Places of Reconciliation

Commemorating Indigenous History in the Heart of Melbourne

Sarah W Pinto

• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780522872347
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Australia y Oceanía

Central Melbourne is filled with markers of the city's pasts. At its heart are the stories of exploration and settlement, of the so-called first to arrive, and of the building of a colony and nation. But when it comes to its Indigenous pasts, the centre of Melbourne has long been a place of silence. Over the last two decades, Indigenous histories and peoples have been brought into central Melbourne's commemorative landscapes. Memorials, commemorative markers, namings and public artworks have all been used to remember the city's Indigenous pasts. Places of Reconciliation shows how they came to be part of the city, and the ways in which they have challenged the erasures of its Indigenous histories. Sarah Pinto considers the kind of places that have been made and unmade by these commemorations, and concludes that the twenty-first century settler city does not give up its commemorative landscapes easily.

Chapter 1

Unsettling the settler city

In June 2000 Victoria’s Minister for Major Projects, John Pandazopoulos, announced the name of a major new arterial road in central Melbourne. The road had been built as part of the redevelopment of Melbourne’s Docklands precinct at the western edge of the city’s central business district (CBD). As Pandazopoulos explained, Victoria’s newly elected Labor government, led by Premier Steve Bracks, did not want to follow in the footsteps of the previous government, led by the Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett, and name new features and locations in Docklands after political figures. A year earlier, the Kennett government had announced that a major new tollway bridge over Docklands would be the Bolte Bridge, named for the former Liberal Premier of Victoria, Sir Henry Bolte.¹ Instead, Pandazopoulos declared that the new arterial road was to be given an Indigenous name, Wurundjeri Way, in recognition of the Wurundjeri peoples.

The name Wurundjeri Way was chosen from more than 1200 suggestions submitted to Melbourne’s tabloid newspaper the Herald Sun.² At the time of the announcement, Pandazopoulos noted that Wurundjeri Way was expected to carry more than fifty thousand vehicles each day, presumably to highlight the potential reach of the naming.³ The naming of Wurundjeri Way was the first permanent and official Indigenous commemoration to be introduced into the centre of Melbourne in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The naming also accorded with the agenda of the Bracks government, which had made a pre-election commitment to build a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and communities in Victoria. But it also took place during a period of significant public conversation about the relationships between the settler nation and Indigenous peoples. In the year 2000 a key driver of this conversation lay in Australia’s formal process of reconciliation.

In June 2000, Australians were nearing the end of a formal ten-year reconciliation process that aimed to bring together Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in a newly reconciled nation (discussed further below). Reconciliation had been both the source and subject of significant public and political debate throughout the 1990s, but with the end of the planned ten-year process looming on the centenary of Australia’s Federation on 1 January 2001—and the requirement to produce a formal document of reconciliation—this was a time when debates were heightened.

In the weeks before the Wurundjeri Way announcement, the organisation charged with running the formal reconciliation process, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, held one of its last major events, Corroboree 2000, in Sydney. The first day of Corroboree 2000 took place at the Sydney Opera House on 27 May, where the Council presented its final proposals for a formal document of reconciliation. It was a day of contention and disagreement, not only about reconciliation, but also about the Australian nation’s relationships with Indigenous peoples. Some Indigenous leaders, including Yawuru man Patrick Dodson, who is often referred to as the father of reconciliation, had refused to attend the gathering in protest at the direction of the formal documents. At the gathering itself, Prime Minister John Howard was booed and heckled by some in the crowd for his government’s agenda, and especially his continuing refusal to apologise to Indigenous peoples following the release of the Bringing Them Home report into the removal of Aboriginal children from their families.⁴ The Howard Liberal/National government had come to power in 1996, halfway through a reconciliation process that it had not created. Howard was at times particularly hostile towards the idea of reconciliation and had sought to shift the focus of the process solely to what he termed ‘practical reconciliation’, where government policies would target contemporary Indigenous socio-economic disadvantage rather than work towards structural or institutional change to address the historical origins of disadvantage and secure Indigenous rights.⁵

On the second day of Corroboree 2000, the Council led a People’s Walk for Reconciliation across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which they expected would involve tens of thousands of people.⁶ In fact between 200 000 and 400 000 people walked across the Bridge that day.⁷ Those walking included politicians and Indigenous leaders—although notably not the prime minister, who refused to take part. Throughout the morning, the word ‘sorry’ appeared in skywriting above the marchers, prompting cheers from the crowd and demonstrating the continued importance of saying sorry in public conversation, particularly for non-Indigenous people.⁸ A week later, just days before the Wurundjeri Way announcement, more than fifty thousand people marched in support of reconciliation across the William Jolly Bridge in Brisbane, where a skywriter again wrote the word ‘sorry’ above the marchers.⁹ Reconciliation walks were held around the country throughout the rest of the year. They culminated in walks in Perth and Melbourne in early December that attracted huge crowds. More than three hundred thousand people marched from Flinders Street Station to the Kings Domain parklands in Melbourne—crossing the Princes Bridge and passing the Shrine of Remembrance as they did so—led by Victorian Premier Steve Bracks and the chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Aboriginal and South Sea Islander woman Evelyn Scott.¹⁰ The name of Wurundjeri Way was announced in this context. As Pandazopoulos put it: ‘It is appropriate, as we celebrate Corroboree 2000, that Victorians can recognise the traditional indigenous [sic] landowners of the city.’¹¹

Like Wurundjeri Way, all of the Indigenous commemorations examined in this book are linked to Australia’s reconciliation process in some way, even when they have been created long after the end of the formal process at the end of 2000. In the first two chapters of this book, I consider the kind of commemorations that have been created in these places of reconciliation. I do this by looking closely at the commemorations themselves: their backgrounds, forms and locations in central Melbourne. I argue that, taken together, these commemorations make an intervention into Melbourne’s settler colonial commemorative landscapes, in two important ways. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which they unsettle some of the markers of the city’s settler origins, particularly the commemorative presence of Melbourne’s contesting founders, John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner. In chapter 2, I chart the ways in which the commemorations themselves tell stories of an Indigenous Melbourne. These commemorations pose a challenge to the colonial erasure of Indigenous peoples and histories at the heart of the city.

Reconciliation in Australia

Australia’s formal process of reconciliation forms the background to these interventions in Melbourne. Reconciliation was legislated in the federal Parliament by the Bob Hawke Labor government with unanimous support in 1991. It was the Hawke government’s response to more than a decade of activism by Indigenous peoples that centred on demands for land rights, self-determination and a treaty. Although the Hawke government had committed to a federal land rights policy and the negotiation of a treaty with Indigenous peoples in the 1980s, both were abandoned by the government in the face of political, industry and public opposition.¹² The idea of reconciliation emerged in their place, with support or encouragement from a range of institutions, including churches, unions, corporations, the National Farmers Federation and the federal Opposition. Reconciliation was also the last recommendation of the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which was released in 1991.¹³

Many Aboriginal people were doubtful about reconciliation from the very beginning, and how it would shift the agenda away from the key issues of sovereignty, land rights and the need for a treaty. As the federal government was preparing to announce details of the formal process in November 1991, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leader and Uniting Church Minister Reverend Charles Harris worried that reconciliation would be another way for governments to deny the past: ‘The proposal could become another cover up of the criminal actions of the past, another way of whitewashing what has happened to get attention away from what has happened in the past’, he said.¹⁴ As the Wiradjuri writer, artist and activist Kevin Gilbert argued in 1992, reconciliation will ‘achieve nothing because it does not at the end of the day promise justice’, or a treaty, or ‘reparation for the taking away of our lives, our lands and of our economic and political base’.¹⁵ The focus of reconciliation on the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia also marginalised Indigenous peoples from the formal process itself, which often proceeded without significant and direct involvement from Indigenous communities.¹⁶ It is little wonder, then, that some Indigenous people chose to protest rather than attend the Corroboree 2000 events.¹⁷ Nor is it surprising that Aboriginal people have continued to denounce the failings of a reconciliatory agenda in the aftermath of the failed formal process. In 2006, for example, the celebrated leader and activist Galarrwuy Yunupingu, an Elder of the Gumatj Clan of the Yolngu people, called for the return of the Barunga Statement, which had been presented to Prime Minister Bob Hawke in 1988 and hangs in the Great Hall of Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra, in protest at government failures on Indigenous rights: ‘The treaty turned into reconciliation and reconciliation turned into nothing’, he said.¹⁸

The formal process of reconciliation was centred on three goals: educating non-Indigenous Australians; addressing Indigenous disadvantage; and creating a document of reconciliation.¹⁹ The Hawke government established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, which had oversight of the formal process. The federal government appointed both Indigenous and non-Indigenous members to the Council, but the Chairpersons were both Indigenous people: Yawuru man Patrick Dodson (1991–1997), and Aboriginal and South Sea Islander woman Evelyn Scott (1997–2000). The Council and its staff were part of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, with modest annual operating budgets of between $3–5 million. The Council’s work ranged from conducting research and education programs to running conferences, producing reports and issue papers, and engaging in consultation and work with communities, governments and industry.

Although reconciliation had a significant national profile, much of the work of the Council took place at a local or community level. It encouraged local reconciliation projects, held community meetings to discuss reconciliation and commissioned research into attitudes to reconciliation in the Australian community. The Council deliberately focused on the local government sector, providing local governments with advice and resources, and sometimes working collaboratively with councils or with the Australian Local Government Association. When the City of Melbourne commissioned Another View Walking Trail as part of a wider commitment to reconciliation in 1995, for example, it sought funding from the Council to support the project.²⁰ A year later, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation announced a partnership with the Australian Local Government Association in the Local Councils Remember Program, which supported the creation of Indigenous memorials and commemorations.²¹

Reconciliation has been understood by researchers as an attempt to ‘re-organise social relations’.²² It is one of the ways that many societies have sought, at the turn of the twenty-first century, to make amends for past events.²³ In apologies for past wrongs or in demands for reparations or restitution, we can see growing evidence of a push not only for historical justice, but also for historicised change. On this score—and on so many others—Australia’s reconciliation process has been widely viewed as a failure.²⁴ As political scientist Andrew Gunstone has detailed, reconciliation largely failed to achieve its aims.²⁵ The Council’s own surveys of public attitudes at the apparent end of the process in 2000 revealed deep divisions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia, particularly on the need for any kind of historical justice for Indigenous peoples, and on the question of how to achieve equality.²⁶ The fact that reconciliation had not been achieved was also clearly evident in the language of the Council’s final Declaration Towards Reconciliation, which noted that although many ‘steps have been taken’ towards a reconciled nation, ‘many steps remain’.²⁷

Many have argued, however, that the very idea of reconciliation that took hold in Australia was a failure in and of itself, because it explicitly positioned the process within a nation-making framework.²⁸ Something other than a reconciliation process—the negotiation of a treaty, for example, or the restitution of land rights—might have disrupted the legitimacy of the settler state in Australia, forcing a re-imagining of the nation. But the formal process of reconciliation was much more concerned with unifying Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples within an Australian imaginary that remained fundamentally unchanged. Reconciliation was simply another example of the myriad ways in which Australian governments have sought to ‘manage the consequences of colonial occupation’, as geographers Haydie Gooder and Jane M Jacobs have p...