What are the chances of a government or local authority commissioning a statue in the next few years to honour a great achiever who happened to be heterosexual white male? To paraphrase the late satirist A.P. Herbert, he would have to be the righteous man, always thinking of others.
Prudence is his guide, his motto “First, cause not offence”. He is one who considers every potential ramification of his words and actions, and he defers to the sensitivities of his audience. His speeches can never be misconstrued, nor is he afflicted with unconscious bias. He is pure in motive and thought.
Every one of his utterances on social media is judicious and tactful. He is so wise he can discern the values of generations to come. Every book he has read, every play he has seen, every movie he has watched is free of the dreaded microaggression. Never has he been in the company of those who fail to meet these high standards.
He is pacific by nature. As a leader, he will fight only to defend his country against the forces of fascism and even when raining fire upon the enemy he will not so much as cause the death of a single non-combatant. He is a friend to the animal world, having ingested neither meat nor fish. He is one with the environment, his lifestyle carbon neutral.
So prescient is he that his study of the science of hurt feelings transcends millennia. He has devoted his life to atoning for the sins of his ancestors. His life mission is to defend the oppressed, the wretched, and the marginalised. Every panel he has sat on, every workplace he has overseen, every policy he has drafted reflects diversity.
So serene and tranquil is he that he has never lost his temper, except when the subject matter turns to white people. Whereupon he totally loses it in a fit of self-flagellation, denounces Western civilisation as a hotchpotch of imperialism, racism and genocide, and finally collapses in the foetal position to whimper as his audience bursts into applause.
In other words, the chances of new statues being dedicated to conservative white men are Buckley’s. That bothers me not all, for if anything the practice is an anachronism. What I do find unsettling is the wanton and criminal destruction of these objects, some of which are hundreds of years old.
Last week in Minnesota, US, rioters tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus. After doing so, they danced and spat on it. In Ottawa, Canada, students at Carleton University, citing racism and misogyny, have demanded the removal of a statue of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi. In London, a statue of former British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill – the nemesis of fascists – was defaced and is now boarded up. As his granddaughter Emma Soames lamented “We’ve come to this place where history is viewed only entirely through the prism of the present.”
Yet some commentators have effusively welcomed these events. “The recent, ferocious challenging of public forms of history, I have to admit, has thrilled this historian’s heart,” wrote Sydney Morning Herald columnist Julia Baird last weekend.
“What has happened to statues – rolled into harbours, set aflame on their plinths, defaced with graffiti, hung with signs – is merely the visible form of what historians, buried in archives, wrestling with raw material, have been quietly doing to the myths of the past for decades, uncovering and tapping into computers – documenting a more complete account,” she said.
Baird either disregards or is oblivious to the fact that many protesters are motivated not by historical rectitude but by authoritarian ideology. To equate iconoclasm with scholarly refutation is sophistry. Moreover, I doubt Baird, who is also the co-host of ABC current affairs and news program The Drum, would be so sanguine about people taking the law into their own hands to correct inaccuracies on her program, which overwhelmingly features left-wing commentators while having black-listed for the past two years representatives from conservative think-tank The Institute of Public Affairs. Would not Baird – who stresses that people should engage in “respectful conversation” on The Drum’s social media site – prefer viewers dispute wild assertions from GetUp! panellists by asking ABC Fact Check to investigate? Or would it thrill the historian inside her if instead conservative protesters invaded The Drum’s studio and spray-painted the set to reflect what they saw as rectifying these inaccuracies?
As ever, the ABC is keen to report stories of racism, a phenomenon intensified by the Black Lives Matter movement and its co-opting by indigenous activists. Yesterday it reported that last year, at a Christmas party in a Sydney pub, members of the NSW Police Tactical Operations Unit had as a joke delivered a mock acknowledgment of country by substituting “indigenous” and “custodians” with “tactical” and “protectors” respectively.
Among those the broadcaster sought comment from was indigenous woman, ABC presenter and UTS professor Larissa Behrendt. “I find it disappointing and actually heartbreaking,” she said. “We can see strong evidence that there’s still very little respect for Aboriginal culture, and therefore Aboriginal people.”
You might remember Behrendt for comments she made about indigenous Alice Springs woman Bess Nungarrayi Price, an anti-domestic violence advocate and supporter of the Northern Territory intervention. In 2011 she tweeted to another ABC presenter “I watched a show where a guy had sex with a horse and I’m sure it was less offensive than Bess Price,” something she later claimed was “taken out of context”. But by all means, professor, please feel free to lambast others for showing Aboriginal people little respect.
Price’s daughter, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, shares many of her mother’s views. “To us, much of history was horrible, but it is why Western society is as it is,” she wrote this week in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Removing evidence of that history is the construction of an alternative reality. It is not reality itself.”
It prompted an angry response from Sydney Morning Herald columnist and Uniting Church minister Stephanie Dowrick. “This article is deeply offensive,” she tweeted. It insults #FirstNations and all who walk with them in their legitimate claims. A further insult that @smh would even consider publishing such facile, regressive views.” Hail the benevolent and wise white woman who protects indigenous people from an “offensive” article, even if it means trying to censor them in the process.
“Censoring history makes the past impossible to grasp†This article is deeply offensive. It insults #FirstNations and all who walk with them in their legitimate claims.A further insult that @smh would even consider publishing such facile, regressive views. https://t.co/aKTomZxqoJ
— Rev Dr Stephanie Dowrick (@stephaniedowric) June 17, 2020
In her column last weekend, Baird urged readers to “accept the truth of history”. She lionises indigenous author Bruce Pascoe, whose book Dark Emu she describes as “brilliant,” and cites approvingly his claim indigenous people had constructed prior to European settlement “a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity”.
Pascoe’s claim that for millennia “Aboriginal democracy” ensured what he called the “Great Australian Peace” is belied by many accounts. First Fleet officer Watkin Tench was horrified by the treatment of indigenous women at the hands of their menfolk, saying “They are in all respects treated with savage barbarity; condemned not only to carry the children, but all other burthens, they meet in return for submission only with blows, kicks and every other mark of brutality.”
In 1995, paleopathologist Stephen Webb published his findings into his analysis of the skeletal remains of 4500 indigenous people, many of which predated the arrival of Europeans. He found that indigenous women were far more likely than men to have suffered skull fractures, the injuries consistent with their being attacked from behind.
I mention these not to deny or mitigate the horrific violence that Europeans inflicted upon indigenous peoples. But I wonder whether Baird’s calls for us to learn the truth of history includes considering these and numerous other unpalatable accounts of indigenous violence, or whether it falls into the category of what she derides as history “written by white men,” which she dismisses simplistically as “frequently used for propaganda purposes, and the buffering of myths”.
On one hand she urges us “to stop thinking about history as a kind of binary ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, as either nice or bad,” yet she praises and unquestioningly accepts the accounts of historians who claim indigenous Australians lived in a peaceful and advanced democratic utopia, while at the same time glossing over the documented observations of European settlers that give a confronting version. Binary, anyone?
Ironically many of those who cite the recent toppling of statues as a great moment for historians are themselves set in stone regarding their understanding and attitudes.
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