Australia Day

by Stan Grant

  The West is battered and tired. The United States is showing signs of retreat, its global leadership and prestige worn down by endless war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The shadows of the attacks of 11 September 2001 orchestrated by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, loom long. It shook America’s confidence and has tested its resolve. It has drained the US of blood and treasure. The Global Financial Crisis – a worldwide recession if not depression – has shattered confidence in the global economy; the rules of the game looked rigged; the entire financial system exposed as an elaborate shell game. Ordinary Americans lost their houses and livelihoods and the shock waves have been felt around the globe. And all of this is playing out at a time when China – an authoritarian still-Marxist regime – represents a viable and worrying alternative to what we call the liberal democratic order. It is little wonder some are asking, has the West lost it?

  Don’t think for a moment that this doesn’t affect Indigenous issues; Indigenous people are in the crosshairs of this global crisis. The anger and protest on Australia Day is part of this growing resentment, liberal democracy has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Aboriginal people. If liberalism is to survive it will need to meet this challenge here and abroad. Liberalism is a fighting faith, and we need to plant our flag firmly in the ground.

  But this is not a discussion we are good at here. Too quickly any attempt to square the legacy of history with the future of liberalism descends into a culture war between those who want to dismantle the West and others pledged to defend it. Western triumphalists are frozen solid in an eighteenth-century vision of Enlightenment and Liberalism that is ill equipped to deal with the complexity of challenges in a diverse, interconnected world. Enlightenment was never just for white people. Tired rhetoric about the sanctity of individual rights is not enough to silence the demand for group rights; smarter thinkers find a way to fuse the two. The old defenders of the faith are out of ideas or they have just stopped asking the right questions. But on the left there is an inability – or a refusal – to see the potential of liberalism. They dismiss it with empty slogans about ‘dead white men’. The truth is, as French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, said ‘western civilisation is a jailer that slips you the key’.

  Treaties, constitutional recognition, can be consistent with Australia’s democratic principles; indeed, Australia would be strengthened. Rather than locked into exclusive, restrictive group identities, individuals, previously marginalised in Australia, would be freed to explore the full range of their affiliations, ambitions and desires, and identify themselves how they would wish. They could believe in an Australia that had not always believed in them.

  The Uluru Statement is a high water mark in the history of Australian liberalism. It came after an exhaustive process of consultation from the top end to the Tasman Sea, from the cities to the red centre. People listened and were heard, stories were shared, and tears shed. Some have walked away and renounced it, as is their right. But at a convention at Uluru there was abiding resolve born of consensus. A people for whom Australian democracy was first designed to exclude were saying that democracy can work for them.

  There are those in Australia, people with their own deep commitment to liberalism, who find fault with the Uluru Statement. They believe that race should have no place in our constitution and I agree with them. But we should remember, race is baked into our democracy. It was there at the very beginning. Section 51(xxvi) of the constitution – commonly referred to as the ‘race power’ – authorised the parliament to make laws for ‘the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any state, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws’. It wasn’t until the referendum of 1967 that the words ‘other than the aboriginal race’ were deleted.

  The referendum also struck out section 127, that had said, ‘In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth . . . aboriginal natives shall not be counted.’ Yet section 25 remains, allowing for the disqualification from voting of persons of any race.

  By now we should have moved beyond the scientifically discredited and destructive ideas of race. Race should have no place in our constitution. But Indigenous peoples are not a race, they are the First Peoples of a land; in some parts of the world there are Indigenous people who would be classified as ‘white’. The Uluru Statement does not seek a voice for a race, but representation for a people. They are a people for whom the federal government can still make special laws, they are a people for whom our courts recognise unique rights such as native title, they are a people who have endured a history, at times, of neglect, segregation and discrimination.

  Democracy’s strength is its capacity for innovation and self-correction. In many parts of the world democracies recognise and incorporate rights and laws framed around difference. Canada allows for the cultural autonomy of Quebec, and its Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms extends a constitutional protection of language groups. In Canada, collective and individual rights coexist. The Uluru Statement makes a plea to empower the powerless here and ignite the individual potential of each Indigenous person in Australia. As the statement says:

  When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

  The Uluru Statement from the Heart asks much of us. It tests whether Australian democracy can be truly representative, hold a place for those whose numbers are so few, whose history is so unfair and whose burden is so heavy. It asks of Australia’s political leaders, vision and courage. It asks much too from Indigenous people. Can we set aside historical grievance? Can we look to a civic unity with our fellow Australians, beyond our difference? The Uluru Statement includes a Yolngu word from Arnhem Land: Makarrata. It asks us all, can we make peace after our struggle?

  WHAT TO US IS 26 JANUARY?

  What, to the American slave, is your fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

  Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

  Frederick Douglass was born in 1818, his mother a slave and his father most likely the white man who administered the Maryland plantation his family was held on. As a boy he was considered so insolent he was sent away to be ‘broken’ by a cruel overseer in a property reserved for troublesome slaves. He was made to work from dawn to dark and was beaten almost daily. By the time he died he was one of the most famous men in America, a confidant of the rich and powerful, an intellectual, a writer and a devastating speaker. In 1852, a decade before the Civil War, Douglass gave a speech ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’. It was a fiery denunciation of America, an America that denied its own creed of equality even as it celebrated the date of the nation’s birth. But there was something else here, a profound belief in the hope of America. The hope lay in the constitution, what Douglass called a ‘glorious document’. If America lived up to the full measure of its constitution, he believed, it would set all people free. As Douglass wrote, ‘I do not despair of this country’, within the constitution was salvation, a d
ocument he said was, ‘entirely hostile to the existence of slavery’. As he wrote, ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened, and the doom of slavery is certain.’

  I look to Frederick Douglass and ask the same question here: What to the Aborigine is 26 January? It is a question that Indigenous people have long posed. There are echoes of Douglass in the Day of Mourning, 26 January 1938. On the 150th anniversary of colonisation the Aborigines Progressive Association organised a protest march through the streets of Sydney. They were turned away from Sydney Town Hall and held a meeting instead at the Australian Hall, but were told they could enter only by the back door. A hundred people turned out, among them members of my own family, in what is considered one of the first civil rights gatherings. They delivered a manifesto declaring that ‘This festival of 150 years so-called “progress” in Australia commemorates also 150 years of misery and degradation imposed on the original native inhabitants by white invaders of this country.’ The meeting concluded with a resolution that stated:

  WE, representing THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA, assembled in Conference at the Australian Hall, Sydney, on the 26th day of January, 1938, this being the 150th anniversary of the whitemen’s seizure of our country, HEREBY MAKE PROTEST, against the callous treatment of our people by the whitemen during the past 150 years, AND WE APPEAL to the Australian nation of today to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines, and we ask for a new policy which will raise our people to FULL CITIZEN STATUS and EQUALITY WITHIN THE COMMUNITY.

  Here is a tension that exists today. A celebration of a national day that for so many of the First Peoples of this continent remains a day of pain, a reminder of a history of segregation, exclusion and brutality. But here too was a powerful statement of belief and hope in this nation. That despite our history, the promise of democracy could include even those locked out. Like Frederick Douglass, the people who met on that Day of Mourning, believed that the ‘arm of the lord is not shortened’, that as Martin Luther King Jnr would say decades later, ‘the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice’.

  26 January 2017: my father was to be awarded a special Australia Day honour in his hometown as a respected elder of his community. My father has lived a life at times at the coalface of bigotry and brutality; there have been beatings and dark nights of lockdown in a cell. He has been judged by the colour of his skin, by those who would not see the full content of his character. Yet for it all he has remained a man proud of who he is, and unwavering in his belief and hope that Australia is better than its worst. In his later years he has helped to revive his language, Wiradjuri, teaching it not just to Indigenous people but allowing all Australians to share in his heritage. Because, to my father, it is all our heritage. If you are on this land, this belongs to you. My father has been awarded an Order of Australia medal, and a doctorate from Charles Sturt University for writing the first full dictionary of Wiradjuri language.

  That evening I spoke to my mother, and she told me how proud she was of how well my father was treated, and what an honour it was to celebrate on that day, when Australians celebrate all that we have made in this country. But my mother told me again of another Australia. As our conversation often does, it turned gently to her life as a young girl, living with her family, a black father and a white mother, on the outskirts of Coonabarabran in north western New South Wales. On this Australia Day she reminded me of how her family’s tin humpy was bulldozed to the ground, she told me of the constant presence and threat of welfare officers, of her brothers and sisters made wards of the state and separated from their family, she told me again of seeing her father led through the streets handcuffed and roped together with other Aboriginal men, arrested for simply drinking alcohol. This is her Australia. These are her memories, the memories of wounds. We talked about Australia Day, a day that had been one of pride. ‘It wouldn’t hurt them to move the date,’ she said.

  *

  Should we move the date? There are those who would abolish Australia Day entirely. They reject the very idea of Australia. In 2017 I finally had to answer this question for myself. What did I believe? I was speaking to a group of university students, touching on issues of identity and belonging and how I had lived my life to free myself from the chains of history, to move beyond narrowly defined ideas of who or what I should be. One of the students asked me what I thought about Australia Day. It is a question I have wrestled with, torn between pride in my country and my family’s legacy of suffering. I could so easily have repeated that mantra that the date is offensive, a reminder of invasion and colonisation. There are times in my life when those words would have fallen easily from my lips. But I know now, we are asking ourselves the wrong question.

  Australia is more than a day, it is more than a date – whatever that date may be. Moving the date or abolishing Australia Day does not answer the question, who are we? I fear moving the date would only hand it to those who would reclaim it as a day of white pride, turning it into a bombastic day of division. There are also those Indigenous people who cling to Nietzsche’s ‘politics of ressentiment’, whose identities are so wedded to grievance that to relinquish their anger would be to lose their sense of themselves; moving the date would not satisfy them.

  Here is the question I posed at the start of this book: on this day am I meant to be at war with myself? No. On this day I am neither black nor white, I am its synthesis: I am an Australian. That is all I can be. I am a convict in irons on a ship called Providence, a young Irishman banished forever from his land with no home other than the one he would make here. I am a young man not 100 years after the British boats dropped anchor, huddled in the boat shed at Circular Quay with those other survivors of the disease and violence that ravaged the first people of this land. I am John Grant and I am Frank Foster. I am the view from the ship and the view from the shore.

  This is my blessing and my curse; I am blessed to be born to a nation that cherishes freedom – the freedom to rail against the nation itself, to question, to protest. In our world today that is so rare. Ours is a nation that struggles with itself, with the worst we have been, and whose arc of history has delivered us to a point where we are among the most free, prosperous and cohesive nations on earth. Yet, for all that, I am cursed to be born into the crosshairs of this nation’s past; to carry that burden and see it carved into the skin and the souls of so many of my family – some of them broken by this place and others so gloriously and utterly defiant.

  For me, there are the words of Albert Camus: ‘Let those who want to, stand aside from the world. I no longer feel sorry for myself, for now I see myself being born.’ There have been times when I have indeed felt sorry for myself; when the view from the shore was one of unceasing suffering and inevitable doom. No amount of what we would call success, of wealth or glory, could erase the pain that I have inherited. But I have a choice, to see myself as someone with a future, to believe that Australia holds a place for me too and that we can change it and that we have changed it.

  The story of this country asks us to choose: what do we believe? Must I be cursed like Sisyphus, forever doomed to roll the boulder of our history to the top of the mountain only to return again to the bottom? A nation is a narrative, it is a story, it is what we imagine, it is what we choose. For me, I choose the historian, Inga Clendinnen, and the ‘springtime of trust’ over the anthropologist, Bill Stanner and his ‘history of indifference’. Is this naive? No, it is hope. This is the hope of the storytellers who have shaped my life. As Camus wrote: ‘We struggle and suffer to reconquer our solitude. But a day comes when the earth has its simple and primitive smile.’

  David Malouf, the Australian poet and novelist, has called Australia an ‘experiment’. ‘It has taken us a long time to see it in this light’, he writes, ‘and even longer to accept the lightness, the freedom, the possibility that offers as a way of being’.

  Think of when this thing Australia, this nation, this place, this idea was born: it is a child of upheaval and philosophy. By 1788
, the United States had gone through revolution; within a year France would follow. What was it to be free? What were the rights of man? How should we be governed? These were the great questions of the age. It was a time of industrial revolution, new industries were born, global trade accelerated. My ancestors could not possibly have stood aside from this change, the world was coming, foreign ships had been circling these shores for centuries before the strangers came to stay; it would always be cataclysmic but it was not an end. I am – we all are – what came after.

  Australia was part of the great Enlightenment experiment; a triumph of reason over superstition, belief in the fundamental equality of people, a rejection of ancien regime – of hierarchy. In his book The Land of Dreams, David Kemp says Australia was at the cutting edge of these ideas:

  If any society was to be based on the recognition of the equality of each individual person, Australia’s historical circumstances and culture gave it the best opportunity to achieve such equality’.

  Women, Catholics, Asians, Indigenous people, all have at times been excluded from this dream of Australian liberalism. But one by one the barriers have fallen, even as we reach still for the full measure of that equality.

  Australia’s foundations of Enlightenment and liberalism are my inheritance too. Some may think that odd. Some would argue that liberalism is the handmaiden of colonisation and oppression. It is true that some of the foundation thinkers of liberalism, some of the great Enlightenment philosophers, said horrifically racist things. But the idea is greater than those individuals. Liberalism need not exclude the aspirations of Indigenous people; a philosophy rooted in the primacy of the individual can still incorporate the rights of groups. Australia already does. British law that could be used to claim this land for the Crown could also ultimately acknowledge the claims of those whose land was taken.