I never made the mistake when I was young to think things like the government of Australia, or the government of Darwin, or the government of the Northern Territory, was anything to be confused with the real Australia. The real Australia is full of dreaming. Places are alive, mate, and they’ll tell you their stories, if you can shut up and listen. So many Balanda don’t know how to listen. They’re deaf, and blind, and they think stupidly that it’s this deafness and blindness that’s what makes real sight and real hearing. Only when they’re really, really drunk, maybe, can they sometimes learn to listen, if they’re out in the bush alone, or on top of a high hill and watch the sunset, or the sunrise. But that’s the time white fellas everywhere laugh and roll to sleep, to forget about everything the next day but their hangovers. Nasty stuff, the Balanda medicine.
No, I never confused the government of Australia with the real Australia, and I find it queer that the people in America confuse their government with their country. I think it’s very queer that anybody does that, no matter where they’re from, but that’s just one of those queer things that nobody understands. There’s a lot of those things in this life. But, like my Granddad said, often and often he said it, the greatest knowledge is to know you know nothing. Some philosopher said that also, I believe. I’ve heard men in suits and ties talk about him, but they never really believe what they learn in all those books they read. Leastwise they never get any the wiser for it. Yeah, some philosopher said it, too, but I think my Granddad said it first.
Despite not knowing anything, my Granddad was called a “clever man” by the other Aboriginal people in that camp where I was left, foundling that I was, in a basket on his doorstep. That is, he could talk to the spirits. Dreamtime spirits, you know. He’d been taken up as a lad by those spirits, and brought into their world, and they gave him knowledge that was far more important than any book-learned variety the white fellas in their universities brag about knowing. He tried to teach me to talk to those spirits, too, but they took me away before he could teach me.

They took me away. They took all the little children away from the Aboriginal people in my village. Yeah, one day they just barged into camp and took us, to be raised in their schools, and learn their ways. They came without warning, and they left as fast as they came. I remember crying and reaching for my Granddad, but he was stony, like a statue, not looking at me, just looking to the horizon as I was carried off. I was angry at him for years, thinking on that. But those white bastards had guns, and they had numbers, too. I know now that there was nothing the old man could have done, and I’ve long since forgiven him. Forgiven him? It’s not really my right to demand an apology, and I know he could never have offered one. I remember how he kept staring at the horizon, as if waiting for death to come from the west, to carry him and the other old ones away. He did not cry. I was mad at this for a while, too. But I understand now that he must have been weeping horribly inside, but thought he should be strong for us kids. Either that, or he just didn’t want to give those Balanda bastards the satisfaction.
They gave us all new names, my brothers and sisters and me, and taught us to forget our old names. They told us they were “rescuing” us, redeeming us from the slavery of ignorance and savagery. They promised we’d soon like it in our new homes, soon like our new names. That’s when I learned I was called Sydney Darwin, and almost forgot the Wallaby my Granddad called me as a baby.

My brothers and sisters, see, they were all black, so they took them to the schools in Darwin, to be “educated”—that is, to be made to hate themselves. As I was a white child, and not a black one, I was given to a family called the Whitfields, to be raised “among my own kind.” I couldn’t have been seven years old yet, which the churches they took me to said was the “age of reason.” I never did quite figure out what they meant by that, and I don’t really want to know, but all I knew was they could beat me without any guilt, because I was finally capable of “sin.” I guess I’d always been in sin, never baptized or any of that rot, not until I was seven or so and stayed with the Whitfields. That’s what they told me in Sunday school class, that God in His Mercy had given me Original Sin, and that I could be cleansed of it, provided I not enjoy myself ever, and feel generally rotten about any thought, desire, or feeling I ever had. And I did just that for a time. Till I fell in love.