Outspoken by Rod Bower

Author:Rod Bower
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143788416
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

ONE CONFUSED NATION

32

Captain Cook: ‘May We Come Ashore?’

ONE DAY, I was riding through a paddock in the vicinity of where my grandfather and father had died. When I got off my horse to open a gate, I had the strangest experience. As my feet hit the ground I felt as though I were sinking into the earth, as if I were becoming a part of the land. It was an entirely peaceful feeling, and I stood there savouring it until it eventually passed. This was over 40 years ago and it is something I have never forgotten. This experience of connection to place remains immediately available to me whenever I call it to mind.

This, I think, began a wondering in me about what it must be like for Indigenous peoples in the lands where their forebears once walked and are buried. My familial connection to place only goes back 180 years, so what must it be like if a connection goes back 65,000 or more years? This is, for me, the crucial question if we as Australians are ever to properly engage in the deep and essential question of national identity.

When Captain Cook arrived in 1770 he should have asked the custodians of this land three questions: ‘May I come ashore?’, ‘Tell me, please, how do you live in this place?’ and ‘How do you pray here?’

It’s now 2018, and we still haven’t asked those questions. It is disturbing that, up until relatively recently, the framework for understanding our nation’s history was primarily based on the arrival of the British and subsequent colonisation. No looking back, just forward. This is a narrative embedded in the lie of terra nullius – that when the Europeans landed on Australian soil it was nobody’s land. It has been a lie fed to and thoroughly digested by successive generations of Australians, and one that has shaped and impoverished our national identity, culture and consciousness.

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