A Home Away From Home

Larissa Behrendt – Indigenous Person of the Year

Larissa Behrendt finishes off an email, documents piled up around her, spilling over like the spare contents of her mind. Author of an acclaimed novel, Home and an array of seminal non-fiction works it seems Behrendt has mastered the life of a polymath as both an accomplished writer, and an activist lawyer. Behrendt’s passion for justice first emerged when hearing her grand-mother’s story as a stolen generation child, and the xenophobia and shame her father took on growing up in a country boarding school. As a young lawyer, holding on to the hope of a bright future for indigenous Australians, her views on education and the telling of story as the salve to the problem of indigenous rights were thrown into disarray when the Howard government disregarded the Bringing Them Home Report. From here Behrendt was convicted for a deeper form of change, and went on a search for the root cause.

“Because of my family’s direct personal experience with the removal policy, when Howard’s office said that it is only 1 in 10 that were taken away and that it was for their own good and that it wasn’t genocide it enraged me - I wasn’t going to let the government wipe out the stories of my family,” asserts Behrendt. From the anger experienced in those years, and the struggle of confronting the reality of racism and the indigenous plight in Australia was the important step that led her to diverge from governmental advocacy and her work as a pro bono lawyer to write her first novel, Home. The novel works as a fictional account of Behrendt’s family history, capturing the space between two characters from vastly different eras; Candice, a young rights lawyer, and her grandmother, Garbooli a member of the stolen generation. From this process she has developed an out self-confidence and an inner biography of both the nation she emerged from and the one that exists today.

As part of the process of writing and before studying at Harvard University, Behrendt travelled to her grandmother’s tribal lands around Walgett and Brewarrina in Northern NSW. Her time spent there allowed her to piece together the jigsaw of her father’s past, and in so doing her link to her people. “I think it says a lot about the memories of Aboriginal people that when they look at the landscape it’s like they’re reading a history book… (returning to the community) was a very powerful moment for me because it was a reminder that it didn’t matter how poor policies were that there has been something so resilient about Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal families.” Out of it came a renewed vision for lasting social infrastructure and a community undergirded by the Human Rights required for a substantive form of reconciliation. For Behrendt, there was no longer a past denial of identity, but a newborn strength shaped in the crucible of homesickness for Australia in America.

“I felt as Aboriginal there as anywhere else… I was much less concerned with my choices and I knew that I could be a Prada-loving, very comfortable urban Aboriginal person. I don’t think I would’ve felt as confident with my aboriginality if I haven’t been somewhere where there were no trappings of it,” muses Behrendt. For Behrendt, the place our nation needs to consider is ‘home.’ It is this place where Australia will find the source of the problem of Indigenous disadvantage, and the solution in the guise of reconciliation. It is this inbetween space we must go to when our sense of self is shaken. “Identity is such a complex amalgam. It’s almost as if it were one hundred percent nature and a hundred percent nurture. There’s no dichotomy around you in a sense,” says Behrendt.

As we turn the conversation from her own identity to the deeper questions of indigenous rights and law, Behrendt sports an acute academic dexterity and radiates the sensitivity of a life lived in the tensile gap between worlds. She envisages a fresh future in the auspice of an Australian Republic where the stories of the past become an ossified part of our constitution; where story is weaved into a constitution in touch with the diversity of Indigenous Australia. “People need to see the move to Republic as not just a simple legal change that changes the head of state and a few words in the constitution… but we really need to take it as a national building exercise and as an opportunity to make a more inclusive Australia.” It’s not until the policy-making of Australian governments matures from an impoverished dialogue between white and indigenous Australia, and see indigeneity as an intimate part of our history. The personal substance of Behrendt’s testimony naturally demands the respect that surpasses the clanging cymbals of political correctness and rhetoric.

In light of the rigorous political and community-based career she has pursued, it is easy to see why Behrendt was donned the National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee Indigenous Person of The Year for 2009. It seems that her views have touched a deeper place in the indigenous community, which stands as a testament to her natural strength as both an indigenous women and, social justice lawyer. She maintains hope, and the tenacity to strive for a form of justice rare in our society’s constant pursuit of the quick-fix pragmatism which has failed its indigenous people and redressing the injustices of the Stolen Generations. “It has been incredibly disheartening to see that now, despite the apology and despite the endorsement of the declaration on the rights of indigenous people, policies haven’t changed at all and that this government has been as tenacious about hanging onto the policies of the last government,” asserts Behrendt.

Behrendt’s next novel Legacy is coming out this October, and takes a sympathetic view of the rights movement in Australia as our next step in developing a system that has caught up with other developed nations with inbuilt Human Rights and moved beyond the horrors of the past and the current atrocities of the Northern Territory Intervention.

“Legacy’s a very different book, it really focuses on a relationship between a father and daughter - one in the rights movement and middle class educated daughter. It tries to look at the legacy of the civil rights movement and to counter those statements that people make so flippantly that rights movements haven’t worked… I think there will be a time when Australians will be comfortable with a leader who has a fairly strong social justice stance,” says Behrendt.

Legacy is released on the 26th of October.