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'Who speaks, about what, to whom, on whose behalf, with what right?'
Raimond Gaita
WE'VE GIVEN AYERS ROCK back to the Aborigines!' Perhaps I remember those words so clearly because a friend spoke them to me over the telephone when I was in England, surprised almost daily at the reforms of the Whitlam government and at the international interest they excited. Years later I reflected on the meaning of that 'we'. Had he said the same words to an English person, the meaning of it would have been different. Addressed to me, that 'we' wasn't so much a classification that included or excluded me: it was an invitation to be part of a community whose identity was partly formed by its relation to Australia and its past and by its preparedness to accept responsibilities for what had been done to the Aborigines -- at that time (before we knew about the stolen children), the taking of their lands and desecration of their sacred places. Had I thought about it, that would partly have answered the question I did ask him. 'What does giving it back mean?' He couldn't say. In fact no one I asked could. No one was interested. Everyone was heartened by the generosity expressed in the gesture and enthusiastic in their hopes for a new era.
The enthusiasm was justified, as was much of the enthusiasm for multiculturalism and SBS, even though few people were then (or are now) clear about what mulitculturalism means. Embattled politics being what it is in Australia, both the enthusiasm and the vagueness are an irritant to the right which has, in my judgement, failed to see the wood for the trees on these matters.
Only five or six years before my friend told me about Ayers Rock, there was an incident that I recount in A Common Humanity and that still shakes me. It occurred in the late sixties at Melbourne University. I was a member of the Labour Club which was then a club of the radical left. Like other members of the club, I was excited by the civil rights movements in the USA and, by the by, its more radical breakaway groups like the Black Panthers. One day a man came from Queensland to speak to the club. He told us that people were emigrating to Queensland from the southern states of the USA disillusioned with life there because of the progress made by the civil rights movement. Unable to tolerate the thought let alone the fact that blacks might vote and attend the same schools as whites, they thought Queensland might be more congenial to them. Or so we were told. We were also told that some of the immigrants went out on weekends in four wheel drives to shoot Aborigines in much the same spirit as they shot kangaroos.
I'm not sure now that the story wasn't true. At the time though, I gave it credence. Maybe. Maybe not, I thought, and the thirty or forty of my fellow students who attended thought the same , I believe. At any rate, no one said, 'This is unbelievable.' Yet I didn't -- nor, I think did the other students -- bother to find out whether or not it was true.
As I said, the memory of it still shakes me. How was it possible that idealistic young Australian students, sincerely anti racists, should not care whether Aborignes were hunted for sport! What more damaging evidence could there be that we didn't care than the fact that we didn't even bother to find out whether it was so? I don't think one can answer these questions without recourse to the concept of racism. But whatever qualifications must be made to the claim that we were sincerely anti racist students, the place to locate the racism that would explain (though not excuse) our astonishing omission, is not, I think, deep in our hearts. It is in some of the institutions of Australian society that made Aborigines morally invisible to most Australians.
That wouldn't be possible now. But Aborigines are still only partially visible to the moral faculties of many (most?) Australians, even to many who are committed to reconciliation. Sorry Day is an example. It expresses a new aversion to racism that ensures there are not now examples like the one I just recalled. At the same time much of it is marked by a sentimentality that expresses the kind of goodwill that can quickly be eroded by the impatient belief that the Aborigines are asking for too much or showing excessive anger towards the government or (God forbid) to the white community more generally. Remember the tut tutting when Noel Pearson was moved to call members of the Coalition racist scum. 'Mind your place. Don't rise above yourself.' If one denies that that was the tone, one can't , I think, deny that it wasn't far from it. Can one fully understand the evil Aborigines have suffered and be so quickly stirred to indignation about what one takes to be their excesses? Can one really understand it and take most of them to be excesses?
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TWO YEARS AGO I GAVE a public lecture on genocide and the stolen generation at the Australian Catholic University campus in Ballarat. A small number of Kooris were in the audience. During the talk and afterwards during discussion they were sometimes irritable and impatient. Finally one spoke up. He was fed up, he said, with the many distinctions I had been making. Did I know what it felt like to be a victim of genocide? Did I not see that one can speak of these things only if one experienced them? Only Aborigines could speak with real understanding of the genocide committed against them. Did I even know any Aborigines? He finished, by wondering whether I was exploiting their suffering to make a name for myself, writing and lecturing about it.
Anyone who has spoken on platforms with Aborigines, or to audiences where they are present, will know his response is not unusual. People who are not Aborigines will know and perhaps be unnerved by the complex range of feelings -- suspicion, pleasure, gratitude, hostility, warmth -- Aborigines direct their way. Those feelings look inconsistent only if one presses them towards a resolution. But there is no need to do that. Those many conflicting responses appropriately mirror the situation of most Aborigines in contemporary Australia. They are true to it rather than a sign of a muddle.
I replied to the Koori that I spoke as a citizen -- one whose conscience had belatedly been awakened, who wrote on matters of public concern and who believed he had something to say. Being a philosopher, much of what I speak and write about is of a conceptual kind. I have nothing to contribute to the historical argument. But it is not because I am a philosopher, I went on the say, that I believe the conceptual issues are the most pressing. Though we are far from having an adequate history, though Bringing Them Home makes no claim to being one, and though its finding will surely be disputed, the broad picture is already clear. And the disputes about whether genocide had been committed against the children and their parents are not, for the most part empirical or legal. They are philosophical and moral, enlivened by the question whether a criminal category whose paradigm is the Holocaust, could apply to what was done to the children and their parents, even during the worst periods of the absorption programmes.
I wasn't sure how he responded. He listened, at first with the same irritation as before, and then more attentively, but I'm sure he wasn't convinced. I'm not even confident that he considered that I had given him something to think about. We came, he and I, from worlds that are too far apart to be bridged by a brief and irritable discussion after a public lecture.
To some my response to him may seem unnecessarily on the back foot. It's a matter for argument when one's shame and guilt make one too defensive. Argument about political correctness is in part about that and it is right that it should be. But there is, I believe, such a thing as the right to speak because of one's membership of a particular group, a right which is not merely a function of information or insight one may have come by in that way. "Who are you to say this?' is not a question that can rightly be answered by, 'I'm curious about the matter and like everybody, I have a right to say what I believe is true.' for the same reason, 'Who are you to put your nose in our troubles?', is not answered adequately by, 'I am a human being, concerned with right and wrong, justice and injustice.' Even bitter enemies in deadly conflict can (sometimes they do) respect one another, a form of respect that is almost always dependent on (though not entirely based on) contingencies that determine the actual depth of their involvement in the conflict that divides them.
A long tradition has disassociated depth from contingency, but our recent recovery of the important connections between depth of identity and rootedness, and authority and rootedness, has gone some way to correct that. While appeal to our humanity rather than to our local identities is rightly an ultimate moral appeal, by itself it seldom gives one the right to speak or the right to intervene, because it is often insufficient to command the kind of respect necessary for possession of that right.
If a Jew goes to Israel as a volunteer at a time of war, a Palestinian may ask him scornfully why he is not prepared to live there, but he is unlikely to ask him why he is there. One can imagine a discussion between them in which both recognise that contingencies of birth and identity have generated moral necessities that have locked both of them in a conflict in which one may kill the other. In some of his writings Amos Oz imagines just such discussions, emulating, I suspect, Albert Camus whose Letters to a German Friend were written while he was a member of the French Resistance. One might find the writings of both men a little portentous at times, but that should not get in the way of seeing the importance of what they are doing, of seeing the importance of such imaginary conversations as a means -- perhaps an indispensable means -- of helping those embroiled in conflict to judge the justice of their cause or its prosecution.
The question, Who has the right to speak, about what, to whom, on whose behalf? inevitably comes up again and again. That it should sometimes come up uneasily, belligerently, neurotically, is hardly surprising given the situations that prompt it. It has not been asked often in Australia in connection with the Aborigines, but that is changing. It shows in a minor way in our embarassment over not knowing what generic terms to use to describe those whom we murdered and whose lands and children we stole. Unsatisfactory though it is, 'Aborigine' strikes me as preferable most of the time to 'indigenous' and preferable almost all the time to 'first nations'. It is interesting that many Aborigines now use 'blackfella' and 'whitefella', but even if one ignores the fact that not only white Australians must think about their attitudes to Aborigines, few who are not Aborigine have the authority to use those terms.
Impatience with fine distinctions can come from unlikely quarters. Last year I gave a lecture on genocide and the stolen generation to a group of lawyers in Sydney. I argued that there could be little doubt that during the period covered by Bringing Them Home, some Australian state governments enacted genocidal policies as these are defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. I also argued that the United Nations' definition was inadequate, if only because it allowed Bringing Them Home to conclude, quite reasonably insofar as it was guided by the convention, that assimilation policies of the seventies and eighties were also 'arguably genocidal'. A more serious conception of genocide, I argued -- one that is morally alive to the fact that Armenia, the Holocaust and Rawanda are our paradigms -- can be applied to what sometimes happened to the stolen children and their parents. Our thoughts about this, I claimed, have been distorted by the understandable belief that genocide requires murder. That it needn't, becomes apparent to anyone who believes that the forcible sterilisation of a people for the purpose of the extinguishment as a people would constitute genocide. Accepting that there can be genocide without mass killing does not demean the Holocaust and will enable us to understand better what it is about the Holocaust that we try to understand by bringing it under the concept of genocide.
During a discussion, a Justice of the Supreme Court who had been listening attentively said something like this (I embellish a little so as to make his point dramatically clear).
Although I was surprised that the question should have been put to me by a Justice of the Supreme Court, I recognised it as a familiar and important one. The Koori in Ballarat was asking the same question. No matter that now stands before the Australian nation is so painfully a matter of the heart while at the same time so urgently in need of a cool and patient head, a head patiently open to the detailed and subtle examination of the concepts we need to understand ourselves and to have clear vision and realistic hopes. Amongst others, they are the concepts with which to explore what is an issue between those who are content with what he is offering at present; those which enable us to judge which crimes are rightly called genocide and those with which to explore what is at issue in talk of self-determination.
I do not, however, want now to succumb to endorsing a sharp distinction between head and heart of a kind that I have been trying to undermine during most of my philosophical life. Understanding here, even one of the distinctions that will delineate the structures of the concepts I just mentioned, is understanding in which head and heart must come together. Like all understanding, however, it must rise to the requirements of its subject matter, which sometimes look very abstract indeed.
Much of what we need to think about is often discussed under the heading of collective responsibility. To understand the different ways indigenous and non-indigenous Australians can come together and the different ways we can't, we need to understand the ways we can call others and be called ourselves to lucid moral responsiveness to our past. If relations are even to be honest, let alone to realise their human potential, we must asknowledge the different ways we should rise to those calls. One would have to be deaf not to hear that in the demands for an apology and more subtly in the ambivalent responses I described earlier.
Outside of academic circles, discussion of collective responsibility has been woeful because of conceptual illiteracy of an elementary kind -- about the distinction between shame and guilt for example, or between apologies and expressions of regret. I am conscious that I now sound like a philosopher who believes he is in a position to tell people how to think. Some philosophers do assume that authority and I have often deplored it. Nonetheless we will need to think harder than we have done if we are to get beyond the sterile divisions between left and right that disfigure public discussion in this country. A right wing intelligensia -- now grouped around Quadrant magazine -- has a considerable influence on the Coalition and, I suspect, beyond. (Appparently the Prime Minister has become a avid reader of Quadrant since Paddy McGuiness became its editor.) Not all of its members, by any means, are unmoved by the past and present sufferings of Aborigines. If their sympathies are somewhat dulled, it is sometimes because of the embattled nature of much of Australian public intellectual life, in which fine distinctions are treated with disdainful and sometimes explosive impatience. Often, it's not the suffering and injustice of the past the right denies, it is the claim that we are collectively responsible for it; it's not attention to the wrongs done to the children but the idea that it could be genocide that angers them (if it's genocide, Michael Duffy said, then Menzies and Hasluck share the same circle of hell with Hitler and Himmler). It's not greater participation by Aborigines in the life of the nation they are opposed to, it's the notion of Aboriginal self-determination that provokes their derision.
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Collective responsibility needn't mean collective guilt, and more often than not it shouldn't because one can rationally feel guilty only for what one has done or failed to do. But it should be more than regret, even more than the 'deep, sincere and sorrowful regret' John Howard and John Herron say they feel. Regret implies little more than that one wishes that something hadn't happened. Compassionate Americans, Germans, Danes, Norwegians for example, could feel it about the crimes against the Aborigines. The saintly ones among them might also feel profound sorrow. Clearly, though, they cannot be asked to rise to the responsibilities implied in Paul Keating's 'we'.
I understand why you make these fine distinctions in search of an adequate label. I understand because I'm a lawyer and we lawyers are at home with this way of doing things. But don't you think that you must proceed differently if you are to convince those who are not already convinced of how long and how deeply the indigenous peoples of this land have suffered. To do that, you will have to move people -- like Robert Manne does. Your discussion is too abstract, too dry.
I replied that the word genocide was not a label, that it denoted a concept we had reached for to characterise a relatively novel dimension of our political experience in an effort to bring that experience within the space of a common understanding and that -- as Bringing Them Home revealed inadvertently -- it is a concept whose moral and logical structure is still unclear to us. Imagine, I suggested, that you are struggling in court with the evidence, with precedents and complex legal arguments, in an effort to determine whether the person before you is guilty of manslaughter or murder. Imagine now that someone says: 'Why get so bothered about a label? We've seen the tears. That's what matters, not this abstract argument.' Of course, I put the question to him rhetorically, but in fact many people asked something like it in the two great trials of Nazi criminals -- at Nuremberg and in Jerusalem when Eichmann was tried. 'We've seen the corpses pile high, we've heard the terrible stories telling how they suffered before they died. What does it matter whether you call the evil done to them mass murder or a crime against humanity?'