I'm dreaming of a black Christmas – the only real Christmas I have known
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Version 0 of 1. I’m dreaming of a black Christmas. That is the only real Christmas I have known - a Christmas of family and noise and tar-melting heat and flies and burrs in my feet and guitars and singing and food and sickly sweet fizzy drinks. As little as we had, black families spared nothing at Christmas. It is not the presents I remember, not that there weren’t any – a book of Greek myths, a pair of boxing gloves, one year a bike – it is just that it wasn’t about presents. It was about my grandmother’s house in Griffith – a tiny two-roomed tin and fibro place that magically seemed to swell to hold the dozens who would turn up. Somehow we would even all manage to find a place to sleep after we had spent a night swatting mosquitoes and huddled around her small black and white television. Her house was at the back of a big block, big enough to stretch out and play cricket on. We couldn’t afford a bat so we had fashioned one from a block of wood, we carved out a handle and smoothed down the front. We used a tennis ball, usually one that had gone astray from the local courts. If my uncle Bob came he’d have the full kit – a real bat, stumps with bails and a red kookaburra six-stitch ball. Uncle Bob brought the fun. We would wait all day for him to arrive, driving my parents crazy with the endless question: “when’s uncle Bobby coming?” Related: Indigenous Christmas: Mark Olive's recipe for a traditional Australian feast He is my dad’s sister – Lorna’s - husband. His people come from the south coast – a mission called Wreck Bay. He wasn’t like us inland blacks, he was salt water and we were river people. One year we went to his country for Christmas, sleeping in tents at the back of his father’s house. He took us fishing out on the rocks; we would cook what we caught right there seasoned with salt scraped from the rocks. Uncle Bob was a great sportsman – a cricketer, footballer, tennis player – he would humour us for a few overs before rattling our stumps with an in-swinger. He could tell you in advance with which ball he would bowl you out. Uncle Bob and Aunty Lorna had three children the same ages as me and my brother and sister. The eldest Rob loved his cricket just like his dad. Hated getting out though, he would toss the bat or just refuse to leave the crease. Heaven help you if you were batting against his bowling. He was either at your feet or your throat. He would come in off a long run and drive the ball into your shins or leave you spread-eagled on the ground as you ducked one of his missiles at your head. He was not simply my cousin, Rob – he was my brother. This is our way – cousins are brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts are like mothers and fathers. There was uncle Herb and Aunty Kay, Uncle Frank and Aunty Rose, Aunty Flo, Aunty Elaine, Uncle Cecil and Aunty Laurel. Then there were my great aunts and uncles – Uncle Slab (Reuben) Aunty Doreen, Aunty Dulcie, Uncle Manty and all of their kids and their kids. The families were spread from the mission to the town. My great-grandmother lived down the mission – the Three Ways we called it. There was a church there and my uncle Cecil would preach from the pulpit. This was what helped hold us together: family and faith. There is much written about the impact of Christianity on Indigenous people – how it was an instrument of “civilisation”, how God’s word was used to desecrate and denigrate our own culture. Some of that undoubtedly is true. But there is another story here. Related: We are trapped in the imaginations of white Australians | Stan Grant We syncretised Christian teachings with our own beliefs; it wasn’t hard. My people also believe in a divine single creator – Baiame. He made the land and rivers and gave the people our law. The idea of a God and commandments and stories of genesis and the tribes of Israel and exodus seemed very familiar. Sin and salvation was a common theme. The Aboriginal Inland Mission published a magazine – Today – distributed among our communities. It would carry testimony of Aborigines who had converted and how it had changed their lives. There were cartoons depicting a fallen man (always seemed to be a man) who had succumbed to drink or violence but was now saved by the cross. But there was something else at work here: the idea of Christianity as a shield against injustice and suffering. The struggle on earth would be rewarded with eternal life in paradise. This was not unlike the experience of oppressed peoples elsewhere. Historian Eugene Genovese in his landmark work Roll Jordan Roll has written about the growth of religion among black slaves in America. “As the whites of the Old South tried to shape the religion, he wrote…the slaves fought to shape it themselves.” He wrote how the slaves turned religion against the slaveholder: “No matter how obedient – how uncle Tomish – Christianity made a slave, it also drove deep into his soul an awareness of the moral limits of submission, for it places a master above his own master and thereby dissolved the moral and ideological ground on which the principle of human lordship must rest.” Put simply, in the eyes of God it made the slave the equal of his so-called master. This was a religion of suffering and shame, of sin and redemption. This was Jesus on the cross asking God why he had been forsaken. This was a religion that would fortify a people: “Upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18) Related: Stan Grant: 'The Australian media is incredibly offensive to Indigenous people' – Token podcast These were the sermons of my uncle Cecil, all fire and brimstone. I must admit that as a young boy I was terrified and usually left church with a pounding headache and feeling nauseous. But I loved afterward; the adults all gathered around, the kids chasing one another or kicking footballs; sandwiches and cordial. Like black America, Christianity also helped scaffold a hierarchy that replaced old traditional tribal structures. My Uncle Bob and Uncle Frank were also preachers and my grandfather had been what was quaintly - and now patronisingly – called a “native worker”. These were not men of submission – these were proud men working hard for their people. As black preachers in the United States emerged at the forefront of the civil rights movement, Aboriginal Christians like William Cooper, Doug Nichols, or Bill Ferguson were vocal in the early protest actions here. They refused to believe they were not equal and demanded citizenship. Of course – again as in the US – those protests hardened into a more militant action. By the 1970s with the tent embassy, the autobiography of Malcolm X had replaced the bible in the hands of many. My family was there too, Uncle Bob’s nephew Bob McLeod even held up the Department of Aboriginal Affairs with a gun as the Queen was opening parliament. Where politics and strategy may have divided us, family has never strained. This is what Christmas was about – our black Christmas – rooted in family and bound in tradition, our traditional culture and linked with a Christianity forged in missions that were designed to ease our eventual extinction. The Christmas of my long ago childhood remains just a dream now. My children need never make their own cricket bats; their world is bigger than my grandmother’s front yard. The mission church was burned to the ground when I was in my teens. My great-grandmother is gone as is her daughter – my grandmother and my great uncles and aunts. My cousin – my brother – Rob is gone. He passed away nearly ten years ago. Nothing tastes as sweet now as it did then. My memories of those times are memories of our survival. Like other Aussie Christmases ours too was about cricket and sun and food – even if our ham came from a can. We took all of that and we made it our own – your traditions; your religion. Christmas reminds me of just how close, how alike we are, we Australians – and just how different. |