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Conclusion: Beyond Howard, Hanson and Herron

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2011

Tim Rowse
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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Summary

A few months before I started work on this book, I got an angry phone call from a prominent indigenous Australian. It was about my recently published review of Geoffrey Partington's Hasluck vs Coombs: white politics and Australia's Aborigines. In attempting to place that book in the context of current politics, I had written of the Howard government's ‘bewilderment at inheriting the Hawke and Keating governments' corporatist legacy’:

The Hawke–Keating strategy was to promote an indigenous political elite, to give it resources, prestige and a certain influence, both in the government and in the mass media. In the politics of indigenous affairs, these leaders are now a fixture: they give shape and consistency to a tricky constituency, and they reassure a section of public opinion which demands a continuing settler–indigenous dialogue about the ideologies and institutions of nationhood. According to indigenous leaders, Herron [Howard's Minister for Aboriginal Affairs] does not seek their advice.

My caller disputed this reading of political events, particularly the verb ‘give’: ‘They didn't give us anything, we fucking took it!’

That conversation – which was not much prolonged by my fumbling efforts to find other senses of ‘give’ – taught me how easily a political analysis can slip into alignment with the very state apparatus it criticises. I believe that I have not avoided that alignment in this book, and my caller may conclude that I am, after all, incorrigibly state-centric.

Type
Chapter
Information
Obliged to be Difficult
Nugget Coombs' Legacy in Indigenous Affairs
, pp. 219 - 223
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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