Legitimising white supremacy

Is there a need first to dissolve the borders between white and black? What happens to the overwhelming whiteness of this country and its freedom to roam? How do we, the minority, ensure Aboriginality? If we are cannibalised and utilised to Aboriginalise the majority, how do we as individuals and communities sustain our own vulnerable Aboriginality?

So how white is Australia, and is there any possibility of the blackening of Australia’s soul, as Greer argues must occur? I wouldn’t disagree that there must be an admission that whitefellas live in an Aboriginal country, and for the need to recognise Australia’s “inherent and ineradicable Aboriginality”. But what are its possibilities? The history of colonialism illustrates not only a denial of Aboriginal existence, but also a refusal to embrace Aboriginal society; instead, in the past it has rejected it in all its forms.

So what is Greer suggesting? Is she appropriating Aboriginal history and identity as a site of white occupation? Who is Greer to speak, and who can speak of such things? What is the role of the white “commentator-expert” in the context of the silenced spaces of Aboriginal voice?

In speaking of the possibility of coming together, what may be required of us (the Aborigine)? To dissolve into whiteness? For that is what is currently required. Has anything altered that position? Have universal human rights found their way into our recognition? Has the purported recognition given by native title rights advanced our struggle to walk the land? How am I, the Aborigine, situated? What spaces do I, the unsettled native, have to roam? In settled native-titled spaces? Or do we continue - as we have since the time of Cook - to dodge from the belly of genocide, resisting digestion and dilution?

Reconciling the burning fires and the ghosts of assimilation

In the Australian government’s current policy shift to the idea of “mutual obligation”, that is, the idea of Aboriginal communities and government becoming mutually responsible for the future development of communities, I see more a concern with returning to assimilation practices of the past. At the dawning of this new century, the Australian government parades its return to assimilation under the illusionary name of “practical reconciliation”. But is it new or more of the same? Have the ghosts of assimilation returned? Did they ever leave us?

The Howard Federal Government has cunningly used the Australian reconciliation movement to subvert and contaminate its own popular force. The return to a more open approach to assimilation was dramatically revealed by Australia’s Governor-General during a speech made while serving as the Governor of Western Australia, where he called for a greater distinction between “full-blooded” and “part-blooded” Aboriginal peoples.

While many Aboriginal people have embraced and supported the reconciliation movement, there have been just as many Aboriginal people who did not, and many who asked critical questions - like what does reconciliation really mean? Will it provide homes for the homeless, food for the hungry, land for the dispossessed, language and culture for those hungry to revive from stolen dispossessed spaces? How can you become reconciled with a state and its citizens who have not yet acknowledged your humanity, let alone your status as the first peoples of this conquered land? In considering moving forward, what lies before us? In looking ahead, Fanon (1971) wrote:

The final settling of accounts will not be today nor yet tomorrow, for the truth is that the settlement was begun on the very first day of the war, and it will be ended not because there are no more enemies left to kill, but quite simply because the enemy, for various reasons, will come to realise that his interest lies in ending the struggle and in recognising the sovereignty of the colonised people.

It is to the question of Aboriginal sovereignty that we are returned: to the question of an imposed and displaced Aboriginal sovereignty. Whiteness, white supremacy and Eurocentricity fuelled, and continue to fuel, the displacement of Aboriginal sovereignty. The end of this displacement is, as Fanon suggests, in its recognition or its reinstatement.

However, in moving the Aboriginality of Australia forward, white Australia has never in its colonial history embraced this idea. Today, the words “Aboriginal sovereignty” have become the unspeakable. Aboriginal sovereignty is feared as posing a threat to the security of Australians and their assumed “territorial integrity”. Instead, we become again the internal enemy.

Is Aboriginal sovereignty to be feared by Australia in the same way as Aboriginal people fear white sovereignty and its patriarchal model of state - one which is backed by the power of force?

Or is Aboriginal sovereignty different, as I have argued in other writings, for there is not just one sovereign state body but hundreds of different sovereign Aboriginal peoples. Aboriginal sovereignty is different from state sovereignty because it embraces diversity, and focuses on inclusivity rather than exclusivity. Aboriginal sovereignty poses a solution to white supremacy in its deflation of power, and here - as I repeatedly do - I refer to the story of the frog.

In the beginning there lived a giant frog, who drank up all the water until there was no water left in the creeks, lagoons, rivers, lakes and even the oceans. All the animals became thirsty and came together to find a solution that would satisfy their growing thirst. The animals decided the way to do this was to get the frog to release the water back to the land, and that the “proper” way to do this was to make the frog laugh. After much performing, one of the animals found a way to humour the frog, until it released a great peal of laughter. When the frog laughed it released all the water; it came gushing back to the land filling creeks, riverbeds, lakes and even the oceans. As the community of animals once again turned their gaze to the frog they realised they had to make the large frog transform into a smaller one, so that it could no longer dominate the community. They decided to reduce the one large frog to many much smaller frogs, so that the frog would be brought to share equally with all other living beings.

The frog celebrates diversity of community and is different from the idea of the homogenous state, with its trend for fast-tracking the assimilation of Aboriginal peoples into a white racist capitalist culture. Aboriginal sovereignty is also different from Greer’s vision of a national process of Aboriginalisation, one which is capable of being led by expatriate white intellectuals.