One of these things

Scenes I ought to have drawn #2

A man wearing tight bicycle shorts is stooping over a copy of Duchamp's wheel at an American art gallery. His lips are turned slightly upward and he is squinting. Behind the man is a woman, also in tight bicycle shorts, who is waving her arms above her head and shouting, "don't panic, he's a black belt".

Gum nut

True Stories

I've just finished reading Inga Clendinnen's Boyer Lectures (1999) -- collected in a book titled True Stories. The lectures are about the role history plays in shaping a national story. About how 'bad history' is the product of false or sanitised narratives designed to serve specific political or cultural purposes. Clendinnen cites the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up in post-apartheid South Africa, as an agency through which 'good history' was learnt and recorded. She explains that the commission's chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu,

wanted the new state to begin not with no history, not with false history, but with a true history forged out of its divided but shared past. And it worked. Vengeance, reparation, even justice, turned out to be less important than knowledge. From now on, no one in South Africa can deny the past or falsify it. South Africans, black and white, have their true stories. Some will still cry for justice, but the worst of the agony has been assuaged and rendered unavailable for disreputable use by that extraordinary collective enterprise in good history.

Reading about -- being reminded of -- the atrocities and injustices enacted upon Australian Aborigines by white frontiermen, missionaries and politicians has strengthened my belief that it's time we, for the sake of our national healing and so that we can all move forward, set down, in the style of the TRC, a deep store of good public history related to the contact-zone (in particular) and the "colonial question" (more generally).

Let's have it out so that none of this Black Armband cynicism can continue to eat away at our shared past and future.