Article

Professor David Carment spoke to the Palmerston Public Forum on Territory Identity. A copy of an article he has written on the subject for the Journal of Northern Territory History (No 16) is provided here with permission

Published in Journal of Northern Territory History, number 16,2006

Unfurling the Flag: History, Historians, Identity and Politics in Australia and the Northern Territory
David Carment
Charles Darwin University

Do you remember Self Government Day 1997? I do. Doug Gibbons arranged for a giant Territory flag to be parachuted down onto the Esplanade – as it came down the thousands present looked skyward.

I looked at the crowd. Children watched in awe the giant flag cutting through the breeze of that perfect dry season day. Men and women stood there tears in their eyes.

As Chief Minister I thought it’s not just our flag – it’s a symbol of who we are and what we have achieved…

Every time you look at that flag remember that first act of Self Government, fought for and won against Labor as Paul Everingham unfurled that symbol of our future, our hopes and aspirations as Territorians for on that day we came of age.

Shane Stone, Federal President of the Liberal Party of Australia, 2004

In 1996, as an historian of the Northern Territory, I spoke at a ceremony outside Parliament House in Darwin to commemorate the 1918 ‘Darwin rebellion’, when angry unionists forced the departure of the Northern Territory’s first Commonwealth Administrator. I talked about the event in terms of the emergence of a strong local trade union movement and a clash of personalities between the Administrator and the main union leader. Chief Minister Shane Stone spoke next before unveiling a plaque. He thanked me for my remarks but indicated that he disagreed with aspects of my interpretation. For him the Darwin Rebellion was a most significant event in Territorians’ struggle for statehood and needed to be primarily viewed in that context. He likened it, as did the plaque, to the 1854 Eureka uprising in Victoria. 

As the study of history quite frequently deals with the significance of identity in politics, it is not surprising that historians such as myself occasionally find themselves involved in public discussions about the topic. These discussions are part of a much broader historiographical context, the ways in which the memory of a society or a state is created, disseminated, institutionalised and understood. It is not chronological or factual history that is crucial here but, as Stone strongly implied and the American historian Walker Connor states, ‘sentient or felt history…an intuitive conviction of the group’s separate origin or evolution’.  

Some recent Australian histories very usefully analyse how individuals and communities think about the past and their ideas here are reflected politically. James Curran, for instance, in his The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image, points to national leaders since the Second World War grappling with ideas of Australia’s identity and struggling to relate them to the nation’s changing place in the world. These men’s frequent evocation of history in political debate, he maintains, ‘has been no idle glance backwards; it has affected the way they have performed as leaders and given substance to how they have conceived Australia’. Judith Brett’s Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class From Alfred Deakin to John Howard argues that political conflict is often over how ‘particular events, situations, and institutions are represented and the larger frameworks of meaning in which these are located’. The most effective analysis of such conflict involves the exploration of connections between historical memory, notions of identity and political processes.     

In their indefatigable attempts to establish a local sense of identity in the Australia’s Northern Territory, the first Chief Minister, Paul Everingham, and all his Country Liberal Party (CLP) successors until the party lost office in 2001 strongly emphasized in various ways a particular version of Territory’s past, one that gave prominence to the struggle to establish a distinct frontier community. That struggle’s result was a present characterised by excitement, progress and evolving social harmony. ‘Territorians’, a term widely used to include all those people who made the Territory their home, but which sometimes excluded Aborigines, were shown as pioneers and rugged individualists. Local car number plates proclaimed that the Territory was ‘Outback Australia’. Deputy Chief Minister Mike Reed wrote in 1998 that in the past the Territory was regarded ‘by many as Australia’s last frontier. Today, the Territory is still regarded as different from contemporary mainstream Australia, being an exciting and dynamic “frontier” environment’. Chief Minister Marshall Perron, who asserted in 1993 that Aboriginal culture was centuries behind European culture, had no hesitation in saying a year later that Darwin had been ‘a peaceful, multicultural city for more than 100 years’. Commonwealth governments were frequently blamed for the Territory’s problems, with politicians and bureaucrats in Canberra criticised as out of touch with the Territory’s aspirations and needs. As Everingham saw it on Self Government Day in 1978, ‘we are cutting the apron strings that have tied us to Canberra’s control for almost 70 years. Territorians fed up with remote control and its mistakes have been crying out for years for this advance. Now we have come of age’. Considerable importance was given to cultural and economic links between the Territory and nearby areas of East and Southeast Asia. ‘We have’, Perron once claimed, ‘been trading with Asia…since well before Captain Cook ever heard of the great south land…when we talk about building links with Asia we are mentally and geographically part of the region’.
To his great credit, as part of what Ann McGrath describes as a ‘history awareness campaign…strategically pitched at promoting a sense of belonging’, Everingham created the Northern Territory History Awards to provide funding for historical research. He also supported a government History Unit. An expert History Awards Committee recommended projects to a Minister. The History Awards funded some most important work, including Alan Powell’s Far Country: A Short History of the Northern Territory and McGrath’s Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country. At its own expense the Northern Territory Government sent complimentary copies of Far Country to all members of the Commonwealth parliament.

However, alternative histories were sometimes in the Territory, as elsewhere, actively discouraged. After Everingham left Territory politics, there were occasions when Ministers overruled the History Awards Committee’s recommendations on the grounds that inappropriate research was being promoted. In one instance, this involved the rejection of a recommendation that a major project documenting the history of Darwin’s Bagot Aboriginal reserve receive a substantial grant. The Government’s Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory devoted emphasis to frontier life styles and industries, colourful and prominent individuals and ultimately successful battles to overcome hardship and adversity. There was, though, no exhibition with an emphasis on Aboriginal-European conflict.  

The situation so far described is very much a part of what Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger present as the ‘invention of tradition’. Hobsbawm argues that ‘”Invented tradition” is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past’.   Inventing traditions, he continues, ‘is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition’. Of particular significance is his claim that invented traditions are highly relevant to the idea of the ‘nation’ and its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national symbols and national histories.

As Stephen Alomes shows, nationalism in the form of the development of images and traditions has for over a century been an essential element of Australian life. It is expressed in sport, business, literature, music, politics and a variety of other spheres. Alomes demonstrates how in the early to mid 1980s Prime Minister Bob Hawke adopted a distinctively Australian style that promised for some a new sense of national direction. His government subsidised films such as Gallipoli and The Man from Snowy River, which were designed to encourage Australians’ pride in traditions of their national past. To mark the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia, the ‘celebration of a nation’ took place on 26 January 1988. In Sydney the eleven ships of the First Fleet Re-enactment sailed into Farm Cove while in Canberra horses and riders completing the Man from Snowy River rides again trek paraded through the city’s streets. Politicians were conspicuous. A Commonwealth government agency, the Australian Bicentennial Authority, funded and organised many events while the Prime Minister and state leaders gave speeches that often reflected on the nature of Australia’s history and identity. Some Indigenous Australians, though, such as those who marched in protest in Sydney on the same day, expressed their contempt for the Bicentenary and all that was associated with it.

Maurice French observes that the ‘general homogeneity of Australia’s geography and peoples, and the low impact of sectionalism, and the metropolitanisation of the nation-continent have all tended to blur regional differentiation’. This is true but, as the publication of so many regional histories in Australia illustrates, enough differences exist between areas such as North Queensland, the Riverina and the Darling Downs to provide a focus for research that frequently reveals quite powerful notions of regional separateness. Like Americans, Australians often tend to see the frontier as a significant element in national development, frequently using names such as ‘bush’, ‘outback’ or ‘never-never’ to describe it. Graeme Davison suggests that the Australian frontier has always been both an idea and a place, signifying ‘a line on the map and a geographically indeterminate boundary between the known and the unknown, the civilised and the rude, the safe and the dangerous, the ordered and the anarchic’. In large parts of remote Australia today there remain more Indigenous than non-Indigenous inhabitants. The country’s biggest cities are mainly in the southern half of the continent and usually on or very near the coast. The principal industries outside the closely settled areas are pastoralism, mining and tourism. What Davison describes as the ‘idea of the frontier’ is well established in Australia.

Russel Ward contended in 1958 that the archetypal Australian was a bushman in the Outback. Thomas Keneally wrote in 1984 that ‘the region which in the imaginations of most Australians is outback par excellence is the Northern Territory’. Mickey Dewar concludes that the Territory ‘represents a frontier to Australians, a place where the behaviour of Territorians is in some way quintessential to the national experience’. The focus of many writers on the Territory, she observes, ‘was an attempt to locate and define the non-Aboriginal occupation of Australia from all aspects’ that sought to ‘legitimise European settlement’. Alan Powell goes even further. Non-Indigenous Northern Territory residents, he feels, see themselves as distinct in the Australian context because they still believe that they live on a frontier: they ‘rather like the image’, not just for the sake of tourist dollars, but because it causes them to stand out from the general mass of Australians. Jon Stratton agrees. For him the Territory is the ‘other’, part of a discourse by which the rest of Australia defines itself as ‘real’.

Between 1978 and 2001 CLP governments of the Northern Territory enthusiastically created and promoted notions of identity for the purpose of establishing bonds of loyalty to the Territory among its non-Aboriginal population, most of whom came from others parts of Australia and the world.  Governments championed what the political scientist Alistair Heatley described as ‘Territorianism’, an aggressively presented sense of identity that encompassed full statehood and rapid economic development. A significant element was strong opposition to Aboriginal land rights. ‘Territorianism’, he maintained, emerged most clearly in the Territory government’s dealings with the Commonwealth. Criticism of Canberra was ‘traditional for Territory politicians’ who ‘made frequent, forceful (and, one suspects, telling) use of it in the new constitutional and political context’. Chief Minister Ian Tuxworth vividly illustrated this approach when he announced in September 1985 that his government would boycott the ceremony to be held at Uluru at which the Governor General handed over title documents to traditional Aboriginal owners. ‘The handover’, he complained, ‘is symbolic of what is wrong about the relationship between the Territory and the Commonwealth’.

The challenge facing the Territory government was how to establish and then maintain the Northern Territory’s legitimacy as a separate cultural, economic and political entity. Because the Territory only achieved self-government in 1978, Everingham and his CLP colleagues were unable to make much use of already existing bonds of political obedience and loyalty. Their grand aim was a strengthened sense of Territory ‘communion’ and the effective articulation of those elements that to them held the Territory together.  Many observers commented on the phenomenon. Thomas Keneally observed in 1984 that:
The Territorians see themselves as a nation. Not even in Texas do you see a regional flag flown so fervently, and the Northern Territory flag, with its black, its ochre, its Southern Cross, its Sturt’s Desert Rose, resembles more a national flag than does the Commonwealth of Australia itself with its hybrid of Union Jack and Southern Cross. At question time Everingham and his ministers refer to ‘Southerners’ – any other Australians apart from themselves – as if they were members of a separate federation.

Historians Bob Reece and Lenore Coltheart claimed in 1981 that the Territory’s government depicted itself as custodian of ‘a long-awaited and hard-won legislative and administrative autonomy, whose course must be to fulfil the obligations their moment in history entailed. These obligations centred on the development of land resources now that distant government was discarded’. Political scientist Peter Loveday in 1991 pointed to the ‘chauvinism’ which was so evident in the Territory, ‘directed against Canberra and other metropolitan centres, especially at election time’ and asked whether the ‘myth of the frontier’ sustained it. Everingham’s biographer, Frances Chan, explains how the Chief Minister immediately after self government in 1978 led the way here through an astute public relations campaign involving giveaways such as flags, flag pins, coat of arms pins, emblems, ties, scarves and brochures. Like Keneally, she saw the new flag everywhere.

Some marked changes occurred in the Northern Territory after the election of Clare Martin’s Labor government in 2001. Yet in terms the issues I discuss here, there are many more similarities between the present administration and its CLP predecessors than either side cares to admit. Martin and her colleagues remain strongly committed to the promotion of rapid economic growth and the achievement of statehood. A former postgraduate History student, the Chief Minister shares Paul Everingham’s and Shane Stone’s enthusiasm for the past and their recognition of its place in identity building. A well qualified and highly regarded historian of the Territory, Mickey Dewar, is one of her senior advisors. In a parliamentary debate on a government review of the Heritage Conservation Act during October 2003 Martin described how local history and heritage were ‘very dear’ to her heart and highlighted themes such as the struggle to overcome isolation, the push for economic development, the important role of the Chinese and improvements in transport. She was committed, she emphasized, to promoting ‘a strong sense of history and community development’. In June 2003 the Chief Minister launched an events grants scheme, a Territory Service Medal and a commemorative vehicle number plate to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Territory self-government. Although the CLP was in power for most of those 25 years and they were for many Labor supporters a bleak period, Territory residents were asked to ‘celebrate’ the past and special community grants were provided to enable them to do so. As Stone had before her, Martin showed that she felt that the Eureka rebellion mattered for the Northern Territory when in 2004 she allocated $15,000 to commemorate in the Territory the 150th anniversary of the rebellion. Planned activities included the development of ‘community awareness and understanding about the past present and future importance’ of Eureka. Members of the reference group to supervise the activities were required to have an understanding of Eureka’s ‘cultural significance to the Northern Territory’. Also during 2004 a Chief Minister’s Northern Territory History Book Award was inaugurated.    

I have probably said enough to illustrate how history, identity and politics inter-relate in the Northern Territory. While my examples are local, perhaps even parochial, they are relevant to the wider national issues discussed earlier. Australian politicians and the media represent and misrepresent history for their own ideological purposes. They also sometimes praise or criticise historians. As James Curran suggests, Prime Minister John Howard’s attack on historians who, in his words, portray Australia’s past as ‘racist and bigoted’ echoes that of Geoffrey Blainey, although the latter used the slightly softer expression ‘black armband’. The attack illuminates Howard’s strong conviction that people should reflect on their history with pride and his defence of what he describes as ‘traditional Australia’. For Paul Keating, on the other hand, Curran writes, in upholding the ‘radical nationalist’ version of the national past, believed that ‘Australian life was split between genuine Australian nationalists and disingenuous “Australian Britons”’.   Keating, in his own words, credited ‘the Manning Clarks of the world – the historians who work on the big canvas’ as helping politicians such himself develop their visions. All this means that historians as diverse as Blainey, Clark and Keating’s speechwriter Don Watson have had a considerable degree of public influence and recognition.