I have marked ### the paragraph that makes wonder about the value of the
'regret' and question what exactly it is that Aboriginal peoples have
received from the 'compromise' - are they just pawns in
"blindsiding the Labor Party" and Howard's political games?
--- Trudy
=================================================
The Sydney Morning Herald [PRINT EDITION]
August 28, 1999
Moving from words to action.
Mungo MacCallum
Now that we have
the regrets, there's still
the difficult business
of reconciliation
WHEN Senator Aden Ridgeway finished negotiating the proposed new preamble to the
Constitution with John Howard, he was asked about Howard�s position on the more
general subject of reconciliation: how far down the track had the Prime Minister
moved? After a considered pause, Ridgeway said he would mark Howard at about
seven out of 10.
To most observers, black and white, this seemed extraordinarily high. After all,
for most of his time as Prime Minister, Howard has barely been able to bring
himself to pronounce the word, let alone show any real understanding of what it
involves. But Ridgeway clearly knew something the rest of us did not, and within
a week it was clear Howard was at last ready to turn his mind to his 1998
election promise to restore reconciliation as a serious issue to the political
agenda.
This week he delivered, and though Howard�s response remains grudging and his
motives suspect, it would be churlish not to report progress. But as large
sections of black and white Australia remain deeply dissatisfied, not only with
the words used in Howard�s parliamentary motion but by the hasty and secretive
way they were chosen, it shows how difficult the whole exercise has become.
It was never going to be easy; even finding the right term is a minefield. Some
Aborigines, especially among the younger generation, object to the very word
reconciliation as a matter of principle. Logically, if a trifle pedantically,
they argue that you cannot have reconciliation when there was no conciliation in
the first place.
Many would prefer to go back to the idea of a treaty, but Howard has rejected
that, even though treaties have formed a productive base for co-operation
between settlers and indigenes in the US, Canada, and especially New Zealand.
For him, a treaty between inhabitants of the same nation is a contradiction in
terms, and one that would divide rather than unite.
But if the document of reconciliation is not to be a treaty, just what will it
be? What status will it have? Will it be legally binding, and if so, on whom? If
it isn�t, what, if anything, will it achieve? And all this and more before we
even start worrying about what is to go into the document.
Then there is the tricky question of just who should constitute the parties.
Ideally, reconciliation (we might as well stick to that word in the absence of
an accepted alternative) should be a people's movement: the politicians should
act as facilitators rather than principals.
But in practice, from the white side at least, the politicians have to be
heavily involved, both as the elected representatives of the people and as the
administrators who will have to make the bloody thing work.
This in itself has clouded the process for many sceptical Australians.
And finding acceptable delegates from the black side - individuals who will
carry the trust of at least a comfortable majority of indigenous Australians -
is even harder.
When the First Fleet arrived from England, there were more than 200 separate
Aboriginal nations on the Australian continent - how many more, no-one knows.
Even today, after more than two centuries of conquest and dispossession, about
75 different languages are still extant. Yet most white Australians insist on
treating Aborigines as a homogenous race.
A moment's thought shows how absurd this is. Among Europeans, we don't expect
the Finns to act exactly like the Greeks. and Australia is far bigger than
Europe. But until recently, Australia has operated under the bland assumption
that any sufficiently articulate Aborigine can act as a spokesman for all, as a
kind of secretary-general for an indigenous United Nations.
It just doesn't work that way. The attempt to set up a representative Aboriginal
parliament, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC) was
always going to be a dodgy exercise, even if the indigenous people were left to
themselves to overcome al1 the problems arising from inter-tribal rivalry. But
governments, and especially this one, have constantly interfered, usually citing
public concerns over money.
As a result, ATSIC is seen as irrelevant by many communities. The same applies
to the land councils, which are seen as too ready to look after their own.
In something like desperation, the previous government set up the Reconciliation
Council, in the hope a new body might do better than its predecessors. Thanks
largely to the extraordinary respect in which its first chairman, Pat Dodson
(rightly known as the father of reconciliation), is held, the council has more
or less held together, but it has been a fragile artefact.
When Dodson left in despair at Howard�s intransigence, it nearly fell apart.
Howard has had to invite him back to give the reconciliation process
credibility, and since then Dodson and the new chairwoman, Evelyn Scott, have
split over this week�s parliamentary motion. It does not augur well for
consensus over the final reconciliation document.
But if geography and tribalism make it difficult to find the right Aborigine to
negotiate for the race as a whole, they pale into insignificance before the
various generation gaps. When the idea of reconciliation. was first mooted in
the 1970s, one of the problems was finding anyone with the background to talk
about it. At that stage, Charles Perkins was Australia's first and only
Aboriginal graduate. Most of the other blacks who were at all articulate in
English were the products of missions, with all the feelings of cultural
inferiority that implies.
As a result, when Dr H. C'. (Nugget) Coombs and other prominent white
Australians proposed forming a committee to discuss a Makharatt - a sort of
Clayton's treaty - the process was driven almost entirely by the whites. With
the best will in the world, the committee could not escape being more than
somewhat paternalistic. It tailed because of a lack of interest from the people
it was designed to involve.
The serious black politicians of the time - the first generation to try to make
their way into mainstream Australian politics - were in general more interested
in land right and welfare than the abstractions of reconciliation. This base led
to a wider political autonomy.
The new spokespeople include the Dodsons, the Yunupingus, Pat O�Shane and
Lowitja O�Donoghue. Many are members of the generation of stolen children - whom
Howard, in an absurd euphemism, insists on calling �the separated children�,
making them sound like the result of a successful operation on Siamese twins.
For them, reconciliation means more than a piece of paper. It means what
O�Donoghue has described as a concrete gesture of atonement, a form of
measurable recompense for past injustices. Given Howard opposes anything that
can be seen as compensation - he has always had a lawyer�s insistence that
Aboriginal policy must never acknowledge guilt or obligation - this seems set to
be the next big stumbling block.
The Aboriginal leadership may be divided on many issues, but so far has insisted
on a recognition that indigenous Australians are a special group with special
problems and special needs. They are not just another disadvantaged section of
the Australian community which can be brought back to the mainstream through
improved economic circumstances. Howard seems to think Aborigines should be
treated in the same way as poor whites: fix up their health, education, housing
and employment and they�ll be OK.
This is assimilation under another name. Pat Dodson uses the image of black and
white Australia as two separate circles. Howard wants the black circle included
in the larger white one. Dodson wants the two to intersect with an area in
common, but each retaining its identity. Whether this is compatible with
Howard�s �one Australia� is another question to be resolved on the road to
reconciliation.
For the new generation of black politicians - the generation of Noel Pearson and
Aden Ridgeway - it may not be such a hurdle. As Ridgeway points out. he does not
personally carry the burden of the stolen generation, and he has a suit and
briefcase in place of a spear and nulla nulla. He is prepared to compromise far
more than many of his elders.
###For Dodson, an apology is an all or nothing business. For Ridgeway, it is a
matter of political dickering. He accepts that Howard will give away only as
much as he absolutely has to; that he is after political advantage, such as
�blindsiding the Labor Party� (as Mr Howard put it in the party room), and
generosity does not come into it. Again unlike Dodson, Ridgeway is prepared to
go along with Howard in drawing an arbitrary line between the past and the
present. All the �blemish� - what a weaselly word that is to describe massacre,
rape, kidnap, and many cases of attempted, if not actual, genocide - belongs
with past generations even if, through some curious time warp, people are still
suffering. ###
Nowadays everything in the garden is lovely. True, governments have done little
about black deaths in custody, the Northern Territory passes laws that
incarcerate black children for stealing a loaf of bread, and the UN Committee on
the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has found Howard's Wik legislation is
probably racist, but there's no need to talk about that. Let�s all move forward
to reconciliation, whatever that is.
We can only hope Howard and Ridgeway know, because while this week�s
parliamentary motion may have been better than nothing, it certainly was not an
apology. And reconciliation will be much harder.
Alan Ramsey is recovering from major surgery.
********************************
ARE WE MUCH CHANGED SINCE BONNER'S DAY?
IT IS one of the ironies of Australian politics that although the ALP has
generally taken the high ground on indigenous issues, it has never put an
Aboriginal member into Federal Parliament. Aden Ridgeway is, of course, a
Democrat; his only Aboriginal predecessor, Neville Bonner, was a Liberal from
(of all places) Queensland. Bonner was selected to fill a casual Senate vacancy
in 1971, and later admitted that there was probably an element of tokenism in
the process; at the time, he said, Aborigines were rather fashionable.
His origins inevitably gave rise to the suspicion that he would be something of
an Uncle Tom, a fear that seemed to be confirmed when one of his first actions
on arriving in Canberra was to give an exhibition of boomerang throwing. At one
stage a boomerang got caught in a tree and Bonner asked if any of the watching
journalists would like to retrieve it. After a brief and embarrassed silence, he
sighed: �No'? Oh well, I suppose the poor old blackfella will have to do it, as
usual,� and proceeded to shinny up the tree. It was an inauspicious beginning.
Having arrived somewhat starry-eyed, he rapidly became depressed by the cynicism
he found in many of his colleagues. As time went on, he became more involved in
Aboriginal affairs and developed into a bit of a backbench maverick.
He had hoped for promotion in the government of Malcolm Fraser, although never
as minister for Aboriginal affairs: "I prayed... I would never he offered that
portfolio,� he said later. "I think it would have shortened my life because
there would have been so much expected of me that I would not have been able to
produce, and that's on both sides, white and black.
"The Aboriginal people ... would have said, 'Ah. we've got an Aboriginal
minister.' They'd expect miracles and you couldn�t produce miracles. On the
other hand, you�d have the whites saying, 'Ah, we�ve got a blackfella up there,
we�ll see how bloody good he is; how can he change the system?' And, of course,
you couldn�t.�
But promotion didn�t come, and in 1983, with Aborigines no longer fashionable in
Queensland, Bonner was dropped to an unwinnable position on the Senate ticket.
He resigned from the Liberal Party and stood as an Independent, polling well but
not quite well enough to hold a seat.
In retirement he continued to campaign for Aboriginal rights hut was always a
moderate; the increasing militancy of the new generation and what he saw as
their disrespect for their more patient elders caused him great distress.
Bonner�s last major public appearance came at last year�s Constitutional
Convention, which he attended as a monarchist delegate. Though gravely ill from
lung cancer, he made a passionate speech in which he accused the republican side
of betraying every principle they had taught his people. For two centuries
Aborigines had been urged to forget their old ways and accept the superior
whitefella system, but now the whitefellas were saying the system wasn�t really
so good. �How dare you," cried Bonner, �how dare you'."' It was electrifying.
He died soon afterwards, sincerely honoured and mourned, hut still unreconciled.
When Bonner left the Senate, he summarised the position as he saw it:
"Governments, regardless of their political persuasion, have not gone out and
sold their policies to the general Australian community, and I must say to a
large extent we, the Aboriginal people, must share the blame, too, because we
haven�t tried to enlighten our fellow Australians of the problems that we face.
And there is a need for special legislation and special projects to assist us to
enter into the 1990s alongside our fellow Australians, with dignity and pride
and where there is justice for all, and particularly for us, the Aboriginal
people."
A cynic would say that only the date has changed since. This is the challenge
that Aden Ridgeway still has to pick up.
Mungo MacCallum
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