William Vollmann - The Atlas

Originally we was from up the bush, Snake said, opening the first V.B. North coast. We came just visiting here. Then we stayed.

Tell you something about Redfern, the younger man cut in. They got a different attitude here. A bad attitude.

So why did you come visiting then? I asked.

Well, really there wasn't nothing up there, said Snake. Not enough to do. More opportunity in the city than in the country. That's why we're here.

Yeah, look at him talk, laughed Rob as he took out a beer. What kinda opportunity have you found, Snake? What kinda opportunity's anybody got in this town?

A lot of people playin' the numbers just to pass the time, Snake admitted. Really can't go anywhere. I'm only just visitin'. Wanna go back, huntin' and fishin'. And my woman, she's from the snow country, the table lands.

I miss the trees, the mountains, the grass, agreed Sadie wearily, sipping at her V.B.

All we needed up there was a tent, said Snake. Like, you could go to the river and get everything. I can kill anything with a stone that big. I could take two men out. I done it before.

Maybe someday I'll go somewhere, said Ruthie. Because they always stare. If I was sittin' on a train, I look out the window so they don't bother me. Some people don't have no respect. Oh, how they stare!

Shall we speak of stares? I myself seldom fail to gaze into other faces as they come to me. Looking is a natural act, and if Ruthie had come to my notice on a bus I would have looked at her because she was beautiful, but Ruthie would not have known that I was looking at her for that reason. That afternoon she said to me: When you get in a bus, the first thing people do is look you up and down, see if you're black. — I guess that was how it was for me, that first time I came into Redfern. They were all gazing at me — all of them! — and I was not their color. Maybe each gazed at me for his own reasons, but because they all gazed I had to assume a single reason, the same one that Ruthie assumed in her bitter anger. So perhaps the way to discover people's lusts and angers is not to fish behind their peering eyes but to read what they write on the walls of their public toilets. In a men's room at the Sydney airport I came across this profundity:

KILL ALL ABO'S I HATE COONS HA HA FUCKEM

which another soul had seconded as follows:

ABO'S WILL RUIN AUSSIE LAND

— a remarkable reversal of fact which took my breath away so that I almost did not appreciate the remarks of the third sage who had weighed and balanced and urinated and concluded: GOOKS ARE WORSE. — What exactly does it mean for land to become Aussified? Let me introduce a retired farmer I met in Tasmania, where the exterminations of the last century enjoyed great success: there are no fullblooded Tasmanian aborigines anymore. Horses bowed in the whitish and yellowish grass where this farmer had lived his years out, and huge cylindrical bales stood upon the fields like gateposts for the low blue sea-wave of mountains to the west. Age parted him from his farm, but his heart lived there yet; I think he was homesick for his peppermint gum trees. — The wildlife around here is a tremendous problem, he told me. You clear a field here and the animals will come from miles around, just strip it, clean it out, particularly kangaroos and wallabies. — He was the son of pioneers whose hard work had justified them to themselves. The land belonged to them. The kangaroos had no right to it. I requested his views on those strange, dark, barrel-shaped marsupials called Tasmanian devils, and he said: People in fat lamb areas could have experienced a lot more problems with them than I did. On my two hundred and fifty acres, while I did see them, they were never in sufficient numbers to cause a problem. — Their foreseeable extinction could not grieve him. Maybe he was even glad. It is not for me to hold him blameworthy. He paid allegiance to the laws he believed in, and lived quietly. If some native plant or animal caused "trouble" or a "problem" then he resolutely defended his interests; otherwise he kept neutral. He didn't kill venomous snakes, for instance, unless he found them close to the house. This philosophy, so conveniently practical with its tiny cabinets of self sameness, had come with a drawer to fit native people in also. — The whites have just about had enough of free handouts to the blacks, he explained. A few educated aboriginals tend to cause a bit of trouble. The uneducated black, he don't expect so much.

Snake, Sadie, Ruthie and Rob did not expect very much, I guess, maybe because they knew that Redfern was Aussie land. — This used to be a white community, Snake said, opening another V.B. Before the blackfellas moved in. The whitefellas want it back. They want to put a carpark in.

I'll tell you something else about this place, said Snake. They got no respect for the elders. The young fellas have got to keep the respect they got for the elders. The mother and father, they're not strict. And the old ones look out for us. You see, I call 'em all uncles and aunties.

That's what I noticed when I came down here, Rob mumbled, leaning back, closing his eyes, and raising the can of V.B. to his lips as his other wrist relaxed, his fingers falling and opening. (The case was already more than half gone.) — I call everyone brother and sister, but here they just pass on.

That's right, Snake, it's about respect, said Ruthie. No respect anywhere. I'm glad I haven't got no kids. They'd just get raised up in this shit. The average white person hates us, except for ferals and hips.* And the bikers, too. They back us up. But the others. . Especially the police. I saw one man last week, they made 'im strip down to 'is skin. Happened right outside this house. That's their aim, to strip us of our dignity.

You tell your magazine how there's always police, Sadie said. Blackfellas want peace; the police always wanna teach us a lesson.

(And here I have to say that the second time I went to Redfern, which was at night, I saw the police slam people down, but 1 also have to say that those people were wretched drunks who were hurting each other.)

Snake pointed. — Police got a camera there on the street. For surveillance.

Always watchin' us. Since we was kids. Always movin' us here and there. My man here, he got took, said Ruthie. He got took, I got took when I was seven, and put into institutions where we got the religion. The gubbers✝ did it.

What did they do that for? I said.

We was just sittin' around at home, said Rob, opening another beer. But they see us in our family and they say you're poor. You run around naked, barefoot. So you get took.

Where did they take you?

I can't really remember, but it comes to me in bits and pieces.

* "Ferals are the people who stand up against the loggers," Rob had told me.

"Hips are the people who deal [drugs]."

✝ "Governors: " white men.

Rob, who'd met his wife at the rehabilitation center, called himself a blackfella but he was pale golden in color, like any Caucasian surfer in Sydney or Honolulu or Santa Barbara. In 1688 William Dampier had described the aborigines he met as "coal black like. . the Negroes of Guinea." The people Captain Cook found were dark brown. Maybe there is no such thing as race now, not really; so many Greenland Eskimos I met were blond and blue-eyed like their Danish fathers; my goodhearted D. is Thai but Thais sometimes think her black African; it seems to me that the most that can be said is that there are loose racial types which some people conform to and others live in between. I wish that I could bring back to life the juryman who addressed the press after acquitting seven whites of shooting and mutilating twenty-eight aborigines at Myall Creek in 1838: I look on the blacks as a set of monkeys and the sooner they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better. I would never consent to hang a white man for a black one. I know well they were guilty of murder, but I for one would never see a white man suffer for shooting a black. What would this man have made of Rob? The only way he could have known that Rob was black would have been if Rob had told him so.