Faith Bandler (1918–2015)

Faith Bandler needs no introduction to many Australians of my parents' age, but one who mustn't have heard of her is our current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. Last year, when debates about whether black lives actually mattered spread around the Western world, Morrison publicly pointed out that Australians shouldn't feel as bad as Americans because we never enslaved our people of darker skin. To say he was soundly and rapidly disabused of this notion is an understatement! I am very glad that Mrs Bandler was not still alive to hear him say that, after a life of tireless campaigning for Indigenous rights and for the education curriculum to include more information about "blackbirding", or the use of "Kanakas" (as Polynesians and some Melanesians were known) as enslaved labour in Queensland during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Wacvie is a short, unusual, elegant read. A novelised version of the life of Bandler's father, it tells in simple but engaging prose about life on his island (in what is now Vanuatu) before it was entirely despoiled by colonisers, and his subsequent experiences when forcibly taken to the Australian mainland for indentured work. Given that the real-life "Wacvie" was born in 1870, at a time when living elders could recall the first white people they ever met, it's an especially exciting and inspiring narrative.

In many ways, the Indigenous self-determination movement has evolved in the 45 years since Wacvie was published. Bandler only died in 2015; a remarkable journey, considering that her father would have met people who could recall the beginning of the 19th century, and she lived into the age of the iPhone!). Although her opinions evolved over the decades (no doubt), I suspect in some ways this novel's simplicity and its polite, impassioned response (the 1970s copy in my possession notes on the inside cover that it's great that she writes "without bitterness"!) would put it at odds with the current Indigenous self-determination movement. Still, for a portrait of its time, and for a keen second-hand insight into one of the most barbarous chapters in our nation's history, this remains a worthy read.… (altro)