But What About the Piccaninnies?

Andrew Bolt, The Hun's answer to Kyle Sandilands, has had a very angry bee in his infested bonnet this week. Andrew is outraged that prizes and scholarships for aborigines are going to people who are too deficient in skin and hair pigmentation to be proper blacks.

On Sunday, artist Danie Mellor, winner of the 2009 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award attracted Bolt's outrage with a double offence: not being black enough for Andy and his readers, and winning the prize with an art-work that wasn't proper aboriginal art. It wasn't a dot painting. Mellor was brave (or foolish) enough to reply to Bolt; all it got him from Bolt and his readers was more derision and contempt.

On Wednesday, it was Fulbright Scholar Mark McMillan's turn in Bolt's pillory. Bolt found plenty to sneer about, including this article by McMillan at ABC Online, where 'McMillan describes the agony of not being discriminated against for being Aboriginal'. In keeping with Bolt's high journalistic standards, a bit of deft cut and pasting produced an edited quote that depicted McMillan as a chronic whiner - 'Just the kind of Aboriginal who needs a special handout.'

On Thursday, Bolt added Rebecca McGrath, the latest recipient of the Monika Law Scholarship at the University of Technology Sydney, to his roster of fake aboriginals, went McMillan again (for receiving the Black Women’s Action in Education Foundation Scholarship) and took a gratuitous swipe at UTS Law professor Larisa Behrendt (A frequent target for Bolt).

Knowing that a picture is worth a thousand inflammatory words, in all three posts, Bolt included photographs of the undeserving 'whites' and the real aborigines they were elbowing aside, including pictures of 'real draw-in-the-dirt Aboriginal artists such as Dorothy Napangardi, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson and Walangkura Napanangka' and a pair of smiling aboriginal children who looked much too young to benefit from either a Fulbright scholarship or a scholarship to UTS anyway.

By Friday Bolt had enough material for a column; he'd also (perhaps at the behest of The Hun's editor) managed to concoct a couple of principled reasons for his outrage. The first we've already heard - white folks shouldn't be taking awards meant for black folks. The second:

And here’s my other objection.

Seeking power and reassurance in a racial identity is not just weak - a
surrendering of your individuality, and a borrowing of other people’s
glories.

It’s also exactly what we have too much of already.

The noble ideal of Australia, that we judge each other by our character
and deeds, and not our faith, fortune or fatherland, is breaking down...

For me, Bolt's resort to calling his targets 'weak' carries vague echoes of the schoolyard of the 1960s, where being 'weak' was an invitation to bullying. It suggests a very unpleasant mentality to match Bolt's unpleasant public behaviour. What he has to say about those who 'borrow other people's glories' might equally apply to the history warriors, like Bolt himself, who want history teachers to ignore the bad stuff and concentrate on giving kids a history they can be proud of. We have too much of it already? That wasn't what he was saying about John Howard's 2006 history summit and for years he has been routinely ranting about the superiority of our culture over all others. Bolt, it seems, is as weak as those he targets.

That final invocation of 'the noble ideal of Australia' rings especially hollow, when Bolt has spent so many words (and so much of his time over the week) on attacking people not so much on their characters and deeds, but on the spurious grounds of race. But then no seasoned Bolt reader expects to find principled consistency in his writing. That's not what he's paid for.

Elsewhere: Jason Wilson describes what it's like to be 'Bolted' at New Matilda.