It’s been excellent entertainment observing certain sections of the commentariat over the past week circle their settler wagons around yet another day that is becoming increasingly sacrosanct in the mythos of Australia’s nationhood. Particularly after the rise in public support already this year for a more honest and inclusive construction of the national narrative. Further agitating commentators such as Steve Price and Karl Stefanovic is the encroachment of consumer culture into the nether recesses and up the plinths, cenotaphs and poles of everything we hold sacred.
I refer, of course, to Anzac Day, but there is another significant anniversary this week. For those unaware, Sunday 29 April is the commemoration of Lieutenant James Cook sailing into Botany Bay in 1770.
Recent examinations of these dates in relation to Australia’s preferred representation of its national character have been inspired. Last week in a National Press Club address, Man Booker prize winning novelist Richard Flanagan seared several sacred cows of Australia’s national sensibility. And the historian Mark McKenna has also taken a hot pin to numerous bloated cultural conceits in his Quarterly Essay titled Moment Of Truth. No doubt Quadrant magazine has an armoury of apoplectic, scorn-enriched columns on standby. So it goes in the history wars, lest we forget.
You will hear a lot about Aboriginal resistance on the frontier this week. And rightly so. It began with the arrival of Cook’s exploration party, and it is patently inexcusable that “the cult of Anzac”, as Flanagan described it, continues to wilfully exclude the sacrifices and massacres of our First Nations soldiers. In recent years, there has been incremental improvement on this front but even the battle for that modest recognition has had to be fought tooth and nail.
Every year, as the dawn service gets underway, as the Anzac processions march the streets of cities, towns and villages across the continent, as the crowds stand stony-faced and reverent to the plaintive strains of the Last Post, I invariably find myself wondering how many of the people in attendance have, at any time during their lives, thought or said that Aboriginal political dissidents should just “get over it”. And in response I ask, what does it matter that the superhero film, The Avengers: Infinity War opens on Wednesday? Welcome to our world. I, for one, welcome our new Marvel overlords.
Price and Stefanovic cry that it is an insult to “our” traditions. Well, I recall a similar “grubby cash grab”, as Stefanovic described the decision to release the film on 25 April, sweeping into the institution of Good Friday around two decades ago. As many people remonstrated at that decision to “open” the most sacred – and previously the most boring – of Christian holy days, I stood and applauded. Wonderful stuff, I thought then and stand by that position today. It wasn’t an intrusion on “our” society’s values. Enough of the hypocrisy. Open the markets! Open the stadium gates for the footy! Open the cinemas! Open the detention centres! Open the formation of Australia’s national identity to new influences and criticisms too.
We’ve all witnessed the retaliations on Scott McIntyre and Yassmin Abdel-Magied in the past couple of years for their critiques of the peculiar fanaticism that has permeated the commemoration of the Anzacs since around the mid-1990s. Should I be threatened with similar reprisals, I reiterate that I do attend Anzac Day services and indeed respect the sacrifices of our diggers. There is a history of soldiering in my family. But I also realise that the Anzac “spirit” has been exploited by a litany of preening politicians to curry a notion of national legitimacy among otherwise politically indifferent and economically disaffected constituencies.
I look around at the crowd during welcome to country ceremonies too. What do I see? Non-Indigenous people diving head-first into their smartphones. When I am at the front of the room delivering an acknowledgement of country, I see the courteous smiles tighten and the eyes glaze over.
Some Aboriginal people have upped the ante whenever presented with the opportunity to address a gathering. They forcefully drive home truths about our dispossession and our ongoing resistance to colonialism. These expressions are generally followed by pointed declarations of sovereignty. I’ve given that kind of delivery a run but have come to realise that it too is readily disregarded. A sinister glow instantly illuminates a wall of detached faces.
After some consideration, I decided the elders who concocted these ideas were much savvier than I am. These ceremonies are not polite gestures, nor defiant statements, but shrewd provocations. They are mechanisms that oblige you to position yourself in relation to acts of barbarity. And that situation confers new responsibilities upon you. You either become woke, as the kids say; or remain complicit in the perpetuation of an increasingly wretched cover-up. And that is something that the spirit of our ancestors, our diggers and our marvellous cinematic superheroes spurn in the name of justice.
• Jack Latimore is a Goori writer and researcher based in Melbourne
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