White Lie Number Ten

Nicholas Jose

• Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and ‘Our’ Society edited by Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris
  Aboriginal Studies Press, 295 pp, AUS $29.95, March 1998, ISBN 0 85575 294 7
• Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation by Henry Reynolds
  Allen and Unwin, 221 pp, AUS $17.95, July 1996, ISBN 1 86373 969 6

Australia’s first Government House, built for Captain Arthur Phillip when he arrived with the first fleet of convicts and settlers in 1788, was demolished in 1846 to make way for the grander Neoclassical architecture that befitted a burgeoning colony. Today the site is the forecourt of the new Museum of Sydney, with the ghostly floor-plan of the original residence picked out in white on the granite flagstones. At its perimeter, adjoining a row of Victorian terraces once used for Customs and Immigration, stand 29 pillars of sandstone, steel, I-beam and hacked, charred wood. One is inscribed with the few known names of local Aborigines – the Eora people; others with Latin and Eora names for local botanical species. Several are inset with organic materials – ash, bone, shell, resin and human hair – that evoke the Eora’s world of fishing and feasting and its transformation (its holocaust) when white men came. As you walk among the pillars, you can hear taped Aboriginal voices, eerily disembodied, recite the placenames where the vanished Sydney clans once lived.