Savages: a truth telling

‘Savages’ cover.
‘Like Dark Emu, it paints the strength and grace of Aboriginal people.’
‘Savages: a truth telling’
‘Savages’ is a young adult novel set in 1850s Australia that explores the frontier conflict between the white settlers and the Aboriginal people of Ballina. It is the story of the Nyangbal people, but could be the story of any other clan across Australia. It narrates events in a very unique way. ‘Savages’ retells the story of the East Ballina Massacre as it happens, through the eyes of its Aboriginal characters.
As an English teacher, I think it’s a very important story. From the teachers who are teaching my book, they tell my it’s a pretty good read and, more importantly, that it opens the eyes of their students to events in our past that they had no idea existed.
The tricky part for me, as a self-publisher, has been getting it in front of people so they can have a look at it and make up their mind for themselves.
I recently ran an ad on Facebook trying to connect with my audience. Let’s just say that it didn’t quite go to plan. I had someone respond to the ad for ‘Savages’ who was appalled that I had written a book that explored the East Ballina massacres. That really got me thinking.
This is what he wrote: ‘Bad things happened in the past, but do we have to keep rehashing them? Can’t we just focus on the future?’
My response was, ‘Should Germans forget about the holocaust? Should Australians forget about Gallipoli?’
Bad things happen in the world. Very bad things. And we need to acknowledge that they do. If we don’t, it’s pretty hard to move on.
Sometimes the truth can be hard to swallow; especially when we are the ones who have committed the atrocities.
As an English and History teacher, I am not afraid to face the past. Aboriginal people have never been frightened either. In fact, in Aboriginal culture, it would be vital for your very existence to face it and acknowledge it so that you didn’t repeat history.
Each terrible incident – like the ramifications of over-hunting an animal to extinction or of invading your neighbour’s land – would have its own Dreamtime story to ensure that it would be remembered. It would be passed on from generation to generation so that future generations would avoid making the mistake their ancestors made.
Remembering something is a good thing, as bad as that thing might be. It acknowledges that it occurred and reminds us that bad things happen in the world. It also allows us to ‘Jack Reacher’ them, to ‘Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst’ so that we can prevent them from reoccurring in the future.
What surprised me most about that Facebook ad that I ran was that I attracted every racist in Australia. 70% of them were male Boomers. To call them denialists would be an understatement; to call them ignorant haters, would not be an overstatement.
They gravitated towards my ad because of one quote I’d included that was in praise of my novel. Here’s what it said, ‘Like Dark Emu, it paints the strength and grace of the Aboriginal people.’
It was weird. People who had no interest in my book came in droves to use my ad as a platform for hate speech denigrate Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’.
Facebook’s algorithm didn’t help. Because the haters engaged with the ad the most, FB decided they were my target audience. I mean, really, I guess they are. They’re the ones who need to open their minds to the world around them. You can’t just bury your head in the sand anymore and rant and rail online at anyone who disagrees with you. The world is closing in. You need to move with the times or be moved by them.
‘Savages’ is book 3 in the ‘Australia’s Black History’ series.
What was interesting was that not one of them looked closely at the quote. The reviewer’s focus pointed out that my book painted the strength and grace of Aboriginal people, like ‘Dark Emu’ does. They all just wanted to hate on Bruce.
As an analogy, it’s a bit like me making a pie that looks like Bill’s pie. Bill’s is apple, mine is blue berry. They’re great looking pies. Taste good too. But then here comes Harold. Harold’s a bit uptight when it comes to pies. He only likes his own pies. Meat pies. He reckons Bill has no business calling his pie a pie, even. He goes to town about it. Reckons Bill’s not even a proper cook. Points at his mates’ pies. Reckons Bill’s just ripped them off and tried to claim them for himself. And as for my pie? Harold didn’t even taste it. He took one look and said it was rubbish like Bill’s. Pretty bizarre, hey? Boomers can be very weird.
It’s probably because they’re not dealing so well with the changes that are happening. The anglocentric world that they knew is becoming a thing of the past.
As an educator, I try to prepare our children for this brave new world that is coming. It’s a globalised world. A multicultural world. A woke world. A postcolonial world. It is a world of fake news. A world where the powerful control the narrative.
The world is much harder to navigate now. There are a lot of hidden agendas at play. Navigating this world takes great skill. The texts we choose point out these hidden agendas and they certainly don’t sugarcoat the world. They show our students just how ugly the world can be. Not to traumatise them, but to help them understand the world they live in.
‘Hidden Agenda’ is a 1990 political thriller that follows the investigation of a killing in Northern Ireland by British security forces. Different incident to our Australian context, but a similar agenda.
We no longer solely teach books from the English canon that promotes an Anglocentric perspective. Australia is no longer the extension of the British Empire that it used to be.
We are finding our feet. Our own identity. Our own culture. Writers, like Henry Lawson, have helped to remind us that our values have diverged. We like to think of ourselves as classless and celebrate mateship, stoicism and larrinkinism still to this day.
We no longer solely teach books about British culture, like we used to. It doesn’t mean that we don’t read books like ‘Robinson Crusoe’ or ‘Tarzan’ though. They’re great books; but it’s not our culture anymore. We are an island, far from the Motherland and we are drifting further and further from the Commonwealth. Fiction that promotes the superiority of white upper class, English males, is outdated. Books that are written to remind women, lower class males and marginalised races they are inferior are frowned upon. And for good reason.
It doesn’t mean we should condemn these books to the fire, though. I encourage my students to read books from the English canon so they can identify the biases contained in them so they can contrast the values of the past to those we have today. We do it with Australian texts too.
Not even Lawson is safe. While we celebrate Lawson’s contribution to the shaping of our modern values, we also separate ourselves from his colonialist ones. Racism and his misogynistic attitude have no place in Australia today. Leah Purcell’s post colonial re-imagining of Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife: the Legend of Molly Johnson’ highlights this all too viscerally.
Our evolving world and its values make it vitally important for us, as teachers, to ensure that our students are hearing the multitude of voices that exist in the world, and in our own country.
As an English teacher I am compelled, by the Department, to teach texts that invite our junior students to experience the voices and perspectives of children from different cultures. The texts are hard-hitting. They deal with some dreadful situations.
There is ‘Parvana’ by Deborah Ellis, a story about a girl living in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan; and ‘Never Fall Down’ by Patricia McCormick, a story about a young boy in Cambodia who witnesses the Killing Fields and is forced to fight for the Khmer Rouge; and ‘Sold’, also by Patricia McCormick, a tale about a Nepalese girl who is sold into prostitution in India.
I sometimes feel that our text choices are verging on the sadistic side, and many parents agree, but this is the world we live in. It has become our role, as teachers, to educate our children about this world they are growing up in. The world is not as it once was. We can’t take shelter from it any longer. We can’t bury our heads in the sand and pretend it isn’t changing. We no longer live in a monocultural society, but a multicultural one. Whether we like it or not, it’s a reality and we have to understand it so that our children can meet the challenges of tomorrow.
Australia is changing, and young Australians are embracing this change. ‘Savages’ is a book about our changing values in Australia. It is a book that is written for a young adult audience that aims to help them understand their own country’s less than ideal past.
It is a book that also helps to fill the gap in my students’ reading. I wrote it, in part, because there was no other book that told the truth of Australia’s past, at least not one that presented the past from the perspective of an Aboriginal character.
‘Savages’, like the books above that I have taught my students, is not an easy read, but it is an important one. It doesn’t pull any punches. It doesn’t sugarcoat the past. It acknowledges what happened, helps readers understand why the present is the way it is and it offers a better way forward. For all of us.
There’s a whole lot of stuff like this out there that we weren’t taught about in schools. It’s worth checking out.
Want to Know More About Aboriginal Culture?
If you or your children would like to know more about Aboriginal history and culture, check out Magpie Publishers’ bookstore. There you will find stories that celebrate our First Nations’ People and detail the impact of colonization on Aboriginal people, the environment, and their culture.