I was once bluntly asked by someone “Why are you so weird about it?” with “it” referring to my identity. I still don’t have a good answer, but this is my best go at providing one. My identity doesn’t belong to me, it is something conferred by others, and how others perceive me is well beyond my control. In an alternative timeline with strong community and relationality, that would be a good thing. However, much of my discomfort is driven by the fact that something important to me, something intrinsic to me, is ethereal in a world requiring tangibility.
There are some who know me from quite a while ago that would be… very surprised to say the least upon hearing Nicholas Astill, Kamilaroi person. Namely, those from my previous, non-musical, non-professional life who might immediately think “Nick’s Aboriginal is he? Well he certainly didn’t act or seem like it.” No, I’m sure I didn’t - and I certainly wasn’t encouraged to either. This was an element in the family that was frowned upon, to put it lightly. I naïvely thought that this was a thing of the past, but I’ve since learnt that this is an all too common occurrence in contemporary Australia. I’m not going to violate the privacy of my family, but I can talk about myself and how I have grown. My attitude has changed significantly through the wisdom and grace of Aboriginal people who, in lengthy conversations, took the time to discuss my relationship with my identity with me.
Identity never made conceptual sense to me. I identified as myself and whatever other people called me, and learnt that most attempts at categorising people result in fuzzy labels rather than concrete binaries. Whenever I, or someone else, pointed at someone and claimed that they were like X because of Y or did X because of Y, even if that were true, the details were remarkably incomplete, and usually invalidated the exclusivity of such a claim. Yet socially, we rarely operate on spectrums: we’re always creating binary labels, defining criteria, and so on. The complexity of individuals is not easily described in our contemporary cultural vocabulary, which makes identity a necessary construction acting as a proxy for truth.1 While I have always known the details of who I am, it was a matter of whether those details coalesced into anything meaningful and/or alien enough to others that they needed to use a word to explain it. I’d arrived at that idea long before I had a word for it; we only needed the word once it had to go into paperwork and laws.2 So, I didn’t identify when I was younger, because I didn’t identify with anything except for what other people knew me to be.
That changed when my understanding of my identity was unexpectedly challenged. I was working a residential for First Nations students in NSW as a student ambassador for USYD, where they stay on campus for several days and us staff show them around, explore what university is like, and let them know how they can pursue higher education. While walking between locations at some point, I vividly remember a group of them asking if I was Aboriginal. On one side of my family tree but I’m not really Aboriginal, I answered. “Why?” I turned to find myself met by several confused faces. I said that I was very disconnected and it’s a very complex, contentious topic in my family. I don’t think I knew how to voice that particularly well without going into detail and I wasn’t too sure exactly how sound my reasoning was. Most conversations on this topic end there rather abruptly, but that didn’t stop them. I explained a bit more about growing up, but that didn’t convince any of them. It dawned on me that I was explaining social dynamics most of them were familiar with in their own family. If I thought about myself this way, then what did I think about them and their identity? I very bluntly changed the topic; I had enough to deal with that day without an exhibition of intense introspection. I caught some bemused smirks, as if I wasn’t understanding something simple, right in front of my face. It was a very, very strange day for me.3
For me, it has always been a question of community acceptance and belonging, which is where culture, knowledge, and what being ‘as something’ comes from. Talking to all the mob I’ve met up in Sydney, they’ve shown me that when I speak about who I am, my story and my understanding of the world around me, that is what counts. Furthermore, I’ve been encouraged to identify, to demonstrate that Indigenous identity isn’t a monolithic stereotype. To demonstrate that the effects of colonisation take many forms. I don’t look black, so, to be blunt, my life is immediately way easier. Uber drivers don’t take a look at me and drive off, and a barrage of other vile things I’ve never experienced. So, while I am glad that I can, in my own small way, help unclamp the stereotype vice, I don’t do so without acknowledging the precise nature of the ways in which I differ.
I apply the following principles in my public and private life. To be part of a community is to be a force for good in it; these principles are my distillation of what that means for me:
1.Give back and get involved in the community - that is what it’s about after all;
2.Don’t take opportunities from those that need them more;
3.Acknowledge disconnection and act from your own story.
I’ve agonised over this. Whenever I’ve tried to write these thoughts out before, they start burgeoning with malignant thoughts and emotions that start small then grow uncontrollably, spitting out endless necrotic dilemmas. My last attempt was 11,000 words. Application of my principles is hard to prove, yet I can’t help but keep wanting to prove them. Nothing about my identity has truly changed, however now that I’ve had room to grow, my relationship with it has. But, crawling up the back of my spine comes the concern about the gaze of those who knew me from a while ago, seeing something they judge as incongruent and untrustworthy. I’ve come to accept that we cannot control or escape how others see us; we are always vulnerable to being frozen, misread, or condemned by another’s perception.4 External observers fundamentally can’t truly understand internal motives. So I can’t prove anything, just do my best.
I care about what it means to be part of and do right by community, and I act accordingly. I just can’t let rampant anxieties about disconnection overrun my mind anymore. The scars of colonisation can’t be undone any more than I can change who my ancestors are; refusing to identify doesn’t change history. I don’t claim cultural continuity I don’t possess, but I also recognise that denying this heritage entirely would erase the impacts of colonisation. This position isn’t comfortable or simple and I doubt it ever will be.5 I’m not a cultural authority and certainly not someone who is best positioned to speak ‘on behalf’ of mob.6 Which is why it is rare that you will see themes about Indigenous matters in my creative work, when I do have something to say, it is quite specific and bound to my own experience. While I know intellectually that I don’t need to justify who I am to the world, just to my community, my gut insisted that I put something out there. I wonder how I will change five years on from now.
Thank you for reading; mail@nicholasastill.com