This year, the National Reconciliation Week’s theme is Don’t Keep History A Mystery. The theme is a clever disruption of white Australia’s preferred national narratives, and while I firmly believe that learning history is an appropriate critical response every day of the week the whole year round, like a lot of blackfellas, I’m still not persuaded that the so-called “path” towards reconciliation has sufficiently advanced the cause for a more just contemporary Australia.
Shortly after the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation launched Australia’s first Reconciliation Week in 1996, I overheard two whitefellas standing at a bar of a football clubhouse in Southport, Queensland considering the nature of “Abos”. By their erudite account, reconciliation was a joke because blackfellas were never happy, were always whinging about the past, and if you gave them an inch they’d end up thinking they were entitled to the bloody lot. Besides, they already got enough money and free Land Cruisers out of the government anyway.
That was 22 years ago. I regularly encounter the same uninformed bigotry today.
I recall the episode clearly because I interrupted them, in a respectful manner, to explain that the term “Abo” was offensive. I was a young fella and the men were middle aged and we were all standing in surveilled surrounds. I suppose they found some degree of novelty in my reproach, because an open conversation about generally acceptable terms for Aborigines ensued. Again, I routinely find myself engaged in identical conversations today.
Every year, the crux of Reconciliation Week is about fostering these types of encounters: mildly respectful dialogues that hopefully bridge cultural divides and differences through awareness, understanding and forgiveness. In this endeavour, the campaign reflects its provenance as the Week of Prayer for Reconciliation, a 1993 initiative of Australia’s major faith communities to observe the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People.
Yet, every year Reconciliation Week feels like a campaign that is preaching to the converted without making any meaningful headway into reconstructing contemptible racist attitudes that continue to undergird Australian society.
Research by Reconciliation Australia suggests around a third of the nation’s population still refuses to accept the historical facts of the inhumane treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, firstly at the hands of the colonial invaders, and then the white commonwealth. I’m certain that an even larger portion of the populace would dispute the fact that civil rights abuses towards First Nations peoples in Australia continues today.
The attitudes of this section of Australian society have not budged in a constructive direction in the past quarter of a century. The polite path, bejazzled with niceties, has failed. Consider how ridiculous it sounds to assert that this society is unified by a common understanding of our shared history. An incorrigible third of the populace simply has not and will not come to the table. Accordingly, the centrist public appeal can be shelved. Certainly, at this precise juncture in 2018, it must not be permitted to alleviate several urgent issues in Aboriginal affairs.
First, there can be no possibility of reconciliation while the Turnbull government continues its attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. There is public support for treaties, a truth commission, and an enshrined voice to parliament, but the cynicism within the federal government – commanded by a few senior ministers – and its shameful bromides to the far right impede the goodwill of the majority of people.
Only last week, in Senate estimates, a desperate government, led by Nigel Scullion – the minister for Indigenous affairs – attempted to discredit the Statement from the Heart by spinning a narrative to suggest that the Referendum Council didn’t meet its terms of reference, that the process was dominated by only a small group of elite Indigenous leaders, that the voice to parliament was an overreach, and, significantly, that it was a black-only process that excluded white Australians from participating.
In March, yet another joint parliamentary committee was appointed to punt the whole issue forward again. Rather than demonstrate any leadership, Malcolm Turnbull, like the conga-line of former prime ministers behind him, prefers to avoid calling-out this mulish third.
Nor can there be hope for reconciliation in a nation where it is considered acceptable that no criminal charges should result from the proven abuse of young Aboriginals in custody. Or where five out of eight states and territories refuse to formally implement a scheme like the custody notification system which is proven to reduce Aboriginal deaths in detention. Or even where critical black voices are persecuted for “creating more division” when attempting to speak out against the intolerance and systemic racism that continues to impact their lives.
On its website, Reconciliation Australia has identified five inter-related dimensions of reconciliation that it aims to address and, in doing so, achieve its vision of a reconciled nation: there is historical acceptance, equality and equity, race relations, institutional integrity, and each of those dimensions is connected by social unity. This year’s theme might succeed in generating engagement around one of those dimensions during the course of the campaign, but without genuine structural change, Australia will be no nearer a genuinely reconciled nation beyond this week than it has been at any point in the recent past.
- Jack Latimore is a Guardian Australia reporter and columnist
