There have been two moments, in the last forty years, of apparent national consensus in support of Indigenous Australians. In May 1967, more than ninety per cent of voters approved changes to the Constitution widely understood to be helpful to Indigenous Australians. And in June 1991 the Australian Parliament gave bipartisan approval to setting up the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.
However, a closer look at both moments reveals cracks in the consensus. At the time of the referendum a large minority of respondents in opinion surveys supported the racial segregation of public spaces, and most said they would not like an Aboriginal person to marry into their family. In 1991, the Coalition expressed its own dissenting view about the limits of ‘reconciliation’, and in 1992-3 the High Court's finding that Indigenous Australians could claim parts of Australia as their 'native title' exacerbated disagreement about what ‘reconciliation’ required.
In Divided Nation? Murray Goot and Tim Rowse propose a way to account for both moments of unity and moments of sharp dispute. Non-Indigenous Australians have long thought about Indigenous Australians in two ways - as both 'the same as' and 'different to' an imagined Australian ‘mainstream’.
Public opinion polls, examined over half a century, reveal the persistence of these two rival and complementary framings of the Indigenous presence. Indeed, by choosing whether to write questions in the language of equality or the language of difference, pollsters can represent 'the public' either as hostile to Indigenous rights or as sympathetic.
In explaining the processes by which 'the public' has become imaginable as a collective actor, with its own thoughts and desires, Goot and Rowse expose some powerful myths propagated by politicians, journalists and pollsters: that there is such a thing as 'Middle Australia’, that there has been a 'backlash' against Indigenous interests, that Australian political culture is defined by 'racism'. They conclude that the ambiguities of 'liberalism' - not the persistence of 'racism' - account for most of the variation in Australian public opinion about Indigenous issues. The public is divided by the multiple implications of some of our most cherished ideals - 'equality', ‘difference’, and ‘responsibility’.
