4 comments

1. Terence MillsJuly 30, 2024 at 10:11 am

   Robbie Thorpe, the uncle of independent senator Lidia Thorpe, was one of the noisy campaigners who sought, successfully as it turned out, to defeat the Voice Referendum and even petitioned the High Court, unsuccessfully, to have the referendum declared unconstitutional.

   I’m not sure that ‘Uncle’ Robbie and his niece are actually speaking on behalf of First Nations People.

2. ArndJuly 30, 2024 at 10:46 am

   “We must all stand together to end these atrocities and recognize the Sovereignty of First Nations people.”

   I think we all may need to do a fair bit of homework on this one. What, exactly, do we mean by “sovereignty”? What, exactly, does Uncle Robbie mean? There seems to be a whole lot of confusion surrounding the exact meaning of this term!

   And not just for Uncle Robbie. At least some of you will remember Little Johnny Howard’s proposed Preamble to the constitution (the Howard-Murray preamble), which begins like this: With hope in God, the Commonwealth of Australia is constituted by the sovereignty of all its citizens”.

   Which, to my anarchist mind, immediately confirmed the fact that Howard didn’t know what he was talking about – and there were at the time critical evaluations by (non-anarchist?!?) constitutional experts exactly echoing my reservations: the (bourgeois) concept of nationhood and the Rule of Law requires, and is centrally defined by the fact that citizens surrender (or abrogate) their sovereignty to the institutions of the state. Howard – a trained lawyer and long-standing senior legislator – should have been aware of this basic fact, but clearly wasn’t, and had been spouting jurisprudential garbage!

   I admit that I feel somewhat possessive about the notion of sovereignty: google the term, and you’ll come across the concept of “Westphalian Sovereignty”, which came into existence at the Peace Treaties of Osnabrück and Münster, back in 1648 at the conclusion of the exquisitely brutal Thirty Years War. Now, guess what: I grew up in Westphalia… – and whilst I obviously did learn about the Peace of Westphalia at school, until much more recently I never realised the enduring international importance of the concept. All it did explain to me at the time was why we in Bielefeld were majority Reformed/Lutheran Church, whereas Paderborn, a mere 40ks to the south-east, was a staunchly Catholic Archbishopric. And how all that did vastly complicate the establishment of the first German nation state in 1871. And how it prompted some “Old Lutherans” at the time to pack their bags and seek “religious sovereignty” on the other side of the globe, in Klemzig, Hahndorf and the Barossa Valley. Etc.

   I am, myself, an internationalist, and in hindsight must admit that I always have been, since long before I learned of the word or knew what it meant. Thus, until the last few years, I never really paid that much attention to the concept of “sovereign nation state”, and how truly confused people are about it. Brexit, anyone?

   On that basis, I do get annoyed with people venting about “sovereignty” in ways which make it clear that they have not explored the indications to a degree that could lend some weight to their utterances on the subject. I don’t necessarily disagree outright with Uncle Robbie (or Lydia Thorpe, to name another vocal advocate) – but I would like to explore in a bit more detail where they actually want to go with this.

3. ClakkaJuly 30, 2024 at 4:33 pm

   Well said Arnd,

   There seems to be a weird sort of ‘bake your cake and eat it too mishmash by the Thorpes. That’s OK, but just how far back in both ‘western’ legal precedence and First Nations’ law / lore will they want to go?

   ‘Sovereignty’ is such an ethereal and ephemeral beast.

4. B SullivanJuly 31, 2024 at 4:58 am

   In the interests of truth and reconciliation…

   The land was not stolen. Nor was it owned. Ownership of land is an artificial, non-natural, abstract idea, and should not be confused with the territorial imperative that drives species throughout the animal kingdom to defend their space, which is not fixed to a place but instead moves to wherever the animal goes.

   When the first fleet arrived in Australia the entire population of the continent was perhaps as little as 300,000 people. At most it was about 1.3 million, about the same size as the population of London alone at that time. Based on subsequent maps made by linguists studying native languages there were about ‘500 different nations’. You may have seen these maps if you’ve ever had to attend job centres. Do a bit of mathematics and you get an average of as little as 6,000 people or at most 26,000 people per nation at the time of the arrival of the first fleet. That is not a lot of people. And Australia is a very big country. Consequently practically all of Australia was unoccupied by people. So I ask by what right does anyone have to claim that the land belonged exclusively to these privileged few or that it was stolen from them by newcomers? The newcomers may have unjustly claimed the land for themselves when they brought the artificial concept of land ownership to Australia, but it definitely didn’t belong to “traditional landowners’ because there never was a tradition of land ownership, and until that truth is recognised there can never be reconciliation. The idea of land ownership evolved from the establishment of civilisations – permanently settled communities that required the organisation, recognition and enforcement of rules and laws of who was entitled to live where, and civilisation was never established in Australia before the arrival of the first fleet.

   Like their victims, the perpetrators of historical injustices are long dead and cannot be called to account for their deeds. As for reparations, why is anyone alive today entitled to reparation for crimes that were committed in the past not against them but against other people? By all means address current injustices that are happening now, but this attempt to profit from the suffering of the long dead is ghoulish to say the least. A festering idea of entitlement through inherited grievance.

   But if you must have reparations consider them as already paid. In return for invading this mostly empty, unoccupied land, 500 primitive nations that used to live in complete ignorance of the reality of the rest of the world have been endowed with more than ten thousand years of accumulated advanced science, technology and culture that required the combined efforts of billions of people throughout history and from all over the world to create. They now have the ability to record their own history thanks to writing and reading and have gained access to incredible literature, art and music far, far beyond anything they ever knew. Now when they paint pictures they are not limited to a palette of black and white, and red and yellow ochre. Now they can paint with green and blue, as well as a spectrum of brilliant non earth pigments so that their ability to depict the world around them has vastly improved. Symphony has replaced monotony. Consider the expansion of their minds and awareness as compensation for their rude awakening to the rest of the world’s existence. Note also that nothing that their ‘longest unchanging culture’ ever achieved had not already been achieved elsewhere in the world. The balance of trade in intellectual property is overwhelmingly in their favour. How much more reparation do they deserve? Land privileges? Clearly they are not talking about rights that we are all entitled to.

   As for sovereignty, the greatest thing that primitive Australians had any power over was fire, which in their ignorance of environmental ecology they used without compunction to destroy the forests and bush lands just to make hunting their preferred prey easier. Under Aboriginal sovereignty they committed mass ecocide with absolutely no idea of what they were even doing.

   These are just some of the undeniable truths that need to be recognised if any meaningful reconciliation is to be achieved.