aboriginal studies
A PROPOSAL
Morag Fraser
Michelle Grattan (ed)
Reconciliation: Essays On
Australian Reconciliation
Black Inc./Bookman Press $24.95pb, 318pp
1 86395 186 5
Spend just one day reading Reconciliation and you'll understand what I mean. This is a collection with such substance and range in its views that the proposal might even get up. Teachers would devour it. It could infuse life into history classes: so many crucial, hard-to-locate primary source documents are here, like John Howard's 'Practical reconciliation' speech, Paul Keating's Redfern address, Noel Pearson's essay version of his Brisbane Institute address, where he attacked welfare dependency amongst his own Cape York mob, and Patrick Dodson's 1999 Vincent Lingiari memorial lecture, in which, with a certain grim resolution, he declared the terms for a treaty.
You could base a sparkling English unit on it. There is stylistic variety enough -- from Mary Darkie's limpid narrative of Aboriginal station life to the rhetorical tactics of the conclusion to Christopher Pearson's essay ('What the polls suggest is that working-class taxpayers want to see more achieved in the way of lasting progress in the Aboriginal affairs budget and less wasted on self-serving bureaucracies, both black and white.'). Legal studies would have a feast, and any resourceful commerce or politics teacher could do much with Paul D. Wand's essay on Rio Tinto's reconciliation and negotiation experience on the ground with Aboriginal people in the Pilbara . Religious studies students could tease out the definitional strands of the word 'reconciliation' and do some advanced ethics with Raimond Gaita's fine essay on 'Guilt, Shame and Collective Responsibility'. I could go on and on. This is a collection to set the pedagogic glands of an old teacher racing. It is too much to hope that all state and federal politicians will read it -- though they should -- so the temptation to plant it where it will bear is strong.
In her introduction, Grattan says that the origins of the book lay in the early 1970s, when she became a junior reporter in Canberra and was given Aboriginal affairs as her beat. 'It would', she says, 'turn into an enduring interest'. I have been following Michelle Grattan's writing -- what (ageing) newspaper addict hasn't? -- since about that time without ever noticing the kind of tic or myopia that afflicts, for example, some economics journalists. You can't predict what Grattan will say. If she has an abiding interest in Aboriginal affairs then it has not clouded her judgment, or corralled her sympathies. She is pre-eminently a journalist/editor whose academic past shows in her old-fashioned capacity for gathering evidence scrupulously and for looking at political process as carefully as she chronicles event. (It's a very good old fashion -- if only it would return as regularly as flares.)
In Reconciliation she covers a lot of ground. P.P. McGuinness is there ('The reality is that of course the Aborigines have to adapt to co-existing with, and therefore sharing with, the rest of the Australian community'), as is current ATSIC national chairman Geoff Clark ('It's probably time to stop being coy or evasive about what action is required to achieve reconciliation. Personally, I doubt I will be satisfied with anything less than a treaty'). The divergence in the views of these two men is predictable, and it's as well to see their positions laid out. The other contributors are much less predictable. You don't come away from them with a lilt in your hopes or with a rivet in your prejudices. What they do leave you with is a comprehensive account of a very difficult process and period in our history. And none of the balm of ignorance. You can't read Robert Manne's detailed research into the government documents relating to the removal of Aboriginal children, particularly 'half-caste' children, from their families and remain under any illusions about the intentions of the policy -- to 'breed out' Aboriginality. In the face of the evidence, the residual 'for their own good' arguments and 'well-intentioned in their time' defences look thin, self-serving and morally repugnant.
The collection also gives a comprehensive account of the history that has led us to our current impasse. And much of that history comes through testimony and story. Even Frank Brennan, one of the most forensic analysts of the relevant legal and legislative processes of the last three decades, and one of the notable activists, anchors his essay in a parable about understanding what goes on 'on both sides of the river'. Evelyn Scott tells a powerful story about her father, who, in 1949, took a white teacher to court for beating Scott's brother in class -- and won. But even more remarkable is the final detail of the story: 'When my father came out of the courtroom after winning the case, one of the first people to shake his hand was the teacher's son. I learned a lot from my dad's way of challenging and questioning authority.' And so do we.
The potency of story in this collection (as anywhere) lies in its capacity to galvanise imagination. When all of the analytical faculties are exhausted, when you can't cope with a skerrick more debate or legal and rhetorical jousting or trading of your rights for my rights, out of the air comes something unexpected, a tale that extends logic without defying it. And then fresh understanding becomes possible. Many of the contributors to Grattan's collection have their own way of interpreting the phenomenon. Kim Beazley names it as imagination and picks it up in the negatives where Paul Keating's Redfern speech left it: 'It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us'.
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Return to Australian Book Review /July 2000