This week, Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbot dismissed the practice of recognising traditional landowners during major events, claiming it reeked of “tokenism”. “Tokenism” is a great word, because decent, right-thinking people hate “isms”, like “sexism” or “racism” or “baptism”.
The thing is, Tony Abbott actually raises an interesting point. And if that sentence chills you to your core, then rest assured he didn’t do it on purpose. Or rather, he did, but if he follows his line of thinking through to its logical conclusion, he’s not going to be very happy.
A couple of years ago, I was at some event launch arts thing that was, like all event launch arts things, on at an incredibly inconvenient time in an incredibly inconvenient place, where all the people there could look one another up and down in the judgmental knowledge that the person they were looking at clearly had nowhere cooler to be.
The event began with a “brief” introduction from some local politician. (You know the type: one of those people who appears as if their middle name is “grassroots”, and looks disproportionately happy that she’s been asked to do anything that comes with a pre-wrapped audience.) “Before we begin,” she said, “I’d like to acknowledge the Djargurd Warrung people as the traditional occupants of this land.”
Everyone nodded in self-congratulatory concern… well, they didn’t, because everyone’s used to this sort of thing by now, but about ten years before this particular event, that’s what everyone did when someone else said it. Their heads bobbed meaningfully, desperately, so that everyone would see just how much they liked acknowledging things.
In the meantime, I was unable to do anything for the remainder of this event but think about how happy the descendants of whichever particular Djargurd Warrung people who’d successfully remained un-massacred must be that some obscure councillor had gratefully acknowledged that they once lived here. But it did make me wonder: whose interests does such an announcement serve?
I tried putting myself in the position of the Djargurd Warrungals and picturing something a bit more immediate and relatable. What would a modern exchange of this nature look like? I imagined somebody stealing my car, the thief starting up the engine, turning to the person beside them, and gratefully acknowledging me as the traditional occupant of the driver’s seat.
I imagined someone stealing my wallet, and gratefully acknowledging me as the traditional owner of its contents as they charged a new entertainment unit to my traditional credit card.
So, as I stood there listening to a speech that could not be less consequential if the words had been delivered in a randomly-generated order, I thought this: if we’re all in agreement that the Djargurd Warrung people used to live on this particular plot of land, and the government is happy to admit it to the extent that its councillors open every single speech with a confession to this effect, then why don’t we just give it back to them?
Well, okay, in practical terms, it’s probably not likely to happen. We have an entire society dependent on the fact that people need to keep their homes and businesses. But as a hypothetical, the question stands: what’s our moral argument for not giving it back? What’s the line between an acknowledgment of traditional ownership and an acknowledgment of potentially judicial guilt?
After wracking my brains for the time it takes to make a coffee and get distracted by a twenty-four news channel, I was unable to find one. See, this is basically the same argument used to point out why Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should not, as he did back in 2008, apologise to Aboriginal Australians for all that stuff we did. (Here, “we” refers vaguely to two hundred years of Commonwealth rules. “Stuff” refers to stuff I’m going to let you look up on your own.)
There’s really only one conclusion that can be reached: hypotheticals be damned, let’s just give it back to them. All of it. The whole country. Sure, it’ll probably plunge us into some massive civil war, but surely that’s preferable to this ridiculous cycle of moral ambiguity we’re currently engaged in.
Briefly acknowledging we’ve fucked over an entire race of people before moving on to the introductory remarks from the Creative Director of the National Institute of Sodding Whatever might just be a tad patronising.
Of course, proclaiming exactly how the Djargurd Warrung people should feel about this whole thing is probably quite patronising as well, but at this point I feel like being patronising is just upholding tradition. The decision to acknowledge traditional Aboriginal land owners was made by white men in expensive suits, and the arguments against doing so were also made by white men in expensive suits. I am a white man in hole-ridden pyjamas, which, depending on your perspective, ups my credibility, or completely destroys it.
When it comes down to it, I, unlike Mr Abbott, enjoy the odd bit of tokenism. It alleviates guilt; the sort of guilt you acquire after writing an ill-informed article you don’t, in fact, necessarily agree with. So, allow me to end on this note: as they are the traditional occupants of this land, I respectfully acknowledge the Djargurd Warrung people as the traditional instigators of this argument.
