Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

He had had his self-accusing doubts, was he forcing her to leave because they belong together as proven in every circumstance and solution. Now she has made her decision for Australia, down under in herself, to pry into it would be to admit some macho misuse of intimate freedom.

South Africa inhabited by humans for almost two million years.

Australia inhabited by humans for less than sixty thousand years.

He’s called up online. ‘Australia at the time of European settlement in the seventeenth century the Indigenous population with its highly developed traditions reflected in a deep connection with the land was estimated at least 315,000. The Indigenous population declined significantly as a result of increased mortality and by 1930 was only 20 per cent of its original size.’

Colonisers solved any future problem of liberation movement by killing off the natives, one way or another.

‘There was no population referendum until 1967, after 250 years of colonisation. The Australian constitution was then altered to allow Commonwealth Parliament to make laws to include aborigines in the national census.’

Before that they didn’t exist.

‘The 2006 census. The Indigenous percentage of the total Australian population 2.3 per cent. But with an average annual growth of 2 per cent compared with 1.18 per cent for the total population.’

Poor always breed like flies.

‘Just over half Australia’s Indigenous population live in or close to major cities but as a proportion of the total population Indigenous people are far more likely than non-Indigenous people to live in remote areas. Nationally, Indigenous people make up 24 per cent of Australians living in remote or very remote areas and just 1 per cent of those living in major cities. The expression “native title” is used in Australian law to describe communal, group or individual rights of aboriginals. In a decision of the High Court of Australia in 1992, Eddie Mabo was the first Indigenous person to have native title rights recognised on behalf of Indigenous people. The court rejected the idea that Australia had been terra nullius —land belonging to no one — at the time of British settlement. The Mabo decision led to the establishment of the Native Title Act which recognises and protects native title throughout Australia.’

End of Outback Bantustans.

‘The Australian government is committed to the process of reconciliation between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians. Reconciliation involves symbolic recognition of the honoured place of the first Australians and the implementation of practical and effective measures to address the legacy of profound economic and social disadvantage experienced by many Indigenous Australians, particularly in health, education, employment and housing. Fewer Indigenous students attend and finish school than Non-Indigenous students. Today Australia has a population of 21 million. More than 43 per cent were either born overseas themselves or have one parent who was born overseas. The Indigenous population is 23 per cent of the total.’

In South Africa everything in reverse. Whites 12 per cent of the 49 million population, still dominate the economy, the black majority which overcame also produces those who join the white class and take freedom as the advance to corruption and distancing from the majority living jobless between shacks and toilet buckets.

Take the Down Under information to her; familiarising herself with law over there, unlikely she’s not aware…

The fact that she’s never brought it, to us.

We’ve paid our Struggle dues: and the result? What our son and daughter must grow up to be here, at home, by birth and genes, responsible to a Zuma, a Malema.

Gary Elias is practising on his newly acquired guitar and Sindi, Jabu and Wethu are watching the news on TV, Wethu doesn’t want to see again alone in her cottage the excreta of city’s life where she found herself that afternoon, the rotting food nesting flies, the shore of dirty paper, broken bottles, torn T-shirts cast by municipal workers on strike again, when she was there to buy some special headache muti demanded by a sister back home in KwaZulu.

Education — no, mustn’t allow himself to be distracted by sections on agriculture, bird life, entertainment, Internet cafés. Education: over the past decade the Australian government has committed to halving the gap in literacy and numeracy between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians (that’s a humbling admission in identity, imaging South African whites agreeing to call themselves Non-Africans!)…Although it’s admitted there’s still a long way to go to increase the educational levels of the Indigenous, the progress is encouraging. Out of the country’s total population the number of Indigenous children attending school has increased to 4.2 per cent…universities: the proportion of Indigenes attaining Bachelor or higher degrees, 5 per cent of the national intake—

And at that moment, darkness — Oh fuck! from Sindiswa, a wild thrum from Gary Elias — electricity blackout.

He and Jabu share the moment. Just some piece of the vast equipment that misfunctioned. Probably failure to be routinely checked. Or, other times, the explanation, cables stolen. Evidently you can get good money for them from metal dealers, one of the ingenuities of having no job, the culture of unemployment, as a professor coined it at a social science seminar last week.

Dark is not — like a sudden flare of light, a disruption. The fumble around for candles, the bed the place of darkness as another kind of reflection: back at the results published end of term on the boards, 23 per cent dropouts missing. Earnest dutiful bridging classes a finger stuck in the hole of the flood wall against the failure of schools to provide ‘learners’ with education. The indigenes of this African population.

Some of the indigenous homeborn, homeskin, emigrated from poverty to the status of money and political power, the indigenous mass left behind, below, to do the work of fouling the streets in desperation for pay to survive on. A luta continua . Where’s the cosmic gap least, if never closed, in continuation of freedom’s revolution? Sweden, Denmark, Iceland? Too far. Too cold.

What to do with the house; the Dolphins don’t want it to go to strangers who won’t fit in with the Suburb, near-neighbours to themselves. They have found two men who have always fancied the possibility of extending the Suburb’s character by moving in, so to speak. The Suburb has been and will continue to be, if the Dolphins, Isa and Jake, Blessing and Peter have anything to do with it, a place, a home where colour, sexual partnership, have nothing to do with the qualities of living in freedom. — Even as an enclave in the tsunami — Dolphin Eric says — of revenge for the hideous old years, gimme my tender to build a World Cup Stadium, I’ll stash up millions in your ministerial pocket , you’re all welcome to keep afloat in our Gereformeerde Kerk pool. — (It would be a good line in one of Marc’s plays, neh.) The care the Suburb comrades have for one another has meant that although the playwright doesn’t live there any more he has made a deal whereby the prospective buyers rent the house to the former owners until these — depart. The new owners will take possession on 1 December; but the price of the sale — the playwright is shrewdly wise on the comrades’ behalf, is to be paid in advance; now. Unusual. But Foreign Exchange regulations on the flight of capital mean we may not be allowed to take it all to Australia. — You better go wild and kit yourselves out. You Can’t Take It With You.—

Gary Elias wants to know — When’m I going to BabaMkhulu’s for the holidays? — Two weeks of July have already gone by. Maybe when you are too young, and one of the protected, to have experienced ruptures in your way of life (they’ve even avoided this against their own better judgement by following the Mkizes’ decision that the boys stay on at that school after the initiation exposure) you have no precedent to bring sense to parting and loss.