Georgina Arnott

There has been, for some time, a debate among researchers of Australian history. Should the moral and psychological dimensions of settler experience be examined, or do we know enough already?

Islands, as recent histories of immigration detention and quarantine show, offer unique things to human societies. Rimmed by a watery bulwark, they have more surveyable borders than do mainlands. Their status as sublands suggest that they exist outside the conventions and temporal dimensions of larger, mainland societies. What happens on an island stays on an island; at least, island prison warders and sojourners imagined this to be the case. 

Janet Malcolm knew the difference between the remembered thing and the thing itself. Her writing life and 1984 masterpiece, In the Freud Archives, explored that crevice, asking: is what really matters how we experience life, not life itself?

‘To fully understand why the shadow of slavery haunts us today, we must confront the flawed way that it ended.’ This premise guides the third book of Kris Manjapra, a Bahamian of African and Indian descent and history professor at Massachusetts’s Tufts University. As Manjapra invites us to see, the ‘voids’ in his family’s history reflect the pernicious afterlife of five hundred years of Atlantic slavery; his loss just one of its manifold legacies.

On the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum, the Weekend Australian editorial devoted considerable time to savaging the dominant 1970s model of indigenous development, most closely associated with Nugget Coombs: a ‘neo-pastoralist dream [that was] philosophically flawed, a fatal fusion of romanticism and Marxism’. Helen Hughes, in an excerpt from Lands of Shame in the same newspaper, echoes the sentiment, labelling the re-creation of remote communities ‘reverse racism’. Hughes writes: ‘a few courageous leaders are demanding an end to welfare dependence, but their voices are drowned out by articulate élites.’ Enter Noel Pearson, whom the paper’s editorial applauds, along with John Howard. The Australian also published an edited version of the fifty-page article ‘White Guilt, Victimhood and the Quest for a Radical Centre’ that appears in Griffith Review 16.   ‘White Guilt’ puts flesh on Pearson’s well-known objection to welfare and his emphasis on individual indigenous ‘responsibility’. He looks to early black-American models of liberation, including those of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, for inspiration. It will surprise no one to learn that Pearson favours Washington’s approach, in which ‘blacks should secure their constitutional rights through their own moral and economic advancement’, over Du Bois’s call for ‘ceaseless agitation’. Pearson firmly believes that public policy should encourage the most disadvantaged people in society to change the way they think about themselves, rather than the way the majority thinks about them. While acknowledging that racism originates at a systemic level, Pearson argues that it is a ‘terrible thing to encourage victims … to see themselves as victims’. The consciousness of Bill Cosby, he suggests, would be a good role model. Pearson draws extensively on the black American Shelby Steele, who argues that white guilt, in the form of affirmative action, for example, erodes black agency by making blacks feel helpless: ‘agency’, Steele believes, ‘is what makes us fully human.’

Georgina Arnott’s 2016 biography The Unknown Judith Wright was an absorbing exercise in discovering the facets of Judith Wright’s early life and formative experience that were unknown, hidden, or forgotten, by biographers as well as by Wright herself. It was a revealing study of a writer who had a love-fear relationship with the projects of biography and autobiography. In the 1950s, Wright wrote loving, admiring histories of her pioneering family, but in her autobiography, Half a Lifetime, published in 1999, the year before her death, she began: ‘Autobiography is not what I want to write.’ There were good reasons for this. There were the formal challenges of life writing – the person writing is not the person written about – but also what Wright had discovered, in her archival research for her rewriting of her family history, about her Wyndham colonial ancestors’ role in Aboriginal dispossession, and violence.