'If we are to survive as a people ': Noel Pearson's economic history

The representation of Indigenous Australians as a 'population' scarcely enters into the work of Noel Pearson. His is a discourse of people-hood. 'Australia is a country shared by two peoples,' he declared in his 2004 Judith Wright Lecture. He rarely refers to statistical disparity when he writes about the relationship between these two peoples: 'closing the gaps' is not the social justice idea that drives him. Rather, the crucial relationship to get right, he wrote in 2007, is between 'Indigenous governance institutions' and Australia's governments. He asks: 'Is the relationship based on negotiation, and is there mutual accountability in the relationship?' These are questions about the quality of relationships between peoples, not about the size of the socio-economic gaps between populations. In Pearson's thoughts on people-hood, the 'link with ancestral lands and culture' is fundamental, as he made clear in his 2005 Mabo Oration. However, his notion of people-hood is more than 'cultural'. He titled his Wright Lecture 'Peoplehood', and devoted not a single sentence to evoking Indigenous cultural heritage; rather, he declared the 'economic context' to be 'ultimate'.