I used to sleep with Noel Pearson

Stu Pocknee

05 Sep 2023

Voice , Uluru , indigenous affairs

WARNING: This is a true story. Despite yet another cringey click-bait title, this post contains no salacious sexual content. If you are not Australian, or have no interest in either the Uluru Statement From The Heart or the 2023 Constitutional Referendum, you have probably read far enough already.

What impression do you have of Noel Pearson?

To me his public persona is that of a stern, opinionated, imposing man. Someone who does not suffer fools gladly. Wise and worldly, yet volatile and prone to reckless self-destructive impulsiveness.

An idealist, an activist, an advocate.

A glowering presence with a reverence for words, and a belief in their power.

Pearson will leave an inerasable impression in the landscape of indigenous Australian relations. Good or bad? History will judge.

In his 2022 Boyer Lecture Pearson opined (on the status of Aboriginals):

❝We are a much unloved people. We are perhaps the ethnic group Australians feel least connected to. We are not popular and we are not personally known to many Australians. Few have met us and a small minority count us as friends. ❞

I've been an Australian since my birth in the concluding year of the 1960s.

When Pearson speaks of the Australia least connected with the Aboriginal peoples, I suppose I am who he is referring to. I have previously claimed to be very much an average Australian bloke. An exemplar of Middle Australia. In judging Pearson's assertions, it's natural to me to examine my own experiences with indigenous people.

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In the early 1970s, when dad had time off work, my family would venture north out of Brisbane to camp by the sea.

One day mum noticed a group of about 20-30 Aboriginals about 50m along the beach. Mum, being mum, was curious. I remember dad shaking his head disapprovingly. I think this was mainly just about staying out of other people's business. Mum's dad (grandpa), on the other hand, was pretty clear he didn't think that mixing with Aboriginals was a brilliant idea.

Anyway, mum cared not, and dragged us kids up the beach.

The group had been gathering shellfish in Tin Can Bay. Now they were boiling them up in a large iron pot. Periwinkles. Cockles. Pipis. I don't remember many things about the event (I was only 5 or 6, maybe in my first or second year of primary school), but I do remember them generously allowing us kids to sample their catch. The shellfish tasted great.

I also have vivid memories of wide smiling lips and lustrous white teeth. They were exceptionally friendly.

I was a bit perplexed by that.

Much is made today of Australia's supposed willful blindness to colonization's effect on Indigenous people. Even as a child, I had few illusions in this regard. School curriculums did not teach of massacres and brutal dispossession. The stories of Cook, Phillip, and colonization were one sided and sanitized, but there was never any pretense that the country was non-populated. Far from it.

Kids are not stupid. I could look around and see that the Aboriginals who should have been present were not. The non-sensical voids in what we were taught told their own tale. I did not know details. I didn't need to. Even at that age it was obvious there had to be a story of injustice, theft, and violence in my country's history.

That is why the smiles surprised me. My simplistic understanding of people expected animosity. It wasn't there, at least not for a curious young white woman and her skinny, freckled kids.

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To be clear, there have been few Aboriginals in my life. Primary school in the inner suburbs of Brisbane was pretty much what you would expect. Mainly Anglo kids with a smattering of immigrants - usually from continental Europe. In that time and place being different was uncomfortable. The type of difference didn't really seem to matter. Weight, height, name, clothes, intelligence, ethnicity. Kids can be cruel. If there was a chink to exploit, they'd try. Italian kids were 'wogs', indigenous kids were 'abos'. In my class of ~30 there were two Aboriginal girls. I am sure they suffered at times, but less so than some of the other kids I remember being bullied. They gave as good as they got, and mixed well with the rest.

The conclusion of primary school brings us to the title of this piece.

In my 13th year I entered a boarding school. Like the majority of private schools in Australia this one was religious. Lutheran missions had long been established in North Queensland, the Northern Territory, and Papua New Guinea (PNG). This explained the strong contingent of Aboriginal and PNG boarders.

The main school dormitory was divided into age-based wings. Each contained a long corridor with multiple open-ended cubicles on each side. A 'cube' contained 4 beds and some sparse, built-in wardrobe space. Each dorm wing contained a cube of seniors¹, ostensibly to help the dorm masters maintain order. They had special privileges, like a privacy curtain across the mouth of the cube, and delayed lights-out times.

The mathematics of the situation sometimes meant a younger lad found themselves the unwelcome resident of a senior's cube. Regrettably, one of those boys was me.

Two of the senior boys in my cube were Aboriginal, the other white. None were particularly thrilled that I was there, but they accommodated me well enough.

One of them was Noel Pearson.

My first impression of Noel was quite literal: he was big, black, and muscular. Physically, he was already very much a adult. Being thrown into his presence was intimidating for a kid not yet in his teens.

Our first conversation did not involve introductory chitchat. Just business. It was kind of like going before a severe, but not unkindly, headmaster. Where was I from. Who was I related to (at this school everyone was related to someone). What sports did I play. That type of question. Satisfied, he let me be, and (to the best of my memory) had little interest in me from then on. I was not concerned by this. There was a definite hierarchy in the boarding house. For certain older members, monstering younger boys was a relished sport. Pearson was not one of these, but I had no desire to inadvertently poke the bear.

I'm unsure exactly how long I stayed in that cube. Maybe a term. Maybe two terms. Sometime in my first year a bed opened up elsewhere and I gratefully escaped.

If you were hoping for some dirt on Pearson, I apologize. I have none. He was a serious person. He was a respectable person. Others deferred to him.

I can't say how well he was liked by his peers (it wasn't something I would have been cognizant of). I believe he was well regarded by staff. I don't think he was the Head Boarder, and maybe not even a Prefect. It would not have mattered; I can't imagine any serious decisions being made amongst seniors without his agreeance.

My enduring memory of Pearson is as a sportsman. At our school, rugby union was king. Pearson was the fullback for the First XV. By-and-large the Aboriginal and PNG boys were all gifted on the playing field. Noel was no exception. I remember watching him in one game, resplendent in the revered maroon & white stripes. From deep in our half, he charged the opposition back-line, smashing aside defenders. Once clear and beyond re-capture, he set sail for the posts. It was not a regular sprint, but a magnificent bounding gallop. Raw triumphant exhibitionism. A celebration of youthful exuberance and physicality; gloriously-demonstrative exaltation. Even then, Pearson was a showman.

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The end of high school was pretty much the end of my direct experience with indigenous Australia. At university I was in a stream (agriculture) not well known for indigenous participation².

After university I left the country for a long period, spending well over a decade in the deep south of the US. Certainly, there were some interesting race issues there. Locals were naturally interested in what parallels could be drawn between indigenous Australians and African Americans. It was never a subject I felt comfortable with, and I would normally point to the Native American experience as having more in common with the Australian situation. Partly so I wasn't drawn into conversations with racist undertones, and partly because I thought it true.

In the last decade or two I've had only a few personal interactions with indigenous folks. A girlfriend of a friend, a handful of chaps in the Queensland gas fields. That sort of thing. Passing, superficial relationships similar to hundreds with non-indigenous Australians. Beyond that I can only point to watching certain shows on NITV and, of course, gritting my teeth during the various rote displays of virtue that our life cannot proceed without.

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Ultimately, I think about "indigenous Australians" less in terms of the "indigenous" bit, and more in terms of the "Australian" bit. Previously, I would have assumed this this was a good result. Nowadays I am not sure.

My lived experiences support Pearson's assertion that Aboriginals are "Not personally known to many Australians" and "befriended by few Australians". The basic calculus of population numbers and geography make this unsurprising. Most of us simply have neither the opportunity nor the time. It is no different than with various other Australian minorities.

If First Nations peoples are as "unloved" and "not popular" as Pearson claims, you'd have to apportion part of the blame to simple mathematics. Obviously, there is more to it than that. It is a subject deserving more space than I have here. Speaking as a representative of Middle Australia, however, I am going to push back at the blanket implication of racism. In this I think perhaps Pearson both flatters himself, and over-estimates us.

Hanlon's razor states "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

I'd adjust it in this case to "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a paucity of bandwidth."

My version of middle Australia doesn't have the energy to be racist, or to be out finding new people to love. Our lives are already overloaded by the daily struggle of work and family. I'd love to have more friends. I probably should have more friends. I couldn't care less if they were black, white, pink, or purple.

Should we make the time? A fair question. It requires a two-way street. Can indigenous Australians spare the time to make more non-indigenous friends? Dunno. I reckon that mob at Inskip Point all those years ago would have.

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There is much I hear Pearson talking about that I agree with. There is also a reasonable amount that I don't, or perhaps that I don't understand.

If we were to meet again, I reckon we'd probably get on fine. At least, that would be my starting point. A few drinks and a barbecue. There are many things I would likely ask. Some might be uncomfortable for one, or both, of us. I imagine I'd be a frustration for him at times, as he would be for me. But then, that's the way friends are.

Pearson is no longer the fine physical specimen I once admired. I'd rib him about that, and maybe talk about my own weight loss experience. If he wanted to go for a run, I'd be glad to tag along.

His oratory style impresses many. The performative characteristics unsettle me. I am reminded of the imperious, sanctimonious Lutheran pastors we both had to suffer. The southern black church influences distract, and invite questions about authenticity. I doubt it now remains, but I'd prefer to hear the voice he had prior to those influences.

So yeah, I used to sleep with Noel Pearson. No, it wasn't in the way you were hoping. It's a mundane and largely forgotten piece of trivia from my life-story. Pearson's role in current events doesn't make it any less boring, or more relevant. For me it is simply an interesting hook on which to anchor appraisals of certain Australian affairs.

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