Walsh begins his assault upon what he believes is a pervasive political correctness about Aboriginality by targeting the 'censorious classes' and 'chattering classes', who are, he maintains, the villains here. His accusation begs the question -- to what class does Peter Walsh belong? As a critic of public comment and ideas about the status of indigenous people, what makes Walsh qualitatively different to those he disparages? Surely if such classes indeed exist, then Walsh is not outside them, but is a solid constituent -- discoursing on matters of history and public policy with regard to indigenous peoples along with Archbishop Hollingsworth (who was outraged by Hanson's comments), by implication Manning Clark, and other unidentified, but presumably legion chatterers. As one who presumably would have 'classed' himself, and perhaps still does, a social democrat, Walsh should know that 'classes' can hardly be defined by sets of ideas or political beliefs. Common usage understands classes to be socio-economic formations. In what ways then would Walsh socio-economically distinguish himself from his adversaries? In the absence of any classificatory information, and based on the fact that Walsh is obviously at least occasionally engaged in thinking and chattering, we must assume he is more or less of this same 'chattering class' as the rest of us. So then, what is the substance of his chatter?

Walsh bemoans a lack of racial equity in apology giving. If white Australia is required to apologise to Aborigines for a history of injustice then, at the suggestion of Pauline Hanson, Aborigines should apologise to the descendants of the Chinese they allegedly ate last century. For whatever reason, these Chinese descendants or their agents have not as yet appeared on the scene to demand such an apology, and we could scarcely expect Aboriginal representatives, if they felt such atonement was due, to accept that Pauline Hanson is suitably accredited to receive it on the former's behalf. However, the Australian government is clearly on hand to receive reparation requests from Aborigines, who are also very much here in person to make them. But more to the point, Walsh has framed the matter as essentially one of a ceremonial and symbolic exchange of remorse. There may be a need for this but it is only one facet of Aboriginal demands upon government -- from appropriate social and economic program delivery, to land rights, to the recognition of their inherent right of sovereignty. None of these demands is in any way compromised or qualified by the decoy of alleged cannibalism in North Queensland more than a century ago, in the same way they are not diminished by the fact that Aborigines in WA make up over a third of those in state prisons (because, as Peter Newman, one time Perth radio shock jock aspirant, so deeply put it -- 'they commit more crimes'). It is perhaps tempting to counter Hanson's ploy by pointing to the far greater acts of violence and oppression committed against Aborigines by settlers than Aborigines could have possibly inflicted upon the latter. Alternatively one could simply term any act of Aboriginal violence as justifiable resistance to invasion. But while these responses might be defensible positions, they are to some extent playing along with a game that says that a people's rights are dependent upon their morally good performance. This is really why we perpetually worry about such negative images of Aborigines, because we think their rights, and hence survival, hinge on their gaining a certificate of moral fitness.

This is where cannibalism is not just any kind of morally bad performance, any kind of abhorrent violence. It has historically held a very special place within Western sensibilities at least. An old chestnut. Imagine a coin bearing the romantic image of the noble savage on one side and the human flesh-eater on the other. It seems to have the effect of nullifying the most basic of human rights to freedom and autonomy. People like Hanson and Walsh raise the bogey of cannibalism -- extra loudly, it seems, when Aborigines get close to having some land returned to them -- as a kind of ultimate proof of the justness of colonisation, the European civilising mission, the obsolescence of indigenous custom and hence justifying forced assimilation. It is not my intention here to argue the spuriousness of claims of indigenous cannibalism -- people such as Brisbane's Richard Buchhorn have done that admirably -- but rather, to argue that it should not be necessary to argue it as a matter of urgency.

Because even where it is proven, barbarism does not in any case annul the claims of a people for freedom and autonomy. Not even the last word in barbarity. Recall the welling of world emotion at the sight of the Berlin Wall coming down and the German people celebrating their re-unification. Their indomitable sovereignty even becomes the proof of a new world order. It seems there is absolutely nothing the German people could have done to compromise or diminish their inherent right of sovereignty. So immune is this right to the vagaries and extremes of collective behaviour (in the sense that Hanson implies) that the 12 million lost in the most unspeakable systematised murder in human history does not in any way -- for all but perhaps the survivors, debase it. The fact of the Holocaust did not seem even to tarnish the ecstatic scenes of the Germans, re-united and free.

But here in Australia there prevails a certain mentality whereby the implication that cannibalism plausibly disqualifies the right of self-determination of a people -- while by no means generally accepted, and rejected outright by many -- is not altogether ridiculous. It is not so beyond the pale that it cannot be regurgitated in a respectable daily finance paper, a pillar of the same liberal polity that so recently unprejudicially rejoiced in the German people's inviolable right.

The same goes for Walsh's questions about the "goodness" of the idea of 'knock[ing] out a 12 year-old's tooth with a wooden punch and rock'; 'unhygienically circumcise[ing] a 12 year-old boy with a sharp bit of stone'; 'marry[ing] 12 year-old girls to old men'. Certainly these claims may be inaccurate, or distorted or ethnocentrically biased and extracted from context or more comparable to non-Aboriginal customs than might be presumed, or all of these things. But as for cannibalism, no matter how strange or objectionable some might find them, they are part of the reservoir of red herrings drawn upon by some commentators to constrain the public discussion about indigenous rights to the perennial question of the moral worth of indigenous culture.

As Henry Reynolds indicates in his recent book, Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation there is no act on the part of Aborigines, alleged or factual, that can have legally extinguished their sovereign rights, except their voluntary formal ceding of those rights -- and that they have never done. Indigenous rights of sovereignty and self-determination are inherent. This does not mean non-Aborigines have no rights. Neither does it follow that we must vacate the continent or that Aborigines must establish a separate nation-state. Sovereign rights can and do overlap and co-exist. But for this co-existence to be just and successful we must first of all fully recognise and respect the distinct sovereign status of Aborigines, and negotiate with them to realise the various entitlements that follow from this.

If any criticism could be made of Archbishop Hollingsworth's outrage at Hanson's comments last July, it is that, rather than say 'such things should never be said', he could have identified them for what they were -- an attempt to sustain the fallacy that collective Aboriginal rights and entitlements (including the right to an 'apology') are voided because of Aboriginal behaviour, past or present, spurious or factual. Instead of entering into a debate on Hanson's (and Walsh's) terms, on the truth or otherwise of Aboriginal cannibalism or any other interchangeable offence, we need to dismantle the structure of ideas that makes them so worrisome.