A RIGHTFUL PLACE

Correspondence

Peter Sutton

‘My thoughts flash back to the warriors who fought the colonial invasion …’; ‘I cannot take my mind off William Lanne …’; ‘I want to re-remember what happened in [Tasmania] …’; ‘I indulge my own nostalgia by sharing those things that possessed me as a boy …’; ‘[the death of Truganini was in] the primary-school curriculum of my childhood …’

Noel Pearson’s language in A Rightful Place reflects a new phase in his trek as an intellectual and as a person. It is time now to think more on the past, and, also, on what it is to be indigenous, on what it is to be an Australian, and on what it is to be. Pearson’s reform trajectory, one that began with the legal achievements of land rights, and midway added an incandescent focus on the restoration of social functionality to communities in deep trouble, has moved again. It is not a shift from action to contemplation in any simple sense, but it is in some sense. Noel’s own mellowing struggle with the terms of belonging is projected here onto the wider screen of the various peoples of the commonwealth. This wrestling all night is not in vain. It leads him to put the psyche back into what it is to be a citizen, complementing what is so often a reduction of the political personage to a rights-bearing participant in the economy.

Noel writes in the essay of:

‘existential angst’, ‘the great existential enigmas’; ‘existential anxieties’, ‘psychological discomfort’; ‘a legitimate anxiety’; ‘the emotional convulsions of identification and memory’; ‘the psychological meaning of this historical legacy’; ‘this historical and spiritual turmoil’.

On this occasion:

I am not now concerned with the legal question [of indigenous relationships with territory]. I am concerned with the metaphysical question: the spiritual notion.

This is why, in the essay, Noel is able to frame the constitutional issues other than by legal and political lineaments alone. I think this saves them from being less engaging, less interesting, less alive, than they will be if they remain forever in the secular combat zone of structure and rights. Here Noel walks gingerly the fulcrum of a seesaw. Tipping in one direction, one might suppose, are social unity and integration, which are matters of structure. Tipping in the other, perhaps, are past-based identities and cultural distinctions, which are much more matters of feeling and value. But it is too easy to consider the structural unity of the modern liberal nation-state as not being composed also of tradition, of the past, of feeling. And it is likewise too easy to consider the rootedness in the past of traditional identities as having a life apart from the superstructure of government, industry, education and the media. Once again, here, Noel is offering a radical centrism, one in which structure and peoplehood have to meet the elemental demands of the psyche for a home, a haven.

In other words, if the coming constitutional amendments do not nurture the soul, they will be as chaff. The next liberation in Noel’s to-do list has to be “psychological.” He does not say “emotional.” This difference matters, as it is the psychology of the emotions surrounding identity and the post-colonial self as an embodiment of history that is his concern. It is about feeling but it is even more about a thinking awareness of feeling. This is the hope for those who endure troubled and anxious times about who or what they are. One thing they need to be relieved of is the notion of belonging to a native “race.” The self, not just the constitution, and not just popular ideas of indigenous peoplehood, has to be de-racialised.

Reforms to the constitution, chief among which should be the removal of the notion of race, will be “not just a matter of symbolism. I think this will be a matter of psychology.” The day when indigenous Australians come to regard themselves as people with a distinct historical and cultural heritage but not of a distinct race will be a day of “psychological liberation.” Until then, “psychic trouble” will continue to beset Aboriginal people. “The virulent but sometimes subtle antipathy of some Australians to our existential claims is the source of the indigenous Australian anxiety,” Noel claims. I’m not sure about the aetiology here, but the end aimed at is impeccable. Race is dead.

The past seems now to be Noel’s latest major agenda item for the future. Resolution of the past, of memory, nostalgia and regret, is a necessity of restoration for a troubled spirit. As we age beyond mid-life, our futures have become largely our pasts. Eventually we know we have far more time behind us than ahead of us. The economy of time imposes itself. Traditions and the pasts of others gain in realism and seem less exotic. Like the dead, we who are getting older belong to history as well as to the now. The idea of the classical world as a rich Ur-state appeals perhaps more and more, as a new, if retrospective, start. My own current immersion in the world of the 1930s has this kind of appeal. There is affective security in its fixity.

There is much in Noel’s essay about the importance of the Aboriginal classical cultures of the past, both for the descendants of those creative Old People but also for Australians and the world generally. He refers to the ancient myth-based song-lines of Australia, and the wide and rich linguistic and narrative heritage of the continent and its islands. There is no hyperbole in his description of these bodies of lore as the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia – they are, and they are played out on a vaster stage than the coastal Mediterranean, and in several hundred more tongues.

Noel’s Cape York Partnership, of which he is chairman, has recently begun to expand its role beyond being a policy think-tank to seeking to set up a centre for Cape York Peninsula languages. Most of these scores of languages are lost or moribund or, as some say, “sleeping.” Wik-Mungkan alone remains the first language of children, at Aurukun. Other remote and not so remote regions of Australia have had language centres for years or decades. They are places where recording, analysing, teaching, revitalisation and archiving of local languages and oral history take place, and written and audiovisual language aids are produced. I recall raising the Cape’s gap in this domain with Noel in about 1991, but there have been other, urgent purposes with which to deal. A few years after this we also had a long phone call during which I raised with him the suggestion that “race” needed to be removed from Australian identity politics. The years have rushed by and we are, perhaps, almost there.

A very substantial archive of past language, song, ceremony, technology, art, mythology, ethno-biology, political geography and other cultural riches exists for Cape York Peninsula. Touchingly, for me anyway, Noel refers in his essay to the records of past researchers of these matters as “part of the world’s heritage.” The age of primary bush fieldwork of this kind in the region may not be over, but the older practitioners are getting on a bit and the emphasis is shifting to IT rather than mixing salvage ethnography with shooting pigs and digging for water.

Such wells of information make it possible for the Australian landscape very widely to have restored to it the tens of thousands of place names that were in place before the first colonial explorers and surveyors arrived. These place names have been mapped in on-the-ground detail most intensively since the heroic arrival of the four-wheel drive vehicle, from 1946, first the Canadian Blitz, then the English Land Rover, then the Japanese Toyota. Noel regards this restoration of the original toponyms as “a vitally important agenda for the country.” I agree. Most of this knowledge is still dormant in the records of scholars and in the vaults of the collecting institutions. Digitisation via geographic information systems is the greatest gift to unleashing access to this treasure while allowing its long-term preservation and conservation.

What has all this to do with amending the constitution? Along with what Noel regards as the necessity for indigenous people to have a “bi-cultural future” and “psychological liberation,” in his essay he deems the need for this fabulous knowledge of the past to become liberated from obscurity a necessity for the national social fabric. It is a part of the array of unfinished business between Australian peoples and their country. There will be no “more complete commonwealth” unless all Australians have added a layer of identity that connects them to such heritage: “This is the true meaning of commonwealth.”

Noel’s essay is not so much an offering to a debate as an announcement, albeit one full of serious care, one steeped in Australian political life, and one that draws in the magical strings of his omnivorous reading. It is a manifesto but at the same time an act of compassion, and of courage. It is not self-protective, although some readers will be left wondering who Noel’s British ancestors were, having heard here about his Aboriginal grandfather, Ngulunhdhul, and great-grandfather, Arrimi, and his ill-tempered mother’s mother. 

For all its generosity, Noel’s essay is nevertheless remorselessly tough on the left and in particular on what he identifies as their silence on the “social crisis” in many of the communities. But it comes from a big, if irascible, heart. In Australian political life it is hard to think of anyone less cynically disposed, or more passionately caring about his own and others’ variously layered country-selves and identities, from the local to the national.

Peter Sutton