Confronting history is not erasing it

The Sirius Building in Woden - occupied by the Department of Health - would be dropping its old name and getting a new one.

The HMS Sirius was the flagship of the First Fleet that brought Arthur Phillip and his cargo of prisoners to Australia. The present building's design, intended to suggest a ship's stern, was created by Peter Russell, who said he was disappointed.

Peter Kurti of the Centre for Independent Studies, worried over "yet another attempt to unpick Australia's history and its past". Is this so? And if it is, where do we draw the line?

The answer to the latter question is that no effort to draw a line will have the slightest effect.

Debates about our history and its legacy are ongoing and can never be contained. Nor should they be in a democracy that values freedom of inquiry and expression.

In recent years around the world - from South Africa through to the United Kingdom and United States - debate about the legacies of racism and colonialism have intensified.

They find expression in the destruction of statues of imperialists and slave-traders, in decisions to remove Confederate officers from public view and, yes, in proposals to rename places, institutions and buildings.

It's hardly unusual to find public things being renamed in response to a changed political circumstances and sensibilities. It happens to cities, and even to nations. Decolonisation often provides the backdrop to name changes - as it has in the case of the Sirius Building. Such change reflects wider transformations in how societies remember the past, and how they understand its implications for the present.

The name "Sirius" was apparently first bestowed in 1968, on an older building, with surrounding street names in Woden Town Centre being connected with the First, Second and Third Fleets. Timing matters: this was two years before the Cook bicentenary of 1970, and a period when Australians were becoming more likely to feel pride rather than shame in their convict heritage.

But 1968 was also the year on which W.E.H. Stanner, in delivering his Boyer Lectures for the ABC, spoke of "The Great Australian Silence". In the previous year, Australians had overwhelmingly voted "yes" in a referendum about Aboriginal people, but they were rather confused about what they had actually voted for.

The national reckoning with the destruction colonisation wrought on Indigenous peoples was in its infancy. So was the movement of Aboriginal rights.

The "history" culture warriors want to defend from the vandals often turns out to be of more recent vintage than they imagine. That is true of the Sirius Building. It reflects not some deep and abiding Australian reverence for the First Fleet as a national foundation story but a late-1960s sensibility about Australian history: one that was learning to cherish convict origins while still refusing to confront what 1788 meant for Indigenous people.

So, does this mean the name of the building should be changed? It would not be unprecedented, even in Canberra. Centraplaza - also in Woden - became Charles Perkins House in 2019, without apparent controversy.

While "Centraplaza" was notable for its blandness and had no historical associations, it is doubtful whether too many Australians - or Canberrans - would recognise the connection of "Sirius" to the foundation of British Australia. Many, after all, are unable to decide whether January 26 commemorates Arthur Phillip or James Cook.

Indigenous Australia does register in the naming practices of the ACT.

Highlights include the town centres of Tuggeranong and Gungahlin, the district of Molonglo, and suburbs such as Aranda and Ngunnawal. Liberal Party senator Neville Bonner, and the activist, sportsman, and governor of South Australia, Doug Nicholls, each have suburbs named in their honour.

Overwhelmingly, though, it is settler Australia that figures. Interestingly, among the many politicians honoured, most major architects of the White Australia policy are there: Barton, Deakin, Kingston, Reid, Watson and Higgins. Samuel Griffith was Queensland premier at a time when frontier massacres of Indigenous people were still common; similarly with John Forrest as premier of Western Australia, and John Downer of South Australia at a time when that colony governed the Northern Territory.

There have been no campaigns for renaming the Canberra suburbs named after these men.

The fibreglass statue of Winston Churchill at the Australian National University has received more attention from critics and activists. So far, anyway. The time might come when harder questions are asked about places named after our Federation - and White Australia - founders. That is not to be dreaded: well-functioning democracies have a knack for resolving such questions.

One technique some advocate is "dialogical memorialisation", a concept developed by the Australian sociologist Brad West. It is a complex term for a simple idea. Rather than letting a state or site speak for itself, it is possible to add detail that communicates the contested histories that swirl around it.

In the case of the Sirius Building, if there is to be a change of name, one could add a historic exhibit or plaque that explains the background to the original naming of the building and why that name was changed.

Rather than erasing history, the effect is to draw attention to it. Where once those who encountered the building's name might have known nothing of its provenance, now they are confronted with it. It is in such moments of questioning, and disruption, that we can ethically use, rather than abuse, a complex, contested and often painful history.