Australia must acknowledge and reconcile it’s past to embrace its future

Australia must acknowledge and reconcile it’s past to embrace its future

January 26th is a special day for many peoples. In India it is Republic Day, the day the Constitution was adopted to replace imperial rule with a democratic republic. A democracy that has always been noisy and rambunctious and today is fraying at the edges. In Australia, the day remains fraught. For some it is ‘Australia Day’ a celebration of the arrival of the First Fleet which claimed Australia as territory of the British Empire. For the First Nations people who inhabited these lands for 60,000 years before, it is ‘Invasion Day’ or ‘Survival Day’ a day of mourning and grief.

As a migrant to this country, I have shied away from speaking out on the country’s treatment of its Aboriginal people fearing that it is not my place or that I’d be told to go back to where I came from. I realise now that I have an important (and hopefully useful) perspective as an outsider who has had the privilege to live and work in several countries and learn from many cultures.

In my day job, I spend a lot of my time observing (and sometimes engaging in) Australia’s international relations. I cannot help but see and feel a strong connection between the country’s treatment of its First Peoples and its anxieties about its newest people and neighbours. Having taken this land through force, without it being ceded, without the legitimacy of a negotiated treaty, white Australia remains in a perpetual state of anxiety that what they have done to the First peoples will be done onto them. NO Justice, NO Peace, the old protest chant reminds us.

That anxiety continues to manifest in the exaggerated fears too many Australians have of being swamped by ‘boat people’, over-run by Muslims, threatened by ‘African gangs’, invaded by China, or losing their homes or jobs to migrants. This connection between how the Aboriginal people have been treated and the continuing border/migrant panics is what academic Ghassan Hage calls the ‘sensitivity of thieves.’

This is a difficult topic to even think about because it is wrapped around powerful emotions like guilt and shame which do not like to be disturbed from their burial place deep within our collective psyches. It is work that needs to be done though if Australia is to live up to its promise of a harmonious, multicultural society where the dignity of every individual is respected. As Aboriginal people have been saying for many decades, this work needs to begin with truth telling and reconciliation, with Constitutional Acknowledgement and respect, with an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, with treaties that recognise Aboriginal sovereignty. It is only through Justice that we can have Peace.

It will be a difficult process for many, but the upshot will be that Australia can become a more self-confident nation, proud of its heritage while contrite about elements of its past. And from this place of self-confidence and consistency with its own values, Australia could transform its relationship with its own multicultural elements and its international neighbours to advance its prosperity and security without falling victim to panic and anxiety.

We each have a role to play, through our words and deeds, to make this future a reality. I'm learning more each day.