A RIGHTFUL PLACE

Correspondence

Fred Chaney

A Rightful Place is another powerful contribution by Noel Pearson to public issues we prefer to avoid. While he provides a balanced description of the contesting forces around the telling of our history, his preparedness to face the brutal reality of the destruction of the Tasmanian people is welcome. 

Noel is much respected by conservative Australians and they in particular should be exposed to all his views and not just to the many they find comforting, such as demands for responsibility and welfare reform. The dispossession, dispersal and, often, destruction of indigenous populations across Australia are as much part of our history as the fortitude of settlers in confronting harsh and difficult conditions, the building of a modern democracy, and the bravery of our soldiers in successive wars. We are entitled to be proud of our successes and achievements as a nation, but should avoid masking the darker aspects of our past. 

Equally confronting to conservatives is the prospect of continuing Aboriginal collectives going neither peacefully into history nor foregoing their desire to retain distinct cultural identities as one layer of Australia’s ongoing identity.

And yes, constitutional recognition is important and relevant to our future as a nation. It is easy for us to agree that it would be good to remove race from the constitution. It is easy to agree we need a continuing constitutional power to legislate to deal with matters such as native title, now established in our law as something peculiarly available to those who are part of the tribes or polities of First Peoples, First Nations, call them what you will, and whose collective identity as native title holders is defined through their own laws and customs. What is less easy to determine is how to give substance to constitutional recognition. Around what proposition can the nation coalesce as we managed to do in 1967?

Pearson’s essay does not purport to answer this question fully. It is part of the continuing debate and argument about what form of recognition should be put before the Australian people. Eventually that will be determined by parliament, with the assistance of the parliamentary committee led by Ken Wyatt and Nova Peris and the review panel led by John Anderson. Noel’s essay contributes to that debate. But the aspect of the essay which most interests me is how we deal with the long-term place of indigenous peoples within the Australian nation, how we deal with what he describes as the “existential anxieties of distinct peoples” about their survival and having a “proper and rightful place” in the nation.

The essay recognises that reconciliation is about more than the gap in economic and social circumstances. That gap is, of course, important and is widely acknowledged. What is also important, but more difficult to comprehend, is that reconciliation is also about survival of indigenous collectives as distinct peoples, with a continuing place within the Australian nation.

There is much goodwill at government and community levels about closing the social and economic gaps. In part, that is because it is in accord with our natural tendency to see assimilation as the answer. Some, such as Gary Johns, are overt in putting a negative view about indigenous culture, the virulence of which “indicates a depth of antipathy that is rooted in a troubled history.” Whatever the source, A Rightful Place, correctly in my view, asserts that the default position (what I would call the visceral response) of many of us remains assimilationist. So we find it easy to embrace Closing the Gap, making “them” all the same as “us.” That was the spirit of the 1967 referendum, as I remember it. It was a demand for equal citizenship.

This time, we are grappling with issues relating to continuing separate identities. This is more difficult for us. Noel tries to explain it and make it acceptable to us through the concept of layered identities. He gives the example of the Jewish community participating fully and at a high level in every aspect of the life of the nation while holding strongly to its own identity and practice.

It is helpful to read this essay alongside a viewing of Noel’s address at Garma this year, published on YouTube. There you get the force of presentation as well as intellect. Following reference to the destruction of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, he posed the question “we are still grappling with today”: “will European settlement of Australia enable a different people with a different heritage to have space in it?” He poses it as a question still unresolved. He says that in the 1820s in Tasmania we answered the question by our actions. Then in stark terms he suggests, “If we don’t come to a just answer to that question today, that same answer will come about for benign reasons.” If he is correct in this, and I think he is, it is a matter of great seriousness for all of us.

There is much in Australia today to suggest that we are not very interested in allowing room for indigenous cultures to continue to be part of our national fabric. Whatever lip service we offer the world’s oldest living cultures, the clear message from our actions is that our main concern is to bring indigenous individuals into full enjoyment of their rights and duties as Australian citizens. There is no clear message that we understand and value these cultures as part of our nation. There is no indication from our actions that we will preserve sufficient space for the Yolngu, the Nyiyaparli, the Nyungar and so on to retain collective identities and distinctive cultural spaces.

In the case of remote communities that still observe practices close to those of pre-settlement cultures, the policies of successive governments seem designed to strangle them. 

This issue poses challenges to both the broader community and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

The challenge to the broader community is initially one of comprehension. If we achieve that comprehension, the next challenge is to set policies that allow difference. We won’t be able to meet that challenge unless indigenous voices can be heard and have a genuine say in decisions which affect them. The essay begins to address this and has already sparked further conversations about how this might be done.

It is for the indigenous population to decide how serious they are about preserving their collective identities and how they wish to speak with authority for those identities. In Radical Hope, Quarterly Essay 35 (2009), Noel captured, in a single sentence about a great Crow leader, Plenty Coups, the challenging task facing today’s indigenous leaders: he “led his people through the door to an unknowable future, and he stood his people on their feet to contend with the new world.” 

Through native title, the raw material for legally acknowledging collective identities exists. Around Australia, claims both determined and undetermined document collective identities and their memberships. Even where native title is deemed to be extinguished, the process can identify who speaks for country, who the tribe is, and what the territory is. The Yorta Yorta spokeswoman Monica Morgan reacted to the dismissal of their appeal against the denial of their native title by saying firmly, we are Yorta Yorta, we are here, and you have to deal with us. In the same way the substantially dispossessed Nyungars, with the reality of massive extinguishment of native title across their territories, have been able to be at the table with the State as the traditional owners of the southwest of Western Australia.

In this respect, the assertion on page 67, that “there is no official recognition of the many tribal nations associated with particular territories,” is incorrect and is contradicted by Noel himself on page 69: “Through land rights schemes [and] native title rights … much has been done to recognise the territorial rights of … the original Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes.” If indigenous people are serious in wanting to address the power imbalance caused by their extreme minority status, native title alone is an opportunity to have a place at the table as negotiators rather than supplicants. 

The essay has already sparked discussion about how the democratic imbalance Noel identifies might be rectified. A few designated seats in parliament would be unlikely to produce members with authority to speak for the whole indigenous community. To what body would legislative proposals affecting indigenous people and peoples be referred? Who does speak for indigenous Australia? Or does each of the hundreds of indigenous cultural groups speak for itself? These are questions which only indigenous people themselves can answer. 

It should not be so hard to progress discussion on these issues. Post-Mabo it is part of Australia’s reality that First Peoples, identified through traditional law and custom as a native title group, have particular rights peculiar to them over identified territories. Numerous mining and other agreements are made with indigenous people not as individuals but as members of traditionally based collectives. Those involved are fully Australian citizens and are also fully members of Aboriginal polities, with a group as well as an individual identity. What Pearson’s essay describes are the existential anxieties of these distinct peoples about whether they can survive and have a “proper and rightful place” in the nation. They will only do so if, to borrow again from Quarterly Essay 35, they are a serious people able to speak for themselves: “Do we have the seriousness necessary to maintain our languages, traditions and knowledge?”

I hope that A Rightful Place will promote the discussions required in general and indigenous communities about the challenges they both face. As a member of the general community, I hope governments and communities will ensure that there is space and time to permit indigenous people to work through these issues and for us to get beyond our instinctive demand for assimilation. 

Fred Chaney