We're all owners, Mr Dodson

Pat Dodson's declaration that Aboriginal people own Australia is hardly likely to advance the cause of reconciliation

Aboriginal leader Pat Dodson, former chair of the National Committee on Reconciliation, has some news for all of us.

Those of us who think that we own our own homes and that Australia is a country we jointly own, are quite mistaken.

On Radio National early last Thursday he announced that "Aboriginal people are owners of this country".  Of the proposed constitutional preamble "if they want to put anything in there, put the fact down that we own Australia".

This statement is nonsense.  Australia is a nation created from the processes which flowed from European settlement.  Before that invasion, this continent was inhabited by 200 to 300 separate cultures, which had no common language or identity.

The sense of a common Aboriginal identity has been created out of the experience of displacement and absorption into the Australian nation.

Though there is much to be ashamed of in the treatment of indigenous Australians in that process, Australia is a free, democratic and decent society.  A society built up by the efforts of millions of people from a wide range of origins.

Before glibly dispossessing the more than 98 per cent of the Australian population who are not Aboriginal, Pat Dodson had disparaged Democrat Aboriginal Senator Aden Ridgeway.

Senator Ridgeway, commenting on the proposed constitutional preamble, had said that, given their dictionary meanings, kinship was a better description of Aboriginal relationship with the land than custodianship or stewardship.

Pat Dodson's response was not to debate the issue, but to attack Senator Ridgeway's capacity to articulate Aboriginal cultural ideas.

"Aden ought to go back and learn what customary law's about rather than what the English have to say," he said.

In Mr Dodson's somewhat totalitarian universe, Aborigines can apparently only have one view to accurately reflect Aboriginal cultural concepts, and Mr Dodson can tell us what that view is.

Senator Ridgeway appears to have conducted himself with considerable sense and dignity in the negotiations between the Prime Minister and the Democrats.

The Senator Ridgeway presumably also takes the view that he is a Senator for New South Wales, not merely the 1 to 2 per cent of that State's population who happen to be of Aboriginal descent.

By saying these remarkably silly things, Pat Dodson is playing to the role of "approved" Aborigine.

The idea that there is some specific "Aboriginal" opinion which approved Aboriginal spokespeople can articulate may flatter the pretensions of the moral-vanity brigade, but it is a condescending simplification of a very wide range of opinion amongst Aboriginal Australians.

If we stop treating people as individuals, capable of having their own thoughts and making their own decisions, we deny them an essential part of their humanity.

Of course, if Dodson were Pauline Hanson, saying that Australia belonged to the people of European descent and that John Howard ought to go back and learn what Anglo customs really were before talking about Australian culture, few would fail to identify such offensive nonsense for what it was.

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