I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, the traditional owners of the land on which we meet.
It is appropriate that I should begin with an acknowledgement of land because our alienation from this land lies at the spiritual roots of our present difficulties. When, in the sixth century before our present era, the Hebrew people were in exile in Babylon, one of their poets commented on their alienation from their land. Having been asked by their captors to perform their traditional songs and dances, the poet said on behalf of the people
How can we sing the Lord's song
in a strange land?1
This heartfelt cry seems to me to apply both to Indigenous Australians, whose dispossession from their land is manifest and to non-Indigenous Australians, whose presence here is based on long standing wrongs. I interpose here a reference to that other situation that has been referred to in this conference, the treatment of asylum seekers. On any rational analysis, asylum seekers landing on Australia's shores cannot be the threat that they are made out to be. To characterise them as a major threat to our national sovereignty and security, as has been done, with the subsequent dehumanising references is to exceed any reasonable action. What is the attraction of this patently unreasonable activity? Why do Australians find themselves overwhelmed by it? Why does it appeal to our worst qualities and tempt us to turn our backs on 200 years of welcoming newcomers to the country? I suggest that our failure to resolve the question of sovereignty imposes such a burden on non-Indigenous Australia that the asylum seekers, who appear to threaten that which we hold by the merest thread, make the ideal scapegoats. It is no accident that a government that refuses to apologise to Indigenous Australians for the theft of their land also promotes asylum seekers as the solution to our territorial insecurity.
Eventually the exile ended and the people returned home. A poet captured the joy of this with the words:
When the Lord turned again the fortunes of Zion
then were we like those restored to life.2
Unless we can turn our fortunes again and come home, we will forever live in a land from which we are alienated.
For Australia to be at home in the land, we need a specific change event, a focus that we are now calling a treaty. One of the criticisms of the move towards a treaty is that it presupposes two nations in Australia, given that there must be parties to such a document and that they must have the same status. It may be that the idea of ‘covenant' would serve us better, in spirit even if not used as a term.
‘Covenant' is a term that features heavily in Christian theology where it expresses a relationship with God. Covenant ‘is more than formal agreements or legal duties; it is about the dynamics of relationship'.3 Covenant does not presuppose two entirely distinct sides. One party can covenant without reciprocity. One can covenant with oneself. Thus this term helps to overcome the argument that there cannot be a treaty within a national entity. Covenant can survive failure or differential compliance.
Covenant implies a sharing of pains and sorrows, pleasures and celebrations. This aspect of covenant is important when the parties have a long and conflicted history, where they inhabit the same space and where the mutual sharing of stories is paramount.
This is important because it takes only a little thought to envisage a scenario where a debate about treaty continues and even deepens the divisions within Australian society rather than resolving them. Indeed, it is possible that the most important thing about a treaty will be the successful management of the process of achieving it. Nobody can imagine that the whole population will automatically and openly receive the idea of a treaty in its legal and formal sense. Within both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities there will be differing positions, some of them openly hostile to the idea. It would be a tragedy if a successfully negotiated treaty left behind it significant disaffected groups. I do not argue that unanimity is a prerequisite. That would be to make the treaty a hostage to willful refusal. I do argue that the process of achieving a treaty is at least as important as the treaty itself.
The name for the principal barrier to a treaty is, we may say, ‘terra nullius'. It is commonly believed that this doctrine, narrowly conceived as a kind of historical legal error, has been expunged by the Mabo decision. The Christian churches are very familiar with the self-deception of thinking that formal decisions have an inevitable power. The great councils of Christendom, from Nicaea in 325CE onwards, have seemingly resolved complex questions that have had a habit of resurfacing from time to time in a different guise. This is because they dealt with deep-rooted issues. ‘Terra nullius' is like that for Australia. Far from being only a discredited legal doctrine, it is a way of thought that encourages a form of national blindness. It comes close to being a form of national sin.
Another criticism of a treaty is that it will encourage litigation in attempts to ensure its enforcement, in other words, division will continue beyond the treaty. Dr Rowan Williams, recently appointed to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, has noted as a problem the tendency in rights based discourse to require people to continue to identify themselves as victims, even to compete with others for the title of victim. He says:
"The challenge is to do with imagination: with imagining relations other than those of master and slave, advantaged and disadvantaged, and imagining a definition of my or our interest and identity that would require the presence and welfare of others with whom I was not forced constantly to struggle for precedence."4
We need to be committed to this kind of outcome. For this reason we will need to be clear where our commitment lies. If we have a commitment to a treaty that is contingent on the resolution of certain issues, whatever they are, those issues will inevitably become barriers to the successful completion of the process. If we have a commitment to a treaty that is prior to the resolution of issues, the resolution itself becomes possible.
Does our commitment then lie on this side or on the other side of the resolution of specific issues? Only if it is on this side can we have a successful process.
How then can we achieve such a commitment? Widespread support from significant organisations within the community is essential. Significant individuals also have a role to play. Without national leadership at the highest level, however, such commitment may possibly elude us.
Progress will be enhanced by an acknowledgement of the plurality that exists within both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. In particular, the diversity of Indigenous groups means that within any national treaty there will need to be individual treaties on a more local level. Those agreements will take place between people in a local government area, a town or a village. In principle they need not wait on the conclusion of a national process but can proceed at their own pace. If such smaller agreements can be encouraged, they will inevitably contribute to the successful completion of the larger scale process.
But I turn now to the involvement of the churches themselves. The churches of Australia have had an ambiguous relationship with Indigenous Australians. From the beginning of colonisation the churches have insisted that Indigenous Australians are children of God, that is, truly human over against those who regarded them as sub-human or animal. At the same time they regarded Indigenous Australians as human children, incapable of an independent existence. Later they supported equality before the law and the possession of the full array of civil rights. They placed this support, however, within the mistaken policy of assimilation, neglecting the essentials of Indigenous culture and spirituality. They participated in the policies that led to the Stolen Generations with apparently good motives, but were unable to prevent abuses or subject that policy to necessary criticism.
The churches of Australia have encompassed both champions of Indigenous Australians and oppressors. The churches of Australia have been on the same journey as the rest of the community in resolving the issues that have led to this conference.
The churches have a responsibility to undertake a vigorous educational program amongst their members about a treaty and its possible contents. They should do this as a matter of their own integrity and as a contribution to the nation itself. The members of the churches have a responsibility individually to continue to participate in community activities around a treaty and in other ways.
Fundamental to any resolution of the issues around a treaty is recognition of how much of our social compact is based on historical and present violence. We live in a nation that was established with violence, both towards the majority of the first colonists and certainly towards the original inhabitants of the land. That violence has caused violence must also be recognised. The NCCA is committed to the process of self-examination that the overcoming of violence involves. A treaty, with its formal recognition of the status of Indigenous Australians can set the spiritual, psychological and organisational context for the recognition of violence in our midst and thus commence its elimination.
I return now to where I began. Australia lives in a context of alienation from itself, its land and its history. If we ask ourselves what kind of song we can sing in this land, we receive no harmony, only a discord or, rather, no music at all. If our fortunes are turned we can be as those restored to life and thus able to sing our song.
1 Psalm 137
2 Psalm 126
3 Peter Lewis, National Director-Covenanting, Uniting Church in Australia, ‘Covenant and Treaty - an exploration', http://www.covenanting.unitinged.org.au/
Resources/th_covenant_treaty.doc
4 Rowan Williams, Lost Icons, Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 2000, pp. 85-86.
