Invisible roots: a creative nonfiction essay

Written for Power of Story, University of South Australia

Buried beneath a pile of dead bodies, he lay shivering in the snow beside the train tracks, waiting for the guards to give up their search. “Franc defied all odds, escaping from the brutality of the Russian military and finding his way home over many months,” I read. It’s what my grandpa told me of his father — albeit rewritten to suit my year 9 history report. It was an unbelievable story, woven from fragmented memories of a man I never saw without a glass of vino in hand. Yet people believed it. They honoured my family’s account of Franc as a hero, who, by making it home, ensured my grandpa’s birth, his migration from Slovenia to Australia, and the lives of all since born on this land. On Aboriginal land. Yet the same honour isn’t granted to those who were already here, I reflect, reminded of the juxtaposing experience Ngarrindjeri Elder Uncle Kym shared in his lecture.

Uncle Kym is a descendant of Ngarrindjeri inventor, David Unaipon, who he describes as a “great man … a quiet gentleman”. I can hear the resemblance in Uncle Kym’s voice, which whispers from my laptop speakers like the humble, contemplative creak of a rocking chair. “He invented the cutting mechanism for the shearing handpiece,” Uncle Kym says of Unaipon. “They produced a circular motion until he made it cut in a straight motion.” Unaipon was an author too, who wrote for the Sydney Daily Telegraph and published booklets on various science, literature and ethnography topics (Judd, Standfield & Ellinghaus, 2020). His work spreads like tree roots, thick and sturdy, underlaying the base for modern Australian science. Yet his achievements went unrewarded; he experienced racial discrimination, and his legacy has been denied. “They’re trying to say now that he didn’t invent anything, that he didn’t do anything,” Uncle Kym says.

I’m 14 years old, standing over my history teacher’s desk, hands clasped together nervously as she reads my report draft. “In 1907, World War I, [Franc] was captured by the Russians and sent to a concentration camp at the age of just 20,” she reads aloud. “Do you mean 1917? World War I didn’t start until 1914.” My cheeks grow red with embarrassment over the typo as I exclaim that yes, I had meant 1917. Despite this error, she does not question me further as she reads about Franc jumping off the prison train, hiding under dead bodies, trekking through the snow and killing a man who threatened to expose him. “What an incredible story,” she tells me when she’s finished. She doesn’t call my great-grandfather a murderer, or a liar. As I’m handed my report and walk back to my desk, my family’s story remains an accepted truth. The kindly inventor’s story, with its far-reaching roots, doesn’t. 

It's White privilege, I think, pulling up an article by Anderson and Handelsman. It’s that “invisible package of unearned assets” (McIntosh in Anderson and Handelsman, p. 39) that White people like me ‘cash in’ daily without a thought. I was given the benefit of the doubt that day in class; I cashed in my white skin for trust, for the presumption that I was intelligent and honest. Just as I have benefited from White privilege, Unaipon and Uncle Kym have been oppressed by it. As the article, Unaipon: Behind the da Vinci comparisons (Judd, Standfield & Ellinghaus, 2020), puts it, Aboriginal people have been systemically discriminated against due to the “normative and persistent settler-colonial stereotypes of aboriginal intellectual deficit”. Hence Uncle Kym’s research has been questioned and Unaipon has been branded a fraud. Scanning through the article, I read that we all carry a “knapsack of privilege” (Anderson & Handelsman, 2010, p. 40) because we experience different forms of privilege in different contexts. There’s language privilege at play, too, I think, recalling something Uncle Kym said in the lecture.

“I never knew that through all the years of my research that John Kerwin Stewart was or has been held up as the inventor of oscillatory motion,” Uncle Kym says, reading from his in-progress biography on David Unaipon. He repeats the word ‘oscillatory’ and holds it in his mouth for a moment like an unsavoury bite of food he can’t bring himself to swallow. Uncle Kym knows that Unaipon coined his invention the ‘straight cutting motion’ well before 1907 — the year that US entrepreneur John Kerwin Stewart released his version of the shearing head. But “Stewart had money, he had the privilege to patent first,” Kym says. “They change the word, and then they change everything else to do with it.” As straight cutting motion is dubbed oscillatory motion, its true inventor is delegitimised. “This is how they beat you … all throughout Unaipon’s life, they’ve used language – English language – against him.”

It's uncomfortable, realising that the written English word, which I used to honour my great-grandfather, is simultaneously a colonial weapon wielded against Aboriginal people. I’m reading Romancing Theft, a conference paper by Harriet Gaffney. British Romanticism, which has left its legacy on Australian society post-colonisation, heralds the Western narrative as dictator of truth, ownership and authority (Gaffney, 2016, p. 1), I read. The narrative appeals to ideals of heroism and national unity. It also centres around categorisation, I think, recalling a quote from an article by Phillips and Bunda: “White [narratives] document names, dates, places, roles … what is privileged and what is authorised” (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. 6). The last sentence of my history report comes to mind: “If Franc hadn’t escaped from the Russians and survived the treacherous journey home, none of us would be alive today, and we will always remember his story and appreciate his immense courage.” I unwittingly used language privilege to craft a narrative about my great-grandfather that aligned with colonial standards of accepted truth: immense courage, the “us” of unity, documented “facts”.

White settlers used the same tactics for a darker purpose, I read. They wrote themselves as central characters in Australian history, crafting dominant narratives of Aboriginal people that were “sutured into questionable facts of history that continue to hold sway” (Phillips & Bunda, 2018, p. 6). I think back to John Kerwin Stewart’s patent. I picture him writing ‘oscillatory motion’ in loopy script on paper, dotting the ‘i' and linking the ‘l’s, erasing Unaipon’s inventions with a swoop of his privileged hand. Acts like these legitimised the injustices committed against Aboriginal people like Unaipon (Gaffney, 2016, p. 3), obscuring the reality of their experiences and the need for systemic change. But Uncle Kym wasn’t just aware of this weaponisation of English language, I realise, thinking back to the second half of his lecture. He knew how to take the weapon and make it his own: by writing back.

“I found them all, everything, I found all of his inventions,” Uncle Kym says. “I found many other things too, and it’s all in the book.” As Uncle Kym tells us Unaipon’s story, I imagine him combing back the earth with gentle fingers, uncovering those sturdy roots that colonisers claimed weren’t there. He tells us that Unaipon invented water pumps and “things to move weights”. Unaipon was “absolutely so close to inventing perpetual motion it wasn’t funny”. Yet Unaipon was “taken for a ride” by government officials, mission staff and academics, who barred him from financial aid, jobs and the commercial rights to his inventions. “Racism was the driving force and David Unaipon lost out,” Uncle Kym says.  Worse still, the Point McLeay Mission where Unaipon lived was “like a prison camp”. “They’ll abuse and say anything they want to you and ring the police every day just to show that they can,” Uncle Kym says. I imagine Unaipon as a ball in a pinball machine, bouncing around rapidly and being deflected at every point of contact until it falls to the bottom, defeated by a system that set it up to lose from the very start.

“I’m not a writer, I don’t know how to write,” Uncle Kym says, finishing the lecture by reading from his biography on Unaipon. “But I thought I’d tell the story rather than letting someone else tell the story because this is my family, this is my grandfather, and I deserve the honour to do that.” The passage flows like a stream of water spilling over a dam. There’s no narrative structure, no tidying up and categorising into ‘facts’ — just his family’s truth, after all these years. He dismantles the colonial narrative, I think. He advocates for the place of Aboriginal storying in historical research. He centralises his rocking chair voice and ‘others’ the central authority (Gaffney, 2016, p. 9) of that privileged hand to demand social change. Yet his story is still questioned. 

As I read through one last article — David Unaipon, inventor By Uncle Kym and Kathy Bowrey (2023) — a passage near the end captures my attention. “I am not afraid to be questioned about my defence of the great David Ngunaitponi” (Kropinyeri & Bowrey, 2023, p. 814), Uncle Kym says. “There appears to be a rush to point out my shortcomings but even uneducated and pushed to the very edges of society we survive” (Kropinyeri & Bowrey, 2023, p. 814). Without acknowledgement of the impact of colonial racism, the stories of Aboriginal inventors like Unaipon will continue to be obscured (Kropinyeri & Bowrey, 2023, p. 795); yet sceptics try to erase them even as they are unearthed. I think back to my great-grandfather, shivering beneath that pile of bodies. I can’t imagine how afraid he must have been in that moment. I'm grateful that, once he made it home, he could tell a story that would remain undisputed truth. Uncle Kym combs his fingers through the earth over and over, hoping there will be a last time.

References:

Anderson, S.K., & Handelsman, M.M. (2010). Basics of awareness: privilege and social responsibility. In Ethics for psychotherapists and counselors (pp. 37-44). Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444324303.ch2

Brodard, Camille. (2017). Brown tree with roots [Image]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/brown-tree-roots-peOp2E3Zukk

Gaffney, H. (2016). Romancing theft. In N. Fanaiyan, R. Franks, & J. Seymour (Eds.), Authorised theft: writing, scholarship, collaboration – the refereed papers of the 21^st conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, University of Canberra, Australia, 28-30 November 2016 (pp. 1-10). Griffith University.

Judd, B., Standfield, R., & Ellinghaus, K. (2020). Unaipon: behind the da Vinci comparisons. The University of Melbourne. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/unaipon-behind-the-da-vinci-comparisons

Kropinyeri, K., & Bowrey, K. (2023). David Unaipon, inventor. Australian Historical Studies, 54(4), 794-815. https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2023.2189276

Phillips, L.G., & Bunda, T. (2018). Beginning stories and storying. In Research Through, With and As Storying (1^st ed., pp. 1-16). Routledge.             https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315109190-1