Quarterly Essay 69 Moment of Truth

History and Australia's Future

Mark McKenna

• Publisher: Quarterly Essay
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781760640507
• eBook ISBN: 9781743820377
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Australia is on the brink of momentous change, but only if its citizens and politicians can come to new terms with the past. Indigenous recognition and a new push for a republic await action.Judging by the Captain Cook statue controversy, though, our debates about the past have never been more fruitless. Is there a way beyond the history wars that began under John Howard? And in an age of free-floating fears about the global, digital future, is history any longer relevant, let alone equal to the task of grounding the nation?In this inspiring essay, Mark McKenna considers the frontier, the Anzac legacy and deep time. He drags some fascinating new scholarship into the light, and pushes the debate about history beyond the familiar polarities.

MOMENT OF TRUTH	History and Australia’s Future
	Mark McKenna

Walk across the vast open spaces of Canberra’s Parliamentary Triangle and there is more than enough room to reflect on Australia’s future. Nature has been ironed out. It’s all grass and sky. Standing in the strip between the Tent Embassy and Lake Burley Griffin, the invented nature of the place hits you in the face. And the silence.

It is not only the absence of any acknowledgment of the country’s violent foundation that makes the silence palpable, but also 65,000 years of Indigenous occupation. If it were not for the Tent Embassy and the easily missed Reconciliation Place, Indigenous Australia would have no obvious presence within the Parliamentary Triangle. More than a century after federation, Australians still struggle to include Indigenous people in our vision of the nation.

Since the doors of Old Parliament House opened on 9 May 1927, Aboriginal people have beaten a path to Canberra to remind the Commonwealth that their rights and sovereignty have not been extinguished. First in a long line of petitioners were Jimmy Clements and John Noble, two Wiradjuri elders who walked over 150 kilometres from Tumut in southern New South Wales to attend the opening ceremony at Parliament House in the presence of the Duke and Duchess of York. When it came time for officials and dignitaries to be paraded before the royal couple, Clements insisted on his right to be presented. As Melbourne’s Argus reported, “an ancient Aborigine, who calls himself King Billy and who claims sovereign rights to the Federal Territory, walked slowly forward alone, and saluted the Duke and Duchess.” Clements was eighty years of age. One photograph of him taken that day shows a bearded man sitting in the dust, surrounded by his sleeping dogs, clutching an Australian flag. When he died three months later, a newspaper reported that he was buried in Queanbeyan cemetery, “outside consecrated ground.”

Clements walked to Canberra to claim his “sovereign rights” at the very moment the sovereignty of the Crown and the Australian parliament was asserted. One year later, on behalf of the Aborigines Progressive Association, Fred Maynard wrote to the Royal Commission on the Constitution of the Commonwealth to remind the nation’s leaders that the constitution and laws that governed the lives of “Aborigines … were an insult to the intelligence of our people.” Since then, the line of petitioners is long, yet their names barely register in the memory of most non-Aboriginal Australians. They include the leaders of the 1967 referendum and the founders of the Tent Embassy, and the authors of both the 1988 Barunga Statement and, of course, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, transmitted from the country’s spiritual centre to its political centre – all of them hoping, like the Yirrkala petitioners in 1963, that they would not be “completely ignored” by the Commonwealth government, “as they have been ignored in the past.”

If the voice of one Indigenous leader resounds more than any other, it is surely that of Yorta Yorta activist William Cooper. In 1934, Cooper drafted a petition to King George V. The message was unambiguous. Indigenous lands had been “expropriated” by successive Australian governments and their inhabitants’ legal status unjustly “denied.” He wanted a voice for Aboriginal people and he asked the King that they be granted the power to “propose a member of parliament.”

Cooper delivered the petition to the Commonwealth government, led by Joseph Lyons, in September 1937. It carried over 1800 signatures. Two months later, with fellow campaigners Doug Nicholls and William Ferguson, Cooper called for a “Day of Mourning” on Australia Day, 1938, to protest the white man’s seizure of their land and to demand full citizenship rights. In March, the Lyons government informed Cooper that it would neither support his demand for parliamentary representation nor forward his petition to King George VI. Incensed by the hypocrisy of a supposedly Christian nation’s refusal to accept the equal humanity of Indigenous Australians, Cooper wrote a stinging response to Lyons.

White men … claimed that they had “found” a “new” country – Australia. This country was not new, it was already in possession of and inhabited by millions of blacks, who, while unarmed, excepting spears and boomerangs, nevertheless owned the country as their God given heritage … Every shape and form of murder, yes, mass murder, was used against us and laws were passed and still exist, which no human creature can endure. Our food stuffs have been destroyed, poison and guns have done their work, and now white men’s homes have been built on our hunting and camping grounds. Our lives have been wrecked and our happiness ended. Oh! Ye whites! … How much compensation have we had? How much of our land has been paid for? Not one iota. Again we state that we are the original owners of the country. In spite of force, prestige, or anything else you like, morally the land is ours.

Much of what Cooper said bears a remarkable resemblance to the demands of Indigenous leaders today. He asked for recognition and acknowledgment. He petitioned for a voice in parliament. And he wanted the truth told. At the heart of his campaign was what he called the “horror and fear of extermination” that in one way or another had touched every Aboriginal community in the country.

Yet today, if one scans the monumental landscape of Canberra’s Parliamentary Triangle, there is no acknowledgment that such events ever took place. The nation simply rises unencumbered from the ground.

Like every place in Australia, Canberra has its whitefella creation stories. Among them is one told by the “father of Canberra,” journalist and NSW MP John Gale. Probably apocryphal, it tells of a day in the late 1850s when Gale, “travelling across country,” was helped by a local squatter to cross the flooded Molonglo River. To gain a clearer view of the country, he “rode on to the top of a hill.” From there, standing “under a giant kurrajong tree,” he gazed out “in delight over a magnificent panorama” and foresaw a new Jerusalem.

“What a site for a city!” he exclaimed. Sixty-three years later, in 1920, “Gale was present to see the Prince of Wales, under the same kurrajong, set one of the foundation stones of the city of Canberra.”

Gale’s recollection, tailored after Canberra’s foundation, was typical of the Biblical narratives that settlers told to sanction their taking up of an “empty” land. Kurrajong Hill, the site of Gale’s epiphany, has since been renamed Capital Hill, where Parliament House stands.

For the Ngunnawal, however, Kurrajong Hill was one of several campsites in the Canberra area connected by traditional pathways that saw “local and regional Aboriginal people … come together” for important seasonal ceremonies, like their Bogong festivals that celebrated the arrival of moths in the mountains.

Today, the two histories that coexist on the hill have yet to find a way to meet. And William Cooper’s words go unanswered. At a fundamental level, we have failed to see, failed to listen, failed even to hear.

In 2014, “Uncle” Boydie Turner – determined that his grandfather’s words be delivered to the house of their original addressee – submitted Cooper’s petition to Queen Elizabeth II via Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove. It had taken eighty years to arrive. How long before it receives a response?

FROM THE HEART

Yolngu country, August 2017. The annual Garma Festival in northeast Arnhem Land is in its nineteenth year. It is barely three months after the release of the Uluru Statement and only weeks after the Referendum Council’s final report, which endorsed the Uluru recommendations, and expectations are high. More than two thousand people have gathered to discuss the central theme of this year’s gathering, “Makarrata,” a Yolngu word for “healing” or “coming together after a struggle.” At the heart of Makarrata is truth-telling, an elusive habit for much of Australia’s history.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition leader Bill Shorten have both made the pilgrimage to a place that’s invariably described by the media as “remote.” Here, way out of their comfort zone, Canberra’s elders can appear decidedly ordinary compared to the undeniable stature of their Indigenous counterparts. Like polite visitors from another country, dazed by the heat and the kaleidoscope of theatre and ceremony, they are courteous and attentive, but prone to platitudes. Every year, another Garma holds out the promise that one of them will break the mould.

Official proceedings are dominated by Dr Galarrwuy Yunupingu, leader of the Gumatj clan and a towering figure in the campaign for Indigenous rights. Battling ill-health and recovering from a kidney transplant, he addresses the audience from his wheelchair, reading slowly from a script. Turnbull and Shorten sit in front of him, only metres away. “At Uluru we started a fire,” he tells them haltingly, “a fire that we hope burns brighter for Australia.” His fellow Indigenous leaders, many of whom have worked for years on committees and consultative groups along the long, tortuous road to recognition, are listening. Yunupingu’s incendiary metaphor captures their hope that the Statement from the Heart will receive widespread support. All eyes are on Turnbull and Shorten.

Turnbull begins by congratulating the Referendum Council on its report – the fourth in as many years – and “on reaching an agreement” at Uluru three months earlier. He frames his response as a series of questions and challenges, although his reluctance to embrace the key recommendations from Uluru – a constitutionally enshrined “First Nations voice,” which would advise parliament on legislation pertaining to Indigenous Australians, and a “Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history” – is patent. He offers the occasional olive branch – “the answers are not beyond us” – but remains noncommittal. What would this voice “look like,” he wonders: “Is our highest aspiration to have Indigenous people outside the parliament providing advice to the parliament, or is it to have as many Indigenous voices elected within our parliament?”

Of course, these aspirations are not mutually exclusive. Lurking just beneath the surface of Turnbull’s remarks is the suggestion that the supremacy of parliament is threatened by a First Nations voice.

Turnbull points out that every piece of parliamentary legislation relates to Indigenous Australians. Would the advisory body, he asks, seek to comment on every bill? And what of juvenile justice and other legislation that is the domain of state and territory governments? It is all beginning to sound too hard. Eager to remind Indigenous leaders of his bitter personal experience leading the “Yes” vote in the 1999 republic referendum, he cautions them: “Australians are constitutionally conservative. The bar is surmountable … but [a double majority of states and voters] is a high bar.” Turnbull’s argument, which has become conventional wisdom, conflates the voting tendencies of the Australian people with section 128 of the constitution. It is not the people who are necessarily conservative – witness the result of the same-sex marriage survey, which was conducted on the more democratic basis of a simple majority – but the mechanism by which the people vote for constitutional change. The people are more enlightened than their constitution allows them to be.

Shorten’s response is both heartening and frustrating. “Labor supports a voice for Aboriginal people in our Constitution,” he declares, “we support a declaration by all parliaments, we support a truth-telling commission. We are not confronted by the notion of treaties with our First Australians.” But then comes the rider. Shorten suggests yet another bipartisan parliamentary committee to prepare the recommendations for a referendum on the advisory body.

After so many committees in recent years – Julia Gillard’s Expert Panel on recognition (2012), Tony Abbott’s Joint Select Committee (2015) and Turnbull and Shorten’s Referendum Council (2017) – the mere word is anathema to Pat Anderson, the co-chair of the Referendum Council. Like so many others, she has worked her way through countless dialogues and consultations: the Uluru Statement was the unanimous position to emerge from that lengthy process. Now she is being told that another committee should be convened. Yet another delay. Yet another failure to resolve what needs to be resolved. “They will do anything and everything except talk to us,” she says, exasperated.

Worse was to come. On 26 October, the day before the High Court handed down its decision on “the Citizenship Seven,” effectively ruling five federal MPs ineligible to sit in parliament, Turnbull released his government’s response to the Referendum Council’s report. There was no press conference or address to the nation to indicate the importance of the issue. The timing could not have been more cynical. Politicians were preoccupied with their own survival and the deadline for the same-sex marriage survey forms was little more than a week away.

A former Liberal senator and Referendum Council member, Amanda Vanstone, had provided Turnbull with ammunition in her “qualifying statement” in the council’s report. Frustrated with what she saw as Uluru’s shift away from “symbolic constitutional change,” Vanstone was deeply sceptical of the proposed advisory body – the new “can” that Indigenous consultations had put “on the field” – believing it had little chance in a referendum. “The electorate is not all fired up,” she remarked, “let alone set alight with enthusiasm.” Despite her reservations, Vanstone was respectful of the dialogues and careful not to frame her statement as dissenting. She was still willing to work towards a broadly acceptable “Indigenous voice to parliament.”

Turnbull, however, left little room for compromise. He rejected the idea of an Indigenous advisory body unequivocally, announced another joint select committee and shelved the whole question of recognition indefinitely. With any luck, after a few days of negative publicity, the media focus would shift elsewhere. The language of the government’s response was emphatic and left no doubt who would be advising whom:

Our democracy is built on the foundation of all Australian citizens having equal civic rights – all being able to vote for, stand for and serve in either of the two chambers of our national Parliament – the House of Representatives and the Senate. A constitutionally enshrined additional representative assembly for which only Indigenous Australians could vote for or serve in is inconsistent with this fundamental principle. It would inevitably become seen as a third chamber of parliament … Moreover, the government does not believe such a radical change to our constitution’s representative institutions has any realistic prospect of being supported by a majority of Australians in a majority of states … The Council’s proposal for an Indigenous representative assembly, or Voice, is new to the discussion about constitutional change … The challenge remains to find a constitutional amendment that will succeed, and which does not undermine the universal principles of unity, equality and “one person one vote.”

The statement was both deliberately misleading – Turnbull was happy to peddle Barnaby Joyce’s earlier lie that the advisory body would act as a third chamber – and wilfully blind to Australia’s history. Colonial, state and federal governments had denied Indigenous Australians “equal civic rights” since the late eighteenth century. Now the government threw equality back in their face. No “special treatment.” No First Nations (only one nation). No acknowledgment of the long history of profound neglect and interference – we are all equal now.

Although polling suggested – and would continue to suggest over subsequent polls – majority public support for an Indigenous advisory body, Turnbull claimed to know the result of the referendum in advance. Yet another Australian government was telling Indigenous Australians that it knew what was best for them. The proposal, he insisted, was too “radical” to have any chance of success. Radical? Even Alan Jones – resplendent in his gold jacket and tie on the ABC’s Q&A – supported the idea. When asked for evidence that the advisory body would “go down in flames” in a referendum, the response of Senator Nigel Scullion, Minister for Indigenous Affairs, was astonishing for its arrogance: “I don’t need evidence … we have done a lot of polling, not on this particular matter, but on other matters … [and in any case] evidence is a long string … it’s our instincts.”

More of the government’s instincts were on display when Malcolm Turnbull fronted Q&A five days after the same-sex marriage bill was passed in the House of Representatives on 6 December, parliament’s final sitting day of the year. Emboldened by the survey result, Turnbull was in a combative mood – the pugnacious barrister in full flight. When audience member and lawyer Teela Reid, who had been part of the dialogues leading to Uluru, pressed him about his misrepresentation of the advisory body as a third chamber with a potential veto over parliament, Turnbull became agitated.

“What’s wrong with the [Indigenous] MPs that are in parliament?” he asked, shifting the focus of the discussion, before accusing her of portraying Indigenous MPs as “tokens.” Reid didn’t take a backward step, telling Turnbull that his rejection...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Moment of Truth
• Correspondence
• Contributors
• Back Cover