“…there’s been a death”

I

I am in my small house in Yulara, cooking for shabbat on a Friday in December 2006, when the phone rings. A male voice speaks: It’s Sergeant Benjamin, doctor, of the Mutitjulu Police… I’m sorry to trouble you….there’s been a death.

A pause.

The voice resumes: It was a hanging. We need someone to certify the death. The nurses here can’t do it; it has to be a doctor.

I am sorry, doctor.

The voice is careful, it is feeling its way. I don’t know the officer. The voice I hear is sober – sobered almost to a halt by the news of a death.

I ask the officer to bring the body to the clinic. We arrange to meet in twenty minutes’ time.

It is early evening – 1830 hours in official language – when they pull up at the clinic. Even at that hour the heat is relentless. The sky is painted blue. There are two vehicles, the ambulance in its familiar livery of white slashed with red, preceded by a police car. A large oblong man steps out of a police car of such startling blueness that the sky pales behind it. The officer’s face is deeply creased.

We shake hands.

His offsider gets out and straightens. She dwarfs her sergeant. Apart from the odd post-adolescent pimple, her face is smooth. She walks over to the ambulance and commences a laughing conversation with the nurses who have driven the body.

After a time the nurses are free to attend to my questions. I address the older of the two, the one I know from the clinic: When was she found?

She turns to her associate. For a moment, both are silent, then she says: I’m not really sure. The family called us an hour ago – when they felt ready to let us take the body, I guess. Someone found her before that and called the family. We don’t know when…

We release the latches and the heavy door of the ambulance clunks open, revealing a large white bag resting on a collapsed stretcher.

Warm air flows from the interior.

The nurses step backward. Fumbling, I try to pull the stretcher a distance from the vehicle’s dark interior. The nurses step forward and help, then again retreat. I pull on the zipper and the bag falls open, exposing the head and upper body of a human.

I pause. There is no sound, no movement.

There is a moment of reverent peacefulness. The skin of the person whom I stand and regard is brown, the same brown that glows from the earth and the many heads of rock in the early sunshine during my early morning run. That colour has penetrated me, claiming me like a mother.

I place the back of my gloved hand against the brown skin. It is warm.

Just as shocking, the face is very small.

I straighten and ask the nurses: Do you have a date of birth?

One shows me a file. She points upper left, where I read “19 November, 1991.”

I look again at the small face. There are a couple of blotches of acne. The child has buckteeth. The body is short and slender, the body of a girl who has scarcely begun the journey to womanhood.

I have no doubt, I feel no hope, but I rest my fingers lightly over her carotid artery. It is still.

I check her eyes. Dull now, pupils wide, fixed and unresponsive to the light, those are pearls that were her eyes.

I apply my stethoscope to her chest. The silence of death is drowned in a distracting chorus of inanimate rustling and chafing sounds. These are the artefacts of my examination. I hear no heartbeat. No air moves in or out of the chest.

This is the body of a fifteen-year old girl whose life is extinct. No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees; rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.

I have another question for the nurses: What do you know of her health before today?

“Six months back she was sniffing, but not since then; there’s been no sniffable petrol in the community since then…

There were some family problems. She had been seen by Mental Health…”

The answer is unsatisfactory. Any possible answer would be unsatisfactory. It all boils down to one thing: we do not know.

On an afterthought I lean forward again, peering past the fine cheekbones and the slender jaw, peering at the soft tissues beyond. There, on her throat I see what had to be seen, a bracelet patterned in her flesh, a curvilinear design that is unexpectedly graceful. It is the embossing in her skin of the fatal rope.

II

After my time in Uluru, I return to practice in the city  where life is conducted discreetly, where emergency services screen the ugly and the violent from us good citizens, and life feels normal again. Here the tragic is not the rule.

After half a year, I am ready to work in a remote community again. I fly to Hall’s Creek in the Kimberley, dimly aware that the town is said to be ‘troubled’.

As I board the plane, the hostie hands me a morning paper. Headlines leap out at me, reporting an alarming increase in youth suicide in the outback, especially in the Kimberley.

When I arrive in Hall’s Creek, I am greeted by a passing parade of silent figures, most of them too thin or too fat, floating noiselessly like spirits along the streets of their own town, as if they have no right to be there. Or no right to be heard.

At night, it is the opposite: the people are heard, but dark skinned in the moonless dark, not readily seen. They cry out hoarsely, harshly, sounds of abuse, the odd scream, cries punctuated by peals of riotous laughter.

Late at night, sober people do not walk the streets in Hall’s Creek.

I go to work in the clinic. My patients seem to fall into two categories – those who are wrecked but salvageable and those who are wrecked, whom I cannot redeem. I work hard with members of the former group. Bare feet have been nicked by a bindi eye, and have become infected. Scabies have been scratched and infection has entered. A small cut on a child’s palm is infected.

At every infected site pus gathers. Where infection is deep set, the pus is trapped and it is my job to release the foul fluid. It pours, it bursts, stinking into freedom. The smell lingers in the air. Something is rotten in the state…

My patient feels relief, and I, little relieved, bandage the foot, the hand, the leg, and send it out to become infected again.

And turn then to the unredeemed, to the old ones.

A ravaged woman, thin, hobbling on the arm of her stronger sister, her mind seemingly destroyed along with her body, is unable to recall how old her baby is. Her file tells me she is 31 years of age.

After two days at work in Hall’s Creek, I have contracted an insidious condition that is rampant in the town. Apathy and acceptance, braided into a noose, rest around the neck here. Slowly, it tightens into a passivity that numbs and deadens. I have never before been afflicted in this way.

You can get the papers here, one day late. Page after page is full of gloomy report of the Aboriginal condition, page after page of relentless criticism of the industry in which I work as a reliever for a palliator.

And although Hall’s Creek is a town of only 1800 souls, the name appears with surprising frequency on the pages of this Perth daily. Hall’s Creek appears to be proverbial for all the things that have gone wrong, everything that has been done, everything that has been done wrongly, everything that has not been done.

The paper arrives 24 hours late, but it makes no difference. Not until Thursday, 21 June. That is the day when the prime minister shakes off his own passivity and declares martial law against child abuse in the Northern Territory.

I feel confused. I am not surprised to find myself deeply ambivalent about these brave, bold, brash initiatives. For anyone with any humility, confusion is morally mandatory on Aboriginal matters. And confusion is, of course, quite useless.

But no-one else I speak to seems confused. Among people who are not customarily supporters of the prime minister, minds are quickly made up: it has to be done.

Today is Friday. There are new regulations in Hall’s Creek that restrict the sale of grog. You can’t buy alcohol before midday and you aren’t allowed to buy more than a dozen cans of full strength beer. A few minutes after noon I pass the bottle shop, as a stream of people snakes along the road. The new grog regulations are taking effect: everyone carries the identical purchase; everyone has bought the maximum.

Early this evening, there will be a footy match in town. There is a mob coming from near the NT border to play the local team. (I try to imagine Collingwood going to play in Sydney – the whole team driving both ways. Next weekend, the home teams will drive similar distances for their away matches.) Here is an opportunity to see something distinctive, an exhibition of gifts in full and exuberant flower. Aboriginals playing footy are not known for passivity.

I decide to walk the 150 metres to the town’s floodlit oval. An emerald of green, it shines in the light, a reminder of how grass used to look in the country towns of the Garden State.

Although it is only 6.00pm, the town is dark and drunk and very easily audible. There at the corner of Hall Street and the Northern Highway, a man urinates against a fence. At the next corner a woman stands beneath a street light, her shirt undone, her breasts fully exposed to view. She stands there, more or less steadily, her back braced against the fence, facing the street. Is she offering herself for sale? Or is she available free of charge? Or is she simply too drunk to achieve the buttoning of a shirt, or just unconscious of her exposure?

The night is rent with the cries of kids, the screams of women, the hoonish menace of daylight’s shy youths as they bay now in groups to an unseen moon.

I never make it to the footy. After a few minutes I turn and retreat to my house, to the peace and sweetness of shabbat.

© Copyright Howard Goldenberg

Howard is the author of the sellout memoir, My Father’s Compass (Hybrid 2007, 2008). He is a GP who has made fifty working visits to outback communities. His new book, Raft (Hybrid 2009), tells the story of a doctor in a yarmulke who enters Aboriginal Australia. Raft is a reflection on what he sees, feels and learns; and how this sits with being a comfortable, white, middle-class Jewish citizen of Australia. Raft and My Father’s Compass both feature at the Melbourne Writers Festival (Aug 20-30, 2009).

by Howard Goldenberg

On November 9, 1938, Heinrich Korn is nine years old.

William Cooper is 77 years old.

Shaike Snir has not yet been born.

Heinrich Korn and his family are proud Germans. Heinrich’s father is proud to serve his Kaiser and his Fatherland in World War I. Heinrich (nowadays, Henri) says he only ever begins to feel his Jewishness in the autumn of 1938, when he is excluded from his school in Wupertal-Elberfeld because he is not Aryan. At this moment, the Nazi government creates Henri the Jew.

***

At 11.00 o’clock on the night of November 9, Henri is awakened by noises from the street. He joins his parents at the window and witnesses unimagined scenes of savagery. Below, by the pagan light of flickering torches, throngs of their fellow citizens, normally reserved and formal people, are cheering and singing wildly.

Henri sees uniforms, ordinary householders, gangs of youths. He hears sounds of crashing and the endless splintering of glass. In the moments between the sounds of destruction he can make out some of the singing: ‘Let the blood flow!’

On all sides in the crowd there is a hideous joy.

From the hallway below them, Heinrich and his parents can feel the thump of approaching booted feet. The footsteps come up the stairs and reach their first-floor landing. Heinrich sees his parents, ‘grey with fear.’ The footsteps stop at the Korn threshold. Then they hear a woman’s voice ring out, harsh and urgent: ’The Korns are decent people, good Germans, of good character!’

All sound stops. After long seconds of silence the boots clatter down the stairs.

The voice belongs to their neighbour, Frau Lewitzki, previously no friend to the Korns. Frau Lewitzki has two sons, both members of the S.S. It is they who have given their mother forewarning of the ‘spontaneous’ demonstration. It appears that neither the local Nazis nor the Lewitzki sons have noticed how similar their Polish surname is to Levi, Levitzki, and other Jewish names.

***

A friend and classmate of Henri Korn, Leo Trosky, dies during Kristallnacht: when the mob invades the Trosky flat, Leo’s parents fight back, the mob seizes them and flings them through the window to their death below. Then they take hold of the child and throw him too, to die on the pavement, a nestling flung from its nest.

Early in the morning of November 10, Henri Korn creeps into the street to a scene that ‘mere words cannot describe.’ Some seventy years later, Henri tells me he cannot speak of it without losing his composure: ‘The streets were littered with smashed furniture and thousands of shards of glass… candelabra, brassware, cutlery, bed linen. An upright piano!

Dwellings had been ransacked, women were weeping and men were wandering around aimlessly…

One image haunted me: an old grandfather clock, split in two by an axe-wielding maniac.

How strange that we had been spared the horror, thanks to the intervention of Frau Lewitzki.’

‘Later I slipped out again. In the city centre, people were in a state of great excitement as the synagogue was burning… I ran towards it with all speed…

A large crowd was milling around, mostly working-class women, dressed in their blue aprons, whom I remember as being big and fat. Their faces were twisted with hatred… they waved their fists, screaming “Get rid of the Jews!”

A woman was attempting to salvage the Torah scrolls and a torch was thrown at her, setting her clothes alight.

People laughed and applauded at a human in flames.’

‘Suddenly one woman looked down at me and exclaimed, “This boy is a Jew. I know his face!”

Immediately six heads swivelled and their eyes stared menacingly down at me. I fell on my knees and crawled among the many legs, managing to escape. I was shaking and hid under a bench, expecting to be pursued by an angry mob but nobody came. The burning synagogue must have offered a much greater attraction.’

‘Apparently those efforts to burn the synagogue down failed that afternoon, so the evening brought the experts, who eventually managed to destroy it. The next day, 11 November, I was drawn to see the ruins… and the gutters of nearby streets were littered with hundreds of torn fragments of Torah scrolls.

For days after, cold and blustery north winds dispersed the Hebrew-inscribed remnants across the city.’

Henri stops. He comes back to the quiet and complacent peace of Selwyn Street in Elsternwick. In his beautiful diction, he explains: ’You know we Germans felt utterly abandoned by the world of civilized people. Some American Jews – not many – a few twittered in protest.

American public opinion was hostile and Jews were  cowed.

In Britain, Oswald Moseley was describing Kristallnacht as “a necessary event”, needed to teach Jews a lesson.

From Australia there was silence. Only William Cooper and his League acted.’

At the Jewish Holocaust Museum, Henri shows me the plaque that reads:

The Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre honours the Aboriginal people for their action protesting against the persecution of Jews by the Nazi Government of Germany in 1938.

Nearby a photograph shows Heinrich Korn embracing a great-nephew of William Cooper.

***

In Mebourne, William Cooper reads the sketchy reports of Kristallnacht in the newspapers and he acts: together with Bill Onus, he organizes and leads a protest by the Australian Aborigines League to the German Consulate in Melbourne.

William Cooper is the son of an Aboriginal woman and a white Australian father. He is thus a ‘half-caste’ in the classification of humans that obtains in his own country and in Germany; he is not good enough to live in the mainstream.

Being of mixed blood, Cooper must be civilized and Christianized. He is taken from his home to a mission. There he reads the Bible and absorbs ideas of the equal value of all humans in the eyes of their Creator. He reads too of another people, dispossessed, dispersed and humiliated, and sees his people’s experiences in the in the same light as those of the Jewish people.

Cooper’s fellow protestor, Bill Onus, is another early Aboriginal activist; his son and grandson become  recognized urban Aboriginal artists.

The Onus grandson, Tiriki, works in close collaboration with Shaike Snir, an Israeli Aussie artist, art patron and entrepreneur, eccentric and activist.

***

Henri Korn and Shaike Snir are contrasting individuals. Henri is a neat man, formal even in his weekend clothes, considered of utterance. He gives birth to his words with careful deliberation from behind the bushes of his Bismarck moustache. His speech is dignified, precise as a physicist’s.

Shaike Snir is picturesque stringbean of a man with the beard of a prepubertal billy goat; informal, intimate and intense in utterance, he is a deadly serious joker.

After meeting the Onus family in 1989, Shaike engages endlessly with indigenous people and causes. His medium and his milieu are those of the artist. In 1995, together with two other Jewish painters, Shaike makes a pilgrimage to Mistake Creek in the Kimberley. It was here in the 1930’s – in the same historic moment as the massacres of Kristallnacht – that a massacre occurred of Aborigines.

A cow belonging to a pastoralist had gone missing; local tribespeople were suspected; children and women were rounded up and shot.

Later that day the cow wandered back.

It was a mistake.

When Shaike arrives he makes a gift to the local people. It is an art work of his own making, a white bull, echoing both the cow of the mistake and Picasso’s great painting of modern barbarism, Guernica. This is Snir’s act of Teshuvah and Zikharon, at once contrition and memorial.

He asks Hector Gandalay, a local leader – himself a painter – whether he can forgive the massacre.  If I do not forgive, says Gandalay, the evil spirit will take me.

Later, Shaike recruits painters and sculptors from around Australia to contribute to a large-scale touring exhibition on themes of memory and contrition. He calls the show ‘The White Bull’.

Snir does not rest, does not disengage, creating work after work on the theme of the white bull and the red heifer (an enigmatic sacrifice stipulated in the Old Testament for symbolic penance following sin); and working to this day with Tiriki Onus on a major project, recalling Bill Onus and his Kristallnacht protest.

As Shaike observes: Tiriki and I are good friends. Consider the racial elements: Tiriki is one quarter Aboriginal. His mother, Jo, is German, so he is half German. Tiriki is Aboriginal, I am a white man, a Gadya. Tiriki is German, I am Jewish.

***

My nineteen year old son is playing pool in a rough pub in inner suburban Melbourne, his customary kippah (skullcap) on his head. An Aboriginal man stares at him. At length, the Aboriginal weaves a path towards him and speaks: “You’re a Jew, aren’t you?”

Ready for anything, my son replies:”Yes, I am.”

“Well, us mob gotta learn from you mob.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean – you mob, you got your land back, you got your culture, you got our pride.

We gotta be like that.”

© Copyright Howard Goldenberg

Howard is the author of the sellout memoir, My Father’s Compass (Hybrid 2007, 2008). He is a GP who has made fifty working visits to outback communities. His new book, Raft (Hybrid 2009), tells the story of a doctor in a yarmulke who enters Aboriginal Australia. Raft is a reflection on what he sees, feels and learns; and how this sits with being a comfortable, white, middle-class Jewish citizen of Australia. Raft and My Father’s Compass both feature at the Melbourne Writers Festival (Aug 20-30, 2009).