The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  Darwin wrote:

  when civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short … Of the causes which lead to the victory of civilised nations, some are plain and simple, others complex and obscure. We can see that the cultivation of the land be fatal in many ways to savages, for they cannot, or will not, change their habits.

  Of course, the deformation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection into social Darwinism and the scientific racism of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth was the source of much misery for indigenes throughout the colonial world. Darwin was not entirely innocent of this conflation of biology and culture, which gave scientific authority to an ideology of inevitability about the demise of the Tasmanians and others of their ilk in the face of European superiority.

  I expected Charles Darwin. But I didn’t expect Charles Dickens.

  Of the century’s greatest English novelist, the author of Great Expectations and an immortal canon, Lawson writes, ‘Dickens famously attacked … the humanitarian idealisation of the “noble savage” in June 1853, in a furious denunciation that amounts, to use modern-day language, to a call for genocide.’

  Dickens wrote:

  I call him a savage, and I call a savage something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth … my position is that if we have anything to learn from the Noble Savage, it is what to avoid. His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his nobility nonsense. We have no greater justification for being cruel to the miserable object, than for being cruel to a William Shakespeare or an Isaac Newton; but he passes away before an immeasurably better and higher power than ever ran wild in any earthly woods, and the world will be all the better when his place knows him no more.

  I am yet to work out whether, how and when to tell my girl that the creator of Pip, Pumblechook and that convict wretch Magwitch may have wished her namesake great-great-grandmother off the face of the earth.

  Ironically, when one’s identification with the magnificent literary treasures of England turns out so, there is a Dickensian pathos to the crestfallen scene. One is acutely conscious of what Robert Hughes called ‘anachronistic moralising’, but the bridge between our contemporary values and those of Dickens’s time should surely be a universal and timeless humanity – but alas not.

  I don’t know whether it is hard for all Aborigines, but it certainly is for me, to read this history with a historian’s dispassionate objectivity and without the emotional convulsions of identification and memory. As a child, I loved my mother’s mother most in the world; her humour, generosity and ill-temper I often detect in myself and in the various countenances of my children. An irascible, pipe-smoking, bush-born lady, she bustled with her portmanteau on perambulations to her numerous grandchildren growing up in the Daintree and Bloomfield missions, and the Hope Vale Mission of my childhood. She could have been Truganini, but less travelled and from a smaller rainforest world than the nineteenth-century Tasmanian whose passing in 1876 was a world-historical event, marking the assumed extinction of a race. It was a reverberation I would feel when I learnt her name in primary school and the awful meaning of her distinction.

  How many Australians born in the 138 years since Truganini’s death learnt her legend and scarcely thought deeper about the enormity of the loss she represented, and the history that led to it? Her spirit casts a long shadow over Australian history, but we have nearly all of us found a way to avert our eyes from its meaning.

  That small item in the primary-school curriculum of my childhood would have been learnt by all my generation. Maybe it wasn’t a formal part of any syllabus, but it was one of those salient facts of Australian society that every child absorbed, like Don Bradman’s batting average and Phar Lap’s outsized heart. It would have been learnt by John Howard and Paul Keating. By Gough Whitlam and Robert Menzies. I don’t know if they teach kids about Truganini today.

  As a student of history but not a historian, I am as well read as many, but I too have skirted this history. Learning later in life of the descendants of the original Tasmanians, and the offence of the assumption of extinction, seemed to lessen the imperative to face the question of Truganini’s moral legacy. Maybe the scale of the horror diminished as the country accepted the fact of the continued survival of Tasmania’s Aboriginal community. But surely the fact of the descendants’ survival does not in any way alter or diminish the profundity of what happened to their ancestors.

  In his 1968 Boyer Lecture, W.E.H. Stanner spoke of the ‘Great Australian Silence’:

  inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness. It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale. We have been able for so long to disremember the Aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so.

  This excluded quadrant of the landscape was not just a national phenomenon: it was personal. Forgetfulness was not just a cult: it was resorted to by individual Australians, descendants of both the invading Europeans and the Aborigines. Australians who, like me, struggle to work out how we might deal with the past.

  The cult of forgetfulness

  I had hoped to avoid the past – for sheerly political reasons. In this essay I seek to make a case for constitutional reform recognising indigenous Australians. This must by definition be a unifying cause. If we don’t have an argument that can persuade 90 per cent of the nation, then the cause of constitutional reform is lost. Any successful case must transcend the natural political and cultural polarities of Australian society, and seek and seize political bipartisanship. This can only happen if Australians faced with a constitutional proposition are led by the better angels of our nature.

  The risk with history is that it may provoke partisanship and division, both among the cultural and political tribes of the nation at large, and between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

  We witnessed this in the History Wars of the 1990s and 2000s, when the ‘black armband’ historians and political leaders were pitted against the ‘white blindfold’ historians and political leaders. Led by Keith Windschuttle on the one hand and Robert Manne and Henry Reynolds on the other, the wars were a bitter and not always illuminating affair.

  But the wars were unavoidable.

  Following the Great Australian Silence at the end of the 1960s, from the ’70s through to the ’90s there was a burgeoning of Aboriginal history, led by scholars such as Reynolds. In hindsight, given the intense relationship between indigenous policy and politics and the representation and interpretation of the nation’s history, the rise of a counter-narrative in the form of Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Volume 1, 2002), was inevitable. No discourse can lean one way for long. No wind can blow from one direction without restraint.

  The public contributions of the doyen of conservative historians, Geoffrey Blainey, were the first indications of the discomfort of those who held the settler Australian narrative. Blainey would have been better qualified to steady the ship of the nation’s narrative had he done so as a historian. Instead he did so as a polemicist. His caricaturing of the new frontier history as the ‘black armband’ view made for a tribal fight in the public square, rather than a debate within the discipline of history. Blainey’s commendable record on Aboriginal history was obscured in the ensuing debate: he was not contemptuous of the Aborigines; he wanted to defend settler traditions. It was most unfortunate that Blainey made his case in this manner. A serious point in an unserious way.

  Over the past three decades, I have read Henry Reynolds’s numerous books, and I well understand the grounds upon which conservative and nationalist readers of his histories baulk at his interpretations. It seems to me that Reynolds’s lifelong contribution has been a
liberal pursuit of a shared history for the nation. He has been about finding grace for the nation by breaking the silence on Aboriginal history and all the time being faithful to Australia.

  But there are two problems with Reynolds’s project. First, he comes to the case from a patently political background. His wife, Margaret, was a Labor senator for Queensland during the Hawke years, and the couple came at politics and indigenous issues from a certain Labor left perspective. There is a strongly Fabian tone to his arguments, and trenchant advocacy frames his books. In the acknowledgements of An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australian History (2001), Reynolds tellingly reveals: ‘My family – Margaret, John, Anna and Rebecca – have been, as ever, supportive and have frequently reinforced my commitment to progress along the often difficult road of human rights advocacy.’ Which, for his critics, raises the question whether he was primarily engaged in academic history or human rights advocacy, and perhaps suggests that more dispassion and less politics might have better enabled Reynolds to secure a shared history for his fellow Australians.

  I will say at this point that I am at one with Henry and Margaret Reynolds on the human rights side of the equation, but at odds with them on the responsibilities side. They have been and are mute on the social crisis of Aboriginal Australia; indeed, I have observed that the policies needed to tackle indigenous misery – economic integration, social order and welfare reform – have been championed by the right, and in 2006 noted that ‘Windschuttle and [Gary] Johns are more attuned to many of the necessary policies than the progressives’.

  The same thing struck me about rock star and former Labor politician Peter Garrett as the former senator Reynolds. No greater friends when it came to indigenous rights and paying the rent and decrying the burning beds of history, but completely silent about the unravelling social crisis of the present – and, to the extent they thought about what needed to be done, mostly wrongheaded. It is strange that people who would insist strongly on Aboriginal agency in the past would turn a blind eye to such passivity in the present.

  Second, I find persuasive Bain Attwood’s critique of Reynolds’s oeuvre as consisting overmuch of ‘juridical history’: the telling of history as if presenting evidence in a legal case before a court. I share Attwood’s view that Reynolds’s core trilogy – The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), Frontier (1987) and With the White People (1990) – is unimpeachable. But much of the rest has the features of juridical history, and too many contentions seem to be submissions to a court case rather than based on a proper grappling with the political economy of the time and circumstances of which he writes. Therefore some appear thin.

  In a 2007 essay for Griffith Review, I analysed the dynamic of the political discourse between progressives and conservatives. I observed that the conservative camp comprised a broad spectrum, ranging from true denialists such as Windschuttle to those who, in their cups, would admit the truths of Aboriginal history, but who were defensive of their own heritage and of the accomplishments of their forebears. John Howard was not a denialist; he was defensive about his settler heritage. Of course, an inability to deal with the psychological meaning of this historical legacy often means the default position becomes a version of denialism – or is strongly coloured by denial. After all, the long, 150-year reign of the Great Australian Silence was about denial.

  On the other hand, I observed that progressives were prone to use racial discrimination and historical denial as political bludgeons against their conservative opponents, and their advocacy for an honest confrontation with the colonial past degenerated into moral vanity. The result was that progressives reinforced victimhood of the indigenes while their opponents denied their victimisation.

  Having said this, I now turn to the volatile question of the extirpation of the original Tasmanians.

  I hoped to avoid the past, but it is not possible. I hoped to dis-remember the past, but it is not possible.

  The question of genocide in Australia

  The use of the term ‘genocide’ and the rhetoric of the Jewish Holocaust is incendiary. The destruction of the Tasmanians was an event of world history long before the Nazi genocide of the Jews. It was well established in the discourse of British and Australian history long before the 1948 Genocide Convention. It was referred to around the world during the course of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth.

  Whether you use the word most common in colonial times – ‘extirpation’ – or other words also used – ‘extermination’ or ‘extinction’ – or the word ‘genocide’, they speak to the same meaning. And that meaning is the loss to the world by the passing of a people from history by killing and mass death. The fact that a descendant community survived this history does not negate or reduce the profundity of the loss. When as a primary schooler I was told the significance of Truganini was that she was the last ‘full blood’ of Tasmania, I understood clearly what was meant. The language of racial composition was commonplace in that time, and still is, among black and white Australians, despite its contemporary disreputability. It is not to deny the fact of the survival of the descendant community, and neither is it to impugn their identity, to remember the enormity of the fact that Truganini’s death marked the passing from the world of one of the last Tasmanians without mixed lineage. A lineage that had occupied that land for more than 35,000 years.

  Those last sentences were hard to write. I was not sure I could get it right, and still don’t know whether I have. I mean not to offend contemporary Aborigines of Tasmania. I mean not to return to the mind-frame of racialist eugenics that has so tangled the history that I wish untangled. I just do not want to deny or diminish the tragedy of Truganini and the old people of Tasmania.

  Of course, as a reader of history and not a historian, I can hardly untangle this history. I can only say how I respond to and deal with it, as an Aboriginal and an Australian.

  History is never resolved, and we should not make a shared future contingent on a shared past. For this reason I cannot abandon the examination of genocide as readily as some eminent historians in the wake of the History Wars prescribe.

  I will not deal with the debate on whether the removal of children, identified by Michael Dodson and Sir Ronald Wilson in the Bringing Them Home report of 1997, constituted genocide. I will also not deal with the debate on whether the colonial history of mainland Australia – particularly my home state of Queensland – involved genocidal episodes. Instead I will confine my discussion to what happened in Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century.

  Among historians who have been at the forefront of Aboriginal history, there is some respectable consensus against the use of the term ‘genocide’ in this context.

  Henry Reynolds’s An Indelible Stain? centres on official correspondence from secretary of state for the colonies Sir George Murray to Tasmania’s lieutenant governor, Sir George Arthur, on 5 November 1830. Murray referred to the ‘great decrease which has of late years taken place in the amount of the aboriginal population’ and his apprehension ‘that the whole race of these people may, at no distant period, become extinct’. He wrote:

  But with whatever feelings such an event may be looked forward to by those of the settlers who have been sufferers by the collisions which have taken place, it is impossible not to contemplate such a result of our occupation of the island as one very difficult to be reconciled with feelings of humanity, or even with principles of justice and sound policy; and the adoption of any line of conduct, having for its avowed, or for its secret object, the extinction of the native race, could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British government.

  Reynolds’s discussion focuses on the coining of the term ‘genocide’ by the Polish Jewish jurist and American émigré Raphael Lemkin, in the 1940s, and its adoption in the Genocide Convention of 1948, following the Holocaust. Lemkin was clear that while the term and its establishment as a crime in international law was new, its occurrence in history was no
t. Lemkin specifically assumed that the events in Tasmania which I am discussing here constituted such an occurrence.

  Applying the definition of the crime of genocide to events before the enactment of the Convention involves retrospectivity, and indeed its application to the Holocaust was necessarily retrospective. It was applied by Lemkin and is generally not considered anachronistic when applied to the history of the Armenians at the hands of Turkey in 1915. How far back does retrospectivity turn into anachronism?

  But anachronism is not the only objection to taking terminology invented in the 1940s and applying it to events in colonial Tasmania. In his discussion in An Indelible Stain? and Forgotten War (2013), Reynolds comes down against the application of genocide to Australia because the 1948 Convention requires intention on the part of the offending state. The absence of an explicit intention on the part of the colonial authorities, who frequently expressed concern at the treatment of indigenous peoples at the frontier, ultimately underpins Reynolds’s conclusion. It is a lawyer’s conclusion. The lawyer in me protests that the circumstances and the evidence clearly speak of a constructive intention on the part of the colonial authorities, but this debate is not merely a legal argument. John Docker’s point is apposite:

  We must also remember that in Lemkin’s 1944 definition … the cultural and political were both strongly present as part of the manifold ways the essential foundations of life of a group were being destroyed. Lemkin’s 1944 definition and the Lemkin-influenced definition enshrined in the 1948 convention have acted in subsequent thinking about genocide like a double helix – neither reducible one to the other nor wholly separable. The definition of genocide, that is, always has a double character: both discursive and legal. In my view, we should not base the historical study of genocide on a legal definition alone; indeed, we should not base the historical study of any phenomena on a legal definition alone.