Quarterly Essay, Mark McKenna: it’s time we moved beyond dates
Mark McKenna believes it’s time the nation moved beyond dates and debates.
The story won’t come to you. You must go to the story. Not the most profound piece of journalistic wisdom I ever heard from a grizzly and ageing newspaper sub-editor, though a darn sight more useful to one’s career than “quality gin softens the hangover”.
Historian Mark McKenna offers a useful lesson, too, for future historians attempting to reassess the narrative of our nation: get out of the library, get on the road.
Now here’s a fool’s quest: a Quarterly Essay, grandly titled Moment of Truth, on the impacts of European development on indigenous Australia. An essay that attempts “to yoke a vast body of historical scholarship that has transformed our understanding of Australian history over the past five decades to the deeper currents of a country on the brink of momentous change”. Or to put it into the words of a gin-loving newspaper editor: “Gimme 100 pages on ‘Change the Date’.”
Wisely, McKenna’s first instinct was to leave his office at the University of Sydney. Go see the land you’re writing about; the soil we all stand on when we fling our barbs and our backslaps in the history wars; go stand as close as you can to the statues of those grand explorers and complex colonists; as close as those anonymous and slow-witted dunces when they sprayed “Change the date” across the statue of Captain Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park last August, defacing the image of a giant — in heart, in mind, in legacy — who mapped the NSW coast 18 years before Arthur Phillip raised the flag of Great Britain in Sydney Cove on January 26, 1788.
“Change the curriculum!” might well have been a more useful request. Six months before the Hyde Park vandalism, research group Review Partners conducted a survey asking 1043 Australians to identify the historical event celebrated annually on Australia Day.
Only 43 per cent connected the date with the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, with one in five saying the day marked Cook’s discovery of Australia’s east coast, and a small but puzzling 2 per cent saying the day recognised an important battle in World War I.
If mindless urban graffiti is at one intellectual extremity of a long-incendiary debate, then McKenna’s deeply thought, deeply felt essay is at the other. He is the author of From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark and Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: An Australian History of Place. Each of these books would have informed the many threads of this essay, beginning with a pavement-pounding Oz odyssey from May 1927 when 80-year-old Wiradjuri elder Jimmy Clements walked 150km from Tumut, southern NSW, to represent his people and their “sovereign rights” before the Duke and Duchess of York at the opening of Old Parliament House.
From Canberra, McKenna moves to Yolgnu country, where he finds Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten “way out of their comfort zone” at the annual Garma Festival in northeast Arnhem Land in August last year.
The Prime Minister demonstrates a reluctance to embrace the key recommendations from last year’s historic and hope-filled Uluru Statement From the Heart: a constitutionally enshrined “First Nations voice” advising parliament on legislation relating to indigenous Australians and a “Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history”. Turnbull asks questions. How would this First Nations voice operate? What would it look like? Should such a voice speak outside parliament or from within it? “It is all beginning to sound too hard,” McKenna writes, briefly reducing Turnbull to a boy who doesn’t want to make his bed. But it is hard, of course, especially when a significant chunk of Australians on one side of the debate consider Turnbull’s questions perfectly valid.
Makaratta, as defined in the Uluru Statement, is “the coming together after a struggle”. It’s a beautiful notion. Two sides of a struggle uniting through a restorative and healing “truth-telling”. It’s this notion McKenna carries close on his further travels through modern Australia, a place so at odds with and fearful of its national narrative that the very term “modern Australia” has become politically charged.
On a drive through Sydney’s Kurnell Peninsula, where Cook first came ashore in April 1770, he spots a quaint relic of a sign by the road: “Welcome to Kurnell. The Birthplace of Modern Australia”. Just one of those curious and unexpected surprises a writer can find when they leave the office desk. The sign’s wording prompts McKenna to make a brief and revelatory historical side dig into the history of Kurnell, where signs once welcomed visitors, tellingly, to the “Birthplace of Australia”.
McKenna lays his cards on the table, too openly sometimes. The use of words such as “invaders” to describe Europeans — maybe even language such as “hasten their extinction” and “conquered by Europeans” — will alienate some readers, who will throw the essay in the bin on page 23 and not stay for the reliably illuminating ideas in the following 50 pages.
His passion for indigenous recognition, he says, began on his own land. In the mid-1990s he purchased a “patch of relatively unsettled land” on the NSW far south coast. When he thought about his place on that land, historically, questions about ownership and belonging “suddenly became deeply personal”. He had, it seems, been snapped out of his own indifference towards solving the question of indigenous recognition. A national version of that indifference, the essay contends, is one of our greatest obstacles to a shared narrative, one that both sides of the divide can embrace. Makaratta seems a powerful way through. Truth-telling. But whose truth? Here, for example, is Geoffrey Blainey’s truth, in this newspaper on Australia Day:
Sections of the media, universities and schools exaggerate the bad news. This is a powerful ingredient in the present criticism of Australia Day. These critics, putting on their black armbands, now imagine that before 1788 the Aborigines lived in a kind of paradise, from which later they were brutally and deliberately expelled.
Aboriginal life did have many virtues, and from the 1950s Australian archeologists, anthropologists, prehistorians and others rediscovered them. The nation owes them a debt. But the extreme concept of a paradise, wholesome and more spiritual than Australia today, has also won converts. They depict Aborigines as living in peace and harmony with one another and with nature. But the evidence, globally, is that these traditional societies suffered through warfare and that little children and women were often the victims. Massacres of Aborigines by Aborigines, however, are unlikely to find their way into the main textbooks. Their extinction of native fauna will rarely interrupt a school lesson.
Here, too, is Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s truth, written in The Monthly in 2016:
What Aboriginal people ask is that the modern world now makes the sacrifices necessary to give us a real future. To relax its grip on us. To let us breathe, to let us be free of the determined control exerted on us to make us like you. And you should take that a step further and recognise us for who we are, and not who you want us to be.
Let us be who we are — Aboriginal people in a modern world — and be proud of us. Acknowledge that we have survived the worst that the past had thrown at us, and we are here with our songs, our ceremonies, our land, our language and our people — our full identity. What a gift this is that we can give you, if you choose to accept us in a meaningful way.
Perhaps there’s a place in our schools for the extraordinary work of historian Lyndall Ryan — the driving force, McKenna writes, of an ongoing project to create an interactive online map of indigenous massacre sites across Australia — to be taught in the same rooms where kids can hear about the mighty achievements of that grand stone Yorkshireman defaced by spray paint last year, a man McKenna says has come to represent more than the embodiment of inevitable colonisation.
“He is also the promise of peace and reconciliation,” he writes of Cook. “He plants the seeds and is gone. He claims possession without consent, yet he also brings with him the law that will belatedly recognise native title more than two centuries later. He is at once the agent of destruction and the agent of redemption. A man who becomes a story that remains open-ended — a story that continually draws us back, although we know the whole tale will always elude us.” McKenna is drilling deeper here than debates and dates. He’s searching for an understanding of how we all got to where we are now that goes beyond what he calls the binaries of shame and pride. “Our history will always challenge and unsettle us,” he writes.
But we have to bring that history with us all the way, all sides of it. All the truths that hold within them a more nuanced national narrative filled at once with great tragedy and great hope for all Australians. The debate, like this essay, is not about settling on a date to celebrate the story of us. It’s about settling on the story. That won’t come to us. We’re gonna have to go to it.
Trent Dalton is a senior journalist at The Australian. His debut novel, Boy Swallows Universe, will be published in June.
Mark McKennawill be a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, April 30 to May 6.
Moment of Truth: History and Australia’s Future
By Mark McKenna
Quarterly Essay 69
Black Inc, 144pp, $22.99