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ICS Seminar Series - Professor Tim Rowse

Date: Thursday, 25 March 2021

Time: 11.30am–1pm

Venue: The seminar will be held online via Zoom. Please RSVP to email yan.wang@westernsydney.edu.au by 5:00pm Wednesday, 24 March, to receive the zoom link.

Truth-telling and public opinion: evidence from the Reconciliation Barometer

Presented by: Professor Timothy Rowse

Discussant: Ms Robyn Oxley

ABSTRACT

“What do we know about the Australian public’s dispositions towards the truths of Australia’s colonial past?"

Data relevant to answering this question has been collected in alternate years from 2014 to 2020 by Reconciliation Australia and used for its Reconciliation Barometer. This Barometer seeks to measure progress in the reconciliation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. One dimension of reconciliation that the Barometer makes measurable is ‘historic acceptance’ —that is, the proportion of the Indigenous and general community who agree or disagree with several statements about Australian history. This seminar reviews the data and discusses the following points:

  • the differences between the indigenous and general community samples;
  • the puzzlingly large minorities within the Indigenous sample that do not ‘accept’ some of Reconciliation Australia’s historical ‘truths’;
  • the problematic meaning of ‘accept’ in the survey instrument; and
  • the possibility that the moral significance of statements of historical fact affects respondents’ assessment of them.

BIOGRAPHY

Professor Timothy Rowse is a former Professorial Fellow in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and Emeritus Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society.

Although much of what he writes can best be described as History, his formal training has been in Government, Sociology and Anthropology. He has taught at Macquarie University, the Australian National University and Harvard University (where he held the Australian Studies chair in 2003-04), and he has held research appointments at the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland and the ANU.

Since the early 1980s, his research has focused on the relationships between Indigenous and other Australians in Central Australia (where he lived from 1989 to 1996) and in the national political sphere. In the 1990s, his research and other interests led him to write two books about the life and works of Dr H.C. Coombs.