Why armbands

In Mabo no. I profoundly reject the black armband view of Australian history. I believe the balance sheet of Australian history is a very generous and benign one. I believe that, like any other nation, we have black marks upon our history but amongst the nations of the world we have a remarkably positive history. I think there is a yearning in the Australian community right across the political divide for its leader to enunciate more pride and sense of achievement in what has gone before us.

I think we have been too apologetic about our history in the past. I believe it is tremendously important, particularly as we approach the centenary of the Federation of Australia, that the Australia achievement has been a heroic one, a courageous one and a humanitarian one. Since the election of the Coalition government in March , John Howard and Geoffrey Blainey-motivated by the preceding Labor government's alleged cave-in to the lobby groups of the new social movements, the Keating-Watson attempt to distort Australian history, and some High Court judges recognition of 'unutterable shame' regarding Aboriginal dispossession, have together advanced a new and powerful label in Australian political language.

In a debate which is at times highly emotional, the Queensland Premier has referred to the High Court as a 'pack of historical dills', while Pauline Hanson has declared that 'if White Australians are to feel guilty about settling Australia then Aborigines should apologise to the relatives and descendants of the Chinese they cannibalised in North Queensland in the s'.

Prime Minister Howard has accused some school curricula of teaching Australian students that they have 'a racist and bigoted past'. John Howard has been by far the most important figure in the public debate on Australian history since his election in March As Prime Minister, he has placed the issue of the representation of Australia's history at the core of his government's position on national identity and Australia's self image. This focus was prefigured in Howard's fourth Headland speech as Opposition leader in December In this speech, he referred to Paul Keating's attempts to distort Australia's past.

Australians, said Howard, should not have to 'choose between our history and our geography'-they did not have to 'disown their past' in a bid for acceptance in the South East Asian region. Here, Howard spoke of his predecessor's desire 'to rewrite Australian history' and 'stifle voices of dissent.

History was a national story:. The fact is that the history of our nation is the story of all our people and it is a story for all our people.

It is owned by no-one. It is not the story of some general conspiracy or manipulation: it is a history which has its flaws-certainly-but which broadly constitutes a scale of heroic and unique achievement against great odds. In between the time of John Howard's Playford lecture in July and his delivery of the Sir Robert Menzies' lecture in November, Pauline Hanson delivered her maiden speech in the House of Representatives on September 10, in which she attacked the level of funding for Aboriginal Australians as well as the level of Asian immigration.

As the debate gathered momentum, the Prime Minister appeared on the John Laws program on 24 October One of the issues explored during the program was the reason behind the popularity of Pauline Hanson. It was while discussing this issue that John Howard made the following remarks:.

You don't want to turn people into martyrs and you don't want to create a situation where people attract unnecessary levels of attention. Now I understand the sense of unease and insecurity that a lot of people feel about their jobs, about the future of Australia.

I think we've had too much I sympathise fundamentally with Australians who are insulted when they are told that we have a racist bigoted past.

And Australians are told that quite regularly. Our children are taught that. Some of the school curricula go close to teaching children that we have a racist bigoted past.

Now of course we treated Aborigines very, very badly in the past These comments suggested that Mr. Howard saw the spread of an overly negative view of Australian history as one of the contributing factors to the electoral appeal of Pauline Hanson's populist nationalism.

The media pounced on the comments made in the interview with John Laws, and sought responses from leading historians. Professor Henry Reynolds accused the Prime Minister of attempting to censor history-'we have to face the reality of our past to say as he does that Australia does not have a racist past suggests to me that John Howard does not know his history'.

In this lecture, which was reported widely in the media, he rejected the Keating government's 'sustained, personalised, and vindictive assault on the Menzies' legacy'.

In doing so, he returned again to the theme of black armband history:. I have spoken tonight of the need to guard against the re-writing of Australian political history and, in particular, to ensure that the contribution of Robert Menzies and the Liberal tradition are accorded their proper place in it.

There is, of course, a related and broader challenge involved. And that is to ensure that our history as a nation is not written definitively by those who take the view that we should apologise for most of it. This black armband view of our past reflects a belief that most Australian history since has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. I take a very different view.

I believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud than of which we should be ashamed. In saying that I do not exclude or ignore specific aspects of our past where we are rightly held to account.

Injustices were done in Australia and no-one should obscure or minimise them. But in understanding these realities our priority should not be to apportion blame and guilt for historic wrongs but to commit to a practical program of action that will remove the enduring legacies of disadvantage.

Academics contacted by the Sydney Morning Herald criticised the Prime Minister for seeking to exclude certain views from Australian history. Professor Henry Reynolds claimed that Howard was trying to restore a 'white picket fence view of history that minimises women, Aborigines and other minority groups'.

Professor Anne Curthoys saw Howard's speech as nothing to do with history but every thing to do with 'an appeal to a political constituency. By the end of Mr Howard's first nine months as Prime Minister, it was clear that the desire to project a largely proud, heroic and benign version of Australian history was at the heart of his government's political philosophy and possibly its electoral strategy. This became even more obvious in when the Prime Minister repeated his assertions regarding black armband history in the context of his government's response to the Stolen Generations report and the debate surrounding the Wik legislation.

Speaking at the Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne in May this year, he reminded those in attendance that while he felt personal sorrow in regard to the injustices committed by previous generations of Australians against indigenous people, he was unwilling to accept any suggestion that Australian history was 'little more than a disgraceful record of imperialism, exploitation and racism'.

Contemporary Australians could not be held responsible for the sins of past generations. Before embarking on a survey of the various responses to the Prime Minister's arguments, it is important to point out that Professor Geoffrey Blainey has made one further contribution to the black armband debate. This occurred shortly after the handing down of the High Court's Wik decision. In an article published in the Bulletin in April , Blainey launched a sustained attack on the High Court and increased the stridency of his language.

Blainey's article is especially significant, given the previously similarity between the rhetoric of John Howard and Blainey's Latham lecture. After the Wik decision, Blainey's views departed from those articulated by Mr Howard, becoming more emotive and sensational.

Blainey's most recent foray is quoted below. In the past two decades a tidal wave of opinion has swept across a big section of educated Australia. It has challenged and changed the way people think about the nation's past, and especially about the Aborigines. This view of history is increasingly called the black armband view. It often laments Australia's abuse of the natural environment, attitudes to women and minorities, and above all the treatment of the Aborigines.

In its view the minuses virtually wipe out the pluses. In my mind the swing, useful in pointing to past wrongs, has run wild the black armband view, while pretending to be anti-racist, is intent on permanently dividing Australians on the basis of race. Many historians preach a black armband view, but the view is more emphatic outside than inside the history books. It is vigorous in the Canberra based media, whose members mostly cheered aloud when the goal of black armband ideology, the Native Title Bill, was bulldozed through federal parliament by the Keating Government which, it now transpires, did not know what the Bill portended partly because that black armband tribunal, the High Court, was still in the process of discovering the law.

So long as the black armband view is influential-so long as it insists that the treatment of Aborigines was so disgraceful that no reparations might be adequate, that no reconciliation can be certain of success, and that black racism is justified-then Australia's future as a legitimate nation is in doubt.

Blainey's attack on the High Court was more in keeping with some of the more spirited criticisms emanating from tropical Australia after the Wik decision. But it is significant because many of the comments made in response to the anti black armband crusade have appeared in the context of not only John Howard's remarks, but also those of Geoffrey Blainey.

The distinction between the two is not often made. If we turn to the historical profession for a response, the most conspicuous critic of the Howard-Blainey assault has been Don Watson-the former Keating speech writer. In March , Watson addressed a seminar at the University of Melbourne, devoted entirely to the black armband issue. His main target was John Howard. The employment of this black armbands charge is probably quite dangerous.

It will be a very sad thing if it begins to affect school curricula. It's pernicious because the puerility of it has been cleverly attached to the national mood. We have to presume that is why John Howard took up the cry. None of us believes there is a single serious Australian historian whose work fits Mr Howard's description. It is difficult to believe that the motives of the black armband school are not political, if only because their reading of history and their understanding of how it is written could be so wrong headed without being wilful they might be in denial.

In a much longer essay in the Australian's Review of Books , in July , Watson described the black armband school as those who wanted to leave out 'the grisly and sad bits' from the national story and 'tell a story with only light.

Pearson stressed that the Prime Minister had publicly acknowledged that 'injustices were done in Australia and no-one should obscure or minimise them'. Other historians not traditionally aligned with the Labor side of politics, such as Professor Patrick O'Farrell, tend to agree with John Howard that the 'guilt school of Australian history has gone too far'. According to Professor O'Farrell, as reported by Mark Uhlmann, 'there should be no apologising for murder or mistreatment, but even in such cases a historian has an obligation, using the tools and intellectual rigour of his trade, to understand why things happened.

An individual or society who does one bad thing, is not usually wholly bad. A historian must also look for the redemptive features'. The historian was not the judge of human error but the person who bore a social responsibility to explore the stories of human endeavour-in all their various shades and colours.

Intellectuals outside the historical profession, such as Stephen Muecke, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Technology of Sydney, have approached the history debate from an entirely different perspective. Muecke has argued that 'the most memorable national historical events are black armband events. They are associated with loss of life, grief on a national scale, and rituals that bring people together in common remembrance. The critics of the black armband view therefore want 'to be selective about whose dead should be honoured in this kind of way.

For example, the erection of a monument in Canberra, in commemoration of all those Aboriginal Australians who have died defending their land since , as proposed by Professor Henry Reynolds, is unlikely to be endorsed by the Howard government if we accept Muecke's position.

Other prominent intellectuals who have offered a critique of the black armband categorisation have focused their attention on Professor Geoffrey Blainey. Dr Gerard Henderson, Fairfax columnist and executive director of the Sydney Institute, has criticised Blainey for failing to name the historians responsible for the black armband view.

In Blainey's Bulletin article in , he mentioned only Don Watson. The other guilty parties were not historians but High Court judges. In Henderson's words, this lack of hard evidence makes Blainey's claims of a black armband school of thought 'vague' and a 'bit thin'. As a concluding remark, it is worth pointing out that perhaps the more remarkable aspect of the responses to Blainey and Howard is that there has been so few.

Don Watson has chastised the members of his own profession for failing to speak out. Perhaps their silence also reflects the fact, that unlike Don Watson, who for personal reasons is undoubtedly keen to defend his reputation as a historian, other historians do not perceive the black armband debate as an assault on the historical profession.

This paper has attempted to provide readers with the background to the current debate on black armband history and a concise map of the most significant arguments involved.

Some patterns in the debate are now discernible. First, the debate over the issues associated with the black armband label predates Professor Geoffrey Blainey's use of the term in his Latham lecture by more than a decade. Second, Aboriginal Australians have employed the black armband as a symbol of their historical dispossession since at least Third, Prime Minister John Howard appears to have relied heavily on Blainey's Latham lecture in the formulation of his own argument on Australian history.

This indicates that Professor Blainey's role is not entirely dissimilar to the role played by Manning Clark during the Hawke-Keating era.

However, it could be argued that John Howard's views have remained reasonably consistent over the last four years whereas Professor Blainey's views are expressed in more virulent terms-especially since the High Court's Wik decision. Another significant difference is that Professor Blainey does not appear to occupy the same status in the national psyche as Manning Clark did in the s. Leicester City players go to Thailand for owner's funeral.

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