The 254 years between today and the first violent east coast continental contact between Aboriginal people and European invaders is barely a moment in the aeons of Indigenous occupation of this land.
But it has undeniably been a moment of apocalyptic upheaval for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who’ve survived an attempted colonial genocide by the unholy coalition of gun, government and God.
Not for want of ongoing resistance have there been hard-fought advancements in Indigenous rights. But social, economic and health outcomes (not least terrible suicide, incarceration and child removal rates) are still shamefully poor for Indigenous people as evidenced by the annual governmental performative reckoning of Closing the Gap figures.
Speak to any professional who has worked to advance Indigenous people in this country and they’ll explain what should be obvious. And that is the very short, straight line between dispossession and the widespread massacre of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the theft of their children and the cruelty imposed on many by Christian and other institutions, and contemporary traumas manifest in – but rarely remedied by – Closing the Gap.
Nyamal woman and clinical psychologist Tracey Westerman (the first Australian Aboriginal person to attain a PhD in clinical psychology, dedicated now for 25 years to improving mental health outcomes for Indigenous people) parses this institutional failure in her recent memoir, Jilya. Founder of The Westerman Jilya Institute for Indigenous Mental Health, which mentors Indigenous people from high-risk communities to become psychologists for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander clients, recently wrote in the Saturday Paper, how the “no vote” in the voice referendum was carried by an idea that yes would privilege one group over another.
“What was really being argued is Aboriginal people who make up these [Closing the Gap] statistics are there because they did it to themselves. That the causative factors underlying these statistics have nothing to do with forced removals, government-inflicted generational trauma and entrenched systemic failure.’’
She articulates a sadly pervasive white (or non-Indigenous) paternal attitude that has permeated so much historical and contemporary regulation (and acute human rights infringement) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives. Namely, that the Black people, poor souls, needed to be saved from themselves and the responsibility for doing so – no matter how punitive the means – fell to government and church saviours.
Historic violent dispossession from traditional lands, massacres, extreme cruelty, oppression and active eugenics (a driving force behind assimilationism and its insidious imperative to “breed out” or “dilute” Indigeneity – a cultural impossibility) have their contemporary twins in obscene incarceration and suicide rates, forced removals of children and blithe corporate indifference to cultural antiquity (witness Juukun Gorge).
There was no uniform mission experience. Some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experienced compassion and protection from settler and government violence. For others the cruelty was profound.
It’s all part of our history that has been (as it continues to be) storied to make more benign the settler-colonial impact of violent dispossession and to ameliorate responsibility (and perhaps guilt) for today’s trauma manifestations.
Over decades I’ve deep-dived into Australian Black-white history, from the violent racism of the frontier to that of the academy. A consistent racially malevolent undertone runs through it. It involves more than naivety. Something akin to a deliberate unknowing.
So when I see a workbook that asks school students to consider how Aboriginal people were “blessed” by British colonialism. I’m hardly shocked. (The author has since apologised, saying “My own understanding of First Nations history and culture has developed considerably in the over two decades since the student workbook was authored and published.”) The sentiments behind such nonsense, sadly, I do not believe were an outlier when the book was written 20 years ago – or indeed today.
Ditto during the voice campaign when Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the federal shadow Indigenous Australians minister of Warlpiri heritage, dismissed concerns about intergenerational First Nations trauma, saying there are no negative ongoing impacts of British colonisation on Aboriginal people.
Sure, you can tell any story you like. But that doesn’t make it history.
Which brings to mind the advocacy of early 20th century anthropologist Donald Thomson, who put his life on the line to resist the often malignant impact of church and state – and resource harvesting – on the Indigenous people of Cape York and Arnhem Land. During the Caledon Bay crisis the autodidact anthropologist (celebrated, not before time in a recent biography by Robert Macklin, Fighting For Justice) dissuaded the federal government from mounting a reprisal expedition against the Yolngu after their killing of invading Japanese trepang fisherman in the early 1930s.
Thomson was infuriated by state and church mistreatment of Aboriginal people and by massacres, most recently at Coniston in 1928. During a visit to Cape York in 1932 he’d been appalled by the cruelty meted out to men and women at the Presbyterian Aurukun mission. He spent his life vociferously railing against the impact of guns, government and God on Aboriginal people and urging all to stay away.
Almost a century ago he understood better than too many today just how history reverberates into the present – and how it must be learned from.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
