Defeated Voice

 

To Peter in Berlin

OK I'm going to dictate this rather than type so this is voice to text at work.

I think some of what I say here Peter might surprise you. I have a lot of - anger perhaps is a bit strong - but certainly a lot of frustration about what's going on with the Aboriginal issue in Australia. Not just about the Voice but there's a whole lot of stuff going on here which you may have picked up on while you were here earlier in the year but as you haven't been here in the lead up to the Voice you wouldn't have felt this absolute bombardment of the Australian public about Aboriginal issues.

Now for the record I voted yes. I thought it was really important that the yes vote got up just to give Aboriginal people the message that they belong here. But what they got is a message that lots of Australians don't think they do belong here. I think it was a monumental cockup by both the Labour and Liberal parties. I think both parties should have stayed out of it and basically said to the Australian people ‘this is not a political issue; this is a personal conscience vote issue’ and they should have stayed out of it. What in fact happened is that it became like an election with Liberal versus Labour and it was a disaster for all concerned.

I think a lot of what happened is that there are a lot of Australians like me who are sick to death of hearing about it. Someone on the ABC wrote today that at a time when we have major problems in this country with education, not enough beds in the hospital system, not enough doctors, not enough houses for people to live in, people are struggling to get enough money to buy food and a whole host of other issues the last thing that many Australians want to think about is the welfare of the Aboriginal people. The timing was disastrous, and it feels to me like we are being force fed a diet of Aboriginal issues 24/7 in all forms of media. Now whether or not other people believe that to be true doesn't matter because the perception is from a lot of people that it's just been rammed down our throats and it's another example like with the whole gender issue. We are being told what to think and you get the message that you can't object to what people are saying or you'll be considered sexist or you know gender-ist, or racist. You’re reluctant to express any dissatisfaction with the prevailing orthodoxy for fear of recrimination and accusations.

 

A simple example of this is that it's a recurring theme now that I see on Facebook and I hear people say it to me and I hadn't said it out loud 'cause I guess I didn't want to appear racist. But - I am sick to death of being welcomed to my own country – at every game, every bit of theatre, every movie,  every talk, every lecture, every everything you are subjected to this tokenistic welcome to country. I know that country in the Aboriginal sense of the word is different to what we mean by country but I think that's irrelevant here in the bigger picture.  The fact is I and a lot of people just don't want to be welcomed to country because it's already my country. And I find myself at these things when they're talking about elders past and present and I want to ask what about my elders? what about the Italians? what about the Vietnamese? What gives the Aboriginal people the right to have this little gig behind every public ceremony just because they were first here? Well it is important, they are important, but I don't think they're that important that they have to occupy you know several minutes of our consciousness every day of our lives. 

A local Councillor the City of Playford, said he thought acknowledgements had gone "overboard".

"I listen to the younger generation who attend university and colleges, it's being read out for every lecture," he said. "I think it's gone a little too far, and for me, I don't think is balanced."

The acknowledgement needed to be "inclusive", adding the words "our people, our forebears that have contributed in building and defending our great nation and way of life".

"This is Australia, we are a great nation, we've got to be thankful and grateful to our custodians," he said.

"But we also have to respect our forebears that have built this great nation, there are many people who've put blood, sweat and tears, sacrificing their lives for this nation."

"In this climate, it takes courage to do this ... some people will see this as some sort of racist attack, and that's far from what it is," he said.

"[The acknowledgement] loses a bit of its meaning when every single meeting, every single lecture, we have this verbatim read out."

And I think there are a lot of Australians - in fact I know a lot of Australians like my brother Shaun are fed up with the Aboriginal issue. And it is still the case that a lot of Australians think - as the guy who looks after our pool said when he was here the other day - they already get everything for free. They get free healthcare, they get free education, free housing - what else do they want? so I'm voting no he said. So there is still a perception in the Australian community that Aboriginal people do get a lot more breaks than the rest of us. Ironic given that all the poverty and well-being markers still show that Aboriginal people are way behind the rest of the country but the rest of the country still feels like they're getting an easy ride and are not inclined to give them what they see as an even easier ride by giving them something called the Voice which people didn't understand anyway.

 

It's really interesting too that when you analyse the data from the referendum and look at where the majority of yes votes were recorded. It was in the inner cities of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane,  Adelaide where educated well-off possibly more liberal (as in left thinking) people live. They voted yes. The further you move out from the inner city to the outer suburbs and then out into the countryside and then out into the remote regions the thinner the yes vote gets so it's an enclave of inner city elite thing.  I don't know how you want to describe them and I guess I'm in that category too and I think we’re actually a little bit out of touch with what the rest of the country is thinking. The rest of the country was absolutely conclusive - no. Not interested. Don't care.

 

And I think that care factor is significant here. With the same sex marriage plebiscite - strictly not a referendum - that was put through because everybody knew someone who was affected by the laws as they were then which said same sex relationships can't be legitimate, they couldn't marry, they had no rights so everybody knew there was a practical outcome within their families or within their circle of friends. So people cared. In this context with the Voice it made absolutely no difference to the average Australian whether this thing got up or not. Obviously it did to Aboriginal people but to the average white Australian they didn't give a toss. They didn't understand and didn't care. I don't know what it says about Australia. It feels like a sad empty feeling but what angers me are these two things 1) that politicians got involved and it scuttled the whole thing and 2) read the room. There's a number of people in this country who are sick of - I think it's called identity politics. They want governments to spend time and money on issues that affect all of us – education, health, transport, the economy, food, places to live - they don't want governments to spend their time looking at you know whether or not you're gay or whether or not you're transgender or whether or not you're Aboriginal or whether or not you're autistic. They want the government to focus on problems which affect everybody. Now this is a little bit my interpretation of what's going on but I feel like that's a bit how it's running at the moment.

Some weeks later I found this – seems I’m not alone in my thinking. Don Watson put it this way:

“if the Left wants to regain the ground it lost it needs to give up its fashionable pieties, broaden its reading, examine its own motivation for signs of vanity and self-interest, and stop equating occupation of the moral high ground with doing something useful. It should recognise that identity politics is an option for people whose identities are threatened, but it won’t get you a democracy where all identities are secure. It will get you Trump.” (The Monthly, November 2023)

But I'm sad the Voice didn't get up. It was a good idea. It was a necessary step towards reconciliation, to treaty, to healing - it's now gonna take another decade or two so we’ll be long dead methinks before the Aboriginal question is satisfactorily resolved, if ever. It feels strangely sad and negative and empty today. It says something about Australia that I don't like but I kind of understand why it happened and I just think these inner urban elites and politicians need to read the room and focus on the things that actually mean something to everybody.

 

Song #43 200 Years

 

Salcombe, Devon

200 YEARS

(Listen HERE)

You left home as a boy to ride the ocean breeze

You left home as a boy to sail the seven seas

Christmas Day on the ocean so far away from home

If ever you had one on England’s green shores

On England’s green shores

 

And tonight you are certain that you’ve somethin’ to sing

Yes tonight you are sure that you’re so full of song

You’ve come back for a party and a tragic event

To celebrate history however it went

However it went

 

But have you heard of a black man who lives here in pain?

For whom Christmas means nothin’ after 200 years

He’s never been on the ocean nor left his land

For the earth is his mother and the source of all being

The source of all being

 

But you the white wanderer who travels the world

This planet is your backyard to live and to grow in

You’ve come back for the party, the drinks and the song

And how could one blame you - you’ve done no wrong

You’ve done no wrong

 

Sing Happy Birthday Australia with your flag wavin’ and cheers

You’re covered with white skin so go drink your beers

It may as well be this day; it’s as good as any

To bid a warm thank you to this great southern land

This great southern land

 

Sing Happy Birthday Australia with your flag wavin’ and cheers

You’re covered with white skin so go drink your beers

It may as well be this day; it’s as good as any

To bid a warm thank you to this great southern land

That’s very much older than 200 years

Than 200 years

 

(© Michael Coghlan, December 1987)

Commentary

Best read in conjunction with the song before it - Third Fleet. Had just arrived back in Australia for the festive season and wanting to balance the ledger a little. Definitely a folk song; has a kind of sea shanty feel.

 

 

Myall Creek

Myall Creek Memorial

I started to tear up from about 20 kilometres out. I started looking at the landscape as it may have been in 1838; tried to imagine how it might have looked then. I tried to imagine Aboriginal people wandering the land as it was and was just overcome with the realisation that it was THEIR land. In a way I had never really grasped before. And it has been taken from them. So I was already filled with a deep sadness before I arrived at the Myall Creek memorial.

Happily (for me) there was no one else there. Just a dusty carpark with a sign pointing down a winding track. I reached the monument and just let it all wash over me …..

Off and on over the years I had heard tales of Aboriginal massacres. Like many Australians I imagine I just somehow pushed the information aside with thoughts like ‘it was a long time ago’ or ‘it wouldn’t  have been that many people’ or ‘it was just the same as what happened in many places where the New World met ancient cultures’. An inevitable consequence of progress or something. It didn’t really have much impact on me.

But I have now read Henry Reynolds’ work. (The Other Side of the Frontier, This Whispering in Our Hearts). Reynolds lays bare a tale that has been ignored for more than 200 years. And the most recent research reveals that at least 6,000 and up to possibly 70,000 Aboriginal people were killed during the first decades of white settlement. We will never arrive at a finalaccurate figure; suffice to say it was in the thousands.

What sets Myall Creek apart is not the fact that a group of Aboriginal people were killed there in cold blood. That, it turns out, routinely happened all over the land – but in this case witnesses came forward and at least some of the perpetrators were tried, convicted, and hanged. So while the simple monument at Myall Creek was created to honour the memory of the 28 people who were killed there, in the shameful absence of memorials for the other tens of thousands who suffered a similar fate, it also stands as a de facto monument for all of them, and is a stark reminder of the fact that white Australia has yet to fully reconcile its past.

The fact that white Australia has yet to confront and accept this part of our past is sickly ironic in the light of our obsession with the “Lest We Forget’ mantra for soldiers who fell in wars.

As far back as I can remember I heard about ‘the Aboriginal problem.’ As I grew older and lived longer I came to understand the complexity and depth of this ‘problem.’ I don’t know the answer but I still see evidence of an ongoing, persistent trauma that has reverberated down through the generations. As Stan Grant says in his recent documentary, TheAustralian Dream, it’s hard not to inherit the DNA of trauma, and as long as that trauma persists there will be cultural breakdown.

And I have a longing to quieten the whispering in our hearts that Henry Reynolds speaks of. To once and for all reconcile our past with our present, and publicly acknowledge what we did to indigenous Australians. Perhaps this kind of meaningful reconciliation just might act as a circuit breaker and lead to Aboriginal Australians once again feeling like they belong in their own land. Feel as if they are respected. Valued.

Right now I suspect many of them don’t feel any of these things.

Australians need to talk about this stuff. We need to know the truth of our past. I taught Australian history in schools in the 80s and found no reference to the events that Reynolds writes about. These materials – letters, newspaper articles, public notices, church correspondence, reports to the British government, all documenting decades of atrocities, have lain hidden and ignored for two centuries.

Gradually I experienced the central truth of Aboriginal religion: that it is not a thing by itself but an inseparable part of a whole that encompasses every aspect of daily life, every individual, and every time – past, present, and future. It is nothing less than the theme of existence, and as such constitutes one of the most sophisticated and unique religious and philosophical systems known to man. (Richard Gould, American archaeologist, quoted in Deep Time Dreaming.)