Not just black and white

Our view of our ourselves as a nation went on trial on the final night of the The Age Melbourne Writers' Festival. On one side was the academic Robert Manne, a child of Jewish migrants and fierce anti-communist whose public life changed course when he discovered the part played by eugenics in the thinking of those who framed Aboriginal policy in the first half of the 20th century.

On the other was Andrew Bolt, a media commentator with a wide following and a book of columns titled Still Not Sorry, which carries a commendation on its cover from the Prime Minister saying he speaks "with a good deal of sense".

The debate that followed was predictable. Bolt went first and accused Manne of perpetuating a myth that was killing Aboriginal children today. The logic to his argument was as follows: state instrumentalities are reluctant to intervene in cases of Aboriginal child abuse, including sexual abuse, because they fear being accused of repeating the scandal of the stolen generation.

Manne's speech was precisely historical, listing legislation and official statements by those who, in plainly racist terms, conceived the policy of taking Aboriginal children of mixed race from their parents. Later, when a woman stood and said, "Are you saying that if I disagree with you, I haven't got a kind heart?", Manne begged her to read a weight of documentary material he has published on the website of The Monthly magazine.

Manne's approach exposed Bolt's near total disregard for the history of the issue, but as the evening progressed the complexity of that history became, in purely debating terms, a burden since after World War II the situation becomes murkier - welfare considerations were also involved in the removals. Thus, when the two debaters asked questions of one another, Bolt, in sporting terms, made ground.

He asked Manne for 10 cases of people who had been removed because of their Aboriginality. Bolt claimed that in each of the cases there were welfare considerations. This was Bolt's litany for the night. Name 10 - in fact, name one. Manne was arguing the failure of the state to supply appropriate services was a factor in postwar removals, but his argument was at risk of becoming too refined for the audience though most were for him.

Bolt claims to be "driven" by his concern for Aboriginal children. Anyone who seriously wishes to confront Aboriginal problems must confront their terrible complexity. At one point he said, if it were only "good feelings" that made them believe what he refers to as the "myth" of the stolen generation, then that wasn't enough. Their duty was to "the truth".

I rarely read Bolt's writing, but I did read some of what he wrote on Keith Windschuttle's version of Tasmanian history, early Tasmanian history being a subject I have studied for most of my adult life. Bolt's contribution to that debate was characterised by the extreme partiality of his view.

What I would most like to ask Andrew Bolt is not what he believes but why he believes it. Where, exactly, do his views come from? In enthusiastically taking up the cudgels on Windschuttle's behalf, he failed to redress the grievous misjudgement that lies at the core of Windschuttle's view. By denying the Aboriginal relationship to land, as Windschuttle effectively did, he denied the source of their meaning as human beings.

If such success as Bolt had on Sunday night was to employ the tabloid device of reducing the issue to a handful of words, he met his match in a young man who looked to be of school age and asked the last question of the night. "Mr Bolt," he said, "are you honestly suggesting that an attempt to recognise the injustices of the past has actually led to a modern-day maltreatment of Aboriginal people?"

There are now two major problems blocking progress on Aboriginal issues and harming black-white relations. The first is that the severely limited interest of non-indigenous Australia in indigenous issues means tabloid arguments hold sway. The second is that Aboriginal voices have effectively been excluded from what is termed the Aboriginal debate. The latter situation is not merely unjust; it's dangerously unwise. Where does it leave the next generation of Aboriginal leaders to go?

The most telling moment in Sunday's debate came during question time. About the fourth question came from a woman upstairs. I didn't see her, but I certainly heard her voice as it came booming down. She was Aboriginal, she was from the stolen generation, she was from Victoria. Bolt's supporters called on her to ask a question, but, of course, she didn't have one. What she was saying was that I exist and I am here. Unless she was a liar, or entirely mistaken as to her personal history, Bolt was wrong.

No view of Australian history that doesn't accommodate the Aboriginal view, however precariously, can be taken seriously. We either want a joint history or we don't. If we do, that means actually listening to what is being said. If we don't want a joint Australia, we shouldn't be surprised at the political consequences.

When Bolt was asked if he saw any racism in Australia's past, he said he thought so in cases where white men got black women pregnant and then deserted them. He specified the case of Michael Long's grandmother. I'm writing a book with Michael Long. Suffice it to say this is a most incomplete version of how he sees his history. The forced removal of both his parents as infants from their mothers is something that reverberates through his life and that of his family to this very day.

Martin Flanagan is an Age writer.