 |
| Captain James Cook |
The
son of a coal bargee from Scarborough, Captain James Cook taught himself
navigation, never flogged his men, was never more than five nautical miles out
in his reckoning at sea, and observed the transit of Venus, a discovery that foreshadowed
quantum mechanics – the means by which space ships will one day explore the
universe. He was also the first man to map the eastern coast of Australia. A statue
of Cook, in the midst of Sydney’s Hyde Square, always seemed like a reasonable
enough memorial to one of the most accomplished seafarers to ever live. Not so,
in the opinion of identity militants, who defaced the memorial in August 2017
with the slogan “no pride in genocide”.
The
refrain “no pride in genocide” has become the catchcry of radicalised
Indigenous Australians and their left-wing (mostly middle-class) apologists. It
is a smear increasingly ascribed to almost everything that has transpired in
Australia since the arrival of the First Fleet on January 26, 1788. Australia
Day, which commemorates that very event, is now regarded as Ground Zero in the
mythology of “no pride in genocide”. Our national day of celebration, in a
world turned upside down, now becomes Invasion Day. It was, no doubt, only a
matter of time before Captain Cook came under attack.
The
critics have found every conceivable reason to disparage the Hyde Park statue. Stan
Grant, Indigenous editor for the government-funded Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, has spoken of the “silence” about the Aboriginal perspective in
contrast to the commemoration of heroic British figures. This might have been
true once, perhaps fifty or sixty years ago, but today in Australia the
Aboriginal viewpoint is promoted in a myriad of ways. There are Indigenous
advisory boards to governments and local councils around Australia, a
state-sponsored Indigenous television network, festivals celebrating Indigenous
art and music and the Welcome to Country
and Acknowledgment of Country
ceremonies, which explicitly identity Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders
as the traditional custodians of the land. Moreover, the role of Aboriginals
before, during and after the advent of European settlement happens to be a key theme
of the national History curriculum. “Reconciliation”, as the policy is known,
involves everything from theme-based sporting fixtures to the provision of academic
scholarships for young Aboriginals. To assert there is “silence” on the subject
of Indigenous Australians seems almost perverse.
Grant
even bemoans the inscription attached to Cook’s Hyde Park statue, which reads:
“Discovered this territory 1770”. He claims the caption should be discounted as
“fiction” given that Australian Aboriginals inhabited the Great Southern Land
for some 40,000 to 60,000 years before the British navy’s research vessel, HMS
Endeavour, arrived on the scene.
Nevertheless,
Keith Windschuttle, historian and editor of the conservative Quadrant magazine, has pointed out that
by being the first to navigate and chart the entirety of Australia’s eastern
coast, James Cook had, conceptually
speaking, discovered “this
territory”. Without for a moment questioning the pre-existence and superior
knowledge of their respective tribal lands, Windschuttle makes the sound
observation that Indigenous Australians did not identify the eastern seaboard as
a cartographical unit: “None of them gained the view of it that Cook had in his
four-month journey from Port Hicks to Cape York in 1770. He was the genuine
discoverer of the whole entity”.
For
the naysayers, though, this is mostly beside the point as James Cook allegedly committed
a racist crime when he came ashore on Possession Island, August 22, 1770, and claimed
the entire eastern coastline for the British Empire. Cook’s offence, and the
offence of the British colonial project that later ensued, was to treat the
continent of Australia as terra nullius,
a term interpreted by activists and educators alike to mean “unoccupied” or “land
belonging to no one”. The charge, to put it bluntly, is that the British Empire
annexed this new Pacific territory on the basis of a racist lie.
The
problem with this argument, as Michael Connor outlined in his 2005 book The Invention of Terra Nullius, is that
it’s erroneous: “The phrase was unknown to eighteenth and nineteenth-century
Australian colonists: it was not referred to in colonial courts or the Privy
Council; it was never used by the British government to explain their
appropriation of New Holland.” Legal academics and historians concerned with race
relations were shocked to discover, as Connor explained to Windschuttle, that
the sense in which they employed the expression had only been in use since 1981
and “that they had all been simply recycling one another’s footnotes without
bothering to look up the original source”. Not that this stopped them – or Aboriginal
activists and the publishers of modern-day school textbooks – carrying on as if
it were true. Today, as a consequence, young Australians are uncritically
taught that terra nullius constitutes
the original sin of British settlement.
This
is significant because modern-day Aboriginal activists and most academics,
argues Keith Windschuttle in The Break-Up
of Australia, have wildly exaggerated the violence between the original
British colonialists and the Indigenous population. The extent of Aboriginal
acquiescence to Western civilisation is entirely omitted from the radical
narrative in order to accentuate active resistance. Left-wing historians, such
as Henry Reynolds, did this in order to assert that Australia was not “settled”
but “invaded” by the British. One of the political consequences is the
promotion of “Aboriginal sovereignty” at the expense of the Australia’s
national sovereignty. Windschuttle’s The
Break-up of Australia makes the case that militants of every hue foresee a
parallel Indigenous state that will challenge the legitimacy of a popularly
elected parliament to rule for all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous
alike. Thus, in the name of so-called reconciliation between Australia’s “First
Peoples” and everybody else, we might actually be in a downward spiral to a new
form of sectarianism.
The
situation might not be so dire if the chattering classes throughout the West,
not excluding Australia, had not fallen in love with a nihilistic fantasy. Roger
Sandall’s seminal The Culture Cult
perceptively argues that the “heavily didactic semifiction” of Ruth Benedict’s
and Margaret Mead’s anthropology has shaped contemporary Western middle-class
sensibilities in ways that are deeply detrimental for all concerned. Now, in
the soft totalitarianism of PC rectitude, the inequities of Western
civilisation are unfavourably contrasted with a sanitised version of
pre-Colombian or pre-European tribal societies. Sandall cited Walt Disney’s Pocahontas as the apotheosis of the
“Noble Savage” caricature: Immaculate Powhatan Native Americans exist in a
state of harmony until Westerners – “uncivilised” and “ignorant heathens” who
are “beasts” and “filthy savages” – descend on paradise like “ravenous wolves”
and “devour everything in their path”.
It
is the same story in Australia. Where once people of all political persuasions
spoke about the “common good”, and how Indigenous Australians could best
benefit from being an integral part of a democratic and wealthy country, the
1972-75 Whitlam government came up with the idea of Aboriginal
self-determination and the establishment of land rights in isolated (and mostly
northern) parts of the country. Many Indigenous Australians, on account of this
policy, endure an almost Third World standard of living. Although the Northern
Territory government, in 2007, released the Little
Children are Sacred Report, detailing substance abuse, domestic violence
and suicide, the legacy of the Whitlam remains firmly in place. These days,
anybody who suggests that self-determination has been a policy failure runs the
risk of being called a racist.
The
irony is that Indigenous Australians who inhabit the suburbs of the (mostly
southern) towns and city of the continent have experienced, as even Stan Grant
has acknowledged in the past, a veritable “renaissance”. Australia, then, is
not a racist country but a British-style parliamentary democracy that has allowed,
at least in the long haul, people the freedom to be the architects of their own
destiny – something that is only possible as long as they live in relative
proximity to a good education and good jobs. That is not, of course, to deny
that the Aboriginal “renaissance” has been a long time coming. There have been
countless tragedies and misunderstandings along the way, none of which should
be ignored, and yet if “reconciliation” is to really mean anything there has to
be respect on all sides: the astonishing feats of Captain James Cook are worthy
of some of that respect.
Warren
Mundine, an Aboriginal leader on the more conservative side of the Indigenous
movement, described the campaign to remove Cook’s statue as “nonsense”. That
said, he advocated more memorials for Indigenous Australians: “In Australia,
the problem is an absence of memorials, we need more about our people, our
indigenous people.” Where Mundine differs from the Left – and where he reveals
a concern for the common good above mindless sectarianism – is his denunciation
of the “no pride in genocide” campaign as Stalinist, an attempt to rewrite the
past in order to serve the political-correct fashion of today. Or, as George
Orwell would put it: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls
the present controls the past.”
