Cricket XXXX Cricket (12 page)

I was not the only person to receive a medal that week. Australian captain Allan Border was awarded some gong on the first day of the Test Match for services to sport, and took his rightful place amongst the Aussie pantheon of sporting deities. But the gods have a way of dealing cruel blows; Allan Border, national hero on the first day of the Test, had been metamorphosed to Allan Border call-me-Grumpy by the fifth.

It is unfortunate that I cannot give you an eyewitness account of Border’s allegedly surly behaviour to the press, nor of his refusal to participate in the post-match hanging of heads and wringing of hands. There are apparently certain well-worn, penitential rights defeated captains are supposed to observe, certain acts of contrition they are obliged to perform, certain major confessions of error they are expected to make, and certain very firm purposes of amendment they are encouraged to promise if they are to have the slightest hope of media forgiveness. Poor Border. He apparently had not heard the rules, or if he had, was not inclined to play by them that particular day. I for one would certainly not blame him. People grovelling all over you one day, and trying simultaneously to stab you in the back and bonk you on the head the next, it is a wonder the man has not been consigned to some dark room with very soft walls, to go absolutely schizoid. All this, however, is mere hearsay. Despite my media
passe-partout
medal, despite press passes and accreditations a-go-go, despite the vicarious clout of the entire Murdoch empire, there was no way I was going to be allowed into that post-Test match press conference.

It would, at this juncture, be facile to rant about these backward Queensland gatemen in particular, and about sex discrimination and male chauvinist pigs in general. (Sad to relate, however, the same thing is equally likely to occur at that apogee of enlightened NW8 civilisation, Lord’s.)

‘You cannot come in here,’ commanded the withered, leathery, petrified geriatric old gargoyle guarding the picket gate with Cerberus-like ferocity. I have met these mini-Hitlers all over the world, and am convinced that obnoxious stupidity must have become a basic requirement for employment in cricket grounds everywhere. I showed him my multifarious media credentials; Peter Roebuck argued that I was his wife; other members of the press corps awarded Roebuck the George Medal for irresponsible courage; the gateman’s obdurate ‘nyet’ would not alter. ‘You cannot come in here,’ he repeated mantra-fashion; ‘you are a lady.’

There were at least a dozen British pressmen prepared to jump to my defence, and to testify to the mendacity of such a wild allegation. By this stage, however, Mike Gatting was making his stirring victory speech, proclaiming how ‘nice’ it was, indeed, how ‘always nice’ it was to win a Test match. I decided to husband my aggression for a worthier cause and moment. This shrivelled, apoplectic creature was no worthy adversary, and that triumphant day I did not feel inclined to wage the war of equal employment opportunities on behalf of the entire oppressed female population of Queensland.

As a codicil to this episode, however, there is one general point that crosses my mind. The worst discrimination against most women is generally meted out by both men and women who are socially, intellectually or educationally inferior to the women they discriminate against. The worst instances of discrimination, all women know, are perpetrated by the likes of gatemen, waitresses, barmaids and a certain breed of air hostess. Phil says I am super-sensitive, but it is all right talking about other folk being super-sensitive when you have never been subjected to the phenomenon yourself.

My pet aversion is the sort of air hostess who wheels the newspaper trolley down the Business Class section . . . ‘Paper, sir?
The Times .
. .
Financial Times . .
.?’ she smirks to all those dirty old men trying surreptitiously to get on with their
Playboy
magazines.

In the meantime you, one of the relatively few women in business class, look up furtively from your Marcel Proust, trying hopefully to catch her glassy, over-made-up, male-oriented eye, and are tacitly made to understand, by a sequence of special air hostess body language, that you are not deemed to be capable of so much as reading the in-flight sick bag. Some of my worst tantrums have been precipitated by such behaviour, and I can see the well-coddled male contingent thinking, ‘What a bitch . . . dear little air hostess has so much to do . . .’

Of course, when travelling with an England cricket team, or indeed I suppose with any group of relatively young and athletic sportsmen, a woman would have to go into cardiac arrest before attracting the attention of the average air hostess. Our domestic flight carrier, in terms of administration, baggage handling and the general organisation, has been superb. During the in-flight, however, I saw some of the most blatantly offhand service ever witnessed, and I have flown Aeroflot. An entire section of the plane waited patiently for its plastic lunch, and – in my case – not quite so patiently for its in-flight alcoholic drink, while one hostie regaled two not entirely disinterested members of the team with her contact addresses and telephone numbers for the next two months. Meanwhile an old lady with a stick hobbled down the aisle, unassisted, to the WC. Phil had to restrain me from lodging a complaint with the Purser. The England team was getting its flights heavily subsidised, if not more or less gratis. Frankly, I did not care. I was not, and neither was the handicapped old girl. All the more reason for us to be given if not priority, then at least equal, treatment.

‘Come off it, Frances,’ remonstrated Phil. ‘If a team of men is on a plane, it is totally understandable that the cabin crew will make a beeline for them.’

Understandable, it may well be. Acceptable, never.

Discrimination in its minor manifestations can be irritating. In its worst excesses it may be a moral canker that society would prefer to camouflage and forget. Perhaps that is why the West is perversely comfortable with the South African situation. What on earth would we do without apartheid? It is so much easier to pontificate righteously about the motes in other nations’ eyes when the alternative is to contemplate the beams in our own. In international fora, for instance, the British, who are as consummate hypocrites as the next nation, are the first to decry the treatment of Jewish dissidents in the USSR, but will obstinately veto discussion on discrimination against the Roman Catholic minority in Northern Ireland as foreign interference in the United Kingdom’s domestic affairs.

It must be on that understanding that any outsider ventures to address the vexed issue of Aboriginal and Islander ethnic minorities in Australia. Let’s face it. We are
all
fed expurgated and nationalistically biased accounts of history. Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler even had the history books rewritten in order to shore up their own political and social philosophies. Often, history has been recast to salve consciences, to exonerate the men from heinous crimes committed in the past, to whitewash behaviour which would be totally unacceptable by any current moral standard. The history of the Aboriginal people is a case in point.

It is worthwhile considering for starters, that whereas ‘Australia’ will be celebrating its bicentenary in 1988, Aborigines have inhabited the continent for well over 30,000 years. More significantly, 1988 not only represents 200 years of European settlement, but it is also the twenty-first birthday of Aboriginal ‘emancipation’. Difficult though it is to believe, it is only since 1967 that Aborigines have been counted as human beings on the census, and given the right to vote. It certainly puts drinks trolleys, newspapers and air hostesses in their proper perspective.

In terms of brash statistics, about one-and-a-half to two per cent of Australia’s population are Aboriginal or Islander, of whom about one third lives in Queensland. In Brisbane I visited the Queensland and Torres Strait Islander Consultative Committee and was shocked by some of the literature even a day’s perusal in their library turned up. It was only in 1977, for example, that Aboriginal workers were first given wages for their labour on reserves, rather than rations. We are talking about less than a decade ago! Going back eighty years, we find a member of the new Commonwealth Parliament stating in 1902: ‘There is no scientific evidence that the Aboriginal is a human being at all.’

And in 1891,
The Boomerang
commented on the reported shooting of an Aborigine thus: ‘Why bother us . . . with everyday commonplaces like this? Has it come to this in Australia, that the taking off of a solitary black fellow is to be wired all over this island continent? Have coloured persons ceased to be national game?’

And even worse, an ex-Education Minister of Tasmania, who declared that: ‘Aborigines have less [
sic
] rights than kangaroos.’ (Personally I feel that Education Ministers who say ‘less’ when they mean ‘fewer’ would do better to keep their mouths shut, and, with sentiments such as those, perhaps for good.)

Generations of politicians, governments and historians have all worked hard at sanitising the true story of European settlement. Aborigines could be summarily executed as criminals if they so much as endeavoured to stop settlers invading and taking over their ancestral lands. The countless atrocities perpetrated against the indigenous population have been historically bowdlerised, however, and even in his speech introducing the Aborigines Act of 1971, the Minister, the Hon. N. T. E. Hewitt, professed to believe that: ‘Smallpox was almost certainly the mass killer of Aboriginal people, and however much some of us might lust for murderous forebears, whose sins we might repay in an orgy of self-abasement, blame must be substantially allocated to their bacteria rather than muskets.’

This is as may be, but even in the course of my brief research as a historian (if I can be called a historian, or even a writer), I was able to discover otherwise. It might not have gone amiss if some parliamentary researcher had bothered to note that between 1824 and 1900 over 10,000 Aborigines were brutally murdered in Queensland alone, and many more
besides
died from diseases introduced by the European settlers.

The list of crimes against humanity is endless, and modern Australians were truly horrified to have their social consciences shaken by ABC Television’s production of
The Secret Country
, a historical reconstruction of events, produced by John Pilger. Gradually more and more of the settlers’ obscenities are being unearthed: incidents such as young Aboriginal children being buried up to their necks in sand, whilst mounted Europeans played polo with the protruding heads they managed to knock off.

Suffice it to say, the early European settlers were as guilty of genocide as Hitler’s Nazis. In 1788 there were over 500 distinct Aboriginal and Islander ethnic and language groups: now there are fewer than 200. It is perhaps the white man’s worst disease, ethnocentricity: wipe out everything and anything that is not exactly like you. Invaders always endeavour to eradicate a subjugated nation’s language early on, since they realise that with the language goes the entire cultural heritage and identity of the ethnic minority. Even today, many Aboriginal children are obliged to learn through the medium of English – their second language, and a language often inadequate for the expression of certain cultural and intellectual concepts shared by all Aboriginal communities.

It is without doubt this fundamental difference in outlook and values which continues to divide the ethnic minorities from the white majority today. At the root of the cultural divide lies the two societies’ diametrically opposed perception of land, and its use. Land for white, essentially capitalist society is a tool, an asset to be worked and exploited for further increase of wealth. Aboriginal society perceives land as something more spiritual – life itself. It is this basic antagonism between the European quick-buck philosophy and the more transcendental Aboriginal ethos which lies at the root of Australia’s most serious running sore, of the wound current politicians would rather veil with thin gauze than dress properly. The Aboriginal land rights issue sadly is not a vote catcher.

Since the arrival of the Europeans, Aborigines have been hounded from their tribal homelands. Land to the Aboriginal people means far more than somewhere to graze sheep, rear cattle, mine bauxite, or even the far more lucrative uranium. Land means the source and the locus of life. It represents the eternal nature of the spirit. By removing land from the Aborigines, Europeans were doing far more than physically expropriating them. As Professer W. E. H. Stenner wrote: ‘Particular pieces of territory, each a homeland, formed part of a set of constants without which no affiliation of any person to any other person, no link in the whole network of relationships, no part of the complex structure of social groups, any longer had all its coordinates.’

It never crossed any state premier’s mind, not even in his wildest socially concerned moments, that Aborigines should be entitled to compensation of any sort for the real estate that had been wrested from them, and these people have been kicked, from reserve post to settlement pillar, for almost 200 years now.

What is ironically worse is that the land they were grudgingly allowed to live on, courtesy of the fact that it was unsuitable for agriculture, has often proved to be rich in minerals. What the farmer would not touch, the mining experts have grabbed. So it was in Mapoon, where bauxite, the raw material for aluminium, was found in the 1950s and 60s. The Aborigines refused to leave their lands, and so the police moved in, set fire to their settlements, and cleared the land for the mining companies Comalco and Alcan. Collusion between the Queensland government and the mining companies was scandalously repeated at Aurukun in 1975, when the government again made free with other people’s land. This incident created far more international consternation since the anti-nuclear lobby became involved. This time the more controversial end product was to be uranium.

Even as I write, a fierce battle is raging in the Northern Territories over the fate of Kakadu National Park, where mining companies could well do irreparable ecological damage as well as ruin centuries-old Aboriginal cave paintings.