The Real Australia

By ROBERT HUGHES

The first thing to mistrust, should you be an American thinking of going to Australia for the first time, is your idea of the place and its people. Probably you think the 2000 Sydney Olympics is a vastly important event for all of us, a huge national rite that will "put us on the map"--the same map, presumably, on which the last Australian Olympics, in Melbourne in 1956, failed to inscribe us.

Actually, despite our traditional obsession with sports, despite the coercive drumming of pre-Olympics hype, some of us don't care that much about the Olympics. We think we matter for other reasons. We suspect we're on the map already and that only American myopia would see us otherwise.

Ten to one, you think Australians are rather like Americans and that we want to be more so. Dead wrong. No idealism attended the birth of Anglo-Australia. White colonization in America began as a religious venture; the Puritans thought they were, literally, creating God's country. Australia, by contrast, began as the continent of sin, the dump for English criminals. Australians, unlike Americans, have never felt they had a mission or a message for a fallen world. There is no doctrine of Australian exceptionalism. If this deprived us of the heights of American moral expectation, it spared us from the anguish of American disappointment. Not a bad trade-off.

Especially in Sydney, we still tend to embrace the disreputable. Organized religion doesn't play one-tenth the part in Australian life that it does in American. The churches have power, but compared with the U.S. our civilization is almost entirely secular. Our state-sponsored education is excellent, and we do not give a cent in subsidies to church schools. And we have fierce democratic commitments that hardly exist in America. It is, for example, a (lightly) punishable offense not to vote in a national election. As for campaign contributions, and all the corruption and perversion of democracy that the pursuit of them creates in the U.S., they don't exist in Australia; a whole national election costs less to stage than a California primary. You don't need to be rich or a plutocrat's pet to run for office here.

Better yet, we have no Fundamentalist Christian tradition, and the level of born-again tub thumping is mercifully low--though there are signs that as a result of American cultural influence, it is creeping up among the young. Any political candidate who declared that God was on his side would be laughed off the podium as an idiot or a wowser (prude, intrusive bluenose).

So although Australians have their doctrinal and moral disputes, they don't swing as fiercely between extremes of private indulgence and public penance as Americans do. The idea that the whole nation and its media could be convulsed and obsessed by a Prime Minister's hole-in-the-corner affair with a pudgy little Canberra intern is, to say the least, implausible. We are realists, not idealists.

The truth is that Australians tend to be natural pagans. Everything favors this: the delicious climate of the coasts, where most of us live; the dramatic and seductive landscapes of pounding surf and golden sand; the tanned bodies strutting; the food (some of the finest and most inventive in the world); and the wines, which are superb.

In such a setting, Australians--Sydneysiders in particular--have evolved a natural ethos as pleasure seekers in all areas of life. As the writer David Malouf points out, we don't even think of ourselves as hedonists because that would be too self-conscious. Australian culture is for the most part deeply democratic, and joyously so as well. It is no longer "provincial," a distant and nervous response to norms generated in imperial centers. It is the result of a bloodless and slow-developing social revolution conducted over 40 years as a small society grew larger and immeasurably more complex, shook off its sense of derivative Englishness and its fear of American domination and learned to trust its own talents.

But a reasonable equipoise, a relaxed uprightness of cultural carriage, is with us only some of the time. Jingoism still disfigures the lowbrow end of our journalism. "One of the ways in which we have matured is that we don't give a stuff about what other people think," blustered one such "cultural" columnist, Susan Mitchell, in the Australian, a national daily, last month. "We no longer feel we have to explain ourselves to anyone but ourselves."

This dismal, Serbian-style solipsism was actually meant as self-praise. But on some levels it is, alas, true. One sees it, for instance, in the bristling posture of denial that the Australian government recently took against U.N. criticism of its flouting of the human rights of Aborigines. Australians still tend to be worried about what outsiders think, keep asking and then get furious if the answer is even fractionally less than flattering.

The answer from America is benign but not satisfactory. America's idea of Australia is mostly thin and vague. Americans fantasize in a desultory way about Australia but know much less about us than we do about them. Australia, we hear, is rather like Texas 50 or 100 years ago. The basic American idea of the basic Australian male is--who else?--whatsizname, him with the big knife, star of Crocodile Dundee. Aussies (wrongly pronounced Awzies; the correct pronunciation is Ozzies, though we'd rather you Yanks dropped the dumb pseudointimacy altogether and just called us Australians) are all supposed to be as straight as Harrison Ford or John Wayne, despite our superficially confusing habit of addressing a friend or a stranger of the same sex as "mate."

Here we supposedly have the last stand of the last Wild West, the place and ethos that were buried in America a century ago: a celluloid fiction, reinvented with kangaroos. Australia, largest of islands or smallest of continents, does something to compensate for that loss, or so you think. In the bush, men are men and women must be grateful. And don't Australians all feel the bush at their back, amplifying their memories, shaping their values?

Well, uh, no. Australians are among the most urbanized people on earth. They have seen their national animal, the kangaroo, only in a zoo or as roadkill on the Hume Highway. Nearly 90% of us live on the coast, not in the outback, wherever that elusive place may be defined as being. (The "bush" is outside the suburbs, the "outback" beyond the bush, and the "black stump" is the term for a very remote datum point, as in, "He lives way out there beyond the black stump.") Our country towns are in decline. Their inhabitants keep moving to the coast, away from the center. Because Australia has no fertile center--no Great Plains, no Mississippi--there is no place for them in that immense, empty outback.

So the "typical Australian" is not, as foreigners once thought, a bushman. He is a slightly worried guy with a tan, a bald spot, a mortgage, a mower and two kids, whose Australian dream is a double-front brick bungalow on a quarter-acre lot in the suburbs less than 30 minutes' drive from the nearest beach, with two other nice, two-kid, one-PC families on either side of him.

And yet there are Australian traits that do, indisputably, come down to modern Australia from the vanished days of the bush, and even from the convict era. They are wound tightly into our social history. One of these is the value set on "mateship"; another, related to it, is a much paraded dislike of elitism. Mateship--essentially, male bonding--began in the harsh world of the penal settlement. It continued in the hardly less tough environment of labor that was the lot of most men in the bush: shearers, station hands, shepherds. To have a mate was to survive; to betray that mate was to be a scab, less than a man; such was the hard calculus of colonial life, and its traces are very much alive in Australia today.

Less admirable than this loyalty is the Australian fetish of antielitism. If you want to nuke an enemy, call him an elitist, especially if he is an intellectual. The word is empty, since no society, including Australia's, has ever been able to function without elites of skill, intelligence and ordinary competence. Yet Australians can rarely bring themselves to say they value human superiority. It sounds undemocratic.

The one field of exception to this unseemly prejudice is sport, the real religion of Down Under. The idea of nonelitist sport is, of course, an absurdity. No Australian would waste time watching a football match in which nobody was better than anyone else, or a horse race in which every nag plunked along at exactly the same speed. And (of course) Australians find no contradiction in that. Ours is the meritocracy that dare not speak its name.

Some Australians will tell you they have a classless society. This is the merest fantasy. Never since human societies began has there been a classless one. We began with the most ironbound of all class distinctions, between prisoners and the free. The freeborn (the "sterling") were bitterly opposed to giving up their social placement above the ex-convicts and their children (the "currency"). But the "lower orders"--that is, most 19th century Australians--fiercely resented the pretensions of the nobs and were well aware that in a pioneer environment Lady Luck was a more powerful queen than Victoria Regina. This was rammed home after the discovery of gold in Ballarat in 1851, just after the California gold rush. "All the aristocratic feelings and associations of [England]," wrote John Sherer, an observer of the gold rush in 1853, "are at once annihilated...It is not what you were, but what you are, that is the criterion."

Today's Australians may be more sophisticated than last century's digger with his pockets full of gold dust, but at root the dotcom millionaires of the late 1990s are not so very different from their mining ancestors. The metaphor of all wealth production is gambling, and Australians are among the most shamefully obsessed gamblers in the world. We have 20 times as many "pokies"--poker machines--per person as Americans. Our styles of wealth production enforce the belief that superiority is luck and only luck: no moral lessons apply. The Puritan impulse toward social responsibility that created the American system of educational, cultural and scientific philanthropy hardly exists in Australia.

And we are poor at symbolizing ourselves. Many of us would like to snip the Union Jack off our flag, but no one can agree on a new design. Our official Olympic mascots and emblems are kitsch, climaxing last month in the Great Medal Screwup. It turned out that all the Olympic medals, the bronze and the silver as well as the gold, had been designed to feature not the Parthenon in Athens, not even the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, but the Colosseum in Rome, less noted for Olympic-style friendship than for gladiatorial butchery. What the hell, the officials of the Sydney Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games apparently reasoned; it's still the ancient world, right? Then it befell some luckless S.O.C.O.G. flack to claim it wasn't meant to be the Colosseum, just a colosseum. Nice try, kid. It was too late to make new medals.

Apart from the kangaroo, the koala and other enchanting marsupials, Australia seems short of identity icons. There is, of course, Ayers Rock, the most sublime stone on earth. There is also the incomparable Great Barrier Reef, a single coral organism some 1,250 miles long. We have two famous structures, both in Sydney: the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, the latter a masterpiece by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon. Perched on one of the world's most beautiful sites for a ceremonial building, a headland in Sydney Harbor, and surrounded on three sides by sapphire water, this great building was never seen in completion by its architect. He resigned under stress and never came back to Sydney, so that the promise of those lovely tiled arcs and shells is not fulfilled by the interior, awkwardly finished by a local designer.

Where it counts--which is more in production than interpretation--Australia has a vigorous cultural life, sometimes enthrallingly so. The list of first-rank Australian novelists, headed up by Murray Bail, Peter Carey and David Malouf--writers of exceptional power and social insight--is a considerable one. London has a brilliant biographer and diagnostician of past culture in Peter Conrad, an erudite and dark-minded expatriate from Tasmania.

Books, of course, circulate everywhere, whereas paintings and buildings do not. Consequently major architects like Glenn Murcutt and Philip Cox are little known outside Australia. This is a pity, and even worse is the general ignorance of Australian contemporary painting. At a time when serious pictorial talent is so thin on the ground in the U.S., it seems bizarre that artists as excellent as John Olsen, Colin Lanceley, Tim Storrier and Mike Parr aren't the world figures they deserve to be. The only Australian art that attracts much overseas attention is contemporary Aboriginal art, which varies enormously in quality.

The clarity of Australian cultural achievement is often muddied by our most irksome cultural shortcoming: a peevishly insecure hatred of "tall poppies," people distinguished by their achievements in any area except, of course, sport. Australia has never honored its artists, intellectuals, writers and musicians as fully as its sports figures; there is always an undertow of resentment, of the lowbrows' residual suspicion that the highbrow is conning them. Everyone bitches about this; nobody does anything about it. It is hardwired into us, a proof of "toughness."

Underknown culturally, Australia is also politically obscure. Why? Because we're so well behaved. We are not the mouse that roared. Historically, we have rarely even contemplated roaring. As former Prime Minister Paul Keating has pointed out, Australia has always been short of the defining value systems that are gained through conflict. We have never had a civil war or a revolution. We have never been invaded--though we nearly were during World War II, by the Japanese. We are piteously short of good political scandals and low on graft. Nobody has ever called us a Great Satan or even a little one. We tend to like Americans more than most nations do, although we do not have the least desire to be like them.

We are absolutely not a threat to anyone. But this does us no good in the media. It is why you do not read about Australia in U.S. newspapers. Practically nothing in Australia is considered worth reporting. In all the 30 years I have lived in New York City, I doubt that I have seen as many front-page stories about my country in the New York Times as you'd get about Israel in a month. Why would you want to know about us? We don't rock your boat or export much you're interested in, except for our admirable wines, a steady supply of sports figures and a few actors like Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman.

Historically, Australia felt little resentment about its colonial control by Britain and its sovereign. Its population was heavy with Irishmen and Irishwomen, but the resentments their ancestors had brought with them soon mellowed into ineffectuality in the antipodean sun, not much more than folk costume, once the chains of convictry were abolished. As a colony, we were content peaceably to fulfill our natural destiny, which was to supply Britain with cheap wheat and wool and (when required) with cannon fodder for wars against the Boer or the Hun.

In these, we had little or no perceptible stake of our own. Britain, with grim enthusiasm, condemned us to assist in the creation of dead colonial heroes. In World War I, Australia lost 59,258 young men out of a total of 330,000 sent abroad. Both as a proportion of troops killed or missing and as a proportion of national population, this was the highest figure for any Allied state. It left us in the 1920s as a psychically devastated nation of widows, spinsters and orphans. This enormous death toll was rationalized as a cleansing, an erasure of the inherited stain of convictry. Winston Churchill, who sent our grandfathers to die on the implacable slopes of Gallipoli, was by no means the only Englishman to think they came from "tainted" stock.

Australia still had a largely colonial mentality when I was born, in 1938. Only vestiges of it survive today. The most important of these relics is, of course, its monarchy. It is a bizarre fact that no Australian can be the head of state of Australia. That role is reserved for the King or Queen of England, by definition a foreigner, and not even an elected foreigner: the office of the Australian head of state remains purely hereditary, open only to a small clan of Anglo-German squillionaires known as the Windsor family. This appreciably narrows the field of talent.

According to the Australian constitution--a document written for us by the English at the turn of the century--it is ultimately the English monarch who rules Australia through an unelected viceroy, the Governor-General. This official may be Australian or may not. He may, on behalf of the Queen, cancel any law enacted by the Australian government or even throw out the government and call for new elections. Or he may not. In practice he almost never does. The last and only time he did was in 1975, when the G-G, Sir John Kerr, fired the Labor government led by Gough Whitlam. This caused shock and resentment. Millions of Australians felt that Whitlam, their hero, the great reformer of government policy in the domains of race, immigration, foreign policy and the arts, had been stolen from them. There are still plenty of people around who regard this as not far from a coup d'etat.

The firing of Whitlam made many Australians sit up with a jerk. It had never occurred to them before that the Queen had the raw constitutional power to do such a thing. It cranked up the long-dormant impulse toward republicanism. Until the 1970s this had been an issue only for intellectuals and a few left-wing workers whose vehemence earned them an undeserved reputation as ratbags (obsessed eccentrics). The problem was democratizing the republican issue while detaching it from the ownership of the Australian left. And it did slowly broaden, though its main political instrument, the Australian Republican Movement (A.R.M.), didn't come into existence until the 1980s.

The growth of republican feeling in Australia coincided with, and was strongly encouraged by, the prime ministership (1991-96) of Paul Keating, a brilliant and abrasive Laborite much feared for his insults ("pansies" and "unrepresentative swill" were among the milder epithets he launched at his foes in parliamentary debate) and greatly misunderstood for his tastes: given his passions for antique French clocks and Georgian furniture, Keating was the most cultivated Australian ever to serve as Prime Minister. The movement's chief unelected backer was a formidable young merchant banker named Malcolm Turnbull. (Full disclosure obliges me to say that Turnbull is married to my niece Lucy, herself the deputy lord mayor of Sydney.) Despite Keating's defeat in the 1996 elections, Turnbull and his fellow republicans were able to bring the republic issue to a nationwide vote in 1999.

The result was a triumph of electoral timidity, worsened by fake populism. By a queer flip-flop of logic, a majority of Australian voters (55% to 45%) decided that to have an Australian President appointed by a democratically elected government was elitist and unsafe, whereas to have an immensely rich hereditary monarch as their head of state was somehow democratic and good. To understand how this weird inversion could occur, one must be aware that Australians are even more skeptical about the character of their "pollies" than Americans are, though they have little reason to be: the level of serious political graft in Australia is extremely low.

In the end the monarchists won the referendum, not because Australians were devoted to the Queen and her successors but because feuding republicans couldn't agree on which model of republic to uphold. Should the new-style head of state, an Australian President, be appointed by Parliament? Or elected in a national campaign, in the American manner? The A.R.M. wanted the former, but Australians hated the idea of an American-style republic--or American-style anything--in their public life. This split the republican vote, to the boundless relief of the monarchists, who could never have carried the issue on their own. (Pollsters thought that about 70% of Australians were for a republic of some kind.)

Soon after the referendum, Elizabeth II and her cold fish of a consort, Prince Phillip, toured Australia. The crowds were small and more curious than enthusiastic; the media, polite but indifferent. The romantic, near mystical Queen worship that had surrounded her tour in 1954 was gone forever. Being smarter than the monarchists, Elizabeth II could easily read the signs. She openly acknowledged (and was scrupulously careful not to attack) the possibility of a stable republic in Australia. The current Prime Minister, John Howard, is an obdurate monarchist. But the next in line as head of Howard's conservative Liberal Party, Peter Costello, is a republican. The Australian Labor Party is republican through and through. It is only a matter of time before the less reactionary and nostalgic Liberal politicians can come out of the closet, and then Australian monarchy will be finished.

It is hard to say why, apart from habit, there should be any nostalgia for royal forms among Australians, especially when we are so fond of our national antielitism. But people, including Australians, want figures to admire. "If we don't have the Queen, whom can we look up to?" was one of the most frequent complaints at referendum time. The thought that in a democracy you don't look up to your superiors, but sideways at your fellow citizens, wasn't much aired in monarchist circles. And Australia has always been short not only of convincing shared ceremonies of national identity but also of shared folk heroes. You can count them on less than two hands. Two are alive--the great cricketer Donald Bradman, now 91, and the swimming champion Dawn Fraser. The veterans of Gallipoli, a few of whom still live, are invested with a collective heroism. The other heroes are dead. They include a racehorse, Phar Lap; and a criminal, the bushranger, Irish nationalist and protorepublican Ned Kelly, hanged for theft and murder in Melbourne in 1880.

Another reason why some Australians want to keep the monarchy is unease about mixture. The Queen evokes the loyalty and gratitude of the "pure" Anglo-Australian because she personifies "pure" Britain. This worked fine a half-century ago, when more than 90% of Australians were still of British descent and could feel themselves to be, as Prime Minister Robert Menzies would later put it, "British to the bootheels." But today the picture of exclusionary Australia, the continent-size British island just below Asia, has almost faded away. The White Australia Policy, that disgraceful provision whereby no one of Asian or black descent could settle in Australia, was abandoned in the 1960s, never to be revived. Whole suburbs, like Cabramatta in western Sydney, have become Southeast Asian enclaves. Though Australia admits only some 85,000 legal immigrants a year, a minuscule fraction of its population, the Asian component is very visible and it excites xenophobia. The role of the Queen as head of state has a calming effect, suggesting that the "old" Anglo-Australia is still notionally within reach.

Compared with their older selves, Australians--especially the younger ones--are a tolerant people. Few of the extreme emotions set off in the U.S. by the idea of multiculturalism have been awakened by its Australian version. We are, in fact, one of the world's most successful multicultural democracies, and this is an ethical triumph of no small consequence. Australians on the whole realize that multiculturalism, that forbiddingly bureaucratic polysyllable responsible for so much hot air, really means learning to read other people's image banks, not a forced renunciation of one's own. They realize, quite naturally and instinctively, that the desire to "give people a fair go," which is one of the traditional moral imperatives of Australian life, also applies to immigrants, including those of a different color.

This does not, however, mean that Australia's road to multi-culti has been stoneless. Translated into government policy, multi-culti in the 1980s became, its critics say, not just a neutral recognition of diversity but a pork barrel for buying the temporary loyalties of ethnic groups.

Maybe, but it doesn't ultimately matter. Immigration has done its work. It has changed Australia irrevocably. Nobody old enough to remember the dullness of its old monocultural cuisine can regret that. The British Empire has gone. The British Commonwealth is no longer, to put it mildly, a decisive linkage between nations. The Australia Act of 1986 formally defined Britain as a foreign country. Australia's economic links to Britain, though not insignificant, are small and dwindling in comparison with its trading ties to the Near North, once known as the Far East. Britain is in the European Union, and will act in accordance with its interests there, giving no priority to Australia. Australians who feel they are British because they speak English are fooling themselves but no one else. You can no longer "be" Australian and, without conflict, "feel" British. The two nations are too far apart.

Once upon a time, back in the 1950s, the hot emblematic issue in Australia's politics, as in America's, was communism. We feared Stalin and subversion by the enemy within; the "red menace" was played on, crudely but efficiently, by conservative politicians. Today all that is gone. Australian politics has a new emblematic issue, a different moral center. It has nothing to do with ideology. It is race: the politics of identity, of Aboriginal rights, and the obligation to face a murky and cruel history.

About 2% of Australian citizens are black, roughly the same percentage of Aborigines as there are Jews in the U.S. This amounts to roughly 390,000 people out of 20 million, a tiny minority. Unlike American Jews, however, Australian blacks have very little power, economic, political or cultural. There are no rich Aborigines, no Aboriginal-owned newspapers, no Aboriginal CEOs of Australian companies. Out of the 224 elected members of the Senate and House of Representatives, which form the Australian Parliament in Canberra, only one is Aboriginal, the brilliant and resolute young politician Aden Ridgeway. Aboriginal influence is exerted mainly through bureaucracy, committees and the courts; for political clout, Aborigines depend largely on the sympathy and support of whites.

The fact that they have any serious political power at all is remarkable because Australian whites, in the course of waging an undeclared war of conquest against the Aborigines, systematically denied them any access to the culture of politics right from the moment of settlement in 1788. Aborigines weren't mentioned in the Australian constitution when it took force in 1901. Not until 1962 were they given federal voting rights. The historical weight of discrimination against them is crushing.

A lot of white Australians think of this minority as a bunch of thievish, ignorant welfare bludgers who are played upon by a handful of black demagogues. They oppose the idea of a national apology for past treatment of the Aborigines--a deserved and, in liberal opinion, an essential gesture of goodwill--by saying all this happened in their grandfathers' time, and the living bear no responsibility for it. This is Prime Minister Howard's view too, although--significantly enough--he is quick to drape himself in the nobler emblems of Australian history with which his generation had nothing to do, such as the heroism of the soldiers at Gallipoli.

The Aborigines are a very old people. their ancestors colonized Australia from the north, by sea, tens of thousands of years ago--nobody can say just how many. At the time of the first white contacts in the 18th century, there were perhaps half a million of them divided into hundreds of tribes, speaking mutually unintelligible languages, thinly scattered across the vast hot skin of Australia. They lived by hunting and gathering. These seminomads were, even by the lowest standards of Africa or the Americas, almost incredibly low tech. They had fire, sticks and stones, and little else. Yet their traditional oral culture is of great antiquity; their structure of myth is remarkably coherent and continuous across millenniums, not just centuries; and as anyone can see who visits some of the sacred cave sites scattered across northwestern Australia, their traditions of rock painting--animals and fish of every kind, spirit figures and the imposing, fearsome effigies of the great Rainbow Serpent--are as impressive as anything in the caves of Lascaux or Altamira and tens of thousands of years older. As far as we know, the Australian Aborigines stood at the very dawn of human imagemaking.

Through most of the 19th century the Aborigines were driven off their ancestral lands by settlers, and when they resisted, they were killed. Many more died of disease or social despair. Nobody knows how many because no one bothered to count either the living or the dead; the whites were engaged in the more important task, as the history books used to say, of "nation building." By the end of the 19th century it was assumed that the natives would soon be extinct, and the whites' only task was "to smooth the dying pillow."

But having been in Australia for 40,000 years or more, in contrast to the whites' 200 or less, the Aborigines were not giving up. So the policy changed to assimilation. First, the Aborigines were deprived of their nomadic tribal life and concentrated in "mission stations," communities run mainly by Protestant evangelists, where they were taught the Gospels, shown white ways and prepared for low-level jobs as servants.

Around 1910, an even more shameful policy came in: the "stealing" of children from their natural, Aboriginal mothers. These kids, whose only crime was to be Aboriginal, were abducted by the white authorities to be assimilated, as orphans, into white society. The members of this stolen generation were not told their parents' names, and most would never see their mothers again. This odious experiment was not abandoned until 1970 and did not become general public knowledge until 1997, when a report on it, "Bringing Them Home," by Sir Ronald Wilson, caused national outrage.

The key to all Aboriginal rights is land. Land is identity; to own none is to be no one, deracinated, invisible. Land is also theology. In Aboriginal myth, the Australian earth--its valleys, hills and watercourses, together with everything that grew and lived on it--was shaped by ancestral beings during an ahistoric period called the Dreamtime. When these ancestors withdrew from the earth, they left behind not only the humans they had created but also a body of sacred law, embedded in dances, songs and images, that described their worldmaking acts. These images showed how the spirits of the dead were continually absorbed into the land and recycled into the newborn living. Hence, to Aborigines, land is far more than real estate. In their struggle for rights, it is the key element.

But it has taken a very long time to drag the Australian courts and government into admitting that the Aborigines owned their land before white arrival--that the doctrine of terra nullius (no- man's-land) was legally invalid. This finally happened in 1992, when Eddie Mabo, a member of the Meriam clan on the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait off northern Australia, successfully argued before the high court that his people had been there before the whites and had never given up their ancient rights of ownership. This was the first "native title" victory in Australian law.

Its results have been explosive. Huge deposits of minerals, including, at Jabaluka in the Northern Territory, the richest known uranium deposits in the southern hemisphere, lie beneath the earth. No less than 15% of the total land area of Australia is owned or controlled by Aboriginal groups and councils. Some 700 land claims, covering 50% of the Australian landmass, await determination by the courts, and more are coming in every day. This avalanche has caused legal and bureaucratic gridlock. Few Aboriginal groups accept mediation by whites. No two groups agree on land use. Some, for instance, think that tribal land should not be exploited at all, and left sacrosanct. Others are for all-out mining.

And then there is the question of proving original ownership. Sometimes a group can show it has been on a given tract of land since records began. But this situation is rare. Often a claim is just that, a mere assertion unbacked by documents of any kind, made by Aborigines who live in an entirely different area. This infuriates some Australian graziers, especially those whose stations (ranches) are on land they do not own outright but hold in lease from the Crown. A native title claim on their land, even a weak one, can freeze their assets and put bank loans out of reach. Moreover, it is facile to fall in with the favorite assumption of white urban Australian liberals: that only Aborigines have an authentic spiritual connection to the land. Why cannot whites have one too?

The point is, however, that this and a hundred other issues between blacks and whites in Australia can be worked out only in an atmosphere of reason, trust and reconciliation. The time of name calling should be over. But despite the dignity and moderation of Aboriginal leaders, and the goodwill of so many whites, it is manifestly not over. Finishing it off, at last, is work that will take us into the millennium. But it has to be done, or we are a much lesser nation for it.