I am writing this after news has come through that independent senator and Indigenous activist Lidia Thorpe has heckled King Charles in Parliament House during his tour of Australia. Her protest does not seem to have been motivated by hostility to Charles personally. It was about the British monarchy as a symbol of the brutal impact that colonialism has had on the Indigenous people of Australia over two hundred years.
“You committed genocide against our people,” she said. “Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want treaty.”
An exaggeration? The wholesale massacres of Aboriginal peoples that took place since the late 18th Century suggest not. Neither do the government policies which enabled the forced abduction of Aboriginal children from their families and communities to “civilise” and assimilate them into white religious and other institutions. It was systematic, it was abusive and it was going on until the 1970s. They call them the Stolen Generations.
Lidia Thorpe has a reputation for being a divisive figure in Australian politics whose views and approach have sometimes attracted criticism from other supporters of Indigenous rights as well as political opponents. Even so, having recently returned from visiting my family in Perth, Western Australia (WA), her protest has resonated with me. It has crystallised the multiple identities and contradictory collective histories and traumas that have made Australia what it is today and of which I caught another glimpse last month.
Australia is physically one of the most astonishingly beautiful places I have ever seen. The photos below (most of them taken by my partner, Amy) are just a few examples from our visit last month – the buzz of downtown Perth, the incredible sunsets, the breathtaking forests, the amazing wildlife …
And when you visit, you experience an informality from those you meet that is as welcoming and friendly as you will find anywhere on earth. As one shopkeeper in Nannup, WA, put it to us last month; “You are only one hello away from a new friendship.”
You find a people that have deep pride in their country and its achievements, and who also have both hope and ambition for its future.
But deep contradictions are everywhere too. I think I saw them best summarised in the book A Secret Country, written in the late 1980s by Australian writer and journalist John Pilger, who sadly died last year. A Secret Country traces the roots of a schizophrenia that came to characterise so much of white Australian identity. On one hand, there is the enduring legacy that has been left by Australia’s past as the place to which convicts were transported from Britain. It’s an anti-authoritarian legacy of mutual aid between mates to overcome adversity and build a future together. That legacy has influenced a lot of the way that Australia has developed over the generations.
But Pilger traces another legacy too: one of the outcast trying to find redemption through recognition and respectability – not least from “the old country”. To Pilger, it’s a legacy that also has had an enduring impact on the decisions that Australia has made over the last century or more, including those which led many thousands of Australians to give up their lives at Gallipoli in a war whose roots were in Europe rather than under the stars of the Southern Cross.
Today, both legacies still find echoes in arguments about whether Australia should continue keep the UK monarch as its head of state or become a republic.
And of course, the European focus of both legacies now faces a 21st century challenge as Australia increasingly looks to a pan-Asian economic future and one reflected in the changing demographics of its people.
Which brings us back to Lidia Thorpe’s protest. Because neither legacy of White Australia has ever really come to terms with the reality that Australia’s First Nations had been there for thousands of years before Captain Cook ever set foot on Australian soil or the first British convict was transported there. Indeed, not only had those Indigenous people lived there, but over the millennia they had developed a unique and deeply spiritual relationship with the land and nature that was beyond the comprehension of most of the European culture that Australia imported and then developed in its own image.
Admittedly, in recent decades, there has at least been some acknowledgement of the existence of Australia’s First Nations and what was done to them. For example, after years of campaigning by those who had survived forced abduction as children, in 2008, the Australian Government led by Kevin Rudd issued a national apology to the Stolen Generations. But the apology was not enough. It followed a government-sponsored inquiry ten years earlier which had made 54 recommendations to support healing, compensation and reconciliation. Most of those recommendations have still not been implemented to this day.
The consequences are still being felt. The Stolen Generations and their families still typically live in substandard housing. They experience limited employment opportunities and low pay and they live with poor physical health and ongoing psychological trauma. Crime, alcohol and drug abuse continues to blight Aboriginal communities. Young Aboriginal people are disproportionately likely to end up in jail. Over 400 have died in custody too over the past three decades, often in suspicious circumstances for which nobody has been convicted.
During our recent visit to WA, my partner and I met Troy (shown in the photo below), an Aboriginal artist from the Noongar nation whose own mother was stolen twice as a child. His family are still living with the inter-generational trauma. His family’s story is far from unique. It is estimated that around half of the Aboriginal population in WA have family links to the Stolen Generations.
Troy accepted that these days there is more acknowledgement in official circles of the existence of Australia’s Indigenous people than there used to be. He also said that too often ticking boxes seem to take precedence over trying to understand the lived experience of Indigenous people and sustainable action to address ongoing injustices in practice.
Last year, a government proposal for Australia’s Indigenous peoples to be given a statutory consultative voice in public policy was rejected in a referendum. By all accounts, the details of what was, in reality, quite a modest proposal were either poorly thought through or poorly explained by government. The fact was, however, that the chance to enable Aboriginal peoples’ voices to be heard was once again missed.
Australia is an amazing place in so many ways. For it to achieve the future it deserves, however, it needs to face up to uncomfortable truths about its past that still disfigure the lives of its Indigenous people today. Australia needs to listen to what Troy, Lidia Thorpe and countless others are saying.
