When Gordon Matthews, author of An Australian Son, joined the Department of Foreign Affairs, he believed that he was of Aboriginal descent. He had been adopted as a baby and did not know who his natural father was. While at school (at Scotch College, Melbourne) he had been subject to racist teasing and, in this cruel way, offered the identities ‘Abo’ and ‘Boong’. While resenting such teasing, he considered it possible that he was of Aboriginal descent. As an undergraduate at the University of Tasmania, he was persuaded by an advocate of Aboriginal education that he probably had ‘Aboriginal blood’ and that he was entitled to a Commonwealth study grant. He was attracted to this possibility, for the certainty it gave him about his identity, and because he felt that ‘I had suffered for my colour’ (1996: 76). His adoptive parents and the Commonwealth accepted his decision.

He subsequently found out that his natural father was not Aboriginal but Sri Lankan. Between the act of identification and this discovery, Gordon learnt to be Aboriginal. One lesson came directly from the Australian public service. Gordon applied for a position in Foreign Affairs. In the interview (which took place in the late 1970s or early 1980s), he was told that his Aboriginal background was one of the qualities that made him attractive to the Commonwealth. Once in the job, his contact with other Indigenous public servants gave him the sense that, for the first time in his life, he was ‘participating actively in Aboriginal Australia’ (1996: 89). As well, he was assigned to duties in the Department’s promotion of awareness of Aboriginal culture and in its recruitment of Indigenous staff. The Commonwealth’s multi-faceted promotion of Aboriginality was a nurturing context for Gordon, making it unimportant, for a while, that he had never proven to his own satisfaction that his father had been Aboriginal. However, that question never completely left his mind, and he undertook a long search for the identity and whereabouts of his natural parents. Most of the second half of his book is about how he and his natural parents and siblings came to terms with one another, once he presented himself to them.

Among the anxieties provoked in Gordon by his discovery that his father was not Aboriginal was a certain insecurity about his status in the Department of Foreign Affairs. The Bicentennial was looming, and in that politically sensitive context it was likely that Gordon’s Aboriginality would become an even more salient part of his work for the Australian government. How could he tell his superiors that he was not, after all, an Aboriginal man? In the event, Gordon’s boss took the revelation well and decided that, apart from altering his personal file, the Department need not make his change of ethnic status a public matter. His Indigenous public service colleagues sympathised with the personal ordeal of ‘de-Aboriginalisation’, and they treated him the same as before. Indeed, ‘indigenous officers in the Department insisted I continue to participate in the informal group we had established to discuss issues relevant to indigenous staff’ (1996: 210). One ‘senior Aboriginal leader’ told him that he was still Aboriginal because his life had been shaped by the assumption that he was. As well, as Gordon writes, ‘I had experienced first-hand what it felt like to grow up Aboriginal in mainstream Australia’ (1996: 211).

To grow up in ‘mainstream Australia’ in Gordon’s times (1960s and 1970s) meant being positioned both negatively in popular culture and positively in official culture. Not only was he taunted with epithets such as ‘boong’ and ‘Abo’ at Scotch College, but he was also favoured by state practices of representing ‘Aboriginal heritage’ as part of Australia’s nationhood. And the positive valuation of Aboriginality in official cultural policy, by the 1980s, was generating among Indigenous public servants in Canberra a discourse on Aboriginality in which the facts of genealogy were less important than the social promptings of identity politics.