At the 2016 Australian census, Stan Grant was confronted by a question-box asking if he was an Aborigine or Torres Strait Islander. Seemingly a simple question. Tick or don’t tick. Black or white, one might say. The problem for Grant was that his family history, traceable back across five generations or more, is an Australian tale of love and marriage between men and women on both sides of that box. To tick the box is to deny the white grandmother he loved. Not to tick is to deny his Aboriginal parentage.
That choice or, more precisely, Grant’s rejection of the choice, is the mainspring of On Identity, the latest in the Melbourne University Press series Little Books on Big Ideas. Grant has had a high profile for some time and I thought his reflections might shed useful light on what constitutes Aboriginal identity—an increasingly controversial issue.
Grant ticked the box in 2016, but now he rejects the choice, not simply on the census form but in any form and in all places, and he does so because he rejects the concept of identity. He wants to be free of identity, to be neither white nor black nor Aboriginal nor Irish, and his book is a personal essay about his emotional and intellectual life-journey to that decision.
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