Cafe Society: Acknowledge the past to move into the future

PROFESSOR Henry Reynolds wants to see a Black War memorial in Hobart.

Historian Henry Reynolds wants Aboriginal history to be better recognised in Tasmania. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

IN the past month, Professor Henry Reynolds has spoken at five writers’ festivals around the country on a subject that has long preoccupied him: the brutality of indigenous dispossession, its denunciation by white humanitarians, and colonial government response to crusader protest and lament, which was largely to absorb it then ignore it.

If that sounds familiar, you may already know the seminal work of this famous Tasmanian historian, who has dismantled the carefully constructed version of colonial history on which many of us were raised and replaced it with a more nuanced and confronting one.

Or maybe you’re just having a deja vu moment about the Federal Government’s rejection of last year’s Uluru Statement from the Heart, which proposed constitutional reforms including one relating to truth-telling about history.

It was “a rebuff of the most shocking kind” and “a stunning blow” to the indigenous groups involved, says Reynolds.

“Once again, reconciliation became nothing,” he writes in a new conclusion to his classic book, This Whispering in Our Hearts, which has just been republished with extra chapters that cover the 20 years since first publication.

“It may not recover. But it becomes clearer where the sticking point is. There are still many people who cannot reconcile themselves to what has been true since the very start. White Australia has a black history…”

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It is this tension that has consumed Reynolds, 80, for decades. It shows no signs of easing, I discover, when we meet at Czegs’ Cafe at Richmond, where he lives.

Given his track record of taking the long view while leading a shift in historical understanding, does he think Tasmania can move forward without better acknowledging its past?

Elevating the place of Aboriginal Tasmanians in our shared story and consciousness is central, he says.

To that end, Reynolds is calling for a monument to resistance leaders of the Black War (1824-31) to be built on or near Hobart’s Queens Domain, home of the Cenotaph that commemorates our Anzacs and other Tasmanians who died in faraway conflicts.

“It was a serious war that was fought in Tasmania by Tasmanians about Tasmania,” says Reynolds of the frontier conflict that culminated in the notorious Black Line that swept across the state in late 1830 in the biggest military operation on Australian soil until World War II.

A war memorial, he says, would serve to recognise “that these people stood up and fought for their country”.

“They weren’t just victims crushed by brutal, cruel white people. They were people who fought a war and lost.”

Convict victims deserve recognition, too, he says.

“It was violence in a justifiable war of resistance, but the people who were in the front line were overwhelmingly poor young British convicts from the cities who knew nothing about the bush. They didn’t choose to come here and they were also victims of British imperialism.”

Reynolds wants to see a convict remembrance wall built in the Macquarie Point or Hunter St precinct, where so many convicts stumbled ashore, sea legs heavy on terra firma, to start the Tasmanian part of their lives.

“The wall would become a pilgrimage site for all the descendants of the convicts,” he says.

Returning to Aboriginal issues past and present, their indivisibility, and the dispiriting response to the Uluru Statement, Reynolds advocates the reconstitution of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

The federal representative body was disbanded in 2005 and he thinks bringing it back, with its members elected by district, would enable a strong presence at national level while offering a way of transcending the disagreements between the state’s two main indigenous bodies, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre and the Tasmanian Regional Aboriginal Communities Alliance.

“Tasmania has to be part of a national scene,” he says.

Reynolds would also like to see a specific agreement for the return of crown land in the state’s North-East to its traditional owners.

Reynolds grew up in Hobart but lived for decades in north Queensland with his wife, former Labor senator Margaret Reynolds, and family, including daughter Anna, who is a Hobart City Council lord mayor aspirant.

There, in the early nineties he lived, breathed and wrote a book about the landmark Mabo case and the decision that recognised native title as a pre-existing right.

Today, he believes a native title claim could succeed in the North-East if the implications of the government of the day tricking people off their land were properly considered.

Demonstrating that the broken physical connection to ancestral territory was involuntary would be central.

A simpler pathway might be an Indigenous Land Use Agreement, he suggests.

Either way, he says, the potential claimants to whom he refers are clear about their genealogy.

“They know exactly where they came from.”

It is history, as ever, to which he returns to find a way forward.