The Stolen Generation

I found myself sitting in a small rubber lifeboat, crammed in with eight other passengers, bobbing on the waves of the Sydney Harbor.  We were wearing bright orange inflatable life jackets courtesy of Quantas Airlines.  With small rubber paddles we rowed as much as we could towards the main shore of Sydney, which loomed on the near horizon but seemed miles away.  There were other boats around us, probably ten in all, holding wet and nervous passengers who were all rowing in the same direction and hoping for a quick rescue.  When we were close enough we pulled out a flare gun and shot one off into the sky, sending a burst of light into the sunny daytime sky.  The cavalry came quickly – a column of Australian Coast Guard rescue boats with their red sirens blazing.  They pulled up next to us and carefully helped the occupants of the life boats climb up a rope ladder.  One guy fell in, cursing at the cold water, but he was ok, and other than that we all got on board safely and headed for the marina area.  The concerned Coast Guard guys gave us blankets and water bottles and asked if anyone had any medical issues.  Soon we were at the docks and unloaded and herded into the vast cafeteria of an emergency shelter.  Nurses, doctors, policemen, and Quantas officials interviewed us to make sure everyone was OK and assess our medical condition and start a report on each individual passenger.  They wanted to hear our stories, for it’s not every day they have to pull plane crash survivors from the Sydney Harbor.  

A nurse in a crisp white uniform asked me if I was ok.  Yes I was.  She asked what my name was, where I had been sitting, and what happened.  As I gave her this information she wrote it diligently on a clipboard.  I was supposed to ask her about something, something very important, but I was forgetting.  I think it was about my wife or something.  Yeah, that was it, I was sitting with my wife and when the plane crashed against the waters and we headed for the doors we got separated.  I was supposed to ask about my wife’s whereabouts.  

“Have you seen my wife?” I asked matter-of-factly.  “When the plane went down she may have been hurt and I haven’t seen her since.” The nurse looked at me with mock concern.  Did I get it right?  Shit, this was bothering me.  I put one finger up and told her to hold on a second, and pulled an index card from my pocket.  I read it and shook my head in recognition, and then addressed the nurse again.  

“Forget about my wife - ummmm, I don’t even have a wife. But I think I’m having a heart attack.”  I looked at my index card again.  “Yeah, definitely a heart attack.  My name is Igor Federov and I am a Russian businessman and I’m having severe chest pains and my arm is numb.  I require immediate medical attention and I am allergic to codeine.”  The nurse looked annoyed – my gaffe had caused her additional paperwork and she had better things to do on this Saturday morning.  She scratched out “lost wife” and start filling in “possible heart attack” on the airplane crash survivor report.  I sat back calmly and looked around – there were plane crash survivors on gurneys, requesting translators, and looking for lost family members, all with straight faces and bad accents.  I hoped this would be finished soon so I could go down to the bar in King’s Cross to watch the horse races and drink a few beers.  

It was all just a drill.  Sorry – I couldn’t resist.  Quantas Airlines was running an emergency plane crash response drill and needed volunteers.  I was doing some work with the Red Cross in Sydney, mostly on landmine awareness in war-torn countries, but then they offered me the opportunity to help with a harbor rescue drill so they got me aboard.  Everyone was preparing for the upcoming 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, and mock drill to test the readiness was in order.  About fifty volunteers were rounded up and taken out to the center of Sydney Harbor that sunny morning and dropped onto lifeboats and abandoned.  We’d been briefed on the procedure and each of us had an index card that listed our name, country of origin, and any special circumstances to report. There are two things I learned that morning – that I never want to be stuck on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of complaining tourists, and that I am not a good actor.  I only had one line on my index card and I still got that confused with someone else’s card and messed the whole thing up.  My attempts at a Russian accent sounded like a constipated Ivan Drago.     

When we were done I headed down to King’s Cross, a funky neighborhood in the low rent area of the city filled with hostels and backpackers, pubs overflowing with Victoria Bitter Beer, and tattoo parlors.  It was where the action happened, where you could get blindly drunk while rooting for the Australian rugby team or watch a chick fellate a live Boa Constrictor in a sex show at a strip bar, all within a four block radius.  I preferred the rugby matches.  It’s also where I found a cheap hotel, and money was getting really tight on by sixth month of traveling around the globe.  And King’s Cross was the place you could see Aborigines, if you really were looking for them, passed out drunk in alleyways or selling trinkets from the shadows of the street.  No one looked at them, nor talked openly about their plight, nor acknowledged them in passing on the street.  It was almost like they were an invisible people.  

I passed a man sitting on the ground under a tree.  He was painting,  a few jars and brushes scattered around him and several canvases for sale.  I walked up to him to take a closer look at what he was selling.  He was dark – his skin so black that he even paled most African, and his curly hair fell in thick brown rings.  He had rounded features and was roped with muscle, wearing only a pair of red running shorts and walking barefoot on the sidewalk.  He smiled and introduced himself as Neville Oodgeroo Dingo and showed me what he was painting.  The colors jumped out at me – a kaleidoscope of reds and oranges and yellows snaking around the page.  There were no lines or forms, just a series of little dots in circular patterns, but if I zoomed out a little it also looked like a map, or an eagle’s eye view of a mountain range, with a kangaroo in the middle.  Everything was interconnected, yet its own separate form, so you couldn’t find where the painting started or finished, but it told a story in its entirety.  It was brilliantly colorful and yet so simple.  He mixed and stirred a series of paints traditionally made from smashed ochre, clay, animal blood, and wood ash.  Although the Aborigines had been painting on rock caves and dried bark for thousands of years it looked eerily familiar.  I saw traces of Indian art, or even the roots of symbolism and movement that I recognized in modern artist, like the New York graffitist Keith Haring.    

I complimented the Aborigine man on his painting, and he titled his head slightly and looked right through me with his ancient, sunburnt eyes.  That was the first time I saw The Dreaming, and it was the start of my spiritual journey.

The Aborigines may be the most ancient people on earth.  The oldest human skull ever found dated back 40,000 years (sorry Creationists) but there is evidence that descendants of the Aborigines dated back 125,000 years.  To put it in perspective, that is 3 years longer than Bob Barker was the host of Price is Right.  Of course Australia is an island, albeit a huge continental land mass surrounded by smaller islands like Tasmania, so its thought that the first inhabitants migrated over from India when the two landmasses were closer.  For eons they had the run of the land, living in loose tribes with no need for a formal government, economy, or laws.  They lived in harmony with the land, which makes sense because of course they are the earth just as much as they are on the earth – it’s all perfectly interconnected in one reality.  At one point there were about 750,000 Aborigines speaking 250 languages and dialects, but then the white man came.  The British helped themselves to New South Wales as a penal colony in the late 1700’s.  By penal colony I don’t mean they were all dicks, though that may not be too far off, but they used the island to ship their criminals for a sentence of isolation and harsh conditions.  Disease and mistreatment by the white settlers thinned their ranks to only about 90,000 in 1900, threatening to extinct the race.  Nowadays the Aborigines have regenerated to about 400,000 people – roughly 2% of Australia’s population, but they remain a permanent underclass in modern Australian society.  Many of them in the cities are subject to the diseases of alcoholism and drug addiction and live in extreme poverty.  There are few jobs, schools, or opportunities for the Aborigines, and until recently they had no real political or social voice.  But in the 1990’s a movement of consolation and reprisal started healing those wounds.  At least they plight was brought to light, much of it through mainstream exposure to their culture and art. 

We were coming off some crazy and dangerous experiences in Central and South America, and I thought that the departure to a more “civilized” country would make us safer, but I found the opposite to be true.  Jesus Christ everywhere we went in Australia we got into fights.    

The white dudes there are very racist, very anti-immigrant, and sexist pigs, and love to swill massive amounts of beer and display their toughness – not a good combination for the rest of us.  Within a four-day span we got in at least three altercations.  One of our first nights in Australia we were chilling at a disco in King’s Cross when Shane, who was always smooth with the ladies, saw a chick he wanted to meet on the dance floor.  He went up to her to say hi and touched her on the arm to ask her the time or when the place closed or something.  Out of nowhere this diesel psychopath with a shaved head and prison tats ran onto the dance floor and threw Shane back about ten yards.  He started screaming that no one was going to touch his girlfriend, and was ready to fight.  I ran up behind him and got him in a great chokehold.  I have no idea where it came from, but I had his head, his neck, and his whole right arm completely immobilized like a dangling puppet.  I guess I should have hit him – I have a bad habit of not taking the cheap shot in a fight, and I thought it was going to cost us dearly.  The dude kicked and thrashed, ripping my shirt, but he couldn’t get free.   By now the commotion brought four HUGE bouncers, all rugby-playing Maoris (think Samoans), who made me let the guy go and ushered us to the door.  As we all marched outside I thought for sure I was going to have to fight one of the Maoris, and I began mentally preparing to eat my meals through a straw the rest of my life.  But they were cool and just wanted to clear the imbroglio out of the club.  Once we were on the front street the psycho guy huffed and puffed and yelled and jumped up and down, and then charged at Shane, who stood their cool as a cucumber and didn’t say anything.  As the guy came at him Shane executed a flawless side step and rode the guy’s momentum into a parked car.  His head hit hard enough to create a dent and set off the car alarm, and from there they went down on the pavement and punched and kicked a few times before the bouncers broke them up again.  Nice work Shane.  We walked off unscathed.

But the antics continued.  I had the good fortune of meeting a really cool girl in Australia, a Filipina named Monina Applebum.  We crossed paths in a park one day and after I mustered up the balls to approach her, we hit it off famously.  I found her adorable because she was this petite pretty Filipina but spoke with a thick Australian accent, like the Queen of England was coming off a bender.  Monina and I explored the city, hanging out the gorgeous Bondi beach by the day and partying at the casino at night.  But I noticed everywhere we went there were always some ornery white boys ready to talk shit about her being Asian.  I found out that those Australians were extremely rough around the edges, xenophobic to the point where they went out of their way to insult or pick fights with anyone who was of color or an immigrant.  I felt bad for the Aborigines, who were forced to coexist with those assholes for 300 years.      

Their beautiful ancient culture was almost wiped out by the British migrants, an integration into modern society (or attempts at genocide depending on who you ask) called The Stolen Generation, or The Stolen Children.  For one hundred years, from 1869 until as recently as the 1970’s, the Australian government alongside with the Christian Church forcibly removed Aboriginal children from their homes and placed them in special Missionary schools (or prisons depending who you ask) with the rationale of converting them to Christianity.  They ripped families and cultures apart and basically kidnapped these children to create a permanent underclass that mimicked their Western/Christian belief system.  

And then at 18 years old they were turned out, lost without the support of family, or an understanding their true culture.  Even their names and language were changed in this white washing.  The damage to the psyche of the Aboriginal people was devastating.  Many of them went directly to the cities, where they faced crime, poverty, drugs and alcohol with no chance of advancement or a good living.  Their identity, their lives, had been stolen from them.  

I was beginning to understand how important that was.  When I started my trip around the world I had been looking for hot beaches, hotter parties, and smoldering chicks.  But after a while that held less and less appeal to me.  I was at a crossroad of conscious, for the first time asking myself some important questions.  How could I not after everything I’d seen?  I began to truly comprehend just how lucky I was, to be born to a good middle class family in the United States.  I had plenty of love, support, food on the table, and never worried about safety or a roof over my head.  I was luckier than 99% of the rest of the world, and yet I saw so many warm, kind people with so much appreciation and happiness in their lives.  It was humbling to see people sleeping on the street, children going hungry, voiceless victims of other’s greed and cruelty, and those with no opportunities for a better life.  I began to understand the “beautiful struggle” of life, as Talib Kweli describes it.  We were all temporary and all on this earth just for the blink of an eye, but our spirits, how we lived our lives to help others and the legacy we left behind, could transcend and become eternal. What did I want to do with my life?  I wanted to serve.  I wanted to give a voice to those people – to help the underdogs who no one else would help.  Most of all I wanted to leave this world a better place.  I didn’t have all of the answers, but at least I was starting to feel that I was pointed in the right directions.  

But there in Sydney random acts of violence kept stunting my spiritual journey.  It was uncanny how trouble found Shane and I no matter where we went.  We were walking across the street, at a crosswalk, when a car pulled through and clipped Shane.  I was pissed, and went to the driver’s window and banged on it for him to get out.  Shane was Ok, just a little shaken up, but the driver sped off before I had the chance to smack him around.   

We decided to attend an opera at the historic Sydney Opera House so I went to buy us tickets that morning.  I got my tickets and was looking at some of the colorful pictures of past operas at the side of the big entrance hall when I heard a commotion.  I turned to see a man, a normal-looking tourist in his 40’s, screaming at the top of his lungs at the gal behind the ticket counter.  I have no idea what he was upset about, but judging by the way he was foaming at the mouth and waving his arms frantically, he was out of control and about to get violent.  The poor girl was petrified, but she was stuck behind the open counter within arm’s reach of the lunatic.  Everyone in the place stopped and stared, frozen.  His rage escalated until I was sure that he was going to attack her and I had to do something.  I walked over and squeezed in between him and the counter, blocking her.  I asked him what was going on and told him to calm down, and gave him a look where he knew I was ready – that he’d have to go through me to get to her.  This brought him somewhat out of his violent trance, and his mind for the first time started registering consequences for his actions.  He took a half step back and continued to yell, but now the gal was safe, and he didn’t come at me.  The police ran in from outside and came up behind him and wrestled him to the ground and cuffed him.  I advised the cops that I thought he was schizophrenic or mentally ill but off his medications.  When I turned around the gal was in tears, and looked me in the eye and thanked me as sincerely as I’ve ever seen a human being say those words.  In retrospect I should have parlayed her gratitude into a hot date that night, but back then I wasn’t nearly as opportunistic as I am now.

With all of that behind me I returned with Shane to the opera house that night.  It was a classy affair, most of the men wearing suits or tuxedos and the women wearing cocktail dresses.  The opera was Turandot by the Italian Puchinni, a dynamic explosion of color and movement set in an ancient Chinese Emperor’s court.  Of course it was in Italian, which added to the majesty but made it impossible to understand.  There was an electronic viewing screen where they translated the singing into English, but our seats were so far in the back that it was out of view.  No worries, I sat back and enjoyed it…  until the Eurotrash dude next to me started in.  He was some swarthy self-important Italian with his Froggy French girlfriend, and upon the opening scene he started whispering to her.  I thought they were just getting settled in and it was only mildly rude, but soon realized that they planned on talking the whole time.  He was translating the opera to her – word for word.  Are you kidding me?  I “shhhhd” them once, softly.  They kept on.  I shushed them again, a little more vehemently.  They only got louder.  So I told them to shut the hell up.  They kept talking, but did quiet down a little, and I resigned myself to watching the opera next to the most inconsiderate people on earth without letting it ruin my experience.  Once the opera was finished and the curtains closed and the lights came on I turned and walked away without looking at the Italian.  I know my temper and I didn’t even want to go there.  To my amazement he grabbed me by the elbow and yelled at me “Don’t you shush my wife!”  Oh boy.  Here we go.  I was shocked that he put his hands on me and I saw red, but I tried to be chill about it.  I told him something eloquent, like “then don’t talk the whole way through a Goddamn opera next time.”  We went back and forth a little bit, and I told him that if he ever touched me again I’d knock him back to ancient China.  I tried to simplify the problem for him so any third-grader would understand, that we all paid a lot of money for these seats to listen to the opera, not to hear him talk the whole time. 

“Well if it’s the money you want, then I pay for your whole ticket!” he exclaimed, turning up his nose at me. 

“Ok.” I responded, holding out my hand.  He was stunned by my reaction. 

“Ok dude, give me the money then, I accept your offer.” I said.  He hemmed and hawed but of course didn’t reach for his wallet.  A couple people around us chuckled that I had called him on his bluff and made him look like a fool.  It was going nowhere, and the next step was for me to smash his arrogant Euro trash teeth in, but Phil pulled me away.  I knew I couldn’t do anything, not because I’d even have to break a sweat to mop the floor with him, but because my mom, my dear sweet mom, who is a huge opera buff, would be heartbroken if her son got in a fight and arrested at the Sydney Opera House.  Love ya mom!  

  

I wanted to experience a more tranquil life, to have my environment match the newfound spiritual awareness that was within me.  A short train ride away from Sydney found me in the Blue Mountains, where I spent a week at working farm.  It was quiet and it was beautiful, and I thoroughly enjoyed my dawn runs through the groves and eucalyptus tress, the misty paddocks wetting my sneakers as I chased after kangaroos that bounded away when they heard me. 

I watched the Aborigines on the farm placidly going about their work.  They seemed most at home, at peace in the natural beauty of the mountains, like they had an extra hour in the day or knew a secret that no one else did, where I was grossed out by the sheep sheering and struggled to milk a cow, hoping it wasn’t a bull. 

I talked to them a little bit and began to understand what they called “The Dreaming.”  In the Aboriginal belief system the world was created in the “Dreamtime,” where nothing else existed until their ancestors, called the First Peoples, walked the land, creating everything and naming it all as they went.  The aborigines have always kept history through passing down oral traditions and lore, and their “religion” is really a spiritual connection with the earth and a reverence for the time of creation, The Dreaming.   But it is also the present day reality, for there really is no difference between past, present, and future, far and near.  Everything is interconnected, in space and in time, and mother earth is one living organism.  We are all small, insignificant dots, but if it weren’t for every one of us there would be a void in the painting – the fabric of reality would be torn and not exist. The Dreaming means that nothing in this life is truly real, and everything you can not see or touch is just as tangible as the rock and the tree and the sky around us – it is all just a journey, with no beginning and no end: if you walk about for long enough you end up back right where you started.

Less than a year after I left Sydney the 2000 Summer Olympics went off without a hitch.  No Russian businessmen named Igor Federov had a heart attack, nor did he misplace his wife.  No Quantas aircrafts crashed in the bay and needed to be fished out.  It was a historic event, christening the millennium and shining a light on a part of the world that was both ancient and new.  Watching it on TV from the safe confines of the United States, where no Aussie meat-heads could take a swing at me, I saw that an Australian woman, a sprinter named Kathy Walker, was handed the torch and lit the Olympic ring at the Opening Ceremonies.  She went on to compete brilliantly, winning her 400 meter event and becoming the first person ever to light the Olympic Flame and go on to win a Gold Medal.  I smiled and got goose bumps thinking about the colorful dot Kathy Walker just placed in her own painting of her existence, her Dreaming, for Kathy Walker was a full-blooded Aborigine.