Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans - The Atlantic

Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans - The Atlantic




Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans

Native communities’ vulnerability to epidemics is not a historical accident, but a direct result of oppressive policies and ongoing colonialism.

APRIL 29, 2020
Jeffrey Ostler
Professor of history at University of Oregon
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An illustration of Native Americans with red dots surrounding them.

CULTURE CLUB / GETTY / THE ATLANTIC

As the death toll from COVID-19 mounts, people of color are clearly at greater risk than others. Among the most vulnerable are Native Americans. To understand how dire the COVID-19 situation is becoming for these communities, consider the situation unfolding for the Navajo Nation, a people with homelands in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. As of April 23, 1,360 infections and 52 deaths had been reported among the Navajo Reservation’s 170,000 people, a mortality rate of 30 per 100,000. Only six states have a higher per capita toll.

The spread of COVID-19 is reminiscent of previous disease outbreaks that have ravaged Native American communities. Many of those outbreaks resulted in catastrophic loss of life, far greater than even the worst-case scenarios for COVID-19. Even the 1918–19 flu pandemic, in which an estimated 650,000 Americans died (0.6 percent of the 1920 population of 106 million), pales in comparison to the losses Native Americans have suffered from disease.

Until recently, histories of disease and Native Americans have emphasized “virgin-soil epidemics.” According to this theory, popularized in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, when Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere, they brought diseases (particularly measles and smallpox) that indigenous people had never experienced. Because they had no immunity to these diseases, so the theory goes, the resulting epidemics took the lives of 70 percent or more of the Native population throughout the Americas.

New research, however, provides a much more complicated picture of disease in American Indian history. This research shows that virgin-soil epidemics were not as common as previously believed and shifts the focus to how diseases repeatedly attacked Native communities in the decades and centuries after Europeans first arrived. Post-contact diseases were crippling not so much because indigenous people lacked immunity, but because the conditions created by European and U.S. colonialism made Native communities vulnerable. The virgin-soil-epidemic hypothesis was valuable in countering earlier theories that attributed Native American population decline to racial inferiority, but its singular emphasis on biological difference implied that population collapses were nothing more than historical accidents. By stressing the importance of social conditions created by human decisions and actions, the new scholarship provides a far more disturbing picture. It also helps us understand the problems facing Native communities today as they battle the novel coronavirus.

Virgin-soil epidemics undoubtedly occurred. In 1633, for example, a smallpox epidemic struck Native communities in New England, reducing the Mohegan and Pequot populations from a combined total of 16,000 to just 3,000. The epidemic spread to the Haudenosaunee in New York, but no farther west than that. Smallpox did not hit communities in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes until 1756–57, a century or more after initial contact with Europeans. When it did, it was because Native fighters, recruited to fight for the French against the British during the Seven Years’ War, had contracted the virus in the east and infected their communities when they returned home. Lack of immunity mattered, but it was the disruption resulting from war that promoted smallpox’s spread.
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Smallpox did not arrive in the Southeast until 1696, a century and a half after the Hernando de Soto expedition. It was once thought that de Soto’s men carried smallpox, but this view reflected the flawed assumption that Europeans were always infected with smallpox and always contagious. De Soto’s expedition did cause disease to erupt in Native communities, but the reason was that the expedition’s violent warfare led to outbreaks of pathogens such as dysentery, which was already present in the Americas. When smallpox finally hit the Southeast, it spread rapidly from Virginia to East Texas across networks created by an English trade in Native captives for enslavement in their coastal and West Indies colonies. Raiding, capturing, and transporting human bodies created pathways for the smallpox virus. To make matters worse, those bodies were already weakened by war and its companions—malnutrition, exposure, and lack of palliative care.

By the end of the 18th century, most Native communities in what would eventually become the United States had been exposed to smallpox. Nevertheless, as smallpox recurred in the 19th century, its impact correlated not with a lack of prior exposure, but with the presence of adverse social conditions. These same conditions would also make Native communities susceptible to a host of other diseases, including cholera, typhus, malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, scrofula, and alcoholism. Native vulnerability had—and has—nothing to do with racial inferiority or, since those initial incidents, lack of immunity; rather, it has everything to do with concrete policies pursued by the United States government, its states, and its citizens.

Consider the impact of the Indian Removal Act. Formally adopted in 1830, this policy called for the relocation of Native peoples east of the Mississippi River to “Indian Territory” (what would eventually become Oklahoma and Kansas). Most everyone has heard of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, but it is seldom considered a U.S.-caused health crisis. The expulsion of the Cherokee from their homeland in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee had three phases. In the first, the U.S. Army forcibly evicted Cherokees from their homes and held them for several months in concentration camps with inadequate shelter, insufficient food, and no source of clean water. The camps became death traps. Of the 16,000 people held in them, about 2,000 died from dysentery, whooping cough, measles, and “fevers” (probably malaria). In the second phase, the journey west, an additional 1,500 perished, as people, already sick and further weakened by malnutrition, trauma, and exposure, succumbed to multiple pathogens. In the months after reaching Oklahoma—the third phase—an additional 500 died from similar causes. The death toll was 4,000, or 25 percent of the original 16,000 forced from their homes.

Although the Cherokee Trail of Tears is the most well known, there were dozens of other such forced removals. Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Senecas, Wyandots, Potawatomis, Sauks and Mesquakies, Ojibwes, Ottawas, Miamis, Kickapoos, Poncas, Modocs, Kalapuyas, and Takelmas represent only a partial list of nations that suffered trails of tears. Not all experienced the same mortality as the Cherokee, but many did, and for some, the toll was even higher. The allied Sauks and Mesquakies were forced to move four times from their villages in western Illinois—once to central Iowa, once to western Iowa, once to Kansas, and finally to Oklahoma. In 1832, the time of the first expulsion, the Sauks and Mesquakies numbered 6,000. By 1869, when they were finally sent to Oklahoma, their population was only 900, a staggering loss of 85 percent. Year after year, unrelenting diseases, including an outbreak of smallpox in 1851, took many lives. Low fertility and infant mortality, the result of malnutrition, sickness, and trauma, hindered population replacement. The Sauk and Mesquakie catastrophe was not an accident. It was a direct and foreseeable consequence of decisions made by the United States and its citizens to dispossess Native people of desirable lands and shove them someplace else.


Read: The people who profited off of the Trail of Tears

Navajos (Dinés, as they refer to themselves in their language) were also evicted from their homelands. In the winter of 1863–64, the U.S. Army pursued scorched-earth tactics—destroying their peach trees and cornfields—to drive them to a barren reservation at Bosque Redondo, on the Pecos River in New Mexico. On the 250-mile forced march, known as the Long Walk, several hundred of the 8,000 to 9,000 Dinés died en route. Over the next four years, Dinés lost as many as 2,500 of their people to disease and starvation. In their darkest hour, though, Diné leaders successfully prevailed on government officials to release them from their prison and return home. But even though their population has grown over time, the legacies of the Long Walk remain. The Diné historian Jennifer Denetdale observes that “severe poverty, addiction, suicide and crime on reservations all have their roots in the Long Walk.”

As cases of COVID-19 began to appear on the Navajo Reservation in late March, tribal President Jonathan Nez spoke to his people on Facebook. Summoning memories of the Long Walk, he “called on citizens to help one another,” reminding them “that’s when the best came out of many of our ancestors, helping each other out, carrying the load for the elders, carrying the children for our mothers.” “Now it’s our turn,” he said, “to think of our future, our children, our grandchildren.” Ongoing colonialism makes fighting COVID-19 a challenge. Although the Navajo are a sovereign nation with resources of their own, Dinés have a high incidence of conditions—diabetes, hypertension, and lung disease—that increase their susceptibility to becoming severely ill from the coronavirus. Lack of access to clean water makes hand-washing difficult. Many people cannot afford food, hand sanitizer, and other necessities. And there is an acute shortage of hospital beds and medical personnel.

Many public officials, health experts, and journalists are drawing attention to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color. Even so, large segments of America are indifferent, if not outright hostile, to recognizing these disparities and the inequities underlying them. Native Americans are visible to the general public far more often as sports mascots than as actual communities. The Trump administration initially resisted providing any relief to tribal nations in the $2 trillion stimulus package passed in early April, and although the legislation ultimately appropriated $10 billion to tribal governments, the Treasury Department, tasked with distributing these funds, has failed to disburse them. According to New Mexico Senator Tom Udall, Treasury Department officials “don’t know how to interact in the appropriate way with tribes and they’re just not getting the job done.”

Countering the invisibility of Native peoples, of course, means greater awareness of how COVID-19 is affecting them and enhanced efforts to provide resources to help them combat the current outbreak. It also means creating a deeper understanding of the history of American Indians and disease. Although the virgin-soil-epidemic hypothesis may have been well intentioned, its focus on the brief, if horrific, moment of initial contact consigns disease safely to the distant past and provides colonizers with an alibi. Indigenous communities are fighting more than a virus. They are contending with the ongoing legacy of centuries of violence and dispossession.
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JEFFREY OSTLER is the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas.

Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connection – A New Edited Collection

Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connection – A New Edited Collection



Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connection – A New Edited Collection
December 20, 2019MCCAdmin
Photo by Tim Gouw on Pexels.com

Submission by: Assoc. Prof. David Chapman

In 2007, Assoc. Prof. David Chapman led a project highly successful symposium held at the University of Queensland entitled “Japan in Australia“. The symposium sought to investigate a curious gap in the literature on Japan-Australia relations. While previous discourse on the two countries had focused primarily on the relationship between Japan and Australia, there had been little focus “on Japan’s place within Australia and within the nation’s social, cultural and historical landscape”. Furthermore, “with the changing dynamic of Australia’s relationship with Asia [particularly with Australia’s increasing focus on Chinese and South Korean relations] there is a need for a fresh look at Japan within Australia and how Japan has been understood and conceptualised”.

From the research presented at the symposium, Assoc. Prof. David Chapman and Assoc. Prof. Carol Hayes (ANU) edited the newly published collection: Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connection. This collection is “a work of cultural history that focuses on context and connection between two nations. It examines how Japan has been imagined, represented and experienced in the Australian context through a variety of settings, historical periods and circumstances”.Photo by Catarina Sousa on Pexels.com

As the publisher notes: “Beginning with the first recorded contacts between Australians and Japanese in the nineteenth century, the chapters focus on ‘people to people’ narratives and the myriad multi-dimensional ways the two countries are interconnected: from sporting diplomacy to woodblock printing, from artistic metaphors to iconic pop imagery, from the tragedy of war to engagement in peace movements, from technology transfer to community arts. Tracing the trajectory of this 150-year relationship provides an example of how history can turn from fear, enmity and misunderstanding through war, foreign encroachment and the legacy of conflict, to close and intimate connections that result in cultural enrichment and diversification.”

Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connections thus “explores notions of Australia and ‘Australianness’ and Japan and ‘Japaneseness’, to better reflect on the cultural fusion that is contemporary Australia and build the narrative of the Japan-Australia relationship.” This collection features several chapters from our team of academics who research cultures out of the School of Languages and Cultures at The University of Queensland who have previously submitted posts to this blog including Assoc. Prof. Tomoko Aoyama, Dr Lucy Fraser, and Rebecca Hausler. Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connections is currently available through Routledge via e-book, with a hardback edition. It will be of particular interest to academics in the field of Asian, Japanese, and Japanese-Pacific studies.


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Japan in Australia: Culture, Context and Connection

by 

David Chapman (Editor),

 

Carol Hayes (Editor)

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Japan in Australia is a work of cultural history that focuses on context and connection between two nations. It examines how Japan has been imagined, represented and experienced in the Australian context through a variety of settings, historical periods and circumstances.



Beginning with the first recorded contacts between Australians and Japanese in the nineteenth century, the chapters focus on 'people-to people' narratives and the myriad multi-dimensional ways in which the two countries are interconnected: from sporting diplomacy to woodblock printing, from artistic metaphors to iconic pop imagery, from the tragedy of war to engagement in peace movements, from technology transfer to community arts. Tracing the trajectory of this 150-year relationship provides an example of how history can turn from fear, enmity and misunderstanding through war, foreign encroachment and the legacy of conflict, to close and intimate connections that result in cultural enrichment and diversification.



This book explores notions of Australia and 'Australianness' and Japan and 'Japaneseness', to better reflect on the cultural fusion that is contemporary Australia and build the narrative of the Japan-Australia relationship. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Asian, Japanese and Japanese-Pacific studies. (less)

Gerald Murnane's “The Plains” Is a Strange Australian Masterpiece | The New Yorker

Gerald Murnane's “The Plains” Is a Strange Australian Masterpiece | The New Yorker





A Strange Australian Masterpiece


By Ben LernerMarch 29, 2017






Gerald Murnane captures the paradoxical mix of uniformity and mystery, the former producing the latter, in his novel “The Plains”: small differences have an outsized power amid so much sameness.PHOTOGRAPH BY AUSCAPE / UIG VIA GETTY





The Australian writer Gerald Murnane was born in a suburb of Melbourne, in 1939, and has spent his entire life in Australia. His novel “The Plains,” first published thirty-five years ago and reissued next month, is a bizarre masterpiece that can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed.

Having grown up in a small capital city located on the Great Plains of North America, I recognize something in Murnane’s descriptions of expansive grasslands, unobstructed sky. He captures a plain’s paradoxical mix of uniformity and mystery, the former producing the latter: small differences—a hill, a sudden patch of wildflowers—have an outsized power amid so much sameness; they’d fail to stand out among the dramatic natural beauties of California or the overwhelming built spaces of New York. Sometimes, to break up long drives, my dad would pull onto the shoulder of the highway, and we would look for fossils in the limestone that crops out in the road cuts. The traces of ancient invertebrates with astonishing names (crinoids, fusulinids, and so on) were just one of many signs that the landscape my coastal relatives used to mock for its monotony in fact harbored wonders.


In the world of “The Plains,” which both is and isn’t Australia, the plain people and their plain speech also serve to conceal things—elaborate rituals, cosmologies, obscure passions, arcane knowledge. The apparent provincialism of the inhabitants of the plains is actually a kind of camouflage:

A plainsman would not only claim to be ignorant of the ways of other regions but willingly appear to be misinformed about them. Most irritating of all to outsiders, he would affect to be without any distinguishing culture rather than allow his land and his ways to be judged part of some larger community of contagious tastes or fashions.

The cosmopolitan coasts leave nothing to the imagination. For Murnane, for the plainsmen, this obviously apparent richness of the actual is a kind of poverty. To quote the narrator of the short story “Land Deal,” a distant cousin of “The Plains”:

Almost anything was possible. Any god might reside behind the thundercloud . . . The almost boundless scope of the possible was limited only by the occurrence of the actual. And it went without saying that what existed in the one sense could never exist in the other. Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual.

The poet-philosophers of the plains (and every plainsman is one) know that the plains are unknowable in their totality, and are therefore charged with possibility. This is because what at first appears “utterly flat and featureless” reveals, as you learn to look, “countless subtle variations of landscape.” But it is also because there is another plain (or plains) behind this one, “always invisible” even though you’ve “crossed and recrossed it daily.” “The Plains” is a book about the planes of the actual and the possible, about their interplay, how one haunts the other.

Murnane’s sentences are little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth. They combine a matter-of-factness, often approaching coldness, with an intricate lyricism; they are measured, both in the sense of “restrained” and in the poetic sense of “metrical,” the former meaning often giving way to the second as you read. Take this sentence, although any of a thousand sentences would serve, from part two of “The Plains”: “None of the scholars I mention can even guess how many successive encroachments of afternoon sunlight on the shadowy corners of libraries will have bleached the glossy inks on the books that they open at last.”

The sentence begins with an anthropological tone, the restricted affect of objectivity, but it transitions, starting with “afternoon sunlight,” into a more romantic register as it slowly zooms in on the letters and their lustre. The grammar here is both plain and elaborate: there is no internal punctuation, just a repetitive chain of prepositions (of, on, of, on), but there are delicate changes of light and shade and scale as the sentence unfolds. Beats fall with considerable regularity within the internal divisions of phrase and clause, so that a sense of poetic rhythm accumulates as you go. (I read it as anapestic and dactylic—the accentual stresses tending to be divided by a pair of unstressed syllables.) Murnane’s mysterious plainsmen pursue the “lifelong task of shaping from uneventful days in a flat landscape the substance of myth.” And this is what Murnane achieves, again and again, through his carefully shaped sentences, the prosaic becoming poetic along their length.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKERThrowing Shade Through Crosswords


“The Plains” is an ekphrastic novel, full of descriptions of other works of art. The narrator arrives from “Outer Australia” (“the sterile margins of the continent”), as the people of the plains call it, determined to make a film—he plans to title it “The Interior”—that can capture the evasive truth of the plains. Much of his narrative is taken up with describing attempts in other media to produce art works worthy of the place. There is the controversial painting “Decline and Fall of the Empire of Grass,” for instance, which appears at first full of “deliberately imprecise” shapes, “of no style known from history,” and yet, when you step back, you can see “a painting of plants and soil.” There are poems such as “A Parasol at Noon,” vaguely reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, which imagines “a land apart” that is “neither a plain of old nor yet a dream.” And there is the composer who, in an attempt to find “the musical equivalent of the characteristic sound of his district,” stages a performance that, in Murnane’s telling, sounds like a synthesis of Kafka and John Cage:


the members of the orchestra were stationed far apart among the audience. Each instrument produced a volume of sound that could be heard only by the few listeners nearest it. The audience was free to move around—as quietly or as noisily as they wished. Some were able to hear snatches of melody as subtle as the scraping together of grass-blades or the throbbing of the brittle tissue of insects. A few even found some spot from which more than one instrument was audible. Most heard no music at all.
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The works of art that Murnane describes are failures. The composer responds to critics of his work’s insufficiency by saying that “the purpose of his art was to draw attention to the impossibility of comprehending even such an obvious property of a plain as the sound that came from it.” And yet he hopes that he can capture a “hint of the whole” through his experiments. For this composer, for Murnane, for his narrator, any serious art work will fail, as soon as it becomes actual, to capture the possible; but that failure itself can gesture toward, offer a hint of, the invisible topology that is no less real for being unrepresentable. A hint of the narrator’s unmakeable film survives only by collapsing into this novel.

Gerald Murnane has never been on an airplane. He’s left the state of Victoria few times in his almost eighty years. He suffers from anosmia, the inability to smell, although perhaps “suffers” is the wrong word, as he says it has intensified his experience of color, given him the gift of synesthesia. (“If you were to say to me,” he told an interviewer, “the smell of the lilac was very strong this afternoon, I would see little droplets of lilac-coloured moisture floating through the air.”) To experience one sense in terms of another, to transpose smell onto the plane of vision, is a kind of embodied ekphrasis. Perhaps it adds to the mystery of the world to hear constant talk of a sense you don’t possess, just as refusing to travel might keep the allure of other landscapes intact.

Certainly, Murnane is interested in what part of consciousness—of sensation, of emotion—might be shareable and what part is irreducibly individual, a private territory. This is a concern that scales up in his work from the question of what one person might know of another to larger questions of collectivity, of those “imagined communities”—to borrow Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase—called nations. While a plainsman likes “to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain,” a nation of one, the plainsmen’s constant debates about art, ornament, architecture, and archive, their rivalries and sports, their concern with differentiating themselves from Outer Australia, betray an obsession with constructing and contesting collective fictions. “Australia” is the name of Murnane’s supreme fiction, the idea that his private landscapes might somehow correspond with those of his countrymen and women, or at least be glimpsed by them, without having to be translated into mere “taste or fashion,” where commonality is purchased at the price of standardization. “The Plains,” as much a prose poem as a novel, is this Australia’s interior, Murnane’s heartland, a realm of possibility, where “the invisible is only what is too brightly lit.”

_This essay was adapted from the introduction to a new edition of “The Plains,” by Gerald Murnane, out in April from Text Publishing. _

Ben Lerner is a MacArthur Fellow. His most recent book is “The Topeka School.”

Australian author, Nobel candidate Gerald Murnane on having career upswing at 80 then quitting publishing - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Australian author, Nobel candidate Gerald Murnane on having career upswing at 80 then quitting publishing - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Australian author, Nobel candidate Gerald Murnane on having career upswing at 80 then quitting publishing

ABC Arts 

By Sarah L'Estrange for RN's The Book Show

Updated 8 Apr 2019, 1:50pm

PHOTO: Gerald Murnane says he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature for about a decade. (ABC Arts: Zan Wimberley)

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.

AUDIO: Gerald Murnane's novel A Season on Earth republished in full (The Book Show)

RELATED STORY: Your guide to this year's best books by Australian women

When Gerald Murnane came into the ABC's Southbank centre for an interview and portrait session recently, he regaled photographer Zan Wimberley with a rendition of the Hungarian national anthem (he learned Hungarian late in life). He sang with gusto and a big grin. He certainly has a lot to be happy about.

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Since his first novel Tamarisk Row came out in 1974, Murnane has been known as a writers' writer — which is shorthand for saying the author's work is highly regarded in literary circles, but not broadly read by the public.

As the author of 16 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, Murnane is also known for not winning the Miles Franklin, arguably Australia's most prestigious literary prize.

However in 2018 several things happened that seemed to signal a shift: his 2017 novel Border Districts was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Best Fiction, and got a US release via Farrar, Straus and Giroux (alongside a collection of his short stories).

Then the New York Times touted Gerald Murnane as the next Nobel laureate for literature, describing him as "the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of". (The 2018 prize was subsequently cancelled, due to a sex scandal.)

This particular type of praise is not new for Murnane — he says that for the last 10 years he's been nominated as a candidate for the Nobel; it does provide satisfaction, however.

"The satisfaction comes just from being considered an Australian candidate, never mind the vague possibility that I might actually win it."

Certainly, the attention of international reporters has propelled him beyond his coterie of readers.

In 2019, Murnane has two books being published: his four-part novel A Season on Earth (through Text) which was written more than 40 years ago but never published in full; and a collection of poetry titled Green Shadows (through Giramondo).

Ironically, perhaps, he has also announced that he will no longer be writing for publication — only for himself.

PHOTO: Gerald Murnane says Goroke in western Victoria "fulfils the geometry" of his life. (Supplied: Giramondo Publishing)

Finding big success in a small place

The resurgence of Murnane's career seems to have coincided with his move to the tiny town of Goroke, in western Victoria.

He moved there from Melbourne in 2009, after the death of his wife of 43 years, to live with one of his sons.

Since being in Goroke, he's had eight books published. In 2017 an academic conference was held in his honour, at the local golf club.

Murnane finds it hard to explain the attraction of Goroke but says "my interest in the place is partly explained by the fact that it fulfils the geometry of my life".

"I don't expect anyone to understand."

Living in Goroke does seem to be an uncanny fulfillment of his literary preoccupation with landscape (most clearly seen in his lauded 1982 novel The Plains, which mythologises the people of the flat lands).

A novel's true ending finally revealed

Murnane turned 80 in February, and he was given a heartwarming birthday celebration by the "citizens of Goroke" (again, at the golf club).

The publication of A Season on Earth the same month was the "icing on the cake" for the writer, as he's waited 43 years to see the book published in its complete state.

PHOTO: A Season on Earth has been published in its entirety for the first time. (Supplied: Text Publishing)

It was first published in 1976 as A Lifetime on Clouds (through William Heinemann), but only the first half of the manuscript was published, as his editor at the time felt it was too long to publish in full.

Murnane was not happy with this decision, nor with how it was described as a comic romp.

"Now that the four parts are published it looks anything but a comic romp," he says.

A Season on Earth is about Adrian Sherd, whom the reader meets as a teenager going to a Catholic school in 1950s Melbourne.

Reading the first part of the book, it's easy to see why it was considered bawdy — it opens with Sherd's fantasies about an orgy with Hollywood starlets.

The second half, which wasn't published at the time, is about Sherd's time in a seminary, and concludes with him leaving to embrace the philosophies of poets.

Murnane did try to shorten the book without changing the four-part structure, but in the end he had to admit he was wasting his time.

"The experience of running around in circles trying to cope with the publisher's demands — and other problems at the time — slowed me down by a couple of years."

His next book (The Plains) didn't come out for another six years.

"That's a long time without anything happening," Murnane concedes.

With the publication of A Season on Earth, the book is now as Murnane had imagined it, and he says it will satisfy "some puzzlement that people felt about A Lifetime on Clouds."

"People have often said to me 'A Lifetime on Clouds doesn't seem quite the same as some of your other works, not quite so substantial.' My answer to that would have been 'No, because it's half a book — and now the whole book can be understood and comprehended.'"

He says, "Michael Heyward's (director of Text Publishing) decision to publish was a great for relief to me".

PHOTO: Gerald Murnane is no longer writing for publication, but for his archives. (Supplied: Ben Denham/Giramondo Publishing)

Still writing — but only for himself

Murnane says that Border Districts is his final novel.

"When I did write it, I felt there was nothing more to write about," he says.

"For me it had the quality of someone's last fictional statement."

This doesn't mean the author has stopped writing completely, however.

"I'm always writing," he says, explaining that it provides relief for the "unbearable build-up of imagery and feeling" that he experiences.

The author has also taken up playing the fiddle, after letting it slide for a few years, and he plays golf.

Between these activities, he says, "I'm just about able to express all that I feel needs to be expressed".

And then there are his archives. Since writing his first novel, Murnane has meticulously documented his life and writing in filing cabinets which are now held in his Goroke home.

He says he is now writing just for his archives, which includes a 20,000-word autobiography that he doesn't want published in his lifetime.

"One day I will probably be remembered for the contents of my archives, even when I'm forgotten as the author of some of my books," says Murnane.

"There's a lot in those archives that will change people's view of things. I'll just say, there's a few surprises."

Topics: arts-and-entertainment, books-literature, author, fiction, poetry, awards-and-prizes, goroke-3412, australia

First posted 5 Apr 2019, 5:38am

Nikkei Australia » Jim McFarlane’s Nikkei Australian family history

Nikkei Australia » Jim McFarlane’s Nikkei Australian family history

Jim McFarlane’s Nikkei Australian family history

April 22, 2020

by Nikkei Australia

1 Comment

All individuals featured in this article have been approached for permission to be named.

Coral Setsuko Jack Caulfield, 1954

My name is Jim McFarlane. My sister Coral and I come from a Japanese mother and an Australian father who met in Hiroshima during our father’s service in the occupation forces in 1952. Setsuko Nakamoto and Jack McFarlane met through my uncle Mitsuaki who, as a young boy, came to the camp regularly to practice his English. A romance developed; my mother was attracted by my father’s charm and good looks and my father being in his forties saw that the prospect of marriage and a family life was still not out of the question. Setsuko fell pregnant and Jack had to go back to Australia with the army in order to be discharged. A lengthy wait ensued as at the time the White Australia policy was in force and even though Jack and Setsuko were married they were not allowed to make a home in Australia. In the mean time Coral was born in Hiroshima and it must have been a grueling time for Setsuko. Would Jack abandon her and Coral like so many other soldiers did their Japanese wives, or would he honour his vows and stay true to their relationship?

Setsuko & Jack, Kure, circa1950

A change of government in Australia with a new immigration policy allowed Setsuko and Coral to finally come to Australia and for Jack to see his now eighteen-month-old daughter Coral for the very first time. They travelled by ship along with two other war brides, Satchy Faulkner who went to New Zealand; another lady whose name I have forgotten went to Western Australia. These women developed a deep camaraderie sharing their hopes and dreams of living in a new country whilst harbouring the regret of leaving their families behind. Sadly, once the ship had arrived in Australia, they all went their separate ways and were never to meet again. On the ship, a friendly couple that were returning back to Australia, noticed my mother and her companions. They were the Ringland-Andersons. John was a famous eye surgeon and keen amateur photographer. He and his wife Mary were enthusiastic art lovers and were instrumental in the creation of the Borovansky Ballet, the company that later became The Australian Ballet. The Ringland-Andersons were extremely kind to Setsuko. They lived in Melbourne, looked after her, and invited us as a family to their home many times. As fate would have it, my partner Yvonne many years later joined the administration of The Australian Ballet and still works there with over 35 years service. I, as a photographer have had The Australian Ballet as a client for around 30 years and I still get the odd call from them. For Yvonne and I, our life’s lesson is that the Arts, by its nature is an industry that is truly multicultural, and that those people who love the arts are generally the most humanitarian.

It was a difficult time to be a war bride in Australia during the early fifties. Cherry Parker was the first war bride in Melbourne. For at least the first year she needed to be accompanied by a bodyguard wherever she went. The second war bride was Setsuko. One would have expected that they would meet, become friends and supported one another. Unfortunately this did not eventuate; Cherry lived in Ringwood and we lived in Caulfield on the other side of the city. Back then communication was very difficult, as many households didn’t even have a phone. They were always aware of each other but Coral and I cannot recall to this day ever having met Cherry Parker.

With little English it was a trying and lonely time for Setsuko in 1950’s Melbourne. Our Australian neighbours even drew up a petition to rid the street of us. My mother’s friend Miyuki, recalls the time living in Geelong when walking along the street she stumbled across some Japanese sailors who happened to be in port. Miyuki was too shy to introduce herself to them but followed close by just in earshot so that she could hear their Japanese voices. Jack, although loyal, was not a supportive husband. He was a misogynist and indifferent to Setsuko’s need for a break from the kids and was completely ignorant of her emotional needs. Jack was the result of an Italian, Scottish, Catholic rural upbringing. He was brought up in boarding school away from his siblings and had tough overbearing parents. His father hated him. Jack was dogged by severe low self esteem for all of his life and was delusional. These days this would be recognised and seen to with counseling and therapy but not in the 1950s. Our father was a victim of self-loathing mixed with living in a blokey society where ignorance represented strength and compassion weakness. Setsuko’s was a life of suburban, cultural and spiritual anonymity and her only form of self-expression was to put her heart mind and soul into the raising of the kids.

Setsuko was quite fortunate in as much as Jack had already owned our home in Caulfield. That gave them an enormous head start compared to other people. Our neighbourhood was leafy and middle class. Many people were professional types or ran their own businesses. Our Jewish neighbours were all pretty much part of the clothing trade. Apart from rice, the local shops were all stocked with plain Ozzie food so if Setsuko needed anything Asian it required a trip into Chinatown in the city. There she could get Chinese ingredients and adapt them to Japanese cooking. Over time, Japanese ingredients slowly appeared, soy sauce, seaweed, wasabi and other products. There was a fish shop in Caulfield where she could get fresh fish. I remember the owner was amazed that Setsuko could tell which fish was fresh; the locals had no idea.

Jim, Setsuko and Coral, Caulfield 1957

In Caulfield, many of our neighbours were Jewish Holocaust survivors. They were the ones who were the kindest to Setsuko. In her they saw their own life stories and could only feel compassion for her. Kind people never wish their own unfortunate experiences to be lived by others… The Himes, the Silbermans, the Silvers, the Landaus, the Kligers, the Michaelsons, the Shwartz’s, each and all of these families were kind to Setsuko.

I have always regarded with great fondness our Jewish neighbours in Caulfield. This brought me into sharp, inner conflict when several years ago, when visiting Gaza as a photojournalist, I bore witness to the atrocities that have been inflicted upon the Palestinians by Israel. It broke my heart. In the mean time whilst Setsuko enjoyed friendship with our Jewish neighbours Jack remained aloof, as he was an anti-Semitic. To me at a young age this was a lesson in the complexities and contradictions that racism presents. Setsuko herself was not totally immune. I remember her discomfort towards the Vietnamese with their supposedly crude and unsophisticated ways. She feared that among the Australians, the Vietnamese would be mistaken as Japanese. I have always found it curious that so many migrants are themselves anti immigration and unsympathetic towards refugees. My own theory is that once people become prosperous they become selfish. I have experienced at first hand the generosity of the poor and dispossessed. In Niger and in the refugee camps of Gaza and Jordan, I have been given food many times by complete strangers who don’t even have enough to feed themselves.

As Coral and I started school Setsuko’s English started to improve and when we became old enough Setsuko started working in a clothing factory making quilt dressing gowns. Being an outgoing and gregarious person, she quickly made friends with the other migrant women and shared food and recipes. Les, the night watchman would bring her bags of scrap material, which Setsuko would take home and transform into quilts. Before we knew it everybody we knew had their beds graced by her handiwork. Years later Coral, an accomplished needle worker herself, had her work in everybody’s homes too. By this time a small community of Japanese began to develop in our side of Melbourne. Some were war brides, others were associated with Sukiyaki House, which was the first Japanese restaurant in Melbourne. Others were business families sent to Australia from Japan during the time of Australia’s wool boom. Setsuko became the ‘go to’ person for new arrivals who needed to get to know the lay of the land here. Setsuko relished in the status that this role gave her and was always ready with homespun advice for new mothers and arrivals. People were attracted to her generosity, her sometimes brutal honesty and sense of fun. A new sense of independence gradually emerged and opportunities arose too. Setsuko, a hard worker who lived on her wits, became very adept at doing a lot with very little. She was soon much sought after in the emerging restaurant trade and was useful for her dress making skills too. None of this was ever well paying but it got Setsuko out of the factory and into an environment where she was working with friends, speaking her own language, developing skills, and enjoying the freedom of greater mobility.

There were a few families that we had the most to do with in our early years. Auntie Tommy (Machiko Bryce), who passed away about ten years ago, was married to Doug, who died in the late 1960s. They had a son Charles and a daughter Edith who tragically died in a car accident when Edith was only 18. Edith was bridesmaid at Coral’s wedding. That accident tore Auntie Tommy apart and she never really recovered; Tommy was the driver. Charles has a partner Janet and two daughters, Catherine and Tara. Auntie Tommy was from Okayama and was the best educated of my mother’s friends. Her English was very good and she drove a car: the only war bride I knew who could! They lived in Clayton and I remember regular visits in our growing up years. Auntie Tommy had a hard life. At first she nursed Doug, who had severe asthma which he finally fell victim to in his mid fifties. Then of course was the tragedy of her daughter Edith. In later years Tommy absorbed herself into ballet, music and cultural events.

Auntie Jean (Sadae Abe) Lawrence was married to Jimmy Lawrence and they have a son Ted. Jack was very fond of Jimmy Lawrence; they knew each other in Japan and it was Jimmy who kept an eye on Setsuko after Jack went back to Australia and Coral was born. Jimmy suffered very badly from arthritis and died in the late 1960s around the same time as Doug Bryce. They lived in Wodonga so we didn’t get to see them so much other than visiting Jimmy in the Heidelberg Repat hospital where he was admitted many times. Their son Ted is a very keen and gifted musician. He studied electronics at RMIT and after graduating was taken on by Sanyo in Albury at the time colour TV was taking off here. He was sent to Japan many times for company business. On one occasion he took his mother along with him to visit her family. Very tragically, Jean died while they were there. She had not enjoyed good health, but it still came as a very bad shock. Naturally, her family took over the funeral arrangements and poor Ted who spoke almost no Japanese endured a full Buddhist funeral service without anybody explaining to him what the ceremony involved. Ted had always lived with his mother. What a sad, empty and lonely house back in Wodonga he must have returned to.

Hiromi Elrick was married to Peter a Scot, they lived around the corner from us in Caulfield. Hiromi was from Kumamoto. They had four kids. Margaret, Jimmy, Leslie, and Brian. It was Hiromi that Setsuko did her sewing with. Hiromi had a bit of a business going amongst our Jewish neighbours and they gave her lots of work. Michiko Marquis was married to Stan; they had a daughter Maggie and for a while they lived in Caulfield. Michi was the brains of the outfit and was very entrepreneurial. She set up a small café next to the Glenhuntly tram depot. There was lots of regular business with the tram workers and, as the trams operated from early morning until late at night, they were kept very busy. Setsuko often helped them out in the kitchen and experimented using Japanese seasonings on their pies and chips. Michi later moved on to Croydon, a growing district during the immigration boom. There she set up a general store; they prospered there and did well for themselves.

Mitsue Evans was married to Ted Evans and had two sons, Brian and Wayne. Ted had some kind of business in Seoul, Korea and in the 1960s brought his wife and boys to Australia where he pretty much dumped them. In Korea, Brian and Wayne grew up in an American expat district and had American accents and an American education. They lived in Edithvale and later moved to West Brunswick. Mitsue was a hat designer and was often exploited by her employers because in the Japanese tradition she never asked for a pay rise or complained – but she did complain to Setsuko. Miyuki Linsdale was the one with whom Setsuko shared her passion for cooking. Miyuki had a tough life holding her family together with an alcoholic husband. She seemed to try to spend as much time away from home as possible and she and Setsuko would cook delicacies for each other. Miyuki reintroduced Buddhism to Setsuko. This became increasingly significant for Setsuko as Coral and I were reaching the age that we would inevitably be leaving home. The prospect of being alone at home with Jack for the rest of her years was not a happy one for Setsuko.

Across the road from us, a neighbour, Wally, who worked in the travel business, had a fascination with Japan – having travelled there many times. He had made lots of Japanese friends there and they would come and stay at his house while on working holidays in Australia. Kyogo Ue was pretty much adopted by Setsuko as another son. He was fond of her and included her in every social gathering that was going on. Like Setsuko, Kyogo was outgoing and had lots of friends. Setsuko enjoyed their friendship immensely and was always running across the road with saucepans of delicacies for him. Kyogo gained permanent residency in Australia and still lives here.

The years moved along, Coral started working as a secretary and soon married and started a family. Two daughters Tara and Amy were born. Setsuko being very vain was at first a bit awkward with the prospect of being a grandmother. She later warmed to it, but it was a sign to Setsuko of not only her own mortality (she never wanted to grow old) but of Coral’s independence and Coral’s need to run her own family on her own terms. For Setsuko, being needed was her only need.

My attentions too were straying away from home. In my younger years, I was always out tearing around with mates. Setsuko had worked very hard and had sacrificed a lot to see her kids through. She did this single handedly with little interest from Jack. I remember Jack never once went to a parent teacher night with Coral. So losing the grasp she had on her kids was hard for Setsuko. Setsuko’s health was starting to fail. She was diagnosed with diabetes and in those days it demanded that she have a very severe diet. Being so passionate about food, she refused to comply, pronouncing that if she can’t eat what she wants life wasn’t worth living. This attitude saddened us but Setsuko was her own person and that same willfulness that got her through her life could also turn destructive too. In this way Setsuko had much in common with her fellow war brides. Each and every one of them were larger than life characters, brave, confident and uncompromising. I often chat with Coral and we ask each other if any of the war brides were ever really happy? I think for them it was survival first and if happiness should come long, that was a bonus.

Setsuko always wanted to go back to Japan for a visit. In her low moments there must have been nagging doubts as to whether she made the right decision coming to Australia. A visit may put things into perspective. She was very keen to see her five brothers and sister after all this time. Setsuko was very fortunate that when she left Japan she had the blessing of her family. After the destruction of the family home and the whole country in chaos, they told her to seek a better life. So for Setsuko there were no awkward moments and no animosity to reconcile. Many other war brides were not so lucky; most of them were disowned by their families. So after 25 years Setsuko finally made it back to Japan. She stayed there for about three months. I went over for six months, sharing Setsuko’s final month there together. Setsuko was thrilled to see her family and again they were wonderful to her. Her youngest brother, Shinya was only eight years old when she left and Setsuko remembers that he followed her everywhere when he was a boy. He followed her in the exact same way 25 years later. By now, the family had moved mostly to Tokyo and were doing okay with their lives. Uncle Yoshiharu, whose home we stayed at, ran a stationery store. Two other uncles were teachers. Mitsuaki, who came to Jack’s camp as a kid, lives in Hokkaido. He became an English teacher. Setsuko’s only sister, Katsuko, married a teacher as well. Keiji was the head of an exclusive high school. He was fascinated to hear Setsuko’s voice because she spoke in a style that was 25 years old and he saw her as a walking time capsule. That cultural gap had taken its toll on Setsuko; she ended up disliking Japan and finding it a big disappointment. Those lonely times in Australia when she missed her family conjured up images of Japan in her mind that were rich in sentiment and stayed with her until they were cruelly dashed on her return. This story is not unique to Setsuko: many migrants when visiting their home countries felt as though they had returned to a strange place where they didn’t quite fit in. And as they didn’t fully belong in Australia, they found themselves stranded in a physical and cultural limbo. Setsuko was fortunate in this regard; it helped make her mind up that her true home was Australia. Japan had changed a lot, but so had she. Uncle Yoshiharu arranged a bit of a family reunion in their hometown Ogori near Hiroshima. After the plane landed in the snow at the airport, we took a taxi to the house. Setsuko was very chatty to the cab driver to the extent that I was forced to comment. Her reply was that she hadn’t heard nor spoken that dialect for 25 years. There was a big reception waiting for us in this beautiful old farmhouse. People came from far and wide. It was a reunion for Yoshiharu too because living away in Tokyo meant that he hadn’t seen them for ages either. Over the next few days we drove around Setsuko’s old haunts. There was the university where she had worked as a typist and there was a place not far from the house where we stopped and she said, “This is where I was standing when the atom bomb went off. The mushroom cloud was over there.” Later we found ourselves standing at the entrance of a train station. “This is where I said good-bye to my mother,” Setsuko said. “I can see her here just like yesterday. Somehow she was able to find herself some lipstick (difficult during rationing) and my last memory of her was when we parted: she turned around nodding with reassurance to me as she smiled good-bye. I will always remember how pretty she looked….”

It was the furthest thing from my mind as a 22 year old that in just a few short years time, we would lose Setsuko. She was only 56. In the years since her passing, Coral and I have kept in close contact with our remaining uncles and cousins in Japan and we are very close to them. They have visited here and Japan is like a second home to us. We are so lucky to be part of a multicultural family and it makes us feel privileged, special and different.

Here is one of Setsuko’s pronouncements that I think well describes her…

“When inviting people over for dinner, never try to guess what they will like because you might be wrong. They won’t like it and you won’t like it. Always cook what you like because you will be good at it. If on the other hand they don’t like your cooking, at least you will like it. But if they do like your cooking, you’ve made a friend.”

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1. Andrew Hasegawa April 23, 2020 at 7:30 pm Reply

   Jim thank you for sharing your family story with me and all who are interested