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Photo: Pixabay

Truth-telling vital for Australia's unity

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Australia will not be comfortable celebrating its national day until we have greater racial understanding, based on truthful retelling of history, academics say. However, they say we can be encouraged by our multicultural cohesion and growing levels of inter-racial co-operation – seen in part by last year’s handling of the Cook Anniversary celebrations.

Organisation/s: Flinders University, Charles Darwin University, University of Canberra

Funder: N/A

Media release

From: Flinders University

Australia will not be comfortable celebrating its national day until we have greater racial understanding, based on truthful retelling of history, academics say. However, they say we can be encouraged by our multicultural cohesion and growing levels of inter-racial co-operation – seen in part by last year’s handling of the Cook Anniversary celebrations.

"Australians are ready to acknowledge the painful histories and historical injustices that have been experienced by Indigenous Australians,” says Flinders University Professor Claire Smith, who collaborated in a soon-to-be published paper on Cook’s Landing in Australia.

"It is important that all Australians understand the impacts of colonisation and dispossession and the truth of the frontiers wars", says co-author Aboriginal archaeologist Dr Kellie Pollard, from Charles Darwin University. "The continuing intergenerational disadvantage arising from this history of injustice is still suffered by Indigenous people today."  

“While Australia’s national day remains defined by colonial anniversaries, this ties discussions about the national future to contested histories,” says collaborator University of Canberra’s Professor of Cultural Heritage Tracy Ireland.

“Changing the date for a national day could be an opportunity to build a new conversation about the future of the nation, while also expanding the process of historical truth telling into a broader public discussion, that does not reignite the same old debates every January.”

‘Reflect, respect, celebrate’ is the theme of Australia Day, 26 January 2021, also described on the website as “the day to reflect on what it means to be Australian, to celebrate contemporary Australia and to acknowledge our history”.

“Unlike the racial polarisation as seen in the US and #BlackLivesMatter movement, Australia is moving towards higher awareness of racial reconciliation and respectfulness towards First Nations peoples,” says Professor Smith.

“The handling of the Cook Landing monument and national celebrations, although disrupted by COVID-19, demonstrates how we are making significant progress in this space.”

The final point is seen in the report, entitled ‘Kamay Botany Bay National Park: Captain Cook’s Landing Place in Australia. A Site of Celebration, Commiseration and Contestation,’ which praises decision-makers’ handling of initial plans to acknowledge the controversy surrounding what many refer to as ‘invasion day’ and find more inclusive and alternative commemoration avenues.

“Rather than unthinkingly adopting typical colonial models of commemoration, this case shows the value of working together with the people who are most directly affected by the contested history to provide creative and productive solutions to inherently contested public spaces,” concludes the report, which was commissioned by the Salzburg Global Seminar in partnership with the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation and the International Bar Association, and due for publication in an international journal this year.

The allocation of $48.7 million in the 2018–2019 Australian federal budget to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Cook’s voyages to the South Pacific and Australia, including a proposed new monument to Cook, caused a furore as part of a wider social movement seeking to enforce a colonial identity on contemporary Australia.

“The 2020 commemorative installation at Kamay Botany Bay National Park has been shaped in a way that avoids adding to the controversy surrounding the British invasion of Australia. Moreover, by choosing to commemorate both sides of the story (shore and sea, Aboriginal and British) it is likely to contribute to reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians,” the archaeology researchers say.

“While the installation is located at the site where Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook first stepped on Australian soil, the commemoration has been shaped as a meeting of cultures, rather than the beginning of the colonial oppression of Indigenous Australians.”

Direct involvement of local Aboriginal people, particularly the La Perouse Aboriginal Land Council with chairperson Noelene Tembury and project chair Bruce Baird, during the consultation processes was important, researchers note. “Working together they were able to obtain broad support from the community for a project that had the potential to contribute to deep divisions within the nation.” 

Another new article, ‘Truth-telling and Heritage Erasure’ (2021) by C Smith and K Pollard, is in prepress in Current Anthropology (University of Chicago Press).

 

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