Professor Henry Reynolds
The Public Role of History
What public role does history have, particularly when issues such as Reconciliation are being discussed?
I’m sure that many
of us would agree with Graeme Davison’s recent observation in the opening
sentence of his The Use and Abuse of Australian History that: "It
is both exciting and unsettling to be a historian in the late 1990s."
In the Universities'
departments age and shrinkor in the case of my ex-university, disappear
entirelysubsumed within a larger disparate schools. Fewer courses are
offered; students fly to work related subjects. At the history teachers conferences
which I have recently attended in Brisbane and Melbourne participants
lamented their increasingly marginal status in the minds of Education
Departments and curriculum planners.
Meanwhile professional
historians feel under threat from critics who question the intellectual
base of the whole enterprise. In his recent book On History the distinguished
scholar Eric Hobsbawm wrote: "Theoreticians of all kinds circle
round the peaceful herds of historians as they graze on the rich pasture
of their primary sources."
In his Defence of
History Richard Evans observed that the question was not so much "What
is History?" as "Is it possible to do history at all?"
Historians at the end of the twentieth century, he believed, were
"haunted by a sense of gloom" because doubts had been
cast on core beliefs about the ability to gain objective knowledge about
the past and about the nature of truth itself, or as Hobsbawm put it
"essential but imperilled element in the writing of history, the
idea of truth."
But despite epistemological
doubts and shrinking student demand history stands tall in popular interest
and estimation. Was there ever a time in the past when history was so
central to the political debate; when Clio was consulted so readily? Individuals,
families and communities are researching their history. Old buildings,
old artefacts, old locations are restored, renewed and rediscovered. Mainstream
Australia seeks to affirm its roots in the continent. The past is consulted
for explanations about present dilemmas and future prospects. Like the
community, politicians turn to history for justification and inspiration.
Paul Keating’s ‘big
picture’ was as much about the past as the present. Speech-writer/historian
Don Watson saw to that. The two men sought to persuade the electorate
that to navigate our way into an uncertain future we had to correctly
orientate ourselves to the past. For his part John Howard appeared to
be obsessed with history in the early part of his prime-ministership.
He declared that he wanted the community to feel relaxed and comfortable
about the past. He refused to apologise to the stolen generation and he
denounced what has come to be called the ‘black arm-band’ version of history.
In his Future Directions document of 1988 he declared that people had
been taught to be ashamed of their past:
"Even people’s
confidence in their nation’s past came under attack as the professional
purveyors of guilt attacked Australia’s heritage and people were told
they should apologise for pride in their culture, traditions, institutions
and history."
In his Playford lecture
of 1996 he declared that the attempt to rewrite Australian history was
"one of the more insidious developments" over the past
decade.
The political leader’s
engagement with history is not surprising. It has been deeply implicated
in many of the most controversial issues, which have emerged during the
1990s. The High Court’s Mabo judgement of 1992 was about both law and
history. The six judges defined and supported their arguments by reference
to copious and diverse legal judgements. Their main business was jurisprudence.
But the passion, which drove the judgement, came from a deep sense of
the need to remedy historical injustice with Justices Deane and Gaudron
referring to a legacy of unutterable shame.
If anything history
was even more important in the Wik case which turned on the question of
how to assess the nature of pastoral leases. The Commonwealth and the
State governments argued that they had to be considered in terms of common-law doctrine. The Wik people asserted that pastoral leases had to be considered
historically as a unique product of Australian colonial development, created
specifically to allow for the mutual use of land by pastoralists and traditional
owners.
The whole native title
process has drawn historians into its quasi-judicial machinery. Whereas
the Northern Territory Native Title legislation of 1976 required anthropologists
and linguists to help establish customary ownership, the post-Mabo world
requires historians who can establish if, when and how pre-existing native
title had been extinguished. Even then Australian experience is dwarfed
by the functioning of the Waitangi Tribunal which is by far the largest
employer of historians in New Zealand.
History was even more
directly involved in the Human Rights Commission’s report Bringing Them
Home which was based on the testimony of 535 people who gave evidence
both publicly and in camera. One theme which ran through much of the testimony
was the insistence that governments both apologise and explain why the
policy had been implemented in the first place. One anonymous witness
argued:
"The Government
has to explain why it happened. What was the intention? I have to know
why I was taken. I have to know why I was given the life I was given and
why I am scarred today. Why was my Mum meant to suffer? Why was I made
to suffer with no Aboriginality and no identity, no culture?"
The collection of
testimony was not just a method to compile a history from below but was
an expression of an overwhelming desire for recognition and a need to
speak and hear the truth. The Report explained:
" For victims
of gross human rights violations, establishing the truth about the past
is a critically important measure of reparation. For many victims and
their families, an accurate and truthful description of past policies
and practices and of their consequences is the first requirement of justice
and the first step towards healing wounds."
Insistence on the
truth has echoed through Indigenous politics for the last decade. The
demand is that white Australia acknowledge the past. The popular slogan
"White Australia Has a Black Past" sums it up well. Aborigines
want European Australians to accept and to admit that their territories
were invaded, their ancestors shot and brutalised and their land expropriated
without negotiation or purchase. Over and over again Indigenous leaders
have warned that without truth there can be no reconciliation. At the
Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne in May 1997 the Chairman of the
Reconciliation Council, Patrick Dodson, looked forward to the prospect
of a nation at peace with itself because it had the courage to own the
truth of its past, to heal the wounds of its past, and therefore free
itself from the chains of the past. He sought from the Government and
people an apology so that Australia could become a nation "one
part of which apologises for the wrongs of the past" and the
other part which "accepts that apology and forgives."
This emphasis on telling
the truth, confession, forgiveness, apology and reparation can be seen
in many parts of the world during the 1980s and especially during the
1990s. It is as if the approach of the millennium called forth a ubiquitous
desire for a clearing of the decks, for atonement and new beginnings.
In the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe, in the new democracies
of Latin America and in post-apartheid South Africa whole communities
have been drawn into the process of reconciliation.
The instrument used
for this end is what has been generally called the Truth Commission. It
has taken a variety of forms. The United Nations has set up Commissions
to deal with Bosnia, Rwanda, El Salvador, Guatemala and Somalia. There
have been government bodies in South Africa, Argentina and Chile and unofficial
ones in Brazil and Uruguay. Writing of these commissions in the Duke Journal
of International and Comparative Law the American scholar, Michael Scharf,
argued that they served four primary purposes:
- to establish an
historic record;
- to obtain justice
for the victims;
- to facilitate national
reconciliation; and
- to deter further
violations and abuses.
He believed that creating
a credible account of human rights crimes prevents history from being
lost or rewritten, and allows a society to learn from its past in order
to prevent a repetition of such violence in the future. Justice, he argued,
was promoted by imposing moral condemnation and laying the groundwork
for other sanctions. National reconciliation and individual rehabilitation
were facilitated by acknowledging the suffering of victims and their families,
helping to resolve uncertain cases, and allowing victims to tell their
story, thus serving as a therapeutic purpose for an entire country, and
imparting to the citizenry a sense of dignity and empowerment that could
help them move beyond the power of the past.
A central concern
of the societies in question was to investigate and interrogate the past
in order to prevent a return to the tyrannies, whether practised by communist
party officials, death squads or police and para-military forces of right-wing
dictatorships. The main weapon available to fledgling democracies was
thought to be the truth. The El Salvador Commission on Truth was established
in order that the "complete truth be made known." The
Argentine Commission into the Disappeared Persons was instructed to "ascertain
the truth of what had happened" under the generals. In the then
Czechoslovakia the authors of Charter 77 declared:
"We call only
for the truth. The truth about the past and the truth about the present
are indivisible. Without accepting the truth about what happened it is
impossible to address correctly what is happening now; without the truth about what is happening
now it is impossible to substantially improve the existing state of affairs."
Victims of torture
and oppression, like members of Australia’s stolen generation, are often
insistent that what they want above all is an investigation which establishes
the truth about what happened to them both in order to come to terms with
their suffering and to ensure that it will never be forgotten. A Chilean
commentator who followed the proceedings of the local Truth Commission
noted that:
"If anything,
the desire for truth is often more urgently felt by the victims of torture
than the desire for justice. People don’t necessarily insist that former
torturers go to jail but they do want to see the truth established."
The exposure of the
truth has been seen as necessary for both individual victims and for societies
endeavouring to recover from periods of oppression and tyranny. The Deputy
Chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Alex
Boraine, observed that for the process of healing it was essential that
the truth about gross human rights violations came out into the open.
"To be able to forgive", he wrote, "one needs
to know whom one is forgiving and why." Without the truth it
was impossible to do that.
On reflection it is
easy to see why the assorted investigative bodies have been given the
generic name of truth commissions. Voices from many different parts of
the worldSouth Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Australiajoin in chorus to demand that their societies discover and proclaim
the truth, to record the facts about brutality and repression. The exercise
is seen as playing a critical role in the process of democratisation,
reform, reconciliation and reparation.
Historians are called
upon to play a forensic role of uncovering and proclaiming the truth.
Society expects much of themat the very time that they are care consumed
by epistemological doubt and are not sure if they can find out what actually
happened in the past. The irony was not lost on the American legal scholar,
Mark Osiel, who wrote in his recent book Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory
and the Law of "this social movement for factual recovery."
"Before there
is any debate about who is morally or legally responsible for what, about
which lessons must be learnt by whom to prevent the catastrophe’s recurrence,
people want to know ‘the facts’. The banners they proclaim through the
streets might just as well carry the motto of the nineteenth-century German
historian, Leopold von Ranke: to discover the past ‘as it really was’a view today treated as the object of ridicule by many professional
historians."
There is, he observed,
something about large-scale administrative massacre that brings out the
residual positivistin virtually everyone … Even when deeply repressed
among post-modern intellectuals.
In Argentina, El Salvador
and the old Soviet Empire he noted much of the population
"rises up
in support of the view that there is a bedrock of basic facts about who
did what to how many, when, and in what fashion. These must be authoritatively
established, to provide the foundation for any legitimate public discussion
of these events. It is not enough that the facts be generally known; they
must also be publicly acknowledged."
The critical question
which arises from the discussion to this point is whether the search for
justice and reconciliation is dependent on a bedrock of basic fact and,
by implication, on the ability of historians to discover what actually
happened in the prisons, the torture chambers, the police cells, the government
committees, the military barracks, the fringe camps, the missions and
the Aboriginal Children’s Homes.
Norman Geras, Professor
of Politics at the University of Manchester has argued strongly:
"If there
is no truth, there is no injustice…if truth is wholly relativised or internalised
to particular discourses or language games…final vocabulary, framework
of instrumental success, culturally specific set of beliefs or practices
of justification, there is no injustice…The victims and protesters of
any putative injustice are deprived of their last and often best weapon,
that of telling what really happened. They can only tell their story,
which is something else. Morally and politically, therefore, anything
goes."
This paper began with
the observation that it was both a good time and a bad time for history.
In Australia the Prime Minister has accused history of undermining the
community’s pride in its past and of donning the black arm-band of mourning.
History has a very high profile and has been central to many of the major
debates in the community but it struggles for survival in both schools
and universities.
To the circling theoreticians
traditional history appears old-fashioned, unreflective, unsophisticated.
But events outside the academy re-affirm the moral authority and political
potency of history. While it has always been used by the rich and the
powerful it is a weapon within the reach of the poor, the oppressed and
the disregarded. Though still dressed in her dowdy late-Victorian clothes,
Clio can move the world. Even if she has not yet touched the heart of
a recalcitrant Prime Minister.
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