The Great Australian Wickedness

In 1968 the distinguished anthropologist Bill Stanner complained about what he called "the great Australian silence", the way that Aborigines and their plight had been virtually written out of our history and consciousness for many decades.  In the intervening thirty-two years all this has changed, and no responsible public figure would now deny that Aborigines have suffered great injustices, some of whose effects are still being felt.

But today, a new compulsion operates to distort our view of Australia's history.  This is the urge to demonstrate "the great Australian wickedness", the desire to undermine the legitimacy of much of the non-Aboriginal past.  The moral panic unleashed by the Howard Government's attempt to correct misrepresentations surrounding the "stolen generations" issue shows the prevalence of this view among the Aboriginal movement and much of the educated middle class.

I have long believed that Bringing Them Home, the 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report on the "stolen generations" issue, involved a betrayal of the very people it was supposed to benefit.  Certainly, many Aboriginal children were inexcusably removed from loving parents, whether or not such removal was lawful at the time.  But a prerequisite for resolving long-standing injustices is a truthful account of how these occurred, one that can withstand any challenges directed against it.

However, HREOC was so intent on doing Australia down that its presentation of history was a travesty.  As well as misrepresenting key documents -- which it did in its disgraceful claim that the child removal policies constituted "genocide" -- Bringing Them Home simply ignored important evidence which might temper its account of national wickedness.

Among the many examples is its failure to present a truthful account of the complex relations that once existed between "full-blood" Aborigines and those of mixed ancestry in many parts of Australia.  There is indisputable evidence that at different times a number of Aboriginal groups refused to recognise mixed-race children as Aboriginal, a rejection that in at least some cases led to attempted or successful infanticide.

For instance, in the "stolen generations" test case currently before the Federal Court, evidence was presented that the plaintiff, Peter Gunner, had told people that his mother tried to kill him by putting him down a rabbit hole soon after his birth.  Of course, some of the reasons for such brutality might be found in the harsh conditions which Aborigines experienced after white settlement.  Nevertheless, given such cases it is not surprising that authorities believed they were acting properly in removing some "mixed race" children.

Bringing Them Home also completely ignored that for most of the first half of the twentieth century there was a widespread belief amongst those concerned with Aboriginal welfare that there was a moral obligation to differentiate "full-blood" from "mixed race" Aborigines.  This belief was held right across the political spectrum, from communists to Christian conservatives.

So if the Howard government is really guilty of serious wrongdoing in relation to the "stolen generations" issue, it is that it waited too long to expose the shoddiness of the HREOC report.

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