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manhood
Melissa’s Story
By Melissa Lucashenko
Fathers? Oh, where to
begin. Not with my
own father, who was
raised with a refugee’s
violence and loss, and passed
some of it on. Let me speak
instead of some indigenous men I
know — men of colour in a white
world. Black men, who, like me,
are not just afraid that their sons
won’t make it into the uni course
of choice, but afraid also that
our sons may die grubby, violent
Let me speak instead of
some indigenous men I
know — men of colour
in a white world.
deaths in police cells or parks.
‘S’ is from a coastal Northern
NT community, raised in
Darwin, lives in Brisbane. He
is light-skinned, has married a
white woman and has a blonde,
blue-eyed son. He listens to his
son, oh how he listens! Every
anecdote is theatrically reacted
to. At three, this boy can tell a
story! Gestures, wide eyes, the
lot. On the riverbank, ‘S’ wrestles
his boy in play as I and
three very black grannies look
on. Conversationally, I speak of
the violence in the Byron community,
and how I want to help
change that. ‘It’s not terrible,’ I
explain. ‘Not like say in Tennant
Creek or somewhere.’ S pauses.
As always, he speaks softly but
seriously. He is a law man, been
through ceremony. No need for
loud noise or bluster. ‘Even a
little bit — that’s too much,’ he
says. Pinches finger and thumb
together. ‘Even that much. It’s
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too much. Any amount.’ He is
suggesting a very different universe.
‘B’ is from North Queensland.
I hear him ask his five year old,
‘Do you like being an Aboriginal
boy?’ and listening carefully to
the answer. I have asked another
Aboriginal man, a mutual friend,
to be an uncle to my own boy,
whose father is white. When
puberty hits, my partner can do
some of the work for our son,
but not all of it. He needs
black men too. Unasked, ‘B’
says to me in the same fashion
as ‘S’, quiet, serious but
not pious, ‘He can call me
Uncle.’ Unasked, mind you.
These black men have broad
shoulders.
Another man, also from
Queensland. Hurting. In a public
mall in an Australian capital city,
he is told by police to move on.
‘I can’t, I’m meeting my ex here
with my kids,’ he protests. ‘We
don’t care,’ the coppers reply.
‘You can’t be around here any
longer than two minutes.’ He is
forced to leave, to stand up his
kids.
There is a mythic Aboriginal
man in the white Australian psyche
— drunken, violent, raging,
dangerous. I know one or two
such black men, but I know a lot
more like ‘S’, and like ‘B’. Black
men who know our kids are precious,
and act like it. Whitefellas
have a lot to learn from them, but
will have to shed their ingrained
racism to do so. That’s part of
being an Australian father too.
Melissa Lucahsenko is an indigenous novelist
who is optimistic about our children’s future.
Painting courtesy of Byron Community Primary School
encouragement. But if we had that, how
would we have turned out?
The vision for me around our indigenous
people within this country is to
see dads take a lot more of a role with
the evolvement of their kids, all the
way through from their birth through
to their death, really. And I suppose giving
something to their kids that they’re
able to clutch on to.
I treat the work that we’re doing,
it’s like we’re going through a jungle
and we’re clearing a path. A lot of our
elders in our time before us have cleared
the path in front of us, but there’s bits
of debris still left. We’re going through,
finding that debris on the road. And even
though we’re finding that debris on the
road, there’s still a little bit more behind
us. And if we continue to keep doing this
and keep role modelling to one another,
eventually we’ll have a good path that
our kids can go down and they won’t
have to deal with all the debris.
We need to get down to the core, to
the guts of what our problems are. Some
of it can be growing up in a home where
there’s violence; it can be emotional violence,
or neglect, sometimes it may be
sexual abuse. I hear people who talk
about how not having violence or abuse
in any way, but just not having physical
connection with one another can be hurtful.
I’ve heard other men share how at
least getting a hiding was getting some
attention, better than no attention.
I’m getting people to become more
aware of that, to really keep working
with one another around those issues.
It’s always going to be there, and slowly
over time we’re cleaning the debris out
of the road. Eventually we’ll have some
good tracks but we need to be joining
together to make that happen, because
regardless of all the family turmoil you
have, there’s also the discrimination,
the racism, the experiences.
It’s a learning process that goes on.
When we stop learning is when we
stop breathing. I make a lot of mistakes
along the way, but mistakes are about
learning. If we don’t learn from them
we repeat them — the bigger the mistake,
the bigger the learning. It took me
a while to realise that sort of stuff. But
I’m glad today, and what I do is I share
it with others. The good part is I share
it with my kids.
I’ve been lucky, like I say.
Greg Telford is co-ordinator of Rekindling the
Spirit, a program set up by the Aboriginal
community of Lismore to service Aboriginal
people. He is a father of five children and three
children currently live with him and his partner.