Among his many achievements, John Howard is sometimes credited with the invention of "dog whistling" politics - whereby, without any objectionable or racist idea being directly stated, the dog hears exactly the message meant.Whatever the truth of such claims, throughout his long career the Australian prime minister has left himself open to the accusation of racism. From questioning Asian immigration in the 1980s to initially welcoming the racist comments of the far-right MP Pauline Hanson, Howard was widely perceived to play the race card to great effect.
He won the 2001 election after dramatically ordering troops to stop a Norwegian container ship, the Tampa, landing on Australian soil hundreds of refugees it had rescued at sea. He has overseen a transition from a national commitment to multiculturalism to a strident advocacy of "national values" - an oily phrase that appears to be a stalking horse for a new intolerance. When riots broke out between white supremacists and Lebanese youths on Sydney beaches in 2005, he described it as an issue of law and order, rather than race.
Certainly Howard has shown scant interest in black Australia, which at the time of his coming to power seemed - for all of its problems - renascent politically, culturally and socially. There was a growing sense that whatever the Australian nation was and would be, at its heart lay a necessary accommodation with black Australia.
Within white Australia there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000 to demand the government say sorry for past injustices. Reconciliation was a single word that encompassed a large hope. But John Howard refused to say sorry. For 10 years his government did little other than dismiss the suffering of Aboriginal people in the past as an invention of leftwing academics in the present.
Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted. By 2000 official figures revealed that more than 41% of indigenous women and 50% of indigenous men could expect to die before they reached 50. Still nothing was done. The condition of many Aboriginal communities - frequently and accurately described as third world - grew only worse. The dreamtime was a grog-ridden nightmare. In the last few years black leaders, government agencies and welfare bodies have been talking of a growing crisis in traditional communities and calling for immediate action. But not until last week did Howard, less than six months out from an election and facing polls pointing to, in his own words, "electoral annihilation", discover this "national emergency".
The immediate catalyst was a Northern Territory government report into child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities. It presented a horrifying picture of black Australia in collapse, ridden by violence, despair, pornography, drugs, gambling and sexual abuse, all fuelled by "rivers of grog".
Howard's response - a five-year takeover of 60 indigenous communities, with soldiers and police overseeing alcohol and pornography bans, the part-quarantining of welfare payments to parents to ensure money is spent on food and other necessities, and the compulsory testing of Aboriginal children for sexual abuse - stunned Australia. Initial confusion soon gave way to condemnation of the plan as draconian, racist, unworkable, an ill-conceived shock-and-awe campaign, a cunning land grab and a black Tampa doomed to fail. Howard's past was rebounding.
It took many back to the horror of the infamous "stolen generation", thousands of Aboriginal children taken, often forcibly, from their families into institutions in a misguided attempt at assimilation through the 20th century. Despite Howard's reassurances, fear and panic were reported to have seized Aboriginal communities. Families were already fleeing to the bush, fearful of seeing soldiers take their children away.
Then condemnation transformed into what is now being described as "a widening revolt", joining together Labor state premiers, a former Liberal prime minister, indigenous leaders, religious leaders, police, and more than 60 community and indigenous groups.
From Howard's viewpoint, his action may well have successfully wedged the Labor opposition (which supports the plan federally) and black Australia, while portraying him as decisive and humane. His bold strategy seemed to turn 40 years of Aboriginal politics on its head with a pronounced rightwing twist: instead of self-determination, a new paternalism; instead of rights, duties; instead of welfare, obligations.
And yet Howard's plan drew qualified support from one of black Australia's most gifted and articulate leaders, Noel Pearson. This was less surprising than it may seem: his ideas, after all, were the stimulus for Howard's plan. Pearson had long argued for personal responsibility and an end to a culture of welfare dependence in black communities, and had called for intervention.
But Pearson has made it clear in his writings that the fundamental necessity for black Australia is to understand why it doesn't have power and what it must do to gain that power. Pearson, in giving Howard some common ground on which he could act and drawing Howard out, may just have done something remarkable.
It appears ever more unlikely that the profound issues Howard's plan raises will be contained within his narrow authoritarian nostrums, and nor will it end with the federal election later this year. After 10 years a great debate has finally recommenced about white and black Australia. It is not a debate, as Howard for so long pretended, invented by ideologically driven academics about Australia's past. It is about Australia's future. It is about whether Australia is prepared to engage with the most fundamental truth of itself.
For 10 years the trauma at the heart of Australia had not only been denied, but exacerbated. Now there was a damburst, a national outpouring of despair and anger. With every day since he announced his plan, the clamour has grown only louder. And Howard - journeying like Quixote into the heart of a nation's great historical wound that he had denied for 10 long years, seeing only a windmill of an election - seemed neither to comprehend nor care, as the ride grew rougher and stranger with every passing day.
Richard Flanagan, the author, most recently of The Unknown Terrorist.