A modest proposal: Why today should be Australia Day















Donnelly applies the whitener to Australian history

A few years back there was an ad campaign based on people’s ignorance of Australian history. According to the ad, everyone knew George Washington was the first US president but no one could name Australia’s First Prime Minister. The ad itself ensured the name of Edmund Barton, if not his legacy, was at least temporarily remembered.

What the ad was trying to do was to encourage more interest in Australian history, but therein lies a problem and a likely clue as to why no-one knew his name in the first place –  it is a contested space and full of cobwebs many want to remain undisturbed. One of Barton’s first acts as Prime Minister was to introduce the White Australia Policy. He told the new national parliament in 1901 Melanesian Kanakas were inferior to Europeans and they (the white parliamentarians) were guarding the last part of the world where “the higher races can live and increase freely for the higher civilisation”.  Barton’s point of view was shared by most white Australians in 1901, but these days is inconvenient for anyone wishing to laud the positives of Australia’s past.

This is Kevin Donnelly’s problem when he speaks about the Australian education system. The curriculum should be impartial and disinterested, he said, and should be based on the search for wisdom, understanding and the truth. This is motherhood stuff and what he is really complaining about comes when he bemoans the lack of focus on western civilisation and Judeo-Christian teaching in Australian history. Donnelly’s complaint is codswallop, as religion and western civilisation pervade all aspects of our educational system. But given his focus on Australian history and his concern those values are being “airbrushed” from the education system, Donnelly might not like it, if the truth was really told.

How would you apply western civilisation and Judeo-Christian values to why the Europeans came to Australia in the first place, uninvited and with a self-given mandate to take over?  How much was western civilisation and Christian values at fault when those that did come to Australia felt superior to those that lived here before, unwilling or unable to recognise Aboriginal culture when they didn’t see cities, councils, cathedrals or crops? How might civilisation and culture explain why the Europeans destroyed what went before, treating Indigenous people like either vermin to be killed off, animals to be tamed, or children to be educated in white ways? Or why those that came in the name of religion at missions and churches treated natives like slaves and their children like souls to be bartered off to the highest bidder?

Why was it a Barton-led nation at Federation determined Australia would be for whites only, preferably British, and the Aboriginals were no better than flora and fauna?  Would that religion explain our nation’s fetish for war – as long as they weren’t ones that took place on native soil? Would the “Judeo” bit explain Australian anti-semitism and the refusal to take in refugees from Nazi Germany? And why did the various branches of the “Christian” bit hate each other so much and leave a legacy of bitterness and bigotry that spanned generations?

Maybe Donnelly might tell us which aspect of western civilisation and Judeo-Christian heritage explains why in 2014 we are such a pack of bastards when it comes to letting others into the country and then washing our dirty immigration laundry in other people’s sinks. Never mind complaining about the new $8000 media visa into Nauru, why not examine the circumstances by how we permit this vile charade to happen?

Maybe too, Donnelly might have a quiet word with the marketing managers at Aldi and tell them why t-shirts with “Australia Est 1788” mixing snappy corporate branding with unfunny, inaccurate history is not such a good idea.

But Donnelly will do none of those things, being more keen to wallow in the reflected glory of western civilisation and religion celebrated than explore the murky shadows of their massive blind spots. The common point in these questions is what we choose to remember. Donnelly wants us to ignore the elements that make us feel uncomfortable and bask in those that make us feel good. His views are a proxy for those who want to paint a clean veneer of white-picket fence philosophy onto the messy and complex canvas of modern Australia.

Kevin Donnelly is doing the donkey work for more powerful actors. This pandering to Anzacs and Gallipoli is leftover secret men’s business from the days of the Howard government with many of the same players in the same positions of power to finish off the agenda. This is not education, this is cultural indoctrination.

Forget the Preamble, what Australia needs is a Treaty

The new Coalition Government has been making noises on a referendum to change the constitution to recognise First Australians. The wording has yet to be announced but Prime Minister Tony Abbott is saying it would “complete our constitution rather than change it.” What Abbott means by completion rather than change is not clear but I assume it means the change will be ornamental rather than have legal force. According to deputy Julie Bishop, the government wants a “deep discussion” with the Australian people before agreeing to the wording but here’s a free tip if the changes are purely for show: Forget it.

I say forget it, not because Australian constitutional referendums usually fail, but because there are genuine things constitutional change could do to improve the situation of First Australians. The most profound change would be to turn the preamble into a Treaty, common enough in other settler countries, but the first ever in 225 years of European occupation of Australia. Unlike a flowery but pointless preamble, a treaty would acknowledge past failures and injustices and show sincere desire for a better future and more just relationship.

A Treaty is a political document between sovereign people and it was this difficulty that saw John Howard reject the idea in 1988 as an absurd proposition that “a nation should make a treaty with some of its own citizens.” The idea is far from absurd to many Indigenous people who see it as the first step in the recognition of the wars and dispossession of their country and the genocide that followed. Howard’s assimilatory ideas in the face of historical evidence were blatantly contradictory. His culture of forgetting was shared by his immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock who told ABC in October 1998 there couldn’t be a treaty because there never had been a war in this country.

Ruddock’s idea of war was flawed as was his view of a Treaty. A Treaty (also known by its Yolgnu name Makarrata) was long seen as an appropriate way for whites to acknowledge Aboriginal equality and prior ownership. In 1979 an Aboriginal treaty committee was formed by prominent mostly left-wing whites. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser offered to discuss treaty conditions with Aborigines while eight years later his successor Bob Hawke spoke of ‘a compact of understanding’. This whitefella idea of a treaty was rejected by the Federation of Aboriginal Land Councils because of insufficient consultation with Aborigines, doubts about its significance and consequences, and because it would legalise occupation and use of sovereign Aboriginal lands by the Australian settler state. The Aboriginal Sovereign Treaty campaign in 1988 called for sovereign recognition and treaty. It was enshrined in the Barunga Statement presented to Hawke.

Barunga called for a treaty, a national system of land rights, compensation for land loss, an end to discrimination, Aboriginal self-determination and protection of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. Hawke promised a treaty but it faded from the agenda, replaced by land rights in the 1990s. John Howard fought land rights and firmly rejected treaty recommendation in favour of what he called ‘practical reconciliation‘. There was no reason the two couldn’t co-exist and indeed true practical reconciliation is impossible without a treaty framework. Australia has never negotiated the basic terms of peaceful coexistence between the first peoples of this continent and those who followed. Australia’s first peoples remain on the lowest rung of our society and are largely locked out of the wealth of an affluent country.

A Treaty that might address these failings has mutual obligations. For the Government it would mean responsibility to long-term funding and administrative support for education and health. For the Indigenous community it would mean taking primary responsibility for child protection, community justice and substance abuse. There are three key elements to a treaty: a) a starting point of acknowledgement b) a process of negotiation and c) outcomes in rights, obligations and opportunities. The hardest will be working out outcomes for a Treaty. A Treaty must be on the reasonable basis Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander societies have been injured and harmed throughout the colonisation process and just recompense is owed. This means giving away power or land or sovereignty – none of which will be easy. It might mean governments stop fighting land claims or guaranteeing Indigenous seats in parliament or returning Aboriginal reserves or other Crown land to original owners. There will be resistance to some or all of these. But if not addressed, we will merely be coping by forgetting and moving an age-old moral problem to the next generation. Without a Treaty, Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Islander people have difficulty advancing claims of title, compensation and sovereignty.

A Treaty is not just an important opportunity for blackfellas. It is also important to non-Indigenous people to come to grips with a challenging issue of great difficulty and complexity. Unlike a preamble which goes nowhere, a Treaty would help bridge the gulf, enable mutual understanding, and provide better public policy and better use of money. A Treaty would eventually be a source of pride, like Waitangi is to modern New Zealand. As a way of righting wrongs, it can also help in building a better nation, more secure in its identity, its symbols and values.