1Like much Aboriginal writing, Kim Scott’s Benang is a life story – the story of how Harley comes to discover then celebrate his aboriginality, and eventually re-connects with his own culture, despite the whites’ relentless attempts to erase the relevant connections. Of course, the difference with, say, Sally Morgan’s My Place, is that Benang is a work of fiction, not an autobiography. But the novel’s basis in Scott’s research about his own family shows a very comparable will-to-truth, a desire to dispel white lies in order to come into one’s Aboriginal own.

2But writing fiction demands different narrative strategies, and no doubt allows the author greater imaginative freedom. Where Sally Morgan could do with first presenting the clues that alerted her to her aboriginal identity, and then recounting her quest to piece together those fragments in order to establish her true ancestry, as if this was relatively unproblematic, Scott is under no constraint to follow a linear and rational story line. In fact, there are considerations that go against such a straightforward approach.

3The issue is to find a narrative strategy to bring out the truth, both about the protagonist’s Aboriginal heritage and more generally about how the white colonists had tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to erase all traces of Aboriginality in those mixed-race children whose destiny, it was decreed, was to be “the first white man born,” i.e. evidence that their indigenous lineage had been brought to a sudden halt, amounting to genocide. Scott could have chosen the realist mode – after all he is dealing with an all too real tragedy, which he has no intention of embellishing or glossing over. But realism presents a number of potential pitfalls. For one thing, it is based on a Western conception of reality which is often at odds with indigenous conceptions: realism implies that, with diligent research if needs be, reality can be known in its entirety, from A to Z. Once the relevant facts have been established, a rational, linear narrative will set them out in compelling order until the original question is answered and the case is closed. An afterthought may be added to present whatever uncertainties or doubts sometimes remain but the realist paradigm will confine it to the footnotes. Where uncertainties are the central stuff of narrative, as is the case with Benang (cf. the title of Lisa Slater’s paper, ‘Kim Scott’s Benang: An Ethics of Uncertainty’) quite a different narrative strategy is required.

4Besides, Mudrooroo has argued that realism was unsuited to Aboriginal preoccupations. He has criticised indigenous novelist Archie Weller’s collection of short stories Going Home, deploring “an emphasis on gritty realism which is gloomy” (Mudrooroo 115). “Such writers,” Mudrooroo goes on, “are content to describe the present situations as they occur, and although there may be individual development, the community is not treated as a whole and capable of development out of the morass in which it finds itself” (Mudrooroo 116). Indeed, any depiction of Aboriginal conditions in the realist mode is bound to be gloomy and to leave little hope of a better future, doing injustice to a people, who are, in Mudrooroo’s words, “a great race of survivors” (Mudrooroo 116). The Aboriginal worldview, in Mudrooroo’s opinion, is one that transcends Western realism to incorporate the spiritual and the supernatural, and Aboriginal interests are better served by a literary mode that reflects this worldview, namely magic realism.

5Kim Scott may have listened to Mudrooroo’s message, as he clearly departs from the linear, informative and realist narrative mode that predominates in Western fiction (including Australian fiction). To suggest how Harley discovered his Aboriginal heritage, Scott chooses to mimic in his very writing the difficulties and uncertainties faced by the protagonist: like the latter, the reader is never too sure what the relationship between this character is and that, where and when this or that scene takes place, etc. In other words, the reader has to piece the story together and reconstruct it, just as Harley had to. The ‘snaking’ nature of the narrative itself compels the reader to empathize with the protagonist, as reviewer Mike Heald notes: “The complex narrative, in recollection, returns me to a difficult, precarious, maze-like journey of discovery. I feel that a smoother, clearer narrative trajectory would not serve this kind of experience as well” (Heald). Scott does provide many clues, which help to solve the various puzzles. But some clues remain missing, leaving, as it were, holes in the narrative, which is thus fragilized as many Aborigines are fragilized because access to the truth about themselves and their parentage has been denied to them by a racist white Australia. Significantly, Harley speaks of “this shifty, snaking narrative” (Scott 22) and indeed his story is made up of a succession of micro-narratives presented with no apparent regard for chronology. And while the narration is mostly retrospective, chronological shifts often blur the time frame. “Once again I am confusing things,” Harley admits, “not following an appropriate sequence” (97). The sense of confusion that results is enhanced by the occasional use of the present and the future tenses when Harley thinks of past events, such as the removal of part-Aborigines from Gebalup to a kind of reserve: “Some of these are heading, inexorably, towards the first proper white man born. The others, irrespective of caste or fractions will mostly make a different future” (Scott 90; my italics).

6If the narrative seems uncertain, tentative, it is because it deals with uncertainties, as is pointed out on various occasions. Thus: “Our mothers Harriette and Dinah were sisters,” said Uncle Jack, “and Patrick might have been my father,” he continued, “but probably not” (171). The confusions in Harley’s genealogy are expressed through narrative confusions: Harley and his grandfather Ern thus confuse generations – Ern calls Harley “My son” while Harley replies: “Thanks, Dad” (14). There is a similar confusion concerning mothers:

‘I came here with my mother, once,’ Kathleen said. ‘I think she brought us here.’
‘Your mother!’ Ern snorted.
‘Harriette. I mean Aunty Harriette.’ (126)

7Harley’s is a quest for the truth about his Aboriginal heritage and, by extension, about the heritage of his fellow part-Aborigines, whom the policy of assimilation has cut off from their roots. The confusions, gaps and time shifts in the narrative are meant to suggest how difficult this quest is proving but do not lead to the conclusion that some fundamental truths that no fundamental truths can be established. For novelist and protagonist alike, the issue is how to establish those truths and convey them to the reader, and this requires the subverting of western narrative forms. “I have to work right through this white way of thinking,” Harley reflects, “it is the only way to be sure” (112).

8Some of those truths – part of the evidence presented by Scott – take the form of documents which the novelist lifts from the historical record and incorporates into his narrative. They include excerpts from A.O. Neville’s book Australia’s Coloured Minority, from his official correspondence as well as interviews; excerpts from official reports, submissions to a Royal Commission, newspaper articles, etc. Scott lists all those sources in his ‘acknowledgements’ and they confirm how much archival research has gone into the writing of the novel. This incorporation of non-fictional elements amounts to a kind of hyperrealism – fragments from the real world finding their way into an invented story, anchoring the fiction in historical reality. But, for all Scott’s debt to the historical records, those fragments are just that – fragments: they do not amount to a unified or comprehensive narrative which might form the basis of the novel. This is no doubt because the historical record was written by white people, and reflects the white point of view, turning the Aborigines into objects, into subalterns who, as Gayatri Spivak famously asserted, cannot speak for themselves. What we might term ‘white realism’ – a realist rendering of white attitudes to the Aborigines – could not serve Scott’s purpose, except when it establishes the colonisers’ genocidal intentions, the unfairness and brutality of their methods for dealing with the indigenous population: white colonists and bureaucrats are damned by their own words. But this still leaves the problem of expressing the indigenous viewpoint.

9There are ways of achieving this through well-established, conventional narrative methods, such as dialogue: thus, soon after Scott notes at the beginning of his account of the public entertainment at Gebalup, that “Daniel had brought his son, but left Harriette and the girls at home” (255), we are given the indigenous point of view on this through the following sarcastic remark: “Someone beside Fanny muttered, ‘She too black for him? Frightened she might catch something from us, eh?’” Authorial comments may serve the same purpose, as when, in the same scene, the narrator notes in a kind of aside:

Everyone having such a good time.
Or nearly everyone (256).

10The aside neatly and economically captures the discriminations visited upon the local Aborigines by the white settlers.

11Since the story is narrated in the first person by Harley, who identifies as Aboriginal, it might be argued that this is sufficient to allow an indigenous point of view to predominate. But Harley’s aboriginality is tentative: his physical appearance and his estrangement from Aboriginal culture mean that it is by no means easy for him to assert himself as an indigenous person. He does say, towards the close of the novel, “I am no white man” (494) but this isn’t quite the same as saying “I’m Aboriginal.” It is left to Uncle Jack to make the unambiguous assertion “To start with, what you are is a Nyoongar” (494). Harley himself is aware of the perplexity and embarrassment of his Aboriginal audience: “I am something of a curiosity – even for my own people” (495). Now, ‘curiosity’ suggests something strange and unfamiliar, something outside the norm, and it casts some doubt on Harley’s potential as a representative of his people.

13Scott proceeds in very much the same way in respect of white discourses, showing them to be deluded or downright mendacious. A community which disguised its dispossession and persecution on indigenous people behind such administrative tags as ‘Terra Nullius,’ Aboriginal Protection’ or ‘Native Welfare,’ and, more recently, ‘Aboriginal Reconciliation,’ indeed needed to have its discourse questioned and deconstructed. A great deal of Scott’s focus is on the desirability of whiteness as supposedly characterizing a superior type of human being. Scott’s allegories deconstruct whiteness, equating it with nothingness and death. But those specific allegories should be seen in the context of the novel’s reliance on allegory as a narrative device.

14The most obvious allegory has to do with what Harley describes as his “propensity for elevation” (12), his tendency to rise up in the air and drift where the wind carries him. This of course signifies his lack of substance and of roots because of the white tampering with Aboriginal identity – he is a “drifting lightweight” (31). And when Harley trails “like a banner” behind Ern’s wheelchair (33) he seems, in his ‘uplifted’ state, to be advertising his grandfather’s eugenicist success… At the same time, his aerial drifting allows him to get a bird’s eye view of the geographical environment, which is his ancestors’ traditional country, and thereby helps him to reconnect with this country. This is just one, though no doubt the most spectacular, allegorical element in Benang.

15Harley’s floating body is one example of how Scott inscribes a specific meaning into his characters’ bodies, turning them into living though grotesque allegories. Other examples range from Daniel Coolman’s monstrously swollen body to Sandy One’s post-mortem get-up. “Daniel’s adherence to pioneering values and capitalism,” Lisa Slater contends, “results in his body becoming monstrous and riddled with disease” (Slater 2, 66). The connection between Daniel’s Weltanschanung (a big word for an enormous character…) and his physical condition is a purely symbolical one, just as is the way in which dead Sandy is decked out: “He was naked, except for a hairbelt and a kangaroo skin draped over his shoulders, and he stared at Daniel as if defying him. His old resolve seemed back” (352). In life, Sandy claims to be a white man (not out of shame but out of practical concerns) but in death he reclaims his aboriginality. Given the differences in the historical context, this episode yields a different meaning to the one of the anecdotes recounted by Scott in his Alfred Deakin lecture:

I read one of the case studies in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. A young man found that he was of Aboriginal descent. The case notes said that in the days before his death he’d made a boomerang, and someone had seen him standing in front of a mirror in a one legged stance, with one foot resting on the thigh of the other leg. You know, like the image on tea towels. He must have been wondering. Wondering who he was, trying on personas (Scott, 2001).

16Where the young man’s image of Aboriginality amounts to little more than an outdated stereotype and can do very little to assist him in achieving an authentic identity, Sandy’s attire is the real thing. Indigenous bodies are also presented, in allegorical fashion, as being of the earth itself, like Sandy who tries to maintain his dignity in a manner that identifies him with his traditional country, “this granite coast” – “He held himself still, like granite” (227) – or Jack Chatalong: “His heavy feet appeared misshapen and roughly hewn, as if they were no longer toes or bones but were torn from the earth itself, and he was some weak sapling growing from them” (309).

17The decaying and corruption of Aboriginal culture under the impact of colonisation is also presented allegorically, through the symbol of the bad smell haunting indigenous characters. The colonists think of purifying the Aborigines by making them ever whiter but, in fact, they turn them into a mix of putrefaction and shit. The bad smell can be that of a once-healthy environment destroyed by colonisation:

A world gone? Changed. The telegraph line, railway line, wheel tracks everywhere. Rubbish, and bad smells. Trees gone, grass grazed to the ground, the earth cut, shifting, not healed and not yet sealed, vegetation left too long without flames and regeneration (478).

18The pervasive bad smell is also that of the decomposing body of an Aboriginal child – another victim of white colonialism whom the narrator connects with his own preoccupations:

When I began this project, I too breathed in the scent of something discarded, something cast away and let drift and only now washed up. It was the smell of anxiety, of anger and betrayal. Of course, it may equally have been the rank odour of my grandfather, his puke and shit (9).

19By extension, all Aborigines have a bad smell - Scott takes his cue from the racist view that blacks stink, and works it into an allegory that has to do with Harley’s bowels. This appears early in the novel when Harley says: “And it is thus – with a bad smell – that I should introduce myself; even if such an aroma suggests my words originate from some other part of my anatomy than the heart” (8). This part of his anatomy, as we shall see, has to do with colour as well as smell, and is very much part of the allegorical network which pervades the novel.

20The tree allegory should be mentioned as well. The tree stands for indigenous culture and the roots the latter has sent deep into the ground. Ern’s wish to have it cut down is a symbol of the whites’ genocidal intentions: “Grandad wrote: Cut down the tree. Burn it, dig out its roots. He might also have written: Displace, disperse, dismiss… My friends, you recognize the language” (107). But Harley frustrates his grandfather’s plans, expressing, again in allegorical form, the Aborigines’ obstinate survival: “I had trimmed only those limbs which could be seen from the window, and left others intact. The tree still lived; it would grow again” (108). As we shall see further on, trees also feature in Scott’s allegorical representations of whiteness.

21Some allegorical elements make just a fleeting appearance, as when Harley describes, among Ern’s documents “a page of various fractions” expressing the proportion of Aboriginal blood resulting from cross-breeding through several generations, and concludes: “Of course, in the language of such mathematics it is simple; from the whole to the partial and back again. This much was clear; I was a fraction of what I might have been” (26).

22No less significant is the mirror allegory, in which the reflected image of Topsy in the broken looking glass, with its missing elements, signifies her ontological incompleteness: “The mirror in the bedroom had patches missing and her [Topsy’s] face was incomplete. There were areas of blackness, pieces where there was no her” (369). Blackness here is apparently synonymous with nothingness, as if Scott was equating the colour black with lack of being. In a novel intended to support the cause of black Australians, the symbolism might strike one as inappropriate. But it should be seen in the broader context of black and white symbolism.

23Topsy is seen by Ern as the vehicle towards the first white man born – the black in her is denied, repressed, and the image in the broken mirror shows precisely the return of the repressed, which cannot be integrated into a complete picture. This return of the repressed also appears when Harley looks at himself in an unbroken mirror, to see himself “teasingly revealed” (159). He can’t recognize what he sees – a white creature who is not his true self, who shimmers “just like the aliens do on the television” (159). So he deliberately brings about the return of the repressed, i.e. of blackness:

I turned away, turned away from the mirror. I turned my back, showed my black hole, that last aureole of my colour, my black insides’ (159).

24In a reversal of the satirical coconut or Oreo cookie image (black on the outside but white inside), Harley highlights his black inner self. Perhaps Topsy, who has been trained to nurture and parade her fake whiteness, lacks the strength of mind to accept the blackness in her, and so remains alienated. The mirror is supposed to reveal “Who’s the fairest of them all” (158) – it is, with its emphasis on appearance and implied divorce from reality, an instrument of white oppression, as is also the case with Uncle Jack:

Uncle Jack told me how he used to have [a mirror] hung up in the boughshed he and Harriette shared among the peppermint trees, not long after the war years. He told me he even used to pinch his nostrils together. He would wet his hair, and flatten it with the palm of his hand (160).

25In the eyes of many characters – though not Harley – overwhelmed by racist propaganda and “that ultimatum delivered by the likes of my grandfather: ‘Be a white man or nothing”’ (426), the mirror signifies both the desirability of whiteness and its impossibility. Once trapped in a spectacular image that is not of themselves, the characters are left hopelessly alienated unless, like Harley, they manage to subvert that superficial and incomplete whiteness to bring out the inner black.

26This is of course very difficult to achieve since, through the various Aboriginal Acts, the whites are firmly in control of everything black – where black people can live, whom they can marry, what jobs they can do, where they can raise their children, etc. White discourses define blackness, dispossessing Aborigines of the very core of their being, turning them into mere objects incapable of representing themselves, as Scott shows in an allegorical fashion in the classroom scene featuring young Jack Chatalong:

With the stub of white chalk he wrote the word ‘black’ on the board. It looked like nothing, and a lie. The word said black, it was written in white. He rubbed it with his hand, making a white smear, and then wiped his hand clean of it […] Chatalong rubbed at the letters until they were completely gone (306).

27The colonists’ obsession with turning the Aborigines white is evidenced not just through Neville’s own writing, i.e. in realist fashion, but also symbolically, as in the festival scene where the faces of black children become caked with flour, turning them “suddenly white, shocking” (256). This game is a farcical variation on the topic of “breeding out the colour,” and is associated with “various other shameful entertainments” such as black and white minstrel shows – another allegorical “tableau vivant” - which were very popular at the time, and the racism of which went either unnoticed or uncondemned.

28Allegories of whiteness serve to deconstruct the colonists’ racist discourse, to show up its fallacy. This is not to deny its mirage-like power of attraction for the poor souls who, over many years, have been brainwashed or bullied into believing it is the pinnacle of human experience. Such power is illustrated by the prevailing whiteness at Kathleen’s wedding: “Yes, Kathleen glowed. Wore white… A white wedding” (95). But the white wedding is a fraud, in more ways than one. Not only is Kathleen pregnant by Sergeant Hall but she is actually ‘a Nyoongar woman’ (p. 98), not a real white. Whiteness is an illusion, as is announced early in the novel when Harley, drifting up to the ceiling, faces “a whiteness which was surface only, with no depth, and very little variation” (11).

29If, in western cultures, black is the colour of death and mourning, Scott turns the tables on this ethnocentric symbolism by equating whiteness with death. In passage after passage the colour white is associated with the destruction wrought upon the land by the pale invaders. Driving his grandfather into town, Harley notes: “On either side of us trees, dying, turning white” (34). The indigenous inhabitants are also the victims of this destruction and turn white – either literally, like their bleached bones, or more symbolically, through cross-breeding that robs them of their rightful colour and consequently of their rightful identity. Those two kinds of deathly whiteness are forcefully associated in Harley’s mind as, driving with Uncle Jack, he comes upon the gathered bones of the victims of a massacre: “Bones white like the skin of the young ones will be, the children flowing from these, the survivors growing paler and paler and maybe dying” (176).

30Benang is about the ultimate failure of the invaders’ whitening project – for all their cruel efforts, many Nyoongars cling tenaciously to their indigenous identity. “I am no white man, despite the look of me,” Harley proudly contends, echoing Uncle Jack’s assertion: “To start with, what you are is a Nyoongar” (494). Whiteness, in Harley’s case, is just a kind of forced disguise one needs to see through, and work through.

31Allegory has been characterized as “a mode of systematic commentary upon a text” (Fletcher 42). It gives the text “a lode of inner meaning” (ibid.) which provides an entirely different perspective on the apparent subject of the narrative which may thus be shown up as pure hypocrisy, as a mere gilding of the lily, as in the following kind of discourse:

What a blessing for the natives that they have got a sympathetic superintendent and self-sacrificing staff.
Segregation is the only thing for the Aborigines. But let their segregation be Christian and the natives taught to be useful … (93-94).

32If Benang seems to mirror the dominance of white discourses in which there is no place for Aboriginality, behind the scenes, as it were, a deconstructive activity is going on, an undermining of the dominant discourse. Allegory, which relies on a contrast between surface and inner truth, proves to be an adequate vehicle for this deconstruction as it highlights the hypocritical contrast between a discourse of whiteness that seems to promise some distant salvation to indigenous Australians and the reality of ruthless racism and discrimination. In this respect, the point of Scott’s novel is not basically different from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Both works denounce the obliteration or repression of black reality through the imposition of an illusory whiteness which, far from fulfilling its promises of liberation, reinforces the black subject’s alienation and cuts off all escape routes.

33Scott’s narrative is held together by a series of linked metaphors and symbols which, taken together, explode the misguided rhetoric of Neville and his minions, and expose it as a confidence trick. The phantom whiteness which pervades the story has to be cleared away so that black identities can re-emerge and hold their own. The critical instrument that is allegory proves very effective to achieve that clearing away.

34As a literary instrument, it allows Scott to transcend the binary opposition between realism and magic realism or symbolism without discarding either narrative mode. The account of the village festival, for instance, combines realistic descriptions of the various events, such as the episode of the treacle buns (255-56), with a symbolic layer of meaning to denounce the tragic farce of the whites’ determination to breed out the natives’ colour.

35Allegory has other uses too for an Aboriginal writer. As A. Fletcher contends, “Allegorical narrative yields a fixated image of change, in which time is synchronic, not ever diachronic,” so that allegory gives “the image of permanence in a world of flux” (Fletcher 47). Benang does show the permanence of Aboriginal culture in a context of historical change. White colonists, hell bent on ‘improving’ the land and turning it into a source of profit, claimed that this required the dispossession and ultimate disappearance of its first inhabitants, and Scott’s novel does trace the many social and economic changes inflicted upon Western Australia by its invaders, from the mid-nineteenth century sealers down to the end of the twentieth century, changes that resulted in the marginalisation and institutionalisation of the Nyoongar people whose only future was to have the colour bred out of them until only whites remained. White discourses (and practices) turn the Aborigines into a doomed race, as Fanny realises: “Those who had been closest to her were gone. She felt surrounded, almost, by the dead. They circled her, and there were more and more of them” (246). Harley, as for him, feels “Absorbed, barely alive” (35) at first.

36But for all the devastation they have endured, the Aborigines have survived. As Harley points out, “I know now there are many of us, rising. Like seeds, we move across and dot the daytime sky. More and more of us, like stars we make the night sky complete” (109). Allegory is again enlisted to suggest the Aborigines are consubstantial not just with the Australian earth but with the entire cosmos as well – as long as the world endures, so will they. Scott does not use allegory to encode a message that only initiates could decode, although this would be consistent with traditional Aboriginal narratives, as set out in indigenous stories and paintings. But he does use it as a subversive subtext to clear away the white people’s lies in respect of their barbarous treatment of the Aborigines, to break what anthropologist W.H. Stanner called ‘the great Australian silence’ concerning the whites’ genocidal practices.

37In Benang, allegory is an additional narrative mode. For all its pervasiveness, it is not predominant. One might see the novel as tripartite, as working on three separate though related levels. There is the hyperrealist element (quotes from books and newspaper articles), the realist (most of what Harley narrates), and the allegorical. The first level – received white wisdom in respect of the Aborigines – is obviously discredited, and stands in ironical opposition to the other two. Raised against those white voices, Aboriginal voices – those of the multiple Harley, of Uncle Jack, Uncle Jim, Fanny, etc. – enter into a conversation of healing. The allegorical elements confer an additional dimension to this conversation, allowing it to deconstruct white discourses. Behind the scenes of white racist practices, Aboriginality is alive, if not well.