“That family needs a miracle”, said the charge nurse after a memorable crisis meeting I’d observed as a medical student, “and I need a cigarette”.
In the 25 years since then, I have heard versions of this from so many colleagues as we’ve worked with families under stress. Although it’s more coffee and dark chocolate now.
Families, I have learned, are both the most powerful and most dangerous thing on the planet. The best and worst of us.
No such thing as a normal family, under enough stress they all have cracks that show.
But I love them so much.
And they drive me nuts.
Which brings me to politics. I love this great big happy family of a country so much and yes, right now, nuts.
Just so much nuts.
Large and small groups of humans aren’t of course identical in how they work, but there are similarities.
Power is uneven, there are alliances and feuds, there are rules spoken and unspoken; communication gets more complicated the larger the group gets, and sometimes people are just dodgy.
But the family that sorts its shit out survives. The others need a miracle, and maybe a charge nurse who’s had a smoko.
But before charge nurses, before the miracles of nicotine, caffeine and refined sugar?
Before the time when humans first worked out that you could fix a broken leg with care and and a splint rather than leaving a tribe member to die alone in the wild?
Before then, families that didn’t sort out how to work together got overwhelmed too often.
Safe to say, we are not descended from those families.
I think it helps to think of our nation as like a family, like any normal-weird, messy-when-stressed family.
The referendum is a chance to sort some of our shit out.
Because our shit is there whether we care to look at it or not. And a major piece of it is that we haven’t reckoned with the injustice of colonisation.
Our Indigenous people are unimaginably disadvantaged, and although only 3% of us identify as Indigenous, they’re the descendants of millions (yes, millions) of people who were here before the rest of us, and whose connection to the land we live on means something enormous for its future, and ours.
They are the marathon men, women and children who outlasted every civilisation on Earth by a country mile, sidestepping revolutions Agricultural and Industrial with a quietly revolutionary life down under the globe, watching the Southern Cross turn clockwise in an entirely different relationship with time.
And country.
And family.
We can learn so much from them.
And yet in 235 frenzied years, a tiny but violent burst of European hot mess, this 65,000 year-old civilisation with the keys to a sustainable future for us all has been all but trashed.
The internet might call this situation FUBAR.
Which stands for F-ed Up Beyond All Recognition, to save anyone googling it.
Because as the polls would seem to say, we are presently Beyond All Recognition of our First Nations people in our constitution.
And that is, IMO, f-ed up.
It doesn’t matter how well the rest of the nation-family thinks they’ve done, there’s shit here we haven’t sorted out, and it’s not going to go away.
In 25 years of medical experience I have never, not once, seen a family get better just by hoping their shit goes away.
Because there are no actual miracles, that’s just a word for the unexplained. Shit between humans has a half-life beyond that of nuclear waste.
Except.
Unlike nuclear waste, we can actually process our shit, and turn it into stuff that heals and sustains us. It’s an alchemic ability of humans and it really feels like a miracle when it happens.
It isn’t a miracle, there is neuroscience behind it, but it truly feels miraculous.
I get to see it in my work as a psychotherapist often enough to love my crazy job as much as I love this crazy country. Humans! We can do this amazing thing!
It’s just that we don’t. Not off our own bat, anyway.
We don’t care to look at our shit – every family that comes to me for help does so in crisis or because of one.
It takes a crisis to put the writing you don’t want to read on the wall you can’t look away from.
Some believe the crisis we need will only come after a No vote, when we see what we have done to a gentle people who so patiently welcomed us to walk with them.
Sure, I have seen families that need to hit that kind of rock bottom and feel that kind of hurt before they can let go of assumptions and pride enough to try and change.
But I have also seen families hit what we all thought was rock-bottom then crash through it, as overwhelmed nervous systems in vicious cycles of stress and mess just keep heading south.
Some don’t recover.
Most do though, and how well and for how long depends very much on who reads the wall-writing and acts on it.
Acting on it nearly always involves sorting out what’s fair enough for the family to keep on going. But we can do better, and help families find a fair-enough that actually gets them better.
We call that repair.
Now, the R in FUBAR can stand for Repair too. It’s interesting, because in the referendum they’re connected, recognition and its close relative repair, the finding of fair-enough.
Of course, having your Voice heard is essential to repair, but I think we all know that by now.
I want to believe our nation isn’t FUBAR; but I have seen a lot of f-ed up families, and this nation is starting to look like one that needs a miracle.
It’s not too late.
The writing on the wall (to which I hope this will add in its own tiny way) is there to be read if enough of us don’t turn our backs on October 14.
At this rate though, a Yes result will feel like a miracle.
If you need me, I’ll be having a coffee and dark chocolate out the back.
This series of pieces on the 2023 Australian Referendum for First Nations Constitutional Recognition and Voice To Parliament was written on Wurundjeri Country, with the assistance of many draft-readers and feedback-providers. I am grateful for the assistance, but even more grateful for the Country.
My Doctor's Handwriting 