What an intriguing book this is: distinctive in both content and style. Grant’s voice, opinions and passion dominate the text and long passages read like a stream-of-consciousness autobiography. It is repetitive and often contradictory. It will both inspire and anger its readers. Few will be indifferent to its full-voiced passion and unchained introspection.
The title The Queen Is Dead is particularly apt. Like an incantation, the phrase is repeated more than thirty times through the text. The emotional charge comes from Grant’s response to both her death and her funeral, and particularly the ABC’s treatment of it all — the black suits and ties, the distinctive, deferential voice, and above all the acceptance of protocols devised over there and not here. Not mentioned by Grant is the fact that the ABC sent a team of twenty-seven to London for the funeral.
“Think what we could have done,” he thunders:
We could have thrown open the doors and created a crescendo, a discordant choir of anger, sadness, tears, love, respect, disrespect, regard, disregard. We could have invited a reckoning with history, but instead we erased it.
“No one stands with me,” he declares. “I know, right now, that I am alone. My people do not matter. Here, in this moment of the White Queen’s death, we do not matter. That’s the truth. How could it be other?” But he refuses to temper his defiance, writing, “I will not put on a black suit and tie. I will not lower my voice, bend my knee, bow my head to the White Queen.”
The ABC had set the tone for the treatment of her death: “It is not the right time… The righteous voices from the other side of history should be kept quiet.” From the prime minister down, political leaders were on air reminding Australians to have respect. What does that mean, Grant asks, and then comes up with the withering answer. “It means they would rather talk about corgis than colonisation. The Queen’s love of her dogs matters more than the lives of those that the Crown has broken.”
It is here that the gap between Grant’s views and those of mainstream opinion is most apparent. Australia is largely unaware of the ongoing transformation of the historiography of the British Empire, and of the centuries-long domination of the West now under siege from many directions. Both the funeral and the coronation were weighed down with reverence for history and heritage. It could not be missed. But how carefully selective it all was, drawing deeply on those myths of the benign British Empire on which older Australians were suckled.
Grant knows where global opinion is flowing. He’s aware of Britain’s long engagement in the slave trade, and the violence that was used to build the empire and to strive to preserve it. He refers to Carolyn Elkins’s recent masterwork, Legacy of Violence. Elkins calculates that there were more than 250 separate armed conflicts in the British Empire during the nineteenth century, at least one in any given year. But more damaging to Britain’s reputation is her study of the rearguard brutality in the middle years of the twentieth century in places as widely dispersed as Kenya, Palestine, Malaya, Aden (now part of Yemen) and Cyprus, much of this occurring during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
For hundreds of millions of people, Elkins writes, “the empire’s velvet glove contained an all too familiar iron fist.” Responding, Grant observes that “from India to Africa to Ireland, the Pacific, the Caribbean and of course here, Australia, people from the other side of history have felt that fist.”
Grant’s intellectual outlook partly reflects his wide professional experience in many parts of the world. But the powerful emotional force of the book comes from his understanding of the tragic history of Australia’s First Nations, and particularly the experience of the Wiradjuri people of central-western New South Wales. When they resisted the rapid expansion of European settlement across the western plains, they became the victims of the Bathurst Wars of 1822–24. The governor, major-general Thomas Brisbane, declared martial law and dispatched punitive expeditions of mounted soldiers and settlers.
That fierce conflict foreshadowed what was to unfold across the continent during the following century. Endorsing a study by the historian Stephen Gapps, Grant declares that “this isn’t just a war for Wiradjuri country, this is a war for Australia: the country we are still to be. Our nation begins here.”
Growing up Wiradjuri in the small rural towns of New South Wales, surrounded by his extended family, left an enduring imprint on Grant, just as it did in many First Nations families of his and earlier generations. Typically they lived in fringe camps outside their town, down on the river bank, out near the cemetery or beyond the rubbish dump. Segregation was rigidly enforced. Men and women who did casual labour had to be out of town by sunset. Children were frequently banned from local schools, swimming pools and other public facilities. Everyone knew the Aboriginal families and there was no escaping their lowly status.
When there finally came a very gradual movement into town, other forms of racial discrimination developed. Grant still vividly remembers his upbringing. “Those dirty Blacks,” he writes:
That’s what they called my mother and her family and all the beautiful people she lived among, laughed with, cried with, mourned with and loved with. There was in her little town, as in all little towns, a colour line. On one side the people who thought themselves White, and then the others — often of hue barely distinguishable from the White people themselves, and sometimes even with the same blood — who were the Blacks. Those dirty Blacks. Blackness was a stain, an irremovable stain. To get close to it was to be stained as well.
Grant makes clear in myriad ways that he was shaped by his experiences and those of his family in small-town Australia during an era of deep racial discrimination. Race itself still haunts him. The idea of whiteness, he confesses, “has shaped my entire life… I have never escaped its clutches… When I think I may have slipped free of race, it returns, spitting at me.”
And then there is the abiding question of history: “I am a product of invasion, colonisation, and empire” that “still affects the lives of people in my family.” More dramatically, he declares, “It is in my bones. It is in my blood. It is, you know, my mother’s milk, what I was raised on.” In many passages he writes about grappling with this collective legacy while wanting to be free of history’s chains. “I want to think myself free,” he writes. “I want to know if I can live with history without being chained to history. When I speak of the wounds of history, it is to open them to sunlight, not to bathe them in salt.”
It is not a sunny story. Anger and bitterness are often just below the surface, particularly apparent when he deals with his attitude to Australia itself. In a passage of powerful rhetoric he cries, “Damn Australia. Damn it to hell for what it did to my family, what it did to countless Black families. Black families with White blood more often than not, but families who could never be White.” Australia, he writes in another angry passage, was:
born out of theft and slaughter and built on a law to keep the country White, which still today does not formally recognise the First Peoples, which has signed no treaties — how does this country hold its head high in the world? That’s the question I ask. And the answer, to me, is that it is shameless. It is a place beyond shame. Why would I think otherwise? Yes, damn it all.
Many Australians will see these as fighting words. And they are indeed challenging coming from a man who has had a brilliant career and who many would no doubt think should be, if not grateful, at least a touch patriotic. But Grant’s challenge is not only about the past and those things the nation has “never been able to face.” He looks forward to “the country we are still to be” and gestures with hope to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which he believes is about love, and “if we cannot find in ourselves love for our place, and for each other, what future is there?” •
The Queen Is Dead
By Stan Grant | Fourth Estate | $34.99 | 304 pages
