Liberating the Will of Australia. Geoffrey Burn

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      This photograph was taken by myself in Canberra on the National Day of Healing in May 2005. The paving in front of the billboard formed the stage on which Aboriginal artists performed: dancing, playing music, and singing.1 The billboard for the Australian Ballet performance is attached to wooden fencing around a construction site. The title of the ballet is White, and its strap line is “Escape into a timeless white world of elegance, style and gorgeous music.”2 On the top of this poster is a smaller one, partially covering the poster about the wonders of whiteness, but not removing it, nor hiding it from view, declaring the National Day of Healing. How can a nation that is very conscious of constructing itself deal with its past and go into the future in a way that is more than just placing a sticking plaster over the deep-seated myth of normality of whiteness portrayed by the dominant culture, where the First Peoples are more than just an interesting spectacle to be watched by a mixed crowd? How can the welfare of all the peoples be assured in this great land?

      With the rise of instantaneous, “as it happened” news coverage, events get fragmented into pieces that the audience then impressionistically reassembles to fit their pre-judgments. But time is precisely what you need to think of things that are new—things that exceed the conventional wisdom.3

      . . . increasingly we become constitutionally ill-disposed to that slow work of listening, reflecting, deliberating . . . 4

      I am inviting you to take time to think new things, things that exceed conventional wisdom, for conventional wisdom has failed. Most people in Australia would not want to cause harm to the First Peoples in Australia but welfare metrics show that harm continues to be done. There have been many developments in recent decades in the relationships between the First Peoples in Australia and those who came after, but Indigenous women and men, who have been at the forefront of the struggle for decades, despair that they have grown old and tired, and they feel that little has been achieved. Jackie Huggins writes:

      We older leaders were young and energetic once, but we have grown weary from repeated defeats. The tiredness sets into our bones. Our hearts ache to think of our elders who lived through small wins only to see even greater losses. What we gain we do not grasp for long. For Indigenous people, powerlessness and impermanence go hand in hand.5

      Reflecting on his decades of work for the welfare of First Peoples, Galarrwuy Yunupingu wrote a powerful lament in an article in 2008. I urge you to read the entire article, where wave after wave of prose reflect the waves of power that he has experienced crashing over him and his people. Here is a small extract that captures some of the feeling of his article:

      I am seeing now that too much of the past is for nothing. I have walked the corridors of power; I have negotiated and cajoled and praised and begged prime ministers and ministers, travelled the world and been feted; I have opened the doors to men of power and prestige; I have had a place at the table of the best and the brightest in the Australian nation—and at times success has seemed so close, yet it always slips away. And behind me, in the world of my father, the Yolngu world is always under threat, being swallowed up by whitefellas.

      This is a weight that is bearing down on me; it is a pressure that I feel now every moment of my life—it frustrates me and drives me crazy; at night it is like a splinter in my mind. The solutions to the future, simple though I thought they were, have become harder and harder to grasp. I have learnt from experience that nothing is ever what it seems.6

      The purpose of this book is to understand why it is that many First Peoples in Australia find themselves in the position so eloquently expressed by Jackie Huggins and Galarrwuy Yunupingu, and also to ask whether anything can be done about it. In particular, it is answering two questions:

      •Why does harm continue to be done to the First Peoples in Australia, even when good is intended?

      •Is there a way into the future which does not continue to perpetuate this harmful dynamic?

      A consultation process with the Indigenous Peoples in Australia, an unprecedented act of listening in Australian history, resulted in a report from the Referendum Council, which contains the Uluru Statement from the Heart.7 This is a statement of what the First Peoples feel they need in order to be safe in Australia. The consultation process resulted in proposals for three reforms: voice, treaty and truth.8 The Voice is about Indigenous Peoples having some control over policies that affect them. Treaty is about the unfinished business of the occupation of The Land without making any agreements with those who were already there. Truth is about telling the multiple histories and making peace after what has happened. Politicians have been rushing to do nothing with it. The Uluru Statement of the Heart was not only addressed to politicians, but to all the peoples in Australia. What are we to do with it? The report raises an important subsidiary question that will also be addressed by this book:

      •If the changes requested in the report from the Referendum Council and the Uluru Statement from the Heart are implemented, will it deliver security and space for the First Peoples to thrive?

      The answers to these questions are easy to state, but it will take the whole book to explore and comprehend them, because they require a different sort of thinking, seeing things in a different way. The answers to the questions, challenging, incomprehensible and unimaginable as they may be at this point, are as follows:

      •Harm continues to be done to the First Peoples in Australia because the failure to negotiate a just way of living with those who were already in the land, when the first British incomers arrived, has become bound up in the essential nature of Australia.

      •The only way to stop harming the First Peoples in Australia is for Australia to repent of the way that is was founded, where repentance is more than an apology, but requires the willingness to renegotiate the very foundations of the nation.

      •Without this repentance, implementing the Uluru Statement of the Heart will not be safe for the First Peoples in Australia.

      The argument that is being made in this book will be summarized in the following paragraph. This will then be expanded in the rest of the Overture, introducing the structure and argument of the whole book.

      In summary, the argument of the book is as follows. What has become known as the nation of Australia was founded on the failure to negotiate a way of living with those who were already in the land. The nation was bound at its birth to a way of living that denied the truth of what was found. For reasons that will become apparent later, this will be called the Root Sin. In particular, the nation and its law were founded on the legal fiction—in this case, also a falsehood—that the land was unoccupied. This remains true whether this concept, terra nullius, was worked out at the time or only as a later legal explanation and justification of the situation that ensued. A key theological concept, bound willing, will be introduced. Bound willing explains how actions that flow from such binding result in the further binding of the will, which is so drastic that often, even when people want to choose that which is good, harm is done, because those thus bound are unable to see what good is. This is critical for understanding why harm often continues to be done to the First Peoples СКАЧАТЬ