Abner Aborigine

I’m Abner and I’m an Aborigine. My ancestors were the earliest human inhabitants on the Australian continent. They were there at least 50,000 years before the English sent their debtors, thugs and reprobates to my homeland to spread smallpox and kill half the population of the blooming place. Nice gesture, that one.

It’s fashionable nowadays to call Aborigines like me “Indigenous Australians,” as though we evolved there like fucking koalas or some such thing. That’s silly, of course. The only things indigenous to Australia are crocodiles, Kylie Minogue and fucking sand. The Aborigines came to Australia the same way you white people did, I reckon, which is to say partly by accident and partly out of practical necessity. If you find yourself adrift in a rickety boat in the South Pacific with no navigational apparatus and not welcome wherever you came from even if you knew how to get yourself back there, the site of land (even shit land like Australia) is a strong motivation to set ashore.

Least ways, that’s how I figure it. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never even been on a boat. I’m an Aborigine. I’m not Thor-Fucking-Heyerdahl.

Look, all that’s not really the point. The point is that Mr. Knucklypaws saw me playing soccer at Dingly Community College the other day and asked if I’d pop by one morning and tell all you boys and girls what it’s like being an Aborigine. At first I told him to piss off but he took me to the pub and got me right shit-faced and I eventually agreed. So I’ll tell you, I reckon. Boys and girls, it’s shit being an Aborigine.

For a start, there’s the fact that even though my people have been in Australia since they were running around naked drawing on rocks and hunting fucking moa birds with crooked sticks and even though you lot have only been there since some monarch banished a few hundred of you to the furthest point on the globe, you now outnumber us around 50-to-one. You’d reckon a head start stretching back to the god damn Pleistocene would give a population an advantage. Yeah – you’d reckon so, but not for us. We’re Aborigines. There are fewer of us today than there were when your ships first anchored off Sydney. It’s as if we spent several thousand generations forgetting how to fuck. But that’s not the half of it.

Had I stayed put in Australia I’d be part of a distinct minority, but at least folks would know what the fuck I am. But then I didn’t stay put, did I? I came here to earn a degree in accounting. God knows why. But anyhow, I’m here and thus, the real reason it’s shit being an Aborigine is that over here in the States being an Aborigine is like being from bloody Mars. Most of you reckon I’m a black fella, but I’m not, not really. Every single, blooming day I have to tell people, “I’m an Aborigine,” then explain what that means and deal with the follow-up question: “So does that mean you’re black?”

Of course black people here reckon I’m Puerto Rican. Bugger all – do I look like Rosario Dawson?

Then too, I’m named Abner. I suppose my dad thought that was cute. It’s not. My full name is Abner Kneebone Dingo Goragong. That’s one shit name, let me tell you. But it doesn’t matter because here everyone just calls me Abner Aborigine. That sucks.