I watch people march under Black Lives Matter (BLM) around the globe. Trepidation arises in my stomach from my concern for the people’s safety from COVID-19 and associated police powers, each equally unwanted during a protest. An ironic smile slightly touches my lips, about extended police powers under the guise of ‘health’ cast against those who advocate an end to racialized policing.

The ‘ping’ sound of a new email draws my attention. I see it is from my cousin, titled ‘old family photos.’ My cousin saved the electronic file as: ‘Heithersay Prospecting, 1893, Coolgardie’. Curious, I open the photo that takes me to a significant moment. My white great grandfather; Afghan cameleers, and Aboriginal trackers, each embody an impressive end-of-nineteenth-century poise.

It strikes me that this is one of those uncanny timeless moments etched in history that play out before my very eyes in the present.  A moment where personal family stories – represented in the photograph I open – are writ large across national and global political landscapes.

I contemplate the way my personal family history entangles with race relations enacted past and present. The family photo encapsulates the essence of why the BLM movement came to be and its current relevance both globally, to Australia, and for me, a white Australian citizen. I think about the centuries of persecution against Black people and how the privileges attributed to white people are yet to reconcile in many countries, including Australia.

A matrix of time and place yawns wide before my very eyes.

In this suspended matrix moment, photographs of the activists who campaigned against the nine-minute choke-hold of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man who called out ‘I cannot breathe’ until he asphyxiated, murdered by Derek Chauvin police officer flood traditional and social media celebrating the first guilty verdict of a police officer. In Australia, 475 First Nations peoples have died in custody since a Royal Commission to Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 30 years ago. The Government continues to ignore the recommendations.

The pictures my cousin has sent me vexed me in a way I’ve never experienced. I feel gut-wrenching sadness and compassion for what I see. Who are these people? Whose country are they on? I start to notice the details before my eyes and feel my breathing return with the usual passing of time. The caption says ‘The Annisfield Prospecting CPY LTD’ to the left and toward the right-hand bottom is ‘Coolgardie.’ On the back of the photo is ‘1893’.  My cousin notes that one of the images is on an expedition party led by the Heithersays. John Heithersay is my great grandfather.

The image taken in Coolgardie has the soft browns of its time, 1893. The quality of this old photograph that had lasted 200 years with little fading, although there is some damage from wear and tear, draws me. The image is still clear enough to view the people, to see the red shades of fine powder-granulated dirt upon which people and animals stand and sit. Hand-sized rocks are scattered here and there to the horizon.

Two large white-trunked trees stretch a few ghostly gangly arms up and across beyond the frame. Smaller saplings as far as the eye can see emerge from the land as if a hand has cast their seeds and is gently caring for them under the expansive, bright sky. In the timeless pause, I feel the dirt granules underfoot, smell the trees’ slightly sharp eucalypt scent, and hear the soft whispering of the leaves.

The scene reminds me of Gammage’s book The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia how the oldest continuing culture developed carefully pan-continental environmental and agricultural management that sustained all natural resources. Brown marks from sticky tape smudge the sky of the photo. This picture represents an era that catastrophically disrupted this ancient care of the country.

Four First Nations men sit cross-legged at the feet of their master, my great grandfather John Heithersay. My breath stifles. I look in turn at each man. The thought arises: here it is. I wondered if my family was ever directly involved like this. Simultaneously I am aware of curiosity: who are you? From where do you come? … My grandfather had slaves! Were your family harmed or killed? What happened to your country?

I look at my great grandfather with misgiving. What have you done? 

I look closely at each person’s clothing in the photo as if doing a virtual pat-down security check for weapons. I expel a deep sigh of relief; there are none. No tell-tale bulge in clothing. Nor is there a ‘saddle gun’ visible on the camels. If they were the hunter/killer type, wouldn’t they proudly brandish their weapons? I look again at the cameleers. Is this a package deal of camels, cameleers, and Indigenous trackers to service what became the Kalgoorlie gold-vein craze? 

I remember going to school with Afganni Descendents in N.T. Their families had been Australian for many generations like mine. Perhaps the Aboriginal men astutely evaded death through their arrangement with the cameleers. Maybe they are family through marriage. After all, the camels, cameleers, and Aboriginal trackers must have worked together before my great grandfather procured their service.  

Now, as I look at the Indigenous men in the photograph, I again have the thought: Who are you? I have to find out. Mmm, to find out about these Indigenous men in the photo, I first have to know where the hell is Coolgardie?

Online I find the Wangka Goldfields Aboriginal Language Centre Aboriginal Corporation (GALCAC) based in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia (WA). Sue Hanson, a Senior Linguist, promptly emails me back. The photo is of immense importance to the Centre. Sue tells me that three main activities decimated the Coolgardie region’s Indigenous people: the mining industry, the railway installation between Perth and Kalgoorlie, and the pipeline from Mundaring to Kalgoorlie.

Sue writes that by 1910 only twenty to thirty people had survived. The descendants of those survivors are currently trying to prove their relationship to the land through Native Title. She is sure the descendants will be delighted to see this photo as they have no images that date back to the 1890s.

I wish I could send The Uluru Statement from the Heart, written by First Nations to the Australian Government and people, through the matrix of time to my great grandfather. I think about how the story of my great grandfather, the Afghan cameleers, and the four Indigenous men on Wangka Country is just one of the thousands of moments. It could have been different in 1893 if there had been Voice and Treaty with First Nations People. Instead, that era brought genocide.

We need people’s movements such as BLM to march and demonstrate on the stolen ground never ceded that First Nations Sovereignty and Black Lives Matter. Daily, during a global Climate Crisis, governments and big business destroy sacred sites for fossil fuels and roads, right across Australia such as the Stingray Sisters in Maningrida, N.T., Wangan and Jagalingou in Queensland by Adani, Jukkan Gorge Caves, in Western Australia by Rio Tinto, and the Djab Wurrung trees by Victoria State Government because we don’t have a document such as the Uluru Statement from the Heart as our nation’s spiritual constitution. This document is our shared cultural and spiritual understanding for the benefit of all Australians.

God is dead, said Nietzsche long ago. Since then the phrase has been interpreted in many different ways. One is an observation of the collapse of order, the dissolution of hierarchies of power between leaders and followers, teachers and students, parents and children, employers and employees, men and women, news producers and newsreaders—An exponential surge in student protests, and social media interactions of once-newsreaders-now-turned-news-producers, among others, substantiates the argument.

Some call this state of affairs the chaos of postmodernism, an era dominated by a loss of trust in authority, a questioning of power, followed by the belief that with no order, no right and wrong, that every value is necessarily right, every concern as equal as any other; others identify it as the phenomenon of moral and cultural relativism. But dissidents react by saying, ‘Stop! We have to draw the line somewhere! There must be standards!’

The ingenuity of Nietzsche’s statement lies in its prescience. Made at the turn of the twentieth century, it foretells the news headlines we are now privy to, more than one hundred years later. Through the mouthpiece of Zarathustra, Nietzsche warned posterity about the imminent danger of a world that found no merit in hierarchies and dividing lines. Through Zarathustra, Nietzsche reproduced the trope of the quintessential madman in literature. Thus Spake Zarathustra is the story of an unpopular prophet, castigated and excoriated for his cryptic statements, who broaches matters we now know were ahead of his time.

Nietzsche foresaw the eradication of order, systems, and hierarchies as a preliminary to nihilism; a negation of the individual rather than a longed-for affirmation of the self, which has ironically dominated the political forefront of countries with liberalist agendas. Such an agenda has sought to celebrate individualism, exalt every trait and concern of the individual, in order to allow him/her to grow to be healthy, wholesome, unique. Rather than that, these steps in the direction of caring for individualism, of pushing the liberalist agenda forward by recognizing every trait (and hence creating labels for everything) is fostering a culture of hypersensitivity, drowning the individual in a bucket of labels so that he/she is beginning to matter less and less.

African-Americans feel their identity to be threatened, especially by their White, American counterparts.

These labels do not manifest the ‘Who am I?’, but instead emphasize ‘What am I sensitive about?’ (Interestingly, and quite tellingly, as an indication of how labels are also relative, in Western and Central Europe this aspect of the liberalist agenda that exalts the individual is embraced by right-wing economic liberals and heavily criticized by left-wing radicals, whereas in the US it is resonant with what is seen as the progressive left.)

The growing trend of associating the label of ‘Ethnocide’ on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the United States has encouraged people from other cultures to wonder whether they are victims of the same phenomenon. Ethnocide it must be recalled, is the practice of destroying the soul of a people, as opposed to genocide which aims at decimating a whole genus or race. Ethnocide is the cultural assimilation of a non-dominant group by a dominant one, and the BLM movement has waved this card because African-Americans feel their identity to be threatened, especially by their White, American counterparts.

Yet, the distinction between pain and trauma slowly disintegrated. About twenty years ago, ‘trauma’ began to include experiences that were both physical and emotional, roping in a subjective element to is determination.  The label of ‘trauma’, or for that matter, ‘PTSD’ is now widely used, furthering the culture of ‘antifragility’, ‘safetysim’, or hypersensitivity that are weakening us.

One point must be stressed upon at the outset: the United States has for a long time been the ‘trend-setter’; the originator of most labels that have in no time, gained currency in other parts of the world. Raphael Lemkin for instance, knew that he had to come to the United States for his cause to gain legitimacy; for the label of ‘genocide’ to be recognized as a punishable crime.

Naturally if this country is where labels usually originate, there is a lot to say about how this process can and has gone wrong, for one of the insights one gains in a thorough study of anything, is that no system, no phenomenon, no process can be perfect.

So for example, the sensitivity we have developed to every remotely negative experience/reaction/feeling to external stimulus (of whatever form), and following that, our decision of affixing ourselves with an associative label (among the myriad of those to choose from) has made labelling—or self-labelling for that matter—rather effortless. Many of us now feel that in respecting the sensitivities of the other (to avoid the other from being ‘triggered’), we’re constantly having to walk on eggshells.

These practices of self-censure place barriers on communication, on the freedom of expressing ourselves, and while some groups may feel liberated by being given the chance to speak up, others feel threatened to express themselves in case their speech, or any part of it should encroach upon the sensitivities of an interlocutor.

The result: a constant atmosphere of tension and apprehension in which no speaker is at ease, and where one must necessarily begin with a barrage of disclaimers. (In the past few months, it has now become a requirement on several websites accepting submissions for novels, short stories, and other art work, to insert one or more disclaimers in case content may hurt the sensitivities of the reviewer/s).

Overall, a feeling of malaise seems to have crept in, especially (and ironically) in forums that are meant to foster creative thought and writing, and in the context of free speech, one of the pinnacles of liberalist constitutions, young writers, as validated by Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, seem to be intimidated and silenced.

It is justifiable that certain words should be used carefully, because of their meaning and purport, and the reactions they may stir up in marginalized groups suffering centuries of torture, oppression, and abuse, but the matter is quite another when one has to question whether it is legitimate for a writer from a dominant group to create characters in his/her novel who hail from a non-dominant one.

Questionable when one can no longer feel free to express a violent experience one has endured because it may expose a reader/listener/viewer to violence. If we don’t arm ourselves with our interior defences, or to put it a different way, develop and strengthen our immunity against external attacks, even the slightest, then all these labels, these shields, or the sources of distress they denote, would drown us, weaken us, and expose us to harsher threats later in life.