The Australian, I think it’s fair to say, leads this charge into the future – a role it took on explicitly when it editorialised against Robert Manne’s In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right. If I understand Jack Waterford, writing a review of Manne’s essay in Eureka Street (May 2001), many young people are sympathetic. They are impatient for an apology, he says, so that they will no longer have anything to apologise for.

Why the impatience? Inga Clendinnen says that if you talk about genocide in connection with the stolen children, you shouldn’t be surprised if minds slam shut and you provoke some people into behaving like ‘rascals’ (The Australian Review of Books, May 2001). At the end of his essay, Manne asks: ‘Why has so much energy been expended in the attempt to deny ... that a really terrible injustice occurred?’ The essay gathers evidence to fuel the rhetorical force of that question. Clendinnen gives no answer. Nor does she say we should be suspicious of its rhetorical tone. Even so, she appears more dismayed by the lapses of tone she attributes to Manne on his way to putting that question than by the need to put it. Why did a sense of proportion desert a writer of such fine intelligence and moral discrimination as Clendinnen? I don’t know, but it is an expression of that same querulous impatience, I think.

Without a doubt, minds are shut and I fear that hearts have hardened. But talk of genocide did not cause the hostility that Manne records and to which he responds in his essay. That hostility was directed against any serious discussion of the need for Australians to acknowledge collective responsibility for the wrongs committed against the Indigenous peoples, against any suggestion that those wrongs were the expression of a pervasive and deep-rooted racism, against native title, often against the demand for an apology, and always against discussions of self-determination.

Hugh Morgan accused the justices who found in favour of Eddy Mabo of ‘being ashamed to be Australians’. He said that ‘they seem to have no pride in their country and they strive mightily to melt it down and recast it, furtively, in a new self-deprecating and much diminished mould’. The people Manne calls to account – Paddy McGuinness, Andrew Bolt, Keith Windschuttle, Ron Brunton, Michael Duffy, Frank Devine, Piers Akerman, Christopher Pearson – expressed the same anger when they wrote on Hindmarsh Island, assimilation, and Bringing Them Home, the report on the stolen generations. Michael Duffy called most of the pro-Aboriginal intelligentsia ‘white moral maggots’ in the Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2000. That is about as low as it got publicly, but the sneering contempt was pretty much unrelenting, especially up north where Ron Brunton let his hair down in his columns for the Courier Mail. I plead with the reader: read these people before you judge that Manne has gone too far.

When Clendinnen calls such people ‘rascals’, I suppose she hopes to remind us that they are not wicked and that a clear realisation of that fact should constrain one’s tone when one writes about them. Moralism, she reckons, can make us lose sight of it. She is right about that, of course. But urbane condescension can just as surely lose contact with reality. If the rhetorical force Manne invested in his closing question to his readers was justified, then so was his tone – sometimes scornful because of the shabbiness of the arguments he had to deal with, sometimes angry because of their nastiness. Absence of anger in his essay would have been a failing, not just a human failing to respond with appropriate emotion to what he was disclosing, but also an intellectual one (an epistemological failing, if that doesn’t sound too grand) because sometimes only such anger reveals the full meaning of what it is directed against.

In Denial is not a book of history. It is a political intervention. By holding an influential section of the right to account – for their embattled aggression, their over-simplifications, their obsession with the foibles of political correctness, and above all their role in encouraging Australians to deny the degree and extent of the wrongs done to their Indigenous fellow citizens – Manne was exercising the kind of responsibility often demanded of public intellectuals. The people he held to account exert considerable political influence on some members of the Coalition, including the prime minister, and on the more general public through Quadrant and through their newspaper columns. After the apology, they will again sharpen their knives for use against anyone who calls for a critical openness to talk of self-determinations.

It matters, therefore, whether they can be trusted. From where I stand they can’t. With depressing consistency, they have been unable to resist the simplifications and half-truths that distort the thought of politically embattled public intellectuals who, as Max Weber put it, live off their cause rather than for it, in this case psychologically rather than materially. From where they stand, they have injected scepticism and complexity where political correctness has produced gullibility, complacency, and over-simplification, and they believe it has taken courage to do so. The reader must decide. It is hard to see how any intellectual culture worth taking seriously could believe it doesn’t matter.

Within the next year or so, the Indigenous peoples of Australia will almost certainly receive a prime-ministerial apology. They are owed one because their present and past miseries are in large part a consequence of the injustices they suffered at the hands of our political ancestors, and in part because of our relative indifference to that fact, and to their continued suffering and humiliation. That much, however, could be acknowledged by an English person or a German or a Dane. If such a person was particularly compassionate, then she might feel sincere and profound regret for the suffering of the Indigenous peoples and for the injustices inflicted upon them. Regret, after all, is merely the wish that something hadn’t happened.

Most of us, however, feel we stand in a different relation to those miseries and injustices than compassionate foreigners do. For one thing, we are obliged to do something about them, in a way they are not, because the Indigenous peoples are our fellow citizens. And many Australians feel something deeper. Paul Keating expressed it when he said in his Redfern speech: ‘We took the traditional lands, committed the murders, took the children.’

‘Not me!’ John Howard would say, together with (I think, all of) Manne’s targets. But Keating did not, of course, mean that most of us literally did those things, nor even that we were accomplices to them. He meant much the same as John Howard would if he were to say: ‘We cleared the land, suffered the fires, the drought and the flood; we built the nation; we fought at Gallipoli and later in Europe and Asia against tyranny.’ That ‘we’ expresses, in the most natural meaning of the term, a sense of collective responsibility. It might seem strange to call expressions of national pride acknowledgments of collective responsibility because the term is usually reserved for the wrongs we have done or in which we have become implicated. According to the circumstances, we might feel guilt or shame for them – guilt if we did them or omitted to oppose them, or shame because, though we are not guilty, we are implicated on account of a love of country that has become fundamental to our identity.

National pride and national shame are two sides of the same coin, having the same conceptual structure. They are two ways of acknowledging that we are sometimes collectively responsible for the deeds of others. Some people say both are irrational, and there is a case to be made for that, but its hyper-rationalistic assumptions are not congenial to most people. In the debate over the apology, it is national shame that has come under attack in the name of national pride. The wish to be proud without sometimes acknowledging the need to be ashamed is that corrupt attachment – I will not call it love – that we call jingoism.

A sense of national shame is really nothing other than the pained, humbled acknowledgment of the wrongs in which we have become implicated because of the deeds of our political ancestors and which a faithful love of country requires of us. Jingoists find it impossible to believe that shame should be one of the forms of love of country, but it is so. An apology is one, natural though perhaps not necessary, expression of it. In the right circumstances, the solemn announcement of the findings of a Commission for Truth and Reconciliation might be another, making a formal apology otiose. Be that as it may: the Indigenous peoples have asked for an apology and so, in our circumstances, it has become necessary to give it. But it would mean nothing if it were not part of a practical concern to alleviate the material and psychological misery of much of the Aboriginal community. And it would be servile if it meant, as those who go on about black armbands appear to think it must, that we should descend into morbid self-abasement – afraid to criticise Aboriginal culture or institutions.

            It is inconceivable that after the apology the Aborigines will stop thinking about their past, about how to describe it adequately, about which concepts are necessary for the task. That will not be a scholarly exercise with results destined for scholarly journals. It will be, in the broad sense of the term, political, a practical effort to find themselves in relation to the Australian body politic in a way that is truthful to the continuing meaning of the fact that ‘we took the traditional lands, committed the murders, took the children’. They could not do that without seeking the right names for the crimes committed against them. Discussion of genocide will not go away, therefore, and it will try to answer two questions. First, is genocide the only concept that will fully disclose the meaning of some of those crimes? Secondly, should the concept significantly determine the character of historical narratives of white–black relations, in the act of settlement and after? Without inconsistency, one can answer ‘yes’ to the first question and ‘no’ to the second.

Paul Kelly says that Bringing Them Home’s ‘verdict of genocide (was) so extreme that it provided no resolution to the injustice it identified’ (The Australian, 16 May 2001). A lot of people agree, I know, but I find it puzzling that they should after informed reflection. If one reads Bringing Them Home together with the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, then one is likely to suspect – fearfully but reasonably – that sometimes the crimes committed against the children and their parents satisfy the criteria established by the Convention. The fact that such a suspicion is reasonable does not make it right, but it does mean that its introduction into discussion is not the act of an extremist. To the contrary, because Australia is a signatory to the Convention, it is obliged to consider whether crimes committed here are in breach of it. Discussion of cases that appear to constitute such a breach is therefore an obligation that falls on us simply by virtue of the fact that we have signed up to the Convention. Without a doubt, discussion of it has offended many people whose minds slammed shut, but that is not, as Clendinnen claims, ‘a moral, intellectual and ... political disaster’. It would have been an intellectual and moral disaster, however, if Australian intellectuals refused to discuss what they are obliged to think about because they were afraid to anger people who will not read or, if they do read, will not think.

One may, of course, judge that the criteria proposed by the Convention are seriously inadequate. Clendinnen does and so do I, though not for the same reasons. The Convention fails, in my judgment, because, amongst other things, it permitted the authors of Bringing Them Home to conclude, reasonably insofar as they were guided by the Convention, that assimilation is genocide. That strikes me as a conclusion that stretches the concept to the point where it no longer has moral connections to its paradigms, all of which involve mass murder. It is tempting for someone who agrees with that judgment to conclude that, as Clendinnen does, connection with its paradigms will always be broken when the concept is applied to crimes that do not involve murder. ‘To take the murder out of genocide is to render it vacuous, and I believe with Orwell that it is essential to keep such words mirror bright because ... we will surely continue to need them.’

Coming from the author of Reading the Holocaust, that last claim is a strange one: in that book, she wonders whether the concept is useful in describing even the crimes of the Holocaust. ‘Is the guilt attaching to the intention to destroy a whole people ... different in kind from the intention to kill an equal number of individuals?’ she asks. ‘Does the crime of “genocide” inhabit a moral category of its own?’ It’s an important question, one that many people have asked when they contemplate the unnerving, even distasteful, distance between the abstract nature of the concept and the horrific details of the crimes to which it has been applied.

Clendinnen makes no attempt to answer it. Perhaps she thought the concept insufficiently substantial to justify the effort. Perhaps she had no taste for the discursive, analytical discussion required to answer it. Storytelling, even the wonderful storytelling of Inga Clendinnen, will not lead one to an answer, however much it may enrich it. Or more precisely: storytelling has nothing to offer after that critical point where even the best of it must give ground to discursive argument of an essentially philosophical kind. Whatever the reason for her refusal to answer the important question she raised, the profound disagreement, from the time of the Nuremberg Trials, over answers to it should have shown her that the concept was never ‘mirror bright’.

Clendinnen refers to a thought experiment I proposed in A Common Humanity to clarify the conceptual structure of genocide. I asked whether one should count as genocide the forcible sterilisation of a people for the purpose of eliminating them as a people. Someone who answered yes, I argued, might not find that crime morally so different from the forcible, often brutal removal of children from their parents when the intention of those removals (infected with racist disdain for the Indigenous peoples) was their extinguishment as a people. Like most thought experiments, this one does not deliver conclusive answers, but if one answers yes to the question it poses, one may then go on to judge that genocide was sometimes committed against the Indigenous peoples during periods of the absorption programs. One will then also conclude, perhaps with a shock, that they suffered crimes worse than genocide. Some people find that too paradoxical to accept because they are used to thinking of genocide as amongst the worst, if not the worst, of crimes. But there is now much Australian scholarly work to suggest they are mistaken – by Colin Tatz, Tony Barta, and by younger historians Geoffrey Levey, Dirk Moses, and Simone Gigliotti, for example.

Whatever else happens after the apology, we can be certain that many Indigenous peoples will continue to think about how the fact of their dispossession should enter into their sense of cultural and political identity. How could it be otherwise, given that their religious and spiritual sensibility conditions and is conditioned by their relation to the land? Here, at any rate, politics and religion cannot be separated. Resistance to assimilation and talk of a treaty and of self-determination are, at the very least, the insistence that discussion of the political future of the Indigenous peoples should not be closed by the complacent assumption that their political destiny lies as fully assimilated members of a multicultural Australian nation.

Inevitably, there will be muddle in that discussion. Because it is an exploration of forms of political association that are novel to the classical tradition of Western political thought, talk of self-determination does little more than gesture towards an outcome whose full conceptual character is unforeseeable. Imaginative, disciplined openness to this discussion is no more than a continuing expression of our acknowledgment of the way we are implicated in the wrongs committed by our political ancestors.

Nothing is written in stone concerning what we must agree to. Nothing forces us to concede the cynical assumption of the right that openness to talk of self-determination is openness of the kind that inspired the joke about the man who had a mind so open that his brain fell through. But if we do not listen, if we do not encourage the Indigenous peoples to speak in their own voices, if we are not genuinely open to novel possibilities, if, before serious dialogue, we shut our ears to talk of new forms of political association within the commonwealth, if we yield to an impatient, false realism, then our apology will be self-indulgent and self-promoting, and our practical efforts patronising.

Are we listening? Over the last ten years or so we have been, not always intently and by no means always with comprehension, but much more than before, I think. It’s an expression of the revulsion against racism that has gained ground since World War II. The Holocaust had much to do with it, but ever since the Black Panthers shocked the Western liberal conscience with their aggressive declaration of difference, much of the Western intelligentsia has responded to white-against-black racism with an awareness of its distinctive nature.

Racism of the kind connected with skin colour is best characterised as an incapacity on the part of racists to see that anything could go deep in the lives of their victims. For such racists, it is literally unintelligible that parenthood or sexuality, for example, could mean to ‘them’ – the victims of their racial denigration – what it does to ‘us’, just as it is unintelligible that anyone could see in a face that looked to them like the Black-and-White Minstrel Show’s caricature of an Afro-American face, all the magnificence and misery of Othello.

Legal justifications of colonial settlement in many parts of the world were often infected by racism of that kind. Sometimes, at least, the law was intended not just to rationalise imperial interests, but also to justify settlement of foreign lands to a reasonable conscience. Terra nullius – the doctrine that the land was, for legal purposes, empty – is an example. Consistent in theory with the recognition of the full humanity of those whose lands were colonised, in practice its application was often the expression of a racist denigration of the ‘capacities of some categories of Indigenous inhabitants to have any rights or interest in land’, to quote Justice Brennan. That denigration expressed the belief that, since nothing could go deep with them, their forcible removal from their lands could not do so (could not count as dispossession as we ordinarily mean it), and therefore could not constitute a grievous wrong against them. More than preceding judgments in other lands – Canada or the USA, for example – Mabo made clear why the rejection of terra nullius, and the property laws infected by the racist assumptions that often governed its application, was nothing less than the recognition of the full humanity of the Indigenous peoples who had been dispossessed.

Just as many of the settlers could not imagine that the Aborigines had relations of any depth to the land, so many of their descendants could not imagine that they had relations of any depth to their children. The first form of blindness enabled whites to take their lands, the second to take their children, both with a relatively clear conscience. Many of the people who took the children protested sincerely that they did it with the best interests of the children at heart. Sometimes their deeds gave the lie to those protestations. Often, however, they did not. Often the dehumanising treatment of the children and their parents was entirely consistent with those intentions because they were intentions saturated with profound disdain for the Indigenous peoples who were regarded as less than fully human.

The point becomes evident in an example that is more extreme but also less emotionally threatening to us. Some white slave owners in the southern states of the USA treated their slaves with the sort of kindness that did not, even for a moment, threaten their belief that slavery constituted no injustice against blacks. We know that some of them rebuked their slave-owning neighbours who raped black women, while being incredulous at the suggestion that black women could be wronged in the same way as white women are when they are raped. Just as they could not believe that a black woman’s soul could be lacerated by this violation of her sexual being, so Australian racists could not believe that an Aboriginal mother could grieve all her life for the child that had been taken from her.

James Isdell, Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia in the 1930s, said that he ‘would not hesitate for a moment to separate any half-caste from its aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring.’ Those words can mean many different things in different mouths but coming from Isdell, their racist meaning was clear. ‘Our’ suffering goes deep. ‘Theirs’ cannot. ‘Their’ children are replaceable. ‘Ours’ are not. Once one recognises the racist nature of Isdell’s remark, one sees that his denigration of the Indigenous peoples’ capacity to grieve, extends to every aspect of their inner-lives.

Many Australians thought like that, as did racists all over the world. Some of them were brutes. Most of them were not. Some were very good people when judged by their behaviour towards their fellow whites. And, of course, this incapacity to see depth in the lives of a racially denigrated people can be a matter of degree, ranging from vicious denigration to a form of patronising condescension not very different from the relatively benign, xenophobic condescension directed against swarthy foreigners immediately after the war. One would be naïve to deny that both the racism and the xenophobia were widespread.

The real complexity in the argument about the intentions of those who took the children is therefore not, as Paul Kelly believes, the mix of welfare and racist motivation but, rather, the mix of unambiguously good intentions and intentions that in one way or another, to one degree or another, were tainted by a racist conception of what Indigenous peoples could do and feel and therefore of what kinds of wrongs they could suffer. Much of the bitterness of the argument over the stolen generations is a function of the fact that many people understandably find it almost impossible to believe that friends or relatives who were sincerely pained at the sight of Aboriginal suffering, who sincerely hoped that assimilation would promise a better future for children of mixed blood, could at the same time look upon the Indigenous peoples as less than fully human.

The thought (if it should be called a thought) that nothing ‘they’ do or suffer can go deep is quite different from the relatively straightforward empirical claims concerning the abilities of Indigenous peoples that racists often make to rationalise their disdain for those whom they denigrate. The latter – claims concerning the allegedly low IQs of Indigenous peoples, for example – can be checked by well-established empirical methods and their status can be recorded in textbooks or encyclopedias. But coming to see dignity in faces that had all looked alike, the full range of human expressiveness in a face or voice, to hear suffering that lacerates the soul in a person’s face or in a people’s music, or to see it in their art, is quite different from coming to acknowledge, however reluctantly, that they have IQs as high as we do. We do not discover the full humanity of a racially denigrated people in books by social scientists insofar as they aspire to the kind of knowledge destined for encyclopedias. If we discover it in reading, it will be because the writing has the power to show us, generally because it moves us that, for example, Aboriginal rites depicting the relation between life and suffering contain, as Williams Stanner put it, ‘all the beauty of song, mime, dance and art of which human beings are capable’. Or it may be because we have read Sally Morgan or to take a more recent example and in a different genre, Inga Clendinnen’s fine essay on Mr Robinson, at one time Protector of the Aborigines in Tasmania.

The discovery by large portions of the Western intelligentsia of moral or spiritual depth in practices and beliefs that had previously seemed to express only the superstitions of scientifically backward savages is one of the finest achievements of the latter half of the twentieth century. In a generation raised on entertainment (Tarzan films, for example) in which blacks were portrayed as brutish and ridiculous, this was a revolutionary change in sensibility, one that went together with a deepening disillusionment with the often brutal and sometimes murderous practices of Western governments in the underdeveloped world. It also went together with a scepticism about the epistemological and social hopes of the Enlightenment, a scepticism that became anxious as the lessons of the Holocaust entered deep into the Western psyche.

Who should be surprised, then, that the discovery of depth and beauty in the practices and beliefs of Indigenous peoples, often tragic victims of colonial settlement, should sometimes decline into a strange mixture of romantic and cynical muddle. We are now told that it was muddle with dangerous effects, encouraging Indigenous peoples to cling to inferior and doomed cultures, with the result that ‘illiterate, vocationally disabled, unpresentable outside the ethnographic zoos they live in, these tragic people are Australia’s contribution to the New Stone Age’.

It is hard to believe how someone could write the words I have just quoted and believe himself to have expressed concern for the people he intends them to refer to, no matter how often he qualifies the contemptuous attitude to their condition by reference to their ‘tragic’ fate. The writer is Roger Sandall, and the quotation is from his book The Culture Cult. Sandall is unrelenting in the disdain he heaps upon the intelligentsia who, having seen the depth in Indigenous cultures, doubted the usefulness of asking, flatly, whether those cultures measured up to Western civilisation, whether they had anything to match Socrates, Shakespeare, and Newton.

Sandall’s opening sentence warns of what is to come: ‘Romantic primitivism has two faces, and its romantic face is by far the prettier. This is the one that gave the world a whole collection of colourful and eccentric Englishmen who liked to dress up as Arabs, jump onto camels and ride about over the sands of the Middle East.’ Later, in the same tone, he ridicules, amongst others, Rousseau, Isaiah Berlin, T.S. Eliot and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is described thus: ‘Turning his back on the chilling conclusions of the Tractatus, he now decided that the ordinary speech of the peasantry was a serviceable philosophical instrument after all – especially if you didn’t worry about truth or logic.’ But nothing in the book matches the ghoulish hatred he reserves for Raymond Williams: ‘Today Williams resembles one of those huge fallen statues of Stalin, the legs broken and the head detached, with weeds growing out of its nostrils and mould mantling the lifeless eyes.’

It is reason for sorrow and embarrassment that a book so venomous and so intellectually shabby should have been received by the major quality papers as a contribution to a much-needed rethink about the virtues of assimilation. Time will tell whether this was an aberration. If it proves to be, and we are again able to see the wood for the trees, then we will remember that, however foolish the romanticisation of aspects of Indigenous culture may be, and however baleful the consequences may sometimes have proved, these are as nothing compared to the effect on Indigenous peoples of their dispossession and continued humiliation. Nothing done in response to the racist denigration of Indigenous cultures that informed many of the assimilation programs would justify a claim that those responses had left us with a ‘legacy of unutterable shame’.

No inconsistency exists between the recognition of the fact that cultures may be food for the soul and the acknowledgment that they can sometimes be poison for the soul. No inconsistency exists between the local formation of identity and a sense of common humanity with all the peoples of the earth. The universality to be found in those things that give moral and spiritual sustenance – literature, art, dance, religious rites, and so on – is different from the kind of universality found in science, which aims at an abstract language, stripped of all local association, of all local and historical resonance. In literature, for example, one aspires to universality of a kind that is achieved when a story or poem in a particular natural language, historically rich and dense, shaped by and shaping the life of a people, is translated into another natural language, historically rich and dense, shaped by and shaping the life of different peoples. Every writer needs an address, said Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Distortion of points such as these sometimes leads to an uncontrolled scepticism about truth and objectivity. Recently, a professor of English at one of the Melbourne universities told his students, apparently without a trace of irony or the intention to provoke, that having disposed of the illusion that there are great books it remained only for him to dispose of the illusion that there are good ones. Irritation over such things should not make one vulnerable to the bitter voice of someone like Sandall. Pat Dodson has written that ‘there is no right more fundamental to Aboriginal peoples than the right to self-determination’. One might not agree. But can one refuse to discuss the matter, or unilaterally set limits to what the outcome of such discussions might be? If not, could one go into discussions with Dodson armed with Sandall’s book and say: ‘We need to start again, to think things through from the beginning. This is just the book to help us do it!’

When The Australian talks about ‘ideology’, it means to disparage, in the name of a practical – the only really moral – concern for Aboriginal welfare, thoughts such as I have expressed in this essay. But why should anyone think that to be efficiently concerned with Aboriginal health and education, for example, one should put a stop to talk about a treaty and self-determination. The only answer that comes to mind is that they fear that if the Indigenous peoples and others ‘talk ideology’ after the apology, then resentment that they are doing so will threaten support for the practical programs.

Would there be widespread resentment? There is likely to be if many Australians believe that when the prime minister apologises and the Indigenous peoples forgive, the past should no longer have a moral claim on us. They would then think that after the apology the practical work should not be undertaken in a spirit of reparation. After the apology, they think, Aboriginal disadvantage may as well have been the result of a natural catastrophe as a consequence of their dispossession.

The best that can be said for such a view is that it is shallow. No apology could be serious if it were given in the hope that it could magically disassociate the future from the moral claims of the past. Practical work after the apology will demean us and the Indigenous peoples if it is not done in a spirit that continues to acknowledge that ‘we took the traditional lands, committed the murders, took the children’.

Good-hearted people find it intolerable that just treatment of the powerless should depend on generosity – on the charity, in the old fashioned sense – of the powerful. Since at least 1789, the refusal to accept it has driven the rhetoric of human rights in a noble attempt to bestow dignity on the powerless by creating the illusion that rights are a kind of moral force field, a metaphysical barrier to the indignity of being ruthlessly crushed. It is an illusion. Unless an appeal to rights has force to back it, its acknowledgment depends entirely on the spirit of justice in those to whom the appeal was made.

No one has written so beautifully and so hard-headedly about justice as Simone Weil, I believe, because no one has written so hard-headedly about affliction and the way in which the full humanity of those who suffer severe and degrading forms of it become invisible to other human beings. Unless one is a saint, compassion shown for those who suffer severe and degrading affliction will prove condescending, and that will show itself, even in those who work heroically for them, in small gestures or in tones of voice.

The Indigenous peoples have no power worth speaking of. If their voices are to be heard, if they dare speak from their hearts, then it will be because we have been moved by the spirit of justice to listen.

I have often felt – and I felt it intensely while writing Romulus, My Father, when I rediscovered some of my roots in pre-multicultural Australia and in my admiration for the men and women with whom I grew up in country Victoria – that many Australians are blessed with a distinctive decency, though like most virtues it has its corresponding vice. Terry Lane tells a story told to him by one of the Dunera boys. They were Jews who had fled to England from Nazi-occupied Europe only to be shipped to Australia as enemy aliens. On their march to a camp on the edges of the desert, an Australian soldier who was guarding them handed one of them his rifle and said: ‘Here mate. Hold this while I have a piss.’ ‘I knew then,’ said the Dunera boy, ‘that I was in heaven.’

Possibly, that same man was a racist. Certainly, many men of that kind were, and many of their spiritual descendants would think of the nature and consequences of a prime-ministerial apology in ways that I have been criticising, if indeed, they believe there should be an apology at all. But if the gesture of the Australian soldier guarding the Dunera boys could grace the debate about what might come after the apology, or perhaps, more realistically, if it could grace what was done after the apology, then here in Australia we might, in the words of Hannah Arendt, ‘create something new, something foreseen by no one’. When some of the Indigenous peoples talk of a treaty and of self-determination, I think that is what they hope for.