The events depicted below are based on real experiences I had in Australia from 2020 to 2022.
The names of people and places have been removed. Not to protect them, but rather to accommodate the handful of names that have relentlessly built and pushed forward the same issues I am about to address. Think of this as a handy guide for 1) people of colour to follow and 2) white people to do better.
Also, a quick emphasis on the real.
I mean, shit, it may not have all happened in sequence. May even seem a bit too insane to be real at times. But you have to remember: it’s all real. The emotions are real. The attitudes are real. The experiences are real. They’re so real in fact they just get somewhat surreal at times.
For real.
Our faces smeared the countryside skin colour white and black at 90kms per hour. The morning sky rushed the hillside like an upturned ocean, capable of catching and dragging out those below who stared too deeply into its cloudy rips and waves, drowning them in obsessive thought.
I, in the car, timidly waded in this oceanic reality, contemplating the big stuff, a maelstrom of questions like…
“Why do white people act so off-kilt when you leave the city?”
The rural broadcast got drowned out as we begun surfing from station to station. Static gargled the silence of a car inhabited by the exhausted. It was midsummer, early into a new year claimed by the pandemic. The five of us flexed like flower petals in the heat, withering from a ride that seemed everlasting.
We were far from the city and any urban areas of comfort. Livestock lined barbwire fences and gumtrees formed a tunnel mould over the roads. I liked the fresh air. In fact, I fucking loved it. But, for real, leaving the city has me constantly on some sort of edge.
What edge, you may ask?
Well, I don’t expect you all to notice it. Shit, it may as well be invisible to the mind’s eye. Perhaps a form of ignorance; certainly a form of normalisation. I often find it hidden in the nuances of it all (or lack of nuances), but whenever I venture out of the progressive city jungles into the dry, ye olde plains of the countryside, I honestly find the white folk to be, well, pretty fucking backwards.
Honestly, going rural in predominately white country is like a cruise in the DeLorean: whipping back through time to go safari in some dinosaur landscape. And yeah, certainly the smalltown vibes – whether that be in the hills or by the beach – are silly attractive, but man, all these wrinkly-ass Jurassic-era creatures are hungry. They’re ravenous for black boy flesh. And I personally can’t help but see the remnants of their consumption – the bones of their consumerism – scattered across the wastelands.
Alas, it was all we had at the moment. If the pandemic era had taught us anything, it was to get off the couch, go exploring and see our backyards. So we decided to do it. We decided to dust off, spread our wings and travel again… even if that meant just down the coast for a rural seaside weekend away over the summer. I mean, what could go wrong?
The car came to a shuddering halt at the campsite by the sea. The town, usually quiet and timid, was drunk off the intoxicating crowds that pooled for the weekend. The corner stores and takeout hotspots guzzled down the influx of young and old spirits, yearning for a spot to bake in the sunrays. Families spritzed their way from the caravans to the beaches, whilst the ocean waters chugged the beach bums who refused to emerge from their watery terrain.
We parked up before deciding it was high time for a well-earned pint.
The inevitable afternoon came to bake on the waterfront with the sun simply melting like some discarded ice-cream on the oceanic pavement. We sat outside the local pub observing the final morsels of the day before twilight would come to reboot the acclaimed mellow sky.
It was a round of beers for them and hard lemonade for me. My friends and I laughed, enjoying one another’s company. One keeled over in a chuckle and, as they did, their dipping head uncovered a fairly interesting sight from down on the beach.
Emerging from the water came what could only be coined as a pack of surfers, marching up from the shoreline.
There were about four of them: three guys and girl. All tattooed, well-built, sandy, salty beach bums. Yet, what initially drew my attention to them came in the form of two specific traits:
1) the way their skin so unnaturally peeled away from their flesh and,
2) how it remained barely concealed by the thick, blonde, white-boy dreadlocks they sported in confidence.
Rule #1: White people with dreadlocks is an instant red flag.
Now, I shouldn’t have to explain to you why white people with dreadlocks is kind of fucked up, but in layman’s terms, it’s got to be one of the most baffling forms of modern cultural appropriation, hands down. See, the surfers certainly weren’t the first people I noticed bearing these specific traits in the town. Suffice to say, it wasn’t like playing Where’s Wally; these fools made themselves fairly easy to spot in the broad daylight. They stood out so much it hurt. Like seriously, what was their angle here?
But these guys… these guys felt different. They walked with a certain swagger, with this air of unbridled confidence, like they owned the place and owned the look.
Don’t think this is just a rural thing, by the way. This is an everywhere thing. It’s just more common to see this species of person by the water’s edge. Only by the ocean, I figure, they could find excuses in the way the sea salt and sand swells and gels their hair, matting it, and allowing them the grace to dreadlock it into thick pale tubes the size of King Kong’s fingers.
~ Ok, quick sidebar. I swear to god, if white boys with dreadlocks weren’t white, their most defining trait for being a white boy with dreadlocks would be how fucking thick that shit is. Like damn, that can’t be healthy. ~
I played with my own dreadlocks, manically twisting a single thread in my fingers.
My eyes followed the pack as they ascended up the dunes towards a clapped-out van in the carpark. They were met by others of their kind, all of whom were sporting a much darker skin tone than the surfers. Where the original four peeled from the baking sun rays, their van friends were blessed with a more graceful tan.
To them, this look perhaps gave them more confidence in their ravenous pursuits to claim a sense of character. To me, it only cemented their abhorrent, maniacal perversion to appeal to a culture they remained both ignorant of but also in debt to. What it all resulted in was the birth of a new culture, one of further dastardly consumption that led to an appropriated sense of style, but substance all over.
White, sure, but they existed primarily as an amalgamated ill-guided clan of culture shock. Like the Na’vi of Pandora, their outer layer presented as bold and unique, but their finer details were ignorant and confused in regards to their core style influences. They existed on their own planet, communicating in their own dialect and connecting with one another through the intimate touch of their filthy, filthy dreadlocks.
These people, man, they always think they’re the coolest cats out, but to me, they’re nothing more than mere aliens that live on a whole other plane of existence. I don’t get them, and they sure as hell don’t get me.
“I’m getting another drink,” I loudly announced as I stood from my seat and proceeded back inside the establishment.
The pub, at this moment, was fairly full. There were plenty of older gents populating the bar, sitting in squalor and attempting to find reason to engage with one another in conversation. I’m sure they were looking for any reason to break that common old-man silence.
“ID?” the bartender asked.
I handed it over in haste. Plucking it from my grip, he stared at it for a long minute. The bartender, scruffy and silver, would ever-so randomly stare back up at me from time to time, and then peek back down at the card.
Eventually, he handed back my ID with a smirk across his face.
“You look much darker in the photo,” he chuckled.
The rest of the bar started to laugh around me. For the first time in a long time, my brown face paled.
Rule #2: Engage minimally with older white men, for you exist purely as the butt of their jokes.
I guess it ought to be classified a cliché by now, and a telling one at that, for the black guy in the movie to walk up ahead of his white friends in the creepy old town by the sea and be like, “Something ain’t right here…” But there I was, a few metres up ahead, hands tucked firmly in my pockets and observing my surroundings with a feeling of haunt.
And you know what, it’s true: something just wasn’t right here.
The village lived a dusty existence, consumed by lacerating waves of sand from the beach. The buildings remained in an uncomfortable state of stunted evolution, never successful in their progression from decrepit settler cottages to unspecified retro mod looks that further promised a canvas for a 21st century face lift. But those faces remained paled and peeling; the paint wore off their ‘happy day’ facades. It’s like they had the option to step into the now but chose to remain firmly in the ambiguous yesterday.
The locals were waxy white, like mannequins built in the 1960s, privileged enough to remain somewhat intact despite time eroding their town into a relic. They passed me by as if I were an erected stone in a running stream, diverting their paths for seconds at a time, but long enough to be an inconvenience.
Perhaps that’s why they stared at me… why their eyes burrowed into the corners of my skull and their breaths drew coldness as they passed me… why, when I turned to meet their stares, their heads would fall crescent into their chests…
I, a black stone, wedged into the waterways of their flowing township, stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the lapping fluids of their simple, shaded existence.
Or perhaps, I was just being anxious… sometimes my mind escapes me… although, as streams do, they all flow one way, and nobody, not a single passerby, was heading in the same direction as me.
These waters were heading inland, rippling around my hardened exterior and disappearing into the current beyond the corners of my iris. They were all going beyond my sight and flowing out from the corners of my vision… suffice to say, they were all just pooling behind me.
I halted.
Rule #3: The black guy always dies first.
Yeah, I know: it ought to be classified a cliché and blah blah blah, but motherfucker I have seen enough movies at this point to know and accept the fact that the black guy who wanders too far off the beaten track is first blood. Their death in the movie is a warning to those innocent white babyface teens that Ghostface is coming for them. And nah. Uh uh. That wasn’t going to be me.
So, there I stood, erected on the spot, amidst what was clearly becoming a budding silence sweeping across the town.
No cars were on the road. Nobody stood before me. Everything was just grey.
In the corner of my eye, I could just make out ‘ANTIQUES’ stained on the window glass pane of the neighbouring shop front. I turned my head slowly towards the blurred reflection of my stilted black form. And although I couldn’t make out the inside inhabitants of the shop, I found solace in the visibility of my personal company. I wasn’t alone. I had myself in the silence.
But you know what they say: you stare too deep into the abyss, and the abyss stares deep back into you.
Things weren’t clear initially, but the longer I gazed at the paned reflection, I realised my figure was not the only one halted and staring longingly into the glass.
Initially, I couldn’t make out the other smaller, blurred shapes bespeckled upon the takeout window. For all I knew, they were just smudges. But a closer squint identified them as people. They too stood stilted and frozen in time, like the waxy white mannequins they were – albeit with a ghostlier presence.
The townsfolk looked on at me from their somewhat limbo-like state. They had quietly amassed over my very shoulder, staring darkly at the outsider I happened to embody. Their ethereal composure bound them to the age of the town and everything that came with that imperial timestamp. Deeper into the pane I stared at them, as if I were viewing their lifeless reflections on a lake-top surface, gazing into the ripples that would distort their eerie stances.
And their stares came with an aura of brash curiosity and near sheer confusion that a black stone like I were to be so bold as to stand alone in disruption to the flowing river of their white-foamed leisure. For I knew it to be then that these waters weren’t flowing as a progression into tomorrow. No, they were pooling behind me in a still lake of algae, moss and accumulating plastics, unclean and reeking of a putrid past incapable of flowing out of the deep, deep quarry that had encased and preserved them for well over a hundred years.
I turned around on the spot and the ghosts dissipated.
Engines roared to life, birds fluttered in the soundwaves and the people of the town dialled up their voices in competition with the rush of the neighbouring ocean. If that before was ever a moment of true silence, then time was ignorant of it. But time generally is an ignorant beast of its own.
Perhaps I was just imagining things; perhaps those things belonged to squashed-down anxieties I refused to lend credence to.
It was at that moment I recognised my friends to be somewhat absent from the street. I couldn’t spot them. I looked up and down the road, but their faces didn’t seem to completely match others in the marching colony.
Just then, the antique store door behind me swung open and, sure enough, my friends waved me inside.
Rule #4: Beware an antique shop.
If white people had any semblance of culture, you could only really find it in antique shops.
It’s weird, because its like I get it, but also, I don’t. I mean, seriously, every antique shop is literally the same as the last; why are you all so obsessed with these places?
It’s like every time you walk in, you walk into a small calamity of a redesigned living room. Glass cases kiss the ceiling, books hang off their last remaining structurally integral pages and a musky smell protrudes from postcards and stickers that sorely never reached their pre-proposed destinations. A small counter sits smack bang in the heart of the room with some ailing tortoise sitting behind it, clutching a magazine that dates back further than six years. They half-heartedly read whilst their spectacles made a descent down their weathered nostrils, proving they’re not actually reading: they’re just trying to find an excuse not to talk to you. And when you bend yourself around said counter, you quickly notice the shop is not just one room; alas, it stretches on and on into room after room of accumulated white junk that I am expected to stand there, look at and go, “Noice.”
This particular antique store extended down a hall made up of a visible six more rooms. It was somewhat crowded and featured almost all demographics.
To be honest, I don’t hate antique shops. I frequent a few here and there. I like the cameras, ceramics and typewriters typically found lodged in free space corners. And hey, who doesn’t enjoy a light game of Hard Rock pint spotting? But the majority of antique shops I tolerate belong within the city limits. As soon as you leave the sanctuary of the skyscrapers, white folks tend to collect weirder crap. I’m not shitting you when I say that these rural antique shops are always pedestaling the most whack racist shit I’ve ever seen.
For real, with every 50c Beach Boys record you spot, another golliwog bounces up from the deepest depths of hell to make you wanna shit your pants. Its like a discount museum ran by your fucked-up single Nazi uncle whom your family only tolerates for Christmas lunch and not dinner (he gets kicked out by that point).
These predominately rural antique shops are nothing more than a habitat for aggressive and obsessive white consumerism to fester with only the occasional fool to walk in and – oh shit, was that some antique lighter?
You know what, I must admit, I’m a sucker for these old-timey lighters. They had a small assortment, all of them worn and lacking fluids. The majority appeared as relics of the Vietnam War, scratched and bleached from years of stuffing in pockets and falling in mud. They all sat upwards, on a shelf chest-height to me before a few weathered, decaying books.
I systematically flicked through the lighters, attempting to see which may have regained their spark. When it came to the second-to-last, the spark flickered before catching alight and creating a flame millimetres above my naked thumb.
Chuffed I was as I rose the lighter higher to fall adjacent with my eyeline. The flame danced in my hands, swaying, sparking and creating a blur around it that unfortunately failed somewhat to conceal what its dance initially obscured to me.
On the shelf behind the dancing flame sat a small clunky bust. I could make out the face of a man in said bust, but it was only when I snapped close the lighter that it completely became obvious what it was I shared a gaze with.
It was cast iron: a black man, but his skin was darker than the night and his lips redder than the blood that currently bubbled in my veins. He smiled a forced and tortured toothy white grin whilst his iris shared the same demonic red colouring of his unnaturally plump, bloody smeared lips. His upper body was visible and dressed in a red, green and white circus-like outfit, with a single arm present and held close to his chest as if a waiter in service of a master.
Rule #5: Blackface is still very real; you just have to look closer.
I snapped my head to the side, attempting to swallow back vomit, and as I did the little shop of horrors descended deeper into Dante’s Inferno.
On the opposite side of the room, another bust sat in a glass case: this one of a black-skinned woman with lips and eyes also as red as strawberries and skin, again, that appeared to emulate tar. She sported an afro and cackled in her frozen mould, head rolling back as if forced to live infinitely in a sadistic state of insanity.
Another two, children almost, sat amongst a series of colonial texts and idealised European propaganda literature. A fifth, I could spot two rooms down, large and unmissable to the human eye. And yet, nobody could see them. No one. Not a soul.
I stood alone, stunned. I had never seen a blackface headcount in an antique shop this high before. Meanwhile, white women gawked over pots and surfer lads shakkaed over boards, all whilst the black guy stood in silence before this drawling account of modernistic racial horror.
I stepped towards the original bust I found on the shelf. Raising my hand to touch it, I felt that his metal arm was cold on approach and his eyes remained near soulless as I caressed his tortured features and moved my fingers over the $49 price tag. His arm appeared moveable and emulated a clunking sound as I began to pull the hand up, moving it towards his widespread, satanic grin. And the higher his arm rose, the heavier the clunking got. It was as if his torture was to feed himself nothingness for eternity…
But I will never forget his eyes, for whenever his arm was raised, they would roll deep up into the back of his skull with every clunk… clunk… clunk, leaving nothing but white soulless pupils in their wake.