A Rightful Place

In reply to Noel Pearson's Quarterly Essay, A Rightful Place: Race, recognition and a more complete commonwealth.

A RIGHTFUL PLACE

Correspondence


Henry Reynolds

A Rightful Place is an admirable addition to the Pearson oeuvre – intellectually bracing and cogently argued. Peppered with apt references to and quotations from a wide assortment of authorities, from Johann Herder to T.S. Eliot and H.G. Wells, from Amartya Sen to Roger Scruton and Robert Hughes. Along the way we come across engaging glimpses of Noel’s childhood and his community of Hopevale, just north of Cooktown. But the essay does not stray far from its charted course. It is a forensically powerful polemic about the future place of indigenous Australians in what he calls “a more complete Commonwealth.” As the argument unfolds, Pearson makes many pertinent observations on the nature of democratic societies – and Australian political culture, in particular. There are allusions to the universal fate of cultural and ethnic minorities and their struggles for survival. A Rightful Place is a valuable addition to the nation’s political literature.

But a polemical work does not stand alone. It cannot be detached from the cause in contention. It is judged and maintains its relevance only so long as the circumstances which called it into existence prevail. The final brief chapter, “Making Peace,” brings the argument home to the “national challenge” of achieving a “yes” vote in a coming referendum on constitutional recognition for indigenous Australians. Noel has been intimately involved in the process and was a member of the panel that proposed to government a draft bill incorporating amendments to be put to the electorate.

The essay leaves behind a strong sense of dislocation, a mismatch between the powerful plea in the body of the work for a new relationship between indigenous and settler Australia and the extremely limited and cautious proposals to be incorporated in the referendum. There is more passion than ambition. There are reasons for this, of course. Noel and the other panel members were fully aware of the history of failed referendums and the need to have bipartisan support as well as a large majority of the electorate on side. And the difficulty of this task cannot be underestimated. But the panel limited its own task when it began by defining the four principles which would govern its deliberations. The first – to contribute to a more unified and reconciled nation – was the most important. As with the whole process of reconciliation, the hidden implication is that indigenous Australia has to do far more reconciling than the rest of us. And the reference to a unified nation is a give-away. It embodies the continuing Liberal Party commitment to assimilation. A straight line can be drawn here from the policies of Paul Hasluck in the ’50s through Howard’s One Nation to Abbott’s Team Australia.

The proposals to strike out references to race in the constitution are timely and unlikely to be seriously challenged. But the two clauses relating to recog-nition do little more than state the obvious and uncontested. New section 127A will recognise indigenous languages as part of our national heritage but establish English as the national language. There is nothing here to prevent future governments from determining that English should override indigenous languages in education. New section 51A has a similar reference to the obvious, declaring that Australia was first occupied by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

This brings us to the heart of the matter. “Occupy” is such a carefully chosen word, presumably devoid of legal purchase, purposely sidestepping the question of prior indigenous sovereignty. The panel was aware of this problem. Many submissions referred to the question. But concern about likely community reaction to any reference to either sovereignty or self-determination merged easily with the overarching conservatism of the panel itself. So a successful referendum would leave the fundamental questions untouched: were the indigenous nations sovereigns? If so, how and when did Britain acquire that sovereignty? Does any remnant of sovereignty reside in indigenous society? 

Noel Pearson’s powerful advocacy notwithstanding, Australia has regressed on indigenous matters – a generation ago the question of a treaty was seriously discussed, as was the status of traditional law. And this leaves us far behind comparable societies such as New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the Scandinavian countries. Noel argues that we cannot expect any more because, unlike the Maoris, indigenous Australians are only a very small minority. But this carefully avoids comparison with the much higher status of the Native Americans in North America and the Sami in Scandinavia. 

The eloquence of A Rightful Place points in one direction; the political agenda directs us elsewhere.

Henry Reynolds

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