Comment

Stan Grant
Understanding suburban sovereignty

For me, the great Australian novel is Patrick White’s The Tree of Man. I am not the first to say this: the story of Stan and Amy Parker as they build a new home in the wilderness is an Australian Genesis story.

Questions of God loom over the work. Stan Parker could not see the God of his mother, the God of “pale-blue gentleness”. The God Parker feared was the God of his blacksmith father, who had looked into the fire. Parker’s God was a God of the prophets.

The Tree of Man is biblical in its scope and its poetry. White mines the deepest mythical tropes of flood and loss, love and betrayal, despair and hope to reveal something unique about ourselves and whatever we might call the national soul.

As in all great myths, White takes us into the dark forest. He asks, what price are we prepared to pay to call this fallen Eden home? Two scenes define this work and set it apart from all others that might similarly tilt at such gravity and ambition.

The first is the moment when Parker swings an axe and strikes a hairy tree. White writes that the sound “was cold and loud”.

“It was,” he writes, “the first time anything like this had happened in that part of the bush.”

With an axe Parker had broken a silence of tens of thousands of years. White doesn’t have to say it – this was his genius – but for the First Peoples of this land that sound reverberates still.

The second scene is when Parker’s dying mother tells her son of his inheritance, a bit of “scrubby land”. Keep this property, she tells him, “it’s safe”.

Never in Australian letters has a first chapter thundered with such prophecy. White establishes that this is now a place of existential violence and loneliness, a place where the God of grace is hard to find. Land is all we have. We are nothing without land. It is our safety.

Parker clings to his land. He is cast on the winds of fate but whatever may come from that first swing of the axe, this is now determinedly his place. This is Parker’s Australia. He has land. Aboriginal people will be cursed to live without land in the land of our ancestors.

I was born in the echo of Parker’s axe. We were a landless family. My early years were spent on the road. We were itinerant and poor. Schooling was disrupted and sporadic. I did not have a home until I was 15 years old.

Everything turned for me and my family from that moment. It was the mid 1970s and the federal government introduced a program for Aboriginal families with regular employment to gain low-interest home loans.

My parents bought a small, ex-government house in a nondescript Canberra suburb. To me it was a palace of possibility. No more did I have to pack for a moonlight flit to another town. I had my own bed. I attended the same school for a complete year. I arranged a maths tutor to catch up on my still-infant-school knowledge of numbers.

Dad worked nights in a sawmill, Mum rose in the dark before dawn to detail cars, coming home with her hands red raw.

We settled into a life of stunning, domestic, suburban boredom. In time our fortunes turned. This boredom saved me. That small house saved me.

The old saying that good fences make good neighbours is much misunderstood. It does not mean fences keep people out; it means fences are places to lean on, to talk across, to invite others over.

In our modest suburban home I met Australians in a way I never had before.

Australians may not understand each other, speak the same languages, worship the same faiths – we may not even necessarily like each other, but that fence is sacred. The fence is the most meaningful expression of suburban sovereignty.

We do not cross that fence with impunity and when someone on the other side of the fence needs help we tend to lend a hand.

One awful night, my parents’ home burnt to the ground. Our little dream was gone. Everything was lost. Their neighbours took them in.

Home ownership is the Australian compact. History, race, tragedy, poverty – home trumps everything. Take it from me – we experienced it all, and having a home gave us a chance.

Patrick White knew it. Keep this property, Stan, it’s safe.

Of course, not everyone gets a home. History, race, tragedy and poverty sees to that. Most Aboriginal people remain locked out of home ownership in Australia. About 40 per cent of Indigenous people own a home, compared with nearly 70 per cent of the rest of the population.

Here’s the twist, though. Indigenous people are massive “landowners”. A recent Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies conference revealed that Indigenous communities, entities and individuals have rights and interests recognised to cover up to 60 per cent of the Australian land mass, predominantly via freehold, native title or land rights.

This is an extraordinary statistic. A people dispossessed have regained so much of their land. Yet Closing the Gap statistics remind us that Indigenous Australians are the most impoverished and imprisoned people in the country.

Nowhere else in the world is it the case that land equals poverty. Nowhere but here do a people with so much possession of land suffer so disproportionately.

There are many complex reasons for this. Simply put, Aboriginal people have land but not always “ownership”. We sit outside the Australian compact. We are not safe.

Native title is not freehold title. It can be extinguished by the grant of freehold title. Aboriginal Traditional Owners may erect a form of shelter but not necessarily construct a permanent dwelling.

It is a source of frustration among Indigenous communities that native title does not equate to an economic base.

This is not to diminish the significance of native title. The High Court Mabo ruling was a landmark that refuted the lie of terra nullius. It reset the terms of the Australian settlement.

Yet there are many Aboriginal people who have land and are desperately poor. Likewise, I can guarantee that an Aboriginal person who has closed the gap has likely had the benefit of home ownership. I have.

This is something to ponder as we enter another NAIDOC Week – a week of observance and celebration of Indigenous culture that stems from the 1938 Day of Mourning.

We will not close the gap while Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people do not have home ownership. No Indigenous child should be denied what I enjoyed, the life-changing opportunities of a home.

My family went from landless poverty to having a stake in this country, a place we could call our own. We met Australians on our terms.

No Aboriginal child should be locked out of the Australian compact. Nations are founded on a grand idea that defines them. In America it is the revolutionary if still unattainable dream of equality; in France it is liberty.

Australia is not so lofty. This is a hard-scrabble place. It is scrubby land. Yet from the beginnings of the penal colony it offered the possibility that we may all share a piece of it.

We betray our compact when home ownership slips from reach, when property becomes a get-rich scheme, when the game is rigged and the young are priced out of the future and Indigenous people have land but no home, are trapped in an insufferable past.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet hovers over The Tree of Man. A hamlet is a human settlement, a place of neighbours, a place to call home. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is haunted, cursed by his home of betrayal and revenge. Time itself is out of joint.

Older now, Stan and Amy Parker watch a performance of Hamlet and in all that madness and nonsense, where “loonies speak their own language” in this “empty stage”, each relives the madness of their lives in this home carved out with an axe.

The Parkers confront the inevitability of death and burial. White is telling us our lives are consumed by our history and buried in our dirt. While we are here all we have is each other and this place that we might call ours.

In death, “the earth is falling down”.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 5, 2025 as "The echo of the axe".

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