Blog closing

This blog will no longer be updated, it was too hard getting Google to index it. I don't know enough about computers and Google was completely opaque. You can go to the Facebook page if you want to stay connected with Myall Creek.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064367095175

Survival Day commemoration, Moree

Myall Creek has sent out this tile announcing a “survival day’ commemoration gathering on 26 January at Moree, on the NSW tablelands. A quick Google search tells me they have done this before, although it’s not widely known in the cities. The Waterloo Creek massacre is remembered in Roger Milliss' boo, where he also talks about Myall Creek.

Hopefully Waterloo Creek will be better known if more people go along to events like this. It would be good to see media representatives also getting out, however they can, to remember all the slaughter than happened in the time of our ancestors. I come from a family with roots in Victoria and South Australia but it wouldn’t be hard to find occasions when they – at least knew about, and said nothing – massacres of First Nations people.

My great-grandfather lived in Leongatha before moving to Melbourne so his family wouldn’t have been completely unaware that this sort of thing was taking place. No stories about massacres have come down to my generation, THAT much is sure. This is why we need these memorial events: to let us remember so that we can be fully aware of what it means to be Australian.

Just whose Australia are we advancing.

Change the date change the flag

Maybe there’s a way to heal after the trial of the Referendum, a way to ease the pain felt by so many people and a way to bring people together for one cause. The Australia Day debate goes on every year and 2024 will be no exception, I can almost feel the anger expressed on social media, it’s like they’re already arguing.

What about changing the flag at the same time as we change Australia Day. By doing both at once we can both acknowledge our debt to Britain while, at the same time, acknowledging the importance of First Nations people who were so grievously let down by the Crown. What I suggest is a way to move forward and change a defeat into something that works for all citizens regardless of their background or allegiances.

Myall Creek is a seminal event in the country’s psyche. Not only was it the first and last time White people were convicted of killing Aboriginal people, but it is celebrated for what it can offer all of us today. Both descendants of perpetrators and descendants of survivors come together on the Kings Birthday weekend every year in rural NSW. If we change the flag at the same time as changing the date of Australia Day to match this celebration, we can alleviate the anguish of First Nations people. 

Just look at the two designs I have made.

The first I rejected because it brings in the additional connotation of France, who arrived on our shores just days after the First Fleet.

Now if we get rid of the red and white stripes we can arrive at a design that centralises FN. It keeps the signal Southern Cross, which is so beloved of everyday Aussies (I can’t count the memories I have of calves of other body areas with a Southern Cross tattooed).

The red black yellow Aboriginal flag hasn’t been approved for use but perhaps we can just take some of its colours. This lets us introduce something original and distinctive – there is no flag even remotely similar to this in the whole world – while at the same time recognising FN heritage as a central pillar of national identity.

But keep Australia Day on the Kings Birthday. Some things have to stay the same. It’s safer that way. I think it is important to acknowledge FN people but also to acknowledge people of British heritage whose forbears worked so hard to make this country the best country on Earth. After all the Uluru Statement from the Heart talks about the three strands of the national story: Aboriginal, British, and immigrant.

We should be talking about the Voice

It’s been a few months and the only answer that seems to have any currency is that Australians are “racist” but is that true? As long as Labor refuse to bring up the failed referendum we’ll never know. It’s like some sort of curse, something that you never wake up from like one of those movies where the lead characters is doomed to repeat exactly the same steps from waking in the morning until he’s killed again and again. With another Australia Day coming up it’s probably a good idea for Albanese to bit the bullet, publicly confess to having botched the poll, and start a discussion about ways forward that will actually help to improve the situation.

Knowing Albo however – he’s a seasoned political player – this won’t happen. Meanwhile the gap is as large as ever and while other people grow rich and prosperous Aboriginal people continue to experience poverty, high rates of incarceration, and low academic achievements for youth. Aren’t these things more important than the fortunes of a political party?

It seems not.

Politicians are addicted to power, it is the fuel that keeps the engine of government running, not anything like human rights, individual liberty, or equality of access to social benefits. Power is the goal of every politician who enters Parliament to ostensibly “serve” the people. What they want and what they get are people serving their interests. If you manage to get to the pinnacle of the structure, for example as prime minister, you will be particularly well served.

Once you have that access it’s difficult to give it up. It would require qualities in a person that the job of politician is singularly well engineered to weeding out. Nobody with the general interest at heart has a gnats chance in a snowstorm of getting to the top. Albanese for all his apparent sincerity is just another power-mad creature.

What I mean by all this is that to even ask the right questions is something that the business of politics prevents. Since it’s not possible to be a Good Person and a politician at the same time (since to rise to the top you need to be a gaslighting narcissist) then it follows that the interests of the people ostensibly served will instead be ignored in favour of the narcissist’s own interests.

So here we are in 2024 no closer to closing the gap. Instead the gap is used as a cudgel to beat the Opposition around the head because that’s politically expedient. No movement on important metrics, no improvement, nothing. Because it’s against the interests of the very people who have been elected to fix the problem. As long as there’s a problem it will be exploited in order to cause pain to the people on the other side of the Chamber.

No Voice?

The Opposition are racists. It follows like night follows day. This is the only possible takeout. The government will continue to blame the Opposition for not supporting the Voice and there will never be any reconciliation. Reconciliation is not feasible where, in a Westminster system, opposition is the modus operandi of all players.

Sad for the Voice

At the beginning of December I saw a post on X (formerly Twitter) saying that Megan Davis, the university professor and prominent Voice advocate, had been given a position at Harvard University. I was struck by a feeling of jubilation that she’d been rendered silent by the lack of success for her favourite cause and then had disappeared from the public stage in Australia to take a position overseas. This is what “booted upstairs” looks like.

Davis was a take-no-prisoners kinda gal, the type who punches first and asks your name second. Better to put down a rival before they can take you out even if it might be the wrong person.

I’d had a run-in with Davis on Twitter (when it was still called that) precisely about the Voice. I started writing about the Voice in 2017 when the initial report was released and I was watching developments carefully since then up to the time when Davis and I crossed paths in the cybersphere.

The ground upon which we squared off was littered with corpses from her previous battles so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me that she took me for an adversary as soon as I mentioned the word “detail”. But it was detail that I wanted and detail that had been woefully lacking in public debates up to that point in time.

You got two types of contestant in the main, the people who were unthinkingly “for” the Voice and those who wanted to see it crushed. Davis saw only two types of contestant so when I mentioned the “D” word she bridled and lashed out verbally, nicking me with her tweets. I retired but never forgot, so it was easy to work in the shadows monitoring progress of the Voice toward polling day. 

I saw many things. I saw Labor politicians lambasting people on the right with insults and belittling replies. I saw people like Ms Davis following the lead the politicians offered. I saw other Aboriginal luminaries follow suit, always using strong language when mild replies might at least have made their opponents look bad. I saw the people who were trying to progress the Voice to a successful conclusion sink their own ship. Within 40 minutes of the polls closing Anthony Green had declared the result and the game was, unceremoniously, over.

Then silence.

The vanquished went off to lick their wounds and friends of mine said how sad they were. I wonder how sad people were in the Yes camp at any point from August 2017 to 14 October 2023? I wonder how downcast they felt while they were bruising the dictionary with their fast use of epithets designed to cause pain. How sad were they then? Were they sad when they insulted people who disagreed with them? Were they downcast in anticipation of the drubbing they’d receive at the ballot box? I wonder what Megan David pans to do from her aerie in Cambridge, Massachusetts?

Will she remain sad for long?

Referendum is an indictment of organisations

The only reason we’re having this vote is because of the organisations charged with embodying the collective will with regard to First Nations people. If the institutions of government were working properly there wouldn’t be any reason to have a Voice because the wishes of the subject people would be referred to management naturally in the normal course of events. The problem is that the message from the ground isn’t making its way up the food chain, and senior managers are just doing what they want regardless of the needs and wants of the people for whom the programs are run.

Having worked in organisations from 1985 to 2009 I am not surprised. It’s the job of managers to implement top-level policy, not to listen to the people working on the front line. Usually the two things are at odds, and it’s no surprise to learn which wins out in the relevance stakes. Because these organisations work in a vacuum, and the only people who actually know what’s going on are people working in them, the decisions of the top brass are not questioned. 

What a Voice could do is hold the top leaders to account. Normally what happens is that occasionally a Senate enquiry opens up debate to the public, or if something major goes wrong we get a royal commission. These bodies have the power to coerce people to appear and answer questions put to them, and often parts or all of these proceedings are made public on television. A Voice could be a Senate enquiry or r royal commission on steroids, running 24/7 365 days a year, bringing to the public issues that are normally sequestered in the halls of power.

Out of sight out of mind.

A Voice would make the leaders accountable for a change. In the normal run of things their subalterns are the ones who are accountable, and who must reconcile the actual needs of FN communities with official policy. In general, these two things will be at loggerheads as top managers try to impose government policy on people who have no need for it. 

A Voice could potentially give front-line workers the ability to funnel their accumulated learnings into policy, by showing how the things they’re been asking their managers for for years are actually in the best interests of the FN communities and, by extension – because we all want to see those Close the Gap benchmarks improve – of the country as a whole.

A Voice is the only way to make this happen. It will act like a permanent TV channel directing important FN debates into the newspapers and onto the TV screens of millions of voters and taxpayers around the country. There is no better solution to Indigenous disadvantage than such a feed of worthwhile information.

Julian Leeser leaves the front bench

When I was reading back over that post from July I discovered something ironic, because it transpires that Julian Leeser publicly asked for more detail at that time. Now, he’s quit the front bench of the Liberal National coalition out of frustration that his party rejected the Voice to Parliament.

What’s going on?

The Liberal Party’s discomfort with Labor’s policy is exactly the same as Leeser’s back in xthe depths of last year when Labor had just come out with its plan. The plan was for Parliament to fix the details of the VtP once it had been enshrined in the Constitution.

Leeser is disagreeing with himself.

The Liberal Party has been running interference for a long time, even before they openly sided with the opposers of Labor’s plan they were asking for more details, in fact it was this public position that Leeser in July was conforming to. Leeser has taken a position on the VtP (leaving the front bench) on the basis of a disagreement that he once was voicing himself.

It’s routine that politicians are labelled hypocrites, but Leeser’s stance on an issue that is so central to his identity is very disconcerting. It makes his commitment to the cause seem fragile, partial, and even something driven by ulterior motives. If he believes so strongly in a VtP why then didn’t he come out and say so back in July? Why follow the party line back then and now, in April, take a different tack?

It’s very strange.

I wonder if Leeser thinks that everyone has forgotten what he said last year when he had the opportunity to visibly support a policy he says he now endorses? Well, most people won’t remember. I recall when the media first made the announcement of Leeser’s retirement from his job that no mention was made of the fact of his utterances back in the depths of time. A week is a long time in politics. Six months is positively Triassic.

What are the alternatives to a Voice to Parliament?

There’s a film that was made over a decade ago that posits a Chinese invasion of Australia seen through the eyes of teenagers. Back in 2010 it would’ve been impossible to predict that the CCP would ink a pact with the Solomon Islands which Australian authorities are enviously eyeing as heralding the start of a new Cold War. 

In response (again, unthinkable in 2010 when the movie was released) the United States has started devoting more effort to the Pacific. A new frontier for global diplomacy. Two hundred years ago the Frontier Wars were resulting in unnumbered Aboriginal deaths as the colonial government threw its forces into an effort to try to stop reprisals against settlers – who had stolen the land from the continent’s original inhabitants – by persecuting tribes up and down the east coast. 

Nowadays it’s easy to sit back and reflect soberly on the injustice, as though we deserved this period of relative calm, but what about Manase Sogovare and his overtures to China? If we deserve our peace then what do we do about people who would disturb it? 

Perhaps the answer lies in trying to come to terms with our past in a way that might light up the way forward. The offer of friendship that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have held out to the settlers’ descendants is genuine and it’s a generous opportunity to find a solution to the problems that we see playing out in the media every day. How many massacres make a genocide? How many deaths in custody perpetuate it? 

How can we move toward a place where there is justice? An authentic response to the troubles currently informing the public sphere in Australia must involve all parties. At the table we must have representatives from the three strands that make up modern Australia. 

As the Uluru Statement points out there is much to be thankful for, but the benefits of the long peace haven’t been distributed equally. It’s not a matter of “equalising” through reparations it’s just a matter of telling the truth. It may make you free. The alternative is certainly bondage.

Voice to Parliament starts to become clearer

I was talking with a friend about the Voice in the light of the prime minister’s speech at Garma during which she’d had tears in her eyes listening to the events unfold. I agreed with the ABC presenter that it was a momentous day, but when the two of us, my friend and I (and her rambunctious, friendly, intelligent dog), were crossing the park I said that the most important thing about the day wasn’t what Albanese said but the fact that the Opposition spokesperson was present.

This morning a Sydney Morning Herald headline agreed with me, drawing me in to read a story in which he said that more detail is needed. But the thing I like the most about Labor’s proposal is that it contains two parts: one to establish the Voice in the nation’s founding document, and then Parliament deciding how it should be formed and what form it should take.

This open-ended strategy almost circumvents Leeser’s misgivings as any future government would also be able to change the formulation of the Voice. Doing things this way should give the Liberals confidence that nothing is set in stone forever in this term of government, and that alterations, improvements, adjustments and tweaks can be made at any time well into the future.

Given this new way of thinking about a Voice I think we’re in a better position to sit down and feel comfortable that there’s no need to panic – or to kill the idea. This would be my main worry, and having the Liberal Party along for the ride (and the Nationals as well) is central to the success of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Let’s reflect on Albanese’s wise words: this is mere courtesy, and it’s also very practical since the way we’ve been managing things up to this point obviously aren’t working very well (though no doubt there have been success stories). 

Opening a new page can be liberating, and we’ve got an opportunity with the USftH to do just that. It’s time to lift the covers and find our future written within. 

Paramontage - 'Syntax prescribes - I'

A third work of art by Matthew sent to the group. Enjoy.

This work is the last one in a series.

Another photographic work - 'On the way to New England'

This is a 3-minute video with a second artwork Matthew made commemorating Myall Creek. 

Hope you enjoy watching it. Thanks for your time.