Assimilationism and anti-Communism: A reflection on Gerald Peel's 'Isles of the Torres Strait'

Abstract

In 1993, I helped to develop a community education kit commissioned by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR). Our project team included non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal educators active in the Aboriginal rights movement, most of whom had major reservations about the politics underlying the establishment of the CAR, particularly the wav it had distracted attention from the more difficult issue of a treaty. Nevertheless, reconciliation was the 'only game in town' in terms of government support, and the project provided an opportunity for large numbers of people in church groups, unions, local government and community education centres to educate themselves about the major issues of the debate. The kit we developed included sufficient material to suggest that reconciliation was a problematic concept for many in the movement, but it was published under a title chosen for us by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 'Australians for Reconciliation'. Future generations of historians may well take this as evidence that 1990s activists had too simplistic a notion of Indigenous rights. Similarly, I suspect, Aboriginal rights activists in 1950s Australia would have often had no choice but to use the hegemonic discourse of assimilationism to build wider support for campaigns against racially discriminatory government policy and legislation. How would they feel, I wonder, seeing this now being cited as evidence that the left of the Australian labour movement - which was the backbone of the equal rights movement in this period - were advocates, not opponents, of assimilation. This chapter uses a 1947 publication of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), interwoven with my own experiences and understanding, gained through membership of that same party in the 1970s and 1980s, to tell a different, more complex and more challenging story.