Truth-telling about a settler-colonial legacy: decolonizing possibilities?

In 2017, the Uluru Statement calling for Voice, Treaty and Truth was released by Australia’s Referendum Council. The Uluru Statement calls for a Makarrata Commission to oversee a process of ‘agreement-making’ and ‘truth-telling’. I argue that it was in the regional dialogues held by the Referendum Council prior to the release of the Uluru Statement that this demand for truth-telling was substantively articulated by dialogue participants. This article explores this grassroots invocation of truth-telling within the context of the desire for political transformation, most recently expressed in the Uluru Statement. I argue that truth-telling is conceptualized by regional dialogue participants as an opportunity for First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians to participate as equals in a process of place-based dialogic engagement about the ‘truths’ of colonial history that may or may not lead to local reconciliation. This type of ‘agonistic’ political encounter, therefore, does not assume an outcome of national or even local reconciliation. I contend that these types of encounters may have the potential to create local decolonizing spaces in which more equal terms of association are negotiated. However, they could also be appropriated to pursue ideological forms of consensus that undermine this possibility, as occurred in previous periods of Australian history.