… for in such business
Action
is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant
More learned than the ears…
Coriolanus Act three, Scene two
As a young man
working in the bush, whenever I engaged in conversation with older Aboriginal
men regarding ‘The Law’ or ceremony, there would almost always be a statement to
the effect that if I could go to a particular site, or was to be present at a ceremony,
or could see a particular object, I would immediately understand its immense
importance and significance. In other words, the significance and importance of
Aboriginal Law would be made manifest. It was an unquestionable truth
that stood without the need for further explanation.
I respected
these statements and had no doubt that they were made sincerely and believed
unquestionably by those making them. Like my mother’s adherence to her Catholic
faith. In neither case did I see a
reason or purpose in seeking to dissuade the individuals from their beliefs, a
belief that I didn’t entirely understand in the case of Aboriginal customary
law or share in the case of my mother’s faith. It was enough to know that these
beliefs were important for the individuals that held them.
In his recent
commentary titled The rejection of history in The Saturday Paper,
Stan Grant writes (link here) perceptively on the issue of truth
telling and the limitations that undermine its significance and perhaps utility
as an element in the widely accepted and articulated Indigenous aspirational
program or political agenda. The Uluru Statement from the Heart (link here) and the Yoorrook Justice Commission
(link
here) are just two of
the most high-profile examples of this aspirational program.
I previously
published two posts about Yoorrook (link here and link here) that deal with the issues of how to
progress Indigenous aspirations within a potentially hostile mainstream
community. I recommend interested readers re-read them. Neither post argued for
greater reliance on truth telling. Not
because I don’t accept the existence of truth (though I do think that finding
the truth is invariably more difficult and complex than most of us understand).
My reasons had more to do with an assessment that the wider community do not
find these processes manifestly persuasive. What might be manifestly
true for Indigenous Australians is often for non-Indigenous Australians not
only misunderstood, or beyond comprehension, but often — unthinkingly and
disrespectfully — summarily rejected.
These
ruminations were brought to the surface when I read Stan Grant’s essay.
The extracts from
Stan Grant’s commentary below give a sense of his argument, though I don’t
claim to have encompassed its full sophistication. He stated, inter alia:
Truth-telling
has become a mantra. I wonder if we understand what we mean by truth. For
Indigenous people, history has become a source of justice and healing. I have
lost count of the number of times I have heard people say that when we learn
the truth, we will walk together….
What
happens, though, when your history is here? Indigenous people breathe history
every day. It is in our land. It haunts us…. Indigenous people are spooked by a
history without end and a future out of reach….
History
in the wrong hands, becomes ressentiment….
Historical
resentment poisons the well of human goodness. It is the source of so many of
our conflicts today. It powers the resurgence of political populism. It
energises the worst of the political left and right.
We
need to sever identity and politics from the past. Truth-telling has been a
necessary corrective to the Great Australian Silence, yet it has its limit. For
too long Indigenous people were written out of our national narrative. Not
today. The books have been written, the films made, to some degree the
curriculums changed. We may plead indifference but we surely cannot plead
ignorance.
I recommend
reading Stan Grant’s short yet intellectually elaborate commentary in full. I
was struck particularly by his use of the concept of ressentiment (link here).
It strikes me that it serves as one (but not necessarily the only) explanator
both of the vitriol that exudes from so much populist political ideology, but
importantly, as an under-rated factor in explaining why First Nations and their
leadership should reconsider their current approach to pursuing their
high-level policy aspirations (while noting of course that the First Nations’
leadership is a heterogeneous and ill-defined notion and their policy
prescriptions are diverse and variable in their framing and their targeting). Invariably, these policy aspirations involve
the pursuit of institutional reforms whose implementation relies on persuading
the executive arm of government to both change their current policy
trajectories, and therefore to intentionally disadvantage some interests who
benefit from the status quo.
A widely
under-rated element of modern Australian political life is the extent to which
governments are beholden to or captured by powerful interests (link here). In these circumstances, advocacy
strategies which merely rely on pointing out ‘the truth’ (however we define
that), or which implicitly assume policy reform will emerge from some
mysterious sense of beneficence on the part of governments will inevitably
fail. The more significant the reform, the more likely that governments will
find ways to evade investing the political, policy and financial resources
necessary to develop a solution. As prima facie evidence, I might mention the long-standing
and ongoing national crises in Indigenous incarceration, child removal
policies, and domestic violence, the endemic failure of school education in
remote Australia, the housing crisis across remote Australia, and the inability
of governments to deal with the consequences of intergenerational trauma,
especially drug and alcohol abuse (to name those issues that came to mind
without any deep thought).
My suggestion
that First Nations and their leaders should reconsider their current strategies
is not intended to exonerate governments and the wider Australian electorate
but reflects what I would term a realist approach to public policy. We can
assess the ethical and moral calibre of governments, politicians and indeed the
current state of a particular policy domain, but policy reform will not emerge from
beneficence, but from political elites and governments responding to
substantive electoral pressure. For First Nations interests, this points to the
necessity of building the civic institutions necessary for Indigenous unity and
resilience; and developing high level political strategies and alliances that
will deliver institutional reforms. In turn, this means in most circumstances resisting
the temptation to focus on symbolism over substance. Truth telling into a void,
where no-one is listening, helps no-one.
In seeking to
understand the role of truth in public life, it is worth contemplating Hieronymus
Bosch’s painting The Conjuror (link here and link here). It portrays
a trickster holding the attention of a group of observers as he engages a person
watching intently in a sleight of hand trick related to a shining ball held between
the trickster’s thumb and forefinger. Meanwhile, an accomplice, eyes skyward, is
surreptitiously lifting the dupe’s purse. Just as there are multiple
interpretations of its meaning (link here), there are always multiple
interpretations of policy, its intentions, its meaning, and its effects.
The Conjuror provides insights (if not lessons) for
governments, for First Nations interests and advocates, and for we mere
observers of the policy process. On which side of the table are they, (or we), standing?
Are they (or we) setting the agenda or being manipulated? Are what we see, or know, manifestly true? To
my mind, one lesson to draw from The Conjuror is that the reality is
that too often we, as well as governments, the electorate at large, and First
Nations interests, focus on the ephemeral while the issues that matter occur
out of our line of sight and are much more consequential. It seems to me that this
is a truth worth contemplating and telling.
28 July 2026
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