What does it mean to be Australian?
I was born on this land and that ties me to it. By the Preamble to the Constitution, this makes me an heir to the people of the Commonwealth.
"The Commonwealth" means exactly that, the common benefit or interest for all people tied to this land. This is now inclusive of the original inhabitants and the current ones. For me, actions of good by individuals are only what contribute to the highest benefits for all people.
That means the opposite is also true. So here I want to bring up some sober reflections on what was not so good, as a means to learn more about what being of the people of the Commonwealth is and what our responsibility is as part of that vision.
A "moral" superiority to justify violence
Before the first fleet came to these shores there where men, women and children living by the land for hundreds of thousands of years. We call them Aboriginal but they are more accurately the original inhabitants of this place. By that scale of time, everything changed dramatically, by comparison it was like just a spark in time.
As a result of that spark, hundreds of languages are now lost, millions of stories lost, whole cultural histories desimated and let's not forget the thousands and thousands of people who died and brutally too. Perhaps it was more like a fire.
When other people came from Europe to settle here, it's clear many felt their culture was superior. It's not clear to me that the Aboriginal people living then felt their culture was superior but I imagine many would have.
If you saw people all coated up and strapped together upon layers and layers of 18th century English attire, alkwardly walking around the Australian bush, sweating profusely in the melting sun, waving and cursing at the flys attracted to the stench of body odour eminating from them, you might think something was terribly wrong with the culture. And you'd be right, something was very wrong with that culture.
They kept convicts like slaves, who they whipped regularly to keep in line. Maybe it was to get them to work harder on building all those enormous stone structures, including the prisons they'd soon be locked up in. They also went on murderous sprees, killing off Aboriginal people, seen likely as expendable nuisances standing in the way of claiming the land, which should have been put to better "use" as farms. It's not as if the Aboriginal people where using it "properly" anyway, or so they thought.
But what else did the new colonialists observe of the Aboriginal people?
I visited the lighthouse at Palm Beach in Sydney a couple of weeks back. Near that lighthouse there's a museum where I came across some dusty posters with a little history on the Aboriginal people who lived in the area at the time. What I read shocked me to an extent, it described how most of those people had a finger and tooth missing that was removed as part of their cultural practice.
You can imagine how that might have been done and with the kind of blunt instruments they had at their disposal, it could not have been good. Its fair to say that this experience on children and adults was traumatic. Its also fair to say that if you witnessed this today, you might also be led to believe your culture was superior too.
In this context, it's worth acknowledging this wasn't an isolated practice but that there's evidence the culture was generally brutal as well. Perhaps as brutal as the European culture at the time, who can say but here's more on this topic that doesn't exactly describe an idealised society, much the opposite: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/bennelong-papers/2013/05/the-long-bloody-history-of-aboriginal-violence/
So I don't know which was more brutal.
I feel to know what means to be Australian, it's helpful to view those people, 200 and more so years ago, as part of a collective condition - a human condition that includes both Aboriginal and European cultures as well as all others. All such cultures aren't simply good in the same way ours is not today - much was also bad and still is, even though we always have the opportunity to change it for the better. At least, that's what I'm led to believe.
However, for that to happen, we have to live up to our responsibility to look frankly at our own history. That means making the effort not to sugar coat any of it to fit a convenient kind of ideology or group-think that might get us extra browny points of so called virtue.
Its our responsibility to listen, learn and be humble - to notice when we might be judging people or cultures based on our own feelings of superiority or our special brand of wishful thinking that tells us: "if only I could have had the power back then, I know I would have done it all much better!" Sure...
For me, that kind of feeling isn't dissimilar to what people with colonialist mindsets had when they justified the killings of Aboriginal people. It's not either too dissimilar to those missionaries taking a stand for "Christ" observing the brutally in one culture and but utterly blind to their own, ignorantly believing they had "righteous" cause to remove, in fact steal, thousands of Aboriginal children from their rightful parents.
Australia no doubt has a history of injustice. As an outcome, there are many people taking up the banners of justice in pursuit of making things right again. But for me, I have as suspicion that can't lead to anything remotely productive because of what might lie beneath the surface.
So, what lies beneath?
Its easy to identify with injustice as a whole and one that's not our own. The alternative is much harder, that is to experience the injustice that we feel in ourselves. It's easy to rally around the results of injustice in Australia's history and that of the world at large, to make our dissatisfaction known and gain moral superiority in return.
It's much harder to look at our own motivations critically. It's much harder to take a few steps back regularly and ask ourselves why we are we invested and what is our payoff we seek?
That is not to claim everyone does "good" for a payoff, but it's safe to assume many do. It's a fact that much of our motivations aren't that obvious to even ourselves. So, we certainly require more cultural introspection and reflection, if we really seek to change things for the better that is.
By taking a stand and fighting back for others, I can jump over my real sense of powerlessness, which I couldn't simply do before. When I was most powerless, how could I have defended myself as a child, the most vulnerable part of my life (so far)?
I, like many of us was open and abundantly giving of whatever small offerings I had, not much by scale, but everything for me. What I'm talking about is that natural love all children can bring with ease to those who should have accepted it with open arms, nurtured it and protected it... but often didn't.
That happens to most of us, if not all of us, by various degrees and in a variety of ways. And that's an injustice that might never be redeemed. So, it's easy to overlook all that in ourselves and see the injustice outside of us instead. We can then align with those injustices, make them our own fights and our own path to deliverance.
But there is no deliverance on that path - just blindness and suffering.
The way I see it is there are no simple good and bad collectives of people. The people of Australia from today and those back hundreds of thousands of years ago, aren't simply bad or good either.
The main reason is because we are not arbitrarily defined groups of people, we are more like unique souls, individual beings with particular and specific passions, longings, dreams and purposes etc. These are only ours alone.
Its undeniable that some people make mistakes, others are are purposely malevolent, and others are ignorant. But many strive for what is good and all those options exist across all of our cultures and it seems across all time.
If Australian people strive for what's really good as much as possible, then I'm proud to say I'm one of them. If they don't, then I have to contend with isolation and loss of social acceptance, to stay true to my values, my purpose, my soul.
Black and white reflections or worse, revisions of history based on this do no good at all.
In some sense the tragedies of our past are a reflection of this overall human condition. So taking sides, no matter what that side is, is the same as avoiding our side of the fence - our own personal and spiritual journey to grow up as individuals.
That's because choosing the opposite just adds to this overall suffering. The real solution to injustice, is humility and not anger at any one arbitrarily defined group - be that culture, nationality, race or political ideology etc. etc. These are often used as purposely abstracted groupings to take us away from real individuals, there real lives, emotions and experiences.
So, instead of getting the affairs of others sorted, it's better we take care of our own affairs and do so right now - our relationships, our children ourselves. The only reasonable way to do so properly is to squarely confront our inner resentments, especially those we easily cast out on some abstract category of people, instead start dealing with our own stuff.
In the end, there is nothing but real individuals here. So, let's be braver, kinder, more mature, truthful and so better individuals on Australia Day (and every other day). At least, that's how I'll be celebrating.
This is an interesting and balanced perspective. I get what you're saying about settlers and not judging them. I think for me the issue lies in yhe current prevalence of their continued views toward aboriginal people. Every time I hear racism I feel so disheartened and my thought is always "haven't we done enough damage?". Its time to stop. The aboriginal culture has many wonderful and fascinating ways. We could learn a great deal about kinship, spirituality, community and environmental management if we would just stop with the continued attitude of superiority. Hats off to you for broaching this topic.
Agree! One of the most interesting things I've learnt about their culture was the purposeful abomination attitude to writing. This was so because the stories and guidance was shared based on merit of whomever was to receive it, so the culture as a whole purposely did not develop a system of writing. Instead a system of stories, symbols and imagery to be understood at many levels and so it was more secure. This is the same as the symbolic language of Western traditions too, it meant to be read at many levels. So for Aboriginal people, before knowledge could be passed down, people had to be assessed by someone who knew, writings could be potentially be shared by anyone and that would potentially be left with people not ready. It was irresponsible then to write because knowledge given to those not ready was considered a danger to their tradition.
That is fascinating. I did not know that the lack of written history was intentional in this way.
This is a really interesting perspective @alkhemst. We never really look back and reflect on what previous cultures might have thought was best and justified at the time. I certainly had no idea about the Aboriginal people being quite violent back then and how that played into the overall amount of violence that was taking place at that time. I think you make a good point also that it is easy for people to judge others and think "if only we'd done this" without thinking about the impacts that their current actions/behaviours are having, and consequently, how that would be judged. This was a great post. Thanks for writing it.
Yeah I didn't either, they're not really popular facts today. Seems to me that every culture is full of people who do wrong, so I don't know if it's culture or more so our general condition as humans that we have the possibility to do bad things. Great thing is we can choose not to, so I reckon that's more practical to focus on than debating the merits of one culture over another.
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STOPIronically I want to say good post, but there's not much good on the way we continue to tackle conflicts with embedded fight or flight resolution tactics. We're lacking people skills whereby we can work together to come to a mutual agreement. You see it everyday on the roads, people are just getting more and more sick of each other. Hopefully in my lifetime, we'll see more love and less war.
Totally and what ever happened to the real anti war protests? People look more worried about protesting against Australia Day than war that's been ramping up and ongoing especially since Sept 11 2001. At least that's seems to be more a an issue in the public sphere.
Very good article, well done!!
Thanks!
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