Prior to the European invasion and settlement, there were around 300 Aboriginal language groups in Australia. They were extremely varied in religious outlook and local practices. The language of the Tasmanian Aborigines, for example, had been separated from any mainland language longer than English and Persian have been from their common linguistic roots.
Unlike the Melanesians of the Torres Strait Islands, none used settled agriculture more complex than stone fishing traps. However sophisticated some of their cultural practices may have been, for reasons which may well have been a rational response to their environment and its limitations, they had not participated in the Agricultural Revolution of the Neolithic era. As Geoffrey Blainey has pointed out, the arrival of the British of the early Industrial Revolution in 1788 probably represented the greatest gulf ever encountered between human societies. A journey in technological and organisational sophistication that it took the British 40 centuries to travel, Australian Aborigines have had to traverse in less than two -- and during the most rapid social and technological changes in human history.
The impact of European arrival, with their accompanying diseases, on epidemiologically isolated peoples was devastating. But disease was simply the most deadly of a series of devastations. There were massacres (some with Aborigines on both sides: joining the police force or becoming a stockman were one of a very limited number of ways indigenous skills could find employment in the invading commercial society), dispossession and deportations.
The obvious physical characteristic of different skin colour was tied to the cultural gulf and used to justify excluding Aborigines from full participation in the new society being created. This, and their nomadic hunter-gatherer approach to land use, had the further convenience of devaluing any possession claims. The Aborigines confronted an immensely more powerful invading culture. On top of the enormous inherent technological and organisational gulf, explicit legal barriers were put in place, making the gulf even harder to bridge.
Policy has since faced a serious bind. Abolishing the legal barriers did not mean the gulf in skills, organisational arrangements and understanding was bridged. As Ron Brunton points out, you cannot achieve industrial-society life expectancies with hunter-gatherer notions of good health practice. But acknowledging that gulf easily lead policy makers back to special arrangements. In the end, one set of rules for all is the only proper way to show inclusion, yet does nothing to deal with the specific problems.
These are not easy issues for policy to confront. Unfortunately, they are made even less easy to deal with now that showing (very narrowly defined) "concern" for indigenous Australians has become a prime form of displaying one's moral splendour among journalists, academics and other commentators. Truth and open inquiry is sacrificed to the status-seeking of conspicuous correctness. Discrimination becomes the catch-all explanation of Aboriginal disadvantage, since that creates the appropriate drama of mascots, targets and approved solutions for the conspicuous correctness game to be played out.
Having been colonised for their land, indigenous Australians are now being used for the patronage opportunities of the Aboriginal industry and the moral display opportunities of the indigenous-concern game: a mutually-supporting arrangement.
A fine example of the conspicuous correctness genre is provided in the recently (November 1999) published Concise History of Australia by Stuart Macintyre, Ernest Scott Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Melbourne University.
There are 38 illustrations in the Concise History. Thirteen, or more than a third, are of Aboriginal subjects. It could be, of course, that Aborigines are regarded as particularly photogenic: exotic images with which to titillate foreign readers -- the book is part of a Cambridge University Press series. Alternatively, it could be the author parading how much he shares their pain. Any reader of the History -- which Professor James Griffin has labelled "Olympian, self-gratifying, baby-boomer history" and drawing attention to its rosy-hued rendition of indigenous cultures -- can only conclude that the latter is the case.
It tells you much about this History that the Index provides references on 25 pages to "communists" and "Communist Party" yet the Index lists no specific references to Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans or Jews and the only specific reference to Catholicism listed are three references to the Catholic Social Studies Movement. The Index lists eleven references to Christianity in general, overwhelmingly concentrated in the early colonial period with the last reference referring to the impact of Darwinianism: presumably the point at which intellectuals no longer had to treat Christianity seriously. Henry Lawson's influence gets more serious treatment than that of Christianity. By contrast, the first page of the Index lists 151 references to Aboriginal matters on 60 pages including six for Aboriginal spirituality. But, then, concern with Aboriginal matters gets top-rank conspicuous correctness points, while taking Christianity seriously is a major negative. As the lack of coverage of Catholic experience indicates, the book demonstrates that the Irish have been abandoned as a mascot group by cutting-edge "progressivism".
The fact that Aboriginal Australians are marginally more likely than the rest of the population to identify as Christian highlights how ridiculous this self-indulgence passing as serious history is (71.5% to 70.9). Only 2.06% of Australian Aborigines (themselves only 2%t of the general population) identified as followers of a traditional Aboriginal religion (ABS Catalogue Number 2034.0).
Then there is Macintyre's treatment of the Mabo case. Even though the crucial decision was not handed down until 1992, right at the end of the period covered, the case is clearly totemic for Macintyre. He mentions it on pages 34, 35, 263, 264 and 276. Yet he cannot get basic facts right. On page 263 he says
In 1992 the High Court determined that Eddie Mabo, a Torres Strait Islander, had common law rights in his land on Mer Island. The High Court did no such thing. The High Court found, 6 to 1, that the common law of Australia recognised native title. The specific claims were determined by Justice Moynihan of the Queensland Supreme Court, who found against Eddie Mabo. These claims were not appealed to the High Court, so Mr Justice Moynihan's findings stood. Most of the original claims of the Mabo case (in which Eddie Mabo was not the only plaintiff) failed: a revealing fact of some significance to native title's wider prospects.
For Professor Macintyre, the myth of Mabo is more important than the facts. If the primary validator of your intellectual output is something other than truth, then truth will be sacrificed for it. One only has to see the operation of media coverage of, say, the Hindmarsh Island concoction or the "stolen generations" issue to see that. (The Hindmarsh Island concoction does not get a mention in Macintyre's History, but there are references to removal of Aboriginal children on eight pages).
The Christian religious identity of over 70% of Aboriginal Australians is something Macintyre would presumably class as the sad legacy of colonialism: the choice of a mere 2 per cent, "authentic" -- that is, conforming to the pattern most useful to fashionable moral posturing.
But Aboriginal Australians are not mere props in a public play of self-congratulation. Only treating them as they are shows them genuine respect. And one thing they are, in the main, is Christian. They are not noble eco-savages, with some purer, pristine mysticism, nor of inherently nobler moral fibre. They are making a way in the world like the rest of us.
Scion of a wealthy family, a committed Christian when young, a member of the Communist Party in adulthood (after Hungary and the Prague Spring), Macintyre is almost a walking caricature of the modern progressive intellectual. The contrast between Macintyre and his predecessor Geoffrey Blainey (himself a prominent victim of the conspicuous correctness game in attack mode) is quite stark.
As Peter Ryan pointed out in the March Quadrant, Blainey has the gift of making history accessible and interesting. Blainey makes history serve the reader: he makes history an engaging story. He makes it our tale, a tale of how we came to be, and came to be as we are. When he taught at Melbourne University, students flocked to his lectures.
Macintyre seems to me to make history serve his own ends, the ends of the writer. His is a history of Australian failings, problems and inadequacies, with achievement glimpsed amongst the wreckage. But failings provide such better props. Through them, the reader is invited to revere the author's moral grandeur. While Blainey expands the appeal of history, Macintyre is left bemoaning the decline of student enrolments.
Blainey's approach produces history with an audience of thousands. Macintyre's produces history with a vanishing audience. Propping up the "progressive" ego via conspicuous correctness is a vacuous activity, all the more because it has become such a common self-indulgence.
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