Acknowledging Country: Why Do Australians Like Apologising so Much?

An Indigenous woman performs during a welcome to country ceremony during the FIFA Women's World Cup 2023 soccer match between China and Haiti at Hindmarsh Stadium in Adelaide, Australia, on July 28, 2023. AAP Image/Matt Turner

Commentary

I recently flew into Rome’s Fiumicino airport. As an Australian traveller, I’m all too familiar with the acknowledgement of country at the end of any flight.

But apparently, they do things differently in Italy: there was no recorded voice to apologise to the Etruscan people who were the former owners of the territory on which the airport now stands.

The imperialistic Romans stole the land from the Etruscans and obliterated their memory. How could they be so callous as to ignore that?

Of course, all that happened about 2,000 years ago, so I suppose modern Italians feel that they got away with it and have no ongoing need to apologise.

But is that good enough?

Can anybody tell me how many generations need to pass before we should stop nurturing guilt for the deeds of our ancestors? Two thousand years, 200 years, maybe just a century?

If you detect a certain sarcasm in what I’ve said, you are right.

I am grieved and wearied by our Australian obsession with apology. Some members of my family came to Australia more than 200 years ago.

The Aboriginals who were here when my people arrived and their descendants today have a far, far longer claim to indigeneity, but what has mere duration got to do with it?

Members of the public wave the Australian flag as they watch the Anzac Day March in Sydney, Australia, on April 25, 2023. AAP Image/Bianca De Marchi

We are all Australians now, and after generations of inter-breeding, our DNA is complex.

It is considered a gross insult to question any individual’s claims to aboriginality, but the reality is that many who identify as aboriginal have at least as much Irish and Scottish blood as I do.

They may be the descendants of victimised and abused peoples, but they are also descendants of those who stole the land and maybe slaughtered—or ignored the slaughter—of the original owners. Who of us shall throw the first stone?

The inconvenient truth is that nobody has clean hands. Every nation on earth has committed atrocities against minority groups that stood in the way of their ambitions.

There are also ample records of Aboriginal groups fighting and killing each other for the possession of land.

The Uluru statement calls for truth-telling. But some truths, it seems, are so uncomfortable that we content ourselves with a sanitised version of the story that feeds the romantic myth of the “noble savage” yet ignores actuality.

Guilt Can Be a Good Thing

When “taking the knee” became fashionable, my first reaction was negative.

I’ve since softened my attitude. I’ve come to understand better why people of my generation, born in Australia (or some other such “colonial” European enclave) in the years after World War II, growing up in the midst of an extraordinary and unprecedented flowering of material prosperity, should feel exceptionally privileged. And being privileged should feel some sense of guilt when they consider that most of the world’s people live in relative poverty.

Christians are often criticised for obsessing about guilt, but why should they not? Feelings of guilt are the nerve endings of the soul.

The more morally alert we are, the more guilty we are going to feel about the deprivations of our fellow beings.

In itself, guilt has no moral value, but consciousness of guilt may sometimes be a good thing—provided that it moves us to do something about it.

Highly paid sportsmen who take a knee, corporate leaders who acknowledge the original owners of the land they occupy without any intention of giving it back to them, or business owners that turn their office lights off for one hour every year on “Earth Day” while keeping them ablaze for the rest of the time are indulging in hollow acts of tokenism.

Aaron Finch (L) and Matthew Wade (R) of Australia kneel for Black Lives Matter during the 2nd T20I between Australia and West Indies at Darren Sammy Cricket Ground, Gros Islet, Saint Lucia, on July 10, 2021. Randy Brooks/AFP via Getty Images

These empty gestures may be well-intentioned (let’s give them credit for that, at least), but in themselves, they achieve nothing.

Arguably they are worse than useless if they beguile us into thinking, smugly, that we have done all we need to do. Or they drive us to despise those who think differently and advance alternative solutions to the same problems.

Losing Grasp on History

History has been the gravest casualty in our education system. We have all but abandoned the systematic study of the growth and evolution of our culture.

True, school history used to be strongly European in emphasis, with an even greater emphasis on the history of the British Isles, but in so far as it looked at other civilisations, it did so with respect.

Modern kids experience little of this: for them, the focus is on politically-charged social issues, narrow and detached from context, episodic, with little grasp of process and development.

The term “narrative” is often used to denote the accepted version of a story, but the narrative is a misnomer: there is no true narration in the “woke” account of events.

It’s the Snapchat approach to history: there’s no epic movie to watch any more, just sound bites and static images.

Some see in this the malign obduracy of Marxism, which failed politically in the West yet is still determined to destroy the inherited culture in its long march through the schools and universities.

There may be something in that. But to my mind, the exponentially exploding availability of knowledge best explains post-modern scepticism: as we are ever more aware that we cannot know all that happened in history, we conclude (rather like spoiled children who destroy what they cannot possess) that perhaps there’s nothing to know.

So having lost the capacity to distinguish between knowing and known, we construct our own “truth” in our own image.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.