After the Apology: still keeping our distance

For instance Major-General Dave Chalmers in leaving his role leading the Northern Territory intervention reports himself a profoundly changed man; saying that he has a much deeper understanding of Indigenous Australia than he did before. The issue here is not the new understanding, but why, as a well educated Australian, wasn’t he aware before?

And it explains what a colleague, Dr Norm Sanders from the University of Queensland, refers to as the burden of disregard. The lack of knowledge about individual Aboriginal people and as Aboriginal lives in general allows for Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations to be built around pejorative stereotypes: there is a normalisation of disdain. These stereotypes and disdain underpins the widely held notions of Aboriginal over-entitlement which are doggedly resistant to the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

There is a casual disrespect of Aboriginal people in general that permeates everyday Australian life. This patter of casual and almost thoughtless denigration pervades our society’s conversations. You hear it in cabs, at the hairdressers, on the bus - everywhere. Not knowing anything much about Aboriginal people, or not knowing any Aboriginal people does not stop non-Aboriginal Australians having loud opinions about those people they don’t know.

The “deficits” and “inadequacies” of Aboriginal people and lifestyles provide an infinitely variable circular rationale for Aboriginal disadvantage. Commonly expressed perceptions are that it is Aboriginal lifestyle, behaviour and culture which maintains and regenerates poverty by self sustaining practices such as welfare dependency. This confidently espoused lack of knowledge and lack of knowing is supported and maintained by representations of Aboriginal lives and communities within media exposes and every-day talk as caricatures. In this way the huge inequities in life chances and life expectancies faced by Aboriginal people can be viewed through a lens of social remoteness; a form of safely distanced voyeurism.

This means Aboriginal people, urban and remote, live their lives in Australia under an emotionally, socially and personally remote public gaze which at the same time is contradictorily, intense, intrusive and highly judgmental. The consequent portrayal operates to deny the legitimacy of an Aboriginal place in Australian society, and within this gaze Indigenous people fall outside common Australian citizenship.

Finally, the separation of Aboriginal lives from Australia and Australians’ understanding of themselves also explains why, despite the regular rediscovery of poverty and appalling living conditions in the last 30 years, so little changes. As Greg Sheridan said of his visit to Hopevale, where students have to travel to Cooktown 45km away on a dirt road often impassable in the wet to get a secondary education: while it won’t solve all the problems, surely they (meaning government) can pave the damn road.

I now want to end with what I hope for from a post-apology Australia. I want an Australia where to be Australian, for all Australians, means understanding and being proud of our Indigenous heritage and our Indigenous present.

Where all Australians know and interact with Aboriginal people as part of the normal interactions of daily life; where your dentist, bus driver, teacher or neighbour or all of them are likely to be Aboriginal and this not be considered unusual.

Where Aboriginal culture is celebrated and where Aboriginal ways of being, doing and living have embedded social and political legitimacy and are a significant and inextricable aspect of “the” Australian culture. And where regardless of our own heritage, where we live, and our occupation, we all have plenty of Aboriginal friends. But there’s a long way to go.