Unfinished Business: Discourses on Reconciliation in Australian Society Dr Nina Burridge, Faculty of Education , UTS

1. Unfinished Business: Discourses on Reconciliation in Australian SocietyDr Nina Burridge, Faculty of Education , UTS .

2. Overview of presentation • 1. Brief Background to Reconciliation policy 1991 - 2001 • 2. Reconciliation typologies and meanings • 3. Reconciliation since 2001 • 4. The future

3. Outline of the Reconciliation discourse • Background • Creation of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation • Meanings and Perspectives of Reconciliation • Framework for a definition • Community perspectives • Dissenting Voices • Reconciliation and the changing socio-poltical climate • Practical Reconciliation • Reconciliation as a nationalist /assimilationist discourse

4. Background to Reconciliation • Aboriginal and non -Aboriginal relations since invasion - 1788 • 1967 Referendum • 1980s Leaders of Australian churches - towards reconciliation in Aust society • Lead up to the bicentenary -Hawke and the Makarrata - the Burunga Statement • The Government is committed to a real and lasting reconciliation, achieved through full consultation and honest negotiation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal citizens -Hawke 1988 • CD Rowley The Remote AboriginesIt seemed to me paramount to establish a case, in each State and in the Northern Territory, for recognition of some degree of autonomy, and for a patient attempt at reconciliation and negotiations 1971

5. 1967 referendum

6. Background to Reconciliation • The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 1991 • Recommendation 339: • That all political leaders and their parties recognise that Reconciliation between the Aboriginal and non Aboriginal communities in Australia must be achieved if community division, discord and injustice to Aboriginal people are to be avoided. To this end the Commission recommends that political leaders use their best endeavours to ensure bipartisan public support for the process of Reconciliation and that the urgency and necessity of the process be acknowledged. • Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Bill June 1991 • Tickner, Wooldridge, Chaney -cross party support

7. Reconciliation typologies • Reconciliation rhetoric; • ‘symbolic’ Reconciliation; • ‘genuine’ Reconciliation; • ‘true’ Reconciliation; • ‘substantive’ Reconciliation; • ‘soft’ Reconciliation and • ‘hard’ Reconciliation • Normative - Assimilationist

8. Reconciliation typologies • Fig: 1 Reconciliation Typologies • LEFT CENTRE RIGHT Hard Soft Assimilationist • Substantive Symbolic - Rhetorical Normative - Practical ‘Genuine’ or ‘true’ treaty/sovereignty ceremonies standard health compensation marches housing land/sea rights gatherings, education celebrations aspirational one great tribe first nations people

9. Genuine Reconciliation .

10. Reconciliation - aspirational statements • There can be no peace or harmony unless there is justice (Canadian RCAP,1996) • …We cannot achieve reconciliation without truth.However costly the search for truth and knowing the truth might be, it is of fundamental importance to base peace and unity on truth. (Dr Alex Boraine, VP Truth and Recon Commission SA 1997) • Lets call it Australian Reconciliation - that is what it really is - it’s not Aboriginal people who need to be reconciled (Aboriginal teacher, 1998)

11. Reconciliation: Meanings and definitions • A united Australia which values this land of ours; respects the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage and provides justice and equity for all (CAR,1991 vision statement) • Reconciliation is lived. It’s a personal commitment and personal recognition • Reconciliation is about confronting ourselves and understanding the way we perceive difference (comments from interviews with teachers ,Burridge 2003)

12. Reconciliation Meanings cont • Reconciliation is first and foremost about land (Aboriginal elder) • It’s not Aboriginal peoples’ job to bring about reconciliation - that’s for whitefellas to do • It’s not about reconciling ourselves to our own dispossession • Finding a way of living together in this country • Mutual respect • (comments from interviews with teachers, Burridge 2003)

13. Dissenting voices on Reconciliation • Aboriginal people are still forced to hold much of their contact history with white people locked away inside of themselves. The best parallel which describes that hidden history is to say it that it has been trapped like a bunch of angry hornets inside a Pandora’s box. There is a big lock on the outside of this box that white people have slapped a label on called ‘Reconciliation’. (Wright, Grog War, 1997, p. x) • I’m against it. I’m against it. I’m saying it’s just a big load of John Howard’s white bullshit (Aboriginal leader pers comm)

14. Australia at the crossroards • Pat Dodson (CAR) placed Australia at the crossroads in April, 1996: • We are at the crossroads….. Together, Indigenous and other Australians are called upon to choose the path we now take. Our choices will determine the future shape of our nation. Will it be a nation which lives in harmony because it has healed the wounds of its past with generosity of spirit and wisdom of intellect? Or will it be a nation where the wounds created by dispossession and injustice still fester, and where the same old conflicts still linger, because the imperative of Reconciliation did not inform crucial decisions? (Koori Mail, 1996, p. 12).

15. Practical Reconciliation • National Reconciliation calls for more than recognition of the damaging impact on people’s lives of the mistaken practices of the past. It also calls for a clear focus on the future. It calls for practical policy making that effectively addresses current indigenous disadvantage, particularly in areas such as employment, health, education and housing (Howard, 2000, SMH Features,p. 1).

16. An answer to Practical Reconciliation Mick Dodson responded to the notion of practical reconciliation And also don’t be distracted by notions of practical Reconciliation, because they mean practically nothing. Now although issues of health, housing and education of indigenous Australians are of course of key concern to us as a nation, they are not issues that are at the very heart or the very soul of Reconciliation. But they are, to put it quite simply and plainly, the entitlements every Australian should enjoy… Reconciliation is about deeper things, to do with nation, soul and spirit. Reconciliation is about the blood and flesh of the lives we must lead together, and not the nuts and bolts of the entitlements as citizens we should enjoy (Dodson, M., 27 May 2000).

17. Reconciliation as assimilation • A large element of Reconciliation is the recognition on the part of Aboriginal people that their land was colonised two hundred years ago by a people who fortunately did not attempt the genocide of the original inhabitants and who have brought with them the most respected means of governance devised, a most bountiful economy, the most brilliant intellectual traditions and an openness and tolerance unknown in Aboriginal culture (Johns and Brunton, Reconciliation What does it Mean? 1999).

18. Reconciliation as a normative discourse • Reconciliation works as a normative discourse and as a means of silencing alternative or other voices, especially radical voices, that are working to achieve substantive rather than symbolic change. The practice of Reconciliation fits in with the dominant narratives of Australian nationhood...[it] fits in neatly with ideas of the nation as singular and monolithic effectively silencing discussion and debate about indigenous rights (Pratt, Elder and Ellis. 2000)

19. Genuine Reconciliation • According to Geoff Clarke, former head of ATSIC these rights • … arise from our status as first peoples, our relationships with our territories and waters, and our own system of law and governance. Our right to self-determination is a core principle. The Reconciliation process must lead us into a new era of constitutional consent. No constitutional document records our consent to the terms of our relationship with non-Indigenous Australians (Clarke, as cited in Hecate, 2000, p. 4).

20. Black armbands and white blindfolds The history wars

21. Senate inquiry into the progress towards reconciliation 2002/3 • Reconciliation off the agenda It is certainly true that the federal government has abrogated its leadership role in the broader reconciliation agenda and substituted a focus on practical reconciliation. This emphasis on practical reconciliation has limited the reconciliation process developed by the Council of Aboriginal Reconciliation. It is also true that sufficient resources are no longer available to allow wide community communication and education(Reconciliation Australia, 2002. Senate Inquiry submission)

22. Reconciliation off the agenda • “Howard stopped the bi-partisanship model… and withdrew from Reconciliation. It showed a fundamental lack of understanding of the spiritual connections of Aboriginal lives… This is not an age of symbols and matters of the heart and spirit” (Glendenning, 2006, ERC) • Altman and Hunter (Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, 2003): Aboriginal peoples’“relative wellbeing” overall has not kept pace with the rest of the population in a period of general prosperity. In the period 1991—2001, there was relative improvement in five variables, and a relative decline in five variables. Of particular concern was relative decline over the period in educational and health status. In terms of reconciliation, if this is interpreted in relative and ‘practical’ socio-economic terms, there is less reconciliation in 2001 than in 1996.

23. The future • What is Reconciliation? Nothing much has changed in Gove where I live. Reconciliation is a big white fella word. What does it mean? People ask me that and I don’t know what to say. I was on Sydney Harbour Bridge when everybody walk across the bridge and they did that for ‘reconciliation’. I been grown up in the bush and I know our law. Our law never changes…I don’t understand your law. It always changes. The only thing that stays the same for the white man is that he never listens to our law and our kids keep getting locked up with that mandatory sentencing. I don’t understand your reconciliation. (Commonwealth of Australia, 2003, p. 14)

24. Howard’s ‘New’ Reconciliation 2007 • NT Intervention -lack of consultation, what is the agenda? debates on its effectiveness • October 2007; A ‘new’ form of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. • Accepted the blame for a ‘dwindling of relationships’ between the government and Indigenous leaders • A referendum on amending the preamble to constitution to recognize Indigenous peoples • Ruled out a national apology for past acts of dispossession and a treaty, because it implies ‘that is some way we are dealing with two separate nations’. • Australia was ‘one great tribe; one Australia’.

25. Unfinished business • In the socio-political context of 21st century Australia there is not likely to be a ‘one size fits all’ reconciliation. • Consequently, what Aboriginal people call the ‘unfinished business’ of reconciliation, those ‘hard’ issues of treaty, self determination and first nations rights, still remain at the crux of dispute of what constitutes reconciliation. Whether this ‘unfinished business’ is returned to national prominence will depend on the will of the nation’s leadership. Then as in previous debates, it will be a case of what form of reconciliation the nation wants.