Racism under the skin

Adam Goodes copping racist remarks from a thirteen year old and from Eddie McGuire during a weekend to celebrate indigenous football players has caused a fair bit of discussion. However, this has all been about racism, and nothing above the din of tired old opinions. I’m about to change that though. I’m going to try to convince you that if you consider yourself Australian, then you are essentially indigenous.

I’ve always found it strange that white Australians get called “Australian”, but Indigenous Australians have to have a qualifier. Even non-white Australians — whichever way you want to slice that, born here, grew up here, or citizens — get their ancestry attached: Asian Australians, Sudanese Australians, etc.

In my mind, you have one of two consistent interpretations of being Australian. The first is one of ancestry, where your bloodline goes back to an Australian is an Australian, and everyone else is an immigrant. A lot of people think of being Australian in this sense, with the very notable exception that somehow “Australians” now get relegated to being “Aborigines”, and white Australians are now “Australian”, with no qualifier apparently necessary.

Actually, I’m painting my brush strokes too widely by saying “white”. Italian or Greek Australians are apparently not “Australian” enough, nor are Polish or Russian or all manner of other “white” people. The qualifier-free “Australian” seems to only apply to people with a bloodline from the British Isles. To be honest I have trouble being able to tell. In a sun-burnt country, bronzed skin is all too common even among the “white”.

My point is, the view is inconsistent, or at least involves some word play or slippery thinking.

The second consistent interpretation of being Australian is one of belonging. When you become a citizen, you have to pledge yourself to this country. If you are naturalised or born here, you would similarly have a view that, whilst on the one hand you might have relatives, a small or a significant proportion of your family in other countries, that this is the place where you belong.

From this time forward
I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people,
whose democratic beliefs I share,
whose rights and liberties I respect, and
whose laws I will uphold and obey.

At some point, you might ask yourself “what does it mean for me to be an Australian?” You can look at other countries, and I would wager most of us have links to another country, and see how people see themselves as part of those countries, and try and figure out what that means for you as an Australian.

The thing you’ll notice about every civilization is that you can’t dig a hole without finding a dead king. Whether it is the intrigue of the courts in European history, or the dynasties in Asian history, every culture is rich with history. It is literally in the soil. There are buildings, some standing, some buried, there are people and dynasties, but all of that comes to one thing: Stories!

So we look for Australian stories. More people are walking the Kokoda track each year. We celebrate Anzac Day and Australia Day a little more each year, and we take the time to think of that question: “What does it mean for me to be an Australian”. We have Ned Kelly, the Eureka Stockades, we like gambling and beer… and…

That’s pretty much it. The first fleet only arrived about 200 years ago. This might seem a long time, but it’s only about 4 or 5 generations. Your grandfather could tell you stories about his grandfather and that would be almost as far back as you could go. You dig up the dirt here, and there are no kings. There are no stories. There’s nothing.

Australians are great at burying our heads in the sand. I love that term “the lucky country”, because I can almost see that metaphor — rather than take control of our destiny, we close our eyes, hope for the best, and everything goes better than expected. Except it hasn’t gone better than expected. Because when you ask yourself that question “what does it mean for me to be an Australian”, you get this niggling feeling that you don’t really want to investigate. This feeling that when you dig up the dirt here, there are dead kings. There are stories, there are gods, there is the dream-time.

If you think of who you are as an Australian, as someone who belongs to this country, as someone who, despite having an ancestry from another country, is looking for a history which is rooted here, the stories you’re going to have, stretching back to ancient times thousands of years ago, are going to be indigenous stories. Those are our stories, and these are our people — the Kooris, the blackfellas.

If you’re an Australian with British ancestry that thought must be terrifying, because the story of Australian history has essentially been told by the villains. I think we sense that fact and just don’t want to look any further. This isn’t simply a sense of guilt, it is your ancestry colliding with your desire for belonging.

The fact is, we need Indigenous Australians more than they need us, because they hold all of our shared culture, our shared history, our shared stories. They are the ones who hold the answer to that question: “What does it mean for me to be Australian”. They are our elders, and we need them to see all the dead kings as we dig into the earth and look to set our roots. Without them, there is nothing.

So when things like this happen, when an Australian is called an “ape”, with full view of our history, this is an assault not on some distant group of disadvantaged people. It’s an assault on all of us. It isn’t racism, it’s denial. We are all — those of us who belong to this country — Australian. Our culture is indigenous culture. The sooner we can come to terms with that, the sooner we can move forward as a country.