Give the Man a Break

also published in the Courier-Mail as "Let's have a laugh on Marree Man", 23 July 1998

Burnum Burnum would have known what to do about Marree Man.  If he were still alive he would have ridiculed the Aborigines who want to erase the 4 kilometre long earth sculpture in the far north of South Australia.  The Dieri Mitha Council claims that it desecrates significant sites, although a team from the state's Aboriginal Affairs department who went to Marree found that no archaeological sites had been damaged.

Burnum Burnum was a cheeky Aboriginal activist who would have seen the wonderful potential Marree Man offers for local Aborigines to have a laugh, make some money, and take the mickey out of the earnest souls who suffocate them with their piety.  He knew that a people who retain a mischievous sense of humour never lose their dignity, no matter how badly things seem to be going for them.

In 1988, rather than participate in the national wailing on the left that accompanied Australia's Bicentenary, Burnum Burnum travelled to England, where he planted the Aboriginal flag above the white cliffs of Dover, claiming Britain for his people.  He did more to make ordinary people reflect on the injustices that attend Australia's past than a hundred ATSIC officials or reconciliation committees could ever do.

A few year later he penned a testimonial for American author Marlo Morgan's best-selling New Age fantasy, Mutant Message Down Under.  Tens of thousands of Americans seeking spiritual wisdom believed Morgan's fictional account of her travels through Australia with the Real People, an Aboriginal tribe who supposedly lived in harmony with nature and themselves, and who communicated with each other by telepathy.

While a group of Aboriginal elders made an ATSIC-funded trip to America to protest against Morgan's "appropriation of Aboriginal culture for financial gain", Burnum Burnum wrote to tell her that Mutant Message "uplifts us Real People into a higher plane of consciousness and makes us the regal and majestic people that we are".  And in a funny kind of way, he was right.  Morgan's make-believe ennobled Aborigines, rather than denigrated them.

Burnum Burnum would probably have told the unhappy Aborigines of Marree to lighten up.  Aboriginal cultures change.  With a little bit of Aboriginal blarney, they could easily incorporate Marree Man into their sacred lore.  Rather than stopping people from driving to the site or planes from flying over it, as the Dieri Mitha Council is demanding, Marree Man could become a significant cultural site for all Australians.

Tell the world that it had been made thousands of years ago, but kept invisible until recently, when tribal elders decided to materialise it so as to promote reconciliation.  Or that the elders, using their ancient supernatural powers, had taken telepathic control of earthmoving equipment in order to create a symbol of all the people, black and white, who had loved this great country of ours, and whose spirits had returned to the land.

Americans would lap it up.  Californians would flock to Marree in their thousands to gain enlightenment and to cure the great spiritual hunger that so many of them seem to feel.  A creative alliance of Aborigines and white townspeople could concoct a delightful eco-religious experience from which everyone would benefit.  And we owe the Yanks for all the stories they have been feeding us over the years.

So some people would have to have to tell a few fibs.  But since when has that been a problem?  After all, when a group of Ngarrindjeri Aborigines pretended that Hindmarsh Island was the site of "secret women's business" thousands of years old, anthropologists, church-people, politicians and journalists stampeded to support them.  Maybe the same people could offer their services to the Marree Aborigines.

There was a time when all Australians would have appreciated the inventive larrikinism of Marree Man.  But now, when they hear of a man with a 200 metre penis carved into the desert, the police get called in.  Is this what Pauline Hanson has done to us?

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