Haunted by history.
History brings out the worst in me. It is like holding shattered glass.
“There is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again.” (Eugene O’Neill)
The great American playwright knew something didn’t he. History is a death spiral. It locks us in its grip and it will not let us go.
The great ones know this. James Joyce famously warned us that history is “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
At times like these, I am haunted by history. I am haunted by a photograph of a young Aboriginal girl staring blankly into a camera. Her eyes look joyless; dead really.
She is standing with a group of other young girls against a brick wall in a place that has become notorious. It was a girls home in the small Australian rural town of Cootamundra.
Here young Indigenous girls would be taken from their families and “trained” to be domestic servants. This young girl in the photograph lost her name and was given a number: 658.
Number 658 was separated from her family along with so many others - over 1500 in the twenty year period from 1912.
In the Cootamundra girls home she slept in a dormitory with the other girls under a sign that read “think white, act white, be white.”
Many of those girls were forever lost, never to see their families again. Number 658 was sent to work as a maid for wealthy farming families. She found her way back, finally having to seek approval and permission to marry the man she loved, and live on an Aboriginal mission with her husband and alongside her long lost brother.
Number 658 would die a young woman, only 37-years-old from rheumatic fever she first contracted in the girls home. She left behind six young orphaned children ... a life beaten down by the weight of our history.
Number 658 had a name - a name taken from her. Number 658 was Eunice Josephine Grant. She was my great aunt. I tell this story because this week has been “Sorry Day” and the beginning of Reconciliation Week, to mark the apology the Australian Government gave almost 20 years ago to what is now known as the Stolen Generation.
Yes, I am haunted like so many others by history. As philosopher, Tsvetan Todorov, said “History tends toward the grave”.
