Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The modest mandate of 1967
- 2 ‘Land ownership for Aborigines presents difficult problems’
- 3 Mediating the Yolngu
- 4 Voice and feet
- 5 North and south
- 6 A national indigenous leadership?
- 7 Clans and councils
- 8 ‘As nasty a piece of chicanery as I can remember’
- 9 Effectively Aboriginal
- 10 An indigenous public sphere
- 11 From James Cook to Eva Valley
- 12 The 1940s in the 1990s
- Conclusion: Beyond Howard, Hanson and Herron
- References
- Notes
- Index
Conclusion: Beyond Howard, Hanson and Herron
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The modest mandate of 1967
- 2 ‘Land ownership for Aborigines presents difficult problems’
- 3 Mediating the Yolngu
- 4 Voice and feet
- 5 North and south
- 6 A national indigenous leadership?
- 7 Clans and councils
- 8 ‘As nasty a piece of chicanery as I can remember’
- 9 Effectively Aboriginal
- 10 An indigenous public sphere
- 11 From James Cook to Eva Valley
- 12 The 1940s in the 1990s
- Conclusion: Beyond Howard, Hanson and Herron
- References
- Notes
- Index
Summary
A few months before I started work on this book, I got an angry phone call from a prominent indigenous Australian. It was about my recently published review of Geoffrey Partington's Hasluck vs Coombs: white politics and Australia's Aborigines. In attempting to place that book in the context of current politics, I had written of the Howard government's ‘bewilderment at inheriting the Hawke and Keating governments' corporatist legacy’:
The Hawke–Keating strategy was to promote an indigenous political elite, to give it resources, prestige and a certain influence, both in the government and in the mass media. In the politics of indigenous affairs, these leaders are now a fixture: they give shape and consistency to a tricky constituency, and they reassure a section of public opinion which demands a continuing settler–indigenous dialogue about the ideologies and institutions of nationhood. According to indigenous leaders, Herron [Howard's Minister for Aboriginal Affairs] does not seek their advice.
My caller disputed this reading of political events, particularly the verb ‘give’: ‘They didn't give us anything, we fucking took it!’
That conversation – which was not much prolonged by my fumbling efforts to find other senses of ‘give’ – taught me how easily a political analysis can slip into alignment with the very state apparatus it criticises. I believe that I have not avoided that alignment in this book, and my caller may conclude that I am, after all, incorrigibly state-centric.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Obliged to be DifficultNugget Coombs' Legacy in Indigenous Affairs, pp. 219 - 223Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000