Abstract
In 1992, the Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, acknowledged the racism, inequality and injustice inflicted on generations of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Sixteen years later, his successor as Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, went even further and fully apologised to Australia’s Indigenous peoples for such acts as dispossession and child removal. In between these landmark political speeches, another Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, had cast doubt on the veracity and value of Aboriginal testimony and voiced scepticism of the proprieties of acknowledging past violence and suffering. It is on this interim period that Kelly Jean Butler focuses, attending to the acts of witnessing – listening to stories of violence and suffering and acting upon that process – that were made in contrast to the resistance to testimony of the Howard government. Responding to the conjunction of personal stories and public histories which this involves has been central to the meaning of ‘good citizenship’ among settler Australians. During the period of the Howard government, it occurred in the context of the ‘history wars’. Against what became derisively known as the ‘black armband’ view of Australian history, various historians and intellectuals advocated a fully fledged response to the voices of the socially and politically marginalised. Butler’s book is an exploration of how these various voices have been heard, how ethical citizenship has been manifested in Australia, and how settler witnessing is in certain ways compromised by the politics of recognition and national renewal. Along the way, there is an interesting discussion of various artistic forms of historical witnessing, such as novels like Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, films like Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence and historical works such as Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers and Katrina Schlunke’s Bluff Rock. Butler also considers the culture of denial among settler Australians, and the ways in which such Australians have witnessed to their own experiences. All of this has changed, and is changing, how Australianness is represented and understood in contemporary public culture, around the axes of history, testimony and memory. Butler’s study is theoretically informed, lucidly written and copiously referenced. It makes for an astute contribution to discussion of the possibilities and the limitations of liberal discourse on witnessing, both in Australia and beyond.