The historian as prophet and redeemer. (History).(treatment of the Australian aborigines)

THE CENTENARY of Federation in 2001 was ostensibly to celebrate one hundred years of independent, democratic Australian government. Given the very few other societies that have recorded such an achievement, the event should have been an occasion to focus on national virtues. Instead, many of the centenary commemorations, especially those addressed by the then Australian Governor-General, focused on a great flaw that allegedly lay at the heart of the nation. In speech after speech he gave around the country, Sir William Deane turned the celebrations into an opportunity to lecture Australians about their failings over one issue. One hundred years of stable and successful government meant little compared to the treatment meted out to the Aborigines. The nation would remain diminished, he said, until it came to terms with this fundamental defect at its core. He told one audience:

 
   that past oppression and injustice remain part of the very fabric of our 
   country. They reach from the past to blight the present and to demand 
   redress and reconciliation in the future. 

Deane was anything but a lone voice. A number of the cultural expressions produced for the centenary took up the same theme and candidly identified where the fault lay: Australia had committed genocide against the Aborigines. The accusation was not simply of action by default, such as inadvertently introducing diseases that killed people who had no immunity to them. Australia was allegedly guilty of conscious, wilful genocide resembling the kind the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews.

When the National Museum of Australia was opened in 2001, it commemorated the genocide thesis in the very design of the building itself. Architect Howard Raggart borrowed its central construction--shaped as a lightning bolt striking the land--from the Jewish Museum in Berlin, signifying that the Aborigines had suffered the equivalent of the Holocaust. The museum's director, Dawn Casey, described the opening of the institution as "a birthday gift to Australia", but to symbolically accuse the nation of the most terrible crime possible was a strange present to offer. Yet, apart from a handful of conservative objectors, the country accepted it without demur.

The reason was that the Governor-General, the architect and others who expressed similar sentiments were all reflecting the consensus reached by the historians of Aboriginal Australia over the previous thirty years. This is a consensus that has been largely accepted by the country's intellectual and political classes. It commands an overwhelming majority of support in the media, the arts, the universities and the public service. The historians have created a picture of widespread mass killings on the frontiers of the pastoral industry that not only went unpunished but had covert government support. In short, in the founding of Australia, it was not only the convicts who were the criminals but the colonial authorities as well.

In other words, the debate over Aboriginal history goes far beyond its ostensible subject: it is about the character of the nation and, ultimately, the calibre of the civilisation Britain brought to these shores in 1788.

In 2000 I published a critique of the orthodox thesis in Quadrant, arguing that it did not have the empirical foundations its authors claimed. Rather than being common, massacres of Aborigines were rare and isolated events. Some well-known apparent atrocities had been exaggerated out of all proportion and some were entirely fictitious. The overall death tolls cited by the most reputable historians were no more than guess work and fabrications.