JF: They turn red and start sweating …
JL: They become dithery, it makes them physically nervous, to say the C word or the F word.
JF: [laughs]
JL: That’s just a really basic example, but there’s a bit of that kind of thing as well. There are high rates of intermarriage between – in that part of the world, where I come from – of Irish-Aboriginal inter-marriage. So, there’s that aspect of combined civil disobedience.
JF: Intermarriage as a form of civil disobedience?
JL: In some situations, but no, I mean the civil disobedience of being able to disarm people by knowing what will upset them without touching them. Like the swearing.
JF: And what about the role of rage in your writing?
JL: Ah, yes, rage. That’s a good question. A long time ago I was reading a Canadian scholar called Marie Batiste, who’s an educational scholar, and she was reinterpreting this Hawai’ian thinker who has an English name, called Hayden Burges – his Hawai’ian name is Poca Lunai (aka Hayden Burgess, Hawaii) – he said there’s five steps in a de-colonial process. One of them is shame. I think the third is anger and grief. So, the first stage is kind of like, survival, and the second is working within oppression, and the next one is anger and grief. Which is a productive stage within a decolonial process, but both these scholars in terms of educational cultural context are warning that that’s a phase that people need to pass through and express legitimate rage and anger and grief through appropriate channels. Not by taking your anger and rage and grief out on other people, because that makes an oppression cycle, but putting it into writing, art, a job, things like that. Then there’s two other steps, the last one being reclamation or self-determination. But you can’t get to the fifth phase without going through the others.
JF: Speaking of rage and humour, I was at a talk on the weekend where Jessica Hutchison and Robbie Thorpe were on the panel, and Robbie was talking about art and artists and saying, ‘I’d love to be an artist, I’d love to have the privilege and freedom of expressing myself, but for Aboriginal people like me, survival is an art’. And he was saying, ‘I’m not impressed by this civilisation, but I don’t want the statues and the monuments destroyed. Don’t destroy them: give them to me! And I’ll put them in a theme park in the bush’. [Laughs].
JL: I don’t want them destroyed either! I want them rearranged and reframed through a First Nations lens and discourse.
JF: Yes, rearranged. With humour and rage in tow.
JL: Yes, and with citations. They’re sort of put there like history, but – I was saying this on the panel the other day – history is not what happens, it’s not the past. History is just a method. A method of recording what becomes labelled as the past. It’s very selective in what it magnifies and what it buries as well. History is not really the past. I don’t want those things destroyed either! Because people will forget, and forgetting, the destruction of things that need to be talked about, is a problem. I like that idea, the theme park. Even leaving them where they are and …
JF: Reframing them.
JL: People could reframe them, and people could also embellish them. Like the red paint that gets put on Governor Macquarie all the time.
JF: Well. It’s been a real honor to get this time with you and to be able to pick your brain.
JL: Thanks for your perseverance in making it happen.
