VOGUE VOICE

In honour of Father’s Day, Walkley Award-winning journalist Stan Grant pays tribute to his Aboriginal father and the examples of hardship, pain and strength he saw as a child. Grant drew on his family history in writing the new film The Australian Dream, a documentary about the life and career of footballer Adam Goodes and of Australia’s first peoples.

I’M NAMED AFTER my father. Stan is his name. To his family he’s Black Horse. He got the nickname because as a young boy he used to run around with tin cans tied to his feet and hands, imitating a horse. And he’s black. He’s black, Dad: black in a way I am not. It’s a blackness that comes not just from the colour of his skin, but the depths of his soul. It is blackness that comes from a certainty of being. He belongs here and this place is black.

To be black was tantamount to a crime when Dad was growing up. Black meant that he could not be free; not counted fully as a citizen; told where he could live; whether he could swim in a pool or drink in a pub. Drinking was a crime if you were black: he was locked up for it often enough. Dad tells me a story about when he and a few of his mates walked into a pub in Sydney and the publican told them he couldn’t serve them. One of his mates was cheeky enough to ask why. Because you’re Blackfellas. “We’re not Blackfellas,” Dad’s mate said, “we’re American Indians.” The publican told them: “Boys, you’ve thrown more boomerangs than tomahawks, get out.” Dad would always laugh at that. He’s black and that’s what Blackfellas do, they laugh at pain.

As a boy I saw up close what being black did to a man. I saw a man denied the chance at an education; a man who made his living with his fists and his muscle. He was a footballer, a fighter, a sawmiller. He lost the tips of three of his fingers and broke countless bones, heaving logs three times his size. All of this to put food on our table. I’d see him come home after work, his clothes sweaty and stained with blood and sap. Mum would run a bath with hot water boiled from the old tin copper we used. We didn’t have running hot and cold in our place. I’d see him there, eyes closed worn out from the struggle of survival.

How I worried about him. I worried about him and I worried about us. He was all we had. We were a black family, dirt poor, itinerant with no permanent home. We were a family – cousins, grandparents, uncles and aunties and in-laws – always on the move. We outran our hunger and we outran the state; Dad knew what the state could do, how it could take your home or your kids. He was all we had to hold us against the world.

My stomach used to cramp with pain when he was at work. I used to wedge myself up against the window waiting to see the dust from the dirt road telling me his car was heading for home. Then I’d relax again; breathe again, until the next day and the day after and on and on. It is the strongest memory of my childhood, that burning, tension in my gut, that feeling of impending doom. If we lost Dad, we lost everything.

I remember Mum, too; a wiry, tough woman. She knew blackness; her blackness. Her dad was black, her mum was white. In some ways that made her the blackest of us all. Her family paid the biggest price; being white didn’t stop her mum being rejected and too often humiliated, and being half white made my mum and her siblings something to be pitied and reviled. They were targeted, too: moved on from their makeshift shanty homes; her younger brothers and sisters made wards of the state and sent off to children’s homes.

They made a good pair, Mum and Dad. What Dad couldn’t earn with his hands, Mum would make up by going to the churches and getting food vouchers. Some might say swallowing her pride, but she’d never lower her head. She’d clean cars to bring in some extra cash. She’d make onions and mince stretched to feed whoever needed it. And she’d go to bed hungry to make sure our bellies were full. I’d see her sometimes rub her hand over the back of Dad’s neck and watch his shoulders fall and his muscles relax. I’d watch them late at night from the back seat of our car as we went in search of our next home; she’d light up a cigarette, take a puff and hand it over: a little ritual of love between two people who had only each other.

They’re old now and they still hold each other. They made it through. Dad – this man who carries the history of this country on his skin, dark ink tattoos and scars – has helped save the language of his people: Wiradjuri. He wrote the first dictionary of Wiradjuri along with a man named John Rudder, a hero of a bloke, a linguist who befriended Dad and gave him a reason for living. As a boy, Dad had seen his grandfather jailed for speaking his language; now my father has been awarded an Order of Australia. He earned a Doctor of Letters from Charles Sturt University, and oversees that university’s Indigenous language program.

He’s been bigger than Australia, Dad; and he’s made Australia better. I have thought about my father throughout making the film, The Australian Dream. It is a film about Adam Goodes and how he confronted racism on the football field, but it’s more than that. Much more. It is the story of a people and a nation. It is my father’s story and his father’s story and his father before him. It is my story. It is the story of our dream: what our country has been; what it is and may yet become. It is the story of being black in our country and the price too many have paid.

He’s black, Dad, in ways I’m not. I’m softer black, more privileged black, wealthier and healthier black. He wanted me to be tougher: he taught me to throw a punch and play footy. He feared for me, the life he’d lived. He was hard, sometimes too hard. But without him I couldn’t have survived. I got lucky and he’s glad for that. I’m black – proudly – but not black like Dad: I’ve got his name, but I could never be worthy of it. He’s a man, my dad.

It is the story of a people and a nation. It is my father’s story and his father’s story and his father before him. It is my story