This Whispering in Our Hearts by Henry Reynolds

I remember a conversation a year or so ago with an Australian scholar who had recently returned after a stint in Europe and was astonished to hear colleagues refer to Henry Reynolds as a ‘populariser’ and not true historian. I’ve heard it myself. Now that Reynolds has become a full-time writer we can expect to hear it more often. All of which goes a long way toward explaining why academic history is in decline. Of course, it is nonsense to suggest that Reynolds is somehow not a real historian because his books sell tens of thousands, instead of a few hundred, and because he has such a keen political sense that history should change our understanding of the world. As Greg Dening has said in his appreciative essay on Reynolds: ‘The dead need history for the voice it gives them; the living need history disturbing enough to change the present.’ And this is the kind of history Reynolds has always written. I embarrassed him at an Adelaide Festival by identifying him to some overseas guests as a national treasure. It’s true though, he is. Bearing in mind that books take several years to research and write, and maybe another year between writing and publication, it must be said that Reynolds has an uncanny prescience for the stories that the community needs to hear at a particular time. This is why pathbreaking is so often the adjective appropriate for his work. In The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), he shattered the convenient, sentimental narrative that Aboriginal people were passive victims of an inexorable process. They didn’t just lie down and die, Reynolds’ meticulous history showed. They fought to defend their country, their way of life, their sacred sites; ever the underdog, always outgunned. The Law of the Land (1987) pulled the rug from under the doctrine of terra nullius and provided an intellectual framework for the recognition of native title. He showed how the law had been corrupted by the colonial process and that the intentions of the Crown to recognise native title-had been consistently perverted. To the fury of some who wish to read the past differently, it was clear that Reynolds’ work had a profound influence on the High Court’s Mabo decision. The late Eddie Mabo had been a student and friend of Reynolds. I hope that decision has been source of satisfaction to him. Even in the 1990s many people like to argue that the dispossession of Aboriginal people was inevitable: they could not adapt and they had played no constructive part in the pioneering work to build Australia. With the White People (1990) analysed the crucial role of Aboriginal workers in the process of nation building, from guides and linguists to nursemaids and cooks, cattlemen and mine workers. From the very beginning, alongside confrontation there was collaboration. As well as resistance, Aboriginal people offered assistance, always. Since Mabo and the subsequent Wik decision we have heard a lot about ‘the black armband’ approach to history. This contemptuous label, originally applied by historian Geoffrey Blainey, is particularly meant for Henry Reynolds. We are told by the Prime Minister that we are not responsible for the appalling injustices of the past: things were very different then; morality was of another order. Once again, in This Whispering in Our Hearts, Reynolds’ calm scholarship offers an important corrective. ‘There were always men and women who stood up and demanded justice for the Aborigines,’ he writes. ‘Even on the most troubled frontiers when the conflict was at its height.’ In the 1830s Robert Lyon sounded this uncanny warning to his fell ow settlers: If ye determine upon a war of extermination, civilized nations will be mute with astonishment at the madness of a policy so uncalled for, so demoniacal. When your doom is passed, your own children, for whom ye have invaded the country, will join with the disinherited offspring of those ye have slain to pour a flood of curses on your memory. He was right. Whether Geoffrey Blainey likes it or not. And voices such as this can be found in the records throughout nineteenth century Australia. Nor is our shameful past as far away as apologists would like us to think. We watch the Dawn Ceremony on TV and are told not to forget the landing at Gallipoli in 1916. Should we then forget the Forest River massacre in East Kimberley ten years later, when 130 Aboriginal men women and children were rounded up and chained together, before they were shot, dismembered and burnt, their remains pulverised and scattered over what had been their country? In the wake of the Wik decision there will be those who feel we should forget, especially since these Aboriginal people had been removed from a pastoral lease and were being punished for having speared the lease owner who had taken possession of their tribal land. They would also like us to forget that Aboriginal slavery was common practice in Western Australia until the 1950s as the way the ‘Kings in Grass Castles’ worked their pastoral leases. We need not remind ourselves that during the 1930s the Anti-Slavery Society established a committee to monitor Aboriginal slavery in Australia. Instead we should concentrate on the plight of those poor pastoralists who might now have to share their pastoral leases with the original owners. Forget is not what Reynolds’ book will allow us to do. Just as the reformers and agitators who are the subject of This Whispering in Our Hearts made uncomfortable companions for their contemporaries, so Reynolds irritates those ‘who want to feel relaxed and comfortable about themselves and innocently proud of their history’. Reviving the words of the gentleman in 1826 who wrote’ deeply are we in arrears to these injured beings at whose expense we live and prosper’, Reynolds makes the point, yet again, that settler prosperity was purchased with Indigenous land and Indigenous lives. That is the coinage of Australian success. Justices Deane and Gaudron recently reminded Australia that we have inherited a legacy of unutterable shame. They are not late twentieth century bleeding-hearts, merely the latest in a long lineage of humanitarian voices asking Australians to act with honour and integrity toward the original people of this marvellous place. How many times do people need to voice this plea before we are willing to listen to the whispering in our collective hearts?

Cassandra Pybus

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