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Walton, Alastair --- "'This'll Get 'em for Sure' -- An Interview with Bob Merritt" [1985] AboriginalLawB 82; (1985) 1(17) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 16


‘This’ll Get ’em for Sure’ – An Interview with Bob Merritt

by Alastair Walton

This'll get 'em for sure!

... a piano playing the old Bing Crosby song, "There's a Happy Land Somewhere". The PRIEST sings to the WOMAN and BOY.

Oh, there's a happy land somewhere,
And it's just a prayer awaay.
All you've dreamed and planned is there,
And it's just a pray awaay!
There'll be good conditions on your friendly Missions
Filled with laughing children at plaay.
Where your hearts will sing for it means one thing
All your old sins will be passed awaay
Ohhh! There's a happy land somewhere,
And it's just a pray awaay.

THE CAKE MAN, Act One.

The Eora Centre is in the same building as the CES and TAFE, in Regent Street, Redfern. It is quiet because the students have finished their session of activities and studies. The only people present are Bob Merritt, the Aboriginal playwright and coordinator of the Eora Centre, plus a few friends and co-workers.

Robert Merritt is the author of The Cake Man, amongst several screenplays, a play written in haste in the early seventies which was first performed by the Black Theatre in Redfern, Sydney in 1975. In 1977 the Bondi Pavilion Theatre and the ABC were involved. Then in 1982 a production by the Aboriginal Theatre Company in Sydney went to Denver, Colarado and it was a success in the World Theatre Festival despite enormous bureaucratic and private company disinterest.

The play tells of life on a NSW Aboriginal mission. Bob Merritt grew up in Cowra on the Erambie Aboriginal mission station.

Bob Merritt looks everything a fit person of forty could aspire to- - confident, relaxed and willing to barter with words into the tape-recorder.

Before interviewing Bob Merritt I viewed a video of the recently produced one hour documentary Eora Corroboree. It is a slick film depicting Aboriginal students at the Eora Centre for performing and visual arts acting, workshopping, storytelling and enjoying themselves. Connecting the segments is Bob Merritt aiding and positively affecting the students so they will in turn do the same for their communities.

The New South Wales Minister for Education, Rod Cavalier, has arranged for every public secondary school and TAFE College in NSW to have access to a videotape copy of the film. While NSW Aboriginal Affairs Minister, George Paciullo, has made similar arrangements for videotape copies to go to Aboriginal communities throughout the State.

The film confronts many issues which are confronting Aboriginal people in the eighties. Urbanism, crime, alcohol, Aboriginality, landrights, discrimination, survival, education and the future of an indigenous people who are regaining confidence and reshaping history.With all these labels, words, themes and issues in my repertoire I approached Bob Merritt, not as a 'spokesman' for the Aboriginal people, but as a person who had wanderea the labyrinths of self-doubt, racism, oppression, success, and of the 'new'Aboriginal movement which had mushroomed in the sixties and seventies in the form of Aboriginal institutions, land rights and cultural pride. Bob Merritt is a communicator who can talk of 'now' with no holds barred as no bars have held.

Bob Merritt: Yeah, I think he is a frustrated Minister for the Arts.

So at least he sees Blacks in an art form.

Alastair Walton: Yeah, just like some old school anthropologist.

I want to talk to you about the correlation in Aboriginal history, where culture is denied and the people buried by the legal system. You have worked in both 'areas' and in the film Corroboree you talk about how you want to do something about the drunks and the despair of Redfern. You adopt the line that, through a 'cultural renaissance' matters will improve. Is that due to having worked in the legal service and believing it was not doing enough?

Oh no, I don't think the legal service can take blame for that. I seethe legal service as prostitute to a filthy system that doesn't offer anything to blacks whatsoever, no protection, no rights. So the legal system is just mysery row. I mean that as no reflection on identities in the legal service or the function that it serves, but in terms of reality. Unless you can quote a precedent from Lord Such in the Year 1914 or something justice doesn't stand. So what I am really saying is: no one in this day and age can afford to be tried as a black person.

So do you see a cultural 'renaissance' of Aboriginal people providing strength to get over those problems?

Sure, I am a great believer of prevention is better than cure. This myth called cure doesn't quite work for me and it certainly reflects in the institutions that the government's cropped up. In the legal service you're right if you want an identity - you break the law or be accused of breaking the law and they'll give you a lawyer. If you're sick you run along to a medical service and they'll give you a band aid.

But if you want to be an ordinary citizen with hopes, ambitions, dreams - the lot, you're totally denied. And the centre here, the cultural aspect of it is: some call it a sub-culture if you like, but something has to emerge out of fringe dwellers. I see this place here as a place of discovery. And the most important thing, a place of self discovery for people who really have no expectations of themselves whatsoever. Those denied the right to dream further afield than the next fortnight when the postman brings the cheque.

In Corroboree the people of the centre play act a law court scene. Why were the students doing that?

They were trying to shift through their own turmoil and that's what I mentioned earlier, that is what this unique sort of style, this will, comes from. I am not really into duplicating people here, that's done elsewhere. What I am interested in is staying in front of me and polishing that. Their own lives, they don't realise it of course, but they are so rich and that court room to me epitomises that substitute initiation cermony.

A lot of young Aboriginal people in the movie, and even your own background, always talk about their conflicts with the law. Has that been a major event in a lot of Aboriginal people's lives, both urban and rural?

Sure, all Aborigines are born into prison, gaol further down the line is just somewhere that they hide you out of sight.

In the movie a young fellow, Henry, who seems like such a soft person starts his life behind bars in a children's home.

Sure, totally institutionalised. And aren't we all? Waste born into an environment that we have to accept without challenge and until that psychologicall blindfold is lifted sometimes you wish that you didn't have to lift them because life, reality is pretty harsh and there are certainly no 'beg your pardons' about it.

What was the driving force for you in writing The Cake Man?

Oh, I heard a news item. They were interviewing a black American director who came out here specifically for the purpose of a Playwright's Conference and one of the questions that they asked him was why would he come to downtown Australia? He said that he was waiting, quite enthusiastically about it, waiting to read some Black works. They virtually laughed at him and said that there were no Black works.

So I listened a little further and I discovered that it was a Playwrights Conference. I thought. 'what's a play?' I didn't have a clue, never been to live theatre in my life, I didn't even know a structure. So, I thought, fuck it, for better or for worse he will have his play. As soon as I discovered the Playwright's Conference went for three weeks I knocked out the play in ten days and sent it to him.

The lesson to be learnt there, particularly from my point of view was that the greatest thing that I had going for me was my own naivety. It boiled down to, you can't go to University and be taught how to write. Sure, there's some pretty slick writers around but with nothing to write so they normally join the ranks of the 'catering business', they become glorified journalists.

Was it harder to write Running Man, the second play? You didn't have that spontaneity?

It becomes a different ball game then. What happens is the system here is designed totally for mediocrity.

So you've got to go through funding stages and your producers and other people have got to assess your works. Incidentally, I take exception to that practice. But you're virtually writing with tongue in cheek. To give an example. I'd write scripts and people would say 'this is a great script, but . . .'. And the 'but' is the bottom line - 'but, these roles are a bit good for Blacks aren't they?'

I did it, call it sarcasm, call it vindictiveness, I call it sense of humour. I deliberately put a black man in bed with a white woman and watch their reactions? I was smart enough in that particular screen play to take him out in the same scene again. So that got away with an audience.

I am a little bit fed up with the middle man and I think that the onus really belongs with governments and responsible ministers who are in charge of these public funding bodies, who have public servants overthere assessing creative peoples works. It's not on as far as I am concerned.

If any government of today thinks they are going lo get off the hook by pacifying a handful of people and expecting people to come out and write what's digestible, I think they're in for another big think. I can write anywhere I want, the Rock of Gibraltar, the lot and they're certainly not going to get off the hook.

So do you think that when it comes to 'art and culture' in Australia, the people working in that industry are only fed crumbs?

I see Australia as dying.

What identity has it got? There is no real contemporary status. They haven't quite made up their minds whether they want to be British or to be Americans.

In reality, the practice is - Australia is a suburb of America. So those people who don't have a culture, and what you don't understand you brand, therefore beat the 'Abos' around, in terms of the pecking order.

It really is like a conspiracy to get anything off the ground in this country if you write.

Especially if you've got the audacity to write on a universal theme, for other people, from downtown slum Ireland to Europe, so that they see themselves in what you're depicting and you do it in a positive way. The story unfolds and the colour transcends and it's really about people.

Changing tack, would you tell me some of your experiences in the Aboriginal legal services.

It is very frustrating, it's misery road. The same kids that you are getting off the hook or the flea bargaining exercises this week, are back there in two weeks time because what happens is that they're let out into the same sort of rotten environment where the problems stem from. You look at these people and there's nothing wrong with the people and their practice. It's normal people trying to get normal reactions in very abnormal circumstances.

The legal service has done great stuff but it still feeds off misery row.

The penny dropped with me one day and I said 'well, this practice can't be for me'.

It was great for me then, it helped me with my craft. It helped me to know about people, human nature and understand the reflection of myself that I saw in them.

In my opinion I think it's a great principle of law practice, that whereas the weight of the allegation should command the weight of the lawyer and I shudder to think just how many people who are in gaol were victims of the best justice in the world and that's British justice. Providing you can afford it.

In the film Corroboree there are themes of dichotomysuch as urban/tribal, black/white, physical/spirit. Are they problems or commonality or different? Do they have or need common antidotes or responses?

It's called dispossession and it effects people universally especially so-called conquered people.

When you have come from an so-called invisible society within a society and for the last 200 years been role playing into someone else's interpretation of who you are because that vehicle of time-culture, the Corroboree-was denied and not encouraged to be practiced.

Therefore people no longer see the reflections of themselves. It's the equivalent to Dracula looking into the mirror and seeing nothing's there.

So you're talking about offsprings of the gin-jockey, bastards, that are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, with no point of reference either way.

I think Aboriginality is starting to raise its head again. It is at the adolescent stage, but for the first time people are saying 'yes, I am Black'.

Of course they go through these phases where you identify with the movement of the sixties in America and elsewhere. Where as culturally related their is an accurate reflection with the Red Indian, but who wants to identify with the Red Indians because John Wayne chucks them over every time.

So it wasn't, 'I don't want to be black anymore because I am ashamed of my culture, or because of the oppression, but it doesn't get you anywhere'.

But out of the struggle sometimes good things still emerge. I think we are living in an exciting age. I see Aboriginality starting back in and in a generation or two so will that dignity come along with it.

There was a time when I didn't want to stay in this country and see the psychological genocide completed. But I have been pleasantly surprised and taken a big bit of the cake and asked of people nothing, just what they have to offer. 'I am not sure, what it is, you are not sure, let's find out together'.

It may be the first time they have been asked that so they respond. So they, in their own right, serve as a deposit for the next two hundred years.

One obvious action of this centre is that you are not trying to perpetrate a myth of Aboriginality being only related to 'stone-age-ism', as you put it in Corroboree.

That is, Aboriginality is dynamic-Jeans, t-shirts, and country and western music, do not deny Aboriginality.

Sure, of course.

From an Aboriginal point of view, we would not have the audacity to expect non-Aboriginal people to go back to caves chasing dinosaurs.

It is ludicrous to expect us to run around typecast in a lap-lap chasing Skippy.

Aboriginality is like a relation, it is only dead if you stop believing in it.

This centre is overcoming that.

Yes, the timing is right. Simply because the system took our culture away and denied us to practice it. We are now offering an alternative.

It has taken us two hundred years but look how long it took our brothers across the water to break out of their slave chains.

There are psychological barriers still, that need to be broken down.

In Corroboree there is a great line - Aboriginal people are expected to have 'expertise without the privilege of apprenticeship'.

Yes, that's right and I stand by it.

Well, that covers a lot of what I wanted to ask, unless you have anything you want to say...

Oh no, I'm not here to flog my own band wagon.

People like you everyday come and force me to justify my own existence and I am sure you understand that.

Being an 'Ambassador' for a raggedy-arsed bunch of people - and not by choice incidentally - you are forced to do the best you possibly can. Hope to Christ you do it some form of justice.

One thing to store up is, at the end of the next batch of students, in eighteen months, you won't have to come to me, you will be able to go to these people. Walking out with their heads up.


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