Friday essay: why it’s time to move beyond truth-telling to Indigenous resurgence

In the early 1840s, the first European to invade the country between the Murumbidgee and Galari rivers shot camp dogs at a place called Burrowmunditroy to intimidate Wiradyuri people into leaving their own land.

His niece recorded that within days 1,500 warriors were gathered nearby ready to attack. Painted for battle, the warriors formed a line, then charged the homestead. The terrified white people inside braced for the onslaught.

But when the warriors got 50 yards from the homestead, they suddenly stopped, squatted on the ground and broke into a song.

Their leader, Cobborn, was respected by both Wiradyuri and white people. He forced the white man to take part in a 24-hour formal ceremony, at the end of which each warrior assured him of their forgiveness. They confronted him about his behaviour, then forgave him because that was required of them as warriors.

Before leaving, the warriors gifted him cut bark to help him build his house. The ceremony gave him an opportunity to reflect on his actions and learn more about the people whose land he had taken.

In the long run, the process did little to alter how ideas about race impacted Wiradyuri lives. The ceremony only reinforced the man’s belief in the inferiority of Aboriginal people. Within a generation, the descendants of the warriors who participated in the ceremony were not able to live Wiradyuri lives. They no longer controlled their land. Most could not speak their own language.

Dhoombak Goobgoowana

The events at Burrowmunditroy happened a little more than a decade before the University of Melbourne was founded in 1853. Now Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff are leading the university through a process of truth-telling to give a full and accurate account of its more than 150-year history.

Dhoombak Goobgoowana , a phrase from the local Woi Wurrung language that translates as “truth-telling”, is the first volume to be published from this process. The book is a thorough account of how the university shamefully benefitted from racism, murder, theft and grave robbing.

Edited by Ross L. Jones, James Waghorne and Marcia Langton, it collects essays by academics across a range of disciplines. Their contributions are organised into four themed sections.

Place shows the university’s connection to stolen land, its disregard for Aboriginal landscapes and plans for the future of its campuses. Human Remains describes the university’s efforts to repatriate bodies it stole from Aboriginal graves. Settler-Colonial Knowledge and Indigenous Knowledge show a recent shift within the university toward a growing understanding and appreciation of Indigenous knowledges.

The book widens its view beyond the university. Not only does it engage with other institutions and museum collections; it incorporates a broader discussion about how the university contributed to and supported wider societal racism.

The editors say the book is about how race has been constructed by academics, who wielded their power against Aboriginal people. They call for an apology for the treatment of Aboriginal people as well as “a permanent place for truth-telling and correcting the record” on campus.

The book is also about the promise of truth-telling:

Truth-telling is one form of restorative justice. Writing factual histories that fully acknowledge the Aboriginal peoples impacted and their fates can make some recompense for this history.

Dhoombak Goobgoowana shows just how much of what university benefactors, staff and students did to build the university was based on ideas about race. The foundation stones for the university were set down on land taken by force from its Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung owners. The land was reshaped in the image of the invaders’ European homelands. The university was staffed with people who promoted ideas about race that negatively affected Aboriginal people’s lives.

They disparaged and punished Aboriginal people, who in their opinions deserved pity and protection. In the worst cases, they exposed Aboriginal people to risks and shocking treatment, including the case of the graduate student, who was implicated in a mass killing of Aboriginal people while working on a research project. An investigation found that the man was involved in the killing of at least 16 Aboriginal men and women whose bodies were incinerated.

The university was a place where natural selection and “Aryan” supremacy were promoted and taught. Bad interactions between the university and Aboriginal people continued throughout the university’s history, as self-styled experts on race characterised Aboriginal people as a problem they knew how to solve. Eugenics-based beliefs were used to define, control and exclude Indigenous people from higher education. A racist professor even argued that “Indigenous Australians had a brain size and thus mentality of a 13-year-old Anglo-Saxon child”.

Taken together, the stories in Dhoombak Goobgoowana show the enormity of the challenges Aboriginal people faced.

Aboriginal people responded by challenging the racist ideas the university promoted. They forced places for themselves within the university. Margaret Williams Weir became the first Indigenous graduate from the university in 1959, more than a century after it was founded. Ian Anderson later became the first Aboriginal medical doctor to graduate.

Williams Weir and Anderson were trailblazers, who defied the racists and proved their arguments wrong. Gunditjmara elder Uncle Jim Berg, who began working at the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service in the early 1970s, emerges as an important character in the story.

“Things had started to change at the university,” he writes in an autobiographical essay he has contributed to Dhoombak Goobgoowana. “Having Koori students at the university and having Kooris working there made a big difference.” He urged the university to complete a history of the relationship between the university and Kooris.

His interactions with and battles against the university show the resilience, skill and capacity of Aboriginal people to confront – not only endure – racism and to fight for and to achieve the right outcome.

Without Berg, and the examples of Williams Weir, Anderson and other Aboriginal actors, the book could mislead readers into seeing “poor old blackfellas” where they do not exist.

‘Deficit thinking’

What is beyond truth-telling? Truth-telling is more than a process to get a fuller and more accurate account of history. It is also an effective framework for thinking about Aboriginal people.

In the past, ideas such as “assimilation” and “protection” compelled generations of Australians to think and act toward Aboriginal people a certain way.

For a generation now, people have been encouraged to see, and engage with, Aboriginal people within the framework of “reconciliation” and “truth-telling”. That means seeing Aboriginal people in relation to ongoing impacts of dispossession, conflict and colonial violence.

The vision for reconciliation is to create change, so that Aboriginal children will have the same life chances as non-Aboriginal children. In practice, that means trying to change Indigenous people to achieve sameness. At its heart, reconciliation is about strengthening relationships between Indigenous people and Australians for the benefit of all. It is not only about what is best for Aboriginal people.

Truth-telling also encourages people to think of Aboriginal identity as tied to the effects of colonialism. The experience of truth-telling and reconciliation confines Aboriginal people to being known in relation to outsiders.

People mostly hear about Indigenous people in relation to historic and current injustices, which negatively impact health, wellbeing, educational and living standards. This way of seeing us says Aboriginal people are wronged, victimised, hard-done-by, and so on.

The danger of truth-telling as a permanent idea to frame thinking about Aboriginal people is that it feeds into the established pattern of deficit thinking. Native activism has always sought equality of opportunity, while maintaining a strong defence of difference.

When Australians celebrated their sesquicentenary in 1938, the Aboriginal Progressive Association told the shocking truth of “settlement” with a “ Day of Mourning ” protest. They outlined what white people’s actions since the landing at Sydney Cove meant for Aboriginal people:

you took our land away from us by force. You have almost exterminated our people, but there are enough of us remaining to expose the humbug of your claim, as white Australians, to be a civilised, progressive, kindly and humane nation. By your cruelty and callousness towards the Aborigines you stand condemned […]

These are hard words, but we ask you to face the truth of our accusation […] Give us the same chances as yourselves, and we will prove ourselves just as good, if not better, Australians, than you!

The Association also noted that while the Aboriginal people who were being “protected” by white people were dying out, the “most healthy” Aboriginal people were the ones who “have to look after themselves” outside of the reach of “protection” policies.

Baby Boomer and Generation X activism was much more aggressive in defence of cultural and racial difference. They demanded land rights and self-determination and preached Black Power through cultural strength.

In recent decades, activists have pushed the idea of Indigenous resurgence to frame their thinking. Resurgence is an alternative to asking outsiders to face the truth and change. It is an alternative to proving to outsiders the value of our culture, knowledge, even our language.

Resurgence is where native people turn away from the state to work each day to reconcile with our ancestors. Indigenous resurgence is focused on identity. It advocates being a good Indigenous person: a good or better Narrungdera person of the Wiradyuri Nation, a good or better Wurundjeri person of the Kulin Nation, and so on, rather than a good or better Australian.

Resurgence is already widely pursued within native communities across the world. It is beyond reconciliation. It is beyond truth-telling.

Lawrence Bamblett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.