The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Politics, History, and Culture) by Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Author:Elizabeth A. Povinelli [Povinelli, Elizabeth A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-09-09T08:36:00+00:00

The Australian achievement, as I said, is of a scale that should make all of us proud. This country has achieved enormous things. This country has won itself great repute and great credit around the world. Just as we as a nation are entitled to draw pride from the triumphs and the achievements of Australians, so we must in a completely unvarnished fashion confront both dimensions of our national story. We must not only confront and embrace the dimensions which give us pleasure and pride and a sense of achievement and a sense of satisfaction but also confront the uglier parts of our national history.20

Kim Beazley, Labour opposition leader, countered the liberal tense of colonial history, referring to the Royal Commission report on the Stolen Generation (Bringing Them Home): "What I read about were events and institutions in my life - my life - and people who had been in those institutions in my house - my house. But, if you go through dates and places and times, you see that that report takes us well into the 1970s.... We are dealing not with far past history; we are dealing with contemporary history."21 But in no less dramatic terms did the Labour opposition place the fate of Australian nationalism in a shared achievement of mourning, holding out to the imagined publics of its national address a renewed national optimism as the desired end to their honest "atonement .1122

In this way we see that the High Court decision and public statements supporting it, from the Left and Right, leaned not only on images of the shamed national subject, but also on images of a national subjectivity now fully conscious of its past mistakes. Their statements continually referred to a repaired social body, to an equitable society, and to a tolerant nonracist white subject made possible through the verdict of Mabo and the passage of the Native Title Act that was the legislative response to it. Court judgment and legislative act would be the political testament to the good intentions of the state and its normative publics. Repairing the law and national attitudes would rupture the nation's legacy of racial and cultural intolerances. These repairs, however, were primarily made to the torn images and institutions of AngloCeltic Australians-the real addressees of the court. That is, the High Court and its supporters constructed their legal act as a journey to a promised land in which the possibility of social discrimination would cease because good attitudes and good legislation would repair the unnatural deformations of the law's good intentions and, thereby, those of the state and its normative citizens. The potential radical alterity of indigenous beliefs, practices, and social organization was not addressed. Instead the court decision and the public discourse surrounding it urged dominant society on a journey to its own redemption, leaning heavily on the unarguable rightness of striving for the Good and for a national reparation and reconciliation. The problem is that discrimination was not exiled from the law, nor the source of intolerance banned from public forums.

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