William-Blake-and-the-Indigenous-Imagination-A-Review

him alive, were slaves. 13 In both Blake and Malouf there was, and is, something divine
and transformative in the experience and vision that the outsiders and vagrants and
unvanquished artists possess: what is it?
David Malouf’s 1993 novel Remembering Babylon opens with a startling epigraph from
Blake: “Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon we Know Not” (FZ iv.102). Like much of
Blake, it’s an ambiguous, thought-provoking statement. In the contested histories and
worlds of how we define reality, who is to say what is freedom and what is Matrix-like
captivity? Who is to say that ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ is not rational practice, is not
a protector of freedom and identity? Blake’s next line helps develop these uncertainties:
“All is confusion All is tumult & we alone are escaped”. In Blake’s world, there is not
one Urizenic, correct, ‘objective’ interpretation of experience, as the Cartesian mind
(craving certainty, and thus control, power) would like. But rather than seeing this as a
failing or a limitation, Blake urges us to embrace this multiplicity of vision, this
enrichment of meanings (as the angels and devils embrace on the cover of The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, in an explosion of colour). In this sense, we are all subjects - not to
an Other, not to Monarchy, not to Ideology, not to Empire - but to ourselves, embodied
perspectives, each with particular (subjective) vision and experience. It is this holiness of
subjectivity that the subjugation of Aboriginals tramples on so disdainfully: a desire to
eradicate the other’s perspective. As Griffith pointed out, it is significant in this respect
that the indigenous people of Australia were not even counted as humans but were
classified by the original English explorers/ invaders/immigrants as part of the “fauna” of
the place, of what they called an “empty land”. 14 Sadly, despite all the centuries of
genocide (chronicled in Bringing Them Home, the influential 1997 report of the Human
Rights Commission), despite all the governmental statements of apology, which resulted
in part from these findings, the Aboriginals remain largely “invisible” in much of
contemporary Australian life. 15
The Blakean epigraph also suggests a way forward: as Griffith noted, the quotation points
to one of the main themes of the other great Australian novel that he discussed in his talk,
Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White. This Nobel-winning book, first published in 1961,
13 It is estimated that in the first century A.D. up to one million slaves were owned by the
richest five per cent of Roman citizens. Indeed, during this period the slave population
constituted approximately one third of the total population, which is perhaps why the
message of Jesus had to be defused so urgently. It was the Emperor Constantine who
finally managed this, turning him into a pro-Empire Mithraic Sun-God in the third-fourth
century (Meager, D., Slavery in Bible Times; Brown, P., The Rise of Christendom). As
Marcus Borg notes, Jesus represented and embodied what he terms the “politics of
compassion”, in stark contradistinction to the “politics of purity” that was associated with
the priestly tradition, and centred on the temple. For Jesus, Borg adds, “compassion had a
radical sociopolitical meaning … The inclusiveness of the Jesus movement continued
into the early Christian movement as we hear it described in the parts of the New
Testament. It was one of the most striking qualities of the movement” (Meeting Jesus
Again for the First Time (1995), p. 13, p. 58. p. 58).
14 Pilger, op. cit., p. 187.
15 Ibid., p. 186, p. 181.
6