by Graeme Cordiner
This article was published in the SMH on June 2, 2008
My life and Myall Creek I think were always meant to cross. If I turn my back on it, and at times I have tried to – it is all too painful and too hard - something in me comes unstuck.
What is Myall Creek? This is the story of Myall Creek. On June 10 1838 a group of 12 stockmen rode into a camp of 28 peaceable Aboriginal people on Myall creek station, tied them to a long tether rope, and hacked them to death. The exceptional thing about Myall Creek was not that there was a massacre. The exceptional thing was some Europeans in the story actually brought it to justice.
Dee Brown wrote ‘Bury my heart at Wounded Knee’ about a watershed massacre in the US. It moved me deeply. But I am Australian, not American.
Bury my heart at Myall Creek,
An Australian identity, my own, I seek,
Journeying into my nation’s past,
I come face to face with myself at last.
Face to face with the good and the bad. The Myall Creek convict stockman Charles Kilmeister who having beforehand played with the children, joined the gang. The convict George Anderson who did not. Both are in me. The times I let my own background and culture and peer pressure decide; the times I have not. Myall Creek sobers me and challenges me to follow in the footsteps of integrity of those like Anderson.
These days a grassroots reconciliation movement has led to a memorial on the site. It has a peculiar power to it. A commemoration is held each Saturday of the June long weekend. One year I witnessed two descendants - of those massacred and those who massacred – embracing.
The embrace struck me as a welcome home. Only the Aboriginal people can welcome us to this country. When we so rejected Aboriginal people, we of course rejected our own possibility of deeply belonging here, our own link to the land. But in Aboriginal descendant Sue Blacklock’s freely given embrace I saw today we have another chance.
Freely given, yes, but not without cost. I recall the banner I saw on the 2000 Harbour Bridge walk: ‘60,000 years of dreaming, 200 years of nightmares’ - ongoing post colonial trauma nightmares judging by the pain so evident today in many Aboriginal communities. In this context Sue’s offer of embrace is all the more astonishing. And all I have to do is to receive it.
Yet in me I have sensed at times a strange and strong resistance. I have been afraid I think. Afraid of change. Afraid of the pain, for there is much pain in this story. Afraid it may lead to deeper questioning of my own culture and civilisation. Afraid even of what my peers might think.
Yet now I see how this fear has impoverished us all, cut us off from so much richness, from our core sense of who we are as Australians.
This reluctance was what also amazed Aboriginal leader Charles Perkins. “ My expectation of a good Australia”, he said, “is when white people would be proud to speak an Aboriginal language, when they realise that Aboriginal culture and all that goes with it, philosophy, morality, kinship, is all part of their heritage. And that’s the most unbelievable thing of all, that it is all there waiting for us all. White people can inherit 40 or 60000 years of culture and all they have to do is to reach out and ask for it’.
My good intentions I realise are not enough. The path to Australia’s future passes through its pain-full past. There is no other way round. When we walk that way we will be changed. When enough of us walk that way, Australia will be changed, and I know for the better.
Myall Creek is situated near Bingara in northern NSW, on the Bingara/Delungra road. The commemoration on June 10 starts at 10.30.
Graeme Cordiner is co-chair of Sydney Friends of Myall Creek.