Through a Glass, Darkly 
by Sharlene Allsopp

A hall. A mirror. Bundjalung land. 

Aunty Jane digs around in the depths of the cardboard box until she finds the photo she is looking for. She puts it on top of the glass table in Mum’s dining room. It is the first time I have seen my great grandfather as he was then: twenty-five years old, unmarried, a miner from Cangai. It is only a portrait; his body is not visible. The colour is filtered, grey in tone, softer than black and white. The top of his uniform is a little puckered, his hat perched at exactly the right angle. His face is serious, unsmiling. Beneath his hat, his ears stick out prominently. I recognise his eyebrows. They look just like my boys’ brows. He does not look much older than them. And his eyes. They are perfectly almond shaped, very dark, and…vulnerable? Uncertain? He exudes serenity.  

I marvel at how handsome he looks in his uniform, then I realise that this is a sanitised relic—a touched-up photograph designed to document and impart confidence and power. It shows nothing of who he was after the uniform was put away.  

Later, at the end of the hallway in Mum’s bathroom, I search my face in the mirror for evidence of him. Leftover clues and hints at his likeness. My search appears fruitless—I am a mosaic of images. Shards of time reflecting my many-ness. I see my father’s alabaster skin and the shape of his eyes. The narrowness of him. I see thin, straight brown hair. My eyes are probably a similar colour, but brown eyes are so generic. I think I need a line-up to connect us. Perhaps, Mum and her dad—my poppy, Claude—standing beside me. Then we might see the shades, the blurring of the hard borders. I know that somewhere deep within my smallest parts there is a genetic code—a story—that can be traced back to him. William is present there. Nobody else will ever search so closely, nobody else looks for his image in me. 

My family nickname as a kid was Casper. I stood out. I wanted to blend in. I was the kid who pored over photos, loving the smell of dust and age that Nanny’s photo albums promised. I have always hunted for resemblance, to hear somebody exclaim, wow, she looks like him, or her! In northern discourse, whiteness is the unexamined invisible prime meridian, but in me, it is blackness that is invisible. Like a tattooist, I take up words and ink to overwrite whiteness and I cringe at the effect. My desire is belonging—to look in a mirror and see reflection, to see evidence of the genetic truths that lay beneath my skin. To believe that I belong. All I want is to see them in me.  

I imagine William has searched through time to find me, a storyteller. That he knows the pain of fighting wars we have no ownership over. That in the all-at-onceness of time, we are together. We are a black and white image unrepresented by an archive. That is a lie of omission that can be remedied. It is my only power—an act of creation, of Dreaming—to write us together on this page. 

Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, France. 

I see a black and white Bettmann image captured in June 1919. World dignitaries hunched over, pen in hand, in the famous Galerie des Glaces, to ink the Treaty of Versailles— formally ending the Great War and ushering in their legislated peace. The image is shadowy, chandelier-lit pomp and circumstance. There is no room but this room, no hall of power so powerful, no view beyond the centre. The gardens surround the palace, eclipsing it in scope and beauty, yet they are invisible to the lens. 

I see another image, William Orpen’s colourful representation in oils of the same event. The room itself rises above the dignitaries, reducing them to the margin. The mirrors in the background act like a kaleidoscope, distorting the view, reflecting unknown shadowy figures peripheral to the history makers, gazing out at the gardens. These minor figures appear unimpressed by the occasion, their attention arrested by an external view, a hint that beyond this mirrored hall, there is more to the story. 

Outside those windows, hours to the north of this great hall, there is another garden where at this historic moment Claude Monet, sight darkening, is feverishly pursuing light and colour, splashing water lilies across giant canvases. One day soon he will gift his impressions of chaotic beauty to France, and to the world, in the hope that beauty might invite healing.  

On a dreary day in September, a century later, I enter that hall of mirrors. It is almost empty. There is no great flurry of activity. No suited men of power puffing on cigars. There are no tables and chairs, no rugs covering the gorgeous parquet floor. The chandeliers cast artificial light foregrounding the interior. Once again, those gardens retreat into the background. Drawing closely to the west-facing windows, I glimpse that garden’s beauty, shrouded in grey fog. Water, water everywhere, drawing my gaze far into the distance. There is no wildness in sight, no disorder, no mess.  One-hundred years ago, those peripheral shadowy figures would have seen almost the same view that beckons beyond the centred narrative.  

I am giddy with the sense of history and power. The first generation of my ancestors to travel to such places and stand where monumental moments unfolded. I do not yet know about the Bundjalung soldier who left blood behind in the mud of western fields. There is a story that flits in and out of the light, a face that ought to haunt. It is a dim reflection that I cannot see full face. A shadow that hovers on the periphery. 

You only see France for the first time once. With that fresh, glazed-over gaze, all is marvelled at, all is revelation. Myth and musketeers, castles rising up out of lakes and rivers, gothic gargoyles towering overhead. I first saw Paris before my great pain, and I will never again see her without it. In the years following that stroll through Versailles I would embark upon my own war. A war that breaks out on many fronts, leaving me desperate for mercy, for treaty, for a re-drawing of my borderlines. 

The Indian Ocean, between wars. 

At the moment the men in suits ratify the Treaty of Versailles, altering the borders of Europe forever, the SS Port Napier is gliding across the Indian Ocean, returning soldiers home to Australia. While they carry visible and invisible scars with them, the vast majority leave war in their wake. They return home as winners, expectant of the spoils designated theirs. A treaty will punish the losers and bestow glory and honour upon the victors. They are unaware of the myth they will morph into. Some of them, not all of them. The imaginative re-write that Nation will cast.  

The Port Napier delivered her victors to Fremantle in June 1919.  One-hundred years later I visited the west coast of Australia for the first time. I stood on the rocky shore of the Indian, looking out across the low tide flats. Ripples of sand held caches of water shimmering in the twilight, and my breath was taken by a staircase to the moon. Layer upon layer of naked stone beneath my feet. There were shades of reds and browns and yellows. I stood on the edge of a continent staring across a vast ocean, having just discovered my family’s invisible story. The story of my great grandfather—Private William Olive—an Indigenous soldier who had disembarked the Port Napier a century before me. A soldier who left unceded Bundjalung land with no sovereignty of his own, who fought along the Western Front, giving up his own blood for the freedom that victory promised, only to return home and discover that the borders had not changed for him. Land that he had been dispossessed of yet could never be extricated from. The war he fought on foreign soil had no freedom leftover for him. There is no treaty here. 

William sailed around the southern coast of Australia on HMT Somali to return to Bundjalung Country. I flew home from Broome across the centre of the continent, trails of tears down my face. It was a year of war, a season of grief. I cannot tell you the details of that story. That archive does not belong exclusively to me. My week in Broome had taken me almost as far from my eastern front as possible. It was time to return. Hurtling over Anangu Country, I imagined sitting with William at night beneath the mango tree in his backyard, surrounded by the scent of southern skies, held tightly by the darkness. I suspect we would need few words. I think he would understand about fighting a war that will not end in neat, tidy peace accords. About how men in power always seem to get the final say. That ‘protection’ does not mean what they say it means. 

I remember a primary-school classroom, with huge glass windows facing rolling fields, haunted by a lilting voice and melody; young Willie McBride, forever enclosed behind that glass frame, bones buried beneath the warm summer breeze, red poppies dancing to the Flowers of the Forest. Those words reached deep inside my chest and remained there, squeezing tight. The Fureys had no intention of perpetuating war myths, but our curriculum prettied it up just right. If those countless white crosses stand mute in the sand, what of the black ones? I was never shown a photograph of a black soldier. I assumed they did not exist. I bought the myth hook, line and sinker. The myth that no war had ever been fought on our country’s soil. That there were no casualties. No frontier wars. Apparently, the brief bombing of Darwin was the first assault on our people. All those prettied up lies we believe to make all that ugly invisible.  

Decades later, I stood in Willie McBride’s fields still ignorant that my own Willie’s blood had been spilled in that soil. I marvelled that a war could be fought there. There was nowhere to hide. Tidy rows of white headstones as evenly marked out place keepers for bones. Probably not all their bones, probably not laid out in a recognisable shape. A photograph would be no help now. But the earth that surrounds them remembers. Those fields are not fooled by the order. They remember the chaos. They do not see only white. We who are onlookers hear silence, see order. That is the lie. If memorials really wanted us to remember they would play recordings of the sounds of war, day and night, the screaming and shouting, the clatter, the banging and the shattering. The ragged breaths, the sobbing, and the death rattles. The desperate mates, the boys crying out for their Mum. They do not want us to remember; they are desperate for us to forget. 

The Bettmann photograph leads me to other photographs. I see shots of the war-ravaged fields of France and Belgium. Black and white landscapes devoid of beauty and serenity. The black and white offends me. The way our collective mind has associated war with monochromatic images. Distilling them to black and white sanitises the truth and romanticises the horror. There is no red. There is no stench of burning flesh and excrement and smoke. No cacophony of shell and scream. No confusion. No residue of suffering. 

The night I uncovered William’s archive was moonless. I was unsettled, restlessly googling to distract myself from an ever-present home front. I cannot even explain why I googled his name. I did not know that we had soldiers in our family. I was taught that The Defence Act had outlawed Indigenous enlistment. The National Archive delivered bare facts. Before enlisting in 1915, he had probably never left Cangai, outside Grafton. Those long narrow copper mines arresting his focus, his gaze never further than a few metres ahead. I assume the journey to Enoggera, Queensland, snaked through never-before-seen landscape inside a train. Sheer glass framing inaccessible country.  

I cannot conceive of his boat journey. Those wide-open seas must have lifted the top off the world, shimmering blue as far as his eyes could roam. Did you stand up on the deck, eyes hungry for vastness? Heaving overboard as the great ocean carried vomit far from you? The irony of the world opening before him only to empty him into the trenches of France squeezes my heart tight. Maybe five or six weeks onboard the Star of Victoria felt like a cruise ship compared to the restrictions imposed on a Blackfella on home country. How would you describe pulling into Port Said, Alexandria? Egypt! What did an Indigenous man think of such ancient culture? One that compares to his own in age yet has been named powerful and conqueror, globally acknowledged as a keeper and recorder of stories. Had you ever even heard of it? 

There is a tiny, almost illegible, note on his war record requesting leave in Paris after the declaration of peace. So, in February of 1919, just a few months before the Treaty was signed, there you were. Those world leaders, Lloyd, Wilson, and Clemenceau, were, at that moment, holed up in Paris, expanding on Wilson’s 14 Points, deciding the cost the loser must pay, the consequences for all that suffering. Who cares about their pressed, freshly laundered suits? It is the bloodied ones that tell the story. Barbed wire, deeply scarred fields. Fighting for what? Why did you agree to fight for a nation that had never fought for you? That had legislated your every movement, had prepared and perpetrated your extinction. Did you know that in 1902, a Tasmanian Member of Parliament dismissed the need to include you in a national census on the basis that: ‘There is no scientific evidence that he is a human being at all.’ Did you know that they had stolen the bodies of your ancestors, removed the flesh, and filled their skulls with millet seeds to measure their mental faculties, to prove it? How did a boy from Cangai form knowledge? What knowledge did you value? I wish I knew. All I know is that you did not explicitly pass on Bundjalung culture to your children. You are unknowable to me. And not knowing you means there is a part of me that will remain unknown.   

Yet, there is something in this discovery that makes sense of me. I have been long obsessed with France and the Western Front of World War I. I have always felt the need to be immersed in that place, my feet firmly buried in those fields. I did not know that your blood was spilled in that dirt. I am certain that a part of you remains there. Modern knowledge tries to separate earth from human as though they are mutually exclusive concepts. But even the western Christian creation story puts sword to this lie. Dirt and humankind are indivisible—inextricable. How can they claim a creator God yet deny the significance of combining dirt and flesh in the act of creation? I have always known that Bundjalung Country nourishes and welcomes me—re-creates me. She summons me home no matter where I roam, but I never understood my magnetic attraction to France. Knowing this story makes me feel more whole. 

Here is the great struggle in the telling of my story—I cannot tell it without telling stories that do not belong to me. They are not mine and I have no explicit permission to tell them. Yet we are so completely entangled that I cannot extricate myself without violence. How do I tell you who I am without them? I refuse to co-operate with silence. Nor will I over-write them, stealing their voice. Instead of a glorious archive, painstakingly spooled across the walls of the West, inviting gaze, I choose the living. One foot in front of the other, fossicking fields and faces for fragments yet to be found.

Sharlene Allsopp was born and raised on Bundjalung country and dreams of capturing that elusive perfect sentence—preferably liquored up in a Champagne field in France.