Douglas Smith is one of the more interesting voices to emerge in the print media this year, writes David Penberthy – and here’s why

The fact that Douglas Smith is writing for a newspaper at all is vast development, writes David Penberthy.

One of the more interesting voices to emerge in the print media this year is that of Douglas Smith, a 31-year-old Newscorp columnist with a special interest in indigenous affairs. He worked previously as a TV journo for SBS and NITV in Sydney and Queensland but is now back in newspapers. He has a crisp, clean writing style and punches out good columns that cut to the chase. He sometimes uses tales from his life to make a broader point.

This was the case last week when he wrote a powerful column the entry point being his childhood on the west coast South Australian town of Ceduna. In a matter-of-fact way, Smith told the story of how, when he was 10, he and a bunch of mates were all down at a popular swimming spot. Ceduna is a pretty multicultural town with a lot of Greek-Australian families and Smith was schoolmates with a lot of those kids. A police car was doing a routine patrol and drove past the kids, one of whom – not Smith – called out “Oi!” to the police. The police stopped and from the large crowd of children picked out Smith, who had done nothing, with one of the officers saying: ““Do you want to get locked up you little black b******?”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with News Corp Indigenous Affairs reporter Douglas Smith. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Of as much as interest as Smith’s column was the reaction to it from readers. The majority were negative and defensive. Some of them sounded annoyed that Smith had told his story at all. Others sprang to the defence of police arguing that with the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the crime statistics it was only natural that Smith had drawn the attention of the constabulary. This last criticism struck me as odd, having always assumed that police were meant to act on the basis of what people had done, as opposed to what they looked like.

The fact that Smith is writing in a newspaper at all is a terrific and overdue development as historically there have not been anywhere near enough indigenous people in our line of work, as is the case in most businesses and industries. Indeed I would hazard a guess that most columns that look at the question of indigenous affairs are written by people who aren’t indigenous.

The thing about Smith’s column is that it wasn’t an angry rant, but the matter-of-fact recounting of someone’s life experience, one which no doubt gels with that of many other indigenous Australians. He’s not about to start his own BLM riot, he simply explained with justification how this incident and others his friends experienced informs the fact that, as an adult, he still has a mistrust of the police. And that seems pretty understandable based on what happened to him when he was just 10 years old having a swim with mates.

Douglas Smith worked previously as a TV journo for SBS and NITV in Sydney and Queensland. Picture: Michael Marschall

Douglas Smith, aged 10.

The column and the reaction suggests that as white Australians we need to pull back on our natural defensiveness and start listening more to people like Douglas Smith. I don’t understand why we have a propensity towards feeling paranoid or persecuted whenever someone dares offer a warts and all account of our history, and their own experience. There is nothing remotely unique about our past. It is the same story of colonialism and intervention that happened everywhere, affecting everyone from the Sioux and Navajo to the Aztecs and Incas and Hawaiians and Maori, in every single country in Africa that was carved up by the colonisers to pillage natural resources and human labour. The challenges we are grappling with are no different from those in many other countries, including countries where history is bloodier and more brutal than anything that occurred here.

This wasn’t intended as a column about the proposed Voice to Parliament, but it sort of is, as it’s a column about listening which is what the Voice essentially proposes. It is a listening mechanism where governments that are seeking to pass good laws for people will check first to see whether those people think they will actually be good. Australian history is littered with well-intended schemes ostensibly for the betterment of Aboriginal Australians that have had the reverse or zero effect. The chief reason for this – a bit like newspapers covering indigenous affairs without having any indigenous staff – is that many of these schemes were cooked up without a single black voice in the room.

Senator Kerrynne Liddle, an Arrernte woman from Alice Springs. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

There are of course other Indigenous voices that should be heard in this debate, such as that of new Senator Kerrynne Liddle, an Arrernte woman from Alice Springs who has enjoyed great success in business and who worries the Voice risks being tokenistic and not linked to outcomes. I would have thought her words serve not as an argument for its dismissal, but one to make sure it achieves the policy grunt Senator Liddle rightly demands.

My touchstone for the concept of the Voice has nothing to do with politics but comes from the world of football. It involves my own AFL club, the Adelaide Crows, who have endured years of shocking publicity on account of a motivational camp for players after their 2017 grand final defeat. The camp had the effect of distressing indigenous players through the use of indigenous rituals as well as delving into their personal lives and using harrowing information against them. No-one running the camp nor anyone who signed off on it heard from or spoke to any of the Indigenous players ahead of staging it. The people who ran the camp, and the people in club management who signed off on it, were good people. Clearly it wasn’t their intention to torment and divide the players and subject the club to four years of rotten headlines. But that’s what happened. It’s a salient reminder of how much bad stuff you can achieve by not listening to people and talking to people.