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June 6, 2003
Every now and again I have argued for the tragic perspective into Australian life. The latest was the downfall of the Governor General. There has always been a resounding silence to this proposal. Tragedy avoids the hate sessions.
So it is good to see tragedy being used here with respect to destructive relationships between aborigines and white settlers in Tasmania. It offers a way around the closed circle of the current debates once the research errors of Reynolds, Ryan et al, have been corrected.
Let me quote what is said:
"The awful truth of tragedy is suppressed in the present debate.Tragedy is not injustice. It is, as starkly revealed in Sophocles's Antigone, the conflict of right with right specifically, in the play, the legitimate claims of Creon the civil power as set against Antigone's ardent loyalty to holy and unwritten laws.
THE play is a dramatic representation of the tragic facts of collision and reconciliation. Public law and order and familial love and duty are both presented as good and integral aspects of a moral society.
But, in the play, both forces are pushed to their extremes by the opposing parties so that they negate one another....To say that the tragedy of Tasmania's Aborigines is better understood by reading Sophocles' "privileged words on paper" does not belittle the suffering. Rather, it makes the horror more real because it confronts us with a chilling possibility what happened was an inevitability. No one can be blamed."
Greek tragedy offers a way of acknowledging the horror, holding onto the historical shudder and making ethical sense of what happened.
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