March 24.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
White and black perspectives
“They have not had their land stolen...”
In going to the heart of the matter of constitutional recognition [of the Indigenous people] there are few more important documents than Yunupingu's December 2008 essay in The Monthly which discusses the Yolingu 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 Yolingu from history.
And the gulf between the powers-that-be in Canberra and the Yolingu 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 0f 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 the dead.
Acknowledgment: Noel Pearson, A Rightful Place – Race, recognition and a more complete commonwealth, in Quarterly Essay Issue 55 2014, Black Inc. Griffin Press, Collingwood, 2014, pp. 1-2.
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“...what of the small matter of dispossession?”
Apart from massacre and humiliation, what of the small matter of dispossession?...it is hard to conceive it being done without injury to those dispossessed. Apart from its practical implications, there is a point that Raimond Gaita has made about the significance of dispossession, in his suggestion that:
For many of the settlers, the Aborigines were not the kind of limit to our will, to our interests and desires, that we mark when we speak of respecting someone's right, or treating them as ends rather than as means, or of according them unconditional respect, and so on. [1]
Henry Reynolds, who in less philosophical fashion has made this the point of his life, makes a poignant observation in this connection:
The injustice was gross regardless of whether the Aboriginal circumstances were compared to those of the settlers or those of indigenous people in other Anglo-Saxon colonies of settlement...whose native title was recognised...
The contrast between the respect accorded Aboriginal property rights and those of everyone else in early colonial Australia was even greater [than the latter]... Convicts – and marines as well – were hanged for theft while Sydney was still only a few months old. Hangmen and flagellators continued to enforce the sanctity of private property for the first two generations of settlement. A community with such priorities could not find a more decisive way to illustrate its fundamental disrespect for another society than to ignore its property rights. Even an enemy beaten in battle might receive more consideration. [2]
Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity, Text, 1999, pp. 78, 79.
Bain Attwood, 'Frontier Warfare', Australian Financial Review, 28/2/2003, 186-7.
Acknowledgment: Martin Kyger & Robert van Krieken, "The Character of the Nation" in Whitewash, On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, ed. Robert Manne, Black Inc, Melbourne, 1982, 2003, pp.91-92, 106 n.26, n.27.