^B00:00:01 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Cathy Craig: Welcome everybody, I'm Cathy Craig. Welcome the First Nation's Australia [Inaudible] Panel. We are absolutely honored and delighted to be here to talk to you today and tell you a little about who we are, about our cultures, and also about our writing, which is I guess a natural extension of the oral storytelling that our people's had. And our writers today. We have Bruce Pascoe, who he doesn't seem to leave the seat, Bruce. Bruce Pascoe. Tony Birch and our youngest writer with us today, Ellen Van Neerven. We might start off, this session it's sort of open [Inaudible] this session really. What the session called? Isn't that terrible? >> Ellen Van Neerven: Stories from Down Under? >> Cathy Craig: Well let's see it's open. So we've been telling these stories from Down Under in the last two sessions but we might start straightaway. Now, Ellen, the other two have already been up so we might start with you. And get you to tell us a little bit about yourself first. >> Ellen Van Neerven: Yeah, sure. Hello everyone. I'm a [Inaudible] from the East Coast of Australia. [Inaudible] people, we belong to the [Inaudible] language and our family group which tell eagle people that's the bird we identify with and we call [Inaudible]. So when we see a [Inaudible] fly over us, that's a good sign, that's a good omen and we believe that the eagles will protect us while we're on our country. I grew up in Brisbane, which is the third largest city in Australia and grew up traveling from the city and back to our ancestral country. I started writing through, it was a journey that happened because, it was all because my mom got in a library. My mom got a job in a library when my brother and I were young and too young to be left at home and we would have to sit in the library while mom worked and yeah, there was nothing to do. You know, we were outdoor kids but we had to make do with the strange things that were around us and yeah, we found books that way. Found you know, the stories that got me through childhood and high school years but it wasn't until I was in my 20s at university that I read my first, read a first book by an Aboriginal writer. You know the schooling that I had was a whitewash. It was very one-sided and so of course the history but also the literature as well. So I read works by what we call the elders of our literature from [Inaudible] people like them, they were activists but also writers and so I really got to learn a lot through reading their works and it made me feel, myself as an Aboriginal person, I could also write. And so my book, Heat and Light, which came out last year, it's told mainly through a young perspective. You know, being a young person myself and these young people are learning about their family, their culture, about [Inaudible] on the land and that people are living with and you know they're really making their way through all different sorts of circumstances. And a big part of my book is about a family and I feel like the way I explain is it's a family tree. In a book, you get to find three or four generations of one family through this continuing story and it's told through different perspectives of each family member. Because you know, I feel like if you, at a family gathering, that we all will tell a story a different way. Sometimes it can be quite comical so what's left out and what's put in and so I wanted to let all the family members have their say in this book. And later on or maybe now depending on what you'd like. >> Cathy Craig: We're going to get you to read further. [Inaudible] >> Ellen Van Neerven: Yeah from one of the young characters in the story. >> Cathy Craig: I just wanted to introduce the other two. I know they've been up on stage before but I'm not quite sure how much the audience has changed. So, I was just going to call you Bruce and that's Tony. We'll start with Tony. If you could tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. I know we've done it before but just to. >> Tony Birch: I'll tell something different. I'll make something up so a new one. So my name is Bruce Pascoe. >> Cathy Craig: And he has been mistaken for some film star since you've been here haven't you? >> Tony Birch: Harvey Keitel. In the Bad Lieutenant. Probably what I would say which is Ellen just talked about what she is interested in writing about and the supposed theme of this is, I did mention before, I grew up in the city of Melbourne and one of the great volunteers was asking me before about you know is it much more quieter than Washington? Well in fact, no, Melbourne is the biggest city and much noisier than Washington. So I come from a city of about four and a half million people but grew up in a very dense inner city area, which would be similar to many in the cities of North America so like us you experienced [Inaudible] in the 1970s and 80s. Being an Aboriginal kid in the inner city, I was very fortunate that someone mentioned the word multicultural before. I grew up Catholic so I went to school where all my friends were Italian. I went away to high school. I went to a school in Richmond which was mainly Greek migrant from the 60s and 70s so all my mates were Greek. So I was very lucky. And then I lived for about 20 years in Brunswick, which has a huge Middle Eastern community. So one of the things about growing up in Melbourne as an Aboriginal person is you have great opportunity to genuinely mix with kids outside the [Inaudible] culture. A great friend of mine, a poet, he said that anyone who grew up in Melbourne after the war until the 70s has the same emotional vibration so that there's a street language that you grew up that's in common. And one of the things that was talked about earlier, Jeanine talked about sort of the two worlds. What happened in Melbourne is a little different in the sense the two worlds divided between home. So your home might be your Aboriginal [Inaudible] but the street belonged to all those kids. I'm very lucky to have grown up in a generation who are now, yeah, sort of mid 40s to mid-50s who had that great common experience in the [Inaudible]. So I'm very, very fortunate. And so that leads to is that most of my work is about failures, about people who are outsiders who don't succeed and I'm very much drawn to people who exist on the margins of mainstream society. My latest book and some of the stories in this book are about homeless people, people who are disenfranchised from family, people who have made really bad decisions in life and try to get back their life and usually fail. And I actually think coming from a country like Australia, which has this incredibly shell like mythology about who we are and what we are and you know, we [Inaudible] in Australia about you know, we're the greatest country in the world and we are a country which has enormous, not only dark history which has a complex history which in fact, is more interesting. So I actually think failure is more interesting than fiction of success. So that's what I write about. >> Cathy Craig: And one of the things we talked about earlier in the other two panels, we talked about the hidden history and the scared history in Australia that you don't always get. That you're not taught in schools but it's the history of Aboriginal people and you know, not just through contact period but also before. Bruce, I know you've introduced yourself. You were just on the last panel. But just quickly and then I want to come to your book and come back. So could you just tell us who you are? I know your name is really Tony. But. >> Tony Birch: I'm better looking. >> Bruce Pascoe: My dogs think I'm really good looking. >> Tony Birch: My dog sleeps with me. True story. >> Bruce Pascoe: Too much information. My family, I hid their identity. In order to find some branches of our family, I had to go and talk to people from those language groups. I'm trying to find out what had happened to the family, where they were now, that sort of thing. And I was a university graduate by that stage and the people that I went to thought I was a complete idiot because I had gone to school. I'd gone to secondary school. I had gone to university. I studied history. I eventually taught history and English and I believed the history that my country had written about Australia. So when I started asking these ridiculous questions of my elders, they sometimes refused to talk to me and they refused to look at me. And gradually they encouraged me to look more deeply at the history. They provoked me into looking more closely at the history and I was ashamed. I was a university graduate. I thought of myself as an intellect and I realized that I had swallowed the thimble and pea which is an old-fashioned game. We say it in Australia swallow the thimble and pea, you would believe anything. And I did. So I had to refurbish my mind and in doing so, I realized that there were no books that could explain the history that those old people were talking about. The official Australian history had Aboriginal people doing nothing. When Europeans arrived they didn't fight for their land, which is a complete lie. They didn't walk meekly into the missions and begin taking rations. But in fact, there was a completely different story to that and so as a fiction writer, I was trying to tell that story through fiction but realized eventually that I'd have to write histories. Someone mentioned last night in that wonderful building, The Library of Congress building, that they only write histories that they thought they would like to read. And so I was trying to write histories that I thought I could read with some confidence that it would be the correct history of the country. >> Cathy Craig: The panel today is, I mean this one this afternoon, is quite open. It's about stories Down Under but the, all these stories are their own personal introductions. You could say there's a big diversity in Aboriginal people. It's not just the diversity in our languages and cultural practices across the country. Although we have lots of common areas, there's lots of you know, stereotypical thoughts about Aboriginal people. That we all look a certain way and that's never been the truth. That we all have the same backgrounds. That's never been the truth and I think today you've been introduced to six writers who all come from very different backgrounds. So I'm going to come back to you Ellen because your story, Heat and Light, is about that family, has family journeys through it and you just told us a little bit about your own family and about reading, you know, coming to Aboriginal literature later in life. Tell us a little bit about Heat and Light. >> Ellen Van Neerven: Sure. So Heat and Light, I explained a little bit earlier. The family in Heat and Light are called the Kresinger family and the two main characters are two sisters, Marie and Pearl. And Marie, her and her sister are very, even though they're very close in age, they're very different and their father, he, [Inaudible] was when the settlers came, you know, they decided that he would be king of the people, his people and gave him a breastplate. This echoes my own family story. I'm a descendant of [Inaudible], when the Europeans came, it was easier to choose someone to be a spokesperson to communicate with and to have what they have what they call kings but that's not how traditional structure worked. So he was made to wear a breastplate around his neck and so this, and the reason why I write about this is because there are hundreds of descendants of [Inaudible] today. I'm just one of them and we're very, very diverse. We all have our own different stories and so in the Kresinger family you see a whole range of characters and different lives and how they intersect and this is really shown through these two sisters who are very different. Pearl actually, she disappears. There's a huge chunk of her life missing that now the younger generations are trying to figure out. >> Cathy Craig: What happened to her? >> Ellen Van Neerven: Yeah. >> Cathy Craig: Or where she was? >> Ellen Van Neerven: Yeah. >> Cathy Craig: In fact most of our stories are based around family or based around our culture. I mean there are very few Aboriginal artists of any sort, including visual and music, that we don't write or in some way try to tell a story from our own cultures. I'm going to come back to Tony and have a little talk about The Promise. What is The Promise about? >> Tony Birch: The Promise, like all of my books, always has a reference to Bruce Springsteen. >> Cathy Craig: And here I was talking, that's the Aboriginal Bruce Springsteen. >> Tony Birch: I always have a Springsteen reference in all of my books. And it might seem like where's the connection? But one of the great influences in Aboriginal communities is much and even though we have, again, great traditions of forms of music as storytelling communication, very strong contemporary music, one of the greatest influences of music in Australia, in Aboriginal communities Australia wide is country and western music. And one of the stories in this book is called The Ghost of Hank Williams and I suppose in a way, the story of Peter [Inaudible], the book is an ensemble of short stories is that this book is about me wanting to say these are people who either are restrained from community because of their own choice or we force these people to the mountains because they don't fit the image that we want to convey to ourselves or to the world as sort of supposed democratic society. And one of the great myths, again, of Australia is the notion of Egalitarianism, which is a complete and utter myth. We have talked about, by the way, this morning being a very contemporary and current context, our absolute disgust, and shame of being Australians abroad when our government treats refugees and asylum seekers in a violent and reprehensible way in the name of doing violence in Aboriginal country that we're completely opposed to. So all of my work tries to take people in those situations of marginality and not try to redeem them but try and give them full value. One of the things I'm interested in is alcohol. Alcohol, not personally. I don't drink alcohol at all. This is not a whisky throat. It's, alcohol can be something that can be quite devastating in all Australian communities. It's not an Aboriginal problem. Statistically more white Australians drink and abuse alcohol than Aboriginal people. But at the same time, I actually think there's a way of looking at alcohol and how people have partaken in it in a way that accepts them for what they are. I'll just read one page of my work and I'll go on. But this is two characters, two Aboriginal men who drink and one of them is a [Inaudible]. His name in the story is Curtis but there is a very well-known Aboriginal [Inaudible] in Melbourne called Black Elvis and you may not know it or not, but he is Elvis Presley and he will tell you that Elvis inhabits his body and is an Aboriginal country and western singer in Melbourne and you don't ever doubt it. Okay. I met up with Curtis the next day and settle him under a tree sharing a bottle. I already decided it would be best not to spoil a nice afternoon with a tale of woe from my doctor. And I didn't want to interrupt the story he was telling about the 92nd way going off on him. And he got down on his hands and knees in the kitchen and prayed to his long-dead mother to help him get the love of his life back. I had my eyes closed and I heard this roaring wind that came down under the chimney over the wood stove there in the kitchen. She slapped me hard across the face and told me I didn't deserve a woman good or evil. My own mother used those very words. He took a swig from the bottle and wiped it on his sleeve and passed it to me. I held it to my hand and thought long and hard about a drink, about taking one. How long had your mother been dead by then? I asked him. A good 20 years he said, maybe 30. How'd she look after being dead all that time? Just as I expected. My mother looked like an angel. Curtis and me drank away the afternoon and into the night trying our best to out bullshit each other, until we passed out against a tree. I sat staring up at a big, black sky until I feel asleep too. I don't remember getting to my feet or taking off anywhere. But when I woke the next morning, I saw a hot sun lifting in the sky. I was lying in a paddock in the middle of nowhere. My shoes and socks and shirt were missing and I had bruises and cuts on my arms and feet. I didn't know where I was, how I got there, and my pockets were as empty as a ghost coffin. I also had taken a decent belting. I got to my feet and stumbled across the paddock, trying to stay out of the way of the thistles and thorns. I came across a road and started walking. It wasn't long before a cop came along. He pulled onto a rise on the side of the [Inaudible]. I was in trouble but was worn out and ready for him to put me away. But he never. He drove me to the local lockup, drug out a [Inaudible] shirt and some shoes and socks from the lost property box. [Inaudible] even gave me a 20 dollar note from his own wallet and dropped me at the railway station. Your train should be here around 40 minutes. It will get you back to the city. I thanked him and I meant it. How'd you end up here? He laughed. You've got a car in the middle of nowhere. I looked up at the sky and scratched my head. I better find out. >> Cathy Craig: Tony talked a little bit about, you know, the situation in Australia at the moment and a government that has the slogan of turn back the boats. And for Aboriginal people, they were all boat people that came in. But we're never asked our opinion of how we feel about you know, the situation with migrants coming in. Over the last couple of months there's been a group in Australia, a group of Australians that are calling themselves Reclaim Australia. And they come out and they're protesting around different cities and countries, areas. And this is all about their opposed against the Muslims coming into our area. They're opposed against basically anything. But one of the most beautiful things that I saw was they were having a rally and there were lots of clashes between a lot of young Australians who oppose, their, you know, sort of behavior. And Melbourne in fact was one of the most violent protests. >> Tony Birch: We do good in Melbourne. >> Cathy Craig: It's that drinking. But one of the most beautiful. While all this was happening, this conflict was happening, there was a young Aboriginal boy that was standing with a sign. And he didn't say anything, he just stood there and in the sign it said it's not yours to claim. And you know, I think that's one of the reasons why it's important for Aboriginal writers. It's because we need to correct the truths and we need to tell the real story of Australia. So I'm going to come up now to. I was going to call you Santa Claus then but [Inaudible] keeps getting to me. To Bruce, because Bruce, we're talking about the diversity in Aboriginal people and Bruce's latest book is called Dark Emu. Black seeds - Agriculture or Accident and you know, I guess we question some of the things that are around. And there's always been this notion that Aboriginal people. We didn't do anything. In the argument of [Inaudible] was that, well there wasn't anything growing. They didn't have fences. So they didn't really own it. So I want to pass it over to Bruce to talk about some of those things and what you've raised in your book. You know, some of the truths that haven't been told. >> Bruce Pascoe: I've been up since 3:30. Normally my forehead is, you know, very smooth. I look quite handsome in my normal life. I'm just having a rough day. I couldn't sleep, none of us could sleep last night. We had a big day at Smithsonian Institute, Library of Congress. I got up at 3:30. I started writing a little to my son. I said I'm in the land of the blood quantum. I said you know, because we've had this discussion with my kids before. I said if they bring in blood quantum into our country, you two are going are going to foul because you know, this is probably the reality of it. I hope it never does happen. But yesterday when we went to the Smithsonian Institute and I was devastated. I tried to prepare myself because in Vancouver, I went to the First Nations Museum there and I saw those beautiful facades of those magnificent houses. [Inaudible] which is so beautiful and so moving and I just sat down in a corner and I thought how could you possibly look at that art, look at those houses and call those people savages? Yesterday I thought I'd, you know, tied myself up pretty well and I got in there to the Smithsonian and there is a photograph of 40,000 buffalo [Inaudible]. And the purpose of that as written in the literature as displayed there was if we can't kill all the Indian people, we could at least kill their food. And going around through the Smithsonian I saw continuous references to the church being involved, being party to these decisions. Not people of massive ill will but these people with a huge opinion of their own culture and religion as opposed to what, if you look at the Smithsonian, was a perfectly valid culture. [Inaudible] Village there, beautiful photograph of it, vast village, beautifully architecturally built and yet those people were dispossessed as savages. Hard to believe. And last night we went into the beautiful Library of Congress, one of the best libraries in the world. One of the most beautiful buildings in the world. I met the Deputy Editor of the Washington Post, one of the best newspapers in the world and she didn't come to see me. I found that hard to believe. She came because she loved the building. But I was still back in the Smithsonian and this fellow here said as we're going in, it's amazing that this library can build, isn't it? And it's true that of that is built on the bones of the Indian nation and the bones of buffalo. This book, Dark Emu, I'm trying to redress the history of the country because we've been called hunters and gatherers and you know, all our archeologists, all of our historians, bend themselves in two trying to prove that Aboriginal people did not have possession of the soil, did not use it. And in fact, the explorers who were all English, saw a completely different economy of the Aboriginal land. They saw people harvesting grain over an area of nine miles. The grain was not only cut but it was stooped with people in Major Mitchell's party who saw this, said it looked like an English village. This is not hunting and gathering. The book talks about numerous examples of it. Some of them are very, very dramatic but my aim was to show we weren't hunters and gatherers. I don't care what the label is but it wasn't hunting and gathering. I know people had a viable culture which was intricately devoted to the land. Because we mentioned it in the panel before about women being central to our culture and in most Aboriginal cultures, we refer to everything through the mother. We touch the ground, the ground is the mother, through the mother. It comes up all the time. And we're devoted to the land not the other way around. We don't own it. We come from it. And we have to protect it and that's what the book is trying to do. And when I first went to publish this book, I had a group of professors from our national capital, Canberra. They invited me to a special meeting. They all had the leather patches on their elbows to prove that they're real academics. They tried to smoke pipes. And the said we're really disturbed by this manuscript because you've mentioned agriculture in the same sentence as the word aborigine. It didn't happen. And I went out after that and I bought the first explorer's journal I could find and in it I read that passage about Thomas Mitchell writing through nine miles of cut grain and I then said to myself I have got the book. Not out of my own genius, which his quite substantial, but I have got the book that is being given to me, came to me, was delivered and I was so pleased to find that evidence that white academics could not refute because it had been written by other white academics. It's called the explorers academics for they were probably the best-educated people in the land at the time. So this is a defense of Aboriginal life, the Aboriginal economy, the Aboriginal spirit and hopefully, you know, in years to come, we won't have to do this kind of stuff. We'll be able to tell more important stories about our people. But at the moment, we seem to be in a different. Sorry? >> [Inaudible] >> Bruce Pascoe: Well thanks for cheering me up again. I'm superbly conscious of that. >> Cathy Craig: He's trying to make sure that our stories survive that. And the title of your book with the Dark Emu and this is something academics and other people in Australia are starting to realize, and you know, it's the same old. I was laughing at the news a couple of months ago. It said the next big superfoods will be indigenous foods of Australia and we went oh, geez they told us before that was crap. Now they want us to eat it. And I started looking at what the so-called superfoods in the world were and quinoa. Where does it come from? You know and so you start to think about is the world turning? Are you starting to realize that indigenous peoples, native peoples, they had, that this is that hidden history, that hidden secret history they had answers to things. And Tony said earlier that you know, we need to look towards indigenous people and their histories and how they survived because in Australia, we survived through Ice Ages, mega fauna and that will led us into our next speaker, who is actually, her next book you might want to tell us about, what you're writing about. >> Ellen Van Neerven: I'll talk briefly about the book because it's sort of you know, you kind of feel a little bit guilty sometimes when you haven't been working on something. You know, we've been having fun here as well. Definitely not much time for writing. But yeah, my next novel is going to be about the creatures, the animals that used to inhabit Australia during the period where Aboriginal people lived together with these, you know, you think of kangaroos and wombats and all the Australian animals that you may know that there was once was a way bigger versions of these animals. Yeah, I'm really interested in those stories and how the nation has held these stories of these animals through song and dance and stories and yeah, I'm really excited this next book which has the tentative title of Days of the Extinction. My uncle he told me that our neighbors, the [Inaudible] people who were entwined with, were the happiest people in the world. You know scientifically proven that they were because of [Inaudible] country being so rich and by diverse and you know, there was a lot of, didn't have to work many hours of the days. There was a lot of time for art, for family life, for culture, that was really a big part of everyday life and that was something, that's a value that I choose to live by and encourage other people in myself and you know, to make time for culture, for art, and writing is now a part of that. And you know, he's also told me about the biggest gathering in the Southeast coast, Southeast Queensland was the [Inaudible] about four hours west of Brisbane is the [Inaudible] Mountains, which you know, there's still a lot of [Inaudible] trees that remain there. A big population there but a lot of have been cut in, you know, a lot have been, there's not many around anymore in surrounding areas. People from all over the place used to meet at this location and, but they were at conferences, that was how we passed on information and really had this multination approach to land and land management. How looking after land will increase the rainfall in other area, how everything is connected. And so you know these teachings that I'm learning as I mentioned before, are contradictory to my learnings at school and this is, if I have some time, I would like to read from a passage that talks about how young people even today are growing up so confused by this two world thing that Jeanine mentioned. >> Cathy Craig: While you're getting that ready I'll just tell people about the [Inaudible] art. >> Ellen Van Neerven: Oh sorry, it's a superfood. >> Cathy Craig: I wasn't going to say that. >> Ellen Van Neerven: No, we're not going to say that. But don't take that [Inaudible]. So you talk [Inaudible] >> Cathy Craig: So you get your book together. The [Inaudible] only comes out every four years and the festival Ellen is talking about, it was like an Olympic game. It only ever happened every four years and the tribes would come from all over including my own, which now is in another state after borders were put in. But we would come over and it was, when the food was in abundance, that's when people met and we would exchange everything from ideas to tools. You know, they found pearl shells from [Inaudible] down at these festivals because they had trade routes across Australia were moving. And there would be competitions, best dance, running exercises, you might have found a new wife there. You know, there's all sorts of things that happened but these festivals were quite important. It's like the Olympic Games. >> Ellen Van Neerven: So my uncle has told me a little bit about it but it's men's business. I'm sure you guys understand we have women's business and men's business. But initiation to climb up to the top of the tree and to bring the [Inaudible] nuts down and they used, they made holes in the tree, foot holes and you see now that these are pretty amazing if you go to the [Inaudible] mountains to see how the trees have grown and how these foot holes, so far this far apart. Yeah, it's pretty cool. We've been here for a long time. So this is a reading from the book. 13 is the age that makes you. I lived in the hill and roadhouse with my mother and grandmother. When I complained about no electricity or that the toilet was outdoors, my grandmother said Cullen look, pointing to the grasslands that surrounded our property and the mountain that held. You are living and breathing on country. This makes you my very special grandson. When dinner had been prepared and I had eaten my usual ferocity, I would sit eagerly by my grandmother's side and wait for her yawning time. Even when I could barely keep my eyes open, I put my head to the floorboards and listened. As the only child in the house, I liked when my cousin Amy came to visit with my uncle and we would [Inaudible] at the car shop at the corner and race through the flats. The bikes never had much fuel so we know we could only go so far. [Inaudible] most times empty creek bed. I knew we were both itching to go further knowing that when we got home Amy would have to go before dusk back to the city and I'll be thinking about school the next day. School and the other kids were still something I was negotiating. My father had come from Ireland so I wasn't very dark. When I've passionately shared a few of the stories my grandmother told me, the other kids called me half cast. It didn't really stop me though. I even spoke up in English class because the teacher was talking like we weren't even here before and I got kicked out but I had to whole [Inaudible] to myself until lunchtime. I made a nest out of twigs. I was the sort of kid who couldn't stop touching the earth, sculpting it with my hands. And that was when I saw Mia. She was beautifully brown. Her face was brown, her eyes were brown, and her legs were brown. She was walking with her adoptive mother. They'd come through the gate at the bottom of the oval. I gathered up my bottle caps and put them in my pockets of my shorts and scrambled over banks and followed them. I knew I should have made myself known and helped them find their way but I straightaway felt shame I wasn't in class. Plus Mia was dressed so pretty too, shiny black shoes and white socks. [Inaudible] here. They disappeared into the school office. After lunch, I saw that she was in my class and I rushed home and told grandmother there's another black kid in my class. A girl. Grandmother said go easy, I have to check you [Inaudible] first. >> Cathy Craig: That's great. We said earlier in one of the previous sessions that family is core to Aboriginal lives and that as kids you have the competition of who's got the most cousins. Is that my cousin? Is he my cousin? You walk around. So we've always got to be checking because of the stolen generation and people having to move, you know lots of people moving into cities for all different opportunities, educational. We have sometimes might have known and we have to be told. Hang on that person might be a cousin. You know you can't marry. I was just going to finish up on, you know, there's a lot of, the situation in Australia with Aboriginal people is often, it's still not great although we are now taking it on ourselves to tell our stories and to come out and say this is what we want. This what we like. But currently we still have higher mortality rates, ten years less than other Australians. And you might want to add to this. We have the highest incarceration rates of any race of people in the world. We have a large suicide rate amongst our youth particularly and we have a phenomena called class suicides, where it's not just one, it's several. And it happens to be mostly boys, young boys. Can someone tell me any other stats? A couple more? >> Tony Birch: Good ones? >> Cathy Craig: Good ones. No, just give me some [Inaudible] on a good one. >> Tony Birch: I was in fact, this morning, one of the Australian papers I looked at online, the suicide rate is about thirty times higher than anyone else. Where it clusters the other way in a sense of where the Aborigine communities where those statistics drop are communities that you again, we talked about it before, communities were very strong role, a dominant role of women in the community. Dry communities, generally dry communities and communities that get access to whatever [Inaudible] we take for granted. Talking about Bruce's work and I'm working on climate change academically, one of the interest statistics there is that when Aboriginal peoples knowledge is actually give property creditability and authority, the impact on that on young Aboriginal people to give people a sense of purpose is enormously strong. And in communities where Aboriginal people are pushed to the margins and Ellen's talking about you know hiding stories that we grew up with, few [Inaudible] Aboriginal community where [Inaudible] or in a sense they don't exist, that itself can lead to depression, mental illness, and suicide. There's a wonderful Australian filmmaker called [Inaudible] who made a wonderful feature called Beneath Clouds and there is the most telling moment in this feature film if you could ever see it, where Vaughn who is an Aboriginal boy who has escaped from an institution, a jail, he tells another Aboriginal young woman about a clifftop where all the Aboriginal people were pushed off by farmers. And he says now nobody gives a shit. But what's interesting, the next thing he says is he said my mom left me because she knew she was going to have a criminal for a son. And it's not coincidental that once he tells the story of the denial of what happened to Aboriginal people, his next comment is about having no self-worth. So when you don't allow people to tell their stories, you lose your self-worth. [Inaudible] the German writer who wrote a great lecture of his said that we owe it to the people who have had their story taken from them, their dignity to return it and let them tell their own story. And if young Aboriginal people or people who have, Native American people, whatever, your own [Inaudible] deny people a basic human right and that has a shocking effect on people. >> Cathy Craig: And just to finish up, we have contributed to Australian society. It's probably not acknowledged as much. We're not just the best sports people in Australia, apart from that we have contributed in many other ways. And one of the examples I want to give you is Australia as a country that has fairly damaging bush fires. And when Aboriginal people for thousands of years would do what they call back burning. You would burn the dry vegetation at the bottom and that was always laughed at. Why are they doing it? And now they've realized that that's the way you stop the damage in the bush fires. So our knowledge. People are starting to accept our knowledge. But even though there's always, there are still those high statistics, I just want to end on something quite incredible. In 2006, the Australian Bureau of Statistics would do the census, every so often. They give you all these statistics that could make you cry about Aboriginal people but there was one that really struck me. 70% of Aboriginal people said they are happy. On that note, I'd like to thank you for coming. >> Bruce Pascoe: Sorry, Cathy, I'd just like to. >> Cathy Craig: Oh you're not happy. >> Bruce Pascoe: Remind people that there is one other great Australian Aboriginal invention which was the oil can. And I'm surprised that hasn't been imported into America because otherwise this door behind me would stop squeaking. >> Cathy Craig: You had me going for a while I'm thinking oil can? So, we're open to questions and thank you for coming. Any? >> Did anybody define what an Aboriginal is in Australia? What an Australian Aboriginal person is because Bruce mentioned [Inaudible] and so many people have asked me. Did we give our definition? That's all I'm going to say. >> Cathy Craig: I think after the session and you left the room, we talked a little bit about the diversity and that Aboriginal people are all different. We've got all different histories and Bruce talked about the quantum because we know that here in America they're still that for instance. And I mean it's a big debate in Australia. We don't believe the people are measured on blood because of our histories. We believe that if you strongly identify and you have those links that should be the way that, that's why we all look different. But maybe one of you would want to comment on that. >> Ellen Van Neerven: We also recognize two indigenous groups in Australia. [Inaudible] who at the top of Australia. Queensland we're proud to have both groups [Inaudible]. >> Cathy Craig: Different racial group the [Inaudible] and the associations are more with [Inaudible] and places like that. But they are part of our country too. >> Tony Birch: And I suppose [Inaudible] people in Australia find this hard to believe let alone outside Australia, I come from the state of Victoria which instituted the first caste legislation in the commonwealth in 1886 called the Half Caste Act, with defined categories according to caste, half-caste, [Inaudible]. But as I was saying to Lee today, the ambiguous nature of Aboriginal identity in Australia is not from the community. It's in government. From that first act that defined Aboriginal identity, there is a [Inaudible] have instituted 80 different categories of [Inaudible] identity and are instituted for political advantage, social disadvantage, etc. So any time the government was dissatisfied with the way they identified Aboriginal people, it would change the legislation to its current political, social, and economic agenda. So if you're an Aboriginal person born in New South Wales in the year 1900 and if you died in 1960, which would make you a very old Aboriginal person, your status, your legal status, and identity were changed eight times during your lifetime. >> Cathy Craig: Yes. So that's. Any other questions? >> Is it okay to ask? >> Cathy Craig: Yes. >> Okay. So two questions or so. Like do Aboriginal people or people who have part Aboriginal and part other countries, other continents, when they move to another place after being born in Australia, do they face the same problems? And the second question is when they come back to visit their relatives, are they treated fairly when they come through. >> Cathy Craig: Are you talking about what we call the stolen generation? The children were removed and we found children in the Netherlands. We found children over here in the Americas that were moved all over the world and we have had people coming home trying to find their families but it's very hard for them because some of them don't even speak English. They were raised speaking [Inaudible]. >> I wasn't only thing about that. That was part of what I was thinking of. But also currently how is the situation? And what country treats them the best when they move to that country? >> Cathy Craig: I'm not quite sure. Do you mean you're talking about Aboriginal countries? If we know that you've got a relation, then you're accepted. If there's a bloodline there and you're accepted in the community. I think we've tried not to take the way that's happened to Native Americans. We've tried to say you're Aboriginal if you are Aboriginal and you have that bloodline. >> Tony Birch: Unless you follow Bruce's football team. If you're an Aboriginal person and you follow Richmond football it's very hard to get accepted into any community in Australia. >> Cathy Craig: Any other questions? That's it? Thank you. One, sorry. >> Are your work and your stories and your issues getting heard and getting an audience in the United States and other places? >> Cathy Craig: This is our first big trip. Individually we've come over at different times and we've worked with a lot of our writers and artists. In fact, we've got 30 performing artists in Vancouver at the moment. So we do come quite a lot. But I guess it's, the biggest part for us is that it's outside of Australia that people actually probably are more interested and informed. Within Australia it's sometimes hard. The younger generation are a lot different but mom used to say you have to wait for the old white men to die before we can move on. And you know all the governments and it's probably like a lot of western countries, it's a family traits in politics and so often it's the same family that runs through. [Inaudible] is a great example of that. >> Bruce Pascoe: And we are trying to you know, broaden our readership and we're starting this afternoon because of the bookshop downstairs. >> Cathy Craig: Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E00:54:50