Call to end ‘silence’ on indigenous history

Stan Grant is calling for the ‘great ­silence’ about inaccuracies in our indigenous history to end.

ABC’s indigenous editor Stan Grant.

Indigenous broadcaster Stan Grant is calling for the “great ­silence” about inaccuracies in our indigenous history to end, starting with correcting an inscription on a Captain Cook statue claiming that the English explorer discovered Australia.

Echoing the debate in the US over the removal of statues of Confederate generals, Grant, the ABC’s indigenous editor, says the 1829 statue should not be removed from Sydney’s Hyde Park but it would be apt to correct it.

Grant told The Australian he wanted to draw attention to the different ways indigenous history was treated in Australia and the US, where violence, controversy and a national debate erupted after a concerted push to remove Civil War memorials.

“Americans are tearing down the monuments to hate, but we remain oblivious to ours,” he said.

“We certainly don’t grapple with it in the way America does. Thinking about the difference ­between the two countries, in Australia there is more of an ­apathy, of not even going there and letting it lie.”

In a column on the ABC website to accompany his Friday ­current affairs program The Link, Grant wrote how he frequently walked past the statue of Cook and read the inscription on its base saying Cook “discovered this territory”: “Captain Cook is part of our story but he didn’t discover Australia. That has been a very damaging lie for Aboriginal people.”

He wrote some indigenous people would prefer to see the statue removed “for good reason”. “Personally, I accept that it remains; Cook is part of the story of this nation.”

If Malcolm Turnbull were serious that Australia Day was a day to honour indigenous Australians, “what could be more apt than to correct a monument that tells us, still, that in 1770 we did not exist?” he wrote.

But Keith Windschuttle, historian and editor of Quadrant, said Cook deserved credit for being the first person to record the whole of the east coast.

“Stan Grant’s disgust at the inscription on the statue of Captain James Cook is completely misplaced. When it says Cook was the one who ‘discovered this territory’ it is perfectly accurate, if we take the word ‘territory’ to mean the eastern coast. Cook was in fact the first person in human history to traverse the whole of this coastline. No Aboriginal person had ever done that before — they did not have the maritime technology to do it,” he said.

Grant also called for a discussion on place names, including the Coxs River west of Sydney, named after William Cox, who in the 1820s called for the massacre of Aborigines.

“Townsville is named after a slave trader and we don’t even talk about it,” he told The Australian.

“Arthur Phillip and Governor Macquarie were revered for what they did, but they also ordered the massacre of Aborigines.”

Grant referenced Bill Stanner, the anthropologist who coined the term the “great Australian silence” in the 1968 Boyer lectures, referring to how Aboriginal history was largely ignored.

“The First Fleet is part of our story; 65,000 years of history is part of our story,” he said, adding he hoped Australians could participate in the “crafting of a narrative in which everyone can be included”.

Hyde Park, the oldest public park in Australia, is operated by the Sydney City Council. A spokesman for the Lord Mayor said: “Any proposal would be referred to the City’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory panel for their consideration and advice.”

This could then be taken to council for a vote.

On Friday, The Link examined the controversy over Confederate statues in the US and contained an interview with academic David Smith from the US Studies Centre, who said the Confederate statues were “fundamentally about politics” rather than history.