Close to the Edge (19 page)

“Thirty years on, it's the same old song and dance / Still no basic human rights, no chance / No economic or political voice / Like the elders of my people say, we gotta have a choice.” Rapping over the top of a plaintive descending bass line and the droning sounds of a sampled didgeridoo, Waiata's voice was militant. On the cusp of the thirty-year anniversary of voting rights for Aboriginal people, little had changed. The song, “Reconciliation Crap Rap,” announced the arrival and presence of a new generation prepared to strike back: “We're here to assert our status, our rights / Every Black man and woman gotta stand up and fight.”

The song counterposed images of strength connected with the ancestors—“barefoot and free”—and nature—”the spirit of the trees, mother earth, the beautiful creation that gave us our birth”—with the ongoing colonialist mentality of the right: “When will the ignorant Pauline Hansons understand? / There is no One Nation on blackfullas land.” But Waiata also took white liberals to task for assuming that apologies could remedy the historical injustices of more than two centuries: “Not no reconciliation package gonna rectify the damage.” And, last, she came to Aboriginal people themselves: “Blackfullas over here over on the right side / Blackfullas over there over on the left side / Blackfullas in the middle saying hey diddle diddle / Abcrats sittin' on the fence playing with their diddles.” At a time when black leftists like Noel Pearson were espousing neoconservative arguments about self-reliance, and Aboriginal people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, the boundaries between the traditional left and right seemed to be dissolving. The establishment had nothing to offer young people.

During the chorus the melody and bass line dropped out, adding heightened urgency. “Blackfulla Blackfulla why is it so / That we die so young and into prison we go? Blackfulla Blackfulla why can't you see / That the future of our children is up to you and me.” The song was about the specific situation of Aboriginal people in Australia and the political juncture that they found themselves faced with. But through the music Waiata placed blackfullas in a local tradition of black resistance and a global history of oppression. The riff, “Blackfulla Blackfulla,” was based on the chorus from a song by No Fixed Address, a 1970s Aboriginal reggae-rock band, with an echo of Bob Marley at the end: “We gotta stand up for our sovereign rights.”

O
n January 26 the nation celebrates “Australia Day.” The date—when Britain's First Fleet landed in Sydney Harbor in 1788—is lauded as the birth of the settler colony. Glittering bonanzas of red, white, and blue fireworks light up the sky above downtown's Darling Harbour. Crowds of thousands are entertained with live bands and testimonies from “new Australians” to mark the event. For most Aboriginal Australians the date marks the colonial encounter and centuries of brutal dispossession. To them Australia Day was better known as Invasion Day or Survival Day.

Waiata was invited to an event in Hyde Park to commemorate Australia Day in 1997. The organizers retained the colonizers' name for the holiday but were interested in making the day a gesture toward reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples. In the humid air of late January, Waiata fanned herself with a folded program as she sat through endless speeches from whites and blacks about brotherhood and tolerance. Finally, unable to contain her rising frustration, she broke with decorum and stood up, asking to speak. The host reluctantly handed over the microphone. Waiata performed her “Reconciliation Crap Rap”: “Time to wipe the bullshit from our eyes / Every time we die, we're living their lies.” She delivered the lines with controlled anger, to an audience of scandalized liberals and quietly indignant blackfullas.

A
sense of discontent was growing among young black emcees. “Two hundred years of this bullshit / Us Kooris have had enough,” rapped Brothablack. “Time for us to raise up out of the dark / From Broome all the way back to Redfern / Brothas and sistas, stand up, it's your turn.”

For Ebony Williams the time had also come to speak out. On her song, “Open Up Your Mind,” she painted a devastating portrait of Aboriginal Australia. “Diseases running rife in the outback communities / Because the chances of having the opportunities / Of getting food and fresh water to the people out there / It seems to me that no one cares.” Over a sparse backing track consisting only of a bass and a sampled drum kit, Ebony unleashed a torrent of sharp retorts against Pauline Hanson as a “high profile trouble maker,” with “no answers, no solutions,” whose “mind is still filled with illusions.” She alludes to Hanson's ignorance: “You say, ‘I'm not a racist,' have you learnt the meaning yet?” During a
60 Minutes
interview Hanson was asked if she was xenophobic, to which she replied, “Please explain?”

In media-orchestrated debates Hanson supporters were pitted against advocates of reconciliation with Aboriginal people. But to Ebony these debates legitimized the hate speech of Hanson by giving her a platform while ignoring the real issues:

Where are the special benefits Hanson talks about, asks Ebony, adding, “I haven't seen nothin' yet.” Danielle Tuwai sang a chorus over a funky bass line: “Open up your mind, pay attention, open up your mind.” The Hanson phenomenon fed on undercurrents of close-minded racism in white Australian society. Meanwhile, a new and multiracial generation was beginning to speak up and find its collective voice.

D
ressed in dark blue baggy jeans, a burgundy silk shirt, and Jordans, his baby face framed by slicked-back hair, Alec Heli waited at the northeast corner of Redfern Park. He sniffed casually at his shirt, reassuring himself that he smelled decent despite his nights in the Salvation Army men's home around the corner and the quick baths he took from a trickle of cold water that spouted from a tap for a few hours every evening. Alec was being picked up on the corner by a friend from back home who was taking him to a club downtown, and Alec didn't want his friend to know that he was living in a home for vagrants. It was by chance that Waiata and I were out at the same club that night, where we met Alec for the first time.

Born in Auckland, New Zealand, of parents who had emigrated from the small Polynesian island of Niue, Alec heard stories from his cousins about the money you could make working as a bartender or a bouncer in Sydney. He had saved up the money for a ticket. But when he landed in Sydney, his cousin, who was supposed to meet him, had moved to Melbourne, and Alec didn't have money to get there. Alec was wandering along Oxford Street, hungry and alone, when he saw a homeless man climbing out from a dumpster. The fellow, who had strings of banana peel and potato chips in his hair and clothes, was slightly deranged. But he showed Alec how to scavenge for food in the narrow alleyways behind the ritzy restaurants and how to hide in the dumpsters during police raids. After a few days they were both picked up by a Salvation Army van and escorted to the men's home, where Alec slept fitfully amid the cacophony of snores, farts, and retching coughs that went on throughout the night.

Alec eventually found a room in an apartment in Leichardt and spent his days listening to music and writing rhymes. When he was growing up in New Zealand, he had joined in the b-boy frenzy in the mideighties and listened to Public Enemy and Wu-Tang Clan. By the midnineties the local New Zealand hip hop scene was thriving, from 3 The Hard Way's party anthem “Hip Hop Holiday” to the more hard-core Maori nationalist Upper Hutt Posse. Conscious of his Polynesian roots, Alec gravitated toward the Maori-Niuean rapper Che Fu and the Samoan emcee King Kapisi, who talked about European colonization of the Pacific. “The raps were my history textbooks,” Alec told us. In his own rhymes he paid homage to the Maori warriors who had killed and eaten the French colonizer Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne.

Raised on roots reggae and brought up in a Mormon household, Alec peppered his lyrics with biblical imagery of the devil, good versus evil, and divine retribution for past wrongs. With his deeply melodic voice and New Zealand lilt, he joined our group, adding soul and humor to our militant outfit. We recast ourselves as Deadly and did our first gig in February 1997 before an audience of about seven skeptical college students at Macquarie University's Multicultural Night.

But things were changing. Social forces were regrouping, young people were mobilizing, and the antiracism movement galvanized multiracial protesters across the country. The movement began to peak in 1997 when Pauline Hanson traveled around Australia, holding public meetings to set up local branches of her One Nation party. The anti-Hanson rallies brought together a large cross section of people. According to the 1996 census, 34.5 percent of the Sydney population were first-generation immigrants, as were 22.7 percent of the broader Australian population. A further 15 percent were second-generation immigrants. The changing demographics of Australian society had disrupted the White Australia fantasy; a more diverse and multiracial immigrant population was not willing to tolerate the bigotry of the past.

It was in these protests that a younger generation—beneficiaries of the voting rights legislation and more open immigration policies of the 1970s—began to come into their own. Whereas the radical movements of the sixties, such as the Vietnam War protests, were led largely by white students, the antiracism movements of the late 1990s involved many young people of color—immigrant and Aboriginal—who were involved in the day-to-day activism of organizing rallies, protest marches, and teach-ins.

In January 1997 the Rock Against Racism coalition was formed. It counted on the support of important indigenous musicians such as Tiddas, Yothu Yindi, and Kev Carmody. An annual music festival known as “Big Day Out” supported the Rock Against Racism movement, and fans and bands wore orange ribbons in solidarity.

“We're Nunga, Niuean, and Indian,” announced Waiata, in front of four hundred revelers at a Sydney nightclub, the Harbourside Brasserie, at a Rock Against Racism concert. “And we're here to say no to racism.”

Yet somehow it didn't feel right to me. Being Indian was a cultural and ethnic fact of who I was, not an oppositional identity like being Nunga or Niuean. Indian people were not displaced from their land for more than two hundred years or taken into slavery or economically disenfranchised as a class. Besides, I didn't really feel Indian. I hadn't grown up around any Indian people, except my family, and I was raised Catholic—I had never been to a Hindu temple or a mosque. I felt like a fraud, claiming to be Indian.

But something powerful was bringing us together, and it had more to do with the new racial geographies of a post-White Australia and the antiracist alliances that were being forged in those days. I began to think about my father's stories of how he ended up in Australia. In May 1964 he had packed all his belongings into two trunks and sailed from Bombay to London in search of work. My dad's older brother had gone to London a few years earlier, but he was away working on a boat, and he never got my dad's telegram announcing his arrival. So no one met my dad at London's Victoria Station. These were the days before the Race Relations Act made housing discrimination illegal, and as my father wandered the streets looking for a place to stay, all the “For Rent” signs carried a disclaimer: “No Asians or Blacks.” He tried calling in advance, but when the landlords saw his face, they told him the rooms were taken. Eventually, an older Jewish lady rented him a room with a broken window in her attic, where he survived the bitter winter by putting newspapers between his blankets for warmth. Cold and lonely, he imagined a better life in Australia. Compared with gloomy postwar Britain, the Australia he knew through following cricket seemed a warm and welcoming place. But when he went to the Australian Consulate in London to request papers, the officials wouldn't even give him an application form. The White Australia policy was still in full effect. It wasn't until 1969 that he was permitted to apply and then received a visa. It occurred to me that these histories of border crossing and racism and rejection captured more about my life than any imaginings of my Indian ancestry.

I also began thinking about myself and my own experiences with racism in a way that I had not through the years of political activism. When I was in high school, opposition to Asian immigration was fueled by talk-radio hosts such as Ron Casey. My white classmates would say to my face that they thought Asians should go home and stop taking Aussie jobs. Some classmates told me that I acted too white, but at the same time I was expected to fit in. The strong emphasis on assimilation in Australian society had meant that identifying with your cultural background was unfashionable or uncool. My Tongan school friends dug big pits in their backyard to roast whole hogs for parties, and at home we relished the gelatinous fish eyes of my mum's signature “head curry”—things we would never talk about openly for fear of being labeled some Indiana-Jones-monkey-brains-eating freaks. At school we all ate meat pies and sang the national anthem. Talking about my experiences of white working-class racism was as embarrassing as admitting to eating fish eyes at home, and even somewhat misdirected, since I went on to college while many of my white classmates were still working low-wage jobs. But when I saw how this same racism was feeding into a white supremacist movement, it made sense to speak about it. I felt that I did have something to say, and rapping seemed to be the right way to say it.

T
he Sydney march was held on a crisp sunny day in late winter. More than five thousand people gathered in the downtown First Fleet Park in Circular Quay. There was a speech by an Aboriginal activist, Jenny Munro, and then a smattering of trade unionists and representatives of various ethnic organizations also spoke before we were called to the stage to perform.