Wayne King, the author of Black Hours (1996) grew up about ten years ahead of Gordon Matthews, in Ipswich and in a working class Aboriginal family tormented by the father’s alcohol problems. Upon leaving school, Wayne became a clerk in the Queensland public service. Although he was conscious of the racist unfairness of Queensland society, Wayne was not attracted to political activism. Rather, he sought his escape by taking a job in Canberra as a telex operator in the Department of External Affairs in 1966. In Canberra, he also found it possible to form a homosexual relationship, to be ‘camp’, in the parlance of the day. In 1967, he and his boyfriend Garry moved to Sydney, and Wayne got a job with Mitsubishi. His friends in Sydney included activists in Federal Council of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. As the issues of Aboriginal rights became more prominent in Australian public life, so, too, did the racism of his and Garry’s gay acquaintances become apparent. It was difficult to deal with their racism, because Wayne found that there was a difference between the easily assumed liberalism of conversation about Indigenous political issues and the subtle racism that remained so powerful in his social life that he and his Aboriginal friends could not even talk to each other about the shame that they felt in being Aboriginal. By 1970, Wayne had found that no milieu in Australia offered him escape from white racism.

He applied to join the United Nations as a conference typist and moved to New York. There it was no longer necessary to be Aboriginal. ‘On the streets of New York I might have been from anywhere — South America, Greece, Italy — and the racism wasn’t directed against me’ (1996: 98). The UN enabled him to be ‘a citizen of the world’ (1996: 98). Wayne relished a Bangladesh posting, with its good pay and the opportunities that he made for learning that other international language, French. Yet, after returning to New York he felt discontented, and in 1975 he resigned and went back to Sydney. As soon as he arrived, he knew he had made a mistake, for to be back in Australia was to be an Aboriginal person once more. Taking a job as a court reporter, he heard the room go quiet when he answered his new work-mates’ questions about where he was from; the subsequent conversations about ‘the Aboriginal problem’ were a disheartening reminder of white Australian complacency. He worked as hard as he could to save the fare that took him back to New York in March 1976. ‘This time I wouldn’t come back to Australia. I would never come back to Australia. I knew I didn’t belong. I would be a gypsy for the rest of my life’ (1996: 125).

Wayne King found New York and Ismailia (outside Cairo) — his next United Nations posting — to be truly cosmopolitan spaces; people from many countries and of many colours worked side by side and among these work-mates there was simply no category ‘Aboriginal’ available to apply to him. He became friendly with the only gay work-mate, an Argentine called Alfredo, and they mixed with a group of gay diplomats whose social outings would always begin by a discussion about which language they would use that night.

In the richest sense of the word, Wayne’s happiness in Egypt was the product of his ‘deracination’. Over several years, he had thoroughly uprooted himself from a culture in which he and his kind were the object of racism. He lived in a world that was relatively autonomous from the person-defining processes of family and nation. One word that describes this semi-detached world is ‘impersonal’; here was ‘impersonality’ in a benign form, the demands and opportunities of international bureaucracy and of gay sexuality combining to foster an ethos of personal liberty.

This turned out to be not enough for Wayne King, and his story makes it impossible to romanticise ‘deracination’; he makes us see the limitations, for him, of the UN’s cosmopolitan impersonality. He became alcoholic and psychotic, and this prompted him to come back to Australia and to hear his mother’s life history. Black Hours is one of those Indigenous autobiographies — the most famous is Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) — in which the narrator discovers a part of the truth of him or herself in the narrative of a parent’s or grandparent’s suffering. As he puts it, ‘I came back to Australia to find my roots. But I found my roots had been taken from me’ (1996: 224). In that low state, a friend persuades him to join Alcoholics Anonymous, and the book ends with Wayne urging that Australians take a step towards national maturity by ceasing to deny their collective racism.