Mabo and Other Myths

Letter to the Editor:

Sir:  Though Keith Windschuttle's demolition of Coombs' and Reynolds' pretensions (September 2000) is most enjoyable, it does, however, contain some factual missteps.  Fortunately, their correction provides further support for his thesis.

First, to clarify an ambiguity, while it is true that the case brought by Eddie Mabo and others resulted in native title being recognised by Australian common law, it is not true his claims succeeded:  on the contrary, they were denied by Mr Justice Moynihan's Supreme Court judgement.  Since Moynihan's findings on specific claims were not appealed to the High Court -- the appeal was only on whether the common law recognised native title -- those findings stood.  Eddie Mabo's case may, therefore, be characterised as successful in the general, but a failure in the specific:  to say Mabo's land claim was "eventually successful" is too bald.  That most of the land claims in the original Mabo case failed is not without significance for native title's wider prospects, and makes the spread of the mythology about Mabo (which Stuart Macintyre does rather more egregiously in his Concise History) particularly unfortunate.

That Mr Justice Moynihan's judgement is notably hostile regarding Eddie Mabo's reliability as a witness is also something of wider indicator, as witness accuracy has been a bedevilling problem in recent indigenous cause celebre's:  most obviously in the Hindmarsh Island concoction but also in the original stolen generation inquiry, subsequent claims of being "stolen" and native title cases.  (Of course, a rigorous commitment to truth has not been a notable feature of the performance of much of the media and academe in these matters either).

The proportion of Aboriginal Australians nominating their religion as Christian in the latest Census is, in fact, 71.5 per cent, not sixty per cent, as Windschuttle's text states.  Aboriginal Australians are slightly more likely to state their religion as Christianity than the general population (70.9 per cent).  A further piece of prima facie evidence that Aboriginal Australians do not support separatism is that less than one in four of those eligible bothered to vote in the latest ATSIC election.  An unremarkable performance for voluntary voting maybe, but hardly a sign of a burning desire for separate representation.

One notes with interest that Coombs and Reynolds apparently both deny the contention of multiculturalism -- whether in "hard" (cultures should remain separate) or "soft" (many cultures will feed into a developing common Australian culture) versions -- that many cultures can exist within one political system without separate representation:  an implication of their positions that many would surely find unpalatable.

Peter Ryan's comments about Norman Lindsay are very apposite:  the images of strong women is one of the most striking features of the art displayed at the Norman Lindsay museum in the Blue Mountains.  There is no hint of misogyny in Lindsay's art.  If anything, it is his own gender that he seems to have had problems with, although that might be just Lindsay's teasing, to use Peter Ryan's apt term, of male pretensions.