Friday 6 May 2016

Shadows.



How much is our present shaped by the uneasy shadows of the past - the half-forgotten spectres that lurk at the periphery of our cultural vision?

As a kid in 1980s white Australia, I remember there were three kinds of jokes: one kind was about Irishmen; one kind about Jews and the third about Aboriginals. Jokes about Irishmen centred on how stupid they were, Jews were money-grabbing and Aboriginals were pitiful and dirty. At the time I had no experience of people who were Irish, Jewish or Aboriginal. I know now that I was surrounded by people from all these backgrounds - some of whom would have been conscious of their heritage and others who were not. It’s an uncomfortable thing to remember as I think about the way these jokes were traded for cultural capital. We were kids passing narratives we didn’t fully understand, but we knew enough to sense the power they gave the teller and the power they sucked from their victims. 

Penguin Books Australia
I’m reminded of these “jokes” as I reflect on James Boyce’s book Van Diemen’s Land. Boyce’s history of early 19th century Tasmania tells of the arrival of the British with their - mostly Irish - convicts and the subsequent conflict with the aboriginal Tasmanians. This part is widely known. What isn’t so well known is how well things went initially and how an abundance of kangaroo and a fairly liberal attitude by the British Governors to the convicts left everyone - including the Aboriginal population - relatively healthy and relatively happy. What changed was the overhunting of kangaroo and the arrival of settlers who were given allocations of grazing land for their sheep. In a short space of time, the grazing lands of Tasmania went from being a shared resource to become a private bounty for the British settler class: conflict became an inevitability.

What also isn’t so widely known is the duplicity of Governor Arthur and George Augustus Robinson, Protector of Aborigines. Boyce sums this up clearly in the following paragraph:

The sense of inevitability about what occurred to the Aborigines that still pervades Tasmanian history is a distortion of the historical record. It disguises the fact that the colonial government made a policy choice. The decision to remove all Tasmanian Aborigines after 1832 and to pursue this relentlessly to its tragic end was, even by the standards of the time, an extraordinary and extreme policy position. Robinson’s public lies and absurd journal self-justifications, along with Arthur’s carefully worded dispatches, have disguised the truth for too long. The colonial government from 1832 to 1836 ethnically cleansed the western half of Van Diemen’s Land [Tasmania] and then callously left the exiled people to their fate. The black hole of Tasmanian history is not the violence between white settlers and the Aborigines - a well-recorded and much-discussed aspect of the British conquest - but the government-sponsored ethnic clearances which followed it.

So how much is our present brash self-confident Australian identity built on a past we choose not to remember? Like the jokes of my childhood, how many of the cultural narratives which we use to shape our present identity are built from a fabric of repressed history we choose not to remember? How many of those who are stridently opposed to “boat people” are choosing not to remember the migration stories of their own families? When the government chooses not to engage Aboriginal communities in discussion about ways to address the myriad issues that face them and instead imposes white solutions to black problems, how much is a denial of past wrongs unconsciously shaping the present political agenda? To what degree are we realising the inevitability of  Santyana's assertion that, “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”?

These are not new questions. Nor is the answer new: when we remember the past and engage honestly and justly with all who inherit it, we have a foundation for building an honest and just future. 

Teaching and learning to remember the past

There are many pasts to remember and many ways to remember them. This is the crux of the teaching challenge: how to empower students with the skills and knowledge to engage with the past and understand it with a meaningful level of complexity when there are so many ways to remember so much history? Teaching for meaningful historical understanding is a task that is even more challenging - and interesting - in the context of an International School like UWCSEA where the students come from all corners of the earth. The particulars of Tasmanian history are of limited relevance to my Kazakh students. 

But the underlying shadows are not. Every human society has its history of repression and its fights over land. The specifics of how each conflict plays out may differ in the detail, but the underlying motifs are similar. As we work in our teaching and learning to bring the shadows of the past into the light, the challenge is to move meaningfully between the specifics of history and the underlying patterns that cross times and cultures. 
Kurt Hahn

When Kurt Hahn and the founders of the United World Colleges conceived of the schools’ mission, it was in response to the horrors of WWII. Like so many of the world’s conflicts, land was a key ingredient in WWII as well. Hitler’s policy of “Lebensraum” (space to live) lead to the succession of incursions that preceded the German invasion of Poland and to the declaration of war by the United Kingdom in September of 1939. 

Kurt Hahn’s vision was to mix together students from the world’s diverse nations and cultures to create an environment where humanity came before nationality. It is a very human trait to identify with particular groups - be they political, social, economic or national - but beneath these labels is always a common humanity. 


The lesson that I take from Boyce’s account of Tasmanian history is that humans always make choices but the motivations behind these choices are often complex and deeply rooted in our cultural identity. Making choices that are just and lead to a better world requires learning about our own culture and about the culture of others. This is complex. But equally important is to remind ourselves, as Kurt Hahn did, that beneath the diverse cultural identities of the world is a common humanity. Understanding this is simple. 

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