I saw a news article, and have limited social media nowadays so am not the best judge, but the announcement that Stan Grant had officially left ABC’s Q+A program seemed to barely raise notice. Perhaps because in a news cycle that has, for the last week, included Barbie and bombs, Grant making a temporary exit permanent wasn’t newsworthy.
I found the announcement sad. In many ways, when Stan published his opinion piece back in May explaining what he had been facing for years, and his pain at the inaction of those he felt should have had his back, I found it deeply relatable. Truth be told, there was a time when I did not believe I would have much in common with Stan at all, yet his sentiments hit at a time when I myself was coming out the other side of a similar quagmire.
At the beginning of his career, though Stan was always Aboriginal and was known as such, he was not an “Aboriginal journalist”. He anchored that desk at Real Life and then later at Today Tonight, going about his mainstream job in a professional manner and not ruffling feathers.
It was on his return from a long stint in China that things started to change. Through his work with NITV, he was suddenly in the driver’s seat of a lot of Indigenous news coverage and broadcasting.
Perhaps I’m petty. I will admit that when his profile started to rise dramatically in the mainstream as an Indigenous commentator, I found myself becoming agitated. This happened around the time of his famous Racism is Destroying the Australian Dream speech, which he did as part of a debate in 2015 at The Ethics Centre.
I found myself being overrun by progressive white people asking me “have you seen Stan’s speech?” and giving it massive accolades. This speech began by referencing the public bullying of Adam Goodes on the football field, then drew on Australia’s broader history of racism.
Suddenly, every time Stan spoke or wrote, he was the “talk of the town” for any progressive white person wanting to talk about racism. Yet like many other Aboriginal people who came from more activist roots, I didn’t get it. Grant, for example, often talked of Aboriginal struggle from a historical standpoint, not from the Indigenous rights perspective that I and others wrote from. His views were comparatively conservative. He talked about being locked out of the “Australian dream” by racism which must be corrected, rather than there being a deep need to overhaul this entire society through methods such as treaties and decolonisation. He appealed to “middle Australia” in a way that so many other Aboriginal people never do, through his insistence that Australia was “better than this”.
Things change. With the power of retrospect, I see parallels between the courses of Goodes and Grant. As Goodes started taking stronger stances on racism, he was punished. What I witnessed up to the coronation coverage indicates similar happened to Grant. The same white progressives who had championed Grant as “the Aboriginal voice” turned on him or stayed silent. This is to say nothing about the slurs and threats he had also received from the rabid, racist Australian underbelly for years.
As he occupied more space and became more outspoken, Stan became too much for those people. When I saw him being ripped on Twitter every time he appeared on Insiders, the complaints seemed to be that he interrupted and wouldn’t let other folks get a word in. Given some of the “luminaries” that appear on this list of panellists and their modus operandi, I have to wonder if criticism of Grant was justified, or whether the same progressive types who loved him not months earlier suddenly found themselves threatened by an “angry Black man” trope, even if that man was a highly educated and experienced one wearing a suit.
Some of Stan’s best writings have happened over the past year. Suddenly I found myself praising what Stan had expressed. Take, for example, this piece on the Voice to Parliament which raised incredibly important talking points from grassroots community members. Or this piece reflecting on the death of Queen Elizabeth II and Australian racism. There were more pieces, but the more I saw him talk about genocide, invasion, colonisation and so forth, the more relatable I found his work and the more I praised it.
Perhaps it was simply a case of time and confidence? Perhaps I was too hasty in my initial assessment and my view was always going to shift? This said, it upsets me that we are now down another Indigenous commentator in the public sphere, and one that had something different to offer, because Australia refuses to be an anti-racist space.
Grant’s long-ranging racism experience quickly got watered down to one bloke being investigated for harassment when it was so much more than this. A systemic failure cannot be undone by one man receiving a summons. If, in one hand, a media organisation holds a protest placard, and in another, a pen with which to contribute to the problem, are they ever really seeing the part they play in perpetuating racism?
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Stan and I will ever be in staunch agreement on Indigenous rights. We come from different perspectives. That’s OK. What is not OK is that yet again, Australia has lost another Indigenous perspective with which to challenge it when really it could well do to listen to as many of us as possible. Will this pattern change?
