Kim Huynh | What would William Stanner say? A look at history to address Voice to Parliament

Anthropologist William Stanner died in Canberra on October 8, 1981. He was one of the most influential Australians of the 20^th century. Stanner was a key figure in developing Aboriginal studies and in the successful 1967 referendum that removed discriminatory provisions from the constitution.

In his 1968 Boyer lectures, he broke the "great Australian silence" over the British dispossession and the ongoing indifference to Aboriginal life. Returning to Stanner's exceptional essays can help us to address contemporary questions of race, redress and the Voice to Parliament.

William Stanner worked as a journalist in Sydney while studying anthropology before taking up academic appointments in Sydney, London and Oxford. During World War II, Stanner enlisted in the Australian Army, patrolling Australia's rugged north where he regularly encountered Aboriginal groups. After the war, he resumed his academic career and became an ANU professor.

No-one has done more to foster understanding and respect between black and white Australia. Stanner's work in the NT with Wagiman and Ngan'giwumirri people around the Daly River, and with Murrinh-patha people at Port Keats, was marked by empathy, sophistication and respect.

He took on prevailing attitudes and policies of assimilation which sought to erase the heritage of Aborigines and to make them "un-be".

In coining "the Great Australian Silence", Stanner argued that, despite efforts to forget, downplay and distance the violence and injustice of British colonialism from Australian history, its effects stuck out "like a foot from a shallow grave".

This silence needed to be broken not only as a matter of justice, but because it inhibited all Australians from appreciating the distinctive value of Aboriginal life, culture and society.

An appreciation of cultural distinctiveness, integrity and diversity comprised what Stanner referred to as "the anthropological principle".

Emerging as much from the sustained efforts of artists and authors as it did academics, Stanner believed that the anthropological principle was rising in the 1960s to contest the push for assimilation in academic and public spheres.

Specifically, assimilationist judgments that placed humans on "natural scales of better or worse" were increasingly being challenged by a realisation that the accurate study of others and indeed any respectful interaction demanded an "appreciation of difference".

Such an appreciation of Aboriginal life, thought Stanner, would "stretch the sinews of any mind" and leave one "tongueless and earless". He contrasted the non-Aboriginal idea of "land" with the profound Aboriginal connection with "earth" as their shoulder, side, and part of their body.

So too, non-Aboriginal notions of "home" for all their warmth and meaning, were no match for Aboriginal conceptions that encompassed, "camp, hearth, country, everlasting home, totem place, life source, spirit centre and much else all in one".

The Dreaming was an "impalpable and subtle" concept that was central to Stanner's wonderment, bringing together Aboriginal time immemorial with Country.

Eternally present time differs to Eastern chronological cycles evident in Buddhist reincarnation and the Chinese zodiac. And it contrasts Western time which so often runs straight, runs out, or is marked by money.

The Dreaming, said Stanner, is "everywhen". Aboriginal Country is not only a place, but also incorporates an ecology and cosmology within which people are embedded. These people recite and enact stories that operate as "poetic keys" to access The Dreaming.

For all its philosophical grandeur, Stanner observed how Aborigines draw upon The Dreaming in innumerable practical ways. His fear was that, because so much of their life and thought was concerned with The Dreaming, it would clash with a non-Aboriginal world of "power and change". This he believed would lead to extinction.

Perhaps in this respect Stanner failed to fully appreciate the resilience of Aboriginal people and how, while traumas can remain ever-present through The Dreaming, so too can the knowledge that repairs and sustains Aboriginal culture and communities.

Stanner was scathing of Governor Arthur Phillip for his failure to follow the instructions that were given to him: to establish cordial relations with Aborigines; to barter with them; to record their population and practices; to punish newcomers who wantonly interfered with or harmed them; and to act with "amity and kindness".

The problem, according to Stanner, was that Phillip naively believed that the early British settlers could avoid "any dispute with the natives" because the Aboriginal nations would be enamoured of "their new guests" and eager"to be civilised".

These early sentiments predictably collapsed into an "ensemble of violence, indifference, and contempt" that suited the "mood and needs of a transplanted people". By "mood and needs" Stanner points to how the colonists, by their own terms, were possessed by a "mania" for land, stock, artefacts and women.

In "the fact of indifference" Stanner makes an especially incisive critique of British settlement.

This indifference was firstly towards Aboriginal life, not only biological life, but also language, culture, and forms of navigation and cultivation, all of which the colonists failed to register well into the 1900s. Secondly, the indifference was towards the foundation of Australia which was built upon preconceptions of "the Europeans' maximal, the Aborigines' minimal" and which allowed the former to act with impunity.

Via indifference, Phillip and early British settlers established a pattern of theft, subjugation, destruction and denial that was repeated by those who followed.

With intellectual and moral courage, William Stanner contended that Aboriginal disadvantage was not caused by their inherent inadequacies, but rather ongoing patterns of theft, subjugation, destruction and denial.

The fallacy of assimilation, he argued, was that while proclaiming to end discrimination by imposing sameness, it perpetuated these colonial patterns. However, just as Aboriginal people could not "un-be", their identity and heritage - which Stanner in the 1950s understood to stretch back 10,000 years or more - could not be absorbed into modern Western society.

It was the sustained attempts to force them that caused homelessness, powerlessness, poverty and dependence. Because Aboriginal social foundations had been radically destabilised, Stanner observed that many of them suffered from a "vertigo of living".

Durmugam, the warrior who Stanner profiled over decades, aptly described this condition in his later years: "My belly is like a fire. My brain never stops. It goes round and round."

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It was even worse for youth who became "'creatures of the wilds' with no one to guide them to a confident home or status or attainment or honour either in their society or in ours". More broadly, Stanner bemoaned that when it came to "land, food, shelter, jobs, pay, the safety of women and children, even access to and protection by the law" Aborigines were at "great disadvantage, and without remedy".

Because this condition was neither an accident nor a by-product of good intentions, it was crucial for Stanner to understand the deliberate way in which Aboriginal loss was inflicted and specific ways in which it was suffered.

What was decimated, observed Stanner, was the High Culture that underpinned the values, conventions and disciplines of nobility and which were typically preserved by elders through secret rituals.

This High Culture worked to limit conflict and deflect animosity both within and among Aboriginal groups. It was exemplified in warriors like Durmagam, who were the foremost adversaries of British colonialism and therefore its primary targets. What endured were elements of the Low Culture, which were also essential to Aboriginal life. Low Culture sustained "secular ceremonies, magical practices, mundane institutions, and rules-of-thumb for a prosaic life"; that is, it guided domestic and everyday activities.

While the Low Culture was not as threatening to the newcomers, it proved to be more vulnerable to aspects of their low culture. Thus, while the noble High Culture was customarily destroyed, the Low Culture was contaminated with crass materialism, alienating individualism and conformity.

It was from these coordinated attacks on High and Low Culture that the continuity and oneness of the Dreaming was severed and Aboriginal society "fell to pieces".

Stanner was devastated by this fact. But he was also amazed to witness Aboriginal people start from scratch, draw upon the eternally present Dreaming, and adapt contemporary knowledge and resources to resist, survive and flourish. Stanner described these efforts and achievements as belonging to a "Nobel prize class of human spirit". Today, this spirit spreads across Australia through the revitalisation of Aboriginal language and culture.

It was William Stanner who suggested that Gough Whitlam pour Gurindji soil into Vincent Lingiari's hands in 1975 as a sign of restitution and belonging. Because he was of a conservative persuasion, Stanner supported self-determination, knowing that it was "far easier to destroy an identity than to created something new and solid in its place".

Stanner had also come to know hundreds of Aborigines, none of whom wanted to give up their heritage and assimilate.

They had a range of approaches to coexistence and integration, but all of them insisted on maintaining choice and dignity. In this insistence, Stanner believed that the Aborigines were no different to anyone else.

While Stanner perceived a growing appreciation of the "distinctive qualities" of Aboriginal life in the late 20^th century, he was not romantic or even hopeful about Australia breaking free from Silence. In his "Concluding Thoughts", Stanner remarked with typical candour that, "some of the most difficult problems for [the Aborigines] and for us are still ahead".

He knew that while racists are often ignorant, racism is often intelligent and dynamic. Indeed, racist structures can share the "impalpable and subtle" characteristics of the ever-present Dreaming.

Stanner saw discrimination against Aborigines in early Australia as being defined by three shifting mentalities: "disdain, turning to dislike and contempt; romanticism, turning to despair and morbidity; and a bankruptcy of ideas, turning to indifference".

These mentalities remain very much present in current debates over the Voice to Parliament. The descent into claims about whether or not Australia is racist following senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's contention that colonialism had had a positive impact on Aboriginal life, highlights how, for all the loud and open chatter, there is no adequate vocabulary and not enough good will to engage in a serious public discussion about discrimination in Australia past and present.

Stanner would have likely supported the Voice to Parliament, not as a fix for Aboriginal disadvantage, but rather as a commitment to dialogue and means of protection against The Great Australian Silence.

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