Inheritance

by Elle Bower Johnston

Let me tell you a tangled story about legacy, kinship, and the things we inherit. To tell this story we must begin with the land. Or in my case, lands.

We begin in the scorching sun and iron-rich red dirt of Australia. Turn the saturation all the way up and you’ll begin to get the picture - cobalt skies, blood red soil, rainbow riots for birds. The breathtaking whoosh of dry heat and flies on a summer’s day. The terror of magpie swooping season, and the comfort of their warbling song in the morning. The smell of saltbush and pigface mingling with the tangy air of the pounding surf.

My family has been Australian as long as you could be white and Australian. Shipped over in chains from the crowded grey of Georgian London to a land believed to be uninhabited. Terra Nullius. As though the Aboriginal people were just another strange animal populating this land filled with strange animals.

I have no idea what my ancestors felt as they arrived, after months traversing the seas, in a land so far, and so foreign, from the only one they’d ever known. Did they look on in wonder at the glittering waves, the brash, clattering birds? Were they awed or afraid?

I have no idea how they felt, once their penal servitude was over and they were set free with a grant for a slice of that land deemed empty. Did they feel its brutal power? Did they long for the soft green of home?

At nineteen I reversed my ancestor’s journey. Came back to the motherland. 24 hours on a plane landed me in the crowded grey streets of London, a place that seemed like the opposite of Terra Nullius. A place of people but no land.

Everything here felt touched by humans. Domesticated. The land segmented out into little green squares, neatly fenced and delineated. Tidied away into manicured parks and crisp lines. A place to gaze upon perhaps, but not to be in relationship with.

And that suited me just fine. I was a baby queer, pulled here by the desire for kinship and hypnotised by the palimpsest of a city that had been standing for nearly two millennia. The sheer depth of human history beneath every step. I craved the pulse of other queer bodies in dirty clubs and the sense of belonging with other weirdos like me.

I moved through this human world, skirting over the surface of the land as though the greenery surrounding me was a theatre backdrop. Something to set the scene but not to be interacted with. This, I guessed, was the price paid for empire.

And then five years in,  the land started to whisper to me.

The language England spoke was so different. It murmured in dove grey skies, hazy pastels and soft drizzling rains. The birds sang and tittered, barely a screech amongst them. Everything was verdant and tender. Hardly anything was trying to kill you.

And just as I had rooted into a circle of human kin in this new home, I started to root into a relationship with this new land. The land of my ancestors. I learned the names of the more-than-human life living around me. Elder, nettle, blue tit, jay. I welcomed the vibrant heads of crocuses pushing up in the drear of February, and learned to keep an eye out for the midsummer day when the flying ants would litter the skies.

The movement of the year was so familiar, the same seasons and holidays I’d lived with my whole life, but here they made sense. Of course we feast at Christmas when the days are the shortest and the nights are cold. Of course we celebrate Easter with eggs and bunnies as life is reborn in the Spring. These were holy days born of this land, carried to Australia as invisible cargo and overlaid onto what they found there. Never mind that there it’s 34ºC as you struggle through your Christmas roast, or that the Easter rebirth happens in Autumn when the lambs have long since grown into sheep.

I realised I never learned the real language of my homeland. Didn’t know the six seasons of the Noongar people, native to the areas around Perth. Didn’t know when to dig for wild potatoes, or hunt emu. When the banksia would flower, or how to recognise if a quandong was ripe. I didn’t know my other home as well as I thought, and there was so much knowledge lost or silenced. 50,000 years of aboriginal wisdom cut off at the knees in a few short centuries of colonisation.

I have no idea what role my ancestors played in the decimation of the Aboriginal people, who had lived in relationship with the land for generations. Did they notice when thousands were killed by influenza and smallpox? Did they saddle up and ride out to hunt when a sheep was stolen?

What I do know is the wider legacy left behind. The legacy of colonisation and empire, of human dominance over nature, of white body supremacy, capitalism and disconnection. It’s the story of the modern western world. A legacy played out in my two homelands and many others. A legacy handed down to so many of us.

At this point in the story, I find myself wanting to shy away from the violence and pain in my own lineage. To distance myself as so many of us do - “I’m not the one who did those things” “I can’t be held responsible for the actions of people born generations before me” “Things are different now”. But I know that would be a disservice.

And of course, I can only speak to my own inheritance as a queer, white woman. Perhaps your lineage is filled with different sides of the story, different places that history has played out in the branches of your family tree. We each have a tangled web of histories within us. But no matter what our heritage, we all live with the legacy of colonialism in some way.

Our bodies carry the tangled stories of all those who have come before. Our ancestors, both blood and kin. Like tributaries flowing into a river, they intermingle, they shape the way we move through the world. We might not be responsible for the actions of those who came before us, but we are responsible for how we handle that inheritance. Both the good and the bad.

It’s our responsibility to learn to hold the uncomfortable truths in our hands and learn from them. Reckon with what lies in our lineage and ask ourselves how we want to move forward. To offer thanks and compassion to our kin where possible - for surviving, for doing their best, for fighting for change. Find our way back to a relationship with the land that is beyond consumption, a remembrance of our place in the family of things.

Because our stories and inheritances tangle together beneath the surface like roots in a forest, interconnected and interdependent. Spiralling back in time and into the future. We are future ancestors, whether we have children or not, and it’s our work to ask ourselves:

What have we inherited?

What are we passing on?

What world are we cultivating for those to come?