Dillon, Hugh --- "Books Review - My Country of the Pelican Dreaming: The Life of an Australian Aborigine of the Gadjerong, Grant Ngabidj, 1904-1977 (by Bruce Shaw) ; and Fringedweller (by Robert Bropho)" [1982] AboriginalLawB 56; (1982) 1(5) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 20

• Books Review-My Country Of The Pelican Dreaming: The Life Of An Australian Aborigine Of The Gadjerong, Grant Ngabidj, 1904-1977 And Fringedweller

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Books Review -


My Country of the Pelican Dreaming:
The Life of an Australian Aborigine of the Gadjerong, Grant Ngabidj, 1904-1977

and

Fringedweller

My Country of the Pelican Dreaming: The Life of an Australian Aborigine of the Gadjerong, Grant Ngabidj, 1904-1977

by Bruce Shaw

Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1981 ($7.00).

Fringedweller

by Robert Bropho

Alternative Publishing Co-operative Ltd.,Sydney, 1980 ($9.95).

Reviewed by Hugh Dillon

These stories of two WA Aboriginal men are very different. Grant Ngabidj was a full-blood man living traditionally for much of his life in the East Kimberley, a member of the Gadjerong tribe whose lands were around the Ord River. He was born in 1904, a time when the tribes were still relatively strong and white cattle-people were few, a time when the Aboriginal people were still being `tamed' by the squatters and the police. He died on a reserve in 1977, the last of the very old Gadjerong men.

Robert Bropho speaks English and his home is in a campsite outside Perth. He has been a fringedweller all his life, an outcaste in Australian society, an antipodean Harijan.

Grant - Ngabidj's book is a beautiful production. Bruce Shaw, his friend and editor, spent a number of years taping conversations with Grant and other people from the region in order to build up a history of the tribes and some of their members. This book is the first in a series of life histories collected by Shaw in Kununurra.

Ngabidj was an accomplished storyteller. Some of his stories of murder and payback are simply shocking - even to watchers of American movies. There are also scenes of high hilarity, such as men riding crocodiles, and scenes of profound solemnity, as when Ngabidj is initiated. For the typical urban white, the sheer exoticism of these episodes is a revelation. Less foreign and therefore perhaps all the more horrifying are the accounts of massacres, in particular the police killings of a large number of Aborigines near Forrest River in reprisal for the spearing of a white man named Hay on Nulla Nulla Station in 1926:

There was a proper bid mob of black-fellers there I tell you, to dance the "balga", Baimbarr and many Gadjerong. As they were dancing about, the word passed around: "Alt, policeman; allabout there" ... They put chains on everyone: blackfellers, lubras, and piccaninnies. They shot all the dogs. They travelled down a gully and tied all the blackfellers at a big tree; tied another lot to another tree; tied a third group at another tree. They shot the first lot and finished them off. There may have been more than twenty. They shot those at the other tree, picking off the old women and piccaninnies there.

There may have been somewhere about twenty-two . , They then went to the third lot and shot them: piccaninnies, old old women, blackfellers, old old men - somewhere about a hundred. That finished all the Gadjerong, killed in two lots .. , ' (P. 108)

The traditional Aboriginal relationship with the land is not explicitly stated by Ngabidj, because this is not a polemical work on land rights or the injustice inherent in white-black transactions, but it infuses the whole of the story. The land is the source of the dreaming,' of the spirits incarnated in the animal, vegetable and mineral inhabitants of the land.

Fortunately, Bruce Shaw's introduction is superb. At times I struggled with both the strangeness of the narrative (lacking the imagination and experience to comprehend fully the complexity and sophistication of Ngabidj's account), and with some of the difficult language he used. The introduction also gives fascinating treatments of Aboriginal English, the beginnings of a new wave of Aboriginal history and the historical background to Ngabidj's oral autobiography. The book is well indexed, has a glossary, appendices on both the Forrest River murders and a spearing, and a chronology. It is beautifully printed, and most importantly, an absorbing read.

Robert Bropho is a man with a prophetic mission: to raise the poor and outcast fringe-dwellers from whom he has come and among whom he lives. His book is in essence a diatribe against the forces which have subjugated his people, and which, while not eliminating them, marginalises them and condemns them to an existence which is literally a dog's sort of life. 'If you're born in the high mansion on the hill then you've got a good chance of surviving in this human rat race. If you're born in a pigsty then you've got a fight on your hands, that fight is to be recognised as human beings.' (p.13)

Bropho's subject matter is the way of life, the living conditions of the poorest of the poor in Australia. He writes in an immediate, abrasive style - demanding and pleading for recognition, land and the right to real self-determination. His descriptions of the camps and the people in them speak eloquently of the need for change on the part of government and white society, perhaps more so than his polemical passages. Fringedweller is worth reading for these sketches of black life alone.