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Bittersweet prize

by Nicholas Rothwell

27 January 2009 - INDIGENOUS rights campaigner Mick Dodson, the newly appointed 2009 Australian of the Year, confided yesterday that he had found the accolade a hard one to accept given the bleak resonances for many Aboriginal people of January 26, the date when the First Fleet hove to in Sydney Harbour: "invasion day".

"I angsted about it, I thought about it very, very deeply," he said: "I too share the concerns of my indigenous brothers and sisters about the date."

How to avoid legitimising the regime that honours you, when you disapprove of its core symbols and lament the sweep of its national narrative?

It is a familiar dilemma for Dodson, who has received many distinctions and national awards in his high-profile career of activism. He dealt with it smoothly on Sunday: within minutes of accepting his title from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, he was canvassing the idea of changing the date of Australia Day.

But lurking behind Dodson's immediate difficulty is another, much more disquieting problem for today's old-established indigenous campaigners.

What to fight for, against whom? How to avoid being co-opted by a federal Government and establishment so sentimentally accepting of the Aboriginal cause?

The pattern of Dodson's life well illustrates the shifts that have occurred over the past generation in the possibilities of indigenous political action. He has gone from the margins, step by step, towards the centre of the national stage, and back out into the shadows again.

Born in the Northern Territory, descended from the Yawuru people of the Broome region, educated initially in Katherine and Darwin, and then at the blue-riband Monivae boarding school in the Western District of Victoria, Dodson took a law degree at Monash University.

It was the prelude to a career in the nascent Aboriginal political vanguard. He worked in the Victorian Aboriginal legal service, and became a barrister. Soon he moved to Darwin, and worked there for the Northern Land Council, at that stage an organisation full of energy and passion, embroiled in constant front-line struggles.

By the end of the 1980s, the course for a new phase in Aboriginal activism was set, and its champions had emerged: Dodson himself to the fore, accompanied by his brother Patrick, the theorist of reconciliation, academic Marcia Langton and Kimberley Land Council director Peter Yu.

Like his colleagues in this movement, Dodson presciently believed a new era in the battle for rights was dawning: the vital contests would be fought in the arena of law, his own speciality. They would be fought, above all, over issues of social justice and claims of recompense for past wrongs.

By chance, Dodson was soon able to devote himself this new agenda. In the bicentennial year, 1988, he was appointed as counsel assisting the landmark royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody: the inquiry lasted more than two years, and laid bare in uncompromising fashion the conditions in remote bush communities, conditions that have only worsened in the decades since.

Dodson was next appointed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, a post he held from 1993 to 1998.

It was a time when the faded past of Aboriginal Australia was coming into fresh view, and the experiences of the Stolen Generations were being excavated after long silence. It was also the period when the second crucial document that shifted Australia's way of imagining indigenous affairs was being drawn up: the emotive Bringing Them Home report into the separation of Aboriginal children from their families.

Bringing Them Home appeared in April 1997, early in the reign of conservative prime minister John Howard: his administration briskly shelved the report, and refused every call for a national apology to the Stolen Generations.

Upon the report's completion, Dodson went into long exile from governmental favour, an exile that only really ended this week with his appointment as the nation's chief ambassador to itself.

But it was an unusually high-profile kind of exile, for late 20th century institutional Australia offered a rich diversity of posts to an Aboriginal campaigner with attitude.

As a result, the past decade and a half has not been without activity for Dodson: he is presently a professor at the Australian National University, the director of its centre for indigenous studies, the chair of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, and the co-chair of Reconciliation Australia.

This thick portfolio of positions testifies to the strong appeal of the Dodson brand. He is famous chiefly for his willingness to critique the liberal establishment. His public manner, both curmudgeonly and cerebral, fits well with the flow of his arguments.

Above all, Dodson has been there, in the headlines, holding his ground, for a generation, Akubra-hatted, unbowed.

What lies behind the gruff persona? Dodson's lectures and speeches reveal a persistent enthusiasm for international law as a lever to effect constitutional change in Australia: he helped draft the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, and he is a member of the UN permanent forum on indigenous issues.

It is this impeccable biography of urgency and agitation that Dodson now puts at the nation's service, as he sets about presenting and articulating Australia's grand themes and concerns, and applying pressure on society to adjust its values and its norms.

Much as the 2007 Australian of the Year, environmentalist author Tim Flannery, seemed a contrarian choice well selected to counter and neutralise criticism of the eco-sceptic federal government of the day, so Dodson's appointment has a political undertext. He is not the first indigenous Australian of the year: far from it - previous incumbents include Galarrwuy and Mandawuy Yunupingu, Evonne Goolagong Cawley, Neville Bonner and Lowitja O'Donoghue. But he is the first indigenous activist with so clearly defined a critical profile.

It is hard, given the membership of the Australia Day Council Board, rich in senior public servants, not to see Dodson's new post as part of the Rudd Government master-plan for dealing with the indigenous domain. This blueprint is straightforward: engage every Aboriginal leader, and keep them talking, debating and consulting indefinitely.

Thus the project for a new indigenous representative council is now the subject of protracted debate, while the fine points of the native title system, indigenous housing and education are all under wide discussion, with reviews and submissions flooding in.

Since Rudd made an apology to the Stolen Generations the first item of business on the first sitting day of the new federal parliament, in February last year, it may seem natural for campaigners such as Dodson to regard the present regime in Canberra as one more sympathetic to the cause of indigenous rights that its obdurate predecessor.

In fact, the track record to date suggests that Rudd and Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin intend little shift in the broad settings that determine Aboriginal policies. The NT intervention continues, and has been quietly extended to cover much of the east and central Kimberley: compulsory income management is now in place in a wide range of Aboriginal communities across central and north Australia, despite the fervent opposition of many Aboriginal activists and the party chieftains of the Labor Left.

No: for Dodson and the current he incarnates in the indigenous political leadership, the chief significance of the Rudd Government's arrival is rather that the days of reflex opposition are gone. The federal Government is no longer a natural object of hostility and scorn, presided over by a prime minister who refuses to apologise.

On the contrary, it is, in theory at least, an ally. The space for activism has thus vanished, almost overnight.

Consider the fate of the Dodson and his key comrades in the old indigenous vanguard. His brother, Patrick Dodson, has been drafted in by the NT Labor Government as a facilitator in Aboriginal communities, to explain why it no longer supports the creation of remote outstations.

Peter Yu, the former Kimberley land rights activist, prepared the NT intervention review for Macklin late last year, and was sharply critical of several key provisions: Macklin used his moral authority and then ignored his critique.

And now Mick Dodson is seen as a figure sufficiently mainstream to represent Australia and its inchoate identity on the national stage. It is an outcome rich in ironies, for the titans of a movement that once dreamed of turning the political order upside down.

Perhaps, in a sense, the linked fates of the radical indigenous leadership point to nothing as much as their success.

A generation on, Australia is a very different place in its attitudes to the Aboriginal domain. But the federal Government, and the extended establishment that revolves about it, is also very different: it has new and subtle skills and methods for the embrace and control of its critics.

No one more critical of Australia's past could be imagined than Dodson, who regards the day of the First Fleet's arrival as "the day on which our world came crashing down".

What a masterstroke, then, to elevate him to a position of ambassadorship, to have him represent Australia's tolerance and commitment to the abstract principles of indigenous advancement.

Dodson, like others of his generation, now looks around and sees the complex, mixed picture of indigenous Australia: fast-growing, culturally vibrant, traversed by disadvantage and chaos, observed, all the while, admired from outside, administered by the mainstream with warm, attentive eyes.

Who would have thought the story of a career in protest and struggle would come to this particular climax? Who would have expected Dodson, after years of sadness and qualified eclipse, to be brought, in this ambiguous way, back home?

Australia has an odd way of functioning as an open society, through forgetting and through silence as much as through generosity. Dodson, who railed against the system all his adult life, and fought with steely reserve against its systematic injustices, now finds himself in the spotlight for his deep Australian characteristics: it is the deepest honour, and, in some subterranean fashion, the strangest blow.

by Nicolas Rothwell

Source: The Australian

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