Today’s academics should apologise for historical mistakes

Saying sorry is not virtue signalling, it is a starting point, says Katrina Schlunke

LAST year, seconds before COVID swept into town, Contemporary Art Tasmania Gallery held an exhibition called Reserved for Healing.

It included an unforgettable array of works by Indigenous designers, creators and artists. One of the works was a rich set of large family portraits by Michelle Maynard, hung to move with the air flows and so catch the viewer’s eye at different angles.

Depending on the minor air flows these full-of-life Cape Barren family members looked young and cheeky, old and wise, playful and commanding, as they came in and out of sight in the faint breeze.

Amid these spirited lives was a small square of reportage from 1913 where a paper read by a LWG Buchner before the Science Congress denigrates the islanders of Cape Barren according to their failure to conform to the ideas of Dr Ramsay Smith concerning the quality of person produced by “cousin marriage”.

Buchner was not an isolated crank, as coverage by several newspapers suggests. He along with many other scientists, anthropologists and anatomists studied in universities, went on to hold positions of authority within the university system and shared and passed on that knowledge to their students.

At that time their knowledge was proved by the measuring of cranial capacity and usually brief excursions to Indigenous communities, prisons and asylums, or wherever human subjects were rendered available to observe and remark upon.

Universities, in their role of institutionalising and giving authoritative weight to particular kinds of knowledge, produced these experts who would be lauded as knowing the people they studied better than the people themselves.

So when a university apologises to Indigenous people as many already have and as UTAS did in 2019 (December 4), the apology must be, in part, for the ways in which knowledge has been used as a way of producing power over others. It was a way of making others “known”

to the educated by creating that knowing. That kind of knowledge made a closed circuit between education and experts that was only slowly broken open by Indigenous interventions that continue to this day.

To say sorry for being among the many educators, and the educators of the educators, who produced that knowledge as power is a simple acknowledgment that what was once thought of as neutral or innocent knowing never was.

Saying sorry for those of us who have been a part of the university system is to say we have heard, seen and read what so many Indigenous peoples have said, done and written for so long. Saying sorry is not virtue signalling or doing anything at all except setting the scene for a starting point. Sorry, I hope, suggests that we non-Indigenous may be capable of helping create a different idea of education.

Standing among the art within the Reserved for Healing exhibition there was a literal enactment of what being in the state of sorry could produce – a rearrangement of white knowledge, a shimmering of continuous Indigenous presence and a quiet waiting.

Without sorry, my only point of identification was Buchner’s “knowledge” built on racist and classist hierarchies.

But with sorry there was an opening, a chance of seeing and feeling a much richer life where other ways of knowing could be possible.