The great Australian silencing of First Nations peoples’ suffering must end

There’s a nasty subtext to Australia’s rediscovery of monarchic respect on the death of the queen: after 50 years of lifting the lid on the “great Australian silence” on Indigenous issues, we’re suddenly confronted with an active — and vicious — great Australian silencing of First Nations peoples.

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been witnessing an all-too-eager embrace of the opportunity to huff at, ignore and discredit Black and decolonising voices. It’s been nodded on by leaders who should know better, threatening to cancel First Nations’ voices before the Voice to Parliament gets off the ground.

Silence can be hard to hear. But the silencing is all too loud if you’re prepared to listen.

This week, squeezed between the royal goings and comings, we’ve seen where that silencing leads as it became integrated into the daily practice of racism at the Hawthorn AFL club with the deliberate cleaving of Indigenous players from their families. We can see, too, how it obstructs understanding in the Northern Territory’s unfolding coronial investigation into the killing of Kumanjayi Walker.

The over-the-top, panicked intervention by the National Rugby League in suspending and fining Newcastle Knights player Caitlin Moran for her tweet describing the queen as a “dumb dog” was the loudest. Among the watching crowd, it came paired with an apparent Adam Goodes-style booing of South Sydney fullback Latrell Mitchell, even after the code’s leaders had pleaded for it to stop.

Most hamfisted was the thoughtless decision of Victoria (a state whose name already honours the last queen but one) to replace the proposed name for a new Melbourne hospital from the local Woiwurrung-language Maroondah to the very English Queen Elizabeth II. (Was there no safely dead old white bloke it could rename it after?)

From a media perspective, the most disappointing development was online trolls bullying IndigenousX into suspending its promotion of Indigenous voices through its Twitter handle hosting system. The organisation tweeted last week: “Given recent events, the IndigenousX team is concerned that we cannot currently provide a safe space for hosts or followers via this account.”

The IndigenousX hosting program has been at the heart of the Australian Twitter ecosystem for a decade. It’s one of the most significant innovations in any media built off the reach of social media. It’s made founder and CEO Luke Pearson (if still largely unrecognised) one of the country’s most important media figures.

By lending its Twitter handle and its 80,000 followers week by week, IndigenousX has empowered hundreds of different First Nations peoples with the social media status to tell their stories to wide audiences.

Macquarie University’s Professor of Indigenous Studies Sandy O’Sullivan was hosting the handle when the queen died and tweeted a thread that started:

For those saying we should be magnanimous about the passing of the queen, a reminder that the queen inserted herself into the lives of Indigenous people here multiple times. She wasn’t a bystander to the effects of colonisation and colonialism, she was an architect of it. Demanding Indigenous people be respectful about the passing of someone who intentionally made our lives worse is outrageous. It’s worth considering what she *could* have done — and didn’t — to effect change.

In the darker reaches of the internet, it went about as well as might be expected. The toxicity of the responses led to the (hopefully temporary) suspension of the Indigenous hosting.

In the stillness the silencing threatened to leave behind, the ABC’s Stan Grant stepped up: “I know what will come,” he wrote at the weekend. “I know the abuse that will come from those who don’t like Aboriginal people who speak up … Why do we do it? … Why? Because a voice is all we have. Because too often that voice is silenced. Like this week.”

As the Hawthorn story broke, the ABC’s Tony Armstrong reached out “with love to all First Nations people” to say: “we have had basically 10 days of wall-to-wall coverage of the Queen, and I know the Queen means so much to so many people, (but) to first Nations people she was the ultimate symbol of colonisation and we all know what came with colonisation to First Nations people.”

One of John Howard’s great cultural achievements was to strip Australia’s once-radical nationalism out of its anti-imperial roots, reaching back past Henry Lawson’s nightmare “Old Greed” to William Charles Wentworth’s pastoral “a new Britannia in another world”, all fought as a culture war over the flag.

Howard’s work was cultural jiu-jitsu at its finest: meshing the white settler racism that was too often part of the anti-colonialist logic into Australia’s coming-of-age through the empire’s old wars (Gallipoli! Fromelles! Hamel!). It provided the ground for turning the defeat of the 1999 republic referendum into a public validation of an unbreakable tie to monarchy.

(Tony Abbott, of course, then nearly mucked it all up by taking things to their illogical conclusion with his bunyip knighthoods.)

Like all ideological projects, it had a practical goal: the reaffirmation of the logic of a colonial terra nullius that was filled only by British settlement. Now the fear of the post-Howard right is that the death of the queen pulls out the keystone to send the carefully constructed edifice tumbling down.

The solution? Use the demand for “respect” to silence the decolonising challenge before it can get off the ground, to sustain the breach between Australia’s old nationalism and vision of a new sense of the country that puts the Uluru statement at the centre.

Not so easy. A more fragmented media, social platforms, diverse voices and First Nations activism makes it impossible to silence absolutely. Won’t stop them trying. Time to make some noise.

Does the drowning out of First Nations peoples’ voices enrage you? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.