January 9.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
‘A cult of forgetfulness’
“...it would seem as though the protection of our Aborigines might be regarded as a mere cant term.”
Days after the trial [of William Henry Willshire in 1891] an editorial appeared in The Port Augusta Dispatch cautiously examining the terms on which frontier policing in the Interior, up until this point, had been enabled to proceed:
The trial of MC Willshire last week points unmistakably to a necessity for some more efficient manner of dealing with crime in the interior than that at present in vogue. If no attempt is to be made to alter the conditions which now obtain, it would seem as though the protection of our Aborigines might be regarded as a mere cant term. As the case stands at present we have a police officer appointed to take charge of a corps of native trackers away in the interior. The former has absolute control – in fact his rule is despotic. The men whom he governs are...armed with the most deadly and destructive firearms, and have every means to hand for committing crime secretively in regions far removed from centres of civilisation...Let us put a case plainly. Suppose the officer in charge...should be tempted in an indiscreet moment to tumble a few native evildoers 'heels over head', who need be any the wiser? [1]
The Port Augusta Dispatch, 31 July 1891.
Acknowledgment: Amanda Nettlebeck & Robert Foster, In the Name of the Law – William Wilshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier, pp. 122, 199 n.16.
____
So knowing Aboriginal people died did not have the effect it should have. It was not the sort of moral tale that automatically brought the 'never, ever again' response. These historical deaths were part of the shutting down of a history, not of its continuous opening up.
Acknowledgment: Katrina M Schlunke, Bluff Rock – Autobiography of a massacre, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 2005, p. 13.
____
A 'cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale'.
In his 1968 Boyer Lectures After the Dreaming WEH Stanner wrote that the inattention of Australian historians to Aboriginal people was on such a scale it could not be explained by 'absent-mindedness'. He insisted that historians had carefully placed a window 'to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape'. Over time, he said, this simple forgetting turned into a 'cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale'. [1]
WEH Stanner, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians – An Anthropologist's View, ABC, Sydney, 1968, pp. 24-7.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas' Point, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2002, p.94 and n.29.
____
[Some 50 years later] in 2018 a book was published containing a collection of accounts from fifty-one Aboriginal contributors. It was titled Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia.
Each account reveals, to some degree, the impacts of invasion and colonisation – on language, on country, on ways of life, on how people are treated daily in the community, the education system, the workplace and in friendship groups.
The stories cover country from Nunkunu to Noongar, Wiradjuri to Western Arrernte, Ku Ku Yalinji to Kunibidji, Gunditjamara to Gumbaynggirr and many places in between.
Experiences span coastal and desert regions, cities and remote communities, and all of them speak to the heart – sometimes calling for empathy, oftentimes challenging stereotypes, always demanding respect.
Acknowledgment: Anita Heiss ed., Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, Black Inc, Carlton, 2018, p.1.