Guilt over Aboriginals not new, says author

By Damon Shorter

Guilt in Australia about the dispossession of Aboriginal people is not a product of 1990s political correctness, according to an ANU historian.

From the first days of European occupation, white settlers have been troubled by the treatment of Aboriginal people, and the vehemence of current debate about the Wik decision and the policies of Independent MP Pauline Hanson reflect that entrenched anxiety, says Dr Tom Griffiths of the Research School of Social Sciences.

"Talk of guilt and invasion is highly political in Australia today. It makes people uneasy," he says. "What I'm trying to show is that these sorts of feelings and sensitivities about invasion and dispossession are not just the invention of the so-called politically correct minority. They have a long history in Australia and have a deep place in the settler psyche. They are the emotional burden of Australian settlement."

Dr Griffiths is the author of Hunters and Collectors which has received several literary awards since it was published last year, including the 1996 Eureka Science Book Prize and the 1996 NSW Premier's Book of the Year Award. Most recently, the book has been short-listed for the NSW Premier's Prize for Australian History.

Hunters and Collectors explores the lives and attitudes of the earliest white settlers, how they related to Aboriginal people, and how the attitudes of these original settlers helped shape today's popular perceptions of Aboriginal history and culture.

"Through their history-making", writes Dr Griffiths, "Europeans sought to take hold of the land emotionally and spiritually, and they could not help but deny, displace and sometimes accommodate Aboriginal perceptions of place."

"Pauline Hanson has very much an 'us and them' view of settlers and Aboriginal people in Australian history," Dr Griffiths says. "Yet, the more you look at it, the more you realise there is a long shared history of accommodation and negotiation on both sides."

"The profoundly important role of Aboriginal labour in the pastoral industry has been completely ignored in the Native Title debate because it is inconvenient. It makes complex what those opposed to the Wik judgement want to portray as simple - the notion that settler Australians have 'civilised' the frontier and that basically Aboriginal people were lucky to receive the 'gift' of civilisation."

Feeling guilt about the past is not the issue; there is enough in the present to be disturbed about, Dr Griffiths says. "As an historian I can see good purpose in learning from the past in order to act in the present. I hope that history is a spur to some sort of activism or sensitivity. When Hanson dismisses this as a self-indulgent view of the past, I think that is completely missing the point. We are learning from the past to understand the present, and to plan a much more just future."