By Frances Goold
Voice Crash Investigation [1]
1
‘Mario, what’s your relationship to this park?’
‘This is the park where my wife and I got married, roughly eight years ago.’
‘And what did you father say to you at the wedding?’
‘My dad told the photographer he didn’t want that statue in our wedding pictures’.
‘Can you remember what he said about the statue?’
‘He said it represented the oppression of the African American people by individuals like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, etcetera…’
‘And your father, he’s from Georgia…so that statue to him has real horrible meaning?’
‘Yes, it does’.
‘I’m sorry that the American Civil War turned up to your wedding.’ [2]
There would not be many of us who have not, at one time or other, felt a powerful compulsion to avoid persistent memories of an overwhelmingly distressing life event – just as Mario’s father may have felt compelled to do in Lee Park on his son’s wedding day. Yet somehow Civil War trauma filtered through to Mario, having already claimed his father, who simply wanted to remove a distressing, “subliminally racist” reminder of Confederate power reasserted by a statue commissioned and erected during a period of state-sanctioned lynchings and racist terror in Virginia.
ON Mario’s’ wedding day, emotional pain and discomfort were managed civilly, contentious as the historical situation was in this case, and conflict was avoided.
*****
Trauma is often described as a normal reaction to an abnormal event, but what is not often understood is that trauma can shift and mutate through subsequent generations in intricate ways, in turn occasionally reinvigorated and refreshed by traumatic memories of war, and even by memorials erected in the ensuing peace. This is called ‘transgenerational trauma’.
In some way or another most of us have been impacted directly or indirectly by a traumatic event, either proximally, or back in time. Depending on the type and severity of the traumatic event, and one’s personal or social circumstances, there is very often timely recovery from a traumatic event – most especially in healthy communities where support provides natural conditions for healing that then reduces or even eliminates altogether the secondary impact on family members and community.
It transpired, however, that Mario’s father was not the only one wishing to render the statue invisible, and that more would be added to the story of Lee Park, with subsequent events adding layer upon layer to existing transgenerational traumatic aspects, some folding in from peripheral trauma histories ostensibly unrelated to the central event but compounding and contributing to its multiple ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ causes, until all necessary and sufficient conditions slotted themselves in place to bring about a deadly explosion.
On May 13, 2017, neo-Nazi Richard B. Spencer led a torch-lit rally in Lee Park in protest at the Charlottesville town council’s decision to remove and sell the statue. Counter-protesters gathered the following day and held a silent candlelight vigil that attracted over a hundred of the town’s citizens. A couple of months later, on July 8, 2017, the Klu Klux Klan held a rally in Charlottesville protesting the city’s plan to remove the statue. Approximately fifty Klansmen were met by several hundred counter-protesters. The police used tear gas to disperse the crowd, and made many arrests. On August 12, 2017, during a ‘Unite the Right’ rally, clashes broke out between supporters of the statue, who marched under Confederate, American, and Revolutionary flags, and counter-protesters. During the rally, counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed and 19 others injured by a car-ramming attack. The perpetrator, James Alex Fields J., was found guilty of ramming his car into the crowd, and was sentenced to life in prison.[3]
Yet a closer look at the perpetrator’s – albeit brief – backstory reveals he was doomed from the start by an almost improbable trauma history, which began before he was born, and arguably overdetermined his psychological susceptibility to the supremacist influences and fantasies that drove him to murder.
*****
PTSD was first formalised as a psychiatric diagnosis in 1980 in the 3rd Edition of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder – best known by its acronym PTSD – is an anxiety disorder of the greatest severity. Significantly, it is the only classified ‘mental illness’ solely caused by an external or environmental stressor.
Traumatic events such as environmental disasters, the catastrophic human and material destruction and carnage of war leading to mass deaths and injuries, atrocities, dispossession of lands, countries, culture and language – and the interpersonal traumatisation caused by domestic violence and sexual abuse can lead to chronic levels of disturbance and dysfunction, folding in on families and communities in complex webs of intersecting causation. Occasionally escape and avoidance may be the only recourses for PTSD sufferers, precipitating maladaptive behaviours and ‘priming’ them for re-traumatisation and further dysfunction.
Our responses to a traumatic event are instinctive and mostly unconscious. During a moment of extreme threat we may find ourselves gripped by an instinct to survive, perhaps to protect others, and to regain control. It is not merely the original traumatic event that determines its emotional impact upon us, but how we respond to it as individuals, and even as cultures and communities.
Chronic PTSD is characterised by its enduring, complex character which, due to the environmental cues (triggers’) which reinvigorate and cause the sufferer to feel they are reliving the traumatic event all over again, may then cause them to resort to various ‘defences’ to ward off unwanted memories of the traumatic event, and thus gain control over their environment.
These defensive strategies may distort their relationships with those closest to them, and perhaps even a trauma sufferer’s ability to lovingly parent. Children of severely traumatised individuals are occasionally secondary victims, who may in turn develop a range of self-protective/defensive strategies to cope with a disturbed parent upon whom they depend. They may then in their own turn engage in overprotective, or other dysfunctional parenting styles modelled by their own disturbed parents., and so on infinitum.
Dissociation is an instinctive, autonomic response to an overwhelming stressor, and when this occurs in traumatised children, they may not be aware of what precisely they experienced until much later. Child victims of interpersonal trauma may be threatened into silence if the trauma occurs in the context of domestic violence or sexual abuse. Lacking the words to describe their experience, children may retreat into fantasies of escape and freedom, such as obsessively drawing pictures of birds and aeroplanes. If a child withdraws into themselves to manage a traumatic experience, they may fail to develop the verbal abilities to express their feelings, with all that this implies for healthy growth and development.
Adolescents and adults may also resort to maladaptive ways of forgetting and removing painful intrusive memories (e.g., nightmares and ‘reliving’ or ‘re-experiencing’ the original traumatic event in response to external triggers). They may habitually escape into substances or escapist activities simply to avoid traumatic memories, often unpredictably triggered and compounded by environmental cues over which they have no control.
Without adequate diagnosis and therapeutic intervention – and most crucially – without support and understanding, chronic, complex PTSD may develop, consolidating into a debilitating disorder of the self (personality disorder) which may impact and even cause great suffering and fresh trauma in those closest to the traumatised victim: families, extended families, and even cultures.
Hopelessness – as it plays out for all traumatised victim/survivors of colonial violence and racism – inevitably engenders a feedback loop of despair and rage in people who have been hurt repeatedly, then not listened to, causing a spiralling down into feelings of anger, rage, and depression, which in turn may precipitate further cycles of violence and trauma. Occasionally acting out in anger is the sole defence against powerlessness, or against perceived dangers of surrender, acceptance, passivity. When all else fails, in rare instances, suicide may be seen as the only way out of intolerable pain and perceived powerlessness.
As the Charlotteville tragedy demonstrates, the trajectory of untreated (or unresolved) trauma as its psychological impacts radiate through families, generations and communities – even entire countries consumed by revenge to start wars against their neighbours – is often difficult to identify. Everyone is impacted by the sufferings demonstrated by the historical examples: a returned soldier, his wife, his children, all suffer in different ways at different times, the children’s personalities shaped and their life circumstances and trajectories determined by the posttraumatic sufferings of a parent who fights for his country and afterwards, with no help forthcoming, is then left to battle his private demons alone. As demonstrated by the seemingly endless traumatic sequelae of war, there is no trauma that does not manifest in some way or another within and across generations. A severe untreated trauma can be as unpredictable as it is complex, and as opaque as it is decimating; indeed, it might be said that psychological trauma characterises the human condition.
Trauma changes us, and trauma shapes us.
Apart from child (sexual) abuse, the common existential threat for societies and nations woven through each of these instances of transgenerational trauma are colonialism and racism, which in their most violent forms spring from it and perpetuate it. And the frontier wars which inflicted such barbarous cruelties the Indigenous peoples of a country conveniently classified as terra nullius to justify European invasion and colonisation also set in train among the traumatised survivors the added complexities of transgenerational trauma.
2
On September 14 last, during a Q&A following her Press Club speech, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (hereinafter referred to as SJNP) responded to a question by journalist[4] regarding her view of the negative impact of colonialism on Aboriginal people (here quoted in full):
A: ‘No, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think so. Positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we’ve got running water, we’ve got readily available food, I mean everything that my grandfather had (sic) when he was growing up, because he first saw white fellas in his early adolescence, we now have….’ ‘… But if we keep telling Aboriginal people that they are victims we are effectively removing their agency and then giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives, that is the worst possible thing you can do to any human being is to tell them they are a victim without agency, and that’s what I refuse to do.”
Q: “So you don’t believe there’s any negative ongoing impact of colonization on indigenous Australians today (just to confirm)?”
A: ‘No, there’s no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation. …’
Q: ‘(There have been) …generations of trauma amongst indigenous Australians as a result of colonisation (whether that means colonisation continues now is probably a separate question), but would you accept that there have been generations of trauma as a result of that history?’
A: ‘Well I guess that would mean that those of us whose ancestors were dispossessed of their own country and brought here in chains as convicts are also suffering from intergenerational trauma, so I should be doubly suffering from intergenerational trauma’ (laughter and applause from supporters).[5]
*****
Of course it’s not for me to say when denial and disavowal become betrayal.
But what I can say with confidence is that for many, being In Denial is good, that it is a good, safe place.
And that denialism is only a few little denials away.
And also, that denial is sometimes a psychological defence against some bit of reality that has to be repudiated.
For many people, denial may feel like the only means of warding off traumatic memories, and to open up psychic space for renewal and reinvention and for strengthening bulwarks against unwelcome memories from intruding upon a new, safe emotional place. Denial can be a way of warding off whatever might threaten some hard-won security that has been cobbled together by a determined use of available opportunities.
Denial is also a cognitive defence against an overwhelming reality, where its repudiation is another means of gaining mastery over intrusive recollections and emotions. Denial of selected bits of reality and even against feelings such as trauma-related guilt (“if only I had been there/not been there, this would never have happened”, etc) may be seen as a component of well-integrated traumatic symptomatology, a determined – perhaps courageous – statement of resilience in the face of unbearable reality.
SJNP’s attempt to minimise the trauma endured by “convicts in chains” (my ancestors, as it happens) as a means of debunking the unimaginably greater sufferings of Indigenous people violently forced off their lands and dispossessed by the colonial ticket-of-leave squattocracy, was to deny the humanity of both the Indigenous invaded and colonial invaders, together with their many and varied sufferings and the wretched conditions imposed on all people by a ruthless, imperialistic, colonial power.
Was SJNP’s ahistorical denial of the negative impacts of colonialism and transgenerational trauma upon the First Peoples a mere political ‘provocation’, as Noel Pearson suggested,[6] or something deeper, such as a denial of her own origins in colonial history (including massacres) and her family’s trauma?
It is possible to tune into SJNP descriptions of her life experiences – and those of her mother, Bess Nungarrayi Price (hereinafter referred to as BNP) – and speculate upon how their collective experiences may have determined their commitment to Indigenous public policy. SJNP’s autobiographical stories contain much that is both traumatic and self-redemptive, which might illuminate her zeal regarding local self-determination and interventionist approaches to changing the lives of Aboriginal people.
Price has written that her mother was “born under a tree and lived within an original Warlpiri structured environment through a kinship system on Aboriginal land. Her first language was Warlpiri, and her parents, my grandparents, only came into contact with white settlers in their early adolescence in the 1940s.”[7]
What Price omits to mention is her maternal grandfather’s proximity to the Coniston massacre, about which her mother provided the following account:
‘Sitting on a plastic chair under a tree at Kirrirdi, Price waves her arm lightly to the west and tells how her father, Dinny Japaltjarri, was a boy out hunting with his father when he saw white men for the first time, riding on camels in the desert 200km west of Yuendumu at a place called Yampirri. It scared and excited him. He was initiated at the time of the 1928 Coniston massacres, the punitive expeditions led by Constable George Murray, a Gallipoli veteran, in which at least 52 and perhaps many more Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye men, women and children were murdered in the last act of the frontier wars. She says he never spoke of it.’[7]
Murderous violence remains close and haunting. SJNP has experienced and witnessed – as did BNP[8] – seemingly endless violence, abuse, humiliation and degradation in her communities – a tragic outcome for which she blames Aboriginal men and white (and corrupt Indigenous) bureaucracies for ignoring, yet there is no disguising her contempt for the Indigenous middle-class she blames for the situation, for feminists who fail to stick up for murdered women. “We are human”, she reminds her audience, whilst yet denying the complex nature of trauma in her communities and its links to colonialism, white settlement and the frontier wars.
As she stated in her 2016 speech hosted by The Centre of Independent Studies (an Australian right-wing think-tank), “If my parents had not found each other, my mother would probably be dead”, as a result of the domestic violence suffered by her mother during her first marriage to the father of her first child (who tragically died at ten years of leukemia, during the early years of her marriage to David Price). Like her mother before her, she escaped by dint of her own personality and fortitude, through the support and security of marriage to a white man, and her ability to seize opportunities she maintains are, via her somewhat offensive bootstrap rhetoric, also available to her people.
So it seems there are some for whom the planets serendipitously line up and circumstances suddenly manifest for the priority of getting away, and just as a benevolent Christian mission and a white marriage saved her mother and offered her a pathway out, SJNP – straddling both white and Indigenous cultures as she says of herself – envisions redemption for her people along a similar trajectory.
Thus it appears that paternalism is better than nothing when your communities are imploding.
SJNP’s tone as, she speaks of the violence experienced in her communities, is a familiar one to any therapist who encounters a story told from “the zone” – an emotionally flat delivery that permits the retelling of traumatic experience without decompensation. There is a sense of her looking across from a safe place – which indeed is where she finds herself, embedded in the fickle and falsehearted embrace of the political Right.
Denial can be an aspect of the hubris that so often accompanies rapid political ascendance. Forceful denial serves both as pushback in the political bearpit and as a cognitive survival strategy for a woman who admits she has “straddled” two worlds, and has struggled to reconcile conflicting feelings associated with what is occasionally referred to as ‘cultural schizophrenia’.
It is possible this struggle been internalised and normalised, pushing SJNP towards political compromise.
3
It must feel good to have gotten out from under, be feted by power and cow-towed to by the media. When SJNP stated in her Press Club speech that “we should not be enshrining racial division in our constitution”,[10] that the Voice is built on lies and is “an aggressive attempt to fracture our nation’s founding document and divide the nation built upon it rather than bringing it closer together”[11], that Australia’s democratic system needs to be completely overhauled, that Indigenous people are over-represented in Federal Parliament, that “attributing problems to colonialism does nothing to address the true causes”, and that the Voice is just another layer of bureaucracy and solely about the left holding onto their jobs (“once we get rid of marginalisation, their jobs will no longer be necessary”), one can only marvel at her reasoning. When she is moved to assert while casting her vote that “socialism is destroying the Territory and continues to destroy the territory”, one can only wonder what planet she is living on.
History may be regarded as the knitting together of rival interpretations, but to promote a rival history of a nation’s first people is to enter the realms of fantasy and hubris. But perhaps it is a better option than acknowledging the traumatic impact of colonialism closer to home, when such an acknowledgement may mean having to face the horrors all over again. Why would anyone wish to revisit such a past in memory, unless to make things better?
So it is that SJNP’s denialism may be lent credence in light of certain other remarks by her regarding ‘victimhood’ versus ‘agency’, and her borderline obsession with responsibility and self-determination. Nevertheless SJNP tends to conflate things and view compatible things as mutually exclusive – such as, for example, bureaucratic accountability, self-determination, self-responsibility, and so on, as incompatible with a Voice to Parliament. It follows then, that the very idea of transgenerational trauma must be repudiated because – according to SJNP – it has created a victim mentality among Indigenous people:
‘I strongly believe that intergenerational trauma was just a farce and ideology created to stand as another excuse for Aboriginal people to play victim to white government perpetrators… What Marcia helped me understand was that intergenerational trauma came in the form of thought pattern (sic), a way of looking at life through the eyes of a victim. The victim mentality is what grew out of intergenerational trauma, it has been the older generation and members of the stolen generation that have instilled within each generation passing that as Aboriginal people we have been victims of colonialism, white government and oppression. The current generation of the city-based victim brigade also reinforces the victim message. This argument has sat at the forefront of political debate driving the activists for whom it once served a very real purpose and brought about much-needed change, but at this point in time in our country’s current circumstances it is drowning out the voices of the victims who are being victimised by our own cultural forms of oppression.’ Activism has become so infatuated with looking outward that it is unable to look within. Guilt politics is the easy option, to point and blame deflects responsibility and puts it onto another, that other is our government which cannot fix our problems.’
Marcia Langton was likely here speaking metaphorically, so a literal interpretation of a throwaway by SJNP is probably disingenuous, perhaps even designed to lend authority to the disparagement of attempts to empirically establish the transgenerational traumatic impacts of colonisation upon Indigenous people – because (if I understand her meaning) to do so encourages passive victimhood precluding the personal responsibility and ‘ownership’ necessary for change.
It seems to me that the problem with this argument is its ‘either/or’ character; that one thing can exist only by eliminating the other, that the two things – presumably a constitutional Voice and self-determination – are mutually exclusive. Not only is a throwaway line by Langton invoked to decouple the misery of traumatised, violent communities from the intergenerational impact of colonialism, but is cited to support the idea that colonial history is fake and must be denied so as to restore dignity to Aboriginal people; that is, by disabusing them of their view of themselves as ‘victims’, by discouraging them from self-identifying as victims, and thus rescuing them from lethal passivity and inertia.
The muddle-headedness of this argument is that it implies that the indisputable facts of colonial history and an important conversation about ‘victimhood’ cannot co-exist. This argument creates a problem for the individual by virtue of the psychological fact that denial will not remove the traumatised and damaged ego from the person – notwithstanding SJNP’s view of herself as a paragon – and creates a problem for Aboriginal people in (it follows) that ‘Makarrata’ and truth-telling cannot take place without an acknowledgment of the impact of colonial history upon Aboriginal people by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
Another difficulty for this line of argument is SJNP’s tendency to construct ‘straw men’. This was revealed in her various rationales for opposing the ‘Canberra Voice’ (a NO Campaign slogan) that relied upon her misapprehension of the role of parliamentarians as legislators who can “transfer constitutional power”, and so on. Her characterisation of the Voice as a top-down, Canberra-based legislative process, and her negative depiction of it as racially divisive was patently autocratic in tone:
‘We don’t need a Voice to Canberra, we need accountability. It is incumbent upon us as members of Parliament to determine what actions are required in order to fix the current structures and apply greater accountability. It is not for us to initiate a mechanism for a transfer of constitutional power to an entity controlled by a handful of individuals then relegating an entire group of Australians based on racial heritage to this entity. It is my hope is that after October 14 after defeating this voice of division we can bring accountability to existing structures and we can get away from assuming inner city activists speak for all aboriginals and back to focussing on the real issues’. (c.28.00)
Whilst in many instances doubtless justified, occasionally SJNP’s tone also shifts into contempt for Aboriginal male perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence in Indigenous communities, where her scattergun delivery is suggests a defensive process akin to traumatic displacement where – perhaps in order to preserve her own kin from her own rage or ‘fighting spirit’, which according to JNP’s husband is formidable – less helpless surrogates must be found.
Being perfectly privileged by LNP reactionary discourse, contempt and rage can be readily displaced onto the progressive left or even other Indigenous activists rather than inadvertently finding a tributary back into hapless Aboriginal communities, where rage – unable to be sublimated via erstwhile cultural pathways – now finds only violent expression. A more hospitable outlet for one’s unresolved trauma -related feelings may therefore be found via a political alignment with the ruthless agendas of the LNP and their unabashed dalliances with the American Right, which leave political neophytes such as SJNP spoiled for choice.
SJNP’s Press Club repudiation of the traumatic impact of colonialism upon Indigenous peoples – further pointing to herself as a perfect exemplar of psychological health – is likely just one of a range of trauma-related conservative strategies that have assisted in the family’s reinvention of itself beyond colonial history, but which nonetheless specifically requires the extra step of dissociation from that past to model self-responsibility and self-determination.
The fact that SJNP’s own CLP and the Federal Coalition have overseen a litany of failed promises and service delivery across a decade of government seems not to have distracted her from her loyalties to the political right. Despite the fact that nothing has changed under the auspices of the Federal Coalition in decades, SJNP believes that under her political leadership and the good auspices of the CLP in collaboration with Canberra, the ‘marginalised’ will rise from 230 years of depredation in a triumph of democratic representation (after democracy in this country has been overhauled, of course).
Indigenous self-responsibility may be remodelled by a mythologising of Indigenous strength unshackled by enfeebling and debilitating traumata:
‘The cause of their pain has not been colonisation or racism, the cause of their pain has been closer to home – these are the voices that will not be represented within the new Canberra voice; the Canberra voice would not have a purpose if the lives of the most marginalised would dramatically improve. The Aboriginal industry would come to a screaming halt if the gap between our most marginalised and everyone else including privileged Aboriginal people disappeared.’
In this manner SJNP projects a sense of herself as a model of what Aboriginal people can achieve in similar fashion, by cold-turkeying from welfare dependency, and so on. Nominating herself as academic lodestar and reference point for these assertions is akin to the arrogance of her statement about being “more concerned with knocking over this referendum”, an autocratic and pugnacious remark.
While it is likely SJNP’s provocative statements were in line with the cheap sloganeering and Machiavellian tactics of the political right to which she has hitched her wagon, I suspect they also served to shore up her view of her personal achievement as unscathed and freely won – bootstrap-style – both as a means of flexing her muscle and authority as an emerging Indigenous leader, and as a measure of how far she can deny reality without much consequence. Her doubling down on her ‘double denial’ may be interpreted as a massive defence against emotionally re-entering her own ‘trauma trails’,[12] or that she is dependent upon anyone at all.
The difficulty presented by SJNP’s political rhetoric on self-determination is how will her people, who are continuing to suffer ongoing (transgenerational) trauma, find some interim, rational, healing place from which self-responsibility and self-determination may emerge. That dependency has been a theme in her husband’s life trajectory, or that she may herself have formed new co-dependencies – for example upon the Liberal party’s fulsome endorsement of her in exchange for her services to the LNP’s No Campaign – remain open questions.
SJNP envisages a positive future for Aboriginal people as a possibility even without a constitutionally enshrined Voice to provide an enduring, politically transcendent mechanism for change. But how does she reconcile the desperate need for life-saving interventions in her communities with an awareness that these may continue to originate from the same racist (e.g., assimilationist) government policies that led to the Stolen Generation, to deaths in custody, to domestic violence and sexual abuse in communities? To deny the impact of colonialism is also to deny that the source of so much misery has been at the hands of the conservative parties to which SJNP has sworn allegiance.
According to BNP, NT Labor did not listen to their pleas and requests, so she jumped ship for the CLP, thence followed by her daughter. SJNP’s fury is palpable and her opposition to constitutional recognition, viewed as a Labor conspiracy, is resolute. Indeed, so unified are mother and daughter that they appear to have become the ‘Aboriginal industry’ they scorn, and remain unruffled by their dubious affiliations with the network of Liberal right wing thinktanks and alt-Right organisations that provide them with multiple media platforms in service to mutual ends. There are always horse-trades and trade-offs in politics; however, in this instance, the Prices have traded off Constitutional Recognition – anathema to their parties – for a decentralised ‘voice’ and the status quo for their people.
To deny the negative impact of colonisation upon Indigenous Australians is one thing, but to emphasise its positive benefits against the historical record is remarkable for its ’severance of cause from consequences’ and wilful repudiation of empirical science and first psychological principles. The longstanding empirical validity of intergenerational trauma as applied to non-Indigenous peoples cannot be denied; to deny its applicability to traumatised Aboriginal people is simply to deny their humanity.
4
The conservatism of the Indigenous leadership behind the No Campaign was surprising – even shocking. And whether the failure of the Referendum can be sheeted home to conservative Indigenous voices such as SJNP’s, it can be safely assumed that its failure sprang – as might an airline crash investigation unfold – from multiple causes and conditions amongst which this snafu may be fairly adjudged as having been the critical factor.
Co-opted by the Right in a perfect marriage, SJNP is compelled to repeat the past. By squandering her political capital, and by hitching herself to the CLP/Coalition wagon, she has – perhaps unwittingly – embedded herself in an alt-right bankrolled project having an agenda far beyond her ken.
One can only hope it doesn’t end in tears. Or maybe that it does, dadirri–style.
5
‘Participants expressed disgust about a statue of John McDouall Stuart being erected in Alice Springs following the 150th anniversary of his successful attempt to reach the top end. This expedition led to the opening up of the “South Australian frontier” which led to massacres as the telegraph line was established and white settlers moved into the region. People feel sad whenever they see the statue; its presence and the fact that Stuart is holding a gun is disrespectful to the Aboriginal community who are descendants of the families slaughtered during the massacres throughout central Australia.’[13]
It’s difficult to avoid seeing commonalities between the feelings of the people of Charlottesville and the feelings of the people of Alice Springs.
These events and their consequences on vastly different continents encapsulate the transgenerational suffering and trauma among Indigenous and African American peoples. This writer can only hope that – post-Referendum – Aboriginal Australians will come around to believing that their trust has not been wasted, that despite the awful, politically-manipulated rejection of the Referendum, there remain great swathes of non-Indigenous Australians who will continue to stand with them through ‘Makarrata’ and beyond, no matter what it takes.
*****
[1] The tv series, Air Crash Investigation inspired this title. I was fascinated by the consistency of the show in demonstrating time and again the causal rule that ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ were the causes of an airplane crash; that several necessary conditions might apply but that a crash did not occur without some final and sufficient condition, usually man-made in the aviation context.
[2] Lucy Worsley interviewing Mario, an African-American in the former Lee Park, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA; American History’s Biggest Fibs (2019), S1, Ep 2. During a separate interview with Professor Justene Hill Edwards, Professor Edwards stated that the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee wasn’t commissioned until 1917 and only later erected in 1924 during a time of heightened racial violence against African Americans, particularly lynching. Professor Edwards suggested that because of the timing of their commission and erection the Confederate monuments were intended to intimidate, to instil fear in people.
[3] Fields was later also sentenced to 419 years for the state charges, with an additional life sentence for the federal charges.
[4] Josh Butler, Guardian Australia.
[5] From about 50.00 – 59.30
[6] About. 10.50
[7] https://www.swcs.com.au/BessPrice.htm#Childhood
[8] Bess Price is a fellow member of the CLP, who served as a minister in the Adam Giles NT Government, holding portfolios including housing and statehood, and was a vocal supporter of the Howard government‘s 2007 Northern Territory Intervention, that implemented new legislation in response to the crises facing Aboriginal communities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bess_Price
[9] Senator Jacinta Price addresses National Press Club | ABC News – YouTube
[10] ‘This proposal provides nothing’: Jacinta Price on Voice to Parliament – YouTube
[11] – 3.22
[12] Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia, Spinifex Press, 2002.
[13] Megan Davis, https://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/people/exploration/display/103326-john-mcdouall-stuart
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