Glenn Loughrey
2 March 2025
Eddie Gilbert wrote a book in 1972 entitled Because a White Man’ll Never Do It which is a part of a longer quote attributed to Aunty Alice Briggs which says:
“The only answer is to give them back their land rights and try and let the Aborigine try and rectify what the white man has done because a white man’ll never do it.”
I recently read this book again and it was as relevant now as it was when written 50+ years ago. Little has changed; it seems that much has got worse. Contemplating the title and the quote from Aunty Alice, I realised it’s not that white won’t do it, but that he can’t.
It is time to name the foundational reason why Australia as a society is unable to recognise, reconcile and share human rights with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in this country. Professor Garry Foley was right on 26 January to say: “The failed Voice referendum showed the greatest obstacle to a better future was Anglo-Australian racism born out of fear and ignorance.”
This is my experience and all other reasons given for the Voice’s failure emanate from this unholy trinity of devils at work.
Read more: ‘Act for the good of the whole’
Since the late 1970’s when this country moved from assimilation after the failure of the extermination policies of the White Australia mantra, it has appropriated ideas of self-determination, rights, reconciliation and recognition as three political phases of engagement with our people.
Each of these policy positions share one significant element – none can occur without the permission of the dominant culture. Self-determination is always attached to funding and the guidelines embedded within them. Failure to act accordingly, effectively as an arm of the government, will see the funding ceased, and puts a lie to the self-determination. It’s up to them.
Rights are not universal. Human rights are available only to those deemed to be human, and those who did not exist (terra nullius and the Voice failure) are not able to access those rights without the permission of the dominant society. This applies to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples statement, which fails because it is administered at the whim of those in power.
Reconciliation in this country is the second phase of the assimilation program. It is all about including us in the dominant society through policies and plans that make individuals, companies and governments feel good about themselves.
It is black-cladding and we have been used to give it legitimacy by being employed to implement their policies. It is a key element of the Closing the Gap project. When you become educated, articulate and successful you cease to be Aborigine or indigenous, you become one of them.
Read more: New safe space for First Nations’ people
We have just exited the recognition stage. This has been the process for several decades and produced the Statement From The Heart which was white anted by the side of politics who asked the Referendum Council to find out what we wanted. Recognition needs the other to recognise and therefore power remains firmly out of our hands.
Why Can’t Australia Do It?
To leave it here is cowardice. We need to look at why this is so.
Settler colonialism is the basis of the unholy trinity and is the reason Australia can’t recognise, reconcile and institute rights for the original people of this land. What became the White Supremacy project we now know as Australia is the outworking of settler colonialism whose modus operandi is to clear the land of all impediments, including the original people, in order to occupy and utilise the land. Once occupied they have no intention of leaving. They have come to stay.
At the beginning of the Bathurst Wars in 1824 the following response after a stockman was killed by local Aboriginal, William Cox (or perhaps his son) said: “The only way to deal with these vermin is to exterminate them – that includes women and children.”
David Marr in his book Killing for Country shows how this extermination was carried out.
Australian academic Patrick Wolfe writes in an article published in Journal of Genocide Research:
“So far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is who they are, and not only by their own reckoning. As Deborah Bird Rose has pointed out, to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home. Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.”
Read more: Country church papers walls with Statement from the Heart
In this sense the land is deemed to be empty of human beings and therefore they can be managed as one would noxious weeds or feral animals, killing, rounding up and domesticating them. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musician, Ziggy Ramo, writes:
“So-called Australia is built upon a lie: that 97% of the population are human. And the others simply ‘Indigenous’, devoid of the same basic human rights.”
The reason Australia cannot engage in dialogue is that there was and remains no one to dialogue with. There are no humans with rights to be included in the constitution or given a voice. There are no humans who deserve better than a life of deficit, incarceration and violence because that is the lot of vermin, those less than human. There are no humans of value except those we can transform into humans through education, career and property ownership.
There is one suggestion for how engagement can occur which offers hope. Based on the Statement of the Heart and its key elements: Voice, Treaty, Truth, Makarrata and Justice the circle mat allows us to engage with each other and to begin the lengthy process of seeing ourselves in the other. It is the process to becoming human.
I presently use this process in an engagement with Jewish, Muslim and Orthodox clerics and we are about half way through this process after a number of engagements over several months.
The Venerable Canon Uncle Glenn Loughrey is Archdeacon for Reconciliation, First Nations Recognition and Treaty.
He presented the above paper at the Whitehorse Friends of Reconciliation Forum in September 2024. It has been edited for publishing purposes.
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