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Article Excerpt
Shortly after the 'People's walk for reconciliation' in May 2000, the Age reported:
Since the 1967 referendum that gave the Commonwealth power to legislate on indigenous affairs, and especially since the High Court's Mabo judgment in 1992, relations between Indigenous and other Australians have been a central question of national politics. In Sydney a week ago, the events of Corroboree 2000 may have provided a third great milestone. The hope and goodwill generated by the Walk for Reconciliation, when more than 150,000, perhaps a quarter of a million, Australians crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge together, seem to demonstrate a groundswell of support for reconciliation. Given the antagonisms that have been generated by particular issues such as native title, an apology for the stolen generations and mandatory sentencing, that groundswell is no small achievement. (1)
The year 2000 was one of major public events where Australians performed their 'values' and identity on national and international stages. The two main bases for these performances were the completion of the tasks of the Council for Reconciliation, culminating in Corroboree 2000, and the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The walks for reconciliation that were a feature of Corroboree 2000, like the 1967 referendum, continue to be celebrated as significant statements of support for positive change in Australian race relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Writers such as Gail Jones and many others have examined the positive potential of the reconciliation process overall, revealing the rich potential for change and shifts in perspective that these walks represent. (2) Others such as Andrew Gunstone, Angela Pratt, Catriona Elder, Cath Ellis and Colin Tatz have highlighted and examined problematic aspects of the process in terms of its nation building elements and the positioning of Indigenous people and Indigenous sovereignty within the process. (3)
This article examines the walks as public events that hold a powerful place in the social imaginary through the translation of the events into the social memory as performative acts. My intention is to interrogate these performances of public sentiment and their role as performative acts, or actions, as cross cultural negotiations within the reconciliation process. To do so, I draw primarily on popular media accounts preceding and following the 'walks for reconciliation' as examples of documented shifts in the meaning and understanding of the walks and as active participants in the process of developing and framing this meaning and understanding. (4) In the first section I outline the political context of the establishment of the Council of Aboriginal Reconciliation and its work in the 1990s. I then examine popular press narratives about the 'people's walks for reconciliation', and the framing of the walks as performative of cross-cultural healing and reconciliation. In the final section I consider the function and outcome of the walks and the competing performative narratives in relation to the 1967 referendum and its outcomes. This examination reveals that in practice rather than acting as support for change or a tangible achievement, the repeated focus on the specific events as performative acts in themselves (as if the performativity they represented actually enacted change) has in effect worked against positive or active changes in cross cultural relations.
The Council for Reconciliation
From events around the establishment of the Council of Reconciliation in 1991 to the year 2000, the politics surrounding relations with, and policies towards, Indigenous Australians engendered competing performative protests and actions across many levels of society, including those Stuart Hall identifies as the recognised 'legitimate "gate-keepers" of the political domain', the agents or representatives of government control and the mass media. (5) One of the most significant achievements by Indigenous activists in the early 1990s was Eddie Mabo's success before the High Court in 1992, culminating in the Mabo decision, which finally set aside the myth of terra nullius. Post Mabo, the degree to which reform and change were contested within parliament and the media by various interest groups increased both legislatively and socially. The balance of power between the competing interests and positions shifted substantially when the 1996 federal election was won by the Liberal-National Party Coalition, led by John Howard. At the same election, Pauline Hanson was elected as an independent for Oxley in Queensland, and later launched Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party.
Both reflecting and expressing a racialised neo-liberalism represented by Hanson and Howard during the 1990s, the resistance to calls for social justice by Indigenous Australians changed from what Steve Mickler describes as 'soft prejudice' into 'hardened opposition'. (6) The 'myth of privileged' Aboriginal Australians strengthened and was in turn used to justify the opposition to social justice. At the same time, the living standards of Indigenous Australians were among the worst in industrially developed countries. Studies carried out by conservative organisations, such as the Australian Medical Association, found that the socio-economic gap between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous people in Australia was widening. (7)
This hardening of opposition to Indigenous claims became all too evident when in late 1996 a second High Court ruling, this time in relation to the Wik people of Queensland, found that pastoral leases did not extinguish native title. (8) With the potential to extend the land rights available to Indigenous Australians, this ruling further incited the government's opposition to land rights, resulting in Howard's government making a commitment to extinguish native title. In 1997, the Native Title Amendment Act, designed to extinguish native title claims to coexistence on pastoral leases, was proposed. In late 1998 the amendment was passed with some changes. Known as the Ten Point Plan, this Act legally diminished Indigenous Australians' common law rights. (9) Questions of Indigenous rights were further complicated by other ongoing issues, such as the introduction of mandatory sentencing in the Northern Territory in March 1997, which was aimed primarily at young Indigenous males. (10) Similar laws were later enacted in Western Australia. This ongoing culture war against Indigenous sovereign claims extended into what have become known as 'the history wars', which continue to be fought out within the framework of teaching and writing Australian history. (11)
Central to many of the wilder dips and turns in cross cultural relations over the decade were the reports of two major inquiries. In 1987, a Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody was established and the report was tabled in Parliament in 1991. While the report did not find that Indigenous people were deliberately killed in custody, it did find that neglect was a causal factor in many of the deaths. The report argued that the key to finding a solution would be found in the recognition of Aboriginal people as a distinct people, who had been actively dispossessed of their lands and rights, and denied respect as human beings. The National Report focused on the history of intercultural relations and the central role played by racebased narratives in determining policies and attitudes towards Indigenous Australians. In order to facilitate the opportunity for Indigenous Australians to establish themselves on an equal basis with non-Indigenous Australians, one of the final recommendations of the report advocated formal and ongoing reconciliation processes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. (12)
In response to this recommendation, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was established by a unanimous vote of federal Parliament in 1991. The Commonwealth Government Act that established the Council for Aboriginal...
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