Standing At The Bridge Over The Cultural Divide
The Age
Saturday January 3, 1998
SALLY DINGO was Sally Butler when I first met her, one of the belles of her year at the University of Tasmania. Pretty, fine singing voice, beautiful musical laugh, well-read. She came from Penguin, a little town on the north-west coast of the island. She had a friend from Burnie, just down the coast, whom I got to know a lot better. In fact, she became my wife, and when Sally married we got to know her husband, Ernest Ashley Dingo.
A gifted man? Yes, I would say so. He can sing and dance like a vaudevillian, read something like Bill Neidje's Kakadu Man and make the words sound as ancient as stone bluffs, but with a gift for performance that extends far beyond what is normally understood by the word theatre. I have seen him take over cafes, buses, whole sections of football crowds.
My brother Richard went with him to a final at the MCG between Geelong and the West Coast Eagles. Ernie is an Eagles man; the local crowd was overwhelmingly for Geelong. Ernie tolerated their carping for as long as he could, then turned round, stood up and shouted: "Shut up you black bastards!"
A crowd-stopper? Well, yes. It's not as if people don't say those sort of things at the footy, but they're not normally said by the only black person in attendance.
Ernie has the gift of personality. He implied to me once it came to him from his grandfather from whom he gets his blackfellah name, Oondamooroo, meaning shield. I didn't understand that entirely either until I started seeing interviews with Ernie in magazines that revealed little or nothing about him beyond those flashing white teeth. That grin can deflect anything. The first journalism to get behind the shield was the SBS documentary called Oondamooroo. You might remember a wonderful scene it has of Ernie driving along in his little red car, ironic grin on his face, singing: "I'm as Australian as Ampol."
A brave man? Again, in my view, yes. One of the many things that the Howard Government seems not to understand is the special courage required of high-profile Aboriginal people - Pat Dodson for example - who attempt to walk a middle path in this country.
Not only do they cop it from racist whites, they get it from those members of their own community who see them as sell-outs, as coconuts: brown on the outside but white inside. It was once suggested to Ernie's face that he shouldn't have married a white woman.
"Are you white?!!" he said, turning to Sally incredulously. "Why-didn't-you-tell-me?!" His other stock reply when asked if it is a cross-cultural marriage is to say: "Yes - I'm Australian and she's Tasmanian."
There are many stories to be told about E. A. Dingo, but there are also the stories only a wife can tell. Sally always had a sharp eye and an instinct for the telling moment, the telling word. My only criticism of her as a story-teller was that she invariably forgot them before I could see her again and fix their details in my mind. But she is, and always has been, story-rich.
She has stories about her years as a waitress at the Last Laugh comedy cafe, about the high-fliers in the corporate world she met when she entered television and, now, about life with Ernie. I have never forgotten her telling me about going with Ernie to find a white friend of his called Chunder with whom he'd played footy when he was teaching at Camp Jungai in northern Victoria in 1981. They finally found him in a pub.
"How are you, you black bastard?" he said, when he saw Ernie.
"Not bad you white bastard," replied Ernie.
Basically, they swore at one another for 10 minutes; to Sally, it was as if no other language was available to a young white man and a young black man wishing to publicly express affection to one another.
A few months ago, Sally's book Dingo was published. Ostensibly, it is the Dingo family history or what the sub-title calls: "The Story of Our Mob." But it is also an account of what it means for a white woman to marry into an Aboriginal family.
The book begins with her husband receiving a phone call in Sydney to say that the spirit totems basic to his family are missing, possibly stolen, from the cave where they were stored by his grandfather. Suddenly, no one in the family is safe. A terrible new fear has entered her world. What does a white girl from Penguin do? What does she say to comfort her husband? To comfort herself?
In the course of the Wik debate, voices from rural Australia have repeatedly said that the moralists from the city have no knowledge of the reality of racial co-existence. There is undoubtedly truth in this. Most media perceptions of Aboriginal life are either stereotypical or highly stylised.
I once watched a TV documentary with Ernie about dot painters from northern Australia; for an explanation of their work, the program went to an academic at an American university. We both laughed. It was a joke.
Craig Brown, another Tasmanian of our generation who includes among his credits a score of 61 against the West Indies when he opened the batting for Tassie, subsequently lived for 10 years with the Pitjantjatjara in central Australia, working as a doctor. He said the longer he lived with them, the less he knew. That is the importance of books such as Dingo. They are the testimony of people who have grappled with the reality of trying to cross the cultural divide.
Dingo is the most significant book of its kind since Neil Murray's Sing For Me Countryman, and it has had a similarly disinterested reception from the guardians of our written culture. Australian literary culture is overwhelmingly urban-based and, to use a dated word, bourgeois. Neil Murray's book was seen as an old-fashioned attempt at a novel when in fact it was thinly disguised reportage of the highest quality dating from his time with the Warumpi Band.
Good journalism is about knowing what you know, knowing what you don't know, and not confusing the two; in his poetry from that period, Murray took that principle to an art form. The result is extraordinarily candid glimpses of what it means to be a young white man - from Lake Bolac, in Victoria's western districts - living in an ancient black culture. Sally Dingo's book, on the other hand, seems to have been dismissed as a celebrity bio.
White novelists can, and should, continue to deal with Aboriginal themes and characters, but it is remarkable how little of that work tends to stand the test of time. If the organisers of the Melbourne Writers' Festival are interested in people trying to bridge what is a profound cultural divide via the medium of the written word, they might consider inviting people like Sally Dingo and Neil Murray together with an Aboriginal writer such as Aunty Iris Lovett-Gardiner of the Gunditjmara.
Their stories and perceptions are not only of interest to people in Australia. In my experience, they are the aspect of this country which most interests people from overseas - including academics at universities in the United States of America.
* Martin Flanagan is a staff writer. Shaun Carney is on leave.
© 1998 The Age
