Is Prince Harry really prepared to face up to the Commonwealth’s past?

When people such as Prince Harry say they want us to face up to the past, do they really mean it? It’s a demanding task, needing patience, humility, and effort. Some people spend their whole lives on it. It means understanding people from very different cultures with very different values. It means acquiring some feeling for the hard physical conditions they had to face, their insecurity, their limited resources, the always slow and often imperfect spread of information, and the frequent illnesses and pains they took for granted. It means gaining some insight into their beliefs about the universe, their understanding of their own history, their fears about their present, and their expectations of the future. Facing up to the past should make us less sure of our own superiority. Is Prince Harry – who said, when talking about the Commonwealth, that we need to ‘look at the past’ to move forward – prepared for that?

Once in a remote part of Queensland, my hosts showed me the unpublished diary of the family who in the 1880s had set up the cattle station they owned.