Back in 1992, the Australian High Court handed down the Mabo decision. The Court found, inter alia, that Australia's history had been predicated on a legal fiction, that being the declaration of terra nullius made by the British on first settlement of this wide brown land. The Court held that Mr Mabo was right - Australia did have a people and system of law that predated the white man. Australia was anything but a land of nothing.
At about the same time, my Ma decided that our family needed a sea change. Perhaps without thought to the true consequences for me and my two brothers, our family upped and left Oz's second most populated metropolis for a small tropical tourist town in the deepest northern tip of Australia. 3000 or so kilometres we flew. My mother had elected to relocate us to the end of existence.
It'd be years before I picked up a constitutional law text book and first read about the plight of Eddie Mabo, but if you'd have summarised it for me just as I disembarked the plane at the end of my journey north, I could have confirmed, without need of legal qualification, that the Court had got it wrong. Terra nullius was in full effect.
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42
Flashback noise.
I was raised in Melbourne's inner city (griots). Lived in an apartment in a marginal 'migrant' suburb. Poor, they called it back then. Grew up next to towers that blocked the afternoon sun. It wasn't a postcard, but it had an unrelenting pulse and, more to the point, it was home.
My best friend in primary school was a refugee from Laos. Came over on a boat and nearly died when he swallowed his tongue, or so his mother was fond of telling us. I remember his grandparents, sitting on a woven mat, laughing at my whiteboy ways, their red smiles broken from betel nut. When I'd visit, we'd eat ox tongue soup and ramen raw out of the packet, the entire chilli sachets included. I made the mistake of rubbing my eyes once and ended up crying like a fucking baby. Asian kids must get taught not to do this shit.
Another kid I used to run with, Achilles, came from Cyprus. He lived with his sister Maria, his mother and grandfather. They used to dry orange peels on their window sill and eat them as a snack. We'd sit there and chew that stuff, although I never knew why. Damn things tasted like shit. I remember Achilles lost his shoes after soccer practice one day, his grandfather beat him and made him wear his football boots to school for a week. I still remember the sound of his plastic molded studs sliding on the concrete as we walked to class. Poor Cypriot bastard.
Growing up in this environment, I came to love, and at the same be immune to its diversity. In my first grade photo, I'm one of a handful of white boys amongst a sea of yellow and brown kids. Fuck Benneton, we owned the patent pending. On the flipside, growing up poor, I could never quite identify with the well-to-do white kids. They all had two cars, two bathrooms, two parents, two incomes in a two-level house. All I had was two homes, homes.
It's probably unsurprising that I took to hiphop in this context. My older brother, visionary that he is, first introduced me to it. First song I heard? The Message. We used to listen to it in secret when my Ma wasn't home. Even then, I knew, that some black music could be more relevant to me than white music ever could.
As I got older, I also took to ball. I first started shooting with an old Chinese guy who, come to think of it, probably wasn't all that old. I loved hoops immediately. As I have said many times before, it's one of the few sports that makes sense with ten guys, four, two or one. All you need is a hoop, a ball and some will. Sometimes all you need is a hoop.
Consciously or not, I had consumed a lot of black culture by my midteens. And whilst it would prove to bring a lot of love and relevance to my life, I never felt the compulsion to not be white. Never fronted that I was a hoodlum. Didn't even own a baseball cap. I loved hiphop and I loved hoops, but I also had other things on my mind. Poetry and pussy, mostly. That said, I was more coloured than I realised.
Flashforward noise.
The first thing I noticed was the unceasing heat. It was late in the summer when we first arrived, and you wear that kind of humidity like a fucking G-suit. Our place was located ten minutes north of the main strip of town, but even at this short distance we were edging the town's limits. I remember my pasty white legs strolling through the wide fucking streets, gazing up at wooden houses that disappeared into the mountains, subsumed by the tropical forests with greens so deep they swallowed the unrelenting sun. As I walked, people stopped to say 'hello' for no reason. Where the fuck was I? Kansas?
Starting school in a town like this may have made for a good sitcom pilot, but it was a dark HBO comedic hell for me. The kids were all tanned, all wore short shorts, spoke slowly and didn't know a fucking thing about the city or hiphop.
Life up north would quickly drive my brother south. While I eventually acclimatised to some parts of life in the tropics (tanned girls are easy), I never truly felt comfortable - I always missed the rattle and hum of the city. A tropical town always slept and on hot humid nights the lack of noise, apart from the high pitch of mosquitos and the low thud of falling coconuts, is enough to drive a city boy mad.
Blasting holes in the night 'til she bled sunshine.
At school, I fit in well, but I was always the city kid. I never could convince anyone to embrace hiphop. Hiphop is for black people, they told me. See, underneath all that tan, my friends were white. They liked rock music and lived in nice wooden houses. They didn't eat orange peels and they ate their ramen cooked and watery. The sun would last long into the evening and set beyond the mountains. What appeal or relevance would Illmatic have to a kid who has never felt a city's respiration? Not fucking much.
So I did my time. Learned to appreciate the whiter things in life, like cricket, cucumber sandwiches and Sonic Youth.
After three years up north, I finished school and headed back down south to colder and cooler climes to study at university. Back to civilisation. I recall immediately feeling at home on my return. Truth told, I miss the north sometimes. Stockholm Syndrome, I suppose.
So what prompted this little trip down memory lane? Thanks to that cancerous little social networking tool, I am starting to hear from people I knew way back when. Some I'm even happy to hear from. One such girl from my high school days in the tropics, I hadn't heard from in close to 12 years. We weren't all that close, but I seem to recall we took an art class together.
She sent me a message recently, out of the clear blue. She wanted to tell me that I was, in fact, right. She explained that it took her a few years to realise, and some travelling, but she now loved hiphop. She told me that she was most partial to A Tribe Called Quest. And that's pretty much all she wanted to say.
For the life of me, I can't remember the conversation to which she referred, but it made me smile, nonetheless.
This one is for Bec:
I left my wallet in El Segundo
A Tribe Called Quest
when I was making my mix CD, this was a coin flip away from being included.
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