Blainey, Geoffrey --- "Success and Failure Intertwined- Europe's Legacy" [1982] AboriginalLawB 44; (1982) 1(5) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 4

• Success And Failure Intertwined – Europe’s Legacy
• The Need To Restore Land
• Restoring Self-Respect

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Success and Failure Intertwined –

Europe’s Legacy

Geoffrey Blainey

What are our main achievements as Australians? And what are our failures? In the last two hundred years European people have made something of this continent. They have come from the cold climates and the cramped spaces of the northern hemisphere and have learned to master a new environment. Today fifteen - million people live here. This soil not only feeds us with virtually everything we need, but it also grows enough food for millions of people in China and other lands. It produces fibres which keep out the cold for several hundred million people. It produces minerals in such abundance that many of the world's great bridges, ships and buildings are made from Australian iron, and equipped with the aid of Australian copper, aluminium, zinc and other minerals.

Australia is infinitely more productive than it was two centuries ago. Much of what it produces is the result not only of Nature's gifts but of human qualities - imagination, thought, hard work, the taking of sensible risks. We possess those qualities today. But our grandfathers and grandmothers had them. Australia feeds and shelters and clothes fifty times as many Australians as lived here in Aboriginal times. Or if we count what we export, the multiplication should be one hundred, not fifty, times. To make an arid, unfamiliar and isolated continent so fruitful is an achievement.

Our achievement is accompanied by a failure. This land until 1788 was occupied entirely by Aboriginal peoples. They had their own civilization, their own history, their own values, their several hundred languages, and their own intelligent nomadic way of life. That civilization has largely vanished, and no matter what repairs or restitution are made, much of it is irrecoverable. We Europeans in one sense are to blame for the collapse of the Aboriginal way of life and the extinction of so many tribes. Many Aboriginals were shot and some were poisoned. Most who died, however, were the victims of their contact with European diseases to which they had no immunity.

It might have been better for the Aboriginals if no Europeans had ever reached these shores. But human history is full of these contacts between different peoples. If all sections of the human race, in the last ten thousand years, had lived in complete isolation from the neighbouring section, human progress would have been small. Contact creates as well as destroys, it enriches as well as impoverishes. In other words, success and failure are intertwined.

The need to restore land

It is essential that Aboriginals should once again feel at home in their own land. It is essential that we restore to them selected parts of land. At the same time we should realize now that the granting of land rights may well create problems, animosities and contradictions which we do not at present foresee.

Firstly, in European history in the last two centuries, and especially in Australian history, one of the most applauded changes has been to diminish the power of hereditary rights, whether the hereditary power of the monarchy or the nobility. In the light of that democratic trend it is not easy, in the 1980s, to enthrone hereditary rights again. It is not easy to give Aboriginals the permanent and therefore the hereditary right to lands and many of the natural resources which they contain.

Secondly, much of modern European and Australian history has been based on respect for - and a striving for - the idea of material progress. It is therefore not easy to surrender land to Aboriginals who themselves do not readily accept the western idea of material progress, though they accept many of the fruits of that progress.

Thirdly, if our way of compensating the unprivileged is to give them grea privileges, and if our way of reinstating the dispossessed is to give them valu able possessions, then the day will come when new groups of the unprivilegec and dispossessed may well resent thi Aboriginals and what they possess. And in such a day the Aboriginals, unless they respond, will possess more of the nation's land than its respect.

Restoring self-respect

We have no alternative but to violate these three principles. We have no alter native but to swim against the currem of our history. If this land is to be one land, if we are all to be one people, ther we must make reparations to the Aboriginals. And the greatest reparatior is to help to restore their self-respect by giving back that which they see as most valuable - land.

There is ultimately a limit to the land which can realistically be handed back to the Aboriginals. If we give back toc much land we endanger the standard of living of the average Australian, and indeed we may well lower the standard of living of scores of millions of people outside Australia.

In the eyes of the world, the white newcomers to Australia have used this land much more effectively than did the original Australians. I hope I don't say that boastfully; and I don't say it accusingly. For we are the beneficiaries of thousands of years of technological progress in the northern hemisphere, a benefit of which the Aboriginals were deprived by their long isolation. That technology enables so many Australians to live in comfort, where once there were few. A recent, outstanding book on world history (by Professor Eric Jones of La Trobe University's School of Economics), is called simply, The European Miracle. We would be silly to throw away the gains of that miracle.

I hope the day will come when most Aboriginals will take pride in the European achievement. Even more important, for Australia, I hope the day will come when all the peoples in Autralia will be proud of the Aboriginals' long history, and will cease to say, `This is a land with no history'.