2006 Launch of Jackson's Track Revisited - Institute for Public History
Launch of Carolyn Landon, Jackson's Track Revisited: History Remembrance and Reconciliation, Monash ePress 2006
Readings Bookshop 11 August 2006
Not many authors revisit the subject of their
books. Like Arabs departing an oasis, as soon as they have emptied
the springs of inspiration they fold their tents and move on. Writing
a book absorbs so much emotional energy, and often takes so long,
that as soon as it is finished the author succumbs to a kind of post-partum
depression. Soon you notice the typos that you inexplicably missed,
helpful readers point out factual errors and direct you to sources
you didn't even know existed. You ought to feel grateful, I suppose,
but once the book is out and beyond recall, there's little you
can do. I usually thank my correspondents, promise to correct the
book in the unlikely event of a revised edition, and hurry on to
the next project.
In 1999 when Daryl Tonkin and his collaborator Carolyn Landon published Jackson's Track, the moving narrative of Daryl's life as a whitefella living among the Kurnai people of South Gippsland, their book not only deservedly became a best-seller but its publication created powerful reverberations, both nationally and locally. It opened a window into the rich heritage of people who had often been invisible to their fellow Victorians, even to their fellow Gippslanders. I knew a little in general terms about the history of Victoria's Aboriginal people, and I recognised some of its best known names - Doug Nichols and Lionel Rose, for example- but until I read Jackson's Track I had little understanding of how the story of Victoria's Aboriginal communities was interwoven with the history of specific localities and of how enduring were the social and spiritual links among them.
Jackson's Track probably surprised many readers in its rich, detailed evocation of the community of people, blackfellas and white fellas, who cut (or as Daryl would have said 'falled') timber in the forest country near Drouin in the 1940s and 50s. The devotion of Daryl to his partner, the Kurnai woman Euphemia ('Euphie') Mullett stands at the centre of his elegy for a place that Daryl remembers as a kind of paradise of freedom and independence.
Seasons came and went... We always had a mixed workforce and there were never any rows among us...we were all bushmen who had a respect for the bush...All of us who lived and worked here looked after each other, and did the decent thing by each other. Everything about life on the Track was good.
But by the time Daryl told his story, that paradise had been lost. In the final chapters of the book, Daryl recounted the story of the relocation and dispersion of the community. The Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board, acting with the cooperation of municipal authorities and local people Daryl characterises as ''Christian do-gooders', carried out a policy of 'forced' assimilation. Instead of the independence and freedom of the Track, the Kurnai people were forced into a demoralising life of dependence on state welfare. The book ends with Daryl's graphic eye-witness account of the arrival of unnamed men with trucks and bulldozers who proceeded to demolish the huts of the timber-workers, set fire to the rubble and load the distressed families on the back of the trucks for transportation to their new homes. It is a poignant and shocking scene that dramatises the paternalism and unintended cruelty that undergirt a policy ostensibly dedicated to humanity and social uplift.
This is how the story might have ended but for the quietly devastating intervention of one of the readers of Jackson's Track. Janet Cowden was the daughter of one of those Christian do-gooders who Daryl presents as the villainous destroyers of his community. One evening in 2002, towards the end of a local reconciliation committee meeting in Warragul, Janet came forward to introduce herself to Carolyn and produced a box of documents. They were the records, as it turned out, of a local branch of the Aborigines' Advancement League in which her father had been a key member. It was a surprise package in more ways than one. The Aborigines Advancement League, the leading local advocate of Aboriginal rights, had hardly figured in Daryl's narrative and it scarcely seemed plausible that its members included people who, Daryl suggested, 'had wrecked the blackfellas lives'. This was not one of those minor gaps in the story that could be deflected with a promise of corrections to a new edition. From the beginning, Carolyn realised that Janet's Cowden's box of documents opened up a whole new vantage point on the story of Jackson's Track.
In her new book, Carolyn recounts her journey back along the Track. She describes her encounters, not only with the Christian do-gooders-who, she discovered, were actually defenders of the Jackson's Track community before they were reluctantly caught up in its destruction-but also with the Kurnai people, who, ironically, often appeared to regret its passing less than Daryl, the whitefella who had come to live among them. There were many other surprises along the way, not least the fact that Daryl, alone of all the people of that community, recalled that shocking scene of bulldozers, fires and forcible dispersion. She was left with many questions: Did others observe the scene, but repress the memory? Or did they perhaps consider the arrival of the bulldozers too unimportant to remember once the community had begun to relocate? Was Daryl's narrative of demolition and dispersion a way of dramatising events that were actually more complex and drawn-out?
Revisiting Jackson's Track required the personal courage and integrity of many people: Janet Cowden who agreed to give Carolyn access to her family papers and memories saying, 'My family is willing to be exposed in that way'; Alwyn Jensen, still confident in the rectitude of his actions, but willing to be interviewed several times until his story was fully told; Aunty Gina Rose, elder of the Kurnai people, whose remarkable trust and candour enables us to see that not all the people of Jackson's Track saw themselves as victims of its end; and, finally, Carolyn's friend Pauline Mullett, whose request to help Daryl tell his story first drew Carolyn down the track and whose moving testimony about her connection to the land of her ancestors brings the book to an end. '
I am the messenger, I carry the message stick', Pauline says. So, in another sense, does Carolyn. In Jackson's Track, it was Daryl's message that she carried. Now in this new book she offers her own message as well as the testimony of the others who have entrusted their memories and documents to her. Jackson's Track Revisited is a marvellous testimony to the trust that Carolyn developed and still enjoys with all the people who shared this story. We hear a lot from Canberra about 'practical reconciliation', a phrase its advocates often use to signify a focus on present-day social and economic issues rather than the legacies of the past. This book demonstrates that practical reconciliation often involves an honest and truthful reckoning with personal and local histories that continue to frame our understandings of the present.
When I first read Jackson's Track Carolyn was one of my students, in a course entitled 'Reading and Writing Australian History'. We read books by Australian historians and responded, not just by writing essays, but by experimenting with different forms of writing and discussing our efforts in regular writers' workshops. I encouraged my students to think more deeply about the relationship between testimony and narrative, memory and history. As I read her first efforts, I realised that Carolyn was already a talented writer with her own confident voice. She had joined the class, she said, because she wanted to know more about historical theory and method. There was part of me, I admit, that would have discouraged her from this enterprise. Would her narrative freedom be fettered by too much theory? I wondered. I should not have worried. In Jackson's Track Revisited, Carolyn's draws on her wide reading on Aboriginal history, memory, biography and history to inform, but not overwhelm, a story that remains an intensely personal one, both for the writer and her subjects. I think many readers will come away enriched by the unflinching honesty and imaginative sympathy it reveals. I believe the book is likely to take an honoured place, not just in the history of Aboriginal Victoria, but also in wider debates on history and memory.
Every book launch is a landmark in the life of the author. For you, Carolyn, and for those who have helped you write the book, I hope that it brings pleasure and satisfaction and that its publication is a great success. I would like to think that after the reviews and radio interviews that you might move on to write more books. However, if anyone happens to have brought along another box of papers for Carolyn's inspection, may I suggest that you perhaps allow her to savour the pleasure of this moment of arrival before you launch her on her next journey?
Graeme Davison
Photos from the Launch of Jackson's Track Revisited, 11th August, 2006
 Wurrundjurri Elder Annette Xiberras giving a 'Welcome to country' adddress |
 Professor Barbara Caine |
 Professor Graeme Davison |  Author Carolyn Landon |