First things first. Jess White has been a member of this blogging community forever. She was an editor on Australian Women Writers Challenge, which is now my other gig; she has often contributed to projects I’ve been running, both here and at AWWC; we (infrequently) exchange emails; and if the fates would stop intervening we would by now have been in the same city long enough to at least have had a coffee together. So not ‘JW’, or ‘White’. Jess.
I reviewed Jess’s first novel, A Curious Intimacy, (2007) some time ago, an accomplished work of historical fiction set in WA’s south west, where she has long been researching the life of Georgiana Molloy (1805-1843). When I wrote to tell her I was reading Entitlement, she said a) she’s mostly forgotten what she wrote; and b) she would be back in WA soon to finish her Molloy project.
Entitlement (2012) was Jess’s second, though in subject matter at least it feels much more like a first, in that she draws on her own upbringing on a family grazing property in the northern part of New England, NSW (I think) to build her novel around a thirtyish professional woman, single, a doctor working in Sydney, estranged from her parents, who is called home because she is a partner in the trust that owns the property and her father and his brother wish to sell up and retire.
The issues that come up for Cate are: her much loved brother Eliot, a promising musician who was persuaded to stay on the farm and help their father, has been missing for years, and Cate won’t believe he might be dead;
her father’s (irrational) antagonism towards her;
an Aboriginal man, Mellor, a worker for her father, and with whose daughter, Rachel, Cate and Eliot grew up, is living with his aunts, in shacks on a remote corner of the property, and they will be displaced when the property is sold.
[‘Mellor’ has been itching away for weeks, but now I’ve got it. Mellors was the lucky gardener in Lady Chatterly’s Lover].
There is a further stream, light relief maybe. In Sydney Cate has met Finch, a patient, who is from her home town. He follows her back there, ostensibly to stay with his aunt, and so bobs in and out of the main story.
Cate is obdurate about not selling the property while there is any chance of Eliot returning, despite her father’s obvious physical incapacity to continue. There’s other stuff, about Cate as a teenager turning away from Eliot to have a relationship with his bad boy best friend, who may shed some light on his disappearance if only he weren’t over West driving trucks. But the issue that gradually comes to the fore is Aboriginal dispossession.
When Mellor spoke, his tone was cold, ‘You know anything about Native Title?’
Cate surprised, shook her head. ‘Not much. Bits and pieces I’ve read in the paper.’
Do you know that game, “Paper, Scissors, Rock”?’
‘Yeah Eliot and I used to play it on the bus going to school. With Rachel.’
‘That’s the game the government plays with us. Paper covers rock. That’s what all this Native Title is. We need mountains of paper to prove an unbroken connection to our land. Your father’s country.’ He sounded mocking. ‘That’s how whitefellas see their country. Something to be owned, to be passed down through sons, or sold off to a mine. But how can you sell something alive? Something that breathes, speaks and takes care of you?’
Mellor in this novel stands in for the Aboriginal people pushed off the land and on to the margins of society by white settlers. Jess firmly takes the Aboriginal side, that there must be restitution, and she gives these views not just to Cate, but to Mellor. Mellor’s one job in this novel is to carry the Indigenous point of view.
My first thought was that’s brave – in the Yes, Minister sense – and also maybe a step too far.
We have argued in the past that authors like Catherine Martin, The Incredible Journey (1923), Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land (1941) and even Thomas Keneally, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) were right to present Aboriginal viewpoints in their works, as there were no Indigenous authors in their times, we had no other way of seeing them.
I thought about the year of publication, 2012, and my second thought was that this was relatively early in the current wave of Indigenous Lit. and that carried me through reading the book and up to today, writing it up.
My current (third or fourth) thought is that Aboriginal activists had begun to speak up – well forever really – but let’s say from Charles Perkins and the 1965 Freedom Rides. Then Indigenous writing began impinging on the white consciousness with Jack Davis’s plays and poetry in the 1980s, Sally Morgan, My Place (1987) and Ruby Langford Ginibi, Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988). I can’t establish what the first novel was of the current generation of writers but by 2012 Kim Scott had published four including the wonderful Benang (1999).
So: I agree entirely with Jess, that Aboriginal people have a very deep connection with the land, and (extrapolating) white politicians, on both sides, from Keating and Howard on, have tied themselves in knots since Mabo in 1992, coming up with ways to minimise Native Title, to minimise this connection being put into practice.
That we need to share the land we stole (my own starting point is that all Crown land should revert to Aboriginal ownership, and if we want/need to use some of it then we had better start negotiating).
And I sort of agree that Jess needed to put the Indigenous and the white settler positions side by side in this novel, which she does, in order to debate them, and to put her view, that it’s time we whites made practical steps towards restitution
But: My fallback position is always that our first priority should be paying attention to Black views being put by Black writers.
To get back to the story. It’s well written, with lots of interesting characters and situations and a striking ending. I’m not sure about print on paper, but it’s readily available as an ebook, which is how I read it.
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Jessica White, Entitlement, Viking, Melbourne, 2012. 296pp