Witnessing Australian Stories

History, Testimony, and Memory in Contemporary Culture

Kelly Jean Butler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351471480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

This book is about how Australians have responded to stories about suffering and injustice in Australia, presented in a range of public media, including literature, history, films, and television. Those who have responded are both ordinary and prominent Australians—politicians, writers, and scholars. All have sought to come to terms with Australia's history by responding empathetically to stories of its marginalized citizens.Drawing upon international scholarship on collective memory, public history, testimony, and witnessing, this book represents a cultural history of contemporary Australia. It examines the forms of witnessing that dominated Australian public culture at the turn of the millennium. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in Australia in response to the increasingly audible voices of indigenous peoples, migrants, and more recently, asylum seekers. As these voices became public, they posed a challenge not only to scholars and politicians, but also, most importantly, to ordinary citizens.When former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his historic apology to Australia's indigenous peoples in February 2008, he performed an act of collective witnessing that affirmed the testimony and experiences of Aboriginal Australians. The phenomenon of witnessing became crucial, not only to the recognition and reparation of past injustices, but to efforts to create a more cosmopolitan Australia in the present. This is a vital addition to Transaction's critically acclaimed Memory and Narrative series.

1

Witnessing the Stolen Generations

When Bringing them Home, the report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, was released in May 1997, its findings were circulated widely in the Australian media. The press, in particular, played a crucial role in communicating the effects of child removal to the public. Typically, this was achieved through the publication of extracts of testimony included in the report and summaries of its recommendations. However, beyond simply reporting the HREOC’s findings, commentary in major newspapers sought to encourage settler Australians to witness to Bringing them Home. To do so, numerous journalists and opinion columnists promoted reconciliation as central to fin-de-siècle national renewal. In a paradigmatic editorial, the Age wrote that

the removal of Aboriginal children constituted one of the most tragic and traumatic episodes in our history. As a nation, we must own it. We must acknowledge that it was a terrible error, we must recognise the damage it has done, and we must apologise. We claim, with good reason, to be a more sophisticated society now than when we implemented these policies. A sign of that maturity would be to face up to this issue and to try to make amends as best we can . . . It is about helping to clear the national slate of this century’s mistakes so that we might face the next together, rather than from across a great divide.¹

For the Melbourne-based Age, witnessing to Bringing them Home was tied explicitly to the end of the century. As an historical “turning point,” the Fin de siècle, and the concomitant centenary of federation, provided a symbolic opportunity for the nation to demonstrate its “maturity.” The need to witness to the stolen generations was central to this expression of cultural and political “sophistication.” Here, the stolen generations figured as a “traumatic episode” that should be worked through, collectively, to clear “the national slate of this century’s mistakes”. Within this national teleology, progression was dependent on the willingness of settler Australians to “recognize” the suffering of Indigenous Australians and take responsibility, on behalf of previous generations, for the policies of child removal.

Reflecting on the 1901 federation of Australian states, Helen Irving wrote of “the strange, almost surreal optimism that accompanies the end of one century and the anticipation of another”.² “As with other great temporal milestones,” she argued, “. . . a new century is experienced by many as a time when change is both possible and expected, when the routine and predictable may be set aside”.³ For Irving, the Fin de siècle was not the cause of federation per se. Rather, “it encouraged the will to achieve Federation to emerge.”⁴ Similarly, for many Australians, the turn of the twenty-first century provided an opportunity to take stock of the nation and consider both the legacies of the past and the possibilities of the future.

The moment between 1997 and 2001 was, undoubtedly, the zenith of Australia’s popular reconciliation movement. Alongside the release of Bringing them Home, a series of major events clustered around this period, including, in 1999, the Australian republic referendum; in 2000, the Sydney Olympic Games and the winding up of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR), the end of the “official” reconciliation process; and in 2001, the centenary of federation. As key moments within the “narrative” of Australian nationalism, all drew on the symbolic power of the end of the century, whether to celebrate the achievements of the nation or to propose change.⁵ The imperative to advance reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians was common to calls for change, and hinged on the need for settler Australians to witness to Aboriginal testimony.

Though this time was marked by fierce public debate over the meanings of Indigenous stories, it was a period that also saw hundreds of thousands of individuals express their own apologies to the stolen generations through numerous acts of public witnessing. Signing “Sorry Books” and attending reconciliation walks were two of the most popular and publicly visible ways “ordinary” settler Australians chose to witness to the nation’s history of Indigenous dispossession. Similarly, many of Australia’s prominent public intellectuals, artists, and critics spoke out in favor of reconciliation and an apology. In a direct challenge to the Howard Federal Government, a large minority of settler Australians understood witnessing not simply as a personal act, but also as a contribution to a collective, national process of confronting the past.

In this way, Bringing them Home became a site for the contestation of broader, collective truths, irrevocably changing the present ground of history making. Indeed, no other event in contemporary Australian sociopolitical life has necessitated such a profound reorientation of national history. The Mabo case was a landmark legal achievement, and, as such, has been oft cited as a turning point in the reconsideration of Australian history; whereas Bringing them Home captured the attention of “ordinary” Australians in a far more direct fashion.⁶ It did this precisely, because it invited the attention—and, more importantly, the response—of settler Australians. The report collated and mediated stolen generations’ testimony in such a way that it worked to elicit an empathetic response in its implied audience: Settler Australians signed Sorry Books and participated in reconciliation marches as a part of their own response and apology. Unlike the Mabo (1992) proceedings, which aroused the interest and criticism of many Australians but did not require their participation or assent, the reconciliation discourse centered on Bringing them Home produced a participatory occasion. The significance of Bringing them Home, then, lay in the way that it precipitated the development of a community of witnesses—a community bound by a shared commitment to recognizing the broader historical and cultural implications of stolen generations’ testimony.

Although the discourse of reconciliation has been widely critiqued for its vagueness, I argue that the concept of witnessing was central to the way it functioned during the late 1990s.⁷ The authors of Bringing them Home explicitly positioned witnessing as the core imperative of reading Indigenous testimony. To this end, the report promoted witnessing as a process that involved both recognition of the pain of the stolen generations and a broader engagement with the legacies of child removal. The report argued that

in no sense has the Inquiry been “raking over the past” for its own sake. The truth is that the past is very much with us today, in the continuing devastation of the lives of Indigenous Australians. That devastation cannot be addressed unless the whole community listens with an open heart and mind to the stories of what has happened in the past and, having listened and understood, commits itself to reconciliation.⁸

Here, witnessing was established as the starting place for reconciliation. In order for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to come to terms with the past, the testimony of the stolen generations needed to be affirmed thorough a process of empathetic witnessing. To hear, and respond, was to contribute to historical change in the present; to play a pivotal role in “healing and reconciliation for the benefit of all Australians”.⁹

Although the report stressed that this was the responsibility of the “whole community,” the implication was that witnessing was, in fact, the task of settler Australians, as it was this community who had not previously “listened and understood” the history of child removal. In its “Australian Declaration Towards Reconciliation,” the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR)—the government body charged with advancing reconciliation between 1991 and 2000—figured reconciliation as a process that was grounded in witnessing.¹⁰ CAR understood reconciliation as a dialogic process fueled by an exchange between the Indigenous testifier and the settler witness: “one part of the nation apologises and expresses its sorrow and sincere regret for the injustices of the past, so the other part accepts the apology and forgives”.¹¹ The decision to “own the truth” of the stolen generations through witnessing would pave the way for a future in which all Australians could overcome the past and “move on together at peace with ourselves”.¹² For CAR, the architects of popular reconciliation, witnessing was the key to healing for both individuals and the nation.

Accordingly, this chapter focuses on the actions of those settler Australians who adopted the challenge of reconciliation and worked to listen to Indigenous testimony “with an open heart and mind.” It builds on the now extensive critical response to Bringing them Home to explore the diversity of settler Australians’ public responses to stolen generations’ testimony. It examines both collective events, such as CAR’s year 2000 Sydney Bridge walk for reconciliation, and the acts of witnessing performed by prominent individuals, such as Robert Manne and Raimond Gaita. Broadly, I consider how a culture of witnessing to Aboriginal experience developed to produce a counter-public of settler Australians committed to reconciliation. To be clear, my focus is on the development of a settler audience for stolen generations’ testimony. My suggestion is that Bringing them Home served as a moment of coalescence, building on earlier responses to Aboriginal testimony to figure witnessing as a preeminent mode of ethical citizenship.

Bringing them Home was ostensibly a vehicle for the voices of the stolen generations to be heard publicly, and it was also crucial in the development of a contemporary discourse on settler virtue. In witnessing to the dispossession and violence of the past, settler Australians—through their expressions of shame, contrition, and complicity—were, in fact, engaged in a performance of ethical citizenship in the present. By recognizing and taking steps to ameliorate the “mistakes” of the past, many forms of public witnessing provided a way for settler Australians to reaffirm the supposedly core national values of egalitarianism and a fair go. Thus, Bringing them Home not only posed a challenge to the settler nation by exposing the violence committed against Aboriginal children, but also, somewhat paradoxically, provided the grounds for the recuperation of that national community.

Accordingly, in examining the role of witnessing in the reproduction of settler identity, I also explore its ambivalence. Although witnessing has been understood by theorists of testimony as a vital component of the testimonial process, there exist a variety of ways in which witnessing may actually be performed.¹³ Witnessing is often figured as a dialogic exchange, and it has also frequently contributed to individual and collective action that actually works to foreclose, rather than enhance, intersubjective dialogue. Indeed, if witnessing is, as a process, oriented toward an engagement with the demands of the other, the desire to witness to Aboriginal testimony has also provoked an inward turn, and a great deal of “soul searching” on the part of many settler Australians.

As a result, I address the way that stolen generations’ testimony has fueled a broad, somewhat diffuse phenomenon of settler witnessing that has, largely, become estranged from any engagement wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Public Histories, Personal Stories
• 1. Witnessing the Stolen Generations
• 2. “This Is How I’m Sorry”: Creative Witnessing in Contemporary Australian Historical Fictions
• 3. Frontiers of Witnessing: History after Testimony
• 4. Witnessing UnAustralia: Asylum-Seeker Advocacy and the National Good
• 5. “Do You Want the Truth or What I Said?”: False Witnessing and the Culture of Denial
• 6. Witnessing (Dis)possession: Victims, Battlers, and “Ordinary” Australians
• Conclusion: Witnessing Australian Stories
• Bibliography
• Index