Australian Launch of the International Year for the World's Indigenous People
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am very pleased to be here today at the launch of Australia's
celebration of the 1993 International Year of the World's Indigenous
People.
It will be a year of great significance for Australia.
It comes at a time when we have committed ourselves to succeeding in the
test which so far we have always failed.
Because, in truth, we cannot confidently say that we have succeeded as
we would like to have succeeded if we have not managed to extend
opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the indigenous pople of
Australia - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people.
This is a fundamental test of our social goals and our national will:
our ability to say to ourselves and the rest of the world that Australia
is a first rate social democracy, that we are what we should be - truly
the land of the fair go and the better chance.
There is no more basic test of how seriously we mean these things.
It is a test of our self-knowledge. Of how well we know the land we
live in. How well we know our history. How well we recognise the fact
that, complex as our contemporary identity is, it cannot be separated
from Aboriginal Australia. How well we know what Aboriginal Australians
know about Australia.
Redfern is a good place to contemplate these things.
Just a mile or two from the place where the first European settlers
landed, in too many ways it tells us that their failure to bring much
more than devastation and demoralisation to Aboriginal Australia
continues to be our failure.
More I think than most Australians recognise, the plight of Aboriginal
Australians affects us all. In Redfern it might be tempting to think
that the reality Aboriginal Australians face is somehow contained here,
and that the rest of us are insulated from it. But of course, while all
the dilemmas may exist here, they are far from contained. We know the
same dilemmas and more are faced all over Australia.
This is perhaps the point of this Year of the World's Indigenous People:
to bring the dispossessed out of the shadows, to recognise that they are
part of us, and that we cannot give indigenous Australians up without
giving up many of our own most deeply held values, much of our own
identity - and our own humanity.
Nowhere in the world, I would venture, is the message more stark than in
Australia.
We simply cannot sweep injustice aside. Even if our own conscience
allowed us to, I am sure, that in due course, the world and the people
of our region would not. There should be no mistake about this - our
success in resolving these issues will have a significant bearing on our
standing in the world.
However intractable the problems may seem, we cannot resign ourselves to
failure - any more than we can hide behind the contemporary viersion of
Social Darwinism which says that to reach back for the poor and
dispossessed is to risk being dragged down.
That seems to me not only morally indefensible, but bad history.
We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that
Australia once reached out for us. Didn't Australia provide opportunity
and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees
from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and
Asia? Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and
remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can
find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians -
the people to whom the most injustice has been done.
And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem
starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.
It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it
was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and
smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The
alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their
mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine
these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to
make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and
minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?
As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all
of us.
If we needed a reminder of this, we received it this year. The Report
of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody showed with
devastating clarity that the past lives on in inequality, racism and
injustice in the prejudice and ignorance of non-Aboriginal Australians,
and in the demoralisation and desperation, the fractured identity, of so
many Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.
For all this, I do not believe that the Report should fill us with
guilt. Down the years, there has been no shortage of guilt, but it has
not produced the responses we need. Guilt is not a very constructive
emotion.
I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit.
All of us.
Perhaps when we recognise what we have in common we will see the things
which must be done - the practical things.
There is something of this in the creation of the Council for Aboriginal
Reconciliation. The council's mission is to forge a new partnership
built on justice and equity and an appreciation of the heritage of
Australia's indigenous people. In the abstract those terms are
meaningles. We have to give meaning to 'justice' and 'equity' - and, as
I have said several times this year, we will only give them meaning when
we commit ourselves to achieving concrete results.
If we improve the living conditions in one town, they will improve in
another. And another. If we raise the standard of health by 20 per
cent one year, it will be raised more the next. if we open one door
others will follow.
When we see improvement, when we see more dignity, more confidence, more
happiness - we will know we are going to win. We need these practical
building blocks of change.
The Mabo judgment should be seen as one of these. By doing away with
the bizarre conceit that this continent had no owners prior to the
settlement of Europeans, Mabo establishes a fundamental truth and lays
the basis for justice. It will be much easier to work from that basis
than has ever been the case in the past.
For this reason alone we should ignore the isolated outbreaks of
hysteria and hostility of the past few months. Mabo is an historic
decision - we can make it an historic turning point, the basis of a new
relationship between indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians.
The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the
recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or
the deepening of Australian social democracy to include indigenous
Australians.
There is everything to gain.
Even the unhappy past speaks for this. Where Aboriginal Australians
have been included in the life of Australia they have made remarkable
contributions. Economic contributions, particularly in the pastoral and
agricultural industry. They are there in the frontier and exploration
history of Australia. They are there in the ways. In sport ot an
extraordinary degree. In literature and art and mustic.
In all these things they have shaped our knowledge of this continent and
of ourselves. They have shaped our identity. They are there in the
Australian legend. We should never forget - they helped build this
nation. And if we have a sense of justice, as well as common sense, we
will forge a new partnership.
As I said, it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imaigined
ourselves dispossessed of land we have lived on for 50 000 years - and
then imagined ouselves told that it had never been ours.
Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in tehworld and we were told that
it was worthless. Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered
and died in the defence of our land, and then were told in history books
that we had given up without a fight. Imagine if non-Aboriginal
Australians had served their country in peace and war and were then
ignored in history books. Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had
inspired admiration and patriotism and yet did nothing to diminish
prejudice. Imagine if our spiritual life was denied and ridiculed.
Imagine if we had suffed the injustice and then were blamed for it.
It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice then we can imagine
its opposite. And we can have justice.
I say that for two reasons: I say it because I believe that the great
things about Australian social democracy reflect a fundamental belief in
justice. And I say it because in so many other areas we have proved our
capacity over the years to go on extending the realism of participating,
oppotunity and care.
Just as Australian living in the relatively narrow and insular Australia
of the 1960s imagined a culturally diverse, worldly and open Australia,
and in a generation turned the idea into reality, so we can turn the
goals of reconciliation into reality.
There are very good signs that the process has begun. The creation of
the Reconciliation Council is evidence itself. The establishment of the
ATSIC - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission - is also
evidence. The Council is the product of imagination and goodwill.
ATSIC emerges from the vision of indigenous self-determination and
self-management. The vision has already become the reality of almost
800 elected Aboriginal Regional Councillors and Commissioners
determining priorities and developing their own programs.
All over Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities
are taking charge of their own lives. And assistance with the problems
which chronically beset them is at last being made available in ways
developed by the communities themselves. If these things offer hope, so
does the fact that this generation of Australians is better informed
about Aboriginal culture and ahievement, and about the injustice that
has been done, than any generation before.
We are beginning to more generally appreciate the depth and the
diversity of Aboriginal and Torrest Strait Islander cultures. From
their music and art and dance we are beginning to recognise how much
richer our national life and identity will be for the participation of
Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. We are beginning to learn what
the indigenous people have known for many thousands of years - how to
live with our physical environment.
Ever so gradually we are learning how to see Australia through
Aboriginal eyes, beginning to recognise the wisdom contained in their
epic story.
I think we are beginning to see how much we owe the indigenous
Australians and how much we have lost by living so apart.
I said we non-indigenous Australians should try to imagine the
Aboriginal view.
It can't be too hard. Someone imagined this event today, and it is now
a marvellous reality and a great reason for hope.
There is one thing today we cannot imagine. We cannot imagine that the
descendants of people whose genius and resilience maintained a culture
here through 50 000 years or more, through cataclysmic changes to the
climate and environment, and who then survived two centuries of
dispossession and abuse, will be denied their place in the modern
Australian nation.
We cannot imagine that.
We cannot imagine that we will fail.
And with the spirit that is here today I am confident that we won't.
I am confident that we will succeed in this decade.
Thank you.
