Sacred Space - Grace Karskens

INTRO

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Welcome to Compass. I’m Geraldine Doogue, and I’m standing in an absolutely magical part of the country. Below me lies the mighty Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury River, which just recently experienced yet another of its major floods.

The river’s been a magnet for so many of us, lots of different groups over the centuries. Grace Karskens has made it the centrepiece of her storytelling as an historian, exploring its troubled past and then discerning some real hopes for Australia’s future via an inspired discovery made a long way from here – across in Sydney’s CBD at her sacred space, the venerable Mitchell Library.

STORY

SACRED SPACE

GRACE KARSKENS,HISTORIAN

I love the library. It’s the greatest collection of Australiana in the world. It’s a knowledge-holding place. It’s a treasure trove.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

For Grace, this building is the physical manifestation of her life’s passion – the study of Australian History.

GRACE KARSKENS

I do see the profession and the discipline of History as a vocation, and it’s the most wonderful mix of just rigorous following of the evidence but it’s also magic.

We cultivate wonder. This place is full of magic. There’s a mystery about it, that you’re always pursuing something and opening out something and coming across things in an uncanny way. It’s quite an extraordinary thing to be doing.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Grace Karskens is a leader in her field. She has published several books, including The Colony and People Of The River. Both these titles explore the interaction between early settlers and First Nations people. They have earned accolades, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for non-fiction.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Oh, my goodness.

GRACE KARSKENS

Isn’t it amazing?

GERALDINE DOOGUE

It is. It is grand.

GRACE KARSKENS

I just love the light coming down.

TITLE

THE MITCHELL LIBRARY Gadigal Country, NSW

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Yeah. It’s beautiful.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

For Grace, this library is a cathedral of knowledge.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Oh, look at this one.

GRACE KARSKENS

Millions and millions of books.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Yeah.

GRACE KARSKENS

What happens to me is I will end up in a place almost unexpectedly and I’ll think, “Oh, this is it, this is sacred.” You know, I’ll be on a high place, and I think it’s a combination of being high up, having spread out the empty space before you, and the sounds that just drift away. There’s a silence that really beats into your ears. I think those are the times when I feel I have to stop and just take this in.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Well, Grace, it is awe-inspiring. We’ve got to be so reverent. We’ve got to be so quiet.

GRACE KARSKENS

Yes.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

So, it’s a little bit like a prayer sort of thing.

GRACE KARSKENS

It is. It is a sacred space. I mean, if you say that this is our memory place, our knowledge-holding place, this is where all the new discoveries are made, this is where people come to learn – I think that’s sacred.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

It’s also the architecture

GRACE KARSKENS

Yes.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

It genuinely has a grandeur to it.

GRACE KARSKENS

It’s had generations of people looking after it, and they’ve passed that down to us, so it’s also an amazing inheritance. And in these days of bean-counting and not respecting the past, that is such a precious thing to me. It’s kind of like an anchorage. And it’s also exciting because you never know what you’re going to find. There are hidden treasures in there that pop up.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

The thrill of finding something that has been hidden away for years still fills her with wonder.

GRACE KARSKENS

When you find a document that no-one’s looked at before, that may have been written in the same way that the person spoke, say a diary or something, you actually go into that world with that person who’s been dead, like, a hundred years or something. You travel into the past. It’s the most incredible feeling. And then, because that’ll raise more questions, you go chasing off after other evidence to meet that question.

And I’m the sort of historian who’s a bower bird – I will use any kind of evidence I can find, so I will read archaeology, I will look at paintings, I will look at the ecologies of places and how they were formed geographically and put that all together to create what is called ‘thick description’. So, re-create those worlds.

So, we go back into the past but then we’ve got to come back into the present, right, with the stories that we’ve found.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

How did a child of migrants end up documenting early Australia?

GRACE KARSKENS

Well, I think it was because I grew up in a place that didn’t have any received history. I grew up in Western Sydney, various places. One was Baulkham Hills, that I witnessed that whole area just being swallowed up by suburbs. Those armies of houses, you know, the timber frames going up, eating up the old paddocks and the farmhouses and the bushland. And I’ve always been interested in those edge places and the stories that were part of that place but also destroyed by that place. I’m always asking, “Who was here before?” and “Where are the traces?” So, I think that was one of the things that really made me curious about landscapes and where we are.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

What about your parents and your family life?

GRACE KARSKENS

Well, Mum and Dad were both migrants from Holland. Mum was actually from Dutch Indonesia. And their young lives had been turned upside down, maybe even ripped apart, by World War II.

Dad was from Zaandam in Haarlem in the Netherlands. And Mum was from the north part of Java, but she’d been in a prison camp because the Japanese invaded Indonesia, of course. And Mum was with her mother and her sisters in the concentration camp and they...they basically starved. And my dad was in occupied Holland, and he was part of the Resistance, and he was also in a Nazi concentration camp in Amersfoort.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

After the war in Europe ended, the Indonesian War of Independence erupted, and Grace’s father was drafted by the Netherlands government to go back to war.

GRACE KARSKENS

Dad never talked about this. I think he deliberately wanted to draw a line under all that suffering and pain and start anew in a new country. He came to Australia and he was determined to become Australian.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Wilhelm met Francine at a Dutch community gathering in Sydney. They married in 1956 and embraced the opportunities of a rapidly growing city.

GRACE KARSKENS

I was about seven when we moved to this brand-new brick-veneer house that Mum and Dad had built. They were building the migrant dream, like so many other people in Western Sydney in the post-war period. I mean, they were all about the future, as was everybody in the suburbs. It was all about building homes, building new lives, getting kids educated. Everything was busy. Hammering and sawing.

Of course, you can’t leave PTSD behind, but people didn’t talk about it, they just...

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Do you think he had that or they had that?

GRACE KARSKENS

He may have had it, but he never showed it, ever. If you did try to bring up the past when he was older, he would often just clam up and go silent. But I think it became more pressing on him ‘cause I know as you get older the past comes back. And occasionally something would just well up and we’d all go quiet so we could listen.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

What did you parents bring with them from the Northern Hemisphere, the Old World?

GRACE KARSKENS

Well, they’re both Catholic. My dad was a more quiet Catholic – observant, go to church on Sunday. In Dutch you go ‘biechten’, which is going to confession, biechten. But my mother, she was more proselytising.

We all went to Catholic schools, even though they really couldn’t afford it at all. But that was a top priority. But I don’t remember having a particularly spiritual upbringing.

It’s hard to say that, because it’s immersed in the Catholic religion and church on Sunday. But I do feel like it was a lot about “Behave. This is how you behave yourself. “These are the rules you have to follow to be a Catholic.” And I didn’t really connect that with a sense of...peace or spirituality that, even as a kid, that I could feel roaming in the bush and the beautiful places that I found there and that sense of the past being all around that you never learnt about in school.

At about 12, I read Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land, and that was the first thing I read that made the landscape that I lived in make sense and gave it depth. ‘Cause I’d had imaginings about convict... I don’t know how I even knew about convicts or Aboriginal people, but I knew about them, and I had imaginings that they had lived in this place before, and I was only a kid. And when I read The Timeless Land, something fell into place. I knew that there was this deeper history there, and that’s what I was attracted to. I wanted to know more, even from then.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Thirsty for knowledge, young Grace longed to join her father on one of his regular trips to the Mitchell Library.

GRACE KARSKENS

I felt awe when I went into this space here, the library.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

This first encounter made an indelible impression that only increased over successive visits.

GRACE KARSKENS

That was my dream, lined with books.

And when I was in second year of uni and I had to do an assignment for Australian History and they said, “You can’t get in there unless you’re a third-year honours student,” and I didn’t do honours. And I was, “Oh!” Oh, I really wanted to get in there. (LAUGHS)

So, you really had to earn your pass into this place. You had to be some kind of scholar. So, it was very exclusive.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Pursuing a career as a public historian, the Mitchell became a second home for Grace. Here she researched her PhD and her contribution to the Dictionary Of Sydney.

GRACE KARSKENS

Down here is the special research area. There used to be a microfilm reader over there. And that’s where I found the McGarvie List.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Grace’s 2017 discovery of the McGarvie List unlocked a cache of riches.

GRACE KARSKENS

I’d just spent 10 years researching the Hawkesbury and the Nepean for my book People Of The River. And we had five names in that area that I was writing about. And I was reading a microfilm of the journal of Reverend John McGarvie, who was a Presbyterian minister who was the incumbent at Pitt Town and Ebenezer in 1826. And I only found bad poetry and drafts of his letters, and it was really boring and I just kept turning the wheel, thinking, “Oh, well, maybe there’s something further on.”

And I came to one frame and it was headed List Of Native Names For The Hawkesbury. And...actually, literally didn’t believe what I was reading. And there were, like, six pages of neatly written-out list of names for the Hawkesbury. And it just struck me, the loss, the loss of all the names, ‘cause every single place, bend of the river, beach, would have had an Aboriginal name. No wonder, if you’re an Aboriginal person, you are grief-struck by the loss of what happened.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

So, Grace, what are we looking at here?

GRACE KARSKENS

This is part of the Reverend John McGarvie List of Aboriginal names for the Hawkesbury. So, we were actually able to work out where he went collecting these names. This is why it was so stunning, ‘cause we didn’t know the name for the Macdonald River, which is a tributary of Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury. It’s Gunanday. Gunanday is the name of the Macdonald River, which is, like...it’s like a gift from the past, it really is.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

We should...

GRACE KARSKENS

Yeah, we’ll put these on, shall we? Yes.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

..handle right.

GRACE KARSKENS

And he’s actually given us hints about where these things are. So, Yambung is Smiths and Flemings. This is the same Fleming that led the Myall Creek massacre.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Oh!

GRACE KARSKENS

This is probably where that man, John Henry Fleming, hid out...

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Oh, gosh.

GRACE KARSKENS

..after the massacre. Yeah. It’s probably where he was. So, we know the name of that place. ‘Yambung’, it means ‘soft’, so we think it means ‘soft earth’.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Oh!

GRACE KARSKENS

That beautiful flat, river-flat country.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

‘Cause it was fabulously fertile.

GRACE KARSKENS

Yes.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Realising the significance of what she had stumbled upon, Grace contacted some traditional custodians. With these Dharug educators and knowledge-holders – Leanne Watson, her daughter Rhiannon Wright, Jasmine Seymour and Erin Wilkins – Grace set up a research project to connect the words back to the landscape, putting the placenames back on the map.

GRACE KARSKENS

What we had to do is then check all those early records of where the farmers were that were mentioned on the list. Once we knew where their farms were located in 1829, then we knew that that’s where the name belonged. So, what we did was then plot that on a digital map. Then we went out on country to look at the landscape, look at the geology.

RHIANNON WRIGHT

It’s amazing to be back here again.

GRACE KARSKENS

Yeah. Remember we came here on our very first field trip? Gosh.

JASMINE SEYMOUR, ARTIST, WRITER AND EDUCATOR

That was a long time ago now.

RHIANNON WRIGHT

Feels like forever ago.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Using the historical records and the clues provided by the McGarvie List, the group worked with linguist Jim Wafer to define or ‘gloss’ the root meaning of the words.

GRACE KARSKENS

It was just magic to go on country and to see the landscape that the word was referring to. And it was only by seeing the river whole with its names that those names started to make sense and we could identify zones of lagoons, zones of forests and sacred zones.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

An understanding of these words and their meaning allowed previously hidden Dreaming stories to emerge from the landscape.

JASMINE SEYMOUR

We’re here on the banks of the Dyarubbin at the site called Wuwami, or Wowawme, and you can kind of see the shape of a head and a body as it goes back into the ranges. And this is a very special place, one of huge spiritual significance, and we think that ‘Wuwami’ means ‘the place of many eyes’. And that was glossed in the McGarvie List.

GRACE KARSKENS

Yes, it was. That’s right. We also think Wowaw might be the monster fish, who could be related to the Great Eel Spirit, Creator Being.

ERIN WILKINS, ABORIGINAL CULTURAL EDUCATOR AND TRAINER

Where he sits is quite significant because he can actually see right around this hairpin and then can extend down through the other path of the river. He’s always looking out, making sure we’re all doing what we need to when we need to and doing it the right way.

JASMINE SEYMOUR

It’s a sacred highway almost, you know. Around the corner we have Dorumbolooa, which means ‘the place of the rainbow’.

GRACE KARSKENS

Down the river we’ve got Karemooloomooloo, which I love to say.

JASMINE SEYMOUR

Beautiful word.

GRACE KARSKENS

‘Kari-mulu-mulu’ probably more correct. ‘Place of falling stars’.

JASMINE SEYMOUR

Falling stars. Beautiful!

GRACE KARSKENS

Which is another, like, a rainbow, a sign or a portent of magic and sorcery.

GRACE KARSKENS

We have joined up McGarvie’s List, which actually came from the river, back to the river, back to the people who shared those words with him.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

And the point about this is that this man, who was very much of the Old World, sufficiently respected the Aboriginal people to ask them, they gave him this information back and he transcribed it.

GRACE KARSKENS

Yeah.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

So, it’s sort of...

GRACE KARSKENS

It’s a gift. It’s a... And it’s a collaborative thing. Just like our project on this list was collaborative.

I know some Aboriginal people find this alien, and I agree, that it’s ink...

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Do they?

GRACE KARSKENS

Well, it’s ink, it’s dry paper, the document is locked away in a library in the dark, separated from country, from the river where it belongs. And, yet, this is a collaborative document.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Yeah.

GRACE KARSKENS

Because those names were given to McGarvie. They trusted him enough and liked him, actually, as it turns out in his diary, enough to give him the gift of these names. And we have checked all these 178 names against seven dictionaries. So, we know pretty well what they mean. And we’ve got about 90 of them back on the map.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

That is fantastic.

GRACE KARSKENS

It’s awesome, isn’t it?

GERALDINE DOOGUE

That is a real result, isn’t it?

GRACE KARSKENS

Yeah. It’s a result, yeah.

(BOTH LAUGH)

ERIN WILKINS

Being able to put name back onto country and actually understand why that particular story that was on that particular piece of the river brings back not just knowledge, it brings back strength, it brings back the stories, it brings back so many different elements and layers that...I won’t say that they were lost, they were just...

GRACE KARSKENS

Waiting.

ERIN WILKINS

Yeah, they were just waiting.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Under cover.

ERIN WILKINS

They were sitting under the carpet a little bit. They were sitting inside a book...

GRACE KARSKENS

Yeah.

ERIN WILKINS

..waiting for it to be opened.

JASMINE SEYMOUR

When you have your language back, you receive your culture back because that’s... the historical documents, the words are all about country and spirituality and culture and also connectivity, about how we are connected to everyone else in the broader area.

That part of the puzzle for us is where we fit in here, how our story is part of the bigger story of Indigenous Australia, and that is what the language component of this has really give us, which is completely profound.

RHIANNON WRIGHT, ABORIGINAL EDUCATION OFFICER

I think this project has been amazing for showing people the true history of this area and what’s happened here. And something that does really surprise me is the interest of people, especially...

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Really?

RHIANNON WRIGHT

Yeah, non-Aboriginal people have been very interested, people in the Hawkesbury, about what has happened here.

GRACE KARSKENS

Absolutely. Like, in the non-Aboriginal community, there’s a hunger to learn more deeply ‘cause there is a rising awareness of invasion, you know, frontier war and what happened.

RHIANNON WRIGHT

A lot of the families that have been here for years have been, yeah, really interested in knowing what’s happened where they live or what their family may have been a part of.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Have you met any opposition?

GRACE KARSKENS

(LAUGHS) Well, I have encountered a few people who are property owners who wouldn’t return my emails. I was a bit disappointed by that, but on the whole, everyone that we’ve worked with on our field trips has been very keen to help. We’ve had a lot of community support from people who have their properties where Aboriginal people worked in the 19th century.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

‘Cause, I mean, you know, there were some terrible incidents occurred.

GRACE KARSKENS

Absolutely, and that’s another thing we’re trying to include in the proj...we ARE including in the project.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

So, you’re not dodging that?

GRACE KARSKENS

No.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

And people aren’t seeking to dodge that, sort of?

GRACE KARSKENS

Oh, they might, but... (LAUGHS) ..that’s too bad ‘cause it’s happened and it’s history. And we can include the stuff that was recorded but always under the assumption that more happened than was recorded. So, we always say that as well.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

How do you deal with that? I mean, it didn’t happen to your immediate family, past families, but then how do you incorporate some of those horrors?

ERIN WILKINS

By truth-telling, through education and...yes, it didn’t happen to our immediately family, but those ripple effects still continue. So, there is such things as intergenerational trauma, and that trauma will ripple and ripple through generations. It’s not just what happened to them, it’s also the displacement that we feel, that loss of connection or that...that missing link somewhere that we’re not too sure about that make us sometimes feel a little bit uneasy.

TITLE

TASCOTT, Karree Country, NSW

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Meanwhile, Grace is preparing herself for what complexities she may discover in her own family history.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

Do you think you will try to use your historian skills to do that?

GRACE KARSKENS

Yes. But it makes me feel very ignorant, ‘cause I’m a historian of Australia, so I know a little bit about Holland and Indonesia but shamefully little. So, I would love to explore that.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

So, that’s to come?

GRACE KARSKENS

I think so.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

You think so?

GRACE KARSKENS

Yeah, I have to talk to my siblings. (LAUGHS)

GERALDINE DOOGUE

You’re still not sure, are you?

GRACE KARSKENS

Hm... What will I find? There are mysteries in our family. My uncle joined the Nazis. My uncle, his nearest brother. And I know they were close. And he was never found. He disappeared in Prague.

GERALDINE DOOGUE

So, that’s...

GRACE KARSKENS

We don’t know what happened to him. So, every year, my grandmother got a letter from the Red Cross saying, “We haven’t found him.” Every year till she died. And she never found out what happened to him. I wonder if it’s possible now. Do I want to know? I don’t know. Do I want to know about the atrocities in Indonesia? I think I do, actually.

So, we moved a lot as kids ‘cause Dad and Mum were quite ambitious, we moved to bigger houses. And we always had Dad’s suitcase, and we were never allowed to look in it, ever. Verboden. This suitcase followed them around all the way up to Dorrigo and down to Coffs Harbour and then back down to Sydney. And then when Mum and Dad had to go into care, I had to clean the house out, and they had kept everything. And there were all these suitcases. And I picked up one and it was heavy, and I was said, “What’s in here?” And Dad said...”That’s my suitcase.”

And I went...”Oh, my God, it’s the suitcase!” So, I said, “Dad is it alright if I take it now?” And he said yes. His whole life was in there. Thousands of photographs. Every letter kept. In a bit of a mess. They were all jumbled up. And his epaulettes from being in the war in Indonesia.

I got such a shock. (LAUGHS) Because I suddenly thought, “He’s been carrying these things with him all these years, he hasn’t talked about it.” It was jaw-dropping, it really was.

You know, there are things in Dad’s suitcase which are worrying, you know, why are they there? But, on the other hand, I want to honour them too, I want to honour the fact that they had to deal with those questions and those dilemmas of war. It’s not about goodies and baddies. It’s a complex messy story. And I think, perhaps, to honour them, that would be a great story to tell.

I also think, “He DID keep the suitcase...” And I think, well, maybe he did want it to be told after he was gone.

TITLE

DYARUBBIN EXHIBITION LAUNCH, Mitchell Library, Gadigal Country

GERALDINE DOOGUE

How do you see history? What’s the worth of finding out about the past?

GRACE KARSKENS

That’s such a good question. Usually my history is connected to great worth. But, you know, history is a discipline that is so democratic. We all make history. We all do history. We all talk history. Everyone has to have history, otherwise who would we be? We don’t have any memory, we don’t know who we are. So, part of being a historian is also looking at the history that we’ve been telling ourselves in the past and understanding where that’s come from but also being critical about it. Because, if you get new evidence, then it does mean that you have to change the narrative about the past.

I just think it’s the queen of disciplines. (LAUGHS) Because it’s so connected to the most important issues that we’re dealing with now. And, of course, one of the most urgent things I think we’re dealing with is the achievement of makarrata, of reconciliation, with Aboriginal people. One of the great demands, the desiderata of the Uluru Statement From The Heart, is truth-telling through history.

WOMAN

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys. Thank you!

TEASER

ANNOUNCER

Next time on Compass...

TITLE

THE HEALER

MAN

I remember how I felt as a patient. I felt so disempowered and I felt so disconnected. And I often try to remember that when I see patients in the emergency department. Just nice to be a part of a patient’s journey and help them through, you know, what might be the most catastrophic thing they’ve heard in their whole life.

We have the technology to put it all together. To try and drive some results for people like me who have spinal cord injury. Life is nothing without hope.

ANNOUNCER

The Healer – next time on Compass.

 End.