrastructure, whatever that is, education, law and order, health. I don’t think he mentioned housing. I don’t think he mentioned ‘wiping your nose’ – though here and there in parts unseen but momentarily reported, children are told to wipe their eyes.

‘Wipe your eyes, kiddies, and you may have a nice surprise’ – a swimming pool at the end of the day with the Ph values all wrong and your eyes infected and blasted forever amen.

A reward.

The State gives rewards. I wonder if you can get frequent voting points – so your vote is worth 1 528 times more than the mug next door’s …

6

Yes, Noel hands things over to the State but then there are things he wants back. I’m not sure what these are. Yes, it is true, every divestment is a lowering of responsibility. More to the point, it is a loss of skills. You lose capacity – but at the same time there may be new things that start to emerge, other capacities.

I’m not sure he puts it this way – but if he is concerned that religion detached from necessity is a real hazard, then I could only agree with him. At present blackfellas live in a world where politics has become the main extractive industry. This is true of politicians too, of course. So what’s good for the goose is presumably good for the gander.

And what do politicians wring their hands over? Anybody’s guess. No, not anybody’s guess at all: how to get other people to do the dirty work so that you can get your hands on the money to make decisions over spheres of life that you have removed from the people who are now making the money for …

What does politics produce? It is a form of ritual action intended to reinforce certain values and orientations at the expense of others. But let me not be told that it does this on a basis of rationality …

The economists are the magicians of the [S]tate, the soothsayers, the ‘mystifiers’ …

Others sit on the fringe twirling the roulette wheel of ‘guess your investment’ …

The creation of need is a skilled art. It requires absolute conviction detached from any sure knowledge.

7

Your comments are correct[i]. The fact is I’m quite amazed I got through as much as I did in the circumstances and now I may be suffering. Truly, my eyesight is at an all-time low. I’m hoping it has to do with some ‘unseen thing’ that is yet to announce itself.

Bloody hell!

The event. The fact that a thing can be – can be at all. That in itself is something, any appearance, any thing. Not the plane that is flying overhead at this moment. It’s there but it signifies nothing. What is here now is you – you are there. I’m addressing something. That something has a history, an attitude, an orientation to things, a way of responding. A presence. A presence partly because it can retaliate, strike back. You.

But these other things, can they really strike back? Do they have ‘retaliation’ in their repertoire? What’s to stop us chucking them in the fire?

I never thought much of them, these ‘carvings’. They looked like the people who made them so already they were substitute figures – as if the living presence of the person was not enough, they had to be coupled  - artificially – to what they signified, what signification they were asked to bear.

Diane’s garden has willy-wagtails. They are rather fat, chubby. They make nests, they shit on the concrete pavers, they are very here. They would be here even if they did not shit or stand on the winding branches of the vine or were their shadow not to appear through the canvas awning. For me they appear when they appear most, there standing on their straightforward legs, black and white, straightforwardly – not as shadows of themselves.

It’s when they put in an appearance, not merely when they appear.

Which event makes the event an event? Well, something has to draw my attention to it. In the museum, especially when it sits on some shelf in some backroom, in storage, it merely is. It’s there. It ain’t much. Even the Mona Lisa wouldn’t be much in such circumstances. She has to be on the wall, on display. Maybe she now needs a permanent retinue of Japanese tourists – a bit like the Dom in Koeln with its busloads, videos running, as if the building isn’t present if it isn’t being recorded.

Who sees these recordings?

The willy-wagtails (I feel like calling them the ‘bloody willy-wagtails’), they’re always a bit bigger than I think they are. They are too big for themselves, too. They build nests that ultimately they can’t get into. There’s a certain silliness to these birds. ‘They take turns attending the nest’, says Diane. That is an interesting behaviour when you think about it. ‘Maybe we do the same’, I say, ‘maybe it is a very basic pattern. taking turns, I mean’.

‘We learn’, she says, ‘children have to learn – otherwise they talk over the top of people’.

Secretly to myself I say: “But maybe they think it is their turn already. That’s what they’re announcing: ‘Now it is my turn’.”

8

You. I knew I hated that abominable practice with text messages where people say u instead of you.

A u is nothing at all, just a convenience. There should be an effort. By the time you become u then u itself might be deleted. Perhaps we could conduct a little experiment. I’ll ask a question: ‘Did you go to the pictures? What did you see?’

I’m no expert in textmessageese. Perhaps it honks!

What I come up with is ‘PicturesPT?’ To be decoded: Pictures past tense, meaning ‘Did you?’ Maybe we can add the what/wot …

All rather silly, I know. But I’m still vaguely entranced by the idea that we could put a tense marker in – PT for past, P for present and F for future, and then just throw in words …

No, I have no idea what I am trying to achieve …

9

Yes, so whom shall we address, how? I stroll down a corridor. It is already a foreign construct. It talks about rooms off to either side. Doors.

See, foreign.

These were not the spaces, these enclosures. We cannot divorce such thoughts from thought itself. Pigeon holes come with pigeons. It stands against forms of thought which are looser, more bird on the wing, more ‘nest’.

I grieve for my friend. I grieve for Peret. My eyes, ears, heart, brain, caring, skin, fingernails – and a competence I could never have.

(Christ how the locals bleat on.)

What science do we need in the present? No science, We need a sort of anti-science, more feeling, more sensitivity, more awareness.

I look out the window. What does it give me? Behind the waving leaves there is water. Near to where

I am sitting there are blinds. They barely conceal but they conceal enough. They hide something. I feel the need to look past them, to see what is really going on.

Something.

The sun is too implacable, the land runs on to somewhere. A bird calls, the same call over and over again, a single cheap repeated.

I just hear the wind.

29 September - 3 October 2006 (Melbourne – Finniss/Clayton)

[Lightly edited 18 April 2010; changes are placed in square brackets. Don’t always ask for sense. Transparency may appear in another form.]