Bain
Attwood
Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History
Allen & Unwin, $29.95 pb, 264 pp,
1741145775
FOR
THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, Bain Attwood
has been trying to deprovincialise what
he sees as an insular historiography
of Aboriginal Australia by imploring
colleagues to embrace the latest intellectual
trends from France, America and New
Zealand. In Telling the Truth about
Aboriginal History, he expands on
his many press articles on the ‘history
wars’ and combines them with methodological
reflection on postmodernism and post-colonialism.
What advice does he have for his colleagues
in the face of doubts cast on their
work by newspaper columnists and other
‘history warriors’?
His task is complicated by the fact
that this book is also explicitly directed
at a general audience, an aim that is
frustrated by indulging in psychoanalytic
vocabulary with little definitional
assistance. Pitching his discussion
of identity politics and Keith Windschuttle’s
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History
(2002) at the lay reader, Attwood delivers
able summaries of the issues, although
they do not go beyond the now extensive
literature on the subjects. To this
extent, two-thirds of Telling the
Truth about Aboriginal History
repeats commonplaces and rushes through
doors opened by scholars before him.
Some of these scholars are acknowledged;
many are not.
It is in the last section of the book
on the public use of history and the
rise of rival forms of historical knowledge,
such as oral history and indigenous
storytelling, that Attwood gets into
his stride. Here his agenda is nothing
less than ‘a basic reconceptualisation
of historical practice and historical
knowledge’ that can ‘transform
the way we represent the work of history’.
Why the need for such fundamental change?
The field is methodologically provincial,
he thinks. The empirical reconstructions
of the frontier in the 1970s were based
on a naïve realist view of the
sources, such that Western protocols
of verification — the use of settler-produced
documents, above all — occluded
indigenous experiences and thus prefigured
a grossly incomplete account of frontier
relations. Moreover, the positivism
of mainstream Aboriginal historiography,
like historiography generally, posits
a distinction between past and present
that ignores what Attwood, following
Dominick LaCapra, calls the ‘implication’
of the historian in the past. Yet past
and present cannot be separated so neatly,
he insists, because we are dealing with
‘traumatic histories’, the
effects of which linger in the present
to colour memory and identity. Oral
history and indigenous myths and legends
thus pose a challenge to Western pretensions
to objective knowledge of the past.
The Captain Cook story common among
Aborigines may be factually inaccurate,
but it contains another kind of truth,
namely the congealed indigenous experience
of colonisation.
Attwood’s answer to the problem
of rival truths — academic and
indigenous — is to plead for tolerance.
Historians should respect the esoteric
truth that indigenous stories reveal
while also becoming conscious of their
own investments in the narratives they
produce. Relying heavily on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s
Provincializing Europe (2000),
he hopes that the ensuing mutual regard
will prevent the seamless integration
of indigenous stories into a renewed
master narrative of a redeemed, non-racist
nation-state. A truly democratic public
sphere will be characterised by dialogue
between different memories of our past,
and that is to the good. The truth about
Aboriginal history, then, is that truth
is protean, and that we need to live
with this pluralism.
This section of the book, then, is a
seemingly tolerant, if by now predictable,
call to respect difference. Does the
argument work? For all the criticism
of historians’ blindness to their
‘implication’ in the past,
Attwood does not thematise his own.
The prose affects the tone of Olympian
objectivity, implying distance from
partisan histories, but the reader will
not fail to notice, but may not understand
the reasons for, the intemperate barbs
directed at Robert Manne. The preoccupation
with Windschuttle seems as excessive
as the neglect of female historians
in the field, such as Anna Haebich,
Ann Curthoys, Marilyn Lake and Ann McGrath,
is striking. Some reflexivity would
have been welcome, too, in the decision
to omit mention of Attwood’s extraordinary,
patricidal attack on Henry Reynolds
in History Compass (2004), in
which, in a notably unguarded statement,
Attwood described The Law of the
Land (1987) as propagating a ‘lie’
about the origins of terra nullius.
Like indigenous people, Reynolds, it
seems, indulges in myth rather than
scientific history, which, despite his
postmodern rhetoric, Attwood remains
determined to rescue. Nor is Attwood
correct in the analysis generally. Historians
have been well aware of the link between
past and present in the work they do.
Their ‘implication’ was explicit.
An interest in indigenous people and
contemporary racism in the 1960s and
1970s sent a generation of students
such as Raymond Evans and Lyndall Ryan
to the archives.
Attwood’s attack on the ‘naïve
realism’ of the frontier conflict
research agenda of the 1970s is also
questionable. The problem was not documentary
positivism but that he strove to replace
the conflict paradigm with one stressing
‘accommodation’ between settlers
and Aborigines, an approach embraced,
incidentally, by Windschuttle. In this
way, the empirical reconstruction of
this now very contentious area was nipped
in the bud. I can’t imagine this
neglect occurring with the Armenian
or any other genocide. Researchers in
this field don’t let themselves
be distracted by such methodological
doubts.
The same can be said of Attwood’s
curt dismissal of the connection between
genocide and colonialism in Australia
in view of the fact that historians
around the world are writing about this
relationship in North and South America,
Asia and Africa. After all, by the nineteenth
century, colonial authorities were well
aware of the catastrophic demographic
impact on indigenous peoples of European
settlement, yet they pressed on regardless
in the name of progress and civilisation.
Attwood acknowledges that genocide is
a term popular in indigenous circles,
and is prepared to permit this view
as allegorical — it is a ‘truthful
myth’, like the Captain Cook story
— but scholars are bidden to avoid
it. Closer inspection reveals that,
in fact, the indigenous understanding
accords with international law and the
conception of Raphael Lemkin (who coined
the term in 1944) better than his own.
For neither the UN definition of genocide
nor that of Lemkin limits the perpetrator
of the crime to the state. No grand
plan need exist, nor even that mass
killing take place. Some settler historians
appear to be in thrall to myth rather
more than is the case with indigenous
people.
This example shows the limitations of
hypostasising the categories of ‘indigenous’
and ‘academic/Western/European’
régimes of truth. Is our thinking
really confined to ethnic categories?
Indigenous people write academic history
as well as tell traditional stories,
just as settler Australians write poetry
as well as rummage in archives. Everyone
can make esoteric and exoteric knowledge.
Rival claims, such as the genocide one,
can be adjudicated exoterically. A democratic
public sphere does not just, somewhat
condescendingly, tolerate esoteric truths,
but enables learning processes, which
lends it a productively subversive potential.
That is how the oppressive nature of
colonialism was revealed to the world.
But the game of mutual recognition Attwood
enjoins is inadequate for another reason.
A priori, settler Australians
have no reason to care about indigenous
experiences. Even if they acknowledge
Aboriginal suffering, they engage in
the simple moral calculus called theodicy:
any injustice committed has been redeemed
by the just nature of the modern society
that replaced indigenous ones. Now for
settler Australians to criticise this
theodicy, they need to be moved by stories
of the suffering and to believe them
to be true. Thus it is not a problem,
as Attwood contends, that readers identified
with the Aborigines rather than the
settlers in the frontier conflict books
of the 1970s. In view of the long criminalisation
of Aborigines in settler writing, it
is an achievement. If historians are
to promote moral consciousness among
the public regarding the value of alterity,
they need to master a certain rhetoric
and emotional register, as Reynolds
has, rather than engage in theoretical
parlour games.
Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History
is a missed opportunity to educate a
wide readership about the nature and
importance of empirical research. In
its habitual invocation and lengthy,
deferential quotation of (overwhelmingly
male) ‘authorities’, and the
deployment of vague yet seemingly profound
statements that lay readers won’t
understand, the book evinces a characteristically
provincial combination of anxiety and
overconfidence that does not answer
the questions historians and the general
public are asking about the research
methods and the public use of history.
This deprovincialisation of Aboriginal
history needs to be deprovincialised.
