There’s apparently been some minor unrest over the proposal to permanently fly the Aboriginal flag on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.



Really? Until Australia can summon the maturity to design a national ensign that the Union Jack doesn’t dominate, one reflective of this continent’s rich Indigenous heritage, surely both the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colours ought also fly up there daily as they do on so many other public buildings and monuments.

It is regrettable that anything approaching public argument over such a fundamental acknowledgement of Indigenous history and presence could possibly still be smouldering in 2018.

Regrettable but perhaps not surprising, given the recent rhetorical contortions of opponents, from the prime minister down, to re-thinking Australia Day.

Barely a week later we hear the yowls of resistance from the bunker, amid spurious arguments that this flag proposal is nothing but a distraction from the real issues – poverty and social disadvantage – affecting Indigenous Australia. This was usually twinned, somewhat illogically, with other propositions: that to put the Aboriginal flag up there alongside the Australian and New South Wales ensigns would be an act of “cultural vandalism”, nothing more than “empty symbolism”, “gesture” and “identity” politics.

Significantly, many who trot out the old “distraction”/”mere symbolism” line ever more regularly on occasions such as these when their cultural touchstones are challenged will rarely, if ever, invest their energies at any other times into arguing anywhere near as vociferously for a better deal for Indigenous people.

Of course fixing entrenched Indigenous disadvantage (including reversing incarceration and high child mortality rates, bolstering educational and economic opportunity) is more important than a flag. But these things are not mutually exclusive. They are not either/or propositions.

And, of course, if the simplest reform, in this case involving a flag, can’t be implemented without triggering cultural outrage, what hope for the many matters of national Indigenous emergency?



In practical terms, fixing the entrenched disadvantage in Indigenous Australia requires courage, honesty, a new investment in self-determination and national leadership – all lamentably absent when it comes to Indigenous policymaking. It also requires a massive cultural shift, central to which is a mainstream political and social acknowledgement that colonialism’s malevolent legacy manifests in that appalling disadvantage today.

History and the present are inextricably linked, in country, in belief, in story, in memory, in traditional life, throughout the Indigenous nations of this continent.

Acknowledging the people to whom European settlement dealt such an appalling hand, via public showcasing of the symbols of their culture, is a simple part of a bigger equation. No less so than finding a national day that doesn’t trample, no matter what the politicians say, on their sensibilities. It shouldn’t be contentious.



Indeed, the flags we fly on our internationally recognisable buildings, the holidays we celebrate, the words we cling to (”for we are young and free”) signal to ourselves and the world who we are as a nation. They speak of our priorities and of our inclusiveness – or otherwise. They project what it is that we want to remember and, by omission, what it is some of us would make every effort to forget.

It’s 50 years since anthropologist William Stanner shouted out to this country in his 1968 Boyer lectures, After the Dreaming, just how colonised Australian history had remained since federation.

Stanner had a term for our malaise of memory. He called it the “great Australian silence”.

It involved, he said, the failure of most books about Australia’s past to substantively address Indigenous history, not least resistance and black/white frontier violence.

Stanner said: “It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.”



A national cult of forgetting.



That silence is profound, even half a century later. You can hear the pin drop. But still our leaders and many opinion makers can’t seem to hear, through the silence, the tens of thousands of Indigenous people marching in the streets demanding agency in a place their people have inhabited since before time held meaning.

What would Stanner make of Australia today?

I reckon he’d be appalled at the pervasive forgetfulness and the lack of progress, the inertia and resistance across the spectrum, from the biggest Indigenous issues all the way down to the little things.

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist