The Long March continues —
’…The disfiguring of Captain James Cook’s statue with painted slogans in Sydney last year was not, after all, a criminal act of historical illiteracy, or so we’re being asked to believe. It was a gesture of resistance intended to rebalance the memorial landscape by challenging the cultural power of white Australia, according to historian Lisa Murray. The real vandals were the cleaners who removed it.
“Should the graffiti have been removed?” asked Murray. “Is challenging the dominant historical narrative a legitimate part of the monument’s heritage? I ask again; should the graffiti have been removed?”
Murray, you will be disheartened to learn, is not a minor academic talking to an empty classroom in a country university. She is the City of Sydney’s official historian. A minimum requirement for such a role should be a commitment to the facts, particularly those concerning a figure so central to our history as Cook.
Yet when Murray delivered the Jim Kerr Address last month she lurched in the opposite direction, appearing to justify an act of criminal damage and declaring Cook guilty by association, according to accounts of the event.
“This act is not obliterating Australia’s history,” she was quoted as saying. “It is part of a growing public consciousness to recognise Australia’s history and to point out the complexity of our past … Slave traders and representatives of colonial imperialism are equally on the nose in Britain, parts of Europe and America..’
The disfiguring of Captain James Cook’s statue with painted slogans in Sydney last year was not, after all, a criminal act of historical illiteracy, or so we’re being asked to believe. It was a gesture of resistance intended to rebalance the memorial landscape by challenging the cultural power of white Australia, according to historian Lisa Murray. The real vandals were the cleaners who removed it.
“Should the graffiti have been removed?” asked Murray. “Is challenging the dominant historical narrative a legitimate part of the monument’s heritage? I ask again; should the graffiti have been removed?”
Murray, you will be disheartened to learn, is not a minor academic talking to an empty classroom in a country university. She is the City of Sydney’s official historian. A minimum requirement for such a role should be a commitment to the facts, particularly those concerning a figure so central to our history as Cook.
Yet when Murray delivered the Jim Kerr Address last month she lurched in the opposite direction, appearing to justify an act of criminal damage and declaring Cook guilty by association, according to accounts of the event.
“This act is not obliterating Australia’s history,” she was quoted as saying. “It is part of a growing public consciousness to recognise Australia’s history and to point out the complexity of our past … Slave traders and representatives of colonial imperialism are equally on the nose in Britain, parts of Europe and America.”
Murray was not available to clarify her remarks yesterday. It is disappointing that she has adopted a grievous distortion of Australian history that has leached from radical humanities faculties and is contaminating the national debate. It is taught in most Australian schools, encouraging students to loathe their ancestors and disregard their achievements.
There is an acute danger that it will become the official narrative, but fortunately history belongs to the people, not just its intellectuals.
The federal government’s funding of a $3 million memorial as part of the $50m development of Cook’s landing place at Botany Bay could be the best money it has ever spent, providing the project can be kept out of the hands of the ideologues.
That won’t necessarily be easy, even though a Liberal government is stumping up the cash. John Howard’s National Museum in Canberra, built to mark the centenary of Federation, was quickly captured by revisionists who proceeded to run amok on the taxpayer’s tab, creating a postmodern confessional for national self-loathing.
Presenting Cook as he actually was, the captain of a scientific voyage of discovery, in command of a ship with three eminent botanists, an astronomer, two artists and boxes of scientific equipment, is the first step in understanding the nature of the settlement and the nation Australia became.
A nation that can’t agree on what it is and where it came from will never be able to agree on the nation it wants to be. The successful formula that propelled this continent from pre-modernity to one of the most prosperous nations on earth in the space of 230 years is the best guide we have to chart the way ahead.
Yet today we are presented with two competing foundation narratives. The first imagines Australia as the fatal shore, casting Cook and Captain Arthur Phillip as the agents of death, misery and destruction.
The second sees Australia as a laboratory for moral and scientific progress, formed by the British Enlightenment, driven by the pursuit of knowledge and a vision of freedom, justice and equality of opportunity.
Neither narrative denies the remarkable tale of human endurance and ingenuity of the Aboriginal peoples, the first to show humans could survive and prosper on a capricious continent.
The difference is that one condemns Aborigines to live as victims frozen in time. The other portrays them as people with a future, in a nation enhanced by the arrival of modernity.
The dreary anti-colonial narrative taught today does not allow for Australia’s peculiar circumstances or the exceptional people who persuaded the British government to establish a new kind of colony. Never before had an imperial power settled in a foreign land on the terms under which Australia was settled. Never before had a government transported a thousand or so souls to the other side of the world with meagre supplies and told them to fend for themselves.
It surely won’t be news to the City of Sydney’s historian to learn that Phillip did not stop in Africa to pick up slaves but supplies of fresh food to keep his crew and passengers free from scurvy.
She would know that whatever tragedies befell the Aboriginal people, they were not enslaved. The leaders of early settlement were steeped in the classical liberal values that emerged, uniquely, in Britain with the Enlightenment. The terms of the Australian settlement were framed by men such as William Wilberforce, the chief figure in the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire.
It was a radical doctrine for its time, and is still radical in many parts of the world today where slavery persists, yet all the great initiatives of social progress in the 19th century were to follow in its wake. Its key sentiments were expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence, 11½ years before the arrival of the First Fleet: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The 250th anniversary of Cook’s exploration of the east coast of Australia in 2020 inevitably will become a contest between the two warring narratives. The winner, if indeed there is one, will have captured the right to define the origins of our nation’s settlement and to frame everything that followed.
Which is why we must start by putting facts on the table, facts etched in the minds of every Australian who graduated from high school before, roughly speaking, 1980, but that are largely untaught today..’