BY SIMON BUTLER
The opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games portrayed a shorthand version of Australian history that international visitors and news services would find easy to digest, even if a little bizarre. Aboriginal performers gave way to European pioneers driving Victa lawn mowers and lugging sheets of iron (which prompted a commentator to exclaim, "Where would this country be without the industrious corrugated iron!").
But European settlement did not lead to Aboriginal people simply dancing off the stage — Aboriginal people were massacred, gunned down, poisoned, raped and dispossessed.
In his recent book, Australia: Biography of a Nation, Philip Knightly noted: "It remains one of the mysteries of history that Australia was able to get away with a racist policy, that included segregation and dispossession and bordered on genocide, practices unknown in the civilised world in the first half of the century until Nazi Germany turned on the Jews in the 1930s".
The Australian ruling class has largely succeeded in mystifying and obscuring the conflict between European settlers and the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Colonial and post-colonial governments buttressed policies of segregation, assimilation and land seizure with a racist ideology based on Aborigines' supposed inferiority.
Government programs for Aboriginal people — such as the forcible removal of children from their families — were designed to "smooth the dying pillow", a reference to the widespread belief that Aborigines were a dying race.
Two weeks before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X was asked why he thought the oppression of Aboriginal people in Australia was so rarely talked about internationally. "[It's] because the Aboriginal Australian isn't even allowed to get into a position where he can make his voice heard in any way, shape or form. But I don't think that situation will be quiet too much longer", he said.
The marginalisation of indigenous people in Australian society was accompanied by staunch resistance, an aspect of Australian history that has been studiously buried.
This history goes back to 1788, when the Aboriginal leader Pemulwuy began a 20-year war against the British takeover of tribal lands.
Over the past few decades, a range of historians have documented some of the massacres committed by pastoralists and government authorities. In his 1981 work, The Other Side of The Frontier, Henry Reynolds estimated that 20,000 Aborigines died in the frontier wars with Australian settlers.
Quadrant
A renewed and concerted ideological attack on Aboriginal rights is coalescing around Prime Minister John Howard's favourite publication, Quadrant, currently under the editorship of the right-wing columnist P.P. McGuinness.
A debate has erupted in the establishment press over a Quadrant seminar on September 9-10 which attempted to provide justifications for the policies of the federal Coalition government.
The seminar attempted to dismiss two fundamental aspects of Australian history: the stolen generations and the extent of the genocide carried out against the Aboriginal people.
The seminar's keynote speech was delivered by Douglas Meagher, QC, the federal government's leading barrister in the recent stolen generations test case initiated by Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner, who had been removed from their families while children.
Meagher celebrated the commonwealth's victory in the case and misleadingly argued that Justice Maurice O'Loughlin had concluded that no general government policy of removal of Aboriginal children had existed. He went on to infer that those who were removed ought to show gratitude to a benevolent and responsible government.
Meagher also attacked the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's "Bringing Them Home" report on the stolen generations, claiming that the failure of the Cubillo and Gunner case proved that the report's estimate of the number of Aboriginal children taken from their families was grossly exaggerated.
'Exaggerated'
Most debate has centred on a 35,000-word paper presented to the seminar by former academic Keith Windschuttle, which will be published in the next three issues of Quadrant. Windschuttle accuses historians such as Reynolds and Knightly of systematically fabricating, distorting and wildly exaggerating the violence against Aborigines by white settlers.
According to Windschuttle, there is a pressing need to reflect on "how deeply the notion that Australian society was founded on deadly violence against Aborigines has penetrated the mentality of those who shape public opinion". Windschuttle disputed Reynolds' figure of 20,000 Aborigines killed, claiming that Reynolds relied excessively on secondary sources of doubtful validity and that he ignored other sources.
Windschuttle analysed the evidence for two notorious massacres of Aborigines (Forest River, Western Australia, in 1926, and Waterloo Creek, NSW, in 1838) and concluded that it was "doubtful" that they had occurred. Windschuttle reassuringly claimed, "... most killings of Aborigines occurred not in large numbers, but in ones and twos ... it remains true that there were some massacres but they were rare and isolated" (Sydney Morning Herald, September 18).
Windschuttle believes Reynolds and the historians who contributed to the Oxford Companion to Australian History sought to isolate Aborigines from contact with whites in order to promote Aboriginal autonomy and encourage the establishment of separate indigenous governments and lands.
Conservative assault
A host of conservative columnists have been only too happy to take Windschuttle and Meagher's presentations to their logical conclusions. Christopher Pearson (Australian Financial Review, September 11) wrote that Windschuttle's paper was "an overdue revisionist account of some extremely scrappy, ideologically driven and inventive historiography". Pearson judged the research of Reynolds and Knightly as "a grotesque misrepresentation ... the sort of rhetoric which is designed to turn Australia into an international pariah, the next South Africa".
Pearson, in the September 18 Financial Review, moaned that the legacy of Reynolds' confronting research is that Australia now seems "incapable of the cultural confidence or self-possession to represent our collective past with the pageantry most other nations manage".
"Unwarranted journalistic attempts to turn Australia into an international pariah on indigenous issues would result in a parallel decline in tourism and other export industries", he warned.
McGuinness, writing in the September 14 Sydney Morning Herald, declared: "Keith Windschuttle was able to demolish the exaggerations of general massacres and frontier warfare". A mischievous picture of Aboriginal history had been painted by left-wing historians that contradicts "the experience of many who have had dealings with Aborigines".
McGuinness and Frank Devine (Australian, September 11) have strongly promoted the idea that overly sentimental, guilt-ridden historians have portrayed a false history of genocide and dispossession in order to demand some kind of ritual abasement of the white community.
Political battle
Windschuttle (Herald, September 19) admitted the political agenda behind the Quadrant seminar: "The debate ... is only partly about the quality of historical research. It is also about the foundation of the Australian nation."
Windschuttle, McGuinness and others realise that Aboriginal history has to be rewritten in order to weaken the legitimacy of the Aboriginal rights struggle, especially in the wake of the mass outpouring of support at the Sydney Harbour Bridge reconciliation walk on May 28.
Mike Steketee (Australian, September 11) attended the Quadrant seminar and described it as "a new attempt to airbrush history" in which "participants seemed to be seized by a nostalgia for the nice version of history — the one of intrepid explorers and pioneers and economic development that they would like the Olympics visitors to take home".
Former Quadrant editor Robert Manne (Herald, September 18) explained that for "the past three years Quadrant has been conducting a single minded campaign, not without success, to convince the nation that the issue of the stolen generation is a hoax — an expression ... of Aboriginal Australians exhibiting collective false memory syndrome".
Reynolds entered the debate on September 12, writing in the Herald. He noted that the figure of 20,000 indigenous dead was an estimate, but an educated and conservative estimate based on 10 years of research. The lack of official documentary evidence of Aboriginal massacres is hardly surprising: colonial and post-colonial governments were negligent in preventing, and sometimes responsible for, the atrocities.
Reynolds added that the debate over historical accuracy is largely secondary. "It's clearly a well-organised political campaign to grab the intellectual high ground. They clearly are unhappy with the whole thrust of Aboriginal politics and want to undermine it by undermining the intellectual underpinning to it", he said.
The formal rights won by Australia's indigenous people have yet to be transformed into concrete social gains. More Aborigines die in police custody than ever before, Aboriginal health languishes at Third World levels, and the life expectancy of Aboriginal people is 15 years below that of non-indigenous people.
The Howard government has steadily escalated its attack on Aboriginal rights, particularly around the issues of native title, recognition of the stolen generations and mandatory sentencing. Yet the government is under increasing pressure, at home and internationally, after condemnations from UN human rights monitoring bodies.
The huge marches for reconciliation earlier this year also demonstrated that a growing number of Australians oppose the government's racist policies and support real justice for Aboriginal people.
It is this context that has impelled right-wing intellectuals to launch a political counterattack. By propagating the notions that the stolen generations do not exist, that Aborigines were never really subject to genocide and that successive Australian governments have been benevolent rather than inhuman, they hope to absolve and justify the racist policies of the Howard government.