Reconciliation: The Genesis of a New Social Representation

Abstract

In this paper we examine the various ways in which the recently introduced concept of ‘reconciliation’ into Australian public discourse was represented and constructed by political and community leaders during the 1997 Australian Reconciliation Convention. This Convention became an important site from which contested representations of reconciliation emerged and subsequently proliferated into the wider Australian polity. A discursive analysis of a subset of 12 speeches delivered at the Convention demonstrated that the concept of reconciliation was represented as a process moving towards peaceful co-existence of different cultural groups within Australian society. A common and pervasive metaphor that was used by speakers to anchor this process to the already familiar was that of a journey in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people walked together. This journey of walking together was constructed explicitly as natural, necessary, moral, and based on common-sense. Furthermore, reconciliation was represented as an essential process in the development of a unified nation. Reconciliation was constructed as simultaneously a topdown process involving government and institutional policies and practices, and a bottom-up or ‘grass-roots’ process involving the wider Australian community. Both practical and symbolic actions were represented as necessary for reconciliation to become a reality, requiring both changes at a collective and political level, and changes at the individual psychological level. Our discussion focuses on how these representations of reconciliation and the public debates they have generated in the wider Australian community are inextricably related to struggles over competing versions of Australia’s history and national identity.