Abstract
On May 28, 2011, the Economist published reports about Australia. Inside a cover dominated by a golden map of Australia with the caption “The Next Golden State,” referring to the mining boom, is an article about the diversity of its population, titled “The Evolving Platypus.” A most evocative metaphor.’ This rare monotreme is an egg-laying mammal with a duck bill, a beaver tail, and flipper limbs, as unique as the continent where it lives and the nation that now inhabits it. To outsiders, it is remarkable that a meager 22 million people of disparate cultures and races managed to occupy a vast continent, thrived, and prospered. The nation has certainly evolved in the last 60 years: in the 1940s Australia was 98 percent Anglo-Celtic; today 26 percent of the population was born overseas (compared with 21 percent in Canada, 14 percent in the United States, and 10 percent in the United Kingdom).2 The 2001 and 2006 Census showed the second most spoken language is Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin) and the third is Arabic. Reconciliation, a grand narrative and a national imperative, can no longer be seen as unfinished business only between blacks and whites, the main historical antagonists.3 Reconciliation in the twenty-first century must involve other migrants: yellows, browns, mixed races, and blacks from Africa. This topic is rarely explored.
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Notes
David Alexander, “The Evolving Platypus,” The Economist 399:8735 (2011): 10–12. Alexander describes Australia’s unique economic model as a “platypus model,” which combines small government and egalitarianism to maintain a harmonious society and minimize populism. Alexander uses this metaphor to describe the diversity of its population.
Reconciliation is a grand narrative but not the “Grand Narrative” of victors, heroes, or gods, often criticized by postmodern “Masters of Suspicions.” Philosopher Richard Kearney argues that narrative memory of victims has just as much need to be felt as commemoration of glory. Films and documentaries on the Shoah, for example, are meant to honor our “debt to the dead” and ensure that it never happens again. See Richard Kearney, On Stories: Thinking in Action (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 61–69.
“Paul Keating … stood his ground on reconciliation, and the moral investment he made through the Redfern speech and then the Mabo native title legislation, paid out handsomely for Kevin Rudd a decade later when he made the apology to the Stolen Generations.” George Megalogenis, Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era, Quarterly Essay 40 (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2010), 20. Keating considered the Redfern speech a comprehensive apology. He could not understand why indigenous people wanted another apology from John Howard (Interview with David Speers on the twentieth anniversary of the Keating government, Sky News, Dec 15, 2011).
Marcia Langton and Noel Loos, “Kara Ged: Homeland,” in First Australians, edited by Rachel Perkins and Marcia Langton (Carlton: Miegunyah, 2010), 244–45.
Don Watson, Reconciliation of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM (Milson’s Point: Knoff/Random House Australia, 2002), 288–91.
Cited in Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 1.
See Christian Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010).
Raimond Gaita, “Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics,” Quarterly Essay 16 (Melbourne: Black, Inc., 2004), 41.
Peter Reith, then senior minister in the Howard government, wrote to Fr. Frank Brennan to explain why John Howard could not offer a national apology. Cited in Raimond Gaita, Collective Responsibility and Reconciliation with Australia’s Indigenous Peoples, Aquinas Memorial Lecture, delivered at the Australian Catholic University, Brisbane, on Nov 11, 1998.
Bernhard Schlink, Guilt about the Past (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2009), 5–22.
See Penny Edwards and Shen Yuanfang, Eds., Lost in the Whitewash: Aboriginal-Asian Encounters in Australia, 1901–2001 (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 2003);
Regina Ganter, Ed., Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006).
See Peta Stephenson, “New Cultural Scripts: Exploring the Dialogue between Indigenous and ‘Asian’ Australians,” Journal of Australian Studies 77 (2003): 57–68.
Erez Cohen, “Multiculturalism, Latin Americans and ‘Indigeneity’ in Australia,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 14 (2003): 39–52.
Minoru Hokari, “Globalising Aboriginal Reconciliation: Indigenous Australians and Asian (Japanese) Migrants,” Cultural Studies Review 9 (2003): 84–101.
Ann Cuthroys, “An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous,” in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, edited by John Docker and Gerhard Fischer (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000), 32.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London/New York: Verso, 2006), 6–7.
Don Watson, “Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America,” Quarterly Essay 4 (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2004), 47.
Joan Hendriks and Gerard Hall, “Spirit of Religion Project: Aboriginal Australians,” in Spirit of Religion: A Project for Meeting and Directed by Raimon Pannikkar, edited by Milena Carrara et al., (Milano: Servitum, 2011), 5–6.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Penguin Books, 2009).
Cited in Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 287.
Jonathan Sacks, The Persistence ofFaith: Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age (BBC Reith Lectures 1990) (London, New York: Continuum, 2005), vii.
Sacks argues that the other two models (“society as country house” and “society as hotel”) are unworkable. Society as country house imagines host and guests, insider and outsider, majority and minority, which is the old “assimilationist” or “melting pot” model in which minorities have to lose their identity to belong. In the society as hotel model, minorities don’t have to lose their identities because there is no such thing as belonging at all, that is, no dominant culture, no outsider, and no national identity. See Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (London, New York: Continuum, 2007), 15–16.
Following Edward Said, Langton thinks that those who argue for the preservation of Aboriginal “culture” are not sufficiently critical of “traditions,” some of which might exacerbate entrenched Aboriginal disadvantages. These protagonists often have a romanticized notion of Aboriginal society as a gerontocracy that no longer conforms to statistical facts. Marcia Langton, “The Shock of the New: A Postcolonial Dilemma for Australianist Anthropology,” in Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia, edited by Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), 91–115.
Cited in Digby Hannah, “Experience of Place in Australian Identity and Theology,” Pacifica 17 (2004): 309.
Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (London, New York: Continuum, 2005), 225.
Timothy Fry, Ed., The Rule of St Benedict in English (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1981), 13.
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© 2014 Jione Havea
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Tam, M. (2014). Reconciling a Platypus Nation: Can Churches Help?. In: Havea, J. (eds) Indigenous Australia and the Unfinished Business of Theology. Postcolonialism and Religions. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426673_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426673_6
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