Talk to Randwick Rotary 1 March 2016

As Australia once more fails to “Close the Gap” and opposition remains to Recognition, what can a local community such as Randwick do to help end the war against Black people with a just, lasting and positive peace? Why might we talk of this as a War? If we want peace, what do we the nonIndigenous people of this country need to do? Remembering the past and commemorating history, re-embedding the Indigenous stories of this place into our landscape and perceptions, and working for a proper Peace Treaty could be part of the way forward. This talk is deliberately provocative but also hopeful and open, inviting non-Indigenous people to own our history of this place and our treatment of the invaded peoples, through looking for dialogue and resolution.

My parents arrived in Australia as refugees from Poland through China in 1946. From my earliest days in Bondi I can remember thinking about the Indigenous people who had lived where we lived, whose lives had ended as finally as that of my grandparents in Poland under the Nazis. Like most White Australians I knew few if any Indigenous people as I grew up. My father owned a drycleaning business in Taylor’s Square where a couple of his pressers were Aboriginal men. He’d tell me as the dry came on in the north, that they’d soon be on the road and he’d see them next year when they returned.

As I grew up through the 1950s and 1960s my knowledge of Indigenous Australia was sprinkled with stories of the Never Never and spare paintings of the Centre. Yet I really learned almost nothing about their struggle for survival, the resistance and the terrible toll the European invasion had taken of the original owners. Every story we heard was wrapped in a cloak of inevitability that what had occurred was the way things needed to be. Yet one thing was so self-evident to us, that the violence of the past was over, and that there was no longer any question that Australia was White. We had no sense of the stolen generations, yet even less of the earlier generations who had died of disease, of violence, or of heart break. Later at university I was a photographer with the Redfern All Blacks at the Casino Knockout in country NSW, and researched issues of racism especially in the media.

Some years ago when I started thinking about why Australia seemed unable to resolve its Black history I had recently returned from one of my visits to Poland. Poland was for my family its particular killing field. My grandfather had died of disease and hunger in the Litmanstadt ghetto. My grandmother had been poisoned in a gas truck at Chelmno, my great grandmother shot in the head in the Warsaw ghetto. Even though the Polish army was defeated in a few short weeks by the Nazis and Soviets in 1939, the war against the Poles continued for many years. Their intellectuals were rounded up and executed, their culture was banned, their children were stolen. For Polish Jews the future was to be inevitably the end of their race, accelerated in places like Treblinka and Auschwitz by industrial extermination. In Prague Hitler turned the synagogue into an anthropological museum for the artefacts of a disappeared race. I could feel resonances with the fate of indigenous Australia.

So what does a post-war war look like? Much I fear like the experience of many Indigenous Australians. The recent Closing the Gap report and the discussion of it, help plot the landscape of our War against the Blacks.

Young black men are far more likely to be gaoled than to go to university, usually for offences of resistance or as a consequence of chemical warfare injuries (alcohol and drugs). Indigenous people will die ten or more years younger than non-Indigenous. Indigenous languages are under attack everywhere and culture is disappearing. Chronic diseases will attack Indigenous people in far greater proportions. Young women will bear many more children, who will often sicken. Children will drop out of school in far greater proportions. Youth suicide is by far the highest in Australia if not the world; killing yourself before the enemy gets you?

This is a picture of a people under sustained and continuing attack. In the past the biological warfare of disease and the chemical warfare of alcohol and refined sugar had torn Indigenous communities apart, leaving piles of bodies around campsites all over the Sydney basin. The billabong at Coogee (the rugby oval), which was a meeting place for tribes and a great place for hunting and ceremony, would have seen tragic scenes as diseases ravaged the local people. I wonder what the first White people might have found as they hacked their way through the bush and waded over the sand hills.

Yet resilience and survival are also everywhere – no Indigenous peoples have ever surrendered, despite the belief of many White people that the war is over. As you can tell, I think the war continues, low intensity (for White people), high impact (for Indigenous people).

So the challenge for non-Indigenous Australians is, what do we want to do about this war? We have broadly, three options.

We can just put up with it because the cost isn’t impossible and the outcomes are manageable (for the moment); we can keep the pressure on, more interventions, more attempts to privatise Indigenous lands, more seizure of children, more young men in gaol, more beaten women, more drug dependence. Destroy language, erode culture, fragment and decimate tribes. Oh and every year declaim our wonderment at the long heritage of Indigenous peoples. Meanwhile keep looking in Indigenous communities for potential contributors to the national economy, educate them, build them up into successful Indigenous people. Rescue them from war zones.

We can try to win the war, by forcing the Indigenous population to capitulate everywhere, because the war has to stop. That would be costly and difficult to achieve, given over 200 years of war has not achieved that outcome. It’s also not clear what “capitulate” would mean – probably the annihilation of communities by widespread seizure of children, dispersal of family groups, and the redevelopment of homelands and land rights areas. Push assimilation to the hilt, and reprogram Indigenous people as nuclear family consumers. Mainly though force Indigenous people to concede that indigeneity means nothing and colour is not an issue worth worrying about.

Currently the main protagonist of the “get over it” perspective is Melbourne commentator Andrew Bolt. His attack on Adam Goodes whose war dance infuriated him, comes from a place where it’s the Black insistence on difference that’s the problem. For Bolt Indigenous should just fade away, the war is a war by Blacks on Whites, and they should just stop it. He does not see any of this as a resistance to the White control of Black lives. Rather he frames it as resentment, dependency and failure. That’s why he and his mates hate the idea of reconciliation and are appalled by the movement for Constitutional Recognition. Some Indigenous activists are also unconvinced that the Recognition outcomes proposed mean very much other than a symbolic capitulation by Indigenous Australia to the invasion and their consequent dis-enfranchisement, a soft variant of the second option.

The Third option is/are peace treaties, declaring an end to hostilities. This is the most difficult, because it requires White recognition of indigenous suppression, and the political desire to change the conditions that produce the disadvantage. Moreover it requires all Australians to surrender some of their booty to the common good, never an easy ask of our property ravenous society. Think only of the savaging that Bob Hawke received when he first tried to bring in national land rights legislation in the 1980s (to which he succumbed) , or John Howard saying that he was on the side of the pastoralists against the Indigenous people in the debate over the Wik amendments in the 1990s. Reflect on the huge hostility to any recognition of Indigenous people in the constitution, yet their continuing marginalisation for over a century in that same founding document.

I believe that such hostilities are best resolved by local communities declaring peace, until every community across the country has made its local and individual peace. This would provide a bedrock foundation for a national resolution. We know how hard peace negotiations are, but with all such things there is a need for trust building.

Last year I approached Randwick Council to suggest it might take an initiative to recognise the local Indigenous people through a memorial on or near Coogee Beach. I noticed that there was a memorial for a mayor and local member (Hyman Goldstein whom it should be recognised was probably murdered at suicide point), three memorials to Coogee residents murdered in Bali, and a memorial to a digger and lifesaver as part of the Great War commemorations. The beachfront is a narrative of memory. Yet no narratives exist there of the residents of previous millennia, the Indigenous folk whose home this was.

I met with the then mayor Ted Seng and Development officer Gary Ella; they referred to a war memorial for Indigenous diggers to be built at Maroubra. As our conversation developed we spoke about the possibility of a speaking memorial, digital points created along the coastal walking path from Watsons Bay to La Perouse, that could tell stories of the Indigenous people of the area that walkers could encounter on their smartphones as they followed the route (a real possibility with amalgamation). We talked of how important it would be to open a dialogue with Indigenous residents, to research the history accurately, and to involve Indigenous people in the design and ceremonies associated with a memorial at Coogee. I thought one could be erected near the former billabong or along the creek that drained it out into Coogee Bay, nearby to and paid for by the Pavilion. Regularly we could perhaps hold an annual story telling and smoking ceremony as important as the Bali memorial ceremony or even Anzac Day.

Recognition and reconciliation as pathways to building trust and securing peace require strong community input and support. This is the point that I am thinking that Rotary and other community groups could start to own our local track, putting into place small steps that might build recognition into our daily lives, signifying the permanent place Indigenous people have in the life of our locality. There is not a good Indigenous history of Randwick. One should be commissioned. There are few signs of the Indigenous people – they should be recovered and named and celebrated. We cannot remake the people whom were destroyed so that we could all live here. But we can recover their spirits and their resilience and resistance to the fate into which some of our forebears had hoped to consign them. And in doing so, we may help to end the war.

  From Fairfax

I am first generation. When I say that now, despite my years of privilege, I still get goosebumps. I have inherited gratitude. People in Australia were and are sometimes vile about Jews but they don’t betray them to the authorities. They don’t shoot them in the back of the head. This is not to forgive anti-semitism in any respect, because it is at the heart of genocide; but genocide only exists in Australia for one group of people; and it isn’t Jews.

Of course, like most of us, I abandoned some aspects of the values of my parents and grew out of hiding my displeasure at the government, even though I know that both my parents would be appalled at my critique of governments past and present. The gratitude should outweigh the analysis. I wonder if my parents would have come around to my way of thinking if they knew how the Australian government treats refugees now.

Australia Day was huge in my family. My parents worked 11 days a week but Australia Day was a serious celebration. We’d go to Nielsen Park in Sydney’s Vaucluse and swim. Or what passed for swimming in my family, breaststroke without putting your face in the water (it is with some pride that my offspring can all swim freestyle and breathe on both sides. Pride and amazement. How do people actually put their faces in water and live?)

So in 1988, when I was pregnant with my second child, I’d planned January 26 events very carefully. Watch boats. Have picnics. Watch Aboriginal dancing. See fireworks. Be extremely grateful. I was. Two years later, we organised a holiday up on the far north coast with another family. The topic of Australia Day came up and they were hugely critical. I burst into tears.

Of course, they were right. And wrong. And I was right and so wrong.

Nearly 30 years ago, when I had that fight with my friends Robin and Neil, Australia Day was still acceptable and it’s become less acceptable now. For me, then, it was a time to celebrate being in country which didn’t kill me or reject me or exclude me in a systematic way. But it marks the day when the colonisers of Australia began to kill, reject and exclude the Aboriginal people. Or, as Stan Grant put it when describing how the brilliant Swan Adam Goodes was treated last year: “I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos, we heard a sound that was very familiar to us . . . we heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival. We heard the howl of the Australian dream and it said to us again, you’re not welcome.”

I doubt there could ever be a day when Aboriginal people could or would celebrate the colonisation of this land or the formation of this nation nor should we ever question the motives of anyone who doesn’t want to take part in a joyless jamboree. Australia Day is connected to the destruction of another culture, this country’s first people, although we must acknowledge that every day, the life expectancy, the education, the health, gap between Aboriginal and whites continues to exist.

As Grant says later in his speech at the IQ2 racism debate last year: “My people die young in this country, we die 10 years younger than average Australians and we are far from free.”

If we move Australia Day, it allows a bunch of martyr rightists to claim Aboriginal activists won. If we don’t move Australia Day, we ignore the destruction of the Aboriginal people.

But we could change Australia Day, make it a time when we can account for ourselves and our progress. January 26 will always be a day of mourning and it could also be a time when we examine the state of the nation and all who live here.

It will also make it possible for those of us who were given shelter here to give thanks for that shelter.

A friend wrote* to me to say he’s had enough of being a continuing unwilling protagonist in the war against Australia’s Indigenous people. Me too. We have become unwilling parties to the war on Aborigines.

Could Australia Day be reshaped, away from drunkenness and celebrations, towards acknowledgement, reconciliation and peace?

I wrote:  “I’ve had enough of war. My parents survived theirs through luck, guts, and hope – a bit like all refugees then and now. But I’ve had enough of being a continuing unwilling protagonist in the war against Australia’s indigenous people. Fed up to here and beyond. Australia Day is about two wars – the one my parents escaped that let us be, and the war they entered despite themselves that I’ve inherited. Time to make peace; and what better day than Australia Day to declare we are committed to finding a lasting and effective peace. That means we need to decide we don’t want to win that war through annihilating or crushing Indigenous Australia,  and we don’t want the war of attrition  to roll endlessly into a god forsaken future of misery. We want to end it ASAP.”

This Youtube Vid of a Powerpoint provides a work in progress for a paper under development. The paper is an output of the Cyber Racism and Community Resilience research project, funded under the ARC Linkage scheme. We seek informed and constructive feedback, which can be posted through the Comments link. All on topic comments will be approved subject to basic codes of civility.

See on SBS Page
In December 2005 I was discussing inter-group issues with a Palestinian sociologist at Haifa University; reflecting on the breaking news from Cronulla, he suggested I might like to stay in Israel for a while. News of the conflict travelled far and fast.

Who has learned what from those violent days in that hot summer? The build up at Cronulla was set against a year of growing tension, with news reports of gang rapes, beach-front violence, and increasing racially-charged stirring by shock-jock Alan Jones.

Despite the denials of PM Howard, Cronulla was a quintessential modern Australian mess.

The key participants in those events and their aftermath are drawn from every part of Australian society – the coastal communities with their own histories of sexism and violence, the western suburban communities of the children of the refugees of a generation before, the conservative heartland of the Liberals, and the knock about branch stacking of the Labor Right. Despite the denials of PM Howard, Cronulla was a quintessential modern Australian mess.

When Strike Force Neil later reported to the NSW Cabinet on the debacle of the day and the retaliation raids in the aftermath, it revealed a police and government uncaring and unprepared, with no intelligence of what was happening in the communities, and no capacity to foresee and thus be forearmed or even forewarned, and no public presence in the ongoing debate.

The police learned a lot from Cronulla: they became militarised, they modernised with riot squads, body armour and anti-personnel ordinance. Their command and control structures were reinvigorated with a much greater planning and response capacity. Most importantly but not sufficiently, they realised that community relations and engagement would be crucial. While a battle raged in the upper echelons of the NSW Police over corruption and competence, the first steps were made, albeit on tottering ankles, to lay down long term positive relations with some of the communities. Ironically the relations are today better with the Muslim communities, from which most intelligence now comes, than their non-Muslim antagonists, whose rallies on Cronulla Day will do most to stoke community apprehension and anger.

So one lesson from Cronulla that has bitten for both absolutists and white racists, has been that hate speech works for them and their causes.

The political class has learned very little. They appear not to realise that the absolutist wing of the Islamic groups need their Islamophobia to gain purchase on the apprehensions of the wider Muslim communities. Whenever a Federal minister slings off at a Muslim leader, often in an ill-considered and demeaning way, he or she adds to the evidence that absolutists use to intimidate their own communities into subservience to the Jihadist fantasy of a Caliphate.

Whenever a ministerial slam is made on a Muslim leader, the racist Right draws courage from the affirmation they see for their claims to the irremediable deviance of all Muslims. So one lesson from Cronulla that has bitten for both absolutists and white racists, has been that hate speech works for them and their causes. Reclaim Australia and the Jihadists desperately and achingly need each other; no one else does.

The Muslim communities have learned that they face two enemies. Inside Islam, they are continually harassed by extremists, who want all Muslims to turn their backs on the values of democratic Australia and to bow unthinkingly before the ideologues of Islamism. Outside Islam they confront a spreading stain of invective and hatred from non-Muslim society, occasioned by the violence of small minorities, which preach the religion of despair. This has become an excruciatingly painful impasse in which to be trapped.

Ten years after Cronulla frightened and angry non-Muslims will rally at Cronulla to “celebrate” what was in truth then not even a Phyrric victory. They will be protected and deterred by a heavy police presence, now steered by people who have studied the mistakes of the past, and the somewhat limited successes (such as the prevention of the attack on the US Consulate through Hyde Park in 2012).

Cronulla has taught us that sustained engagement, active and respectful listening, and creative involvement…remains crucial to building the trust that necessarily underpins the social capital of a cohesive society.

State politicians in NSW will be better guided by a major strategy of community engagement and social cohesion, and few if any will be allowed by their leaders and advisers to erupt into the demagoguery and rhetoric of 2005. Federal Liberal politicians, with no such strategy and an emotional imperative that seems to demand they call out to the most fearful and least rational parts of the community, will probably do so again as they have done in recent days.

Australians have moved a few steps beyond the aged supporters of 18th century France’s Ancien Regime, which had learned or forgotten nothing. Cronulla has taught us that sustained engagement, active and respectful listening, and creative involvement, enabling people to put down a stake and a place in the complex web of reciprocal social relations, remains crucial to building the trust that necessarily underpins the social capital of a cohesive society. Unfortunately those who do not want to see that trust realised are all too eager to find every opportunity to let the conflict rip.