'Ruby Langford Ginibi's Everyday Songlines'
Kylie Valentine

The following reading of Don't Take Your Love to Town will, I hope, do a number of things. First, it sets out to examine the ways in which location is important to the structure of the text: the place of place, in other words. Second, it looks at the background to the importance of land in the book, especially the political significance of land in Aboriginal history and culture, and the political struggles around land in Aboriginal communities today. Third, some of the differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal storytelling in the use of land will be examined. I argue that because Ruby Langford has a knowledge of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal understandings of history, culture and land, her book is both an important contribution to the Aboriginal struggle for justice in Australia today and offers ways for non-Aboriginal readers to understand some of this struggle.
Ruby Langford Ginibi was clearly writing for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal readers; the closing lines of her book sets out that one of her reasons for writing it is to "help better the relationship between the Aboriginal and white people" (269). Part of the title of this paper comes from my wish to make obvious my position as a white reader. I will be arguing that it is possible for white audiences to gain an understanding of land and its significance to Aboriginal peoples through reading Ginibi's text. I will not be arguing that as a white reader I am able to, or should be able to, tell Aboriginal readers what land means to them. There is a long and unfortunate tradition of white people telling Aboriginal people what things mean, or what they should mean: a tradition that I want to avoid joining. However, this paper will try and make clear some of the elements of the relationship between Aboriginal people and land to non-Aboriginal readers who may not have learnt or thought about these issues before.

Don't Take and other, more conventional, autobiographies share a number of characteristics that work towards setting up a kind of 'frame' around the text. To look even briefly at some of these characteristics - the way the book is opened and closed, the way the chapters are set out - suggests the remarkable achievements Ginibi makes in both using and departing from traditional white tools of storytelling. The book opens with "Names", a chronological trace of how the identities and locations of the author have been figured throughout her life, and it closes with the manuscript that will become this book (the book that we have just read). In between are chapter headings that have individual titles but are all subtitled with the names of the places in which the chapter will be set. Immediately, then, we have signals as to what will be made important in the text: testimony to the people and places the author has encountered; testimony to the labour of writing itself and the ways in which the book was brought into being; and the importance of location in the book.

We also have from the outset signals as to how this text will differ from more familiar (to white readers) autobiographies. Australian white-authored autobiographies do not generally begin with an acknowledgement and foregrounding of the ways in which other people have seen the narrator, the "I", of the text. Most start out and continue with the "I" at centre stage, to the point where we lose a sense of the importance of relationships with other people. Many, if not most, white-authored autobiographies do not locate the political nature of the production of the text, and its political function, as part of the main action of the book. Most autobiographies can be recognised as an unravelling of the lives of people into a straight-line chronological account, with the self at centre and all else peripheral, described only in terms of their importance to that self (what I thought about my mother, my school, my lovers, my coach, my co-stars). The autobiography itself becomes a memoir of that life, something to be added on to it, rather than becoming a part of the joys and struggles that make it up.

Ginibi's book is something different. While it can and has been read as a 'straight' autobiography in the above terms, a number of the features of the book suggest alternative ways of reading and understanding it. In achieving a different understanding of the book, it is possible to achieve an understanding of the radical achievements of it. As mentioned above, these include the importance of other people in the action of the text - suggested in the way the text opens - and the importance of writing and language - suggested by the way that it closes. Another of these features, and what I want to concentrate on in this essay, is suggested in the way that chapter headings are consistently sub-titled throughout the book: the importance of land and place.

While some attention has been paid in the media over the past few years to land and Aboriginal peoples as a result of the Mabo and Wik decisions in the Australian High Court, a lot of confusion and misinformation has been generated as a result of this attention. Some of the most important aspects of these decisions are obvious, as are direct results of them. For example, one of the most important findings of the Mabo judgement was the refutation of the principle of terra nullius, or empty land. This principle had been responsible for the basis of Australian common law. Despite its name, the principle did not come from ignorance on the part of white invaders of Australia to the presence of Aboriginal people, but rather from the refusal of early white law to grant Aborigines the status of people. Instead, they had the same status as fauna, and so recognition of the ownership of the land by Aborigines was legally impossible. Even with the later recognition of Aboriginal people as not only people but citizens with all attendant rights of citizenship, the principle of terra nullius was not and could not be revoked until the Mabo case. As a result of the Mabo decision, and subsequent court cases, not only have there been (limited) opportunities for Aboriginal people to seek out reparation of historical injustices and misunderstandings – injustices that still form part of Australian law – but also wider discussion and attempts for understanding by white people of the importance of land to Aboriginal people.

Land has been opened up as an issue for discussion in two ways. Firstly, land is central to struggles for justice and equality: the right of Aboriginal people to be considered as inhabitants and owners of the land prior to white invasion. Secondly, land is an important means to attempting to understand the differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relationships to land. Heather Goodall has examined the meanings of land prior to invasion in terms of culture and politics and concludes:

There are strong grounds then for arguing that for Aboriginal people in south-eastern Australia before the invasion, land was the physical and symbolic basis for almost every aspect of life. Social relations were expressed, managed and negotiated through relations to land; political standing was legitimated and authority granted in landholding. Knowledge was structured by its relation to place, and it was taught, held in memory and performed according to this organisational framework. (Goodall, 1996: 17)

Land as an "organisational framework" doesn't replace organisational structures more familiar to non-Aboriginal readers: structures like the family, legal and political institutions and codes, and religion. Instead, land plays an important and foundational role in the way these structures are set up and understood. For example, where most "western" stories and histories are understood in terms of time (think of the importance of the division of the world into units of time from years to microseconds, the concept of "progress", the importance of age and how long things and people have been around, the way years are calculated, the way history is taught), Aboriginal cultures paid less attention to time, and more to place. Or, as Tim Rowse has put it:

It was essential to the nature of every person that he, she or it belonged to a place. The world is a world of places; the persistence in time of the things of the world was of no account in the fundamental categories of Aboriginal thinking. (Rowse, 1994: 40-41)

One of the ways in which Don't Take can be read is as an example of ways in which the struggle to maintain culture is carried out in the face of widespread decimation of Aboriginal populations and lack of understanding of Aboriginal ways of making sense of the world. This reading can also realise some of the differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relationships to land, and the importance of land to storytelling. White writing generally devalues the significance of place, and location is often figured as descriptive backdrop to the real action of the text or serves as some sort of metaphor for it. Don't Take, in contrast, figures locations as significant not only in naming them at the beginning of each chapter, but in investing a number of places with an importance independent of their place in the lives of the text's players. Bonalbo which, like inner Sydney, is a scene of repeated arrival and departure, is described as "my belongin place" (61) and is associated with a strong sense of community and identity. One of the most powerful moments of the book is the account of the visit to Uluru:

It was like a huge animal that was asleep in the middle of nowhere. We came closer and I could feel the goosebumps and the skin tightening at the back of my neck. Everyone else was quiet. It made me think of our tribal beginnings and this to me was the beginning of our time and culture. Time was suddenly shortened to include all of history in the present, and it was also stretched to include a way of seeing the earth that was thousands of years old. (234)

Bonalbo and Uluru represent two different examples of how place and land can be significant in the constituting of identity and relationship: Bonalbo is important because of the pivotal familial and communal ties associated with memories of it. Uluru has a less individual, more broadly cultural significance: emblematic of both the historical and contemporary Aboriginal societies. However, despite the significance of land and place, no opposition is set up between rural and urban settings to Langford's sense of self; location is never more important than her identity and experiences. Katoomba, where the "kids disappeared straight into the bush and made cubbies and climbed trees, they were so happy" (121) is eventually inadequate because "isolated - not enough Kooris to go around" (126). Described in the text is not some mystical 'primitive' significance of place, nor a conventional story of travel. Instead is an argument against both white traditions that disrespect land, and against white racist ideas of the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and land. Traditions in Australian white writing, particularly colonial writing, set place as always knowable or always unknowable. In either case location and land is set as romantic scenery or threatening to people but having no significance apart from that AB Paterson and Barbara Baynton are two onotable examples.

Many of the ways in which non-Aboriginal societies have attempted to understand the relationship of Aboriginal people to place has been inadequate because it has been characterised by a lack of knowledge, a lack of understanding, or a desire to manipulate facts for ulterior motives. A recent example of this is the so-called Hindmarsh Island affair. This 'affair' was based around a development proposal to build a bridge in South Australia in an area which a number of Aboriginal women claimed to be sacred. In the ensuing court case a number of other Aboriginal women claimed that the area didn't have religious significance, a proposition which was eventually allowed by the court. The result was in some ways less significant than the reaction of a number of people involved in the court case, who cited the lack of agreement between Aboriginal people as proof that the women were either dishonest or incompetent. Argument within the Aboriginal community is constructed as 'proof' that the religious significance of the land is fabricated, simply because not everyone agrees. Dispute within non-Aboriginal communities about the cultural or religious significance of sites (dinosaur footprints, Mt Ararat, Jerusalem) isn't regarded as proof of anything and, of course, it isn't. The subtext is clear: only white people are allowed to disagree about such things. When Aboriginal people do, it is immediately read as establishing the fraudulence of Aboriginal claims to the significance of land, as though such claims should be instinctual, as though such instincts were animal.

A lot of these non-Aboriginal attempts to explain the importance of land to Aboriginal people have had the unfortunate effect of describing land in Aboriginal traditions as more important than people, or as simple-minded, or as based on instincts. These attempts have not made sense of the fact that no cultures can be explained that way, and that every society in history has been complicated and rich with its own systems of meaning. Langford's text represents a different possibility: one aware of and outside of both white devaluing of land for the sake of privileging individuals, and white misreadings of Aboriginal societies in which the relationship is simply reversed.

This representation of the relationship between communities and land is one that is a disruption of white traditions of story telling, but it is also part of the way that action unfolds in the texts. Don't Take has a basis significantly different to that of more familiar texts. Rather than an account of an isolated individual making a straightforward journey through time and space, what is drawn instead is a complicated web of not only people, but also places in which the narrator moves. Movement from place to place is one of the most consistent and powerful of the text's themes: described at times is an almost convulsive series of journeys.

Because of the way that land structures many of the traditional systems of Aboriginal cultures, movement from one place to another is part of that structure. An important feature of the organisation of knowledge is the songline. Songlines describe:

a body of oral tradition held in memory and taught in performance as the words and music of songs, as painting and dance. All of these performed works are celebrations of and communications with the continuously existing Dreamings of which they speak…[These are] occasionally about events associated with a single site, but far more often they celebrate journeys across country. These are travels made by ancestal figures, in human or non-human form or both, during which they are engaged in epic struggles of competition, love and conflict, sometimes creating landforms as they go… Dreaming journeys have been called tracks, strings, pathways by Aboriginal people, and they can all be mapped out onto the countries they cross. The knowledge is then both embodied in [made a part of] and inscribed onto [physically marks] the land. (Goodall, 1996: 3)

Can Ginibi's text be described as a songline? While it differs from the 'Dreaming' stories described above in that the book is contemporary and naturalistic, grounded in the realities of everyday living, Don't Take is also without doubt a tale of 'epic struggles of competition, love and conflict'. It is also, without doubt, a tale mapped onto the locations in which it takes place. I would argue then that Ginibi's text is in many ways a songline of Ruby Langford Ginibi and the people to whom she is close, and these songlines represent the changes and crises of contemporary Aboriginal life. The reasons for travel are examples of this. There are times when travelling is done because of a desire to go somewhere; but often it is for other reasons - because of the need for work, or because of family crises, or because of the need to share space to save rent, or because there are so many people sharing the same space that conflict is generated. These constant presences in the text: family, poverty, conflict, struggle, are thereby set against the places in which they occur, and these places become a part of them rather than simply a backdrop.

As the book progresses and its political focus becomes increasingly apparent, description of the troubles of people is also reflected in the way place is described. Inner Sydney, initially a place of unfamiliar but solid community - her father and stepmother live there, she meets friends and family walking down the street (42-45) - becomes at the end of the text emblematic not only of the solidarity of Aboriginal communities but also of threats to them. Two of her children run away from the house in Fitzroy Street Newtown (127), David dies at Glebe House (227). Importantly, transformations in places such as Sydney - and the contrasting unchanged nature of Bonalbo at the school reunion (243) - in some ways take the place of more conventional transformations in autobiography; where for example a hometown represents the difference between childish and adult perceptions.

Rather than Ginibi tracing what is only a journey of spiritual development and learning, she instead traces the community and networks of her family and the ways these are transformed over time. This shift in perspective from the more familiar autobiographical development involves absences - there is little attention paid, for example, to the impact on Langford of the circumstances in which her mother left home, or of being a mother so young herself, no long passages of the thoughts that went through her mind, or the lessons she was learning. A single individual's growth and change becomes instead an account of the movement and struggle of a whole community of individuals.

The reading of travel and journeys as important also means that it is possible to read the travel Ginibi makes not only between places, but also between communities, cultures and languages: "I spread the clothing on bushes to dry and years later standing over a washing machine in Alexandria I saw an image of myself squatting over a gilgai - how I'd had two completely different lives" (91). This travelling and movement is one of the most important ways in which the narrative is mobilised and, as noted above, often replaces the more expected long reveries and descriptions of thought and feeling of autobiography. Travel also outlines and makes visible the politics and struggle of moving between the white and black communities described in the text. The trip to Uluru is the result of lobbying, fundraising and building of solidarity; it is also part of the process of the explicit involvement in politics that Ginibi undergoes quite late in the book, and which produces the book. Uluru itself becomes a meeting of the different worlds of tribal and urban Aboriginal people, one in which the differences between them remain distinct. Despite the significance of Uluru and its impact on the group of visitors of which Langford is one, there is no erasing of difference between people, no reduction of the movement and struggle of Langford to some esoteric Aboriginality.

Don't Take charts an arena of political struggle for the Aboriginal communities that are described. However, in making language, the labour of writing, testimony, and the politics of place into important narrative structures, the arena of struggle is transformed. In this way, Ginibi's book becomes a part of the battle that it describes. For if the battle described in the text is one against bureaucratic, educational and legal institutions that are both enormously powerful and (probably) intractably racist, then the text is an argument that the tactics of struggle can be found outside of the courts and in the way people live their lives and fight their battles. Ruby Langford lives in a "half black half white world" (235) that says too often that Aborignal people belong in neither. Don't Take demonstrates by its existence as well as its language and movement that Langford has instead a knowledge of both; able to use both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal storytelling conventions and other cultural traditions. The importance of place in the book is one that is established by the significance of land to Aboriginal communities, the political imperative to make this significance understood to non-Aboriginal communities, and the knowledge of the ways in which it is difficult for non-Aboriginal people to gain this understanding. Don't Take is thus a testimonial, a bearing witness to struggle, as well as becoming in its own right part of the struggle itself.

Kylie Valentine
PhD student in Women's Studies at the University of Sydney

Works Cited

Goodall, H. Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in NSW, 1770-1972

Langford, R. Don't Take Your Love to Town (1988) Ringwood (Vic): Penguin

Rowse, T. "Aboriginal Underworld", Overland 135 (Winter 1994) 38-45