“The Australian experience differed from the West Indies slavery in that the Aboriginal people were enslaved in their own beloved country as their spiritual and physical identities were stripped away,” writes The Gadfly columnist ROBERT MACKLIN. 

The timing of the forthcoming October royal tour is perfect. When Charles III and Queen Camilla touch down in the “King’s Voyager” it will be exactly one year from the crushing defeat of the Voice referendum. 

Its supporters have learned the lessons of that disastrous campaign and begun to rally around the Truth-telling Commission. The Greens are introducing a bill in federal parliament to establish it, and while PM Albanese hates being pushed around by them, his own Indigenous Minister Linda Burney has reminded him that “money for the commission is already in the Budget”.

It will highlight the crime against humanity that was the violent occupation of the 7,680,000 square hectares stolen by agents of the British Crown from the 800,000 to a million Aboriginal folk who had owned and cared for the land and its creatures for many thousands of years. It will capture the emotional heart of white Australia, a vital element in their embrace of the cause.

The arrival of the royal couple will undoubtedly revive the Republican Movement. And while the PM is also sympathetic to that cause – as, I suspect, is the new Governor-General Sam Mostyn – he’s made it “crystal clear” that Aboriginal recognition must come first.

Recent events in other parts of the former British Empire have driven home the determination of victims to hold the perpetrators to account. 

As the great Henry Reynolds noted in a recent article: “The hostile reception which met the tour of the West Indies by the young royals in March 2022 was a warning sign that old ways were out of joint with the emerging rise of the Global South. The old colonial deference has passed its use-by date.

“It is now time to begin talking about reparations in recognition of all the benefits that the British extracted from their far flung empire and the ubiquitous violence which accompanied the pillage. 

“At its very simplest we should expect that the British admit and shoulder moral responsibility for the great tragedy that continues to shadow our history.”

The Australian experience differed from the West Indies slavery in that the Aboriginal people were enslaved in their own beloved country as their spiritual and physical identities were stripped away. 

As I discovered in the three years of research and writing The Donald Thomson Story – Fighting for Justice, the biography of our first home-grown anthropologist, we whitefella Australians were thoroughly complicit in the crime. 

It’s to be published later this month, and other works will precede and follow it. It’s not a story of massacres, nor even of the stolen generations, but of the intimate tribal lives of the Aboriginal people of Cape York, the NT and to a lesser extent the central deserts. 

Thomson was accepted by them in their most sacred and scarifying ceremonies of initiation, corroboree, cult and even the nightly dances that told their old and new stories the way we flock to the passive equivalent we call TV.

Until his death in 1970, Thomson was their champion in the highest echelons of government, academia and the mass media. 

He led them to war against a Japanese invasion and even recruited 75 headhunters to forge a path behind the lines in Dutch New Guinea. 

But his was a nation whose first parliament invented the White Australia Policy and whose population largely followed the British colonial leader.

Little wonder that his fellow professors at Melbourne University dubbed him “Australia’s Lawrence of Arabia”.

But like Lawrence, he failed to win his own people to the rightness of his cause by the time he died. It is unfinished business. We need the courage and the moral decency to bring ourselves to account.

robert@robertmacklin.com