It must be hard for a prime minister to admit that he has been crushingly defeated in an electoral contest that he originally expected to win with ease. In one segment of his speech last Saturday night, Anthony Albanese praised himself as a bold man of conviction – as if he had actually won the referendum.
Many viewers who at first sympathised with the Prime Minister on television regretted that he did not directly congratulate the two Aboriginal leaders who especially defeated him.
Only one sentence was needed. He failed to speak that sentence. Yet in our long political history this probably was the most significant public victory yet achieved by Aboriginal campaigners. Moreover, they had fully digested and then condemned the controversial Uluru Statement from the Heart, but Albanese had not even digested it. As a political leader he has his merits, but command of crucial detail is not yet one of them.
Alongside him on election night was Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney. She offered no congratulations to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the talented senator by whom she had been overshadowed and outgunned this year.
In the past 60 years there were notable victories in achieving Aboriginal goals but they owed more to mainstream or white Australian political leaders The victories also owed as much to High Court judges. Here was a unique event – a national triumph for two true-blue Aboriginal leaders, Nyunggai Warren Mundine and Price.
Crucial to the national debate is the health of Indigenous people. It is often proclaimed to be a matter of urgency, almost of shame, that they have a “life expectancy eight years shorter than non-Indigenous Australians”.
But that fact, standing on its own, is misleading. The life expectancy of us all, Aboriginal people included, has improved dramatically since 1788. Nearly every country in Africa has a much lower life expectation than Indigenous Australia. Even the EU displays more than an eight-year gap between member nations. There is even a wide gap between north and south England.
Today Aboriginal Australians have a life expectancy equal to that of Bulgaria and rural Romania. Their life expectancy is higher than that in Russia and Ukraine. It is about the same as the average citizen of the world. Indeed, it soon would be improved if those Aboriginal men aged 40 and older were not heavy smokers. Of course we in the Western world – my generation included – taught them to smoke.
Ownership of land remains another divisive topic. Federal departments some years ago should have investigated what proved to be right or wrong, sensible or misguided, in the way vast areas of land were transferred to Indigenous people. Should these new possessors of the land be exempted from paying taxes on this new but erratic source of income? Moreover, should the families who lived on native title lands be able to build a house and own the land? Instead, most of such land is held collectively, almost in Soviet fashion.
Here is one of the most remarkable ventures in Australia’s modern history, indeed in world history, but some of the key effects are blanketed in silence or dispute.
In all, an area of land twice as large as Indonesia and eight times as large as France has been transferred to Aboriginal Australians since 1975. The supporters of this transfer tend to excuse it or apologise for it by asserting that it is largely desert or semi-desert, but in fact it embraces or borders one of the main mining regions in the world. It also contains mini-regions with high rainfall and a potential for tropical agriculture as well as large expanses that are reserved for environmental reasons.
‘The idea that Aboriginal people could have remained, even today, the only occupiers of this huge expanse of land is fanciful.’
Gary Johns, a minister in the Keating government, later became an alert investigator into Aboriginal affairs. In The Burden of Culture he is brave enough to conclude that the introduction of native title has proved to be a dubious reform: “The benefits are few and fitful; the costs are high; the disputes are many; the system will need to be propped up forever on the pretence that native title holders can contribute to the ‘north’ of Australia, or indeed, the remainder of Australia.”
In Johns’ opinion, these unique kinds of land tenure that now occupy a little more than half of the nation are based on the faith that all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a spiritual affinity with their tribal lands, to which their spirit or soul, on death, must return.
But most Indigenous people even in the Outback no longer cling to the religious faith that underpins the concept of native title. The censuses of 2016 and 2021 make this clear. I believe most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are far, far better off today than if they were living in 1788. Price, after recently expressing a similar belief, was flayed by critics who had faint idea what daily life ashore was like before the coming of the First Fleet. Unfortunately, a minority of Aboriginal people still have to struggle with two different values and ways of life.
This land is infinitely more fruitful than it was in 1788, and most Aboriginal people are now the gainers. The whole globe gains too. In some years Australia produces enough food to sustain probably 100 million people in the world as a whole. In the past decade it has produced for at least one billion people the minerals with which to build aircraft, railways, motorways, ships, cars, power stations, schools, stadiums and city apartments. Likewise, here in this continent arose a democratic society that, for all its imperfections, offers liberty in a world where liberty is not normal.
The idea that Aboriginal people could have remained, even today, the only occupiers of this huge expanse of land is fanciful.
How can the 1000 or more Aboriginal towns be helped? Have such tiny and remote towns a future? The question has to be asked again and again. It is an experiment rarely conducted in modern history – the creation of isolated towns that grow little of their own food, rely heavily on subsidies and social welfare, are mostly too small to attract a capable nurse, police officer or teacher, and provide few jobs for their poorly educated children. Most of these Aboriginal towns are too far apart to share amenities. They are also marred by family violence.
The Uluru statement laments the high numbers of Aboriginal men in jail but does not mention that so many are there because they bash the women of their own race. This message Price has emphasised. Without saying so too loudly, she knows the so-called Stolen Generations were often Aboriginal children who had to be rescued for the sake of their own safety and welfare.
Such remote and tiny towns can exist only in a nation that is wealthy enough to subsidise them on a generous scale. Yet many are eyesores, viewed by their few visitors as blots on the nation that allows them to exist.
One argument in their favour is that the older people wish to retain their own culture and to oppose assimilation by an alien culture. On the other hand, the recent censuses reveal that Christian pastors – mostly Aboriginal – are more influential here than in most suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.
A simple, short and accurate statement of the rival Yes and No cases is required for every referendum. This year, small but rival groups of federal parliamentarians had each summarised the arguments to be printed, side-by-side, in Your Official Referendum Booklet. The Australian government then printed millions of copies. Translated into many Indigenous and foreign languages, it reached more households than any bestselling novel in our history. At the front of the booklet, readers are assured they will find valuable information on where and how to vote if they turn to page 21. But the editors had forgotten to number the final pages.
Even enthusiastic citizens must have been bored or even bamboozled, except for the occasional short quotations from lawyers speaking with some authority.
Alas, the booklet did not even print the one-page Uluru Statement from the Heart. As this referendum involved more factors than any other in the past 100 years, a lucid source of information was vital. The booklet failed.
In contrast, at the 1999 referendum on the proposed republic, a committee of four lawyers and historians – presided over by Ninian Stephen, the former High Court judge and governor-general – had issued a readable and careful assessment of the rival arguments. The present government seemed unwise to ignore such a precedent.
Australia is one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world. Democracy is government by debate. The federation and the commonwealth were born only after long and extensive democratic debate extending from 1889 to 1900. In contrast, the present government has shunned or tried to minimise debate.
We can now see that the debate conducted during the past year was indirectly a clash about two conflicting views of this nation’s history.
Albanese’s view is of an Aboriginal Australia that was – for 60,000 or more years – a form of utopia. His vision owed much to historian Bruce Pascoe, an engaging speaker who by pretending to be Aboriginal tended to convince young people, and their teachers too, that he possessed an insider’s knowledge. Pascoe claimed the Aboriginal people invented democracy and that they lived in peace and prosperity until the Europeans invaded.
The present government and its leader can hardly be attacked when the heads of the University of Melbourne, RMIT University and other universities actually promote a similar black-armband version of Australia’s history.
Albanese was captivated by a heroic version of history even before he won the federal election last year.
Persuaded that such a version had been deliberately hidden from us all, he announced that since 1788 our nation had provided largely a history of brutality – until the era of multiculturalism arrived. One day his project – though defeated in last Saturday’s referendum – may provoke or inspire a total rewriting of Australia’s history. Its official names will be Truth-telling and Makarrata, for they are embodied in the short Uluru statement: a document containing highly vulnerable accusations against mainstream Australia as well as several sobering statements about Aboriginal distress today.
There are two different Australias. Admittedly, many Aboriginal Australians live in unsatisfactory and even appalling conditions. Also true is that a larger number in urban Australia have become important ingredients of our success as a modern nation. They are often overlooked.
On election night we often gathered from commentators the idea that most Aboriginal Australians lived in the Northern Territory or in remote tropical outposts to the east and west. In fact, NSW, especially Sydney and its far western hinterland, is the nation’s stronghold of Aboriginal people.
More live there than in any other state and territory; and an update from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the surprising advances they have made in the 10 years from 2011 to 2021. Their life expectations are higher than the referendum booklet dismally reported. Of their houses, the overwhelming numbers are not overcrowded.
More than 40 per cent of these houses are owned outright or with a mortgage. The proportion of their students who pass year 12 or attend university and other tertiary institutions has soared. Successful Aboriginal leader Mundine, originally a tradie, was reared in one of these towns far west of Sydney.
The Uluru statement, compiled by the leading large group of Indigenous activists, concludes that a revolutionary new era is beginning: “We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country.” But hosts of Aboriginal people have little need to leave their base camp in the big towns and cities and go trekking.
They belong to the 21st century and share in its opportunities.
Historian Geoffrey Blainey is the author of more than 40 books. His recent memoir is called Before I Forget (Penguin).
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