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University of Queensland Press, 2009
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Although the kids displayed a frighteningly high level of deafness in the confines of the classroom, it was remarkable how acute their hearing became when they went outside. Sister had always believed this strange phenomenon pointed to the fact that the tympanic membranes in the bush mob's ears were tuned to another frequency. Why else would they have such trouble learning the teachings of God and how to stop acting like a black person? If they had tympanic membranes like a white person they would have the ability to become rational, thinking human beings with a whole different outlook on life. Let's face it, no one in their right mind would want to go fishing every day, or sleep under a shady tree while the kids played in the waterhole, or walk around in a state of undress in the tropical heat like the bush mob did. They'd want to be on their knees praying to God and learning to read so there wouldn't be a repetition of last month's little disaster when Leah had accidentally washed the nuns' habits in starch instead of washing detergent causing them all a great deal of discomfort…
The Novel: Every Secret Thing is possibly the funniest novel I have ever read. And when I say 'funny' I don't mean 'wryly amusing' in the standard literary sense of the word. I mean gut-bustingly, laugh-out-loud hilarious, the kind of book you feel compelled to recommend to friends and relatives so that they too might experience its mixture of razor sharp satire and rollicking comedic anarchy.
What makes the book so remarkable is that it all takes place on an Aboriginal mission in the Northern Territory at the height of what's now referred to as the era of the 'Stolen Generations' — a shameful period in Australian history that continues to have serious ongoing social and cultural repercussions for its disadvantaged and marginalised indigenous people. Less a standard novel than a collection of colourful vignettes artfully stitched together into a narrative that spans several decades, Every Secret Thing manages to both recreate and satirize this time while revealing, in the plainest terms possible, how misguided and ultimately destructive the policy of 'native assimilation' was.
The plan, as the government of the day saw it, was ridiculously simple. After invading and then successfully stealing the land of Australia's traditional owners, the white status quo felt it had the right (if not the duty) to systematically force these 'savages' to adopt and adapt to the white way of life whether they proved willing to do so or not.
Step one was to remove them from their ancestral homelands and send them to live in church-run missions where they would be taught to become Christians and to speak English (and only English), thereby eliminating scores of First Nations languages that were, in some cases, thousands of years old. Step two was to remove the lighter-skinned indigenous children from the custody of their parents — the children defined as 'coloured' rather than 'black,' who stood a much better chance, it was erroneously assumed, of being accepted by and at least partially integrated into white society — and send them to purpose-built institutions that would train them to become low paid household servants like maids and gardeners and, in the case of almost all of the girls and many of the boys as well, the sexual prey of their future white male employers.
How, you may be wondering, could any of that serve as the basis for what is essentially a work of broad comedy? Surely there's nothing humorous about genocide and cultural erasure, just as the idea of removing children from their parents and literally dumping them in the laps of paedophiles certainly provides no cause for mirth. But that's precisely why Every Secret Thing is such an impressive work of fiction. It pokes fun at the horror and, more significantly, at the deluded white do-gooders — priests, nuns, anthropologists, social workers, stoned hippies beguiled by the mythical 'freedom' Aboriginal people seemed, to their perpetually befuddled minds, to possess — who were directly responsible for perpetrating such outrages in the name of nebulous concepts like 'enlightenment' and 'progress.' And the book does this without once diminishing the underlying seriousness of what's being done to its indigenous characters by the people who are so self-righteously determined to 'rescue' them from themselves.
Of course, the idea of utilizing humour to combat horror is nothing new in literature or in wider popular culture. The oppressed making jokes at the expense of their oppressors has become commonplace in the twenty-first century, a means of acknowledging atrocities and the pain those atrocities inflict on their victims while simultaneously distancing those victims from the memory of those same catastrophically painful events. Munkara does this by introducing us to three separate yet oddly interdependent worlds — that of the Catholic missionaries and their lay brethren (none of whom possess so much as a basic understanding of Aboriginal culture), the restricted and restrictive world of the 'mission mob' (indigenous people who live in supervised church housing and have ostensibly been converted to Christianity and been 'rechristened' with arbitrarily chosen Biblical names) and the more easygoing world of the 'bush mob' (indigenous people who refuse to convert and cling to their traditional way of life while taking sly advantage of what the mission has to offer, including its readily available supplies of flour and sugar, as and when it suits them).
Every Secret Thing is also notable for its portrayal of the sexual lives of these three loosely affiliated groups, with Munkara never shying away from describing the impact that the sight of so much young unclad black flesh had on the missionaries and especially on inexperienced Catholic brothers who, despite their vows of celibacy, frequently proved unequal to the task of resisting temptation. This is not just a source of sometimes ribald humour, it's also an accurate depiction of what went on inside the religious communities of the time — practices that were never acknowledged by hypocritical church elders in order to maintain the lie that white people were somehow 'morally superior' to the people they had come to these communities to allegedly 'educate' and 'civilise' and, of course, have regular heterosexual and/or homosexual encounters with.
But for all its humour, the book is not without its elements of tragedy. Marigold, a girl taken from her mother as a baby, returns to the bush mob only to learn that she no longer fits in with them and can't endure the 'primitive' sort of life they lead, a life that her lifelong training in the dubious art of 'thinking white' has taught her to view as being grossly inferior to the world defined by supermarkets, automobiles and suburban fibro cottages. As the years pass and the traditional ways gradually give way to the encroachments of post-World War Two, post-colonial Australia, the laughter begins to take on an even darker tone. Change may be inevitable, Munkara warns, but what it steals from indigenous people can never be completely understood or quantified. Her brilliant debut work of fiction is a timely reminder of that and of the fact that as much harm was done to native populations in the name of short-sighted policies of 'assimilation' and 'integration' as it was by any of the many diseases their white invaders so thoughtlessly and brutally inflicted on them.
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MARIE MUNKARA, 2019
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The Writer: Marie Munkara is a woman of Rembarranga and Tiwi heritage who was literally born on the banks of the Mainoru River in the central Arnhem Land region of Australia's Northern Territory. She was brought into the world by her paternal and maternal grandmothers on 6 February 1960 and spent the first eighteen months of her life in this riverside setting before being sent to live in the Nguiu community on the Tiwi Islands.
Having been born relatively light-skinned, Munkara was sent to a Catholic mission at the age of three and subsequently fostered by a white Catholic family (her foster father turned out to be, in her words, 'a rampant paedophile'), living with them in the Melville Island mission until the age of fifteen when she left to pursue further education on the mainland. The accidental discovery of a baptismal card in a book belonging to her foster parents during a return visit to Melville Island in 1988 revealed the hitherto unknown fact that she was of mixed indigenous and indigenous/Chinese heritage.
'The name and place of birth were unknown to me but then my eyes were drawn to the date of birth,' she recalled in her 2016 memoir. 'Daly River was where the ritual of baptism had been performed on me at the age of eighteen months by a bloke by the name of Father Fallon, and yep there it was, a westerly few hundred kilometres from Mainoru. I went and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I still looked the same. But I didn’t feel the same, that’s for sure. In the space of ten minutes my world had risen to dizzying heights of joy only to be smashed to pieces on the cruel and fickle rocks of fate… On the way home I thought about how our mother [ie. her white foster mother] in her more generous moments would refer to me as her "dusky maiden." How I was told that I could "pass for anything." How I now felt an ugly piece of shame taking root in my heart at my embarrassing and humble beginnings.'
Soon after this Munkara returned to the Tiwi Islands and was reunited with her birth mother Judy — a reunion she initially found to be disillusioning and confronting (and on which she no doubt based much of the Marigold material in Every Secret Thing). During her flight back to Melbourne she had a chance encounter with a woman whose son-in-law, she was told, had been a pilot tasked with the job of flying black kids from the Tiwi Islands to the mainland throughout the 1960s. Viewing this conversation as an omen, Munkara decided she owed it to herself to return to the island of her birth despite the dirt and lack of amenities (and the unavailability of alcohol) and the feelings of alienation she had experienced while interacting with her lost blood relatives.
Her decision proved to be a wise one. In time she developed a close and loving relationship with her birth mother Judy, who died in 2000 around the age of sixty. Nine years later Munkara fulfilled her lifelong dream of becoming a published author, with her first novel Every Secret Thing winning the 2008 David Unaipon Award for a previously unpublished work of Aboriginal/Torres Strait Island fiction before being published by the University of Queensland Press the following year. After re-locating to Darwin in 2009, she went on to publish two indigenous-themed children's books Rusty Brown and Rusty and Jojo and her second novel A Most Peculiar Act before her widely acclaimed memoir Of Ashes and Rivers That Run to the Sea appeared in 2016. At present she is reported to be working on her PhD and a television adaptation of Every Secret Thing.
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JUDY with her daughter MARIE MUNKARA, 1988
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Use the link below to visit Magabala Books, publishers of both Every Secret Thing (2009) and A Most Peculiar Act (2014). The memoir Of Ashes and Rivers That Run to the Sea (2016) is published by Penguin Books Australia.
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