How sad that race politics is preached over bushfire dead
OPERA singer and activist Deborah Cheetham surprises me. I thought my real opinions were shocking enough to her without her needing to invent even worse.
Don’t I say that the global warming scare is wildly exaggerated?
Don’t I say that no one can name even 10 “stolen generations” children who truly were stolen just for being Aboriginal and not because they were abandoned or in danger?
Don’t I say that we should not divide ourselves by race, even flying race-based flags over government buildings, but to see ourselves united as Australians?
But even those views are apparently not shocking enough now for Cheetham, even though she, too, says she’s one of the “stolen generations”.
No, she writes in a new book of essays that I’ve said something far, far worse. Monstrous, if true.
Cheetham writes that the last time she sang our national anthem was in 2009, at a memorial service after the terrible bushfires in Victoria, in which 173 people died.
“I decided to use a fantastic orchestral arrangement … which included clap sticks and yidaki (didgeridoo),” she writes.
“Andrew Bolt called into question the need or relevance for clap sticks and didgeridoo and, for that matter, an Aboriginal singer. What did the horror and devastation of the worst bushfires in over half a century have to do with Aboriginal people? ...
“Insensitive and ignorant to the fact that Aboriginal lives were counted among those lost on that day, Bolt proclaimed that the anthem had nothing to do with my Aboriginal self and, although it pains me to credit such a person with a role in my personal growth, he was right.
“I finally realised that this song had nothing to do with me.”
Pardon? Most of this is pure fantasy.
Nowhere in that piece — which I have republished on my blog for you to check — did I claim the bushfires or our national anthem had nothing to do with people identifying as Aborigines.
Nowhere did I deny Aborigines died in the fires. The races of the dead are to me irrelevant. The suffering is the same.
And far from having “called into question the need or relevance for … an Aboriginal singer”, I wrote that Cheetham actually deserved to sing at that ceremony.
“Fair enough that indigenous soprano Deborah Cheetham sang the national anthem — not because of the colour of her skin, but the quality of her voice,” I wrote.
But I noted that the ceremony had been hijacked by race politics, as so many since have been, including this year’s preachy opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games.
It divided us just when we should most unite. For a start, why play a didgeridoo throughout a memorial service for the dead in Victoria when that instrument was not indigenous to that state?
I went on: “There was even a homily on Aboriginal methods of burning forests. Was this to comfort victims, or to flatter the sensitivities of politicians?
“But most inappropriate of all was that Aboriginal ‘leader’ Joy Murphy was asked to give an official welcome to the land of the Wurundjeri people.
“This ludicrous formality, now obligatory at most state government functions, has rarely sounded so utterly inappropriate as it did here.
“Those who perished in towns such as Marysville, Kinglake and Strathewen need no welcome to their country, as if strangers to the land they loved, lived and died in.”
Cheetham seems unable to accept that this land is now our joint home, passionately loved by people of many “races” — most of us now a racial blend, anyway.
Cheetham says she has never since sung our national anthem and even refused a gig at an AFL Grand Final because they would not let her change the words of “for we are young and free”, which offend her.
If I detected at that 2009 funeral service the seeds of division, not unity, Cheetham’s blossoming into racial politics has since confirmed it.
She is entitled to argue that her strident approach is best to achieve “reconciliation”, much as I believe it won’t.
But she is not entitled to invent the slur that my own approach is apartheid — to kick Aborigines out of our common ceremonies and deny their freedom to even sing.
It is the opposite. In our deepest grief, as after those Victorian fires, most of us are actually united by the realisation that we are all human.
Race is never more irrelevant, so how sad that Cheetham even now preaches race politics over those bushfire dead. Watch Andrew Bolt on The Bolt Report LIVE 7pm week nights