Richard Broome

Now in its fourth edition, fully revised and updated, this book by La Trobe academic Richard Broome is a masterpiece. The story it tells is a sorry one of near-genocide - though that is of course one of the controversies Broome has to address, in the post "History Wars" revision. Was there attempted genocide? The answers to this fall into a neat Right/Left spectrum, and the History Wars generated by John Howard's assimilationist approach to Aboriginal affairs are just one of the phases of a tragic tale Broome relates.

Broome sits in a sort of centre-left position on the Aboriginal history spectrum - a little more willing than a Langton or a Moreton-Robinson to acknowledge that one or two on the Right side of history (including some church groups and figures such as Sir William Deane and Malcolm Fraser) have made efforts at human compassion, a little (lot) less likely than a Blainey, a Windschuttle or a Partington to pretend that God is in his European heaven and all was right with might. His footnoted documented evidence is exhaustive, and his narrative powers are consummate.

In the end therefore this 2010 version - a year or two post-apology - is not tragic, at leat in a final, reverberating hopelessness sense of the world. One gets the sense that, for the second time in a sorry tale, signs of hope are abounding. The first era of hope was the second half of the nineteenth century, but that era of radical hope was'quashed', as Broome puts it, by the surge in European nationalism (that greatest of all evils) and related rise in pseudo-scientific idiocies such as Phrenology and Social Darwinism.

The second era of hope emerges from the realms of sports, arts and spirituality, nascent to a non-Aboriginal observer, re-nascent to an Aboriginal person. The movement grew from the boxing rings since the 1930s (think of Lionel Rose, Australian of the year in 1968; Anthony Mundine), from the magnificence of Evonne Goolagong's tennis (Australian of the Year in 1971), the Ella brothers' rugby, right down to and beyond Cathy Freeman's athletic triumphs in 2000 (she was named Australian of the Year in 1998). This second era of hope includes both reclamation of traditional forms of art and dance, emergences of literary excellence (Sally Morgan, of course, and Oodgeroo Noonuccal) and re-interpetations of musical tradition (Galarrwuy Yunupingu, who was in fact named Australian of the Year in 1978 for his mining negotiations), Mandawuy Yunupingu (Australian of the Year 1992) and (we might now add) Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, and of emergent powerful political forces, such as politican Neville Bonner (Australian of the Year in 1979),and Lowitja O'Donoghue (Australian of the Year in 1984).

I mention Aboriginal figures awarded Australian of the Year recognition because, as Broome notes, these represent a groundswell of favourable attitude in mainstream Australian society, Aboriginal and non Aboriginal alike. The awards and accolades represent a vanguard of change that may not yet be represented satisfactorily in health, education, or income statistics, but which suggest that a magnificent culture far, far more ancient than the European culture that invaded and dominates it may well be re-emerging, adapting to a new world, and poising to triumph over post-modernity despite all but insurmountable difficulties spanning two centuries of oppression.

Party politics have not even remotely always reflected the changing fates of Aboriginal Australians (the Labor party and trades union were, until the 1950s, abysmally opposed to equality of opportunity or remuneration for Aboriginal workers), but as the era of optimism best symbolised by the Kevin Rudd National Apology faces almost inevitable changes of federal government in the near future it is to be hoped that the groundswell of Aboriginal pride and (in terms comparative to the past) well-being are greater than the chambers of Canberra. The Intervention stands to remind us that divide, conquer and paternalise are not just historical processes. Broome does not reflect much on the future - he is an historian, not a prophet. It is though to be hoped that this time around the tide of radical hope for Aborinal people is unstoppable.

Only a slightly meagre and strangely compartmentalized bibliography mars this magnificent account of a sorry tale.… (mais)