A young black man dances unapologetically.
It is 11 pm at The Workers Club in Fitzroy and Ziggy Ramo, hip-hop artist, is performing his latest single, Pretty Boy.
Learn to love your own skin
So sexy when you sink in, sink in
You’re too pretty not to love yourself
As the beat approaches he leaps onto one foot.
Does anyone like to dance, Melbourne? Cause this black man loves to dance.
His movement is joyous. The back of his jacket reads Ziggy Ramo, The Love. A red heart sits islanded between each of the words.
Above: Ziggy Ramo.
♥
Below: The Love.
♥
The black shirt he wears underneath says, in white, yellow and red,
JUSTICE
FOR
ELIJAH
During the show he tells the audience
The man responsible for that
his voice breaking
served three years.
• • •
Elijah Doughty was a 14-year-old Wongatha and Noongar boy from Kalgoorlie-Boulder. On the morning of 29 August 2016, he was killed by a ute. The non-Indigenous accused, his identity in court anonymised as ‘WSM’, had chased Elijah. WSM identified the motorcycle Elijah was riding as one of two stolen from his rental property the previous day. The Supreme Court of Western Australia made no finding or indication whether Elijah had been involved in the theft.
The chase (or ‘event’, as the Supreme Court repeatedly described it) lasted just over 20 seconds. It was determined that Elijah died instantly through massive trauma. It was also determined that WSM’s vehicle came to a stop some 20 metres from the point of impact.
And the fact is that a 14-year-old boy is dead, and he’s never coming home. We have to stand on his grave with his mother, his sisters, his nieces, his nephews—and they were never gonna see Elijah again.
WSM’s defence submitted that Elijah had swerved in front of his ute. The court accepted this, despite CCTV evidence suggesting that Elijah was riding in front of the vehicle. The speed of the ute, at around 67 kilometres per hour, was not fast—unless you took account of certain contextualising details:
1. That the motorcycle was moving at 47 kilometres per hour.
2. That the ute chasing it was driven by a more experienced driver across terrain it had been designed to handle.
3. That WSM’s vehicle weighed more than 1.5 tonnes (at least 15 times the weight of Elijah Doughty’s approximately 55 kilogram dirt bike).
I ask of you guys tonight let’s not spread hate—let’s use his memory for love.
In the sentencing remarks of the Supreme Court is a degree, only partially limited, of approval for vigilantism—‘reasonable pursuit may have been justified’, Chief Justice Martin stated, albeit not ‘dangerous driving’.
It is worth recalling here the words of District Court judge Sweeney, the original sentencing judge in the case of Timbrell. She observed that a car is a ‘lethal weapon’. Yet in the Supreme Court’s reading, WSM is a hapless passenger. Employed and with no prior record, he is carried along like Meursault in Camus’s L’Étranger. He is the victim of some terrible convocation of circumstance. Not a man who took his ute and clicked the vehicle’s trigger.
Attending police had suggested stolen bikes were often ridden around the site where Elijah was killed at Gribble Creek Reserve. Since there was no indication that police had investigated the area, it is difficult not to see this as constituting a kind of tacit approval for WSM to undertake his
own investigation.
Between the police and the court, permission was given not once but twice to taking matters into one’s own hands.
In that moment I was speechless. I had no words. But I made a promise to his mother. I said, if you allow us to wear your son’s name, we wanna use it to spread love.
The Aboriginal community of Kalgoorlie-Boulder was adamant that a prosecution for murder be pursued. This was denied. Instead, WSM was charged with the lesser offence of dangerous driving causing death, plus manslaughter.
In the foreword to Call Them by Their True Names (Granta, 2018), Rebecca Solnit observes:
There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that the white kids are ‘hanging out’ but the Black kids are ‘loitering’ or ‘lurking’. Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.
Western Australian poet John Kinsella, in ‘“The Killing State”/The Murdering State’, refers to the ‘cold hard specificity of legalese’. This specificity was reserved particularly for those who, responding to the charges, and the barring of several of Elijah’s family members and friends from court proceedings, resolved to protest outside the courthouse on 30 August 2016. Their intervention was, in the chief justice’s appraisal, ‘ill-informed’. The descriptions applied to them (‘uncontrolled’, ‘unruly’) suggested a demarcation between those of good character—people whose lives have meaning and whom sentencing serves to protect—against those who are ‘ill-informed’; citizens whose naivete requires them to mark out a separate existence. I will leave it to the reader to guess what degree of trust the protestors—200 strong, and mostly First Nations—must have in the state’s highest court.
On 21 July 2017, WSM was found not guilty of manslaughter. He was convicted by an all-white jury in Western Australia’s capital, Perth, of the lesser offence of dangerous driving causing death. WSM was sentenced to three years imprisonment, backdated from the time he entered custody, with eligibility for parole, and a driver’s licence disqualification of two years. The Supreme Court situated the offence at the ‘lower half’ of seriousness. It could not identify ‘any’ aggravating factors.
I am reminded of James Joyce’s Ulysses; of the graveyard Leopold Bloom sees from the window of the funeral carriage: ‘They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn’t broken already.’
Elijah’s mother has allowed us to dedicate this next song to his memory and she asked us to dedicate it to all the dances Elijah’s never gonna have.
In March 2018 WSM was released on parole. He had served just over 18 months of his sentence. The parole board determined there was no risk to the Kalgoorlie-Boulder community from his release. According to media reports WSM and his family moved interstate.
At the end of WSM’s term of imprisonment there were reports and images of a police car in Perth running over an 18-year-old Aboriginal man, William Farmer.
Three months later, in June 2018, Wongatha Elder Leo Thomas awoke to signs plastered over his home in Pinjin Station, 140 kilometres north-east of Kalgoorlie. Signs saying
We destroy black nigars
black nigars
holding up mine
Minister Johnson + DMIRS
support us
Leo and Lawrence will end
same as Elijah
Leo Thomas had been involved in a dispute with Hawthorn Resources, owner of a number of mine sites. Hawthorn Resources operated an open-pit gold operation near Thomas’s home. He had claimed that their work was damaging his property, covering his home in dust.
‘The effects of dust and noise with large 777 dump trucks, excavators 24 hours a day, and now blasting operating so close, within hundreds of metres, is like being physically and mentally tortured from the impacts of the mining operations,’ he told the Guardian that year.
Thomas was one of the Elders who had tried to calm crowds during the protests in Kalgoorlie.
At the same time, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Francis. The circumstances of Francis presented an inverted version of the factual matrix in WSM’s case: Jude Francis, an adult man, in his car, chased a 15-year-old boy whom he believed was riding his stolen motorcycle. The pursuit ended with the boy dying from fatal injuries after colliding with another vehicle. Francis—whose identity was not protected by an alias at trial or in the media—was Aboriginal, while the deceased was not.
Jude Francis received a seven-year sentence.
The principles of sentencing in the Sentencing Act 1995 (WA) require the court to determine the seriousness of an offence with reference to the ‘vulnerability of any victim’. In Francis the victim’s youth and vulnerability were emphasised: he was a ‘boy’, a ‘Master Chase’. The word ‘fear’ or its derivatives were used seven times.
There was no sense in Elijah Doughty’s case that this was a boy who had just turned 14. The Supreme Court referred to him instead as a ‘young man’. Consideration of his vulnerability as a target of racism by the non-Indigenous driving community was limited.
You see this young boy, he was too young to come out to things like this. He never fell in love. He never got to dance to live music.
Neither fear nor its synonyms warranted inclusion in how the court described Elijah’s feelings toward WSM chasing him in his ute. The loss of life was simply ‘an element of the offence’, the taking of which needed to be discouraged. Death was a ‘tragic accident’.
Language can bury the bodies or uncover them.
So for his memory, for his name, for his honour, for his family, for his mother, if you’re willing to let his name live on through you, please dedicate this dance to him, give it everything you got.
• • •
Performing his song ‘YKWD’, Ziggy’s voice reverberates through the crowd:
Get off up, I get down, honey
Let me show you what I’m working with
All about the here now, honey
He jogs on the spot like David Byrne. Releases his arms into the air. As he spins, his white sneakers shine through the dark.
Time to get up out your head.
I know the feeling. Many do. Anyone experienced in the sleeplessness of loss will register its familiarity. There is a Chinese proverb describing this feeling of removal from oneself, from one’s surroundings:
When we think of monsters, we create them.
In his final work, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, French theorist Henri Lefebvre wrote, ‘And yet to grasp a rhythm you must yourself have been grabbed by it, given or abandoned yourself inwardly to the time that it rhythmed.’
The book came out one year after Lefebvre’s death in 1992. It was his attempt to conceptualise a music of the city, a mapping of urban and bodily rhythms.
But whereas Lefebvre insisted that, to hear the music of the city, you have to be outside it, to hear the music of this country you first have to internalise it. This is the birthright of colonisation: something that was never intended by the coloniser, even as it has become necessary for survival.
Becoming attuned to this music means cultivating a rhythm. Listening. Hearing Australian history as a series of narratives.
The story of the life Elijah never lived.
The question of black worth in this country.
Like words written on papyrus, the lives of Aboriginal people can, at one remove, appear solely to detail a narrative of disintegration and loss. It is a story that pervades official narratives and documentation: journalism, court proceedings, government reports, the archives of Trove. Again and again, it restates this trope:
Aboriginality equals tragedy.
In the Supreme Court the word ‘tragedy’ or an iteration of it was employed several times in the proceedings against WSM.
What these narratives fail to acknowledge is the abundance of joy in black life in this country. As if it has never existed, or never will.
Because there was joy in Elijah Doughty’s life.
And there is joy in Ziggy Ramo’s dancing.
• • •
In the song ‘A to Z’, Ziggy sings:
You don’t really ever do this, ay?
But you do for me, you do for me
(Get low, take it slow, wanna a to z)
And I ain’t ever really felt like this
But I feel for you, I feel for you
(Get low, take it slow, wanna a to z)
Seeing Ziggy Ramo perform moved me deeply. Yet I have trouble writing about it. Or rather, I have trouble writing about a specific aspect of it: the fact that Ziggy spent so much of the performance in motion.
What is it about dancing that is so difficult to translate into words?
Learning to love you, showed me how to love myself
Before I met you there were stories I would never tell
I learned to love you, now I’m coming out my shell
I think to myself: Ziggy is performing in a bar in a country where being black gets you kept out of bars. It happened in South Australia in 2016 (the previous week there had been a fight involving Aboriginal people, the venue said). It happened in New South Wales the same year (the patron in question happened to walk with a limp; the venue said he was drunk). It happened in the Northern Territory in 2019 (at a venue that failed to pay its staff).
Every day, across this country, the song remains the same. Even when thousands of Certificates of Exemption granting rights to Aboriginals—rights enjoyed freely by the rest of society—were issued during the 1940s (on the condition you severed all ties to family and culture), it was still up to the publican whether you were served or not.
I think to myself: Ziggy Ramo is dancing, even though a moment ago he described a death in this country that was also a death in the state he grew up in. The state that I grew up in.
I think to myself: it was just the other day that they were reporting more suicides in Western Australia. In the Kimberley. Intergenerational loss.
The effect is cumulative, unspeakable.
Yet we keep having to speak about it.
• • •
In his contribution to the edited collection of essays Long History, Deep Time (ANU, 2015), anthropologist Rob Paton describes the exchanging of objects associated with places diseased by cultural trauma. In the example Paton uses, the trauma stemmed from a number of deaths in a central Northern Territory community. Men had gone hunting and died after drinking from an artesian bore, not realising that it was full of bacteria.
Once close, the ties between community members frayed and splintered. A few left for nearby settlements. Others isolated themselves and grew adrift from communal responsibilities.
Surrounding communities began to view the settlement as ‘diseased’. They saw its grief infecting strings of creation sites and stories connecting it to surrounding communities with trauma.
The ache of death attained a constancy. Days might pass—but not the event. A rupture had occurred; a black hole into which the light of Dreaming stories disappeared. Residents tried to put distance between themselves and their former residences. Temporal separation from the trauma of death.
It did not work.
In an exchange known as winnun, boomerangs made of wood connected to places associated with the loss were exchanged for the spears of another settlement. They were then destroyed or sold to tourists, helping to reconcile the trauma which the objects were connected to.
The nature of the object was wholly immaterial. Even a kung-fu video cassette formed part of the exchange.
Somewhere in the central desert of the Northern Territory its remains lie beneath the sand.
Trauma, left unresolved, does not fade with the passage of time.
It must be left to melt in the sun or it must be lived with.
• • •
There have been dances throughout the history of this country. They have cultivated bodies that, in responding to colonisation, created situations the coloniser not only failed to understand but chose to imitate.
When squatters like William Yuille encountered the Wathaurong in 1838 near a lake then known as Black Swamp, he named the body of water Lake Wendouree. One of the reasons for this was that it was what he had heard the Wathaurong mob tell him it was called when he asked them, Where am I?
What William Yuille did not realise was that the Wathaurong word wendaaree meant go away.
This is not merely one of colonisation’s ironies. It is one of its sorrows.
Our experiences are inextricably shared, yet they are never equivalent.
• • •
For a moment during Ziggy’s set we are caught. What had we done? When Elijah Doughty died, where were we?
It does not matter whether we are First Nations, migrants, settlers or tourists. The question is asked of everyone present that night.
Where am I?
Where were you?
• • •
I wrote earlier that to hear the music of this country you first have to internalise it. Become attuned to its wavelength. In Elijah’s absence that night in the Builders Arms there was a trace that persisted and shaped Ziggy’s performance, echoing like a stone dropped down a well.
Death emerges, and nothing is the same.
A loved one is missing.
Nothing is the same.
• • •
Following Elijah’s passing, Aboriginal youths walking in public spaces and using motorbikes reported an increase in harassment from non-Aboriginal drivers.
Vehicles lurked and hooned outside the house of Elijah Doughty’s grandfather.
WSM’s rental was deliberately torched. His property vanished in an instant.
Like those living in the central Northern Territory, the community of Kalgoorlie-Boulder were unable to establish temporal separation from the trauma of death. Nothing was diminished by perspective, by watching the object of pain recede into the rear-view.
A Justice Camp memorial to Elijah Doughty was built at Gribble Creek Reserve.
In October that year, a relative of Elijah Doughty took her life there.
Drop a stone.
All you’ll hear are echoes.
They followed me home that night.
They follow me to this day.
• • •
We see hurt in this country.
We see it in coronial inquests into deaths in custody.
In the fact of deaths occurring in custody.
In the act of taking custody facilitating those deaths.
It is the all-white jury.
It is the suicide at Gribble Creek Reserve.
The ute chasing Elijah.
(Its driver knowing, as a matter of certainty, that Elijah has stolen the bike.)
It is a hurt that keeps recurring.
Many young people in Kalgoorlie ride bikes. Pushbikes, motorbikes, BMXs. Adults inhabit this world, too, in parallel, mature correlation. They ride large utes and trailers, 4WDs and all-terrain vehicles.
But the black and the white populace do not occupy this world in the same way.
the boy walks with a noose
around his neck the end frays
where it touches the ground
no-one teases him on these days
no-one wants the blame for
any potential consequence
he wanders the streets
peering in windows
as people scuttle for their safety
the bottle shop lady is beautiful
her reflection caught his attention
through frosted glass doors
giddy up she laughs
as she leads him home
he feels giddy!
they unravel the noose
weaving a carpet
for their future
sometimes visitors catch
the word BELIEVE as
they wipe their feet
(Ali Cobby Eckermann, ‘Believe’)
A young black kid on a bike is an object of suspicion. If they stop for too long outside a property the owner is liable to emerge and accuse them of wanting to tear up the front lawn with doughnuts. If they are in public they are a suspect. Every theft, every public disturbance, every missing item or instance of property damage. Maybe it was them.
Where were you?
Well I was there when it happened. I saw him.
So it was in the lead-up to Elijah’s death. Social media became convulsed with panic about Indigenous offending. A particular focus of this paranoia was motorcycle theft (ironically, even Elijah Doughty’s motorcycle had been stolen).
On May 2016, below an image of Elijah on his own motorcycle, someone wrote: Run the fuckers over.
The white kids are hanging out. The black kids are loitering. Lurking.
Endangering our community.
Those who waited and revved their engines outside the home of Elijah Doughty’s grandfather would know the feeling.
It is no surprise that Chief Justice Martin’s sentencing remarks in WSM prioritised protection of the non-Indigenous community. The car owners. The property owners. The miners. A black boy on a BMX or motorcycle is provocation enough (he is always balanced upon a tightrope of white suspicion and surveillance); any indication the property is stolen becomes an open invitation.
And all the neighbours are white. And all the blacks are scared.
But some of us are brave.
Same ships brought scholarships to university
So I can be a doctor and fix my people
But what’s health when you’re still not equal?
Ziggy knows these boys. He is not alone. The actor Steven Oliver was moved to say, ‘When I look at a photo of Elijah, I see my nephews.’
So I sit here thinking, in the weeks leading up to Elijah Doughty’s death, of how the residents of Kalgoorlie flocked to the fora of social media, fantasising murder. Years afterward
WE DESTROY
some would even
BLACK
NIGARS
pin their hatred
BLACK
NIGARS
HOLDING
UP MINE
to the walls
LEO AND
LAWRENCE
WILL END
of an Elder’s home.
SAME AS
ELIJAH
• • •
Our story is of moments
when even slow motion moved too fast
for the shutter of the camera:
words that blew our lives apart, like so,
eyes that cut and caught each other,
mime of the operating room
where gas and knives quote each other
moments before the telephone
starts ringing: our story is
how still we stood,
how fast.
(Adrienne Rich, ‘For an Album’)
Today, the two hate sites that existed before Elijah’s death (‘Kalgoorlie Crimes Whinge and Whine’ and ‘Name Shame Crimes Kalgoorlie’) are gone. During their lifetime, in a population of 30,000 people, they attracted 18,000 followers between them.
What has not disappeared are Elijah’s picture and name.
Should I be on my knees, saying thank you?
I beat a statistic, I should be thankful.
In every performance, there is a part that stays.
A part that is permanent.
Archiving the online racism, the Aboriginal community created the #JusticeForElijah tag, which rode the waves of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter to combat the mainstream media’s prejudicial reporting (including unfounded claims Elijah Doughty had stolen the bike).
They pointed journalists towards truths that might otherwise have remained buried.
We speak of love and hope amid the grief, even as the reverberations of this trauma escape the settler’s grasp.
We dance for the moment. We sing for the moment.
And then that moment is gone.
• • •
Towards the end of the freestyle performance closing his set, I realise that Ziggy’s bars recall Kendrick Lamar’s performance in ‘i’. Ziggy raps:
I don’t care about black, I don’t care about white
I care about what’s wrong, I care about what’s right
In ‘i’, Kendrick Lamar raps:
When you lookin’ at me, tell me what do you see?
(I love myself)
What do you want from me and my scars?
Everybody lack confidence, everybody lack confidence
How many times my potential was anonymous?
Writing about Ziggy, I have often thought about the ending of Lamar’s 2015 record To Pimp a Butterfly. Following the close of ‘i’, the penultimate track, Lamar interviews Tupac Shakur.
Tupac, of course, died 19 years before Kendrick Lamar recorded the album. Their exchange is an imagined one, in which Kendrick (in the present) has Tupac (brought to life via a 1994 recording) responding to a series of questions.
One of them concerns the creative process.
K: Sometimes I can, like, get behind a mic, and I don’t know what type of energy imma push out, or where it comes from. Trip me out sometimes.
T: Because it’s spirits, we ain’t even really rappin. We just letting our dead homies tell stories for us.
While Ziggy sings:
I’m really feeling on myself
If you won’t, how can anyone else?
Ay, how can anyone help
If you don’t love yourself?
And Kendrick says:
How many we done lost, bro?
This, this year alone.
Exactly, so we ain’t got time to waste time.
Niggas gotta make time, bro.
The judge make time, you know that, the judge make time, right?
The judge make time, so it ain’t shit.
It shouldn’t be shit for us to come out here and appreciate the little bit of life
we got left.
After non-Indigenous comedian Eurydice Dixon was killed in Princes Park in Melbourne, the community was convulsed with grief.
This was as it should be.
But it was bittersweet to think how many Aboriginal women lose their lives in equally tragic circumstances and are not mourned in the same way.
Sometimes it feels as though black life is only meaningful so long as its loss can be instrumentalised in calls for change; incremental variations to the beneficence of the settler-colonial state.
I put this country on my back I feel this shit
Cos everybody really wanna say what’s up
If they ask you Ziggy tells ’em that it’s just love
Ziggy sings us into existence. Makes more ways of existing seem possible.
Learn to love your own skin, your own skin
So sexy when you sink in, you sink in
Ain’t no need to fit in, fit in
You’re too pretty not to be yourself
• • •
A confession: I have begun to realise something about the relationship between dance and prose. It is not so much that dancing is difficult to translate into words, as I suggested earlier. It is that dance escapes narration.
Perhaps this is why I find it so hard to write about. Attempting to describe the physical now in which it occurs is elusive. Maybe it is futile.
Ziggy is interacting with the crowd.
Take that sentence. It’s a second-hand account to which Ziggy cannot respond. Not in the moment, anyway.
To describe what Ziggy does—to capture his performance—you cannot be observing (much less writing).
What Ziggy gave was not a static page-bound representation after-the-fact. Ziggy was not documenting the crowd.
He was attempting to relate, to express, to sing, in a country that often cannot let blackness be without first mediating it. (So that blackness finds itself being spoken for.)
(Or to.)
(Or about.)
Hate is too much of a burden for anyone to carry. My mother’s non-Indigenous, my father’s Indigenous. I’m a product of this country. And I’m a proud product of this country. But just because I’m proud doesn’t mean I can’t point out what’s going on in this country.
To me, Ziggy’s dancing says: we need less words on the page.
We need more feet on the ground.
• • •
During the triumphalism of the Bush-era, when my high school in Boorloo—to their eternal credit—allowed students to be absent from class if they wanted to protest against the Iraq War, an unnamed senior adviser told journalist Ron Suskind, ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’
We an empire, so just hold your head high
We survived now we thrive we got nothin to hide
Dance has been employed to yoke bodies to authoritarian regimes. (Witness the spectral parades of North Korea and Nazi Germany.)
Proud of the fact we the oldest people on the map
And they tried to move our history
How fucked up is that?
Yet dance was as necessary for the poor black communities whose pulse informed Detroit’s underground techno as it was during the ring shout of resistance to slavery.
Nuh, ain’t nothin new we got nothin to prove
Fifty thousand years of proof we do what we do
And to you who choose to move our artefacts
Fuck it, I’m bringin it back
Yeah I’m proud to be black
Dance values the serendipitous and makeshift, a spirit of hustle and improvisation. In this it has often served as a vehicle for new expressions, from clubs in the 1980s—subcultures that were often black, Latinx and gay—to the very idea of taking up space. Widening it to welcome you.
It’s black pride
Black lives built this country we got black ties
So just know that you come from a long line
(Because maybe it didn’t when you first walked in.)
There are multitudes of performative behaviour in daily life—gender plays, identity constructions, different selves in different situations. These are performances that create new narratives for us to inhabit.
The dancer offering a verse, chorus and outro.
And if the magic is ephemeral, it is all the more beautiful for it.
• • •
A young black man dances unapologetically.
We live today amidst new categories of experience and world-making; not necessarily those envisaged by European explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or esteemed French philosophers living in the aftermath of their forebears’ colonial projects, forced to limit their attention to the smaller scales of daily life and urban space (Baudelaire, Breton, Benjamin, Bachelard; not to mention de Certeau and, of course, Lefebvre).
Ours is a future envisaged by our Elders and their descendants—First Nations artists
Jimmy Little, Lionel Rose
Vic Simms, Dougie Young
Joe Geia, Kev Carmody
Archie Roach, Ruby Hunter
Yothu Yindi, No Fixed Address
Warumpi Band, Coloured Stone
Baker Boy, Deline Briscoe
Kaiit, Alice Skye
Dallas Woods, Briggs
Electric Fields, Emma Donovan
Radical Son, Emily Wurramara
Mau Power, Tasman Keith
Becca Hatch, Mo’Ju
Benny Walker, Nooky
Miiesha, Drmngnow
Thelma Plum, Birdz
Kee’ahn, DOBBY
Barkaa, JK-47
Kobie Dee, Lady Lash
Sycco, The Kid LAROI
We an empire, empire
We an empire
Rome has fallen, Babylon too
But Aboriginals still here that’s true
• • •
In my mind’s eye, Ziggy is still dancing. His body is grounded but his movements are light. He is graceful even during those moments that, in another context, might come off as awkward and offhand, unintended or residual.
In that moment I was speechless.
When he breaks down and cries during the set, the audience shouts support back at him.
I had no words. But I made a promise to his mother. I said, if you allow us to wear your son’s name, we wanna use it to spread love.
As the setlist progresses, his dancing—that dancer named Ziggy, communing with his audience—transforms.
In motion, he has the chance to be at ease with himself.
And everything must be intended.
‘But denying the pain’, Amy McQuire writes, ‘also means denying the strength of Aboriginal mob all around the country, particularly our old people … It means not acknowledging the strength in our ability to heal ourselves.’
I ask of you guys tonight let’s not spread hate—let’s use his memory for love.
Trauma, left unresolved, does not fade with the passage of time.
Elijah’s mother has allowed us to dedicate this next song to his memory and she asked us to dedicate it to all the dances Elijah’s never gonna have.
It must be left to melt in the sun or it must be lived with.
You see this young boy, 14, he was too young to come out to things like this.
(Somewhere in the central desert of the Northern Territory its remains lie beneath the sand.)
He never fell in love. He never got to dance to live music.
(And nothing is the same.)
So for his memory, for his name, for his honour, for his family, for his mother, if you’re willing to let his name live on through you …
Perhaps nothing is too portentous a word.
Contingency, then.
A history that is residual and contingent and endlessly foreclosed but somehow hopeful.
… please dedicate this dance to him, give it everything you got.
We live for the moment. We dance for the moment.
We sing for the moment.
And then that moment is gone.
Does anyone like to dance, Melbourne?
Declan Fry is a writer, essayist, and poet. Born on Wongatha country in Kalgoorlie, in 2020 he was engaged as a critic for The Sydney Morning Herald/Age newspaper, awarded the 2021 Peter Blazey Fellowship, and a Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Award for memoir. He currently lives on unceded Wurundjeri country with his partner and their cat, Turnip.
Note: The author wishes to acknowledge the work of Professors Kieran Tranter and Thalia Anthony, whose analysis proved invaluable in informing the survey of case law presented here.
