Labor Speaks with Forked Tongue

As scholar Tom Shippey points out, Saruman is the most “modern” character of The Lord of the Rings. His treacherous alliance with Sauron is textbook realpolitik. Saruman’s honey-tongue lies, the “language of Orthanc”, are the language of politicians everywhere.

Including Australia’s Albanese government, where “stepping up to the job” means buggering off overseas and taking holidays at the slightest excuse, “a plan” means clueless flailing, and “truth-telling” means barefaced lies.

Anthony Albanese says children should be taught at school about the massacres of Indigenous people by British settlers as he pushes for Australians to have a “fair dinkum” knowledge of ­history.

As if they learn anything else, already. Even ten years ago, I’d ask high school kids if they learned any Australian history: they rolled their eyes and said, “You mean, ‘Aboriginal history’.” That was all they learned, filtered through a dark lens of endless victimhood and “invasion” narrative. Today, Australian schoolkids are taught obvious nonsense like Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which argues that Aborigines invented democracy, lived in large settlements, and practised large-scale agriculture, as unimpeachable historical fact.

They’re only going to get beaten over the heads with even more of the same.

The overhauled national curriculum released in May included a new “deep time” strand focusing on Aboriginal and Torres Strait ­Islander history and the impact of European arrival, including the concept of an “invasion’’.

A concept which was explicitly rejected by the Mabo decision. If Australia had been invaded and conquered, then Aboriginal land rights would have been erased altogether, by right of conquest.

This is just the start of the lies passed off as “truth telling”.

In a speech to the World Indigenous People’s Congress on Monday, Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney outlined the massacres endured by the ­Wiradjuri people of NSW.

The Australian

Oddly enough, Burney says nothing about the massacres endured by settlers at the hands of Aborigines. As historian Stephen Gapps outlines, the Wiradjuri people were far from helpless massacre victims.

In mid-1824, the Bathurst district was under siege. Local Wiradjuri people had broken off contact with colonists and vowed to kill all invading white men.

Warriors raided outstations, killing people and stock with impunity while large war bands threatened convict stock-workers who either fled or cowered in their huts.

Creative Spirits

Don’t expect the likes of Linda Burney to tell that inconvenient truth.
Don’t expect, either, Labor’s black armband curriculum to tell the truth about the endemic violence of pre-European Australia, well attested both by eyewitness accounts and archaeological evidence.

As historian Geoffrey Blainey has pointed out, pre-European Aboriginal Australia was, in a typical period of even the most abundant regions, as bloodthirsty as a European nation at the most violent point of its history.

The frontier was a violent place — on both sides, as was inevitable when two such vastly disparate cultures came into abrupt contact. The settlers exacted violence upon a people who challenged their takeover. A people who were defending their home and their way of life.

Yet, over the course of two centuries, two cultures 60,000 years apart have achieved more-or-less rapprochement. One has realised and taken vast steps to atone for past wrongs, the other has recognised the enormous benefits the new culture offers. It’s far from a perfect achievement, but it’s a lot better than many.

Let’s hear that kind of truth-telling.