Bruce Pascoe's Salt
Welcome to newsletter number 3! Ooof, even writing that exclamation mark made my hungover head hurt. But there’s no one to blame for the way I feel today except myself… Well, myself and a boozy friend or three. Onward. Slowly.
News
We head out of Sydney tonight for a weekend away with friends, which will be glorious but means I should be packing right about now instead of writing. I guess I can wear the same outfit for the next few days…
What I’m reading
This is a collection of essays and stories about what Pascoe calls the “old and infinitely gentle culture” that belongs to the Indigenous Australians. “This is an old story. Older than everything.”
On the fiction side, he includes a painful fable about a pastoralist and a Tasmanian tiger, and a story about a white-passing man who discovers he has Aboriginal ancestry and finds “his teeth grinding on the grit of his country’s history”.
But the collection focuses more on the essays. “Only in Australia has avoidance of any unpleasantness become a major literary theme,” Pascoe writes, with wry understatement, and refuses to fall into the same trap. His theme is Aboriginal culture, its beauty and its efficiency, and the brutality with which colonists attacked it. He hymns its losses: the waving fields of grain that people baked bread with, the villages, irrigation systems, sophisticated fishing weirs, the structured, settled, safe society and the rich spirituality.
Pascoe writes, “There is nothing postcolonial about Australia.” As testament to this, he mentions the world’s oldest town, which can be found in western NSW. When I search the internet for these terms, I find nothing (if you know the place he’s referring to, please let me know!). He explains how it was written out of history so effectively: the pages in explorer Lieutenant Grey’s journals that detail Aboriginal housing, agriculture, irrigation and roads have been deleted and are not reproduced in modern versions.
And so a culture that lived with “a profound sense of responsibility for the health of Mother Earth for more than 100,000 years” was almost destroyed. Almost, but not quite. I was struck by Pascoe’s point that most Australians reckon they’ve never met an Aboriginal person, but due to the paucity of white women in the colony’s early years, many will be related to one. We see Aboriginal people everywhere but we don’t even realise, he explains, because their face is the face of Australia.
He points out “the brilliance of the Australian agricultural mind”, lamenting that most of us eat nothing native to this country. “Australians need to love their country, love their countrymen and women and love the food our country gives.” Interestingly, he points out that bush tucker is celebrated by chefs, but they ignore the tubers and grains Aboriginal people cultivated and ate - an omission that propagates the myth that Aboriginal people were nomads who simply ate whatever they could forage from their wanderings. It’s a dangerous myth, he explains, because it makes the colonial project seem less genocidal than it actually was.
And that attempted genocide nearly destroyed knowledge that we sorely need right now. “Why are we not curious that Aboriginal people could cultivate crops in the desert? Why do we pay no attention to to the dams and irrigation techniques employed? When our farmers are so threatened by droughts, salinity, erosion and crop diseases, why do we not investigate the crops and farming techniques developed over thousands of years to accommodate the challenging characteristics of this continent?” We’re still dying in the desert like Burke and Wills, in other words, refusing to accept the food freely offered by well-nourished Aboriginal people baffled by those choosing to starve in the midst of plenty.
Native foods are drought-tolerant, perennial - and soon enough we may need to return to them. Pascoe ends the book with a warning - or a promise - about how, when we’ve succeeded in our apparent mission to destroy the planet, we might end up coming back to Aboriginal food, Aboriginal society, Aboriginal ways of being. “For the sake of the country and our economy, we have to embrace the nature of the continent and the knowledge of our people, gathered over aeons as old as speech. Be proud rather than angry: this is the real nature of the land we all say we love.”
And this, I think, sums up Pascoe’s project: the imagination of a new Australia that hews far more closely than our current society to the actual land and its actual history. “It’s natural to want to belong to good, honest parents and a good, honest country, it is natural to want to be considered moral - in fact, it is our saving grace - but we cannot build our individual and national castle on the sands of a fabricated history.” But we have the best of precedents on which to model a new society. “Those old Aboriginal people must have anguished over their social design. Here we are in a dry continent, they must have thought. How can we ensure that it provides sufficient food for all? How can we ensure that everyone has enough to eat, a house, care when aged or handicapped, an education that gives every child a chance to learn about her world? I know those ideas are revolutionary and today would be considered as some kind of communist plot, but they worked. The only firm basis on which to condemn them is to conclude that an elite minority deserve a million times more food and wealth than the majority.”
To blow-ins like myself, Pascoe is generous, inviting “an awakening of the nation to the land itself. We can all love it and care for it... We need non-Aboriginal Australians to love the land.”
And he crafts a stirring, rallying cry: “Let’s bury the stone and steel hatchets and fall in love with our country. Let’s share the guiltless embrace of true love. It will require selflessness and reckless courage, unstinting respect for each other, time and endurance. But it’s worth it. Nations are built this way.”
He’s right on this as on so much else. Read this book!
What I’m listening to
After Work Drinks, a pop culture and entertainment podcast from journalists Grace O’Neill and Isabelle Truman.
This is a homegrown version of The High Low, enlivened by the fact that the hosts are drinking throughout! (Oooh, not today, thanks.) Homegrown, but London-based: Izzy moved to London a few months ago and sadly for us at ELLE and Harper’s BAZAAR, our fashion features editor Grace joined her last week. I didn’t work with Grace for very long but was in awe of her creative energy and ability to turn round features extremely freaking fast, so I’m sure she’ll do brilliantly in the old country. And I still get to listen to her take on events from the Golden Globes all-male best director nominations (sigh) to the Justin Timberlake cheating scandal. Hurray for t’internet.
Look, I think I can just about stomach a coffee now, so I’m off to neck a couple to make sure I can drive to our weekend away without dropping off at the wheel. Wish me luck! Happy weekend!