Reconciliations.
Hall, Kate
Reconciliations Agnes Toth and Bernard Hickey (eds) API Network,
Perth, 2005, x + 209pp ISBN 1920845194
Although its cover photograph of a bridge appears to signal one of
the more common metaphors for reconciliation, Toth and Hickey's
book is not a straightforward collection of essays on the politics of
reconciliation in Australia. Readers who approach this book seeking a
sustained focus on reconciliation and cross-cultural relations in
Australia, from Indigenous and non-Indigenous commentators, may be
disappointed, and they are advised to consult instead Michelle
Grattan's edited volume: Essays on Australian Reconciliation (Black
Inc., 2000), Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope (eds) Reconciliation,
Multiculturalism, identities (Common Ground, 2001), or Gus Worby and
Lester-Irabinna Rigney (eds) Sharing Spaces: Indigenous and
non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Rights (API Network,
2006). (1) Toth and Hickey's book is the second volume to come out
of a series of international conferences grouped under the title
'Australia: the Common Culture'-' and the chapters are
compiled from both Australian and international contributors. It seems
reasonable to expect, then, that the scope of Reconciliations would
extend further than the questions and issues pertaining to Australian
discourses of reconciliation.
As the plural form of the title suggests, Reconciliations is a book
that pushes the boundaries of the term itself, with essays ranging
beyond Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in Australia to include
examinations of comparable socio-political issues in Canada and Israel,
and also a number of literary-critical essays on writers as diverse as
Kim Scott, Elizabeth Jolley and AD Hope. The book consists of two parts:
'Reconciliations in Politics, Law and Culture', and
'Reconciliations in Literature', with five chapters in each. A
more detailed foreword or an introductory chapter might have helped to
define the book's overall project, and to expand a little on the
important and challenging question posed by the cover blurb: 'Does
[the] Australian form of reconciliation involve a genuine attempt at
equality or is it simply a new means of perpetuating age-old
oppressions?' This is a book aimed at an academic readership,
although it is accessible enough, in its language and structure, to make
it a useful resource outside academia. The broad and inclusive approach
to the content of the essays collected means that this book will appeal
to people with an interest in politics, law, literary and cultural
studies and Australian studies. Reconciliation, as the cover blurb
states, 'is a semantically mobile and often elusive term. It
contains a number of potentially contradictory meanings and
possibilities'. Readers who wish to enrich their understanding of
reconciliation beyond the often simplistic and uncritical uses of the
term in media and government rhetoric will find this book a valuable
source of insights into the various and contested meanings of
reconciliation in Australia, and elsewhere.
The book opens with Garth Nettheim's detailed and thorough
exploration of the history of reconciliation in Australia, and this
provides an essential background for the essays that follow. As Nettheim
points out, despite a range of positive developments in negotiations
between local governments and Aboriginal communities, at a national
level the formal process of reconciliation in Australia is still very
much a work in progress: 'reconciliation was not achieved in time
for the centenary of Australian Federation. Nor was there a clear and
agreed foundation for its achievement in the years to come' (p.31).
A large part of the 'unfinished business' of reconciliation
concerns the absence of a treaty, the refusal by the Howard government
to make a formal apology or reparation for the suffering of the Stolen
Generations and the social injustices and inequality that continue to
affect Aboriginal people and communities across Australia.
Nettheim's essay details the complexities of the reconciliation
process and policies, identifies landmark events such as Mabo, explains
the role of organisations like the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation
(CAR), and makes a number of useful comparisons with other countries,
like South Africa, Canada and New Zealand.
Other notable essays include Barbara Bloch's 'Aborigines
don't blow up buses', an intriguing and incisive discussion of
'Australian Jewish interventions in Indigenous issues in the
1990s'. Bloch argues that while some Jewish Australians claim
solidarity with Indigenous Australians based on a shared history of
suffering, the discourses in which such claims are made are problematic
because they often serve to obscure 'any parallels between
Indigenous people and Palestinians' (p.42). Bloch engages
sensitively with the notion of belonging to country, and the trauma of
dispossession that frame debates about reconciliation in Australia and
in Israel. Stephen Alomes reminds us that it is necessary to
'reconcile' Australian events-like the Federation celebrations
he analyses-with concurrent international events, in order to understand
'how they shape our colonial mentality' (p.75). Mitchell
Rolls' complex essay examines the notion of constructions of
Aboriginal identity. At certain points in this essay the argument seems
to oscillate between two contradictory positions: that
'strategic' essentialism is politically useful, but that the
poststructuralist interrogation of identity demands that essentialised
identities be deconstructed in favour of a 'more fluid and
ephemeral' (p.96) notion of culture. Rolls acknowledges that
assertions of cultural uniqueness by Indigenous peoples may be necessary
tools in the ongoing struggle for rights and recognition, but he argues
that such articulations of 'racial essentialism' (p.98) can
have the effect of reinforcing 'former colonial binaries'
(p.96). The title of Rolls' chapter 'The Meaninglessness of
Aboriginal Cultures' is, as he writes, 'provocative', and
readers will have to decide for themselves whether the essay is
justified in the claims it makes.
In the second part of the book, Delys Bird gives an insightful
reading of Kim Scott's Benang, noting that 'the politics of
reconciliation is connected with the politics of literary
production' (p.112) and that the way in which we read and write
about literary texts matters, in ways that may not always be immediately
apparent. Xavier Pons' chapter on David Malouf's Remembering
Babylon examines the problem of how to reconcile words with the things
they represent, and Eleonore Wildburger's 'Revolt and
Reconciliation' offers a sensitive and considered
'intercultural' reading of Lionel Fogarty's poetry.
Acknowledging her nonAboriginal subject position, Wildburger argues that
'the complex Indigeneity of Fogarty's work calls for
interculturally adequate textual analysis based on Indigenous
guidelines' (p.153). The way in which the essay proceeds in this
manner is admirable, not only for the respect it accords Indigenous
research guidelines, but also for the ways in which Wildburger
demonstrates anew the importance of opening and maintaining dialogues
between differently positioned individuals, discourses and texts.
As Anna Trembath (2005) notes in her review of this book,
Reconciliations does 'struggle at times' to produce a
sustained and cohesive response to the questions it poses: 'for the
book to really fulfil its potential, especially in the current climate
when a genuine creativity is required to reenergise the debate, the book
could have done more ... to think anew on what reconciliation might come
to mean.' This criticism notwithstanding, Toth and Hickey's
book succeeds in opening the notion of reconciliation up to new
theoretical and analytical approaches, and the essays collected here do
examine, in very different ways, the 'potentially contradictory
meanings and possibilities' of reconciliation.
REFERENCES
Cryle, Denis and Jean Hillier (eds) 2005 Consent and Consensus, API
Network, Perth.
Trembath, Anna 2005 'Review' Reconciliations, Agnes Toth
and Bernard Hickey (eds), API Review of Books Perth, Australian Public
Intellectual Network. <http://www.api-network.com/main/index. php>
accessed 13 April 2007.
NOTES
(1.) I am a non-Indigenous contributor to this volume.
(2.) The first volume is Denis Cryle and Jean Hillier (eds), 2005
Consent and Consensus, API Network, Perth.
Reviewed by Kate Hall, School of Communication
and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Geelong
<kate.hall@deakin.edu.au>
