By Suneeta Peres da Costa
Roland Barthes once referred to the process of writing history as the "compromise between freedom and remembrance". In Australia, we are presently experiencing the strength of this dialectic as it translates to a reactionary view of knowledge production and a racist demand upon the way in which we ought to remember "the nation='s history".
In a comment in the Sydney Morning Herald, Jim McClelland recently had the audacity to argue that it would be "an exaggeration" to argue that "our" history — treatment of indigenous people in particular — is in any way comparable to the treatment of Jewish peoples during the Holocaust. Even the most liberal critics, it seems, have misjudged the cultural significance of the current controversy over the teaching of the past.
What is this compromise "between freedom and remembrance" in the context of Australia? It is the freedom to selectively sanitise, to systematically forget, the logic of white racism upon which this country was founded; to ignore the rape of indigenous lands and resources — whose direct consequences may be discerned in those same "national achievements" to which Prime Minister Howard wants school children to pay exclusive homage.
This compromise asks us to be oblivious to the rationale of extermination of Aboriginal people and the subsequent exclusion of coloured people, with which Australia was born into the so-called "civilised" world. Howard's motion toward a history of celebration is simultaneously a gesture toward further European subjugation. The danger here is not merely in the promulgation of an inaccurate or "false" reading of how we became what we are; it also exists in the fabrication of a mythical, seemingly intact, national consciousness.
There is nothing very common or shared about Australia's national heritage. Indeed, it is important that we begin to ask who this allegedly unproblematic history of high successes and tremendous opportunity belongs to. What colour is this benign version of history which Howard has asked us to embrace? The stories we come to tell ourselves about ourselves are embedded within racial (and racially gendered) hierarchies.
Racially marginalised Australians trying to resist structures of their domination know that the construction of history is one of them. What historical conditions were indigenous Australians operating in when Miles Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career, or when Patrick White wrote The Tree of Man, for example? What massacres were taking place when Macarthur was dreaming of a merino sheep farming industry, or, when Caroline Chisholm sought, tirelessly, to ensure employment for young, working-class British women in Sydney? Which of the nation's black sons were dying in custody on Australian soil during the period of the Vietnam War?
Alongside white euphoria and white tragedy there is also black joy and black misery. What must we say of a version of Australian history that seeks to validate only one side of these narratives?
Behind all Howard's belated rhetoric of commitment to cultural pluralism, there lies an insidiously racist clause that some historical moments — white moments — are, nonetheless, more "Australian" — more worthy of remembrance — than others. Until white and non-indigenous Australians begin to regard collective pride alongside common culpability, we will continue, racistly, to delude ourselves about our place in, and contributions to, national history.
[Suneeta Peres da Costa is a student of cultural politics, writing and mass-media criticism at the University of Technology, Sydney.]