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Wit and wisdom from the concrete Dreamtime

By Martin Flanagan
May 17, 2004

Anita Heiss: "I'm indigenous. I'm just not the indigenous person a lot of people want or expect me to be."
Photo:Peter Morris

Dr Anita Heiss is quick, clever, witty. Last year, on a lecture tour in America, she was asked by an anthropology student what was the biggest problem now facing indigenous women in Australia. "Finding a decent man," she replied. Her friends include another woman with a sharply comic eye for the contemporary, author Linda Jaivin.

Heiss, one of the emerging faces of Aboriginal Australia, jokingly describes herself as a concrete Koori with a Westfield dreaming. She grew up in the Sydney suburb of Matraville. In her words, she was "socialised and politicised" in Sydney or, as she calls it, Gadigal country.

Her mother was born on a Catholic mission, as a result of which Heiss went to Saint Claire's Catholic College in Waverley. She was suspended twice on her way through Saint Claire's, but, in the absence of an indigenous education, says the school gave her "a good upbringing" - "it gave me a sense of boundaries". She prays not to the Christian God but to Biami, creator spirit of the Wiradjuri.

Her father is from Austria where he left school at age 13 to become a carpenter. She has been to Austria numerous times and is particularly close to one of her Austrian cousins. As fate would have it, she has met four other Austrian Aborigines. Does she have a special affinity with them? "I wouldn't say that. We just acknowledge that we have crossed paths for a reason."

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She believes everything happens for a reason - even, she says, Pauline Hanson. "When Pauline Hanson came along, there was a positive side to it. We soon worked out whose side people were on. It was clear who was racist and who wasn't."

She sees John Howard's Australia as a soulless place that is in flight from the reality of human difference, starting with the difference between indigenous and non-indigenous people.

I first heard Heiss speak last year at a literary festival on the north coast of NSW. The previous day a white speaker had disparaged the welcome-to-country ceremony performed at the festival opening, saying it was no more meaningful than singing God Save the Queen. In the audience were local Aboriginal elders for whom the ceremony was very much more meaningful than God Save the Queen.

The white speaker also said that assimilation was now an accepted fact of life for Aboriginal Australians who were marrying non-Aboriginal people to climb the social ladder. The argument implied that for such people marriage was a commercial transaction. The next day, Heiss responded in a dignified way but with barely controlled emotion: "My mother married my father because she loved him and my father married my mother because she was the centre of his world and she still is." As literary festivals go, it was high drama.

She never intended to become an academic but "once I started it, I was going to finish it". She has an obsession with doing her best that she suspects she gets from her father, a perfectionist. Her CV is a crowded one and, at 35, she is an associate professor at Macquarie University. "All without once using the word 'discourse'," she says, again jokingly. Is she intimidated by academics? "Totally. I just talk about what I know about."

Her parents placed a high value on education, her mother starting a TAFE course at the age of 42. She recalls her father "rocking up in a new suit" the night she was awarded her doctorate and seeing how proud he was. This was why he'd worked all those seven-day weeks and spent his life "covered in sawdust".

Her academic title of doctor she describes as "an elitist wank". She uses it so people don't think she holds some sort of "identified position" insisted on by an affirmative action program. She says her gift is "knowing what to say and who to say it to". She used to just shoot from the lip but these days she's a bit more sparing with her words. "No use arguing with racists," she says. "No logic's going to change them."

She says she has the ability to get on with most people. "I can sit with women in the dirt at Mutitjulu, I can have a drink with my students in a bar." She can sit with the old women in the dirt, but, unlike them, she won't take off her shoes. She doesn't like being barefooted. She doesn't like dogs, either. "Imagine me at Fitzroy Crossing," she says. Her idea of Survivor is a night in a caravan.

Heiss says the Australian media basically has two stereotypes of Aboriginal Australians: one is the man in the desert with the spear, the other the out-of-control Redfern rioter. She's neither. "I'm indigenous. I'm just not the indigenous person a lot of people want or expect me to be."

Heiss is unpretentious yet at the same time defiantly herself. She is saying things about Aboriginality I haven't heard expressed publicly before. In conversation, she can go several ways in a short time without losing herself. "I just know what I know," she says.