by Stan Grant
This recognition is hostage to politics and politics is often the enemy of the truth. This recognition demands finding common cause with those who have no interest in enlarging our nation, but containing it. This recognition demands a dispiriting compromise with those who seek to do nothing more than the least they can do.
To give full flight to our aspirations would be to court failure. What a damning state of affairs in a country that remains the only Commonwealth nation not to enshrine the sovereign rights of its First Peoples. Are we really so stricken with lethargy on this subject? Must we be comfortable with our laggard status? Do we not look to New Zealand or the United States or Canada and ask why we too cannot negotiate treaties? Treaty, even unattainable, sings to the heart of Indigenous people here in a way that recognition cannot.
If recognition is then to mean anything then we need to infuse it with the urgency of now. It needs to speak with hope to the hooded beaten boys in dark prison cells. It needs to rise above the transactions of our daily lives to sing in our hearts. It needs to whisper to the conscience of our political leaders.
If it is to mean anything it needs to be imbued with the power to reorder our lives, to give real voice to the First Peoples. If the constitution is our rulebook then we need to rewrite those rules. Anything less will speak to the poverty of our spirit not the breadth of our vision.
Can we do this? That part of me that wants to believe struggles with what my eyes this week have seen. Those boys: links in a chain that has bound us for 200 years.
This recognition: what is it without truth? To quote the poet Milosz: ‘Crimes against human rights never confessed and never publicly denounced are a poison which destroys the possibility of friendship between nations.’
Can we confess these truths? My people have spoken this country’s confession even when no one would listen.
Our heroes have sought to fill out this country. They have held its greatness to great account.
Our warriors of the frontier: Pemulwuy, Windradyne, Yagun, Jandamarra, Tunnerminnerwait and so many others who resisted invasion and whose names should fall from the lips of schoolchildren as easily as Captain Cook, Arthur Phillip or Ned Kelly.
Their spirit has lived in those who have followed:
Joe Anderson – otherwise known as King Burraga of the Tharawal people – who said in 1933: ‘All the black man wants is representation in federal parliament. There is plenty of fish in the river for us all and land to grow all we want.’
Victorian Aboriginal leader William Cooper who in 1937 petitioned King George VI for representation in parliament.
The years have not diminished our struggle. We have fought on many fronts.
In 1963 the Yirrkala bark petitions were recognised by the Australian parliament. The Yolngu people asserted the ownership of their lands and the right to be heard.
In 1966 Vincent Lingiari walked off Wave Hill station to demand equal pay and won his land when Gough Whitlam poured the sand through Vincent’s fingers.
Charles Perkins led a busload of students to smash segregation in outback New South Wales.
In 1972 a group of activists pitched a tent on the lawns of Parliament House.
In 1988 Yolngu leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu presented the Barunga statement to Prime Minister Bob Hawke demanding what the Yirrkala people had demanded in their petition to the Queen: a treaty.
Eddie Mabo, a man from Murray Island, took his battle to the highest court in the land and did not live to see his claim vindicated: this was indeed his land.
After the apology to the Stolen Generations, Galarrwuy Yunupingu gave a speech talking about what he called ‘serious business’: a final settlement.
Still we wait.
This week we ask again: how long do we wait?
I don’t put myself in this pantheon. I live in the enormous shadow they cast. Compared to their sacrifice and leadership I feel wholly inadequate. Mine has been an individual life. I have tried to make my place in Australia.
I have tried to negotiate that compact: that you can succeed but you must not complain. This is the bargain of the successful Indigenous person: you must be an example held up as proof of Australia’s racial blindness; that anyone can make it and we must be forever grateful.
I have sought a life outside of Australia; while others battled here, I found liberation in a world where I did not have to bear the weight of our history.
This is my right. I will make those choices again. But I want to say tonight that I am indeed grateful: grateful to belong to a people who have survived. I am grateful for my parents. I am grateful to belong to a country with people who have stood with us, loved us, shared our families and fought our fight.
I will not complain. Complaining is weak. I will shout out the injustice that we have been reminded of this week.
I take no pride in the words I have spoken tonight. I don’t revel in their construction. I don’t wish to bask in any personal glory. I would rather I lived quietly. I would rather I didn’t have to speak of what I have spoken of tonight. But these words are all I have and I am fully aware they may not be enough. They may pass into the night barely remarked.
I don’t for a moment pretend that what I have said here will make a difference: many thousands of words have been spoken by people far more able and still we fail.
So I turn to words; the words of a man I turned to as I began this speech. I turn to the speech I had hoped to give. I recalled the words of Lincoln’s first inaugural, his appeal to his nation’s better angels. I return to the words of the weary Lincoln. The Lincoln at the start of his second term, a man whose death stalked him as he spoke:
‘Let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.’
Mandang Guwu – Thank you.
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There, in that speech, were the two sides of me, my double consciousness. Part of me seeks to put aside rancour, to rise above resentment, the other is quick to anger, carrying the scars of Australia’s history. I came to that speech consumed by rage, but by the end I could not help but appeal to hope. Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote ‘maybe a breath of politic words has withered our rose tree’. To Yeats, the time of talking is past, now ‘nothing but our own red blood, can make a right rose tree’. I wonder, how do we tend the gardens of our nation? One thing I know for sure, we cannot soak our ground with the toxic water of the past.
On that night I was tethered to a history of pain; like the man of ressentiment, a prisoner of my past. The ‘politic words’ need to be spoken but they must also bring release and renewal not blame and bondage. Since that night I have asked myself if as an Aboriginal person is history all I have? Without it do I lose my identity? I have come to question the idea of ‘collective memory’; memory is personal and selective. We all experience our past differently; it shapes us independently. We do share our pain, but it need not define us.
For the man of ressentiment, no apology, no monument, no reconciliation will ever be enough. To quote Yeats, ‘he is the man whom sorrow named his friend’; ultimately all he sang was changed to an ‘inarticulate moan’. He cannot fathom the difference between remembering and resentment; for him, one is impossible without the other. It is understandable: releasing the past, for him, would be a betrayal, it would be like burying his wronged ancestors twice, first their bodies and then their memories. He is caught between Homer’s mythical monsters Scylla and Charybdis, one representing remembering, the other forgetting; one is the path to anger, the other to forgiveness, and both exact a price. Forgiveness means forsaking retribution but it offers the possibility of a greater justice, peace. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur says forgiveness has a ‘poetic power’, it shatters ‘the law of the irreversibility of time by changing the past, not as a record of all that has happened but in terms of its meaning for us today’.
Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu knew that forgiveness was the price they must pay to build a new nation in South Africa, free of the hatred of race. Tu
tu called it a ‘costly business’, but one lightened by a ‘remarkable generosity of spirit’. Are nations only possible with forgiveness and forgetting? The nineteenth-century French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan thought so. In 1882, when in Australia it was widely presumed that Aboriginal people were a dying race, Renan penned an essay, ‘What is a nation?’ It remains one of the most profound and powerful statements on national identity. Renan looked beyond what he called ‘the grave errors’ of race, language or religion; a nation, he wrote, was defined not by any one thing but the sum of its many parts, ‘the fusion of the populations that comprise them’.
Race could be no foundation for nationhood, simply because there were ‘no pure races’. A nation, he wrote, was a ‘soul, a spiritual principle’, a marriage of the past and the present, one a ‘rich trove of memories’, the other ‘current consent, the desire to live together, the will to value the undivided shared heritage’.
A collective identity, one free of race, language or religion; how do we find ourselves in each other when we are so tempted to look to the past and see a permanent enemy? History is the past, we cannot change it, but we twist it and manipulate it, we use it against each other. We turn history into a contest of triumph or suffering, history becomes a guiding star by which we sail our ships into new battles. Little wonder Ernest Renan thought the question of history was a ‘threat to nationality’.
Lest we forget: each Anzac Day Australians take the solemn pledge to always remember. There is something sacred about that oath; it has become a secular liturgy. Yet the irony is not lost on Indigenous Australians, that as a nation we still find it so easy to forget the worst of our history – the massacres, the disease, segregation and discrimination. To form a nation we must choose what matters and what determines who belongs. The myth of discovery, the lie of terra nullius, Captain Cook, the First Fleet, Arthur Phillip, our foundation story is incomplete without also Bennelong, Pemulwuy, the Appin Massacre, the Wiradjuri wars. Australia Day lays bare the fault lines of our history and how we still face each other across the chasm of our past. History is important. It tells us who we have been. But Ernest Renan, more than a century ago, asked us something we still can’t answer: why should history determine who we are?
PART 5
NATION
THIRTY STEPS BETWEEN US
In 2017 I held our constitution and I felt its pull. In my hands was my country: imperfect, incomplete, indissoluble. Queen Victoria’s signature of royal assent is fading: a faint reminder of how it required an Act of British Parliament to make Australia a nation. The constitution sits now protected under glass and dim light, lest the ravages of air and time erase it. Rarely is it removed. I held it aware of the privilege. I have a romantic disposition, an affection for tradition and reverence for antiquity, and with that yellowed and weathered document removed from its protective glass casing and resting in my hand, it held a powerful resonance.
Our constitution speaks to our resolve, our endurance, the strength of our democracy. The words of our founding document carry a heavy load. These words come from a time of great debate when a people sought to lift their gaze from parochialism to find amity; out of difference to find union.
These words speak from our past, define our present and underwrite our future. As these words gave shape to a new Commonwealth so they allowed for a Commonwealth still to come: a dynamic nation, a reforming nation. In its final section, section 128, the constitution enshrines the capacity for its own alteration. Change can come only from the people in a referendum carried by a majority of voters in a majority of states.
It is a formidable requirement. In forty-four referenda put before the people, on only eight occasions has there been successful carriage. On the day I held our constitution I held, too, the most resoundingly approved amendment. In my hand was the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) 1967. It won 90.77 per cent of votes cast and carried in all six states. It is a phenomenal achievement, that a handful of Aboriginal people could form a movement, win others to their side and change forever this nation. There is much talk about the racism of our country, and it is true it is a stain on our soul, but when tested, Australians have raised their sights. The referendum altered both provisions in which Aboriginal people were mentioned. Section 51 (xxvi) was amended to give power to the federal government to make laws for Aboriginal people, and it struck out section 127 which had had excluded Aboriginal people from being counted in the census.
In my right hand was the Australian Constitution, in my left the most potent example of the power to change it. In my left hand was a milestone in the journey of my people. Here was the struggle to be heard; the struggle to be counted. As the constitution spoke to me of the enduring strength of Australia’s foundation, so it spoke to me too of the subjugation of my people. As part of me could feel a pride in the creation of Australia, another part of me felt a deep conflict. Let us not forget that at the birth of our modern nation, the First Peoples of this land were deemed unfit to be counted. There was no voice of the First Peoples in our constitution’s draft.
The 1967 referendum was a watershed moment for Australia; it is a high point in the relationship between black and white; one of those rare moments when as nation we spoke almost as one. Yet it remains a victory half won. If anything it ushered in a new era of struggle, as Aboriginal people stepped up the struggle to be recognised in their own country.
I crossed the hallway from the room in which the constitution is preserved to another room which holds the inalienable aspirations of Indigenous people. I counted the steps; just 30. Thirty steps from the constitution to the Larrakia Petition. It reads: ‘Gwalwa Daraniki – This is our land.’ This petition by the Larrakia people of the Northern Territory gathered more than a thousand signatures from Aboriginal people across Australia and was delivered to the Queen in 1972. It is torn and frayed but it speaks to me with a power still undiminished; a demand so just, so clear and still so denied.
The British settlers took our land. No treaties were signed with the tribes. Today we are REFUGEES. Refugees in the country of our ancestors. We live in REFUGEE CAMPS without land, without employment, without justice.
The petition called for treaties like those of the Maoris of New Zealand and the Native Americans. The names of the signatories are scratched on the document, some marked it with their thumb prints. Whole communities signed with the names of their towns. I looked closely and found mine: Griffith, New South Wales. From the constitution to the Larrakia Petition: thirty steps that count the distance between me and my nation, Australia.
Where is the road map for that journey? Professors Megan Davis and Marcia Langton in their introduction to a collection of essays from Indigenous leaders, It’s Our Country, write:
There are two paths from here. One is the path of listening and not hearing. And the other is the path of listening and hearing.
But what are Indigenous people saying? Marcia Langton looks to the continuing reference to race in our constitution and sees self-loathing, dehumanisation, and complicity in racism. Barrister Tony McAvoy sees the belief that Australia was legitimately settled as an immovable rock from which governments and the people cannot move. To go forward, he writes, Indigenous people are crucial to the process. He advocates an assembly of first nations to negotiate eventual treaties.
Geoff Scott – a long-time senior bureaucrat and advocate – calls for substantive reform that acknowledges our uniqueness and difference and moves beyond just a call for equality for all. To lawyer Michael Mansell, ‘recognise’ is a strange word; it acknowledges the obvious, Aboriginal people were always here. He favours legislation enshrining the distinct rights of Indigenous people. Megan Davis argues that how the British asserted sovereignty over the land – extinguishing Indigenous rights, rendering them British subjects – means this is unfinished business. But she also concedes Indigenous people are divided over how to finish that business: ‘a principled resistance camp, a resistance-to-anything camp, wai
t-and-see camp and a not yet camp’.
Differences aside, all wrestle with the same question: how to live as people with rights and dignity in a country that has historically denied – or not even recognised – those rights. Contrast the range of Indigenous positions with those of interested, engaged non-Indigenous thinkers. In a companion publication, The Forgotten People, a range of conservative writers, jurists, academics and religious figures offer their ideas for recognition. They are uniformly of generous spirit and compassion. There is a deep sense of the need to redress how our nation has failed its first peoples.
Lawyer and philosopher Damien Freeman says the time has come to recognise that successive generations of the Crown’s representatives have failed to treat Indigenous people fairly. He believes Australians have come to understand and share the deep attachment of the first nations to this continent and that this could underpin a settlement. Columnist Chris Kenny too speaks of a spiritual attachment to this home – Australia – that allows him to imagine an Indigenous sense of estrangement in the land of our ancestors. He looks for a resolution that is conservative, practical and an end point to historical grievance. Law professor Greg Craven is supportive too but counsels the political realities: ‘practicality is the kissing cousin to substance’. Ambition is fine, but the perfect can be the enemy of the good. Indigenous politics, like all politics, is the art of the possible.
There are arguments of morality and fairness and justice. The more creative support models such as that proposed by Indigenous advocate Noel Pearson for a representative advisory body to help shape Indigenous policy. Pearson argues that Indigenous people need to find a ‘hook’ in the constitution on which to hang their aspirations and demands.
Generally though, the non-Indigenous thinkers are cautious. Their support is framed around unity and reconciliation. As Damien Freeman writes, recognition may present an opportunity but reform of the constitution also risks threatening its backbone. Former Human Rights Commissioner now Federal Liberal MP, Tim Wilson, argues it can help shape Australians’ aspirations for our shared vision of our nation. But he warns of disconnect between the aspirations of Indigenous people and the rest of Australia. Misgivings notwithstanding, conservative support is essential to any political outcome. To Noel Pearson a successful recognition referendum hinges on this backing. The political realities of passing any such national poll suggest he is right.
