Truth-telling about a settler-colonial legacy: decolonizing possibilities?

ABSTRACT

In 2017, the Uluru Statement calling for Voice, Treaty and Truth was released by Australia’s Referendum Council. The Uluru Statement calls for a Makarrata Commission to oversee a process of ‘agreement-making’ and ‘truth-telling’. I argue that it was in the regional dialogues held by the Referendum Council prior to the release of the Uluru Statement that this demand for truth-telling was substantively articulated by dialogue participants. This article explores this grassroots invocation of truth-telling within the context of the desire for political transformation, most recently expressed in the Uluru Statement. I argue that truth-telling is conceptualized by regional dialogue participants as an opportunity for First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians to participate as equals in a process of place-based dialogic engagement about the ‘truths’ of colonial history that may or may not lead to local reconciliation. This type of ‘agonistic’ political encounter, therefore, does not assume an outcome of national or even local reconciliation. I contend that these types of encounters may have the potential to create local decolonizing spaces in which more equal terms of association are negotiated. However, they could also be appropriated to pursue ideological forms of consensus that undermine this possibility, as occurred in previous periods of Australian history.

KEYWORDS:

• Truth-telling
• reconciliation
• Uluru Statement
• transitional justice
• decolonization

Introduction

The release of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart by the government-appointed Referendum Council, while not uncontested, was a critical political moment in Australia.¹ The statement called for Voice, Treaty and Truth, that is, the establishment of a constitutionally protected First Nations Voice to the Australian Parliament followed by a ‘Makarrata Commission’ to ‘supervise a process of treaty making’ and finally local and regional truth-telling between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the rest of the Australian community. Scholarly engagement with this call for truth-telling is still emerging.² I argue that the localized, dialogic process of truth-telling outlined by participants in the regional dialogues organized by the Referendum Council could, if effectively implemented, create opportunities for the creation of place-based decolonizing spaces that avoid some of the limitations of state-centred, top-down forms of transitional justice that have characterized many international experiences of truth-telling.³ At the same time, truth-telling in these local spaces could be appropriated to formulate narratives of reconciliation that ignore the structural legacies of colonialism and seek to refute Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty. The nature of these localized truth-telling processes, whether assimilative, radical or something in between will be determined through contestation and engagement between local actors. This process implicitly recognizes the profoundly ‘agonistic’ nature of what Schaap has called ‘political reconciliation’. Rather than assuming the existence of an a priori political and moral community to which all citizens need to be ‘restored’, regional dialogue participants recognize reconciliation as a ‘contingent outcome of political interaction’.⁴ It is the openness of this process that guards against its appropriation for depoliticizing forms of consensus building that fail to address fundamental power relations.

Therefore, instead of a national process led by the state, as in many other international transitional justice contexts, the truth-telling proposed by regional dialogue participants is a localized Indigenous-led process, independent of, but engaged with, the state. Rather than specific methods of truth-telling being prescribed at a national level, the form that truth-telling takes (e.g. memorial, hearing, cultural exchange, etc.) will be determined by local agonistic and place-based engagement between settler and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to create new forms of belonging to people and place.⁵

These local processes will shape the nature of the ‘truths’ that emerge in different contexts, including the extent to which a shared understanding is developed or any form of reconciliation is achieved. This process is therefore emergent. Nationally, truth telling in all contexts would be motivated by two key imperatives – meaningful and widespread recognition of colonial violence and recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ agency and continued sovereignty. The national ‘promise’ of truth-telling would be practically realized through a Makarrata Commission that would collate and archive these local ‘truths’ to create a collective ‘understanding of the contested nature […] of Australia’s history’.⁶ The focus on localized and contentious engagement about the ‘truths’ of Australian history would therefore seek to avoid teleological or triumphalist historical narratives in favour of building relational connection to people and place through truth-telling.

In writing this article and exploring the articulation of truth in the Uluru Statement, I draw on my own aspiration for more equal terms of relation as a recent settler living on violently appropriated land in Australia and as a South African previously involved in documenting and analysing the human rights violations of the apartheid era at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in that country. I have seen first-hand both the significant potential as well as the limits of the political transformation that can be achieved through truth-telling. My hope for this paper is that it serves as a starting point for contending with the nature of my own responsibility as a settler to respond to the demand for equality and political transformation, most recently expressed in the Uluru Statement.

Revisiting recognition

The recent calls for truth-telling come against the backdrop of an extended engagement between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian government around constitutional recognition, treaty and reconciliation. Appleby and Davis argue that the Uluru Statement clearly articulates the desire of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for ‘truth-telling’ processes that would ‘re-set’ the political relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the broader Australian public,⁷ founded on a recognition of the ‘sacred’ nature of First Nations’ sovereignty, which ‘has never been ceded or extinguished’ but which, ‘co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown’.⁸ This is required because ‘Australia’s political transition [to independence from Britain] at the beginning of the twentieth century excluded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’.⁹

While ‘truth-telling’ was not in the original mandate of the government-appointed Referendum Council, established in 2015 to investigate ‘meaningful’ constitutional recognition for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the Referendum Council found that ‘it was unanimous at every Dialogue’.¹⁰ Truth-telling was seen by regional dialogue participants ‘as a step on the journey for how they believed they could address current disadvantage and power imbalance on their own terms’.¹¹ During these dialogues, participants asserted that truth-telling was a critical component of meaningful recognition and argued that, ‘a nation cannot recognise people they do not know or understand’.¹² Therefore, they expressed the desire to ‘tell the truth about history in our own voices and from our own point of view. And for mainstream Australians to hear those voices and to reconsider what they know and understand about their nation’s history’.¹³

The type of truth-telling articulated in the Uluru Statement is significantly different to the forms of recognition previously enacted by the settler-colonial state, which was part of a legacy of state-driven and compromised recognition initiatives that failed to substantively recognize the colonial violence on which the Australian state was founded or its ongoing effects in the existing political formation.¹⁴ Compromised forms of recognition that seek to assimilate First Nations communities have been seen in several settler-colonial contexts. State-led processes of recognition in Australia and North America, for example, have been convincingly critiqued as an exercise in power, designed to assimilate First Nations communities within the machinery of state authority and effect hollow forms of reconciliation that fail to recognize past injustice or re-order the terms of political association. These forms of recognition, ‘granted’ by the state, codify rather than overturn unequal political relations by offering limited forms of inclusion in an unreformed body politic to First Nation communities on terms dictated by the settler-colonial state.¹⁵

The political community, the ‘we’ that is constituted in these processes of recognition and reconciliation, preserves the identities of colonized and colonizer.¹⁶ It is these tarnished identities, and the relations that support them, that the Uluru Statement seeks to dispute through truth-telling, envisaging instead a new type of ‘we’ premised on an ‘ancient sovereignty’ that ‘can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood’ and ‘a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia’.¹⁷ To date, successive state-led initiatives in Australia have sought to ‘reconcile’, recognize and assimilate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, informed by what Patrick Wolfe has called the logic of ‘elimination’ (first physically, then culturally).¹⁸

Australia is the only ex-British colony to have been established without a treaty with the Indigenous inhabitants of the country.¹⁹ Nevertheless, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have repeatedly demanded recognition of their sovereignty, a demand which remains unmet.²⁰ In 1967 a successful referendum was held in which Australian citizens agreed to important amendments to the Australian Constitution, which expanded the right of the Commonwealth Government to legislate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and to include them in the reckoning of population for determining seats in the House of Representatives.²¹ However, this constitutional change did not provide for a treaty-making process or ‘any constitutional guarantee of fair treatment, nor any specific recognition for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their rights’.²² Instead, there has been a gradual and partial recognition of the violent dispossession suffered by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the need for some form of redress and reconciliation.²³

In the 1990s, the government responded to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ calls for treaty and sovereignty with a series of initiatives around ‘reconciliation’,²⁴ without a systematic recognition of founding colonial violence or the expressed desire of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities for self-determination. This, ‘practical reconciliation’, as it was described by the Howard Government of the time actively discounted the need to address past injustices.²⁵ This left ‘Australians in the paradoxical situation where the cause of reconciliation is universally embraced while the historical injustices that make it necessary in the first place remain subject to dispute’.²⁶ It took until 2008 for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to formally apologize on behalf of the Australian Parliament to the ‘Stolen Generation’ – that is, the thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were forcibly removed from their parents by the state between 1910 and 1970.²⁷ It is only more recently that some Australian states have offered substantive compensation for these violations.²⁸

According to Charles Taylor’s well-known theory of political recognition, in order to establish reciprocal relations of recognition between communities that may lead to reconciliation, we must make a ‘“presumption of equal worth” when entering into a dialogical encounter with the other’.²⁹ Truth commissions are one means through which divided societies seek to reconstitute political relations by instantiating a performative founding moment in which an institutional ‘presumption of equality’ is created in a context where normally ‘the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave’.³⁰ ‘Truth’ is central to this endeavour – but this is not a forensic or evidentiary truth. Instead, it concerns an acknowledgement and recognition of the ‘truth’ of injustice, the ‘truth’ of the ‘slave’ by the settler-colonial society as a whole. This is a social truth about collective oppression made up of a multiplicity of personal, experiential ‘truths’ previously occluded by settler-colonial power. Thus the Makarrata Commission is intended to provide, ‘a record of historical experience’ rather than ‘judge the truths that emerge from the locally led activities’.³¹ The purpose of truth in this context is to narrow the contested ground of debate in the political community by recognizing that injustice did indeed occur and, as Ignatieff has argued, ‘to reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse’.³² It is only on these grounds of mutual recognition of the ‘truth’ of injustice that new conditions of equality can be established and pragmatic actions for redress agreed to.

This performance of equality through a truth process lays the grounds for more equal terms of political association. It creates the context for meaningful political engagement about the terms of political association, rather than seeking to ‘restore’ a fictive pre-existing harmony, as has occurred in previous Australian reconciliation processes.³³

The goal here is not inclusion in the existing settler-colonial order but a reconfiguration of that order. An agonistic form of reconciliation asks the question of ‘who “we” are’ but does not predetermine or presume the answer.³⁴ Instead, it starts by creating the space in which a meaningful engagement about the terms of recognition and political association can take place. A participant in a local government workshop on truth-telling explained, ‘You have to allow it [truth-telling] to happen how it happens – you can’t reverse engineer it. Otherwise you don’t get an agreed outcome, you get an enforced outcome’.³⁵

Truth-telling in an agonistic framework, therefore, becomes ‘a dialogical and dialectical gift between partners’,³⁶ in which settler-colonist and the colonized are equally implicated, rather than a performance of victimhood by the colonized to secure recognition from the colonizers. Simpson has criticized this depoliticized and performative ‘politics of grief’, which ultimately confirms the moral authority of the settler state.³⁷ As noted by Taylor and Habibis, ‘truth-telling about Australian’s history’ is essential in a ‘process of national healing’ that moves beyond ‘passive goodwill or measures targeting Aboriginal people only’ to build the ‘active capacity […] of the whole of the Australian public for more constructive race relations’ and for self-reflexivity.³⁸

Participants in dialogues organized by the Referendum Council therefore emphasized,

the shared nature of this truth-telling. It is not for or owned by any particular group, but for all Australians as we come together after the many, often violent and tragic, struggles of our past […] It was offered as part of a proposal to the Australian people for a different future, one in which all Australians could understand the truth, shame and complexity of their own stories and thus move towards a stronger, freer and richer future.³⁹

Revising narratives

McKenna outlines the urgency of the unfinished task of truth-telling as the foundation for a more inclusive and socially just nationhood:

After nearly fifty years of deeply divisive debates over the country’s foundation and its legacy for Indigenous Australians, Australia stands at a crossroads – a moment of truth. We either make the Commonwealth stronger and more complete through an honest reckoning with the past […] or we unmake the nation by clinging to triumphant narratives in which the violence inherent in the nation's foundation is trivialised.⁴⁰

It is these terms of nationhood that are at issue in current aspirations for truth-telling. However, the national narrative in Australia remains deeply fractured between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ understandings of a society founded on violence and dispossession and a ‘settler narrative’ that does not recognize this violence as the foundation of the country’s current prosperity. These divisions around the Australian national narrative, the ‘stories’ of its past, were expressed in the so-called ‘history wars’ of the 1990s, which followed the publication of the Bringing Them Home report on the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. The report used the word ‘genocide’ to refer to this historical violence, which lead to an intense public debate between historians about the evidence regarding whether there had been a deliberate policy to exterminate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, the number of deaths and massacres on the colonial frontier, and the number of children forcibly removed.⁴¹

Narratives are at the centre of the undoing that needs to occur and this is at the heart of regional dialogue participants’ articulation of truth-telling. Consequently, the first step in imagining decolonization is a ‘significant revision of traditional historical narratives and a re-interpretation of national and/or territorial pasts’.⁴² As Tony Hansen, a member of the Stolen Generation, explains, ‘I look forward to the day when this story, my story is accepted and understood by all Australians so that we can heal individually, collectively and as a nation’.⁴³

Lederach writes of the fundamental political and constitutive significance of stories, ‘narrative creates the formative story of who we are as a people and a place. These are […] the understandings of how people come to see their place on this earth, in a figurative sense and their place as tied to a specific geography, in a literal sense’.⁴⁴

First Nations scholars Glen Coulthard and Audra Simpson, however, have both noted the problematic way that in settler-colonial societies, such as Canada, state-led ‘transitional justice’ initiatives have sought to constitute narratives that establish a false temporal break from the ‘past’ so that dialogue about historical injustice could be shut down on the settler-colonial state’s terms.⁴⁵ In these contexts, in service of a teleological narrative of ‘progress’, First Nation citizens are asked ‘to testify to injustice but also to leave it in the past’ and, most significantly, relinquish their right to meaningful redress.⁴⁶ These attempts to effect an illusory break from the past seek to deny the persistence of settler colonialism as an ongoing structure of power relations.

However, in discussions about truth-telling, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians refute such homogenizing historical teleologies and instead seek to recover a complex mosaic of narratives that would reflect the variegated nature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (and indeed settler) identity and experience. Appleby and Davis, therefore, argue that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have ‘rejected a symbolic, truncated and singular statement of their truths’.⁴⁷ Instead, communities in regional dialogues have articulated a desire for truth-telling that moves beyond the structural binaries of oppression and victimhood, which in other contexts of transitional justice have simply re-legitimated the existing settler-colonial state and enabled it to declare itself ‘post-colonial’.⁴⁸ A delegate to a symposium on truth-telling argued that Australia needs to foster a national identity that is a ‘fuller reflection not only of past injustices inflicted on the First Australians – but also of the depth and breadth of our histories and cultures’.⁴⁹ Instead, the narratives called for are what Yawuru scholar Shino Konishi has called ‘extra-colonial’ histories, which attend to the heterogeneity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life and which ‘do not revolve around settler-colonial domination, expropriation, exploitation or elimination’.⁵⁰

Reconfiguring ‘nationhood’

Therefore, at the heart of Australian nationhood ‘is a dispute about the way the country was conquered and settled’ and whether it has been founded and maintained ‘by committing gross injustices against its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, injustices for which it must now make the appropriate reparations’.⁵¹

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, truth-telling concerns an aspiration to reconceptualize Australian nationhood based on a recognition of First Nations’ prior occupation and ongoing sovereignty in the modern nation-state, as well as an acknowledgment of the violence with which the colonial state sought to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty. The Referendum Council’s report emphasizes that ‘at almost every consultation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants raised issues of sovereignty, contending that sovereignty was never ceded, relinquished or validly extinguished’.⁵²

The terms of inclusion in the political community are particularly complex in the settler-colonial polity, as a number of scholars have noted.⁵³ Settler colonialism is a type of colonialism where the settlers do not go ‘home’ to the metropole, instead, they become ‘indigenous’, seeking to assert ‘settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain’ and appropriating ‘Indigenous life and land’.⁵⁴ As a result, they have a deep and lasting impact on the political formation, long beyond the formal moment of ‘independence’ from a colonial power. As a participant in a Referendum Council dialogue in Perth explained, ‘Aboriginal people have this curse on them declaring them nothing. That’s terra nullius’ (translated from Latin as nobody’s land).⁵⁵ Nevertheless, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians have kept pushing back against this ‘negation’ of their identity in the settler-colonial political formation and have persistently asserted an avowal of their continued sovereignty and agency.⁵⁶

Consequently, truth-telling is located within an explicit vision of political change and recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty that would challenge, rather than bolster, the existing settler-colonial order. The records of one Referendum Council dialogue show that ‘delegates spoke of the need to acknowledge the illegality of everything done since colonisation’.⁵⁷ This is articulated as an existential as well political imperative. A participant in a regional dialogue explained, ‘We should be using the proper names […] that’s the way we get our identity back. I say that I’m Gubbi Gubbi. If I say I’m Aboriginal I disappear’.⁵⁸

In seeking a truth-telling process that recognizes the manner in which the colonial project sought to violently extinguish prior Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty, and the effects this continues to have in present-day Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are seeking to contest the terms of their ‘inclusion in the political demos’⁵⁹ and assert the right to a sovereignty of equivalent value to that imposed by the colonial nation-state. This is a sovereignty based on deep place-based ‘attachment’ rather than a sovereignty founded on the dialectic of possession and dispossession, which has so far characterized the settler-colonial state.⁶⁰

Appleby and McKinnon contend therefore that the Uluru Statement offers a ‘path through the seemingly intractable dispute over “sovereignty”’, because it contains, ‘a powerful assertion of a sacred and fundamentally spiritual sovereignty over cultural lands and waters’ that can ‘co-exist’ with the legal conception of sovereignty affirmed repeatedly by the High Court.⁶¹ Nevertheless, the Uluru Statement, by asserting a prior sovereignty that existed under its ‘own laws and customs’,⁶² poses an implicit challenge to the legitimacy of settler sovereignty, imposed through violence, but which remains unchallenged as the foundation of the country’s current law. As Motha argues, in Australia, there has been ‘a fundamental refusal of a plurality of sovereignties or normative systems and an insistence on an essentially fictive monistic conception of sovereignty that authorises only “one law”’.⁶³ Anxieties about plurality in the liberal nation-state, which is viewed as analogous to the human psyche, ‘makes divisions and fragmentations tantamount to a form of psychosis that requires remedial treatment’ and has led to the rejection of even the most limited forms of sovereignty for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.⁶⁴ Against this fear of plurality senior Gumatj ceremony conductor, Djunga Djunga Yunupingu, articulated an alternative conception of nationhood, which encompasses more than one ‘law’, ‘Our ancient sovereignty is here, just like it says in the Uluru Statement … but we want all people to walk with us. Two laws, two people, one country’.⁶⁵

In this context, Appleby and McKinnon have argued that the Uluru Statement represents a ‘major interruption to the existing debate on constitutional reform’ as it ‘asserts the right to an ongoing voice in the political system’.⁶⁶ According to Little, by refusing to accept the terms of the debate on constitutional recognition and introducing an aspiration for constitutional reform and voice, as well as treaty and truth, the Uluru Statement ‘reset[s] the terms in which the issue of recognition can be meaningfully articulated’.⁶⁷ As a delegate to a Referendum Council dialogue argued, ‘If the government want to speak about “recognition” they need to recognise the true history, recognise the frontier wars. They need to recognise the atrocity of Maralinga’.⁶⁸

Crucially, the truth-telling envisaged in the Uluru Statement also concerns a recognition of a history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander political agency. The truth that must be exposed concerns not only violation but ‘re-existence’,⁶⁹ a recovery of the dignity of colonized people and their ‘ontological density, voice, land, history, knowledge and power’⁷⁰ to reset the terms of the relationship between First Nations and the settler community on more just grounds. Delegates to the regional dialogues held by the Referendum Council ‘asserted that truth-telling must not be limited to narratives of trauma. It must also recall defiance against the government actions and policies, narratives of survival and revelation’⁷¹ during:

the seven phases of the history of struggle, from the ancient ‘Law’, the ‘Invasion’ of the British, leading to massacres, disease and poisoning and ultimately resistance, through mourning and discrimination, which led to growing activism and the fight for land rights.⁷²

Pateman argues that a ‘democratic state whose “beginning” is the settler contract requires the creation of a new political legitimacy, building a new settlement with Native peoples’.⁷³ This requires a dissolution of the original ‘settler-contract’ founded on the doctrine of terra nullius. All members of the polity are implicated in this process of decolonization. Therefore, ‘settler colonialism and its decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone’⁷⁴ and the ‘hard work of decolonising Settler self and society is not an Indigenous responsibility’.⁷⁵

In this context, Veracini notes that transitional justice processes such as truth-telling ‘may offer [an] important avenue for settler decolonising practices that operate beyond an original settler contract’.⁷⁶ The localized truth-telling envisaged by regional dialogue participants offers the possibly of creating spaces ‘beyond’ an original settler-colonial contract in which Australians could engage with each other about new terms of political association.

The right to truth

Globally, truth commissions have emerged as a widespread response to human rights violations in countries as diverse as Sierra Leone and Canada, with over 30 such commissions established since the 1980s. The ‘right to truth’ is now an internationally accepted principle codified in international law.⁷⁷ Truth commissions are generally seen as a non-judicial mechanism to recognize and document human rights violations in the wake of conflict in order to create more inclusive forms of national identity and reconciliation. However, their contribution to reconciliation is disputed in a diverse range of countries that have established truth commissions, ranging from South Africa to Finland.⁷⁸

While initially the politics of reconciliation and transitional justice emerged largely in the context of countries transitioning from political authoritarianism, the politics of recognition developed contemporaneously to ‘remedy deficits within consolidated democratic orders’.⁷⁹ Over time, ‘consolidated’ democracies have increasingly included forms of redress and reconciliation to address historical wrongs as the precondition for more meaningful inclusion.⁸⁰ However, the nature of the relationship between recognition and reconciliation is deeply complex and uncertain, setting ‘these ideas into an unsteady play’.⁸¹ Against this uncertainty, truth processes in international contexts have been critiqued for positing an automatic relation between the two and assuming that recognition will automatically lead to reconciliation. Rather, Doxtader argues, ‘their transformative promise may depend on and unfold within their interplay’.⁸² Consequently, ‘the task at hand is far less to resolve this contingency than work within it’.⁸³ Schaap, therefore, posits an agonistic conception of reconciliation as a way to respond to the ‘untenable’ and yet ‘necessary’ relation between reconciliation and recognition.⁸⁴

I argue that it is this ‘uncertain interplay’ between recognition and reconciliation that regional dialogue participants seek to navigate through localized processes of truth-telling that do not assume an automatic relationship between recognition of colonial violation and reconciliation. Political engagement between settler and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in this milieu is ‘an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict’.⁸⁵

It is this uncertain process that may hold the most transformative promise for reimagining and reconfiguring local political relations but could equally create the space for enforced forms of reconciliation that assume an instrumental relationship between recognition and reconciliation and silence the complexity of local ‘truths’.

Scholarly engagement with truth commissions globally has been dominated by the framework of transitional justice.⁸⁶ Transitional justice, as it has been applied and conceptualized, has been critiqued for being normatively tied to a liberal state-building project and replicating a limited number of ‘technocratic and decontextualised solutions’.⁸⁷ Much transitional justice work has been oriented ‘outwards’ from the Global North, implicitly and explicitly positing liberal democracy as the apotheosis of political transition from authoritarianism in the Global South, while ignoring ‘the extent to which liberal democracies themselves might be considered in need of fundamental transition and transformation.⁸⁸ As Maddison and Shepherd note, this ‘exceptionalism […] is in itself a colonial practice of power’.⁸⁹ These tensions have led scholars to call for an ‘imaginative understanding’⁹⁰ of transitional justice and the need ‘to enhance the field’s existing terms and concepts’, including ‘refine[ing] its histories and paradigms’.⁹¹

A growing body of literature in Australia has been grappling with how transitional justice theory could be developed to more effectively examine contexts in settler-colonial states such as Australia. It asks what the role of transitional justice mechanisms, such as truth commissions, is when there is ‘no agreement on what transition or transformation in these contexts might entail’.⁹² It problematizes the focus in scholarly writing on a ‘recent point of rupture’.⁹³ As a result of this conception, the historical experiences of Indigenous people in settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand and North America have largely remained outside the framework of traditional transitional justice analyses, which ‘renders consideration of colonial power outside of the remit of transitional justice, both in theory and in practice’.⁹⁴ This brief temporal frame means that transitional justice mechanisms often do not address the ‘core injustice’ of structural harm, which is the long-term legacy of colonialism.⁹⁵

Balint and colleagues have therefore proposed ‘a new justice model for transitional justice’⁹⁶ that places structural injustice at the centre of the analysis as the primary object for redress and uses ‘Indigenous worldviews and jurisprudences’.⁹⁷ This accords with the Uluru Statement, which argues that the ‘dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem’.⁹⁸ Balint et al., therefore, offer a reconceptualization of transitional justice as a broad transition ‘from unjust to just relations’⁹⁹ that concerns the transformation of social, political, economic and legal frameworks within settler-colonial states. This marks transition as a moment of political discontinuity, ‘not historical in the chronological sense, but in the political sense’.¹⁰⁰ In settler colonies like Australia, the ‘illegitimacy’ to be addressed is ‘not a lack of liberal democracy’, as in many transitions from authoritarianism, but rather its foundation in colonial dispossession.¹⁰¹ Addressing these original concerns ‘would involve a shift from individualistic and state-focused modes of redress towards a more thoroughgoing evaluation of the structural vestiges of “past” harms and an openness to deep and wide-ranging reforms’.¹⁰²

Transitional justice’s conventional focus on state-building in newly democratic states has meant that in the settler-colonial context, it has struggled to adopt a critical posture to the state itself and has, in contexts such as Canada, been actively used by the state to legitimate itself and facilitate a reformist agenda. This teleological view of history helps to ‘install powerful ideological parameters that limit the field of possibility for new stories of transformation’.¹⁰³ Tuck and Yang argue that these types of ‘reconciliation’ initiatives are in fact part of the eliminatory logic Wolfe identifies: ‘The desire to reconcile is just as relentless as the desire to disappear the Native; it is a desire to not have to deal with this (Indian) problem anymore’.¹⁰⁴

Hence, rather than transitional justice leading to new forms of agency and transformation, Indigenous citizens are rendered more ‘governable’ in a re-legitimated settler-colonial sovereignty and nationhood. Because this dispossession was, and continues to be, facilitated by law,¹⁰⁵ a critical engagement with law’s implication in settler colonialism is required as part of ‘transitional justice’, that is, as an object of investigation, rather than as simply the means of investigation, which has, in settler-colonial contexts, simply affirmed the authority of colonial law.

Thus, Park argues that in order to radicalize transitional justice it is crucial to centre local communities and ‘decentre’¹⁰⁶ the settler-colonial state by refusing its self-legitimating ‘framing of the issues’ that invariably entrench its own power.¹⁰⁷ This, ‘opens space for prefigurative justice’,¹⁰⁸ that is, new forms of justice that are embodied and practiced at individual, intersubjective and community levels. Crucially, Park argues, ‘these practices already exist’.¹⁰⁹ In Australia, truth-telling processes centred around collaborative engagement between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous communities have already emerged organically in many parts of the country. The memorial and annual commemoration of the Myall Creek massacre is only one of the most well known of many local engagements with colonial history.¹¹⁰

Balint and colleagues assert therefore that transitional justice has the potential to ‘reframe’ the discussion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander claims to sovereignty as a fundamental issue of justice and could provide a justice model ‘to rethink underlying unjust relations through which both indigenous and non-indigenous communities may more collectively and holistically address the past and its ongoing effects’.¹¹¹ This would be a ‘transformative’ justice approach that seeks to significantly alter the terms of power and association in the polity.

This truth-telling would not uncritically utilize settler-colonial law but excavate and centre local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge and practices as the primary means through which truth-telling occurs and redress is instituted. Most importantly, the form and content of truth-telling is conceptualized and led by the local communities in which the truth-telling occurs. As a result, it is less likely to become the basis of an identity of victimhood, as has occurred in other state-driven truth processes.

Conclusion

I have argued in this article that the form of truth-telling articulated by regional dialogue participants envisages a process that, as Park advocates, centres local communities and decentres the settler-colonial state, and it is in this articulation that the decolonizing potential of Australian truth-telling lies. While framed nationally by the imperatives of recognition of colonial violation and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty, the process of truth-telling outlined by dialogue participants locates its hope for the transformative potential of truth-telling in local, embodied engagements between settler and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities as equal antagonists in a process of contestation about the terms of political relation. The outcome of these processes remains open, recognizing that any forms of reconciliation are the consequence of contingent political interaction rather than a definitive, and ultimately impossible, restoration of a pre-existing moral or political community. Therefore, instead of seeking to construct a single ‘decolonial’ narrative through a national process of truth-telling, these local processes would recognize multiple, potentially irreconcilable ‘truths’ to stand as ongoing testament to a contested history and its multiple legacies. This is radically different to the state-driven forms of reconciliation practice that characterized the 1990s and sought to enforce a hierarchically determined and depoliticized consensus that would irrevocably leave the ‘past’ behind. By advocating a process of local engagement around truth-telling, dialogue participants seek to navigate the complex relationship between the imperatives of recognition and its uncertain and ambiguous relationship to the possibilities of reconciliation. Rather than assuming a relationship between recognition and reconciliation, as in so many other transitional processes, the truth-telling envisaged here seeks to forge a more complex and uncertain path, negotiated in multiple local spaces that could be potentially transformative but could equally fail to deliver on the ‘promises’ of truth. Ultimately, truth-telling is most likely to deliver both disappointment and transformation.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vanessa Barolsky

Vanessa Barolsky is a Research Associate at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. She works across several disciplinary areas including sociology, anthropology and criminology to tackle questions related to social conflict and its transformation. This includes critical engagements with social cohesion, truth, reconciliation and questions of justice and decolonisation. Her work is informed by her research in South Africa on political conflict where she worked at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and participated in writing the Commission's final report. She subsequently completed a PHD on the Truth Commission's conceptualisation of political conflict.

Notes

1 Seven delegates from Victoria and New South Wales accompanied by about 30 supporters were reported in May 2017 to have walked out of a large constitutional recognition convention organized at the end of a process of national consultation by the Referendum Council. A ‘walkout statement’ titled ‘Opposing Constitutional Recognition and Manufactured Consent’ was released in July 2017 detailing the concerns that led to the walkout. Criticisms most substantively involved the question of sovereignty and the degree to which, by seeking constitutional recognition, the process affirmed, rather than challenged, the legitimacy of the sovereignty imposed by the British Crown, which remains intact as the basis of Australian law and legal authority. See Calla Wahlquist, ‘Uluru Talks: Delegates Walk out Due to Sovereignty and Treaty Fears’, The Guardian, 25 May 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/may/25/uluru-talks-delegates-walk-out-due-to-sovereignty-and-treaty-fears; ‘Walkout Statement: Opposing Constitutional Recognition and Manufactured Consent’, Canberra: Aboriginal Embassy Statement from the Sacred Fire, 2017, http://nationalunitygovernment.org/content/walkout-statement-aboriginal-embassy-statement-sacred-fire; Claudianna Blanco, ‘“We Won’t Sell out Our Mob”: Delegates Walk out of Constitutional Recognition Forum in Protest’, NTIV News, 2017, https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2017/05/25/breaking-delegates-walk-out-constitutional-recognition-forum-protest.

2 More recent substantive engagements with the Uluru Statement include books by Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, Sydney: New South, 2021; Mark McKenna, Return to Uluru, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2021; Megan Davis and George Williams, Everything You Need to Know about the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2021; Thomas Mayer, Finding the Heart of the Nation: The Journey of the Uluru Statement towards Voice, Treaty and Truth, Melbourne: Hardie Grant Publishing, 2019. Prior to this there was relatively little published specifically on the call for truth-telling in the Uluru Statement. Critical scholarly contributions included a piece from constitutional lawyers Gabrielle Appleby and former Referendum Council commissioner, Megan Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, Australian Historical Studies, 49(4), 2018 and historian Mark McKenna’s essay, ‘Moment of Truth: History and Australia’s Future’, Quarterly Essay, 69, 2018.

3 The Referendum Council convened 12 First Nations Regional Dialogues between December 2016 and May 2017, as part of its mandate to consult with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on their views of meaningful recognition. While the Dialogues were not open to the general public and delegates were selected according to a specific set of criteria (60% from First Nations/traditional owner groups, 20% from community organisations and 20% key individuals), they did engage a significant proportion of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population, with a total of 1200 delegates attending the Dialogues in most states in the country. Each Dialogue lasted for two and a half days and involved civics education as well as consideration of a number of options for recognition. It was at these dialogues that the desire for truth-telling was widely articulated. A synthesis of the Records of Meeting produced at each Dialogue was subsequently published in the Referendum Council Final Report, entitled ‘Our Story’, which outlined the themes that emerged in the Dialogues and included a number of quotes from delegates relating to each theme. This article draws significantly on these Records of Meeting as reflected in the Referendum Council Final Report. See Referendum Council, ‘Final Report of the Referendum Council’, 2017.

4 Andrew Schaap, ‘Agonism in Divided Societies’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 32(2), 2006, p 263.

5 Sandie Suchet-Pearson et al., ‘Caring as Country: Towards an Ontology of Co-Becoming in Natural Resource Management’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 54(2), 2013, p 187.

6 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 509.

7 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 503.

8 Referendum Council, ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, 2017.

9 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 504.

10 Referendum Council, ‘Final Report of the Referendum Council’, p 12.

11 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 503 (my own emphasis).

12 Davis and Williams, Everything You Need to Know, p 169.

13 Referendum Council, ‘Final Report of the Referendum Council’, p 17 (my own emphasis).

14 See Paul Muldoon and Andrew Schaap, ‘Confounded by Recognition: The Apology, the High Court and the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia’, Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation: Agonism, Restitution and Repair, 2013, pp 182–199; Damien Short, ‘When Sorry Isn’t Good Enough: Official Remembrance and Reconciliation in Australia’, Memory Studies, 5(3), 2012, pp 293–304; Megan Davis, ‘Listening but Not Hearing’, Griffith Review, no. 51, 2016, pp 73–87; Gordon Chalmers, ‘The Con-Stitutional Re-Cognition (S)Cam-Pain: The Campaign for the Hidden Recognition of First Nations Peoples’ Racial Inferiority’, Indigenous Law Bulletin, 8(15), 2014, pp 27–30.

15 See Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014; Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

16 Andrew Schaap, ‘Political Reconciliation through a Struggle for Recognition?’, Social and Legal Studies, 13(4), 2004, pp 523–540.

17 Referendum Council, ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’.

18 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 2006, pp 387–409.

19 George Williams, ‘Does True Reconciliation Require a Treaty?’, Indigenous Law Bulletin, 8(10), 2014, p 3.

20 One of the most significant recent examples of this was the establishment of what came to be known as the ‘Aboriginal Tent Embassy’ in 1972 when a group of activists planted a beach umbrella opposite Parliament House in Canberra, which they labelled with a sign ‘Aboriginal Embassy’ as an assertion of the right of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to the right to be treated as sovereign nations. Since 1972 demonstrators have maintained an Embassy on the site for over 50 years and are now the longest protest for Indigenous land rights, sovereignty and self-determination in the world. See Bronwyn Carlson and Lynda-june Coe, ‘A Short History of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy – An Indelible Reminder of Unceded Sovereignty’, The Conversation, 2022; Paul Muldoon and Andrew Schaap, ‘Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Politics of Reconciliation: The Constituent Power of the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(3), 2012, pp 534–550.

21 The legal significance of the constitutional changes that actually brought about the referendum has been contested. However, the campaign leading up to the referendum led to significant mobilization around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights in the country and the referendum continues to be seen as a crucial symbolic moment in Australian history. See: Bain Atwood and Andrew Marcus, The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007.

22 Referendum Council, ‘Discussion Paper on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torre Strait Islander Peoples’, Canberra, 2016, p 5.

23 See Muldoon and Schaap, ‘Confounded by Recognition’, pp 182–199; Short, ‘When Sorry Isn’t Good Enough’, pp 293–304; Davis, ‘Listening but Not Hearing’, pp 73–87; Chalmers, ‘The Con-Stitutional Re-Cognition (S)Cam-Pain’, pp 27–30.

24 Referendum Council, ‘Final Report of the Referendum Council’, p 50.

25 Sarah Maddison and Laura J Shepherd, ‘Peacebuilding and the Postcolonial Politics of Transitional Justice’, Peacebuilding, 2(3), 2014, pp 253–269.

26 Maddison and Shepherd, ‘Peacebuilding and the Postcolonial Politics of Transitional Justice’, p 190.

27 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, ‘A Community Guide to the Findings and Recommendations of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families’, 2007.

28 Tasmania was the first state to offer monetary compensation to members of the Stolen Generation in 2006. Over the next 15 years most Australian states and territories have offered various types and amounts of compensation to members of the Stolen Generation. Western Australia in 2007, Queensland in 2012, South Australia in 2015 and New South Wales in 2017. Victoria, the Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory all announced compensation schemes during the course of 2020–2021. See: Compensation for Stolen Generation members – Creative Spirits, https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/stolen-generations/compensation-for-stolen-generation-members.

29 Taylor cited in Schaap, ‘Political Reconciliation through a Struggle for Recognition?’, p 528.

30 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Charles Lam Markmann (trans), London: Pluto Press 2008, p 172.

31 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 509 (original emphasis).

32 Ignatieff, ‘Articles of Faith’, p 113.

33 Schaap, ‘Political Reconciliation through a Struggle for Recognition?’, p 5

34 Schaap, ‘Political Reconciliation through a Struggle for Recognition?’, p 534.

35 Reconciliation Australia, Truth-Telling and Reconciliation: A Report on Workshops Conducted with Local Councils to Support Truth-Telling and Reconciliation at a Local Level in Australia, 2020, p 15.

36 Senghor cited in Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015, p 162.

37 Simpson, As We Have Always Done, p 239.

38 Penny Skye Taylor and Daphne Habibis, ‘Widening the Gap: White Ignorance, Race Relations and the Consequences for Aboriginal People in Australia’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 55(3), 2020, p 15.

39 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 504 (my own emphasis).

40 McKenna, ‘Moment of Truth’, p 15.

41 Maddison and Shepherd, ‘Peacebuilding and the Postcolonial Politics of Transitional Justice’.

42 Veracini, ‘Settler Colonialism and Decolonization’, p 5.

43 Australia, Reconciliation and The Healing Foundation, ‘Truth-Telling Symposium Report’, 2018, p 11.

44 Lederach, ‘On Time: The Past That Lies Before Us’, p 142.

45 See Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus.

46 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, p 202.

47 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 508.

48 Park, ‘Settler Colonialism, Decolonization and Radicalizing Transitional Justice’, p 1.

49 Australia, Reconciliation and The Healing Foundation, ‘Truth-Telling Symposium Report’, p 12.

50 Konishi, ‘First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History’, p 302.

51 McKenna, ‘Moment of Truth’, p 19.

52 Referendum Council, ‘Final Report of the Referendum Council’, p 12.

53 See Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, London: Cassel, 1999; Mark Rifkin, ‘Settler Common Sense’, Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3–4), 2013, pp 322–340; Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Shino Konishi, ‘First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History’, Australian Historical Studies, 50(3), 2019, pp 285–304.

54 Eve and Yang and Tuck K Wayne, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 1(1), 2012, p 5.

55 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 506.

56 Irene Watson, ‘Buried Alive’, Law and Critique, 13, 2002, p 263.

57 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 504.

58 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 508.

59 Schaap, ‘Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Democratic Paradox’, p 55.

60 Simpson, As We Have Always Done, p 43 (original emphasis).

61 Gabrielle Appleby and Gemma McKinnon, ‘The Uluru Statement’, Law Society Journal, no. 37, 2017, p 37.

62 Referendum Council, ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’.

63 Stewart Motha, ‘The Failure of “Postcolonial” Sovereignty in Australia’, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 22, 2005, p 108.

64 Paul Muldoon, ‘Reconciliation and Political Legitimacy: The Old Australia and the New South Africa’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 49(2), 2003, p 183.

65 Helen Davidson, ‘Garma Festival: Indigenous Sovereignty Would Be a “Gift for All Australians”’, The Guardian Online, 4 August 2018.

66 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 36.

67 Adrian Little, ‘The Politics of Makarrata: Understanding Indigenous–Settler Relations in Australia’, Political Theory, 48(1), 2020, p 22.

68 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 506. The reference to ‘Maralinga’ refers to the testing of twelve major atomic devices in Australia by the British government between 1952 and 1957 and around 550 ‘minor tests’ that continued until 1963. The devastating impact of these explosions on local Indigenous communities and on the environment was partially acknowledged by a royal commission the government was compelled to establish in 1984 to meet Australia’s obligations under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but the full impact of these tests remains significantly underexplored and forgotten by much of the Australian community. See J D Mittman, ‘Maralinga: Aboriginal Poison Country’, Agora, 52(3), 2017, pp 25–31.

69 Walter D Mignolio and Catherine E Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, p 18 (my own emphasis).

70 Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Decoloniality in Africa: A Continuing Search for a New World Order’, Australasian Review of African Studies, 36(2), 2015, p 23.

71 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 506.

72 Appleby and Davis, ‘The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth’, p 503.

73 Pateman, ‘The Settler Contract’, p 77.

74 Yang and Wayne, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’, p 7.

75 Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, p 103.

76 Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, p 104.

77 United Nations, ‘International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims (24 March)’, https://www.un.org/en/observances/right-to-truth-day (accessed 16 June 2021).

78 See Rosemary Nagy, ‘Transitional Justice as Global Project: Critical Reflections’, Third World Quarterly, 29(2), 2008, pp 275–289; Richard Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State, Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2001; Jeremy J Sarkin and Tetevi Davi, ‘The Togolese Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission: Lessons for Transitional Justice Processes Elsewhere’, Peace and Conflict Studies, 24(1), 2017; Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Joanne Wallis, Renee Jeffery, and Lia Kent, ‘Political Reconciliation in Timor Leste, Solomon Islands and Bougainville: The Dark Side of Hybridity’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 70(2), 2016, pp 159–178; Jaymie Heilman, ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, no. July, 2018; Kate Griffiths, ‘Hegemony and Reconciling Indigenous-State Relations: A Discourse Analysis of Truth Commission Debates in Australia and Norway’, University of South-Eastern Norway, 2018; Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘Reconciliation as a Threat or Structural Change? The Truth and Reconciliation Process and Settler Colonial Policy Making in Finland’, Human Rights Review, 21(3), 2020, pp 293–312.

79 Bashir Bashir and Will Kymlicka, ‘Introduction: Struggles for Inclusion and Reconciliation in Modern Democracies’, in The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies, 2008, p 4.

80 Erik Doxtader, ‘The Faith and Struggle of Beginning (with) Words: On the Turn between Reconciliation and Recognition’, Philosophy and Rhetoric in Dialogue: Redrawing Their Intellectual Landscape, 40(1), 2007, p 120.

81 Doxtader, ‘The Faith and Struggle of Beginning (with) Words’, p 120.

82 Doxtader, ‘The Faith and Struggle of Beginning (with) Words’, p 141.

83 Doxtader, ‘The Faith and Struggle of Beginning (with) Words’, p 122.

84 Schaap, ‘Agonism in Divided Societies’, p 262.

85 Yang and Wayne, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’, p 3.

86 Adam Sitze, The Impossible Machine: A Geneology of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.

87 Nagy, ‘Transitional Justice as Global Project’.

88 Jennifer Balint, Julie Evans, and Nesam McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm: A New Conceptual Approach’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 8(2), 2014, p 195.

89 Maddison and Shepherd, ‘Peacebuilding and the Postcolonial Politics of Transitional Justice’, p 262.

90 Makau Mutua, ‘What Is the Future of Transitional Justice?’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 9(1), 2015, p 5.

91 Adam Sitze, The Impossible Machine, p 2.

92 Maddison and Shepherd, ‘Peacebuilding and the Postcolonial Politics of Transitional Justice’, p 263. See also Stephen Winter, ‘Towards a Unified Theory of Transitional Justice’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 7(2), 2013, pp 224–244; Balint, Evans, and McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm’; Nicola Henry, ‘From Reconciliation to Transitional Justice: The Contours of Redress Politics in Established Democracies’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 9(2), 2015, pp 199–218; Harry Hobbes, ‘Locating the Logic of Transitional Justice in Liberal Democracies: Native Title in Australia’, UNSW Law Journal, 39(2), 2016, pp 512–552.

93 Balint, Evans, and McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm’, p 200.

94 Balint, Evans, and McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm’, p 254.

95 Balint, Evans, and McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm’, p 214.

96 Balint, Evans, and McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm’, p 197.

97 Balint, Evans, and McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm’, p 197.

98 Referendum Council, ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’.

99 Balint, Evans, and McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm’, p 214.

100 Dirk Venema, ‘Transitions as States of Exception: Towards a More General Theory of Transitional Justice’, in Critical Perspectives in Transitional Justice, Cambridge: Insersentia, 2012, p 75.

101 Damien Short, ‘Reconciliation and the Problem of Internal Colonialism’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26(3), 2005, p 269 (original emphasis).

102 Balint, Evans, and McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm’, p 213.

103 Michael Rothberg, ‘Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice’, Narrative, 20(1), 2012, p 6.

104 Yang and Wayne, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’, p 9.

105 Although Indigenous Australians constitute 2% of the total Australian population, they comprise 28% of the adult prison population and 54% of detained youth. See, for example, Chris Cunneen, ‘Indigenous Incarceration: The Violence of Colonial Law and Justice’, in The Violence of Incarceration, 2009, pp 209–224; Russell Hogg, ‘Penality and Modes of Regulating Indigenous Peoples in Australia’, Punishment & Society, 2001.

106 Park, ‘Settler Colonialism, Decolonization and Radicalizing Transitional Justice’, p 17.

107 Simpson, As We Have Always Done, p 176.

108 Park, ‘Settler Colonialism, Decolonization and Radicalizing Transitional Justice’, p 17.

109 Park, ‘Settler Colonialism, Decolonization and Radicalizing Transitional Justice’, p 17.

110 See Jane Lydon and Lyndall Ryan, Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2018. A forthcoming study conducted by Deakin University and Reconciliation Australia, ‘The Role of Truth-Telling in Australian Reconciliation’ found several hundred examples of these types of local engagements around colonial history across the country.

111 Balint, Evans, and McMillan, ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm’, p 211 (my own emphasis).