me visiting my boyfriend in Victoria country for the weekend. We’ve been to the footy and the pub, and now we’re in his parents’ living room watching 60 Minutes, like they always do on Sunday nights.

The main story is about an Aboriginal community where alcoholism and violence are rampant. It followed the usual formula – something that would make home audiences shake their heads and then wash their hands. I became more and more uncomfortable. I could feel the dam of silence about to break, that someone was going to give off the kind of lowly racist comment that, as a mixed-race woman with pale skin, I was always unconsciously prepared. I started feeling restless around strangers, just in case Aboriginal topics came up. This time it was much worse than usual.

“We should shoot them all when we have the chance,” my future father-in-law announced. “We’re not going to have all these problems now.” My girlfriend said nothing except her mother laughed nervously. “Don’t say things like that in front of Kate.” He didn’t know I was Aboriginal, but he did know I was a left-handed law student.

He continues to fire from his storehouse of bigotry, finally landing on the classic: “I’m not racist. I have Aboriginal friends at work. “It’s true there were Aboriginal people in the factory where he worked, although I don’t know if they were friends. I had never heard him mention them before. I kept staring at the TV and waited for the TV to finish.

For the three of them, it was just a sad wish for an easier life; for me it is a push for genocide that will wipe out half my family.

Being a Native who could be considered white is a privilege and a burden, and privileges and burdens are the same thing: people don’t treat you like you are Aboriginal.

In some ways, you experience racism like an observer in a car accident – it doesn’t happen directly to you, but is traumatic nonetheless. Except in so many important things – mental and emotional repercussions – it happens to you.

Passing for white leaves you privy to the usual micro-aggression of those you love, but who don’t think of you as ‘truly’ Aboriginal. You are exposed to a deeply ingrained and disturbing prejudice that most people just feel comfortable airing in the blue light of their living room. At least until they find out who you are. But there’s that privilege again – they don’t have to know they’re talking about you, unless you tell them.

I tell them, my girlfriend’s family, sort of. I told my girlfriend a few days later that I was actually Yorta Yorta. I pointed out that I wouldn’t be here if her dad got what he said he wanted. The response was predictable. “But you are white. You should have told me. He’s not serious. He’s not racist. “The message was clear: I tricked him and his family into thinking I was someone who wasn’t me. We broke up soon after.

Twenty years later, it still hurts to think about it. And I still feel trapped between two warring cultures. (To be clear, I’m only speaking for myself here.)

I don’t know whether to call myself Aboriginal, Indigenous Australian, First Nation, Yorta Yorta, mixed race, or Australian with an x ​​heritage (insert any of the above). Here in England, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I started with Aboriginal or Native but explained more if someone shows interest. By the way, the English looked surprised Indigenous Australians treated today, without much acknowledging their own historical role. There is limited awareness of modern pain points, many people still wish me Happy Australia Day.

However I label myself, I know I don’t automatically fall into one of the cultures with just the birthright. I had to work on it, and there was always the painful worry that I was doing it wrong. In my naive youth, I tried to use colloquial language like ‘turn off’ or ‘cuz’. But I haven’t grown up saying it yet, so suddenly adopting them at 14 sounds wrong, and made my parents look at me strangely.

It was only then that I started realizing that my identity had nothing to do with how I spoke and everything to do with where I came from, where I felt at home, and who recognized me as part of their community.

Since moving overseas 15 years ago, I have tried to maintain my connection to the culture by following certain people online and reading a lot. But I don’t play any active role. When events like Naidoc Week or Australia Day roll around, I don’t always feel entitled to the undeniable pride or sadness I feel. Sometimes, it’s hard to disagree with people who say I have no right to that.

But it hurts me for Australia, especially this year. There is no internet connection on earth that can replace my connection to a country. No Google maps can get me into the bush. There were no street views from the dirt track where I rode my bicycle barefoot and in my clothes, the rubber tree where I carved my initials, or the ants that were always biting me. My feet miss the ground.

This damp and dark English land will never be mine, even if my surname is from Yorkshire. I crave dust that can’t stay wet, which blows from under the rope and settles in my pores; dirt that, after the rain, roasts and cracks into crunchy curls that are so satisfying to walk through.

I recently dreamed of stepping into Murray, the gravelly sand beneath my feet turning to silken silt, cold gusts of water swirling over my feet, stomach, shoulders until I drowned. I turned around, looked up at the sky and floated on the river like I did when I was a kid.

I felt it all – hot from above and cold from below, the occasional sweep that terrified me whatever was at my feet. This is where my grandparents – my white grandfather and my mixed Nan – took me. They camp here for months every year, chasing fish and whacking snakes. But is this a black or white craving? Why do I care so much?

After breaking up with my girlfriend, I retreated into my left-handed student bubble, safe in knowing that the only Sunday night conversations I will have about Aborigines will involve wine, candlelight, well-meaning performances and pleas for my ‘unique perspective’. .

In my effort to feel more Aboriginal, I started gathering at Indigenous student centers. I took part in the march and then, having switched from law to journalism, I started writing a little bit for the newspaper Koori Mail, which gave me a connection to a community I had never felt before, and frankly, probably not since then.

When I went to visit the newspaper headquarters in Lismore to find work there after graduation, I immediately felt at home and completely foreign. It struck me how little I knew about Indigenous culture, and it was a feeling I never really got rid of. I felt wrong about taking the job, when I didn’t qualify in what matters most.

My Nari’s relationship with her Aboriginalities is also complicated. He never said the A word, at least not to me. I don’t even know there’s a word for us. I noticed, of course, that her parents had much darker skin than everyone I know, but, oddly enough I guess, it didn’t occur to me that they were Aboriginal until I went to my great-grandmother’s funeral and saw it was actually, oh , every one on my family side it’s quite dark.

As a teenager who dreams of becoming a human rights lawyer, I will envy them in winter, when I turn white back and they stick with the same dark honey color. Of course, there are plenty of problematic exoticizations and privileges here that I’m still unpacking 30 years later.

Nan never said a word but she told many stories about ghosts and yowies. Several times he whispered in my ear that I was descended from a king and must not forget it. I never knew who, or what, he meant. He would take me to Boat Rock, a cultural site about 15 minutes from our home where the local Bpangerang used to collect rainwater. While he was sitting there, I was going to run into him, loving how the pockmarked granite felt under my hands and feet, thinking of people who had been doing the same thing for thousands of years before me.

I have thought a lot about Boat Rock this year because, like many others, I faced nostalgia and another vicious pandemic, made worse by being abroad and unable to return.

After breaking up, I never saw the boyfriend or father again. But when I tried to untangle my complicated feelings about home and identity, 20 years later, I finally approached something closer to peace by remembering who I was. And say it out loud.