Landscape as Metaphor myths and reality in Australia's post-colonial history (original) (raw)

Who owns Australia’s past? Is it the victors of a genocidal race war, a century long war for the land, a war unrecognized by the Australian War memorial? Can we disentangle myth from verifiable fact in the legacy of assumed sovereignty and violent, dispossessory occupation? Should we be honouring our First People in the way we write history? With recognition comes identity and authenticity, the capacity for self-awareness, the hope of validation, of falsifiable precepts that, in their consideration, allow us to see more clearly as a society, as for corrective glasses to address myopia. We have inherited many of our behaviours from the past, among them, racism, and a tendency to exploit beyond sustainability, and with them, our displacive values. Is it time to accommodate our failures in a rethinking of our priorities? The early history of Australia since 1788 is caught up in the tension between invasion, resistance, and racially targeted extermination, us, and them, a typology for genocidal land acquisition. Why have we written out Aboriginal society from colonial history? Is it guilt? The guilt of Stanner’s ‘great Australian silence’? What we are is broadly determined by what we were, forged through behavioural epigenetics. Our emergent reality is circumscribed by the choices we make and have made, as a group. The question is: can we accept our past errors and change? Can our mutating rule-based order absorb the lessons of truth-telling and embrace inclusion, the rights of otherness, the rights of the biosphere? What is the role of our agreed values in a more compassionate, sustainable future? Is the concept of landscape a metaphor for our failure as a civil society, or our hope for renewal?