The Undermining of our License to Dwell

Sir Roger Scruton made the intriguing claim that classical architecture uniquely provides us the ‘license to dwell, the affirmation of our right of occupation, and the reminder that our communities precede and survive us.’[1] Whether or not architecture confers such a license, an Briton like Scruton might speak easily of the licence to dwell in England as no one else makes a competing claim to Blake’s “green and pleasant land”. But we Australians are told by Midnight Oil and countless others that our beds are burning because the land ‘belongs to them’, Aboriginal Australians, and we are interlopers at best, genocidal conquistadors at worst.

Many historical arguments might be made about this proposition, and I will not go into them here. However, many Australians remain haunted by the bare fact: depending on location, prior to some point between 1788 and a century or so later, the land was subject to Aboriginal law and occupation. After that point it was made subject to British law and occupation, and most Australians are inheritors and descendants of the latter.

This makes even some conservative Australians uncomfortable. We don’t really get to be ‘relaxed and comfortable’, as John Howard would say, or have a ‘license to dwell’, as Scruton might put it.  This feeling of guilty illegitimacy is exploited by activists black and white, including those teaching in our children’s classrooms. It puts our whole right to feel proud of ourselves and connected with our country into question, this perspective helped by the fact that many Australians are increasingly ‘anywheres’, as author David Goodhart termed them: people – usually educated liberal elites — who are happy to live anywhere they find convenient and attractive because they feel no particular attachment to their land or country.

Those that do feel rooted in Australia, or even just want to feel rooted here in the face of cultural headwinds, are left angry by an Aboriginal rights agenda that, if pursued to its ultimate degree, would seek to make them homeless while in the meantime telling them they can only feel at home when conditions dictated by the activists are met. Often these are working class ‘somewhere’ Australians who share a very definite sense of place and belonging.

So, are they no better than children petulantly clinging on to the toy they’ve stolen from its rightful owner? There are, I believe, two very strong reasons in principle not to think so, but rather to believe all Australians do in fact have a license to dwell in the land without unease. The reasons are complex and difficult to navigate but I believe cogent and powerful once understood.

The first is our inherent dignity as an inherited and lived community. The second is our society’s extraordinary success in the modern world and its place as the bearer of most of what we rely upon and even hold dear. Let me explain. Cultures and communities are notoriously hard to define. Yet unquestionably both of these have been created by the British and other arrivals since 1788 to make an Australian people.

As the spread of people arrived from Britain and Ireland in Australia — first convicts, soldiers and administrators, then increasingly free settlers — they had to establish two key sets of relationships: firstly, with one another and, secondly, with the land. The process whereby they did that formed a culture we can recognise as distinctively Australian. It has changed over time but has a direct line to those people who disembarked on January 26, 1788, and immediately began ordering their relationships with one another, making a thousand adjustments as they settled into a new place with comparative strangers and forming a common understanding and way of behaving that allowing shared goals and mutual cohabitation. This included the development of foundational institutions.

Someone may counter that this was just British and Irish society transplanted. To be sure, there is a deep debt that Australian culture owes to the British isles. The arrivals were only comparative strangers to each other; they had a strong shared inheritance stretching back centuries and more, even in conflict. But Britain, Ireland, Wales and Scotland were far across the sea.

Likewise, they had to form a relationship with the land in the new continent, its flora and fauna, its landscapes and waterways, its soils and its weather. It was an uneasy relationship at times, but one of growing knowledge and attachment. Children were born, livestock raised, crops sown and harvested, people buried and mourned, memories and communities formed. The land, being unlike Britain and Ireland, formed its people in its own way.

THIS WAS a porous culture, of course, looking back mostly to Britain and Ireland and always informed by the waves of migrants who brought the latest habits of their homelands. But it was this identifiable shared experience that Australia’s politicians could point to during the Federation movement, asking if Australia was one nation or many. William McMillan, Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales, echoed the thoughts of many when he asked the 1890 Australasian Federation Conference:

Does any man travelling among the colonies, directly he has passed the wretched custom-houses on the Border, ever feel that he is in a foreign country? (12 February 1890)

On the foundation of this culture was built not just the nation but the many institutions that we know and value, influencing the culture again in their turn.

Now this culture itself can claim to be intrinsically valuable, as much as any that went before it or exists outside of it. Were we to ask why another country shouldn’t simply take control of Australia, as Russia has sought to do with Ukraine, we are entitled to answer: because this is ours, emerging from our lives lived together over generations and worth holding on to.

But does this argument not merely open us to the claim that Aboriginal culture is also unique and, moreover, one with a much longer history and a prior claim on this continent? Leaving aside whether it is in fact one culture or many (could a pre-1788 Aborigine credibly claim that no matter how many tribal territorial borders were crossed he was not in a foreign country?), we can affirm its intrinsic worth on the same grounds as we affirm the worth of the post-1788 culture. But this does not set aside the value of the post-1788 culture or undermine the assertion that it, too, is a spiritual home in which modern Australians are entitled to dwell.

As has been frequently pointed out, arguments against our own culture based on time and prior existence are very dubious. Firstly, once a new culture has established itself, expressed in continuing communities, the time for remedy has passed. There is no way to compare the claim of a continuing culture and community that might have been against one that actually exists on the lands it inhabits.

And introducing the concept of time (or generations) provides no meaningful way of claiming a prior right unless the most primordial (indeed, arch-conservative) ideas are invoked. If applied consistently, these would plunge the world into an endless series of wars as groups which are older occupiers of territories rise up against the present inhabitants by claim of right. If acted on, such a claim always involves the further dispossession of present living, breathing communities, whether done violently or, as in Australia, by legal stealth or at the insistence of the ‘anywhere’ elites.

What about the claim that Aborigines enjoy a deeper connection to the land than anything post-1788 arrivals can claim due to the spiritual nature of their culture? This is  exactly what those welcomes to country are meant to mean — Aborigines know the land and love it, but you are a flaky fly-by-nighter here, running round on the surface, probably abusing the environment, while they care for it like their mother.

This popular romantic notion makes incredible assumptions. When my daughter recently spent time in a remote Aboriginal community, she heard a lot of complaints by local leaders that they couldn’t get their young people off Tik-Tok. The idea that most Aborigines are ‘loving country’ in the old ways is questionable at best, especially if one pauses to note the rubbish and, all too often, the squalor evident in so many of these communities.

Furthermore, even in the age of Tik-Tok, many post-1788 Australians do love their country, feel close to the land and want others to feel the same. However, the constant refrain that they don’t really belong, a meme tirelessly pushed via the education system, encourages a perception of the alleged rootlessness used against them. But at bottom it is impossible in the real world to measure relative ‘connectedness’, to arbitrate the claim of this deeper connection and absurd to try.

However, there is another very powerful reason why contemporary Australian post-1788 culture has a claim to belong: at present it and it alone is able to form a society and nation able to consistently manage modernity. By ‘manage’ I mean to claim its benefits and mitigate its harms. No society or nation is viable in the contemporary world unless it can do this. By ‘modernity’ I mean the rapid development of technology combined with impersonal and mobile forms of social organisation long prevalent in the West and, indeed, in many other countries. I make no claim that modern cultures are somehow superior to ancient cultures, nor that we handle it perfectly; only that modernity is here and must be dealt with by any society wishing to claim ‘success’ in some basic measures. Any and all of modernity’s many manifestations — guns, diseases and their remedies, the society of strangers, enclosed land, professional bureaucracies, competing belief systems, drugs, science, corporations, media, money, trade, ideas of freedom etc – they all would have come to Australia one way or another. And their effect would have been monumental regardless how and whence they came.

It is no disrespect to the Aboriginal people to say that it is very unlikely that a culture (or, more correctly) cultures so long secluded, whose success was largely measured by the ability to maintain cohesion amongst close-knit communities and wring sufficient food from the land (Bruce Pascoe’s spurious claims notwithstanding), would have had many meaningful defences against the problems modernity presents. Indeed, the only way to stop others setting foot on their soil would have been to quickly adopt modern methods, with all the cultural dislocation that would have resulted.

The undoubtedly real impoverishment of many Aboriginal Australians, now sheeted home to the oppression of post-1788 “invaders”, is more than anything the result of the extended process of a culture long shielded from modernity and still struggling to deal with it. We can sympathise with the pain of the incongruity between modern life and an ancient cultural heritage. The disorientation was, and in many cases still is, profound. But we can also see it as an unavoidable development without feeling at fault. In the end, only Aboriginal Australians can come to terms with modernity and find a viable form of life that incorporates it without being devastated by it. Many have done this, but in general it appears a long way off for many others. It will require accepting mainstream Australia as an invitation and an opportunity, rather than something to repudiate or with which to wrestle for some pre-eminent status.

But, looking for someone else to blame, black and white activists claim that if Aboriginal Australians are recognised as independently sovereign enough, these issues would be solved. Far from it! Rather, it could make them worse, as it provides a plethora of opportunities to avoid the challenges of modernity — opportunities that are already legion in the pretend world increasingly being constructed for Aborigines in the name of reconciliation.

WHAT has this to do with the post-1788 Australians’ ‘license to dwell’? Only this: when we rightly recognise that Australians live in relative wealth, freedom and peace, what we are saying is that we have found a form of life, a culture, that is successfully able to claim the benefits of modernity and mitigate its harms, however imperfectly. There are very few countries even today which have managed this. We are right to be proud of this achievement and to seek to conserve it and its rights against anyone who claims it is illegitimate and must give way. In fact it may be the highest good, for from it all our strength flows.

We can even reasonably make the claim that Aboriginal Australians may benefit by participating in what we have to offer on the understanding they, too, can’t shirk modernity by making economic, political and legal claims on a culture and body politic that is left to do the heavy lifting in dealing with the many challenges of the contemporary world.

As a conservative I have a well-grounded fear that what we have inherited is being eroded in many ways. Arguably the fundamental way to do this is to delegitimise it and remove our licence to dwell. This the activists know well, while many good-hearted Australians go along with it thinking it is the right thing to do. And so we are increasingly alienated from our heritage, the land and ourselves.

I wonder if those who seek to undermine our inheritance and their fellow travellers really understand what it would mean to dismantle the cultural ground on which we stand. It may be slow, but the wealth, freedom and peace would be dismantled likewise, and then we will all look longingly at our ancestors who really thought they belonged and consequently planted a civilisation they sought to see endure. Or we may recover our love of our continuing culture, assert our licence to dwell and welcome others who want to collaboratively wrestle from modernity its fruits without expecting others to do it for them.

[1] Scruton, Roger. The Soul of the World (p. 133). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.