November 1999.

The Uses And Abuses Of Myth Making

Human beings are mythmakers by nature. All the world’s communities, from tribes to nations, to international bodies like the United Nations, create myths of themselves to encourage their members to value them and to face other communities and their own future with confidence. The modern nation state did this by teaching acceptance of, and belief in, its own national myth. Originally the whole point of ‘compulsory, universal and free’ education was the creation of a contented, confident, productive, loyal and homogenous citizenry held together by acceptance of the myth of national worth. What is called ‘history’ in the earlier years of schooling is a selective use of facts, and some fantasy, much closer to propaganda than the objective discipline of History. It is designed to reinforce the national myth. Private education systems, such as the Catholic and Lutheran in Australia, came into being to perpetuate different myths for a minority community not catered for in the state system, minorities that were not satisfied with their own position in the myth. For that reason, historically, the majority have sometimes considered them to be disloyal.

Mythmaking is not in itself a bad thing at all, in fact it seems to be essential for the maintenance of stable human communities. Problems arise when substantial or significant sections of a population are demonised in, or left out of, the myth. An obvious and extreme current example is the majority Albanian population of Kosovo who have been demonised in the Serbian national myth and have had the bad luck of living for centuries on land that is considered sacred to the Serbian nation. The results have been disastrous for both sides. The Protestant Unionist minority on the island of Ireland have been similarly demonised in the myth making of the Catholic Republicans, and vice-versa, again with disastrous results for the people of Northern Ireland.

Unfortunately the indigenous people of this continent were not so much demonised as simply left out of the ‘official’ Australian national myth almost entirely. For much of Australia’s history it has not been recognised that the indigenous people of this continent had a history, a story to tell, at all. British Australia was keen to believe that settlement was peaceful. It seemed to the British that if Aboriginal people did not accept white occupation wholeheartedly they obviously benefited. For the British, their invasion of other people’s territory was always ‘good for them’ even if they didn’t seem to appreciate that fact. As the world’s most powerful nation militarily Britain was the ‘world’s great civilizer’ and the Aboriginal people of Australia, according to thinking current of the time, were the least civilized of all and therefore the most in need of British occupation. On occasion that great military power was used in a civilized manner, we shouldn’t forget that. Britain did eventually destroy the international slave trade, the only civilization in history to do so voluntarily.

It has only been in the last two or three decades that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have found the political muscle to be heard at the national level despite the passionate efforts of groups and individuals in earlier times. Up until the late sixties they were not given the status or rights and responsibilities of citizenship or even counted in the census. It is only in that time as well that Australian historians have begun to understand that Australia has a black as well as white history and have tried to seriously investigate and record it. Aboriginal people themselves are now taking a very active part in the process of history making and increasingly of their own myth making as well. And it’s about time.

The Shocking Truth

Australians are now being presented with an alternative view of their history. It turns out that the original inhabitants and their descendants may not have a lot of reason to feel contented, confident, productive and loyal after all. Tales of massacre, injustice, abuse and neglect that have been kept secret or ignored in the past have been coming to the light of public debate. It has come as a shock to most Australians that their national myth was flawed, that the “Lucky Country” was not the paradise they believed it to be for the first inhabitants. Some have decided that the myth has all been a sham and have turned their backs on the values that Australians have traditionally held. Many would rather not hear the Aboriginal version of events, turning a deaf ear to the echoes of brutal violence of the frontier and the consequent neglect and abuse of the survivors. Some try to lamely explain it away or insist that it has nothing to do with the present or with themselves as individuals, as contemporary Australians.

It is however understandable that most Australians are very uncomfortable with the idea of ‘national guilt’ and ‘national shame’ – John Howard’s ‘black arm band’ view of our history. Collective guilt is not a very useful basis for government policy. It is too easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians and community leaders for the purpose of self-enrichment and self-aggrandisement. And it is ephemeral – too easily flipping over into a backlash, and a defensive, ‘blame the victim’ response. Internationally, in relation to the twentieth century’s most infamous and massive example of racist violence, a man of the stature of Simon Wiesenthal rejected the notion of collective guilt. He dedicated his life to the tracking down of those responsible for the Jewish Holocaust but objected to the title of “Nazi Hunter” given him by the media. He insisted that he did not hunt ‘Nazis’ as such, that is those Germans who happened to be party members. He was only interested in bringing to justice those who directly organised and participated in the genocide. It is reasonable that contemporary Australians also reject the notion of collective guilt when it is applied to them.

We needn’t be weighed down by a sense of personal and collective guilt but we do need to come to terms with our history. Germany was forced to come to terms with its history by losing two world wars in a row. We can take pride in the fact that most Australians seem willing to undergo this intensely uncomfortable process without being forced to by defeat in war. In fact, of all the nations in the world, Australia is well placed to achieve this aim even though the process may be messy, controversial and painful. Our collective task is to come up with a workable myth that includes the nation’s original inhabitants and their descendants, and does not deny their story. It also needs to give all of our children a sense of pride in belonging to this community, to allow them the chance to become confident, loyal, productive and creative if we are to hold on to the benefits offered by a stable, democratic nation state.

Frank Brennan puts it well when he says:

We cannot undo or make right all the injustices of the past. But we own our history. The history of Aboriginal dispossession and of European settlement is not contained in legal declarations made by Governor Phillip when he landed at Sydney Cove. This history played itself out in many different ways across the length and breadth of the land. Every local community, every shire, every region and every city has its story. Aborigines want us all to know that story and to own it.

However, there are a great many issues that need to be taken into account if everybody is to be included. The story will not be balanced, every body’s children will not feel good about it, unless this complexity is somehow recognised and given due consideration.

A World Perspective

We will need to put our revised and updated story into a world perspective to make useful sense of it. Most tend to forget that the settlement of this continent was part of a vast worldwide process that continued over many centuries with irresistible momentum. The establishment of the Australian nation was a very small part of a vast movement of people across the globe:

If demography is destiny, population movements are the motor of history. In centuries past, differential growth rates, economic conditions and governmental policies have produced massive migrations by Greeks, Jews, Germanic tribes, Norse, Turks, Russians, Chinese, and others. In some instances these movements were relatively peaceful, in others quite violent. Nineteenth century Europeans were, however, the master race at demographic invasion. Between 1821 and 1924, approximately 55 million Europeans migrated overseas, 34 million of them to the United States. Westerners conquered and at times obliterated other peoples, explored and settled less densely populated lands. The export of people was perhaps the single most important dimension of the rise of the West between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries.

In this great flood, the migration to Australia was a sideshow and most of those who came in the early years had little choice in the matter. Many were driven by the rapacity of the rich, by famine, war and pestilence. Most identifiable ethnic groups, including the Anglo Saxon descendants of the poor of the British countryside and industrial cities, would not have to go far back in history to find a grievance against ‘Government’ that gives their ancestors ‘victim’ status. The Aboriginal experience is only ‘unique’ in the context of our immediate and comparatively recent history. It seems a little unreasonable to now expect the descendants of convicts brought to Australia in chains, often for minor or politically motivated crimes, to feel morally responsible for the consequences of history’s most massive movement of human population. Your average Whitefella doesn’t feel much like a ‘master of the universe’ ruling the world, profiting from the historical crimes of imperialism and capitalism, just because of the colour of his skin.

The obvious problem with apologies to any one specific group is the point at which the modern nation stops apologising? In a very real way it is a dilemma faced by all the nations of the world because every one of them has at least one skeleton in its mythological cupboard:

‘The nation is a soul’, wrote Renan, ‘a spiritual principle. It consists of two things. One is the common legacy of rich memories from the past. The other is the present consensus, the will to live together…’ In order to reach that consensus, many members of the nation will have to forget the oppressions and injustices which once divided them. ‘L’oubli, the act of forgetting, and one might even say historical falsehood, are necessary factors in the creation of nations’.

This is an obviously unpalatable view for those whose pain is fresh and unhealed. It is a point of view that most of my own Aboriginal friends, acquaintances and relatives accept with courage and wisdom. In a very real way ‘we are all in it together’, a very healthy attitude for an ethnically complex community like Australia.

Australia’s Not Such a Bad Place After All

One of the benefits of having a world and historical perspective is that it leads to an appreciation of what we have. The world is a dangerous place. Since 1900 around 125 million people have been killed by the actions of Governments. Of the 52 million or so human beings killed in the Second World War only 17 million were in uniform when they died, 35 million were civilians. Since then things haven’t improved:

The generally agreed statistics are that some 1,000 soldiers, and 5,000 civilians, die per day, every day, for a total of over two million deaths per year, for a total of 75 million deaths over the past 35 years. The conservative English military historian John Keegan stated that 50 million people have been killed by war since the peace began in 1945. Either way these are record numbers. They make World War One into a sideshow. They make the Black Death into a small joke. In general, these deaths are not so much dismissed as eased off any serious agendas with the qualification that the wars in question take place in the Third World.

We should not forget that around a quarter of a million of these victims died just to our North on an island closer to Darwin than Sydney is to Melbourne. We are not isolated and we are certainly not insulated. Our children are going to need to be strong and confident as well as compassionate. We are may be easing too many issues off the serious agenda. We need to fortify ourselves with a workable myth.

In the past we have been too preoccupied with self-congratulation. Now we are just as preoccupied with self-criticism. Australia has been a comparatively progressive, liberal and humane society for most of our history. This fact has rarely been acknowledged by the current batch of social commentators. Feminists have been in the front line of contemporary critics of Australia’s history and contemporary social and political conditions. Some are coming to see that criticism without due praise is dangerously destructive. Miriam Dixson, author of “The Real Matilda” an Australian classic in feminist critique, sees the danger in confusing babies and bath water:

We are in a world shadowed by disintegration, at the level of the person and the family; and by what we see happening on television screens, by the violence, by the relentless trivialisation of life. There is an unravelling of the structures that have kept us tottering along. It’s not extravagant any more to see stormy things on the horizon.

It is the ‘structures that have kept us tottering along’ that have made this country a comparatively very comfortable place to live in, attracting millions escaping oppression and poverty. It is through these ‘structures’ that the majority of Australians have tried very hard to give Aboriginal people a ‘fair go’ in recent decades. Above all Ms Dixson fears that we may lose these unsteady but invaluable ‘structures’ because young generations of Australians are being given:

…a one-sidedly dark sense of their past, and are being estranged from their own history, with all its harshness, which, when it is seen in the context of its time and by international standards, is a fairly benign one.

We are going through a time of extreme social distress and, in her view, the nation must retain its ‘core culture’ as the ‘carrier of values’ to survive and prosper.

…without the strong support of the mainstream, she fears no solid road to the future can ever be built.

What About The Rest Of Us.

The mainstream has been ignored, if not despised, by our opinion forming elites in recent decades. Paradoxically, these elites are themselves the products and chief beneficiaries of the most affluent period of human history supplied courtesy of the mainstream and its core values. In the search for easy answers the national public debate has been trivialized, it has become superficial, swamped by rhetoric and politically inspired sloganizing rather than a genuine search for solutions. To take just one example, the plight of the Stolen Generation has been presented as a stark case of unrelenting and cruel injustice. But there is more to it than that. Gross cruelties were committed against many, far too many. There were also those who would have not survived if they had not been taken away. There were those given away freely by their mothers. We don’t hear their story. There were Whitefellas involved who acted from the highest motives and did see themselves as rescuing children from intolerable circumstances. We don’t hear enough from them.

For the debate to be effective there needs to be a ‘free exchange of genuinely contrary opinions’ involving the majority of citizens. This is precisely what has been lacking in recent years, ‘as the national debate has been carried out by like minded souls from like minded camps’. The place of Aboriginal people and race relations in our history needs to be worked out as part of an open, honest and more egalitarian process. A process that should include the majority of Aboriginal people. They have also been left out of the debate in the past as well as those of us ‘in the mainstream’. Many of the black elite have been as unwilling to allow honest open debate as their white colleagues.

What a prison the intellectual culture in Australia is in. We evade the issues so much that we bore ourselves. If the mainstream are perplexed in their hearts then let their concerns be put on the table honestly. They’ve often had more of worth to say than one may be led to believe. It is possible to reject extremes of populism but respect the views of ordinary people.

In this ‘intellectual prison’ atmosphere, popularly referred to as ‘political correctness’, the development of programs in Aboriginal Studies and Cross Cultural Awareness has suffered from the same limitations and problems as the development of other ‘Studies’ with an ideological rather than an ‘objective’ approach to social problems. Emeritus Professor Joan Rydon, Australia’s first woman professor of politics, has stated her concerns in relation to the current state of Women’s Studies:

…the pursuit of knowledge and its transmission could not be divided into male and female parts. She believed the development of women’s studies was objectionable, not only because of the risk of diviseness, but because its origins were not objective.

‘It has been founded upon some notion that women have been exploited or frustrated in a world dominated by men and has sought to change this situation rather than to emphasise a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Thus courses in women’s studies attempt to indoctrinate – to persuade women that they are in some sense, victims and must strive to change their relationships with men.’

I have similar concerns in relation to some courses in Indigenous Studies and Cross Cultural Awareness, the area in which I work with my wife. Issues in Aboriginal Affairs will not be addressed in terms of an analysis which locates the causes of all problems on the ‘white’ side of the divide and none on the ‘black’. Causes and, consequently and most usefully, solutions are also to be found on the Aboriginal side. Those who suffer most from the consequences of this over simplification and ‘easing of issues off the serious agenda’ are those with no voice – the victims of violence, neglect and abuse in Aboriginal communities. They are being ignored in our preoccupation with the politics of guilt and the clamour for an apology.

The Damage Being Done

The most seriously damaging consequence of all this for Aboriginal people is the failure of ‘good’ people to act. It is only the genuinely concerned, the compassionate among Whitefellas who are touched by a sense of guilt and even consider apologising. Those on the make are still at it. I think it was Edmund Burke who said that all it takes for evil to prosper is for the good to do nothing. To accept the current myth ignores the fact that very serious victimising occurs within Aboriginal communities. They are human communities after all. We have our very own versions of Bill Skates and his mates right here. These communities have sinners as well as saints, the cruel and inhumane as well as the wise and compassionate. In 1987 44% of the victims of homicide were Aboriginal women. They constituted then only 11.5% of the population. Around 80% of the perpetrators of violent crime against them were Aboriginal men, usually their husbands or partners. The other 20% were other Aboriginal women or non-Aboriginal offenders. The situation has not improved since then. The extent of the problem is painfully obvious to those who work in or with remote communities and town camps in the Northern Territory. Why aren’t we talking about it?

It is just as obvious that Aboriginal children are not being effectively educated and are often the victims of gross and obvious neglect and abuse by their own. The agencies concerned, both Aboriginal controlled and mainstream, are not keeping up with the problems. Workers in the field admit readily that intervention is not happening because of a sense of guilt over the past removal of Aboriginal kids from their families. This is happening because of the acceptance of an over simplified version of the story. Those who are in a position to act feel constrained by awareness of the historical injustice inflicted in the recent past by ‘their people’ and ‘their government’. Whitefellas are not taking enough action. Aboriginal organisations are struggling. While the Australian public are preoccupied with the rights and wrongs idea of apology to ‘the Stolen Generation’ another generation is being lost through inaction. In the not-too-distant future those that survive will be entirely justified in taking legal action against Government and community agencies for not acting to ensure their physical and moral well-being right now. An apology won’t help them.

Much of the guilt and professional paralysis is caused by the over use of powerful words like ‘racism’ and ‘genocide’. They are thrown around too much, too easily. Again only ‘good’ people are affected by their misuse. The real racists don’t give a damn. Lets look at the word ‘genocide’. Genocide is shooting an infant through the head with a pistol because she is Jewish, it is about suffocating a woman to death with a plastic bag because she worked as a teacher before the year zero or hacking a child with a machete because he is Tutsi. It’s shooting whole families to make way for sheep and cattle. And it is about doing all of these things on an unimaginably massive scale. In the century of Auschwitz, the Killing Fields of Kampuchea, Rwanda’s nightmare – and in the country where massacre was a deliberate and sustained policy of settlement from the Hawkesbury to the Kimberley – we should not trivialise the use of this word. Let’s keep it sacred and specific.

The United Nations Organisation has inspired the too liberal use of the genocide through the wording of specific conventions. Given the UNO’s abysmal track record in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia recently and its total non-intervention in the savage slaughter in Sierra Leone we should be at least as willing to be critical of that organisation as we are of our own, fallible, democratically elected government. It too is made up of mere human beings. Let’s get our confidence back, be prepared to act and do the jobs we’re paid to do and let’s not be afraid to inject a little more truth into the debate.

Why I Didn’t Say ‘Sorry’

I too am distressed and often enough horrified by the injustices of the past and the ongoing suffering of its victims. I am horrified by the immense crimes and suffering played out on the televised news every day. A sense of personal guilt would not help me cope, or put me in a better position to do something about it all. Let those who perpetrate injustice feel remorse and apologise to their victims. Let those of good will and compassion denounce injustice and get up and do something about its consequences instead of allowing themselves to be paralysed with guilt and anxieties about the past. So this is why I didn’t say ‘Sorry’ on ‘sorry day’. Taking on the guilt for other people’s actions is not a useful basis for setting things to rights. I find very unconvincing the fairly subtle argument currently run by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission that apologising is not about acceptance of guilt.

There is also a very personal level to all of this for me. Children were taken from my Aboriginal wife’s family. My in-laws don’t blame me, or Whitefellas in general for that matter, and certainly do not expect an apology from me. They are getting on with coping with the consequences in terms of their own ‘core values’ and personal qualities. These are the qualities that inspired me to begin working with Aboriginal people over twenty years ago, the qualities that attracted me to my wife, the qualities I want my wife’s family to pass on to my daughter and grandchildren.

I don’t see Australia divided between victims and victimisers, those who should apologise and those who should accept. I see a beautifully varied and complex mix of people, all in it together, all with a story to tell. Children were ‘taken’ from mothers in my own white family as well, for reasons of religion, ‘morality’ and social convention rather than race. Not so long ago it was quite common in the social class I was born into. We are not looking for people to blame or asking for apologies. We are coping in the same way as my in-laws are. In fact my family and my wife’s family have a lot in common. My parents lived in a dirt floor humpy during the Depression. My in-laws lived in them most of their lives although they were much better at building them. My father didn’t make it to secondary school but my family made sure that I did. My father-in-law didn’t go to the Whitefella school at all although he was a highly educated man in his own world. He and his wife did make sure his daughter learned the Whitefella’s way as well as their own. He lived through a massacre of his people by police and pastoralists. I never heard him once complain about any aspect of his life or blame other people for his problems. My mother and mother-in-law both worked at similar low paid jobs, they both lost too many children and their husbands. They’re coped with a strength and dignity I’m still trying hard to acquire.

As a child I was taught that Blackfellas must be alright because the same people who gave them a hard time gave us a hard time. We were on the same side. My father wasn’t politically correct. One of his mates was Aboriginal. He loved him like a brother, he was a ‘white man inside’ said he. I’ve had Aboriginal friends who have told me that although I’m a Whitefella I’m really black inside. They have a pretty similar way of looking at the world as my father had. Of course Aboriginal people were here first and we were the aliens. My lot didn’t have a choice. We were swept along in that great ragged tide of flotsam flushed from Europe into “New Worlds”. We weren’t conquerors, we are the descendants of the conquered of other lands that no longer had room for us. And many now asking for an apology share the heritage of these other ethnic groups, and therefore could feel doubly aggrieved if they knew the history of the other side of their heritage.

When all the shouting and name-calling is over Aboriginal people will solve their own problems on the basis of the common humanity they share with the rest of the world’s peoples and a deep and objective awareness of their historical experience in a world context. They will not be able to do that if they allow themselves to be convinced of their uniqueness and status as “Victims”. They will not be able to do it ‘hiding behind culture’. It does a people no good at all to believe that all of the self-destructive behaviours and meaningless trivia of their daily lives are an integral and therefore inviolable part of their “Culture” along with their collective intellectual and spiritual achievements. As well as being a foundation for belief and action, a source of strength, culture is a trap when it no longer ‘works’, no longer offers solutions.

Their problems will also definitely not be solved by guilt racked, well meaning but confused Whitefellas who are happily throwing out the baby of ‘core values’ with the bath water of the ‘self-destructive behaviours and meaningless trivia’ of their own culture. Let’s tell each other our stories in an atmosphere of mutual respect and recognition of our common humanity and fallibility instead of with accusation, acceptance of guilt and apology. “After the weeping stops we still have to do history.”

I believe along with Miriam Dixson and Frank Brennan that the majority of Australians, black and white, are capable of coming up with and reaching agreement on fair solutions. Again in the words of Frank Brennan:

Most Australians, whatever their race, want to live in a situation of racial harmony where race does not matter in the playground or in the street. They want a situation of peace and security for all, especially in country towns. They want to be able to live together in good faith. They want to be assured of the legitimacy of the nation state which provides equality of opportunity for all Australians.

We share his optimism because we experience this concern for harmony in our work and in the community we live in every day of our lives. We work with real people in real work places. Every group we deal with are a cultural and linguistic mix. They are all Australians. They even include representatives of the white rural working class, those most demonised by the current urban based, Left, liberal intelligentsia. They are confused and often hurt by the public debate. The last race and class based term of abuse allowed in public now is “red neck”. They want to make sense of the issues. And they are almost universally concerned that everybody gets a ‘fair go’ in terms of their understanding of what that means. Let’s ensure that this concern of the majority for harmony is included in the new myth we are making for ourselves.

End Notes

J.M. Roberts, The Rise of the West, BBC, 1985, p. 76.

Frank Brennan, One Land, One Nation. Mabo – Towards 2001. UQP, 1995, p. xi.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. Touchstone Books, 1997, p198.

Norman Davies, Europe, a History. Pimlico, 1997 p. 813.

Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War. Sun Books, Melbourne, 1988.

Francis Beer, Peace Against War, Freeman, 1981, p. 36.

John Rauston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, Penguin, 1997. P.11.

Miriam Dixson, quoted in the Weekend Australian: June 5-6, 1999.

Journalist’s comments on the views of Miriam Dixson, Weekend Australian: June 5-6, 1999

Journalist’s comments on the views of Miriam Dixson

Professor Joan Rydon, quoted in the Weekend Australian: June 5-6, 1999.

Audrey Bolger, Aboriginal Women and Violence, ANU, North Australia Research Unit, Darwin 1991.

Frequently asked questions about the National Inquiry Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC)*

From a recent radio National program on the writing of history and The Holocaust. I recorded the quote but not the details.

Frank Brennan, 1995.