Public ideas
How the Yolngu people shaped our democracy
Imagine how you might feel if you looked out your window one morning and saw surveyors on your property driving marker stakes into your lawn. No notice, not even a knock on your door.
That starts to capture the experience of the Yolngu people of northeast Arnhem Land when, in the early 1960s, surveyors turned up on their land pegging it out for what was to become the massive Gove bauxite mine.
On the ABC’s Conversations program historian Clare Wright describes the reaction of the Yolngu people, the way the Menzies government disrespected and disregarded their concerns, and the “bark petitions” they sent to Canberra in 1963: The bark petitions – How Yolngu tradition changed democracy.
In fact, as Wright explains, they were not petitions. They were not a supplication to a superior authority.
Rather, they were diplomatic communications, from one sovereign people to another, politely demanding that their rights be respected. The Yolngu people had been trading with the people of Sulawesi for 300 years – a trade which had developed a rules-based order to use the current terminology. When outsiders came seeking to mine bauxite, they expected to be shown the same respect.
That respect was not shown. It was still the time of Terra Nullius and the Yolngu people were on Commonwealth land. The case went to the Supreme Court, where in 1971 Justice Richard Blackburn ruled that the Yolngu did not have rights to the land where they lived. This ruling held until it was overturned 21 years later in the Mabo case.
Although the Yolngu people lost that case, it raised awareness of the rights of indigenous Australians at a time – the 1960s – when there were strong movements for social change. Wright reminds us that in the same year as the “bark petitions” were presented Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech. She sees the Yolngu people’s struggle as one of three important points in the expansion of democracy in Australia, as she writes in her book Näku Dhäruk the Bark Petitions; How the people of Yirrkala changed the course of Australian democracy.
The bliss of ignorance
Remember that exhortation “if you don’t know, vote no”?
It shocked those who believed that citizens in a democracy have a moral duty to inform themselves about the choices before them, before they cast their votes – before they participate in a collective decision that will affect the lives of others.
Shedding some light on the valorisation of ignorance, on Late Night Live David Marr interviews Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities at Columbia Universality, about the part ignorance plays in our individual and collective lives: Why we long for the bliss of ignorance.
We all want to know, but we all want not to know, and in our minds there is often a tension between these two desires. Ignorance can be a coping mechanism. People can rationalize their incapacity to understand difficult problems in public policy by resorting to the comforting belief that the common man or woman can understand things better than the educated.
Ruthless populists, unconstrained by any sense of collective morality, can exploit people’s comfort in ignorance. That may take the form of a simplification of an imagined past – such as the nostalgic MAGA appeal.
Lilla fears that we are now living in an age of ignorance.
He is author of Ignorance and bliss: on wanting not to know.