The ‘no vote’ in the 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament can be taken as a double defeat. The actual result itself was a disaster for the ‘Yes’ camp, without a single state victory, and pushed perilously close to an overall vote of a less than a third. The choice of the referendum mechanism was hubristic; the ‘Yes’ campaign was not particularly dynamic in its messaging, and had organisational problems. But the second defeat was that of the question posed itself: to establish an institution that was complex, but also powerless. It was a stake on one bet in the referendum casino. The proposal did appear to have widespread Indigenous support—though far from the scope its proponents claimed—but that was acquired after the proposal was designed. That design occurred in lawyers’ offices in Melbourne, in the early 2010s, reverse-engineered by Noel Pearson, Meghan Davis, Greg Craven and others as a way of coming up with a proposal that could win Coalition support, or at least a free vote. It was too clever by half, proposing a constitutional recognition of two peoples—and therefore a de- and re-constituting of Australia—that was radical to a broad mainstream. Yet its ‘ask’—for an advisory body—subordinated the energies of such to that of request. The double defeat thus created a double disaster. Had the Indigenous leadership petitioned for something more radical—a Nunavut-style territoriality and dual citizenship—then Labor might never have accepted it, and if they had, it would have gone down. But in putting a full claim on the agenda, it would have presented a challenge for full recognition, not a request for institutionalised consultation. As we have noted here, the most important part of a ‘Yes’ win would not have been the political institution it created, but the majority recognition of the difference of the two peoples who have been living together on this continent since 1788, and the difference in their social-cultural forms and histories. As Larissa Behrendt noted in Issue 18 of Arena, it was thought that something had to be tried, contestation having slipped into torpor in the 2010s. But in the loss that ensued, that history has been periodised.
The melancholy fact would appear to be that with the referendum loss, a period of a certain type of Indigenous/non-Indigenous engagement has come to an end. It may restart—it would be surprising if it did not—but it will be on different terms.
The long period we have been in is one that had its imminent prelude in the 1960s—most visibly with the ‘freedom rides’ to desegregate rural towns and cities—and its triumphant starting-point with the 90 per cent vote in the 1967 referendum, and proceeded on through entwined processes of land rights, ATSIC, reconciliation, Mabo, the apology and so on, recognition in arts and culture funding, dual place names and much more.
Arguably, this period has concluded with the referendum defeat. That does not mean that such activities have ceased, nor that the entwined activism of self-organisation, walk-off strikes, tent embassies, medical and legal services, and Invasion Day and other campaigns has come to a halt. Quite the contrary—a point to which we’ll return. But it does seem to mean that something is over, or paused. That would appear to be a sort of consented-to agonist engagement, in which Indigenous demands are in dialogue with a state and an actively engaged section of the white public—a state that may resist the full list, and most of the demands, but that acknowledges, or purports to acknowledge, that they must be considered, and that it must be in constant dialogue with. Even the Howard–Costello governments were part of that overarching sense of dialogue, even if the answer was ‘no’ or the demands were used cynically, as with the Intervention.
Should people find that characterisation of Howard shocking, consider what we are likely to face. The next Coalition government will be a post-dialogue one. It will declare the period dominated by recognition, referendum, reconciliation and so on as decisively over, and the question of Indigenous/non-Indigenous cultural and historical relations as largely settled, and as a closed book. The shift will be to universalism, forms of neo-assimilation and ‘practicality’. The fig leaf of ‘practical reconciliation’ will not be revived; indeed, it will serve as an artefact of political history. Some sort of muscular assertion of One Australia will substitute. Should there be a Labor minority government in the interim, it will certainly not revive any large initiatives on the structural-cultural front.
The melancholy reason for this is that many non-Indigenous Australians who might once have leaned into the questions of Indigeneity and two peoples on one continent—who might once have been the sort of people to have seen it as urgent—have now also fallen away, simply because they believe the question to have been substantially, erm, settled. They marched on the Sorry Days, really or in spirit; they demanded and applauded the apology. In the 1990s they filled town halls for the Australians for Native Title rallies after the Mabo judgement. Many would now see these acts as the ones that acquitted the question. A rising generation within this broad suburban middle class would see the question as having been wrapped up by the previous generation. The significant numbers of people attending Invasion Day rallies and talking of stolen or unceded land are more militant of opinion than that previous broader group. Yet at the same time, they are not there in support of a campaign for a clear actionable demand. Drawn overwhelmingly from the Humanities side of the intellectually trained, their response is ethical, passionate and in solidarity, but it is also caught in contradiction, which I will discuss below.
State governments are willing to make treaty and foster local initiatives. But with no federal government likely to be willing to ‘legitimate oppositional demands’, and a reduced public demand for such, certain strategies and tactics are likely to start to yield sharply diminishing returns in the next few years. And in the middle of the decades-long period of exchange and recognition, the state committed to something else: inward migration surpassing the initial postwar wave of 1948 both in its volume and its effect. With this quantitative shift, the major cities where the majority of Australians live have seen their non-Indigenous populations become decisively post-Anglo-Celtic in ways they were not during the 1948–96 ‘multicultural’ period. With that shift of orientation to the migrant, the agonistic dyad on which a politics of Indigenous demand was baked starts to be undermined. Any society that makes its settings ‘high migrant’ for any length of time will feel a steady shift of cultural legitimacy, from ‘presence and priority’ to ‘arrival’. In terms of content, ‘nativist’ Anglo racism may well emerge, with increasing virulence. But this only serves to emphasise the formal and structural shift of legitimacy. This is never stable, but it cannot not happen if immigrants are to be more than guest workers. Citizenship and legitimacy must shift to an implicit universalism in which anyone who arrives and takes ‘the deal’—work, build a life, be part of the community and so on—is accorded not merely legal but cultural equality. Government policy—assimilation versus cultural particularity and so on—is relatively irrelevant to this process, which is produced by the quantitative impact of such migrant intake and its duration.
Such a de-Anglo-ing of the non-Indigenous population does not interrupt the ‘logic of elimination’ that settler-colonial theorists point to—quite the contrary—but it does recess the ‘agonistic dyad’ of Anglo-Celtic and Indigenous. Rejecting individual guilt, the Anglo-Celtic ‘role’ in this dyad is nevertheless one of real ancestors, known and loved in intergenerational encounters, who lived among, and may have approved of or enacted genocide. I know what my grandmother, as a child, saw happen in the Riverina in the 1910s, and I know because she told me ninety years later.
Many thousands of Anglo-Celtic Australians have this connection, and if they don’t personally, they are part of the ethnos that does; very few non-Anglos do. There is no similar historical agon for more recent arrivals, especially those from the former European colonies. As our cities change from vast mini-colonies of house-and-garden to Eurasian-style dense apartment living, the separation between a historyless present and an unfinished, unrenegotiated past becomes ever wider. Many such migrants may well express solidarity with Indigenous people, based on a shared historical condition of being subject to global imperialism. But that too works against the necessary claims of Indigeneity—priority, particularity, persisting presence—as morally and politically primary. The idea that this relationship can be ‘floated’ into any context is the error that perhaps the proponents of the referendum fell into. Conceiving their approach within the ‘communicative action’ of law, they mistook the tools of language and interchange for the recalcitrant contingency of the world itself.
This is the historical framework within which the next period of such politics will occur on this continent. To the solidaristic supporter-observer, it raises fundamental questions about strategy and approach, some of which have been explored in the preceding section. In the past decade or so, two major preceding frameworks of struggle—black power and reconciliation/recognition—have yielded, on the left/radical side, to an overwhelming organisation around the settler-colonial framework and a broader notion of decolonisation. That has entirely re-energised a radical Indigenous response, but it has also raised contradictions in an era when social relations have become unprecedentedly abstracted and image-based. The settler-colonial approach has pointed out that the increasing adoption of Indigenous symbolic and cultural elements within a process of unceased ‘logic of elimination’ becomes a co-option. The current state of cultural production and circulation bears witness to this, with the genuine expansion of Indigenous practices into the mainstream accompanied by a kitschification of Indigenous culture the purpose of which is the ‘sizzle branding’ of an otherwise unremarkable Anglo-founded culture. Melbourne is really a Birmingham of the South. With Naarm plastered on your band poster or gallery address, however, it becomes special and distinctive. Yet Naarm—the water-land interzone of Port Phillip Bay—was precisely what was destroyed to make Melbourne. Large amounts of this process, as conducted by non-Indigenous people, are questionable and arguably politically retrograde.
This critical doubt goes all the way to the notion of ‘stolen’ land, depending on who the term is uttered by. To describe something you have as ‘stolen’ is, implicitly, to make a commitment to returning it. Yet the adoption of the ‘stolen’ notion has been widespread among people who are as bound up in the property-obsessed culture of the present as anyone. That is not to blame anyone. It is merely to point out the forces that are drawing the mainstream away from questions of Indigenous politics—forces such as the increased pressure of individual living—are those which make filling out the moral demand implicit in ‘stolenness’ impossible. Can a reparations movement—the other side of the claim/admission of ‘stolenness’—establish itself? The headwinds are tougher than they have been at any time. But without it, the repetition of ‘stolenness’ is drained of its moral admission. It becomes its opposite, a Genet-esque expression of thieves’ glee: ‘damn right we stole it’. The symbolic appropriation of Indigenous culture by the nation’s institutions and its non-Indigenous cultural elites is vastly overextended in political terms. Having been appropriated to various major state projects, soon it will all become a target for a renewed, insouciant explicit European suprematism.
This has become one of the curious features of the invoking of settler colonialism as a theory underpinning a strategic approach in recent years: its most radical aspects have been honoured in the breach. As Lorenzo Veracini makes clear, the twentieth century communist Left’s—the main game after all—handling of these distinct social and historical passages has been very complex indeed. As this writer understands it, from the outside, the most radical point arising from settler colonialism is that there will be no final decolonisation. The myths, images and strategies that sustained black power and postwar postcolonial struggle—drawing on Algeria, on Mao, Guevara and Fanon, and embedded in Lenin’s version of imperialism—could not be honoured. No one would be thrown into the sea, the tanks would never breach the Saigon gates. Wolfe’s settler colonialism seems a theoretical answer to a political impasse—a way to generate a new strategy, one which acknowledged the permanent fact of settlement and the ‘logic of elimination’ it had established as a process which might have multiple manifestations. More recently, as the discourse of ‘decolonisation’ has become prominent, the older idea of global anti-imperialist victory has returned as part of the political imagination. This has possibly been reinforced by the fusion—heroic, inspiring—with the Free Palestine campaign in response to the destruction of Gaza, and the crossover with the sort of struggle over past decades that it has been possible for the Palestinian one to be: armed, military, connected to greater powers, and with greater geopolitical possibilities.
For some, as evidenced here, settler-colonial theory’s impasse lies in its every insistence on the ‘logic of elimination’, an element that becomes increasingly unconvincing as the history of the country passes from agricultural dominance to full multi-dimensional capitalism. Jordan Humphreys suggests that this points towards a renewal of class politics, and the re-ordering of class and Indigenous identities in campaigning politics. Dan Tout’s response spells out a detailed response from within Arena’s approach, which was developed in part to answer the limits of class analysis as sufficient for theorising and strategising in the contemporary world. For us, Indigeneity in the settler-colonial context, no matter how ‘drawn in’ to standardised modernity communities may be, retains relations of community and kin, and a culture arising from the importance of the face-to-face, that renders a class analysis insufficient. The historical encounter such as occurred in Australia is the point at which, arguably, Marxism’s explanatory powers break down.
That said, and as Tout notes, the settler-colonial approach can be reified so that the structuring absences it invokes acquire an idealist and mystical dimension which demands repeated reflection, in a critical materialist fashion, as to what sort of process it is naming. This is especially so as Australia goes further down the path of high immigration and urbanisation, its two major cities becoming decisively post-Anglo megacities, vastly oversized in relation to the country as a whole, and cut off from the life and experience of the interior. Some would say that questions of theory and approach are a luxury that cannot be afforded in a world under onslaught from a hard Right whose white supremacism is now undisguised. We would say that bad ideas got us to the point where the substantial progressive, radical forces, Indigenous and non-, were split and mobilised over a proposal no one was happy with in the most foolhardy political gamble for many decades. Now is the time for fundamental rethinking of and debate about the conceptual frameworks applied to the question of two peoples of history living together on one continent.