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As 26 January approaches, an antidote to historical amnesia and ignorance

Introduction by Croakey: In the wake of the Voice referendum, Croakey readers have been asked to do better at supporting the social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities, and to work as if the vote been Yes.

Non-Indigenous allies have been urged to step up to support the rights, health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, to work harder to support justice, anti-racism and truth-telling, and to fix the structural issues that contribute to disadvantage.

At this time of year, it is especially important to listen to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to engage with truth-telling, writes Dr Louis Peachey, who is from Girrimay, Quandamooka and Badtjala ancestors.


Louis Peachey writes:

Christmas and the New Year have passed, so we are back to debates about Australia Day.

In 2017, Review Partners carried out a survey among Australian citizens about Australia Day. Their research found that 59 percent of people surveyed said the date should not change from 26 January.

IPSOS carried out a poll in January 2024 asking if the date should change. They found 48 percent of respondents were opposed to changing the date. This implies that resistance to changing the date is waning.

Another interesting paradox in the 2017 survey by Review Partners was that although 72 percent of respondents said Australia Day was important to them, only 43 percent of respondents could correctly name which event was being commemorated on 26 January. The most popular wrong answer (21%) was that it was the anniversary of “The Discovery of Australia by Captain Cook”.

On 25 September, 2018, National Party Federal Senator Bridget McKenzie, talking about Australia Day, told Sky News: “That is when the course of our nation changed forever. When Captain Cook stepped ashore.”

In other words, a well educated (double degree applied science and teaching) federal senator, who went on a news channel to defend the date of Australia Day, thought it commemorated Cook’s landing.

For me as an Aboriginal man, the raising of the Union Jack by Captain Arthur Phillip was the beginning of the wars against my people. As the frontier wars progressed over the subsequent century, the wars became bloodier and more violent. The depiction of my people in the press changed from “Noble Savage” to “Savage”.

Aboriginal people did contribute to the early days of the colony, but this has been written out of history.

When Captain Matthew Flinders circumnavigated the continent, a key member of his crew was an Aboriginal man known as Bungaree. Whenever they made landfall to replenish fresh water or other supplies, Bungaree would act as envoy for the ship and crew. He would negotiate safe passage. Flinders acknowledged the important role that Bungaree had in the success of the expedition.

Flinders has been remembered in statues, a highway, a university, a mountain range, a suburb of Adelaide, a federal electorate, streets in Adelaide and Melbourne, a girls high school in Geelong, a bay in Western Australia, just to name a few. There is even a statue of Flinders’ cat “Trim” in Macquarie Street in Sydney…

With some few exceptions (a sculpture and a monument), there is little public acknowledgement of Bungaree, and his name is only familiar to a small number of Australians.

Many Aboriginal people participated heavily in the agriculture and cattle industry of the new nation, but their legacy was carefully edited out of Australian history.

This erasure was a major focus of William ‘Bill’ Stanner’s 1968 Boyer lectures, in which he coined the term “The Great Australian Silence” as he described how Aboriginal people were excluded from the historical record.

Stanner said, “It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.”

Just listen

In 2023, Australia held a referendum, asking if First Nations Australians could be recognised by a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament. In the lead up to the campaign, Australians had been consistently more than 60 percent in favour of the constitutional amendment.

That Voice would have been able to advocate for Indigenous Australians but – contrary to popular myth on social media – would have had NO capacity to override or veto the sovereignty of the Parliament. Auntie Pat Anderson, Professor Megan Davis, Noel Pearson, Thomas Mayo, Professor Marcia Langton and Prof Tom Calma were at pains to explain this to all who would listen…

Unfortunately, many did not listen. Ironically the difficulty Australians had during the campaign in listening to Indigenous Voices is precisely why we needed a constitutionally enshrined Voice, just to give a chance that folks of standing might possibly take the occasional moment to listen…

No obligation to accept or act on the advice, but just listen.

Then along came the Queensland Conservatives. First, the leader of the Federal National Party publicly opposed the amendment, then this was followed by the Federal Liberal Party leader also opposing the amendment. This was despite the fact that the shadow Attorney General of the time had heavily contributed to the constitutional research in shaping the design of the proposed voice.

Interestingly, although David Littleproud (Nationals) and Peter Dutton (Liberals) represented two separate parties that form a coalition, they are both members of the very same state party (the Liberal National Party of Queensland). Strangely enough, other Federal coalition parliamentarians appear unaware that the Liberal National Party of Queensland has captured the leadership of the two independent parties which make up that Federal Coalition.

During the referendum campaign, Dutton had been against a constitutionally enshrined Voice, but in favour of a legislated Voice. After the referendum he has backflipped on all of his commitments to Indigenous Australians.

Recently he has promised that there would be “No Truth Telling” under a Government which he leads. His commitment to disallow truth telling in a government led by him is ironically one of the most truthful commitments he has ever made.

The new Premier of Queensland has also promised that his State Government would also have “No Truth Telling”.

One of the oddest things I have witnessed in my entire adult life has been watching the political pundits give commentary about the commitments of Federal and Queensland conservatives to oppose truth telling. None seem to recognise that they are in the middle of a Monty Python sketch when they utter those words.

For me, the anniversary of the raising of the Union Jack by Captain Phillip is simply not a happy date. Since the day was federally endorsed in 1994 by the then Keating Government, as the officially gazetted National Day, I have been OK with accepting that it is considered a happy date for many Australians.

I just wish the rusted-on supporters of the current date could simply refrain from giving we First Nations Australians their unsolicited advice as to how we should feel about that anniversary.

AND if these folk want to so vehemently defend the country’s history, maybe they could possibly learn some of the detail of their history.

In mid 2023, I delivered a keynote speech to a doctor’s conference in Queensland on the topic of the upcoming referendum. When we polled the delegates as to how many had ever read the Australian Constitution, the proportion was eight percent.

In a room full of very literate, clever, socially aware citizens, only eight percent had sought to gain a modicum of knowledge about the founding document of our federation. We found out through the referendum that a majority of Australians were committed to defending the sanctity of a document they had never read.

One young doctor challenged me with an assertion that the Constitution was never intended to be changed. I responded by asking why the authors had included the final chapter (Chapter 8 in the Constitution). This is entirely a description of the process which needs to be undertaken in order to make future amendments to the document…

The response from this young man…crickets.

Acknowledging history

I believe Australia has achieved many good things over the centuries.

We have a robust democracy, with compulsory voting, and preferential voting. Our country was an early mover with women’s suffrage, with our federal parliament extending the franchise to include white women back in 1902 (Aboriginal women… and men, were excluded from the franchise until the passage of the 1962 Electoral Act).

Australians have been responsible for the invention of the electric drill, implantable cardiac pacemakers, finding a medical application for penicillin, inflatable escape slides on aircraft, medical ultrasound scanners, cochlear implants, spray on skin, the cervical cancer vaccine, the winged keel, wi fi technology and polymer bank notes.

Here in the middle of summer, we can expect fires and floods. Thousands of ordinary decent folks will volunteer to assist their fellow citizens via Country Fire Services and/or State Emergency Services. They don’t do it for the pay, they don’t do it for the glory, they do it because they are good and kind.

It behoves me to understand, given all of the good things this country has done, that the only day they can find to celebrate the nation is the day a Royal Navy Officer raised a foreign flag on Australian soil.

When the British created colonies around the world, they negotiated treaties with the original inhabitants…except in Australia. The British colony in modern day Aotearoa/New Zealand was initially part of the colony of New South Wales. The Treaty of Waitangi was one of the necessary preconditions for New Zealand to secede from NSW.

But still no treaty with my people, and now so many Australians have become fearful that a treaty would in some way impoverish them, even though never in human history has a colonial power negotiated a treaty which disadvantages the colonists.

With so many great achievements, why is it necessary to keep the contribution of Indigenous Australians out of the public eye?

Why can’t this generous and prosperous nation acknowledge Indigenous history, as an integral part of Australia’s history?

Two-thirds of Indigenous Australians are middle class. When I completed medical school in 1989, the total number of Indigenous doctors in the country was four, now we have a little more than 900.

BUT when we appear on the news, it is typically to tell stories of poverty and crime.

We may not change the date this year, it may not change in the next decade, but it is inevitable that Australia Day will evolve to something beyond the BBQ and alcohol festival it has been over the last two decades since becoming a national public holiday.

Why would Australia fail to learn from the lesson of King Canute, and continue to try to hold back the tide?

We Indigenous Australians have learned how to walk with our non-Indigenous fellow citizens, which is how two-thirds of us have migrated into the middle class since the late 1960’s.

Why are so many non-Indigenous Australians still frightened to walk with us?

• This is an edited version of an article originally published on Facebook by Dr Louis Peachey.

Author details

Dr Louis Peachey is a highly respected Rural Generalist and medical educator, as well as a mentor for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander doctors and medical students. Founding president of the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association, he was awarded Life Fellowship of the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM), and was instrumental in establishing the College’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander members group. He is based in the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland. Read more here and here.


See Croakey’s archive of articles on the Voice referendum and health

 

 

 

 

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