Forget Howard: Recognise Australia's Mandela

Patrick Dodson ranks amongst the greatest of Australian men. For eleven long years his extraordinary presence and capacity have been lost to the nation. With the prospect of Kevin Rudd or Peter Costello as Prime Minister we have the prospect of this great figure returning to national service. The question for the nation and for Dodson is: how best can his destiny to be one of our greatest Australian leaders be fulfilled?

Our liyan, our spirit, tells us, cries out almost, that this nation has to be reconciled with the Indigenous people and with this land in order for anyone to have pride and dignity in who we are as Australians.

Patrick Dodson

 Bob Hawke seemed to have some pre-ordained destiny to be a national leader, ordinary voters saw it within him. If this is true of Hawke it is also true of Patrick Dodson. The problem for Dodson is that the Howard era short-circuited the period of great men and leadership in favour of a short term pragmatism. There are many who would continue to argue that this is a good thing. But the truth is that as a nation under Howard we have stopped dreaming about what could become and focused on material questions. It was as if the whole nation became mesmerized by their movie size plasma screen in their collective lounge rooms.

Suddenly it seems the nation has woken up on the sofa to realize that ultimately we will all die and there are only so many days on this earth to achieve and do the great things of life and to provide for our children’s dreams. Even John Howard has realized on the eve of his electoral doom. But I agree with Lois O’Donohue it is too late for Howard. His time has come and gone.

Suddenly the lounge rooms are emptying, the screens are flickering off and once again the country is returning to big fundamental issues: they are seeing that the alliance with George Bush and the US in Iraq is a great problem and that our past and future relations may even have been hurt by Howard and Bush; that our economic future lies with our relations with neighbouring powers like China; that the climate is changing and that nationally and internationally our lives must change; and that amongst other core questions, there must be a meaningful and lasting reconciliation with Aboriginal Australians, that, as much as possible recognizes and compensates for past suffering and sets up a positive course for the future in much the same way as Nelson Mandela’s South Africa has done.

In my humble opinion Patrick Dodson is Australia’s Mandela. Is this comparison an inflated one given that unlike Mandela, Dodson has not spent a lifetime in prison? I think not. Patrick and his brother Mick have overcome the greatest suffering and injustice in their own personal lives. They never knew their mother very well and became wards of the state in their pre-teen years. Both Patrick and Mick became outstanding students and leaders of both white and black young people. Patrick was made Head PrefectMonivae College in Hamilton Victoria. He was a champion football player and ruckman later combining with the great Yorta Yorta Aboriginal leader Paul Briggs in the famous Fitzroy Aboriginal team. After leaving school Patrick became Australia’s first Catholic Priest and I have attended events where some clergy have cried, even now, at his departure from the church some years later.

Patrick was to become a model of Catholic achievement but he could not sell out his own people’s spirituality. Unlike the eugenic racists who dominated the Australian state from the 1860s onwards, the Catholics and many of the churches believed that Aboriginal people were of equal ability and capacity as any non-Indigenous person. However that they had not calculated was that Dodson’s very being was imbued with an Aboriginal spirituality and knowledge every bit as strong and disciplined and impressive as the Catholic religion. Like other Aboriginal spiritual leaders that had been picked out before him, the ignorance and arrogant rationality of the Europeans, created an impossible ferment within Dodson. He could not stay with the church and keep his allegiance to his people and so another journey of leadership began for him.

Patrick has the combined tragedy of white and black Australia flowing in his veins. In his Irish ancestry is the hardness that came from “the blacks of Europe” – the potato famine refuges and convicts that we now so well in the legend of the Kelly gang. In his Indigenous ancestry Patrick is a Yawuru man but I know that his birth was a highly symbolic event and that as someone of the pelican moiety he careels high above the song lines that linked all of the nations of Aboriginal Australia. Only he, in my humble opinion, as an observer and friend of many Australian Aboriginal leaders, can see and re-connect them meaningfully. Giving him the resources to play this role is one of the obligations that we non-Indigenous Australians have to Indigenous Australia. But for the past eleven years Dodson has struggled, his office is barely able to pay the rent, he has had to become distracted from the great problems that are at the heart of this nations future because he had to engage in piece meal consultancy work.

One of the reasons why Dodson cannot forgive John Howard for his lack of compassion in saying sorry on behalf of the post-war generation of Australians for the wrongs done to Aboriginal Australians is that after leaving the church both he and his brother Mick had the gut wrenching jobs of researching and documenting Australia’s national eugenic crime of  separating Aboriginal Australia’s mixed race children from their parents and families and the subsequent national disgrace of black deaths in custody. The contradictions of having to broker the ignorance of white Australia and to obtain justice for Indigenous Australians would have killed literally lesser men. Somehow though because the tragedy in their own lives had hardened them, they were able to take the pressure. Even now it makes me weep at what they must have had to go through and experience. These two reports rank as one of the greatest pieces of non-fiction literature in Australian history. They document epic stories that may in fact establish that on our watch, that is in our lifetimes and in the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents, Aboriginal Australians endured the greatest living pain of any of the ignominious periods of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

It is to Patrick Dodson, and his brother Professor Mick Dodson, that we owe the greatest of thanks for bringing this epic period of pain to the eyes of the nation.

Because Patrick Dodson has been the great documenter of pain and because in doing this work he has been the great uniter of Aboriginal nations and because his very existence is of special significance marking him out as a great leader – so too, Dodson, and only Dodson, amongst the current generation of Aboriginal leaders is capable of achieving and brokering a lasting reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. But he must be left free to do this his own way. He cannot head another bureaucratic committee of national reconciliation and lead them through their own personal journeys, the nation must give Dodson the freedom and support he needs and we must trust in his judgement of the way forward.

I could write reams about Dodson’s destiny but I will leave that to historians in the future, the big question we now face is how can we ordinary Australians help Patrick Dodson to play his role midst the pantheon of greatest Australian leaders. How can we make the most of the life and understanding of this great man?

My personal view is that Patrick Dodson could become the greatest  and hopefully the last of Australia’s Governor-Generals. In doing so he would father a reconciled Australia that stands on its own two feet and he alone would best represent the independence and unique sovereignty of our country and its peoples. Some may argue that this would be too limiting a role for Dodson to play in the next phase of Australian affairs, that he is best needed within the parliament or as the head of a powerful new Commonwealth Aboriginal agency. But there are many other capable of playing this role amongst the national Aboriginal leadership group. Foremost Dodson needs state resources and support that the office of Governor General would afford him. I see Dodson as a Governor General not based at Yarralumla but on his homelands in Broome.  I also believe that as our Head of State Patrick Dodson would help the nation grow spiritually closer to Aboriginal Australia.  He would take the whole nation on a great journey of exploration and discovery about our own people. He would articulate the power of Aboriginal spirituality and culture in a way that would forever change our nation.

So let us advocate for Patrick Dodson to become Australia’s next Governor General and the first independent Australia's Head of State. Let us look fully and honestly at what some may regard as Patrick Dodson’s outspoken-ness and radical edges and and let us remember Mandela, once regarded as a murderous radical , now the world’s most celebrated peace maker and visionary. This, I sincerely believe, is Patrick Dodson’s role. He is our Mandela and if now he is overlooked as our next Governor General it would be analogous, for this country, as if South Africa had never released Mandela from gaol.