January 5.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Another dimension of violence
A postscript on another dimension of violence in Australian society.
There are a range of narratives that contribute towards understanding Australian society – both past and present. The focus of So That We Remember has been on the violence entailed in the dispossessing of Australia’s Indigenous people of their land and livelihood.
This violence occurred between two different peoples – the conquering Europeans within the invading British Empire, and the Indigenous peoples seeking to hold on to their ancestral homelands.
But within both groups of people there has been, tragically, a practice of violence that persists to this day. What is in view here is the violence that has been experienced by women and children within the nuclear and extended families of both societies.
It does not help to romanticise either the British Empire or a picture of Edenic innocence of Indigenous life. Both contained violence. For example, for the former it entailed the use of redcoats to “pacify” (to use an untruthful euphemism) the Indigenous people of the land being taken by the empire. It entailed patriarchal power structures permeating society, politics and churches.
For the latter, traditional Indigenous ways could carry with them the dominant rule of “male headship” – a euphemism for male power and control over women and children.
Not only a study of nineteenth century history, but an awareness of current twenty-first century Australian society, reminds, and alerts, us to the fact that domestic violence in Europeanised Australia has been with us since 1788. And the majority of those so adversely affected have been women and children. That is so to the present day.
So, too, when traditions transmitted for centuries upon centuries in Indigenous communities are reinforced or distorted through the importation of Western ways - male headship, clans being forcibly removed from their homeland, the introduction of alcohol, the destruction of language, the weakening of social fabric – domestic violence is also a historic and present reality.
For an awareness of the extent of the scourge of domestic violence in contemporary main-stream Australian society one has only to become familiar with the statistics of police callouts to deal with such a blight. As well, two websites give some indication of the extent of its existence in Australian life.
Family, domestic and sexual violence in Australia, 2018 - A report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare: <https://www.aihw.gov.au › domestic-violence › summary>
Violence Against Women In Australia – An overview of research - Vic. Health 2017: < https://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au>
This same scourge of violence is not absent from Indigenous life. Two studies of this phenomenon in the Indigenous context deserve at least to be noted:
* Peter Sutton, The Politics of Suffering – Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus, Melbourne University Publishing Carlton, 2011.
* Stephanie Jarrett, Liberating Aboriginal People From Violence, Connor Court Publishing, Ballan, 2013.
This summary is too brief for such an important topic. But its reality needs at least to be acknowledged in the context of this particular journey into Australian history.
~ Ray Barraclough