Many Australians, especially those under 40, are struggling to search for a new national identity. They may not realise it, but in the face of decades of multiculturalism we have lost much of our ‘British’ heritage, now interwoven within a variety of races and cultures. Whilst this has brought many advantages for Australia, the question arises ‘who are we now’?
What is Australia, and what does it mean to be an Australian in 2021? It seems that pictures of old Aborigines standing on one leg, and boomerangs made in China just don’t cut it any more as an Australian identity. Neither does the ‘bronzed ANZAC’ of Gallipoli fame mean much to many new Australians who cannot identify with that distant period in our history. We have moved on. Ending in the 1970’s, the White Australia Policy nevertheless gave us cohesion and a proud sense of belonging to an albeit diminishing British Empire – a mutual mindset of who we were as a people, and as a nation. However, over the last 60 years that has been in terminal decline and all but lost; Australia’s new multiculturalism has sealed its fate.
There is now a thirst for something more, especially amongst the young. It appears the understandable lack of any homogeneity between the vast array of Australian ethnicities and cultures means they seek a more inclusive future by identifying with this country’s ancient past. That’s fine, but do we really need to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Do we need to toss aside our British heritage under the weight of multiculturalism? It appears so. Indeed, to be of British heritage, and an older white male at that, is becoming increasingly unpopular.
In our struggle for a new identity to clarify who we are, both to ourselves and to the wider world, our search for meaning appears to be a retreat to our earliest origins, to create a new Aboriginal overlay to everything. As a result we now give serious credence to creation myths and legends that are somehow seen as significant to our heritage and culture. Whereas previously they were merely of curious interest with no literal or scientific meaning, they are now revered as our unique collective ‘creation story’ which we are all supposed to believe in and share, and which increasingly receive legislative protection.
That’s what the ABC, SBS and NITV are clearly trying to create – a new ‘Aboriginal’ identity for all Australians; to create a new place for us in the world, and forcing it upon all Australians whether we like it or not. This media-driven reformation makes us all identify, if not as Aborigines ourselves, but for, and with Aborigines, as a unified ‘Aboriginal’ nation. Meanwhile, attempts to wipe away all vestiges of our once proud British ‘colonial’ past now divide the nation as activists and the media attempt to remake us all into their idea of what our new image and identity should be. The new term is to be an ‘ally’ of Aboriginal people. And if you’re lucky enough to be a middle-class urban ‘first Australian’ then you’re in pole position to take advantage of the new largess. Never has there been a better time to be an Aborigine.
In this new post-modern era, substantive history is ignored and revised, objective truth doesn’t matter because your truth is not my subjective or preferred truth, facts are juxtaposed against alternate facts, and objective analysis is of no consequence because it’s only your opinion. Only propaganda, emotions and the moral high ground matter in this battle for the remaking of Australia. The harsh reality of Aboriginal Paleolithic existence in pre-European Australia must be suppressed and re-written, with fantasy peddled as fact, like Bruce Pascoe’s prosaic yet entirely erroneous claims that Aborigines lived in a settled organised agrarian ‘civilisation’ prior to the arrival of the British. These falsehoods are peddled to the unwary masses and proudly supported by ‘your ABC’, all in the name of inventing a new identity for a nation that has lost its way.
How are we to understand this? Purloining phrases like ‘First Nations’ from the Canadians, because in reality Australia never had any Aboriginal ‘nations’, and appropriating the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogans and campaigns from America that do not apply to Australia because we never had imported black slaves from Africa, give the lie to these campaigns. And yet this overseas terminology is (ironically) being culturally appropriated by those who seek to strengthen their very weak case, erroneously applying it to our Aboriginal past.
It is entirely understandable that the early settlers of the 1850’s to 1890’s thought that these poor unfortunates, these literally Stone Age peoples and their base culture, would naturally and inevitably die out – a distant anachronism to the modern world, and many Aborigines clearly felt the same way too, that they as a people were doomed, destined to simply fade away. It didn’t happen. Broome notes that in Victoria the 1877 census counted 1,067 Aboriginal people (being 774 full-descent and 293 mixed-descent). By 1901 there were 652 Aborigines left; by 1927 only 514, yet by the early 1950’s there were about 1,300 Aborigines now remaining in Victoria.1 Indeed, in 1932 the Aborigines Board reported that “while the ‘full bloods’ were declining, the ‘half castes’ were maintaining their numbers.”2 In fact, the numbers of mixed-descent Aborigines was increasing. As of the 2016 Census, there were an astonishing 47,788 Victorians (.08% of the population) who now identify as being of Aboriginal descent.3
The resurgence of 46,500 Victorian Aborigines in the intervening 65 years, virtually all of whom are now of mixed-descent, has been nothing short of remarkable, greatly accelerating from the 1980’s with the acceptance of the tripartite definition of who is an Aborigine.[1]* During that same period of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, immigration and Aboriginal growth and empowerment have neatly converged and coalesced with the search for a new Australian identity.
Further, early Australia’s education of Aborigines proved to be a two-edged sword. Whilst Aboriginal education was seen as vitally important to bringing Aborigines into the modern era, such education nevertheless brought new problems. The Aborigines Board noted in 1902 that “it is a much more difficult matter to deal with twenty educated blacks than four times that number of the original and totally uneducated people.”4 Aboriginal people have had children with European settlers and become educated and organised, with mixed-descent Aborigines aided by their white allies proving to be a formidable force in modern times. The rise in numbers and the activist nature of some Aborigines and their non-Aboriginal supporters has combined with post-modern Marxist education, immigration saturation and a resultant Australian search for new meaning and identity.
Australia’s newly empowered middle-class mixed-descent Aborigines have spawned a multi-million dollar industry to ‘take back their country’. Having become increasingly educated and finding wide support within educational institutions, Government and the bureaucracy, they now want ‘their’ country back. ‘Always Was – Always Will Be’, ‘Aboriginal Sovereignty – Never Ceded’, and ‘Pay The Rent’, all heavily promoted by the ABC, SBS and NITV, and eagerly snapped up, swallowed and supported by many gullible and naive people, are clear indicators as to where this is heading. And State Government’s across the country are falling all over themselves to bring it about, most notably in Victoria.
In many ways, Aborigines have now become a pawn in a much larger game of power and control of which many are not even aware. Promoted by clearly socialist interests with a divisive anti-capitalist, anti-government, anti-white, anti-European agenda, guilt-ridden non-Aboriginal apologists are happily acquiescing to their demands, no matter how ludicrous or unreasonable. Unfortunately, over the last three decades most young Australians have been spoon-fed the ‘invasion-colonisation’ and ‘frontier wars-genocide’ mantra from primary school through to university. Is it any wonder why we are at this crisis point today; education is a powerful thing, and whoever controls education controls the future.
So how are we to understand the annual Australia Day fracas, which seems to be getting worse every year? We are in the midst of a clash of the old and the new, of the informed and the ignorant. One “respected Taungurung Elder” is quoted as saying “Captain James Cook took our people and slaughtered them. He was not a good person.”5 The truth is that Cook slaughtered no-one, was indeed a remarkably good person and was himself killed by natives nine years before the First Fleet even arrived in Australia. What are we to say in the face of such blatant falsehood and ignorance? Yet this is what is being taught to the young and believed by many, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike. How can this happen?
Australia’s search for a new ‘post-British’ identity is laudable; yes, it’s perhaps time that we moved forward, but at what cost? How do we build a common identity in which we all can share? Not by tearing down the past or reinventing it to be what it never was in an attempt to justify the future. We cannot become unified by handing over vast tracts of public land and assets to small groups of select people to be administered by newly formed and taxpayer funded Aboriginal quangos. Nor can we be unified by giving that same group of people, who are in reality just like the rest of us, special rights and access to land and resources that are denied to the rest of the population. These are recipes for divisive resentment for decades to come.
Whilst such new developments seemed widely lauded by many at the moment, all that can be said is ‘be careful what you wish for’. The ABC, SBS and NITV sloganeering is not for nothing. We are on track to eventually see the whole country handed back to the 3% of people who identify as Aboriginal, and then yes, the remaining 97%, will all be literally ‘paying the rent’. We are yet to see how this will all play out once such developments become more widespread, more widely understood and more firmly entrenched.
So who are we really as egalitarian Australians? Given that most of us are indigenous to this country – we were born here and have nowhere else to go – are we all one people? Or will there now be two tiers of Australians – those with a slim genetic connection to ancient Aborigines, and then the rest of us?
References:
1 Broome, R. (2005). Aboriginal Victorians. Crows Nest. NSW: Allen and Unwin. Pp 147, 194, 209 & 285.
2 ibid. p 216.
4 op cit. p 195.
5 Marysville Triangle News (2021) Vol. 47. No. 3. (29 January). Marysville, Vic: Lions Club of Marysville. p 2.
Dr Barton has been following and working in the area of Aboriginal affairs for the last five decades.
[1]* In the mid-1980’s a new three-part or tripartite definition of ‘Aborigine’ was introduced, being descent, self-identification and community recognition. Although now widely accepted, this new definition is problematic:
- Descent – no matter how small or remote a portion of biological descent, a person can still identify exclusively as an Aborigine with that descent whilst diminishing all other elements of that persons’ heritage. This link of course weakens as generations pass, especially given that 85% of Aborigines are now in a relationship with a non-Aborigine.
- Self-identification – if a person believes themselves to be an Aborigine, that person is an Aborigine. It is entirely a subjective measure.
- Community recognition – again a subjective measure based upon one’s relationship with others already within the accepted Aboriginal fraternity.
