December 31.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
History essential to meaning and identity.
Historians ventured to the other side of the frontier and peered back at the 'white men's eyes', and Aboriginal people were compelled – and some chose – to cross the beach in the other direction. In remote parts of Australia, the Indigenous inhabitants became the custodians of white history as well as black, because they stayed on country while the whites moved away. [1] In the coastal cities Aboriginal people were found to have always been part of Australia's modern urban history. Indigenous scholars studied the nation's unending frontier and the intense colonial revolution into which they had been thrown. 'The gradual surfacing of the very history that had allegedly been “vanquished”', observed Mark McKenna, 'would come to represent the most significant shift in historical consciousness in twentieth-century Australia.' From that moment, McKenna came to believe (as had Greg Dening) that 'there was no history of Australia that was non-Indigenous'. [2] All these insights, with their compelling new narratives, have emerged since I was in primary school.
In the mid-1980s the young historian Noel Pearson sat with the old men of his community on the verandah of the old People's Home at Hope Vale and yarned about language, mission life, history, customs, hunting, birds, animals, plants, the weather, the past, the present, the future, Christianity, the church, politics and land rights. [3] Ten years later and two years after Mabo, Pearson gave the W K Hancock Memorial Lecture to the Australian Academy of the Humanities and, declaring that 'the truth must be sought', he honoured the craft of history because of its 'ability to explain present inequalities in terms of past injustice'. [4] Marcia Langton, another historian...felt that the formal study of history brought 'a terrible burden' for an Aboriginal person. It had for so long been used as weapon against her. But she also asked the question: 'Without history, how would we believe in the idea of Australia?' [5]
History is essential to meaning and identity and it is a powerful disciplinary tool in the search for truth.
Darrell Lewis, A Wild History: Life and Death on the Victoria River Frontier, Melbourne; Monash University Publishing, 2012, p. xix, and Deborah Bird Rose and Darrell Lewis, 'A Bridge and a Pinch', Public History Review, I, 1992, pp. 26-36.
Mark McKenna, 'The History of Anxiety', in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (eds.) The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume 2: The Commonwealth of Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 566.
Noel Pearson, 'Foreword' to John B Haviland with Roger Hart, Old Men Fog and the Last Aborigines of Barrow Point, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998, pp. ix-xi.
Noel Pearson, 'Mabo and the Humanities Shifting Frontiers', 1994 W K Hancock Memorial Lecture, in Derek Schreuder (ed.), The Humanities and a Creative Nation: Jubilee Essays, Papers from the Academy Symposium, November 1995, Australian Academy of the Humanities, Canberra, 1995, p. 52.
Marcia Langton, 'Prologue” to Rachel Perkins and Marcia Langton (eds.) First Australians: An Illustrated History, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2008, pp. xxiv-xxix, and Marcia Langton, 'A Fireside Chat', in Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths (eds.), Prehistory to Politics: John Mulvaney, the Humanities and the Public Intellectual, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996, pp. 134-43.
Acknowledgment: Tom Griffiths, The Art Of Time Travel, pp. 320-321, 366, n.7, n.8, n.9, n.10, n.11.