tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/truth-telling-57769/articlestruth-telling – The Conversation2024-02-22T19:19:08Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2222622024-02-22T19:19:08Z2024-02-22T19:19:08ZFriday essay: neither a monster nor a saint … Sir Samuel Griffith, Queensland’s violent frontier and the rigours of truth-telling<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576652/original/file-20240220-18-hovvkz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4000%2C2000&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Conversation, Pexels, The State Library of Queensland/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>First Nations readers please be advised this article speaks of racially discriminating moments in history, including the distress and death of First Nations people.</em></p>
<p>Social historians – among whom I am happily one – are those utter nuisances of people who adamantly insist on reminding others of all the things they are trying so desperately to forget.</p>
<p>Australian historian Manning Clark, channelling Tolstoy, <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/speaking-out-of-turn-electronic-book-text">once compared them</a> to deaf people who continually keep answering questions that no-one is asking.</p>
<p>Before this new breed of professional troublemaker appeared in the 1960s, Australian History for the majority was a much simpler and more comforting affair. The stray bits of it I picked up at school in the 1950s told of a strictly peaceful, happy land, peppered with heroic pioneers, doughty diggers and colourful swaggies; and overflowing with sheep and sparkling golden nuggets.</p>
<p>Aboriginal peoples, if they were mentioned at all, were way off on the margins somewhere, throwing boomerangs, going walkabout and eating grubs and snakes. In the <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/2014575">most studied Australian history book of this era</a>, edited by Gordon Greenwood, First Nation Peoples literally disappear. They are not in the index, and we are even told by one contributor: </p>
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<p>The country was empty […] empty grazing country awaiting occupation.</p>
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<p>The principal shock here is not just that this was published without intervention but that no-one who reviewed it pulled anyone up for spreading this academic gas-lighting.</p>
<p>Many older readers can perhaps recall that balmy time, so reassuring for white Australians. I know it has never entirely left my consciousness. It was the only world about which we were “publicly instructed”. But it is a far distant place from the one where we are heading in this essay.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/can-more-ethical-histories-be-written-about-early-colonial-expeditions-a-new-project-seeks-to-do-just-that-221974">Can more ethical histories be written about early colonial expeditions? A new project seeks to do just that</a>
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<h2>Explanatory lodestars</h2>
<p>The present modish word for the seemingly recent realisation that the Australian story is not all cosy and blameless is <em>truth-telling</em>. In some quarters, this gets presented as a very sudden epiphany. Yet it has a long pedigree. Even while the tortuous frontier process was unfolding in the 19th century, there were always these brave, lone whistle-blowers valiantly attempting to get the truth out and being slammed and shunned for doing so.</p>
<p>With Federation in 1901 and its sense of ebullient nationalism, such voices were gradually stilled and abolished. But then, in the 1960s, with the global burgeoning of decolonisation, desegregation and the diminution of scientific racism following the Holocaust, such voices re-emerged. Even here, in distant, sunny Australia, a small number of us began clearing our throats. Truth-telling was cautiously back on the agenda.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-great-australian-silence-50-years-on-100737">Friday essay: the 'great Australian silence' 50 years on</a>
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<p>It is hard now to convey how much in the dark we then were on the subject of race. In 1965, I produced for my history honours thesis probably the first extended academic account of an Australian mainland frontier. Every day spent poring over official documents, private manuscripts and old newspapers was startlingly revelatory to me. Virtually everything I was discovering seemed to be so new and beyond the historical pale. It left me feeling exposed and nervous rather than confidently assertive.</p>
<p>At the same time, race relations historian Henry Reynolds was hearing for the first time about Australian frontier struggle, not from within his own land and culture, but as a young teacher, out of Tasmania, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/why-werent-we-told-9780140278422">listening in astonishment to an African public speaker in Hyde Park, London</a>.</p>
<p>So truth-telling stutters and meanders its unstable and episodic course through our past. It encounters the blank stare of denialism especially on subjects to which a tinge of shame is attached. And Queensland in particular, with arguably the most forbidding frontier experience and the most severe convict penal station, is a ripe candidate for such evasion.</p>
<p>In his recent volume, <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/truth-telling/">Truth-Telling. History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement</a>, Reynolds states:</p>
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<p>Truth-telling is now more important than ever. What has been a personal choice is now a national imperative […] Denialism is no longer a viable option. A wall of scholarship built by many hands over the last fifty years stands in the way.</p>
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<p>So, in building the case for “truth-telling”, Reynolds expands on its “critical importance”. It will “weave new stories and make old ones richer and more complex”. These involve the travails of those who became “victims of great wrong”. Complexity, he writes, will have to replace “simple sagas of heroic achievement”, even if this involves a degree of painful iconoclasm. It will likely produce controversy as “the coals of dormant culture wars are fanned back into life”, fundamental reassessments are made, “reputations are called into question” and “status is re-assigned”.</p>
<p>To this tall order of realigning the consensual interpretive framework, I would add, as a professional historian, that, in the process, we should not forget the often slippery and elusive nature of historical truth itself. For, as every working historian knows, historical accuracy is pursued via vigorous empirical attention to detail in extant, relevant documentation. Fact-finding and truth-seeking need to precede any stern truth-telling.</p>
<p>Dependable analysis also entails a careful awareness of the tensions discovered in texts – a difficult grafting process of measuring opposing knowledges. All this, we hope, will lead us closer to a clearer sense of accuracy, balance and probability in grasping the past.</p>
<p>As historians, we are thus more in the business of producing explanation than in issuing clarion calls for action, doling out blame or pursuing the singular advocacy of a pressing cause. We do know that the past’s “other countries” once had definite and ascertainable structures that both constrained and enabled human beliefs, actions and agency. So, we try to seek these out and explain them in the present. But we cannot re-enter and relive them, and thus fully know them.</p>
<p>“We can’t return. We can only look behind from where we came,” <a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/1317681-Joni-Mitchell-Ladies-Of-The-Canyon">as the song goes</a>. This involves caution, as our hindsight vision is necessarily blurred and shifting, as we speculate continuously upon this elusiveness.</p>
<p>History’s truths are never fixed, total and absolute, but remain in a degree of flux, as they get worried over by researchers, especially as new data and ways of seeing come to light. Thus, truth-telling should embody the caution that history’s truths are specifically contingent and incremental ones, always prone to adjustment. They are like explanatory lodestars, leading us along while keeping us out of the swamps of pure fantasy.</p>
<p>It seems helpful to conclude that such research and writing requires balance between a certain degree of commitment and a modicum of discretion. For even as we try to keep going along this road of attempting truth, any single-minded political crusade or victorious forward march should invite some intellectual circumspection, for the bases of historical truth are invariably constructed on quick or shifting sands.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-truth-telling-so-important-our-research-shows-meaningful-reconciliation-cannot-occur-without-it-197685">Why is truth-telling so important? Our research shows meaningful reconciliation cannot occur without it</a>
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<h2>Much to agree on</h2>
<p>With this in mind, let us focus once more on the 2021 volume of Reynolds’ Truth-Telling. My own copy’s text is heavily underscored. The margins are peppered with supportive ticks and asterisks and even the occasional “Good!”. Based upon decades of immersion in racial studies myself, I already know that Reynolds and I have much to agree upon.</p>
<p>We both independently began unfolding the dispossession/resistance model of frontier studies in the early 1970s. We have written on similar themes and reviewed each other’s published work, mostly positively, since that time. From the late 1990s, we occupied the same trench against the <a href="https://quadrant.org.au/">Quadrant</a> marauders throughout the farcical, media-driven <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/the-history-wars-paperback-softback">History Wars</a>.</p>
<p>Both bodies of our numerous writings have dealt with the ongoing partnership between excessive race violence and tight-lipped denial of it. Reynolds asks:</p>
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<p>[…] why did the country’s leading post-war historians not notice [frontier violence] at all? Was it oversight or deliberate evasion? How could they think that Australians had been remarkably slow to kill each other, that frontiersmen rarely had to go armed into the outback and [that] we had an inimitably peaceful history … ?</p>
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<p>In similar vein, <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_203563/DU120_G6E83_1999.pdf?Expires=1707198277&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJKNBJ4MJBJNC6NLQ&Signature=FERZMoHT24ScUpPhOicE%7EUrs7U2-VRYdHrjTn3XRpHEk-qrHQNCOj6pT7sioqAvkcjmK3ISMstpHghMCEDa6EizIsK-LuAYCENZBWwgJGskKbHYNyOvc9954UPGIfvbJXimFqGWRgI92mpXYU7tTb8HmFMuUBH8lcw5pIQFKzSVbb0VMod5quZzIYpa9CCnvtOL20hP0b-J6SfXhadbZM7cJeJcwwD-8VeL2ARTxqg1Vmw%7EESCXxSAlNZuxrQKzivDnqIqyuzlxCYttHh7TtsNZPZdYbxiPxwCAX0lB2SkiAP7iUnBCHQjT4%7ErBcj3iBttKCZa6orXyACAdEobtybg__">I wrote</a> in 1999 of finding a “glaring dissonance” between the startling documents I was reading and the published preoccupations of Australia’s premier historians such as Douglas Pike in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13724454-australia">The Quiet Continent</a> or <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ward-russel-braddock-29606">Russell Ward’s</a> outback of congenial mateship. </p>
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<p>It was all […] very much like ‘another country’.</p>
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<p>So, as I perused Truth-Telling, I was on board with almost everything Reynolds has to say. Especially between pages 184 and 191, where he favourably addresses the statistical accounting of frontier casualties compiled recently <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003015550-6/pale-death-around-footprints-springs-1-assessing-violent-mortality-queensland-frontier-state-private-exterminatory-practices-raymond-evans-robert-%C3%B8rsted-jensen">by Robert Ørsted-Jensen and myself</a>.</p>
<p>This work nullifies prior estimates suggested by Reynolds by a wide margin: that is, our tabulation of over 65,000 Aboriginal frontier mortalities in Queensland opposing Reynolds’ earlier guestimate of 20,000 dead, Australia-wide over a longer timeframe. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, he is good enough to write that our calculations:</p>
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<p>[…] have to be taken very seriously indeed. Once they are widely accepted as they should be, Australian history will never be the same again. It will no longer be possible to hide the bodies or skirt around the violence.</p>
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<p>So, one can no doubt appreciate how much I am enjoying this book. Even when the focus of blame for horrific slaughter in Queensland begins to descend rather exclusively onto the shoulders of Samuel Griffith, arguably Australia’s premier legal mind and pre-eminent statesman, I remain in interpretive accord, adding my approving marginalia to the text.</p>
<p>Allow me now to zero in more intimately upon Sir Samuel; as I need to explain the process by which my position on his degree of culpability for frontier violence began to change.</p>
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<em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/henry-reynolds-australia-was-founded-on-a-hypocrisy-that-haunts-us-to-this-day-101679">Henry Reynolds: Australia was founded on a hypocrisy that haunts us to this day</a>
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<h2>‘Hands stained with blood?’</h2>
<p>In August 2020, I had been asked by Justice Peter Applegarth to contribute to a <a href="https://www.sclqld.org.au/collections/explore-the-law/past-lectures/2020-selden-society-australia-lecture-program">group Webinar</a> at the Queensland Supreme Court on the <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/griffith-sir-samuel-walker-445">“great man”</a> (twice Queensland Premier, architect of the Australian Constitution and first Chief Justice of the High Court).</p>
<p>This invitation was based not only on my record as a historian but also because both Griffith and I were born in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales. So, initially my talk was constructed as a bit of a romp, accompanying Griffith back to his hometown in April 1887, with “massed choirs”, a big brass band and a mock-Tudor castle.</p>
<p>Matters grew more serious when Ashley Hay, the then editor of Griffith Review, asked me to broaden that talk into a <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/griffiths-welsh-odyssey/">more encompassing essay</a> that eventually appeared in their Acts of Reckoning edition of 2022. In undertaking this, I began to think more comprehensively about Griffith in that 1880s era and the class and ethnic dimensions of both Wales and Queensland as colonial entities.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Sir Samuel Griffith circa 1890.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Queensland_State_Archives_3064_Portrait_of_The_Honourable_Sir_Samuel_Walker_Griffith_Premier_of_Queensland_c_1890.png">Queensland State Archives/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Griffith did not emerge looking too splendidly from that original research foray. His 1888 election campaign had helped excite extreme anti-Chinese agitation, though not as vehemently as his successful opponent, Thomas McIlwraith. Several years later, as premier, he helped engineer a crushing of the great Shearers’ Strike of 1891. </p>
<p>Also in 1891, he had not acquitted himself well when ambushed by a Melbourne journalist on the matter of racial outrages in North Queensland.</p>
<p>Two Presbyterian scholars touring the North had returned with a damning report of race relations there. As stated by one of the investigators, Professor Rintoul, it “threw a ghastly light upon […] deeds of lust, reprisal and doom”.</p>
<p>Apparently caught unawares, Griffith had ducked and parried in a less than convincing manner by trying to claim that such yarns were more than 20 years old.</p>
<p>In a stinging and detailed reply letter, Rintoul rebuked Griffith – who, he said, was someone he had regarded in high “esteem” for his vital interest “in the cause of the kanaka and aborigines and of all oppressed people” – for the dismissive sarcasm of his response. He challenged Griffith to further public debate – but Griffith did not respond.</p>
<p>So, I thought: Here we have Rintoul’s contemporary broadside of 1891 alongside Reynolds’ 2021 charges that Griffith must be “guilty of what, after 1945, came to be known as crimes against humanity”.</p>
<p>Furthermore, in the same 2022 issue of Griffith Review that contained my essay, Reynolds <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/on-the-queensland-frontier/">had sharpened his attack</a> by declaring rhetorically that Sir Samuel’s “neatly manicured lawyers’ hands were deeply stained with the blood of murdered men, women and children”.</p>
<p>This set me wondering … There must be actual evidence in the primary sources that would enhance this damning case, rendering it not only supportable but probably cementing it. As a troublesome social historian, my bloodhound instincts for deeper empirical research were now aroused. Just how guilty was Griffith among his contemporaries of frontier violence? What body of imprecating evidence could be amassed?</p>
<p>At this point, I felt particularly scathing towards something Griffith had said to the Melbourne Daily Telegraph reporter in January 1891. When challenged over what was he “doing about the blacks”, he had shot back: “What I should be doing”, quickly adding “at all events, few had taken more interest in the welfare of the native population than I have”.</p>
<p>Influenced by Rintoul and Reynolds, I mentally scoffed at this defensive self-assessment. I was intent on finding all the historical data that would nail him. But, as indicated above, historical truth can be shifting and slippery. It does not always take you where you expect it should go.</p>
<p>Truth-telling requires careful truth-finding to precede it. And for such truth-seeking to work, the evidence should lead the way, with the researcher in train – not yet quite knowing the outcome. For one should not start research certain of a destination – one ideally begins in ignorance and curiosity. </p>
<p>If the opposite is the case, one is simply satisfying a confirmation bias – the contrived endorsement of a preconception.</p>
<h2>An absence</h2>
<p>I began the research odyssey conventionally enough, with a scan of all the secondary Queensland frontier histories for any evidence of Griffith as pre-eminent culprit. To my surprise, he was absent from virtually all the indexes. </p>
<p>It reminded me of Greenwood’s volume and the invisible Aborigines. Not only did Griffith receive no condemnatory mentions – but he also largely received no mentions at all. In the published literature, he didn’t appear to play much of a role.</p>
<p>Throughout my own published writings on Aboriginal dispossession, Griffith does not figure until 2022. And in the most comprehensive recent overviews on frontier violence by <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Timothy-Bottoms-Conspiracy-of-Silence-9781743313824">Timothy Bottoms</a>, <a href="https://boolarongpress.com.au/product/queenslands-frontier-wars/">Jack Drake</a> and <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/3288918">Tony Roberts</a>, who together give the reader the story in startling and comprehensive detail (over 1,100 pages of text) they find no need to provide him with a single mention. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Allen & Unwin</span></span>
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<p>Since my essay was written, David Marr’s massive biographical journey, Killing for Country and Wal Walker’s richly documented study of pastoral occupation, <a href="https://www.squattersgrab.com.au/">The Squatters’ Grab</a> similarly have nothing to say about Griffith either.</p>
<p>This also applies to Reynolds’ own voluminous frontier work. In over a score of texts produced across many decades, Griffith is mentioned just once, uttering a <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1791303">single enigmatic sentence</a> he will repeat in Truth-Telling, while being confusingly cast as a “young Brisbane lawyer” in 1880. It is the only time Griffith receives a speaking part in his recent, general indictment.</p>
<p>So … curiouser and curiouser, I thought … </p>
<p>Especially as the three texts that do give some significant mentions to Griffith and the frontier tend to cast him in a positive rather than a negative light. These volumes are Noel Loos’ highly referenced <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/28747">Invasion and Resistance</a>, Gordon Reid’s expansive <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/3584281">That Unhappy Race</a> and Robert Ørsted-Jensen’s closely argued <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/5778269">Frontier History Revisited</a>. </p>
<p>Most recently, in 2023, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1031461X.2023.2208585">historians Mark Finnane and Jonathan Richards have contributed more case studies</a>, demonstrating Griffith’s belief that “violence against Aboriginal British subjects was not acceptable and should be dealt with [with] severity”.</p>
<p>By all these researchers, he is shown as intent on pursuing progressive reform and legal balance in face of a colonial society, mainly calling for “blood and yet more blood” – a culture insisting furiously that whites should never be punished for harming or killing non-whites. For this was the nature of the socio-cultural order that anyone considering mitigative reform was up against.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/i-cant-argue-away-the-shame-frontier-violence-and-family-history-converge-in-david-marrs-harrowing-and-important-new-book-215050">'I can't argue away the shame': frontier violence and family history converge in David Marr's harrowing and important new book</a>
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<h2>The documentary records</h2>
<p>So, did Griffith pursue frontier reform? Did he rather plot and perpetuate “crimes against humanity” – or even, as lawyer Tony McAvoy, <a href="https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/the-palgrave-handbook-on-rethinking-colonial-commemorations">has recently claimed</a>, “war crimes”? – or, at best, did he do nothing to stop them? The hard data, however, was now starting to pull me in the opposite direction, especially as the bumpy research ride moved up a gear <a href="https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/reason-and-reckoning-provocations-and-conversations-about-re-imag">into the documentary records</a>.</p>
<p>The logical starting point here were the primary sources of the Colonial Secretary’s Office, for this mega-department was directly responsible for the operations of the Queensland Native Police – the main frontier destroyers. </p>
<p>From 1859 until 1897, there were 18 local politicians ostensibly running the Native Police force as Colonial Secretaries across 22 terms of office. A dozen – or two-thirds – of these men were also leading pastoralists in whose immediate economic interests the force operated.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/our-mapping-project-shows-how-extensive-frontier-violence-was-in-queensland-this-is-why-truth-telling-matters-216726">Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters</a>
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<p>Serving as Colonial Secretary for around two years and four months between November 1883 and April 1886, Griffith had the sixth longest incumbency in the role. Prior to this, the two most enduring Colonial Secretaries, Robert Herbert and Arthur Palmer, had overseen 15 years’ service, from the early 1860s to the early 1880s, when racial violence was at its height. They both had large squatting interests and were <a href="https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/1890325/Samuel-Griffith-Essay-Dec2024.pdf">the force’s greatest apologists</a>.</p>
<p>Griffith held the office when the frontier was radically contracting into the far northern Cape and the outlying lands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. These remote places were both scenes of acutely continuing frontier violence; and Griffith, while Colonial Secretary, officially oversaw all of this – at least nominally.</p>
<p>I suggest “nominally” here, for, as archaeologist and historian Michael Slack points out, regarding the Gulf Country, it was local pastoralists, acting privately, then more formally as Justices of the Peace, who “influenced and ultimately controlled the agenda” of the distant Native Police rather than “a centralised government” in faraway Brisbane. As he argues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The vast distance separating Western Burke and the […] government in Brisbane, although immense in terms of physical distance, was even greater in terms of authority […] the frontier territory was run on a largely autonomous basis, firstly by the pastoralists and then by their own bureaucratic constructions [ie the JPs, meting out racial ‘justice’]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The same, more or less, might be said of far Cape York. As Queensland reached its fullest dimensions by the 1880s – around two-thirds the size of Europe – its unwieldy size made it increasingly difficult to oversee, service and control administratively. A tendency towards regional excess in <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/3796249">the process of land seizure prevailed</a>.</p>
<p>Yet, if we closed off the analysis at this point, we leave Griffith, as Colonial Secretary, politically responsible for frontier warfare during mainly 1884 and 1885. Reynolds <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56883944">writes that</a> while in office he did “little” or “nothing” to assuage the bloodshed and “took no action to protect Aboriginal rights […]”</p>
<p>This led me to ask: Did he really do “nothing”? Or if, rather, he only did “little”, what exactly does “little” mean? Is this to be seen in hindsight, employing modern expectations and looking back with judgmental frowns … Or is “little” to be weighed in the context of his time and place – in comparison and contrast with his contemporary political officeholders? How does one therefore quantify “little” within its immediate historical circumstances?</p>
<h2>‘Altogether averse to the Native Police’</h2>
<p>So, I started examining Griffith’s procedures in that office as forensically as the records would allow. The results continued to surprise me, as they may now surprise you. The specifics of this are presented in some detail in <a href="https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/1890325/Samuel-Griffith-Essay-Dec2024.pdf">my recent pamphlet, Samuel Griffith and Queensland’s “War of Extermination”</a>. I shall merely summarise them here. </p>
<p>Basically, contingent with Griffith’s considerable raft of reforms over the oppressive Melanesian labour trade in the 1880s, he was attempting to forward local remedies in domestic “native policy”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kanaka workers photographed on a sugarcane plantation with the overseer at the back of the group. ca. 1890. Cairns.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbirding#/media/File:Groupe_de_Kanakas_dans_une_exploitation_de_canne_%C3%A0_sucre_du_Queensland.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-slave-state-how-blackbirding-in-colonial-australia-created-a-legacy-of-racism-187782">Friday essay: a slave state - how blackbirding in colonial Australia created a legacy of racism</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This begins soon after he became Colonial Secretary in late 1883 with moves to prosecute individual white employers of Aboriginal labour in the shameful frontier maritime industries. </p>
<p>This was followed in July 1884 with “the first attempt” to introduce protective legislation for Aboriginal workers, then exploited as quasi-slaves – The Native Labourers Protection Act. Though passed into law, the Bill was <a href="https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/1890325/Samuel-Griffith-Essay-Dec2024.pdf">emasculated by the pastoral and planter lobby</a> in the Legislative Council.</p>
<p>Concurrently, The Oaths Act Amendment Act was forwarded, allowing First Nation peoples, for virtually the first time, the right to present their evidence in a colonial court of law. Queensland was the last Australian colony to concede this; and Griffith here completed a process he had set in train while Attorney General in 1876. This reduced Aboriginal people’s vulnerability at law, though it did not, of course, obliterate it.</p>
<p>Then, following a much-publicised massacre of fringe-dwelling Aborigines at Irvinebank, inland from Herberton, in October 1884, Griffith began tentative moves against the existing Native Police system. Murder trials were instituted against the white commanding officer, Sub-Inspector William Nichols and the seven implicated Aboriginal troopers.</p>
<p>To Griffith’s disappointment and anger, the vagaries of local white “justice” thwarted the initiative. As a prosecuting attorney, however, he was by now used to this outcome. While Attorney General in the 1870’s, he had unsuccessfully tried to pursue four other cases of serious criminal intent against Native Police officers. He was the first such Queensland official to attempt this. </p>
<p>Such forays in 1875-76 and 1884 were the only efforts to bring a balanced sense of justice to bear upon the Native Police. As a result, officers and troopers were dismissed, though not convicted.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-unearthing-queenslands-native-police-camps-gives-us-a-window-onto-colonial-violence-100814">How unearthing Queensland's 'native police' camps gives us a window onto colonial violence</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Following the failed Irvinebank trials of October-November 1884, Griffith terminated the responsible Native Police camp (at – excuse the name – Nigger Creek), replacing it with a conventional police station. This led on, during 1885, to a new policy, developed by Griffith in coordination with his Police Commissioner: a measured implementation of what was termed “complete substitution”.</p>
<p>It would have been tactically fatal to eliminate the Native Police in one fell swoop. Several years earlier, while in Opposition in 1880, Griffith had played a leading role – alongside John Douglas, the Parliamentary Opposition Leader – in pushing for a Royal Commission into the force. This had failed in Parliament on the votes by a considerable margin. In 1885, the outcry and backlash against sudden termination would probably have outshouted the furore in 1884 when Griffith tried to have two convicted white murderers executed for killing Pacific Islanders.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, by mid-1885, Griffith was asserting, both privately and publicly, that he was “altogether averse to the Native Police” and telling Parliament he wanted “to abolish [them] […] altogether”. As I acknowledge <a href="https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/1890325/Samuel-Griffith-Essay-Dec2024.pdf">in my essay</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is crucial to recognise that […] Griffith was not simply uttering vague phrases, regretting frontier behaviour without any accompanying action. Reynolds is simply mistaken on this. Being tactically astute is not the same as doing [“little” or] “nothing”. Given the clearly exterminatory cast of much of Queensland society […] it would have been politically futile and probably suicidal to have faced colonial electors with the force’s sudden, immediate abolition.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Drawing by Aboriginal boy Oscar of Native Police operation circa 1897 near Camooweal.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oscarnativepolice.jpg">National Library of Australia/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So, between them, Griffith and Police Commissioner David Seymour advanced a more gradual policy. This envisaged that by replacing Native Police encampments with conventional police stations and substituting the illegal, quasi-military armed white officer/native trooper detachments with regular police sergeants, senior constables and one or two unarmed Aboriginal trackers, the original force could be progressively phased out. The process began at Irvinebank, Watsonville and Herberton during 1885.</p>
<p>By the end of the 1880s, there had been around a 65% reduction in Native Police detachments, replaced by some 19 regular bush police stations over much of the North. As historian, Noel Loos observes, Commissioner Seymour, “with Griffith’s instructions and no alternatives” carried the policy of gradualism forward, despite protests from local whites.</p>
<p>In late September 1885, Griffith told Parliament:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The practice of black police making raids through the country as in times past would not be allowed any longer […] It would be intended to assimilate the system as nearly as possible to that of the white police.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To my reading, this is clear evidence of significant policy change. Though Griffith did not succeed in abolishing the force outright, neither did anyone else. It simply faded away by gradual attrition and the frayed endings of the long frontier process. The last camp at Coen was not terminated until 1929.</p>
<p>Furthermore, from around 1883 (sometimes due to local initiatives) ration distribution centres were slowly established, often adjacent to some of the new police stations. The authorities were now observing that many Aboriginal raids were motivated by acute tribal starvation. So, ration stations, where bullocks were killed for meat, and tea, flour, tobacco and sugar sometimes provided, were opened first at Thornborough, Union Camp, Mitchell River, Northcote and Atherton.</p>
<p>Simultaneously, the Griffith regime began encouraging missionary enterprise from 1885 across Cape York, first by Lutherans and later by Presbyterians and Anglicans. These provided sanctuary against frontier excesses and doubtlessly saved lives. As historian, Jasper Ludewig concludes, it was the Griffith ministry:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] which gazetted Aboriginal reserves and provided support for missionary measures, including […] access, cash subsidies, rations and limited building supplies. The State’s administration of missionary work fell to the Colonial Secretary’s Department, which received and processed all […] correspondence.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Within several years, he finds, “Christian missions were fast becoming the solution of choice”. By Federation, “close to thirty mission stations had been opened throughout Cape York and the Torres Strait”.</p>
<h2>On the side of reform</h2>
<p>In sum, what does this demonstrate? It hardly seems to equate with the actions of a leader, singled out from the rest, as pre-eminently guilty of “crimes against humanity” – his hands awash with blood. “Is any other conclusion possible?” Truth-Telling rhetorically asks. Well yes, I think there is.</p>
<p>Indeed, we might cautiously conclude that this tranche of changes represents unique and piecemeal, though progressive and expanding, policy measures. The primary research task discloses:</p>
<ul>
<li>A radical attrition of Native Police services</li>
<li>Implementation of normalised policing</li>
<li>Novel introduction of Aboriginal court testimony</li>
<li>An attempted initiative to rein in the frontier “black-birding” of Aboriginal workers</li>
<li>Prosecution of white frontier crimes inflicted on First Nation peoples</li>
<li>The burgeoning of missionary enterprise across the North</li>
</ul>
<p>So deeper primary investigation, to my increasing surprise, had altered my initial conceptualisation. Official efforts from 1883-86 add up to more than rhetorical virtue-signalling. They mark a degree of reformation from <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/4058607">outright exterminatory policies</a> employing Snider and Martini-Henry rifles. Has a well-oiled blame crusade simply trampled over all this in a rush towards a sensational, disparaging verdict?</p>
<p>However bad things were in this era – and they were definitely atrocious – liability cannot be laid on any one individual’s shoulders, whomever he may be. Griffith’s reform attempts confronted an implacable socio-cultural order in Northern and Western Queensland – and the challenge often outstripped the response. </p>
<p>A travelling press reporter there in 1880 found one colonist after another, including “highly educated persons […] openly professing the doctrine of extermination”. They look upon “any talk of humanity [or] philanthropy”, he wrote, “as the mere sentimental language of those who do not know what it is to live” there.</p>
<p>The remainder of Queensland society was not much different. A former Minister of Justice, John Malbon Thompson despairingly told Scottish Catholic missionary, Duncan McNab that year that, “Nineteen-twentieths of the population care nothing about [the Blacks] and the other twentieth regard them as a nuisance to be got rid of”.</p>
<p>Outspoken frontier journalist, Carl Feilberg concurrently agreed that while a certain minority “acted with barbarity”, the vast majority did nothing, as a small minority actively protested.</p>
<p>That majority of enablers were as guilty as the frontier killers, Feilberg reasoned: “[They] condone and share the crime”.</p>
<h2>A culture of genocidal intent</h2>
<p>What we observe here is a culture of genocidal intent and anyone hoping to confront it was certainly going to have his hands full. Frontier reform was never mentioned at election time – it was a political minefield. So, Queensland electorates had to be slowly cajoled into accepting any redemptive moves. Reform attempts needed to proceed with extreme caution, in an incremental and almost unobserved fashion.</p>
<p>Thus, positive initiatives by Griffith, during his relatively short tenure in the key office of Colonial Secretary, were arguably <em>bold</em> ones in the context of their time and place:</p>
<p>What modern hindsight may condemn as doing “little” or “nothing” may equally be conceived as doing rather <em>much</em> within what was effectively operating as a genocidal culture, where widespread extra-judicial killing was a permissible norm.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-killed-by-natives-the-stories-and-violent-reprisals-behind-some-of-australias-settler-memorials-198981">Friday essay: 'killed by Natives'. The stories – and violent reprisals – behind some of Australia's settler memorials</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>So, by this point, I had dramatically flipped interpretively and was now asking: Was it in any way fair or reasonable to single out Griffith as principal miscreant and hold him – perhaps due to his enviable accomplishments and gifted, tall poppy status – as a scapegoat, made accountable for the crimes and excesses of an entire society, and thereby isolated for blame?</p>
<p>As Charlie Campbell states in his study, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/12538648">Scapegoat. A History of Blaming Others</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The public is most easily appeased by the creation of a scapegoat. As always, the more serious the crisis, the more important the fall guy […] The urge to blame is sometimes incited in us […] The notion of collective responsibility is one that we prefer not to engage with […]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, “collective responsibility” is the much harder pill to swallow. Pointing the finger at Griffith, Reynolds, in Truth-Telling declares:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He did little to stop the killing. How then should history remember him? Will his high reputation survive the rigours of truth-telling? Perhaps, more to the point, should it survive?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet rigorous truth-seeking shows us that among almost a score of Colonial Secretaries and a dozen or so attorney generals, Griffith appears to be the only one ever attempting anything practically mitigative while holding office. </p>
<p>While I had originally scoffed at Griffith’s defensive claim in 1891 that few had “taken more interest in the welfare of the native population” than himself, I was now beginning to realise he was probably right. He had done more on the side of reform. It is not, of course, a broad claim to make, given that virtually all his Queensland political and legal contemporaries had either done nothing positive for Aboriginal welfare or made the situation worse.</p>
<h2>Frontier perpetrators</h2>
<p>Griffith appears alone among those directly responsible for the Native Police as well as all those overseeing the law in attempting anything even mildly reformative in the face of chronic frontier ruination and disorder – as well as the widespread public approval of it. </p>
<p>So, must he be singled out as some pre-eminent culprit, allegedly with “blood on his hands” for perpetuating “crimes against humanity” by doing so “little”? Is it helpful to trash a high-level historical reputation in this way in order to watch how spectacularly and far a tall “fall guy” might fall?</p>
<p>Feilberg wrote in 1880 that it was Queensland’s hands, in general, that were “foully bestrained [sic] with blood” – and it is clear there was blood on so many hands in the colony. Over many decades it had been a virtual free-for-all, with no effective legal redress. </p>
<p>A register of the known names of frontier perpetrators, and those in politics and law who had abetted them, as well as all those in whose direct economic interest the brutality and killing had occurred, would be an extremely long one.</p>
<p>There are many such names. Here are some thumb-nail sketches of just a few who might precede Griffith in any compilation of indictments:</p>
<p><strong>William Forster</strong>, <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/forster-william-3553">Premier of New South Wales in 1859</a> who bequeathed the Native Police to the new colony. Historian, Wal Walker typifies him as “a most […] vindictive hater of Indigenous Australians”. </p>
<p>As a squatter in the Burnett district from 1848, he had taken up 64,000 acres of Aboriginal lands. In 1849 and 1850, he led reprisal raids against Taribiland and Gurang peoples near Bingara and at Paddy’s Island, heading settler armies of up to 100 mounted whites, allegedly killing hundreds of Aboriginal men, women and children.</p>
<p><strong>George Bowen</strong>, Queensland’s first Governor, ignoring official instructions that Aborigines were British subjects, under protection of the Crown, while <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/the-secret-war-a-true-history-of-queenslands-native-police">re-defining his official role</a> as extending “border warfare […] carried out under some control on the part of the government” against “hostile savages’ as his proud "contribution towards the general defence of the Empire”.</p>
<p><strong>Robert Herbert</strong>: The first and longest continually serving Colonial Secretary, known as the Native Police’s staunchest friend. He wrote of Aborigines officially as “criminals”, “cannibals” and “very dangerous savages, deficient in intellect”. </p>
<p>He looked forward to their inevitable extinction. He used Native Police to secure Gugu Badhun territory with violence for his investment syndicate, seizing these lands in the Valley of Lagoons, inland from Cardwell.</p>
<p><strong>David Seymour</strong>: Police Commissioner for 32 years across 16 colonial governments, directly supervising the Native Police and suppressing evidence of their massacres, as he advanced his substantial financial speculations in gold and tin mining, pastoral landholding and timber-getting across the colony.</p>
<p><strong>Robert Ramsey MacKenzie</strong>: Premier and Colonial Secretary in 1866-67. Established a white-washing enquiry in the Native Police while Treasurer in 1861, stacking the board with squatters holding over 3.5 million acres of Aboriginal lands. Himself a mega-pastoralist, leasing 52 runs – later made a baronet. </p>
<p>Before entering the northern regions in 1840, he was involved, along with his brother, in a <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/155840417">mass poisoning</a> of Gringai people at Wattenbahk Station, north-west of Newcastle.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Boyd Morehead in 1888.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=Boyd+Morehead+&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>Boyd Morehead</strong>: <a href="https://adb.anu.edu/biography/morehead-boyd-dunlop-4240/text6845;">Colonial Secretary, 1888 to 1890</a>. His family virtually ran the Scottish Australian investment Company, one of the largest speculators in Queensland pastoral holdings. </p>
<p>He stated in Parliament in 1880 that: “If there were no Aboriginals it would be a very good thing”. “There was not a member in the House”, he claimed, “who did not feel they had to be got out of the way”. This “wretched, mean race […] had to go and go they must […] They mainly got only what they richly deserved”.</p>
<p><strong>Anderson Dawson</strong>: Queensland leader of the short-lived first Labour Government in the world in 1899. He boasted to the Brisbane Worker, as part of his CV as a sterling white man, that in 1886 at the Kimberley gold-rush, he had played his part in what the paper termed a “nigger massacre”. </p>
<p>Historical research claims between 40 and 100 Kitja people were killed. Dawson subsequently became Minister of Defence in the first Federal Labor Government in 1904.</p>
<h2>Beyond individual blame</h2>
<p>I could continue with this listing, but this is probably enough to make the point. I think it is true to say that most readers would not have even heard many of these names before – yet Griffith, the outstanding historical personage, is well known – a big scalp, so to speak, and thus readily targeted.</p>
<p>Like him, however, most of these people have streets, suburbs, towns, districts, electorates, rivers or mountain ranges named after them. Unlike Griffith, though, most of them held wide-scale pastoral interests – interests that the Native Police were defending over extended time-frames against very determined Aboriginal resistance.</p>
<p>So, it would seem that a class/communal explanation for the remorseless dispossession might be a better way to determine causation, motivation and responsibility – in short, a pursuit of a systems analysis of colonialism as a more constructive way of grasping the fundamentals of this history. This can establish the driving rationale and structural underpinnings of occupation, rather than pursuing a singular crusade of individual blame for the manifest theft and violence.</p>
<p>This explanation is at first class-based because it is clearly a dominant minority class sector of, predominantly, pastoralists – but also plantation and mine owners – who were the principal land-takers, dependent initially on Native Police sorties and violent raids by their employees to secure the purloined landed wealth.</p>
<p>Using the excellent compilation work of the late Queensland historian, Bill Thorpe, we find there were over 3000 pastoral run-holders in 1876, contracting to little more than 1000 by Federation. These represented only 1.8% of the colonial or migrant population in the 1870s, down to only 0.2% by the 1900s.</p>
<p>But this tiny sector accounted for most of the privately held landholding in Queensland. Furthermore, in the latter stages, it was mostly foreign owned by corporations and banks operating outside of the colony and State.</p>
<p>These people and organisations – often also at centres of political power – were the direct beneficiaries of profit from the captured lands. The various genocidal processes adopted, publicly and privately, to achieve this were in such people’s immediate material interests.</p>
<p>Communally, most of the white colonial population cooperated, in one way or another, with the seizure and displacement process; and a minority of frontier actors took a leading part in inflicting and perpetuating it, thinking they were “advancing civilization” or “extending the margins of Empire” in so doing. Thus, we might conclude, the colonial takeover was class-based in its ultimate economic interest and communally driven in its comprehensive, destructive thrust.</p>
<p>As David Marr puts it in his recent <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/155840417">Killing for Country</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Australia was fought for in an endless war of little cruel battles […] Nowhere would the occupation […] prove bloodier than here [in Queensland] and no instrument of state [was] as culpable as the Native Police. Slaughter was bricked into the foundations of Queensland.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In mid-1880, a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, travelling around North Queensland, wrote these prophetic words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Those who consent to such things and those who approve of them must look well as to how they will stand in future times with posterity, when the early history of this country comes to be written.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>We people here and now are that “posterity” – and it is imperative that any truth-telling we engage in should be well-targeted, balanced and comprehensive. Truth-telling, as Reynolds advises us, is “complex” – and with that I would agree.</p>
<p>Yet my research indicates that Samuel Griffith did not “consent to such things” nor “approve of them”, although he is neither the untarnished hero of this story nor its exceptional villain. And he was not, as Reynolds’ accounts claim, “especially culpable”. Available primary evidence does not appear to bear this out. “That is”, as John Lennon once famously sang, “I think I disagree”.</p>
<p>Griffith is part of and party to – among so many others – the British Imperial/colonial venture that created, for good or ill, present-day Queensland society. As a socio-economic formation and a culture, we have been very slow to accept how utterly that land-taking venture was steeped in bloodshed – and our collective responsibility, historically speaking, for this. </p>
<p>Yet, is it not ironic that the lone public figure who apparently attempted, however inadequately, to challenge the mayhem should now be freighted with the principal blame for it?</p>
<p>Griffith was neither a monster nor a saint. In determining his specific role, it is probably best not to be too certain in mounting clamorous, angry calls for redress, bearing in mind that truth-telling, where history is concerned, can be multi-layered, elusively structured, endlessly surprising and perhaps at times chimerical.</p>
<p>For, even after the rigorous application of exhaustive research, history remains mercurial and subject to change – within reach without falling into one’s final definitive grasp. The “rigours of truth-telling” warn us never to be too sure of the outcome.</p>
<p><em>This article is an edited version of a lecture given last night to the Selden Society for the Supreme Court of Queensland and Griffith University.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222262/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Raymond Evans has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>Many argue Samuel Griffith, twice Queensland premier and our first chief justice, is guilty of colonial war crimes. Raymond Evans searched for the evidence to nail him but found a different story.Raymond Evans, Adjunct Professor, Griffith University, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2176842024-01-01T20:35:35Z2024-01-01T20:35:35Z50 years after Evonne Goolagong’s Australian Open win, we should remember her achievements – and the racism she overcame<p><em>Readers are advised this article contains offensive language about Aboriginal peoples.</em></p>
<p>Fifty years ago, on New Year’s Day in 1974, Wiradjuri woman Evonne Goolagong delighted spectators at Melbourne’s Kooyong Tennis Club by defeating American Chris Evert to win the women’s singles Australian Open championship. </p>
<p>The overflow crowd of 12,000 people leapt to their feet for a tremendously long and emotional ovation.</p>
<p>The Sydney Morning Herald reminded readers that no Aboriginal person had ever won an Australian tennis title. Of all the other major national dailies, only the Hobart Mercury alluded to race, describing Goolagong with offensive words such as “tawny” and “dark-skinned”.</p>
<p>On the surface, Goolagong’s victory transcended race and racial politics. Yet, she <a href="https://www.philjarratt.com/home-evonne-goolagong-story">would later reflect</a> that her stellar career, which included seven Grand Slam singles titles – sent a false message that all was okay in Australian racial politics: </p>
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<p>See, we’re not holding them [Aboriginal people] back, we give them every opportunity. </p>
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<p>Fast forward a couple of decades and Cathy Freeman was <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2019.1581247">similarly touted</a> as a symbol of reconciliation following her triumph at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.</p>
<h2>From stamps to theatre productions</h2>
<p>This appropriation of Goolagong Cawley (her married name) as a national symbol of racial harmony is echoed in a dizzying range of commemorations. </p>
<p>She holds several imperial and Australian honours, including <a href="https://cms.australianoftheyear.org.au/recipients/evonne-goolagong-cawley-ac-mbe#:%7E:text=1971%20Australian%20of%20the%20Year,of%20Barellan%2C%20New%20South%20Wales.">Australian of the Year in 1971</a>, a Member of the Order of the British Empire and a Companion of the Order of Australia.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/evonne-goolagong-cawley-trailblazer-australian-tennis">giant tennis racket</a> looms over her hometown of Barellan, NSW, in her honour, a bronze bust of her welcomes visitors to Melbourne Park (the current home of the Australian Open), and <a href="https://www.urbansmartprojects.com/gallery/1369?artist_id=7">public artworks</a> dedicated to her <a href="https://www.tennis.com.au/sa/news/2023/10/22/mural-honouring-goolagong-cawley-and-barty-unveiled-as-city-of-playford-tennis-international-gets-underway">abound</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1341500416412905472"}"></div></p>
<p>Yorta Yorta/Gunaikurnai playwright Andrea James brought <a href="https://theconversation.com/sydney-festival-review-sunshine-super-girl-is-destined-to-become-a-legacy-piece-of-australian-theatre-152167">Goolagong Cawley’s life story</a> to the stage several years ago and Australia Post has <a href="https://australiapostcollectables.com.au/stamp-issues/australian-legends-of-singles-tennis">honoured</a> her twice with her own stamps. </p>
<p>Sport has not overlooked Goolagong Cawley, either. She has been inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame, the International Tennis Hall of Fame and the Australian Tennis Hall of Fame. </p>
<p>And in this anniversary year, her currency is at an all-time high: her image will appear on the <a href="https://www.tennis.com.au/news/2023/11/16/goolagong-cawley-to-be-honoured-on-50th-anniversary-of-first-ao-title">Australian Open 2024 coin</a>, as well as on a range of merchandise, designed by Lyn-Al Young, a Gunnai, Wiradjuri, Gunditjmara and Yorta Yorta artist.</p>
<p>Goolagong Cawley is proud of her many honours – and she should be. But as <a href="https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/anu-lives-series-biography/m%C4%81ori-and-aboriginal-women-public-eye">historian Karen Fox argues</a>, these honours can be used by some to cast her as a potent symbol of Australia’s supposed sporting egalitarianism. This, in turn, can help assuage white guilt over historic injustices against First Nations people, including <a href="https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/genocide-in-australia/#:%7E:text=The%20different%20state%20governments%20of,onto%20state%2Dcontrolled%20reserves%20often">genocide</a>, dispossession, marginalisation, racism and exclusion. </p>
<p>It’s also important to remember what she had to overcome to reach the pinnacle of achievement and recognition in her sport – and the ongoing issues that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to face.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/sydney-festival-review-sunshine-super-girl-is-destined-to-become-a-legacy-piece-of-australian-theatre-152167">Sydney Festival review: Sunshine Super Girl is destined to become a legacy piece of Australian theatre</a>
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<h2>Contending with racism</h2>
<p>Evonne Goolagong was born in 1951, which was a fraught period for First Nations people in this country. On the day she was born (July 31), a quick glance of the national media reflects the widespread racism, discrimination, ignorance and suspicion that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people faced. </p>
<p>There were stories about: </p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article161016152">protests in a NSW town</a> over the decision to give “liquor freedom” to Aboriginal people </p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article159713124">misgivings</a> about the ability of Aboriginal people to accept Christianity </p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article187689207">assertions</a> that Aboriginal people didn’t actually live in North Queensland </p></li>
<li><p>a <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article48983185">requirement</a> for half-caste (sic) people in the Northern Territory to carry certificates of exemption </p></li>
<li><p>and an <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article130325614">actress</a>’s black-face make-up tips.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Goolagong grew up in the only Aboriginal family in Barellan. In an <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/29/tennis/evonne-goolagong-cawley-australian-open/index.html">interview</a> in 2015, she recalled her mother being worried the “welfare man” might steal her children. In a <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Home-Evonne-Goolagong-Story/dp/0731803817">biography</a> in 1993, she also said her father feared that “whatever he tried to accomplish, the white man would take away”. </p>
<p>By 1974, the rights of Indigenous people in Australians were improving. First Nations people had been <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/indigenous-australians-right-to-vote#:%7E:text=The%20Commonwealth%20Electoral%20Act%201962,Islander%20people%2C%20unlike%20other%20Australians.">granted the right to vote</a> in all states and territories, though full equality wasn’t reached until enrolment was compulsory in 1984. The <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/1965-freedom-ride">1965 Freedom Ride</a> had drawn attention to discrimination. The <a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/first-australians/other-resources-about-first-australians/1967-referendum">1967 referendum</a> meant Indigenous people could be counted in the national census. And in 1972, Gough Whitlam’s new Labor government <a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/australias-prime-ministers/gough-whitlam/during-office#:%7E:text=On%2015%20December%201972%2C%20Whitlam,land%20rights%20under%20Justice%20Woodward.">established</a> a royal commission into Aboriginal land rights and created the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-1967-referendum-was-the-most-successful-in-australias-history-but-what-it-can-tell-us-about-2023-is-complicated-198874">The 1967 referendum was the most successful in Australia's history. But what it can tell us about 2023 is complicated</a>
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<p>Yet, terrible racism remained. When Vic Edwards, who would later become Goolagong Cawley’s coach, first spotted her talent in the early 1960s, he <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Home-Evonne-Goolagong-Story/dp/0731803817">noted</a> the “Aboriginal aspect might not sit well in tennis circles”. </p>
<p>He was right. Goolagong Cawley shrugged off most insults, but they were truly shocking. She <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/29/tennis/evonne-goolagong-cawley-australian-open/index.html">recalled</a> a white woman calling her the n-word while shaking hands after a match and being denied entry to a Brisbane nightclub because of her skin colour. </p>
<p>Commentators frequently attributed her on-court concentration lapses to going “walkabout” – Fox, the historian, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=qikX50RKgPgC&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=%E2%80%9Cwouldn%27t+go+walkabout+like+some+old+boong%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=DcaOzyCSOy&sig=ACfU3U0SazFeFSh_o4rqxRl2Lfy0MsouSw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiH3KHYv_6CAxWz3TgGHaVNDQ8Q6AF6BAgZEAM#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Cwouldn't%20go%20walkabout%20like%20some%20old%20boong%E2%80%9D&f=false">counted</a> 18 uses of the word in Australian newspaper articles about her in 1980. Fox also recounted an anecdote that an unnamed state premier said he hoped she “wouldn’t go walkabout like some old boong” before her 1980 Wimbledon match.</p>
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<p>These types of racial sentiments were ever-present throughout her career. As she became more successful, she also faced a repression of her heritage in the media and appropriation by white Australia. In an <a href="https://deadlyvibe.com.au/2007/11/evonne-goolagong-cawley/">interview</a> in the early 2000s, she said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] the more successful I became, the whiter I seemed to become. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The <a href="https://ulurustatement.org/">Uluru Statement from the Heart</a>) has called for truth-telling across the nation. This 50th anniversary of Goolagong Cawley’s Kooyong win provides one opportunity for this – a recognition of the racial realities behind the burnished brass, bright lights and shining prestige of the various honours bestowed upon her.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217684/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gary Osmond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Wiradjuri woman will be feted at this year’s Australian Open for her remarkable career. But this is also an opportunity for truth-telling.Gary Osmond, Associate Professor of Sport History, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2149612023-10-15T07:45:14Z2023-10-15T07:45:14ZHow did the media perform on the Voice referendum? Let’s talk about truth-telling and impartiality<p>The rules by which politics are conducted have changed dramatically, especially since the rise of Trumpism. Yet the professional mass media continue to cover politics in ways that are no longer fit for purpose.</p>
<p>This has created distortions in the way the public discourse unfolds – distortions that have been on full display during the Voice referendum debate.</p>
<p>It presents a complex challenge to journalists and editors about how to simultaneously meet their obligations to truth-telling and impartiality, because there is now an unresolved tension between these two professional standards.</p>
<p>Truth-telling requires that lies and misrepresentations are either not published or refuted; impartiality requires that voices on all sides of a debate be heard, especially if they are the voices of people in positions of influence.</p>
<p>What happens, then, when influential voices on one side of a debate engage in obvious falsehoods?</p>
<p>Take two examples from the Voice debate: Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/25/indigenous-voice-to-parliament-referendum-aec-poll-unfairness-claims-rejected">allegation</a> that the Australian Electoral Commission had rigged the referendum outcome by accepting ticks but not crosses as indicative of voting intention, and Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s claim that colonialisation has had a positive impact on First Nations Australians.</p>
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<p>In the pre-Trump era, journalists could have counted on the self-righting process of politics to kick in, governed by conventions that repudiated gross falsehoods and imposed consequences.</p>
<p>A completely baseless allegation by a leader of the opposition that the voting system was rigged would probably have finished his career on the grounds that he had undermined public confidence in the electoral process.</p>
<p>And an outlandish claim of the kind made by Price would have been quickly rebutted by other public voices referring to the facts from Closing the Gap, the findings of various royal commissions and countless other sources of reputable data on Aboriginal disadvantage.</p>
<p>Instead, Dutton sails on as leader of a party that seems to think his conduct unremarkable, perhaps even politically advantageous, while Price begins to be spoken about in certain circles as a potential prime minister.</p>
<p>So the pre-Trumpian self-righting process can no longer be relied on. The old expectation that by exposing misrepresentations of this kind, the media will be holding these public figures to account is dead. Instead, it just gives them publicity.</p>
<p>At the same time, the responsible elements of the professional mass media try to adhere to established standards of truth-telling and impartiality by publishing rebuttals or condemnations.</p>
<p>In the Dutton case, The Australian published <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/coalitions-claims-on-rigged-voice-vote-must-be-called-out/news-story/fe0eecbc0c3cdb7dcd31d5c12c192517">a sharp response</a> from the constitutional lawyer George Williams, calling out Dutton’s “irresponsible and harmful” conduct. In the Price case, her comments provoked a backlash published in many newspapers, including the Canberra Times, where <a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8350469/indigenous-minister-blasts-comments-about-colonisation/">her remarks were condemned</a> as “offensive” by the Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney.</p>
<p>This is all very well, but these responses appear days after the initial misrepresentations. In that time, the damage is done, the social media beast has devoured and regurgitated them in almost unrecognisable form, and public attention has long ago been diverted to some newer excitement. By then, to quote Winston Churchill, the lie has gone halfway around the world before truth has got its boots on.</p>
<p>There is no easy and conclusive answer to this dilemma. But there are some steps the media could take to make it less acute.</p>
<p>First, it requires a commitment from the media not to indulge in disinformation of its own. During the Voice debate, for example, several News Corporation mastheads – though not all – published an article claiming the Uluru Statement from the Heart was not one page but 20-plus pages, and included references to treaties and reparations, none of which formed part of the statement or the proposed Voice.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/journalists-reporting-on-the-voice-to-parliament-do-voters-a-disservice-with-he-said-she-said-approach-204361">Journalists reporting on the Voice to Parliament do voters a disservice with 'he said, she said' approach</a>
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<p>This was too much even for some other News Corp journalists, who pointed out that the document referred to was not the statement itself but a record of meetings and discussions leading up to it.</p>
<p>The second step the media could take requires the application of a few filters. The first is: does this need to be run at all? If the answer is yes, then how can a neutralising antidote be delivered at the same time? Or can this wait until the speaker can be challenged on it?</p>
<p>The third – and some in the media are already doing this – is to confront the threat disinformation poses by drawing attention to examples and calling them out. During the Voice debate, articles of this kind appeared in the Canberra Times and The Age, as well as in the George Williams article in The Australian referred to earlier.</p>
<p>So much for truth-telling: now for impartiality.</p>
<p>Impartiality does not oblige a broadcaster or publisher to ventilate lies, fantasies or misrepresentations as if they are true.</p>
<p>It is not a failure of impartiality to call Dutton’s utterance a baseless allegation at the time of reporting it. It is accurate and it is fair, two vital elements in impartiality.</p>
<p>It is not a failure of impartiality to report Price’s remarks and in the next paragraph point out that this view is refutable by reference to whatever data seem most apt.</p>
<p>Another element in the impartiality equation is balance. Balance is not about giving equal time, space or prominence to each or every side of a story. Balance follows the weight of evidence.</p>
<p>In the context of the referendum, it is false balance to give equal weight to the claim that the proposed Constitutional amendment would import a divisive race-based element into the Constitution, and to the constitutional lawyers’ opinion that it does no such thing.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/an-indigenous-voice-to-parliament-will-not-give-special-rights-or-create-a-veto-196574">An Indigenous Voice to Parliament will not give 'special rights' or create a veto</a>
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<p>The fact is that the Constitution already contains two race-based clauses: 25 and 51, the latter known specifically as the “race power”. Reporting the claim of racial divisiveness without the contradicting facts is a failure of balance.</p>
<p>Giving effect to these remedies requires close scrutiny of potential content and rigorous editorial decision-making.</p>
<p>The alternative – still widely used – is to fall back on that discredited and outdated approach called “he said/she said” journalism. This is where the damaging content is presented as a plausible point of view, someone else is quoted as opposing it, and the public is left to figure out the truth for itself.</p>
<p>This is against the public interest. Lies and misrepresentations are not just another set of truths – what Trump’s one-time press assistant Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts”. They corrode trust. No one knows where to turn for reliable information, and the ground is prepared for yet more conspiracy theories to take root.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214961/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Denis Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The “he said/she said” reporting of yesteryear no longer serves a democratic purpose. Media must do better at calling out lies and misinformation.Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1976852023-09-07T04:45:50Z2023-09-07T04:45:50ZWhy is truth-telling so important? Our research shows meaningful reconciliation cannot occur without it<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542733/original/file-20230815-29-tity3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C4%2C613%2C409&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Invasion Day Reflection and smoking ceremony on parliament steps, Melbourne.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=Invasion+day+2022&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article mentions ongoing colonial violence towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and contains references that feature antiquated language.</em></p>
<p>Truth-telling is a key demand in the <a href="https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/">Uluru Statement</a> and is seen as a vital step for both the Voice to Parliament and a Treaty. However, there has been <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-12/voice-to-parliament-language-barrier-hear-the-same-truth/101956684">ongoing debate</a> as to whether historical injustices against First Nations peoples need to be addressed today.</p>
<p>Wiradjuri and Wailwan lawyer Teela Reid <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/2020-year-of-reckoning/">posed a question</a> in a 2020 essay, is Australia ready to Gari Yala (speak truth) and reckon with its past? </p>
<p>We recently conducted a <a href="https://www.reconciliation.org.au/publication/recognising-community-truth-telling/">study</a> to investigate this question by looking at First Nations community truth-telling practices. Our study found these communities have shown significant leadership in truth-telling, often without resources or support. Importantly, they have invited non-Indigenous people to also take part in truth-telling.</p>
<p>Truth-telling can take the form of memorial and commemorative events, repatriation of remains and cultural artefacts, the renaming of places, and the creation of public artworks and healing sites. A recent example is the Yoorrook Justice Commission’s truth-telling commission. Yoorrook released the truth-telling <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/hub/media/tearout-excerpt/20323/Yoorrook-for-Justice-Report-summary-w-foreword-(1).pdf">report</a> this week, providing 46 recommendations for reforms into Victoria’s justice and child protection systems.</p>
<p>We found when non-Indigenous people participated in truth-telling with First Nations communities, it helped build a deeper shared understanding of the past and the achievements of First Nations peoples. This is why truth-telling is a collective social responsibility and non-Indigenous Australians are crucial participants.</p>
<p>But there is still much work to do. Many important historical events and First Nations achievements remain largely unrecognised. Sustained funding and support and the recognition of Australia’s difficult historical truths are crucial.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/first-nations-people-have-made-a-plea-for-truth-telling-by-reckoning-with-its-past-australia-can-finally-help-improve-our-future-202137">First Nations people have made a plea for 'truth-telling'. By reckoning with its past, Australia can finally help improve our future</a>
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<h2>Our research findings</h2>
<p>Our research focused on documenting community truth-telling that reclaimed First Nations sovereignty and self-determination, as well as recognising colonial violence. We did in-depth investigations through 25 case studies, including ten in which we held yarning interviews with community organisers. These interviews helped shed new light on rich and diverse ways to engage with the truths of colonial history. </p>
<p>In the MacArthur region of New South Wales, reconciliation group <a href="https://wingamyamly.com/">Winga Myamly</a> worked to make sure the <a href="https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/appin_massacre">1816 Appin massacre</a> on Dharawal Country is recognised and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-17/200-years-since-aboriginal-massacre-outside-sydney-appin/7331502">commemorated annually</a>. </p>
<p>In the massacre, at least 14 <a href="https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/unsettled/fighting-wars/appin-massacre/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwib2mBhDWARIsAPZUn_kqp2NWnY_XL4e7JekAd2wt2T6sTJulDelYN3p1-4ZHpS2iJ37nlWgaAg3PEALw_wcB">(likely more)</a> Aboriginal men, women and children were killed by members of a British Army regiment. The regiment chased the group to nearby cliffs at Cataract Gorge where many jumped to their deaths.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/01/when-glenda-met-sandy-descendants-of-massacre-survivor-and-soldier-unite-in-grief">2019 commemoration</a> brought together Dharawal Elder Aunty Glenda Chalker, a descendent of Giribunger, one of the survivors of the massacre, and Sandy Hamilton, descended from Stephen Partridge, who served with the regiment that carried out the attack. </p>
<p>In Portland, Victoria, a towering gum leaf sculpture, <a href="https://natureglenelg.org.au/from-mountain-to-sea-the-kang-o-meerteek-project-celebrates-the-power-of-community-art-history-and-story-telling/">Mayapa Weeyn</a> (meaning “make fire”) was erected near the site of the <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C2699521">Convincing Ground massacre</a>. This is where between 20 and 200 members of the Kilcarer Gunditj clan were killed by British whalers. </p>
<p>The sculpture recognises all 59 Gunditjmara clans, many of whom were killed during the <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/how-the-fighting-gunditjmara-used-country-to-wage-a-15-year-war-of-resistance/1ghh36cu1">Eumeralla Wars</a> that followed the Convincing Ground massacre. Gunditjmara Elder Walter Saunders, who designed the sculpture, spent two years building it and talking with local residents in an informal process of truth-telling.</p>
<p>In Tasmania, the <a href="https://www.oric.gov.au/publications/spotlight/breathing-mannalargenna">Mannalargenna Day Festival</a> commemorates Pairrebeenne/Trawlwoolway leader Mannalargenna. Mannalargenna tried to negotiate to save the lives of Aboriginal people in Tasmania who had been devastated by the <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/the-black-line">Black War</a> during the 1830s.</p>
<p>Our study found truth-telling is more effective when it occurs through immersive experiences. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural practices, such as smoking ceremonies, walking on Country, storytelling and personal engagements with survivors, contributed to healing, dialogue and a deeper shared understanding of history. </p>
<p>Through these events Indigenous people deepened their connections to community, history and Country and non-Indigenous people learned about these connections from them. The increasing attendance at events such as the Appin massacre memorial, the Mannalargenna Day Festival and similar commemorations is evidence of the impact of this type of truth-telling. </p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-didnt-we-know-is-no-excuse-non-indigenous-australians-must-listen-to-the-difficult-historical-truths-told-by-first-nations-people-208780">'Why didn't we know?' is no excuse. Non-Indigenous Australians must listen to the difficult historical truths told by First Nations people</a>
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<h2>Why is truth-telling important?</h2>
<p>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have <a href="https://www.reconciliation.org.au/our-work/truth-telling/">long called</a> for Australia’s history to be told truthfully. The local truth-telling activities we have documented are examples of how communities have responded to this desire. They emphasise the importance of supporting communities to tell their stories, rather than government directing how truth-telling occurs. </p>
<p>While truth-telling does not guarantee reconciliation, the participants in our study stressed that meaningful reconciliation cannot occur without it. They emphasised the importance of reconciliation between First Nations and non-Indigenous communities because for some people these relationships have never existed, or are in need of repair.</p>
<p>Truth-telling is also crucial for political and social transformation. For example, the Queensland government is using <a href="https://www.qld.gov.au/firstnations/treaty/truth-telling-healing#:%7E:text=Queensland's%20truth%2Dtelling%20and%20healing,the%20First%20Nations%20Treaty%20Institute">truth-telling</a> to help inform the path to Treaty. In Victoria, the <a href="https://yoorrookjusticecommission.org.au/hearings/">Yoorrook Justice Commission</a> is investigating historic and ongoing injustices experienced by First Nations peoples, alongside ongoing Treaty negotiations.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-naidoc-week-how-did-it-start-and-what-does-it-celebrate-208936">What is NAIDOC week? How did it start and what does it celebrate?</a>
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<p>Community truth-telling can demonstrate the power of Indigenous identity and self-determination. It can also counter <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25617044">past attempts</a> to erase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from Australian history. </p>
<p>Truth-telling highlights the crucial roles and contributions of First Nations peoples. Their acts of bravery and sacrifice, resistance against colonialism and contributions to communities.</p>
<p>Although some local governments have played a key role in supporting truth-telling, more support for local initiatives is required. National proposals, such as a <a href="https://antar.org.au/issues/native-title/make-mabo-day-a-national-public-holiday/">national recognition</a> of Mabo Day and a <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/dean-ashenden/2022/10/2022/remembrance-or-forgetting">formal remembrance</a> for frontier conflicts, have the potential to create a better environment for truth-telling.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197685/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vanessa Barolsky received funding to conduct research on community truth-telling from Reconciliation Australia, Deakin University and the Centre for Inclusive and Resilient Societies. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Yin Paradies receives funding to conduct research on community truth-telling from Reconciliation Australia, Deakin University and the Centre for Inclusive and Resilient Societies.</span></em></p>Truth-telling between First Nations and non-Indigenous people is a vital step in recognising past colonial wrongdoing. And research has found it is also a step towards self-determination and healing.Vanessa Barolsky, Research Associate, Deakin UniversityYin Paradies, Professor of Race Relations, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2087802023-07-03T20:07:36Z2023-07-03T20:07:36Z‘Why didn’t we know?’ is no excuse. Non-Indigenous Australians must listen to the difficult historical truths told by First Nations people<p>Big things are being asked of history in 2023. Later this year, we will vote in the referendum to enshrine an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representative body – the <a href="https://theconversation.com/10-questions-about-the-voice-to-parliament-answered-by-the-experts-207014">Voice to Parliament</a> – in the Australian constitution. </p>
<p>The Voice was introduced through the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which outlines reforms to advance treaty and truth, in that order. And it calls for “truth telling about our history”. </p>
<p>Truth-telling has been key to restoring trust and repairing relationships in post-conflict settings around the world. Historical truth-telling is increasingly seen as an important part of restorative justice in settler-colonial contexts. </p>
<p>The UN recognises the “<a href="https://www.un.org/en/observances/right-to-truth-day">right to truth</a>”. It’s important to restore dignity to victims of human rights violations – and to ensure such violations never happen again. But there’s also a collective right to understand historical oppression.</p>
<p>The Uluru Statement, too, <a href="https://theconversation.com/first-nations-people-have-made-a-plea-for-truth-telling-by-reckoning-with-its-past-australia-can-finally-help-improve-our-future-202137">sees truth-telling</a> as essential for achieving justice for Australia’s First Nations people.</p>
<p>A successful “Yes” referendum outcome has the potential to make history. The Voice will structure a more effective relationship between Aboriginal nations or peoples and government. It will better represent Indigenous interests and rights in Australia’s policy development and service delivery. </p>
<p>However modest this reform, the Voice is outstanding business for the nation. </p>
<p>But the Uluru statement’s call for “truth-telling about our history” will prove more difficult.</p>
<h2>Barriers to ‘truth hearing’</h2>
<p>“Why didn’t we know?” non-Indigenous Australians still lament when confronted with accounts of past violence and injustice against Indigenous Australians, despite decades of curriculum reform.</p>
<p>Our current research reflects on the barriers to “truth hearing”. The barriers are not just structural. Negative attitudes need to be overcome, too. Researchers have noted <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340480495_NEW_Preface">the levels of</a> “disaffection, disinterest and denial of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history”. They’ve also lamented the piecemeal nature of current educational approaches. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/historys-children_history-wars-in-the-classroom/">Anna Clark’s research</a> on attitudes in schools towards learning Australia history – particularly Indigenous history – shows that students experience Australian history as both repetitive and incomplete, “taught to death but not in-depth”.</p>
<p>Bain Attwood has <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/48554763">convincingly argued</a> that early settler denial of the violence of Indigenous dispossession was followed by a century of historical denial. History as a discipline, he argues, needs to reckon with the truth about its own role in supporting <a href="https://theconversation.com/truth-telling-and-giving-back-how-settler-colonials-are-coming-to-terms-with-painful-family-histories-145165">settler colonialism</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/first-nations-people-have-made-a-plea-for-truth-telling-by-reckoning-with-its-past-australia-can-finally-help-improve-our-future-202137">First Nations people have made a plea for 'truth-telling'. By reckoning with its past, Australia can finally help improve our future</a>
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<h2>50+ years of Aboriginal history</h2>
<p>For more than 50 years, historians have produced an enormous body of work that’s brought Aboriginal perspectives and experiences into most areas of Australian history – including gender, class, race, <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-when-did-australias-human-history-begin-87251">deep history</a> and global histories. </p>
<p>Until the late 1970s, academic interest in Aboriginal worlds was led by mostly white anthropologists and their gaze was set to the traditional north. But historians were then challenged to address the “silence” of their profession when it came to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. They needed to write them into history. </p>
<p>This meant “restoring” the Aboriginal worlds omitted in the Australian history texts of the 20th century. This called for new ways of doing research: oral history, re-evaluating the archive, drawing on a wider range of sources than the official and written text. </p>
<p>Today, some historians work with scientists and traditional knowledge holders to tell stories over much longer time periods. For example, Australian National University’s <a href="https://re.anu.edu.au/">Centre for Deep History</a> is exploring Australia’s deep past, with the aim of expanding history’s time, scale and scope. </p>
<p>And the <a href="https://www.monash.edu/arts/monash-indigenous-studies/global-encounters-and-first-nations-peoples">Global Encounters and First Nations Peoples</a> Monash project, led by Lynette Russell, applies interdisciplinary approaches to consider a range of encounters by First Nations peoples over the past millennium, challenging the view that the Australian history “began” with British colonisation. </p>
<p>On the other side of the sandstone gates, an incredible flourishing of historically informed Aboriginal creative works has taken centre stage in Australian cultural life. This includes biographies, memoirs, literature, painting, documentary and performance: often with large audiences and readerships. They are all forms of truth-telling.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535217/original/file-20230703-192977-95aav6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535217/original/file-20230703-192977-95aav6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535217/original/file-20230703-192977-95aav6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535217/original/file-20230703-192977-95aav6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535217/original/file-20230703-192977-95aav6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535217/original/file-20230703-192977-95aav6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535217/original/file-20230703-192977-95aav6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535217/original/file-20230703-192977-95aav6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>In <a href="https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/black-words-white-page">Black Words, White Page</a> (2004), Adam Shoemaker details the extent of Aboriginal writing focused on Australian history from 1929 to 1988: writers like <a href="https://ia.anu.edu.au/biography/noonuccal-oodgeroo-18057">Oodgeroo Noonuccal</a>, <a href="https://ia.anu.edu.au/biography/davis-jack-17788">Jack Davis</a>, <a href="https://ia.anu.edu.au/biography/gilbert-kevin-john-18569">Kevin Gilbert</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/charles-perkins-forced-australia-to-confront-its-racist-past-his-fight-for-justice-continues-today-139303">Charles Perkins</a>. </p>
<p>This body of work – and much more since – conveys an Aboriginal interpretation of past events, through oral history and veneration of leaders and heroes, drawing together the past and future. </p>
<p>Some early examples include Wiradjuri man Robert (Bobby) Merritt’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-great-australian-plays-the-cake-man-and-the-indigenous-mission-experience-88854">The Cake Man</a> (1975), set on a rural mission, which explores causes of despair, particularly for Aboriginal men. It was performed by the then newly formed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Black_Theatre_(Australia)">Black Theatre</a> in Redfern in the same year it was published. </p>
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<p>Indigenous autobiographies, like Ruby Langford Ginibi’s <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/dont-take-your-love-to-town-2">Don’t Take Your Love to Town</a> (1988), just reissued in UQP’s First Nations Classics series, and Rita Huggins’ biography <a href="https://shop.aiatsis.gov.au/products/auntie-rita-revised-edition">Auntie Rita</a> (1994) are realist accounts of Aboriginal lives, devoid of moralism or victimology. </p>
<p>Many more have followed, including Tara June Winch’s novel <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-yield-wins-the-miles-franklin-a-powerful-story-of-violence-and-forms-of-resistance-142284">The Yield</a> (2019), winner of the 2020 Stella prize for literature. Through Wiradjuri language, she gathers the history of invasion and loss – and survival in the present. </p>
<p>Indigenous artists are exploring ways to represent the past in the present: overlaid, but still present and continuous. Jonathon Jones’ 2020 <a href="https://mhnsw.au/whats-on/exhibitions/untitled-maraong-manaouwi/">artwork</a> to commemorate the reopening of the Sydney Hyde Park Barracks, built originally in 1817 to house convicts, is one example. </p>
<p>Jones <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=374269496789482">explained</a> the installation’s interchangeable use of the broad arrow and maraong manaóuwi (emu footprint) as a matter of perspective: one observer will see the emu print, another the broad arrow. </p>
<p>Each marker, within its own sphere of significance, served similar purposes. The emu print is known to be engraved into the sandstone ledges of the Sydney basin and marked a people and their place. The broad arrow inscribed institutional place and direction. Jones wants to show how the landscape can be written over – but never lost – to those who hold its memory.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Jonathan Jones’ artwork is part of an incredible flourishing of historically informed Aboriginal creative works.</span></figcaption>
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<p><a href="https://www.uapcompany.com/projects/the-eyes-of-the-land-and-the-sea">The Eyes of the Land and the Sea</a>, by artists Alison Page and Nik Lachajczak, commemorates the 250th anniversary of the 1770 encounter between Aboriginal Australians and Lt James Cook’s crew of the <em>HMB Endeavour</em> at Kamay Botany Bay National Park. This work, too, represents the duality of interpretation and meaning. The monumental bronze sculpture takes the form of the rib bones of a whale – and simultaneously, the hull of the <em>HMB Endeavour</em>.</p>
<p>This body of work by dedicated educators, researchers, artists and families has been highly contested.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-black-lives-matter-movement-has-provoked-a-cultural-reckoning-about-how-black-stories-are-told-149544">The Black Lives Matter movement has provoked a cultural reckoning about how Black stories are told</a>
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<h2>Truth-telling, healing and restorative justice</h2>
<p>Many non-Indigenous Australians are interested in – but anxious about – truth-telling, our early research findings suggest. They don’t know how to get involved and are unsure about their role. Indigenous respondents are deeply committed to truth-telling. But they have anxieties about the process, too. </p>
<p>Only 6% of non-Indigenous respondents to Reconciliation Australia’s most recent <a href="https://www.reconciliation.org.au/publication/2022-australian-reconciliation-barometer/">Reconciliation Barometer report</a> had participated in a truth-telling activity (processes that seek to engage with a fuller account of Australian history and its ongoing legacy for First Nations peoples) in the previous 12 months. However, 43% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander respondents had participated in truth-telling.</p>
<p>Truth-telling is seen as an important part of healing, but there is uncertainty about its potential to deliver a more just future for First Nations peoples. And it’s acknowledged that <a href="https://theconversation.com/albanese-is-promising-truth-telling-in-our-australian-education-system-heres-what-needs-to-happen-191420">truth-telling</a> might emphasise divisions and differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. There are also concerns about <a href="https://theconversation.com/more-than-half-of-australians-will-experience-trauma-most-before-they-turn-17-we-need-to-talk-about-it-159801">trauma</a> and issues of cultural safety.</p>
<p>But during the regional dialogues that led to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the demand for truth-telling was unanimous from the Indigenous community representatives. Constitutional reform should only proceed if it “tells the truth of history”, they agreed. This was a key guiding principle that emerged from the process.</p>
<p>Why does truth-telling remain a central demand? The final report of the <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/constitutionalrecognition">Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples</a> described its multiple dimensions. </p>
<p>Truth-telling is a foundational requirement for healing and reconciliation. It’s also a form of restorative justice – and a process for Indigenous people to share their culture and history with the broader community. It builds wider understanding of the intergenerational trauma experienced by Indigenous Australians. And it creates awareness of the relationship between past injustices and contemporary issues.</p>
<p>“Truth-telling cannot be just a massacre narrative in which First Nations peoples are yet again dispossessed of agency and identity,” <a href="https://research.usq.edu.au/item/q6316/teaching-as-truth-telling-a-demythologising-pedagogy-for-the-australian-frontier-wars">argue</a> educators Alison Bedford and Vince Wall. Indigenous agency and the long struggle for Indigenous rights need to be recognised. </p>
<p>And there is an ongoing need to deconstruct Australia’s national foundational myths. A focus on military engagements overseas has obscured the violent dispossession of First Nations Australians at home. As Ann Curthoys argued more than two decades ago, white Australians positioned themselves as heroic strugglers to cement their moral claim to the land. This myth overlooked their role in dispossessing First Nations people.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-voice-what-is-it-where-did-it-come-from-and-what-can-it-achieve-202138">The Voice: what is it, where did it come from, and what can it achieve?</a>
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<h2>Makarrata Commission</h2>
<p>The Uluru Statement called for <a href="https://theconversation.com/response-to-referendum-council-report-suggests-a-narrow-path-forward-on-indigenous-constitutional-reform-80315">a Makarrata Commission</a> to be established to oversee “agreement-making” and “truth-telling” processes between governments and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. </p>
<p>As part of its commitment to the full implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the current federal government committed $5.8 million in funding in 2022 to start the work of establishing the Commission. </p>
<p>Yet few details have been provided so far about the form truth-telling mechanisms might adopt. And there’s been little acknowledgement that the desire to “tell the truth” about the past runs counter to the contemporary study of history, which sees history as a complex and ongoing process – rather than a set of fixed “facts” or “truths”. </p>
<p>Worimi historian <a href="https://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/john-maynard">John Maynard</a> describes Aboriginal history research as generative: the work reinforces and sustains Aboriginal worlds – and it reflects a yearning for truth by Aboriginal people that was denied. </p>
<p>The impact of colonisation not only targeted the fracturing of Aboriginal people but, as Maynard says, “a state of forgetting and detachment from our past”. Wiradjuri historian <a href="https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/bamblett-l">Lawrence Bamblett</a> develops a similar theme. “Our stories are our survival,” <a href="https://onesearch.slq.qld.gov.au/discovery/fulldisplay?vid=61SLQ_INST:SLQ&search_scope=Everything&tab=All&docid=alma9915551944702061&lang=en&context=L&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&query=sub,exact,Australia%20--%20Race%20relations%20--%20History,AND&mode=advanced&offset=10">he says</a>, in his account of Aboriginal approaches to history. </p>
<p>Consider the dedicated labour to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/religion/heidi-norman-bob-weatherall-weve-got-to-bring-them-home/13962068">return Ancestral Remains to their country</a>. Consider the the work of Aboriginal people to restore the graves of their family and community on the old missions. And the work to document sites, such as <a href="https://youtu.be/gTh2rV_VuwQ">Tulladunna cotton chipping Aboriginal camp</a>, on the plains country of north west New South Wales. </p>
<p>Some of this dedicated labour to care for the past is made possible by the recognition of Aboriginal land rights. Aboriginal communities are documenting their history in order to communicate across generations – and to create belonging, sustain community futures and know themselves. </p>
<p>These processes of documenting and remembering Aboriginal stories of the past are less concerned with the state, and settler hostility. They are <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-dark-emu-debate-limits-representation-of-aboriginal-people-in-australia-163006">unburdened by categorising time</a>. The “old people” or “1788” appear irrelevant in the enthusiasm for living social and cultural history.</p>
<p>That history is not confined to the “fixed in time” histories called upon in Native Title litigation, or the debates among historians and their detractors over method and evidence. Nor is it confined to the moral weight of such accounts in the national story. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ancestral-remains-of-first-nations-people-were-once-stolen-for-trophies-now-they-will-have-a-national-resting-place-174537">Ancestral Remains of First Nations people were once stolen for trophies. Now they will have a national resting place</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>History and political questions</h2>
<p>When discussing Aboriginal history, there is an unbreakable link between the history being studied and the present. </p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)">Presentism</a> – the concern that the past is interpreted through the lens of the present – and the concept of the “activist historian” can both impact on the way Aboriginal history is perceived or judged. Disdain for “presentism” has leaked into contemporary discussions recently. </p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2022/is-history-history-identity-politics-and-teleologies-of-the-present">widely criticised column</a> by the president of the American Historical Association – James Sweet, a historian of Africa and the African diaspora – is a recent example. </p>
<p>He argued that the increasing tendency to interpret the past through the lens of the present, plummeting enrolments in undergraduate history courses and a greater focus on the 20th and 21st centuries all put history at risk of being mobilised “to justify rather than inform contemporary political positions”. </p>
<p>These are not new debates. They have taken place within and outside the academy across the world, including in Australia. </p>
<p>But the realities of the histories of <a href="https://theconversation.com/eliza-batman-the-irish-convict-reinvented-as-melbournes-founding-mother-was-both-colonised-and-coloniser-on-two-violent-frontiers-206189">colonisation</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/unpapering-the-cracks-sugar-slavery-and-the-sydney-morning-herald-202828">slavery</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/empire-of-delusion-the-sun-sets-on-british-imperial-credibility-89309">imperialism</a> mean they continue to have an impact in the present. Reparations and apologies happen because of the work of historians and others. They are real-world, present impacts of the work being undertaken.</p>
<p>It’s the role of historians to understand the past on its own terms – <em>and</em> to produce work relevant to contemporary political questions. </p>
<p>Applied (or public) history produces this work. In this work, particularly historical work that sits outside the academy, we do often find “truth telling”. For example, in the important work done for the <a href="https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/bringing-them-home-report-1997">Bringing them Home</a> Commission, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/indigenous-deaths-in-custody-inquests-can-be-sites-of-justice-or-administrative-violence-158126">Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Royal Commission</a> and Native Title claims in courts. </p>
<p>But somehow, these efforts at truth-telling – and other historical research conducted since colonisation – seem not to have impacted on the overall “history” of Australia.</p>
<h2>Forgetting and resistance</h2>
<p>As the referendum vote edges closer, Australians are being asked to make provisions for the First Peoples to have a role in the political process – and the decisions that impact them. </p>
<p>The challenge to address the “<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-great-australian-silence-50-years-on-100737">Great Australian Silence</a>” – to include First Peoples in the stories of the nation, where they were otherwise omitted – has been largely addressed by the significant body of historical work added over the last 50 or more years. That work, and the correction it has delivered, has generated discomfort and hostility. </p>
<p>Yet Australians’ appreciation – and even awareness – of the history of its First Nations people remains deeply unsatisfactory. </p>
<p>There is now little justification for the laments <em>Why weren’t we told?</em> or <em>How come we didn’t know?</em>. Our undergraduate students continue to ask these questions, though.</p>
<p>Australia has a difficult relationship – a kind of historical amnesia; a forgetting and resistance – to hearing those First Nations stories. That resistance is much deeper than simply being <em>told</em>. </p>
<p>The current focus on truth-telling will once again draw our attention to dealing with difficult history. This time, different questions need to be asked.</p>
<p>Not <em>why didn’t I know</em>? But <em>how can I find out</em>? </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Heidi Norman and Anne Maree Payne will be presenting their research at the upcoming 50th Milestones Anniversary of the Australian Historical Association. Heidi will deliver the keynote address, <a href="https://web-eur.cvent.com/event/f99aac02-b195-46e5-b1d9-bf5183aea6fc/websitePage:150e8a3c-395b-4de3-bf2b-98ac8be5929e">The End of Aboriginal History?</a></em> </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Correction: this article originally stated incorrectly that educators Alison Bedford and Vince Wall are Indigenous. The article has been amended.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208780/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Heidi Norman receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Reconciliation Australia. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anne Maree Payne receives funding from Reconciliation Australia. </span></em></p>Non-Indigenous Australians need to actively seek the truth about past violence and injustice against Indigenous Australians.Heidi Norman, Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology SydneyAnne Maree Payne, Senior Lecturer, Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2033422023-05-01T03:03:22Z2023-05-01T03:03:22ZIsotope analysis helps tell the stories of Aboriginal people living under early colonial expansion<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523157/original/file-20230427-644-yjanau.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C3%2C796%2C550&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Queensland Police Museum</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Acknowledgement: we would like to extend our thanks to the Gkuthaarn and Kukatj People who invited us to work on this sensitive project through the lens of truth-telling – particularly Phillip George, Richie Bee and Francine George – whose insights have formed a key pillar of the work.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In 2015, Gkuthaarn and Kukatj community members of Queensland’s Gulf Country invited us to excavate, analyse, and rebury the skeletal remains of eight young Indigenous people who died near the town of Normanton in the late 1800s.</p>
<p>The remains were acquired by Walter Roth (1861-1933). Roth was a medical doctor, anthropologist, and the first Northern Protector of Aboriginal people. He eventually sold the remains to the Australian Museum in Sydney, which held them for almost a century before repatriating them to the Traditional Owners in the 1990s. </p>
<p>The remains were reburied, but later exposed by erosion – which prompted Gkuthaarn and Kukatj community members to invite us to collaborate with them.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11759-023-09469-2">research</a> published in Archaeologies, we show how <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/bioarchaeology">bioarchaeological</a> techniques have helped shed light on the experiences of these young Indigenous people who were displaced by European colonisation.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we only know the name of one of the eight individuals – a young woman named Dolly. Roth’s records indicate Dolly was a member of the Gkuthaarn and Kukatj People, and was working at the police barracks (shown in the banner image) in the town of Cloncurry, about 382km south of Normanton, when she died.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523148/original/file-20230427-14-bp7bl8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523148/original/file-20230427-14-bp7bl8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523148/original/file-20230427-14-bp7bl8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523148/original/file-20230427-14-bp7bl8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523148/original/file-20230427-14-bp7bl8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523148/original/file-20230427-14-bp7bl8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523148/original/file-20230427-14-bp7bl8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523148/original/file-20230427-14-bp7bl8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gkuthaarn and Kukatj rangers reburied the remains in the Normanton Aboriginal Cemetery in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Driven from their lands</h2>
<p>In 2018, we <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11759-018-9354-x">published</a> a study that showed these individuals had experienced nutritional stress and, in some cases, syphilis. These findings are consistent with other evidence relating to the experience of Aboriginal people living on the Gulf Country during colonial expansion.</p>
<p>Archaeological data and historical documents indicate Aboriginal people on the Gulf Country lived as foragers until the mid-1800s, when their lands were occupied by Europeans and stocked with cattle. The cattle depleted resources that were critical for a foraging lifestyle, and conflict ensued.</p>
<p>As a result of the violence and loss of resources, many Aboriginal people on the Gulf Country became refugees in their own land. They had little choice but to move into camps on the fringes of towns such as Normanton. These camps were overcrowded and unhygienic, and many occupants died from infectious diseases as a result.</p>
<p>We spoke to several Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people during the course of our research. One senior person expressed feeling relief when the remains were safely retrieved and reburied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Researchers] put a tarp over and dug it [the remains] up real steady. [They were] fragile from the sun […] We felt like we was just welcome [by the spirits of the people connected with these remains], like they wanted to get reburied. [We] just had that feeling they wanted to get reburied; was a couple of times they had been exposed.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Insight into displacement, disease and diet</h2>
<p>In our recent study, we analysed strontium, carbon, and oxygen isotopes from the teeth of six of the eight individuals. </p>
<p>Measuring isotope ratios in human bones and teeth can reveal information about an individual’s diet and geographical movements prior to their death. When we compare strontium isotope values from tooth enamel to an isotope map (called an “isoscape”) constructed <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Malte-Willmes/publication/331549418_A_strontium_isoscape_of_north-east_Australia_for_human_provenance_and_repatriation/links/5c8efa30299bf14e7e82798f/A-strontium-isoscape-of-north-east-Australia-for-human-provenance-and-repatriation.pdf">for this project</a>, we can see where the six individuals grew up.</p>
<p>Dolly’s strontium value suggests she grew up near the Gulf of Carpentaria. This is consistent with Roth’s suggestion that Dolly was a member of the Gkuthaarn and Kukatj People, as their traditional territory extends to the coast. The strontium results for the other individuals suggest they grew up some distance to the east or northeast of Normanton.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522940/original/file-20230426-140-t6jgr.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/522940/original/file-20230426-140-t6jgr.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522940/original/file-20230426-140-t6jgr.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522940/original/file-20230426-140-t6jgr.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522940/original/file-20230426-140-t6jgr.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=663&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522940/original/file-20230426-140-t6jgr.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=663&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/522940/original/file-20230426-140-t6jgr.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=663&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Maps showing the location of Normanton relative to the Gulf Plains region and Cape York.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Carbon isotope results indicate that in their early years, all six individuals had diets dominated by tropical plants and/or marine foods. However, Dolly’s carbon value suggests her diet was especially high in such foods. This is again consistent with her having lived near the Gulf of Carpentaria when she was young.</p>
<p>The oxygen isotope results we obtained are also high when compared to international samples. We suspect these elevated values can be explained by a combination of the environmental conditions in the Gulf Country, and the effects of infectious diseases that spread into the region with European settlers.</p>
<p>Based on the formation times of Dolly’s tooth samples, and her strontium and oxygen values, we estimate she moved from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Cloncurry area sometime between the age of 2.5 and 10. Our analyses also suggest she was a young adult when she died.</p>
<p>These assessments are in line with <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/docs/digitised_collections/remove/63371.pdf">Roth’s reports</a> from the Gulf Country, which state that Indigenous girls were often taken from their families and made to work for Europeans, and that it was common for such individuals to succumb to diseases early in life.</p>
<p>Speaking on the findings, one Gkuthaarn and Kukatj person told us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am sad to learn of our people getting horrible diseases and, with the study completed, these were young people who left behind such a sad story that needs to be told so non-Indigenous people, not just throughout Australia
but particularly in our region, know and understand that these traumas still
impact on our people 120 years later.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/first-nations-people-have-made-a-plea-for-truth-telling-by-reckoning-with-its-past-australia-can-finally-help-improve-our-future-202137">First Nations people have made a plea for 'truth-telling'. By reckoning with its past, Australia can finally help improve our future</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Voice</h2>
<p>Combined with historical documents and information from contemporary Gkuthaarn and Kukatj People, our results provide new individual-level insight into the devastating impact of European colonisation on Aboriginal people of the Gulf Country.</p>
<p>Australians are currently debating a constitutional amendment to create an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament. The proposed amendment is a key recommendation of the <a href="https://ulurustatement.org/">Uluru Statement from the Heart</a>. Another key recommendation is that of “truth-telling” about the experiences of Aboriginal people during European colonial expansion. </p>
<p>Science can’t tell us whether the Voice is the correct course of action. Yet our findings about these individuals – whose remains we have been honoured to analyse – reveal that scientific work conducted with and by First Nations people has an invaluable role in the process of truth-telling.</p>
<p>We hope such work will help reveal more truth of the experiences of those rendered voiceless by the violence of colonisation. As one Gkuthaarn and Kukatj person explained:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My old grandmother was one of those people who said they was horrible
and didn’t want to repeat it [i.e. they did not want to tell accounts of colonial violence to subsequent generations], but I believe it should be repeated [to] help us understand more about what really happened. <br><br> People [are] just listening to one side of it. You’ve got people who say Aboriginals just live off the welfare, but there was a reason why that happened. Aboriginal people fought for this country. You’ve got people who say you’ve gotta get over that [colonial violence], but what I say is: lest we forget.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p><em>We would like to thank our co-author Susan Phillips for her involvement in this research.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203342/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shaun Adams receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Collard receives funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, and Simon Fraser University. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Westaway receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Martin receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Dr Martin has also undertaken commissioned research relating to native title claims and cultural heritage protection for Aboriginal organisations around the Gulf Country. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>David McGahan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Research conducted with Gkuthaarn and Kukatj community members helps paint a picture of the lives of eight young Aboriginal people who lived during early colonial expansion.Shaun Adams, Archaeologist, Griffith UniversityDavid McGahan, Visiting Researcher, Griffith UniversityMark Collard, Canada Research Chair in Human Evolutionary Studies, and Professor of Archaeology, Simon Fraser UniversityMichael Westaway, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Archaeology, School of Social Science, The University of QueenslandRichard Martin, Senior lecturer, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2021372023-04-10T20:02:42Z2023-04-10T20:02:42ZFirst Nations people have made a plea for ‘truth-telling’. By reckoning with its past, Australia can finally help improve our future<p><em>This is the third article in our series explaining Voice, Treaty and Truth. Read the other articles in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/voice-treaty-truth-explainers-134797">here</a>.</em> </p>
<hr>
<p>Australia has never been good at listening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Despite the truths that have already been told in processes like the <a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/first-australians/royal-commission-aboriginal-deaths-custody">Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody</a> or the <a href="https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/bringing-them-home-report-1997">Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families</a>, time and again governments have ignored recommendations designed to address the impacts of Australia’s settler-colonial past and present.</p>
<p>State refusals to respond to truth have led to renewed calls for processes that will detail the impacts of colonisation in the everyday lives of Indigenous people. These calls were an important part of the <a href="https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/">Uluru Statement from the Heart</a>, which sought “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution”, complimented by “a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history”. </p>
<p>As legal scholars Gabrielle Appleby and Megan Davis have <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1031461X.2018.1523838?journalCode=rahs20">commented</a>, the call for truth-telling in the Uluru Statement is just one part of a wider call for structural reform intended to ensure improvement in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-actually-is-a-treaty-what-could-it-mean-for-indigenous-people-200261">What actually is a treaty? What could it mean for Indigenous people?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Why truth?</h2>
<p>Beginning in the 1980s, formal truth-telling processes (usually called truth commissions) emerged as a method of reckoning with the past in deeply divided societies around the world. Perhaps the most famous example is the <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/">South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a>, which aimed to address the gross violations of human rights that happened under apartheid. </p>
<p>Truth commissions like this are generally temporary, state-sanctioned inquiries that typically last from one to five years, with a remit to investigate particular events and examine specific violations over a defined period of time. This typically involves collecting testimony from victims and (sometimes) perpetrators. </p>
<p>It is only relatively recently that truth-telling processes have been used as a response to settler colonial violence, most notably via Canada’s <a href="https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525">Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a>, which arose after a class action lawsuit on behalf of the roughly 150,000 First Nations children taken from their familes and placed in residential schools. </p>
<p>The Uluru Statement isn’t the first time First Nations on this continent have called for truth-telling. Since colonisation, Indigenous peoples have insisted that Australia must not look away from their experiences of dispossession and survival. </p>
<p>When these truths have been told, however, they have all too often been met with denial, defensiveness or even aggression. For example, when the Stolen Generations inquiry pointed to evidence of the forcible removal of Indigenous children that, it charged, constituted a breach of the UN Convention on Genocide, there was an immediate conservative backlash. The Howard government rejected the findings of the inquiry in one of the earliest salvos against what conservatives have termed a <a href="https://api-network.com/main/pdf/scholars/jas75_clark.pdf">“black armband” view of Australian history</a>.</p>
<p>There is a reason settler governments have been reluctant to engage in truth-telling. First Nations often seek truth as a means of changing an untenable status quo, reshaping society’s attitudes so as to improve their own future prospects and reaffirm their distinct sovereignties and their right to self-determination. </p>
<p>As the non-Indigenous Canadian political scientist Courtney Jung has <a href="https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/aprci/295/">argued</a>, while settler governments may try to use the conclusion of a truth commission to “draw a line through history”, First Nations seek to build “not a wall but a bridge”, using truth-telling to “draw history into the present, and to draw connections between past policy, present policy, and present injustices”. </p>
<h2>Whose truths? What truths?</h2>
<p>Broadly speaking, First Nations peoples seek truths that address three key themes: narrative and memory; trauma and healing; and responsibility and justice. </p>
<p>We have <a href="https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/article/view/6491">described</a> this potential as “the promise of truth”, in which truth-telling leads to a kind of agreement between Indigenous and settler peoples, rather than being a process centred on the state and its violence. </p>
<p>The promise of truth is that it will change national narratives and produce a new, shared collective memory that acknowledges crimes of the past; it will contribute to the healing and recovery of Indigenous people who have been harmed by colonisation and dispossession; and it will compel settlers and their institutions to take responsibility for the harms of colonisation.</p>
<p>This approach stands in contrast to what we have called the “colonisation of truth”, through which truth-telling is seen primarily as rehabilitative of the settler colonial state while obscuring ongoing injustices. When truth is colonised, it may reproduce narratives that restore aspects of settler legitimacy and treat injustices as being solely in the past. Alternatively, this version of truth may treat First Nations people merely as victims, telling stories of harm and trauma without delivering reparation. Or it may suggest that the demand for responsibility and justice has been fulfilled simply by engaging in the truth-telling process, rather than treating the telling of truth as a starting point for a fairer future. </p>
<p>Truth, then, is complex, and what it may achieve in the Australian context is not yet clear. As treaty processes progress in several Australian jurisdictions, the commitment to truth-telling seems likely to be a part of future negotiations. This close connection between treaty and truth is unique to the Australian case and confirms the strongly held belief that truth has transformative potential. We do not yet know whether the linking of truth and treaty will produce the transformation in relationships that is so urgently needed.</p>
<p>Victoria, which announced a commitment to treaty in 2016, is the jurisdiction most advanced in testing this proposition. In 2022, Victoria established the <a href="https://yoorrookjusticecommission.org.au/">Yoorrook Truth and Justice Commission</a> (Yoorrok is a Wemba Wemba word meaning “truth”), marking a new era in Australian truth-telling focused on the history of invasion and colonisation of First Nations’ territories. Until the creation of Yoorrook, no previous commission, royal commission or inquiry into colonisation in Australia has included the word “truth” in its official title.</p>
<p>Yet still, truth is not a straightforward proposition. “Truth burns,” as Indigenous academic Marcia Langton <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/video/2023/mar/23/truth-burns-marcia-langton-warns-media-against-parroting-scare-campaigns-video">recently put it</a>. Sometimes, truth-telling is painful and connects directly to harm and injustice. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-voice-what-is-it-where-did-it-come-from-and-what-can-it-achieve-202138">The Voice: what is it, where did it come from, and what can it achieve?</a>
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<p>Truth is tricky. It can appear to open spaces for new understandings, while simultaneously shutting these spaces down and reinforcing the colonial status quo. </p>
<p>Ultimately, truth-telling is uncomfortable but necessary, as change in any relationship inevitably is. But this is where the possibility lives. As new truth-telling takes place across this continent we have an opportunity to imagine what it might mean to be in a relationship that does not deny the truth of First Nations’ lives, or the truth of how Australia has come to be.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202137/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Uluru Statement from the Heart calls for truth-telling as a crucial step towards reconciliation. What does this process involve, and what are the potential promises and pitfalls?Julia Hurst, Faculty of Arts Indigenous Postdoctoral Fellow, Indigenous and Settler Relations Collaboration, The University of MelbourneSarah Maddison, Professor, School of Social and Political Sciences, Director, The (so-called) Australian Centre, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1914202022-10-04T19:07:11Z2022-10-04T19:07:11ZAlbanese is promising ‘truth-telling’ in our Australian education system. Here’s what needs to happen<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487688/original/file-20221003-66497-rst14i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C109%2C6643%2C4165&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/photo/group-of-multi-racial-school-children-working-royalty-free-image/904531326?adppopup=true">GettyImages</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>First Nations people please be advised this article speaks of racially discriminating moments in history, including the distress and death of First Nations people.</em></p>
<p>In a recent <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/radio-interview-4bc-breakfast-laurel-gary-mark">radio interview</a> with 4BC, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said students should learn about the atrocities suffered by Indigenous people in Australia. Historical events such as massacres should be part of the Australian history curriculum. Albanese added it was something that should be done without <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11252895/Anthony-Albanese-wants-Australian-schools-teach-massacres-Aboriginals-British-settlers.html">feelings of shame</a> from non-Indigenous teachers.</p>
<p>In addition, Albanese has <a href="https://www.theeducatoronline.com/k12/news/why-education-reform-must-include-greater-recognition-of-first-nations-teachers-and-principals/280331">stated</a> teachers’ cultural competency could be further highlighted as an educational issue to be addressed. <a href="https://humanrights.gov.au/about/news/speeches/cultural-competencies-conference">Cultural competency</a> involves an organisation or individual valuing the importance of other cultures and using this to inform their working practices. </p>
<p>This is one of the reasons the Australian education system requires the voice of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1177180120929688.">Indigenous educators</a>: Australian teachers (most of whom are non-Indigenous) can <a href="https://www.acde.edu.au/acde-releases-report-on-professional-experience/">lack confidence and effectiveness</a> in teaching Indigenous students and delivering Indigenous curriculum content. </p>
<p>Teaching true Australian history that represents a more balanced telling is vital. But it is only one aspect of Australia’s education system that requires urgent attention.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/you-cant-just-show-up-and-start-asking-questions-why-researchers-need-to-understand-the-importance-of-yarning-for-first-nations-187920">'You can't just show up and start asking questions': why researchers need to understand the importance of yarning for First Nations</a>
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<h2>The biggest problem with education</h2>
<p>The Australian education system is founded on principles espoused by British colonisers and continued and redeveloped by Australians. This way of schooling <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13613324.2014.969224">predominantly follows Western ideas about education</a> and how people learn. </p>
<p>As a result, <a href="https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/ielapa.474978775159363">the education system</a> is not accessible to everyone. For example, Indigenous people in Australia have had their own educational practices in accordance with Indigenous knowledge systems for more than 60,000 years. These methods of teaching involved Indigenous perspectives of the world encompassing understanding about what knowledge should be learned and how.</p>
<p>This is why education needs to be flexible and adaptable to different ways of learning. Not all children are the same, or learn in the same way, and they can have different learning and cultural needs. Albanese has raised one issue that could be extremely important for everyone in Australia. However not all stakeholders will necessarily see it that way. Parents and teachers will have their own priorities for their children, and changing the history curriculum may not even be on their radar. Engagement with changes may be slow.</p>
<p>Australian prime ministers have commented on the history curriculum <a href="https://theconversation.com/howards-history-repeating-curriculum-complaints-nothing-new-9953">in the past</a>. This has included improvements over time to teaching about Indigenous people in Australia, without necessarily having an in-depth curriculum or practical understanding. These <a href="https://www.school-news.com.au/news/is-indigenous-education-policy-being-deliberately-stalled/">improvements have been slow</a>]. However, the lead-up to the planned referendum on whether to institute an Indigenous Voice to Parliament is an ideal time to discuss further opportunities for progress in education for children in Australia.</p>
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<h2>Affecting systemic change</h2>
<p>Many Indigenous people in Australia experience difficulties in engaging with the current system, as documented <a href="https://reports.acara.edu.au/">annually in the NAPLAN assessment</a>. Difficulties may include language barriers, Indigenous culture not represented in classrooms and curriculum, and disengagement. This is an ongoing concern, discussed and investigated by many academics both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. </p>
<p>Curriculum and ways of teaching have been addressed with the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority continuing to <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/cross-curriculum-priorities/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-histories-and-cultures/">update the Australian curriculum</a>. These updates aim to be inclusive of Indigenous culture through cross-curriculum priorities. </p>
<p>These priorities are still not key learning areas within a school curriculum that focuses instead on Maths, Science and English. They are offered to teachers as opportunities to embed Indigenous related information into key learning situations, but they are not mandatory.</p>
<p>Difficulties could be made worse by an <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13384-019-00315-5">apparent lack of teacher knowledge and efficacy in working with Indigenous students</a> and in teaching Indigenous curriculum content. The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership has attempted to improve this by <a href="https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/intercultural-development/building-a-culturally-responsive-australian-teaching-workforce">implementing changes</a> to the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. These changes address teachers’ cultural competency, by increasing cultural teaching resources, due to be released.</p>
<p>However these efforts to improve our Australian education system are temporary fixes to specific problems. We need a more complete approach guided by Indigenous education experts who understand these issues from Indigenous perspectives.</p>
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<h2>What have children been getting told about Australia’s history?</h2>
<p>As an educator for more than 30 years, nothing has crystallised more for me the problems with the system than listening to students studying to become teachers. Year in and year out, I hear how they didn’t know about the degree of harsh treatment, cruelty and trauma suffered by Indigenous people in Australia since colonisation. “We didn’t learn this in school,” they say. </p>
<p>This proves school students need to be given a balanced and truthful education about Australia’s history. This needs to include the stories of massacres, dispossession, segregation and exclusion, as well as the personal long-term impact of the Stolen Generations and other racist government policies. </p>
<p>If these current teaching students had been afforded this education, the teaching workforce might have been better prepared to teach this. They would already have the necessary foundational knowledge and the ability to empathise through education and understanding. Without cultural competency through education we can be left with ignorance and racism, which are counterproductive to Australia’s journey to reconciliation.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decolonising-classrooms-could-help-keep-first-nations-kids-in-school-and-away-from-police-188067">'Decolonising' classrooms could help keep First Nations kids in school and away from police</a>
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<h2>Decolonising education</h2>
<p>Decolonisation is a word becoming more widely used to express the need for a more balanced education system that includes First Nations peoples. It has been popularised for many years in countries such as Canada and New Zealand.</p>
<p>Decolonisation has been <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-decolonisation-131455">defined</a> as restorative justice through cultural, psychological and economic freedom. Embedding Indigenous ways of learning, honouring different knowledge systems, and acknowledging the histories that have impacted us would decolonise our education system. This would also provide an opportunity for all of Australia to understand First Nations peoples and centralise these cultures within the curriculum as foundational learning for all.</p>
<p>Indigenous educators in the Northern Territory <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1177180120929688">recommended</a> that Indigenous knowledge in education for both Indigenous students and Indigenous teachers is of great importance. It is valuable to all teachers to understand that people do not leave their culture at the school fence and pick it back up when they leave school at the end of the day.</p>
<p>Before anything can happen, there needs to be an informed audit of the larger underlying issues within our national education system. Although it’s significant, the way we teach Australian history is only one small part.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191420/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dr Tracy Woodroffe is affiliated with Charles Darwin University. Dr Tracy Woodroffe is a lecturer in Teacher Education in the College of Indigenous Futures, Education and the Arts.</span></em></p>Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stated students should learn about the atrocities suffered by Indigenous people. However, appropriately teaching history is only one area that needs to be addressed.Tracy Woodroffe, Lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges, Charles Darwin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1783982022-03-24T04:57:28Z2022-03-24T04:57:28ZFirst Peoples in Victoria have a right to the truth about the impact of colonisation<p>Formal hearings of the <a href="https://yoorrookjusticecommission.org.au/">Yoorrook Justice Commission</a> began today in Melbourne. This is timely because March 24 is the <a href="https://www.un.org/en/observances/right-to-truth-day">International Day for the Right to the Truth</a>.</p>
<p>Yoorrook is a royal commission to establish an official public record of the systemic injustices of colonisation based on the experiences of the First Peoples of Victoria. This is reflected in its name: “Yoorrook” is a word in the Wemba Wemba/Wamba Wamba language for “truth”.</p>
<p>It is the first such body in Australia to have this function and the first in the world to be Indigenous-led. Four of Yoorrook’s five commissioners are Indigenous, three of them Victorian Traditional Owners. </p>
<p>The scope of this Indigenous-led pursuit of truth-telling reflects the role of the <a href="https://www.firstpeoplesvic.org/">First Peoples Assembly of Victoria</a> in calling for the establishment of Yoorrook in 2020. In addition, Yoorrook is independently connected with the Victorian treaty-making process.</p>
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<h2>Enforcing human rights law in Victoria</h2>
<p>Under international human rights law, establishing the truth about gross or systematic human rights violations is a <a href="https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G05/109/00/PDF/G0510900.pdf?OpenElement">fundamental legal right</a> to which the <a href="https://www.un.org/en/observances/right-to-truth-day">International Day</a> draws attention. It forms part of a broader <a href="https://www.refworld.org/docid/4721cb942.html">right to reparations</a> and making sure such violations never happen again. </p>
<p>States are obliged to give effect to human rights law in their systems of justice, including through official fact-finding mechanisms like royal commissions and institutional reforms.</p>
<p>The Yoorrook Justice Commission was established within this justice framework. The Commission’s founding <a href="https://yoorrookjusticecommission.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Yoo-rrook-Letters-Patent.pdf">Letters Patent</a> list the key international human rights instruments that support Indigenous peoples’ right to truth. </p>
<p>Among these documents are a <a href="https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G05/109/00/PDF/G0510900.pdf?OpenElement">set of principles</a> agreed by the United Nations to protect human rights. These state that all peoples have the right to “know the truth” about past events involving heinous crimes and human rights violations.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-dispossession-to-massacres-the-yoo-rrook-justice-commission-sets-a-new-standard-for-truth-telling-170632">From dispossession to massacres, the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission sets a new standard for truth-telling</a>
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<h2>Acknowledging human rights violations and the right to truth</h2>
<p>Human rights violations can occur in different settings. One example is a conflict situation during a political transition from dictatorship to democracy, during which violations such as torture and disappearances have sadly been common tactics.</p>
<p>Another example is settler colonialism, as happened in Victoria. Violations such as massacres of Indigenous peoples and dispossession of their territories can occur, which Yoorrook will examine and place on the public record.</p>
<p>In all such settings, the impacts of violations are commonly hidden by the perpetrators, which governments must actively prevent. If they fail to fulfil their obligation to investigate and bring perpetrators to justice, this can give rise to a harmful culture of impunity, both in the institutions of governnment and in broader society.</p>
<p>For the public not to know or deny the truth magnifies the suffering of victims, and their family and broader community. It creates circumstances in which trauma can be experienced individually and collectively, generation after generation, as many First Peoples in Victoria experience. </p>
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<h2>Examples of truth commissions abroad</h2>
<p>There have been more than 40 truth commissions throughout the world since the second world war. Their main focus has been on conflict and like situations. Perhaps the <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/">Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa</a> is best known. But it was not tasked with examining and reporting on the colonial underpinnings of apartheid. It could only tell a partial truth. </p>
<p>More recent commissions have examined particular injustices caused by colonisation. For example, the <a href="https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525">Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada</a> examined First Nations residential schools, a mechanism for forced assimilation of Indigenous children. Some 150,000 children were removed and separated from their families and communities to attend these schools. </p>
<p>On the Commission’s recommendation, a compensation scheme (among many other things) was established. According to the <a href="http://www.iap-pei.ca/media/information/publication/pdf/FinalReport/IAP-FR-2021-03-11-eng.pdf">report</a> of the oversight committee, this amounted to more than C$3.2 billion in reparations in 2021. This commission told a fuller truth about a systemic injustice of colonisation and cultural genocide. </p>
<p>Truth and justice commissions in developed countries having colonial origins (like Australia) now commonly apply these concepts and methods. This is termed a “<a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/transitional-justice">transitional justice</a>” approach because it enables states to transition out of situations invovling human rights violations and systemic abuses with justice for victims. In a recent <a href="https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N21/197/81/PDF/N2119781.pdf?OpenElement">UN report</a>, Yoorrook is discussed as a prime example of this approach. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/forgiveness-requires-more-than-just-an-apology-it-requires-action-177060">Forgiveness requires more than just an apology. It requires action</a>
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<h2>Truth-telling and treaty-making in Victoria</h2>
<p>The Uluru <a href="https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/">Statement from the Heart</a> calls for Voice, Treaty and Truth. Substantive recognition of Indigenous people in Australia requires institutional reform across multiple inter-connected domains. </p>
<p>Yoorrook fits into this pattern. It is a truth and justice commission with a strong mandate to recommend institutional reform addressing systemic injustice. It is also connected with other processes that are underway. One is treaty-making in a way that supports self-determination for First Peoples. Another is recognising and compensating the Victorian Stolen Generations. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.vic.gov.au/stolen-generations-reparations-steering-committee-report">Stolen Generations Reparations Steering Committee</a> was also the product of Indigenous leadership. On its recommendation, the Victorian government has established a reparations scheme for individuals and families affected. Under the scheme, $155 million will be made available so that about 1,200 survivors can can access payments of $100,000. </p>
<p>As the <a href="https://www.un.org/en/observances/right-to-truth-day">International Day</a> recognises, the right to the truth is a human right of great importance that forms part of a broader justice framework. Truth and justice commissions may apply this framework when examining historic and ongoing systemic injustices caused by colonisation in settler states like Australia. Yoorrook is doing so in the Victorian context. It will be delivering an interim report this June and its final report in July 2024.</p>
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<p><em>Correction: this article originally stated Yoorrook’s interim report was due in July 2023, but the correct date is July 2024. This has been corrected.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/178398/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maggie Walter receives funding from the Australian Research Council and NHMRC </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span> Senior Researcher and Claimant in the Yorta Yorta Struggle for land justice that culminated in the Yorta Yorta Native Title Case 1994-2002. President of the Koori Heritage Working Group that achieved major reforms of the Cultural Heritage Legislation in Victoria in the mid-1980s. Key advocate for the United Nations Decleration of Self Determination for First Nations Peoples. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eleanor Bourke, Kevin Bell, and Sue-Anne Hunter do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Formal hearings of the Yoorrook Justice Commission have begun in Melbourne. This is the first Indigenous-led justice commission of this kind in the world.Kevin Bell, Professor and Commissioner, Yoorrook Justice Commission, Monash UniversityEleanor Bourke, Professor and Chair of the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, Indigenous KnowledgeMaggie Walter, Commissioner, Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, University of TasmaniaSue-Anne Hunter, Commissioner at Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, Indigenous KnowledgeWayne Atkinson, Commissioner of the Yoorrook Justice Commission, 2021-2024: Senior Fellow School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne., The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1582642021-04-14T12:37:29Z2021-04-14T12:37:29ZCompassionate courage moves beyond ‘cancel culture’ to challenge systemic racism – but it’s hard work<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/393912/original/file-20210408-21-1jgsvtq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C5%2C4000%2C2520&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Demonstrators gather during a peaceful protest against police brutality. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/demonstrators-gather-at-the-lincoln-memorial-during-a-news-photo/1218001805?adppopup=true">Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is common to read news of someone <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/everyone-whos-been-fired-during-the-2020-racism-reckoning-from-the-times-james-bennet-to-vanderpump-rules">getting fired</a> for speaking or acting in ways that harmed members of another race.</p>
<p>Our current <a href="https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture">call-out culture</a> often advocates publicly shaming and humiliating wrongdoers, destroying their reputations and making them lose their jobs. Further, this culture prioritizes the impact of people’s words or actions <a href="https://strivingstrategically.com/2018/11/intent-versus-impact-the-core-of-misunderstanding">over their intent</a>. </p>
<p>In higher education alone, there have been many cases of such call-outs. <a href="https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/usc-professor-slur/">Greg Patton</a>, a professor at University of Southern California, had to step away from teaching in the MBA program for using a Chinese word that sounded like a racial slur during a Zoom lecture. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html">At Smith College</a>, staff members who were falsely called out for being racist suffered health issues and left the job. UCLA accounting lecturer <a href="https://www.thefire.org/ucla-reinstated-gordon-klein-who-will-reinstate-his-reputation/">Gordon Klein</a> was suspended after he did not agree to relax his grading policies following the killing of George Floyd. Though ultimately reinstated, he said that “it remains to be seen how horribly damaged my reputation is.”</p>
<p>As an <a href="https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/people/pushpa-iyer">activist, scholar and practitioner</a> who has studied peace and conflict for more than 20 years, I have witnessed and researched racial, ethnic, gender and religious conflicts around the world. This experience, combined with teaching and leading anti-racism efforts in higher education, has allowed me to develop and practice a conflict resolution technique that I believe is less divisive than call-out culture and more effective in resolving conflicts. </p>
<p>I call it the compassionate courage approach.</p>
<h2>What is compassionate courage?</h2>
<p>I define compassion as <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073919838609">empathy in action</a>. It is not enough to put yourself in someone else’s shoes to understand their pain; you must walk with them through their grief. I define courage as staying true to your values even when you experience discomfort or suffering.</p>
<p>The closest I have come to seeing compassionate courage in practice is in <a href="https://www.cdacollaborative.org/publication/peace-zones-of-mindanao-philippines-civil-society-efforts-to-end-violence/">my research</a> in Mindanao, a group of islands in the Philippines. The marginalized Muslim minority of these islands, the Moros, have led a separatist armed struggle against the government since the 1960s. The long conflict has led to divisions among the Moros, the Christian majority and the Indigenous Lumads. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/394322/original/file-20210409-15-9fujgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A street scene in the Mindanoa islands of the Philippines" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/394322/original/file-20210409-15-9fujgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/394322/original/file-20210409-15-9fujgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/394322/original/file-20210409-15-9fujgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/394322/original/file-20210409-15-9fujgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/394322/original/file-20210409-15-9fujgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/394322/original/file-20210409-15-9fujgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/394322/original/file-20210409-15-9fujgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Daily life in the autonomous southern region of Bangsamoro in the Mindanao islands.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/view-of-a-peaceful-street-in-the-first-hours-of-the-morning-news-photo/1162660438?adppopup=true">Kaan Bozdogan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>One village, tired of war, decided to do something to keep their community peaceful. Members from all three groups heard and listened to <a href="https://noiseproject.org/learn/introduction-to-critical-race-theory-and-counter-storytelling/">stories and counterstories</a> of their prejudices against one another.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cdacollaborative.org/publication/peace-zones-of-mindanao-philippines-civil-society-efforts-to-end-violence/">They defined</a> what respect and harmony between them would look like. They decided any act of violence or discrimination would be brought to the attention of a committee representing all three communities. Justice would be served and the community as a whole would take responsibility for actions coming from one of them.</p>
<p>Then they worked together with the military and other armed groups to establish sanctions for those who might break the peace. When war broke out again between the armed groups and the military, the communities supported one another instead of being pulled in different directions by the armed actors.</p>
<p>Many conflict resolution strategies, such as <a href="https://crestcom.com/blog/2015/12/29/using-the-dialogue-method-to-resolve-conflict-in-the-workplace-and-in-personal-relationships/">dialogue</a> and <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3699695">truth-telling</a>, emphasize listening to others and building empathy. They assume action will follow. </p>
<p>Sometimes action does follow, but by leaders who step in to correct the wrong when in fact they have responsibility for the systemic issues in their institutions. Further, those who caused the harm have no role in the resolution except to receive punishment. They are not considered part of the solution. </p>
<p>Compassionate courage changes both how a conflict is defined and the goals of its resolution. </p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<h2>A case study</h2>
<p>Say, for example, a university faculty member highlights the lower performance of students whose first language is not English.</p>
<p>Calling out would involve labeling the faculty member racist and asking for them to be fired from their job.</p>
<p>Calling in – an approach that Smith College professor and <a href="https://lorettajross.com/">feminist activist Loretta Ross</a> describes as <a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018776224/loretta-ross-callout-and-cancel-culture-don-t-serve-social-justice">calling out, but with love</a> – would involve the faculty and the concerned students engaging one another to transform the damaged relationship into one of respect. This approach appeals to the humanity of the person causing the harm and allows them to reverse the damage they caused to a community.</p>
<p>Compassionate courage, on the other hand, would bring the school community together to seek clarification on the statements made, the intent, the harm caused and the fear of future injury. Participants might learn, for example, that the faculty member’s frustration lies with the school’s grading policy that prevents them from being flexible. </p>
<p>Instead of ending the process there, compassionate courage would then bring the university’s students, faculty and leadership together to discuss the school’s grading system, and how they can make it more just and more reflective of the strengths of its diverse student body. </p>
<p>The compassionate courage approach not only addresses systemic inequalities, but it also ensures the change is equitable and more widespread beyond one faculty member’s class. </p>
<h2>Building compassion and courage</h2>
<p>In the above example, I believe the university leaders, the faculty member who made the statement, and the group of students who were harmed by the statement all need to build compassion and courage. Sitting at the table and listening to the very people who may be responsible for your frustrations and challenges can be difficult. But this is what the practice of true compassion involves. </p>
<p>Exploring the possibility that a statement may not have been inherently racist but emerged from a systemic problem puts the responsibility on all sides to examine their values, beliefs, attitudes and behavior. This, I believe, is courage. </p>
<p>Accepting responsibility and taking action together can <a href="https://www.beyondintractability.org/bksum/deutsch-resolution">change the status quo</a> and make the institution more equitable. This is what I call compassionate courage.</p>
<p>In my experience, it is challenging to have both compassion and courage at the same time. And if all sides are not committed to this approach, then the one going in with compassion and courage will be more vulnerable in this process. However, I believe the benefits to both the institution and its members makes it worth striving for.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/158264/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pushpa Iyer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A peace studies expert explains a technique for resolving conflict that she says is more effective and less divisive than public shaming.Pushpa Iyer, Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution and Director of the Center for Conflict Studies, MiddleburyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1567462021-03-09T06:12:23Z2021-03-09T06:12:23ZVictoria’s truth-telling commission: to move forward, we need to answer for the legacies of colonisation<p>Last year, the Victorian government <a href="https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/delivering-truth-and-justice-aboriginal-victorians">announced</a> it would establish a Truth and Justice process to “recognise historic wrongs and address ongoing injustices for Aboriginal Victorians”. </p>
<p>Since then, the government has worked in partnership with the <a href="https://www.firstpeoplesvic.org/">First Peoples’ Assembly</a> to figure out how that process would operate. </p>
<p>Today, the government and the First Peoples’ Assembly co-chairs announced the process would be run by the <a href="https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/joint-statement-victorias-truth-and-justice-process">Yoo-rrook Justice Commission</a> (named for the Wemba Wemba/Wamba Wamba word for “truth”). The commission will be led by five commissioners and, importantly, will be invested with the powers of a royal commission. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1369084493160615939"}"></div></p>
<p>The announcement was made at Coranderrk, a former Aboriginal reserve outside Melbourne. The site is significant. Dispossessed from their country, a group of Aboriginal people were allowed in the 1860s to settle on a small parcel of land deemed unsuitable for agriculture. </p>
<p>Rebuilding their community, the group farmed and sold produce into Melbourne. Their success caused resentment among non-Indigenous farmers and the Aboriginal Protection Board. </p>
<p>In 1886, after many years of increasing pressure from the board, residents issued the <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/coranderrk">Coranderrk Petition</a> to the Victorian government, protesting the heavy restrictions that had been placed on their lives. Their petition went unanswered. Residents were evicted, and the land was eventually reclaimed by the government. </p>
<p>The Coranderrk Petition is one example of how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities actively resisted colonisation. It also shows governments can — and often do — act in ways that caused deep injustices. It is these, and many other events, that have motivated calls for truth in the present day. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388454/original/file-20210309-15-1ks8fri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/388454/original/file-20210309-15-1ks8fri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388454/original/file-20210309-15-1ks8fri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388454/original/file-20210309-15-1ks8fri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388454/original/file-20210309-15-1ks8fri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388454/original/file-20210309-15-1ks8fri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/388454/original/file-20210309-15-1ks8fri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Aboriginal resistance in Coranderrk is considered one of the first Indigenous campaigns for land rights and self-determination in the country.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library of Victoria</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What are truth commissions?</h2>
<p>Truth commissions reflect the idea that there can be “<a href="https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2019-11-19/role-of-reconciliation-processes-remarks-security-council">no justice without truth</a>”. </p>
<p>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have often made this connection. For example, in the <a href="https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/report_attachments/Referendum_Council_Final_Report.pdf">Adelaide Regional Dialogue</a>, which preceded the <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BriefingBook46p/IndigenousRecognition#:%7E:text=In%20May%202017%2C%20the%20First,and%20Torres%20Strait%20Islander%20peoples.">First Nations Constitutional Convention</a> (and the Uluru Statement from the Heart) in 2017, participants agreed</p>
<blockquote>
<p>we want the history of Aboriginal people taught in schools, including the truth about murders and the theft of land, Maralinga, and the Stolen Generations, as well the story of all the Aboriginal fighters for reform. Healing can only begin when this true history is taught.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Truth commissions have been set up in many countries around the world as a means to investigate and redress past human rights abuses. Since the first commission began in 1974, <a href="https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15409.html">at least 40 national truth commissions</a> have been established. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/truth-telling-and-giving-back-how-settler-colonials-are-coming-to-terms-with-painful-family-histories-145165">Truth telling and giving back: how settler colonials are coming to terms with painful family histories</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The most prominent truth commission is the <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_of_S/cpYrAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0&bsq=South%20African%20Truth%20and%20Reconciliation%20Commission%20report">South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a>. Set up to investigate human rights abuses committed under apartheid, the commission’s hearings were broadcast live to a captivated nation. Controversially, however, the commission could grant amnesty to perpetrators who confessed to their crimes. </p>
<p>Another example comes from Canada. In 2008, the <a href="https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525">Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a> began documenting the history and legacy of the country’s notorious <a href="https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/">residential schools system</a>, which operated from 1878–1996. </p>
<p>Under this system, First Nations children were forcibly removed from their homes and families and put into boarding schools run by the government and churches. Similar to the Stolen Generations in Australia, the government had a mission “<a href="https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100015644/1571589171655">to kill the Indian in the child</a>”, according to a national apology by then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2008. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/06/canada-dark-of-history-residential-schools">Concluding in 2015</a>, the commission issued 94 “<a href="https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/british-columbians-our-governments/indigenous-people/aboriginal-peoples-documents/calls_to_action_english2.pdf">calls to action</a>” to redress the legacies of the school system and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1367203097810935808"}"></div></p>
<h2>Why an Australian truth commission is unique</h2>
<p>The South African and Canadian truth commissions are valuable examples, but the process in Victoria will need to be designed differently. Thankfully, the government has acknowledged this. </p>
<p>Two points stand out. First, truth commissions are often set up by a new government to investigate human rights abuses under a previous regime. </p>
<p>However, this isn’t comparable to the abuses suffered by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Although the invasion and massacres happened many years ago, the consequences of colonisation continue to this day. This fact was recognised by the <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/IndigLRes/rciadic/national/vol2/">Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody</a> in 1991, which said,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>so much of the Aboriginal people’s current circumstances, and the patterns of interactions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal society, are a direct consequence of their experience of colonialism and, indeed, of the recent past.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Australia, a truth-telling process should not simply document history and investigate “historic abuses”. Rather, it should serve as a bridge to “<a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1374950">draw history into the present</a>”. </p>
<p>Second, truth commissions often focus on individual human rights violations. </p>
<p>This also might not be appropriate in Australia, where many perpetrators of violence are likely to have died. More importantly, Indigenous peoples see little distinction between individual acts of violence, such as massacres, and the broader structural forces behind the laws, policies and attitudes that gave rise to and encouraged such violence. </p>
<p>A truth-telling process can help to identify those connections for non-Indigenous Australians.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-its-time-for-a-new-museum-dedicated-to-the-fighters-of-the-frontier-wars-155299">Friday essay: it's time for a new museum dedicated to the fighters of the frontier wars</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>How Victoria’s inquiry can be a model for the nation</h2>
<p>The Victorian announcement places more pressure on the Commonwealth government to implement the <a href="https://ulurustatement.org/">Uluru Statement</a>. After all, the call for truth and justice is made by all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, not just those in Victoria.</p>
<p>The Uluru Statement called for <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-uluru-statement-is-not-a-vague-idea-of-being-heard-but-deliberate-structural-reform-142820">three steps</a> to empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>putting a First Nations Voice in the Australian Constitution</p></li>
<li><p>the establishment of a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-10/makarrata-explainer-yolngu-word-more-than-synonym-for-treaty/8790452">Makarrata Commission</a> that would oversee a process of agreement-making and then a process of truth-telling. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>Voice. Treaty. Truth. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/lidia-thorpe-wants-to-shift-course-on-indigenous-recognition-heres-why-we-must-respect-the-uluru-statement-141609">Lidia Thorpe wants to shift course on Indigenous recognition. Here's why we must respect the Uluru Statement</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The Victorian government shows this sequenced reform process can work. The First Peoples’ Assembly in the state worked with the government to develop the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission. That commission and the truth-telling process will guide the push for treaties between Aboriginal communities and the state.</p>
<p>The Commonwealth government initially rejected the call for a First Nations Voice. Although its opposition has softened, it remains reluctant to put the Voice in the constitution. </p>
<p>This is concerning. <a href="https://theconversation.com/an-indigenous-voice-must-be-enshrined-in-our-constitution-heres-why-153635">Without constitutional entrenchment</a>, the Voice is likely to struggle to be effective and a national process of treaty making and truth-telling may not occur. Further, a national First Nations Voice will be unable to protect important developments at the state level, like those in Victoria.</p>
<p>Challenges remain, but the announcement today is significant. As First Peoples’ Assembly co-chair <a href="https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/delivering-truth-and-justice-aboriginal-victorians">Marcus Stewart</a> noted, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>never before have we seen a truth-telling process in this country or state.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/156746/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Harry Hobbs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Today marks a first for Australia: a truth-telling process to begin answering for the abuses and injustices suffered by Indigenous people. Victoria’s commission can be a model for the nation.Harry Hobbs, Lecturer, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/964932018-08-06T16:22:33Z2018-08-06T16:22:33ZSilence can be healing for Rwandan youth born of genocide rape<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230472/original/file-20180802-136661-qlz8gq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Rwandan students on grounds of the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village near Rwamagana, in Rwanda., 2014.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Ben Curtis)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Elie* is in his early 20s and lives with his mother in a rural area of central Rwanda. His mother is one of the estimated <a href="https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/1996_Rwanda_%20Shattered%20Lives.pdf">350,000 women who were raped during the 1994 Rwandan genocide</a> and Elie is the child she bore from that assault. </p>
<p>The aftermaths of the Rwandan genocide are alive in people like Elie, whose (mostly Hutu) fathers raped their (mostly Tutsi) mothers as part of the systematic, government-led campaign of violence. More than 20 years have now passed since the genocide. but its legacies — including this sexual violence — are still unfolding in Rwandans’ everyday lives. </p>
<p>How do families like Elie’s that are formed from violence decide what to say and leave unsaid? Is it always good to talk about violent pasts?</p>
<p>In 2016, Elie and 60 other Rwandan youths participated in a research project that aimed to understand the lives and perspectives of people born of rapes committed during the genocide, how they navigate the challenges of belonging in their social worlds and how they make sense of their origins. </p>
<h2>The stigma of rape</h2>
<p>When he talked about his life, Elie expressed a deep ambivalence about whether it is better to talk about or conceal his past. On the one hand, he was adamant that he wanted to know who his father was and whether he was still alive. On the other hand, Elie emphasized that he preferred to conceal the circumstances of his birth from those in his community. He explained, “I don’t want people to know my story.”</p>
<p>Elie was by no means the only person who wanted both to talk and to keep quiet about his origins. This tension between speech and silence was a central theme across our interviews. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230607/original/file-20180803-41357-q6vrzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230607/original/file-20180803-41357-q6vrzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230607/original/file-20180803-41357-q6vrzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230607/original/file-20180803-41357-q6vrzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230607/original/file-20180803-41357-q6vrzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230607/original/file-20180803-41357-q6vrzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230607/original/file-20180803-41357-q6vrzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A view of present day Kigali, Rwanda. The country struggles to deal with the reverberations of the 1994 100-day genocide when 500,000 to 1,000,000 Rwandans were killed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Emmanuel, who was also born of rape committed during the genocide, explained that he wanted to talk to his family members to find out who his father was, but that in order to “get freedom in society,” he also tried not to talk about it. For him, “freedom” meant having the opportunity to be treated like other youth his age.</p>
<p>Claudette, a young woman born of rape, explained that she preferred that her peers and her neighbours did not know her story, because she has suffered from rumours that she has HIV, the same disease from which her mother died when she was younger. At the same time, Claudette appreciates that she has been able to glean some information about her origins from her stepfather who is raising her and from other family members who knew what happened to her mother in 1994.</p>
<p>These young people’s alternately positive and negative views of speech and silence are powerfully <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260517708407">shaped by the stigma they risk</a> if neighbours, peers or teachers find out that they were born of rape. </p>
<p>The very reason many of the interviewees are called “youth” when they are actually legal adults is related to stigma and to local expectations of adulthood. In Rwanda and in other African contexts, <a href="http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/stuck/">people aren’t socially recognized as adults unless they are married with children and living in houses of their own</a>. </p>
<p>Since poverty and the stigma of their origins were typically barriers to marrying, our participants self-identified and were identified by their communities as “youth” in a social sense as, like Elie, they resided with their mothers or other family members.</p>
<h2>African contexts</h2>
<p>The perspectives of these young Rwandans remind us that it’s important to understand how diverse cultural expectations can shape people’s experiences of, and responses to, violence. For example, many Euro-Americans assume that talking about traumatic experiences of war and genocide — while difficult — is a self-evidently good thing that promotes healing and improved social relationships over time. </p>
<p>Psychological models of trauma and recovery, especially post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), are very much grounded in these ideas. And while many people undoubtedly credit PTSD treatment with helping them recover from painful experiences, for several decades <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10369444">social scientists have been asking</a>: <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520247451/life-and-words">do all people, across cultural and historical contexts, assume that it is always good to talk</a>?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230469/original/file-20180802-136670-15j0el1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230469/original/file-20180802-136670-15j0el1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230469/original/file-20180802-136670-15j0el1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230469/original/file-20180802-136670-15j0el1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230469/original/file-20180802-136670-15j0el1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230469/original/file-20180802-136670-15j0el1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/230469/original/file-20180802-136670-15j0el1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Family photographs of some of those who died hang in a display in the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Kigali, Rwanda.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Ben Curtis)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While Euro-American cultural outlooks tend to value individual expression, self-revelation and open dialogue, <a href="https://www.africabib.org/rec.php?RID=Q00021223">the Rwandan context points to different perspectives</a> on the relative worth of speech versus silence. Researchers — both foreign and Rwandan — have noted a general <a href="https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5498.htm">social expectation that people can (and often should) conceal as much as they reveal about their</a> thoughts and feelings in everyday life. There is a strong cultural value placed on “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00083968.2004.10751287">sharing in the unsaid</a>.” </p>
<p>Indeed, <a href="https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4931.htm">silence and concealment are accepted and expected modes of dealing with hardship</a> in Rwandan social worlds. Many Rwandans emphasize that the moral thing to do when one has problems is <a href="https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/EramianPeaceful">to avoid making too much of them</a> so as not to burden others who have problems of their own.</p>
<p>Social expectations like these shouldn’t be interpreted as a sign that Rwandans need more encouragement to open up about their distress or that their communication practices are inadequate. Rather, the value that young Rwandans born of rape placed on silence alongside speech should give us pause and raise questions about the singularly positive status of open talk in the aftermath of genocide and other violent conflict. </p>
<p>Indeed, the perspectives of Rwandans born of sexual violence show us that in some social worlds, talking openly about a violent past might give rise to old and new problems, social conflicts and forms of marginalization. </p>
<p>As one youth put it, it is silence about her origins that helps her and that gives her peace.</p>
<p><em>*</em> <em>All names are pseudonyms to protect participants’ identities.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96493/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Eramian receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Myriam Denov receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. </span></em></p>Is it always good to talk about violent pasts? Sixty Rwandan youths participated in a research project that aimed to understand the perspectives of people born of rapes committed during the genocideLaura Eramian, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie UniversityMyriam Denov, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Youth, Gender and Armed Conflict, McGill UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.