“It is the simple but sometimes forgotten truth that the greatest enemy to present joy and high hopes is the cultivation of retrospective bitterness.”
That wise and rich insight was uttered by Australia’s most successful prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies.
Its acceptance, adoption, and application to Australia’s Indigenous policy discussion today would make a profound difference.
This one sentence of Menzies neatly summarises the issues at stake in Australia’s referendum to be held on Oct. 14 to determine whether the Constitution has another chapter added to it providing recognition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first inhabitants of Australia and providing them with the so-called Voice to the Parliament and Executive.
The Voice to Parliament will be an advisory body comprised of 24 Indigenous individuals selected for a national committee that will receive feedback from the community and make “representations” to Parliament.
Entrenched in the “Yes” campaign is the unrelenting condemnation of all events that have occurred over the last 200 years.
The narrative is that when British settlers arrived everything in the allegedly idyllic lifestyle of the first inhabitants was irreversibly disrupted for the worse. As a result, compensation and reparations are due and owing.
In recent times that narrative, which has gained a foothold as well in the land of the long white cloud (New Zealand), has been comprehensively challenged by articulate Māori and Aboriginal parliamentarians.
In New Zealand, Winston Peters, party leader of New Zealand First, created controversy with his utterances asserting that the Māoris in fact were not the first inhabitants of New Zealand and that they may well have displaced another racial group.
That the Māoris were of Polynesian origin arriving some eight centuries ago is supported by archaeologists. Every other parliamentary party condemned Mr. Peters, asserting the opposite with fighting words.
Benefits of Colonisation?
Turning to Australia, a rising star in her first parliamentary term Senator Jacinta Price, the Opposition Spokesperson for Indigenous Australians, made the point at her recent National Press Club address that there were benefits from colonisation.The predictable and affected outrage was spewed in her direction with all the now too-common attendant vitriol.
Now that the dust has settled, Senator Price’s statement is worthy of examination.
In seeking to dispel the myth of a utopian lifestyle being uninterruptedly enjoyed by Australia’s Aboriginal communities, the senator has initiated a long overdue discussion that needs to include the benefits of colonisation.
Inter-tribal warfare has ceased. Raiding parties for each other’s women folk has ceased.
The reign of terror by witch doctors over their communities was ended. Indeed in the Torres Strait, they still celebrate July 1 as “The coming of the Light.” The day in 1871, when the London Missionary Society landed, was the beginning of the end for the witch doctors.
Underage girls being forcibly married off to men many years older has been discontinued.
Mining royalties from private companies and the $39 billion per annum from the taxpayer flow to every conceivable Indigenous cause—except where it is desperately needed.
Life expectancy has improved. Starvation due to seasonal vagaries has been ended. Medical support for broken bones and other ailments has been literally life-changing and enhancing.
The list goes on.
Moving On Together
Yet two hundred years on, we have all moved on—Aboriginal Australians and those more recently arrived.Delving too far into the negative past of both cultures will deny aspiration, hope, and joy to present-day generations.
This call to retrospective bitterness is stifling, corrosive, and divisive. It helps no one except those who make their living from the grievance industry by perpetuating victimhood status while denying agency and encouragement to live their best lives and grasping the opportunities available.
Colonisation occurred. It has occurred for millennia. Russia’s attempts in the Ukraine and China’s posturing over Tibet and Taiwan are more recent examples.
If history is a guide, it also occurred in Australia before the sailing ships came with neighbouring groups taking over each other’s lands through warfare and conquest.
Just as we can’t unscramble the colonisation events in Europe from centuries ago we can’t unscramble Australia’s more recent history of colonisation.
What we can do is pledge our loyalty and commitment to our common destiny which is best served not by the cultivation of retrospective bitterness but by the development of a forward-looking goodwill.
