Cathy Freeman, reconciliation and the burden of history

ABSTRACT

On 25 September 2020, the ABC released a documentary film to mark the twentieth anniversary of Cathy Freeman’s gold medal victory in the women’s 400 metres at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Media interest in Freeman’s victory still erupts periodically, most recently, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary. This article revisits Cathy Freeman’s historic gold-medal-winning performance in order to ponder the lost promise of reconciliation. At the time, and still today, Freeman’s victory is overwhelmingly celebrated as more than just an athletic feat; it is also lauded as a victory for reconciliation. Rather than trying to determine the extent to which Freeman’s race did bolster reconciliation, or even whether it contributed to reconciliation at all, this article instead analyses the metaphors, rhetoric and images through which Freeman’s victory was represented as an act of reconciliation, and what this tells us about how reconciliation plays out in the Australian context. In particular, it argues that the complex ways in which Freeman’s victory were represented, and continue to be understood, reveal a widespread desire to be free from the burdens of history by projecting the work of reconciliation onto Freeman herself.

KEYWORDS:

• Cathy freeman
• reconciliation
• olympics
• history
• sport

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A number of books have analysed the meanings of reconciliation in Australia. Murray Goot and Tim Rowse’s Divided Nation? published in 2007, examined the ‘collective philosophical ambivalence about Indigenous policy in Australia’, including the Reconciliation process. Damien Short’s 2008 Reconciliation and Colonial Power and Andrew Gunstone’s Unfinished Business the following year (2009) both critiqued the deficiencies of the reconciliation process. In 2010, an exchange in the Australian Journal of History and Politics between Rowse, Gunstone and Short, provides a sense of the range of positions on reconciliation. More recently, Penny Edmond’s 2016 book on transnational performances of reconciliation in settler colonial societies argues that they can be both coercive and utopian, and shaped by ambivalence. Edmonds explores how performances of reconciliation often work to block substantive discussion of the past but are frequently re-visioned by Indigenous people in ways that assert the historical and cultural dimensions of sovereignty.

2. See Simpson on Indigenous refusal.

3. For a detailed analysis of letters to the editor about Freeman and her victory, and what these reveal about the contested place of Indigenous Australians in the national imaginary, see Bruce and Wensing (2009).

4. Freeman’s family history, including the oppressions her family endured and the resistance they enacted was more fully told in the SBS series, Who Do You Think You Are? which first aired in August 2016. (https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/video/14,727,747,905/Who-Do-You-Think-You-Are-S1-Ep4-Catherine-Freeman).

5. Freeman continues to function as a source of inspiration in subsequent commercials, including this Coles commercial that was aired at the time of London Olympics in 2014. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = RboUXrhf24Q).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maggie Nolan

Maggie Nolan is an Associate Professor in the National School of Arts on the Brisbane Campus of Australian Catholic University. Her research focuses on representations of race in Australian literature and culture and she has published widely in the field.

I would like to thank my colleagues, Professor Noah Riseman and Dr Amber Gwynne, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.