The black and white brothers

When I heard the two Georgian Democratic candidates for the Senate in the Georgian run-off Senate election, the Reverend Raphael Warnock, the eleventh of twelve children from a poor Afro-American family and Jon Ossoff, a white documentary maker from a refugee Jewish mother, introduce each other at Biden's election rally as 'black and white brothers', tears came to my eyes as I had a flashback to my experience with a very different pair of 'black and white brothers' in Australia a long time ago!

I felt sad about 'la miserablès', those 'black and white brothers', who so generously gave us a lift from Alice Springs to Darwin nearly fifty years ago!

But I was also bursting with great joy, that these two American, new generation black and white brothers were able, in spite of all the deprivations of their past, to rise from 'zero to hero', in wrestling for themselves positions of power for the good of all, in becoming Senators in the US Congress and opening the door for the Democratic Party to rise to the occasion with them!

Back to May 1973.

It has been the longest wait for a ride since we had begun hitchhiking around Australia from Sydney in January.

Beside me sits my drawcard car stopper: this pretty, longhaired blond, blue eyed, slim lady. (By 2021, my wife for fifty years.)

We have been waiting at the road-sign, 'TO DARWIN' at this junction in Alice Springs for hours, but few cars came by and none stopped.

We are tired and frustrated and for the first time during our hitchhiking we begin to wonder: 'Must we now book a coach?'

Our journey ahead of us is long: all the way from Alice Springs to Darwin.

We are just about to give up waiting any longer, when this beaten up, old Holden appears, chugging along slowly, swaying to the left and the right sides of the road. 'Oh no', I sigh, 'the driver must be drunk'!

But drunk or not, the driver flings open the door of the car when he stops beside us and invites us into the car. 'Are you going to Darwin?' -hesitantly I ask the bleary-eyed driver, with a flagon of grog in his hand. 'Ye' he answers, as I am trying to endure the smell of sweat emanating from the car.

A black hand from the back seat reaches forward towards the white driver, fingers opening and closing, signalling that it was the back seat passenger's turn to have a swig from the flagon.

I look at my hitchhike partner gingerly, as if asking? 'What shall we do? Accept the lift or decline?'

Exasperated, we climb into the car.

The white, dishevelled driver introduces to us, himself and his Aboriginal partner at the back, as 'black and white brothers'.

I shall never forget this moment. This title had a major impact on my life. It etched into my memory and has kept haunting me through the nearly 50 years that has passed since this encounter…

As we travel from Alice Springs to Darwin with this generous pair of down and out alcoholics for the next few hours, the words 'black and white brothers' take on a different, albeit sad meaning for me.

It now means, the broken Aborigine finding his mate in a white hobo: an alliance of 'la miserablés'!

After arrival to Darwin, I can't help noticing drunken Aborigines everywhere!

And lots of 'black and white brothers!'

I am flabbergasted: This is not the self-determination that we so enthusiastically dreamed of, while I was a reporter on This Day Tonight ABC TV, finishing that job just before this hitchhiking.

Now that Gough Whitlam came to power, he became the architect of the new policy of self-determination for Aborigines.

A seemingly unlimited amount of cash is being thrown at the Aborigines with the motto: do anything with it, now you are free! But we whites forgot to ask the question:

Are you equipped to be free now, when we have dispossessed, neglected, injured, disintegrated and demoralised your people for generations?

Is a pile of cash handouts a substitute for acknowledging that we have robbed you of your dignity and for coming to love and respect you as people and for genuinely trying to heal the past?

Well actually, the only people who tended to socialise with the Aborigines in droves then, were the down and outs of white society.

And what many despairing Aborigines who came into contact with them learnt was, that the way to ease their pain was, to join in with them to drink themselves to death!

I certainly found this out, when on arrival to Darwin, depressed by my experience with that pair of black and white brothers, I began to pay attention to the findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Alcoholism in the Northern Territory in 1973, which was in session at that time. I joined the Northern Australian Aboriginal Legal Service then as a volunteer for six months.

Fast forward to now. Slowly but surely, enough new generation Aborigines eventually have gained the education to be able to lead their people as teachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, musicians, entrepreneurs and politicians.

And in spite of some racism, that seems to be still persisting in the Australian society, we have come much closer now to the ideal of becoming truer black and white brothers and sisters.

The likes of Charlie Perkins, Adam Goods and Stan Grant, the US Civil Rights Movement, followed by the Black Lives Matter movement now, may have helped us to wake up and be counted!

So as I hear the black Rev. Rafa, a kind of re-incarnation of Martin Luther King and the white practical idealist, Jon Ossoff declare passionately that they are 'black and white brothers' and that they are determined to bring love for all into politics, I can only cry with joy:

'Yes! Maybe, in spite of the still existing shocking divisions and hatreds and perhaps because of them, particularly in the US, the time may have arrived for us all, Black and White, Brown, Yellow and for all shades of humanity, to genuinely do our best, to bring about healing and at long last become one another's brothers and sisters!'

Now that the Reverend and Ossoff won the two Georgian Senate seats and broke the Republican gridlock over Biden in the Senate, it may be time for the Democrats, the Republicans, the whole US and the world, to step up and to support these two remarkable Georgian Senators to ensure that loving public service is confirmed as the lasting foundation for politics.