A New Lois O'donoghue Comes Back Fighting
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday January 28, 1997
The new Lois O'Donoghue appeared publicly in Sydney for the first time yesterday, choosing the Australia Day holiday to warn that if Australians had no interest in "the unhappy episodes in our past" Anzac Day would end.
Dr O'Donoghue - who has honorary doctorates from "seven or eight" universities and has now ditched "Miss" - signalled that the Federal Government could expect no rest from her criticism since her retirement as chairwoman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission last month.
Just before Christmas she believed she was on her deathbed when she was hospitalised for 10 days with pneumonia. But yesterday, in a new role as elder stateswoman, she rebutted the call of the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, for Australians not to dwell on the sins of the past.
"In recent times it has been suggested that Australians are not much interested in the unhappy episodes in our past, the implication being that we don't like to dwell on our failures, much less be held accountable for them," she said.
"Such thinking - if applied consistently - would see an end to Anzac Day and the commemoration of events at Gallipoli and in Vietnam," she said, launching two Aboriginal Studies Press books at the State Library.
"Much of the criticism of a 'black armband ' view of history seems to be driven by the desire to avoid any liability for present circumstances and above all to avoid compensation.
"Where just cause for compensation is revealed by a detailed reading of history, it compounds the dishonesty to dismiss a legitimate claim as exploitation of guilt."
Dr O'Donoghue found proof that cross-cultural misunderstandings could be explored without "accusation or vitriol" in the books she launched as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival: Black Mary and Gunjies by Sydney playwright Julie Janson and The Great Forgetting by Canberra poet Geoff Page and Port Pirie artist Pooaraar.
Yet Page revealed that "several major publishers" rejected his book on two centuries of "contact" because it was "too expensive to publish and too hot to handle - too political".
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald