Five years on from the Uluru Statement from the Heart a truth-telling process is at last taking shape. So too are some difficult questions: which truths are to be told? Told how? By whom? The last of these questions is most troubling for people like me, a fourth-generation Australian of English and Scottish extraction. The assumption of my lot seems to be that if Indigenous Australians want truths to be told then of course we should support them, but after that it’s their business.
That irresponsibility is being abetted by a very similar Indigenous assumption that it’s their story to be told by them in their way.
These assumptions are now being institutionalised. In Victoria the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission has set to work on gathering information and hearing stories from First Peoples ‘on their experience of past and ongoing injustices’ and on how their cultures have survived. Similar bodies are likely to be set up along similar lines in other States and Territories.
But stories of the Indigenous experience have already been told, over and again, in hundreds of autobiographies, biographies, and oral histories, in documentary and dramatised film and TV, in theatre, dance, song, and poetry as well as in news and comment and feature stories in the mass media. More, they have been told to commissions of inquiry very like the Yoo-rrook Commission, including the ‘stolen generations’ inquiry of 1995-97.
The report of that inquiry, Bringing them home, had a tremendous emotional impact. The then Leader of the Opposition wept in parliament as he related some of the findings; across the country ‘sorry books’ collected tens of thousands of signatures.
'At best, Indigenous people telling of their experience of past and continuing injustices will teach us more about them when we should also be learning more about us.'
But the report also provoked a powerful backlash — and it failed to deliver. Of the four recommendations, for compensation, restitution, rehabilitation, and an apology, only the apology was delivered in full. That apology was of course a great moment in the long history of the First Nations struggle and in the history of Australia. But it was also just another in a series of emotional outpourings dating back to the 1967 referendum — and, in its way, just another abdication of official responsibility.
Compare prime minister Rudd’s apology with prime minister Paul Keating’s catalogue at Redfern: we were the ones, he said, who were responsible for the dispossessing, for smashing the traditional way of life, for the diseases and the alcohol, for the discrimination and exclusion, and for the taking of children from their mothers.
Is there any reason to hope that this time, at last, the telling of ‘past and ongoing injustices’ to commissions of inquiry won’t meet with the familiar kinds of attenuation, delay, and fudge?
The danger is that unless commissions and inquiries are accompanied by other ways of telling other truths they will inadvertently help to shrink that national story into the story of victims who in fact have never been only victims, and of unmentioned perpetrators who in fact have never been only perpetrators.
They risk preaching to a more-or-less converted majority and to an implacably unconverted minority. They risk prompting indifference on one side, hostility on the other. At best, Indigenous people telling of their experience of past and continuing injustices will teach us more about them when we should also be learning more about us.
In my Telling Tennant’s Story: The strange career of the great Australian silence, I offer two suggestions about how complicated truths might be told in ways that engage, and last. Both propose a revamping of our official public history, in localities across Australia in the one case, at the national apex in the other.
On the first: there are more than 34 000 obelisks, statues, plaques, cairns and other such memorials in Australia's towns and cities and along its roads and highways. Of those tens of thousands of markers of the past just 190 remember Indigenous people, places or events. And less than a quarter of those (41) remember violent conflict between white and black.
At the other end of the public history scale is the mighty Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra, one of the world's most recognised institutions of commemoration, adamantly silent on the longest and most destructive of armed conflict between peoples in Australia's history.
Here, in the history curriculum of everyday life and in our institutions of memory is our chance to pull our weight in truth-telling. The Coalition parties are long since lost to this cause, in office or out; Labor has been in steady retreat since Keating’s time. Might an Albanese government do better and pick up where Keating left off?
Two things are doable and affordable. First, a new government in Canberra could establish and fund an agency tasked with encouraging communities across Australia to work with their Indigenous members and with historians and local history societies to document what is and is not told by their monuments, memorials and other forms of public history, and to decide how those markers might be refurbished or added to in the interests of telling a more complete and truthful local story.
Second, an Albanese government could put responsibility for the AWM into the hands of a senior cabinet minister charged with returning the Memorial to its stated mission: to ‘assist Australians to remember, interpret and understand the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact on Australian society’.
If those who spoke From the Heart could lend their support to such other ways of truth telling, so much the better.
Dean Ashenden has published on anthropology and its historical role.