Black Swan – a Koorie Woman’s Life

Black Swan – a Koorie Woman’s Life

Eileen Harrison and Carolyn Landon

Allen & Unwin, 2011

All reviews say more about the reviewer than they pretend to, but this one is far more personal and autobiographical than most.

Black Swan came to me as a review copy when it was first released, but the newspaper I freelanced for wasn’t interested so I set it aside for myself. It has been on my shelf ever since. In the aftermath of thinking again about Singing the Coast, its time has finally come: its parallels and contrasts with that book and with my own life made it particularly relevant to me this year.

Eileen Harrison was born into a large, close-knit family on the Aboriginal Mission at Lake Tyers on the Gippsland Lakes. She grew up there, attending the mission school while I was attending the state school in Leongatha, 250 km away. I went on to secondary school; she was not allowed to. Rather, she and her family were uprooted by a new government policy and sent to the Western District, far from extended family.

As a teenager, then, Eileen was working as a domestic servant while trying to protect her mother and her younger siblings from her increasingly abusive father. The family fell apart under the pressures of racism, alcohol and poverty, and Eileen was overwhelmed. She cleared out – back to Warragul, not far from Lake Tyers – but fell into the same cycle of alcohol and abuse.

Remarkably, she survived. Not only that, she rescued her younger siblings from the orphanage they had been consigned to, got herself an education, and found worthwhile employment. Finally, she returned to art, which she had loved at school, completing a TAFE course and exhibiting (and selling) her art regionally.

But there’s more: she was deaf. So deaf as a child that she missed a lot of what went on in school; using hearing aids as a teenager but still struggling to hear; one of the early recipients of the ‘bionic ear’, the cochlear implant.

It’s an impressive story.

Quite by chance it’s a particularly pointed lesson in white male privilege to someone like me who grew up in the same part of the country at the same time. It is also a good example of the kind of empathy and honesty from the white collaborator that I wanted to see, but didn’t, in Singing the Coast.

Carolyn Landon was a secondary teacher in Warragul when a Koorie art project brought Eileen to the school, very early in her artistic career. They became friends and when Eileen was planning an illustrated children’s story book, she asked Carolyn to do the text. Their initial chats about that story grew, radically, into this full-length biography.

The primary voice is always Eileen’s, as it should be, but Carolyn doesn’t hide herself: she is in the classroom, impressed, when Eileen arrives at her school; she is talking in the kitchen as the book takes shape; she is reading, horrified, Mission records in a Melbourne archive. All of this grounds the book firmly in a reality we know well, even while it recounts a life that is almost unthinkable in that reality.

When I finish a good book, I often want to share it with someone, thinking “X really ought to read this!” or “Y would love this!” I had a whole alphabet of candidates for Black Swan.