In his opening lecture for the ABC’s prestigious Boyer series for the ABC, indigenous leader Noel Pearson has laid bare a challenge to the nations but Christians in particular. “We are a much unloved people,” he tells Australa, speaking of the First nations peoples. ” “We are perhaps the ethnic group Australians feel least connected to.”
A lawyer, academic, land rights activist Pearson is founder of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership, an organisation promoting the economic and social development of Cape York. He is a realist about the challenges facing his own peoples, but in this lecture addresses the deficits of the white majority.
Christians follow a God who is love. In the words of the 1960’s song “They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love“, reflecting the Bible’s commandments to love our neighbours as ourselves. The exhortation in Galatians 6:10 “As we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers,” applies doubly to first nations, who have a higher percentage of believers than the general community.
Here is the key passage from the Boyer lecture. The Other cheek reproduces it is the same spirit as the motion passed at this year’s sydney Anglican Synod (Church parliament) that “church members to give generous consideration to the case to vote ‘Yes’ to the referendum question of whether the Consitution should establish a First Nations Voice, once the details have been made clear.” If the most conservative Synod in the nation can pass this in near unanimity, we should all approach the coming debate with respect and open hearts.
In a significant aside, Pearson rejects the treatment of indigenous issues as the subset of culture wars, by white Australians, another suggestion that is of relevance to Christians.
“Emerging from a screening of a 2019 documentary about the end of the career of footballer Adam Goodes, I thought about the trouble Australians have with Aboriginal people. The trouble is readily called racism, and certainly racism is much to do with it, but the reality is not that simple.
“We are a much unloved people. We are perhaps the ethnic group Australians feel least connected to. We are not popular and we are not personally known to many Australians. Few have met us and a small minority count us as friends. And despite never having met any of us and knowing very little about us other than what is in the media and what WEH Stanner, whose 1968 Boyer Lectures looms large over my lectures, called ‘folklore’ about us – Australians hold and express strong views about us, the great proportion of which is negative and unfriendly. It has ever been thus. Worse in the past but still true today.
“If success in the forthcoming referendum is predicated on our popularity as a people, then it is doubtful we will succeed. It does not and will not take much to mobilise antipathy against Aboriginal people and to conjure the worst imaginings about us and the recognition we seek. For those who wish to oppose our recognition it will be like shooting fish in a barrel. An inane thing to do – but easy. A heartless thing to do – but easy.
“Unlike same-sex marriage there is not the requisite empathy of love to break through the prejudice, contempt and yes, violence, of the past. Australians simply do not have Aboriginal people within their circles of family and friendship with whom they can share fellow feeling.
“My reflection on the Goodes film produced three thoughts.
“First there is the original sin of Australian racism against Aboriginal people. The old assumption Aborigines were innately inferior and sub-human was the strongest idea for almost one and a half centuries of colonial thinking. Listen to Stanner speak of how these ideas still formed the folklore of Australia at the end of the 1960s:
“I was asked the other day whether I did not agree that the Aborigines must have originated and evolved within Australia. My questioner was an earnest and sensible man and I asked him why he thought so. His answer was: ‘because they are in every way so unlike any other people in the world’. He was quite unaware that he was expressing a view common in Australia more than one hundred and thirty years ago which has stalwartly withstood all the biological, anthropological and archaeological information built up since that time. Popular folklore is like that, and our folklore about the Aborigines shows the qualities which distinguish it everywhere, a splendid credulity towards the unlikely and an iron resolve to believe the improbable. It mixes truth, half-truth and untruth into hard little concretions of faith that defy dissolution by better knowledge.
“I believe original sin racism has greatly receded and the vast majority of fair-minded Australians are repulsed by it. If there are now few remnants, its legacy is still prevalent.
“It is the second part that explains the enduring antipathy against my people today. It is the problem Australians have about the place the settlers/invaders have in this country vis a vis Aboriginal peoples. It is a troubling and unsettled question, involving denial and defensiveness and how to deal with guilt and truth. It is also such an old question going back to colonial days: if the colonists recognised the indigenous then would that not be a repudiation of who they were and their place in this country?
“It is this fear of repudiation that lies at the heart of the country’s trouble with Aboriginal people. The country just does not know how to deal with recognition without the fear of repudiation. Denial and a visceral antipathy is the residue.
“After the discombobulation of the Goodes film I realised a third aspect of this trouble: it is what I call the white versus white over black problem. A large part of the conflagration in these past 50 years since racism became unacceptable in the 1960s, is the fight between progressive and conservative Australians over race and Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people are the subjects of this fight, but they are not its prime protagonists. This is what is now the culture war between liberals and conservatives in the United States and progressives and conservatives here in Australia. That we have followed the Americans in this is unfortunate but not surprising.
“Race and the Aboriginal problem of Australia is about white Australians in a cultural and political struggle with other white Australians. It is yet another agenda of the culture wars. The progressives are seen as, and see themselves as, sympathetic to the Aborigines and see their conservative opponents as bigoted and determined to hold onto the legacy of the country’s old racism. And yet, as I will discuss later in my lectures, this dichotomy is not necessarily true.
“My realisation after Goodes and his travails, was that without sorting out that complex of matters falling under the rubric of ‘recognition’ we will forever think that what we call racism is at the heart of our problem as a nation rather than our not knowing who we are.
“Of all the claims I will make in these lectures this is the boldest and one of which I am most convicted: racism will diminish in this country when we succeed with recognition. It will not have the same purchase on us: neither on the majority party that has defaulted to it over two centuries, nor the minority that lives it, fears it and who too often succumb to the very fear itself.”
Image: Noel Pearson at UNSW, UNSW newsroom