HERALD Sun columnist Andrew Bolt is being sued under the Racial Vilification Act by a group of Aborigines led by 73-year-old activist Pat Eatock over two columns he wrote last year.

The two columns are here and here. With all the sensitivity and nuance Bolt typically brings to his columns, they question the Aboriginality of a few easy targets – academics and artists, in the main. For what it’s worth, Bolt fails to grasp – or, deliberately ignores – the fairly simple and straightforward idea that cultural identity is, well, cultural. The columns are undoubtedly offensive and hurtful to their subjects.

But I don’t think even the most malevolent interpretation of Bolt’s columns would have them constitute a threat, or inciting a threat, against their subjects. We’re talking about personal insult here, however deep it may have been felt.

As such, I echo the concerns of Liberty Victoria President Michael Pearce SC:

“‘‘It is easy to imagine that it caused offence and hurt to the people against whom it was directed. However, hurt and offence are caused by all sorts of speech all the time.

‘‘It would be impossible to proscribe all speech which causes hurt and offence.’

Indeed. I’ve personally written things about Bolt which, had he a thinner skin, could cause hurt and offence.

It remains to be seen whether the case will go anywhere; however, the very fact that the case has been brought has a chilling effect on free speech. News Limited can afford legal counsel; others (notably, bloggers) may not.

Regardless of whether this case succeeds, there is little practical benefit to using the law to attempt to silence Bolt’s views on this issue – and, clearly, it’s what this is about, despite protests to the contrary. While shutting him up may be personally satisfying, it will merely make his considerable number of fans more convinced of his heroism and righteousness.

The Racial and Religious tolerance act has a decade of lengthy and pointless court action, and nothing else, to its name. It does nothing to actually help achieve racial and religious tolerance, and should be repealed.

A new national representative body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders has been unveiled in Sydney this morning.

The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples is the first Indigenous representative body since 2005, when the Howard government abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) amid claims of corruption and mismanagement.

Former ATSIC chair Geoff Clark isn’t terribly impressed:

GEOFF Clark has slammed the launch of the new national indigenous representative body, declaring it a “non-event.”

The outspoken Aboriginal activist said the new National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples was undemocratic and subservient to the federal government.

I have no idea how seriously one should take Clark, given his well-documented past and the level of political analysis demonstrated by this piece of wishful thinking:

Mr Clark said recent poor polling by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party was in part a result of the government’s actions on indigenous affairs. “There was the big sorry from Kevin Rudd a couple of years ago and then nothing since,” Mr Clark said.

That said, for all I know the position he articulated on this new body may be one with currency in indigenous leadership circles.

For what it’s worth, as a complete outsider looking in, indigenous Australians have suffered dearly from not having people who can speak for them all, leaving white politicians to pick and choose whose voices they wish to hear. And this body avoids the problem that ATSIC had of being a little bit pregnant – partly an advocacy body, partly a service delivery body, and thus highly compromised at both. I’ve read that some indigenous activists seek what is essentially a parallel government, which gets handed a cheque by the Austrailan government once a year and is then left to its own devices. Even if that was what should happen, it’s never going to. Given that, a pure advocacy body, free to beat up on the government without having to worry about being responsible for service delivery, seems like the right model for now.

But, then again, this still, as Clark points out, has the whiff of something coming from the top down, rather than the bottom up. So it going to be a body that can reach and articulate consensus positions across Australia’s diverse indigenous communities?

Elsewhere: Michael Anderson expresses similar distaste to Clark; again, I don’t know whether to take this as representative of broader opinion or not.

Even those who have seem to be reacting to parts instead of the whole – for instance, Marcia Langton, describing the remarks about her in the book as an “astonishing attack on me”. That’s quite odd, because Langton is being challenged rather than attacked in the book – challenged to agree with Greer’s view that – on the basis of the evidence – the literal appropriation of Indigenous women’s bodies by white men, something Greer documents with footnoted citations from both historians and contemporary sources – is part of the reason for Indigenous male rage. All the rest of what Langton says – accusations of “a 1970s style argument”, a “panoply of protest slogans deployed as social theory” and so on – unless I’m missing something, appears misdirected, or at least based on inference rather than the text itself. On p. 88 of the book, any reasonable reader would see that Langton is not the one being accused of “collusion” with the state, what she took umbrage at, and that in fact the point being made is that the differential impacts of gender on the colonised is still used by whitefellas as a lever to avoid responsibility and to divide people. There’s a disagreement of view, but not an accusation, and it hardly justifies Langton’s claim that the essay is “racist”.

What Greer is doing in On Rage is a provocation to the degree that it’s asking a range of people differently positioned within Australian culture to reflect on the totality of what has occurred and how ineffectual slogans are – and there are slogans within the talk of the “responsibilities” crew as well – in the absence of both understanding and a genuine coming to terms with the parade of extraordinary horrors that is the story of Indigenous dispossession. Greer’s essay doesn’t make for comfortable reading, and that’s the point. Langton may be justified in taking umbrage at some of the things Greer has said in the course of promoting it, and I can quite understand that, but I think in this instance it’s vital to separate the force and quality of the argument in the text itself from the personality of its author. Much of what has been published and said elsewhere, for instance in Greer’s Sydney Morning Herald op/ed adds to (and in a way detracts from) the argument in the book, rather than reproduces it. Greer might be her own worst enemy in this case, but that doesn’t absolve her interlocutors from reacting with their own rage, or at least spleen.

Unfortunately, and again here Greer is not an innocent in all this, I need to dispose of the “howlers” claim before moving to address the substantive arguments in On Rage. There’s been commentary on a previous thread about errors of fact in some other articles Greer has written over the years. But some of the factual inaccuracies – such as the claim that Bob Katter has a following in the Northern Territory are not in the book itself, but made in interviews by Greer. I could only find two errors in the text itself – the claim about the absence of younger Indigenous men at the apology on February 13 2008, and a slip where Katter is said to have been a Commonwealth rather than a State Minister. I suspect the first is an artefact of watching television coverage from outside Australia, but it doesn’t imply that distance devalues everything she says. It’s clear, for instance, that she does maintain contact with Indigenous people. The second, I think, is most likely an error that is easy to make when writing – and raises the issue mentioned here in the context of very slack editing and fact-checking at Melbourne University Press, which is a real worry and calls into question the rhetoric from Louise Adler and Glyn Davis about its role.

So while I think the whole question of why Greer herself attracts such personalised loud denunciation (and I find it hard to believe that any male Professor would be described as a “bint” and a “termagant”, for instance) is an important one, and one that throws its own (pretty unfavourable) light on aspects of Australian culture, I don’t want to discuss that further here – it was considered on this earlier thread.

I want to focus on what Greer actually has to say about rage. As she pointed out when interviewed by Leigh Sales on Lateline last week, in one respect, she’s reflecting on rage itself. It’s a good rule of thought, I think, not to do so in the absence of a concrete context, but to some degree anyway, her phenomenology of rage can stand on its own merits – though in practice it’s closely intertwined with a historical aetiology of rage in colonised hunter gatherer populations. Indeed, Bob Katter is mentioned because he’s relevant – he articulates rage on behalf of a particular group – farmers who he thinks have been dispossessed in their own way (whether Katter is right is of course neither here nor there, but it’s true to say he is representing pain in a real fashion). Greer questions what motivates Katter – who must know he is tilting at windmills – and wonders whether he thinks of himself as somehow sacrificing himself for “his” people. That’s a relevant question because she points to a range of clinical studies which show that extreme anger and rage are incredibly deleterious to human well-being. That’s because it’s turned against oneself – the position from which one expresses rage is an inarticulate one – one deprived of power, one dispossessed from the ability to negotiate – a last and futile act of resistance which eats up and destroys the self, and which is far too often turned against those closest to the self.

[Greer remarks that women tend to grieve while men rage. That may be true, and probably is, but it's unclear whether she recognises this as a cultural artefact. Perhaps the biggest problem I have with the essay - and one which commentators like Langton have rightly highlighted - is a certain essentialisation of gender that's not really foregrounded.]

Greer points to the prevalence of suicide among young rural white men, something Katter has made one of his causes. That leads her onto a consideration of the differences as well as the similiarities between white and Indigenous male despair and rage. Without diminishing the reality of the suffering of rural folk who have seen a way of life torn away by forces much greater than they can seemingly influence, she notes what life possibilities and resources remain to them, which are absent in the case of Indigenous dispossession. She is right to see dispossession as a secular and continuing process rather than a once-off act, and also rightly pings the casual intermingling of disparate cultural groups, which has a lot to do with much of the “dysfunction” Noel Pearson complains of in North Queensland – and it was going on as recently as the 1970s – Palm Island, too, being an effective dumping ground. That’s something I’ve heard myself from Murri people I’ve known.

I don’t actually want to follow her argument step by step, because my hope is that people will read the book itself and consider it on its merits, which are considerable – it’s well argued and passionately written. She doesn’t make this exact analogy, but the story she tells – of how Indigenous women were actually essential to the “frontier” and “progress” – as chattels, sexual objects, servants and how the Stolen Generation was a state action to re-impose norms against miscegenation among other motivations – reminded me of a post Mark wrote here last year on Charles Taylor’s characterisation of Native Americans as having suffered “culture death”:

A culture’s disappearing means that a people’s situation is so changed that the actions that had crucial significance are no longer possible in that radical sense. It is not just that you may be forbidden to try them and may be severely punished for attempting to do so; but worse, you can no longer even try them. You can’t draw lines or die while trying to defend them. You find yourself in a circumstance where, as Lear puts it, “the very acts themselves have ceased to make sense.”

Greer argues that hunters can’t survive in the absence of gatherers – and the gatherers had effectively been appropriated by white men, even if the whitefellas refused to recognise the kinship and cultural obligations of the women they took. She quotes the well respected Indigenous scholar Judy Atkinson on this:

Sexual violence, as well as physical violence, was rampant on the frontier. What must also be named is that the experiences of colonisation were different for Aboriginal women in comparison with Aboriginal men. This created tension and dichotomy in relationships between Aboriginal men and women that continues into the present.

According to Greer, this is the elephant in the room.

And the sexual violence of white men is still effaced and denied – she asks why the evidence that much of the sexual violence against girls in remote communities was perpetrated by transient white men and often in an organised fashion was totally absent from the justification of the Northern Territory intervention. Greer’s focus on Indigenous male rage is a gender aware anthropology of the discarding of Black men as useless by the colonisers, while Black women were to be used. It’s not unreasonable to believe that this dynamic continues to do its vicious work, although one can see why discussion of it provokes such affect. But it’s certainly not the case that Greer is in any way either justifying the incredible rates of self-harm and violence or that she’s somehow betraying feminism by focusing on the differential effects on Indigenous men of dispossession and cultural death. Much of what she is doing is just asking questions about the displacement of responsibility – if the reason for heavy drinking is disinhibition to allow rage to express itself, disinhibition driven by hopelessness and cultural death, will taking away the bottle salve all ills?

Finally, it’s also clear that Greer is not writing a prescriptive or a policy text. She’s arguing that a political structure needs to be created that brings all Indigenous people to the table, and that we all need to confront a whole range of things in our present as well as in our past which we would very much rather not see. In making this argument, she is in effect suggesting that incitements to responsibility and a fictional mutuality (as I’ve discussed previously) are forms of a displacement of a deeper and very painful wound that many of us – Black and White – don’t want opened. But we need to face our demons. All of us. Rightly she’s not prescriptive about how we do that. But she does insist that we do.

Mark wrote in the post on “The great Australian silence” I referenced earlier:

Recognition of your interlocutor in their own uniqueness and difference is, after all, a precondition without which there can be no meaningful reconciliation whatsoever.

Is it too much to ask anyone who professes concern about the condition of Indigenous Australians to try to see what the world might look like from their point of view?

Elsewhere: We’ve already linked to Legal Eagle’s post, but since then the comments thread at Skepticlawyer has developed quite a bit and makes for an interesting read.

Her book hasn’t hit the shelves in Brisneyland as far as I can tell, but I’m awaiting it with interest. There’s a taste of what’s to come at Public Opinion.

Update [by Kim]: Elsewhere, Legal Eagle agrees with Tracee Hutchison about Greer. I think the post is unfortunately all too typical of one of the weird confusions that swirl around Greer’s thought and indeed have a much broader contemporary purchase – that to explain something is to justify it. Greer appears to be setting out to explain Indigenous male rage. From what I’ve seen of her interviews over the last few days, she is insistent that this is not a justification. But apparently people either can’t understand that distinction, or believe that any reference to the origins of phenomena in Indigenous Australia in dispossession and colonisation signals justification. It does not. But it does indicate that we are not exempt from blame. Perhaps the demand that Indigenous people take responsibility, as I was arguing the other day, evades our own mutuality and our own responsibility, and as Greer has been suggesting, diminishes our humanity if we make it in the absence of providing the conditions of its possibility and understand that those conditions involve determinations made by communities whose freedom is a pre-condition of any successful partnership and any true reconciliation.

Germaine Greer will also be a guest. Greer has just released a new essay in book form – On Rage, which I’m very much looking forward to reading. I was interested to see her obvious frustration last night in a Lateline interview with Leigh Sales at the difficulty of articulating any position that goes beyond tired dichotomies on Indigenous Policy and the NT intervention (including those which claim to transcend tired dichotomies). Or perhaps it would be better to say the inability to hear any heterodox position. I suspect a lot of the rage directed at Greer herself comes from an inability to comprehend or recognise any thought that doesn’t follow the predictable grooves of a “debate”, and indeed any call for reflection on issues and stories a lot of us would rather not face. So it’ll be interesting to watch her in this format too.