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Quarterly Essay #69

Moment of Truth: History and Australia's Future

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Australia is on the brink of momentous change, but only if its citizens and politicians can come to new terms with the past.In this inspiring essay, Mark McKenna considers the role of history in making and unmaking the nation. From Captain Cook to the frontier wars, from Australia Day to the Uluru Statement, we are seeing fresh debates and recognitions. McKenna argues that it is time to move beyond the history wars, and that truth-telling about the past will be liberating and healing.This is an urgent essay about a nation’s moment of truth.‘The time for pitting white against black, shame against pride, and one people’s history against another’s, has had its day. After nearly fifty years of deeply divisive debates over the country’s foundation and its legacy for Indigenous Australians, Australia stands at a crossroads – we either make the commonwealth stronger and more complete through an honest reckoning with the past, or we unmake the nation by clinging to triumphant narratives in which the violence inherent in the nation’s foundation is trivialised.’ —Mark McKenna, Moment of Truth

191 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 19, 2018

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Mark McKenna

12 books24 followers

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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
Profile Image for Paul Lockman.
247 reviews6 followers
June 24, 2018
In this essay, Mark McKenna, professor of history at the University of Sydney, reflects on where Australia is at with its recognition and treatment of Indigenous Australians, the First Nations, the original inhabitants of our country. I was drawn to this publication because I truly believe that this is Australia’s big issue, our moment of truth as the title suggests, the one we have to reconcile and resolve before we can be comfortable with our past and who we are as a nation.

In May 2017 the Uluru Statement from the Heart was delivered. Aboriginal elders, academics, activists and others had arrived at a historic national consensus on what they want. The Statement called for a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution and also a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between Governments and First Nations and truth-telling about Aboriginal history, especially truth-telling about the massacres and wars that took place. Makaratta is a Yolngu word for ‘healing’ or ‘coming together after a struggle’.

“It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination……In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.”

Mark McKenna makes an important point I wasn’t aware of: that Australia is unique among British colonies in being colonised without a treaty. The continent was conquered without negotiation with its Indigenous people and was based on the premise that the Aborigines had no legitimate claim on the land. Unlike New Zealand or Canada, Australia has no story to fall back on when explaining how settlers took possession of the land, taking it without compensation and leaving following generations without a redeeming narrative.

Overall I enjoyed reading this essay but I have a few comments and reservations:

Overly optimistic? The author feels that we are on the verge of something historic and significant happening. I am not sure I share his optimism and I don’t think he convincingly tells us why we are near a breakthrough. If there is one thing I have learned and been a bit surprised about over the years, it’s how inherently conservative and averse to change most Australians are. Let’s not forget also, that our country has a very racist history. This is a country that did not even count Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in its census until 1967. A country that up until the early 1970s, through various policies collectively known as the White Australia policy, sought to exclude non-European people from emigrating to the country. Sure we’re starting to see things happen. The Uluru Statement was significant in getting Aboriginal people from all backgrounds and walks of life to agree on what they want. Also, some local councils are questioning whether it’s appropriate to celebrate Australia Day on 26th January, when many First Nations people see it as commemorating the European invasion of the country. I am optimistic that change will happen but I just don’t think we’re on the verge of it happening anytime soon. Certainly not in my lifetime, maybe in a couple of generations.

Political impasse: the author lays the blame for inaction squarely on our politicians. The ruling Liberal party rejected the wishes expressed in the Uluru Statement outright and the main opposition party, Labour, said hey nice ideas let’s form (yet another) advisory body to work through the process. I would have liked more detailed discussion on the political stalemate. Is it a simple numbers game like many other issues? Is it the toxic state of politics in this country, the combative, us versus them mentality that seems to have dominated politics for most of the past 20 -25 years that’s the problem? If so, what can be done to deal with this or overcome this state of affairs? Are politicians really reflecting the views of the electorate? What do they find threatening about the needs and demands of the First Nations? Do we need more diversity in politics instead of the white, male Anglo background the vast majority come from?

Call to action? This essay doesn’t really outline what needs to happen and doesn’t give some practical tips and suggestions for ordinary Australians to get involved. What can you and I do about it? Do we lobby our local members of parliament? Do we start online petitions? What action needs to happen now? What’s next? He seems to be implying that it's just going to evolve and happen naturally.

Recent immigrants: I’d like to know more about what recent immigrants think and feel about the issue. Mark McKenna comes from an Anglo background, as I do, what about the 25% of Australian residents who were born overseas? What do they think? Are they too worried about upsetting the status quo to voice their thoughts, to be galvanised into action?

Preaching to the converted: essays like this are great for awareness raising but is it mainly people like myself, those who are on board and sympathetic to the views and demands of the First Nations, who will be reading it? Any publicity is better than none I suppose.
Profile Image for Loki.
1,465 reviews12 followers
April 28, 2018
A new Quarterly Essay is always an opportunity to do some deep thinking; this one, more than most. McKenna digs into the tangled claim and counterclaim of Australian history, managing to treat most of the participants with some sympathy, and making a very good case for adoption of the Uluru Statement and similar measures. A thought-provoking read, less a call to action than a call to responsibility.
Profile Image for Timothy Dymond.
179 reviews11 followers
April 4, 2018
‘Oh ye whites! … How much compensation have we had? How much of our land has been paid for? Not one iota. Again we state that we are the original owners of the country. In spite of force, prestige, or anything else you like, morally the land is ours’. So wrote Yorta Yorta activist William Cooper to Prime Minister Joseph Lyons in 1937, after Lyons not only refused his demand for Aboriginal people to have the power to ‘propose a member of Parliament’, but refused to even pass on Cooper’s petition to King George VI.

Mark McKenna tells this story in his Quarterly Essay to argue that the demand of the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ (which he reprints in full) for a ‘First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution’ is not new in Australia. The Uluru Statement itself is not even the most radical formulation of that demand. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s rejection of the Statement on the grounds that it was a bit of a surprise and terribly, terribly difficult is itself a denial of the history of contestation around what constitutes a First Nations Voice in Australia.

McKenna cut his historian’s teeth as a specialist in the history of Australian Republicanism. At the beginning his research journey he had assumed ‘that the whole question of a republic could be advanced through the traditional Anglo-Australian axis - breaking away from Britain and becoming fully independent with our own head of state - with little reference to indigenous Australia’. However he came to realise that ‘if we remove the sovereignty of the Crown, and reconstitute the Commonwealth as republic, then we must acknowledge “the first sovereign nations of the continent and its adjacent islands”.’ Recognition and reconciliation, he concluded, ‘in whatever form they take … must take place before the republic’. The ironies of the situation multiply at our republican PM’s expense.

As befits a historian, McKenna is most attracted to the aspect of the Uluru Statement that received the least attention compared to the First Nations Voice: the ‘Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history’. An Australian ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ would be a way for indigenous voices in Australian history, particularly our ‘history of massacres’, to be heard. These histories are not new: they have been told for generations in Aboriginal communities, and in recent decades there has been a great deal of scholarship. However McKenna points out that:

‘Our hierarchies of storytelling dictate what we can and can’t see. Documentary sources are accorded more authority and power. Indigenous testimony is more likely to be questioned and interrogated, its findings cast in doubt.’

A truth-telling commission is therefore crucial to ensuring that the massacre stories of the past (which are not really ‘past’ for Indigenous Australians) are heard by other Australians. Not because ‘History is … a trial of earlier generations, or of the present’. Rather ‘the past matters because we gives it life; because we seek to understand both its difference from the present and the traces of commonality that bind us to the lives of those who have gone before us’.

McKenna’s essay concludes perhaps on too cosy a note about Aboriginal people and the colonisers being ‘bound together’ by history. His points about truth-telling probably over-emphasise the restorative nature of knowing the past. However no other changes in Australia: republic, reconciliation or both, seem possible without some kind of confronting, truth-telling reckoning.
Profile Image for Jennifer.
479 reviews8 followers
June 14, 2018
Excellent essay full of so many pertinent observations I don’t know where to start. But I think the one that stays with me is his excellent expansion of our inability to imagine something like what happened to indigenous peoples happening to us. Our empathy and compassion is clearly conditional.
Profile Image for Mark Kriedemann.
14 reviews
February 18, 2019
If the points in this essay become widely circulated amongst the Australian community, I would expect them to have a very positive effect on the debate over policies pertaining to aboriginal Australians. This is not least because McKenna has a great control of rhetoric, but more importantly he approaches the issue in a very considered and logical direction. While there are a plethora of issues that appear to affect First (aboriginal) Australians today, quite often the ones that we see the most of in the media are those for which data can be provided and figures quoted. These are typically the more superficial effects of what McKenna argues is a much deeper issue. They are only symptomatically representative of a much larger core issue that McKenna understands to be related to the need for “truth-telling”, which he presents very persuasively as a foundational issue. Such an approach is the kind that has the power to shift the perspective of the person reading largely because it presents a very human side of the issue instead of repeating most of what many people may have heard before on the issue, such as the overrepresentation of aboriginal people in Australian prisons and all those other measures often quoted in relation to the “close the gap” campaign. Considering this it’s ironic that such an approach appears to be the product of McKenna actually denying himself what may be considered the more typically human reaction of avoidance from guilt, which he understands as being the product of an unhelpful binary of pride vs shame that permeates much of the debate over aboriginal issues. By doing this he has given us something of a missing link that can only come from having the sufficient capacity to act introspectively in a way that is deeply analytical of one’s own motivations. For these reasons I would say that McKenna’s writing here is both a significant academic and human achievement.
On that note I suppose I should say something a little less rhetorical, a little more analytical about McKenna’s writing, since what I have said so far relates mostly to the effect his effective (and it must be said, necessary) use of emotional appeal. That he doesn’t actually offer many figures in his writing makes analysis a bit limited, but something can still definitely be said for the way in which he structures his approach. For the most part his formula for conveying his points includes the use of a mixture of personal anecdotes, analysis of official positions, provision of historical context, and references to a wide range of individual perspectives to cross-section the population. He uses all these elements on numerous occasions, but to name one exemplary occasion I would identify his discussion of the fallout from the Uluru statement. Here he probably most effectively uses historical context to present the Uluru statement as the logical progression from events over the preceding decades including the 1967 referendum, Yirrkala bark petitions (1963), the Barunga Statement (1988), the National Apology to the Stolen Generations (2008), and the Redfern Park Speech (1992). Accompanying this he refers to statements from a politician representing the aboriginal community, a lawyer and journalist, the previous PM, Tony Abbot, the then current PM Malcolm Turnbull, the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, and Dr Galarrwuy Yunupingu, “leader of the Gumatj clan and a towering figure in the campaign for Indigenous rights”. By contrasting the perspectives and statements of these various personalities, McKenna outlines legal misunderstandings, the effects of obscurantism, the power of perspective and manipulation, and the undermining effect of the political climate that has prevailed since 2010 as saw 5 Prime Ministers in 5 years.
As someone who is only beginning to delve into the subjects explored herein by McKenna, I recommend it as an essential read. It gives a broad historical context for an issue that has been terribly affected by the morass of modern political rhetoric, thereby giving an important lesson on the policy-stunting effect of the modern political climate. It also lists a large number of important people, projects, and events that would help the reader further explore the issues discussed. But most importantly it presents an informed and persuasive perspective that is very difficult to find when investigating issues that inspire extreme bipolarity amongst the vast majority of people to whom they are important.
Profile Image for Dilly Dalley.
143 reviews10 followers
December 16, 2018
This Quarterly Essay from March 2018, written by Mark McKenna, historian at the University of Sydney, reflects on the Australian government's response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which was released in May 2017. It was a dispiriting time when the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, provided an old-school, knee-jerk, shut down to the three eminently worthy suggestions of constitutional recognition and reform, a First Nations voice to Parliament, and Truth and Justice sessions as per South Africa's model. This negative, entitled, parsimonious shut down caused me to once again despair for this country of mine. We will never be reconciled with our past, and never grow into a mature nation, until we can listen to the voices of the First Nations of Australia and do what they ask of us by way of reparation.

The essay began with the reminder of the long history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people petitioning the powers that be for recognition that they are the First Nations of this land, that they never ceded Sovereignty and that the Australian government represents a people who murdered, stole and attempted the destruction of their culture. From the 2 Wiradjuri elders, Jimmy Clements and John Noble, who walked over 150 kilometers to be at the opening of Parliament House in 1927, to claim his sovereign rights, and so goes the historical record - 1934 Yorta Yorta activist William Cooper, Yirrkala petitioners 1963, leaders of the 1967 Referendum, the founders of the Tent Embassy, the authors of the 1988 Barunga statement and now the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart....it is a long and unbroken history of claiming their rights. And yet, we continue to ignore them and to silence the history of dominance and attempted cultural genocide. Not words used in this Essay, as the author Mark McKenna is not a polemicist, instead he writes in the non-inflammatory tones of an Australian historian who knows that all he needs to do is write down the facts and they will provide their own searingly embarrassing and frustrating history of a violent nation, then a privileged nation, then a conservative nation working to deny Australia's First Nations of justice.

I encourage every Australian to read this essay. I entered its pages hurt and angry and ended them with a better understanding of both the distant past and the recent past, and I particularly enjoyed the story of the signage at Kurnell, which was an excellent reminder that we can and do constantly rewrite history to make it relevant to the people of the present. The essay argues that it is not beyond us to reconcile with the First Nations people, in fact it is the only way forward, to truly understand and know ourselves is to meaningfully reconcile that Australia has a black and white past, and a black, white and multicultural future.
Profile Image for Bill Brown.
22 reviews2 followers
March 29, 2019
Personally this was an eye opening account into the brutality of our nation's past, something in which I am extremely ignorant about still. This essay has made me deeply question Australians understandings and recognition of the true events between Aboriginals and white Australians. It is evident that this truth has hardly permeated into the nations identity but is in fact deeply hidden.

Reconciliation and a honest "Meeting of Cultures" will never occur without an acceptance and knowledge of the Frontier Wars, the massacres and the countless atrocities conducted by white colonists and still conducted today by politicians and the greater society in our rejection of the past. I know wholly understand the Aboriginal declaration of the term "Survival".



Profile Image for Sam Schroder.
564 reviews7 followers
May 20, 2018
A timely and interesting read about the shifting mood of the nation as we inevitably move towards meaningful reconciliation. McKenna urges us to embrace authentic dialogue - truth telling - and genuine action. His is an informed voice and I hope that his calls for a Keeping Place and Reconciliation Place within the Parliamentary Circle are heeded.
Profile Image for Phil Devereux.
130 reviews6 followers
May 21, 2018
There are some extremely important and valid points made but sweet merciful baby jesus this essay was repetitive.
Profile Image for Annie.
387 reviews16 followers
June 17, 2018
Agreed. Truth-telling of the past is needed for Australia to move ahead united. I believe we are ready for it and it will happen.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews

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