Sacred Site by Kim Fleet
Monday, and my first blog for Picnic about my novel Sacred Site. I think I should start off by saying what the book is about. Sacred Site is a thriller set in an Australian Aboriginal community. A mining company believes there’s gold under Mt Parker and to get to the gold, it needs to destroy it. However, Mt Parker is a sacred site for the Aboriginal people who live there, and their permission is needed before the mountain can be destroyed. An anthropologist is sent to investigate the claim, but she also discovers there was a massacre of Aboriginal people there about a century before. She’s horrified when an Aboriginal woman reveals that child abuse is rife in the Aboriginal community. As she uncovers more, she receives threatening letters, her colleagues are attacked, and finally she is left fighting for her life in the outback.
Sacred Site is informed by experiences I had working as an anthropologist with Aboriginal people. I came to anthropology in a peculiar way, leaving school at 16 and then deciding after working for a few years to go back to college, do my A levels and then go to university. Anthropology was my third choice of subject at uni, but in the first lecture, I was captivated. A rough definition is it’s ‘the study of people’, and traditionally that meant living in the middle of nowhere and studying the customs of weird and wonderful tribes. But modern anthropologists are just as likely to study online communities, football hooligans, hospital patients or criminal gangs. I suppose that makes me a traditionalist, as when I came to do my fieldwork, I decided to work with Aboriginal people and hoofed off to Central Australia to live at Uluru (Ayers Rock) for two years. My original intention was to come home and be an academic, spending all day intoning ‘The Aborigines do this, and the Aborigines think that…’ but the experiences I had during that first period of fieldwork shocked me so much I couldn’t stomach lecturing about the people I’d lived with for two years. Both appallingly pompous and ridiculously naive, I decided I wanted to try to give something back to the Aboriginal people, and went back to Australia and worked in land rights.
What was so shocking? The condition of the communities. Imagine the third world. Imagine litter and dirt. Imagine scabby dogs driven mad with fleas. Imagine communal showers because your house doesn’t have washing facilities. Imagine TB, hepatitis, scabies. Imagine dying because you were drunk and fell asleep on the road and got run over. Imagine a community that condones child abuse as part of traditional culture and the rights of the elder men, at the same time as the women decry this as ‘bullshit culture’. Imagine violence as routine. Imagine squalor, a life on the dole, living in a community where everyone else is on the dole, where your children will never have a job, where you have no expectation of decent health care and education. Imagine living in a bubble in the middle of nowhere, where no-one thinks this is right, but no-one knows how to fix the situation, either.
I’ve lived in several remote Aboriginal communities, and the conditions I’ve described are common. Who’s to blame? Is it the government, for not sorting the problem out? Or the Aboriginal people, who ought to just pull themselves up by their boot straps? Difficult when you’ve poured money into the communities and nothing seems to change. Difficult to look at the long term when for the past hundred years your land’s been nicked, your children taken away, and hope has long since flown away. At the same time, I was moved by the humour, resilience and determination demonstrated by many of my Aboriginal friends.
It was these issues I wanted to explore in writing, but I didn’t want to write a polemical piece saying how dreadful it all was and something ought to be done, as what I also wanted to look at were the ambiguities inherent in the system. Are we to blame for the actions of our ancestors? Is it possible to atone for atrocities committed by people a century ago, who did what they did because their beliefs about the world were substantially different to our own? I remember talking to an Aboriginal man about the appalling treatment his ancestors had suffered: their land taken, forced to work on the land, paid no wages other than food and a blanket, and frequent beatings. He said, “Yeah, but what did yous do to your own people? You sent them right the way round the other side of the world just for stealing a sheep. No wonder they was like that to us blackfellas.”
I decided to write a thriller set in an Aboriginal community. I’d got an unusual heroine, a cast of colourful characters, and an exotic location. And I thought the thriller format would give me a forum to explore some of the issues in contemporary Aboriginal culture, and allow me to reflect on the history of Aboriginal-white contact. I’m fascinated by the past, and how the past is never ‘done’: it sends tendrils through to the present and future. I love the idea of time as a palimpsest: we might think the past is wiped away, but the ghost of it still lurks there beneath the present, and sometimes becomes visible.
And I’d also got a swag full of the kinds of funny incidents that happen when you work in Aboriginal communities: the kids playing football in the middle of an important meeting; the camels on the airstrip; the frogs in the toilet; the road kill kangaroo proudly brought in for a barbecue. And yes, I did eat it, and yes it was revolting, mostly because the bit I got was practically raw. Thank goodness for tomato ketchup, I say!
Until tomorrow, Kim
October 1st, 2008 at 2:04 pm
great article…i’ll comeback next Wednesday to read some more…chao