A Rightful Place


NOEL PEARSON

Nhanaburru, wangkanmala bapurru dhimirrunguru, arnhemland, nganaburrungu ngurrngu dilak mala, nganthun yukurra nhuna 26th Prime Minister Australia-wu. Nhukala ganydjarr’yu nhunhi nhe ngurrungu walalangu malangura nhuma walala rrambangi, Australian Parliament-ngura, ga ngurrungu Dharuk-mirri nhangu Garraywu Queen Elizabeth-gu, yurru nhandarryun-marama djinawa-lili Australian-dhu luku-wu rom-dhu yurru dharangan ga galmuma nganapurrungu dhangang ga bukmak nha-mala nhanapurrungu:

•Nhanapurrungu walnga-mirri dhukarry ngudhudal-yana.

•Nhanapurrungu, wanga, wanga-ngaraka ga nguy gapu, ngunhi dhimirrunguru, arnhemland.

•Dharrima gungnharra, warkthunara, lukunydja rrupiya-yu wanga-wuy-ga gapu-wuy ga dhangangnha-yana ga lukunydjana yana.

•Dharray walnga-wuy ga djaka yurru nhanapurrung-gala-nguwu djamarrkuli-wu yalalangu-wu.

Dhuwalanydja rom dhuwalana bilina.

Dhuwalanydja rom wawungu wanga-wuy ngandarryunmarama Australian-gala bapurrulili.

Nganapurru marrliliyama nhukula ngurru-warryun-narayngu, marr yurru Commonwealth Parliament ngurru warrwun ga dharangan dhuwala rom ga marryuwak gumana dhayutakumana lukunydja rom.

next pageYolngu Petition, 2008 (English translation next page)

Had Galarrwuy Yunupingu and his dilak elders been present at the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, there might have been a scene like this:

I wait for the new prime minister … An event is taking place at Yirrkala and I have called the leaders of the 13 clans together. No children or young people will participate, only leaders, men and women who have proved themselves: dilak. By my side are Djinyini Gondarra and the leaders of the Elcho clans, Richard Ganduwuy and Dunga Dunga Gondarra, Butharripi Gurruwiwi. Wilson Ganambarr, Gali Gurruwiwi, Gekurr Guyula and Timmy Burrawanga are there. Laklak and Dhuwarrwarr Marika are there, too, along with the great old man from Gan Gan, Garrawan Gumana. My cousin Banambi Wunungmurra brings the prime minister down to us. We have a petition for him.

Learning of the cataclysmic history experienced by Aboriginal tribes in the coastal south and east of the country and the inexorable expansion into the west and the north in the first 110 years of European colonisation, and fearing the time when the Yolngu of Arnhem Land would face the same devastation, Yunupingu might have presented Edmund Barton – along with Sir Samuel Griffith and the other founding fathers of the new nation – with a petition, as he did Kevin Rudd in 2008:

We, the united clans of East Arnhem land, through our most senior dilak, do humbly petition you, the … Prime Minister of Australia, in your capacity as the first amongst equals in the Australian Parliament, and as the chief adviser to Her Majesty … to secure within the Australian Constitution the recognition and protection of our full and complete right to:

•Our way of life in all its diversity;

•Our property, being the lands and waters of East Arnhem land;

•Economic independence, through the proper use of the riches of our land and waters in all their abundance and wealth;

•Control of our lives and responsibility for our children’s future.

In going to the heart of the matter of constitutional recognition, there are few more important documents than Yunupingu’s December 2008 essay in the Monthly, which discusses the Yolngu Petition.

It is no mere essay. It is an existential prayer.

A prayer on behalf of a people fearing their future non-existence. Fear that the old trajectory of colonisation and its continuation in the new nation will lead to the disappearance of Yolngu from history.

I read this document and hear the voices of William Cooper, Bill Ferguson and Jack Patten echoing down the century, the voices of Vincent Lingiari, Charlie Perkins and Eddie Mabo. I sense the Day of Mourning in 1938 and the establishment of the Tent Embassy in 1972. I hear the voices of Margaret Tucker, Faith Bandler and Lowitja O’Donoghue.

My thoughts flash back to the warriors who fought the colonial invasion: Yagan, Pemulwuy, Windradyne, Jundamurra.

I cannot take my mind off William Lanne, the so-called ‘Last Man’ of Tasmania.

In talking about Yunupingu’s existential fears for the future of his people in the deepest, hottest north, I want to re-remember what happened in the deepest, coldest south of the country, at the beginning of two centuries of Australian history. Because I think that as the old Tasmanians saw their world destroyed and felt history’s determination that they should disappear from the earth, they faced the same fears.

Yunupingu enjoyed a youth in the classical culture of the Yolngu (‘My father sent me to school, although he worried that I might lose my Gumatj identity’). He was educated by Methodist missionaries (‘As I received my education from my clan leaders and from the balanda teachers, I watched as the world changed’), and, although he attended Bible college for two years, he returned to the traditions of his people (‘I dedicated myself, under the direction of my father and the older men, to a Yolngu future’).

In his essay, Yunupingu touches on every prime minister since Gough Whitlam. He recalls taking the newly elected Malcolm Fraser on a fishing trip: ‘I try and put words in his mind about the importance of land, about the importance of respect, about giving things back in a proper way, not a halfway thing,’ but the prime minister is preoccupied with catching barramundi – ‘he’s not listening; he doesn’t have to.’

He recalls how Bob Hawke’s promises of a treaty turned to tears of regret when his last act as prime minister was to hang the Barunga Statement in Parliament House (‘I am sure that his tears are for his own failure – we have no treaty; his promise was hollow and he has not delivered’).

The prime ministerial and ministerial merry-go-round over the decades lends a depressing circularity to Yunupingu’s long history of dealing with power in Australia:

I have walked the corridors of power; I have negotiated and cajoled and praised and begged prime ministers and ministers, travelled the world and been feted; I have opened the doors to men of power and prestige; I have had a place at the table of the best and the brightest in the Australian nation – and at times success has seemed so close, yet it always slips away.

He cares nothing for his association with power but only for the purpose to which he wishes to direct it, for his purpose is pressing: ‘And behind me, in the world of my father, the Yolngu world is always under threat, being swallowed up by whitefellas.’

The existential angst of the tribal leader who fears for the future of his people is harrowing (‘it is a pressure that I feel now every moment of my life – it frustrates me and drives me crazy; at night it is like a splinter in my mind’).

Yunupingu recalls meeting minister Mal Brough at his Dhanaya homeland in the wake of the Northern Territory Intervention (‘we talked as men should – about the future of children and of failures and frustrations, and how we could turn it all around with action’) and raises the question of constitutional recognition (‘to bring my people in from the cold, bring us into the nation’).

The future is the source of Yunupingu’s psychic trouble:

I care for and protect my clan. But I have not mastered the future. I find that I now spend my days worrying about how I can protect the present from the future. I feel the future moving in on the Yolngu world, the Gumatj world, like an inevitable tide, except every year the tide rises further, moving up on us, threatening to drown us under the water, unable to rise again. The water sands under our feet shift and move so often – the land to which we can reach out is often distant, unknown.

Yunupingu’s achievements in his struggle for land rights were colossal, both for his people and for people across the Northern Territory and the continent. There is no doubt that securing a territorial base for Yolngu people has gone a long way towards underpinning that society. But Yunupingu’s assessment of his life’s work is bleak:

I look back now on a lifetime of effort and I see that we have not moved very far at all. For all the talk, all the policy, all the events, all the media spectaculars and fine speeches, the gala dinners, what has been achieved? I have maintained the traditions, kept the law, performed my role – yet the Yolngu world is in crisis; we have stood still. I look around me and I feel the powerlessness of all our leaders.

And the gulf between the powers-that-be in Canberra and the Yolngu world is as vast as ever:

There is no one in power who has the experience to know these things. There is not one federal politician who has any idea about the enormity of the task. And how could they? Who in the senior levels of the commonwealth public service has lived through these things? Who in the parliament? No one speaks an Aboriginal language, let alone has the ability to sit with a young man or woman and share that person’s experience and find out what is really in their heart. They have not raised these children in their arms, given them everything they have, cared for them, loved them, nurtured them. They have not had their land stolen, or their rights infringed, or their laws broken. They do not bury the dead as we bury our dead.

To understand what Yunupingu is talking about here is to understand how misguided it is to reduce the Indigenous predicament in Australia to the banal idea of ‘closing the gap’ on Indigenous disadvantage. There is something more fundamental at stake: whether the Yolngu of Arnhem Land will find a place in the Australian nation so that – honouring their fathers and mothers, as obliged by the Second Commandment – they may live long on the earth.

It is a predicament shared by the Wik and the Yidinji of Queensland. By the Wiradjuri of central New South Wales and the Bundjalung of the Northern Rivers district. By the Kaurna of South Australia and the Anangu of central Australia. The Nyungar and Martu of Western Australia. By the Kulin nation and the Yorta Yorta of Victoria. By the Ngunnawal of the capital and by William Lanne’s Palawa descendants in Tasmania.

This is a problem of the world. The planet is occupied by thousands of distinct ethnic groupings, with their own languages and cultures and territorial connections. Many are indigenous to the territories in which they live. Depending on how these distinct peoples are defined, they number between 7000 and 10,000.

But if the fragmentation of Babel resulted in this great diversity, the Age of Imperialism and the creation of empires scrambled many of these societies. Globalisation and modernity now force blending, assimilation and integration, and rupture the isolation and containment that enabled diverse peoples to maintain their esoteric identities, cultures and languages. There has been much history in this process. And that has necessarily left legacies of grievance.

Settler colonialism is one such history, replete with grievance the world over, not least in our country.

There are four focuses of grievance: identity as a people; the territorial lands of a people; language; and culture. Peoples hold hard to these four things.

And then there are the nation-states that harbour peoples. There are only 200 or so of them.

So the problem of the world is: how do 10,000 distinct peoples live well and prosper – and get along with each other – within 200 nation-states?

There is surely no future in hoping the nation-states will further fragment, so that more nations can be created which reflect the existential convictions of distinct peoples. The existing nation-states, jealously guarding their integrity, have no appetite for further fragmentation. At best, in the future, new states of Palestine and a self-governing West Papua will emerge.

But it is also surely clear that nation-states denying the existence of distinct peoples within their territories and insisting upon the unyielding integrity of the unitary state, without recognition of distinct peoples and cultures, is no solution either. Insisting on comprehensive assimilation as the concomitant of nationalism is not the recipe for unity within nations; it foments too much destruction and resistance.

There is an alternative to fragmentation and the assimilatory state. It is recognition and reconciliation: where peoples within nation-states come to terms with each other and commit to the nation, while respecting the existential anxieties of distinct peoples.

The Constitution of Australia adopted in 1901 afforded no such recognition. It is this recognition which Yunupingu seeks on behalf of his people, and in doing so he asks a question that remains unanswered after two centuries: is there a proper and rightful place for the original peoples of Australia in the nation created from their ancestral lands?

WAR OF THE WORLDS

The inspiration for The War of the Worlds came one day when Wells and his brother Frank were strolling through the peaceful countryside in Surrey, south of London. They were discussing the invasion of the Australian island of Tasmania in the early 1800s by European settlers, who hunted down and killed most of the primitive people who lived there. To emphasise the reaction of these people, Frank said, ‘Suppose some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly and begin taking over Surrey and then all of England!’

– Malvina G. Vogel, ‘Foreword’ (2005) to H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

A personal quadrant of the Australian landscape

I came upon this foreword some years ago when sharing an enthusiasm of my youth for H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds with my young son. Even as he makes his way through his own all-consuming passions of boyhood – Thomas, the Crocodile Hunter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings, Minecraft and now Harry Potter – I indulge my own nostalgia by sharing those things that possessed me when I was a boy. We’ve done Richard III, to which we will doubtless return. We’ve read Charles Portis’s masterpiece True Grit, and watched the original John Wayne film and the Coen brothers’ remake a hundred times. We’ve acted out the shoot-out scenes; he’s always Rooster. We are yet to get to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Hound of the Baskervilles. His younger sister and I have started Great Expectations.

First turned on by Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds in early high school, aware of Orson Welles’ radio hoax and having read the Wells book, I was stunned to have been unaware of the inspiration for the idea of a Martian invasion of England – its origin in what was called the ‘extirpation’ of the original Tasmanians. I was disquieted that the source of this extraordinary production in world culture was unknown to me. I knew it was likely unknown to everyone around me, and to almost all of my fellow Australians. How come?

H.G. Wells knew of the original Tasmanians, but that did not mean he felt empathy for the fate of this ‘inferior race’ at the hands of the British. Instead he subscribed to the scientific racism of his era, believing them ‘Palaeolithic,’ and writing, ‘The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants.’

In The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (2014), the English historian Tom Lawson shows how the destruction of the Tasmanians played out in British culture. We will return to Lawson’s contribution to the debate on genocide in Tasmania soon, after we lift the scales from our eyes concerning some of the most revered figures of that culture in the nineteenth century.

The novelist Anthony Trollope, in his emigration guide Australia and New Zealand, demanded his British readers squarely face the fact that colonisation involved the theft of land and the destruction of its original owners – which fact was not morally wrong but an advancement of civilisation. Lawson writes that Trollope cannot be taken as other than calling for genocide when he wrote: ‘of the Australian black man we may say certainly that he has to go. That he should perish without unnecessary suffering should be the aim of all who are concerned in this matter.’

Charles Darwin, the century’s greatest scientist (whom Lawson calls ‘a self-conscious liberal humanitarian’), while opposing polygenist theories that various races were distinct species, nevertheless proposed culture as the basis of inferiority and superiority (Lawson: ‘indigenous Tasmanians in Darwin’s formulation had been swept aside by a more culturally developed, more civilised people’). Lawson writes: ‘The Descent of Man was Darwin’s answer to that new political context, in which he asserted that while biologically the human race was singular there were in effect cultural differences that allowed for some form of racial hierarchy. The Tasmanians appeared at the bottom of this hierarchy.’

Darwin wrote:

when civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short … Of the causes which lead to the victory of civilised nations, some are plain and simple, others complex and obscure. We can see that the cultivation of the land be fatal in many ways to savages, for they cannot, or will not, change their habits.

Of course, the deformation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection into social Darwinism and the scientific racism of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth was the source of much misery for indigenes throughout the colonial world. Darwin was not entirely innocent of this conflation of biology and culture, which gave scientific authority to an ideology of inevitability about the demise of the Tasmanians and others of their ilk in the face of European superiority.

I expected Charles Darwin. But I didn’t expect Charles Dickens.

Of the century’s greatest English novelist, the author of Great Expectations and an immortal canon, Lawson writes, ‘Dickens famously attacked … the humanitarian idealisation of the ‘noble savage’ in June 1853, in a furious denunciation that amounts, to use modern-day language, to a call for genocide.’

Dickens wrote:

I call him a savage, and I call a savage something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth … my position is that if we have anything to learn from the Noble Savage, it is what to avoid. His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his nobility nonsense. We have no greater justification for being cruel to the miserable object, than for being cruel to a William Shakespeare or an Isaac Newton; but he passes away before an immeasurably better and higher power than ever ran wild in any earthly woods, and the world will be all the better when his place knows him no more.

I am yet to work out whether, how and when to tell my girl that the creator of Pip, Pumblechook and that convict wretch Magwitch may have wished her namesake great-great-grandmother off the face of the earth.

Ironically, when one’s identification with the magnificent literary treasures of England turns out so, there is a Dickensian pathos to the crestfallen scene. One is acutely conscious of what Robert Hughes called ‘anachronistic moralising,’ but the bridge between our contemporary values and those of Dickens’ time should surely be a universal and timeless humanity – alas not.

I don’t know whether it is hard for all Aborigines, but it certainly is for me, to read this history with a historian’s dispassionate objectivity and without the emotional convulsions of identification and memory. As a child, I loved my mother’s mother most in the world; her humour, generosity and ill-temper I often detect in myself and in the various countenances of my children. An irascible, pipe-smoking, bush-born lady, she bustled with her portmanteau on perambulations to her numerous grandchildren growing up in the Daintree and Bloomfield missions, and the Hope Vale Mission of my childhood. She could have been Truganini, but less travelled and from a smaller rainforest world than the nineteenth-century Tasmanian whose passing in 1876 was a world-historical event, marking the assumed extinction of a race. It was a reverberation I would feel when I learnt her name in primary school and the awful meaning of her distinction.

How many Australians born in the 138 years since Truganini’s death learnt her legend and scarcely thought deeper about the enormity of the loss she represented, and the history that led to it? Her spirit casts a long shadow over Australian history, but we have nearly all of us found a way to avert our eyes from its meaning.

That small item in the primary-school curriculum of my childhood would have been learnt by all my generation. Maybe it wasn’t a formal part of any syllabus, but it was one of those salient facts of Australian society that every child absorbed, like Don Bradman’s batting average and Phar Lap’s outsized heart. It would have been learnt by John Howard and Paul Keating. By Gough Whitlam and Robert Menzies. I don’t know if they teach kids about Truganini today.

As a student of history but not a historian, I am as well read as many, but I too have skirted this history. Learning later in life of the descendants of the original Tasmanians, and the offence of the assumption of extinction, seemed to lessen the imperative to face the question of Truganini’s moral legacy. Maybe the scale of the horror diminished as the country accepted the fact of the continued survival of Tasmania’s Aboriginal community. But surely the fact of the descendants’ survival does not in any way alter or diminish the profundity of what happened to their ancestors.

In his 1968 Boyer Lecture, W.E.H. Stanner spoke of the ‘Great Australian Silence’:

inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness. It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale. We have been able for so long to disremember the Aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so.

This excluded quadrant of the landscape was not just a national phenomenon: it was personal. Forgetfulness was not just a cult: it was resorted to by individual Australians, descendants of both the invading Europeans and the Aborigines. Australians who, like me, struggle to work out how we might deal with the past.

The cult of forgetfulness

I had hoped to avoid the past – for sheerly political reasons. In this essay I seek to make a case for constitutional reform recognising Indigenous Australians. This must by definition be a unifying cause. If we don’t have an argument that can persuade 90 per cent of the nation, then the cause of constitutional reform is lost. Any successful case must transcend the natural political and cultural polarities of Australian society, and seek and seize political bipartisanship. This can only happen if Australians faced with a constitutional proposition are led by the better angels of our nature.

The risk with history is that it may provoke partisanship and division, both among the cultural and political tribes of the nation at large, and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

We witnessed this in the History Wars of the 1990s and 2000s, when the ‘black armband’ historians and political leaders were pitted against the ‘white blindfold’ historians and political leaders. Led by Keith Windschuttle on the one hand and Robert Manne and Henry Reynolds on the other, the wars were a bitter and not always illuminating affair.

But the wars were unavoidable.

Following the Great Australian Silence at the end of the 1960s, from the ’70s through to the ’90s there was a burgeoning of Aboriginal history, led by scholars such as Reynolds. In hindsight, given the intense relationship between Indigenous policy and politics and the representation and interpretation of the nation’s history, the rise of a counter-narrative in the form of Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Volume 1, 2002), was inevitable. No discourse can lean one way for long. No wind can blow from one direction without restraint.

The public contributions of the doyen of conservative historians, Geoffrey Blainey, were the first indications of the discomfort of those who held the settler Australian narrative. Blainey would have been better qualified to steady the ship of the nation’s narrative had he done so as a historian. Instead he did so as a polemicist. His caricaturing of the new frontier history as the ‘black armband’ view made for a tribal fight in the public square, rather than a debate within the discipline of history. Blainey’s commendable record on Aboriginal history was obscured in the ensuing debate: he was not contemptuous of the Aborigines; he wanted to defend settler traditions. It was most unfortunate that Blainey made his case in this manner. A serious point in an unserious way.

Over the past three decades, I have read Henry Reynolds’ numerous books, and I well understand the grounds upon which conservative and nationalist readers of his histories baulk at his interpretations. It seems to me that Reynolds’ lifelong contribution has been a liberal pursuit of a shared history for the nation. He has been about finding grace for the nation by breaking the silence on Aboriginal history and all the time being faithful to Australia.

But there are two problems with Reynolds’ project. First, he comes to the case from a patently political background. His wife, Margaret, was a Labor senator for Queensland during the Hawke years, and the couple came at politics and Indigenous issues from a certain Labor left perspective. There is a strongly Fabian tone to his arguments, and trenchant advocacy frames his books. In the acknowledgements of An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australian History (2001), Reynolds tellingly reveals: ‘My family – Margaret, John, Anna and Rebecca – have been, as ever, supportive and have frequently reinforced my commitment to progress along the often difficult road of human rights advocacy.’ Which, for his critics, raises the question whether he was primarily engaged in academic history or human rights advocacy, and perhaps suggests that more dispassion and less politics might have better enabled Reynolds to secure a shared history for his fellow Australians.

I will say at this point that I am at one with Henry and Margaret Reynolds on the human rights side of the equation, but at odds with them on the responsibilities side. They have been and are mute on the social crisis of Aboriginal Australia; indeed, I have observed that the policies needed to tackle Indigenous misery – economic integration, social order and welfare reform – have been championed by the right, and in 2006 noted that ‘Windschuttle and [Gary] Johns are more attuned to many of the necessary policies than the progressives.’

The same thing struck me about rock star and former Labor politician Peter Garrett as the former senator Reynolds. No greater friends when it came to Indigenous rights and paying the rent and decrying the burning beds of history, but completely silent about the unravelling social crisis of the present – and, to the extent they thought about what needed to be done, mostly wrongheaded. It is strange that people who would insist strongly on Aboriginal agency in the past would turn a blind eye to such passivity in the present.

Second, I find persuasive Bain Attwood’s critique of Reynolds’ oeuvre as consisting overmuch of ‘juridical history’: the telling of history as if presenting evidence in a legal case before a court. I share Attwood’s view that Reynolds’ core trilogy – The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), Frontier (1987) and With the White People (1990) – is unimpeachable. But much of the rest has the features of juridical history, and too many contentions seem to be submissions to a court case rather than based on a proper grappling with the political economy of the time and circumstances of which he writes. Therefore some appear thin.

In a 2007 essay for Griffith REVIEW, I analysed the dynamic of the political discourse between progressives and conservatives. I observed that the conservative camp comprised a broad spectrum, ranging from true denialists such as Windschuttle to those who, in their cups, would admit the truths of Aboriginal history, but who were defensive of their own heritage and of the accomplishments of their forebears. John Howard was not a denialist; he was defensive about his settler heritage. Of course, an inability to deal with the psychological meaning of this historical legacy often means the default position becomes a version of denialism – or is strongly coloured by denial. After all, the long, 150-year reign of the Great Australian Silence was about denial.

On the other hand, I observed that progressives were prone to use racial discrimination and historical denial as political bludgeons against their conservative opponents, and their advocacy for an honest confrontation with the colonial past degenerated into moral vanity. The result was that progressives reinforced victimhood of the indigenes while their opponents denied their victimisation.

Having said this, I now turn to the volatile question of the extirpation of the original Tasmanians.

I hoped to avoid the past, but it is not possible. I hoped to dis-remember the past, but it is not possible.

The question of genocide in Australia

The use of the term ‘genocide’ and the rhetoric of the Jewish Holocaust is incendiary. The destruction of the Tasmanians was an event of world history long before the Nazi genocide of the Jews. It was well established in the discourse of British and Australian history long before the 1948 Genocide Convention. It was referred to around the world during the course of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth.

Whether you use the word most common in colonial times – ‘extirpation’ – or other words also used – ‘extermination’ or ‘extinction’ – or the word ‘genocide,’ they speak to the same meaning. And that meaning is the loss to the world by the passing of a people from history by killing and mass death. The fact that a descendant community survived this history does not negate or reduce the profundity of the loss. When as a primary schooler I was told the significance of Truganini was that she was the last ‘full blood’ of Tasmania, I understood clearly what was meant. The language of racial composition was commonplace in that time, and still is, among black and white Australians, despite its contemporary disreputability. It is not to deny the fact of the survival of the descendant community, and neither is it to impugn their identity, to remember the enormity of the fact that Truganini’s death marked the passing from the world of one of the last Tasmanians without mixed lineage. A lineage that had occupied that land for more than 35,000 years.

Those last sentences were hard to write. I was not sure I could get it right, and still don’t know whether I have. I mean not to offend contemporary Aborigines of Tasmania. I mean not to return to the mind-frame of racialist eugenics that has so tangled the history that I wish untangled. I just do not want to deny or diminish the tragedy of Truganini and the old people of Tasmania.

Of course, as a reader of history and not a historian, I can hardly untangle this history. I can only say how I respond to and deal with it, as an Aboriginal and an Australian.

History is never resolved, and we should not make a shared future contingent on a shared past. For this reason I cannot abandon the examination of genocide as readily as some eminent historians in the wake of the History Wars prescribe.

I will not deal with the debate on whether the removal of children, identified by Michael Dodson and Sir Ronald Wilson in the Bringing Them Home report of 1997, constituted genocide. I will also not deal with the debate on whether the colonial history of mainland Australia – particularly my home state of Queensland – involved genocidal episodes. Instead I will confine my discussion to what happened in Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Among historians who have been at the forefront of Aboriginal history, there is some respectable consensus against the use of the term ‘genocide’ in this context.

Henry Reynolds’ An Indelible Stain? centres on official correspondence from secretary of state for the colonies Sir George Murray to Tasmania’s lieutenant governor, Sir George Arthur, on 5 November 1830. Murray referred to the ‘great decrease which has of late years taken place in the amount of the aboriginal population’ and his apprehension ‘that the whole race of these people may, at no distant period, become extinct.’

He wrote:

But with whatever feelings such an event may be looked forward to by those of the settlers who have been sufferers by the collisions which have taken place, it is impossible not to contemplate such a result of our occupation of the island as one very difficult to be reconciled with feelings of humanity, or even with principles of justice and sound policy; and the adoption of any line of conduct, having for its avowed, or for its secret object, the extinction of the native race, could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British government.

Reynolds’ discussion focuses on the coining of the term ‘genocide’ by the Polish Jewish jurist and American émigré Raphael Lemkin, in the 1940s, and its adoption in the Genocide Convention of 1948, following the Holocaust. Lemkin was clear that while the term and its establishment as a crime in international law was new, its occurrence in history was not. Lemkin specifically assumed that the events in Tasmania which I am discussing here constituted such an occurrence.

Applying the definition of the crime of genocide to events before the enactment of the Convention involves retrospectivity, and indeed its application to the Holocaust was necessarily retrospective. It was applied by Lemkin and is generally not considered anachronistic when applied to the history of the Armenians at the hands of Turkey in 1915. How far back does retrospectivity turn into anachronism?

But anachronism is not the only objection to taking terminology invented in the 1940s and applying it to events in colonial Tasmania. In his discussion in An Indelible Stain? and Forgotten War (2013), Reynolds comes down against the application of genocide to Australia because the 1948 Convention requires intention on the part of the offending state. The absence of an explicit intention on the part of the colonial authorities, who frequently expressed concern at the treatment of Indigenous peoples at the frontier, ultimately underpins Reynolds’ conclusion. It is a lawyer’s conclusion. The lawyer in me protests that the circumstances and the evidence clearly speak of a constructive intention on the part of the colonial authorities, but this debate is not merely a legal argument. John Docker’s point is apposite:

We must also remember that in Lemkin’s 1944 definition … the cultural and political were both strongly present as part of the manifold ways the essential foundations of life of a group were being destroyed. Lemkin’s 1944 definition and the Lemkin-influenced definition enshrined in the 1948 convention have acted in subsequent thinking about genocide like a double helix – neither reducible one to the other nor wholly separable. The definition of genocide, that is, always has a double character: both discursive and legal. In my view, we should not base the historical study of genocide on a legal definition alone; indeed, we should not base the historical study of any phenomena on a legal definition alone.

Inga Clendinnen, an authority on the Jewish Holocaust and respected Australian historian, also baulked at the application of the genocide definition to the Australian context:

I am reasonably sophisticated in these modes of intellectual discussion, but when I see the word ‘genocide’ I still see Gypsies and Jews being herded into trains, into pits, into ravines, and behind them the shadowy figures of Armenian women and children being marched into the desert by armed men. I see deliberate mass murder.

Bain Attwood’s Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (2005) was a fine circuit-breaker to the History Wars. He showed clearly that Keith Windschuttle’s role in these debates was not as a historian. Windschuttle is a reader of history and public intellectual, not a historian, and Fabrication is a work of historiography, not history. I consider Attwood’s book a good starting place for Australian readers of history to think about how we might come to terms with our past. I therefore take his view seriously:

In my opinion, genocide is neither a necessary nor a useful concept for the task of understanding the nature of the white colonisation of this country.

But I remain unpersuaded that these views should be the final word. Let me enumerate my reasons.

First, the fact of Truganini.

Second, Michael Mansell’s point that ‘the British had more impact on Aborigines than the Holocaust had on the Jews’ is particularly apt in respect of the history of his people. The old people of Tasmania are no more. Only their descendants remain. (Lawson: ‘… if the destruction of their ancestors was not total, it was comprehensive. All original communities had been destroyed since the British invasion, and the population reduction was greater than 99 per cent.’)

Third, I bridle at assessments that derogate from the gravity of what happened to the Tasmanians. In this respect I am resistant to Attwood’s approach:

in becoming the universal trope of trauma [the Holocaust] can also simultaneously enhance and hinder other historical and memorial practices and struggles. In the Australian context, it had undoubtedly done both. My concern here, though, is the way in which invoking the Holocaust has become, in some hands, a means by which other crimes are cast as minor by comparison to its absolute evil. As Peter Novick has argued, making the Nazi genocide the benchmark of atrocity and oppression can ‘trivialise’ crimes of lesser magnitude. This is not merely a distasteful mode of speaking, but a truly disgusting one, he points out. Yet, as he suggests, it is one that readily occurs when something like the Holocaust becomes the touchstone in moral and political discourse.

Without in any way diminishing the Holocaust (as if it could be diminished), I cannot accept any moral comparison that diminishes the fate suffered by the Tasmanians.

Fourth, the accounts – both from the oral histories of Aborigines and from the documented sources of colonial times – referring to the death of Aborigines on the frontier speak to me of the profoundest moral problem of this history: the heavy discounting of the humanity of the Aborigines. It is not the horrific scenes of mass murder that are most appalling here; it is the mundanity and casual parsimony of it all. No people on earth were considered lower. No people rated lower on the ruling scales of human worth, and their deaths elicited the least level of moral reproval. My point is that while the reproof of the time reflected the morality of the age, the racism that underpinned that calculus cannot hold sway today. The Tasmanians were human beings. They were gone within half a century. And only their descendants remained.

Fifth, there is Tom Lawson’s thesis in The Last Man, to which I now turn.

The Scylla and Charybdis of colonialism

Tom Lawson is professor of history at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. His book The Last Man, published this year, is subtitled A British Genocide in Tasmania. If his thesis has any power, it is to make plain that the consensus view outlined above is a long way from having resolved these questions. He puts forward a compelling counter-interpretation.

I will avoid a summation of Lawson’s book, for it is better read in its own right. It is well worth reading. Even if you come to these questions with scepticism or indeed indignation, you have a duty to hear out his scholarship.

If you read Lawson after Reynolds’ An Indelible Stain?, you will be struck by a subtle but critical point made by the Briton about who would wear the indelible stain. For Reynolds:

the question that Murray’s words still confront us with is whether our history has left an indelible stain upon the character and reputation of Australian governments – colonial, State and federal – and upon the colonists themselves and their Australian-born descendants. [emphasis added by Lawson]

But in response, Lawson notes that:

George Murray had not himself been that interested in the moral implications of genocide for the colony, but for the metropole. The ‘indelible stain’ that Murray feared was, it is worth repeating, upon the reputation of the British government.

It is a crucial reorientation of Reynolds’ framing. The discussion of what happened to the Tasmanians in the first half of the nineteenth century is about a British colony run by the British government. The principal players in this history, Governor George Arthur, his predecessors and successors, his superiors back in Downing Street and their agents, such as George Augustus Robinson, on the colonial frontiers were members and agents of the British government, acting under the ultimate authority of the Colonial Office. They administered British policy, and this would remain the case until responsible government was vested in Tasmania in 1856.

It probably required a Briton to face this matter squarely. We might want to discuss the legacy bequeathed to subsequent pre-and post-Federation Australian governments and the colonists who were protagonists in and inheritors of this history, but Lawson’s first point is that the destruction of the Tasmanians occurred in a British colony governed by the British Crown:

This was a British genocide, carried out on the other side of the world by British men, articulating British ideas, discussed in British newspapers and ultimately embedded in British history and remembered in British museums.

This is Lawson’s account of how an island population of several thousand was reduced to an official figure of seventeen inhabitants in fifty years:

Some indigenous people in Tasmania died at the hands of settlers who wished to exterminate them. Some died in the process of being removed from land that settlers wished to develop. Some died in the process of being removed from the land and ‘civilised’ into Europeans. Some died from warfare between the island’s nations that was promoted by their declining resource bases, a result of British presence. Some died of imported diseases. And, of course, some survived, but with little or no access to a culture that the British considered worthless and had attempted to destroy. This happened over the course of a colonisation played out during more than 50 years.

It is not Lawson’s contention that there was a state project aimed at genocide – ‘clearly there was no state project of extermination in either Tasmania or continental Australia’ – but rather that the colonial project itself had a fatal logic – ‘genocide was the inevitable outcome of a set of British policies, however apparently benign they appeared to their authors’ – because ‘even those aimed at protection … ultimately envisaged no future whatsoever for the original peoples of the island.’

And this is the point that Lawson makes which is so compelling to me, and which is so important to grasp: Indigenous Tasmanians were nearly extinguished between the Scylla of extermination and the Charybdis of protection.

These two pincers served the same ends: the preservation and continued prosecution of the colonial enterprise without relent, with sparing pity, but with no pause to the destruction it was so obviously causing the native peoples of the land being colonised, and of which the colonial authorities were acutely conscious long before the bitter end was reached.

This is how Lawson puts it:

the British government knew explicitly that it had unleashed a destructive process that would eradicate those societies. Its representatives disavowed, and indeed even regretted, the exterminatory impacts of their presence, yet they never faltered, never sought to roll back colonial development. Indeed, they even developed an understanding of the world that saw as inevitable the dying out of ‘inferior’ indigenous races.

Coming to terms with the past

Lawson’s is a perspective-shifting analysis for me: that frontier destruction and protection served the same colonial logic. A logic that envisaged no future for the native peoples, whose homelands were to be usurped and societies swept aside by the expanding colonies. Which, in the case of the Tasmanians, led to utter destruction.

Of course, I have always understood that protection worked in concert with frontier dispossession, and facilitated it. It is just that protection seemed to be, if not pulling in an opposite direction, then at least divergent – ameliorating the harshness of frontier colonisation. Instead, protection pulled in the same direction as the frontier – which is what Lawson shows so powerfully in the case of its conception and inception in Tasmania.

I am a third-generation legatee of mission protection. The Lutheran mission at Cape Bedford started in 1886 was the initiative of Johann Flierl, a Bavarian missionary en route to German New Guinea. Waylaid in Cooktown, he started the mission after seeing the devastation of the Guugu Yimidhirr peoples in the wake of the Cooktown gold rush of 1873. The following year his successor, George Schwarz, took up Flierl’s mission. The mission was an initiative of its society back at Neundettelsau, not of the colonial government of Queensland, but following the Aboriginals Protection Act 1897 (later replaced by the Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act 1939) the mission and the Queensland state became entwined. Pursuant to these laws, in 1910 my grandfather was removed from the bush as a boy. Dispossession on the frontier and the state’s protection apparatus – native police ‘dispersing’ the frontier tribes, protectors removing children to the missions, and Aboriginal reserves – led to what would be called the stolen generations. Protection provided new souls for the mission. What began in the 1880s as a safe haven for young women and an enticement for young men wanting partners, from 1900 turned into a receiving station for masses of huddled young, separated from their families.

Protection and preservation were not there for nothing. For the other side of Queensland’s frontier had been and still was a charnel house: consisting of moments when the pitiless logic of colonialism ended in genocidal doom for some groups. As Queensland lacks the defining sea boundaries of the Vandemonian island, the annihilation of tribes on the frontier is more obscure. But there is a wide consensus in Aboriginal histories that the fiction of terra nullius was turned into the remorseless fact of homo nullius in some parts of Queensland.

As inheritors of the mission’s religion and traditions, people like me necessarily hold complex perspectives on this history. The missionaries’ kindnesses and humanity were mixed with the racialism of the time, and their objection to and support for various aspects of the colonial enterprise does not tell a simple story.

This dialectic has been part of my life and identity. The dingoes and sheep of my own exploration of our mission history as a student at Sydney University spoke to this historical and spiritual turmoil.

I will not get into the permutations of the protection regimes that emerged across the Australian mainland following George Augustus Robinson. The Tasmanian model was ameliorated with the setting aside of Aboriginal reserves in other states and the Northern Territory. The attitudes of the churches towards Indigenous cultures, languages and heritage – and the conviction and vigour with which they sought to deracinate their charges – varied widely, according to the proclivities of particular denominations, individual missions within denominations, the personalities of key missionary figures, and the period of history. Therefore, while many missions and government settlements destroyed Indigenous cultures and languages, others actively preserved them, and unofficially (and later sometimes officially) allowed Christianity to coexist with native religious beliefs. The language of the Guugu Yimidhirr survived because of Missionary Schwarz’s conviction that their mother tongue best conveyed the Gospels to their hearts. Robinson’s prototype house of confinement at Wybalena, Flinders Island, might have been the most extreme example, but its original logic remained at the core of all subsequent protection regimes.

So how is this to be dealt with? I cannot let Lawson’s thesis on the Tasmanian genocide be set aside, and I also know that without the Lutherans my people would have perished on the Cooktown frontier. It is for me no longer an ambivalence; it is a clear understanding of the good and bad in the past. Yes, it is often said that history has many shades of grey, but this appreciation of complexity and nuance should not provide refuge from the truth that our nation’s history includes times of unequivocal evil and times of redeeming goodness.

Whatever the ideological and symbolic villainy he represents to Aboriginal people, there is no mistaking Captain James Cook’s extraordinary courage and stature as a seafaring explorer. Indeed, it is ridiculous to dispute it. For me, it is the same with Schwarz. I still cleave to my testimonial to the old man, published in The Australian on the eve of the parliamentary apology to the stolen generations:

The nineteen-year-old Bavarian missionary who came to the year-old Lutheran mission at Cape Bedford in Cape York Peninsula in 1887, and who would spend more than fifty years of his life underwriting the future of the Guugu Yimidhirr people, cannot but be a hero to me and to my people. We owe an unrepayable debt to Georg Heinrich Schwarz and to the white people who supported my grandparents and countless others to rebuild their lives after they arrived at the mission as young children in 1910. My grandfather Ngulunhdhul came in from the local bush to the Aboriginal reserve that was created to facilitate the mission. My great-grandfather Arrimi would remain in the bush in the Cooktown district, constantly evading police attempts to incarcerate him at Palm Island and remaining in contact with his son Ngulunhdhul, and later his grandson, my father. My grandmother was torn away from her family near Chillagoe, to the west of Cairns, and she would lose her own language and culture in favour of the local Guugu Yimidhirr language and culture of her new home. Indeed, it was the creation of reserves and the establishment of missions that enabled Aboriginal cultures and languages to survive throughout Cape York Peninsula. Today, those two young children who met at the mission have scores of descendants who owe their existence to their determination to survive in the teeth of hardship and loss. Schwarz embodied all of the strengths, weaknesses and contradictions that one would expect of a man who placed himself in the crucible of history. Would that we were judged by history in the way we might be tempted to judge Schwarz – we are not a bootlace on the courage and achievement of such people.

My childhood home was on the first street on the northernmost side of the village, named after Flierl. Next is the main street named Muni, a rendering of Schwarz’s Guugu Yimidhirr name. These parallel streets name the key figures of our mission history in succession. The third is named after Wilhelm Poland, who, supporting Schwarz, raised a young family in the earliest years of the mission. A prolific writer and translator, he gave an account of the capture by troopers in July 1888 of Didegal, one of the Guugu Yimidhirr still living in the bush, who was suspected of killing a white man three months before. Didegal was treated as an outlaw, like my great-grandfather. Arrimi eluded police all his life, but Didegal did not:

But, this time, Didegal’s fate was sealed; he was the victim of his own treachery. On the following morning, his pursuers had little difficulty in tracing the clear imprint of his footsteps through soot and ash, and had completed their mission before midday. The man who was still planning mischief 24 hours previously now stood before us in irons, but with that characteristic look of sneering disdain still dominating his dark features. I must admit, I felt a certain compassion towards him. Was he not, after all, a poor, misguided heathen?

After a short break, the troopers saddled their horses, shouldered their guns, indicated to the captive that he was to follow them, and made their way back into the privacy and secrecy of the bush.

No one ever saw Didegal again. Some distance from the beaten track the party was ordered to a halt, a shot was fired, and Didegal was dispatched for good. He was, after all, only a black fellow.

This is what I mean by the casual parsimony of killing on the frontier. Anonymous, extrajudicial, unreported, mundane. Like eradicating vermin. Or inferior beings of human likeness.

LAYERED IDENTITIES

[Australian] multiculturalism asserts that people with different roots can coexist, that they can learn to read the image-banks of others, that they can and should look across the frontiers of race, language, gender and age without prejudice or illusion, and learn to think against the background of a hybridized society. It proposes – modestly enough – that some of the most interesting things in history and culture happen at the interface between cultures. It wants to study border situations, not only because they are fascinating in themselves, but because understanding them may bring with it a little hope for the world.

– Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint (1993)

Bonding and bridging

In a 2006 essay I introduced the idea of layered identities as a way of understanding identity in pluralist societies. I thought the dominant metaphors of the ‘melting pot’ and the ‘patchwork quilt’ were too simplistic, the former implying some kind of muddy soup and the latter a diversity of patches held together in a united whole – but losing the idea that within each of these patches are layers of identity that extend beyond the patches, and sometimes across the whole quilt.

My thought was that by visualising identities as layers we would appreciate the richness and complexity of social identity. It enables us to see individuality and commonality. We can see what is common to members of groupings and what is individual to each member.

National identity is one layer – the largest and most significant within our country – but we can also identify as citizens of the world, or as members of the Anglosphere, the Jewish diaspora and so on. Although we are Australians, we are not just Australians: some of us are Queenslanders and others are South Australians. And we are not just Queenslanders: for some purposes, we are North Queenslanders or, more specifically still, Cape Yorkers.

And of course our identity as Indigenous Australians is equally layered. At a continental level, we all think the black, red and yellow flag is a magnificent expression of our identity, but at a regional level we are also Kooris, Nyungars or Murris, and so on. At the traditional level, the layers are even more complex, comprising nations or tribes, language and dialect affiliations, clan and extended family estate groupings – encompassing songlines and common mythological tracks that traverse vast distances and involving numerous groupings.

At a linguistic level, there are commonalities that unite ancestral languages across Australia. The Guugu Yimidhirr I speak is part of a family of languages linguists call Pama-Nyungan (pama being the word for person in the languages of Cape York and nyunga being the word for person in the Nyungar languages of southwestern Australia). The ancient languages of the Pama-Nyungan family are spoken from Cape York down to the homelands of the Wiradjuri of New South Wales and across to Perth, and roughly from Mount Isa to Broome. Languages to the north and south of this largest grouping represent different families. This is why Guugu Yimidhirr from Cape York startle when they speak to Pitjantjatjara people from central Australia: the similarities between their languages are striking.

How people answer the question ‘What is your Indigenous identity?’ is therefore context-dependent. Whether people zoom in on their narrow clan affiliations or zoom out to a pan-Aboriginality depends upon the circumstances.

While ethnic and religious identities are primary layers, there are many other layers of shared identification: geography, historical association, recreational and social groups, intellectual and artistic communities, as well as sexual orientation and political and other modern cultural affiliations.

Some of these – such as sporting affiliations – may seem trivial compared to, say, ethnic identity, but actually they play important roles in creating connections across the more primary affiliations. These more ephemeral and seemingly unserious affiliations add to the great fund of capital in society which underpins social cohesion. That we may treat these affiliations with playful seriousness probably helps us to have a perspective that would be missing if we only had primary layers of identity. Sporting and other recreational codes and teams are not unimportant layers of identity.

My idea of layered identities complemented Amartya Sen’s analysis in Identity and Violence (2006), where he referred to the ‘illusion of singular identity.’ Sen argued we should recognise ‘competing affiliations’ and ‘competing identities,’ not in the sense of divided allegiances or a lack of loyalty to the sovereign state, but in recognition of the plurality of identities in any society.

Sen was particularly insightful in respect of multiculturalism. Although Australian conservatives have at times sought to criticise multiculturalism, the policy remains well regarded here. The electoral consequences of trying to abandon it, and the fact that leading liberals and conservatives are champions of its history, make their critique unlikely to prevail.

Yet Sen’s analysis allows us to see what can be a problem with multiculturalism if you are concerned for national unity. When there is a singular focus on culture, as defined by ethnicity and religion, and a lack of emphasis on other layers of identity and affiliation, a problem can arise. Cultures become identity blocs when ethnicity and religion are seen as the single dominant affiliation.

Sen shows how opponents and supporters of multiculturalism often share the same illusion: the illusion of culture as a singular identity. There are therefore not just two possibilities – monoculturalism or multiculturalism – but a third as well: plural monoculturalism. This is when several singular identity blocs within a society are isolated and disconnected from each other. Having weak or no bonds with one another, these monocultures end up insular and resistant to a larger mutuality.

This is the potential weakness, not multiculturalism proper. Societies should guard against and work to prevent multiculturalism degenerating into plural monoculturalism, where groups end up raising cultural ramparts against each other.

An antidote to this is what Robert D. Putnam calls ‘social capital.’ In his Bowling Alone (2000), Putnam identified those things that contribute to bonding within religious, ethnic and socio-economic groups. But he also identified those things that contribute to bridging between groups, strengthening ties among disparate groups. His examples of such bridging include the civil rights movement and ecumenical religious organisations.

Plainly, Putnam’s idea of social capital is directly applicable to an analysis of identity. Individuals and groups form bonding and bridging affiliations, and, as with the warp and weft of a multi-layered fabric, a society is all the stronger for them.

Fundamentalism and orthodoxy

Identity fundamentalism is the enemy of commonwealths. When individuals and groups elevate one layer of their identity to the exclusion of all others, then we have a problem. Such chauvinism can arise at the level of subgroups, and at the national level.

While fundamentalism is a problem, orthodoxy is not. Nations such as Australia have orthodox Christian, Jewish and Islamic communities without this being inconsistent with multicultural harmony. Political and cultural conservatives play the role of upholding the country’s Anglo culture and inheritance. Like their non-Anglo counterparts, the conservatives of the Samuel Griffith Society are a minority, but they uphold traditions that serve society as a whole. Without a core of orthodox conservatives, modern societies would descend into a soulless cosmopolitanism. Conservatism respects memory, tradition, ritual and values that we have inherited, over and above an enthusiasm for the future and indulgence in the present.

T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1921) captures the vital presence of tradition in the contemporary productions of European artists:

He must be aware that the mind of Europe – the mind of his own country – a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind – is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsman …

Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.

But orthodoxy that reduces to fundamentalism is not conservatism. True conservatism equips societies and peoples to contend with the modern world and change: it is not obscurant to the changing world. Conservatism understands that fundamentalism is antipathetic to the commonwealth.

Galarrwuy Yunupingu is an Australian conservative, and he desires to hold on to things older than Homer and the Bible. ‘Where would we be without Homer and the Old Testament?’ Don Watson asked in a February 2014 essay in the Monthly. I think this is what Yunupingu means when he says of the song cycles of his culture: ‘My inner life is that of the Yolngu song cycles, the ceremonies, the knowledge, the law and the land. This is yothu yindi. Balance. Wholeness. Completeness.’ Yunupingu’s question equivalent to Watson’s is: where would my people be without the Yolngu song cycles? This question sits within a larger question: where would Aboriginal Australians be without the song cycles of Aboriginal Australia? And this question in turn sits within the largest question: where would Australia and Australians be without the song cycles of Aboriginal Australia?

At the 2014 Garma festival, I heard the renowned Indigenous film-maker and broadcaster Rachel Perkins give an arresting account of urgent work she is doing to record the remaining knowledge of songlines held by women in central Australia:

In Arrernte country, we were lucky to have a very big desert that kept the colonisers back for a further 100 years than the southern states.

Although we pride ourselves on holding onto elements of our classical culture – and although we have our language – the truth is, we are one generation from losing our songs.

These songlines connect us with other tribes – and most importantly connect us with each other in the Arrernte world.

She described how in 2013 she became aware of the desperate need for action:

The women were required to perform and open a festival in Alice Springs at Werlayte Thurre, the place of the Two Sisters Dreaming, where my father was born.

Gathered together to discuss the arrangements, we realised that the song for that place had been lost – an old lady had died, taking the song with her. Our neighbours, the Pitjantjatjara women, could teach us – as they knew the verses that connected their part of the songline with ours – but it was in their language, not ours. It wouldn’t be appropriate, so it was unable to be performed. Of course people and culture innovate and we adapted.

However, this realisation galvanised us into action.

She went on:

We are working strategically, woman by woman, to create an inventory of our songlines, and then we intend to record and fully annotate them for future generations.

Yet we have identified perhaps only ten to twenty women, from the thousands of Arrernte women, who are still holders of these songs.

There is no funding for this type of project, so we dress it up as a documentary, or an online multi-platform project, when really what we want to do is record the songs, our dreamings, the first stories, the heritage that is the true and original Australian culture.

And then she laid out the big vision:

Our hope is that in 200 years a young Arrernte women, who may not have her language or her grandmother to teach her, will be able to listen and learn from these recordings made by her great-great-grandmother and sing the songs of her country: her birthright.

Our hope is that these songs will also be there for all Australians. So we can carry the ancient memory that binds us to this land we share.

Our hope is to create a model that might be used by other Aboriginal nations.

There is such great need for this work at this critical time to ensure the songlines continue to connect us all.

On this level, Perkins is a conservative in the sense that Yunupingu is. It is one layer of her cultural identity as an Arrernte woman. Her concerns, her valuation of what is important, her anxieties and energies are channelled into a conservative project: to keep the songlines of her people and Aboriginal people traversing the heart of the continent. Her sense of responsibility is that of a conservative.

But she is mostly known for another layer of her cultural identity: that of film-maker and artist. In this layer she is thoroughly modern, working at the boundaries of Indigenous culture and the wider currents of global culture. Her politics are more leftist than not, making her more orthodox cultural concern even more striking for its obvious conservatism.

Perkins’ layers of Indigenous identity are complex and sui generis to her own choices and orientation.

The bicultural vision

Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s brother Mandawuy probably did most to articulate biculturalism as the goal for the Aboriginal future in Australia. It was a vision which inspired me, and which we adopted in our thinking about the future of our children in Cape York Peninsula.

We see our future as living in two worlds and moving between each: the Aboriginal world and the wider world. These worlds are not just physical or geographical – though the homeland of the Aboriginal world provides its foundation. These worlds are a matter of mind-frame, and one can move between these two worlds in many contexts, not just physically. Just as the Orthodox Jew might be a lawyer or an entrepreneur during the week, but retreat for the Sabbath from sundown on Friday, Aboriginal biculturalism involves the ability to switch between layers of identity – from Mandawuy’s participation in the ceremonial life of the Yolngu, to his leading a rock and roll band blending the modern forms of popular music and the language, dance and song of the Yolngu.

We should make two important observations about layered identities and the preservation of Australia’s most ancient cultural heritage.

The first is that Aboriginal people desire a bicultural future and there is no monocultural past that we can return to. The Yunupingu brothers recognised this, and their life’s work has been to show the viability and excitement of this vision – which they have done – and to secure the conditions for its realisation in the long-term – which they have not. Not yet.

The second is that, as Perkins said, the songlines of the women of central Australia are also the heritage of non-Aboriginal Australians. It is this culture that is the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia. It is these mythic stories that are Australia’s Book of Genesis. For the shards of the classical culture of this continent to vanish would be a loss not only to its Indigenous peoples but also to all Australians, and to the heritage of the world generally. We would all be the poorer for the loss.

It is in this sense that Australians all have a layer of their identity that connects them to the cultures, languages and lands of the continent. This is the true meaning of commonwealth.

LIBERTY IS RESPONSIBILITY: THE TORMENT OF POWERLESSNESS

To the older generations of Australians it seemed an impossible idea that there could be anything in the Aborigines or in their tradition to admire. The contempt has perhaps almost gone. In its place one finds, surprisingly widely, both interest and solicitude. But old contempt and new solicitude have a common element: a kind of sightlessness towards the central problem of what it is to be black fellow in the here-and-now of Australian life. For this reason hundreds of natives have gone through, and will go through, the torment of powerlessness which Durmugam suffered.

– W.E.H. Stanner, ‘Durmugam: A Nangiomeri’ (1959)

The democratic problem: our extreme minority status

The question of justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within the Commonwealth of Australia concerns three features of our condition.

The first is our putative membership of a race. This race was like no other: at a time when the colonial world ranked races in a great chain, the indigenes of Australia were considered the ‘lowest of the low.’ Today race is freighted with this history, which casts a long shadow over contemporary Australia. I discuss later in this essay the need for us to be rid of race, so I will not deal further with it here.

The second is that we are indigenous to this country. Andrew Bolt equates indigeneity with race. It is a conflation that is made reflexively by many Australians, but clearly wrong. All Australians – native and immigrant – are indigenous to some place on the planet, and though the heritages of many Australians are mixed and multiple, and may be obscured by history and genealogy, there is such a category as people who are indigenous to a territory. Let us be plain: Galarrwuy Yunupingu is indigenous to Terra Australis, and this is despite being of the same human race as Andrew Bolt.

The third is that we are a minority in the Australian Commonwealth. Not just a minority, but an extreme minority: 3 per cent of the population. The extremity of our minority status is underlined when you compare the Maori in New Zealand with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. Each Indigenous population is over 600,000, but Maori comprise 15 per cent of the New Zealand population. Though a minority, Maori are not an extreme minority in the way we are.

The numbers matter when they are this small, because it goes to whether the system of democracy enables the extreme Indigenous minority to participate in a fair way. This is the discussion I now want to have.

Even absent the problems of race and racism, and the issues stemming from our indigeneity, there would still be the question of whether our extreme minority status means we are effectively shut out of the Australian democracy, particularly with respect to decisions made by the 97 per cent majority in respect of our Indigenous affairs. Because ultimately the core of our democratic system – elected representation in parliaments – depends on numbers.

That Indigenous Australians are spread throughout the country dissipates our electoral presence further, except in the one jurisdiction where there is a significant minority: the Northern Territory.

I want to focus on our extreme minority status because I believe it is a defining feature of our condition. It is a crucial explanation of our predicament. If we were not so small a minority, we could participate in the Australian democracy and influence its institutions towards our aspirations. It would help combat the baggage of race and represent our indigeneity.

There are many ethnic minorities in Australia of equivalent or smaller size. Some of them face barriers of racism, but, I would argue, not to the degree that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have faced and continue to face them. And these minorities are not indigenous to the nation, with the particular colonial history that brought us to where we are. Indigenous people were displaced and dispossessed in the founding of British settlement and the development of the nation. Indigenous people therefore have a unique historical and legal relationship with the Australian government.

These three factors combined – the legacy of race, our Indigenous identity and our extreme minority status – explain the nature of our predicament. It is a predicament of feeble democratic participation at best and exclusion at worst.

It explains why the Australian parliaments and executive governments simply do not work for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Routinely and invariably. While Australians complain about politicians, governments and bureaucracies, our democratic institutions, systems and processes generally work for the majority. The electoral system ultimately drives responsive government. Not so for extreme minorities whose presence in that electoral system is negligible.

I think non-Indigenous Australians get a wrong impression of the ability of Indigenous people to get government to work for them. Australians think we hold our own, when the truth is quite different.

They think because of the tragedies besetting Indigenous peoples and the egregious nature of our social and economic problems – reported in those mind-numbing and imagination-defying statistics – that we are in there defining and leading any societal response through government. But this is not the truth.

They think because of the prominent reporting of Indigenous issues that this somehow reflects the power of Indigenous participation. But this is not the truth.

They think because of the large budgetary appropriations in the name of Indigenous affairs that this reflects a system that is working for Indigenous Australians. But this is not the truth. The truth is there is a massive industry around these appropriations and it is predominantly non-Indigenous.

They also think that because there are many prominent Indigenous leaders, such as the late Charles Perkins, Lowitja O’Donoghue, the Dodsons, the Yunupingus, Marcia Langton and so on, this indicates a powerful political presence in the Australian democracy. This is not the truth.

The truth is this peculiar Australian system has produced more Indigenous Australians of the Year (nine) than federal politicians (now eight). While the situation has begun to change in recent years with the entry of Ken Wyatt, Nova Peris, Patrick Dodson, Linda Burney and Malarndirri McCarthy into parliament, one must ask why so much Indigenous talent remains unrepresented. How is it that state and federal parliaments since 1967 are filled with successions of the most mediocre time-servers and yet they have never had a Marcia Langton, Pat O’Shane or Warren Mundine?

The answer lies in our extreme minority status. The scale and moral urgency of the Indigenous predicament far exceeds the power of Indigenous participation in the country’s democratic process. And the system requires that where Indigenous individuals are elected, they must represent their entire constituencies – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – just as they must represent their political parties.

Indigenous Australians lack a voice in the majoritarian decisions made about our distinct rights and interests. This is a deficiency in our constitutional system, one which has direct impacts on policy outcomes in Indigenous affairs.

We have to solve this democratic problem. It is the problem of the 3 per cent mouse and the 97 per cent elephant.

The historical problem: the question of consent

When James Cook first sailed the east coast of this continent on the Endeavour, he carried instructions contained in a letterbook dated 30 June 1768:

You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain: Or: if you find the Country uninhabited take Possession for his Majesty by setting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions, as first discoverers and possessors.

History records that on 22 August 1770 Cook declared possession of the east coast of Australia. Cook noted the land was inhabited, but there was no documented negotiation with the natives. No deal was done, no formal friendship made, nor any alliance formed. Neither the land nor sovereignty over it was ceded by the Aboriginal peoples of Terra Australis Incognita.

There was no consent.

I set this out not to attempt anew some legal surgery on the scabrous wound of the country’s legal foundations. The damage was done and the law of the colonists made the country’s sovereign illegitimacy injusticiable (unable to be legally challenged in the courts). This truly was where might is right.

After the Mabo case, we now know that there were two aspects to the legal meaning of the sovereign settlement of Australia. The first is sovereignty, which the law refuses to deal with, saying it is injusticiable. The second is ownership of the land, which the law belatedly dealt with in Mabo. The law posited native title: the beneficial ownership of land by the occupant native peoples, who were now subjects of the Crown and held their title pursuant to their customary laws, and whose possessions received the recognition and protection of the common law.

The lie of terra nullius was overturned in respect of the legal question of land ownership, but the political question of sovereignty could not be dealt with, let alone resolved.

I am not interested in tilting at the windmill of sovereignty as a question of legal legitimacy: this question has been put and will be put again by others more gallant than me. Instead, I am interested in discussing the political and policy implications of the absence of Indigenous consent for the colonial claim to sovereignty. I will do this by looking at what played out in the absence of consent in this country – and the legacy with which we are grappling today – and considering how this played out during the Age of Empire in other parts of the world.

There is great variation in the histories of various colonies, but before I discuss these, I make the obvious point that treaties were the means by which the terms of any original agreement were captured between colonial powers and colonised peoples.

When a society seeks to take over the territorial sovereignty of another people, in the absence of war or seeking to avoid it, they treat with the pre-existing peoples. Treaties usually set out the terms early in the colonial story. Throughout history they were invariably dishonoured and conflict ensued, though their legacies in the present have not disappeared. These legacies are both legal and moral.

Then there are settlements that seek to address the failure to treat at the beginning of colonisation. Such settlements either revisit the dishonoured treaties of earlier times, or belatedly address those matters originally ignored.

I discern five permutations in how this has played out.

1No consent, independence movement, decolonisation Many colonies were established by colonial fiat, without the consent of existing peoples. Eventually there were independence movements and, following World War II, decolonisation. The European colonies in Africa and Asia fit this model. These were always cases where the native population far outnumbered the Europeans and independence was inevitable.

2Consent by treaty, dishonour, struggle, a new settlement
This is what happened in New Zealand with the Treaty of Waitangi, and in North America. They were almost all dishonoured through colonial history. The native struggle has never abated, and in some cases led to new settlements. The revivification of the Treaty of Waitangi gave rise to what might be called a new settlement process in New Zealand, seeking to restore the honour of the Crown dishonoured through history.

3No consent, struggle, a new settlement
This is what happened in South Africa, where the Europeans were a minority but powerful, and vigorously resisted the dismantlement of the apartheid that underpinned their power. There was a long and bitter struggle, and eventually a new democratic settlement that destroyed apartheid but did not vanquish the white minority – but included it.

4No consent, struggle, destruction / no accommodation
This is what happened in Tasmania. As discussed earlier in this essay, the logic of colonisation made no accommodation for the original peoples of Tasmania – and policies of protection actually contributed to the destruction, rather than avoiding or ameliorating it.

5No consent, struggle, destruction / partial accommodation, no settlement
This is where we are at in Australia today. There was no consent through an original treaty, and neither has there been a post-facto settlement. There have been partial measures of accommodation, but no settlement. The splinter in the mind of Galarrwuy Yunupingu is emblematic of the fact that these accommodations have not resolved the existential crisis of Indigenous peoples.

To our north, closer to Cape York than Tasmania is to Melbourne, this same historical process is playing out in West Papua. I know not whether the situation is 4 or 5 in the above taxonomy. I hope it is 5, but fear it is closer to 4. I wonder what is really going on and how the West Papuans are faring between the Scylla of Indonesian sovereignty and the Charybdis of whatever accommodations have been made to protect them. In a world of instant communications we have fewer conversations about what is happening in West Papua today than took place in London during the colonisation of Van Diemen’s Land in the early nineteenth century. And we Australians are well versed in blacking out a quadrant of our view.

Liberty, responsibility and self-determination

These three things are basically the same. There are differences according to provenance, but I think they coalesce around the idea of the freedom and power to choose. When liberals talk about liberty, when international law advocates talk about self-determination and when conservatives talk about responsibility, they are referring to the same phenomenon, albeit from their particular perspectives.

Liberty for the liberal is about individual freedom and the exercise of free will. The liberal believes in small government, wants to minimise the interference of government and law in the private domain of citizens, and wants to be certain that any interference is justified and authorised by the people through their democratic voice. The market liberal wants free trade with minimal government interference. But liberals understand that individual liberty has its limits: one must not harm others. The law must ensure the vulnerable are protected from abuse and unjust infringement of their liberty.

Further along the individual freedom spectrum, neo-liberals tend towards a free market with even fewer protections for the vulnerable. They are sceptical of any government interference aimed at remedying social injustice. They advocate a return to so-called ‘classical human rights.’ At its extreme, neo-liberalism, in its effort to resist social engineering, can become a penchant for unfettered survival of the fittest, with diminished regard for any sense of the social good or ‘social justice.’ Individual freedom can become the only goal worth pursuing.

Liberty is at the heart of the current push for constitutional reform and recognition. The liberal and the neo-liberal, the classical liberal and the libertarian may well support constitutional reform to ensure all citizens are free and equal. This is because the purpose of a constitution is to limit and define the powers of government and to prevent arbitrary exercise of government power, so as to protect the liberty of citizens. By limiting and defining government power, individual freedom is implicitly protected. Individual liberty is therefore the core value all liberal democratic constitutions uphold.

Where the liberal talks freedom, the conservative believes individuals must take responsibility for themselves. Ultimately, though, the ideas are similar. Freedom entails responsibility. It is only with free choice that responsibility can be exercised.

Let me make one observation about the cherished liberal principle of choice. Choice is not just a freedom. Choice is a power, because with it comes responsibility. Once the individual makes her choice, she is obliged to wear the consequences: she must take responsibility for that choice – for good or for ill. She cannot blame others or blame society. And if she has erred in her choice, it behoves her to remedy her error – not someone else. The popular conception of choice (among liberals and the libertarian left) as an unfettered and careless freedom overlooks that freedom of choice, properly understood, is in truth all about personal responsibility. This is the connection between the liberal principle of choice and the conservative principle of responsibility.

Indigenous Australians now want our equal liberty. We want the freedom to take responsibility.

Indigenous Australians have not prospered under Australia’s Constitution, because our people were excluded from the liberty and equality established by that constitution for the benefit of all citizens. Section 25 was intended as a disincentive, to discourage the states from excluding people from voting. The Race Power, section 51(xxvi), allows the Commonwealth to pass special laws for so-called races in Australia, whether positive or adverse. It therefore empowers parliament to infringe our liberty on the arbitrary and unjust basis of race.

Australia’s constitutional arrangements excluded Indigenous people from the benefits of the liberty – and from the free and equal participation in democracy – that was, for most other Australians, guaranteed. As a result, much discrimination was sanctioned. While the discrimination was explicit and malign at first, more recently we have seen a proliferation of well-intentioned positive discrimination – benign in intent, but still harmful to our individual liberty and thus to our personal responsibility. Such policies have too often entailed the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ – perhaps the most felicitous phrase ever uttered by George W. Bush.

How can a liberal democratic constitution still allow race-based laws against its citizens? The truth is the founding fathers abandoned liberal democratic principles with respect to race. It was an error reflecting the thinking of the time. The suffering that Indigenous people have experienced from this error is real. The loss of liberty meant the loss of personal responsibility. We were prevented from making our own choices. It meant real self-determination for our people could not be achieved.

Self-determination is a concept of international law, applying to nation-states and to individuals. It has also been the policy of the Australian government since the 1970s. But the problem, as Frank Brennan observed in 1993, is that here ‘the political term has no guaranteed legal content.’ It has therefore been conflated with the lesser idea of self-management, whereby the indigenes are given management functions in policies that are determined by government. Brennan argued that a definite legal concept of self-determination for Aboriginal people should result from the logic of Mabo:

An Indigenous community living within the nation-state and enjoying recognition of its legal system by the legal system of the nation is a community entitled to more than self-management. It is entitled to self-determination within the life of the nation.

The right to self-determination set out in the United Nations 2007 Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is defined as the right of indigenous peoples to freely determine their political status and to freely pursue economic, social and cultural development.

Australia and New Zealand, like Canada and the United States, were hesitant in signing up to the Declaration, even though it was legally non-binding. Australia finally did so in 2009 and New Zealand in 2010, but not without reservations – the New Zealand government reassured its population that the Declaration would be implemented only insofar as it fitted in with New Zealand’s legislative and constitutional arrangements. Australia is yet to implement any of the Declaration’s clauses.

In reality, such declarations will always be non-binding on nation-states. Each nation must reach its own settlement and realisation of what the indigenous right to self-determination means within its own democratic institutions.

Indigenous self-determination is a domestic democratic question.

Our right to choose our future

If Indigenous Australians desire a bicultural future, there are two roads we must walk down.

The first I call the Adam Smith road. This is the road of development and social and economic success in the modern, global world. This is a road we travel alongside other peoples of the world who are seeking to escape poverty and socio-economic deprivation. The rules of this road are culture-blind. They do not demand cultural assimilation, but they make equal demands on all cultures. There is no ‘culturally appropriate’ version of Adam Smith’s liberalism. Indians, Chinese, Jews and Ethiopians are not required to renounce their cultures, but the rules of liberal development rarely bend to these cultures: these cultures must instead accommodate the rules of liberal development.

This is not without its challenges for Indigenous peoples, whose cultural traditions and institutions are often at odds with liberal development – communal land, kinship obligations, and so on – but these challenges are no different to those faced by cultures in earlier times. They made adjustments and accommodations between their culture and the imperatives of liberal development.

The second I call the Johann Herder road. The German philosopher (1744–1803) is as important for our cultural determination as Adam Smith is for our liberal development. I will discuss Herder later in this essay.

Bicultural people are not exactly rare. Europe and Asia are replete with examples of peoples who walk the Adam Smith road by day and the Johann Herder road by night. People who grow socially and economically strong without losing their languages and cultures.

These peoples have integrated but not assimilated. And they have chosen how they will adjust their culture to fit in with liberal development. They have not acquiesced to anyone’s demand for deracination.

In Australia, Indigenous peoples have not been allowed to make their own choices about how to reconcile their cultures with the demands of development.

One part of Australia urges the indigenes to renounce development in favour of preservation of some kind of imagined cultural purity. The environmental movement is particularly cynical in pushing this view, for its own ends. Its members prescribe a fictional approach to development for Indigenous peoples which they themselves do not and could not ever live by. This is the adoption of the Noble Savage as the mascot for environmentalism.

The other part of Australia urges the indigenes to embrace development and to assimilate. This is the largest influence, and the default position of government policy, and it underpins the attitude of the average Australian. Indeed, the virulence with which commentators such as Gary Johns condemn Indigenous culture indicates a depth of antipathy in Australia that is rooted in a troubled history.

Buffeted by these hectoring demands, Indigenous peoples have not come to a clear understanding of how a bicultural future might be realised. Instead, they are pulled from one side to the other, and there is no national consensus that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples desire a bicultural future where they are socially and economically developed and still maintain a strong culture. The next politician and the next bureaucrat coming around the corner has their own view on which of these priorities is more important – and on what should or should not be supported.

The only path to closing socio-economic gaps is for Indigenous Australians to become active agents in our own development. Our poverty is a development problem that can only be solved by reversing our disenfranchisement. Calvin Helin asserts, ‘The responsibility for getting out of the welfare trap rests, first and foremost, squarely on the shoulders of indigenous people themselves.’ Indigenous people live the problems facing us. No one is better placed to solve the issues that confront us. Until Indigenous Australians are allowed to take responsibility for our own lives, development and equality will not be achieved.

This requires a fundamental shift. Indigenous policies to date have been premised upon exclusive and hierarchical conceptions of ‘race.’ They proceeded from historical assumptions of Indigenous inferiority and incapability. These assumptions convinced governments that Indigenous Australians are incapable and irresponsible, and, too often, they have convinced our own people.

We have now moved beyond the colonial assumption that the Indigenous development predicament is a result of inadequacies innate to Indigenous people or the darker-skinned so-called ‘races’. Such assumptions were condescending and untrue. They led to ineffective policies inhibiting Indigenous responsibility and empowerment.

Cultural recognition and equality are wholly compatible. Indeed, they are two sides of the same coin, tied together just as liberty is tied to responsibility.

The Japanese came to grips with the demands of Western development and capitalism in the middle of the nineteenth century, during the Meiji restoration. They made important decisions about how they were going to respond. They found a way of contending with the West while maintaining their ancient culture. Other nations and peoples have made similar accommodations.

British culture and traditions evolved as liberal capitalism developed. The Jews have made accommodations between their orthodoxy and their dealings with gentiles in the marketplace over a long period of time. Sometimes there was a steady social and cultural evolution, and sometimes conscious political and cultural realisation and decision.

But unlike other peoples who have contended with the challenge of development and cultural preservation, and unlike immigrants to Australia, Indigenous Australians have been never been allowed to determine their own answer to this challenge.

Through discrimination we were denied access to liberty, and thus to development. Following this, the welfare era did not allow Indigenous Australians to effect their own reconciliation between development and culture, because welfare is choice without consequence, choice without responsibility – and therefore not a real choice.

The choices that Indigenous Australians might be said to have made (‘I want to maintain my traditional cultures, but I still want to have all the vices of the Europeans’; ‘I want passive welfare to enable us to maintain our traditional lifestyles’) are not real acts of self-determination.

Indigenous Australians must now take charge of our own development. Otherwise, self-determination is the welfare version.

The virulent but sometimes subtle antipathy of some Australians to our existential claims is the source of the Indigenous Australian anxiety. We need a constitutional imprimatur for the development formula and the cultural existence formula.

What does it mean to determine our own answer to the development challenge? It involves taking back creative control. Not just consenting.

There is something passive and hopeless in the word ‘consent.’ It makes it sound like we are lying down and saying yes or no to having things done to us, as though we are patients or lab rats consenting to medical procedures, or blushing virgins consenting to the controls and advances of some more knowing and masculine authority figure – a missionary, protector or latter-day Fat or Thin Controller of Indigenous affairs.

Consent is something to fight for when it is all the law allows us. But consent is not the end-game. Ultimately, consent is too passive. We don’t want to simply say yes or no to someone else’s answers. We want to come up with the answers – yes, with the expertise and support and assistance of the best minds in the nation supporting us. Indigenous Australians, like any Australians, should have the right support and expertise. But no one knows the problem better than we do. We live the problem. No one is better placed to solve it.

Indigenous people need to think bigger than consent. We should instead talk about creative control. About coming up with solutions in equal partnership with government – or, better still, with Indigenous peoples leading the way in Indigenous affairs. Should not government consent to our policy and reform ideas?

The conservative understands responsibility. The liberal understands liberty. The Indigenous activist talks of self-determination. They all ultimately speak of the same thing.

Now is the time for our people to be empowered: to take back liberty and responsibility.

We need the right constitutional ‘hook’ for this to happen.

THE TRIUNE NATION

We have to acknowledge that pre-1788 this land was as Aboriginal then as is it is Australian now and until we acknowledge that, we will be an incomplete nation and a torn people … In short, we need to atone for the omissions and for the hardness of heart of our forbears to enable us all to embrace the future as a united people.

– Tony Abbott, second reading of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Recognition Bill, 2013

The race error

Every nation is a unique creation. All democracies are not the same. Every society that has ever created a constitution has had to deal with a unique history and circumstances. There is no template democracy. There’s no template nation.

In 1901, when the Australian nation was created, it reflected the ideas and biases of the time. One bias had as its cornerstone the exclusion of the native peoples of this country. It took a long 66 years before that exclusion from citizenship was remedied in 1967. Back when the referendum was crafted and overwhelmingly endorsed by the Australian people – 90 per cent of the country voted in favour of it – there was not one Indigenous lawyer in the country, let alone an Indigenous constitutional lawyer involved in the drafting of the amendment. Now, leading Indigenous legal intellectuals such as Professor Megan Davis are driving these developments.

Even the greatest democracies are a search for a better unity. National democracy is not just a lapidary achievement. No nation has created the perfect unity. Facing racial conflict, President Barack Obama invoked the idea that the United States is on a journey to a ‘more perfect union.’ Ours is a journey to perfect our commonwealth and the unity it is intended to represent.

During my involvement on the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, set up by Julia Gillard, I became convinced that the basis of our inclusion in Australian citizenship in 1967 was fatefully wrong. We were included as citizens of our own country on the basis of race, and that too reflected the bias of the time. In the decades leading up to the 1950s and 1960s, and for a long time after, it was commonplace to talk about people of different races. So it is understandable that in 1967 the basis of our citizenship was determined in section 51(xxvi) – the race clause. In retrospect, I saw – largely through the arguments of my colleagues on the panel – that our inclusion in the citizenship of the country on the basis of our alleged race was a momentous misstep.

It was wrong in fact. Today we understand that there are no races. And as long as human societies have assumed and perpetuated the idea that there are distinct races across the world, much misery has resulted. Today we understand there are no distinctions to be made among peoples on the basis of race. We are a human race. While we do not share a uniform culture, language, religion and ethnicity, we do share one characteristic: we are members of a single race.

With the knowledge of hindsight, we must perfect the basis of our inclusion in the nation.

This will be a matter of psychology. The day we come to regard ourselves as people with a distinct heritage, with distinct cultures and languages but not of a distinct race will be a day of psychological liberation. And it will also be liberating for those in the wider community who treat us as members of a distinct race, with all of the freight that accompanies this.

Removal of race alone, however, does not fix the fundamental constitutional problem. It does not fix the problem of the 3 per cent Indigenous minority being at the mercy of the 97 per cent majority in respect of their Indigenous rights. Being rid of an outdated concept is one thing; creating a fairer relationship, and a fairer place at the table, is another.

Our nation in three parts

On 15 July 2014 I had the honour of joining Rupert Murdoch and Tony Abbott in Sydney at the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Australian newspaper. In my remarks I said that:

When the history of indigenous reform is written, the place of The Australian under the editorship of Chris Mitchell will be plain … Mitchell opened the pages of The Australian to all shades of debate and indigenous leaders and commentators: no other mainstream platform comes close. Like the paper’s founder, the paper’s editor these past 12 years seems impelled by an unremitting sense of native duty to the nation by taking his indigenous brethren with utmost seriousness. Rosemary Neill’s courageous coverage of tragic violence against Aboriginal women. Tony Koch’s pursuit of Mulrunji’s death at the Palm Island watch-house. Paul Toohey’s searing stories of the petrol-sniffing Hades in the centre. These all echo the proprietor’s campaign in The Advertiser in the Max Stuart case in 1959 abolishing the death penalty.

The Australian treated these subjects not because it believed the country’s indigenous peoples innocent or guilty, right or wrong, noble or ignoble – but because the paper believed in our humanity, and that we and our affairs should not be left on the woodheap of the democracy. No paper welcomed indigenous writers and political leaders more than this one. The late Charlie Perkins, Marcia Langton, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Patrick Dodson, Lowitja O’Donoghue, Warren Mundine and more have been regular protagonists in the national conversation in the national paper.

For those like me whose reform policies have been steadfastly supported by the paper’s editorials, we have not been spared contrary views and criticism in news reporting and commentary. The dialectic of the national conversation plays out in the pages of The Australian.

This was a privilege for me: to witness Rupert Murdoch, one of those rare Australians whom the thoughtful senator from Queensland Brett Mason – in a forthcoming book on such figures – correctly identifies as having in some way changed the world, pause to reflect on a 50-year milestone on his journey. I think that not to marvel at Murdoch’s colossal media exploits and take some borrowed pride from the fact that, like Don Bradman in cricket or Howard Florey in medical science, he is Australian is as absurd as denying the global impact of Robert Hughes on art or Germaine Greer on feminism. There may or may not be some validity in the suggestion that the levelling instinct of Australians is a salient contribution of Indigenous peoples to the national character, but at the heart of that instinct lies a cringe that makes us a smaller nation, with a smaller sense of our own possibilities, when we don’t recognise it as a double-edged sword. I suspect our aggressive egalitarianism is the engine that drives individuals to take on the forces of the establishment – witness the Dirty Digger taking over the London Sun – but it can also see the rest frantically determined to chop down the very outliers who have challenged and beaten the powers-that-be. This is our psychological, rather than cultural, cringe. One side of our egalitarianism challenges the status quo and the other preserves it through levelling.

It was for me a signal event. I tell this story to give a context to my final remarks to that audience, in which I set out how constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians would allow the nation to reveal our true nature and the great hidden architecture of our Commonwealth:

Our nation is in three parts. There is our ancient heritage, written in the continent and the original culture painted on its land and seascapes. There is its British inheritance, the structures of government and society transported from the United Kingdom fixing its foundations in the ancient soil. There is its multicultural achievement: a triumph of immigration that brought together the gifts of peoples and cultures from all over the globe – forming one indissoluble commonwealth.

We stand on the cusp of bringing these three parts of our national story together – our ancient heritage, our British inheritance and our multicultural triumph – with constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians. This reconciliation will make a more complete commonwealth.

The colonial history which I have revisited in this essay is the reason why the relationship between our Indigenous heritage and the country’s British heritage has eluded us. As troubled as this history is, and as troubling as it will be for the foreseeable future, these two things are the heritage of Australia. There is no denying it. It is the reality and it is the truth, no matter how much white Australians might want to ignore it or black Australians might want to reject it. Whatever the mutual denial of the past, the future must be one of mutual recognition.

OIKOPHILIA

[Edmund] Burke developed three ideas that, it seems to me, were then and ought to be now the core of conservative thinking: respect for the dead, the ‘little platoon’ and the voice of tradition …

Burke was one of the first major political thinkers to place future generations at the heart of politics … Burke’s view of society, as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn, carries a precious hint as to how the responsibility for future generations arises. It arises from love, and love directed towards what is unknown must arise from what is known. The future is not known, nor are the people who will inhabit it. But the past is known, and the dead, our dead, are still the objects of love and veneration. It is by expending on them some part of our care, Burke believed, that we care also for the unborn. For we plant in our hearts the transgenerational view of society that is the best guarantee that we will moderate our present appetites in the interests of those who are yet to be.

– Roger Scruton, Green Philosophy (2012)

Love of home

‘Love of home’ – oikophilia – is the intriguing idea put forward by the English philosopher Roger Scruton in Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet. It is, I think, a most important contribution to how the pressing environmental problems facing human societies might be thought about and responded to. Scruton’s book brings together the conservation latent in political conservatism and the conservatism latent in environmental conservation – love of the oikos, or household, is the common motivation in stewardship and protection of environment and society.

This common motive is for Scruton natural: the shared love of place:

That, it seems to me, is the goal towards which serious environmentalism and serious conservatism both point – namely, home, the place where we are and that we share, the place that defines us, that we hold in trust for our descendants, and that we don’t want to spoil.

… it is time to take a more open-minded and imaginative vision of what conservatism and environmentalism have to offer each other. For nobody seems to have identified a motive more likely to serve the environmental cause than this one, of the shared love for our home. It is a motive in ordinary people. It can provide a foundation both for a conservative approach to institutions and a conservationist approach to the land. It is a motive that might permit us to reconcile the demand for democratic participation with the respect for future generations and the duty of trusteeship. It is, in my view, the only serious resource that we have, in our fight to maintain local order in the face of globally stimulated decay.

Environmentalists staring at the stark and impenetrable wall of liberal self-interest frustrating their schemes to turn around environmental decay should read Scruton and pause to reflect on where the mobilising of imposed large-scale bureaucratic strategies against the self-interest of homo economicus has ended up. Put aside your fantasies of eco-revolution and the great green uber-internationale – Scruton proposes another motive potentially as compelling as self-interest: the natural love of home.

Oikophilia is the closest that contemporary conservative philosophy comes to the Indigenous love of homeland, but Scruton contrasts religious and kinship affiliations with national ones. Incorrectly, in my view, he makes assertions about tribal affiliations, which must be answered if his notion of oikophilia is to find common ground with the Indigenous connection to country. This is the difficulty:

It is in contrast with tribal and religious forms of membership that the nation should be understood. By a nation I mean a people settled in a certain territory, who share language, institutions, customs and a sense of history and who regard themselves as equally committed both to their place of residence and to the legal and political process that governs it. Members of tribes see each other as a family; members of religious communities see each other as the faithful; members of nations see each other as neighbours. All these forms of self-identity are rooted in belonging and attachment. But only the sense of nationhood makes territory central and, in doing so, provides the first-person plural adapted to the society of strangers, and to the peaceful coexistence of people who share no family loyalties or religious creed. First and foremost the nation is a common territory, in which we are all settled, and to which we are all entitled as our home …

To put the matter simply: nations are defined not by kinship or religion but by a homeland.

Of course homelands are central to tribes. Scruton’s knowledge of the nature of tribal societies and their relationship with territory is too thin, and this is not his main concern, in any case. That is a pity. Because he would realise that his concept of tribal institutions (‘The idea of an impartial rule of law, sustained in being by the very government that it sustains, has no place in the world of kinship ties’) is limited. After all, it was in respect of Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s Yolngu society that Chief Justice Blackburn famously observed in 1971 that:

The evidence shows a subtle and elaborate system highly adapted to the country in which the people led their lives, which provided a stable order of society and was remarkably free from the vagaries of personal whim or influence. If ever a system could be called ‘a government of laws, and not of men’, it is that shown in the evidence before me.

Scruton would recognise his description of the filial relationship between the Englishman and his native nation resonates with that between the Yolngu and his tribal nation – and speaks to the same conservatism. The barrier that stands in the way of this recognition is Scruton’s point about the exclusivity of the tribe: ‘when it comes to outsiders – the ‘strangers and sojourners’ in the land of the tribe – they are regarded as outside the law altogether and not entitled to its protection’ and ‘Nor can outsiders easily become insiders, since that which divides them from the tribe is an incurable genetic fault.’

Scruton’s objections can be overcome if we accept layered identities. In this way the universal filiation is national citizenship with one rule of law and system of government. The one rule of law and system of government that applies in Scruton’s native Britain is one which does not oblige – and in fact cannot oblige – unfreedom of religion. In the same way that this one rule of law and system of government preserves and upholds all manner of arcane institutions of inherited privilege (staunchly defended by conservatives from Burke to Scruton), so too are tribal nations consistent with the idea of the commonwealth.

The problem with Scruton’s view of the tribe is that it is a dated caricature. It might have been true at the time of David Livingstone’s adventures in Africa, the Australians making first contact in the highlands of Papua New Guinea or the first whites entering Arnhem Land, but it is now a view of the past. No tribes today live in isolation from other societies: they live within nations, where layers of history have left layers of identity. These tribes cannot be expected to abandon the institutions of their inheritance, inextricably bound as they are to the homelands of their inheritance. It would be as indefensible as expecting the inheritors of Britain’s ancient entitlements to forsake their inheritance.

I want to now discuss one aspect of Scruton’s idea of conservatism – respect for and connection with the dead – as part of a consideration of what it means to be Indigenous.

In this passage from the International Court of Justice’s 1975 Western Sahara case, Judge Ammoun captured what lies at the core of the idea of peoples being indigenous to a territory:

Mr Bayona-Ba-Meya goes on to dismiss the materialistic concept of terra nullius, which led to this dismemberment of Africa following the Berlin Conference of 1885. Mr Bayona-Ba-Meya substitutes for this a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the man who was born therefrom, remains attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with his ancestors. This link is the basis of ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty.

I am not now concerned with the legal question. I am concerned with the metaphysical question: the spiritual notion. The ancestral tie between the land and the man who was born therefrom. Who remains attached thereto. And who must one day return thither to be united with his ancestors.

This is it. This is the nub. This is the essence. This is the source.

Before we have the abstraction of law, we have things that are real. The law is not the origin. It is the ancestral bones in the land that is the source. It is the dust of the ancestors mixed with the dust of the land.

It is from that land and dust that the people of the present came. And it is to that same dust and land that they remain attached. And it is to the same land they will ‘one day return … to be united with [their] ancestors.’

At the core of all Aboriginal customary law you find these elements. The ancestral tie to the land, the person born from that land, who remains attached to the land and whose spirits will one day return to that land. I would venture to say that these ideas are universal to all Indigenous conceptions of relationship to their country, the world over.

My point is that it is not the law that is the well-spring of indigeneity: it is a reality concerning the dead, the living and the people to come, and the country to which they are tied. It is a similar reality of which Scruton writes when he refers to ‘Burke’s view of society, as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn.’ If Burke’s association is real, then it is real in the sense captured in Judge Ammoun’s most apposite definition.

On this interpretation it is theoretically possible to take Andrew Bolt seriously when he protests that he too is indigenous to this country. The bones and dust of his ancestors and all settler and immigrant Australians who made this continent their home have been accumulating and mixing with the ancient soil for 226 years. Aboriginal laws and customs recognise the connections that arise from places of birth and burial. In this spiritual sense the Bolts are becoming indigenous to Australia. Perhaps he could recognise in turn that the bones of Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s ancestors have been returning for millennia to the lands from which they arose.

Man cannot live by bread alone

The Cape York agenda I have championed has elements of all three great traditions of political philosophy. This is how I explained it in Up from the Mission:

The metaphor of the staircase may provide some fresh insight into why our agenda has so often proven to be so difficult to categorise in conventional political terms. Our focus on social norms has an inherently conservative flavour. But we also emphasised the critical importance of supporting capabilities – and this has a distinctly social-democratic flavour. Then we talk about incentives, the steps that allow people to choose to build their own lives; this has a distinctly liberal flavour.

I now see that while the liberal component of our agenda is well developed, the conservative element is not.

It is still a caricature of conservatism. Conservatism is not just about social norms. It is the insight that human beings will not be content when the liberal and social-democratic agendas are fulfilled.

If the engine of self-interest is cranked up, if the structure of incentives is right, if people exercise choice, if private property is well developed, if there is social-democratic provisioning of opportunity and people take responsibility to seize opportunity to build their capabilities – then what people will really want to do is to read the Talmud in Hebrew and Aramaic, or learn archaic Guugu Yimidhirr from old recordings, or build a scale model of King Solomon’s temple.

Aboriginal Australian culture is evidence that when humans are at equilibrium, people build traditions tied to language and land and pass them on to the next generation.

Conservatism is not sending your children to school to paint your fence white. It is insight into the imperfection and mystery of human nature. This imperfection and mystery will ultimately make liberal and social-democratic structures inadequate and binhdhu, without taste.

Conservatism is the idea that distinct peoples should continue to exist because difference is an end in itself. The homogenisation inherent in liberalism and social democracy is risky because it robs us of many attempts to answer the great existential enigmas.

Conservatism is qualitatively different to liberalism and social democracy. Liberalism is based on a few principles, and then people do the rest through their own choices. But there is no end to the number of human traditions. Japanese and Guugu Yimidhirr liberalism are the same; Japanese and Yolngu social democracy are similar; but Japanese and Guugu Yimidhirr and Yolngu traditions are different worlds.

Tradition is by definition about the detail and not the broad principle. To work politically for tradition, you have to make sure the dictionary in ten volumes is written, for example. You have to record and teach the songs that traverse the continent.

Self-interest is the engine that drives everything else in the vehicle of progress. But tradition is the engine that drives human existence.

Johann Gottfried Herder thought Emperor Joseph II was wrong to enforce one official language in his empire. Herder’s Letters for the Advancement of Mankind (1791) contains a fictional dialogue called ‘Conversation after the Death of Emperor Joseph II’.

A. Which innocent preconceptions of the people did the Emperor Joseph offend?

B. Of many I mention but a few; first the preconception of language. Has a people, especially an uncultivated people, anything more dear than the language of their fathers? In it lives its entire wealth of thoughts about tradition, history, religion and principles of life, all its heart and soul. To take from such a people their language or debase it amounts to taking from them their only immortal property, which passes from parents to children.

A. And yet Joseph knew many of these peoples personally and very well.

B. The more it is to be amazed at, that he did not discern the intrusion. ‘Who suppresses my language for me,’ thinks the simple man not without reason, ‘will also rob me of my ability to reason and my way of life, my honour and the laws and rights of my people.’ Obviously, as God tolerates all the world’s languages, so should also a ruler not only tolerate the different languages of his subject peoples, but also honour them.

A. But he wanted to achieve a more expeditious prosecution of commerce, a faster moving culture.

B. A people’s best culture is not fast; it does not allow itself to be forced through a foreign language. It thrives at its most beautiful and, I would like to say, exclusively on the nation’s own land in its inherited tongue. With the language one captures the heart of the people, and is it not a grand idea to plant the seed of well-being in the most distant future among so many peoples, Hungarians, Slavs, Romanians, completely in line with their own way of thinking, in their most distinctive and loved fashion?

A. It appeared to him to be a grander idea to amalgamate if possible all his states and provinces to one code of laws, to one education system, to one monarchy.

B. A favourite idea of our century! But is it feasible? Is it reasonable and beneficial?

Conservatism makes the case for continued existence in a deep sense – not just in the trivial sense of having biological descendants.

Continued existence is of lesser concern to Anglophone (or Sinophone) conservatives, because their cultures are too large and powerful to die. Theodore Dalrymple may think people should read more books, but he has no existential angst that there will be no one left who can and will want to read Shakespeare.

Man needs bread, but he cannot live by bread alone.

Conservative arguments for constitutional reform

There are two reasons Australian conservatives should support constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. First, conservatism sees intrinsic value in tradition and inheritance – like our British heritage, Indigenous tradition and inheritance is important and should be recognised and maintained. Second, conservatives value national unity. That is why they should support formal inclusion and recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution, as a shift away from the discrimination and exclusion of the past.

In trying to understand conservative objections to the Expert Panel’s proposals, it is important to understand the Australian mix of liberalism and conservatism, and the influence of constitutional conservatism – the influential group of Australian constitutional experts whom Greg Craven dubbed the ‘con-cons.’ This group, convening as the Samuel Griffith Society, values liberalism and democracy. They insist on parliamentary sovereignty and are ready to accuse judges of usurping parliamentary democracy. They value the Australian Constitution as inherited wisdom.

It is because, as Waleed Aly observed in Quarterly Essay 37, ‘tradition has its own force and wisdom’ that the conservative disposition prefers organic evolution to revolution in society. Conservatives approach constitutional reform with extreme caution. According to Aly, conservatism is ‘resistant to ideological zeal’: it ‘eschews utopian designs and adopts far more modest and pragmatic approaches to policy.’

This explains conservative resistance to including principles such as ‘equality’ or ‘non-discrimination’ in the Constitution. While valuing free and equal participation in a liberal democracy, conservative pragmatists do not think such ideals can be protected simply by writing them into the Constitution. Such alterations risk giving the judiciary too much power.

In their strong aversion to activist judges, constitutional conservatives tend to forget the history that has driven this conversation about constitutional recognition.

Conservatives are concerned with limiting judicial activism, and therefore do not want symbolic words or sweeping ‘rights’ clauses in the Constitution. Indigenous advocates need to take these views on board. But what conservatives in turn need to understand, in an effort to find consensus, is that for Indigenous people the movement for constitutional recognition has always been about achieving constitutional protection and recognition of Indigenous rights and interests within Australia. It is about reconciling the fact that there were peoples here before the British arrived, and making provision for those peoples and their interests to be recognised within the nation. Symbolism and poetry is only one part of it. Substantive change in the national approach to Indigenous affairs is the other.

Conservatives need to understand our position too. Our people lived through the discrimination of the past. We have a legitimate anxiety that the past not be repeated, and that measures be put in place to ensure things are done in a better way. If conservatives assert that a racial non-discrimination clause is not the answer, then what is a better solution?

In ‘The Australian Declaration of Recognition’, Julian Leeser and Damien Freeman assert that the Constitution is a rulebook, a practical charter of government that sets out power relationships, such as between the Commonwealth and the states. It is not a vehicle for aspirations and symbolism: these can be articulated in a declaration, rather than in the Constitution proper. But if the Constitution is a practical rulebook governing national power relationships, then we should also accept that there is one very important national power relationship that it clearly does not appropriately address. The rulebook should be amended to make provision for Indigenous people to be heard in Indigenous affairs.

After all, if unelected judges should not decide what is in the interests of Indigenous people, then who should decide? Indigenous people comprise only 3 per cent of the population, and rarely get a fair say in parliament, even on matters directly concerning them. Parliaments have never been good at listening to Indigenous people. This is why the discrimination of the past has occurred. This is the elephant and the mouse problem that has characterised Indigenous affairs.

We can find a way of ensuring that Indigenous people get a fair say in laws and policies made about us without compromising the supremacy of parliament. We should consider creating a mechanism to ensure that Indigenous people can take more responsibility for our own lives within the democratic institutions already established, and without handing power to judges.

Conservatives should agree with the removal of racial discrimination from the Constitution. They must now also turn their minds to how the Constitution might be altered so that the discrimination of the past cannot happen again. We don’t want separatism: we want inclusion on a fair basis. We want to be inside the decision-making tent. We want our voices to be heard in political decisions made about us. A mechanism like this – guaranteeing the Indigenous voice in Indigenous affairs – could be a more democratic solution to the racial discrimination problem.

Constitutional recognition could therefore include removal of the race clauses and the insertion of a replacement power to enable the Commonwealth parliament to pass necessary laws with respect to Indigenous peoples, and, most importantly, incorporation of a requirement that Indigenous peoples get a fair say in laws and policies made about us. A new body could be established to effect this purpose, and to ensure that Indigenous peoples have a voice in their own affairs.

An agenda for the classical culture of ancient Australia

Distinct peoples the world over hold hard to four things: their identity as a people, their territories, their cultural heritage and their language. These lie at the core of what is indigenous about those Australian citizens who are Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Let us look at how they have been accommodated in Australia.

The indigenous identity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is recognised at a certain level. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags are recognised as official flags under the Flags Act 1953. They fly outside parliaments, schools, council chambers and other public buildings. They are found on lapel pins of leading politicians and have become an accepted part of the public symbolism of the country.

But below that there is no official recognition of the many tribal nations associated with particular territories. Apart from the registrations that occur under land rights schemes, there is no official status or recognition accorded to first peoples. Some towns and cities have signage at airports or at the entrance of towns, or at public buildings which acknowledge local tribes – but it is not part of any official scheme of recognition.

‘Welcome to country’ ceremonies and the practices of acknowledging traditional custodians are now part of official protocols in Australia, even if there is more psychological discomfort about it than in, say, New Zealand – where the practice is de rigueur, sincere and there is no question of embarrassment. I witness many Australian ceremonies that are perfunctory or awkward, reflecting the degree to which we are far from the bicultural society New Zealand has become.

No doubt it helps if you have the greatest team of any sporting code in the modern world – the All Blacks – but it is impossible not to feel comparatively impoverished when the haka is performed and ‘God Defend New Zealand’ is sung in Maori and English. I am afraid to say one wipes tears for the hymn of our enemies and cringes at our own.

The other area of great work that lies before us is the naming of places throughout the continent. Thousands of cities, towns, suburbs, streets, bridges, rivers, creeks and other landmarks have Aboriginal names accumulated over two centuries. By the time you count all of the private names of homesteads, farms, residences, buildings and institutions that are Aboriginal, they number in the tens of thousands.

And yet there is little awareness of the provenance of these placenames. People seem not to know that Coolum is an Aboriginal name, as are the great majority of the town names on the Sunshine Coast. It is strange indeed to drive through places with virtually no Aboriginal presence, but all bearing these ancient names. Many Australians simply do not know the difference between Aboriginal and English names. My children and I play a kind of Gregory’s street-map game of ancient Australia – where we get points for finding Aboriginal names: Cooroy, Noosa, Tinbeerwah, Eumundi, Beerwah, Maroochydore, Nambour. And then we pass the roundabout and see this sign: Murdering Creek Road. And I fall silent.

I will make a wild guess and say that fewer than one in a hundred of the ancient names of Australia have been officially recognised. Most features of the continent, its contours, swamps, sandhills, creeks, rivers, headlands and so on, have Aboriginal names of ancient provenance. How can it be that these names are not officially recognised? Other countries have adopted dual naming practices.

When I visit Yuurrgubarraalbigu, on the coast near the old Cape Bedford Mission, I pass a hill with the prosaic but official name of Round Hill, but its true name is Dhamal Nubuun: One Foot. It is ridiculous that a place that had a name at the time of Jesus of Nazareth is no longer officially known by this name.

This is a vitally important agenda for the country. This continent is a named continent, and Australians should know this landscape is rich with meaning and history.

Through land rights schemes, native title rights at common law and under legislation, land reservations and purchases, much has been done to recognise the territorial rights of the contemporary descendants of the original Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes. This is where accommodation has been made, and the process is by no means complete.

The protection of Indigenous heritage in the form of cultural artefacts and places has long been provided for in legislation. These are of mixed quality and there are gaps, but this is an area of accommodation that has received attention.

There are institutions for keeping and displaying the country’s Indigenous heritage, including a dedicated institution – the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies – but these are not properly supported. There is a yawning gulf between the work they are able to do and the work that needs to be done.

Australia does not have a comprehensive agenda for the recording, preservation, presentation and utilisation of the country’s Indigenous heritage. The urgent work, described by Rachel Perkins, of recording the songlines of central Australia is just one example of the work that needs to be done Before It’s Too Late (BITL).

The former director of the then Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, the late English archaeologist Peter Ucko, was the architect of the first BITL push, which saw scores of young anthropologists and linguists deployed to the four corners of the continent to undertake salvage work by making Indigenous language and ethnographic recordings. This work captured the knowledge of the last of the old people born in the bush, before the mission era. Some of Australia’s leading anthropologists, such as Peter Sutton, were part of this drive.

Australia urgently needs a BITL Mark 3, since the generation that worked on the cattle stations, who were brought up and worked on the land, and who learnt the languages – the next generation on from the old bush-born generation – are now old and passing on. Much of this knowledge will be lost if we do not grasp the importance and urgency of this work. Also, the work compiled by that first generation of BITL researchers needs to be the subject of urgent work itself: converting the mouldering contents of storage rooms of ethnographers who are now in their seniority into forms that are accessible and useful to future generations. It is no exaggeration to say that the notebooks and journals of the researchers who worked in Cape York Peninsula these past fifty years are themselves part of the world’s heritage. We need concerted public support to secure this heritage. And of course much more recording work, utilising the latest information technology, lies ahead of new generations of linguists and ethnographers. The universities need to be part of this national drive over the coming decades, because they need to provide the personnel for this drive.

In 2001, the world watched aghast as the Taliban dynamited and destroyed the 1700-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. Treasures of older lineage are in danger of being lost to our nation through blindness and neglect rather than vandalism.

MAKING PEACE

We have to make peace with the Aboriginal people.

– Prime Minister Paul Keating, address to staff, election eve, 1993

Australia is a blessed country. Our climate, our land, our people, our institutions rightly make us the envy of the earth; except for one thing – we have never fully made peace with the first Australians.

– Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott, second reading of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Recognition Bill, 2013

The national challenge we have embarked upon is the task of getting the majority of the voters in a majority of the states, and a majority nationally, to say yes. This is not a simple majority. Constitutional reform will not just happen because we get 51 per cent of the country on board. Once, 65 per cent of the country voted for a change and it did not get up, because under our Constitution the formula for an amendment is a double majority. It cannot just be a progressive cause: it has to be a liberal cause; it has to be a conservative cause if you want amendment. Our forebears who brought about the 1967 referendum understood that, and they achieved the most handsome vote in favour of changing the Constitution when 90 per cent of the country voted in favour of Indigenous citizenship.

We want to repeat that achievement. We have got to bring the whole country on board. We cannot just seek the endorsement of friends and allies. That is the easy strategy: to talk to those who readily support us. The challenge is to gather in conservatives and Liberals and people with genuine anxieties about amending what is a foundational document.

We must respect conservative concerns about the Constitution. But my argument to the conservatives is ultimately that you cannot have a unified nation, this cannot be a fair nation, without the proper inclusion of that 3 per cent of the nation who were originally excluded from the Constitution.

So our task is cut out for us, but all the indications from polling show that the great majority of Australians want recognition of this country’s original people in the Constitution. We start with a very deep reservoir of goodwill. And for those of us who believe it is important that Indigenous Australians have a rightful place in this their own nation, the challenge over the coming period is to engage the rest of the country.

The journey of reform and inclusion is never quick. Consider how long the United States took to get from the Declaration of Independence to the Emancipation Proclamation under Lincoln, and then to Martin Luther King’s achievement of civil rights. Many decades lay between each of these milestones in the history of their republic, and much suffering.

The Australian Constitution is 116 years old. We still do not have a proper foundation for recognising Indigenous Australians. It is a long time in the history of our country for this business not to be finished. I hope that the rest of the country, contemplating these reforms, will understand that the suffering and exclusion will continue for as long as we don’t perfect the basis of our citizenship. And make a more complete commonwealth.