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Matthew Ryan on the treatment of non-Indigenous belonging.

Article Excerpt
The Germans have a word for it: unheimlich. The familiar is made unfamiliar, uncanny: the unhomely home. In the mid-twentieth century, Judith Wright spoke an unacknowledged truth of unheimlich Australia, which is now being re-thought, re-represented and, perhaps, beginning to be worked-through in some recent Australian films and writing.

Wright's 1946 poem, 'Nigger's Leap, New England', describes an area of land, the scene of a massacre long past. She pictures people driven over a cliff and then their silence, 'waiting for the flies'. She goes on to the way this violent dispossession is somehow remembered in the land itself and what this means for non-Indigenous Australians' relations to both Indigenous people and to the land they have tried to make their home:

Now must we measure our days by nights, our tropics by their poles, love by its end and all our speech by silence. See in these gulfs, how small the light of home.

Here belonging is shaped by its negative. Oppositions, silences, gulfs and darkness: the land is made alien by a willful forgetting, an absence-ridden remembering. 'Our' home made unhomely.

The consequences of this unsettled settlement have, of course, been dire for Indigenous people in Australia. Aside from active genocidal displacement, there has been the condemnation to invisibility or the more passive wait for an always expected, but fortunately never arriving, disappearance. Then the phase in which we still find ourselves, the long years of...

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