by Robert Manne
What is interesting is that these reports did not stir Australian conscience or provoke debate. Tanter calls his study Witness Denied. This does not seem right to me. No one pretended that mass murder had not taken place. What is truly terrifying is that the politically convenient slaughter in Indonesia was greeted in Australia with indifference, not denial.
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What, then, of the attitude of the Australian anti-communist intelligentsia, with whom I was politically associated from the mid-1970s until the late 1980s? The magazine of the National Civic Council (NCC), News Weekly, covered the killings in some detail, and sometimes with what reads like genuine pity, although in general it attributed them not to General Suharto and his army but to revivalist Islam. On the other hand, as late as 31 August 1966, despite the downfall of Sukarno and the mass slaughter of the PKI, the leader of the NCC, B.A. Santamaria, briefly a political ally of mine, warned darkly about the possible return of Sukarno and of the communists, and therefore of the continuing Indonesian threat to Australia. The extermination of the PKI was clearly not enough to still his fears.
The performance of Quadrant, the magazine I edited between 1990 and 1997, was more shameful than that of News Weekly. In Quadrant’s March–April 1966 issue, the journal’s founding editor, the poet James McAuley, wrote of a visit to Jakarta. Even though the murder of between 100,000 and 300,000 leftists was common knowledge, he dismissed the slaughter in two words: a “bloody aftermath”. McAuley reserved his political sympathy for Mochtar Lubis, a liberal anti-communist writer who had spent several years in prison under Sukarno, in conditions comfortable enough to allow him to write. Apparently, the jailing of a single author moved McAuley more deeply than the murder of several hundred thousand communists or their supporters. A year later, Quadrant published an uncritical account of the militantly anti-communist student movement KAMI. It spoke with enthusiasm about KAMI’s championship of human rights and the noble role it had played in the destruction of the PKI. Not a word appeared about the murders or KAMI’s involvement in the slaughter. We know that even the CIA was worried about handing over weapons that might end up in the hands of KAMI. We also know that KAMI was involved in the violence in Aceh in early 1966.
Quadrant’s foremost authority on Indonesia was the Australian National University professor of economics Heinz Arndt. In 1968, at a time when some murders were still occurring, he wrote in Australian Outlook on Suharto and his government. Arndt did not address the murders directly. Instead, in response to criticism of the Suharto government on grounds of human-rights violations, he argued that the government was “desperately anxious not to be thought undemocratic, militaristic, dictatorial”, and was therefore unable or reluctant “to assert its will” against the occasionally authoritarian behaviour of provincial underlings. This was a curious way of describing the nature of a government led by the architect of one of the century’s great political crimes.
By contrast, my old mentor, Frank Knopfelmacher, was brutal – both in his enthusiasm over the political consequences of the murders and in his description of the savagery of the perpetrators. In the News Weekly of 12 January 1966, Knopfelmacher expressed open gratitude that the “Soekarno–PKI racket”, as he called it, had been destroyed. On the other hand, in an article in the Bulletin of 26 November 1966, he acknowledged the role of the army in the slaughter, and described without euphemism the actions of the Indonesian soldier, “the peasant in uniform”, who had fallen “upon the PKI with the most frightful ferocity and conducted the most sanguine massacres in Javanese villages under PKI control or influence”. Knopfelmacher was perhaps the only member of the Australian anti-communist intelligentsia whose writing shows an awareness of the nature and gravity of the human tragedy that had occurred.
This story has a painful personal meaning. My political identity was shaped by the Holocaust. At first this drew me naturally to the Left. However, because of my reading about the historical crimes of Stalin and the contemporary crimes of Mao Zedong, and because of the influence of two teachers, Vincent Buckley and Frank Knopfelmacher, during my undergraduate days I was gradually drawn into the anti-communist movement. There were two main reasons why people became anti-communists in those days. The first was geopolitical: because they believed the future of the world would be determined by the outcome of the Cold War that was being fought between communism and democracy. The second was moral: because of the crimes of Stalin and of Mao. For my part, I did not become an anti-communist because of the Cold War. In 1970, I marched against Australia’s participation in the United States–led Vietnam War. I became an anti-communist because only the anti-communist intelligentsia seemed to speak of the mass killings associated with Stalin and with Mao in an appropriate moral register.
Between the time I was preparing for my matriculation exams in October 1965 and the time I arrived at the University of Melbourne in March 1966, some 500,000 Indonesians were slaughtered. During my undergraduate days there was no discussion of the murders. We were preoccupied by the Vietnam War. As I know now, the American and Australian governments supported the murders through aid and silence, principally for questionable foreign-policy reasons. The threat of Chinese aggression, especially at the time of the Sino–Soviet schism, was vastly overblown. The anti-communist intelligentsia offered their governments full support. It is of course possible, perhaps even likely, that if the Indonesian communists had come to power a different kind of tragedy might have occurred. But can it seriously be maintained, as many anti-communist defenders of the Western policy in Indonesia did then and still do, that acquiescence in the murder of half a million civilians on political grounds can be justified by speculations about possible events in the future?
If I had known then what I know now, while my attitude to the crimes of communism would have been no different, I hope I would have had sufficient judgement to have given the anti-communist movement a far wider berth.
The Monthly, March 2016
THE SORRY HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA’S APOLOGY
The historical process that eventually led the Australian state to offer an apology to its Indigenous inhabitants was protracted, sometimes bitterly resisted and in several details rather puzzling.
To explain the process it is best to begin with two observations. First, settler societies find it peculiarly difficult to apologise to those peoples whose conquest and pacification is the condition of their existence. Those who settled in what became the United States of America have found it easier to offer apology to those they transported as slave labour from Africa than they have to the Native Americans that they dispossessed. The settler Jewish population of Israel has never felt that an apology is due to the Palestinian Arabs. And as for Australia, until relatively recently the British settlers and their descendants have struggled to speak truthfully about what the creation of the new society entailed: the near-destruction of Aboriginal society. Sigmund Freud explained the reason for this moral blindness clearly: “It is universally admitted that in the origins of the traditions and folklore of a people, care must be taken to eliminate from the memory such a motive as would be painful to the national feeling.”
Second, insofar as settler societies do hold in memory the conquest and pacification of the peoples who stand in the way of the building of a new society, it is because of the armed resistance to conquest that the Indigenous populations had been capable of mounting. The military struggle between the white settlers and the native populations has always been a vivid part of American popular culture. New Zealand settlers have never forgotten their wars against the Maori. In Australia, the small Indigenous clans were not capable of fighting the kind of war seen in the United States or New Zealand. As a consequence, both the process of the dispossession and the recognition that this was a morally serious matter dropped out of national memory.
The first person who saw this clearly was the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner. In the late 1960s he outlined the peculiar mindset of non-Indigenous Australians, what he called the G
reat Australian Silence. Stanner did not mean by this that from time to time individual Australians had not felt pangs of conscience when reflecting on the destruction of Aboriginal society. What he meant was that for more than 150 years, the story of the brutal destruction of Aboriginal society had been progressively and systematically erased from collective national memory. At the time of the federation, Australians were proud of the supposed fact that in the creation of their new society scarcely a drop of blood had been shed. Until the late 1960s in all the standard histories of Australia – even Manning Clark’s – the dispossession and destruction of Aboriginal society had no place. John La Nauze thought the story merited no more than a melancholy footnote.
Stanner and his friends, such as Nugget Coombs and Judith Wright, formed the first generation of non-Indigenous Australians that was fully alive to the moral meaning of the dispossession. But the political project they generated was not the idea of an apology but a belated treaty with the Indigenous peoples. During the Hawke years, the idea of a treaty slowly died. It was replaced in the early 1990s by the quest for what was called reconciliation.
This story must be told in two parts. During the prime ministership of Paul Keating, the High Court brought down its Mabo judgement which for the first time recognised the existence in common law of native title. In response, Keating at Redfern in December 1992 spoke about the destruction of Indigenous society with a plainness not seen either before or since: “We did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.”
Interestingly, even though it has always been recognised that these are some of the most important words ever spoken by an Australian prime minister, they have never been regarded as a political apology. In part this is because the word sorry was not spoken. In part it was because there had been no political preparation for the speech or any signal of its importance. The speech took everyone by surprise, even to some degree Keating. After the Redfern speech the idea of an apology to the Indigenous people was still thought of as unfinished business.
Rather confusingly, two processes Keating set in train generated two different versions of the form that apology should take. The Keating government created a Reconciliation Council whose centrepiece was always going to be the offer of a formal apology to the Indigenous peoples and, no less importantly, their acceptance. Simultaneously, the Keating government commissioned a Human Rights and Equal Opportunity report into the removal of Aboriginal children. When delivered in 1997, it called upon the Commonwealth government to apologise formally to the victims of a government practice and policy that lasted seventy years. One of the ideas of an apology generated during the Keating years was very general, concerning the dispossession and its aftermath. The other was very historically specific. In the Australian public mind these two very different kinds of apology were never clearly differentiated, becoming in the end almost indistinguishable.
During the Howard years, both forms of apology were stubbornly resisted. In order to resist the idea of the general apology for the destruction of Aboriginal society, in 1999 Howard brought to the parliament an expression of what he called regret about what he described as the one significant blemish in Australian history: the dispossession of the Indigenous population. Characterising the dispossession as a blemish reduced it to a superficial imperfection. Howard, following the historian Geoffrey Blainey, described giving it a greater significance in Australia’s history than was due as taking a “black armband” view. More importantly, regretting the occurrence of the dispossession was a means by which the present generation could evade the issue of responsibility. To regret something in no sense implies the shouldering of responsibility. I have no doubt Howard regretted not only the dispossession of Indigenous society, but also the Irish potato famine.
When it came to the demand for an apology to the Stolen Generations, this evasion of responsibility was even more explicit. Time and again, Howard argued that no present prime minister could apologise for the deeds of their predecessors. This argument was self-evidently dishonest. Did Howard truly believe that the present prime minister of Japan could not apologise for the brutal mistreatment of Australian prisoners of war during World War II? In addition, he argued that our generation should not apologise for deeds that were carried out by earlier generations because their actions were misguided but driven by good intentions. If the motives of earlier generations could not be questioned then of course in the policy and practice of Aboriginal child removal there was really nothing requiring an apology. Howard never applied this kind of argument to the more general question of the dispossession. It was however not long before one of his most extreme followers, Keith Windschuttle, did.
Howard could slow the momentum towards the formal apology to the Indigenous peoples of Australia. But he could not stop it altogether. It is more or less universally believed that Kevin Rudd’s finest hour was the apology he delivered in February 2008 to the Stolen Generations. There were, however, certain limitations. First, Rudd’s speech did not transcend the confusion that had developed between the general historical apology to the Indigenous people and the historically specific one owed to the victims of Aboriginal child removal. Second, according to the prime minister, the question of the apology was now finished business. It was time to move on to more practical considerations.
Nor had the shadow cast by the Howard years yet lifted. During the early 1990s, the question of the apology was attended by an atmosphere of true moral intensity. For many Australians, something of central importance in the life of the nation was being transacted. During the Howard years that moral intensity gradually drained away. Despite the momentary excitement at the time of the Rudd apology, it has never returned. Insofar as there is any interest in Indigenous questions, it is now focused not on the quest for reconciliation but almost solely on closing the gap and the overcoming of what is called Indigenous community dysfunction.
This emphasis has its costs. When Julia Gillard stitched together her agreement with the Greens, one item on the agenda was Indigenous constitutional recognition. Eventually this question had to be postponed until the next parliament not because there was opposition to the idea but simply because there was, within the non-Indigenous population, so little genuine interest or enthusiasm. The one thing the Gillard government has done was to introduce a preparatory constitutional recognition bill in early 2013. Speaking to this bill, the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, said: “We have never fully made peace with the first Australians. This is the stain on our soul. [Until we have acknowledged] that this land was as Aboriginal [in 1788] as it is Australian now … we will be an incomplete nation and a torn people.”
In the Australian discourse over the dispossession, these words, spoken by the deeply conservative leader of the Liberal Party, ought to have represented a moment of true significance in the moral history of the nation. The entire political spectrum was now united in a long-sought-after understanding: that the Indigenous people of Australia had suffered an unspeakable tragedy; that they were owed a heartfelt and humble apology from the people who had dispossessed them. Yet rather disconcerting, at least to me, was the fact that when that moment arrived, so thin had the moral atmosphere concerning the meaning of the dispossession become that hardly anyone seemed to notice.
The Guardian, 26 May 2013
NOEL PEARSON AND INDIGENOUS CONSTITUTIONAL RECOGNITION
There is one dimension of Tony Abbott’s political character that does not fit with his wall-to-wall conservatism: his interest in the wellbeing, according to his lights, of Aboriginal Australia and his personal “crusade” for Indigenous constitutional recognition. This dimension of Abbott’s politics first became apparent in February 2013 when, as the leader of the Opposition, he spoke on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Recognition Bill. According to Abbott, Australia w
as a “blessed country”, except for one thing: “We have never fully made peace with the first Australians.” Abbott described this failure as a “stain on our soul”. Australia had to do now what should have been done 200 or 100 years ago: “acknowledge Aboriginal people in our foundation document”. When he became prime minister, Abbott showed that these words were not an aberration. He began to prepare the ground carefully for a referendum on Indigenous constitutional recognition and let it be known that its success was one of his most heartfelt prime-ministerial ambitions. Clearly there is something peculiar in the Abbott discrepancy – the arch conservative genuinely interested in Indigenous constitutional recognition – that needs to be explained.
My explanation begins with two words: Noel Pearson. In 2005 Pearson delivered the Mabo Oration on the place of Indigenous Australians in the nation. His speech concluded with these words:
The political truism that only Nixon could go to China is pertinent here. Only a highly conservative leader, one who enjoys the confidence of the most conservative sections of the national community, will be able to lead the country to an appropriate resolution of these issues. It will take a prime minister in the mould of Tony Abbott to lead the Australian nation to settle the “unfinished business” between settler Australians and the other people who are members of this nation: the Indigenous people.
This was remarkably prescient. It was also part of what Pearson describes as his political “long game”. At the time Abbott was no more than a middle-ranking member of the Howard cabinet.
Under Gillard, Pearson joined the expert panel considering the question of Indigenous constitutional recognition, established in the compact with the Greens. For him, however, the planets only began aligning favourably, as he put it, as it became obvious that Abbott would become the next prime minister. For Abbott, as he admitted recently, conversion to the cause of Indigenous constitutional recognition was long in coming. There is every reason to believe that it came primarily because of Pearson’s friendship and tuition.