Why does the mention of Aborigines make some people angry?

For as long as I can remember, there has been one subject almost guaranteed to bring out the worst in some Australians.

Aborigines.

Write about Aboriginal history, Aboriginal disadvantage, land rights, deaths in custody, the Stolen Generation, cultural heritage, native title or even an Aboriginal sporting achievement, and you can almost hear the keyboards rattling before the article has finished loading.

The comments arrive:

They get everything for free.

My family came here with nothing.

Why should I apologise for something I didn’t do?

They should get over it.

What about white people?

And, inevitably:

Stop dividing Australia.

It is an extraordinary reaction when you think about it.

Why does discussing the people who occupied this continent for over 65,000 years make some Australians so angry?

Why the hate?

Perhaps it isn’t really about Aboriginal people

I have increasingly wondered whether the anger directed towards Aboriginal Australians isn’t entirely about Aboriginal Australians at all.

Perhaps some of it is about those in the wider community.

More particularly, perhaps it is about the stories Australia has told about itself.

For generations, Australians were taught a remarkably comfortable version of our history.

Captain Cook discovered Australia. The First Fleet arrived. Settlers pushed inland. Explorers crossed deserts. Farmers battled droughts. Gold was discovered. Towns became cities. The colonies federated and Australia became a nation.

It was a story of courage, hardship and progress.

There was just one awkward problem…

People were already here.

Not wandering aimlessly across an empty continent, but living in societies with languages, laws, kinship systems, trade networks and profound relationships with country.

Once that is acknowledged, the old national story becomes considerably more complicated.

“Settlement” becomes dispossession.

The “frontier” becomes a place where people were sometimes violently removed from their country.

Government protection becomes government control.

Assimilation becomes the destruction of culture.

And removing children “for their own good” becomes something much harder to defend.

None of this means that Australians living today are personally responsible for everything that happened in the past. But acknowledging history and accepting personal guilt are not the same thing.

That distinction seems extraordinarily difficult for some people to make.

“I didn’t do it”

Whenever Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people is discussed, someone invariably responds:

“I wasn’t there. I didn’t do it.”

No. You didn’t.

Neither did I.

But that has never been the point.

Nobody accuses a modern Australian of personally riding into an Aboriginal camp in the nineteenth century.

History isn’t a courtroom in which every living Australian has been summoned to the dock.

History is an explanation of how we arrived where we are.

We readily understand this everywhere else.

Nobody says we should stop talking about the First World War because everybody who started it is dead.

Nobody argues that the Great Depression is irrelevant because today’s stock market didn’t cause the crash.

We don’t erase Gallipoli because nobody alive today landed there.

Indeed, Australians are encouraged to remember history – right up until we reach the parts of history some people would rather forget.

Then, suddenly, we’re told that the past is the past.

The myth of special treatment

Another remarkable feature of the hostility is the enduring belief that Aboriginal Australians live extraordinarily privileged lives.

According to the mythology of the suburban barbecue, the shock-jocks, or Facebook comments, Aboriginal people receive free houses, free cars, free university education, special loans and assorted mysterious government benefits unavailable to everyone else.

If this extraordinary system of privilege actually existed, one might reasonably expect Aboriginal Australians to be among the healthiest and wealthiest people in the country.

They’re not.

Across numerous measures of health, incarceration, housing, education and life expectancy, Indigenous Australians continue to experience significant disadvantage.

That doesn’t mean every Aboriginal person is disadvantaged.

Nor does it mean every non-Aboriginal Australian is privileged.

Human beings are individuals, not statistics.

But statistics tell us something about populations.

And they tell us that the mythical Aboriginal paradise funded by the taxpayer exists primarily in the imaginations of people complaining about it.

Equality sounds simple

There is another phrase frequently encountered:

“I treat everyone the same.”

It sounds admirable.

Sometimes it is.

But treating everyone identically only produces equality when everyone begins from roughly the same position.

Imagine two runners in a race.

One begins at the starting line.

The other begins 100 metres behind.

The official proudly announces that from this moment onward both competitors will be treated exactly the same.

Wonderful.

Except one runner is still 100 metres behind.

History doesn’t disappear because governments announce equality.

Its consequences can continue through generations.

Loss of land matters.

Loss of language matters.

Removal of children matters.

Poverty matters.

Exclusion from education and employment matters.

And when disadvantage becomes entrenched, simply announcing that everyone is now equal doesn’t magically remove it.

Then came the Voice

The 2023 Voice referendum revealed something particularly uncomfortable.

Australians were asked whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should have a constitutionally recognised body able to make representations to Parliament and government about matters affecting them.

The proposal was defeated decisively.

People voted No for many reasons, and it would be foolish – and unfair – to declare that everyone who voted No was racist. Many weren’t.

Some distrusted the proposal. Some thought it poorly explained. Some disliked constitutional change. Some genuinely believed there were better ways to address Indigenous disadvantage.

But nobody who watched the public debate could seriously pretend that racism was absent from it.

Social media became a sewer.

Old stereotypes returned.

Old resentments resurfaced.

And once again Aboriginal Australians found themselves being discussed as though their very existence constituted some sort of demand upon everybody else.

Perhaps the referendum didn’t create that resentment.

Perhaps it simply exposed it.

Social media didn’t invent racism. It amplified it.

Once, the bloke at the end of the bar muttering racist nonsense could be ignored by everyone except the unfortunate person sitting beside him.

Now he has Facebook.

And X.

And an audience.

Algorithms reward outrage because outrage produces engagement. Anger generates comments. Comments generate arguments. Arguments keep people staring at screens.

Prejudice found a business model.

And Aboriginal Australians became reliable targets.

Every story about Indigenous Affairs attracts people eager to tell us that racism no longer exists – often immediately before posting something spectacularly racist.

There is a grim irony in that.

But beneath the anger is something else: Fear.

Not necessarily fear of Aboriginal people.

Fear of losing a comforting national story.

If Aboriginal people were dispossessed, somebody benefited from that dispossession.

If governments deliberately removed Aboriginal children, our institutions weren’t always benevolent.

If massacres occurred on the frontier, settlement wasn’t always peaceful.

If disadvantage today has historical causes, then perhaps today’s inequality cannot simply be dismissed as individual failure.

None of that requires Australians today to hate their country.

Quite the opposite.

Mature countries can confront their histories.

Children need heroes and villains.

Adults should be capable of complexity.

Australia has much to be proud of.

It also has things to regret.

Both can be true.

The strangest accusation of all

Perhaps the most curious response whenever Aboriginal history is discussed is:

“Why are you trying to divide us?”

Think about what that means.

Talking about division supposedly creates division.

Talking about racism supposedly creates racism.

Talking about inequality supposedly creates inequality.

By that logic, doctors create cancer by diagnosing it.

Silence doesn’t create unity.

Sometimes it merely conceals injustice.

There can be no meaningful reconciliation while one side is required to forget what happened so the other side can feel comfortable.

So why the hate?

I don’t think there is one answer.

For some, it is simple racism.

For others, resentment.

For others, misinformation repeated so often that it has become accepted as fact.

For some, it is political. Aboriginal issues have become another battlefield in the endless culture wars.

And for others, perhaps it is something much more human.

Nobody likes discovering that the story they grew up believing wasn’t the whole story.

But history isn’t diminished when we add the missing chapters.

Australia isn’t weakened by acknowledging Aboriginal history.

It becomes more complete.

The extraordinary thing is that Aboriginal cultures survived at all.

They survived dispossession.

They survived disease.

They survived violence.

They survived protection boards, missions, assimilation policies and the removal of children.

They survived governments that sometimes seemed convinced Aboriginal people themselves would eventually disappear.

They didn’t.

And perhaps that is where the discussion should begin.

Not with guilt.

Not with blame.

Not even with shame.

With truth.

Because Aboriginal history isn’t something separate from Australian history.

It is Australian history.

And if the mere mention of it still makes us angry, perhaps Aboriginal Australians aren’t the people we need to be asking questions about.

Perhaps we need to ask some questions of ourselves.