As we approach
January 26, the Australia Day-related content being produced in the Fairfax
media, in youth-targeted new media (Junkee, Pedestrian), in the Betoota
Advocate and on talk radio gives me the strong impression that the level of
dissent building around "Australia Day" is unprecedentedly
significant. The level of dissent may well have reached 'boiling point', such
that it has made the day too controversial to survive in its current form. In
fact, I will stick my neck out and predict – let these public words be the
reader’s ‘bond’ (my ‘skin in the game’) – that whatever the
near-term course of events, "Australia Day" on January 26 won't survive the next
15 years, and that many of the concomitant 'true blue' Australian summer
customs, like extravagantly barbecuing meat, not taking sufficient care of
one's skin or drinking gallons of beer will massively atrophy in that same time
period (these customs have already atrophied non-massively, at the same time as
the Australian accent has been more internationalised since the 1970s (http://www.smh.com.au/national/its-all-english-but-vowels-aint-voils-20100125-mukf.html)).
The most important recent event stimulating the debate – the event that
catalysed the most recent eruption of dissenting media discussion – was the
decision of Triple J to move the Hottest 100 Countdown to January 27. This
seems to be a decision of quite momentous significance, given how significant
this radio program is to many people's Australia Day customs (parties). It
seems like a sign of just how much more popular the anti-colonial reframing of
the date has become over the last two or three years (it feels to me that the
use of the phrase "invasion day" in the Fairfax press and in
youth-targeted internet media (Junkee, Pedestrian) has ramped up in the last
two years, although I would need someone to do a systematic study to be
confident about the exact window).
(A recent conversation with my mum has reminded me that young people
like me have a tendency to see progressive attitudes like these as having had a
longer popular history than the study of history (or older people’s
recollections) bears out. For example, so many young Australians were
justifiably lamenting how “long it took” Australia to legalise same-sex
marriage compared to other countries, but we shouldn’t forget how radical the
shift in public attitudes has been over the space of only fifteen years, when
the legalisation of same-sex marriage was an extremely fringe proposal with
very little popular backing and no major press coverage.)
Personally, I broadly support this dissenting attitude, although I
don't think I think about these issues in a way that the vast majority of
persons do. I definitely have a "mood-affiliation" with the
dissenters, but the truth is that I would have a mood-affiliation with people
dissenting against any national day, since I am anti-patriotic – in fact,
anti-tribal – to the very core of my being. (Long Narcissistic Interpolation:
I'm the kind of person who loves sport, but cannot will himself to sing the
national anthem when he goes to sporting matches (at the Australia-Syria World
Cup-Qualifier Playoff Game played in Sydney, I took a photo of myself sitting
down during the national anthem while tens of thousands of people stood up
singing Australia's quaint and dysphonious national anthem, and joked to my
friends in Messenger (and my dad who was with me) that I was pulling an August
Landmesser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Landmesser)[1]
and feels sorry for the other nation – indeed, starts barracking for them – when
Australia is beating them badly (in the last two Ashes series, I was more on
England’s side in the last two tests). I basically am wary of all flags and
emblems, and am typically repulsed and dismayed by tribal displays of all
kinds. This anti-tribalism started very young; I may have been less inclined as
a child to feel sorry for players from other nations in sports when Australian
teams or players were on top, but from really the beginning of high school I
was repulsed and disturbed by the insane unified chanting that went on during
the sporting events and couldn’t get on board with most of the grandstanding
about the school, despite my family history with the institution (being
literally a fourth-generation attendee (my great-grandfather, whom I never
knew, attended the school, along with my grandfather and father). I also recall
that I never could really get on board with extravagant celebration of sporting
victories, because I typically didn’t feel a great deal of loyalty to my team
(I usually figured there were probably as many nice people on the opposing side
as there were on mine, and there were always several people on my team whom I
didn’t like or who harassed me in the subtle ways that macho males harass
people whom they seek to abase)). Nowadays, my political attitudes reflect my
deep-rooted anti-tribalism; I identify with a personal statement of Chomsky
that he has repeated in different words on more than one occasion to the effect
that he always felt alone or part of a tiny minority in terms of his political
opinions. The fact that this is the case makes me profoundly pessimistic in
terms of my political outlook.)
Of course, I also cheer along with the “Australia Day” dissenters for
some of the reasons that the popular commentators are giving. I do think that
it’s excellent to raise awareness of the horrors of the process of colonisation
and dispossession of this continent, and the
non-systematic genocide (genocide that doesn’t take place in a
relatively short time-span with some degree of government-level instruction,
organisation or at least endorsement but consists instead of thousands of acts
of theft (and destruction) of vital resources, abductions, and of course
outright massacres and lynchings over the course of decades or centuries, with
the final outcome of a massive reduction in the original population and the
loss of entire languages and cultures and ways of living (the validity of the
category is strengthened by the fact that Australia is obviously not the only
place where this occurred)) that took place over roughly 150 years with a fuzzy
final boundary somewhere perhaps in the 1950s or 1960s. This was a nation
founded on genocide; our soil is stained with blood. I also think Australia is
still a country where racism is probably more widespread and tolerated than in
countries with which we otherwise share the most similarities – the place of
One Nation and our political culture generally (the output of The Australian) suggests
that we may be more racist than our neighbours New Zealand, and also Canada,
the country which is economically and socially most similar to us (population
size, demographics, economic base and structure (resources, property bubble)) –
despite how ethnically diverse we have become over the last forty years, with a
very high rate of immigration. This may seem somewhat orthogonal to the issue
at hand, but I think that many – me included – see the idea of tarring January
26 as “Invasion Day” and moving Australia Day as a kind of important offensive
in the war against Australian racism, and see the movement as an engine for the
norm-shift that would be nice to see. Most importantly, the movement to tar
January 26 should help (or would ideally help) raise awareness of current
problems in indigenous communities in this nation: in particularly, the
blood-curdling facts about the gaps in life expectancy and literacy between
indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.
Also, as Mark Kenny writes here (http://www.smh.com.au/comment/australia-day-the-case-for-may-9-20180122-h0m65w.html),
there’s also just the obvious argument that January 26 shouldn’t be seen as one
of the key dates in the founding of the modern white Australian nation, completely
leaving aside all that icky genocide stuff, because that date marked instead
the set-up of a penal colony by
another nation, not a new nation, and there are other days which just seem
nicer to pick.
This said, one of the things that makes my take on this issue very
unlike that of most “Invasion Day” partisans is that I suspect that the very
fact that the dissent around “our” “national day” has reached this fever pitch
is a sign that our society is in what Peter Turchin calls a “disintegrative
phase”, also indicated by the political infighting, and that this portends more political chaos and polarisation for our
near-term future (which in turn makes me extremely worried about our ability to
transform ourselves into the green economy which we could have transformed
ourselves into already, or to address increasing wealth inequality). Perhaps I
ought to actually do the hard work of seeing if a tweaked version of the
Structural-Demographic Theory does actually retrodict the major political
fluctuations in Australian history – certainly the contours over the last sixty
years aren’t so different from those in the US, and we certainly have seen the same "elite overproduction" in terms of too many people with law degrees – but the reason I make this
bold claim without doing this hard work is, of course, because we have seen such an astonishing degree of political dysfunction in this country since the infamous events of the 2009
backstabbing, with no stability of leadership and factional warfare raging in both major parties. And one of the big bold claims at the centre of the research of
Turchin and others in the nascent field of cliodynamics is that a state that
loses strong cohesion and slides into political dysfunction – a state that loses some of its assabiyah, which is forged by unifying symbols, celebrations and rituals, and is at its strongest when these rituals are at their strongest – loses a lot of other things along with it: becoming more prone to corruption, popular revolts and violence,
and more prone to popular immiseration as egalitarian policies and state
welfare become untenable due to political dissension.
By introducing these interesting conjectures, I do not mean to suggest
that the Invasion Day-meme promoters are fomenting this dissent at the ultimate
cost of the stability and health of our entire society; I do not mean to sound
like one of the acolytes of the very prominent “social psychologist” Jonathan
Haidt[2],
who has put forward the extraordinarily grandiose, Hegelian-sounding thesis (e.g.
in the Ted talk I watched a few years ago) that the clash of the yin and yang
of the disruptive Left and the obdurate Right is the thing that keeps our
societies in a healthy equilibrium. (I think that this thesis is so vague as to
be meaningless and worthless. The ontology – “Left”, “Right”, “social balance”
– is not a scientifically powerful one. I have no truck for claims of this
kind.) In fact, it seems clear – whether conservatives like it or not – that
Australian society simply cannot be brought into a new equilibrium of cohesion
and harmony (even a tenuous one) without some kind of disruption that
accommodates the radical dissenters, because it appears that there are now
millions of people out there who will not tolerate going along with the
national rituals and displays as they exist. These people cannot be
re-educated, and so the rituals need to change.
Actually, it may be ‘uglier’ than that from
the point of view of national unity. I think that a huge number of people from
my generation are not patriotic at all; many people, like me, also have
problems with Anzac Day, and a new date for Australia Day wouldn’t make them
suddenly “love Australia” like nationalists do. But, hey, maybe people can
co-operate in big societies even without strong unifying banners that transcend
the individual tribe. Hopefully, Australian politics can be ‘healed’ (become
less dysfunctional and polarised) without a resurgence in more patriotic-type
attitudes that help bond people from very different walks of life, with
otherwise very different outlooks. But maybe it cannot. I don’t know…
Anyhow, the thing that actually motivated me to write all this is that
I started (in December) reading (sporadically) Tim Flannery’s The Explorers, his 1998 curation of
first-person sources (journal entries or book extracts) by Australian explorers
and other adventuring colonists. I’ve only got up to Flinders writing in 1803,
but one of the things that Flannery really emphasises with his curation of the
sources describing the early years in the Sydney colony (and also Cook and Banks’
interaction with the people who lived along the Endeavour River in 1770 after
the big shipwreck at the GBR (account by Banks)) is that the early relations
were largely peaceful and good-natured, with people on ‘both sides’ of the
massive cultural divide intrigued by the knowledge and innovations of those on
the other (and the devastating early smallpox epidemics, which killed so many
Sydney aboriginals, were not, it seems, attributed by the local people to the
colonists). Of course, there would have been massive white racism and there
were abductions, but there were no massacres in the first few years and the
word genocide is totally inappropriate to describe this very early period, when
the colony was a fledgling, desperately struggling enterprise (before the age
of frontier drovers and the like) and the maintenance of good relations with
“the natives” was probably vital for the very survival of the colony (hence why
Phillip ordered that anyone who killed the Aborigines would be hanged, and
endeavoured to become close to the Eora people, leading to his friendship with
Bennelong). As many people know, even after Phillip was speared at Manly, he
ordered his men not to retaliate. Watkin Tench’s compelling and sometimes funny
account of the 1791 expedition with Colbee and Boladeree, Lieutenant Dawes and
Governor Phillip to discover if the Nepean and Hawkesbury rivers formed one
stream is particularly illuminating in this regard. The interesting thing is
that it almost seems as if the desire of the colonists to explore beyond and
through tribal boundaries and to cultivate friendly relations with whatever
peoples inhabited these regions might have helped to forge better relations
between the Aboriginal tribes! Colbee and Boladeree are described as being very
wary of going into others’ country and talk often of how bad and infertile the
country they are walking through is compared to Rose Hill, but when Watkin
Tench and the gang make friends with a friendly man on a canoe with a face
“marked by smallpox” (but “a cheerful countenance”) called Gombeèree,
we see something else: Colbee and Boladeree start happily talking to this man,
and at some point Colbee participates in a healing ritual for Gombeèree:
giving another man from his tribe, Yèllomundee, the water he needs to ‘heal’
Gombeèree’s
old spear wound by means of some symbolic, animistic medicine (spitting the water
onto him and symbolically sucking spear tips out of his chest). Now, it does
seem as if Colbee and Boladeree have talked to people from this country before,
and I might be wrong on this hypothesis – regardless, it’s heart-warming to see
the level of conviviality that was occurring at this stage.
Also, I liked learning about this man: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wilson-john-2803.
I’m sure someone has mentioned him to me before, or I’ve read something about
him before, but I didn’t know the exact details. Fascinating.
Anyhow, people talking about “Invasion Day” should be aware that the
Sydney aborigines didn’t seem to see it that way at first, and it seems that
there was little to no indignation about stolen resources and sacred areas, at
least while the colony stayed small. Well, perhaps that makes me sound a bit
like Keith Windschuttle or something, and I don’t mean to invalidate this
phrase. I don’t really think it should sound reactionary to emphasise these
early peaceful relations, because they only throw into greater relief the
atrocities that occurred later. The Sydney aborigines were not savage,
barbarous, obstreperous, irascible, antagonistic or bellicose; they were tolerant
and often welcoming. And yet they would eventually be annihilated.
Nothing to celebrate about that.
[1] Although
it was a joke, I do really believe that the tribal conformity and emotional
unity on display in these sorts of occasions is probably much the same
phenomenon as one saw in Nazi rallies, or as one sees in the public marches in
North Korea
[2] A
guy who has done some interesting and important research, but who I think can
get really carried away with his conclusions, as we’re about to see. (Also, his
seeming belief that he has transcended politics is pretty hilarious, given that
he is a political activist.)
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