Read an extract from Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia
Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is an important new anthology edited by Anita Heiss. From well-known and new voices, Heiss has brought together a compelling range of experiences and perspectives in this collection. ‘Abo Nose’ by Zachary Penrith-Puchalski is one such account.
I am Koori – my tribe is Yorta Yorta.
I didn’t know I was black till I was seven years old. I didn’t know that people would eventually cross the street to avoid walking on the same path as me. I didn’t know that people would define me as ‘not looking that Aboriginal’, as if it were a compliment. I never foresaw that people would think they understood my story before they heard a word pass through my lips.
My mum and dad would tell me how I believed Mum was chocolate, Dad was vanilla and I was caramel. Me and my sister were half-Koori and half-Polish – black Poles, as my mum and dad lovingly referred to us.
A boy named Shawn told an Abo joke while we were in Italian class in primary school. I laughed along with the joke because I didn’t know what that word meant and I didn’t want to appear stupid. I had never heard that word before so I eventually asked my teacher what it meant and she became agitated; she scolded him and threatened him, but still I never knew what this word Abo meant.
I grew up in a very affluent area where there were white people with million-dollar houses. I grew up in the smallest house on my street. Commission houses with red bricks: everybody knew the red-brick houses meant you were a poor commission-housing kid. If our tiny house wasn’t obvious enough, the faded second-hand clothes made it clear.
Me, my sister and the other commission kids formed a group and would play at the park till Mum shouted from our backyard, hundreds of metres away, ‘Kyrrah, Zack, DINNER TIME!’ We would ignore the first call but the second one we would definitely answer, otherwise Mum would walk to the park herself and we would all cop it. All the kids were scared of my mum. She is an unapologetically black woman with all that alludes to. She embarrassed us deeply. I wished she was less aggressive and more gentle in order to get more white kids to play with me. No white parent understood her defiance. Every black parent did.
My mother is Indigenous, and my father is Polish. He drove taxis, and she was an artist. I had always noticed the way that people looked at them: my mum – a visibly black woman with her dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin and even darker beliefs about the world – paired with a very white man who had blue eyes and blond hair and who was very passive. Sometimes people would ask how they ‘ended up’ together, as if she was a last resort and somehow trapped him. ‘That’s the story white people predict,’ my grandmother would eventually tell me as an adult. ‘They don’t see us as beautiful – they’re trained not to.’
When my mother told me I was black, after me repeating the Abo joke I heard at school, she explained that some people would just hate me because of the colour of my skin. My grandmother chimed in with, ‘Well, now you know’, as if it were a secret they’d resisted telling me. I knew it wasn’t a secret and I realise now that they must have wondered how long they could hold off addressing it. They’d predicted that a nice white area would mean a ten-year delay. I’m sorry that Shawn took that away from them.
I didn’t believe my mother when she told me that people would dislike me because of the colour of my skin. It seemed so outrageous to my seven-year-old brain. I got angry and stormed out of the room, but she was right. I don’t remember the joke but I remembered the word Abo.
By sixteen I would wear sunscreen religiously and avoid going into direct sunlight to keep my skin as pale as possible. I was only half black so was lucky to be able to be mistaken for Italian. I wouldn’t walk around barefoot. I would never wear trackpants outside of the house and I would pretend to be lost if I ever had to set foot inside Centrelink (‘but while I’m here you may as well give me the forms to fill out’). During the course of high school I had heard every Abo joke ever to exist; I had also been told I was a faggot because it was spray-painted on school property somewhere. That’s about when I realised I was queer. Thanks, random graffiti wall!
Other than me and my sister, there were two or three other Indigenous kids at my high school. One of the other Indigenous boys would actively encourage Abo jokes, and would tell some himself. I couldn’t imagine doing something like that, and it made me feel he was beneath me, till I realised he was just trying to fit in. He was applying sunscreen with his words, reducing the cost of being black by engaging in the jokes. He was doing the same as I was but with different tools.
It’s rough to be Aboriginal and proud and stick up for yourself when it means having no friends at all. All white people in my school would laugh at every Abo joke they ever heard while simultaneously being nice to me. I engaged with racist jokes about other cultures in the hopes it would prevent them talking about mine.
By the age of seventeen I had made a solid group of friends, yet I never stopped having to deal with racism about my Aboriginality – and then I’d have to decide how to react. Consider the occasion when I met my best friend’s new boyfriend for the first time. We were all looking at photos of a girl we went to high school with, and her boyfriend said, ‘She has an Abo nose.’ I could feel the tension. He realised he’d said something terrible – and I realised he was attacking my identity. One of us had to react eventually, right? I could tell my best friend wasn’t so much pissed off at what her boyfriend had said as concerned about how I would react. ‘You don’t have an Abo nose,’ the boyfriend quickly exclaimed, as if it were a compliment, as if it exonerated him. To be honest, there was a time where I would have taken it as a compliment. There was a time when I would encourage this compliment. I’d believed that between the sunscreen and these ‘compliments’, I could maybe build a fantasy life in my head.
I didn’t know how to respond so I left the house and went home. I was pissed off. How could my best friend do nothing to prevent this? How could she just sit there and not get mad on my behalf too? Who the fuck was this person I called my best friend?
When I got home and explained to my parents what had happened, they seemed well versed in this exact experience. My dad rolled his eyes and patted me on the back while explaining to me that my friend and her boyfriend weren’t trying to hurt me. ‘It’s common for white people to think that way. They think the goal is to look less Indigenous and appear white.’ It was not a good enough answer for my angry ears, but his logic was flawless; it can also be applied to my being gay: people had often told me, ‘You’re not one of those gays, though’, as if that were a compliment too.
Later I got a text from my best friend, who turned out to be angry at me for creating a ‘scene’. She told me I was a drama queen and was overreacting. And that wasn’t the first time or the last time I heard such comments when it comes to experiences like that one. Suddenly becoming that other Indigenous guy in high school seemed reasonable, the one who made Abo jokes along with white people; it seemed easier. I understood it more and more with every comment about my blackness that I wasn’t permitted to speak about or react to.
I forgave my friend for not reacting or defending me, and I apologised for overreacting. We aren’t friends today, but back then I was very desperate to keep the friends I had, so I often apologised even though I didn’t know what I was sorry for. Was I sorry for being black? Maybe. I sure acted like it was worth being ashamed of. I was most sorry for myself that this was what I had to endure just to keep friends. Friends that I realised weren’t worth it in the end. My identity was assembling.
I don’t speak to anybody I used to know from high school now. Evading situations is still deemed as a scene to people. There will never be a correct way to react in their eyes unless it’s me saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ I’m tired of being sorry that I exist. I know I make white people uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable around them too. I know that you have to think about the way you speak, and it’s like treading on eggshells to be ‘normal’ around me, but this is not my fault. It isn’t entirely your fault either. This is how we’ve set up racism in Australia: where you think it’s okay to make race-based jokes, and I get called a drama queen if I dare react to anything you say. I question myself every time something like that happens and wonder if my reactions are appropriate. I worry more about how you take my reaction than I do about my own feelings. I’m used to questioning myself – it’s almost a sport.
There are still parts of me that are afraid of white Australians. I bought an Aboriginal flag t-shirt and I’ve never worn it in public yet. I intend to, but for now I’m too worried it’ll attract negative attention and commentary from strangers. This is similar to the reasons why I don’t leave the house on Invasion Day: I know somebody will identify me as Aboriginal and want to tell me something. I don’t owe you an explanation for my existence.
Identity is a strong word when you’ve had to fight hard to keep one. It took years of questioning myself to get to who I am now – I can’t let it go. I’m stubborn like my mother now. The qualities that my mother had that used to be embarrassing are now the qualities I admire in myself. Unapologetically black is where I want to be, but just black and questioning myself every now and then is a progression from who I used to be.
I go into the sun a lot without sunscreen now. I enjoy every shade my skin has to offer. I’m twenty-six years old, and I walk to the milkbar down the street barefoot, in trackpants. That’s the furthest I’ve gone. For now.
