The Nation - Be In It
I N I T ?
Colin Mercer
The left can't carry on any longer hoping the Bicentenary will go away. It's time to face the question of how to upset the tidy consensus view of history that's planned for us.
-
Envisaged as an Exhibition
about Australia for Austral
ians, it
will focus
our
history and our heritage, our
culture and our community,
achievements and
our
bus the Australian Bicentenn
T ial Authority (ABA) Factsheet
on 15 December last. Pitched
somewhere between the school
masterly and the "Life, be in it"
modes, the language of the ABA's
publications, especially Bicentenary
88 (the newsletter of the ABA) and
the Bush Telegraph (a tabloid
publicising the development and
progress of the planning of the
Bicentennial travelling Exhibition) is
carefully tailored in its emphases on
participation, consensus, enjoyment
and learning.
All sections of the cornmumty
are addressed in the ABA 's plans:
Aboriginals and Torres Strait
Islanders. women. the aged. the
disabled. unions. young people and
even people whose stories have never
f<"EATURE
been told. Central emphases are
placed on experience of life,
journeys, of histories, of time and
place; and on discovery of self, of
identity, of landscapes, of
communities. The Bicentenary has
ambitions to become what Gramsci
called, without denigration, a
"national-popular" form. It delimits
a particular space and time - the
Australian nation since 1788 - but
also, and more importantly for its
aims, the Bicentenary seeks to
establish or, perhaps, to redefine the
nature of the persons- the people
who inhabit that space and time.
Hence, all the emphasis on
experience, learning, discovery,
effective participation:
"that heightening of the senses
that we hope you can achieve on
your journey through the
Australian Bicentennial
Exhibition."3
or, more economically, and
according to a key refrain of the
ABA's advertising theme song:
"It's a fee-eeling ... just like you
and me"
It would have been easier and
more comfortably academic to have
written this article in 1989 or, better
still, in 2038 when, with more or less
hindsight, it would be possible to
look back on the events of 1988 and
to 1 J:ui lO them as evidence of an
historically specific and politically
charged celebration of national unity
of a particular type. Or, perhaps, as a
resounding failure. Or, as a missed
opportunity. By then, at least, there
would be access to some assessment
of success or otherwise in the form of
attendance statistics at the travelling
exhibition and other events, sales
figures on the "landmark" volumes
to be published. participation rates in
the various community-based
programs and so on. But even
without the benefit of hindsight. it
would. I think. be a pity if some
future researcher were to look back
and identify the 1988 Bicentenary as
a triumph of inane pomp and
circumstance, of restrained official
culture. as a moment of
consolidation of what would. by
then, be called the "Hawkean
Consensus": or as the year of Barrie
Unsworth's Birthday Cake. It would
be a pity, mother words, if 1988 was
seen as a restricted exercise in what
Debra Silverman has called, in
relation to another national
celebration, "selective historical
remembrance".4 What this means, of
course, is that it would be seen as a
moment of a very precise forgetting
of, most importantly, the effects of
settler colonisation on indigenous
peoples.
This last point is certainly the
most crucial issue in the left's current
attitude to the Bicentenary. The
Bicentenary, in this view, amounts to
two hundred years of colonisation,
repression ands genocide. Therefore
it should be boycotted. It is
impossible to deny this fact, of
course, but it is possible, I would
suggest, to recognise it and yet find
ways other than abstention of
publicising and, in appropriate
terms, of "exhibiting" it as "About
Australia and for Australians". This
is one central theme of my argument.
Another theme is that, despite
this indelible mark on the Australian
nation's origins, there are things
which can be celebrated. Among
these we would probably want to list,
for example, the history of socialism
in Australia. the democratic
traditions and progressive
achievements which have been
fought for and won, certain values of
community, identity and allegiance
in local, regional, national and
multtcultural contexts. I may be
beginning to sound a bit like an ABA
brochure, but there is possibly a good
reason for this which is that the
issues which they address are not
inextricably and for all time part of
the repertoire of an official or
dominant culture. A political
strategy based on the presumption
that the past two hundred years of
Australian history is indelibly
marked by a single and repressive
ongtn is as guilty of a one
dtmensional view of history as some
of the most inane re-enactments
which the Bicentenary Itself
promtses. In effect. this stance can
produce no political strategy but
only an ethical position: the ethics of
guilt This 1s a col)trovers1al (...truncated)