You don’t have to be a Midnight Oil fan to appreciate that they sound thoroughly Australian. They have been searching for decades to be an Australian band speaking an Australian language about Australian matters. Whatever that means. I guess they’ve been trying to work out what that means. I’m excited by their return to recording: Gadigal Land. Like I said, they’ve been trying to work out things Australian.
I have only so many useful ideas about what it means to be Australian. To even discuss the question feels like a backwards step to me, putting me in the company of some Australians I would share a slightly-strained barbie with. Still, I just found it irresistible to introduce this ‘Australian-ness’ as a virtue of Midnight Oil. This pool of thought is hard not to swim in occasionally. It has its’ shallow end and its’ deep end. We might disagree on which is which.
I have only the faintest idea what it means to be indigenous. Being first is a very, very good start, but may not be everything. Many of our deep heart matters are imported, some of them very recently. My love for Pad Thai and appreciation of Sudanese-Australian AFL defenders seem out of proportion to the shallowness of their roots. But they hit good soil real quick.
But some things just don’t seem to fit. I know a cheap import when I see one. I’m not sure my judgment is better than the next persons, but I offer my judgment here with the belief that it might be a good one.
Cheap American Imports
Right now, American imports are rubbing me the wrong way. I took MTV on the chin, I’ll cop hip hop and even learn a few rhymes, I’ll stomach the cheeseburger craze (though I wouldn’t mind one of those great Greek café hamburgers of my youth). But some imports seem ill-suited to our soil. American agendas enter our discourse with little comment or control every day. And they come from the Right and the Left.
So Right It’s So Wrong
Right-wing American discourse seems to come with our cheeseburgers. Australians have always talked down government. We have had typical contempt for government, but we have not very often feared it. unlike the US.
Just a few years after Cook dipped his toe in Botany Bay with mixed results, ‘American’ citizen militias were fighting a war against the British monarchy. For this reason, the Constitution of this new Republic spelt out a real fear of any government imposing its’ will on citizens. Whether that fear of government is still legitimate in the US is a question – but militias are now a regular reality again. The landscape is weird, now they often line up alongside government powers. But not always, in my view, you could argue that a protesting crowd outside the White House is inspired by the same motives as the militia. So it is hard to tell why Trump tear-gassed what could be argued was a calm, unarmed peace-militia in the park opposite his house in order to walk to a church and hold up a bible. Strange days indeed.
Now, did you see the US creep in my thinking? That paragraph was longer than intended. I got over-interested in the US. What I wanted to say was something about us - that we typically have contempt for government, not fear of it.
While the anti-vaxxer phenomenon, the to-mask-or-not wars and the COVID-app concerns all represent fair questions about state power, they are now phrased in an accent that sounds to me unmistakably American. This is so Right it’s wrong.
Woke Too Late
It happens on the left-wing too. When Black Lives Matter broke on all our heads, it quickly started a local conversation. All good. Too many Indigenous folks in jail. Too many deaths. No argument. At all. But why the conversation at that time? Why not earlier?
We woke too late. And when Australians started to worry about the death of David Dungay Jr in our local Long Bay Jail in 2020, his family pointedly reminded us that it happened in 2015 with the words, ‘Where have you been all this time?’.
Answer: we were watching America. We woke too late.
A Statement from the Heart
Let’s not be self-righteous. In 2017, Australia was battling over Same-Sex Marriage. We were all moral warriors. The great misfortune of Indigenous Leaders was to have released a major statement at the same time as we were in a flurry of our own convictions. This Statement had been coming a long time, and taken a lot of work, but it was over in weeks. We missed it – we were so woke to our own moral power, that we could not think of more than one thing at a time. The great Uluru Statement from the Heart https://fromtheheart.com.au/uluru-statement/the-statement/ came and went quickly.
But in 2020 we are all so woke. Again, we often wake too late. Better late than never!
Thanks to the immense hard work and perseverance of Aboriginal leaders, the Statement has been re-stated - again and again. They haven’t given up, and they want our ears. Let’s stop shouting about our various righteousnesses, and listen in.
I am going to report on the progress of this Statement regularly to our church because business with Aboriginal Australia is unfinished business, and no Christian cannot be concerned about failures of reconciliation. I don’t expect to see deep peace in my life over this, but I’ll look for local love wherever I can give or receive it, and I certainly don’t want to ignore this deeply Australian challenge.
I don’t mind what you think about it, but as a leader of a few Australians, and someone concerned with biblical matters of race and equity, I definitely want to make sure that if you don’t know about it – it isn’t due to my lack of listening.
I want to wake up in my own country more mornings than not. Don’t you?