Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country, by Bruce Pascoe. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2007, 302pp., Paperback, RRP $39.95, ISBN 13 978 085575 549 2, website.
No society should tolerate child abuse. Drastic measures are sometimes appropriate to break cycles. However, the uniformed force assembled by the federal government to occupy Aboriginal communities carries much lead in its saddlebags. One lump is the suspicion felt by Aboriginal people about the intentions of the government. This is a government, after all, that abolished the elected Indigenous assembly ATSIC. Another lump is the scar tissue that has covered Australian race relations since frontier times. The dishonesty and denial surrounding the dispossession of the Indigenous people ensures that government actions evoke scepticism and cynicism.
The image of uniformed, white officers appearing in Aboriginal communities, supposedly to restore order and protect children, gives eerie timeliness to Bruce Pascoe’s cry from the heart.
The 'Convincing Ground' on Victoria’s western coast was the site of a massacre of Aboriginal people, following a disagreement with whalers. The title captures the irony central to Pascoe’s thesis, as it reflects the invaders’ perception of the incident as a victory in the debate over land ownership.
Pascoe argues that there has been no meaningful discussion of ownership, because the frontier was pushed not by genuine settlers but by speculators engaged in a land scam. The Aboriginal people happily granted the first whites tanderrum, or right of passage, a right they traditionally gave other clans. When the whites stayed, the indigenous people could well have assumed that this meant acceptance of Aboriginal lore.
Most stories about early contact used euphemisms to disguise violence. The reports of those who led genocidal ‘reprisals’ against the Wathaurong and other clans sold the myth that Aboriginal people had disappeared or withered away before an awe-inspiring superior civilisation.
The accounts of the few humanitarians who condemned the killings look more critically at the records. Hints are found that admit the existence of a full scale war. Pascoe draws on oral histories of Aboriginal people and on archaeological evidence, particularly the remnants of stone houses, to debunk myths about Aboriginal people being primitive and unsophisticated.
Pascoe aims to correct the historical account, not just for the sake of justice and fairness, but also because our future will be tragic unless it is based in truth. He argues that this land offers great hope and opportunity to those who learn to love it, but that denial