No point in ignoring facts and history
1:55PM JUNE 14, 2020
On New Year’s Day, no major economist, no famous medical scientist and no political leader had predicted that this would be a tumultuous year.
At first the coronavirus was the world’s feared enemy. Soon it turned into an economic crisis, and now in many nations it is a looming threat to law and order or the sparks of a cultural revolution.
That the campaign against statues is occurring especially in England is a shock. On reflection it should not be puzzling because the British Isles have enjoyed such political continuity, having suffered no invasion since 1066 and no civil war since the 1640s. Therefore it has centuries of statuary and art still standing in public places.
While some Australians publicly applauded the events in Bristol this week, most probably watched with surprise and even apprehension. The statue of Edward Colston was attacked by a small crowd consisting of protesters and — judging by the media illustrations — spectators who seemed more intent on taking photos. The deputy governor of the British company that once held a monopoly for transporting slaves in British ships from West Africa to the West Indies, Colston could be denounced as partly responsible for the 19,000 slaves who died during those voyages. Yet Colston was also a benefactor of Bristol, helping to found schools in an age when education was a luxury.
Why should a mob and not an elective assembly reach this sudden decision that Colston’s statue be heaved into the harbour? A civic statue is a work of art. Don’t works of art merit some protection, or do we allow the statue-thugs to break into an art gallery and cut the nose off a portrait of a long-dead person? As for the city library, why not set fire to offending books?
You might excuse this censorship of the enemy’s culture during an all-out war, but this is not a war. Or perhaps it is already a culture war.
In the eyes of moderate radicals living in Britain, their nation’s most admired prime minister in the 19th century was William Ewart Gladstone, for whom we once barracked when studying history at school long ago. Yet he was the son of the wealthiest owner of slaves in the West Indies, and as a member of the House of Commons the young Gladstone indirectly helped his father’s income from slavery at the time when the slave trade was being abolished.
Now the statue-breakers in Australia, invisible for years, have emerged with their hammer or paint-splasher. James Cook is already a target. A discordant band of Western Australians have rediscovered governor James Stirling. South Australian rebels have turned on CC Kingston in a glaring display of ignorance. They are shattering the reputation of the politician who, perhaps more than any other, took the steps by which Australia became the world’s first nation to give to women both the right to vote and the right to stand for parliament. The long-dead Kingston is now vulnerable because he was one of the legislators who voted for the White Australia policy. Another offence — he should know better — is that his statue stands near an Aboriginal flagpole.
While this month’s Australian marchers were provoked by the dreadful death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, they were stirred equally by our history of Aboriginal deaths in custody. Many of the marchers tried to publicise these deaths not only to fellow Australians but to people around the world.
Australia has its faults and failings, past and present, but by today’s world standards it can hardly be singled out as racist. It has never tolerated slavery.
Even in the era of the White Australia policy, Australians’ attitude to exotic migrants was little different to the attitudes of most European nations.
In the past 30 years we have, measured by the size of our population, admitted more refugees than almost any other nation, and usually afforded them housing ahead of our own homeless Australian-born people.
It is easier for a new migrant to gain voting rights here than in any nation in Asia or the Middle East. But some Australian universities display a tendency to be servile rather than independent. Beijing, and Uluru at times, must not be offended. The anti-statue crusade found instant supporters here.
The essence of studying history is that, as best we can, we try to wear the shoes and put on the spectacles worn by people of the past. We try to see the obstacles and dilemmas they struggled against or evaded. We also hope that the future will try to understand why we made blunders, and learn from failures and achievements of our era.
The statue-topplers, however, have no time for debate. Those who have just banned the once-prized film Gone With the Wind have no time for discussion. In the US it is almost taboo to ask questions publicly about the campaign Black Lives Matter.
In Australia those critics who doubted whether crowded street marches should be permitted when the coronavirus was still at large were reminded that the fight against racism — an enemy loosely defined — was as crucial as the war against a deadly virus. Those painful minutes in Minneapolis were a timely reminder of painful decades in Australia.
This burning topic was already entangled with another. In 1987 the Hawke Labor government, in a courageous gesture, set up a royal commission to investigate Aboriginal deaths in prison and in police custody.
The belief then was widespread that there the Aborigines had suffered an exceptionally high death rate. It was agreed that this exhaustive inquiry would probably harm our international reputation, but might also find a way for reform and prevention.
Learned judges, and many witnesses from every state and territory, met in a variety of courtrooms.
More than three years later the official verdict surprised most mainstream citizens. In short, the typical indigenous prisoner had been no more likely than the typical non-indigenous prisoner to die in custody. They were just more likely to be arrested and to end up in prison.
The Australian Institute of Criminology assiduously began to count and monitor, year after year, the total of deaths in custody, but their observations and statistics are not familiar to most people who, in good faith, marched last weekend. Their findings were not familiar to the television reporters who courteously questioned the marchers.
I heard no mention, saw no slogan, that proclaimed the truth that non-indigenous prisoners were more at risk than indigenous prisoners of dying while in police custody or prison. Expressed another way: the death rate for each 1000 prisoners is lower for the indigenous than for the non-indigenous.
Prison deaths probably cause more concern among the Aboriginal public. Many of their relatives die in prisons far from home and close relatives. Many commit suicide.
Since the early 1990s one-third of all indigenous deaths in prison have been the result of suicide, usually by hanging. Moreover, half of those prisoners had previously attempted suicide.
Fortunately, strong attempts have been made by governments and prison officials to lower the suicide rate in recent years. The main cause of death of indigenous prisoners, especially after 2004, is natural causes: heart troubles predominate, but they might well be a result of earlier living conditions.
An unexpected trend is for the indigenous prison population now to increase at the faster rate; they now constitute 30 per cent of all prisoners.
The high Aboriginal incarceration rate has been the topic of numerous reports and was the message on many of the handwritten notices held aloft by protesters last weekend. It has given Australia a burst of unfavourable publicity, and China this week subtly exploited it.
To solve the prison problem will not be easy. Money alone has failed to solve it. In my eyes — I could be astray — the prison dilemma now seems far more urgent than the question of whether the Constitution should be altered as to embrace or favour the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
The global surge of unrest in the past fortnight had another surprising effect. The British history of this land began as a kind of prison. How to reform that prison was a major debate in the middle of the 19th century. Unexpectedly the prison debate is back again.
Historian Geoffrey Blainey’s latest book is Captain Cook’s
Epic Voyage.
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