Repeal dusty sections of Racial Discrimination Act
CHRISTOPHER PEARSON THE AUSTRALIAN OCTOBER 01, 2011 12:00AM
IN 1981 the students union at James Cook University and the Townsville Treaty Committee convened a three-day event on the theme of land rights and the future of race relations.
Henry Reynolds, a historian, wanted to defuse an argument about whether one of the speakers was, as he claimed, an Aborigine.
He moved a motion: "This conference recognises that the prerequisite for Aboriginality is cultural loyalty and not any false 19th-century genetic theory."
There were a few jokes doing the rounds shortly afterwards about "unleashing the inner Aborigine in us all".
Even so, the radical implications of the idea that racial identity might no longer depend on bloodlines but on cultural loyalty passed almost unnoticed. Aboriginality had, in influential circles, become negotiable.
It was a development that suited some people very well. For example, a poor, fair-skinned Tasmanian could claim a slight element of Aboriginal descent but, being unable to prove it beyond doubt, could affirm their identity, claim their extended family had a mixed-race connection they'd been encouraged to keep quiet about, and suddenly be eligible to apply for various grants and special entitlements.
It didn't suit members of the Half-Castes Association in Darwin at all. They'd stressed their mixed racial origins and wanted to be exempt from the laws that had previously prevented some kinds of racial intermarriage and the consumption of alcohol by Aborigines. They were made to feel as though any attempt on their part to negotiate their way out of a partly indigenous identity -- one that ought to be a badge of honour of paramount importance -- was a betrayal.
In 1983 Justice Gerard Brennan ruled that: "While proof of descent or lack of descent could confirm or contradict an assertion or claim of membership of a race, descent alone does not ordinarily exhaust the characteristics of a racial group."
What, if anything, does the gnomic second half of that sentence mean? It strikes me as a proxy for the position that, contestable bloodlines notwithstanding, you can be deemed a member of a racial group if you identify as one of them and if other members of the group accept you as one of them. If so, Aboriginality had indeed become negotiable.
In the early 1980s the politics of identity were played pretty relentlessly. Any of the usual indicators from what Marxists would describe as your class position to your sexual orientation, ethnic origins and faith or lack of it could be used in a combative way, with scant regard for individual complexity, to pin down who essentially you were.
Marxists of various kinds tended to think your class position determined and explained almost everything about you. For women's and gay liberation, it was at least as much about where you located yourself on the straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender spectrum. (If you had the misfortune to be both male and straight, it helped if you were noisily apologetic about it.) (
that you PB?Just about any non-English racial connections tended to be seen as assets in those days. Aboriginal ancestry brought instant credibility, as did African and African-American origins. They were in a special category where religious affiliation was not merely able to be overlooked but was a positive advantage, especially if funky and tribal.
For younger readers, the last few paragraphs may seem fanciful -- the sort of thing that couldn't really happen in modern Australia. But every generation's ideological blinkers come to look a bit bizarre in time.
In the 80s, when Aboriginality enjoyed a sudden cachet and some privileges, Tasmanian people with claims to one part in 64 of indigenous descent were making the most of them and adopting a rhetoric in which the other 63 parts were dismissed as being of no consequence.
At the same time, many of their siblings exercised the conscious choice not to identify as Aboriginal. In some cases, it was a matter of having struggled so hard to keep up within the lumpenproletariat that they couldn't bear the idea of falling what many would regard as one rung further down the ladder. While most people who now identify as Aboriginal are inclined to say they've always done so, at least in urban settings racial identity tends to be less of a fait accompli than a liminal zone, where individuals have options.
There have been other cases, where people with South Sea Islander backgrounds or fathers or grandfathers who had been black American servicemen stationed here in World War II ended up identifying as Aborigines. Sometimes it was self-deceiving, sometimes an orphan's honest mistake. Often it was the easiest way to turn life at the margins to advantage. But, along with the other elements of negotiability, it has left a legacy of suspicion that attaches to people claiming Aboriginality who don't conform to most people's expectations about what Aborigines look like.
Herald Sun journalist and blogger Andrew Bolt has just lost a famous case. Two of his articles conveyed offensive messages about the complainants, saying they were not genuinely Aboriginal but were pretending to be "so they could access benefits that are available to Aboriginal people". Unusually, the case wasn't a defamation suit but was fought over some contentious provisions of the Racial Discriminatio
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