Want to write a letter to ABR? Send one to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Bain Attwood replies to Clare Wright

Dear Editor,

Professor Clare Wright (ABR, August 2023) fails to make clear why my essay ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ reminded her of ‘Australian historians’ complicity in the project of colonisation’ or ‘the discipline’s striking hypocrisy’ in previously rendering Aboriginal people’s lives largely absent from ‘Australian History’. 

In any case, she has misunderstood and thus misrepresented my essay by claiming that its ‘take-away message’ was that the Yes case is struggling because Indigenous leaders have failed to tell a really good story to advance the case. I suggested there were multiple reasons why the Yes case seems to be in trouble, and gave the Labor government as an example of those that are finding it difficult to provide that story, attributing this to the fracturing of the connection between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution.

Professor Wright believes I should have refrained from explaining why the Yes case is facing an uphill battle, even though Indigenous advocates and historians such as Gary Foley have recently expressed the same opinion and on many of the same grounds as I did. It might also be worth noting that one of the leading Indigenous campaigners declared several years ago that if the case for changing the Constitution to recognise and empower Indigenous people could not persuade the vast majority of Australians to endorse it, the cause was lost.

Professor Wright calls on academic historians to ‘hold our tongues’ unless they are willing to be ‘allies’ of this ‘progressive’ cause and ‘get down in the gutter with the political animals’. Many scholars will be troubled by this prescription. As the eminent historian of Native America, Richard White, once observed: ‘If historical knowledge is made simply tactical, then the past becomes valued only as a tool in present struggles … Such tactical uses of the past discredit those who use them within the academy … Nor [do they] serve [Indigenous] interests even in the short run.’

In my view, academic historians have a responsibility to attend to what the traces of the past can reveal and to be as historically truthful as we can; avoid crossing the razor-thin line that separates historical scholarship from political advocacy; and recover that past in such a way that might provide horizons of understanding that a relentless focus on the present often occludes. The performance of those tasks has become more important in democracies in which discussion of important matters is now dominated by partisanship and presentism, and in which what passes for ‘politics’ threatens to cannibalise everything.

Finally, while I acknowledge that enormous passion necessarily informs the political struggle over the referendum, I wish those such as Professor Wright could be civil and courteous towards those who have different views about the referendum. This might even help the Yes case (which I happen to support).

Bain Attwood

An illiberal silencing

Dear Editor,

Clare Wright’s letter taking issue with Bain Attwood’s article ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ is a predictable example of the suppression of dissent: in that it aims to silence opponents, not by defeating their argument but by stigmatising them on political and/or moral grounds.

Attwood’s delinquency, in Wright’s opinion, is not that he argues against the Voice, but that he suggests, on the basis on his thoughtful analysis of the 1967 and 2023 referenda, that the latter might fail, and that the preferable course of action might be for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to withdraw the referendum in favour of legislating for a Voice. Attwood’s timing is wrong; his intervention unhelpful.

There can be no doubt that it is an urgent national priority to recognise Australia’s Indigenous peoples, and take appropriate action to address their enduring socio-economic disadvantages. But it is deeply illiberal to silence fellow historians who debate the means by which this might best be achieved.

Of course, the writing of history is never value-free. But the primary obligation of the professional historian is to understand the past – even if that understanding suggests conclusions that are unpalatable and unsettling for the present.

Wright concludes with the hope that Attwood will be proved to be on ‘the wrong side of history’. A professional historian should know better than this. If the study of the past teaches us anything, it is that orthodoxies of one generation can become heresies of the next (and the reverse). And even if there were to be something approximating a permanent moral consensus, we cannot be confident that human beings are on a linear progression, improving over time, and emerging from darker, less enlightened times to a more moral present. 

Joan Beaumont

Persistent, civil persuasion

Dear Editor,

Bain Attwood has written a persuasive argument as to why a Yes vote in the upcoming referendum for a Voice to government is a much harder ask than the case for Yes in the 1967 referendum. True, an awful lot, contextually, has changed. Attwood’s case might be even stronger had he cited the supportive international context back then – the US civil rights movement, desegregation, and powerful liberal currents in literature and film. He is right, too, in my view, to emphasise the vicious headwinds of recent times, notably the rise of right-wing populism and the impact of neo-liberalism, the new extremes of inequality, the disenchantment of so many non-indigenous ‘ordinary’ Australians who have lost out and whose resentment and envy can be redirected to those below them.

If 1967 prevailed because voting Yes appeared to be endorsing or emphasising sameness and a ‘fair go’, the problem now is arguing for a Yes vote that seems to be endorsing difference or ‘privilege’, as the No advocates insist. But, implicitly, the Attwood essay does prompt the question: is it that grim today? I think not. There is a voluminous fund of goodwill out there. As a society, we are (if unevenly) infinitely better informed now about the circumstances of Indigenous inequality and the history behind those circumstances; ditto on the question of a sovereignty never ceded. What is being sought is not a ‘special privilege’ but an entitlement long overdue – rightful recognition, more than symbolic, in the Constitution. That word, ‘rightful’, is crucial.

We are also, just now, digesting the upshot of the scathing judgement on Morrison in the 2022 election, the Teal ‘revolution’, and the new moral order post the same-sex marriage plebiscite. Young people and women remain strong supporters of the proposal. There is good reason to be optimistic, notwithstanding the polls. Culture war politics from the right, including the scaremongering and the lies, must be met with the persistent, civil, persuasive case for Yes, emphasising the potential for positive practical outcomes. Attwood’s dark take on our circumstances this time around led on to his call for compromise, but that would not be compromise. That would be defeat. Pulling back on the well-established Uluru position at this point in the campaign, effectively supporting Peter Dutton, whose race-based opportunism is decades long and familiar to us all, is just not on.

On the other hand, Clare Wright’s attack on Attwood is somewhat reminiscent of Noel Pearson’s response to Mick Gooda when the latter called for compromise – nasty indeed. Wright says we need to ‘get down in the gutter with the political animals’. The most impactful of our history warriors, scholar Henry Reynolds, has never done that. Surely this is the wrong metaphor? The take-away, in my view, is simple: we should remain united publicly and express any contrary view internally. There’s room, too, to put the Yes case for rightful recognition in the Constitution with way more clarity than what we’ve seen thus far.

Peter Cochrane

Speechless with fury

Dear Editor,

Thank you, Clare Wright, for that eloquent letter about the relationship of intellectuals to the Voice campaign. I was speechless with fury when I read Attwood’s article, but she said it all.

Susan Lever (online comment)

Stating the obvious

Dear Editor,

What an interesting contribution from Clare Wright (Letters, August 2023). There is something of the ‘protesteth too much’ quality about her letter. I took it for granted that most people would have read Bain Attwood’s article as a statement of the obvious at this point in proceedings.

Patrick Hockey (online comment)

Corruptio

Dear Editor, 

I share your reviewer Howard Dick’s enthusiasm that Melbourne University Press has published Todung Mulya Lubis’s War on Corruption: An Indonesian experience (ABR, August 2023). I did, however, note a common Anglocentric error in the assumption that cognates must indicate borrowing from English. Indonesian korupsi is borrowed not from English but from Dutch corruptie, with both English and Dutch ultimately derived from Latin corruptio through French corruption. Much other Indonesian political, financial, scientific and legal vocabulary has the same borrowing from the colonial language, which is why Indonesian has kasus for case or aliansi for alliance rather than English forms of the cognate – not to mention words such as advokat for lawyer or rekening for account.

Josh Stenberg

Correction

Jonathan Green, in his review of Walter Marsh’s book Young Rupert (ABR, August 2023), sent Rupert Murdoch to the wrong university. Murdoch in fact studied at Oxford. We apologise to everyone at the University of Cambridge.