by Stan Grant
Race has us trapped. It is all but impossible for us to think about ourselves or articulate a sense of identity without referring to race. I identify as an Indigenous Australian; it is something deeply personal, arising from an enduring connection to Indigenous heritage in my mother’s and father’s families. Historically we have been categorised as ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Indigenous’ or more colloquially or disparagingly as the ‘blacks’. That has meant at various times being subject to government policy that has restricted our liberty; has told us where we could live and who we could marry. Families have been divided on arbitrary rulings of colour. The Australian Law Reform Commission lists historically sixty-four different definitions of who was considered as Indigenous.
Let me tell you about my grandmother. She lived a life on the margins; locked out in segregated 1930s Australia. She was turned away from hospital when she was giving birth to her first child; she watched as the police bulldozed to the ground the tiny humpy she called home leaving her and her children destitute. She was harassed and ostracised. She experienced the full weight of the darkest periods of Australian racism. My grandmother was white. Yes, she lived with an Aboriginal man, had black children, and her stepfather and half-brother were black. But she was white. If being Aboriginal is about a history of exclusion and discrimination, of oppression and brutality, my grandmother would have had a far greater claim on that identity than me.
Today I am asked to tick a box on the census form identifying whether I am Aboriginal. It is an entirely invented category that erases the complexity of my heritage. I am descended from Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi people but I also have an Irish convict ancestor and my maternal grandmother was European; how can that census box possibly contain all of me? How can I tick a box that excludes my grandmother? Why is my son asked to tick a box that his mother cannot? See how quickly we become bogged in the swamp of scientifically meaningless racial categorisation: was my grandmother ‘white’? My grandfather ‘black’? What race could properly describe me?
None of us are ‘pure’. Yet the politics of ‘whiteness’ means it is often normalised and ‘blackness’ seen as something ‘other’. These are relationships of power not science. Can we be truly post-racial? This was the tantalising possibility raised by the election in 2008 of Barack Obama, a man with a white mother and a black Kenyan father, as American president. His election was hailed as the fulfilment of the Martin Luther King Jnr promise of being judged not by colour but character. The writer Touré challenged the whole idea of ‘blackness’ in his book Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? He said, ‘the point of fighting for freedom is for black folk to define blackness as we see fit.’ As he made clear, there are forty million blacks in America and forty million ways to be black.
America is consumed by race, in ways that I have found nowhere else. I remember visiting with my sons, each of them different shades of colour. My youngest son was greeted everywhere in Spanish – mistaken for a Mexican – and his brother would regularly receive a nod of recognition and solidarity from African-Americans. Here is the folly of race, that people in the same family can be categorised on sight so very differently.
Historian and social scientist David Hollinger has called for Americans to ‘push yet harder against the authority that shape and colour have historically been allowed by society to exert over our culture’. Hollinger, in his book Postethnic America, dismisses the idea of ‘fixed’ identities; he favours making room for new communities that promote solidarity between people beyond definitions of race or ethnicity. As he says, we ‘live in an age not of identities but affiliations’.
It is a worthy notion that remains a work in progress. America is far from being a ‘post-racial’ nation. The election of Donald Trump is seen critically as a return to old hardened attitudes of racial prejudice and a victory for white supremacy. Ta-Nehisi Coates has called Trump ‘the first white President’. The Trump ideology, Coates says, ‘is white supremacy in all of its truculent and sanctimonious power’. Yet Coates, for all the power and eloquence of his writing, is himself caught in the racial bind: railing against it yet defined by it. The same may be said of me.
To Coates America is irredeemably racist; it is, he says, ‘heritage’; it is ‘tradition’. America, he has written, is built on the plunder of black bodies. What troubles me so about this? Could I not look to Australia and see a story of wealth extracted from Aboriginal suffering? Yes. And yet, it is a bleak world that cannot imagine hope or progress. Coates himself has said it is not his job to offer hope. Yet hope has kept me alive and it was hope that delivered Barack Obama to the White House: the ‘audacity of hope’. White voters who would eventually turn to Donald Trump, for a moment believed enough in America’s promise to elect a black man to the presidency.
Obama spoke of a ‘nation where all things are possible’, yet reality has a habit of mugging hope. As the historian Gary Gerstle points out:
If Obama’s election produced spasms of racial vertigo, the reality for millions of African-Americans who cheered his victory, continued to be contoured by the very forces of racial segregation, police brutality, poverty, unemployment that in some quarters, Obama’s election had suddenly made irrelevant.
Race matters, even if the evidence tells us it should not. Shifting our language is not some ‘Kumbaya’, all-hold-hands fantasy; it is urgent: race exacts a terrible human toll. Barbara and Karen Fields, remind us that ‘race is the principle unit and core concept of racism’. Racism, they write, is a social practice that ‘always takes for granted the objective reality of race’. Racecraft turns the consequence – colour – into the cause. Racecraft switches the burden of blame: an individual is discriminated against because they are perceived as black, not because of anything inherent in the shade of their skin, but entirely because enough people have acted on their ideas of colour. It is racism that is the parent of race, not the other way around.
The Fields sisters say that we have moved beyond fears of witchcraft, but racecraft persists. They reject the language of race, even terms like ‘mixed-race’ or ‘post-racialism’: these draw from the same well as racism. As they write, ‘restoring notions of race mixture to centre stage recommits us, willy-nilly, to the discredited idea of racial purity, the basic premise of bio-racism’. That’s what all the discussion about Meghan Markle’s ‘race’ was really doing – perpetuating voodoo science and fuelling the same old fears of difference, as if that has not done enough damage to our world already.
PART 4
HISTORY
BETWEEN DISCOVERY AND HOPE
The eleventh of June 1770: for Lieutenant James Cook the end looms near. His ship the Endeavour has run aground on the Great Barrier Reef. This man of the sea fears he will now be lost to it. Cook sees his men grow desperate; hope is fading. He dreads that in a little time they will turn violently on each other. Those who survive will anyway be dead to the world; what is left of their lives lost in a wilderness. Cook’s journal counts every passing hour, his mood ever darker.
. . . death has approached in all his terrors; and as the dreadful moment that was to determine our fate came on, every one saw his own sensations pictured in the countenances of his companions . . .
Cook’s life, the lives of his crew, hang on the winds and the water. Everything that can be spared is tossed overboard; with the load lighter and the tide rising, the vessel heaves into the deep water. The crew that had slumped exhausted on deck lift their spirits for a final effort. All hands man the pump to hold the incoming flood at bay. It is on these moments history turns. To read Cook’s words takes my breath away. Here is a man far from his home, commanding a ship on a voyage to lands whispered of and imagined. Through his words I see him; not a cast-iron figure – a statue – but the man James Cook; a man of doubt and fear and perseverance and undoubted courage.
Cook had navigated the waters of the eastern coast of this southern continent, his maps recording his journey. On 22 August 1770 Lieutenant James Cook claimed the whole of
the territory at Possession Island. This land would now be known as New South Wales. As an Indigenous person, my admiration for his feats is mixed with the reality that he looked upon my ancestors as, in his words, ‘some of the most rude and uncivilised upon the earth’. The events his voyage set in train would prove devastating for my family; its legacy hangs heavily still in Indigenous lives today. Yet, Cook brought also the fruits of the Enlightenment, he brought the science of Sir Isaac Newton, he brought the thoughts of John Locke, the father of liberalism, whose ideas had inspired revolution and democracy. By planting the British flag, Cook also sowed the seeds of British law, and it was that legal system which would ultimately deliver justice for Indigenous Australians. Two centuries after Cook’s arrival, Australia’s High Court would strike down the lie of terra nullius. In the historic case Mabo v Queensland (No 2), the court recognised the legal claims to land of the First Peoples of Australia. Captain Cook was wrong, this was not an empty land, my ancestors were not uncivilised brutes, they had a system of law that gave them title to this land, title that endures today.
James Cook and Eddie Mabo bookend our nation’s story, but they hold an even greater place in the history of the world. In 2001 UNESCO compiled what it called the Memory of the World, Australia had two entries: the Journal of Captain James Cook and the Personal Papers of Eddie Koiki Mabo. This is my history, from Cook to Mabo, from Terra Nullius to Native Title. This is the history of all of us who call Australia home.
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I was wrong about Captain Cook. In 2017, I reflected on his legacy and statues in his honour as a debate raged around the world about monuments, their meaning and whether they should be torn down. The United States was in the grip of a culture war; statues commemorating Confederate Civil War figures were being toppled. The distinctive Confederate flag, which had been so identified with racism and white supremacy, was being lowered. This culture war reached its bloodiest point in Charlottesville, Virginia on 11 August 2017. Neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis and nationalists gathered for a rally to ‘Unite the Right’. They were motivated by moves to take down a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
The rally turned violent with clashes erupting against antifascist groups. One white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd, killing a young woman. In the end more than thirty people were injured. History was being weaponised; a battle over the past and who had a right to their story had pitched Americans against each other.
At the time I wondered about our different histories, how Americans grapple – uncomfortably, even violently – with their dark past and how in Australia we have preferred silence. In an article for the ABC Online website, I wrote of walking past a statue of Captain Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park. I had passed by so many times and barely given it a second thought, but on this day I stopped and read the inscription. The words told me that Cook ‘Discovered This Territory 1770’. I wondered at this word ‘discovered’. It was a word from a time when this land was declared empty, when the rights of the people who had been here for thousands of generations were extinguished. Discovery was never just a word, it was a doctrine.
As I wrote in the article, the statue spoke to how differently we – black and white – see our national story:
It has stood since 1879. When it was unveiled more than 60,000 people turned out. The procession at the time was the largest ever seen in Sydney.
No one present then questioned that this was the man who founded the nation.
But think about that today. Think of those words: ‘Discovered this territory.’
My ancestors were here when Cook dropped anchor. We know now that the first peoples of this continent had been here for at least 65,000 years, for us the beginning of human time.
Yet this statue speaks to emptiness, it speaks to our invisibility; it says that nothing truly mattered, nothing truly counted until a white sailor first walked on these shores.
The statue speaks still to terra nullius and the violent rupture of Aboriginal society and a legacy of pain and suffering that endures today.
The inscription that Cook ‘Discovered This Territory 1770’ maintained a myth, a belief in the superiority of white Christendom that had historically devastated indigenous peoples everywhere. Where does that myth come from? In 1452 Pope Nicholas V sanctioned the conquest, colonisation and exploitation of all non-Christian peoples. In 1493, after Christopher Columbus returned from his so-called ‘discovery’ of America, Pope Alexander VI decreed that land not ruled by Christian kings was free to be claimed.
The idea of terra nullius was the law of whiteness, that anyone who did not worship Jesus Christ was less than human. The doctrines of discovery and terra nullius have been demolished by the church, by our courts, by the United Nations. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues says the discovery doctrine is the ‘foundation of the violation of [Indigenous peoples’] human rights’.
I wondered how in Australia we could maintain the ceremonial fig leaf of welcomes to country while a statue stood in the centre of our largest city proclaiming to the world that no one here mattered until a white person discovered the land? It spoke to an enduring problem in Australia, a land of gestures and tokens of respect and recognition, but still with no substantial recognition of Indigenous peoples. There remain no treaties with Indigenous people – the only Commonwealth country without one – and a stubborn political resistance to constitutional reform that would give Indigenous peoples a voice in our founding document that was originally written to exclude them.
As I wrote in my original article, the comparison to the United States was revealing:
Yes, America tears itself apart trying to make itself better.
Race: Americans cannot ignore it, cannot deny it, cannot hide from it.
But what about us?
America cannot avoid the legacy of racism. We find it all too easy to avoid.
If America seeks to find what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature’, we vanish into the ‘Great Australian Silence’.
Anthropologist Bill Stanner coined that phrase in the 1960s to describe what he said was ‘a cult of forgetting practised on a national scale’.
We have chosen to ignore our heritage. So much history here remains untold.
My mind goes back to another journey, well before Cook, a journey unrecorded in any logbook. It is written on the landscape, on cave walls; its trail uncovered today in fossilised remains, so ancient is this story. It is the journey of a people completing that epic human trek out of Africa. These people had come as far as the Indonesian archipelago and now eyed another land in the distance: a final home.
Perhaps they saw smoke from wildfires, perhaps they kept moving because that’s what people do. Something put them in boats to make what was then the first open sea journey in the history of humanity. Somewhere lost in time the first footprints appeared on this soil. Archaeological evidence now dates human occupation in Australia from at least 65,000 years ago. To the people who would create new cultures here, tell new stories, this time is not time at all; it is The Dreaming. Sixty-five thousand years; it is easy to say but so daunting, so awe-inspiring to contemplate. Two-hundred and forty-nine years of British possession; 65,000 years of the First People.
I thought about those things as I watched the spectre of American history cast a dark shadow over that nation. I pondered the questions of heritage and hate. Statues were coming down, old flags of division were being put away and a country was tearing itself apart. Fascists, neo-Nazis and Klansmen who wrapped themselves in the flag of the Confederacy were reigniting the old grievances of the Civil War. How did a nation reckon with itself? What was the balance of history? Could it be weighed and measured? Is it possible to ever truly atone for our past? Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – freeing the slaves – Martin Luther King’s dream, the Civil Rights marches that brought an end to segregation, the election of the first black president, Barack Obama, none of these things truly healed America’s wo
und.
Across Australia there are monuments to settlers and explorers, those who drove Aboriginal people from their lands. Where though are the markers of our frontier battles? There is still no place on the Australian War Memorial Roll of Honour for those Aboriginal people who died on this soil fighting to defend their country. This is what Indigenous people mean when we talk about ‘truth telling’, a full account of our history that doesn’t diminish the suffering or the humanity of the First Peoples. History is so quickly captured by the culture warriors, turned into a political battle of left versus right. The German philosopher Karl Lowith once wrote: ‘To ask earnestly the question of the ultimate meaning of history takes one’s breath away.’ As the lessons of the United States teach us, history is perilous territory; history can so easily inflame old hatreds.
That’s what I got so wrong about Captain Cook. I had forgotten the words of the great African-American emancipation fighter and philosopher Frederick Douglass, who said, ‘we have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future’. I was not wrong to ask questions about the idea of discovery. I was not wrong to ask why we in Australia too easily turn away from history we don’t like. But did I feed a narrative of grievance? Did I turn Australian history into a battleground? Is it even possible to debate history without first loading our guns?
Within weeks of my article on Captain Cook the history warriors were out in force. I was public enemy number one, accused of inciting hatred. Those who hold the pen of Australian history refused to give up, they had written the final chapter and shut the book. To them I was committing a heresy; it was treasonous. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull lectured us that history cannot be rewritten. The more excitable media carried headlines of ‘Stalinism’, Taliban Stan some called me, as though my challenge to the myth of discovery was akin to terrorists tearing down the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
