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.
3 comments:
Hmm...
I'm no intellectual, but I'd say it's oxymoronic that you try to link terms like "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" and HoWARd's "Black Armband view of history".
Also, I feel you give far too much away about your own prejudces when you dismiss the "Black Armband" view as "cynical".
Do you think it was a barrel of laughs for the Aborigines to be dispossessed at the point of a gun?
Try it some time. See how YOU feel...
Gerry, you misunderstand me. The cynicism I refer to is the abuse of the Black Armband symbol by Howard and others in their effort to free us all from guilt or shame or any desire to properly confront the atrocities of the past.
The second paragraph of this excerpt from the Australian Parliamentary Library website, represents my position reasonably well.
"The expression 'black armband view of history' has been used to describe a brand of Australian history which its critics argue 'represents a swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory', to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced. Not only, it is said, does the black armband view belittle past achievements, it also encourages a 'guilt industry' and impedes rational thinking on current problems. From this perspective, the black armband view of history is a strand of 'political correctness'-the dominant but erroneous view of how we see ourselves and what we see as worthwhile in our culture.
"For others, the term is inherently political and a misrepresentation of the work of many serious historians. It is an attempt to appropriate an established symbol of genuine grieving, loss and injustice by those who do not accept, or do not want to accept, that past wrongs must be fully recognised before present problems can be resolved."
I think we need to clear the decks of all the cynical, politically-contaminated, revisionist and denial-ridden 'bad history' and lay down the truth, once and for all, in the form of a big, public, national commission.
Of course, this won't happen under Howard (he's already undermined several attempts to set something like this up) but there's still a lot of pain, mistrust and anger out there amongst Aboriginal Australians that won't go away until something like this is established.
(Afterthought: Howard's policy of 'practical reconciliation' is exactly the kind of regressive denialism I'm talking about -- money, resources and services are not enough in my opinion.)
Ahhh... thanks for clearing that up, LB. Yes, I did misunderstand you and true to form, I snarled. Sorry about that. I blame the war of course... ;-)
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