biography
Philip Morrissey
Ruby Langford Ginibi
Haunted by the Past
Allen and Unwin $17.95pb, 182pp, 1 86448 758 5
WAITING FOR A FRIEND at Sydney's Redfern Railway Station I was appproached by a Koorie woman who asked if I had any change to help her 'visit the brothers out at the Bay' -- in other words visit the Aboriginal prisoners at Long Bay Gaol -- a testimony to the omnipresence of prison in contemporary Aboriginal society. Given the numbers of Aboriginals incarcerated, Aboriginal writing from behind bars has been fairly limited. Haunted by the Past was started by Ruby Langford Ginibi's son Nobby while in gaol and then taken up and completed by Ginibi herself. It discusses Nobby's experiences with the law and his extended battle to make a life outside of prison, Ginibi's attempts to provide him with a grounding in Koorie culture and her analysis of settler racism and the penal system. Underlying Ginibi's concern for Nobby is the real fear that he will end up one more Aboriginal man dying in custody, and to illustrate this possibility she provides short biographies of several Aboriginal men who, unlike Nobby, didn't make it out alive.
Nobby and his problems with the law (recorded in such chapters as 'Nobby goes to Gaol') were an important aspect of Ginibi's earlier work Don't Take Your Love to Town. While that book is an Australian classic -- poetic, historical, political and sociological -- Haunted by the Past does not have the same degree of complexity and affective richness; in consequence, though we learn a lot about Nobby, he remains an oddly insubstantial figure. Ginibi drives home the politics of her narrative with asides directed at the reader and makes effective use of excerpts from Nobby's writing and official documents. But there is a certain complacency in the method, and I had the sense that the author now knows who her audience is and writes accordingly: Haunted by the Past gestures more toward a university Aboriginal studies seminar rather than a less committed general readership. Its thesis, that colonialist racism continues to have far reaching impacts on many Aboriginal lives, is unlikely to be a matter of contention, though a more nuanced approach would have served this point better.
If this is a question of style there is also the matter of content and the values that underpin it. Ginibi has always written about Aboriginal men with sympathy and her position in relation to Nobby's problems with the law is unfailingly that of a protective and indulgent mother. As a teenager Nobby is sent to gaol for shooting at police, a crime he says he didn't commit. When he is released from prison he visits a street prostitute and is arrested and beaten by police before being found guilty of the abduction and rape of her and a co-worker. Out of prison once more, Nobby's flat is raided by police and they discover amphetamines and he is gaoled for two years. Was Nobby innocent of all these charges? Ginibi is certain he was -- and he may well be; when it comes to the history of their treatment of Aboriginals, Australia's police forces have a lot to live down. But irrespective of Nobby's guilt or innocence the excuse of over-determining racism can be stretched to the point where it denies Aboriginal men the dignity of being responsible for their own actions.
The case of one of the men Ginibi writes about is an example of this: with a history of criminal offences he was in custody, at the time of his death, for the rape of a nine-year-old girl and the sexual assault of a hospital patient. While Ginibi does not mention these offences she does write of the 'colonial oppression' which he suffered. 'Colonial oppression' provided the conditions for the emergence of his misdirected life but doesn't explain why he acted as he did (or conversely why other Aboriginal men don't); it doesn't justify his crimes nor negate the rights of his victims.