Telling Tennant’s Story: the strange career of the great Australian silence
Tennant Creek is in the centre of the Northern Territory. In this book, the small town and its place in Warumungu Country, on the Stuart Highway and the Telegraph line, and on the route to prominence for several highly influential thinkers, is right at the centre of Australian history, policy and politics.
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Telling Tennant’s Story: the strange career of the great Australian silence
Dean Ashenden | 2022
While writing Telling Tennant’s Story Dean Ashenden returned to Tennant Creek for the first time since 1955. He and his parents had lived there for several years while his father taught at the local school, and Ashenden had felt little impetus to look back since the landscape had receded from his thirteen-year-old view. Fifty years later, though, as an adult with a long career advising on history education, he wants to understand some of the things he remembered seeing and hearing – and not seeing and hearing – at Tennant Creek as a child.
In particular, Ashenden returns to apply a measure taken from WEH Stanner’s 1968 Boyer Lectures: whether the important stories of ‘relations between two races in a single field of life’ are told at and around Tennant Creek. In his memories, there is an almost complete disjunction between those two fields that exist as parallel realities in the same places. He is concerned that in this yawning gap lies the fulcrum of the ‘great Australian silence’, however loudly stories either side of it are told.
Ashenden tells a highly involved local story, which opens with a sweeping, terrible history of the frontier and its violent acquisitiveness arriving in Warumungu Country. The history of the Warumungu people is entangled with neighbours, including the Kaytetye to the south, but is also quite distinct. Throughout the book, the reader is coached to see the diverse ways in which colonisation continued and continues to overlay Warumungu Country – its tracks, water supplies and living places – and to make particular demands on Warumungu people.
One telling example is the story of a rock that was part of the Kunjarra sacred site, on a women’s Dreaming track. A huge mining boom from the 1930s initially brought hundreds of small-scale prospectors to the region, followed by multinational companies. In the early 1980s, when the first land claims in the region were being made under the Northern Territory’s Aboriginal Land Rights Act, the mining company Peko lifted this rock onto a low loader and brought it into town, where it was to form a plinth for a plaque celebrating the company’s contribution to the economy and life of the region. Warumungu people protested. The rock was eventually returned to Kunjarra, but amidst great derision from some white townsfolk.
Ashenden has a clear view of the importance of this region in the national story. He develops an intense interest in the series of influential anthropologists, historians, archaeologists and policy-makers whose views on Aboriginal culture, Australian history and related policy areas were shaped by their engagement with several generations of the Warumungu people.
Portraits of Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, Paul Hasluck and WEH Stanner, and others as thinkers in and of their times, are humane and sympathetic, but unsentimental. Ashenden’s treatment of Stanner, in particular, gave me, a historian trained in the early 2000s, a fresh appreciation of Stanner’s ideas in their time and their influence on current historical thinking (much as several other wise people have sat me down to read Stanner from the very beginning of my apprenticeship in history!). Ashenden’s reflections on the sincerity and necessary messiness of history-making in the 1970s and 1980s, when the discipline was undergoing enormous change, and the chop and change of policy and politics through the 1990s and noughties are instructive.
One aspect of writing this book was of special importance to Ashenden. He was able to meet and talk with some of the local Aboriginal people of his own generation, with whom he could have been part of the same field of life as a child. Instead, all he can remember is glimpsing them sitting down the front at the open-air cinema or camping across from his house where the spinifex started. His conversations with local Elders traverse intersecting memories of the town and reveal stories about their lives working on the local stations, their brushes with child removal, and the accounts that had been handed down to them of earlier history.
Ashenden has written this book in a frank, collegial voice. He has an economical way of writing that takes no side-steps and delivers his message with a good deal of power at times.
Telling Tennant’s Story: the strange career of the great Australian silence is published by Black Inc.
Reviewer: Dr Emma Dortins, PHA (NSW & ACT)
Dortins is the author of The Lives of Stories, Three Aboriginal-Settler Friendships (ANU press)