Above: Meet the family confronting the history of the Myall Creek massacre head-on.
From sky-high rates of Indigenous children in detention to rocketing rates of HIV infection, story after story describes the deep inequalities experienced by Aboriginal people in Australia.
These stories hold a cracked mirror up to white Australia; showing a country that’s okay with Indigenous kids being locked up, living shorter lives, being disenfranchised and dispossessed.
As a white woman, I struggle to take pride in calling myself Australian when, after a decade of government programs and priorities, most Closing the Gap targets remain off track.
For a long, long time, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians have been calling for the legal right to make decisions over their own lives. And it’s not that complicated. The Uluru Statement from the Heart is practical. It lays out plans for a constitutional voice to Parliament and a Makarrata Commission so that Australia faces up to the reality of our history.
The Uluru Statement from the Heart calls for a Makarrata Commission to ‘supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.’ Without a shared understanding of the history of Australia, there can be no peace, no reconciliation and no unity.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister responsible for ‘closing the gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous outcomes is the same person reinforcing the myth of white Australia. Not only has he promoted a ‘re-enactment’ of Cook’s journey around Australia by a replica Endeavour, he has proposed a multi-million dollar memorial to ‘celebrate’ Cook’s first meeting with Aboriginal Australians at Botany Bay.
There’s nothing wrong with commemorating Cook’s voyage if it’s done in the context of an honest understanding of what the consequences of that voyage meant for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. But the way that this country commemorates Cook validates the invasion and eradicates the genocide that followed. Immortalising the ‘heroes’ of our colonial past in the form of bronze memorials is an insult to our Indigenous future.
People take part in an "Invasion Day" rally on Australia Day in Melbourne on January 26, 2018. Source: AFP
I can think of two countries that have used national Commissions to learn the truth about difficult parts of national history and reconcile fractured communities. The South African government set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996 to help a riven society overcome the legacy of apartheid and move toward justice and reconciliation. The process was designed to enable both black and white South Africans to understand the reality of the regime and what it meant for individuals, families, communities and institutions.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister responsible for ‘closing the gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous outcomes is the same person reinforcing the myth of white Australia.
Like Australia, Canada is another country that forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families to assimilate them into white society. Residential schools were used to ‘kill the Indian in the child.’ The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought to come to terms with the impacts of policies of forced removal on survivors, their families and the wider community.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa and Canada didn’t fix everything – but acknowledging the problem is the first step to solving it.
It may have been imperfect. But the willingness of the Canadian and South African governments to recognise the need for truth and reconciliation points to a political maturity that Australia lacks.
Australia has held inquiries before, most notably the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. But despite making landmark recommendations that would bring real change for the most vulnerable people in this country, only two thirds have been implemented against a backdrop of rocketing incarceration rates.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa and Canada didn’t fix everything – but acknowledging the problem is the first step to solving it.
We don’t need another expensive colonial memorial. That money would be better spent implementing the remaining recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and establishing a Truth Telling commission. But what we need is not what we’ll get – because white Australia can’t handle the truth.
