Kathleen Mary Fallon's last book, Working Hot (1989) was groundbreaking in its experimentation with writing sexuality, with the sexuality — and violence — of writing; her new book, Paydirt, is groundbreaking in writing another kind of violence that is highly political and topical at the moment as it centres on race, child-abuse, whiteness, maternity, and guilt. Its release is well-timed, as the Howard government fills front pages and national broadcast news with its sudden new commitment to wipe out child sexual abuse from Indigenous communities by committing police and military forces with six months of dedicated funding just before a federal election is to be called. In contrast to the political rhetoric we receive in the news, this book approaches violence and parenting and Indigenous community and white paternalism in new and complex and entirely comprehensible ways. It should be required reading for all politicians and current affairs journalists.

 

Paydirt tells the multiple stories of Warren, a Thursday Island boy who was adopted by a white woman, Kate, when he was five years old. The narrative is set in the present, when Warren is now almost eighteen years old. Warren and Kate are on board an aircraft to Brisbane to meet Warren's biological Islander mother for the first time since he was removed. She is ill, and in hospital, and has contacted them after seeing them on television. The journalist evidently drew more than confessions from them, for in the broadcast documentary — the ‘doctored mentality' as Warren calls it — both Warren and Kate revert to stereotypically conflictual relations of racial and generational abuse, demonstrating the strength of such narratives in our cultural imaginations. The idea of screen celebrity is appealing to the naïve Warren, and part of the language of his American-influenced generation. Enmeshed in this narrative and their lives is Kate's history as the daughter of Dell and Keith, and the family home called Dellkeith, which is so saturated with familiar cliché and conservatism we could be listening to commercial television or talkback radio. They have been estranged for some time, but there is a reconciliation anticipated between Kate and Dellkeith. This inversion of the usual terms of reconciliation returns it to the generations of white settlers who still cannot reconcile their own racism and family violence.

 

The book is divided into four separate narratives belonging to: Kate; Warren; Kate's parents, Dell and Keith; and Warren's biological mother, Flo. This apparently simple structure belies a complexity of voice, languages and conflicting positions within contemporary Australian culture and politics, and all are rendered utterly comprehensible and entangled. Warren is the small boy flown off Thursday Island apparently with meningitis and brain damage, institutionalised on the mainland in the euphemistically named Cherrymead until he is five, when all youngsters are transferred to Woodbrook — at which there is neither wood nor brook. Kate is a rebel, the bad daughter who is brought up on June Dally-Watkins' advice for young ladies in a sugarcane town in Queensland, only to run off pregnant then miscarry, and who then finds herself working at Cherrymead. Warren's status as blind, brain-damaged and black has as much potential as the destroyed foetus always referred to as stillborn, stillbirth, still dead, deadbeat, deadpregnant in Fallon's characteristic interrogation of language and narrative devices. Kate cannot bear the thought of Warren's transfer to Woodbrook to eke out an existence of sheltered workshops and drug-induced compliance, so she persuades her flatmate to marry her and files for adoption. While the paperwork is being processed for months on end, she takes Warren out on weekend visits, appalled at the disintegration of his health, psyche and capabilities. This can only be conveyed through Fallon's powerful narrative, which breaks into verse between stream-of-consciousness voices:

 

And then, the next weekend when … I went out there to see him it took them half an hour to get him ready and he was still filthy, still stank of vomit and piss and shit when they took me to this cement room just a cell really, and he was lying there on one of those metal gurney things. He was burning up with fever and they reckoned it was a recurrence of meningitis. When he saw me he reached up and took my hand …

run … run … as fast as … just run … run

 

THE SINCE(E) OF THE PAST – 1

something dead and buried

in unhallowed ground

the sinc(e) of e past

just a bundle of hair and teeth

longed inside her for years

deadpregnent

deadbeat … (17-18 )

 

There's a refrain through Kate's narrative: Run run as fast as you can you can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man, indicating a primitive flight response to danger and risk, but also a cultural response about too-hard generational abuse and black-white relations. It's intoxicating, as the reader also becomes surrounded by the contradictions and complexity of the situation.

 

Kate is angry. Warren is a shit who steals her stuff and disappears for days at a time, while she wonders if he's lying in a diabetic coma or will be the next reported death in custody. He's also in danger of being Section Nine-d, in which ‘the Department' can determine his fate and send him back to Woodbrook to do time, even though he is almost an adult. Kate is also processing what to say to Flo, Warren's Islander mother who insists on calling Kate ‘mum'. Most of Kate's narrative is structured around what stories she is going to be able to tell Flo, and what she is to leave out. And Kate feels complicit and guilty as a white foster mother:

 

I hate Warren. I hate him for showing me up to myself. My coy, closet Christianity. Hate him because he's the focus for all the abuse and filth that's been directed at me, because I chose him to hold up against that as proof of some pudding and now he's the conduit for it. Hate him because I see what that violence has turned him into. The Stolen Generation's just the most recent story in a long epic. Some Christian re-enactment. Save him. Save myself. Hate him because it hasn't worked. I'm lost. I'm part of this Crusade, this maelstrom of involution. (44)

 

While Warren's disabilities ensure he is typecast (his ‘wonkiness' appears to others as alcohol-induced), his narrative is mostly naïvely cheerful, unaware of the danger of being re-institutionalised, but also optimistically romanticising his Indigenous culture and parents. His narrative is oral, spoken into a recording device while he is flying to Brisbane, in rhythmic language akin to hip-hop and with didgeridoo accompaniment. Warren's desire to fit back into his culture as an alternative to the white urban restrictions he's experiencing as a young man are perhaps exemplified in the recitation of the song, ‘Old T.I.' A note in the acknowledgments at the back of the book cautiously advises that ‘“Old T.I.” is a traditional song from the Torres Strait which may originally have been a song sung by the Kanakas who were thrown off boats or jumped ship as they were being returned to Vanuatu. If this is the case, then T.I. probably referred to Tanna Island in Vanuatu' (166). Warren's refrain about belonging to T.I. then may be as misplaced as he feels in urban mainland white Australia. And yet without either unenviable place, there would be no Warren. T.I. operates as a place of hope for both Warren and Kate as a kind of safe haven, until we read Flo's narrative.

 

Flo speaks at the end of the book from her hospital bed, and her narrative is as much concerned with what she will tell Warren and Kate, as theirs are with her. The entire book is a lesson in how to shape narrative, and how narrative shapes knowledge and understanding. It turns out that Flo has been on the mainland for years now, and has no false illusions about the Island as a cosy haven of culture and safety. She would never go back, she says. Flo's section becomes didactic as it lists the historical episodes for which Thursday Island is renowned: the Coming of the Light, the enlistment of all the men during World War Two and the proximity of Japanese invasion, the Japanese pearl divers who taught Islander men to dive, Eddie Mabo, the racial hierarchies between the Malays, Japanese, Islanders. Despite these educating lists, Flo's voice remains compelling, as she carefully fleshes out the prejudices and jealousies that result in the baby Warren being thrown down the stairs and going still for days. The violence of this incident is indeed part of generational trauma and frustrated masculinity, but it pales in comparison with the muted-but-raging everyday violence of Kate's childhood at Dellkeith.

 

Kate's complicity in ‘fighting violence with violence' is traced back to generations of white migrants, of women who were ‘knocked up by the local priest' and exported to the ex-isles, continuing a legacy of class injustice into racial superiority. The Dellkeith narrative is perhaps the most difficult to read as it interweaves fonts and voices, mixing John-Laws-type cliché with aphorisms and sound-bites across time, place and generations of blood-letting and stillbirths. Let me give you a taste: this is the voice of Dellmay (mostly).

 

Nulla-Nulla soap – knocks dirt on the head as the old ad says. But I learnt to hold my head high and stare them down in that rotten little sugarcane town. I vowed then and there that never again — I'd work and I'd scrimp and I'd save and never would I, or my children, never have to feel what that shame felt like. Now she brings him right back into the heart of Dellkeith the-home-which-I've-worked-so-hard-to-make-a-haven. And she's not much better than the Blacks herself. My own flesh and blood. They say that's one good thing, no throwbacks, but I don't know if that applies to the Kanaka Race. They do say sometimes it skips a generation.

 

DELLKEITH CAHOOTS CHORUS

Never anything but a disappointment

we built her a BBQ

bought her a ping-pong table

we turned on the string of coloured lights

every Saturday night

of her teenage generation-gap years

only to be made the butt of her bad-girl jokes

all those beautiful pure wool ensembles

I made for her … (88-89)

 

The story is driven by a race against time: getting to Flo in hospital before she dies, getting Warren to his eighteenth birthday before he's Section Nine-d, and Kate's reconciliation with her parents which is underwritten by a tension so deeply engrained that its very foundations are riven with scars of betrayal over generations. In many ways Paydirt has a hysterical edge, in that it is urgent, heralding the return of the repressed, sung in the voices of dialects both familiar and foreign, and manifesting current social anxieties that need attending to. It is a story of the lies and hopes, stories and rhetoric, but mostly of the emotions — the anger, love, hope, naïveté, guilt, betrayal, and agony — that are so deeply entrenched in the debates around race relations in Australia. This book should unleash an ants-nest of debate, if only it were widely read, which it should be. It marks a turn in UWA Press's New Writing Series to highly accomplished, urgent and political writing whose narrative practices reflect the demand for new stories and a new language in which to speak all our violent histories and their intersections. A thoroughly compelling and courageous novel.

 

Dr Alison Bartlett is director of Women's Studies at the University of Western Australia.