Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Dean Ashenden, Black Inc., $34.99.
How often is it that you return to the town where you grew up? Invariably your memories not recall what you see before you. So many changes have occurred.
Such was the case with Dean Ashenden, who returned to the frontier town where he lived as a boy, 50 years later. He found Tennant Creek had transformed, but its silence about the past was still mostly intact.
Provoked by a half-hidden account, he sets out to understand how the story of ‘relations between two racial groups within a single field of life’ had been told and not told, in this town and across the nation.
He recollects making this statement: “I left Tennant Creek in 1955, aged thirteen. I had never been back and never wanted to go back. In fact, I’d wanted to not go back. I didn’t like it when we lived there and ached to leave.”
Nevertheless, Ashenden gives an eloquent, concise, highly understandable account of the reasons why Australia as a nation continues to struggle with how to acknowledge and move beyond its past. He is goaded into questioning the absence of shared histories on the monuments and tourist information boards along the route. Mostly, the signs record pioneer history, from which the Indigenous people are absent.
When the Indigenous story is invoked, it records traditional practices and does not mention white people. “How did they get from then to now?” he muses. “Just don’t mention the war.”
In a gripping combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence ― from its beginnings in the first encounters of black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy.
Ashenden goes back to Tennant Creek once more to meet for the first time some of his Aboriginal contemporaries ― in a touching finale ― and to ask how best to tell the truths of Australia’s story.
