‘Truth’ and Consequences

Hapless Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney recently announced that, despite the emphatic rejection of the Voice, ‘truth telling’ would be progressed and that it would be included in school curricula. What is truth telling?  On the face of it, it might sound an admirable venture.  Surely, we must acknowledge the truth of our past?

But how do we know the truth of our past?  That, traditionally, has been the province of the discipline of history.  Of course, history does not always get it right, and two historians studying the same set of facts can reach quite different conclusions. History is never black and white. Just like science, it is never settled. 

So, the first thing to understand is that ‘truth telling’ is not history. History is not determined by a commission or a committee acting under terms of reference and/or rules of evidence.  It is a cut and thrust discipline which encourages (or should encourage) robust debate. Truth telling, on the other hand, as its name implies, seeks to set in concrete a version of history that cannot be refuted, no matter what subsequent evidence may come to light. ‘Truth telling’ belongs in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Here is an extract from the Uluru Statement from the Heart that deals with truth telling:

The Dialogues raised truth-telling as important for the relationship between First Nations and the country. Many delegates at the First Nations Regional Dialogues recalled significant historical moments including the history of the Frontier Wars and massacres.

The importance of truth-telling as a guiding principle draws on previous statements such as the ATSIC report for the Social Justice Package. The Eva Valley Statement said that a lasting settlement process must recognise and address historical truths.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples enshrines the importance of truth-telling, as does the United Nations General Assembly resolution on the basic principles on the right to a remedy and reparation for victims of gross violations of international human rights law and serious violations of international humanitarian law.

In its Resolution on the Right to the Truth in 2009, the Human Rights Council stressed that the victims of gross violations of human rights should know the truth about those violations to the greatest extent practicable, in particular the identity of the perpetrators, the causes and facts of such violations, and the circumstances under which they occurred.

It is clear from the above that truth telling is not about setting the historical record straight. It is about constructing a catalogue of grievance – a debit ledger – as a basis for reparations.  Reparations to be paid to people who did not personally suffer from the wrongs of the past by people who didn’t commit the wrongs of the past.  On this basis alone, the temptation to ‘gild the lily’ is overwhelming.  

How would truth telling work?  Well, we have a perfect example in Victoria, where the Andrews Labor government, supported by the Opposition, established a First People’s Assembly – a Voice to State Parliament – which will take guidance from the Yoorook Justice Commission.  From its website:

The Yoorrook Justice Commission is the first formal truth-telling process into historical and ongoing injustices experienced by First Peoples in Victoria. Yoorrook will look into both past and ongoing injustices experienced by First Peoples in Victoria in all areas of life since colonisation. Yoorrook will:

Establish an official record of the impact of colonisation on First Peoples in Victoria.

Develop a shared understanding among all Victorians of the impact of colonisation, as well as the diversity, strength and resilience of First Peoples’ cultures …

Yoorrook will:

Hear stories and gather information from First Peoples in Victoria on their experience of past and ongoing injustices and how their cultures and knowledge has survived.

Support First Peoples to choose how they wish to share their experiences and to avoid experiencing further trauma.

Closely examine information that is already available and seek new information in areas where there are gaps in knowledge …

Yoorook is headed by four Commissioners, all of them proud Aboriginal Australians:

Chair Professor Eleanor Bourke AM, Adjunct Professor Sue-Anne Hunter, Travis Lovett, and Distinguished Professor Maggie Walter. The commissioners are assisted by six Truth Receivers, all proud Aboriginal Australians: Lisa Thorpe, Shayne Morrall, Tara Fry, Joseph Saunders, Stephen Thorpe, and Aunty Colleen Harney.

They are described as ‘trusted community members who can help First Peoples make a submission’.  The very title ‘truth receivers’ suggests that academic rigour or historical accuracy will not form any part of their remit.  They will not be there to assess the veracity or likelihood of incidents of racism, injustice or atrocity.  Their job will be to put some polish on submissions and paper over any obvious cracks in the narrative. 

Here we are talking about an organisation, fully staffed by Aboriginal people, establishing a basis for reparations to be paid to Aboriginal people.  Certainly, they can only make recommendations.  Ultimately governments must approve such expenditure.  But what would be the point of setting up such a regime, if government did not intend to honour its recommendations? 

By now, alert readers might be asking, ‘What is this history of oppression and injustice that we don’t already know about?’.  Since the 1980s we have had a royal commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, a national inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Stolen Generations) and Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse (Little Children are Sacred). In addition, historians have complied an impressive anthology of mistreatment, including massacres, of Aborigines. These include Blood on the Wattle by Bruce Elder, published in 1988. Beyond that, a team of researchers at the University of Newcastle has compiled a national map purporting to detail massacres of Aborigines since 1788 and which claims some 11,000 individuals were killed in 400-odd incidents. Quadrant‘s Michael Connor has taken strong exception to the map and raised serious questions about its methodology and conclusions, but the fact that it has been compiled at all further testifies to my point that there is no a culture of cover-up, not then and not now.

As a result of these initiatives, we, as Australians, seem to have already embraced a number of ‘truths’.  Among them are:

♦ That, from 1910 to 1970, up to 50,000 Aboriginal children were stolen from their parents simply in order to eradicate their Aboriginality. Some activists even call this genocide.

♦ That up to 100,000 Aboriginal ‘warriors’ were killed in a series of ‘wars of resistance’.

♦That Aboriginal people are dying disproportionately to white people in custody.

Let’s have a look at the most sacred of these cows.  I’m talking, of course, about the Stolen Generations.  I have chosen this one because PM Albanese, cynically in my view, recently chose to deliver the government’s ‘Bridging the Gap’ report on the anniversary of the Apology, implying that the lamentable failure to bring dysfunctional remote Aboriginal communities into the modern world is somehow linked to this narrative. (see The Myth of Intergenerational Trauma)

There is probably no part of our history as well known and accepted as the Stolen Generations. Kevin Rudd even made a formal apology for this shameful chapter in our history in the Australian Parliament in 2008.  No one questions it or thinks about what it means. Keith Windschuttle has provided the most forensic response in his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History Volume Three – 618 pages of meticulous research and well-reasoned argument.

In short, the stolen generations is a myth, a gross insult to the nation and the people of Australia.  But, increasingly, critical thinking has been replaced by critical theory. The following extract from the Stolen Generations Report, co-authors Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson, encapsulates the enormity of the deception.

The policy of forcible removal of children from Indigenous Australians to other groups for the purpose of raising them separately from and ignorant of their culture and people could properly be labelled genocidal in breach of binding international law.

What Keith Windschuttle has shown is that Aboriginal children were not forcibly removed, i.e., against the wishes of their parents, in numbers any different from white children at the time.  Indeed, Windschuttle concludes that fewer Aboriginal children were removed for their own welfare than would have been justified.  And, critically, he also shows they were not removed ‘for the purposes of raising them separately from and ignorant of their culture’.  

According to Wikipedia, in 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.

So here we have a judge of the High Court of Australia (Wilson) and a legally qualified senior representative of the Aboriginal community (Dodson), ascribing to Australian State governments over many years, a policy of deliberately setting out to destroy the Aboriginal people.  Certainly, it is not claimed that they instituted a program of killing, such as the Nazis inflicted on the Jewish people.  The suggestion is that children were removed with the intention of marrying them off to white people and thus ‘breeding out the colour’, the ultimate aim being the elimination of the Aboriginal people as a distinct race.   

That is the ‘truth’ you are being asked to apologise for whenever you are asked to acknowledge the stolen generations, that Australia was a genocidal regime.

The stolen generations narrative holds that children were removed at as young an age as possible, to be educated in white ways, and that they should never return to the reserve or stations from which they were removed, in order to ensure that they did not regress. In other words, to eliminate their ‘Aboriginality’.

Despite the emergence of an Aboriginal activist class between the two World Wars – a time when these ‘atrocities’ were purportedly occurring – not one of them called this out.  It was not until 1983, when white historian Peter Read published an academic paper’ ‘The Stolen Generations’, that anyone heard of this stain on our nation.  Read has built his career on this and was swiftly followed by many others, such as Heather Goodall and Anna Haebich, who all contributed to the narrative.  This then led to the Wilson/Dodson enquiry which established the Stolen Generations as an article of faith.  Windschuttle highlights that the Wilson/Dodson enquiry gave unquestioning acceptance to oral testimony and paid virtually no regard to the written record.  Nor did it seek testimony from any of the then still-living welfare officers who supposedly perpetrated this ‘genocide’.

In fact, Windschuttle has shown that probably less than 10,000 children were ‘removed’ over nearly a century.  They were exclusively (or almost exclusively) ‘half -caste’ children who were removed at the request of one or both of their parents because they could not care for them; they were orphans; not accepted by the tribe; they were at risk of sexual predation by white men, or because their parents wanted them apprenticed in some form of work.

Windschuttle has shown that the largest single cohort of children removed from reserves or stations were teenagers, both boys and girls, who were sent to various apprenticeship schemes, generally with the consent of one or both parents.  At the conclusion of their apprenticeships, they were free to go wherever they liked, including back to their families, which many of them did.

Many Aboriginal people now claim to be members of the Stolen Generation, or, as descendants of such people, they claim to be victims of inter-generational trauma.  Governments in all states and territories have made ex-gratia compensation payments to some.

It is telling that despite his devastating criticism of Peter Read, and all his fellow travellers, not one of them has responded to Keith Windschuttle in the form of a book or published paper.  His book is now, more than ever, essential reading for all Australians.  Many Quadrant readers will have read it, and those who haven’t should get hold of a copy.  It will give you the truth about truth telling.  And like all Keith’s work it is eminently readable.  You won’t have to struggle through pedantic and pretentious gobbledygook.

To borrow from the immortal words of Colonel Nathan Jessop in A Few Good Men, ‘How much more of Minister Burney’s truth can we handle?’