November 22.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘...a brutal history.’
“British colonisation was seen as both an invasion and an awesome social experiment...”
As late as 1959 Professor John La Nauze could depict the history of Aboriginal people as a 'melancholy anthropological footnote'. [1]
But in the half-century that followed, Australians discovered that the New World was actually the old, and that the true 'nomads' were the colonisers. The nation continent was reimagined as a jigsaw of bio-regional countries, which had for so long been its state. The biological cringe about 'monotonous gums', 'songless birds' and 'fossil animals' was replaced by a deep historical narrative about the continent's southern organic genesis. [2] Australian history became as much about ecological, social and technological discontinuities as about the political stability and continuity for which the Europeans settlers first celebrated it. British colonisation was seen as both an invasion and an awesome social experiment; there was dancing with strangers and there was war.
Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990, p. 159. John La Nauze, 'The Study of Australian History 1929-1959'.
For an eloquent and influential synthesis of this new biological story, see Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People, Sydney, Reed Books, 1994, where he also reflected on how quickly the factual world of his childhood had been overturned. See also George Seddon, Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997: Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007; and Kirsty Douglas, Pictures of Time Beneath: Science, Heritage and the Uses of the Deep Past, Melbourne, CSIRO Publishing, 2010.
Acknowledgment: Tom Griffiths, The Art Of Time Travel, pp. 320-321, 366 n.5, n.6.
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“One of the problems with Australia is that we don't really recognise the true history of the country. It was a brutal history.”
In 2014, a federal government committee recommended that a National Keeping Place be erected in the Parliamentary Triangle. It would house “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders ancestral remains with no known community of origin”. It would also “serve as a memorial dedicated to the memory of all ancestors who were removed from their traditional homelands, including those that may never be repatriated from collections” around the world. The Yawuru elder and National Museum Council member Peter Yu put the case for a Keeping Place more succinctly than anyone before or since. “A national keeping place”, he said:
would also be a centre for learning and for me it would become like a beacon of conscience in the national capital where it reminds us of the importance of history and what we can do to each other, but [also] where we can learn from what we've done to each other. One of the problems with Australia is that we don't really recognise the true history of the country. It was a brutal history. And I think that contemporarily most Australians are divorced from understanding the trauma in that history.
The natural place for a Keeping Place lies waiting near Reconciliation Place, on the grassy mound between Parliament House and Lake Burley Griffin, in the central axis that connects the Parliament to the Australian War Memorial – a free-standing monument positioned in the heart of the national capital – dedicated to the memory of all those who died in the frontier wars. If we imagine the Parliamentary Triangle as international visitors might see it, the absence of such a memorial and a National Keeping Place – which could be both a place of reflection and learning and a showcase for indigenous culture around the country – is startling.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, Moment of Truth – History and Australia's Future, p. 72.