Today is the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Referendum in Australia, and to celebrate, people gathered at the Redfern Community Arts Centre, to speak, listen, play music and meet.
I found myself listening to some young girls singling in ‘language’ (Aboriginal languages), thinking how the soft sounds and rhythms reelected the worn rounded landscape forms of our country. Beside me was an older woman, non-Aboriginal, who I later got talking with – an original resident of The Block who had lived away for a time but had returned. Our conversation ranged from Redfern, Cambodia, New Zealand to the Antarctic.
She asked me if I had come across a book, Forbush and the penguins, which she said she had read in the early 1970’s. “It stuck in my mind”, she told me, as a story connecting humankind with the landscape, and about how the landscape changed a man. It was written by a New Zealander, she said, and there was something about it that reminded her of how people in New Zealand connect with each other and the landscape. She had grown up there, and the that’s how she remembered it being. The writer was a biologist who spent a winter living alone in Shackleton’s hut, studying penguins. During that time, she recalled, his relationship to the world changed the closer he came to know the birds.
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Returning home, I looked up Elizabeth Leane’s on-line Bibliography for her study, Representations of Antarctica, I discovered that Forbush and the penguins is a novel written by Graham Billing and published in 1965 by Holt Rinehart and Winston (New York) and Hodder Fawsett (London). A film version directed by Arne Sucksdorff and Albert T. Viola was distributed in 1971 in the USA by Cinema shares International as Cry of the Penguins.