Why We Need Black Armbands

Transcription

1 Why We Need Black Armbands Adi Wimmer I profoundly reject the black armband view of Australian history. I believe the balance sheet of Australian history is a very generous and benign one. I believe that, like any other nation, we have black marks upon our history but amongst the nations of the world we have a remarkably positive history. I think there is a yearning in the Australian community right across the political divide for its leader to enunciate more pride and sense of achievement in what has gone before us. I think we have been too apologetic about our history in the past. I believe it is tremendously important, particularly as we approach the centenary of the Federation of Australia, that the Australian achievement has been a heroic one, a courageous one and a humanitarian one. (John Howard) 1 It was the historian Geoffrey Blainey that coined the term Black Armband view of History as part of his 1993 Latham Lecture. 2 The term rapidly gained a public profile thereafter, particularly through John Howard s adoption of the phrase in his attacks on Paul Keating and Manning Clarke. For the last five years there has been a lively public black armband debate, with a very clear axis between Howard and Blainey. There are related derogatory terms that both Blainey and Howard have used, such as guilt industry or purveyors of guilt It is regrettable, I think, that as the debate proceeded, Blainey became more strident and intolerant of the new historicism, not less. In April 1997, shortly after the Wik judgement was passed down, he published an article in the Bulletin that roundly condemned all black armband historians as ideologically motivated and divisive. He also attacked the Native Title itself and defamed it as a product of black armband ideology. The black armband view, he argued, while pretending to be anti-racist, is intent on permanently dividing Australians on the basis of race. His closing remarks were as follows: So long as the black armband view is influential so long as it insists that the treatment of Aborigines was so disgraceful that no reparations might be adequate, that no reconciliation can be certain of success, and that black racism is justified then Australia s future as a legitimate nation is in doubt. 3 Regrettably, in the discourse following Blainey s first attack, those who were problack-armband were, from the start, defensive about the meanings invested in the symbol. Typical of that defensiveness was Henry Reynolds witty remark that the only alternative to the black-armband view of history was the white blindfold view of history. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has as yet presented a case for the positive aspects of past and present meanings of a black armband. For many centuries, Europeans have worn black dress, a black suit, or at the very least, a black armband to indicate a state of mourning. This was certainly part of the culture in which I grew up: if you were married and lost your partner, it was the custom to wear a black armband on your Sunday suit or dress for a year. This

2 Country armband would elicit sympathy and respect for the bearer, but it also denoted respect for the dead. The black armband mapped a personal history and guaranteed memory. The black armband has positive aspects for the living beyond its function of honouring the dead. The bereaved draw sustenance and strength from the support of the community, which is made aware of the mourner s plight by the black armband. Moreover, there is an inbuilt end to mourning, the idea being to provide a sufficient period of adjustment to the loss, and for the mourner to rebuild their lives in that sheltered time. One does not mourn indefinitely. In the region where I live (Southern Austria) tradition provides a one-year anniversary meeting that signifies the end of mourning. Exactly one year after the death of a beloved has occurred, Holy Mass in the morning is followed by a reunion of mourners in a restaurant, at the invitation of the bereaved. A hearty meal is consumed and drinking is not discouraged. It is also customary to remember the bereaved in funny tales and anecdotes. Mourning is thus officially ended and the congregation helps the bereaved to look ahead into the future. Sigmund Freud was cognizant of these practices, reflected as they are in his essay Über Trauer und Melancholie, where he prescribes three steps for the proper handling of loss: Erinnern, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten memory, repetition, and something that might loosely be translated as coming to terms. In the absence of these steps, so Freud argued, the mourner becomes struck with melancholia, mourning perverted into self-pity, which can turn into hatred and aggression. So Freud saw mourning as something positive and indeed necessary for the mental health of the individual. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, both philosophers and members of the renowned Frankfurt School, built on Freud when they developed their immensely influential (also widely denigrated) theory of Trauerarbeit, the labour of mourning. So rapid was the cold war reintegration of German people after the holocaust, the Mitscherlichs argued, that they were practically encouraged not to mourn the loss, both theirs and the Jewish community s. We know that, not least because of the Mitscherlichs, since the 1970s Germany has taken a great many positive steps in the direction of Trauerarbeit, and that these steps have drawn praise from the former victims as well as their descendants. Thus, mourning is psychotherapeutic, in both an individual and a collective sense. Mourning is a coming to terms with reality. It denotes the acceptance of a loss and provides a time in which to deliberate how to overcome that loss. Geoffrey Blainey in his 1993 Latham Lecture seems unaware of the positively connoted European tradition of mourning, which is curious for a historian. He is, rather, reacting against the political use of grief and mourning and identifying a new historical school, which he sees as hell-bent to rewrite Australian history. Indigenous Australians soon adopted the black armband for political purposes. The first time this happened seems to have been at the 1938 celebrations for the 150-year anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet. Members of the Aboriginal Progressive Association wore formal black dress when they met at Sydney Town Hall on January 26 to declare Australia Day a day of mourning. Similar public gestures were made in the post-war era. The bicentenary of Captain James Cook s landing in Botany Bay on April was declared a day of public mourning by the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait 2

3 Adi Wimmer Islanders. In preparation for the Bicentenary hoopla, Aboriginal organisations exhorted members and sympathisers to wear a black armband to indicate mourning for the tens of thousands of Indigenous Australians who lost their lives following the British invasion. Not even Blainey would dispute these historical facts: the British settlement of the continent brought with it tremendous suffering and loss for the Indigenous population. It seems churlish to me to question an Aboriginal right to mourn. We grant that right to many other victims, most notably, the Jewish peoples. Holocaust Day is now a standard feature in most American and British schools, it is respected in Germany, where the Federal Parliament commemorates it, and and I have not heard anyone in Germany, not even the most conservative politician, saying that such black armbandism is inappropriate. The bottom line is: Black armbands fulfil a natural moral function. Let me proceed now with the main section of Blainey s paper of I must quote it at some length: To some extent, my generation was reared on the Three Cheers view of history. This patriotic view of our past had a long run. It saw Australian history as largely a success. While the convict era was a source of shame or unease, nearly everything that came after was believed to be pretty good. There is a rival view, which I call the Black Armband view of history.... The Black Armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced. 4 Taken out of its historical context, this passage seems fairly inoffensive. Blainey is diagnosing a paradigm shift in his field the 1980s saw such paradigm shifts or, as some call it, paradigm wars, all over the humanities. But notice that Blainey is positioning himself to the middle of these two camps, when in reality he had moved to the political Right long before. Camouflaging his entrenched conservative position, Blainey calls his views of Australian history balanced. The title of his Latham lecture as published in Quadrant was The balance sheet of Australian history. 5 Similarly, John Howard has repeatedly spoken of the balanced view of Australian history, alleging that liberal historians were distorting Australian history, presenting the public with an imbalanced account. Well may I ask, was the historiography up to about 1970 truly balanced? Did Australians know en masse about the stolen generation? Did they know about the truly horrific crimes committed by the Queensland Native Police? Did they know about the endemic sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women, the slavery-like conditions on the missions, the deliberate eradication of Aboriginal languages and cultures? Did they know about the considerable contributions that Aboriginal labour made to the nineteenth-century Australian economy? The answer is always the same. Reminding ourselves of these largely denied chapters thereby means taking a more balanced view of a hitherto unbalanced history. Another use of black armbands thus connotes exactly that which Blainey et al claim to be in favour of: a balanced account of Australian history. Henry Reynolds has asked a central question on the issue of Reconciliation: How shall Australians who wish to belong to their land deal with the great burden of Aboriginal pain? His answer is too complex to be encapsulated in a simple 3

4 Country sentence, but it seems safe to say that in his view, re-interpreting Australia s collective history is the most important component. Creating plural histories is not as challenging as creating a more truthful history. A history in which the ideological and moral frames of the nations are re-assessed is needed. By frames I mean a master narrative already in place before History is written, a master narrative that will only accommodate a certain type of subsidiary narrative, rejecting all those that don t fit. Easier said than done, because most of us have internalised a set of assumptions about our history so strong that to be persuaded it could be otherwise, that it could contain murky passages, takes great intellectual strength as well as our willing suspension of disbelief. Paul Keating managed such a feat in his Redfern Park speech of 1992: We took the traditional lands he said, we brought the diseases, we committed the murders, we took the children from their mothers it was our ignorance and our prejudice. Keating did not say Australians or our forefathers committed these acts. He used the personal pronoun we throughout, thereby emphasising a collective and present-day responsibility. That is what I call reconciliation: the acceptance of guilt, the admission of moral loss. The same moral strength can be found in the words of Justices Deane and Gaudron, who in their 1992 ruling on Mabo referred to a national legacy of unutterable shame. Reconciliation can show itself in many ways, including new laws, restitution payments, overturned court verdicts and public apologies to victims. For the reader or discourse analyst, however, the most interesting aspects are the many ways in which a society changes discursive patterns on history and its protagonists; how the margins are brought into the centre and the centre disappears. To acknowledge such shifts or, to put it more succinctly, to acknowledge a history of guilt, is a mark of the maturity of a nation. Another such mark is the degree to which the former subalterns are invited to speak, to contribute to the reshaping of national myths and histories. Things are very much in flux in Australia. Progress has been made in some areas and setbacks have occurred in others. An interim report is all that I can offer. May it shed some light on what occurs, often hidden from the public view, in other nations. We would do well to take a dose of the grief and suffering of history s victims to overcome our inbuilt resistance against a revision of our powerful master narrative. And donning a black armband is surely not a bad start on that journey. Notes 1 John Howard, 30 Oct Geoffrey Blainey, Drawing up a balance sheet of our history, Quadrant, July-August 1993, pp Geoffrey Blainey, The Bulletin, April 1997, p ibid, p 8. 5 Blainey, Drawing up a balance sheet of our history, op cit. Adi Wimmer teaches at the Department of English of the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. He is the editor of Australian Nationalism Reconsidered: Maintaining a Monocultural Tradition in a Multicultural Society (1999) and coeditor (with R Bader and B Braun) of Vergangenheit und Zukunft in Australia/ Australia s Legacy of the Past (2002), two volumes of critical essays; and he was 4

5 guest editor of the Film volume of Antipodes 2/1999. His own work includes Strangers at Home and Abroad: Narratives of Austrian Jews Who escaped Hitler (McFarland 1999), studies of Australian films and theatre, Christina Stead, and Elizabeth Jolley.