Sole Sister

IN CATCHING up with all the news after a few days’ gum-scented respite from the Big Smoke, this splenetic from Marcia Langton set a few bells ringing, especially these sentiments:

For those people who persisted in identifying as Aboriginal, however ''fair skinned'' they were, to use the words of Mordecai Bromberg, life was miserable. This remains the case today, a fact of life for most Aboriginal people, and one that Andrew Bolt has perverted into a mythology based in lies and resentment.

Well, Marcia, folks who sling off at “white boys” would surely rank amongst the prime offenders. As for taking the nulla nulla to Larissa Behrendt and her fashionable footwear, not even white devil Andrew Bolt ever went quite that far.

The above video gets very interesting at about the 3:40 mark, when Marcia really does her ’nana.

Of course, now that Judge Mordy has set the bar, Marcia may be facing a legal assault by Jimmy Choo.

Larissa's Broken Record

DAVID Marr, who figures in the previous post, can leave the reader a little confused at times, but his talent for dragging facts into a fog of omission and leaving them there to perish is perhaps preferable to some other folks’ annoying little ways. With Marr it is at least possible to follow his tracks and drag lost truth back into the light of day. With Larissa Behrendt, however, the confusing trails make even the simplest attempt at verification an energetic exercise. Consider, for example, some of the Bolt plaintiff and well known tweeter’s accounts of her father, ancestors, family and “raised black” upbringing. This account of her dad, as told to the Silly’s Malcolm Knox, is a good place to begin:

That story begins with her parents. Paul Behrendt was the eighth of nine children born to a German editor and an Aboriginal woman in western NSW, Lavinia Boney, who had been taken from her family and was working in Parkes Hospital when they met.

So here is the first confusion, a relatively minor one. Was Larissa’s gran  “Lavinia”, “Lavena” or perhaps a third variant? Knox could have taken it down incorrectly or Behrendt may not have known how to spell the name of the woman she venerates as the fountainhead of her Aboriginality. Whichever party messed up, the short summary of her death certificate suggests the latter is the case, also listing the year of grandma’s death as 1942 and Lithgow as her final resting place. It is definitely the right woman, as Paul Behrendt’s 2006 obit in the National Indigenous Times notes that he was born in 1939 in Lithgow, where the cemetery register has his mum listed as having been interred under yet another spelling, “Lavina”.

Also of interest is this press report in the SMH of November 12, 1934, which names Larissa’s granddad, Henry the German editor, as one of those hospitalized after police used truncheons to break up a protest by “unemployed outside the Courthouse”.  The following month “H.W.E.. Behrendt” stood for the local council but finished last in a crowded field, out-polled by the informals.

Those who put such a stock on heritage might see Larissa’s political activism as the bequest of her white granddad. Then again, probably not. For some reason it is only aptitudes attributed to race, discernible or not, that are to be acknowledged and endorsed.Remember those H.W.E.  initials, by the way. They will figure later in this post. Now back to Malcolm Knox’s profile.

''I never knew either of them. Lavinia died after giving birth to the ninth child, my Uncle Peter, and Dad and his siblings grew up in the Burnside Home for Children. The circumstances aren't known, which was one reason I fictionalised it in Home.''

After his institutionalised childhood, Paul lived on the streets in Sydney.

Two things about this seem odd. The first, that in other accounts of her father’s childhood, Larissa’s words kinda, sorta leave the impression that he, too, was stolen.  Here it is “the circumstances aren’t known.” Or it might be an impression gained by way of inadequate punctuation, as in “my Grandmother had been removed by the Removal Policy and then my father had been in a home since he was five.”  Or this to the ABC’s Michael Cathcart, “My grandmother was taken away when she was twelve … And my father and four of his siblings were institutionalised.”

The second oddity is that other versions from other sources are available, ones that appear to have grasped “the circumstances” very well indeed. Paul Behrendt’s Austlit biography, available to non-subscribers only in this thumbnail, puts it this way:

“…Behrendt's father was unable to support the children, and the children were sent to Burnside Home in Sydney. At the age of twelve Paul Behrendt returned to live with his father and stepmother. Behrendt returned to his ancestral lands and made contact with family members…”

A gulf is opening between Larissa’s version of her father’s life and those available from other sources, many of them official. Austlit says he went home and lived with Dad. She tells Knox, he  lived on the streets, then adds a heartbreaking vignette about a father-son encounter:

''He actually ran into his father, who said, 'I'll keep your shoes clean, son.' It still gives me chills to think of those meetings,'' Behrendt says.

The records would suggest that Larissa can dry those tears and feel just a little warmer and cosier toward the white world, the one that would seem on the strength of her “unknown circumstances” and narrative ambiguities to have cast her black pater aside like so much dusky jetsam. In fact, what they suggest – and strongly suggest – is that single parent H.W.E. Behrendt was doing his very best to reclaim the boys and build a better life for them all. They also suggest that Larissa’s version does the white granddad’s memory a gross injustice.

Start with the SMH of July 9, 1948, which announced the winners of a Housing Commission lottery to determine the “big families” that would get the 100 available homes with three or more bedrooms. The report notes that all entrants in the draw had been on the list for larger digs since 1944, the year Paul and his siblings were placed in that Parramatta orphanage. Amongst the lucky winners, “H.W.E. Behrendt”, who scored a place in Strathfield. That second document is Paul Bahrendt’s service record in the RAN, which Larissa says her father joined “to get three meals a day”. If so, the wages of an “assistant elevator mechanic” must have been very poor, because that is the civilian occupation stated on his service record (click the image tab on the right).

Aspiring seaman Paul Behrendt nominates his next of kin as good ol’ H.W.E. Behrendt, the white man whose memory “chills” Larissa, and the recruits’ civvy street address is listed as 59 Park Road, Burwood, which is on the current border with Strathfield, where H.W.E. won his big family home in the Housing Commission’s lucky dip.

Also of interest is the recruit’s physical description – 5-foot-6-and-a-bit, black hair and an “olive complexion”. No mention of Paul Behrendt being an Aborigine. It is just as well the dead cannot sue, because Judge Mordy might have have to settle another case of ruffled racial sensitivities.

So what do we have here with our competing versions?

By Larissa’s account, a black man who was abandoned by his white father, quite possibly even stolen with the uncaring dad’s consent. Next, a vagrant life, followed by a Navy enlistment inspired only by the need to get a regular feed.

Against this the official record: A hard-pressed widower forced to place his kids temporarily in an orphanage, a man who then began an immediate effort to obtain a large house, and a child who found employment as a junior lift mechanic until he was 18 and old enough to join the armed forces.

Oh, and there is one other document that redounds to the maligned H.W.E.’s credit, once again a report in the SMH, this one published on December 23, 1953, which lists Henry Behrendt as having passed his accountancy exams. In addition to reclaiming his kids and securing a decent home, he also worked and studied to provide a better life for all.

In her interviews, Larissa makes no bones about her novels being thinly fictionalised accounts of what she insists is her family history. She is good at it, too, according reviewer Anita Heiss, Larissa’s pal and fellow Bolt basher, who notes “an obvious talent for the creative form”. Quite a talent indeed!

What a pity Larissa did not view family’s history from another, more sanguine perspective: a racially enlighted mixed marriage, a politically active granddad, the Depression’s privations and heartbreak of a mother’s death, followed by the anguish of a dislocated family. After that, the triumph of the human spirit as the re-united clan found security in a post-war Australia brimming with opportunity and justice for all.

But who these days would want to read a book like that?

Marr And Pa

ANYONE who has read Dark Victory, David Marr’s co-authored expose of John Howard’s inhumanity, will have realised very early on that the man whom Silly editor Peter Fray urges his paper’s reporters to emulate has a tendency to, well, place an excessive weight on some facts while skating very lightly over others. At the start of his Tampa book, for example, the reader gets many sympathetic pages about the plight of the rescued Afghan refugees – many of whom, Marr concedes, were not Afghan at all – before any mention that “a delegation” representing the ship’s unplanned human cargo invaded the bridge and threatened its captain and crew with big trouble unless the vessel was put about immediately for Christmas Island. By any definition it was a hijacking, but Marr leaps with sprightly grace over this inconvenient reflection on his heroic victims’ disregard for law, preferring to paint Howard & Co in subsequent pages as villains for refusing to reward with entry permits those who forced with threat and intimidation that change of course. While this is all ancient history, the Marr syle is well worth keeping in mind when reading his approving analysis of the damage Judge Mordy has done to free speech in the matter of Andrew Bolt.

Consider these paragraphs:

Here's Bolt on Larissa Behrendt: "She's won many positions and honours as an Aborigine, including the David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writers, and is often interviewed demanding special rights for 'my people'. But which people are 'yours', exactly, mein liebchen? And isn't it bizarre to demand laws to give you more rights as a white Aborigine than your own white dad?"
Among the problems here are that Behrendt's father was a black Australian, not a white German. And like all the others, Behrendt was raised black. Judge Bromberg wrote: "She denies Mr Bolt's suggestion that she chose to be Aboriginal and says that she never had a choice, she has always been Aboriginal and has 'identified as Aboriginal since before I can remember'." Bolt didn't contest her evidence.

There is no denying Bolt did get it wrong. Behrendt’s father, by his daughter’s account, came to regard himself as an Aborigine. Chalk one up for David Marr, who curiously neglects to set the record straight. Had he done so, Bolt’s error would not only have struck Silly readers as negligible, the truth would also have bolstered  Bolt’s overall argument that an individual who chooses a single, minor strand of genetic pedrigee above all the rest is making a statement not on breeding but of politics and cultural preference.

The truth is that it was Behrendt’s grandfather who was white and German. It was her grandmother who was of mixed race. Both are an equal number of generations removed from the woman who famously tweeted that she preferred bestiality to Bess Price, so while Bolt is wrong in the particular, his overall point stands.

There is another thing about those paragraphs that is worth noting, the line where Marr says Larissa “was raised black.” Her version, as told to Marr’s colleague Malcolm Knox, does nothing to explain what “raised black” actually means. Indeed,  for those not quite so exquisitely attuned to the mores of racial identity and self-identity, it is a bafflement:

It was, ironically, [her white mother] Raema who instilled a sense of Aboriginal identity in Larissa and her brother. ''When Jason got picked on because of his colour, Dad had said … 'My son is as white as you are.' It was Mum who allowed us never to feel embarrassed about our Aboriginality. She has a great heart and social conscience. But it came at a cost to her, because she couldn't feel part of it herself. So she dropped us off at rallies and stayed outside.''

How odd that Marr did not share these facts with his readers, did not plumb the Silly’s archives for a little context and background. Perhaps he was distracted at his keyboard by the sound of champagne corks popping or, just as likely, more sweet nothings from the lips of a doting editor.

Silence Is Golden

ONE of parenthood’s joys (there are not many) is the satisfaction to be drawn from knowing when to remain absolutely silent. One might, for example, look up from a bedtime storybook at just that the precise instant when the apple-cheeked fruit of your loins falls at long last into merciful slumber. Hush, that hard-wired wisdom whispers, don’t make a sound or your precious cherub will stir, scream and be possessed by Satan once more, for it is only Old Scratch who could sentence an adult to nightly readings over the course of interminable months of Tiger Tim (who belonged to Mr Bingo’s circus) and the mystery of Clarence Camel’s missing hump. 

If an ill-advised word were to set Junior stirring as you slip from the room all hope of a long glass and, if you have behaved yourself, a short smooch with your progeny’s co-producer, will be banished by a renewed bout of fury and maniacal screeching.

As the young ’uns grow and explore their little worlds, silence will also best suit those moments when naughtiness is in progress. Yes, the Black Dog cannot possibly think kindly of having had a crayon stuffed up its sniffable end, but it is a placid creature and unlikely to make too much of a fuss. So why should you? The lad’s fascination with canine hindquarters will fade, and to rebuke him just now could be to sow the seeds of mental infirmity in later life. The scars, the shame, the remembered sounds of a father’s fury – they might in years to come propel an adolescent into the arms of leftist causes, for it is the unresolved conflict with authority figures that appears to inspire so many pro-carbon tax chanters, G20 protesters, and commenters at the Phage and ABC websites. Let the Black Dog work it out, so to speak, and utter not a word of rebuke in the meantime. When relatives are bitten, aunts refused a kiss, teachers kicked or food flung, emit not a peep. It can only make things worse.

This was the philosophy followed for the most part at the Billabong, certainly when Mrs Bunyip was out shopping and the Professor was handling parental duties, and it is good to see that others are now embracing the wisdom of saying nothing when little darlings get out of line. Case in point, of course, is the Fairfax press, where editors of the old, stern school might have been moved to inform their readers of Larissa Behrendt’s dark words about another woman of a good deal more colour. Those days are gone, as are all the dinosaur news editors and their outmoded notions of what constitutes a matter of public interest. Unable to grasp the nuanced, post-modern sensibility that these days determines what news is fit to print, the old guard was disappeared. By their reckoning a story was worth reporting if people were likely to talk about it. Today, it is those very stories, the ones that might set people to chattering, which need to be spiked, especially if the subject of that talk happens to be a very special and favourite person.  

So far, as Keith Windschuttle points out, not a word about the Behrendt tweet has passed into print at The Phage, The Silly, The Finis or online. Some may see this as sniveling cowardice with a dash of shame, as the Fairfax papers have been amongst the high-flying Ms Behrendt’s most ardent supporters, admirers and publicists. Reporting her bitchy eruption could only prompt public speculation that all the prior ink and adulation were squandered on an arrogant, intolerant and undeserving wretch.

Worse might be the consequences for Behrendt, whose profile the Fairfax papers have so assiduously polished. With a Labor-appointed judge about to rule on Behrendt’s gripe with Andrew Bolt exercise of free speech, the knowledge that she is herself quite capable of giving offence might colour his decision. And the Behrendt fan club couldn’t have that, not at all! As The Age reported only weeks ago, it is Bolt who is so dangerous, not the lovely Larissa, who makes such a fine lunch companion and recipient of literary awards.

The Fairfax papers’ quite sensible decision to wish away the matter, to excise from their version of the public record all mention of a favourite’s little sin, cannot be criticised. Having trimmed and pruned their readerships to that smallish slice of the population which shares the editors’ and writers’ enlightened perspectives on all things, an achievement commemorated daily in the echo chamber of the Silly and Phage letters pages, many of those remaining subscribers would have found even the merest mention of Behrendt’s comment deeply upsetting – moreso, one suspects, than the comment itself. Heavens, they might have refrained from picking up their gratis copies of the Phage and Silly at the local fair-trade gymnasium, organic coffee shop and sugarless bakery or bicycle emporium.

Traditionalists like Windschuttle can carp about bias and censorship, but Fairfax understands its remaining audience, which it can thank for being where it is today.

As for Behrendt, whose reputation Fairfax must hope its silence has saved, she will continue to be available for honors, grants, appointments and, of course, lunch with her many in-house admirers.