Marr paints his characters meticulously. Richard Jones, an astute businessman and Christian evangelical, amassed large tracts of land on which to graze his sheep. His accumulation of wealth rested on clearing the land of its original occupants. Aboriginal people were slaughtered with no protection from the colony, a process that Jones was able to keep at arm’s length by giving others the bloody work of “dispersal” or “reprisal.”

Like many other Christians, Jones failed to see the humanity in Aboriginal people and so his charity couldn’t extend to them. At the height of his landholding, he would have more than 600,000 acres. His is the story of the “entrepreneur gentleman,” a type whose wealth was often portrayed as coming from acumen and savvy but who, in truth, took land with brute force (even if not by his own hand) and then used his wealth, power and position (in parliament, commerce and banking) to ensure that laws favoured his interests and didn’t protect those who had been removed.

Marr’s profile of Edmund B. Uhr reveals a man with his own aspirations for large landholdings and status, whose appointment as magistrate gave him the power to condone violence or turn a blind eye to it, often for his own convenience. Marr then tracks the exploits of two of Uhr’s sons, brothers Reg and D’Arcy, as they move through Queensland and into the Gulf country as officers of the Native Police. They helped clear Aboriginal populations from traditional lands, suppressing resistance while avoiding having literal blood on their hands.

This is a two-generational account of the colonisation process. Through the stories of his subjects, Marr shows how land was taken by force and without payment, and how these men used their wealth, status and power to create the rules that validated their theft and turned a blind eye to the violence used to take the land. Marr also illustrates how, on the rare occasions when colonial law sought to temper the excessive violence and murder and hold its perpetrators to account, new strategies emerged to achieve the same end with less accountability. Humanitarian concerns were met with derision by those who charged that sympathetic city-dwellers had no understanding of life on the frontier and in the newly conquered lands.

Marr’s recounting of barbarities against Aboriginal men, women and children is factual and to the point. He understands that this is no place for timidity and euphemisms. But nor is there any need for exaggeration or hyperbole. His account is thorough, searing and unflinching, the stories of these four men compellingly framed by his knowledge of the legal frameworks and politics of the time and his attention to the public debates playing out in the era’s newspapers.

Killing for Country also sets what was occurring in Australia in the context of colonisation processes around the globe, a facet that is too often overlooked. He notes, for instance, that the American war of independence had been sparked by a refusal to grant more land to the colonisers, and the British weren’t keen to make that mistake again. When the line around the Sydney colony’s nineteen counties was breached, there was little appetite to rein anyone in.

Through these prisms, Marr presents a broader narrative of Australian history. In bringing together the personal and the political, he presents a story of power, privilege and the process of aggressive colonisation — of brutal, concerted and bloody dispossession — with not even the facade of a treaty offered to those being conquered.

But Killing for Country is also the story of resistance. Unmasking the violence needed to take country and keep it exposes as a convenient and necessary colonial lie the myth that Aboriginal people simply faded into the background, inevitably ceding ground to a superior force. What emerges clearly from the conflict explored in Marr’s book is that Aboriginal people fought tenaciously for their land, at many moments repelling the onslaught of colonisation ferociously and fearlessly. It was the depth of this refusal to cede that prompted the more shamelessly brutal force in which Marr’s four subjects played their roles.

Marr has been one of the great intellectual contributors to the critique of Australia’s national narrative. Through his body of work, including his books Dark Victory and Panic, and his Quarterly Essays The White Queen and His Master’s Voice, he has been a persuasive critic of the divisive race politics of the Howard era and their legacy, and a compassionate contributor to debates about the type of country we should be. Killing for Country continues his thoughtful interventions in and critiques of the story Australia wants to tell about itself.

With his meticulous, time-consuming research clear in each page, Marr couldn’t have anticipated the exact moment in history when his book would be released. His account of how the country was taken comes just as Australia is processing the fallout of the failed Voice referendum.

The lead-up to the vote saw an increase in the visibility and vitriol of racist tropes — that Aboriginal people are savage and backward, that they were getting ‘something for nothing’ and that recognition of their distinct place would “divide the nation.” Killing for Country reminds us of the seeds of those antiquated and racist ideologies and the purpose they serve.

Marr would also be fully awake to the ripples in the pond that a book like this creates. As a public intellectual who has constantly interrogated what racism and prejudice does to the fabric of Australian society, he is aware of the history of ideological resistance to the forceful telling of frontier history. There is no longer a black armband or white blindfold: they were part of a contest of ideologies over what story Australia wanted to tell itself. Marr slices through this. There is no place for the heroic “white man conquering the land” narrative and there is no excuse for shying away from words like “conquest,” “invasion,” “genocide” and “massacre.” These debates about whether there were massacres or stolen generations were never about a truthful Australian history.

But it is hard to read Marr’s book as an Aboriginal woman and not feel it personally. Massacre sites litter the rivers of my traditional country, and accounts like Killing for Country are a form of validation, however tough the read is at times. The violence perpetrated against our ancestors, often coupled with sexual violence against Aboriginal women, was sparked not just by the taking of land but by Aboriginal communities standing up against settler abuse of women and children. The treatment of Aboriginal women in the process of colonisation still feels under-researched; it is not adequately captured in the archives or written colonial records.

I read Killing for Country as I was travelling on my own traditional country where family members can still point out where massacres took place along our rivers. While the material in Marr’s book felt raw, it is also incredibly important that the gaslighting of history that remains strong in the oral histories of Aboriginal people is replaced with an honest account of what it takes to claim a continent and its human cost.

This is a deeply personal historical account for Marr as well. These are his ancestors. His approach challenges us to think differently about what a truth-telling process might be. It is not just about creating the space for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to tell their truths. It also requires the kind of historical accountability that sits on the other side of the ledger.

What is admirable about Marr’s approach in Killing for Country is that there is no handwringing as he lays bare the exploits of his ancestors. Instead, he poses the question that should be asked: if we can accept true accounts of our past, what will it mean for the shape of our future? What happens if the true history is acknowledged and we can admit that this is a country that was acquired by conquest?

The impact of this type of truth-telling should not be a sense of collective guilt but instead the impetus for meaningful and collective action. With that message, Killing for Country could not be more necessary or more timely. •

Killing for Country: A Family Story
By David Marr | Black Inc. | $39.99 | 432 pages

The post Demythologising the frontier appeared first on Inside Story.

This split, he believes, is “a threat to a cohesive and successful Australia as it tries to adapt to the globalised economy.”

Wait, apologies, I jumbled my notes. That was Kelly after the 1999 vote on the republic, a cause he was very much in favour of.

This time round his columns have run passionately against the proposed Voice, and his tea-leaf reading of very similar voting patterns — the Yes vote fading the further from CBDs — sits on a much more ideological plane.

Once again the big No vote points to a “divided nation,” but now the goodies and baddies are very clear. That “confident, educated, city-based middle class” cohort has become something malignant, purveyors of “progressive sophistry” and “progressive values” and “experiments… tampering with the once accepted but now eroding universal norms that defined the Australian nation.”

The fourteenth of October, to underline the point, was a “repudiation of elite morality and assumed moral superiority.” On and on Kelly goes, for more than 2300 words; quoting various “experts” to categorise this as our Trump/Brexit moment, the revenge of everyday, ordinary citizens tired of being scolded and looked down on.

The Professor has been castigating “elites” (with all the unacknowledged irony this encompasses from a person of his means and position) since at least the late Howard years, but whereas the group once largely consisted of inner-urban Labor and Greens supporters working in academia and the arts, big business — with its public pronouncements in favour of marriage equality and tackling climate change — seems also to now stand in Paul’s naughty corner. “Elite(s)” appears no less than seventeen times in last month’s tirade, along with thirteen mentions of “progressive(s).”

That pattern of higher support in the inner city ebbing lower as you approach the bush can actually be observed in every referendum this side of Robert Menzies’s attempt to ban communism in 1951. It was more pronounced in the 1999 vote (both for the republic and for a new constitutional preamble) and more pronounced again in 2023.

A Labor–Coalition city–rural split has also been growing at general elections, reaching its apogee in May last year. There is change afoot in the electoral arena, and it is also seen dramatically in the ever-plummeting support for major parties.

Kelly’s bitter deep dive is worth citing because it conveniently contains most elements of the gloating-dressed-as-analysis that has emerged from the No-supporting commentariat. Even more than most political journalists, he seems to be a hostage to the present, inhaling the current zeitgeist and reciting it with deep meaning and drama — and often at great length.

So what does the 40–60 Voice outcome tell us about the country? That Australia is racist? Or colour-blind? Or doesn’t like elites?

I don’t think this result should change or even reinforce anyone’s opinion about the nature of this country. Instead it verifies that Australians can be relied on to bury Labor government midterm referendums, regardless of the topic. Set your watch by it: early opinion polling shows overwhelming support; Liberal leader eventually opposes (because to do otherwise would be professionally fatal); the government, encouraged by the polling, still presses ahead. Then it all becomes an orgy of scarifying tales about the danger of messing with the Constitution — the blueprint of this country, the envy of the world. Former judges are exhumed to warn of the risk. Why are the government and its mates so desperate to do this? They’re spending how many millions on it? Such self-indulgence, such arrogance, who can resist reminding them who’s boss?

With counting over, the Voice slots in fourth out of Labor’s eleven midterm attempts to change the Constitution since federation. That’s not particularly bad.

What does set this vote apart is its makeup. Last century, decent statistical correlations could be observed between Labor two-party-preferred support at the previous election and Yes votes. Traditional high-income Liberal electorates reliably took their party’s cue and joined outer-suburban and regional Coalition supporters to deliver, overwhelmingly, above-average Nos.

This time around, that high-income territory is mostly in teal hands (but the locals still vote Liberal over Labor in two-party-preferred terms), and those electorates voted a higher-than-average Yes. It was much like the republic vote, when they could still be loyal Liberals by siding with treasurer Peter Costello rather than prime minister John Howard.

This change in behaviour in the former Liberal heartland was a major driver — perhaps the major driver — of the record city–bush divide.

That might have been because, as Kelly writes, the Voice was seen as a “moral” issue. How might a referendum on something mundane, like recognising local government, have gone? As a Labor midtermer it would have been thrashed, but would it have exhibited those heightened geographic differences or settled back to something more predictably partisan?

Kelly was just as strongly against marriage equality, and that 2017 survey also exhibited the city-to-bush pattern (overlaid by outsized No votes in some suburban electorates with high numbers of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds), but the overall outcome, a big win for Yes, precluded triumphalism. On that occasion, the elites were apparently vindicated.

There is one other tendency in the recent analysis, and not just on the No side. Some people see the referendum as an electoral test failed by the Albanese government. It was so out of touch on this issue, can it recover?

The vote has certainly brought Anthony Albanese, who evidently believed his special skill set would bring this home, thuddingly down to earth. It’s damaged him in the eyes of the political class — they will no longer marvel at his prowess — but does that matter in the long run? Probably not; he had to get real sometime. It was something people were forced to vote on, a tenth-order issue for the overwhelming majority, and won’t feature at all in the next campaign. There’s nothing in the historical record to suggest referendum losses portend the same at subsequent elections.

Kelly was at it again last week, presenting a strategy for Peter Dutton’s path to the Lodge — courtesy of the Voice vote. Acknowledging that it “is easy to exaggerate the meaning of the referendum,” he proceeded to do just that, finding in it a “strategic pathway” for the opposition and piling on advice for the Liberal leader’s “approach post-Voice.”

The old pro-business warrior now sounds decidedly blue Labo(u)r (or should that be “populist”?): companies get a serve for “defending their economic bottom line while doubling down on their promotion of social and environmental values.”

That tedious old chestnut, Menzies’s “forgotten people,” gets an awfully long workout in the context of an imaginary two-term strategy for Dutton, à la (without mentioning him by name) Tony Abbott. Back on terra firma, Dutton will be lucky to survive for just one term as opposition leader, let alone two. •

The post Getting the referendum wrong appeared first on Inside Story.

In our times Indigenous people live in nation-states in which sovereignty, territory and laws are defined and maintained by the descendants of the settlers who invaded and conquered the original inhabitants. Although the terminology used to describe them has shifted from “Natives” to “Aborigines” to “Aboriginals” to “Indigenous” and “First Nations People,” the colonisers have consistently disregarded their primal relationship to land. In many countries, indigeneity is increasingly defined in terms that constrain membership of specific social groups and limit the territory Indigenous people can claim.

Taiwan has experienced successive waves of colonisation over several centuries. The original inhabitants were Austronesians, who were themselves the original colonisers of the Pacific region. They now constitute about 3 per cent of Taiwan’s total population. Like their counterparts in Canada and Australia, they feel the dispossession of their land deeply.

As in other nations where settlers imposed state control over land, indigeneity is highly politicised. Indigenous Taiwanese are entitled to six representatives in parliament but remain disadvantaged socially and economically. They have higher unemployment, they are poorer and their life expectancy is lower. They are culturally marginalised by the dominant Han Taiwanese population and experience discrimination in education and employment.

Using standard human development statistics, Simon notes that the Taiwanese Indigenous population is much better off than Canadian First Nations people. (Had he used Australian statistics, the gap would be much greater.) Simon documents the current resurgence of indigeneity as a political and cultural issue in the context of the Taiwanese government developing policies of recognition.

Simon’s ethnography focuses on two of Taiwan’s Indigenous groups, the Sediq and the Truku, mountain people who were once subsistence farmers and hunters. They grew millet and reared pigs, the latter to be used mainly in marriage, propitiation, the celebration of significant events and other rituals. Simons outlines the history in some detail and discusses the effects of successive colonists (Chinese and Japanese) on Indigenous lives.

The Sediq and Truku cosmologies and ways of life drew no basic distinction between “culture” and “nature.” Gaya, the concept that dominates their lives, encompasses ideas of the sacred, ancestral law, moral relations between people and their environment, and cultural values. It can also simply mean a “mode of life.”

Simon explores Gaya in five “ethnographic reflections,” each one devoted to a specific cultural concept or practice. He begins with Samat, the forest animals hunted by Sediq and Truku men, exploring the relationships between humans and their prey as well as the accumulated effects of colonial exploitation of forest resources. Hunting is a masculine activity and accomplishment, making it a contentious issue for contemporary Sediq and Truku men who resent and resist government restrictions on this activity. But for centuries hunting prowess also involved headhunting and, as Simon explains, this too was inspired by Gaya.

Although headhunting was outlawed by the Japanese in the late nineteenth century, the practice continued for decades, rendered easier by the introduction of guns. Simon depends on early Japanese sources for his descriptions, noting similarities to other Austronesian cultures. As in Borneo and some parts of the Solomon Islands, the taking of heads was a means of attaining masculine adulthood and increasing the strength or power of one’s group. Heads were trophies taken in vengeance, but once displayed they were incorporated as ancestors, welcomed into the village and offered food and drink. Women danced before them and sang songs to them.

In the chapter on “Heart,” Simon explores the moral and political domains of Indigenous life. As in many cultures, the heart is the metaphorical locus of interpersonal relationships and emotional states. Personal trust is a major factor in political allegiance. Prior to colonial governments’ insistence on appointing leaders for bureaucratic purposes, Truku and Sediq were egalitarian, with leadership status earned rather than inherited. Men became leaders because of their generosity, courage and capacity to influence people.

These “Big Man”–based forms of political organisation have been described for other Pacific Austronesian societies. Given the prevalence of local feuding and the taking of heads, it is unlikely that these societies are, or were ever, more democratic or peaceful than other political systems where conflicts often escalated into violence.

As evidence of the persistence of Gaya, Simon stresses the ethical and moral principles that people appeal to in contemporary life. In many respects, though, these virtues — generosity, goodness and loyalty­ — are consonant with those in most cultures. Given that Truku and Sediq people are now almost all practising Presbyterians or Roman Catholics, and have been for decades, they themselves appear to have recognised similarities between Gaya and Christianity. But they have abandoned almost all the rituals associated with their old religion: while they still kill pigs on special occasions, now the religious dimensions of the practice “vary greatly according to community, household, and even individual preferences,” says Simon, adding: “Some families invite the Presbyterian pastor to pray before the pigs are slaughtered.”

Simon doesn’t explore such a radical transformation of practices once linked to ancestor worship, instead glossing it as part of the “flow and ebb of religious practices.” Sometimes he dismisses an Indigenous explanation, presumably because it is in some way at odds with his own understanding. Analysing the meaning of headhunting, for instance, he reports that “people told [him] that their ancestors believed that the heads held energy,” but premises that observation by saying “Perhaps because they have read it in ethnographies.”

This is a complicated book. In many respects it is a conventional ethnography, documenting and describing the lifeworld of Indigenous Taiwanese mountain people. Simon has lived and studied the people of whom he writes for almost two decades and has a clear command of the languages they speak.

It is also an exercise in anthropological reflexivity, with Simon describing his relationships with Sediq and Truku individuals, his data collection methods, his experiences as part of their communities and the knowledge he has gained during more than a decade of fieldwork. As a Canadian, he compares and contrasts Indigenous knowledge and politics in Taiwan with those of his home country.

Simon is also concerned to “decolonise the way in which we do ethnography, putting local, Indigenous ontologies at the heart of the reflection and writing.” This entails embracing Sediq and Truku ways of experiencing and understanding the world by eschewing distinctions between nature and culture. It means accepting other, alien forms of knowledge as true — or at least as true as Western, scientific understanding of the material world. Ideas and concepts that appear “irrational,” or simply fanciful to a Western observer must be accepted as ontological truths: thus, ghosts, spirits and omens are manifestly real because Indigenous people experience them as such.

This analytical move — “the ontological turn” — has been a subject of debate within anthropology for decades. In many respects it is simply an extreme form of relativism; but it is also an attempt at intellectual restitution, refusing to relegate indigenous knowledge to “belief systems.” It also demands a rather different interpretation of the meaning of the word “ontology” from that used in philosophy, where it refers to the philosophical discourse about “being” and “existence.”

Within anthropology it has taken on the meanings Simon gives it when he refers to “a mode of living” or “the concepts that people use to understand their existence.” Although he distances himself from the term “culture,” he uses the term “ontology” in ways that make it synonymous with “culture” or “cosmology,” at least as these terms are commonly understood. His insistence on Gaya’s continuing grip on Indigenous ontology invokes a sort of ethnic essentialism at odds with the evidence of historical, social and cultural changes that challenge or repudiate the concepts or practices that inform it. As in the majority of societies where they have been subjected to colonial appropriation and mass settlement, the lives of Indigenous people have been transformed and so has the world they inhabit.

Truku and Sediq people, like other Indigenous people, are engaged in a politicised cultural resurgence that aims to reclaim their identity and culture. As Simon’s ethnography reveals, this resurgence is constrained and articulated in terms of an indigeneity defined by the state.

Swathes of land have become the Taroko National Park, where hunting is banned. People work in the local Asia Cement factory and as day labourers. They perform aspects of their cultural identity for a thriving tourist trade. Much of their social life revolves around their churches. They attend schools and learn Chinese. Some go to universities and even become anthropologists. The majority vote for the conservative Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, rejecting the Democratic Progressive Party — which would appear to have policies more protective of Indigenous rights — on the grounds that the KMT manages the economy more effectively.

Given the abundant evidence of dramatic social change over centuries of successive colonisation, Simon’s insistence on continuity and the persistence of radical ontological difference is ultimately distracting and unconvincing. Certainly Sediq and Truku people emerge from this study as “truly human,” but not quite in the way its author proclaims. •

Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa
By Scott E. Simon | University of Toronto Press | C$38.95 | 388 pages

The post Being human appeared first on Inside Story.

Recent censuses have documented a quite extraordinary growth in the Indigenous population, largely in southeastern Australia, driven by growing self-identification and rising numbers of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships. As a result, the national profile of the Indigenous population is changing, accompanied by even greater levels of income inequality. Very high levels of income inequality exist within the Indigenous community, levels that are greater than those that exist within the non-Indigenous community.

Alongside these shifts has been a growth in the diversity of political perspectives among leading Indigenous figures. The contrasting views of Indigenous No campaigners Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine, on the one hand, and Lidia Thorpe and author/lawyer Michael Mansell, on the other, are just one example.

The geographical, social and linguistic heterogeneity of Indigenous Australians has long been recognised by policymakers yet only sometimes taken account of. The regionally organised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (1990–2005) was a rare example of a positive recognition of heterogeneity; in other cases — tighter conditions on social security in remote Australia, for instance — the recognition has come with a punitive veneer.

This diversity has increasingly been overlaid (though not replaced) by a pan-Indigenous focus on identity and identity politics that has begun to permeate the national imagination. The emphasis on a single identity — rather than on layered identities, as Noel Pearson advocates — has created a unity with its own fragility.

These strands have created social, economic and political complexities that undercut the possibility of building an enduring consensus among First Nations on virtually any issue. If substantial Indigenous consensus on policy aspirations is just as elusive as it is among the non-Indigenous population, then all-encompassing Indigenous representation is inherently elusive, particularly nationally.

The referendum result alone won’t drive this complexity; it has been emerging for at least two decades. But the vote will inevitably be perceived as a political and societal inflection point. The notion that governments should seek to discern an overarching and representative Indigenous perspective is likely to give way increasingly to multiple Indigenous interest groups, themselves engaged in the cut and thrust of interest-group politics both within the Indigenous domain and between the Indigenous domain and the wider political domain.

Virtually all recent public commentary has been on the politics of the Voice: the campaign, the tactics of the Yes and No camps, the effectiveness of the most prominent advocates, the implications for social cohesion and reconciliation, and the implications for Australia’s international reputation. The shape of the post-referendum policy framework has received almost no attention. Yet it will determine the opportunities available to First Nations citizens and inevitably shape the nation’s future in ways that are difficult to predict but nevertheless consequential and far-reaching.

In a hyper-rational world, the obvious response to the referendum loss would be to press ahead with legislation to create a Voice. After all, if it is important enough to be constitutionally entrenched, why wouldn’t the government seek to establish it legislatively?

We don’t live in an entirely rational world. Prime minister Anthony Albanese explicitly ruled out a legislated Voice before the vote, primarily on the basis that the process of legislating a Voice would become hyper-politicised. Opponents would argue that the referendum result made crystal clear that Australians don’t want a Voice, thus depriving any such proposal of an electoral mandate. Its design would become deeply contentious both in wider political circles and among Indigenous interests. Without constitutional enshrinement, a legislated Voice’s views and policy perspectives would arguably carry less weight and be more susceptible to being ignored by governments.

One alternative path would be to create an appointed Voice, though the prime minister appears to have implicitly ruled this out too. Governments often appoint specialist groups to provide advice; in fact, the previous government appointed a prime minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council in September 2013 with Warren Mundine as its first chair. It was silently abandoned in 2019 when its advice on how best to progress the Uluru Statement and the proposed Voice became politically inconvenient.

Since then, reflecting the triumph of political considerations over rationality, the Coalition government (and now Labor) operated without a formal Indigenous advisory mechanism while simultaneously funding elaborate bureaucratic and legal processes to design and implement a proposed Voice.

The government’s most likely move will be to embrace the role of the Coalition of Peaks, the alliance of eighty-plus Indigenous peak bodies that emerged in early 2019 from discussions between representatives of fourteen Aboriginal community-controlled organisations and prime minister Scott Morrison. Those discussions ultimately led to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. According to its latest annual report, the Coalition of Peaks directly and indirectly represents more than 800 organisations and at least 550,000 Indigenous people across numerous sectors.

Announcing a greater reliance on the Coalition of Peaks — or, more probably, gradually lifting engagement — has several political advantages. The coalition encompasses a wide swathe of Indigenous policy, it was established and funded by a Coalition government, and it is capably led by its convenor, the experienced former bureaucrat Pat Turner. Perhaps even more importantly, building on the coalition requires no legislation and can accurately be characterised as a continuation of the status quo.

If it pursues this option, Labor will presumably take the opportunity to signal its increased commitment by allocating new Indigenous funding in the coming 2024 budget. One obvious spending opportunity championed by Turner and the Coalition of Peaks is housing, a policy domain with implications for health, education, criminal justice and domestic violence. As the government develops its new National Housing and Homelessness Plan, which will encompass new intergovernmental funding arrangements, it could earmark increased funding to Indigenous communities.

The Coalition of Peaks is, of course, quite different from the proposed Voice. Unlike previous Indigenous representative bodies, it seeks to represent the interests of “community-controlled” organisations rather than the entire Indigenous constituency. Its members cover a broad range of Indigenous interests, but obvious gaps include the educational and economic development sectors. Implicit in any greater engagement would be a shift to engaging with coalition’s constituent peak bodies.

At the core of the Coalition of Peaks is NACCHO, the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, which represents 145 Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations across the country employing around 6000 staff. NACCHO’s members service more than 550 primary care sites delivering more than 3.1 million episodes of care to more than 400,000 people.

Apart from their sheer breadth of activity, NACCHO members have the advantage of receiving mainstream healthcare funding for their services, thus ensuring a substantial level of political independence. That advantage does not extend to most of the Coalition of Peaks’s other members, which rely to a greater or lesser extent on discretionary government funding. So too does the Coalition of Peaks’s policy secretariat, creating a major risk to its continued independence.

As a member of the council overseeing the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, the Coalition of Peaks has guaranteed cabinet-level access to every jurisdiction in the Australian federation. This is unprecedented in modern Australian history, though the reality is that it is outnumbered and outgunned by the sheer institutional heft of the states and the federal government, and particularly by the size and intellectual capital of their bureaucracies.

Of course, governments will continue to engage with Indigenous interest groups outside the Coalition of Peaks, and will draw on specialist advisory bodies where necessary, as already occurs in the mainstream policy domain. When both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interests are involved, governments will continue to appoint Indigenous members to relevant advisory committees.

The advantages of using the Coalition of Peaks to underpin the future framework of Indigenous policy are significant, but there are also significant challenges.

Foremost is the fact that the extraordinarily complex policy architecture of Closing the Gap is unfit for purpose and requires serious attention. Its bureaucratic complexity ties the Coalition of Peaks down in never-ending process, across eight jurisdictions, virtually guaranteeing it cannot focus consistently on strategic policy opportunities. Complicating its work is the fact that the Coalition government shifted political responsibility for most targets to the states and territories and stepped back from any overt leadership role, a move not reversed so far by Labor.

These problems should have been tackled head-on in the Productivity Commission’s recent draft report on the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. Although the report is critical of progress, its strategically underwhelming analysis is a lost opportunity to take stock and shift course to ensure governments take their commitments seriously. The machinery of Closing the Gap will not collapse in the short term, but neither will it survive into the medium term without focused attention.

Governments are inherently conflicted on this issue: reform of the policy architecture and a stronger Coalition of Peaks will inevitably make life harder for them. Visionary political leadership within government, always in scarce supply, will be required to crack this nut.

A second implication of the referendum defeat is that governments and First Nations will be forced to reconsider the preparedness of the Australian electorate (and the nation’s underlying political settlement) to accept treaties as a mechanism for advancing Indigenous aspirations. While many First Nations leaders and their supporters will intensify their calls for treaties, the risk of devoting decades of work to inchoate policy reforms, and the challenges of agreement-making with reluctant governments could fracture Indigenous views on the benefits of such a strategy. Pragmatic leaders could well see better and more immediate uses for scarce advocacy resources.

It is also worth mentioning that while a successful referendum would have paved the way for a vote on an Australian republic, the defeat is likely to dampen enthusiasm in the current decade. Perhaps paradoxically, it may also increase the likelihood of an Indigenous person being appointed as Australia’s head of state in the interim.

Progress on Indigenous constitutional recognition, meanwhile, appears more remote than ever. Short-sighted self-interest has triumphed over visionary reform. The 1967 referendum gave the Commonwealth an implicit mandate to lead on Indigenous policy, one it has progressively walked away from over the past decade. The Indigenous leadership, encouraged by progressive Liberals, decided to shift away from the recommendations of the 2012 report of the expert panel on constitutional recognition and replace it with the Voice proposal, a move that now seems a well-intentioned error of judgement.

Led by Pat Dodson and Mark Leibler, the expert panel recommended the repeal of section 51(xxvi) of the Constitution, which allows the federal government to enact adverse and discriminatory laws based on race, and called for a new provision prohibiting racial discrimination.

The nation’s Indigenous policy framework over the coming decades will inevitably focus on particular Indigenous interests rather than a notional general interest, tempered by more of the same: more rhetoric over substance, more evasion of responsibility, more blame shifting, less transparency and ministerial accountability, and continued policymaking aimed merely at giving the appearance of action.

If they are to force their way into the dominant bloc of interests that controls Australia’s institutions, Indigenous interests will need to look beyond governments for support and as the sole locus of political action. To be effective, they must build alliances, institutionalise the independence of their advocacy capabilities, and create their own policy institutions. They will need to span their diverse aspirations, and build and sustain the intellectual capital necessary to achieve inclusionary policy reforms in the face of opposition from mainstream interests concerned to protect the status quo. Inevitably, this will be a multigenerational struggle. •

The post Indigenous policy’s inflection point appeared first on Inside Story.

Early polling indicates overwhelming support. Liberal opposition leaders, regardless of their personal inclinations, lack the authority to support Labor’s proposals. If a Labor government is crazy enough to hold the referendum midterm, it suffers a particularly ghastly fate.

The Voice in 2023 was almost a carbon copy of Labor’s last referendums, in 1988, with overt racism added.

The table tells the story:

The content of the question matters a little, but only a little. It could’ve been purely symbolic recognition, or putting local government into the founding document, or taking out “race” or correcting a typo. If it’s a Labor proposal, and it isn’t held with an election, it gets walloped.

On current counting, the Voice is number 21 on this table, pretty much in the middle of Labor midterm results.

What else can we say?

Tasmania underperformed against general expectations; although, as electoral maestro Kevin Bonham points out, only Newspoll consistently had the smallest state’s support at a more modest relative position. On current counting it has slipped above New South Wales (all state numbers are at the AEC here) to reach second place after Victoria (third after the ACT if we’re including the two territories), which is itself worthy of a mini-headline. Tasmania hasn’t been in third place since, as it happens, that famous 1967 referendum that took out all references to “aboriginals” and “natives.” It hasn’t been in second place since an unsuccessful 1910 proposal.

South Australia’s relative support was always a bit of an unknown, and it came in very low.

In common with the 2017 marriage-equality survey and the 1999 republic referendum, and to varying degrees all referendums back to 1967, Yes was highest around the CBDs of the capital cities, and gradually got lower the further out you went. This routine fact is being turned over and over in the media, but they have to write and talk about something.

(This table on Twitter does show “outer metro” support for marriage equality lowest of all, which can probably be sheeted to its unpopularity in electorates with high numbers of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds. For the Voice, however, there is little evidence of this cohort deviating from the rest one way or the other.)

The figures strongly show big majority support for the Voice among Indigenous communities — if nothing like that 80 per cent January figure that the Yes case cited right up to and including polling day. Several late surveys had Yes support among First Nations people dropping by about the same proportion as the rest of the country, to about 60 per cent, and that looks about right from the polling booth numbers.

(Projecting remote community statistics onto First Nations people who live elsewhere, such as in the cities and towns, is fraught.)

During Saturday night’s ABC TV coverage, federal Liberal MP Keith Wolahan (a No supporter) warned against winners’ hubris, and so far the gloating anticipated on Friday has been restrained.

Late on Saturday evening Jacinta Nampijinpa Price did get defensive when asked about the strong support among Indigenous communities in her electorate of the Northern Territory. She implied an Australian Electoral Commission–Yes campaign conspiracy, and further questions made Warren Mundine so angry he shouted at journalists before they both walked out.

Another normal day for the No campaign. Despite its repeated disarray it wins bragging rights for an outcome that the proverbial drover’s dog could’ve presided over.

The Yes campaign by contrast has announced a week of silence, and who can blame them? The hot takes alone will be more than anyone can endure. While most of us get on with our lives, those who have been involved in this attempted change for a decade or more will obviously feel devastated, and not for a short time.

Anthony Albanese doesn’t seem to be taking it well either, at least twice in the past week describing himself at press conferences as a “conviction politician,” as if this will make voters see him as such.

(Note to Anthony: if you insist on these clunky phrases, it’s best to get someone else to utter them on your behalf. Also, you only get perceived that way by making unpopular decisions and then getting re-elected.)

The prime minister is getting a media pasting. It will be character-building.

On the other side, Peter Dutton is being feted as a winner. But as opinion polls fail to reveal any sustained improvement in his and his party’s standing, the backgrounding will begin in earnest.

How long until we read and hear the inevitable Liberal source’s lament that “we can’t win with Peter”? By June 2024 Dutton will probably be an ex–opposition leader. •

The post The unforgiving logic of Labor referendums appeared first on Inside Story.

I have to start with my parents because without them I would not be here. My mum was born in 1910. She is a Binjarib woman, a direct descendant of the original Nyoongar people from the Pinjarra area in the southwest of Western Australia. A Binjarib Nyoongar. We consider ourselves coastal plain people and we have a strong spiritual and cultural connection to both fresh water and salt water.

Fresh water because we lived right near the bilyah, the river which flowed down from the hills to our east. Salt water because within walking distance of where we lived, the river emptied first into the estuary, then the ocean to the west. It was the perfect location for hunting and fishing throughout the year.

Our mob are the Binjarib traditional and custodial owners. Our ancestry can be traced through both our oral history and the recorded history of the wadjerlar [white people] colonists since settlement. It was Mum’s people, my ancestors, who were killed by white soldiers at the massacre which took place in Binjarib country at Pinjarra in 1834.

Our stories and songlines, our sacred and special sites, and our very cosmology are deeply imbedded in our Binjarib language, land and cultural knowledge. My mum taught us her Binjarib Nyoongar language, but insisted we never spoke it at school. To the white authorities our language was the devil’s own. We risked being taken away from our families if we were ever heard speaking it.

We loved listening to the yarns Mum told. She made us so proud that some of our people had survived the 1834 massacre. How our ancestors had come up against wadjerlar soldiers on horseback, with guns and swords when our maaman only had spears, koondees and boomerangs. Yet despite the overwhelming odds, with many of our people dying, there were those who had lived to pass on to our own children and grandchildren the stories and language for us to share the truth of what happened.

My mum was a very special woman. She was born in Nyoongar Boodja — Nyoongar country — the only sister with five brothers. Like my mum, my uncles passed the Binjarib stories on to their children. Of course, their recollections were from a male perspective, but the outcomes all tallied. Each one of her brothers loved Mum and treated her with utmost respect. I have never known any of my five uncles to say even one angry word to their sister. Ever!

Mum was the keeper of our Binjarib history and stories, a very strong-minded woman, much loved and respected by all her family. Not even government policy could break the family bonds that existed between Mum, her husband, ten children and all her brothers.

One particular policy that really irked Mum related to the citizenship rights papers, as they were referred to among our family at the time. Those Aboriginal people who were given the papers were allowed to enter pubs and buy alcohol. They were also permitted to be on the streets before the six o’clock morning curfew and after the six o’clock evening curfew. It gave them quite a bit of freedom to go about their business and they were seen as “white citizens.”

On the downside, anyone granted those papers was not allowed to interact or socialise with other Aboriginal people. Family members included. If caught doing so, they would lose their papers and face jail.

As Mum told us, “I would never apply to get those papers. I have spent too much of my life being separated from my brothers. First, in New Norcia Mission, and then I was put in Moore River Native Settlement. My brothers and their families are worth more to me than being classified as a white person. I love my family so the government can keep their papers.”

Dad, too, was born in 1910, in the springtime. At least, that was the year the authorities estimated he came into the world. Dad was not a Nyoongar man. His mum, my paternal Nanna Mary, was a Palyku Mulbpa woman from around the Nullagine area. His father was a wayfaring Irishman.

Dad was born in the Pilbara on the banks of the Shaw River at Hillside Station. The homestead was not far from Marble Bar, about seventy miles southwest of the small goldmining town, but it was more than 900 miles north of Perth. He was taken away from Nanna Mary and sent to Perth when he was very young, about eight years old.

Dad always told us that he first met Mum when he was living in Moore River Native Settlement. Mum had been sent to the same place from New Norcia Mission as a fourteen-year-old when she was deemed old enough to go out and work on the stations.

Although they were never sent to work at the same place, Mum and Dad told us it was really tough working on the stations. He cleared the land, put up fences, broke in horses, rounded up cattle and fixed windmills on the stations where he worked. Mum worked in various homesteads as a housemaid. She kept the homes clean and cooked all the meals for the station owners and their family, sometimes for ten or more people.

The hours were long, from sunrise to sundown, and they were paid a pittance. But my mum and dad were survivors. And they always caught up with each other whenever they were sent back to Moore River Native Settlement if their work ran out on the stations.

As it turned out, government and religious rules proved to be hurdles to their plans for a long-term relationship. Back then, if Aboriginal people wanted to marry, they had to apply to the government, and their respective churches, for permission to do so. When my parents finally married in 1934, after years of red tape, they shared a whole lot of love, mutual respect, appreciation and tolerance for each other, and it endured over their years together.

As Dad often told us, “I met the love of my life at Moore River Native Settlement when I was fourteen years old, back in nineteen twenty-four. From that day onwards, I knew your mother was the only one for me. I have never regretted marrying that beautiful girl.”

Theirs was a love story that lasted more than fifty years. Right up until he died in August 1992, many years after Mum, who passed away in 1975, Dad still proclaimed his love for her.

Apart from his own children and our mum, Dad had no other immediate family living around Pinjarra. From time to time he was visited by our people from up north. And though it was usually very late when they turned up, Dad always walked to our fence line to talk with them. Mum warned us kids not to stickybeak when we tried to sneak a glimpse of them standing out in the moonlight talking with Dad. From what I could barely hear, the men spoke in a language I couldn’t understand. Mum said it was “men’s business.”

I realised later that us kids were multicultural even in our own country: Binjarib Nyoongar, Palyku Mulbpa and Irish. When tracing our family tree, very early mention is also made of an American ancestor who sailed here and married a Nyoongar woman from the Albany region. Another interesting fact Mum often told us was that her great-great-grandmother was of Chinese heritage. In the features of some of my siblings there is definitely a strong Asian influence.

Ancestry aside, to the Australian government back then we were classified as Aboriginal. Since colonisation, our people had been through some traumatic times with very limited freedom to do what we wanted. Even when we were adults, government policy dictated everything we did. The rules applied to everyone, and authorities made sure they were diligently enforced. Our people had to be strong just to survive.

In those days, as long as I had my mum and dad, a feed and a bed, I was okay. But I have to tell you, there were periods in my life as a young Nyoongar girl that I found really hard going. To some I know it may sound petty, but back then it bothered me, especially when I got to an age where I began to notice things happening around me and I overheard comments by family and friends.

For instance, when people talked about who was the prettiest in our Connell family — and there being six sisters — my name always seemed to be last on the list. My older sisters with their pretty faces, perfect brown skin and long jet-black hair have won beauty contests. Rightly so. They were very beautiful. Glamorous photographs and huge beauty competition trophies attest to those facts.

My youngest sister, Hannah, much like our oldest one, Janie, has a natural Nyoongar and Asian-influenced beauty, with her black hair, dark doe eyes and smooth unblemished olive skin. But me? With my very pale skin, honey-blonde hair and hazel eyes, thanks to the genetic traits I inherited from my Irish grandfather, I seemed destined to miss out on the compliments. Especially from other Nyoongars.

When my brothers wanted to be extra mean to me, they said our mum had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital. I hardly ever got any compliments. Oh, I sometimes received a mention, but mainly because I was very good at sports and smart in schoolwork. But as a young girl I always felt I missed out when the really pretty faces were handed out in heaven.

I know Mum loved me and she always said, “Lavinia, it’s not what you look like on the outside. It’s whether you are a good person on the inside that counts. God is watching what we do, not what we look like. He already knows those details. So you remember that’s how He will judge us. By our actions. Who cares what other people think? They are just ordinary humans.”

My mum’s words eased my mind. Still, at the time I always thought maybe I should have been the one called Jane. In my mind it surely was a match with me being plain.

There were other tough things about being a Nyoongar girl. And knowing how to fight was one of them, and it was going to come in useful throughout my life. When my four brothers had to fight five other boys, I always fought the boy who was about the same age as me. No hair pulling, biting or scratching like girls fight. It was stand back, shape up and punch each other. Queensberry Rules boxing, Dad said. Maybe if I wasn’t such a tomboy and hadn’t belted them up, those boys might have called me pretty.

Though I was never — and I am not now — a vain person, there were times when people commented on my appearance in a really spiteful way. It was so hurtful to be told, “Lavinia, you wanna know something? From a distance, yeah, you looked gorgeous. But up close? Nah. Nah. You don’t even look Nyoongar. Are you sure you’re Aboriginal? You are so white.” Then the laughter.

When I was thirteen, this was said to me in front of a group of my peers. My two best friends got so angry with the person who said it, they wanted to punch into him. At the time I retorted by telling that bloke to get nicked. He apologised only because he was scared my friends wanted to hit him, but I could tell his apology was fake. Besides, his words were out and they couldn’t be taken back. It stung. I realised later that I was angry for two reasons. One for being called ugly, but also it hurt more to be challenged about being a Nyoongar just because of the light colour of my skin. Thanks, Grandfather!

Another time, I was asked by an acquaintance if I was truly an Aboriginal and whether I should be talking about Nyoongar people. I turned and walked off, but not before I told him to go fornicate with himself with the old Queensland bush medicine, a big prickly pineapple.

I told that mean-mouthed bastard in both English and Nyoongar. Fortunately, that second time I was no longer a teenager. I was in my mid twenties, yet it brought back a reminder of the days when I was younger and more vulnerable to mean comments like these.

Another painful memory as a youngster relates to government policy and its impact on our people. At any given time, it wasn’t hard for the authorities to keep track of us Nyoongars. Especially those six families who owned land and were permanent residents in the town, like our family and Uncle Levi’s.

Because our land was near a big swamp, the police identified us as the “Swampies.” There were also about seven other Nyoongar families living in the area, but they had all set up camps on reserved government land. They became known as the “Reserve Mob.” They had found steady work on the farms and with government agencies, like the public works department, and settled with their families in Pinjarra. In all, there must have been close to eighty Nyoongars in the town who had no intention of moving away.

Then there were transient families who only came to town for seasonal work and moved on when that ran out. They usually stayed with relatives for the duration and sent their little ones to the same state school we went to. Sometimes when that happened, the number of Nyoongar kids in the classes almost doubled. Some families also enrolled their children in the local Catholic school. Strict government rules said it was compulsory for all young Nyoongar kids to get educated. Rain, hail or shine.

If we missed even one day, there had to be a note from Mum or Dad or one of the older sisters who had already left school. If there was no note, the police could be, and often were, contacted by the school and sent to check why we hadn’t turned up.

There was one cardinal rule for every Nyoongar, whether you were transient or a permanent resident. If you were moving into town or leaving the place, you had to report your movements to the police. Failure to comply could mean jail for the parents and the forced removal of their children.

I remember when my first cousin Gertie, who was some twenty years older than me, had her six children taken away from her. Her oldest child, Margie, at eleven, was only a year older than me, and Nina, the youngest, only six. Yet they were unceremoniously placed in a Catholic mission because she could not account for why her koolungahs were not at school.

It didn’t matter that Gertie was heavily pregnant and needed help with other serious health issues. Or that her husband, Dan, had to travel away for weeks at a time shearing sheep for farmers in other towns so he could earn some money for his family.

Her children were attending the local Catholic primary school, so maybe they were under even closer scrutiny and monitoring by the convent nuns. More so than those of us at state school. I don’t know the reason. I do know that it upset a whole lot of people in our Nyoongar community.

Those six kids were an integral part of our family group. Everything changed when they were taken away by the government. Everybody grieved for them, it was so sad. We missed them terribly. It took a long time, especially for everyone in our close-knit families, to adjust to not having them around.

Even though they were allowed to come home during the summer for the school holidays, it was never, ever the same. Most people seemed to understand why their mother, after delivering her seventh baby, turned to alcohol to blot out the hurt of not having all her kids with her. Luckily other family members helped to rear the new baby. But as a one-year-old, that little boy was taken away too. It was a terrible time for everyone, especially us kids. Their departure hurt even more because we kids had spent a whole lot of our lives growing up with them. Then suddenly, they were gone.

We had all gone bushwalking together, hunting for kaardas (big yellow speckled goannas), rabbits, parrots, koomools (possums) and wild ducks. Picking wild berries. Pinching mulberries from the big tree in the middle of the wadjerlar neighbour’s farm, running through the paddocks and being chased by big angry cows and bullocks.

We would spend nearly all our summer months together at the river swimming, fishing and catching marrons — freshwater crayfish. The river sustained us in so many ways. We not only had our bush tucker, but pinched the juicy grapes and ripe stone fruit — apricots, nectarines and peaches — from the orchards that grew near the river. As a last resort, there were always the nuts from the pine trees that grew alongside the Anglican church. Mum didn’t like us eating those because it was said they caused rickets or some illness like that in kids.

And I remember a big mob of us kids crammed together on the back of my dad’s old Model T Ford going to the estuary, crabbing and camping out. We rarely went alone, with other family members in their own vehicles forming a mini convoy of winyarn, rickety old trucks and motor cars heading out.

I clearly remember being taught what we could and couldn’t eat from the bush, and all about our medicine plants. Making sure we tossed some sand into the river to let the spirits know we were there before we cast our fishing lines. Learning from our oldies about our culture and using our own language. We felt so special, having our own Binjarib words. Like some secret code that only we would know. Being reared in the mission, Mum and Dad would have never, ever allowed it, but in secret our older girl cousins taught us our Nyoongar swear words.

At home we were taught our Nyoongar language and culture. We learned that unlike the wadjerlars, who only had four seasons in a year, we had six. Biruk — when it is very hot in December and January; Bunuru — still hot but with the promise of cooler days in February and March; Djeran — cooler weather with signs of early rain in April and May; Makuru — when the heavy showers come down in June and July; Djilba — a time of new growth and flowers everywhere in August and September; and Kambarang — warmer sunny days around October and November. Our Elders explained that our bush medicines and our food supply depended on and varied with each of our seasons.

We were taught what signs to look for when hunting kangaroos, emus, goannas, possums and rabbits. The one thing our family was never allowed to eat was the booyaiy — long-necked turtle — because that was our totem. We spent so much of our time honing our bush skills. To us it was childhood heaven.

Sometimes we even packed some bread or damper and cold meat from home and took it with us, along with a flagon of sweet black tea. That way we would stay at the river nearly all day. If any of us kids happened to have some money, we’d chuck in and buy a loaf of bread, chips, tinned meat or polony and a bottle of cool drink to share. There were even times when Mum let us book up at the local grocery store and paid the account on Dad’s payday. Whenever that happened, a couple of packets of Granita biscuits was the favourite with all of us.

Things were tough at times, but we rarely went hungry or thirsty over summer because we all shared what we had. While in primary school, I remember reading about the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Those two may have had the mighty Mississippi but they had nothing on us lot. We had the pure, clear waters of the Murray. It was like God himself had given us Nyoongars this special gift out of nowhere. Serendipity. •

This is an edited extract from Louise K. Hansen’s Smashing Serendipity: The Story of One Moorditj Yorga, published by Fremantle Press.

The post Two worlds appeared first on Inside Story.

The host used materials created by the Victorian Women’s Trust to get us talking, including a set of cards laid face down between mugs of tea and plates of biscuits. We took turns picking up a card and reading the text on the reverse side. One was about events in New South Wales in 1881:

Forty-two Yorta Yorta men living at the Maloga Mission petition the governor to grant them land, to support themselves raising stock and cultivating crops. The petition is published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph. Six years later, representatives from the Maloga Mission present the governor with a petition to Queen Victoria, again requesting land.

Eventually the NSW government did set aside 730 hectares in the area for a reserve that came to be known as “Cummeragunja,” or “our home.”

Another card told of the 1963 Yirrkala bark petitions:

The Yolngu Nation from Yirrkala in the East Arnhem Region sends Bark Petitions to the federal parliament. They object to land on their reserve being excised for bauxite mining, without consultation. Territories Minister Hasluck rejects the first petition, challenging the validity of signatures. A second bark petition adds the thumbprints of clan Elders…

The petitions led to a parliamentary inquiry, which visited Darwin and Yirrkala to collect evidence. The committee didn’t support a halt to mining, but it did recommend that sacred sites be protected and the Yolngu compensated for loss of livelihoods.

Dating back as far as 1788, the twenty-nine cards detail resistance, protests, pleas, petitions, strikes, walk-offs, court cases and letters to newspapers. They record the creation of new representative organisations — including the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (1924), the Australian Aborigines League (1933), the Aboriginal Progressive Association (1937) and the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (1958) — and the release of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Together, the cards tell a compelling story of a 235-year struggle for land, recognition and justice, of which calls for Voice, Treaty and Truth are the latest manifestation.

Since that conversation, I have played a small role in the Yes campaign, handing out flyers outside a supermarket, a train station and a pre-polling centre. Plenty of people have been supportive and I’ve had constructive, civil conversations with individuals who were genuinely unsure about how to vote. I’ve also been labelled a racist and a race-traitor and accused of not acknowledging that the “real” Uluru Statement from the Heart is much longer than just one-page. This is trivial stuff compared with the abuse copped by First Nations’ representatives on both sides of the campaign, but the atmosphere feels like it has become increasingly polarised as the vote approaches.

Perhaps that was inevitable once the Coalition made the vote partisan and turned the campaign slogan, “Vote No to the Voice of Division,” into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But anger and resentment at the idea of a Voice haven’t come out of thin air. Misinformation and sheer falsehoods need receptive ears. Just as the push for Yes is informed by the long struggle for recognition and rights, so the No campaign draws on deeper wellsprings, including an entrenched defensiveness about Australia’s past.

In a talk at the Byron Writers Festival in August, historian Henry Reynolds recalled the intellectual environment he encountered when he started teaching at the University College of Townsville in 1965. Although it later became James Cook University, at the time the college was a northern outpost of the University of Queensland, and the main textbook set by Reynolds’s southern professors was Gordon Greenwood’s Australia: A Social and Political History.

Greenwood’s collection, with essays by six researchers, was reprinted twelve times between 1955 and 1975, and widely used in teaching around the nation. But it contained nothing about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Reynolds scoured academic reviews of the book and found that “not one of the eminent historians who reviewed it realised there was something missing.”

This is evidence of what art historian Bernard Smith called “the white blanket of forgetfulness” in his 1980 Boyer Lectures. Twelve years earlier, in his own Boyer Lectures, the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner had introduced a similar concept — the great Australian silence. Reflecting on the lack of Indigenous voices in histories and commentaries, Stanner said that “inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness” but must be structural, like “a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape.”

More recently, in Telling Tennant’s Story, Inside Story contributor Dean Ashenden showed how this view has been constructed and maintained. Stopping in the old railway town of Quorn near the Flinders Ranges on the road north from Adelaide, Ashenden finds lots of information about the Ghan but nothing about the Aboriginal people of the area, “who they were or how they fared when the inexorable frontier arrived.” The story was similar all the way up the Stuart Highway.

This is my story too. Growing up in South Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, my main exposure to Aboriginal Australia was seeing people sitting under trees in Victoria Square and the Adelaide Parklands. I had an inspiring fifth grade teacher who introduced us to the culture and lifestyle of the central deserts, and around the same time I met a group of Pitjantjatjara elders who were staying with a neighbour who had worked at the old mission of Ernabella (now Pukatja).

Despite these experiences, though, I never thought to ask who had lived on the lands around Adelaide prior to 1836. I don’t recall hearing the name of the Kaurna people until I was in my early twenties. Like so many, then and now, I was blanketed in forgetfulness.

When he arrived in Townsville, Reynolds was struck by the very visible presence of Aboriginal people in North Queensland — something he was not accustomed to in Tasmania. When he started researching local history with his students he knew they had to include the story of relations between coloniser and colonised. And once they went looking, they discovered records of dispossession, conflict and war waiting to be found, not just in the oral stories handed down through Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal families but also in newspapers, court records and diaries.

The first newspaper in North Queensland, the Port Denison Times, was established in 1861. Reading through copies in the Bowen Council Chambers, Reynolds found that frontier violence was openly acknowledged in the nineteenth century. What’s more, the morality of the colonialism was fiercely debated in its pages.

Yet when Reynolds first pitched his landmark 1981 book, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, Penguin knocked it back because there were already “too many books about Aborigines.”

“Invasion” is still a rarely used word to refer to the origins of the Australian state. “Settlement” remains far more common, suggesting a benign process that met with little resistance and was long ago complete. The Voice referendum is unsettling because it tugs at the corners of the blanket of forgetfulness to destabilise the dominant sense of who we are as a nation.

Many within the No camp believe that nothing is to be gained by looking back and it is time to draw a line under history. After all, we’re all Australians with equal rights. To give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a Voice to Parliament amounts to special treatment and breaches the basic liberal-democratic tenet that every citizen has one equal vote and equal standing before the law.

If we are to move forward together based on a shared commitment to liberal principles, though, we must surely confront the fact that the colonisation that shaped Australia and its institutions was entirely illiberal. It did not treat First Nations peoples equally. It ignored their rights, stole their property, suppressed their languages and cultures, denied them voice and votes. The liberal state is supposed to uphold freedom and equality, but the Australian state denied both of those things to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and faced down their fierce resistance with violence, segregation and imprisonment.

The push for constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Nations peoples anchored in the Voice reminds us of these deep and unresolved wrongs. Its challenge to the legitimacy and identity of the liberal state was bound to be met with anger and resentment. Yet, as political philosopher Duncan Ivison has argued, the Voice also provides a way forward — an opportunity “to reset what seems currently fixed.”

As Ivison writes, “By providing a legal and political framework within which Indigenous peoples’ voices can be heard on matters of deep concern to them, whilst at the same time engaging with the core political structures of the Australian state, it offers a distinctive opportunity for ‘re-founding’ these relations.”

I still hold a hope that the opinion polls are wrong and a surge of undecided voters will swing the vote to Yes on polling day. But I’m not optimistic. Whatever the result, I’m confident that history will keep reaching into the present in unsettling ways.

Each successive generation, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, migrant or locally born, will discover, and rediscover, discomfiting truths that pierce the great Australian silence. Historians and others won’t stop delving into the trove of archival and anecdotal records, stirring up the sediment of the past to cloud the waters of the present. Some Australians, many even, may fail to listen or refuse to hear. But there will always be those who grapple with the insistent moral and political demands history makes on us. There is no foreseeable point in the future where we can draw a line under things and say, we’ve dealt with that, now let’s move on. •

The post Yes or No, history won’t go away appeared first on Inside Story.

Be assured that I’m not going to be sifting through your rubbish on bin night. In my day job as a social history curator I interpret historical material for display in exhibitions, and in that work the context and significance of objects is critical. In my downtime, though, I grub for the bits of history left behind in charity shops, collectables shops and markets. I’m not a collector; I just like being in the presence of old stuff.

Fine antique shops bore me because everything in them has already been assessed for its market value. All is tidily identified, with no space for adventure or mystery. I’m drawn to the places where I can be unsettled by orphaned artefacts and random associations. In charity and collectables shops it’s up to the customers to establish significance, and they’ll do this through Google searching of course, but also by drawing on their own imagination and memories.

“Oh, my mum used to have one of those!” is a commonly overheard remark, referring perhaps to vintage Tupperware or a Corningware casserole dish. I once spotted a glass jug exactly the same as the one my mother used for mint sauce, but I didn’t buy it, because really, it was rather ugly. Maybe she thought so too, but it was what she had.

Whether or not someone will buy other people’s discarded stuff depends entirely on how they reimagine its use and reinvest it with new meaning. Inversion of value is something that the French writer Raymond Queneau had great fun with in his 1967 poem “The Bin-Men Go on Strike”:

it’s strike day for the bin-men
it’s a lucky day for us
we can play ragpicker or peddler
junk dealer who knows even antiquarian
there’s a little bit of everything…

A little bit of everything. I like that. It’s a tough call, Queneau goes on, between the “eyeless armless noseless doll” or the tin of sardines “that lost all its sardines on the way” or the “can of French peas that lost all its French peas on the way,” all of it “yawn[ing] in the midday sun… ripe for the picking.” Suddenly you see a work of art abandoned by some “ignorant philistine”: the Mona Lisa is it? Or The Night Watch, the Venus de Milo or The Raft of the Medusa?

Carol Rumens chose “The Bin-Men Go on Strike” for her poem of the week earlier this year in the Guardian. She suggests that Queneau conjures “art from soiled fragmented images” and, in so doing, simultaneously goes in the opposite direction and reduces art back to rubbish. Who gets to declare what is art and what is not art? And so, I thought when I read the poem, who gets to declare what is history and what not? Anyone. Feeling superfluous is very freeing.

On a trip to Melbourne in June this year I was happily playing this game in my head in the Chapel Street Bazaar — one of the largest second-hand markets I’ve ever seen — when I was brought up short by a commemorative plate, one of those limited-edition ceramic pieces that people collect for display on shelf or wall.

After blinking at it for a few seconds I realised it depicts a moment shortly after the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788. A couple of ships lie at anchor, a Union Jack has been hoisted, and convicts and marines are busy rowing barrels of supplies to a small jetty. Someone has pitched a tent, and already a few trees have been felled to create a clearing.

It was priced at $95. Gingerly I picked it up and turned it over. The painting was titled “Ships of the First Fleet, Sydney Cove” and had been commissioned by Westminster Australia (a company specialising in commemorative ceramics, I later learned) for a limited firing to mark the Australian bicentenary in 1988. The original work was painted by maritime artist Ian Hansen.

Immediately I was taken back to the raucous year-long “celebration of a nation” that was 1988. Most particularly I remember the promotional jingle that planted a twelve-month earworm in all our heads:

Come on give us a hand,
Let’s make it grand!
Let’s make it great in ’88,
Come on give us a hand!

“The road to the Bicentenary was certainly a winding and treacherous one,” notes Frank Bongiorno in The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (2017). His remark makes me wish I had been paying more attention to the swirl of entangled ideologies going on at the time, but, living in Hobart and wrapped up in my own life, I wasn’t.

The First Fleet re-enactment did penetrate my world, mainly because the “tall ships,” as everyone called them, visited Hobart in early January 1988 for a race to Sydney ahead of the spectacular re-enactment event on the harbour on 26 January. Also on that day in Sydney a protest was attended by more than 40,000 Indigenous Australians and supporters from across the country. I don’t have Indigenous heritage and I confess it barely registered with me.

Mostly I recall a lot of people running about in period costume and the myriad television specials, concerts, books and so on. The official bicentennial logo — a map of Australia in green and gold diagonal stripes — was impossible to ignore. It was on everything from caps to coffee mugs to commemorative coins.

I thought it would be on the back of this plate too, but no, this was an unofficial production. I put it back on its little stand. It all seems such a long time ago now. Gradually I started to notice the clutter of other things on the same shelf. A matching hen and rooster in ceramic. A glazed figurine of a cat. A couple of lamps. A decanter and glasses. A bunch of artificial tulips in a vase. A stack of video cassettes topped by a biscuity-looking bust of the Madonna and child.

Tucked in next to the plate was a ceramic bell labelled “4 generations souvenir bell $45,” featuring an illustration of four generations of the royal family: the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince George. The illustration was obviously taken from a photograph of Prince George’s christening in 2013, and I discovered later that it was posed to match a photograph taken in 1894 of the christening of the future Edward VIII. In that photo, Queen Victoria is seated holding the baby prince while the child’s grandfather and father (later Edward VII and George V) stand behind. In each photo the elderly female monarch is flanked by three future English kings. Extraordinary when you think about it.

Here then, in this crazy jumble of stuff, was a glorious freewheeling rejection of the power of professional museums to control the language of acquisition and display; a laugh-out-loud moment for a curator on a day off. This is what I turn up for in collectables shops.

The centrepiece was the commemorative plate, innocently inviting the viewer to remember the earliest days of white settlement on this continent. The flag seen on the right had been hoisted at an informal ceremony on 26 January 1788 at which Captain Arthur Phillip, having decided that this was the best place to establish the colony, had gathered a small party of officers and others to drink to the success of the new colony and the health of their king, His Majesty George III.

And there, depicted on that other useless ceramic thing — the bell — are George’s smiling descendants. There’s his little namesake, who will one day (presumably) be crowned George VII. The god they all worship makes an appearance too, on that altar of video cassettes, also as a babe in arms.

A little bit of everything, at the heart of which was a yawning absence. “Ships of the First Fleet, Sydney Cove” doesn’t depict a single Indigenous person — not one of the Eora people who had cared for that coast for tens of thousands of years before Phillip’s men planted the Union Jack there.

There is nothing to suggest the complex meeting of two vastly different cultures, none of what Inga Clendinnen, in Dancing with Strangers (2003), called “hugger-mugger accidents, casual misreadings, and unthinking responses to the abrasions inevitable during close encounters of the cultural kind.” Certainly there is no hint of violent dispossession. This was a 1988 view of 1788, and all the manufacturer wanted was to make money by producing something that people would be happy to display in their living rooms.

Actually — and this is no surprise in a collectables shop — I was surrounded by numerous examples of complex cultures and histories reduced to toy-like simplicity for domestic consumption. Walking about with fresh eyes I noticed a moustached Mexican doll in a sombrero, several black baby dolls (one of them ludicrously dressed in a grass skirt), some “golliwogs,” some “African” masks and a couple of very choice examples of “Aboriginalia.”

It’s within the collectables market, in bricks and mortar and on online, that we find the best kitsch, and a lot of it is genuinely good fun. It makes us smile, and sometimes generates fresh inspiration for artists and other creatives. But look again at what lurks. While these objects tell us little about the cultures their makers sought to represent, they tell us a great deal about ourselves. Our ignorance, our insularity and casual racism take artefactual form and, over time, fall to the bottom to form a giant, heaving slurry of stuff that we often just don’t know what to do with.

“You’re not going to buy it are you?” my son Harry queried when I told him about the commemorative plate that evening. Of course not, I said, although the thought had crossed my mind. But to do so would enhance the market for this kind of thing, and would, I thought, make me complicit in the artefact’s reductive re-enactment of the past. To own it would be to accept its message. For the price of $95 I would be rejecting Clendinnen’s warning that the people of the past are more than “just ourselves tricked out in fancy dress.”

So I walked away. Yet the plain truth of it is that I’d be embarrassed to own the plate myself and I’m hoping that a public museum somewhere has acquired one so that I can shuffle responsibility from the personal to the collective. I did some searching through various online collection databases but had no success with this particular item, although that’s not to say it’s not there somewhere.

But the 1988 bicentenary seems to be fairly well represented in public collections generally, which is heartening. It shows that, after all, there is a role for publicly funded museums (and libraries and archives) to preserve evidence that disturbs and unsettles our comfortable views of ourselves and our history. It is a job too important to be left to chance. At some point, bin-men and curators all need to get back to work.

Post-referendum we are likely to be feeling more than unsettled. What does the future hold? Australia Day 2024 is not that far away. •

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The visual contrasts with Australia mask many similarities. Taiwan is a young democracy, but its robust institutions underpin a remarkably progressive society. Democratisation has fostered a degree of civic consciousness unknown in the decades of martial law between 1949 and 1987. Multicultural policy has allowed local cultures to flourish after decades of repression, fostering a strong sense of Taiwanese identity.  A substantial body of law, still growing, protects and advances Indigenous rights to land, language maintenance and participation in government. A  marriage equality bill was passed on constitutional grounds in 2019.

Among these measures, Indigenous rights must resonate keenly for the visiting parliamentarians, themselves about to vote in a referendum on constitutional recognition of First Nations in Australia. On their way down Ketagalan Boulevard to the presidential office building on Tuesday, they may have been told that the road had been renamed in honour of the Aboriginal people who first lived in the Taipei area. They may also have seen the small “tent embassy” that has stood in adjacent parkland since 2017, the year that marked the beginning of a protest movement aimed at achieving something like a Wik determination (or better) in land rights.

It won’t be news to the visitors that Taiwan has a substantial Indigenous population. Indigenous studies and arts have been an increasingly important area of interaction and cultural exchange between Taiwan and Australia. In 2018, the Northern Territory government and the Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Development Centre launched a six-week artist-in-residence exchange program. In 2019, the first combined Yirramboi–Pulima festival brought together dance performers from Australian and Taiwanese First Nations in Melbourne. This year, the Narrm Oration at Melbourne University will be delivered by Akawyan Pakawyan of Taiwan’s Pinuyumayan people.

Beyond their First Nation status, little obviously connects the Aboriginal peoples in the two places. The First Nations people of Taiwan are Austronesian. Their languages (and there are many) link them to populations scattered across the Indo-Pacific, from Madagascar in the west to Hawaií in the east and New Zealand in the south.  But Austronesians never settled in Australia.

As colonial subjects, moreover, Taiwanese Aboriginals have a rather “tangled history” that seems not to fit neatly into the model provided by the European settler-colonial states. Since the Dutch occupation of the early seventeenth century, the island has been taken over by a series of competing powers in Northeast Asia. An independent settler-colonial state has emerged, populated largely by descendants of Chinese immigrants, but it is overshadowed and to some extent forestalled by the threat of war from its large neighbour, the People’s Republic of China.

Nonetheless, there are striking points of correspondence in the histories of First Nations in Taiwan and Australia. In both places, immigration, albeit from largely different sources, led to massive population growth during the nineteenth century. In both cases, the influx of newcomers was accompanied by a severe diminution of the Aboriginal population. Forced relocation of whole tribes sundered links with ancestral lands. In both cases, the process of dispossession continued into the second half of the twentieth century, leaving a legacy of trauma and social disadvantage reflected most poignantly in shorter life expectancy for Taiwanese and Australian Aboriginals alike.

Momentous developments meant a fundamental shift in relations between First Nations and the majority society in both places in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In Australia, the Mabo and Wik High Court cases quashed forever the doctrine of terra nullius, altering perceptions of land ownership in Australia and returning a considerable degree of authority over Country to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. In Taiwan, Aboriginal activism gathered momentum as the whole society shifted into democratic mode; the development of opposition political parties in non-Indigenous society was matched by the formation of Indigenous associations that were soon asserting their rights to self-determination.

Since then, First Nations’ issues have rarely been absent from the political landscape in either place. In 2007, prime minister Kevin Rudd, having brought Labor to power after a period of eleven years of conservative government, apologised to members of the stolen generations. In 2016, newly elected president Tsai Ing-wen, bringing the Democratic Progressive Party to power after eight years of conservative government under the Kuomintang, apologised to Taiwan’s First Nations for crimes committed against them after the island was handed over to China at the end of the second world war. Even the sharp division between political parties on Aboriginal issues shows parallels.

Constitutional changes, however, present different problems in the two places. In Australia, the Constitution can be changed by the people, who may or may not prove willing to support the changes about to be presented to them in the referendum. In Taiwan, the constitution is an historical relic, a document drawn in another time for another place — the Republic of China in 1947. Constitutional amendments are impeded by China’s tendency to view any such moves as “a path that seeks independence.” It was in the face of strident criticism from Beijing that Taiwan’s constitution was amended in 2005 to reserve six seats in the national assembly for Aboriginal representatives. With this and one other “additional article” the then president, Chen Shui-pien, made good on his promise that Indigenous Taiwanese would receive constitutional recognition.

Needless to say, all this is bound up with the development of democracy in Taiwan. The formation of political parties and the introduction of open elections in the late twentieth century meant shaking off the Chinese yoke. Politically, acknowledgement of and alignment with Aboriginal rights, especially land rights and cultural rights, has stamped Taiwan as different from China and established Aboriginal people as prior owners of a land that China regards as its own.

Incorporation into China would be damaging to Taiwan’s First Nations.  The very terms Aboriginal/Indigenous — in Chinese, literally “the peoples who originally lived here” — are frowned on in China for their suggestion of prior claim on the land and a history that might privilege them over the Han majority. China has effectively defined its own Indigenous peoples out of existence; all that is left are ethnic minorities (xiaoshu minzu).

Whether this complex of issues has been discussed by the visitors during their time in Taiwan has not been reported. Prime minister Anthony Albanese’s pending trip to China has anyway meant that their visit has been low key. But if some future parliamentary delegation to Taiwan includes a First Nations MP, we can expect indigenous issues here to feature in political debates about Australia’s relations with both China and Taiwan. •

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ANDREW FORD: You once told me the piano was the centre of your musical universe. This suggests that being alone at the piano is where everything starts. Does it?

PAUL GRABOWSKY: Every musician would regard their instrument as the centre of their musical universe, but there’s an additional philosophical proposition behind that to do with what the actual relationship is between playing music and life more generally. What I’ve said many times over the years is “the piano never lies,” by which I mean that the piano, as beautiful as it is, is ultimately a large, complicated piece of essentially nineteenth-century technology, utterly mute, even useless, until it becomes the means of expression for a player. It will quickly reveal to the player where they are at, no quarter given. So that’s been my relationship with the piano: my lover, my scold. Does everything start there? Yes, because my musical language was developed at the piano, and informs everything I make, whether orchestral music, which has lately taken up a lot of my time, or anything else, down to solo piano music per se.

AF: During the pandemic, there were two things I genuinely looked forward to. One was Tim Stevens’s daily “quarantune,” the other your Friday night offering from the piano — and it was an offering, a sharing, a weekly gift. What did you get out of that?

PG: The lockdowns were famously severe in Melbourne. Our communal patience was tested to its limits. There were no gigs for quite a while, but luckily we had the ability to communicate via other means. I’ve long harboured the belief that music is forged out of the mysterious moment of exchange between player and listener; that until that exchange occurs there is no “music,” just latency, intent. To be able to play on those Fridays gave me something to look forward to, a virtual happy hour, which we would prepare for in the home with nice food and drinks, to create a sense of occasion. I did it for the sake of my own morale initially. Just before the first wave of Covid really hit, I had heart surgery, so I was convalescing, and the playing helped greatly. It was only later that I started to realise that a lot more people were listening in than I’d realised, and from all over the place. Now I know that it helped other people find their Fridays, locate themselves within the temporal wasteland, join in the occasion, and I am deeply grateful to have been able to make even a small difference.

AF: You’ve been a collaborator from the start — in trios, leading bands, working with singers — but some of your most surprising and memorable collaborators have been from outside jazz. Do you suddenly think, “This might work”? And how do you know?

PG: I think the word “jazz” has been something of a shibboleth for me. I deeply love the music, and still regard it as describing some of the greatest art produced in the twentieth century, but I’ve felt more drawn to the processes that arrive at certain outcomes than the notes that define what we might call “style.” This was the philosophy behind the Australian Art Orchestra from its beginnings in the early 1990s, that collaborations involving the creative application of improvisatory paradigms, including (but not exclusively) jazz, could lead to fascinating and meaningful outcomes.

A lot of the thinking here has been influenced by my love for the art of Ornette Coleman, where what he called “harmolodics” — and I call “relationality” — is the driving principle of both the music and everything that informs it. This thinking inspired early AAO projects (Ringing the Bell Backwards, Passion, Into the Fire, Sita) and then found its most satisfying outcomes in collaborations with Uncle Archie Roach and Aunty Ruby Hunter (Ruby), and with the Young Wägiluk Group (Crossing Roper Bar). So it has been relatively straightforward to apply this idea of relationality to one-on-one projects with singers (Vince Jones, Kate Ceberano, Paul Kelly, Emma Donovan, Ngaiire, Joe Camilleri, etc.), as I come to them with an open mind, not trying to impose “jazz” onto their songs, but simply to make music together.

AF: The collaboration that has persisted longest is the deep engagement you and other improvising colleagues have had with the songmen of Ngukurr in Southeast Arnhem Land, which I think started with Crossing Roper Bar. How did that come about?

PG: For years I wanted to connect with the oldest musical tradition on the planet. It confused me that Australians were quick to see the unique qualities of the visual art of our First Peoples, even adorning our passenger jets with their designs, but seemed oblivious to their music, other than perhaps knowing what a didgeridoo looks like. Of course it’s not easy to have access to language and culture-based First Australians; the locations are often difficult to get to, and just being there isn’t necessarily going to get you very far. I have a friend, Steve Teakle, who was working with various remote communities in the Territory at the time, and he took me to Ngukkur on the Roper River in Southeast Arnhem Land, as he felt sure that the ceremonial songmen there would be happy to talk. Within minutes of arriving there I met Benjamin and Roy Wilfred, and they were singing the Djawulparra manikay (song cycles) to me. It was utterly overwhelming. Nothing had prepared me for the sheer visceral power of this music. That was in 2004 and I haven’t stopped loving the music and its makers and regarding them as one of the world’s great artistic treasures.

AF: You’ve worked with Daniel and David Wilfred on a number of projects. How do you work together?

PG: The willingness of the Wilfreds to collaborate was there right from the beginning, but it took me years to understand the reasons why these collaborations were second nature to them. It had to do with a belief system that expresses the interconnectedness of all things, including time and space, and that these manikay are expressions of that interconnectedness, that everything that happens within the ceremonial framework of the manikay is the manikay, not some form of provocation. The generous spirit of sharing, of commonality of being, that lies at the heart of this form is the gift we have been offered by our First Peoples since colonisation began, but the colonisers have largely chosen to ignore it.

The latest iteration of the relationship is a project called Raki. This word means several things, including the “bush string” used to make dilly-bags for food; it also signifies “law” in the sense of being the string that binds people together, and conveys knowledge and protection across country and between different peoples. Daniel Wilfred leads the project, together with Peter Knight on trumpet and electronics and me on piano. Daniel explains the significance of the word, and conveys the rhythmic modes played on the bilma (clapsticks). I have to perform some of the yidaki (didgeridoo) functions, and he is very insistent that this is done with the necessary degree of intensity and accuracy. In manikay the yidaki functions as a drum, not as a drone, which is the way it is played in some contemporary practice. The yidaki rhythmic patterns in manikay are very complex, and tightly related to the melodies.

The music follows the start/stop form of manikay: tight bursts of great intensity, followed by what Daniel would call “head song,” which takes the form of a spacious improvisation that often invokes locations and ancestors, roaming through space and time and allowing for freewheeling interaction across the trio until the commencement of the next section.

AF: You mentioned visual art before. There have been some objections in non-Indigenous visual art circles about “traditional” art by First Nations artists turning up in “contemporary” shows. I imagine that to you, as a collaborating musician, such a distinction is moot, but I wonder if you think about it at all — I mean from a philosophical point of view? Wynton Marsalis once insisted that all jazz is contemporary because it’s made in the present and never the same twice. Is it the same with all traditional music?

PG: It seems to me the critique around “traditional” versus “contemporary” when it comes to art is a furphy when we’re talking about the world’s oldest living culture. Was Emily Kngwarreye a “traditional” artist? Rover Thomas? Surely not in a precolonial sense. These ancient practices adjust to changing times and conditions without the teleological overlay of “modernism” playing any role. The same is true of manikay. Songs can be about ancestor creator-figures, but can equally be about smoking, drinking and going fishing (in a powered vessel).

Blues music makes a reasonable point of comparison. When was it ever “traditional”? We use the same term applied to New Orleans–style jazz, too, and this is I guess what Wynton means about all jazz being “contemporary.” My projects with the Wilfreds don’t comply with any need to justify their contemporaneity, as they express a timeless belief system within a contemporary collaborative paradigm.

AF: What do you gain from this collaboration as a musician and — if you can make such a distinction — personally?

PG: As suggested above, my work with First Peoples has been quite literally life-changing. I mentioned the influence of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics to my understanding of musical processes, and this idea of relationality has been clearly revealed to me in the practice of manikay and more generally in my interactions with the Wilfreds. I must add that my work with Uncle Archie Roach was equally profound, and that the generosity of spirit of which manikay is such an eloquent expression was also evident in every word, sung or spoken, by the great Uncle Archie Roach and by Aunty Ruby Hunter.

This is my lived experience of working with our First Peoples, and I wish that every Australian could share in that love. This is why the Voice means so much to me. We as a nation have not listened to our First Peoples, and their right to an advisory body collecting information and making it readily available to governments as they come and go should be enshrined in, and protected by, our Constitution.

AF: This might be hard to answer, but what do you think you offer someone like Daniel Wilfred? Do you think you’ve changed him musically?

PG: It’s not that hard to answer. Like every great artist, Daniel sees possibilities arising out of collaborations that may not have otherwise occurred to him. He sometimes says that his grandfather, the great songman and painter Djambu Barra Barra, comes to him in dreams and gives him new songs. He introduces these into projects like Raki or the work he has done with Peter Knight’s Hand to Earth project.

Manikay is a living, dynamic art form, and while its roots lead deep into the well of time, it remains vibrant, new and exciting in many projects emerging in contemporary Australia. I don’t expect Daniel to gradually reinvent himself as another type of singer, but I do know that he is contributing to the ongoing relevance of the world’s oldest form of song. •

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are calling for similar recognition in Australia. Despite very different constitutional and political settings, Canadian political scientist Graham White’s new book, “We Are in Charge Here”: Inuit Self-Government and the Nunatsiavut Assembly, offers much for Australian readers watching the development of innovative native title settlements in Western Australia and modern treaty-making in Victoria and elsewhere.

While those experiments in Indigenous self-governance remain aspirational, White provides a comprehensive profile of functioning self-government in Canada. If Australian treaty processes continue apace, we may soon see a diverse range of culturally resurgent self-government structures empowering Indigenous communities to respond to contemporary challenges.

Until relatively recently, Indigenous self-governance in Canada was also largely aspirational (if we put to one side extensive precolonial histories). Scholars developed arguments for self-government without being able to assess how it works in practice. Given that self-government’s success, in White’s words, is “highly dependent on the design, operation, and effectiveness” of the legal and policy architecture within which it sits, White’s analysis of the Nunatsiavut in action is especially welcome.

The Nunatsiavut government’s origins lie in what’s formally known as a comprehensive land claim — a modern-day treaty. Canada’s long history of treaty-making began in 1701, and although the seventy signed between then and 1923 were not always fair bargains — and were sometimes honoured only in the breach — they recognised that Indigenous communities owned their land and possessed rights to their country.

Even so, vast areas of Canada were never subject to treaty; like Australia, the Canadian Crown simply asserted ownership and control. But the Supreme Court of Canada complicated this approach in 1973 when it held that Aboriginal title existed prior to the colonisation of North America. Anxious to resolve difficult questions over ownership of land, the Canadian government quickly established a process to negotiate outstanding claims with Indigenous communities. After another two decades of Indigenous political activity, the Canadian government agreed in 1995 that self-government arrangements could form part of comprehensive land claims.

Modern Indigenous self-governance in Canada comes in a variety of forms. In some cases, federal legislation delegates significant authority in a particular sector to specific Indigenous communities; in others, such as the Sechelt Indian Band Self-Government Act, legislation recognises more general powers of autonomy.

In certain regions, demographics have also created the conditions for de facto Indigenous governments. In places like Nunavut and Nunavik in northern Quebec, benefits and services are open to all residents (unlike Indigenous self-government regimes, which are characterised by exclusionary provisions), but with Inuit comprising most of the population the local legislatures essentially operate as Indigenous governments.

These self-government regimes are largely creatures of federal (and in some cases, provincial) legislation. Although they may devolve substantial autonomy, federal and provincial governments retain the authority to revise and even drastically curtail its exercise. This is not the case for self-government arrangements that emerge from comprehensive land claims agreements: section 35 of the Canadian constitution, which recognises and affirms “aboriginal and treaty rights,” provides significant legal protection for this model.

Twenty-three such agreements have been struck, of which Nunatsiavut is the largest in terms of population. Its governance model thus ranks “among the strongest, most autonomous self-government regimes in Canada,” according to White. This is good news for the roughly 7000 Labrador Inuit beneficiaries, around 2400 of whom live in Nunatsiavut’s 72,520 square kilometre territory.

The negotiations that led to the formation of Nunatsiavut, like all comprehensive land claims agreements, proved challenging. Although the claim was filed in 1977, talks didn’t commence until 1988 and only in 2001 was in-principle agreement reached between the Labrador Inuit Association and the governments of Newfoundland and Canada.

Because the federal government “determines the rules of the process,” Labrador Inuit negotiators were forced to offer what White calls “substantial concessions.” Nevertheless, and despite some unease, the agreement was ratified by the beneficiaries in 2004, and the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement entered into force the following year. The first assembly elections were held in 2006.

We Are in Charge Here focuses on the Nunatsiavut assembly, the key democratic body in the territory. In clear, patient prose, White surveys the assembly’s first fifteen years, assessing its structure, operation and effectiveness. He examines the assembly’s success in carrying out its core parliamentary functions, its relationship with the Nunatsiavut executive council (or cabinet), and — critically — whether and how Labrador Inuit culture has influenced the design and practice of this distinctive parliamentary institution.

White also skilfully weaves his technical study of the Nunatsiavut assembly into a deeper examination of the opportunities and tensions involved in blending Indigenous and Western constitutional orders within the state.

The Nunatsiavut assembly is “a site of intersection” between Inuit and Euro-Canadian cultural traditions, he writes. Within a Westminster-style institution, power is concentrated in cabinet — the president and four ordinary members of the assembly — which is responsible to the assembly. Members of the assembly exercise accountability functions through committees and question time.

Nevertheless, the assembly has “some decidedly non-Westminster features.” “Explicitly designed and mandated to reflect and enhance Inuit culture,” its eighteen members must be Inuit. The president is directly elected by all beneficiaries (who must be fluent in Inuktitut) and ten members are elected by geographic electorates, with the membership rounded out with the angajukKât (mayors) of the five Nunatsiavut Inuit community governments and the chairs of the two Inuit community corporations. The speaker is nonpartisan but unusually active and influential.

It is not just the structure of the assembly that differs from the traditional Westminster system. In White’s words, the practice of the parliament demonstrates the “pragmatic adaptability of the Labrador Inuit,” who have modified key elements to “render serviceable for Inuit purposes a decidedly colonial governance model.”

Adversarial politics is shunned as incompatible with Inuit political culture. Political parties are absent, and consensus decision-making is common — though divided and secret votes do occur. Perhaps most alien to Australian readers, a strict and enforceable code of conduct (including no drinking on the job) has led to several dismissals from the ministry and expulsions from the assembly.

But the institution that emerges from White’s research faces real challenges, though their precise cause is difficult to pinpoint. The legislature is largely quiescent, happy to be led by the cabinet. The assembly is not especially active in its key roles of policymaking, legislating, educating the public, and maintaining accountability.

Is this a function of a non-confrontational Inuit political culture or does it reflect conditions in the community the assembly serves? Nunatsiavut is geographically remote, its major population centres small and difficult to access by transport that can’t be used during winter. The assembly, which receives almost 2 per cent of the Nunatsiavut budget, operates on a shoestring, without parliamentary or research staff. Media attention is sparse.

And yet the assembly can exert influence when it chooses to do so. The locally contentious issue of uranium mining, for instance, stretches back to the 1950s. In one of its early decisions, the Nunatsiavut government determined to prohibit uranium mining on Labrador Inuit lands. Extended consultations across the territory, held at the assembly’s insistence, led to a modified proposal for a three-year moratorium on mining and development rather than an outright ban. Following more debate, the bill passed eight–seven, with two members of the cabinet in opposition. While consensus is prioritised, it is not always possible; even so, debate on the mining proposal was forthright but civil.

The uranium moratorium bill reveals the strength of the assembly. More important, though, is the fact that the people of Nunatsiavut had the authority to decide the issue.

The first minister drew on this point when he explained that the larger purpose of the bill was to send a message to exploration companies, mining companies and other governments that the assembly is “in charge here in Nunatsiavut… We are the decision body, we will make the rules that apply to our land. It is our land and we will continue to protect it and we have newfound powers that we will use to ensure that development that takes place will be done so on our terms.”

Against the wishes of largely non-Inuit environmental groups, the moratorium was lifted in 2011. The assembly and community were not anti-development or anti-uranium; rather, they demanded the recognition of their autonomy and decision-making authority.

During that 2011 debate Nunatsiavut’s president noted that his people had spent many years being governed by non-Inuit. “That day has passed.” Now “we make our decisions on what we do. We’ll make our own mistakes. We learn from our own mistakes.”

For the people of Nunatsiavut, self-government means controlling their own affairs. It may be challenging at times, but it is through the assembly that this is achieved. And that is worth celebrating. •

“We Are in Charge Here”: Inuit Self-Government and the Nunatsiavut Assembly
By Graham White | University of Toronto Press | C$75 | 304 pages

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Ross found, first, that many of the 540 signatures to the treaty were added after the stated date of signing (6 February 1840), and even after the treaty’s proclamation (21 May 1840), by William Hobson, the British lieutenant-governor. And, second, she found that not one but two proclamations were made on that day, the second correcting the first by adding the South Island and Stewart Island to the North Island, though not because of the chiefs’ cession but because of the British “discovery” of these territories. Privately, Ross said that her research showed Britain to have been “both very well-meaning and very cynical.”

The treaty — especially approached in Ross’s painstaking manner — was seen as too esoteric for Northland Magazine’s general readership. Friends encouraged her to persist in examining the treaty documents and their context, but a new job with the New Zealand Historic Places Trust pulled her in other directions.

Māori were meanwhile asserting their collective rights in terms that confronted the official policy of assimilation. By the time Victoria University invited Ross to speak at a public forum in 1971, her views had more resonance. She argued that the Māori text of the treaty, not the English text, should be the focus of legal and political debate because most of the chiefs’ signatures applied to a Māori translation whose English original had been signed by relatively few chiefs at Waikato Heads on 6 February 1840.

Importantly, Ross was critical of the Māori translation, and particularly the question of whether it had adequately rendered the English term “sovereignty.” Where the missionary coinage kawanatanga had been used to refer to what Māori were being asked to cede to Queen Victoria, might the Māori concept mana have better conveyed the full significance of “sovereignty”?

The purpose of historian Bain Attwood’s latest book, “A Bloody Difficult Subject”: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History, is not only to celebrate the scholarship and character of Ross (widow, wife and mother in a milieu of male professional privilege), though he surely does that, making full use of her papers. Attwood’s larger points are that the significance of historical truths is highly dependent on the context of their reception, and that any “truth” that has public utility (as knowledge of the treaty surely has in New Zealand) may “assume the form of myth.”

Myth need not mean falsehood. Rather, Attwood means that the treaty has become a kind of blank screen on which “moral, political and legal norms” have been projected. Settler colonial nations need foundation stories, and the treaty is central to New Zealand’s. It can have a “mythic history” because stories about it “have a genuine link to a genuine past” and “at least a partial relationship to past reality and what is regarded as historically truthful.” But what the treaty does, as myth, is serve needs now.

Ross finally got her treaty research published, fourteen years after her first attempt, in the New Zealand Journal of History. According to Attwood, her overriding argument was that it is hard for us to know the intentions of those drawing up and signing the treaty. In her debunking words, the treaty was “hastily and inexpertly drawn up, ambiguous and contradictory in content, chaotic in its execution. To persist in postulating that this was a ‘sacred compact’ is sheer hypocrisy.”

Revealing the treaty to be unfit to serve as a “moral compact, let alone a legal contract” (Attwood’s words), Ross saw her truth as demystifying. But changes in Pākehā/Māori relations meant this was not an argument readers became aware of and valued.

In response to Māori self-assertion, the government established the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, making the treaty a central “constitutional” document (in a nation without a written constitution). It was not the purpose of Ross’s research to establish how the treaty could work as a morally and politically central two-language text, but this was her research’s fate. Indeed, there is irony in her most iconoclastic assertion — “the Treaty of Waitangi says whatever we want it to say” — because, by the 1970s, Pākehā and Māori were wanting the treaty to say a lot.

In fact, the treaty’s protean character was not the undoing but the making of the treaty as a focus of national life. A non-debunking reading of Ross’s scholarship — a reading that found, in Attwood’s words, “that there were substantive differences between the Māori text and the English texts, that the Māori text constituted the treaty, and that any consideration of its meanings and implications should proceed on that basis” — proved unstoppable.

The jurisprudence of the new tribunal was soon shaped by Māori judge Eddie Durie, its chair from 1980 to 2004, who saw the Māori text as fundamental. The centrality of the treaty to New Zealanders’ conceptions of themselves as a socially just people has ensured the text remains in focus as the nation debates the terms of Māori–Pākehā coexistence and the mutual honouring of their sovereignties.

Attwood conveys the disconnect between Ross’s own understanding of her paper’s primary point and others’ later understandings. Her paper is open to being read for both its major argument (a treaty botched, a nation’s veneration of it misconceived) and for its minor argument (the Māori text as the treaty). In other words, as Attwood says, “Ross’s approach to an account of the treaty resembles the treaty itself” by being available to more than one purposeful reading. The minor argument has become canonical because the nation needs it.

In his book’s final two-thirds Attwood reviews the writings of treaty scholars including Paul McHugh, Claudia Orange, Judith Binney, James Belich, Michael Belgrave, John Pocock, Andrew Sharp, Keith Sorrenson, W.H. Oliver, Lyndsay Head, D.F. McKenzie and Mark Hickford. These (Pākehā) names will be well known to anyone reading New Zealand history. Their conversation has used or generated a number of terms — Whig history, common law history, juridical history, and Māori history — that Attwood has found useful in previous publications (for example, in his critique of the “juridical” alignment of Henry Reynolds’s scholarship with the High Court’s 1992 Mabo decision).

Attwood brought these terms (apart from Whig history) from New Zealand, and he now uses them to take the reader through the New Zealanders’ work, showing us the rich soil from which he grew as a historian. The debates in New Zealand are highly relevant for Australian historians who wish to respond to the Uluru Statement’s demand for truth-telling. By making this careful exposition, he has done the discipline of history everywhere a great service.

In his final chapter Attwood returns to a theme he canvassed in Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (2005). There, he remarked that the democratisation of the production of knowledge — accelerated by “contemporary forms of technology” — “has made it difficult to agree on what historical truth comprises.” He then presented academic history as somewhat embattled by having been drawn into the public sphere to perform political and legal service.

Since then, Attwood has read Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (1874), with its typology of histories: monumental, antiquarian and critical. He endorses Nietzsche’s view that each has advantages for living and each needs the tempering presence of the other two. This seems to have had the effect of weakening his strictures on “juridical history,” though the category remains important to him.

Thus Attwood now distances himself from those who privilege the “critical.” In their practice of what he calls historicism, its NZ practitioners concede too little public value to what people have made the treaty mean according to the political dynamics and moral sensibilities of their times. “Many of the matters at stake in regard to the treaty concern justice and ethics and so are legal and philosophical in nature rather than historical.”

Here Attwood enters a global discussion that has featured two formidable contemporary Australian theorists of history, Ian Hunter (University of Queensland) and Anne Orford (University of Melbourne), debating how we should and should not historicise international law. (Their debate is the subject of a perceptive commentary by another Australian, Natasha Wheatley, in a 2021 issue of History and Theory.)

By the final pages of Attwood’s very fine book, the reader will be acutely aware that New Zealand has been a ground for exploring a question that Australians can’t avoid: how does historical scholarship serve a democratic reckoning with a settler colonial past? The idea that he seems to find most promising is John Pocock’s proposed “treaty between histories” (that is, mutual respect between Pākehā and Māori ways of doing history that cannot be blended). We have much to learn from what they have been talking about on the other side of the ditch. •

“A Bloody Difficult Subject”: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History
By Bain Attwood | Auckland University Press | $59.95 | 320 pages

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The title The Queen Is Dead is particularly apt. Like an incantation, the phrase is repeated more than thirty times through the text. The emotional charge comes from Grant’s response to both her death and her funeral, and particularly the ABC’s treatment of it all — the black suits and ties, the distinctive, deferential voice, and above all the acceptance of protocols devised over there and not here. Not mentioned by Grant is the fact that the ABC sent a team of twenty-seven to London for the funeral.

“Think what we could have done,” he thunders:

We could have thrown open the doors and created a crescendo, a discordant choir of anger, sadness, tears, love, respect, disrespect, regard, disregard. We could have invited a reckoning with history, but instead we erased it.

“No one stands with me,” he declares. “I know, right now, that I am alone. My people do not matter. Here, in this moment of the White Queen’s death, we do not matter. That’s the truth. How could it be other?” But he refuses to temper his defiance, writing, “I will not put on a black suit and tie. I will not lower my voice, bend my knee, bow my head to the White Queen.”

The ABC had set the tone for the treatment of her death: “It is not the right time… The righteous voices from the other side of history should be kept quiet.” From the prime minister down, political leaders were on air reminding Australians to have respect. What does that mean, Grant asks, and then comes up with the withering answer. “It means they would rather talk about corgis than colonisation. The Queen’s love of her dogs matters more than the lives of those that the Crown has broken.”

It is here that the gap between Grant’s views and those of mainstream opinion is most apparent. Australia is largely unaware of the ongoing transformation of the historiography of the British Empire, and of the centuries-long domination of the West now under siege from many directions. Both the funeral and the coronation were weighed down with reverence for history and heritage. It could not be missed. But how carefully selective it all was, drawing deeply on those myths of the benign British Empire on which older Australians were suckled.

Grant knows where global opinion is flowing. He’s aware of Britain’s long engagement in the slave trade, and the violence that was used to build the empire and to strive to preserve it. He refers to Carolyn Elkins’s recent masterwork, Legacy of Violence. Elkins calculates that there were more than 250 separate armed conflicts in the British Empire during the nineteenth century, at least one in any given year. But more damaging to Britain’s reputation is her study of the rearguard brutality in the middle years of the twentieth century in places as widely dispersed as Kenya, Palestine, Malaya, Aden (now part of Yemen) and Cyprus, much of this occurring during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

For hundreds of millions of people, Elkins writes, “the empire’s velvet glove contained an all too familiar iron fist.” Responding, Grant observes that “from India to Africa to Ireland, the Pacific, the Caribbean and of course here, Australia, people from the other side of history have felt that fist.”

Grant’s intellectual outlook partly reflects his wide professional experience in many parts of the world. But the powerful emotional force of the book comes from his understanding of the tragic history of Australia’s First Nations, and particularly the experience of the Wiradjuri people of central-western New South Wales. When they resisted the rapid expansion of European settlement across the western plains, they became the victims of the Bathurst Wars of 1822–24. The governor, major-general Thomas Brisbane, declared martial law and dispatched punitive expeditions of mounted soldiers and settlers.

That fierce conflict foreshadowed what was to unfold across the continent during the following century. Endorsing a study by the historian Stephen Gapps, Grant declares that “this isn’t just a war for Wiradjuri country, this is a war for Australia: the country we are still to be. Our nation begins here.”

Growing up Wiradjuri in the small rural towns of New South Wales, surrounded by his extended family, left an enduring imprint on Grant, just as it did in many First Nations families of his and earlier generations. Typically they lived in fringe camps outside their town, down on the river bank, out near the cemetery or beyond the rubbish dump. Segregation was rigidly enforced. Men and women who did casual labour had to be out of town by sunset. Children were frequently banned from local schools, swimming pools and other public facilities. Everyone knew the Aboriginal families and there was no escaping their lowly status.

When there finally came a very gradual movement into town, other forms of racial discrimination developed. Grant still vividly remembers his upbringing. “Those dirty Blacks,” he writes:

That’s what they called my mother and her family and all the beautiful people she lived among, laughed with, cried with, mourned with and loved with. There was in her little town, as in all little towns, a colour line. On one side the people who thought themselves White, and then the others — often of hue barely distinguishable from the White people themselves, and sometimes even with the same blood — who were the Blacks. Those dirty Blacks. Blackness was a stain, an irremovable stain. To get close to it was to be stained as well.

Grant makes clear in myriad ways that he was shaped by his experiences and those of his family in small-town Australia during an era of deep racial discrimination. Race itself still haunts him. The idea of whiteness, he confesses, “has shaped my entire life… I have never escaped its clutches… When I think I may have slipped free of race, it returns, spitting at me.”

And then there is the abiding question of history: “I am a product of invasion, colonisation, and empire” that “still affects the lives of people in my family.” More dramatically, he declares, “It is in my bones. It is in my blood. It is, you know, my mother’s milk, what I was raised on.” In many passages he writes about grappling with this collective legacy while wanting to be free of history’s chains. “I want to think myself free,” he writes. “I want to know if I can live with history without being chained to history. When I speak of the wounds of history, it is to open them to sunlight, not to bathe them in salt.”

It is not a sunny story. Anger and bitterness are often just below the surface, particularly apparent when he deals with his attitude to Australia itself. In a passage of powerful rhetoric he cries, “Damn Australia. Damn it to hell for what it did to my family, what it did to countless Black families. Black families with White blood more often than not, but families who could never be White.” Australia, he writes in another angry passage, was:

born out of theft and slaughter and built on a law to keep the country White, which still today does not formally recognise the First Peoples, which has signed no treaties — how does this country hold its head high in the world? That’s the question I ask. And the answer, to me, is that it is shameless. It is a place beyond shame. Why would I think otherwise? Yes, damn it all.

Many Australians will see these as fighting words. And they are indeed challenging coming from a man who has had a brilliant career and who many would no doubt think should be, if not grateful, at least a touch patriotic. But Grant’s challenge is not only about the past and those things the nation has “never been able to face.” He looks forward to “the country we are still to be” and gestures with hope to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which he believes is about love, and “if we cannot find in ourselves love for our place, and for each other, what future is there?” •

The Queen Is Dead
By Stan Grant | Fourth Estate | $34.99 | 304 pages

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Contact with the real parliament came not long after. Yunupingu’s father was one of the signatories of the Bark Petitions sent to Canberra in August 1963 asking the government to hear the Yolngu before excising land for bauxite mining from the Arnhem Land Reserve. According to some — and this is entirely plausible — Yunupingu helped draft those bilingual documents.

Still an adolescent, he’d already had a taste of two experiences that would be lifelong. One was settler colonial intransigence. Although the Bark Petitions succeeded in their immediate objective — a parliamentary committee visited Yirrkala, heard Yolngu testimony and recommended compensation — they failed to stop the mining province being excised in 1968.

The other experience was translation, for which he had, by all accounts, a particular talent. Translation was Martin Luther’s sixteenth-century gift to Christendom: the imperative to render God’s word in every vernacular (rather than lock it up in Latin) was central to the Protestant rebellion again Rome and to the global “civilising” florescence of Christian faith.

At the mission’s invitation, Yunupingu spent two of his teenage years at Brisbane Bible College. Then, when he was just twenty years old, his people took the Commonwealth to court. Once again, Australia had to bend its ear towards the Yolngu. As anthropologist Nancy Williams writes, Yunupingu and another college trainee, Wulanybuma Wunungmurra, skilfully translated the Yolngu testimonies of customary law into English for the judge, Richard Blackburn. They were assisted by missionary linguist Joyce Ross. Each of the trio occasionally interjected with an alternative interpretation to what had just been heard.

For the first time in Australian legal history, a judge needed to hear an exposition of Aboriginal law and decide whether the laws of Australia were obliged to treat Aboriginal land tenure as binding for non-Aboriginal Australians. He had to answer the question: is Aboriginal customary ownership an enforceable proprietary right?

Blackburn’s judgement in 1971 came in two parts. Yolngu did have a continuing customary law that included concepts of land tenure. But Yolngu concepts of “ownership” didn’t amount to what counts as an enforceable proprietary right in Australian law.

For the second time, Yunupingu found himself on the losing side of a battle he had grown up with. But the twenty-three-year-old had contributed significantly to the judge’s grasp of Yolngu customs, and the case had given him, and the Yolngu clans, unprecedented credibility. In the two parts of Blackburn’s judgment it became possible to see a gap between morality and law. If Yolngu were still living by their own concept of what was right, were Australians not under a moral obligation to recognise them as owners of the reserve ?

The posing of this question in 1971 was an early rupture in Australian colonial consciousness, and it had been made possible by a coming together of enlightened Methodism, Yolngu territorial practice and the Australia’s common law. Without Yunupingu’s (and others’) skill in translation, this productive interaction would not have been possible.

What followed, within a few years, was a bipartisan commitment to land rights legislation. A sufficient number of Australians had seen in Blackburn’s ruling an implicit indictment of the laws they had been living by. That insight has continued to cascade through Australian law and politics: Mabo, Wik, the case for constitutional recognition.

The Garma Festival, which Yunupingu and his brother, Dr M. Yunupiŋu, established in 1999, has proved a lasting contribution to settler colonial Australia’s continuing self-examination. Self-examination doesn’t require shame and guilt, as long as it affords a respectful acknowledgement of difference — the difference, for example, between being a host and being a guest.

Being a guest, in this case on Gumatj clan land, can be rewarding. In 2018, journalist Julia Baird wrote that adopting the Garma protocols (as advised by the Yothu Yindi Foundation) had opened her up to a transformation of awareness, including an appreciation that “the offer of ‘Makarrata’ — a coming together after a struggle — was an act of remarkable generosity… they still invite us to walk with them, to understand better, which is an act of grace.” In January 2019, the Australian Financial Review named several female chief executives who had included Garma in their calendar of self-improvement. It has become a fixture on the calendar of Australia’s national politics.

Garma can also be hard. Leaders who choose the occasion to say forward-looking things about the colonial relationship can expect to be confronted. Just as the guests increasingly feel that they must be there, so the hosts take the opportunity to call them to better efforts. In 2014 Labor leader Bill Shorten hinted in a Garma speech that he favoured “anti-discrimination” language in the Constitution. The following year Yunupingu was reported as saying that the need for such an amendment was non-negotiable, while Marcia Langton got stuck into Tony Abbott’s resistance.

A year later, in 2016, Noel Pearson gave what one reporter described as a “rage-flecked” speech outlining his frustrations about constitutional recognition. At Garma 2017, prime minister Malcom Turnbull warned of the difficulty of constitutional recognition, while others lamented politicians’ lack of ambition. In 2018, Yunupingu, a member of the Referendum Council created by Abbott and Shorten in 2015, admonished Turnbull and Shorten for a lack of progress since the last festival. He had expected “detail and meaning and cleverness, not words and promises and nothingness,” according to one report.

In 2019, attending Garma was part of Anthony Albanese’s preparation for a tilt at the top job; he used the occasion to express support for the Uluru Statement from the Heart. It was a festival punctuated by fiery moments: Yunupingu expressed impatience at recognition’s slow progress and threatened to throw the Australian Constitution into the sea; Pearson, in another scathing address, accused the Institute of Public Affairs and conservative commentators of acting in bad faith.

Garma in 2022 — Yunupingu’s last, as we now know — was perfectly timed for Albanese to present his first draft of a constitutional amendment. Although he led a delegation of sympathetic MPs including federal Liberal MP Julian Leeser, it was also an occasion for Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to double down on her rejection of the Voice live on ABC television.

Will Yolngu in August 2023 find themselves hosting a debate, with Indigenous and non-Indigenous ranged on both sides of the debate? Almost certainly. This year’s Garma falls on the sixtieth anniversary of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions. Recognition has since become an unpredictable dynamic. What the Yolngu — under the auspices of Yunupingu’s Gumatj clan — have given Australia is an annual off-centre space of political performance where the visitors must work out how to acquit themselves honourably as guests. •

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Since 2016, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory have all committed to talk about treaties with First Nations peoples. These processes are still at an early stage, but their challenges, complications and accomplishments provide important lessons for a national treaty process.

First, a refresher. Treaties are accepted around the world as a means to resolve differences between Indigenous nations and those who colonised their lands. They have been struck in North America and New Zealand and are being negotiated in Canada. Australia is an outlier: no treaties were negotiated when the British arrived, or at Federation, or in the years since then. Without any formal treaty setting out how to share the land, many First Nations peoples believe Australia’s moral and legal foundations are, in NT treaty commissioner Mick Dodson’s words, “a little… shaky.”

Many types of agreements have been negotiated between First Nations peoples and governments, but international law sets a clear standard for what makes an agreement a treaty. Treaties are formal instruments reached through a process of respectful negotiation in which both sides accept a series of responsibilities. They provide redress for past injustices, acknowledging that Indigenous peoples were prior owners and occupiers of the land and, as such, retain a right to self-government.

At a minimum, a treaty recognises or creates structures of culturally appropriate governance and establishes means of decision-making and control. Treaties are more than service-delivery agreements and provide more than symbolic recognition.

So, where are the states and territories up to?

Victoria: The Victorian treaty process is the most advanced. In 2018, after several years of consultations, the state parliament passed Australia’s first treaty legislation, the Advancing the Treaty Process with Aboriginal Victorians Act, which created a legislative basis for negotiating a treaty and set out a roadmap for that process.

First, elections for an Aboriginal representative body, the First Peoples’ Assembly, were held. Although turnout was low, the assembly has worked hard to build community support and has had some notable successes. The second step focused on building the key institutions necessary to support treaty negotiations. The assembly and the state government worked steadily and in partnership to accomplish this challenge.

The work has been impressive: an independent Treaty Authority has been created to oversee and facilitate negotiations and a self-determination fund set up to finance Aboriginal Victorians in their negotiations. The Yoorrook Justice Commission, Australia’s first comprehensive truth-telling commission, has also come into being.

In October 2022, the two parties reached agreement on a Treaty Negotiation Framework setting out the principles that will guide negotiations. New elections for the First Peoples’ Assembly will be held between May and June this year. The first treaty negotiations in Australian history are expected to begin by the end of 2023.

Northern Territory: While the patient work in Victoria appears to be heading in the right direction, recent developments in the Northern Territory emphasise the challenges involved in developing treaty processes 200 years after colonisation. Following two years of consultations around the territory, the NT Treaty Commissioner handed his report to government in March 2022.

Recognising that “the time for action has arrived,” the report recommended a truth-telling process, a Territory-wide agreement to set out broad parameters, and a series of individual treaties with First Nations or coalitions of First Nations. The aim would be “self-government, economic independence and reparations.” The report also set out a clear implementation process.

Welcoming the report’s release, Aboriginal affairs minister Selena Uibo noted that “significant support for treaties” clearly existed across the territory, and that “the Territory Labor government is proud to advance this process.”

But something changed: on 29 December, during the Christmas–New Year shutdown, the government quietly released its formal response in a statement on the Office of Aboriginal Affairs website. The independent NT Treaty Commission would be abolished and the Office of Aboriginal Affairs would run its own eighteen-month process of consultations to “test” whether Aboriginal Territorians agree with the report’s recommendations.

Queensland: The treaty process stepped up a gear in Queensland last month when premier Annastacia Palaszczuk introduced the Path to Treaty Bill. The legislation establishes a First Nations Treaty Institute tasked with preparing a framework for treaty negotiations, and a Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry to examine the continuing impacts of colonisation. As Palaszczuk explained, the bill “signals to the rest of Australia and to other nations that Queensland is ready and willing to confront that past and to listen to the painful stories that need to be told.” The move follows several years of consultations, as well as a commitment in the 2021–22 budget to provide $300 million in a Path to Treaty Fund to support the process.

South Australia: South Australia was one of the first jurisdictions to commit to a treaty process in 2016, though it was unclear exactly what the state meant by “treaty.” Some observers worried that the government was more interested in negotiating something like a service-delivery agreement. In any event, the process was abandoned in 2018 by the incoming Liberal government under Steven Marshall.

Treaty is back on the agenda following Labor’s return to government last year. On election night, incoming premier Peter Malinauskas committed the new government to “delivering on a state-based voice treaty and truth for the Aboriginal people of our state.” Respecting the sequencing of the Uluru Statement, the government has prioritised Voice. In February this year, it introduced a Bill to establish a First Nations Voice to state parliament. The government is expected to restart the treaty process later this year.

Tasmania: Treaty is not only the province of the Labor Party. In 2021 the Liberal government in Tasmania committed to finding out from Aboriginal people how the state can pursue reconciliation. The government responded positively to a report by former governor Kate Warner and law professor Tim McCormack recommending a truth-telling and treaty process. In December last year, Aboriginal affairs minister Roger Jaensch announced a new advisory group to work with government to design an Aboriginal-led truth-telling and treaty process.

Australian Capital Territory: Having declared it was open to talking treaty in February 2018, the ACT government provided funding in the 2021–22 budget to facilitate conversations with traditional owners to understand what they meant by treaty and hear how a treaty process might be developed. The report on those conversations was released, to mixed reviews, in July 2022. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs minister Rachel Stephen-Smith apologised on behalf of the government that the process “did not engage as broadly as we had intended” and acknowledged a general feeling that healing was required before treaty should be pursued. Since then, focus has shifted to the first native title claim in the ACT.

Elsewhere: Neither Western Australia nor New South Wales have made commitments to treaty negotiations. Over the last few years, however, Western Australia has negotiated two comprehensive native title claims that several people — including me — have likened to a “lower-case t treaty.” Although they are significant agreements, they were not negotiated via a formal treaty process and therefore don’t cover the full range of issues expected of a treaty.

New South Wales is so far unmoved, though the 25 March state election might change this. The Liberal government supports action at a federal level, backing the Voice referendum in principle, but has no plans to implement a state-based Voice or treaty process. In contrast, the Labor opposition has pledged $5 million towards a year-long consultation with Aboriginal communities to determine if a treaty is desired and, if so, what it should look like. Those conversations would not begin until after the referendum later this year.

The federal government hasn’t made any formal commitments to treaty negotiations either. It is focused, quite rightly, on the Voice. Nevertheless, the Albanese government is committed to implementing the Uluru Statement “in full.” Following the referendum, attention is expected to shift towards a Makarrata Commission to “work on a national process of treaty-making and truth-telling.” Some reports suggest the government might move even faster. In October last year, it provided $5.8 million to the National Indigenous Australians Agency to commence work on establishing a Makarrata Commission.

Several themes are visible in these emerging treaty processes. The first is definitional: just what is a treaty? The fact that no treaties were ever formally signed in Australia makes modern negotiations more challenging. Not only do we need to develop brand new institutions and mechanisms to facilitate fair negotiations, but also the whole concept of what a treaty is or involves remains vague for many people, including governments.

Ambiguity on this central point is unlikely to work in favour of First Nations peoples. Indeed, uncertainty allows some people — like former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott — to argue that a treaty would be divisive and could even lead to the break-up of the nation. Ambiguity can also create space for governments to claim that revamped strategies to engage with First Nations communities mean they are already working on treaty-making. Or that existing arrangements in relation to matters like native title and land rights are sufficient.

Policies aimed at transferring government service delivery to First Nations communities are important, but they are not treaties. Already concerns have been raised on this point. Many saw the initial SA process as a vehicle for the government to push service delivery onto Aboriginal nations. Similar complaints have been heard in the Northern Territory and Queensland.

Other challenges exist. Some Indigenous rights campaigners have called for an agreement governed by international law. While the colonial-era treaties signed in North America and New Zealand were international agreements, modern treaties are different. The treaty processes under way will draw inspiration and principles from international law, but they will be subject to Australian law.

A second key theme is the question of government commitment. Many First Nations people and communities are distrustful of governments and cynical about their promises. An official public commitment to treaty — a statement on election night, or a signing ceremony on Country — breeds hope and anticipation. The passage of legislation builds further expectations. While all understand that treaty-making will be challenging and difficult, inconsistent government action can threaten the viability of the process.

The NT government’s decision to walk away from the Treaty Commission’s report has caused considerable alarm. Yingiya Guyula, the independent member for Arnhem Land, was scathing, declaring that “it’s the same old story”: “My people have always been saying they are ready for a long time and the commissioner listened to that. But the government was not and is still not ready for treaty.” Larrakia elder Eric Fejo agreed: “They’re delaying it after spending millions of dollars, just to shut us up, because they already had the answer.”

The Queensland process is also weathering these challenges. In June 2022, Jackie Huggins, co-chair of the Treaty Advancement Committee, expressed her “frustration” at the government’s seven-month delay in releasing her report. The introduction of the Path to Treaty Bill in February 2023 indicates the government is committed to progressing talks, but questions remain.

That same month the state government proposed to override the state’s Human Rights Act to make breach of bail an offence for children — despite evidence this will disproportionately affect First Nations people. As the Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Protection Peak observed, “This seems directly at odds with the Queensland government’s intention to cultivate a new relationship with First Nations peoples as part of the Path to Treaty.” Whether and how governments can prepare themselves to engage fairly and constructively in treaty processes will go a long way to determining their success.

Treaty-making is challenging, but there are green shoots. The slow and steady approach in Victoria appears to be paying dividends. Community support for the treaty process has grown, and the Liberal opposition has come on board. Bipartisanship is important. Major structural reforms to the framework of governance in Australia are almost never achieved without a broad base of political support.

Developments overseas have also helped propel these processes. In 2021, Canada enacted legislation aimed at implementing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The UNDRIP sets a standard for negotiations and for settlement outcomes. Australia has endorsed the declaration, but it does not have legal force here. Nevertheless, Australian governments are increasingly familiar with the UNDRIP and refer to its provisions within their treaty processes. At the federal level, the Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs is inquiring into the application of the UNDRIP in Australia. These are promising signs for the prospects of treaty-making.

Looming over these developments is the referendum. If it succeeds, the government will likely rely on the expertise and advice the Voice could provide to develop a Makarrata Commission. Just how that national body integrates and supports the various state and territory treaty processes will require careful thought.

If the Voice fails at the referendum, on the other hand, it is hard to know how the federal government will respond. It is worth noting, however, that the states and territories kickstarted their own treaty processes because they were “not convinced that you can wait for a national process that has never ever delivered in relation to righting these wrongs.” Regardless of the outcome, treaty-making is well and truly on the agenda for governments across Australia. •

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We all know that polls taken years before an election are poor predictors of voting intentions. Unforeseen events will occur, of course, but it’s also unrealistic to expect all voters to know what they’d do under the suddenly posed hypothetical: “If an election were held today…”

As the actual vote approaches, polls get better, especially when the question becomes “How will you vote on Saturday the Xth?” (These days the question is tweaked to take account of what is increasingly a weeks-long voting period.)

Things are trickier when a referendum is being discussed. Nearly everyone knows what an election is. But what proportion could immediately describe what a referendum actually is? What about words like “enshrined,” “Indigenous Voice” and the “Constitution” itself?

Way back in 1987, a Newspoll found that only 54 per cent of respondents “knew that Australia has a written Constitution.” In 1992 a Saulwick poll put the figure at 67 per cent. More recently, in 2021, the Constitutional Values Survey found a much higher 83 per cent answering affirmative to the easier statement, “had heard of the Australian Constitution.” And the proportion who could describe how the document is amended? We have no idea.

Americans are more likely to know about their founding document, and it’s possible Australians are more aware of America’s too. Its clauses (particularly its amendments) feature regularly in international news, commentary and popular culture. (America’s, unlike ours, is amended by majorities of federal and state legislatures.)

Until this year the Voice to Parliament was largely a preoccupation of the political/academic/media class. A little over half the respondents to this 2021 survey, for example, had never heard of it.

Given all these uncertainties, springing a benignly described question on an unsuspecting citizen isn’t going to produce a reliable indicator of people’s eventual voting decision. So it’s little wonder early polls on referendums have a history of being wildly wrong — much more wrong than voting intentions ones. But they too become better predictors as the day approaches.

(The 2017 marriage equality survey would also have suffered from the evolution of the question’s meaning, but to a much lesser extent. It was not intended to change the Constitution, and the “vote” was just another survey, labelled as such, voluntary, filled in at home — and by three-quarters of respondents, it turned out, during the first week of the official campaign. Like the 1999 republic referendum, it dealt with a familiar, long-discussed topic, but without the earlier one’s constitutionally ordained, and fatal, requirement that a specific model be approved.)

The last time a Labor government held a referendum — a midterm set of four questions — was in September 1988. Shadow cabinet voted to support two and oppose two, but the party rooms overturned them and the Liberal and National parties campaigned energetically against all four.

Triumphantly as it turned out; what the Hawke government saw as a set of proposals so inoffensive it would slip through unharmed became the worst-performing in referendum history. The cause was not helped by a High Court finding that some of the government’s info-ads had broken the law.

In the final six months of that campaign, polled support halved, from the high 60s and low 70s to the 30s. Party-support surveys have been known to shift by several points over similar periods, but nothing approaching 30 per cent. The actual survey questions have disappeared into the ether, and they would have changed over the months, but the early ones (to take one of the four proposals) might have been along the lines of “Do you support recognising local government in the Constitution?” To which a reasonable answer might have been “Sure, why not, it makes sense.”

By referendum day, after an all-singing, all-dancing campaign, the act of voting had become more complicated for the one-in-three voters who ended up “changing their mind.” From their point of view, the question might have become “Exactly why does this government want to change the Constitution?”

From there, the questions would have multiplied: “We’ve survived this long without this change, why do it now? This important document should not be tinkered with lightly; I read somewhere it will create a lawyers’ picnic. And the taxpayer dollars to do all this” — $30 million–plus was bandied about then; for the Voice the popular estimate is $200 million — “would have been much better spent elsewhere. And it wouldn’t hurt to remind this rather arrogant and complacent government who’s in charge.”

During 2022 and 2023 the main Voice polls have measured expressed opinions about “support/in favour” rather than voting intentions for a referendum held either “today” or later in the year. The wording will change later in the year, but these are the reported questions for recently released surveys.

Essential asks: “As you may be aware, there will be a referendum held later this year on whether a Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be enshrined in the Constitution. Do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

Newspoll, in the Australian: “There is a proposal to alter the Australian Constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament. Are you personally in favour or against this proposal?”

Resolve, in Nine papers: “The new federal government has committed to a referendum — a national vote — on whether to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Constitution. You will be asked to vote on this change to the Constitution in the next year or two, and voting is compulsory. Given this, do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

Resolve’s reported “next year or two” and “new federal government” look like gremlin-induced remnants of 2022 polls. Apart from that, its wording seems best because, while rather long and laborious, it doesn’t assume people know that the Constitution can only be amended by popular vote, or what a “referendum” is. But still, like the others, it’s different from a standard political poll because it doesn’t ask about voting intention.

So there’s variety in pollsters’ questions, much more than is found, again, in party-support polls. Referendum polling seems an even less exact science than general election polling. Despite that, though, the polls are all recording similar levels at the moment: around 60 per cent support once you exclude undecideds and/or push them to choose.

(That Resolve survey was taken in two portions. The first in December found 62 per cent net support, while the second in late January, after opposition leader Peter Dutton had launched his quasi-No “confusion” campaign and the topic started featuring heavily in the news, had it lower, at 58 per cent.)

Obviously the surveys taken in the final week of the campaign will more resemble each other and be very different from those above. They’ll ask people how they voted if they’ve done so already, or how they intend to vote. They’ll all be pretty close to the final result. (Even a 2019-sized poll fail will appear respectable unless the “error” happens to account for the difference between success and failure.)

Afterwards, accounts of the Voice referendum will describe a trajectory of surveyed “support,” but in reality the question respondents answer, from January to referendum day, will gradually have changed.

How meaningful are opinion polls purporting to measure support for inserting an Indigenous Voice to Parliament into the Australian Constitution? At the moment, barely meaningful at all. •

The post Just remind me, what is the Constitution? appeared first on Inside Story.

The number of active and fluent speakers of these languages is low and declining. Among the Indigenous population aged under twenty-five — half the region’s Indigenous population — the lingua franca is primarily English and Kimberley Kriol, a relatively recent hybrid. The 2016 census listed 2315 Kriol speakers and just 158 Gija speakers.

Colonisation came late to the East Kimberley. The four decades of frontier violence after the pastoral invasion in the early 1880s caused untold — and largely unrecorded — loss of life as a result of disease, economic and social disruption, and overt violence. Today’s Aboriginal population of the East Kimberley are the descendants of the survivors of that forty-year war — survivors who made an accommodation with the owners of the cattle that had disrupted their waterholes and destroyed the basis of their subsistence livelihood.

The incentive for Aboriginal people to detach themselves from their subsistence lifestyle, attach themselves to missions and work on pastoral stations was reinforced by the imperative to avoid the pervasive violence of pastoralists and police, and possible exile to Rottnest Island and other prisons. Working for pastoralists at least gave traditional owners continued access to their Country, and time off for ceremonies during the wet season, and removed the risks of relying completely on subsistence.

Despite their concessions, Kimberley people have strenuously sought to maintain their cultures and languages. They have established cultural and language resource centres across the region, and many of the region’s schools support language maintenance. The Ngalangangpum School at the Warmun community and the Purnululu Community School at Frog Hollow, or Woorreralbam, both in the heart of Gija Country, offer instruction in English and Gija. But these cultural maintenance projects increasingly compete against the pressures of modernity and commercialism.

This is the context for Aboriginal Studies Press’s recent publication of Gija Dictionary. Its authors, Frances Kofod, Eileen Bray, Rusty Peters, Joe Blythe and Anna Crane, have produced an extraordinary linguistic resource for Gija people, derived from thirty-plus years of linguistic research, especially by Kofod, and the expert language skills of Gija co-authors Bray and Peters and the linguistic contributions of around sixty other Gija collaborators.

This is not simply an etymological project, translating vocabulary and explaining meaning; in many respects, it allows Gija speakers — and learners — to see themselves and their culture in a linguistic mirror. It reflects and documents the sophisticated worldview, developed over eons, that enabled Gija society to thrive in one of the most severe environments in Australia.

Gija Dictionary opens by introducing Gija language and Country, with an excellent map illustrating the extent of Gija Country’s approximately 30,000 square kilometres. Individual chapters deal with spelling and pronunciation, word classes, grammar and, importantly, Gija relationships. The core of the book, the Gija-to-English dictionary, defines in excess of 5000 words and phrases, and a separate and more succinct English-to-Gija word-finder identifies the Gija terms for more than 3500 English words.

But merely listing the contents doesn’t do justice to the effort and innovative thinking that have gone into producing a dictionary useful to Gija speakers, to future Gija learners, and to teachers, health workers and others interested in learning Gija.

Importantly, the introductory chapters explain the conceptual underpinnings of the Gija language: the fact, for example, that topographical directions (upstream/downstream; uphill/downhill) are just as important as cardinal directions. Interspersed through the text are more than ninety photos of current and past community members, local wildlife and significant locations, each labelled with a phrase in Gija, thus encouraging readers to look up the words to interpret the photo.

Not surprisingly, the dictionary is replete with vocabulary that reflects the social and cultural concerns of traditional Gija speakers, including their outdoor lives and focus on being on Country. Often, Gija terms have no equivalent word in English: for example, the English-to-Gija word-finder lists around twenty terms for different actions associated with the concept “walk.” Or, to pick terms almost at random, galayi means to shade your eyes with a hand while looking at something; galayyimarran refers to being in the brightness at sunrise or sunset; dooloo means to make smoke as a signal or as part of a smoking ceremony.

The word-finder also demonstrates the centrality of spears to traditional Gija life. It lists five different types of spear and six different types of spearhead, along with terms for using spears, such as hooking onto a woomera, straightening a spear, and throwing a spear at someone. My favourite is the word bililib: to drag a spear surreptitiously with your toes.

In Gija culture, the relationship between speakers is always significant. The Gija Dictionary’s definition of garij, calling someone’s name aloud, notes that this is considered an action with serious consequences depending on your relationship with the person named. It also includes a short explanation of the terms used in joking relationships between individuals denoted as ganggayi.

Were I to use any of the swear words listed, Gija speakers would respond with an interjection warri-warri if I was swearing at my parent or uncle or aunt, or yigelany if I was swearing at my brother or sister. If I swore at my brother- or sister-in-law, they would make a kissing noise and two tsk tsk clicks. They would then look away, use their hand to signal me to stop swearing, and then move their hands to block their ears.

Just as the dictionary reflects Gija culture for Gija speakers and learners, it provides a window that allows non-Indigenous readers to glimpse the Gija way of experiencing the world. Gija speakers’ grafting of new meanings onto old terms to incorporate non-Indigenous categories and technologies demonstrates their culture’s inherent dynamism.

Examples of Gija linguistic repurposing abound in the dictionary. For example, it identifies two words for police officer: mernmerdgaleny (literally, one who is good at tying up) and ngerlabany (having string or rope). In a similar vein, the word dimal, for boat, appears to be an appropriation of the English word “steamer.” A note explains that this is an old word used by Gija people, derived from the Aboriginal pronunciation of steamer and referring to the steam ships that transported Aboriginal prisoners to Rottnest Island.

Or take the word lendij, which means either to write or to read, but also to pressure flake a stone. The word came to mean writing because the old people saw it as a similar action to pressure flaking stone spearheads with a small hard stick called a mangadany. The transition from writing to reading followed naturally.

Other words have similarly been adapted. Ngoorr-ngoorrgalill means car (good at growling), with similar variants for car key and car engine. Wingini, which originally meant to spin around and around on the spot, now refers to being drunk. With a gender change, the term for wedge-tailed eagle (wirli-wirlingarnany) refers to an aeroplane (wirli-wirlingarnal). The word for photograph, ngaaloom, is repurposed from the word for shade and shadow.

What these words show is that Gija speakers, while anxious to maintain their language, have been prepared to incorporate non-Indigenous technological, cultural and institutional concepts within the Gija language. This engagement and accommodation has always been strategic, aimed at conceding what can’t successfully be defended, but also reflects a determination to find ways to protect what is important to Gija culture. The dictionary’s presentation of a unique Gija language, culture and worldview provides tangible proof that Australians inhabit a multiverse rather than a narrow social, economic and cultural universe.

While Australian English has similarly incorporated Indigenous vocabulary (boomerang, kangaroo), it is not obvious, at least to me, that this extends to the widespread adoption of such fundamental Indigenous notions as deep respect for Country and the power of reciprocity in cementing ongoing relationships. For all the talk of pursuing social justice and reconciliation with First Nations, mainstream Australia appears unable to acknowledge the extent of the loss suffered by Aboriginal people as a result of colonisation.

Most importantly, the nation appears unable to see — really see — that Indigenous people like the Gija have been prepared to make extraordinary compromises in order to bring the endemic violence of the frontier wars to an end and, later, to survive the upheaval of the equal-wages decision in the 1960s, which led to mass dismissals of Aboriginal pastoral workers and the forced removal of their families from stations.

It is an extraordinary paradox that while the few hundred Gija speakers are among the poorest and most disadvantaged Australians, at least a dozen Gija speakers are represented in international art galleries from Paris to New York, and in every capital city in Australia.

While other schools of Indigenous art have equivalent international reputations, Gija artists certainly hold their own. A reproduction of a work by Gija artist Lena Nyadbi is etched on the roof of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and can be seen from the Eiffel Tower. Internationally known artists such as Paddy Jaminji, Queenie McKenzie, Rusty Peters, Rover Thomas and Paddy Bedford (all of whom are now deceased but contributed to and inhabit the Gija Dictionary) are the subjects of published biographies or catalogues dedicated to their art.

In putting the East Kimberley on the international art map, these artists have also put Australia on the map. The core element in their success was their knowledge of Country and the intellectual capital inherent in Gija “ways of being,” both reflected in the Gija language.

Yet the demographics of the Kimberley are changing. Modern transport, communications technology, regional economic developments, educational opportunities and even sporting opportunities have expanded the horizons of young Gija speakers. The future of Kimberley languages is no longer guaranteed. If the Gija language does disappear, we will all lose not just a language but also an alternative worldview, a way of seeing and inhabiting the world that reflects and emerged from 60,000 years of living on this land.

At its most fundamental level, as an assertion of the legitimacy of Gija perspectives and worldview, the Gija Dictionary represents the next stage in the Gija’s 140-year quest to make their way into the future on their own terms. Its publication is an opportunity for the nation to acknowledge the inherent legitimacy of an alternative Gija worldview and to recognise the strategic compromises and accommodations imposed upon, and made by, Gija people.

Of course, the Gija are not alone in this respect. Hundreds of First Nations have experienced similar histories since 1788. Such an acknowledgement must involve — at the very least — taking effective action to repay younger First Nations generations with the skills that will assist them to continue living successfully in an increasingly multicultural Australia and world, along with substantive financial and policy commitment to language support and maintenance.

First Nations’ languages are a strategic cultural asset for the Australian nation and its people, yet they all confront existential risks. If reconciliation means anything, it means ensuring the survival of these intellectual and cultural assets. The value of the Gija Dictionary is that it is a modest but determined and tangible step in that direction.

Within two years, the nation may have a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice. By 2050, will the Indigenous Voice be limited to communicating in English, or might it youwoori (speak loudly), gooyoorrgboo (speak with power to change Country), wiyawoog (speak or sing to ward off danger) or even just jarrag Gija (speak in Gija)? •

Gija Dictionary
By Frances Kofod, Eileen Bray, Rusty Peters, Joe Blythe and Anna Crane | Aboriginal Studies Press | $34.95 | 430 pages

The post A dictionary for the future appeared first on Inside Story.

Of course if he really, earnestly had questions about the upcoming referendum he could have picked up the phone to the prime minister, or quietly emailed him, rather than send the list to News Corp journalists and then the wider public. The Albanese government’s lack of preparation for the onslaught that followed was evident to all.

Some of Dutton’s fifteen questions deal with the proposed constitutional changes; most go to the subsequent legislation. One of them — “Is it purely advisory, or will it have decision-making capabilities?” — seems to have been answered ad nauseum, in the negative; it can only advise parliament. But the full answer might depend on what “decision-making capabilities” means — the decision to hold a meeting, perhaps?

Can’t give a simple response? Gotcha! Welcome to the politics of advocating change.

The chief problem these questions create for the government and perhaps all Voice advocates is that no one knows the exact answers to most of them. The Voice wasn’t the government’s idea; it came from the First Nations National Constitutional Convention, and the proposal was for a referendum to set up the mechanism, broadly, in the Constitution, after which parliament would thrash out the details via committees and public hearings including, particularly, input from Indigenous groups and individuals.

In the same mischief-making vein sits the demand for draft legislation — now! Of course, unilaterally pre-empting the consultation process would alienate Indigenous groups. It would be picked apart by opponents. It would just be wrong, and ultimately fraudulent, as the government could not promise it wouldn’t be changed, because of course it would be.

How many worlds can you have the worst of?

So Dutton’s “questions” have worked a treat — particularly among the Coalition’s favourite media outlet — with headlines about a campaign in disarray. (It’s not wall-to-wall disingenuity at News Corp; there’s a good summary of the issues by James Campbell in the tabloids.)

Still, the government’s best response would be to provide written, detailed, publicly available answers to the questions. Few will read them, of course, and journalists will still demand succinct three-sentence explanations and tut-tut about the referendum’s chances when they’re not delivered. But at least they will have something to point to.

Some are citing these recent developments as evidence that it was a blunder to propose a change that leaves the details to parliament. But the alternative, trying to define every nut and bolt beforehand, would have been even worse politically — a huge target for opponents to rummage through — and an inherently terrible idea, because like any public arrangements it will need ongoing tweaking.

And seriously, did anyone really think the federal opposition would offer bipartisan support? Expecting that would ignore the constraints within which Dutton is operating.

Right back when the two-party system developed in the second decade after Federation, Labor and non-Labor attitudes to constitutional amendments per se took hold at DNA level. I’ve written before, and again, that Liberal opposition leaders (as opposed to prime ministers) simply lack the authority to support Labor government referendums, even the most benign. A textbook case can be found in 2013, when a party-room revolt forced Tony Abbott to withdraw support for constitutional recognition of local government.

Sometimes the Liberals end up proposing the same (or similar) when they’re in power; see “Simultaneous Elections” under Labor in 1974 and the Coalition in 1977.

And the Voice is inherently more likely to provoke antagonism among Liberal parliamentarians, and more so among the membership. (And the Nationals, of course, have already nailed their colours to the mast.)

So expecting Dutton to go down in history as the Liberal leader who transcended partisan dynamics to reach across the aisle to support meaningful constitutional recognition, only to be later humiliatingly forced to backtrack by his fellow MPs, was always a fantasy.

The surprise is that he’s skipped to the chase so early, in the process catching the government off guard. On Saturday shadow Indigenous Australians minister Julian Leeser, a long-time advocate of the Voice, also castigated the government, criticising it at a Young Liberal convention for “not providing the detail” and preposterously adding that “they’re in danger of losing me.” He repeated the warning on ABC RN Breakfast on Monday, adding that he and Dutton were merely passing on questions people had asked them over summer.

It sounds bonkers, but again the realpolitik is unavoidable: Leeser’s leadership has embarked on a certain course and as part of shadow cabinet he must follow. What, again, is the alternative — generate headlines about division?

(By contrast, Senator Andrew Bragg, outside shadow cabinet and probably the loudest Coalition Voice supporter, wrote in the Australian that while he himself was “not confused,” he believes “a parliamentary inquiry should look at the referendum question, the amendment and the scope of the body or bodies to be legislated,” adding optimistically that it would “allow the legitimate legal issues to be investigated and the red herrings dismissed.”)

Actually, by showing his hand so early, Peter Dutton has done the government and Voice advocates a favour, dashing any illusions of an easy bipartisan path to voting day. It’s now obvious that the best that can be hoped for is the Liberals not adopting an official cohesive position.

(The Greens, it seems to me, barely matter. Their official stance will influence few of their supporters, and if they really do come out against the Voice it will probably be a net positive for its prospects in the wider electorate. And this discussion is about the campaign itself. I assume the legislation to enable the referendum will get through parliament one way or another.)

No one said this would be easy. Okay, some people might have been encouraged by opinion polls over recent years showing substantial majority support. But these involved pollsters contacting people, the vast majority of whom had never heard of the Voice, explaining it in benign terms and asking what they thought.

The past fortnight has reminded us that constitutional change is not remotely that easy. High support that crashes by polling day is a feature of, particularly, Labor government–initiated referendums. The Hawke 1988 government’s set of four went from 60s and 70s in May that year to September Yes votes in the 30s. As the No vote climbs, public figures jump on the bandwagon.

Okay, last year’s federal election showed that commentator pontifications about campaigns off the rails tend to be just so much bubble talk. But referendums are different from our lesser-of-two-evils two-party seesaw. It’s likely that the number of Australians who have actually turned their attention to the Voice increased several-fold over the last fortnight, and unlike the aforementioned opinion polling, their introduction to the topic was not favourable.

Indeed, a new poll in News Corp tabloids boasts “new polling showing more than two-thirds of Australians don’t understand the proposal.” The YouGov survey (actually of respondents only in New South Wales) found 46 per cent in favour, 30 per cent opposed and 24 per cent not sure.

The well-known referendum statistic is eight successes from forty-four attempts. The portion of Labor government attempts is starker: twenty-five attempts with just one success. Some of this history of failure is due to Labor’s propensity to be more ambitious, some to the electorate being more likely to be suspicious of Labor’s centralising plans, but overriding it is the aforementioned absence of bipartisanship.

It all ends up as a giant by-election, and we know what usually happens to governments at those.

It’s easy to snipe. I don’t want to be that negative guy. I can’t fault the “campaign” so far because it hasn’t really started, and it’s hard to know what else the government could have done. The opposition’s sudden quasi-No campaign caught everyone off guard. It’s early days.

I’ll be voting Yes because I respect the consultation process and the people who produced the proposal. In statistics alone, the gap between Indigenous Australians and the rest is dire and the status quo untenable. I don’t see our Constitution is so fragile that changing it threatens the edifice. This view doesn’t generate a totally blank cheque: if, for example, it really was a third chamber, with powers similar to the other two, I would run a mile, because in my opinion one of our chambers (the upper one) is already too big for its boots.

So, how to maximise the odds of success?

Labor’s only successful referendum was on “Social Services” in 1946, part of a set of three. It was held with the first general election for a new Liberal Party, led by the man who created it, Robert Menzies, and he supported “Social Services” but opposed the other two. Because it was an election campaign, his support (and opposition to the other two) was muted; he preferred to talk about the ghastliness of the Chifley government. In the end all three got majority national support but the bipartisan question received four percentage points more than the others, so clearing the double-majority hurdle.

Bipartisanship made the difference, but looked at another way it was only worth a few percentage points.

The Voice referendum’s best chance lies in its being held with the next general election. That’s how they should be done anyway, on logistical and cost grounds. It’s how the first three were put after Federation (two of them successfully) until a Labor government with very big constitutional ambitions developed the habit of midterm ones. Recent events have put paid to the idea that bipartisanship is more easily attained outside a campaign. Concurrent with elections, referendum proposals tend to be buried beneath the campaign proper, and people don’t overthink them. If this sounds cynical, well it is.

A big government win at the 2025 poll (itself not particularly likely) might drag the referendum across the line.

But this seems a forlorn hope, as the Voice vote seems almost certain to be held this year.

Comparisons with the 2017 marriage-equality survey are limited, because people held opinions on that for years, LGBTQI people have long been increasingly out, virtually everyone knows a few, often in the family, and that “vote” truly was about equality. But one stark feature was that almost three-quarters of eventual turnout took place in the first week of a six-week campaign. (Apparently postal-only elections tend to be like that.) If a scare campaign did indeed bite late in the piece, it was too late.

Its voluntary nature probably also helped the Yes side. Replicating those two features might be desirable. But how to do it without, well, appearing tricky?

Some advocates envisage a massive education campaign, but I don’t know how you force people to pay attention. An informed voting electorate would be a first; usually, it’s mostly about vague, half-informed vibes.

The 1967 experience, under a prime minister (Harold Holt) who had just recorded the Coalition’s biggest win since the creation of the Liberal Party and so enjoyed immense internal prestige, also doesn’t help us much. Labor, led by Gough Whitlam, campaigned for the Yes case (as he and his party did for Malcolm Fraser’s set of four ten years later). It was one of a pair, and less controversial than an ultimately doomed attempt to break the nexus between the sizes of each house of parliament. So, in a sense, the now more famous event was a bit like a referendum held with an election, relatively undiscussed at the time.

The important part of 1967 was kickstarting the Commonwealth “race power” to facilitate, eventually, land rights, Abstudy, ATSIC and a host of other special programs. But most Australians probably thought they were just excising constitutional discrimination.

That referendum fifty-five years ago did indeed take out all references to “aboriginals” from the founding document. But it left the ugly word “race” in there. That can’t be taken out (via referendum) without replacing it with something else — some kind of reference to the advancement of Indigenous people — otherwise all sorts of current legislation would become susceptible to legal challenge.

Add some sentences about First Nations people having lived on the continent and surrounding islands for dozens of millennia and you’ve got the minimal “recognition” model that was being spruiked a decade or so ago. It was rejected at Uluru because it would be merely symbolic. When Dutton insists he is in favour of constitutional recognition, it is presumably something like this.

Where is it written that the government is limited to just one referendum question? Holding two together, one for the Voice, another for recognition/taking out “race,” might at the very least throw a curveball at the opposition, and opponents more generally.

Political parties know that choices at elections tend to hinge on simple, often subliminal, messages and ideas. Campaigns are mostly about the horridness of the other side. A successful referendum can be seen as like a change-of-government election: people have been persuaded that the grass is a bit greener on the other side.

About a third of the electorate can be relied on to instinctively vote Yes to the Voice. Another group, probably smaller, never will. What do most (or all) of the rest think of Indigenous people? Through stereotypes, out of sight out of mind, often with a mixture of guilt and resentment. The “better angels” strategy would peck at the guilt. But perhaps Voice campaigners need to get real about what drives electoral outcomes: explain how the Voice will, yes, improve outcomes for Indigenous people, but more importantly why that is good for all of us, individually, in our everyday lives, and as taxpayers.

“What’s in it for me?” is, perhaps, the timeless campaign question. •

The post What’s in it for everyone? appeared first on Inside Story.

By lunchtime on the first day we were in Melrose, a pretty town tucked up against Mount Remarkable in the lower Flinders Ranges. Lunch was a sandwich in the municipal park, and in the park was a billboard. “Paradise Square,” it announced, perhaps with dry humour. “The following is a list of known burials that took place here in the Old Melrose Cemetery between 1846 and 1872.”

And there they were, scores of names in alpha order, each with date and age of death, and a crisp descriptor. NOTT, Thomas Freedman, a surveyor of Melrose, died aged sixty-five on 5.12.1865. NOTT, Mildred, a widow of Melrose, followed her husband on 12.11.1869, aged fifty-five. Jesse Jones, a bushman of Melrose, went aged fifty in 1861. William Jones, storekeeper, went later (1868) but younger (thirty-four).

The dead of Melrose included carpenters, shepherds, a hawker, carriers and teamsters, a corporal of police, a bailiff, a surgeon, all men. The women were daughters, mothers, wives, widows. Then there were the children, so many children, aged three months or six weeks, or five years or nine years, an “unnamed son of Richard Saunders” who died on 3.1.1863 after just four hours of life. It was a touching record of another age.

In a reverie as I read the names, the dates, the lives summed up in a few numerals and a word or a phrase, I struggled to recognise a feeling that refused to surface. And then, it did: where are the Aboriginal dead? The first of the burials in the Old Melrose Cemetery was in 1846, just ten years after the colony of South Australia was declared in Adelaide, 430 kilometres south of here. Melrose in 1846 would have been on the frontier. Where were the Aboriginal dead?

It was the same in Quorn, less than an hour up the road. Lots of info about the Ghan and the movies that had been made in the district but nothing about Aboriginal people — who they were or how they fared when the inexorable frontier arrived. Beltana, a scattering of houses and ruins further on, dwelt on its overland telegraph station, long since passed from use. Nothing about the Aboriginal people there either.

I’d begun to take photos of the many markers of the past — the monuments, the plaques, the information boards, the billboards and museums — and to puzzle over them. What was going on? Some of what was going on was obvious. “History” was a boom industry fed by tourism. Melrose announced itself as “historic,” chiefly on the ground that it had been base camp for John McDouall Stuart on his many attempts to cross the continent from south to north and back again. Quorn was “historic” because on the old line it used to be the last stop for the Ghan before it headed out into the desert for Alice Springs, a couple of days away. Beltana was “historic” by virtue of its telegraph station and by being not much more than a collection of ruins. The old road, which followed the old railway line that followed the old Overland Telegraph Line that followed Stuart’s epic plod, was itself historic. It was now “The Old Ghan Heritage Trail.”

The first of these many markers of History had been installed in the 1960s but most were of more recent date. They were about an implied “us,” our Pioneers, our Settlers, our Explorers, our feats of endurance, engineering, discovery. This was winners’ history. Where were the losers?

The losers made their first appearance near Lake Eyre, 400-odd kilometres on from Melrose. An info board there detailed the many traditional and contemporary uses of ochre, mined nearby. This was the equal and opposite of the markers in which Aboriginal people didn’t appear; there was no mention of us. Neither the markers about us nor the markers about them reported when or where or what happened when we encountered them, and they us. The ochre info board and many to follow did a jump cut: one moment we’re in Traditional Times, the next, in the present. How did they get from then to now? Just don’t mention the war.

That remained the overwhelming rule for a thousand kilometres or more, although there were exceptions: reports of the terror provoked by the huge four-legged, hard-footed animals that appeared without warning in the 1860s, references to the disruption of Indigenous land “since the Europeans first permanently arrived/invaded,” info boards about police operations “to control cattle spearing by Aborigines on newly established pastoral properties,” an info board that dispensed with evasions about “arrival/invasion” and just called the spade a spade, even an angry denunciation of the “transnationals and colonialist governments… defying the natural order of things in their quest for material wealth.”

I photographed every one of these many markers and kept on puzzling. Eventually I realised what should have been obvious: the history wars then raging in newspapers and scholarly articles and books and on the airwaves had been going on out here for decades. We’d won the country and then set out to win the story as well. The struggle over what the story would and would not tell was as much a part of the story as the events themselves.

By the time I reached Tennant Creek, a couple of weeks after lunch in Paradise Square, the telling of the story had been added to my list of things to find out about. Eventually, it worked its way to the top.

I left Tennant Creek in 1955, aged thirteen. I had never been back and never wanted to go back. In fact, I’d wanted to not go back. I didn’t like it when we lived there and ached to leave, despite the fact that it was a kind of kids’ paradise. We’d thread our way through the spinifex to old mine shafts and chuck beer bottles down to see how deep they were, or lie on our backs inside the fence around the aerodrome and scare ourselves stupid as the DC-3, feeling for the runway, roared over us just a few feet above.

Out the back of our place was the Works and Housing depot, surrounded by piles of junk from the war, then only seven years away, including, inexplicably, an old Rolls-Royce limo complete with a screened-off passenger compartment and a speaking tube through which we’d issue instructions in what we took to be toffy tones. There were topknot pigeons to be shot at with air rifles, and old tins and jars to be blown up with miners’ lamp carbide.

We stood at the dam behind the pub where the night before a bloke had bet he could swim across, but drowned, and we pedalled out to the bend in the Peko Road where Mr Archer had killed himself when he rolled his Fargo ute. We swam in the waterhole under red gums at Seven Mile, and every Saturday night there were the pictures at the open-air theatre, Westerns mostly, in my memory anyway.

Sometimes even a kid could see the magic in the desert, the sunsets, the fresh and vivid world after rain, the brilliant stars that would light our way home after the pictures. But mostly it wasn’t like that at all, just the blinding light that flattened and bleached, and the heat, and the incessant moaning of the wind and the ugly cawing of the crows.

I now suspect that in developing something close to loathing for Tennant, I had been taking my mother’s part. She suffered in the heat and despaired at the red-brown dust that was forever blowing through the flyscreened verandas onto furniture, floors, ledges, shelves, everywhere. She became anaemic, teary and homesick. She missed her family and the soft green Adelaide Hills where they worked their orchards and market gardens, and where she’d grown up, and she missed her eldest son, who’d been sent to Alice Springs for high school. She wanted to leave, and so did I, but couldn’t. She fretted that her husband would apply for a transfer rather than wait for another promotion, and it would be her fault.

Her husband, my father, was in his element. For fifteen years he’d been a teacher. Now he was the head teacher, a member of Tennant’s public service elite. Our house was one of five or six identical government houses lined up along with the police station, the post office and the school at the southern end of town. At the other end were two general stores, the bakery-cum-cafe, the cool-drink factory, the picture theatre, and the pubs, the Goldfields and the Tennant.

It was only half a mile or so to the other end of town, and we went down there just about every day. We’d ride our bikes along the narrow bitumen strip between expanses of gravelly red dirt — the Alice–Darwin highway that doubled as Tennant’s main street, lined by dusty shanties with stamped earthen floors and push-out galvanised-iron windows, which looked as though they had slumped in the heat.

I’d visit Mum at the general store where she worked behind the counter or go to mates’ places or ride past the stinky din of the front bar of the pub and see inside as the door swung open or just hang around. It was wholly familiar, but mysterious. We knew that this was the real Tennant to which teetotal public service blow-ins had no access, but we caught glimpses and heard echoes in the stories Tennant told about itself.

These were the stories we told back in Adelaide three years later as reports from another planet: stories about gold that went missing after a couple of fellas came up on the Tuesday plane and went back down again on Wednesday, about cattle rustling or bar-room brawls, about mysterious deaths and fortunes won and lost, and of course the one about how Tennant Creek the town was seven miles south of Tennant Creek the creek because that’s where the beer truck had broken down.

To these we added stories of our own about a hundred days in a row over the one hundred mark, about the dust storms and the weekly bath in a few inches of increasingly brown water, about a diet strong on meat but light on fruit and veg, about the Barcoo Rot and the conjunctivitis from the diet and the flies, about Dad asking the police sergeant whether bush turkeys were protected and being told that they were and how to cook them, and about the New Year’s Day when Danny Brookes’s Rolls-Royce limo — he’d tracked down the owner and bought it for sixty quid, apparently — trundled past our place, draped with men and women in various states of undress, still carousing, did a stately U-turn then headed back to the other end of town.

What I couldn’t understand then was that we had returned from the frontier, the place that all of Australia was at one time or another. Some of it still is.

We’d hardly arrived in Tennant before we found out about the kids from the mission. We saw them every Saturday night at the open-air pictures. We all sat in a deckchair sort of arrangement, rows and rows of long horizontal poles with canvas strips slung between them. It paid to get there early because the canvas strips, permanently exposed to the elements, often ripped to cheers and whistles in the middle of a film, and the strips got shorter and tauter every time they were repaired.

Anyway, we’d all be settled under our blankets against the cold desert nights and waiting for “God Save the Queen” when the kids from the mission would file in between us and the screen, crossing to the far side to the benches reserved for them. After the pictures they’d climb onto the mission truck and head off up the road into the darkness while we walked home under that vast, glittering sky, in the other direction.

Apart from Saturday nights you could never tell when you might see them. Sometimes there was a Black tracker at the back of the police station. Once I saw four or five Aborigines a bit of a distance out in the spinifex that stretched away from our back fence to a distant horizon. I got close enough to see them squatting in the sandy dirt behind a low humpy, playing cards. Then one day they were gone. Sometimes when I visited Mum at the general store there would be several old Aboriginal men sitting, cross-legged, on the veranda. Perhaps it was them I saw one day on a truck rigged up to carry cattle, the mission truck I suppose. They were in army greatcoats, standing motionless and silent as the truck went slowly past.

There was a sports day at the creek. We all drove out from the town and they came down from the mission. We spread ourselves under the gums by the waterhole. They were across the other side of a dusty clearing where the races were run, adults as well as children. We were invited to Sunday lunch at Banka Banka, the nearest station to Tennant Creek. Seated at a long table, we were served by Aboriginal women who padded silently across the cool concrete floor.

One September holidays Dad loaded up his single-spinner V8 Ford Custom with camping gear and off we went to Darwin, where we saw the wrecks in the harbour and neat rows of bullet holes in the walls of the old post office, and gawked at the Aborigines who hung around the back streets. They were really black, we observed, not just dark like ours.

On the way back we stayed a night at the Mataranka Station homestead, already operating as a guest house. We swam in the warm bubbling spring at the head of the Roper River, clear as crystal. In the morning, at breakfast, the room was dominated by a noisy group a couple of tables away. They’re making a film, Dad told us. Among them, quite still, and very beautiful, was a young Aboriginal woman.

These were encounters as in a tableau. So far as I can recall I never spoke to any of these Aborigines, nor they to me. The only exceptions to this rule, and even more puzzling because of it, were three Aboriginal kids at school, the brothers Roy, Rex and Rennie Hare. How come they lived in the town and not out on the mission? Was it because they weren’t real Aborigines? Their father, Mr Hare, was the nightsoil man who collected the tubs slopping with shit and phenol and sodden strips of newspaper from the back of the drop dunnies. Mr Hare was white, but Roy, Rex and Rennie’s mother was Aboriginal. The Hares lived in one of those tin shanties, the very last one right up the other end of town.

The Aborigines were nearly invisible yet somehow always there somewhere; sometimes referred to, even discussed, but never explained. Our Grade VI Social Studies text recorded the feats of John McDouall Stuart, whose explorations prepared the way for the Overland Telegraph Line, which I could see just by looking out the schoolroom window.

I was in awe of Stuart. How could he have walked all that way from Adelaide? More than a thousand miles! Five times! I designed a kind of palanquin supported by poles carried by a horse at each corner that he could have used to stroll along in permanent shade. The Social Studies textbook told us about Stuart’s encounter with fierce Aborigines just a bit further on from Tennant Creek the creek. When we crossed Attack Creek at the beginning of our big camping trip to Darwin, there was a small thrill of excitement. Shots were fired, and spears thrown, here!

 The space between that day in June 1860 and ours was filled by a vague sense of a vanished world. On one of our Sunday drives along bush tracks, we passed close to the bluffs of the gap in the range just north of the town. That’s Gins’ Lookout, Mum said, pointing to one of the bluffs. That’s where the “lubras” used to keep a lookout for the men coming back from the hunt. She told us that one of the old men who sat on the veranda of the general store was their king. Such a dignified old man, she said.

In the early 1960s I went to uni in Adelaide, to what was then generally regarded as the hottest history department in the country. In four years my cohort did no Australian history at all, let alone the history of relations between black and white. It was the fag end of the mental world of the Grade VI Social Studies textbook.

Elsewhere on campus, however, were signs of what was to come, including meetings and protests in support of “rights for Aborigines.” Scrappy little events like the two or three I went to turned into an uproar that subsequently rose and fell but never really went away — a freedom ride, a tent embassy, speeches and tracts and posters beyond counting, strikes, investigations, legislation and litigation, movies, books and docos, then Mabo, a semi-official accusation of genocide, and the ferocious history wars. All that provided the means by which people of my generation and demographic learned what we hadn’t been told and unlearned some of what we had.

For reasons that I can’t really explain but suspect don’t do me much credit, it was a long time before I started to connect all that national uproar with the one time and place at which my life had intersected so directly with the lives of Aboriginal people — and the people who kept them out on the mission, over to one side at the movies, out of our school and town, out of mind.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t know; I hadn’t realised how much I didn’t know. Thanks to all those Westerns, I could reel off a long list of “Indian” tribes, the Cheyenne, the Comanche, the Apache and the rest, but I did not even know that we had been living among the Warumungu and the Warlpiri. I didn’t know what the “mission” was or how the Warumungu and the Warlpiri got to be there or even where it was.

I began finding out, partly out of embarrassment but also out of curiosity. Who were they? Where on earth had a full-on policed and regulated apartheid regime come from? Where did it go? The more I read, the more there was to know and the more I wanted to know it.

That was a puzzle in itself. After a pretty slow start, why the obsession? No doubt it was the usual thing — the further you get from childhood the more fascinating it becomes — but it wasn’t just that. I was being carried along by a deep emotional undertow. The Aboriginal people and their relationship with the rest of us have become sites of proxy political warfare and synthetic emotions, but there’s real stuff there too, ranging from just feeling bad (in my case, whenever I think about those kids crossing in front of the screen at the Pioneer Picture Theatre) through to how everyone felt when Cathy Freeman won the big race. Against any expectation and all intentions, and with very mixed feelings, I decided to go back.

It was partly just a standard grey nomad kind of thing to do, and a chance to revisit what had been, after all, a burst of the vivid in an otherwise sepia-toned boyhood, but there were offsets too — the old aversions and a new one, the fact that Tennant had turned into Australia’s most notoriously dysfunctional town, something I had no wish to see. But I did want to find out where the Tennant Creek I’d lived in had come from, and gone, and thought (correctly, as it turned out) that I couldn’t unless I went there.

So, I set out for Tennant Creek to find out about relations between two racial groups in that particular field of life but didn’t get far — to Paradise Square in Melrose, at lunchtime on Day One to be exact — before there was something else to find out about: how the story of those relations had been told, and not told.

All the stories that the Tennant Creek of my boyhood had told about itself, and the stories we took back to tell our uncles and aunts and grandparents, they weren’t Tennant’s big story at all. By the time I’d made the last of three trips back to Tennant I’d learned that the struggles over whether and how to tell Tennant’s story were for a century and a half Australia’s struggles writ small, and intense. I found that among the protagonists were several of Australia’s intellectual luminaries and that not once but twice poor beaten-down smashed-up Tennant Creek had managed to make it onto the national stage, not in a starring role but in a big enough part to earn a place in the credits. Tennant, with and like Australia, had tried to tell the story. •

This is an edited extract from Telling Tennant’s Story: The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence (Black Inc., 2022). For a 20 per cent discount, follow this link and use the discount code INSIDE at checkout.

The post The strange career of the great Australian silence appeared first on Inside Story.

I’ve been back in Alice Springs since October 2018 to make repairs to my unit and live cheaply while I finish writing a book, Into the Loneliness, about two women who roamed outback Australia last century. I first moved here in 2003, and even after I shifted to Melbourne in 2010 I was never entirely absent, returning to Central Australia every few months to work on a research project.

January is typically when Alice people flee to the coast to avoid the heat, but this year it’s even hotter and more humid than I remember it during the noughts. In summers past, say long-term residents, the temperature usually fell to 15°C at night, but high maximums these days are accompanied by high minimums. One morning when I was making breakfast the temperature was already 39°C.

“Heat wave” — the term that’s used on the news — is surely a euphemism for what we’re experiencing. A 2015 CSIRO report says Alice Springs averaged seventeen days above 40°C each year during 1981–2010 and forecast the figure rising to thirty-one days by 2030. When fifty-five days exceeded 40°C between July 2018 and June 2019 I began to wonder when the desert capital will become uninhabitable.

By the year’s end, the town is awash. On Christmas Eve 2019 I wake to see brown water churning between the normally barren Todd River’s banks across the road from my townhouse.

During the year I’ve struck up an acquaintance in the library with a Luritja woman from Papunya, chatting with her whenever she brings in her grandkids to use the computers. When I admire how the rain overnight brought out the fresh bush scents, she disagrees. She didn’t like it at all; it was too hard to find anywhere dry to sleep. She’d been sleeping rough, of course, maybe in the saltbushes hemming the Todd or in the riverbed.

That’s where some of the library’s local Arrernte regulars sleep, along with the Warlpiri, Anangu, Alyawarr and Warramungu who come into Mparntwe from their communities, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, for cultural purposes, or to shop for supplies, use services or catch up with family and friends. Some stay with relatives in one of Alice Springs’s seventeen town camps or sleep overnight in or around the riverbed, then eat and shower at the Salvos before coming to the library.

Local Indigenous leaders fear that climate change will drive many from their traditional homelands to towns like Alice, escaping from flooded communities and overcrowded houses unsuited to extreme temperatures. “We are already suffering through hotter, drier and longer summers in our overcrowded hotbox houses,” says Central Land Council chair Sammy Wilson.

After the deluge, the usually bare slopes of the West MacDonnell ranges, flanking the town, are festooned in green. It would be tempting to see this as a La Niña bonus if not for the fact that much of the greenery is buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris), an insidious invasive species introduced by pastoralists to feed cattle. Buffel overwhelms native grasses, driving out bilbies and other small creatures and impeding local people’s collection of bush foods. Because of its intense flammability, traditional fire management practices no longer work. As Arrernte Anmatyerr poet Patricia Perrurle Ansell Dodds writes, “It’s too dry now. / The summer is too hot. / That buffel grass is everywhere.”

Back in January a boy had appeared in my peripheral vision as I drove out of the library car park one steamy evening. When he rolled across my bull bar in a loose, graceful motion I slammed on the brakes, fearful of hurting him, then bit back my irritation, waiting for him to move. How old was he? Eight; ten at the most. He was playing chicken, trying to provoke me, and when I failed to respond, he staggered away melodramatically.

I eased out of the car park, a little shaken and annoyed, although I’d soon be home sipping a G&T on my balcony with its view of the MacDonnells. I regained my equilibrium, distanced myself from what this scene ws a reminder of — the youth crime wave said to be plaguing the town.

When I first lived in Alice during the noughts, youth crime was expected to rise over the summer holidays. Since then, reports suggest it has reached epidemic proportions all year round. Aboriginal kids as young as eight are said to be roaming the streets in packs at night and “running amok.” Most of my friends have a story about a window being smashed, a house broken into, or a car being taken for a joyride, sometimes repeatedly.

This time round, the youth crime wave has become the main topic in what writer Robyn Davidson wryly calls The Conversation — the constant discussion about First Nations people among progressives in Alice Springs. Davidson, famous for walking with camels from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean, has been dipping in and out of the town since 1977 while many of the “white do-gooders” (as they are called by their detractors in town) associated with the land rights movement and Aboriginal-controlled organisations in the 1970s and 80s have retired or moved to the coast. Over the past decade, in their stead, my gen-X contemporaries have shifted into the senior ranks of the local chatterati while millennials have refreshed many creative and political spaces in town with their artistic and digital agility. An Indigenous middle class has also emerged, often holding key managerial roles in Aboriginal-controlled organisations.

To live in Alice Springs, regardless of whether you were born here or why you came here, is to be caught up in The Conversation. The reasons relate to Mparntwe’s role as what the late Arrernte artist W. Rubuntja called a “little Central Australian Rome — too much Tywerrenge [or Law].” It is a cultural, social and economic focal point for First Nations people from the cross-border region of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.

Because colonisation occurred later here than in the southeast, First Nations people consequently make up a greater proportion of Alice Springs’s population of 25,000 (a shade over one in five, according to the 2021 census) than of densely populated coastal cities. With the fallout from the encounter between First Nations people and settlers more evident in daily life, The Conversation in Alice Springs is more direct and less notional than the talk on the east coast.

Within eighteen months of my return to Alice Springs in 2018, my van’s passenger window has been broken repeatedly — once in my carport and three times in the library car park. Around the complex where I live, shattered car windows often glint in the grass like dew-encrusted cobwebs. Friends advise me to leave the van unlocked with a window half down so people can break in without shattering the glass. The windows remain intact but I sometimes find signs — an open door or glove box, a cigarette butt — that someone has rummaged around overnight.

A local glazier says he replaced thirty car windows each day during the recent midyear school holidays. Most shop windows in Todd Mall, the main business drag, are shuttered to protect them overnight, dampening what was once a colourful tourist precinct. Windows in the town council chambers and the library were often smashed while I worked there; once the aquatic centre fell victim to a midnight vandalism spree, with eighteen windows shattered and computers thrown into the pool.

The town is “under siege,” one headline declares. On community social media forums people cite the continued break-ins, loss of property and vehicle damage as reasons why they’re leaving town, posting photos and footage from home security cameras of break-ins. The issue of race frequently surfaces:

Sorry but the way I see it now is that anybody with white skin is simply not welcome.

Time to leave.

Where are the parents? comes the cry, along with exhortations to get tough on crime and employ more police to ensure no kids are on the streets after a certain time.

A friend who works with children in care in Alice Springs tells me about how, when she encouraged a boy to reflect on the consequences of theft, he replied, “Whitefellas have lots of stuff. They can always get more stuff.” One possible interpretation is that the rise in crime is an up-yours to the coloniser — to those who’ve taken so much and have so much — by young people exiled to the shadow zones of intergenerational trauma and poverty.

Whatever its causes, statistics lend weight to the perceptions of rising crime and rising rates of recidivism among young people. In 2019–20, NT Police proceeded more than once against 54 per cent of offenders aged ten to fourteen and 37 per cent of offenders aged fifteen to nineteen (with the older cohort making up 82 per cent of all offenders), indicating high rates of reoffending. Young people detained by NT police are overwhelmingly Indigenous.

That youth crime should have burgeoned in Alice Springs over the past decade seems no coincidence. During the noughts, the main Conversation topics within local social justice organisations were violence against women and substance misuse. Central Australia was experiencing record rates of alcohol consumption and associated harms, including assaults, mainly against Aboriginal people. These declined over the next decade following the introduction of alcohol harm-reduction measures, including the NT government’s Banned Drinkers Register, a Labor policy implemented in 2011–12 and then resumed in 2017, when Labor resumed office.

Many young people were consequently born to parents who drank alcohol to harmful levels and mothers who experienced family violence. According to an NT government report, “at least one child is subjected to domestic and family violence every day of the year in the Northern Territory.” Other children live with the effects of having witnessed family violence; still others leave unsafe and overcrowded living situations and gain a sense of identity in street gangs.

Central Australian Youth Link Up Service report seeing a rise in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and other neurological conditions. While the current incidence of the disorder is unknown, a 2003 study calculated its prevalence in the Territory’s Aboriginal children to be between 1.87 and 4.7 per 1000 live births, compared with an estimated national rate of 0.02 per 1000 non-Indigenous children. Parents and educators find these young people, afflicted by limited attention spans, hyperactive behaviour and other learning difficulties, difficult to engage in educational, social, recreational and other activities.

Their parents are often young: in 2019, a fifth of Aboriginal mothers who gave birth in the Alice Springs region weren’t yet twenty. Often they haven’t completed school and face limited job opportunities, especially in remote areas. Around half remote-living Indigenous people don’t receive income from either wages or a Centrelink allowance, so they fall back on families for support, lifting poverty among the broader group. Census data indicates that between 2006 and 2016 Indigenous poverty rates increased to 50 per cent in very remote areas while falling to 22 per cent among Indigenous people in the major cities.

Food, fuel and other essentials were already more expensive in regional centres — and higher still in remote communities — but have hiked further in Alice Springs and its satellite communities since late 2021. Petty crime can be driven by something as basic as hunger.

The rise in crime and poverty also coincided with the implementation of the Howard government’s NT National Emergency Response and Labor’s Stronger Families policy. The BasicsCard, an income management tool introduced in town camps and prescribed communities in 2007, was extended to all welfare recipients in the Territory in June 2010. Fifty per cent of recipients’ Centrelink payments and 70 per cent of child protection payments could be spent only on food, clothing and rent. Financial penalties applied if, for example, children failed to attend school.

The BasicsCard was accompanied by the Community Development Program, a work-for-the-dole program that required remote participants to work for longer hours than their non-remote counterparts. Unlike its predecessor, the long-running Community Development Employment Projects scheme, the CDP was designed without any input from local communities.

Because allowances under these schemes were suspended if participants were unable to meet requirements, poverty rose. An ANU analysis found increased rates of infant mortality, child abuse and neglect, and a rise in low birth weights and child deaths from injury — a sad irony, given that the first round of reforms came in response to the Little Children Are Sacred report.

The rate of family violence in the Territory remains staggeringly high, and in 2021 recorded the greatest annual increase (12 per cent) in family and domestic violence-related assault victims across the country. NT police data indicate that nine out of ten victims were Aboriginal, and eight were Aboriginal women. “It is not an exaggeration to say that intimate partner violence committed upon Aboriginal women in the NT is pervasive,” NT coroner Greg Cavanagh said in 2016. “Almost three quarters” of NT Aboriginal women have been victims of intimate partner violence.

The Tangentyere Women’s Family Safety Group in Alice Springs has developed resources and initiatives to assist women and men in tackling family violence, but the lack of women’s refuges and other services, especially in very remote areas, and long waiting times for already overburdened clinics exacerbate the risks for those seeking to escape violence.

Although the fallout from this crisis is devastating, even the most distressing incidents scarcely rate a mention in national media. Which is why campaigners from the Tangentyere group held a vigil one Sunday in July this year to mourn the deaths of a mother and child, allegedly shot by the woman’s forty-one-year-old partner in a murder-suicide out of town. About one hundred of us gathered on the lawn outside Alice Springs Court and laid flowers on the grass and wrote messages of support to the family. Friends and relatives spoke about the impact of the loss of this thirty-year-old Aboriginal woman and her fourteen-week-old baby.

While the campaigners hoped the vigil would raise national awareness of the high incidence of family-violence-related deaths among First Nations women, the deaths received little attention outside Alice Springs. Indeed, more coverage was given to the shooting of three whitefellas in a property dispute in north Queensland the following month. And the small turnout for the vigil seems telling, too, in a town that focuses so much outrage on property crimes.

Strange things happened in Central Australia during the pandemic. After the first lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020, the streets of Alice Springs became abnormally quiet. Heeding the strong messages carried by remote Indigenous and national media about Covid-19’s risks, people stayed inside their houses or returned to their communities.

Behind closed doors in the library, we continued to provide borrowing and printing services, and moved storytelling and other educational programs online. But we wondered what had happened to our regulars. What were the tjilpis (Pitjantjatjara for older men) who watched westerns in the library doing every day, and the cheeky kids who enjoyed using computer apps to make videos and create emojis?

That was the town’s longest lockdown. By mid May we were dining al fresco in cafes; by early June we were allowed to go camping again (the ban had been a great privation for locals). On the last day of May, about one hundred people gathered at the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens for the launch of local author Dani Powell’s book, Return to Dust — the first sign for me of a return to a fragile normality.

For almost two years, as we resumed life in our own Truman Show in the middle of the desert, the virus seemed hypothetical. We went through the motions of sanitising and physical distancing (mask wearing never became widespread, except where mandated). Because of the Territory’s relative isolation, sparse population and, most of all, strict border controls, the virus’s spread was curtailed until quarantine restrictions were lifted for vaccinated travellers just before Christmas 2021. For me, the pandemic’s most difficult aspect was not being able to visit family in Sydney because of the prohibitive cost of fourteen days’ quarantine when I returned.

Alice Springs didn’t experience its first Covid-related death — an Aboriginal woman from Mutitjulu, who was the third fatality in the Territory — until 31 January this year. By the time five-day Covid isolation ended nationally, the Territory had recorded seventy-three Covid-related deaths and a fatality rate of 0.07 per cent. While any loss of life is tragic, these figures are remarkably low given that the region’s indices of disadvantage are among the worst in the country.

The effectiveness of the Territory’s Covid response stems from advocacy early in the pandemic by the Combined Aboriginal Organisations and peak Aboriginal health bodies, and especially by Donna Ah Chee, the chief executive of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, who initially lobbied for strict border controls.

The pandemic’s first year was also an unwitting social experiment. Property crime rates plummeted from April to August 2020, which some local commentators attributed to the existence of a curfew of sorts. A more compelling hypothesis is that crime fell after the coronavirus supplement lifted the JobSeeker and Youth Allowance by $550 fortnightly in March 2020, temporarily raising welfare recipients’ income above the poverty line.

“For the first time some households have been able to afford basic needs like accommodation, food, winter clothes, whitegoods or repairs to motor vehicles,” reported the Northern Territory Council of Social Service in October 2020. As the supplement was phased out from late September through to December that year, property break-ins resumed their previous high levels.

When people ponder the distance, the climate and the crime they often ask me and my friends how we can live here.

Despite the town’s extremes, it’s possible to experience many things here that have been lost in other urban areas. You can usually commute to work in ten minutes from any direction. You can escape to the bush for a walk or a swim in a waterhole, or to camp overnight, often without much preparation. You can immerse yourself quickly in the dramatic landscape — giant orange rocks cast by ancestral beings, wild dogs (Akngwelye) and caterpillars (Yeperenye, Ntyarlke and Utnerrngatye) churning across the land — and its moodiness, all bold primary colours in bright sun one day, brooding pastels in overcast weather the next. You can enjoy a sense of social ease, bumping into anyone at any time, and you can slot quickly into the town’s social, cultural and sporting lives.

To me, Alice Springs’s greatest strength has always been its community-driven activities, of which it boasts an extraordinary number. The town wheels through a calendar of iconic and idiosyncratic creative and sports events, including Parrtjima, the country’s only Aboriginal light festival, the Anaconda mountain-bike race, the Finke Desert Race, the Beanie Festival, Word Storm (the NT Writers Festival, every second year in Alice), the Bush Bands Bash, the Desert Mob exhibition, Desert Song and the Desert Festival.

In early October, composer Anne Boyd’s Olive Pink Opera was performed with the support of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir in the botanic gardens, on the site where the eponymous anthropologist camped in a tent during the 1950s.

While Alice Springs is best known for its visual arts — Albert Namatjira’s landscapes, the central and western desert art movements, the annual Papunya Tula Art Exhibition — it is also an incubator for experimental work by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. A recent exhibition, Footy Show, at Watch This Space, showcased First Nations artists exploring their relationship to football. Indigemoji, Australia’s first set of Indigenous emojis, was produced by young people guided by senior Arrernte cultural advisers, and Awemele Itelaretyeke is an app with two audio walking tours made by traditional owners to help users learn about Mparntwe’s history, culture and language.

Some of Centralia’s most hard-hitting creative achievements over the past decade have been in film and television: Warwick Thornton’s prize-winning Sweet Country (2017), which premiered at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, is a Western based on the local story of Willaberta Jack, and Penelope McDonald’s Audrey Napanangka (2021) explores the life and work of the Warlpiri artist. Dylan River (Thornton and McDonald’s son) directed Finke: There and Back (2019) for Brindle Films, which follows several Finke Desert Race participants, including local filmmaker Isaac Elliott, who competes on a modified motorbike after an accident left him confined to a wheelchair.

Alice-based production company Brindle Films, founded in 2011 by Rachel Clements and Trisha Morton-Thomas, produced the ABC TV comedy series 8MMM Aboriginal Radio (2015), and The Song Keepers (2018), the NITV/SBS documentary about the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir on tour. Isaac Elliott also worked with Brindle Films on the Netflix TV series MaveriX (2022), about dirt bike riders in the red centre.

Locally made documentary In My Blood It Runs (2019), which screened on ABC iView and Netflix, introduced viewers to the challenges encountered by ten-year-old Arrernte/Garawa boy Dujuan Hoosan in navigating cultural life and Western educational systems in Alice Springs. SBS crime series True Colours (2022), created by Erica Glynn (Thornton’s sister), portrays First Nations people’s social and cultural realities in Central Australia in a way rarely seen on TV. With white characters appearing as marginal figures, it features strong performances by untrained locals including singer Warren H. Williams, Arrernte elders Sabella Kngwarraye Ross Turner and Rosalie Kumalie Riley, and lead actor Rarriwuy Hick.

Books and publishing also have a high profile in Alice Springs. Although Dymocks closed its local store in 2013, local bookseller Red Kangaroo Books, run by the Capper–Druce family in Todd Mall since 2007, battled on, featuring on one list of “21 of the Best Bookshops in Australia to Visit in 2021.” As “the only bricks-and-mortar independent bookshop still standing in Australia between Port Augusta, Darwin, Broome, and Broken Hill,” the shop attributes its success to its “fiercely local” focus, stocking (often hard-to-come-by) books on Central Australian subjects and by Centralian authors.

Community-publishing outfits have long flourished in Alice Springs, especially those dedicated to producing books by First Nations people. The Institute for Aboriginal Development Press, which has published First Nations dictionaries and resources since 1969, has recently been joined by Running Water Community Press, which has produced anthologies of local women’s poetry including Campfire Satellites: An Inland Anthology (2019) and Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women’s Talk: Poems of Lyapirtneme from Arrernte Women in Central Australia (2020). The first book in its new truth-telling series is local stolen generations survivor Frank Byrne’s Living in Hope (2022), an earlier version of which won the Small Press Network’s Most Underrated Book Award in 2018.

Other notable First Nations publications include Central Land Council’s collective memoir, Every Hill Got a Story (2015), and ninety-year-old Kanakiya Myra Ah Chee’s memoir, Nomad Girl (2021).

Among the most inspiring local ventures are the First Nations children’s books published by intergenerational Arrernte learning initiative Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe Children’s Ground. Led by local Arrernte elders, Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe began providing education to First Nations children on Country and in people’s communities, combining Arrernte and Western educational priorities. Since 2019, its Arrernte educators have produced nine educational resources featuring seven local languages, the latest of which include Tyerrtye Atyinhe (My Body), Althateme (McGrath’s Dam) and Intelhiletyeke, a First Nations colouring book.

“We’ve been following government nearly all our lives — this is a new beginning,” says Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe director M.K. Turner. “We are following a new path, our own path as First Nations people for the future of our children. At Children’s Ground, the community is taking the lead. We are very proud of that. We are the government of ourselves.”

When the Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitsh arrived by train in Alice Springs in 1933 he experienced “an uncontrollable joy and fear.” “One feels,” he wrote, “that one is in the middle of the hot, wild heart of the most remote of all continents — Australia.”

I can relate to the intensity of Ravitsh’s response. Unsettling feelings take hold of you on being confronted by Mparntwe Alice Springs, destabilising your perception of Australia. The town continues to draw people like me — rootless wanderers above the ground, as a Māori elder once described the Pākehā — back to the Centre. With its sharp light throwing so much into relief, there is rawness about living in the place.

Here you live on the precipice of the prosperity so many Australians take for granted, where the marginalisation, the poverty, the trauma and the damage to Country that resulted from dispossession of First Nations people are all too apparent. At the same time, it is a privilege to see this other, remote Australia, to live and work alongside First Nations people, to catch a glimpse of what Country means to them, even if the depth and complexity of this relationship is hard to grasp.

“The town grew up dancing,” the late W. Rubuntja wrote. “And still the dancing is there under the town… We still have the culture, still sing the song… It’s the same story we have from the old people, from the beginning here in the Centre.”

May the dance never end. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Viewed through the lens of Frank’s work, Russell Marks’s new book, Black Lives, White Law, can be seen as an identification, and a powerful investigation, of persistent narratives about the incarceration of First Nations people in Australia. It is also a clear-eyed, impassioned attempt by a frontline lawyer to show how the criminal law is applied to his clients — how courts, police and prisons interact with Aboriginal people and their communities, the legal outcomes of which, Marks writes, often “feel like injustice.”

Black Lives, White Law comes at a time when Australia’s criminal justice system is out of step with much of the West. Decades of research have shown us that prisons don’t work. They are extremely costly (Australia is spending more than $4.2 billion on prisons each year) and ineffective in rehabilitating people: a period in prison increases a person’s chances of reoffending and returning to jail. While other countries have recognised the failure of incarceration (including both sides of politics in the United States) and moved towards building alternatives that deal with what drives people into the justice system and encourages them to reoffend, Australia continues to rely on incarceration.

Not only that: we are also locking up a record number of people. Imprisonment rates in Australia have grown steadily for the past twenty years; in the past decade alone, the number of people in prison nationally has risen 44 per cent. These rising rates can’t solely be explained by changes in either the amount or type of crime. Prison is, in part, a policy choice.

The brunt of Australia’s “carceral thrust,” as Marks calls it, is felt by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men, women, children, families and communities. Indigenous men are fifteen times more likely to be locked up than their non-Indigenous counterparts, and Indigenous women twenty-one times more likely; meanwhile, in the Northern Territory, it is often the case that every single child (some as young as ten) in the youth detention centres is Indigenous. “Indigenous Australians,” writes Marks, “are the most incarcerated people on the planet.” And First Nations people die in prisons, police cells and police vehicles: “While I’ve been writing this book, at least thirty-seven Aboriginal people have died in Australia’s criminal justice system.”

The statistics are more than just shocking and shameful. “Absurd” is how Marks describes them. What is to be done in the face of such absurdity? For Marks, a crucial step is to properly understand how we have arrived at this point. This entails unravelling the different stories settler Australians tell themselves to explain why so many First Nations people are in prison. For Marks, while the existing stories might all be true, none of them “goes anywhere near far enough to explain the sheer extent of the problem.”

Russell Marks is not the first to write about Indigenous imprisonment. Throughout Black Lives, White Law he scrupulously acknowledges the groundbreaking work of activist intellectuals and the archival excavations of scholars. And he is not Indigenous: he acknowledges that he is a “white guy,” one of the “beneficiaries of settlement and the dispossessed.”

A criminal defence lawyer, Marks has worked for Aboriginal legal services in the Northern Territory and Victoria, and he holds a PhD in Australian political history. He brings a unique perspective to what he calls “a book about Settler Australia’s system of criminal justice.” He takes us straight to the coalface (in this case his coalface), showing us his efforts to defend his clients and the helplessness and incredulity he feels as the law — settler law — works on them.

In a sense, Black Lives, White Law is Marks’s attempt to explain to himself what is going on and how what is happening can be happening. He does this by combining frontline accounts, case studies, social science research, and a history of settler law. And, always, we are brought back to people’s experiences and their encounters, and their community’s encounters, with the legal system.

The book’s narrative voice, the teller, guides readers through the already-known (what we read in the news) into the not-widely-known, and we trust it. More than trust it: we are crying out to be steered towards a new place of understanding. This new place is arrived at via Marks’s mapping of the stories that settler Australia has told itself for more than two centuries about Indigenous crime and attempts to control it; and he shows us the real-world effects of those stories, including the impact of overlooking another story it should perhaps be telling itself.

Marks introduces us to a story we know well, the “carceral three-act narrative”: crime; arrest and court; punishment and prison. It is a story that “looks no further than the person who commits the crime and does the time.” The simplest explanation, then, of why so many First Nations people are in Australian police and prison cells, says Marks, is that they commit more serious crimes, more often.

One problem with this story is that it is unable to account for another set of statistics: that certain factors (not completing high school, using drugs, suffering abuse or neglect by parents, being unemployed) make it more likely that someone will commit a crime. If offending or not was purely a matter of choice, writes Marks, offending patterns would be consistent across the entire population. “In other words, we’d… see the daughters of Vaucluse offending just as much as the sons of Darwin’s town camps.”

For decades, researchers and policymakers have debated the causal connections between people’s background and circumstances and their likelihood of breaking the law. The most recent large-scale national investigation, commenced in 2016, found what similar inquiries had found going back to the Aboriginal deaths in custody royal commission in 1991: that Aboriginal people and communities are dealing with transgenerational trauma.

Building on the work of Maggie Walter (Palawa woman and professor of sociology), Marks calls this the “deprivation” or “deficit” story of Aboriginal imprisonment. This story sees incarceration as an inevitable by-product of disadvantage, the argument being that eventually, if governments and Aboriginal communities alike work hard to address these various deprivations, fewer Aboriginal people will be locked up. But to stop here, writes Marks, “is to accept that imprisonment… will remain a reality for a high proportion of First Nations people… until they can be dragged into the middle class. It’s a grimly utilitarian position.”

The 2016 national investigation acknowledged another body of research too — a story of institutional bias. Marks reminds us that, while many Aboriginal people are committing serious crimes, most Aboriginal people are being locked up for very minor offences (public drunkenness, for example, or offensive behaviour or the non-payment of fines). Aboriginal children are exposed to police from an early age — there are more police around — and research has found that police regularly use their discretion against Aboriginal people. Bail laws that require financial sureties also effectively discriminate against Aboriginal people, many of whom don’t have the money to pay; meanwhile corrections departments often fail to create community-based alternatives to imprisonment.

This story, explains Marks, quickly becomes one about resources. Where exactly should governments direct their efforts? Retraining police? Reforming bail laws? Or better attempting to deal with Aboriginal disadvantage?

Marks urgently wants to tell a different story, one that might go some way to explaining the magnitude of the problem: that settler law in Australia is neither neutral nor fair; and that “the whole system of crime and punishment… is designed to continue to punish Indigenous people unless and until they adopt the cultural norms of the settler middle class.”

Indigenous incarceration is a fraught topic. Throughout Black Lives, White Law, Marks is unafraid to confront the elephant in the room: the real fact of Indigenous male violence, especially against Indigenous women. As a criminal lawyer, he sees the aftermath of “a lot of horrific violence… photos, videos, terrified victims.” He is troubled by how this violence is enlisted by politicians, the justice system and the media for their own ends: “Settler Australia has told this… story to itself for four decades. It fulfils a particular function: to shock readers into staying the colonial course.”

Marks recounts a conversation he had with a prosecutor in Katherine, in the Northern Territory, a woman who previously worked as a defence lawyer and was now with the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. She tells Marks she is a socialist. Marks asks her how she squares her politics with her role in sending Aboriginal people to prison at such high rates. She tells him that her primary role is to represent the people “who are truly without a voice.”

“I looked at her quizzically,” Marks writes. “I thought that’s what I was doing, working as a defence lawyer for an Aboriginal legal service. Prosecutors represent the state, which is hardly powerless.” The prosecutor clarifies: she represents Aboriginal women and children. “Women and their children are completely silenced in that whole system,” she tells Marks. “It’s our role to give them a voice, help them to stand up to the bully men who are maiming and killing them.”

When men are attacking women and children, those women and children should absolutely be helped, Marks thinks to himself. And yet his exchange with this fellow lawyer unsettles him. He wonders whether the views of this prosecutor might be pervasive within the Northern Territory’s DPP. He is reminded of the 2007 NT Intervention. Yes, women and children should be helped, he thinks. But was the DPP and the settler state best placed to provide the assistance? How? By locking up as many men for as long as possible?

In the long run, Marks believes, this doesn’t protect women. “Violent men come out more violent. Children come out hardened. Everyone comes out broken — if they come out at all.” He asks us, the readers of his book, to be prepared to “distinguish the criminal act, committed by the individual, from the criminal justice system which responds to it by way of policing and punishment. Whether we accept it or not, each — the act and the system — has a history.”

Black Lives, White Law is not about solutions. “It’s about the problem, the one big problem that is perpetuating the subjugation of entire communities.” In articulating the problem, Marks also points us towards a different, more hopeful future.

For 230 years, the original owners of the lands that Europeans have been “settling” on have been demanding justice. “The problem is the immutability of settler expectations, our insistence that our system, with its prisons and its courts and its increasingly militarised police, works and is the only way.” He is not arguing in favour of reversing history so that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can be afforded the uncolonised existence they should have had from the beginning; rather, he is talking to settler Australia “about its need to change.”

There is little acknowledgement in Australia, for instance, that Aboriginal communities and nations had distinct cultures and laws before 1788, many of which continue today in updated form. (While settler law has “experimented” with some recognition of First Nations culture, that recognition is limited, with the court models — the Nunga Court in South Australia, for example — all sharing a common feature: “The law that decides a person’s penalty is settler law.”)

Marks points out that there are significant numbers of people, communities and organisations — both First Nations and settlers — working on developing real-world alternatives to the crime-and-justice model we persist with in Australia. “The only thing stopping us from changing the way we respond to crime is our collective will. [That is not] as insurmountable as it seems.”

Sometimes we see “glimpses of another future, if we know where to look.” Marks writes of agencies agitating for change. He writes of a future where true partnerships are formed:

Settlers are educated on First Nations law and cultural obligations. Social problems are decriminalised and worked on. Individuals are afforded the tools with which to take responsibility, not alone, but as part of whole, self-determining communities. Prisons are rehabilitated and even decommissioned. Communities build, strengthen, heal.

To reach this future, argues Marks, settler Australia and its legal system must first drop its “jealously guarded universality and sheen of neutrality” and enter into a relationship of genuine respect and mutuality with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and nations.

Until then, many lives of First Nations people will continue to be lost to imprisonment, generation after generation of communities defined by the prison experience. Marks visits his clients in jail and watches families visit incarcerated loved ones. He sees Aboriginal toddlers comfortable with their securitised routines. “The idea that prison is a normal place to visit Dad or Uncle or, increasingly, Mum is one that’s been established through regular weekend visits well before many children even set foot in a school.”

Black Lives, White Law: Locked Up and Locked Out in Australia
By Russell Marks | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 368 pages

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As scriptwriter, editor, composer, cinematographer and director, Sen might have laid claim to auteur status in the tradition of the visionary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, one of his acknowledged influences. But Mystery Road was also a genre film, a Western with a crime story at its heart. Its esoteric quality of “silence made visible,” in the words of Inside Story’s late film critic, Sylvia Lawson, was balanced by a commitment to building narrative suspense and creating a heroic detective figure in Jay Swan, played by Aaron Pedersen.

Sen’s dramatic world took on a life of its own, sustaining its imaginative hold as the baton was passed by a succession of directors, including Rachel Perkins and Warwick Thornton. Thornton’s son Dylan River took the helm for the latest series, a prequel that involved a challenging change of actor in the central character of Swan, now played by Mark Coles Smith.

Greer Simpkin, a producer of Mystery Road: Origin, sees the depth of the ensemble acting by a predominantly Aboriginal cast as essential to its appeal. Indeed, the three series in which she and casting director Anousha Zarkesh have been involved seem not so much cast as populated.

River agrees with Pedersen’s observation in 2013 that “the land is a bigger character than anyone” in Mystery Road — though for River, he tells me, this is “a subconscious thing.” With his background in cinematography, telling stories through landscape is second nature. Perhaps this experience also gives him an instinct for who belongs in a dramatised train of events so bound up with everyday life in an outback town in Western Australia’s Goldfields region.

A discerning eye for untrained newcomers with a captivating quality on screen is born of Zarkesh’s decades of experience travelling through remote regions, often visiting scores of schools and social organisations in a few days. But choosing actors for the latest series’s eighty speaking roles, not to mention finding 254 extras, was especially complicated. River, Simpkin and Zarkesh were in different states during the pandemic and filming was slated to take place on the other side of a locked border.

Zarkesh’s role, she tells me, is to facilitate the director’s vision by identifying the dramatic tone of the production and drawing together a pool of likely candidates. The process of blending local extras with professionally trained actors and established stars is a challenge any casting director might face, but here it is the heart of the matter. She describes it as “an overall puzzle,” moving from the selection of individuals with distinctive physical and personal qualities to the composition of an ensemble able to portray the surface tensions and underlying bonds of an enduring community. “Something magical’s going to happen when it all comes together,” she says.

River, likewise, talks of a kind of alchemy that occurs when the chosen actors appear on set. “Once we get shooting you can’t see anyone else in the role. They already are who we want — to the extent that we will change the script and even the character to suit them.”

A remarkable instance came with the casting of Megan Lilly Wilding as Ziggy, a bizarre, ragged figure Swan comes across near an isolated hut in the desert. She carries a shotgun, talks of devils and magic, and gives Swan the slip by haring off into the distance on a dune buggy. Wilding has form as a comedian, and there’s an unpredictability to her performance that is nothing short of inspired as she makes the transition from crazed joker to cowed pathos as an elemental being confined to a police cell. The role was originally written for a male actor, but Wilding had an unmistakable claim on it.

Scripted lines were readily dropped, says River, when they were made redundant by nuances of behaviour truer to the complexities of communication in a social environment where so much is left unsaid and often suppressed. Here the series differs markedly from the dominant tendency for Australian TV acting to be over-explicit, as if the goal is always to find the shortest route to the next emotional climax.

When Zarkesh and Simpkin speak of finding actors who will suit the tone of the production, they are identifying the need to be true to the quietness River encourages, even in dialogue fraught with underlying distress. This is a place where grief and loss are deeply embedded, too acute for ready expression.

This is something Pedersen, as the older Swan, made central to the earlier series. He brought a fusion of brooding machismo and brusque restraint that Mark Coles Smith, as the younger Swan, manages to display as qualities in the making. Coles Smith has a lightness about him that lifts the spirit of the new series (yes, he’s even permitted fleeting smiles) without losing the essential gravitas of the character. “Mark was the only person on our list,” says River, and he brought a subtlety to the role that came of the most attentive preparation.

Experienced actors like Coles Smith and Steve Bisley, as the ageing cop who runs the local station, carry intricately detailed backstories in their heads. These may never emerge in the scripted narrative, but the camera has a way of reading these psychological sub-strata in their faces and bodies.

This discipline and imaginative commitment spreads through the cast, who must sustain their conviction through prolonged camera shots and laconic conversations. River prefers to shoot dialogue with a single camera, placed “at the distance it needs to be emotionally,” which means actors need the concentration for a single, prolonged take. There are no opportunities to mix shots from different angles in the editing room.

As River heads for Toronto to promote the series to an international audience, Zarkesh is in the Northern Territory scouting for new talent for Warwick Thornton’s next film, which needs a group of eight- to twelve-year-old boys to take lead roles. What does she look for? First, kids who are confident, playful, expressive in improvised games; and at the next level, kids who listen, draw on imagination and come from a truthful place. And when they start to form a relationship with the camera, “they’ll break your heart.” •

The post Casting Mystery Road appeared first on Inside Story.

In those last, productive years William Cooper said some things that now seem weird. On 3 December 1939, he asked prime minister Robert Menzies for legislation “granting full rights to aborigines who have attained civilised status.” What did Cooper mean by “civilised”? He didn’t mean “white”: only eight months before writing to Menzies he had complained to interior minister John McEwen about Western Australia’s policy of “absorption of aborigines into the white population” — a policy “as unfavourably viewed by us as by the white organisations.” Yet he could say (to McEwen in February 1938) that for the purposes of the White Australia policy, “the Aboriginal is white.”

And when Cooper used the word “culture,” did he mean what we now mean? On 25 November 1938 he reassured McEwen that “the Aboriginal loses his culture with the greatest facility. He as quickly acquires the culture of the superior race he contacts.” This was consistent with what he had written to the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society’s John Harris in March 1937: that “the primitive culture [is] destined ultimately to perish.” It followed from this prognosis that (as he wrote to McEwen in February 1938) “when the aboriginal people are fully cultured and are Australian in the full sense of the term you will be proud of us.”

Yet Cooper also insisted that there was something distinct and worthy about “thinking black” — a capacity attained by very few white Australians, he told Thomas Paterson, McEwen’s predecessor as interior minister, in February 1937. Cooper was proud of “thinking black” and sought to share its insights with Australian policymakers.

When we enter into Cooper’s world, as documented in the petition, the letters and the newspaper interviews of the 1930s, we must concede him a vocabulary that is very different from our own. The challenge for a biographer is to enable readers to empathise with the unfamiliar terms of Cooper’s demands for recognition and inclusion.

Historian Bain Attwood has written about Cooper before. In 2004, in collaboration with Andrew Markus under the title Thinking Black: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League, he compiled one hundred items written by or with Cooper, nearly all from the period 1933–41. This slim but rich book confronts us with the strangeness (from a 2022 perspective) of the terms in which Cooper appealed to the Australian political elite. Read alongside Michel Rose’s compilation For the Record: 160 years of Aboriginal Print Journalism (1996) and John Maynard’s Fight for Liberty and Freedom (2007), Thinking Black made it possible to construct a tradition of Australian Indigenous political thought and to tease out its thematic continuities and discontinuities.

Few have embarked on this project, however, because one of the effects of the politicisation of debates about Australia’s colonial past has been to make scholars cautious about historicising Indigenous Australians as intellectuals. It has been safer to idealise and essentialise articulate Aboriginality (“always was, always will be”) or simply leave the utterances of past Aboriginal people in the margins of narratives based on the much-quoted axiom that colonisation “is a structure not an event.” To assume that historical events do little more than enact the underlying structure of Australia’s colonisation diminishes our curiosity about contexts of Indigenous agency that were different from those of the more recent past. We have lacked ambition to understand how certain Aboriginal utterances, worded in unfamiliar ways, were pertinent to those who then spoke and heard them.

One lamentable effect of the current popularity of the axiom that colonisation is a structure not an event is that the past becomes too familiar when it would be better to allow it to be strange. Historical enquiry (enjoined as “truth-telling”) can easily become a search for ideological reassurance. It would be all too easy to keep Cooper behind the screen of our “presentism” — a revered ancestor of current Indigenous protest, but not to be too closely examined and rarely quoted.

By attempting a full biography — notwithstanding gaps in the record — Attwood shows us that the man who found his voice (and the attention of politicians and the press) on the eve of the second world war was formed ideologically by the end of the nineteenth century.

By the time Cooper was born, the Yorta Yorta had learned to adapt to colonisation by working for pastoralists; later they would become small landholders themselves. Cooper’s father (Edward or James) was a white worker; the sexual availability of women such as William’s mother was a boon to a hard life. William grew up in an Aboriginal kin group, but under the influence first of John O’Shanassy — land-owner and politician — and then of Daniel and Janet Matthews, who established Maloga Mission in 1874 on Yorta Yorta country. As Cooper became a working teenager, he sought wages outside the mission without losing sight of that secure place in which his wider kin group chose to live. Making Maloga his home from 1882, he helped petition for its extension in 1887. On that added land residents formed Cumeroogunga (“our home”).

Like most missionaries, Daniel and Janet Matthews documented their work extensively, enabling Attwood to narrate Cooper’s early adult world first through the lens of Maloga and then by describing Cumeroogunga’s dealings with the NSW government. In the 1880s Cooper’s sister married Maloga’s Mauritian teacher, Thomas Shadrach James, and we can see in Cooper’s writing during the 1930s the themes of James’s teachings to the Yorta Yorta in the 1880s: “to embrace the opportunities that Christianity and civilisation (as [James] saw it) had to offer but also to assert their rights as British subjects.” In 1881 and 1887 Maloga folk also demonstrated a form of political action — the petition — that Cooper was to take up again in 1933–37.

Cooper committed his life to the Christian God in 1884, as one of many converts in what historian Claire McLisky calls the Maloga Mission Revival. For the Yorta Yorta, Attwood writes, Christianity “was a powerful framework to make sense of their oppression, endure it and raise their voices against it.” God remained one of the two higher authorities against which Cooper — a lifetime Bible reader — would judge the flawed behaviour of Australian Britons; the other was the British Empire, with its promise of liberty and progress under the rule of law. In 1937 he assured John Harris that “the Aboriginal is more British often than the white.”

Attwood shows that people living at Maloga and Cumeroogunga had the chance to find out that the wider world was white-dominated. In 1886 the Fisk Jubilee Singers — evangelical Christian African-Americans and advocates for the rights of former slaves — visited Maloga. Their stories of the vicissitudes of Reconstruction in the United States must have resonated. Cooper’s awareness of non-white peoples was nurtured also by his visits to New Zealand (as a shearer) and by his reading. He was not only a trade unionist (as a member of the Shearers’ Union and Australian Workers Union) but also — we suppose — a reader of the labour movement press. He was to learn how, under British authority, “cannibals” in Fiji had advanced, Māori could elect four members of parliament, the government of Canada was paying attention to the “Eskimo” and, in the 1930s, “native affairs” exercised the imagination of white South Africans.

While white power over non-white people was a global phenomenon, the struggles against it — for Cooper, at Maloga and subsequently at Cumeroogunga — were local and particular. The narrative drive of Attwood’s biography is that the Yorta Yorta (with Cooper himself sometimes in view) were in constant negotiation with various forms of white authority, at times assisted by white champions — and not without victories. On this he gives much interesting detail.

Cooper retired to the inner-Melbourne suburbs of Footscray and Yarraville, where he lived on the aged pension. He recruited allies a generation younger than himself, including his nephew Shadrach Livingstone James (1890–1956), the “Christian communist” Helen Baillie (born c. 1893), Anna and Caleb Morgan (birth dates not given), Arthur Burdeu (born 1882) and Doug Nicholls (1906–1988). This milieu was Labor-affiliated and Christian. By February 1936, they had formed the Australian Aborigines’ League, or AAL. They believed that the civilisation that had colonised Australia had the potential and the obligation to treat Aboriginal people more fairly, and to do more to “uplift” them.

Attwood lists four connected ideas of the AAL that may or may not mesh with the outlooks of many who will read this book. First, that the rights they sought “were not so much an entitlement as something to be earned.” Second, that the demand for justice was more pressing for “civilised Aboriginals” (who were to be entrusted to guide the elevation of those still “myall”). Third, that differences of capacity were what mattered, as there were not any intrinsic differences of “race” or “colour.” Fourth, that Aboriginal people were of the same nature as white Australians. Such precepts may chafe some contemporary versions of identity politics.

Attwood’s account concludes by reminding us how high-handed, self-confident and paternalistic were the political elites of Australia in the 1930s. In the dismissive and deceitful treatment of the AAL’s petition to the King, in the self-congratulatory “foundation” celebrations of John Batman (1937) and Arthur Phillip (1938), and in the reluctance of the NSW government to discipline the bullying Cumeroogunga manager (1939) we see good reasons for Aboriginal people’s lasting anger. A self-satisfied Australia lacked the humility and perspicacity to test itself against the standards of British Christian civilisation on which Cooper and his colleagues were insisting. •

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In one sense, this view has underpinned a foreign policy that is overtly committed to advancing human rights through multilateral institutions and bilateral dialogues, and that views human rights both as intrinsic goods and as a foundation on which peace and prosperity are built. It is a foreign policy that ultimately saw Australia win election to the Human Rights Council (2018–20), engage as an enthusiastic participant in assessing the human rights performance of member states through its Universal Periodic Review, or UPR, process and emerge as a vocal advocate for a range of issues including gender equality, abolition of the death penalty, freedom of expression, and the establishment of strong national human rights institutions.

Yet Australian foreign policy is also marked by a deep reluctance to impose values on others, to take consistent and decisive action against countries that systematically violate their populations’ human rights, or to speak up against some of the world’s most egregious abuses. Preferring quiet diplomacy to overt criticism, Australia’s self-avowed pragmatism has earned it a reputation for being soft on human rights, for letting economic interests override democratic principles, and for signalling tacit acceptance of repressive regimes that routinely violate human rights. It has been accused of “losing its voice” on critical issues heard the Human Rights Council, such as the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population of Myanmar, where it recognised the “complex challenges” faced by Myanmar while other states openly condemned the actions as appalling human rights violations.

Partway through its tenure on the Human Rights Council, Foreign Minister Marise Payne reiterated Australia’s democratic commitment to human rights in its foreign policy: “Democracy, the rule of law, individual freedom and the right to all to dignity and respect — these values have guided Australians for generations. And these are the values which Australia as sought to promote as a member of the UN Human Rights Council.”

The response from much of the human rights community, including Human Rights Watch, was not exactly complimentary. As its Australian director, Elaine Pearson, argued, “Australia should treat its membership in the UN Human Rights Council as both an opportunity and a responsibility to be a leader in defending human rights abroad and at home… Promoting human rights values includes publicly raising issues with foreign leaders, not just making generic statements of concern in Geneva.”

Yet, as Australia’s term was coming to a close, it was to generic statements that Payne turned once again, highlighting the “gravity of the challenges posed to the international human rights system” and raising concerns over the treatment of minorities in Xinjiang, as well as human rights violations in North Korea or Myanmar’s Rakhine State, and national security laws in Hong Kong, Venezuela, Syria, and Yemen. Notably, these situations were all posed as issues still in need of redress, presumably by the new incoming members of the Human Rights Council. Her comments also came as Australia was facing significant criticisms for its own human rights record.

Australia’s most recent UPR in 2021 provided a decidedly mixed assessment of its human rights performance. On the positive side, the Human Rights Council working group welcomed “progress made in the realisation of human rights” in Australia since its 2015 review, highlighting its ratification of the Optional Protocol on the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2017 and, more recently, the development of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

More critically, however, the UPR also raised concerns over Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, First Nations peoples, and children. Among its key recommendations were: ending the mandatory detention and offshore processing of asylum seekers to meet Australia’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention; raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility from ten to at least fourteen, in line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child; and promoting the rights of Indigenous people, reducing discrimination and inequality, and taking measures to address the high rate of incarceration among First Nations people.

In response, the Australian government accepted many of the working group’s recommendations “to reduce the overrepresentation of First Nations people in the criminal justice system” but roundly rejected calls to end mandatory detention of asylum seekers and to prohibit the detention of refugee and asylum seeker children. It noted that the age of criminal responsibility is an issue on which the states must also have a say, referring to Australia’s federal political structure to deflect and defer the matter. It also rejected recommendations for the ratification of several international human rights instruments, including the International Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families, the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, and the Optional Protocol on the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. These recommendations had previously been made and rejected during the 2015 UPR process.

Despite its active commitment to monitoring other states’ human rights practices through multilateral institutions, Australia has been reluctant to implement recommendations made by those same institutions concerning its own performance. After its first UPR in 2011, the Australian Human Rights Commission reported that although the Australian government accepted the vast majority of recommendations issued, less than 10 per cent of them were actually implemented in the required timeframe. With a similar response to its second UPR in 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee castigated Australia for its “chronic non-compliance” with the committee’s recommendations and criticised its habit of picking and choosing which international human rights laws and treaties to follow. The committee’s vice-chair, Yuval Shany remarked in this regard that Australia’s behaviour is “incredible for a country that claims to have a leading role in global human rights.”

What explains Australia’s at times contradictory, often hypocritical, and perennially uncomfortable engagement with the global human rights regime? Why is Australia so uptight and uncomfortable about human rights? And what can Australia do to improve its international human rights reputation and relationships?

Uptight and uncomfortable

In 1996, Prime Minister John Howard revealed his wish for Australians to be comfortable and relaxed about three things: their history, their present and their future. Two decades on from his year 2000 deadline, this continues not to be the case. Where human rights are concerned, Australia is deeply uncomfortable about all three. And that is as it should be. Australia should not be relaxed or comfortable about its past, present or, given its current trajectory, future human rights performance.

This is not to suggest that Australia has not made many positive contributions to the global human rights regime or that its human rights record has been consistently abominable. It is also not to overlook the incredible contributions that many well-respected Australians have made to the development and management of the international human rights regime. But it is to suggest that past and present injustices that Australia fails to acknowledge and fails to address shape its engagement with the international human rights regime and are likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. Those injustices have tended to centre on issues of immigration, whether by migrant workers or asylum seekers, and the treatment of Australia’s Indigenous population. In this sense, Australia’s most recent UPR simply echoes concerns about its human rights practices that have been raised in the international community and at home since the middle of the nineteenth century.

The reason for this sense of discomfort can be explained, at least in part, in the overriding dominance of two key concerns that underpin Australia’s understanding of human rights, its engagement with other members of the international community and with the international human rights regime: unity and prosperity. These concerns emerged in the settler colonial politics and foreign affairs of the 1830s and, although they have at times worked in concert and at others sat in tension with one another, they continue to mark Australia’s foreign policy and engagement with human rights.

The past

Two among many similar issues demonstrate how these dual concerns helped lay the foundations of Australia’s engagement with human rights in its foreign affairs: the so-called “Chinese question,” centred on the influx of Chinese immigrants to try their luck on the Australian goldfields and, later, make inroads into trades like cabinetmaking; and the importation of South Sea islanders to work as indentured labourers, primarily in Queensland’s sugar industry. In both cases, basic early ideas of human rights, which centred on liberty, freedom of movement, free will and benevolence (freedom from harm) came into direct contention with the pursuit of national unity and prosperity. In both cases arguments in favour of immigration restriction centred on fears that increased non-white immigration would be detrimental to white wages and businesses, as well as the idea that social and cultural unity required racial homogeneity.

In the Chinese case, supporters of immigration restriction who cast aside arguments defending the human rights of Chinese migrants found themselves labelled as “enemies of human rights.” Yet, even then, tensions between human rights and other priorities remained. As an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on 9 October 1860 explained:

[W]e believe the colony is… outraging humanity by its treatment of this race; but we see far less injustice in telling them that they shall not dig for gold… We believe there are sacred rights which belong to human beings, among them is the right to go anywhere in search of honest subsistence… [W]e wish there were not a Chinese in the colony… But in our opinion the defence of the rights of a persecuted race is the sacred duty of every enlightened man, and especially of every advocate of liberty.

In short, while even some supporters of human rights were reluctant to extend those rights to Chinese immigrants, the dominant position in the Australian colonies maintained that economic and social interests overrode the universal application of human rights.

Where the importation of South Sea islander labourers was concerned, arguments on both sides of the debate afforded economic interests a prominent place. While critics of the practice argued that the establishment of a cheap labour force would have a detrimental effect on white wages and employment opportunities, supporters maintained that cheap labour was necessary to guarantee the viability of the burgeoning sugar industry. Human rights also formed part of the debate. Replicating arguments used by British abolitionists to campaign against unjust labour practices after the formal abolition of slavery, local and international critics routinely cast the Pacific Islands labour trade as a form of “incipient slavery” because of the prevalence of kidnapping and deception among recruiters, physical abuse suffered by recruited islanders, and disregard for their right to liberty.

The right to liberty formed a key part of the judgement tendered by Justice Lutwyche in one of the few blackbirding cases (R v Coath) to be heard in a court of law. The case centred on the actions of John Coath, captain of the recruitment ship Jason, which was sent out from Maryborough to procure workers for the Maryborough Sugar Company. As an article published in both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Brisbane Courier on 15 March 1871 detailed, several Presbyterian missionaries stationed in the New Hebrides had accused Coath of engaging in slavery, taking young men and boys by force and, on at least one occasion, purchasing them from their chief.

Coath was duly charged with kidnapping and assault. His defence rested on the claim that he had not kidnapped the trafficked men, but had “saved” them by taking them from “islands inhabited by a savage and barbarous people” and bringing them “within the protection of English law.” Justice Lutwyche did not agree. “[W]hether they are civilized or not matters not,” Lutwyche wrote, in a judgement described as a “singular precedent,” “they have a right to liberty, which is inherent in all human beings.”

Yet for much of the nineteenth century the idea that Pacific islanders held the same universal human rights as the white settler population was swept aside in favour of arguments supporting the practice as a means of ensuring the cheap labour that was necessary to guarantee the prosperity of the sugar industry. At the turn of the century, as a fall in the sugar price and the movement toward federation saw the force of this argument begin to wane, it was overtaken, not by an ascendant notion of human rights but an overriding emphasis on social unity.

This idea was articulated most prominently by prime minister Edmund Barton in debate over the 1901 Immigration Restriction Bill, the centrepiece of the White Australia policy, in which he stated, “I do not think either that the doctrine of equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is basic inequality.”

This argument stood alongside perennial concerns over the economic impact of a potential influx of cheap Asian labour, and claims, such as that articulated by future prime minister Alfred Deakin, that “Unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia.”

This understanding of human rights did not only apply to would-be immigrants but was felt most acutely by Australia’s First Nations, who suffered well-documented violence, dispossession, discrimination and dehumanisation at the hands of the white settler community, actions for which the settler population faced criticism from as early as the 1830s. The ramifications of those abuses continue to be felt by successive generations of Indigenous Australians and, as its most recent UPR demonstrates, reverberate in Australia’s engagement with the contemporary international human rights regime. Along with Australia’s past immigration policies and treatment of South Sea islanders, these actions form part of a past that, inadequately acknowledged and redressed, limits Australia’s ability to lead on matters of human rights.

The present

Abundant evidence shows that the pursuit of unity and prosperity still shapes Australia’s engagement with the international human rights regime. One obvious place we find it is in the federal government’s 2017 foreign policy white paper. Across a range of issues, the white paper mentions prosperity a staggering eighty-seven times. While prosperity is often viewed as an end in itself, it is also coupled with other foreign policy objectives, including security, peace and human rights. Human rights, we are told, “underpin peace and prosperity.” While the paper professes Australia’s commitment to “advancing human rights globally” and acknowledges, again in the most generic of terms, that “[m]en, women and children have the right to fundamental freedoms and to live their lives with dignity,” the value proposition is posed in terms of stability, security and prosperity.

Unity is viewed through a slightly different lens than it has been in the past. The term itself has been replaced by the idea of social cohesion and coupled with multiculturalism in place of earlier views on race now deemed unacceptable. What has not changed is its close relationship with prosperity. The white paper tells us that “[b]y generating more and better paying jobs, a strong and flexible economy reinforces the social cohesion and resilience of Australian society.” It also continues to inform Australia’s approach to issues of migration and criticisms of its treatment of asylum seekers: “Without a well-managed migration program, the cohesion of our society could be damaged and community support for our humanitarian program would be unsustainable.” This argument was replicated in Australia’s response to the 2020 UPR, in which it rejected recommendations to bring its asylum seeker policies in line with its obligations under the Refugee Convention.

The future

So, what of the future? What can Australia do to improve its international human rights reputation and relationships?

First, Australia needs to confront its past. At the very least, this should entail making meaningful, considered and concerted efforts to acknowledge and redress the abuses and atrocities committed against South Sea islander and Aboriginal populations, under the direction of affected communities themselves. Otherwise, it will be very difficult for Australia to be a credible leader in the international human rights regime. This is not to say that only those countries that boast unblemished human rights records can comment on rights violations. For one thing, such countries do not exist. Rather, it is to point out that when a country like Australia professes to take on a leadership role in the global human rights regime while doggedly refusing to address the egregious injustices of its past or present, it undermines its own credibility.

Second, Australia must stop picking and choosing which human rights agreements, treaties and recommendations to uphold. As Human Rights Watch argues, it must deal with abuses raised in its most recent UPR, especially those related to its treatment of refugees, children and Indigenous people. Instead of “doubling down on policies that have caused immense harm to asylum seekers and have been repeatedly condemned by UN officials and other governments,” Pearson argues, Australia must uphold its responsibilities towards these people. It must also make serious efforts to reduce the rate of incarceration among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and stop hiding behind federalism to avoid assuming leadership on raising the age of criminal responsibility across all Australian jurisdictions. It should also stop dragging its feet on the ratification of international human rights treaties and agreements.

Third, Australia needs to take a long, hard look at the core underlying principles that direct its engagement with the international human rights regime. Is prosperity really its core national interest? And if it is, should it be? Perhaps more pointedly, is Australia’s perpetual pursuit of prosperity simply a way of justifying or sanitising greed? And if it is, how well does that sit with its professed commitment to universal human rights?

What do we mean by social cohesion? Does it signify a coming together or simply justify exclusion, marginalisation, the stifling of debate and the quashing of dissent? And does social cohesion require the sorts of policies it is said to justify? Would the humane treatment of asylum seekers in accordance with Australia’s international obligations really be damaging to social cohesion? And is that a society we actually want to be part of?

In short, improving Australia’s engagement with the international human rights regime means, first and foremost, taking a hard look at ourselves, at our past and our present, at who we are, what we value, and what sort of society we want to be. •

This is an extended version of a talk delivered on 22 November at a symposium to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

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Australia’s colonial history includes stories of conflict and stories of cooperation. In the words of the final report of the Referendum Council, the organisation that endorsed the Uluru Statement, “the true history of colonisation” includes not only “the genocides, the massacres, the wars and the ongoing injustices and discrimination” but also “stories of how First Nations Peoples have contributed to protecting and building this country.”

Because each locality will have its own array of stories, truth-telling should be a regional or local process, write Megan Davis, one of the influential drafters of the Uluru Statement, and Gabrielle Appleby. It should be “led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples working with non-Aboriginal people in that community.”

Which Indigenous actions should count as “protecting and building this country” will undoubtedly be debated. In an effort to promote more inclusive Anzac commemorations, for example, the federal government has highlighted the contribution of Aboriginal Australians to Australia’s war effort. But what of the trackers who helped Constable Bill McKinnon find Yokununna, the man he killed in the controversial circumstances recounted in Mark McKenna’s recent book, Return to Uluru?

Truth-telling has political significance, and sometimes it avows a political purpose. The Uluru Statement suggested a political context for truth-telling: “We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.” But ought truth-telling be “supervised”?

The verb has strong and weak senses. When Megan Davis agreed to contribute a comment for the cover of McKenna’s book and praised it as “an important part of Australia’s truth-telling canon” she was exercising a mild form of supervision. But some supporters of the Uluru Statement will expect more supervision than a book endorsement. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or SATRC, has been mentioned as an appropriate model of supervised truth-telling, most recently by Peter Baume, the Fraser government’s Aboriginal affairs minister, in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.

In some respects, the SATRC functioned like a court, forensically attaching responsibility for human rights violations to named individuals. From its creation in 1996, it received testimony both in public and confidentially, and awarded reparations to testifying victims. Perpetrators of violence could testify in the hope of receiving amnesty from civil and criminal prosecution. Some 7111 applications were made for amnesty, of which only 849 were granted.

Some Indigenous Australians have mentioned the SATRC respectfully but cautiously. When a parliamentary committee chaired by the Liberals’ Julian Leeser and Labor’s Patrick Dodson received submissions on how to respond to the Uluru Statement, the few who mentioned the South African approach included Jackie Huggins, speaking for the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples. She told the committee on 5 July 2018 that the SATRC — unlike Australia’s reconciliation process — had been “really strong in bringing evidence” and reminded them that Australia’s Stolen Generations inquiry (1995–97) had power of subpoena.

Responding to the committee’s questions, though, Huggins distanced herself from the congress’s submission: “We chose the model [of the SATRC] because it was the one that spoke to us at the time,” she said, adding that “we need to refine the model.” She didn’t provide any details of how it might be modified.

Other Indigenous people have been similarly cautious. In September 2018, Victoria’s treaty advancement commissioner, Jill Gallagher, said that she wished to “look at how it was done in South Africa” but made it clear that neither she nor anyone else involved in Victoria’s treaty process had committed to any particular model for a truth commission. It is too early to say whether Victoria’s Yoo-rrook Justice Commission (established May 2021) will adopt any of the SATRC’s processes.

When Leeser and Dodson’s committee sat on Palm Island in October 2018, James Cook University’s Lynore Geia mentioned the SATRC as an example worth considering. Declining to commit herself to this model, however, Geia said that truth-telling should be led by “a courageous prime minister to step out to get this going, with people behind him.”

As Patrick Dodson himself acknowledged at the committee’s Kununurra hearing, “Sometimes, when we get asked about truth-telling and the Makaratta kind of idea, people think of this notion of a South African–type truth and justice commission.” But that was not his preference, he revealed at a committee hearing in Sydney: “I think it’s more the question of getting an understanding across the nation rather than a commission that was to search for who did what and then bringing it to prosecution in some way.”

What did appeal to Dodson was the treaty process being pursued at that time in South Australia. He liked the fact that it avoided the South African approach — which he characterised as “Let’s root out the perpetrators of these evils and bring them to court.” The Leeser–Dodson committee’s final report recommended that the federal government support truth-telling in non-judicial settings such as those organised by “local organisations and communities, libraries, historical societies and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander associations.”

If truth-telling is to be so localised in its settings, open in its thematic demands and collective in its notion of colonists’ liability, then a Makarrata Commission won’t be anything like the SATRC. Yet one feature of the South African model was retained in the proposal presented by Appleby and Davis in November 2018. The point of a Makarrata Commission, they wrote, is to “inform a renegotiation of the political relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and the rest of the nation.”

Like Dodson and Leeser, Appleby and Davis envisaged a process that was decentralised rather than national, and not forensically aimed at pinning down individual liabilities. Their regional/local process would be “led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples working with non-Aboriginal people in that community… in conjunction with local councils, local history societies, or other local community groups.” They also envisaged a national role for the Makarrata Commission, which would collate and archive the products of the local/regional truth-telling and — subject to permission — make them public.

Appleby and Davis reported that delegates to the Uluru convention wanted truth-telling to fuel “a process by which… reparations and future relationships can be negotiated.” That renegotiated political relationship would result in “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation in Australia’s constitutional structure, and the current governments recalibrating their relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through a Makarrata.”

What collated and archived truths would contribute to such a political result? It is possible to imagine that both themes of Australia’s colonial history mentioned by the Referendum Council —  violent colonising and collaborative nation-building — could spur non-Indigenous Australians to make reparations. Whether Indigenous Australians had been violently coerced (as foes to be dispossessed) or merely exploited (as workers, collaborators in nation-building) the settlers could be motivated — by truth-telling — to make reparations and to negotiate new political relationships.

While Appleby and Davis didn’t say what they thought the themes of truth-telling should be, they suggested that the Australian public was not receptive. “There is a level of disaffection, disinterest and denial of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history in Australia.” Implicit in this claim is that the truths Appleby and Davis have in mind — most challenging to national complacency, most productive of reparations and recalibrations — are damaging to many Australians’ pride in their nation: the “genocides, the massacres, the wars and the ongoing injustices and discrimination” rather than Indigenous Australians’ involvement in “protecting and building this country.”

That the theme of truthful Australian history should be violent dispossession and its coercive sequels has also been the assumption of Reconciliation Australia whenever it has tried to measure what it calls Australians’ “historical acceptance.” For its Reconciliation Barometers in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020, Reconciliation Australia used an online survey to measure agreement or disagreement with the following seven statements about Australia’s past:

Government policy enabled Aboriginal children to be removed from their families without permission until the 1970s.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people did not have full voting rights throughout Australia until the 1960s.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians were subject to mass killings, incarceration, forced removal from land and restricted movement throughout the 1800s.

Government policy in the 1900s dictated where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians could live and be employed.

Australia was owned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities at the time of colonisation in 1770.

At the time of colonisation there were at least 250 distinct Indigenous Nations, each with their own cultural identities and custodial connections to land.

Frontier wars occurred across the Australian continent as a result of Indigenous people defending their traditional lands from European invasion.

The Reconciliation Barometer polls a “general community” sample and an “Indigenous” sample, but anyone who assumes that these two samples differ greatly in their “acceptance” of the above statements will be confounded by the barometer’s published reports. Although a large proportion (30 to 45 per cent) of the general community didn’t agree with these statements, a large minority of the Indigenous sample didn’t either. In 2014, 2016 and 2018, the proportions of Indigenous respondents who either disagreed with these statements or answered “not sure” were in the range of 30 to 40 per cent. If these statements exemplify truth-telling then we can’t assume Indigenous Australians will give unified leadership in affirming historical truths to their fellow Australians.

The gap between the general community and Indigenous respondents was greatest in relation to the statement that “Australia was owned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities at the time of colonisation in 1770.” In 2014 and 2016, nonetheless, about three in ten Indigenous respondents were unsure about or did not accept this statement. (The barometer didn’t test acceptance of this statement after 2016.)

Reconciliation Australia must have been dismayed by such findings. Expressing a fear that respondents in 2014, 2016 and 2018 had misunderstood the question, it changed the wording. Instead of asking “Do you accept or not accept the following as facts about Australia’s past?” the 2020 barometer asked respondents to choose one of three responses to six “historical truth” statements: “I believe this is true,” “I do not believe this is true” or “I am unsure about this.”

The effect was noticeable. Across five of the six statements the proportion of Indigenous respondents saying they did not believe the statements was much lower than the proportions who, in previous years, had said they did not “accept” them. For many respondents, it seems (and this might not be surprising), “accepting” a statement is not the same as “believing” it. Importantly, though, two things didn’t change when the question was reworded.

First, the proportion of Indigenous respondents saying that they were “unsure” whether to believe the statements remained within the same range (15 to 25 per cent across six statements tested). Second, between 2018 and 2020 there was no change in the proportion of the Indigenous sample who declined to agree that “Frontier wars occurred across the Australian continent as a result of Indigenous people defending their traditional lands from European invasion.” In other words, about three in ten Indigenous respondents either did not believe this to be true or were unsure of its truth.

How are we to make sense of this level of disbelief or uncertainty? I suspect that some people (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) didn’t affirm these statements because to affirm them has come to imply that one is taking a position within a morally and emotionally charged debate about blame, forgiveness and responsibility. The statements tested by the barometer are not merely factual: they are emotional and moral. To affirm a story is to arouse feeling and to engage in moral reasoning, and we may or may not feel good about where “I” and “we” stand in that story, and its implication of “me” and “us.”

Australia’s public culture is awash with stories that convey some idea of who “we” now are, what “we” have done, and what “we” can be. (Paul Keating’s Redfern speech in December 1992 artfully mobilised this pronoun.) As a long-term effect of the civic program calling for reconciliation, “we” has become a more complicated pronoun. Through the promotion of reconciliation, it has come to matter a great deal where each of us stands in an Australia evoked in terms of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary. Stories — about violence, resistance, cooperation — abound within our public culture. Each of us tells, hears or sees those stories as an Indigenous or non-Indigenous Australian.

The responses yielded by the Reconciliation Barometer encourage me to think of historical truths not merely as factual but also as implying identities and moral/political positions. I have in mind not only the statements used by the barometer to measure “historical acceptance,” each of which is a mini-narrative. In certain other questions we can also see the designers’ intuition that narratives — true or false — offer feelings, identities and intimations of moral agency to those who hear, read or tell them. The questions I examine here are about “forgiveness” and “responsibility.”

The data generated by posing these questions suggest that “history” fits diversely into Indigenous Australians’ moral reasoning about their own implication in Australia’s future. Let’s start with forgiveness.

In 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020 the barometer asked:

In terms of the history of European settlement in Australia, which of the following statements do you most agree with? (a) The wrongs of the past can never be forgiven. (b) I don’t believe there have been any wrongs. (c) The wrongs of the past must be rectified before all Australians can move on. (d) There should be forgiveness for the wrongs of the past and all Australians should now move on.

This question addresses respondents not only as people who know the past but also as moral subjects using their historical knowledge as the basis for judging what the two parties to reconciliation can now ask of each other. Very few Indigenous respondents (2 per cent) chose (b), so nearly all believe that wrongs occurred. We don’t know what wrongs they had in mind when they responded to this question, but on the basis of knowing that the past includes “wrongs,” each respondent was given a choice of moral position.

Of the Indigenous sample, 13 to 16 per cent (across the four barometers) said the wrongs of the past can never be forgiven, 35 to 44 per cent said that the wrongs of the past “must be rectified before all Australians can move on,” and 39 to 50 per cent said “there should be forgiveness for the wrongs of the past and all Australians should now move on.” If the moral significance of the “wrongs of the past” to Indigenous Australians is as diverse as these data indicate, then it is less surprising that they don’t all affirm the truths presented by the barometer. If a large minority of respondents indicate uncertainty when asked about their “acceptance” of or belief in the seven tested truths, and if some (a smaller minority) simply declare their disbelief, this might be because the respondents are aware of how historical statements have been attached, in Australian discussions of reconciliation, to various positions on “forgiveness.”

A diversity of reasoning about the moral significance of the past is also evident in the data generated by the barometer’s questions about “responsibility.”

It is a familiar idea — promoted, in particular, by the Howard government — that Indigenous Australians are “disadvantaged.” The default framing of Indigenous people as “disadvantaged” has been criticised by some Indigenous Australians as a “deficit discourse” that prejudices our appreciation of Indigenous agency — the ability, duty and right of Indigenous Australians to take responsibility for themselves.

The barometer posed some questions that explore this ideological minefield. The questions that refer to “history” in relation to “responsibility” generated results — again — that illustrate the diversity of Indigenous reasoning about history’s moral meanings.

Respondents were asked to agree or disagree with two statements: “many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are disadvantaged today because of past racial policies” and “many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are disadvantaged today because of Australia’s colonial legacy.” The responses to this question among Indigenous respondents — like the responses on “forgiveness” — are relevant to those who advocate truth-telling as a vital part of a political transition.

A large minority of the Indigenous sample (26 to 32 per cent over four barometers) didn’t affirm that Indigenous disadvantage is caused by “past race-based policies,” and 33 to 40 per cent of the Indigenous sample didn’t affirm that Indigenous disadvantage is “Australia’s colonial legacy.” They either denied these propositions or were unsure.

If a high proportion of the Indigenous samples don’t attribute “Indigenous disadvantage” to the racist processes of colonisation, do they have an alternative explanation for “disadvantage,” or do they refuse the question’s premise that Indigenous Australians are disadvantaged? We don’t know because the barometer doesn’t ask respondents whether they see Indigenous Australians as “disadvantaged.”

To what cause did Indigenous respondents attribute “Indigenous disadvantage”? The barometer confronted this question by testing some historical propositions. Responding to the proposition “That past government policies are a cause of Indigenous Australians now lacking personal responsibility,” a large minority (20 to 29 per cent, across four barometers) said that they could not or would not express an opinion. Perhaps they were baffled when asked to link “past government policies” with Indigenous Australians’ “lack of personal responsibility.”

The barometer also asked respondents to agree or disagree that “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are responsible for their own disadvantages today.” Again a high proportion (25 to 32 per cent) chose “neither agree nor disagree.” Between a quarter and third agreed — but what were they thinking? Were they “blaming” Indigenous Australians for the persistence of their “disadvantage” and implicitly urging them to make a greater effort? Or were they asserting a claim to empowerment?

We can only guess at the reasoning of those Indigenous respondents (41 to 51 per cent) disagreeing that “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are responsible for their own disadvantages today.” Were they thinking about causes of disadvantage that are currently beyond Indigenous people’s control? Were they looking to others (particularly governments) to take enabling or rectifying action of some kind? The data remind us that the word “responsible” is the site of a contemporary political enigma — cleverly referenced by Noel Pearson’s phrase, “Our right to take responsibility.”

History’s emotional resonance and moral meaning are unclear, and they are not uniform across the Indigenous sample. Barometer data point to a disputed sense of colonial and Indigenous agency — an unresolved narrative of colonisation and reconciliation — that links past actions to the present and to the future. Were the Makarrata Commission to mobilise the truths that the Reconciliation Barometer has tested, they would be politically equivocal, not pointing Australians towards any particular “recalibration” of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous relationship.

Reviewing the barometer’s findings, I have confined my discussion to Indigenous respondents, for it is their leadership of truth-telling that will link “truth” to what Appleby and Davis envisage as a renegotiated political relationship. If Indigenous public intellectuals are to assume cognitive and moral leadership in truth-telling, then we need to appreciate the complexity of Indigenous views of the past.

From the Reconciliation Barometers 2014–2020 we can draw two conclusions. First, a minority (15 to 25 per cent of the Indigenous sample) are unsure whether they assent to a truth canon that refers only to “the genocides, the massacres, the wars and the ongoing injustices and discrimination.” Perhaps some Indigenous Australians would encourage “stories of how First Nations Peoples have contributed to protecting and building this country.” The barometer has never tested the frequency of “acceptance” or “belief in” stories about “protecting and building.”

If one purpose of truth-telling is to deal with emotional needs and to confirm established moral positions (rather than “search for who did what and then bringing it to prosecution in some way”) then a thematically diverse canon (as recommended by the Referendum Council) may be better than the narrower set of truths tested by Reconciliation Australia.

Second, we can’t predict what political settlement a Makarrata Commission would promote. The barometer’s data on “forgiveness” and “responsibility” suggest that, for Indigenous Australians, histories of the “wrongs of the past” don’t point towards any particular future configuration of responsibilities (Indigenous/non-Indigenous) for their recovery or to a single Indigenous view about the conditions of their “forgiveness.” •

The post Telling truths appeared first on Inside Story.

Two years ago, Rolfe was a serving constable based in Darwin. When he was named as the man who shot Kumanjayi Walker in Yuendumu in November 2019, no one had yet heard of Minneapolis police officer Chauvin or the man he killed, George Floyd. That changed six months later when harrowing smartphone footage of Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck became 2020’s second-biggest news story. The reignited Black Lives Matter movement, linking America’s history of enslavement to contemporary cross-racial policing, readily translated to Australia’s history of invasion and Indigenous deaths in custody.

The resemblance between the Chauvin and Rolfe cases is more than skin-deep. Walker and Floyd each died after being arrested; both suffered their injuries on the ground with a police officer on top of them. Chauvin and Rolfe each argued that their use of force was reasonable; both were nevertheless charged with murder four days after the killings.

Each of the police officers was also charged during community unrest, although the American upheaval was far broader. That is why it was Floyd’s death, not Walker’s, that prompted street protests across Australia’s cities about the lack of progress since 1991’s royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. A longstanding grievance — the lack of prosecutions of officials in relation to any of the hundreds of such deaths over the next three decades — had by then been partly remedied by Rolfe’s charge and an unrelated Western Australian prosecution in early 2020.

But Australian justice is quieter than America’s. Across 2020, every aspect of Chauvin’s life, from his marriage to his disciplinary record to his side hustles, was exhaustively pored over by the US media, as was every decision by his lawyers, prosecutors and judge. Rolfe’s case, by contrast, lacked not just an emblematic video but also any public airing of the evidence, thanks partly to Australian concerns about prejudicing juries.

What we do know suggests that Rolfe’s trial will be very different from Chauvin’s. Despite America’s greater penchant for armed confrontations, it was the encounter between Rolfe and Walker that involved weapons. Walker’s tool, a pair of scissors, was prosaic, but he was the first to draw blood, reportedly stabbing Rolfe in the shoulder. Rolfe responded not with his knee but with his gun. The gun and scissors explain why Rolfe’s prosecutors, unlike Chauvin’s, claim that he killed intentionally and why Rolfe’s lawyers, unlike Chauvin’s, claim that he killed defensively.

Australian justice is also slower than America’s. Even though Floyd died six months after Walker, Chauvin was convicted of his murder up to twelve months before Rolfe’s trial is now likely to begin. The delays were initially because of Australia’s different pre-trial processes and the Territory’s smaller justice system, combined with the pandemic’s barriers to travel. But then a new problem arose, in the form of yet-to-be-resolved questions about whether and how the Territory’s criminal law applies to police officers.

“Is Zach Rolfe… Di Fingleton?” That question was voiced soon after Rolfe was charged, but it still lacks a definitive answer.

Two decades ago, Fingleton was Queensland’s first female chief magistrate. Then she fell into a fight that was as trivial as Rolfe and Walker’s was tragic. Irritated by the activism of the Magistrates’ Association, a union of sorts for the judicial officers in her court, she wrote an angry letter saying that she had lost confidence in the body’s vice-president and telling him to show cause why he should keep his position as a coordinating magistrate.

Fatefully, her list of grievances included an affidavit the vice-president had given to a panel of judges reviewing an internal workplace dispute, in which he accused Fingleton and her predecessor of mismanaging transfers of magistrates around Queensland. A cascade of overreactions followed: the vice-president referred Fingleton to the state’s corruption commission, the state’s prosecutors charged her with a newly enacted offence of “retaliation” against a witness, and a jury rejected her defence that the letter was reasonable. Queensland’s Court of Appeal upheld that verdict and ruled that six months in protective custody would suffice to punish her.

The link to Rolfe’s case is a legal issue only belatedly recognised when Fingleton made a last-ditch appeal to the High Court of Australia. The national court was the first to notice that, three years before Fingleton wrote her letter, Queensland’s parliament had granted all of the state’s magistrates immunity from criminal prosecution for everything they did at work. Queensland’s chief prosecutor gamely argued that the immunity should not be read literally, but the High Court unanimously disagreed. With her prison stay long completed and her career ruined, Fingleton was belatedly exonerated.

In contrast to judges like Fingleton, police officers like Rolfe are usually given a much more limited protection against being sued for money for things they do at work. But Rolfe’s lawyers were quick to recognise that this had changed in Rolfe’s case just eight months before Walker was shot. A new law enacted by the NT Legislative Assembly stated that the Territory’s cops are not “criminally liable” for anything they do “in good faith” as part of their functions or powers.

Rolfe’s accusers seem to have taken a while to reckon with this obstacle. They knew that they could argue that Rolfe hadn’t acted defensively — that his first shot was a proportionate response to Walker’s scissors but his second and third, the fatal ones, were not. They also had a response to Rolfe’s claim that he acted “reasonably” — a defence the Territory’s criminal code provides officers who injure people as part of their duties — in the form of an expert report criticising several aspects of Walker’s arrest.

Although Chauvin’s prosecutors readily won on similar arguments in Minnesota, Rolfe’s prosecutors knew they faced a tougher challenge. Floyd was killed as he lay on the ground during an arrest for petty counterfeiting, but Walker was arrested for allegedly attacking police with an axe, and was shot while wielding scissors. In contrast to Floyd’s nine minutes under Chauvin’s knee, just three seconds passed between Rolfe’s lawful first and contentious last shots, leaving little scope to argue that the latter were fired in bad faith.

Rolfe’s prosecutor, Philip Strickland, needed to argue that the Territory’s immunity provision didn’t apply at all to Rolfe’s second and third shots. He relied on court rulings that immunities from criminal prosecution should be read not literally but narrowly, and in a way that sits well with other laws. His eventual stance was that Rolfe’s second and third shots weren’t immune because they came after his failed attempt to arrest Walker and were already covered by other (less generous) defences in the Territory’s criminal law.

The upshot is that the question of Rolfe’s guilt or innocence, like Fingleton’s, turns at least as much on how judges read a complex statute as on how jurors decide on the facts. The good news in Rolfe’s case is that the problem was recognised before — rather than long after — his trial. The bad news is that the attempt to resolve it came too close to his trial to do it justice.

“Is Zach Rolfe… John Elliott?” That question was voiced just days before Rolfe’s jury was to be chosen, but will not be answered for months.

Two generations ago, Elliott embarked on a series of corporate acquisitions that made him a major figure in Australia, including as national president of the Liberal Party and president of the Carlton Football Club. But his mid-eighties “white knight” actions against a hostile takeover of BHP prompted an investigation by the National Crime Authority and, eventually, mid-nineties fraud charges.

High-profile white-collar prosecutions are always difficult, particularly when they rest on evidence turned up by a novel body like the NCA. And so it proved in Elliott’s case. Trial judge Frank Vincent spent months resolving multiple procedural and statutory disputes before he ultimately concluded that the NCA had overstepped its bounds and most of the evidence it gathered could not be used against Elliott.

Elliott’s prosecutors immediately raced to the High Court, arguing that Vincent’s ruling was wrong and an injustice was imminent, but the national court said that it wouldn’t hear a challenge ahead of Elliott’s jury trial. Australian law, the judges explained, leaves legal questions in the hands of whichever judge is in charge of the trial and only allows those rulings to be reviewed after the trial is done and dusted. Any other system, they explained, would slow down the trial system too much, to everyone’s detriment.

Twenty-five years later, the task of resolving the question of Rolfe’s partial immunity from prosecution was in the hands of a very experienced trial judge, Dean Mildren. Following standard practice, he planned to resolve legal questions about Rolfe’s prosecution in a closed session just before the trial was due to start. But possibly realising how crucial the immunity question was, he took advantage of a pandemic-induced delay in the trial to send the dispute to a bench of all five Territory judges.

A week before Rolfe’s delayed hearing was scheduled to start, the five judges ruled: Rolfe’s jury must be told to acquit him of all charges if he fired his final two shots “in good faith.” The disappointed Strickland immediately asked for the trial to be further delayed to allow him to seek a review in the High Court, but Mildren refused, citing the High Court’s stance in Elliott’s case.

Mildren and Strickland would have been all too aware of how the Elliott case ultimately played out in the 1990s. After the High Court refused to intervene before Elliott’s trial, his prosecution collapsed without a jury being sworn in. The wounded prosecutors then sought a belated review of Vincent’s rulings on the NCA and won on every point, in both Victoria’s appeal court and the High Court. But Elliott could no longer be tried for fraud because he had been acquitted, albeit (now) with an asterisk.

Strickland faced a very narrow path to successfully prosecuting Constable Rolfe for Walker’s death. He would have to convince the High Court to abandon its earlier stance on pre-trial reviews. He also needed to convince the justices that five Territory judges’ unanimous view of Rolfe’s immunity was both important and doubtful enough to be worth the national court’s time. Then he would have to convince the same court to rule that Rolfe’s second and third shots were not covered by the “good faith” immunity. And, after all that, he needed to convince Rolfe’s jury that the police officer shot Walker both excessively and unreasonably.

But first he faced a more immediate problem: it was Thursday, and Rolfe’s jury would be selected the following Monday.

So, “Is Zach Rolfe… Derek Chauvin?” This question still hasn’t been — and won’t ever be — voiced in court, but Justice Jacqueline Gleeson came close last month.

Two working days before Rolfe’s murder trial was due to kick off, Mildren and Strickland discussed some contingencies that would arise if the High Court decided to get involved. Everyone accepted that the national court probably couldn’t settle whether Rolfe’s second and third shots were subject to immunity in time for the trial to go ahead as planned. But Mildren figured there was time for the national court to at least to decide whether or not it would take on the case.

Such decisions only require two justices and can be made after thirty or so minutes of argument, or even without a hearing. While the High Court usually takes months to schedule a hearing, it can act much faster if a case is urgent enough. During 1998’s waterfront dispute, it responded to a hasty application on a Thursday by Patrick Stevedores to pause a pro-union ruling made by the Federal Court by ordering a hearing before all seven judges the following Monday. So, Mildren pencilled in Tuesday for a possible late start to Rolfe’s trial if the High Court speedily decided it wouldn’t get involved.

It wasn’t to be. When Strickland and Rolfe’s counsel zoomed in the next morning, the duty judge, Justice Gleeson, told them that the High Court would take three weeks to decide whether it would even take on Rolfe’s case. After both lawyers politely said that they would clear their diaries for a thirty-minute hearing in the middle of the next month, Gleeson asked them whether Rolfe’s murder trial should go on as scheduled anyway.

The High Court’s newest judge took up her role in March this year after the retirement of Virginia Bell, a former defence lawyer and experienced criminal appeal judge. Gleeson’s appointment from the NSW registry of the Federal Court preserved the geographical and gender balance of the court, but left the national court without any criminal law specialists for the first time in its twelve-decade history. Her apparent notion that a murder trial could run for weeks before the High Court decides whether to get involved may be an example of that gap in the national court’s expertise.

The lawyers before Gleeson seemed baffled by her approach. Rolfe’s lawyer, the national bar’s most starred figure, Bret Walker, allowed that lawyers running a murder trial might be “distracted” by an imminent High Court intervention. Strickland was less polite: a mid-trial hearing would be “inutile” — pointless — because the trial itself would already have been following the Territory ruling. He mused that maybe the court could act a bit quicker, but Gleeson ignored the hint, pronounced herself disturbed by Strickland’s stance and told him to put it in writing. He did. Either the trial or the High Court hearing could happen as scheduled, but not both.

That left Gleeson with a choice to make and she spent the weekend mulling it over. The following Monday, she ruled that, despite many changes to the legal landscape since the 1990s, the law on pre-trial High Court rulings set out in Elliott’s case hadn’t changed. But the facts had:

The injustice of a possible acquittal of a police officer for murder of a young man in the context of the attempted execution of an arrest warrant, on the basis of an incorrect ruling on a question of law, is of a different order of magnitude from an acquittal on a charge of white-collar crime, however egregious.

In short, John Elliott wasn’t Derek Chauvin. Or, at least, Rolfe’s trial must wait until the High Court dispels at least one, and maybe all, of the elephants in Mildren’s courtroom.

So, who is Zach Rolfe? This morning, three weeks after Rolfe’s trial was supposed to start, the High Court finally decided that Zach Rolfe is… George Pell! That is, it decided, as it did in the last high-profile criminal case to reach the national court, that the very decision on whether or not to take on the case at all is one that needs the attention of all seven of its judges.

Today’s decision means  that the national court will rule on the law, in particular whether or not Rolfe is John Elliott or Di Fingleton or neither, before a jury decides — if it ever does — whether Rolfe is Derek Chauvin. Rolfe, and everyone else, must likely wait until next year to learn each of these answers, including whether or not the last one will come with an asterisk. •

The post The elephants in the courtroom appeared first on Inside Story.

With luck, both men will stay where they are, undisturbed by occurrences neither of them would have condoned. In Bennelong’s case, a mooted local council plan to excavate his grave for roadworks wouldn’t disturb his greatest legacy for Australians today. Long considered a tragic figure who fell victim to a clash of worlds, he is better remembered as a man who fought for his people’s interests and died surrounded by loving kin. He was buried in 1813 where he had spent much of his final years — on land the colonists called Kissing Point and had seen fit to grant to the emancipated convict James Squire.

Colonial sources report that by 1821 Bennelong lay in his grave with his last wife and another male leader. These were probably Boorong and Nanbarree, of the Burramattagal and Cadigal people respectively. Back in April 1789, as children, Boorong and Nanbarree had sought respite at Phillip’s Government House from the horrific smallpox epidemic the colonists had unleashed earlier that year. When Bennelong was brought into the colony as Phillip’s captive in November 1789, the pair greeted him with “raptures of joy.”

That Bennelong wound up buried with these two characters from the early colony’s history might tempt us to focus too much on those heady few years and imagine that Bennelong’s meaning begins and ends with his tussles with the new arrivals. In fact, like Boorong and Nanbarree, he spent most of his life away from Sydney Cove, or Warrane as he would have called it. Certainly his last fifteen years were dedicated to the many different Eora people in the surrounding hinterland.

To see 1789 as the most momentous point in Bennelong’s life is to risk putting colonial people rather than the Eora at the centre of his story. It also reinforces the view among the Europeans who lived alongside Bennelong that his time away from the colony represented a kind of absence or failure, rather than a presence and successes elsewhere.

After he was captured to serve as Phillip’s primary intermediary with the Eora, Bennelong stayed in the colony for the brief six months until May 1790. His reappearance four months later coincided with the dramatic spearing of Phillip at Gayamay, or Manly Cove — an event probably orchestrated by Bennelong himself as punishment for his earlier treatment. With the slate now wiped clean, both men worked together to broker smoother relations between their respective worlds. The two-year period from late 1790 to late 1792, often called the “Coming in of the Eora,” is better considered a fragile era of détente.

At the end of 1792, Bennelong visited Phillip’s motherland with the retiring governor and Yemmerrawanne, a younger Wangal kinsman. A little under three years later, with Yemmerrawanne having fallen ill and died, Bennelong returned alone to Sydney, mostly unchanged and unimpressed by the experience. Almost immediately he resumed the obligations, friendships and enmities of an elder Eora man. Colonial sources are littered with accounts of his involvement in battles around the harbour and in elaborate ceremonies. What colonists dismissed as a tendency to violence and the usual hedonism of savage life, however, was evidence of Bennelong’s high status and the determination with which he maintained old rituals.

Not everything could be maintained, of course. After his return from England, Bennelong led a group on Wallumedegal land north of the river rather than on his old Wangal land to the south. This conglomerate group, known as the Kissing Point tribe among the colonists, had emerged from the disorder that colonialism had brought to some clans, chiefly through disease. Colonialism had not destroyed them, though — only spurred the formation of a new organisation, no less authentic or recognised than any other.

Despite a dismissive obituary in the Sydney Gazette in January 1813, Bennelong’s death stirred large-scale mourning, and scholar Keith Smith in particular has written about the many tributes paid to him. A huge battle to avenge his demise, involving more than 200 Eora men, was seen by passers-by in April 1813. Eight years later, a travelling missionary showed an image of Bennelong to survivors at Kissing Point. “He it is!” they wept. “Bennelong! He was our brother and our friend!”

Bennelong’s successor at Kissing Point was a Burramattagal man called Bidgee Bidgee, who was described in 1828 as a frequent visitor to Bennelong’s grave “amidst the orange trees of the garden.” Bidgee Bidgee voiced a desire to be buried there too, along with Boorong and Nanbarree. We don’t know if this desire was ever fulfilled. We need not dig to find out. The key point is that Bidgee Bidgee’s request is a final refutation to the old argument that Bennelong died an outcast. Contrarily, he was widely loved.

Phillip was not Bennelong’s constant chaperone during his stay in Britain. He organised various lodgings for Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne in London, along with some new clothes and a few activities. But his involvement with the pair was sporadic at best. It seems likely that Phillip’s fiancée, Isabella Whitehead, helped nurse Yemmerrawanne during the early stages of his sickness. But neither Phillip nor Isabella was present when the young man passed away, nor did they see much of Bennelong afterwards, while he waited for his return journey.

St Nicholas’ Church at Bathampton, in which Arthur Phillip was buried. From Everitt’s Views in Bath and Its Vicinity (1840).

Sporadic, indeed, might be the most apt description of all of Phillip’s involvements with New South Wales after his governorship. He wrote several letters of recommendation for old friends in the colony, though few after he helped secure the governorship for Philip Gidley King in 1800. He kept up his correspondence with the colony’s proxy patron Joseph Banks until 1796, and he once gave an audience to returned Governor John Hunter. Although his Australian biographers tend to emphasise these moments, they don’t amount to much compared with that far greater passion of Phillip’s life after New South Wales, his continued service with the British navy.

Phillip still sought naval positions during his fifties and into his sixties. The decade in which he had returned from Sydney was dominated by Britain’s war against the French Revolution, and Phillip commanded three different vessels helping the war effort between 1796 and 1798. He then led the Sea Fencibles to guard British coasts from French invasion until forced into retirement in 1805.

Such activities matched Phillip’s nearly twenty-six years of naval service before his five-year stint in Sydney. Those years included defending colonial possessions in North America, spying on imperial rivals in Europe, assisting Portuguese allies in South America, and helping to subvert French support of the American Revolution. Put together, Phillip’s career reveals a man far more preoccupied with furthering the expansion of a global empire than with focusing on one small outpost.

Phillip and Isabella spent most of his retirement in Bath, close to several addresses recently vacated by Jane Austen. Perhaps it was during their brief stay in Bathampton that they formed an attachment to its lovely church, resolving to be buried together in it one day. Isabella honoured her husband’s wish when Phillip died in 1814, just over a year after Bennelong’s death.

Influential Australians have tried to get Phillip’s remains relocated for more than a century. The Sydney Morning Herald demanded it in 1907, the Courier-Mail followed suit in 1937. Barrister Geoffrey Robertson and politician Bob Carr have lobbied for this to happen since 2001. So far the calls have resulted only in the construction of a chapel within St Nicholas’s, paid for by Australians, declaring Phillip the “Founder of Australia.”

Both the inscription and the idea of repatriation sit awkwardly with the history of Arthur Phillip. If Australia does have a founding point amid the fragile stability hard won in 1790, then it is just as much Bennelong’s achievement as Phillip’s. More significantly, the former governor himself might not have considered his five years administering a penal colony to be his greatest moment.

Phillip’s final resting place in England is a reminder of Australia’s historical role in the sweeping advance of the British Empire through the eighteenth century — an empire that dispossessed thousands and fought against two democratic revolutions. Phillip was its loyal servant, active in many of its chief developments.

If Phillip signifies expanding imperialism over national foundation, then his oft-paired counterpart Bennelong stands for the Indigenous life that yet, remarkably, persisted. Empire and Aboriginality remain the true twin pillars of Australia. •

The post All that remains appeared first on Inside Story.

One of Australia’s finest landscape painters, she was an extraordinarily gifted artist: versatile, productive, bold, subtle and profound. Our appreciation of her artistic achievement will only grow with the years. The intensity and beauty of her work is breathtaking, whether it be a panorama of central Australian desert ranges, an Antarctic iceberg, a dark industrial landscape or an exploding oil platform.

She was renowned as the artist of the largest commissioned work in the Australian parliament, the twelve metres by three metres Red Ochre Cove (1987) which hangs in the main committee room. Beneath its luminous presence, which features a shaft of light that references Tom Roberts’s Opening of the First Parliament of Australia (1903), our politicians and bureaucrats are routinely forced to reveal their failings. During the televised reports of Senate hearings on the nightly news, you can lift your eyes from their humiliations and gaze instead into the exhilarating otherworld of Mandy Martin’s art.

Mandy Martin, Red Ochre Cove, 1987, oil on canvas, Parliament House, Canberra. Click to enlarge

Mandy’s early works were on paper and often in the form of political poster art; later she took to oil painting and produced sensitively observed landscapes, often on very large canvases. Her mother, Beryl Martin, was a watercolourist and her father, Peter Martin, a professor of botany at the University of Adelaide. Years of accompanying her father on scientific field trips honed Mandy’s eye for ecological detail. From the 1990s she brought together her political and ecological sensibilities in a powerful series of “environmental projects,” as she called them.

Guy Fitzhardinge, whom she married in 1996, who brought to their partnership a deep knowledge of the land and its management, became an essential and enabling collaborator. As well as being a beef farmer, Guy was a director of Bush Heritage Australia, a member of the Commonwealth Threatened Species Scientific Committee and a director of Meat and Livestock Australia, among many other public roles.

Martin produced such a rich and varied oeuvre that it is impossible to encompass it here. But her environmental projects are worthy of special notice, and it was my good fortune — along with many other writers, scholars and scientists — to be invited to contribute to them. Mandy and Guy’s home in Wiradjuri Country near Mandurama, with its sweeping views across white box woodlands towards Mt Canobolas and Orange, became a salon, a place of art, nature, productivity and good conversation.

There was a fine beef herd in the paddocks, sugar gliders putting on a nightly show in the gums, superb parrots flitting past like darts, Mandy’s art on the walls, the latest literature on Guy’s shelves, a white box log in the fireplace, a great leg of hogget in the oven, a cherry pavlova on the table and gatherings of people passionate about the land and its future.

Mandy, always zinging with electric energy and fun, had a flair for creating this chemistry on tour as well: her artist’s caravan would unfold itself — alongside her famous ironing-board easel — in some of Australia’s most remote landscapes. Multidisciplinary conversations enabled by the art would then break out around the campfire and under the stars, leading ultimately to new, rich insights and significant literary, artistic and political outcomes.

Shadows lengthen as Mandy Martin finishes her day’s work back in camp at the Mulligan River, Cravens Peak Reserve, 2009. Tom Griffiths

Mandy’s imagination was already turning inland in the late 1980s, but from the mid 1990s she launched a triptych of projects that ventured beyond the Darling River in northern New South Wales to the edge of the Simpson Desert. Each of them — Tracts: Back o’Bourke (1997), Watersheds: the Paroo to the Warrego (1999) and Inflows: the Channel Country (2001) — involved a fieldtrip, a travelling gallery exhibition and a published booklet and were supported by Peter Haynes as director of the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery. I was invited to join the last two as a writer and was thus given a rigorous education in the aesthetics, history and politics of the Australian inland.

Guy Fitzhardinge seems to know everyone across outback Australia and so we travelled from homestead to homestead, walked the paddocks, engaged with the ecology and listened to the locals — under their verandahs, in their kitchens and by their firesides. He shares Mandy’s conviction that conservation is an urgent national priority, believing that productivity, ecology and aesthetics have a beautiful relationship and that you need people on country to look after it. As well as being an innovative farmer, he has a doctorate in environmental sociology and the ability to talk to people from all walks of life.

Mandy’s art grew out of her passionate engagement with both landscape and people; thus her painting was intensely social and self-consciously historical. People rarely featured in her landscapes but human feelings and beliefs framed them. She saw herself in a lineage of explorer-artists (especially Ludwig Becker, who travelled with Burke and Wills), and so planned “expeditions” and painted a series, numbering the canvases in the sequence of a journey.

Country and conversations energised her creativity, and the public character and momentum of an expedition placed her under daily pressure to produce. She relished having to sculpt her art out of the circumstances of the travelling day; it had to be swift, opportunistic and impressionistic, alert to mood and moment, light and sky, lunch and dinner.

Her creativity was visible and public and social, the dogs and children played around her feet and an impromptu painting lesson for a nine-year-old was conducted on the side. Mandy painted as we ate, as the billy boiled or under threat of dusk. And she also painted under command. For it was her deliberate strategy on this trip to ask landholders to choose her sites and scenes. She encouraged local people to take her to their special places and allow her to paint them.

Thus her art often depicted beloved scenes, places of significance to inhabitants. This generated further pressure, of course. Her hosts had expectations, especially about the portrayal of favourite spots. They would review the progress of a painting over her shoulder or with a grave sense of ceremony at the end of the day.

I remember how one gravelly voiced grazier of the Channel Country, Sandy Kidd, paced like a restless beast around the finished canvas of his favourite waterhole as it lay on the concrete floor outside his home in the fluorescent light after dark. He had even graded the track to the spot that day to ease the artist’s way. By the waterhole that morning, sitting on the newly graded earth where a deadly snake had just slithered, he looked around with pride. “I wouldn’t call the king me uncle in this place,” he announced. “I couldn’t catch a cold here.” Later, as we awaited dinner at his home, he handed us beer cans spattered with blood from the meat chiller.

Finally, the moment had come to see what the artist had done. With drink in hand, Sandy circled the finished canvas, approaching it from every angle and looking at it from the corner of his eye as if trying to take it by surprise. In a Shakespearean stage whisper, he muttered, “This intrigues me, this does!” Then, nervously gesturing towards the painting as if it were alive, he declared, “This puts emotion into me. I come over all emotional looking at that. The Channels, eh? I didn’t know I loved them so much till they tried to bugger them up.”

In 1996, Mandy and Guy both spoke at a scientific workshop held nearby in Windorah, where local landholders, Aboriginal people and scientific visitors offered “an ecological perspective on Cooper’s Creek.” The workshop was coordinated by locals and responded to the environmental threat posed by plans from Currareva station to develop irrigation for cotton farming. The community came together impressively in defence of their wild rivers — they surprised themselves just as Mandy’s painting surprised Sandy Kidd.

Mandy Martin, Coopers Creek on Currareva Station, 2001, oil, ochre, pigment/linen, 90 x 330 cm.

Crusty pastoralists admitted to emotions. The mayor of the Barcoo Shire, Bruce Scott, used words like “braided” and “anastomosing” and “ephemeral,” adapting the words of urban professionals to advocate the special attributes of their water system. One Cooper pastoralist, full of genuine wonder, called the channels “anastomazing.” And they are! The Cooper, Diamantina and Georgina are the three great rivers of the Channel Country, flaring out into myriad braided channels, revealing an intricate web of arteries across a vast landscape. Aerial photos of the terrain look like microscope slides of organic tissue.

This is a boom-and-bust ecosystem, an arid land animated by waterflows from elsewhere, a place where monsoonal rain falling hundreds of kilometres away to the northeast periodically floods down dry channels, bringing a spectacular pulse of life to the plains and a precious, intense productivity. The flush of water occasionally reaches all the way to the saltpan of Lake Eyre, a continental rain gauge. Constituting almost a fifth of the Australian landmass, the Lake Eyre basin is the largest inland draining system in the world. Aboriginal people hold up the open palm of their hand to represent the basin, their fingers signifying the rivers that drain into it.

You need science, art and imagination to understand an ecosystem of such scale. In winning the battle of the Cooper at the turn of the millennium, Mandy Martin’s art was as important as Richard Kingsford’s surveys of river birdlife or Chris Dickman’s long-term studies of desert marsupials or Bruce Scott’s regional political advocacy or the Gorringe family’s testimony of deep Aboriginal attachment. They all successfully argued for the importance of “going with the flow” in arid Australia, and they did so by bringing together science and art, ecology and emotion, economy and history. Channel Country pastoralists found themselves beginning sentences with the words: “I’m not a radical greenie, but…”

In 2010, further field trips to the Channel Country and new interdisciplinary work with fifty local and visiting experts culminated in the publication of a large and beautiful book, Desert Channels: The Impulse to Conserve (edited by Libby Robin, Chris Dickman and Mandy Martin). Martin’s canvases — designed in four sets of four and presented as gorgeous interludes between essays — were all painted on location at Ethabuka and Cravens Peak on the eastern edge of the Simpson Desert, and this time she deliberately chose “ordinary or unsensational places to paint, places encountered by chance rather than design.” She wanted to capture the accidents of nature and the intricacies of ecology, to help people feel “the sensuousness of texture.”

Mandy Martin, S-Bend on the Mulligan River, Toko Range, Cravens Peak Reserve 2, 2009, pigments/ochres/acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm.

Mandy was striving to generate a new vocabulary and palette suited to the arid zone. Aesthetic evaluation, she argued, should be valued alongside scientific assessment, and both rely upon processes of sampling and re-sampling, consistent methodology and the patient accumulation of data. Mandy painted four canvases in sequence in each location, tramping back and forth between the different viewpoints, labouring for up to ten hours a day in the searing sun.

Martin was a researcher and a theorist, an artist-scholar, an esteemed speaker at international environmental history conferences and an adjunct professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. South African environmental historian Jane Carruthers, who contributed to Mandy’s environmental projects, wrote of how the artist can partner the historian by fostering “interdisciplinary collaborations between the written and visual,” empowering others to think visually “and even to produce art.” Martin drew out the artistic potential of all her collaborators.

Great art breaks down barriers and opens minds, liberates people to see and feel in new ways. It is an effective political tool because it transcends politics. Mandy’s opening trio of environmental projects focused on settler lore and aesthetics, on the wisdom as well as failings of imported environmental visions in Australia. Her painting practice mobilised and elaborated traditions within the history of art: plein air painting, artists’ camps and documentary and scientific expeditionary art. Her work connected in this way not only with the likes of Ludwig Becker, Sir Thomas Mitchell, Conrad Martens and Eugene von Guérard, but also with the camps of the Heidelberg School, the multi-disciplinary expeditions of Russell Drysdale and John Olsen, and the immersive materiality of John Wolseley.

Did she relish the gendered intervention of her ironing board? Surely this early practitioner of feminist art did. Her ironing board was her stage, a place of theatre erected in the middle of the camp from which she could survey the scene and interact socially with her team, always with an eye for the comfort and interests of others. She directly addressed the landscape, like a conductor with her score. The horizontal board was perfect for the splash and wash of colour, the deft sketch of detail, and the urgent and fluent capturing of raw material and impressions which she later refined in her studio. She would use the sand at her feet, grind ochres, work blown dust and pollen into the paint and build layers from the substance of the place in which she stood.

Keenly conscious of how the land she painted was already layered with representation, Mandy often inscribed and painted words on her canvases that conjured connections to these cultural histories. Perhaps they were Becker’s words or Mitchell’s evocations of the seventeenth-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa (his favoured lens for the new land), or the latitude and longitude of the place, or some topographical annotations, or descriptions of its geology and vegetation from contemporary scientists and scholars. In this way she brought her painting into direct dialogue with science and literature, a conversation also enacted by her fieldtrips.

Mandy Martin, Westerton Ram Paddock 2, 2001, oil, ochre, pigment/linen, 90 x 165 cm.

David Malouf wrote in 2002 of her conscious cultural layering and Mandy, in turn, wrote in 2013 of how she and fellow artist David Leece were influenced in their choice of prospect by their shared reading of Malouf. Malouf perceived that the ambition of the literate European explorers of Australia was “to gather these new lands into a world of feeling that would be continuous with the culture they had brought with them.” Martin honoured that quest and built upon it, but she also took it in radical new directions.

Increasingly, she sought the guidance and collaboration of Indigenous artists on Country. In 2004, environmental historian Libby Robin, archaeologist Mike Smith and ecologist Jake Gillen travelled with Mandy and Guy to Puritjarra, an ancient rock shelter in the red sandstone Cleland Hills, 350 kilometres west of Alice Springs. Puritjarra is an extraordinarily significant place that, from the mid 1980s, deepened the chronology of human history in the centre of the continent from 10,000 to 35,000 years and provided evidence that people managed to sustain civilisation in the central deserts during the last ice age.

This expedition to such a remote site was a cross-cultural experiment, not just in bringing together art and science, but also in collaborating with the Indigenous owners, Ikuntji artists from Haasts Bluff. Their traditional knowledge, interpreted in acrylics on canvas especially for the project, was brought alongside Martin’s “European” vision where it generated a respectful dialogue about aesthetics, economy and history in a place of national significance. The paintings by Narputta Nangala Jugadai, Daisy Napaltjarri Jugadai, Molly Napaltjarri Jugudai, Anmanari Napanangka Nolan, Eunice Napanangka Jack, Colleen Napanangka Kantawarra, Alice Nampitjinpa and Linda Ngitjanka Naparulla are visually stunning and environmentally precise about their home.

Mandy, the visiting artist, painted her own breathtaking panoramas of the range and also collaborated with each of her visiting team members to produce multi-panelled canvases inflected with their distinct visions: archaeological, historical, pastoral, botanical. The boldness of this collaborative intervention in our national cultural life, captured in an exhibition at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs and the book Strata (2005), was remarkable.

Further ambitious, cross-cultural ventures followed. In 2007, renowned Kimberley artist Janangoo Butcher Cherel invited Mandy to paint alongside him in Fitzroy River Valley Country: “It led to one of the most extraordinary working relationships I have ever been lucky enough to experience,” remembered Mandy. On the Puritjarra project, the Ikuntji artists had done their painting at Haasts Bluff, but here Mandy was shoulder to shoulder with Mangkaja artists painting the same landscapes at the same time of day. The following year, three generations of Cherels came out to Painters Rock on Jalnganjoowa (Fossil Downs) to continue this journey into memory, country and the alchemy of art.

Southwest of Fitzroy Crossing is a big desert lake named Paruku (Lake Gregory), a World Heritage wetland in northwest Australia and “a human home of great antiquity,” a setting that geomorphologist Jim Bowler had long seen as a northern echo of his investigations into ancient human history at Lake Mungo. During 2011 and 2012, a project team of fifty artists, scientists and Walmajarri people from the Mulan community worked together on the Paruku Indigenous Protected Area beside the lake.

Alongside Mandy Martin, the curators and editors of the project were artist and writer Kim Mahood (who had a long association from childhood with Paruku and the Tanami), desert ecologist Steve Morton (who researched fire ecology in the Tanami and worked with Anangu people on the Uluru Fauna Study), and anthropologist John Carty who has lived and worked with Mulan people since 2002. Other visiting contributors included Guy Fitzhardinge, Jim Bowler, archaeologist Mike Smith, American writer and curator Bill Fox, ethno-ecologist Tanya Vernes, conservationist David Rickards, and creative artists Laura Boynes, Alexander Boynes, Faye Alexander, David Leece and David Taylor.

To draw together such a team was extraordinary in itself, but to do so on Country in a productive relationship with the Indigenous owners shows the sheer power of art, and of great artists, in energising genuine collaboration. Morton, Martin, Mahood and Carty wrote in their introduction to Desert Lake: Art, Science and Stories from Paruku (2013) that Paruku resonated with the most important questions of contemporary Australian life: “How are we to live with our shared history, our shared environments, our shared homes, in difference and respect? And how do we tell these stories together?” The Walmajarri people and artists welcomed and worked with the visitors, not only guiding the project, but redirecting it in several crucial ways. They had faith that multiple perspectives would generate “a kind of truth, a type of honesty about how things are in Australia now.”

These three innovative cross-cultural art projects focused in turn on deep archaeological perspectives, contrasting aesthetic visions, and social and ecological belonging. The next such project — known as Arnhembrand — brought art to bear on contemporary environmental challenges in caring for Country. Guy Fitzhardinge was chair of the Karrkad-Kanjdji Trust, which supports traditional owners in land management and cultural conservation in the Djelk and Wardekken Indigenous Protected Areas in western Arnhem Land. He knew that community members ranked “empty country” as the most severe threat to the maintenance of healthy country. His own research had for years critiqued the separation of social systems from ecosystems that underpins much Eurocentric thinking. In 2013 Mandy Martin was approached to work with Bininj people in western Arnhem Land as she had with Walmajarri people at Paruku, and in 2015 she held a drawing workshop supported by Djelk Rangers who saw the opportunity to tell stories about the cultural and land management work they were doing.

By 2017, nearly eighty Bininj people had become involved as performers and artists working with Martin and fellow Balanda artists Alexander Boynes, Laura Boynes and David Leece. Paintings, video works and a commissioned woven mat were created, and a mixture of Bininj and Balanda techniques were used. Mandy described the joy of watching the Bininj artists prepare their traditional bush brushes from speargrass slashed from the seafront and then deploy them with fluid precision. The team also used “the latest fluorescent Anthropocene pigments” mixed with traditional ochres to tell novel, confronting stories about invasive species, new fire regimes and changing climates.

As the project historian Billy Griffiths put it, “buffaloes, pigs, feral cats and cane toads have trampled, chewed, rubbed and wallowed their way across a delicate ecosystem… In the absence of traditional burning, fire, too, had become feral. The cultural landscape had transformed into a modern wilderness.” The project work, which was exhibited at Australian Galleries and published as Light — Stone — Fire (2017), has been archived by the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art where the director Bill Fox (a brilliant interpreter of Martin’s work) saw parallels in challenges faced by traditional Indigenous communities around the world, “whether it is the Inuit of Nunavut in the Canadian Far North, the islands of Vanuatu, or the scattered settlements of Arnhem Land.” Fox sees his museum as preserving information about how to achieve resilience in the face of change “and passing it down from generation to generation, and from place to place in order that we might all survive.”

After each of these exhilarating trips away, Mandy and Guy would return to their home amid the undulating white box woodlands, perched with its view northeast towards Orange. Winking at night on their horizon, bordering their property and expanding every year, was the Cadia Hill gold mine, the largest in the southern hemisphere. Mandy’s lifelong critical engagement with industry was now taking place in her own backyard.

True to form, her relationship with the mine owners was honest, forthright and constructive — and mediated through art. She completed a series of one hundred small canvases of the Cadia region, fifty of them depicting the local Belubula River in a golden palette using river sand and natural pigments, and the other half portraying the mine in a copper palette, using tailings from the dam and sulphide concentrate from the mine’s sag mill. She worked with Wiradjuri artists, and collaborated on canvases with neighbouring Indigenous artist Trisha Carroll. She launched further interdisciplinary projects combining art, science and storytelling that focused on the local mining landscape: The Lachlan: Blue-Gold (2003), Land$cape: Gold & Water (2003) and in 2016 a broader retrospective entitled Homeground, in which Mandy reflected on twenty years living in the Central West and selected twenty of her paintings of the region (out of more than 200) for exhibition.

As a boy, Guy would explore the rocky twists and turns of the Belubula River, whose name captures the sound of a gurgling, flowing stream, and he grew up knowing and romancing the traces of past mining in the landscape. But Cadia Hill was different in its sheer scale of mining and earth-moving and also in its amorphous international corporate elusiveness. In a beautiful essay for the Land$cape catalogue, Guy reflected that he now had “a neighbour who I do not know and probably will never know” and whose process of wealth creation lay far outside the local ecosystem or community. Nevertheless, he was determined “to explore and enlarge what we do have in common.”

Mandy, with fierce commitment, used her art to humanise the corporate face of the mine so that she could engage with it. And the argument she and Guy made through their work was that “the actual value of the Cadia region landscape is aesthetic, not material, and that the natural values of the river and native habitat if preserved, would in the long-term, outweigh the value of gold extracted from the mine.” It is a simple statement that is incontrovertibly true — if one can see long-term, can value the more-than-human, and can understand that Country needs people.

While plumbing the depths of her local region, Mandy was also prosecuting global environmental issues. Human survival in the face of massive anthropogenic climate change was a vital and urgent concern of hers for decades. In Australia, business and the arts have moved into the vacuum left by federal government denial of climate change, as Libby Robin has analysed, and are creating new partnerships such as a series of biennial Climarte Festivals, the first of which was held in 2015.

Mandy, working with Alexander Boynes and composer-musician Tristen Parr, created a series of stunning, panoramic performance pieces that combined traditional oil painting with video projection and a music composition. In Luminous Relic, a factory belching smoke gradually gave way to a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf, and in Rewriting the Score a Gondwanan fern forest morphed into an open-cut coalmine that became ravaged by fire. This piece ended with Parr, wearing a mine worker’s hard hat, poignantly playing his cello in a landscape of fern, coal and fire. These performances are visual enactments of chaos theory: time and landscapes collapse before your eyes and the globe becomes whole, elementally. Standing in that gallery in Morwell in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley in 2019, shoulder to shoulder with locals, I listened to workers moved by art who were feeling their way towards a new politics.

Martin had first painted the Yallourn Power Station in the Latrobe Valley in 1991 and here she was, a quarter of a century later, returning to the land of brown coal to deepen her critique. It is testimony to the coherence of her career. Her art began as a radical commentary on industrial and corporate power, drawing on the responses of European Romantic poets and artists to the industrial revolution to portray contemporary industrial incursions upon the Great South Land. She explored the links between the dark, satanic mills that emerged in the late eighteenth century and the vulnerable, beautiful landscapes of Australia today. As Mandy made these explorations from the 1980s, the grim implications of anthropogenic climate change burst upon us and made those links manifest in the very air we breathe.

We might reasonably say, therefore, that Mandy’s art foresaw the full horror of climate change. Her canvases from the early and mid 1980s pictured chimneys, mining residue and industrial plants in sublimely beautiful settings and they prompted us to ask: are they abandoned? is this the past or the future? is that smoke or cloud in the sky? are those mountains natural or terraformed by industry? Martin was already investigating the blurred line between nature and culture; she was preparing herself for the Anthropocene. Science eventually caught up with her and she was ready. The Sublime is both beautiful and terrible, grand and grotesque; it has a violence at its heart that threatens everything. When Mandy painted an exploding oil platform, it was both a magnificent form of terrorism and an objective commentary on fossil-fuelled cupidity.

Mandy Martin, Oblivion, 2019, pigments, acrylic and oil on linen, 200 x 200 cm. RLDI

And it is also wonderful art. When Dorothea Mackellar wrote of her love of the wide brown land in her poem My Country (1908), she evoked “her beauty and her terror.” Living on the land Mandy knew those Australian extremes, the supreme skies at sunset and the aching earth in endless drought. As an artist in thrall to the Romantic Sublime, she explored the edge between awe and fear and her paint dripped with passion. As an environmental scholar she was sensitive to delicacy and complexity, urgency and deep time, and the fragility of the planet’s predicament, the beauty and the terror. As a human being, she was warm, funny, intelligent, loving. Mandy Martin was a remarkably original, courageous and generous Australian artist whose vision of our land, and of its past and future, is inspirational. •

The post The beauty and the terror appeared first on Inside Story.

Peter Sutton writes:

“Did Australian anthropology retreat to an ivory tower during its ‘postmodern turn’ in the 1980s,” asks Stephen Bennetts in Australian Book Review, “and lose the ability to engage a broader audience in the way Dark Emu, for all its flaws, has clearly done so powerfully? Perhaps.”

And perhaps not. Too many exceptions come to mind. We discuss them in Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, but you could start with Philip Clarke’s Where the Ancestors Walked, which should have sold a lot more than its 5000 copies since 2003.

Bill Gammage claims in Inside Story that Pascoe’s academic critics are people in disciplines where “jargon and theory are eminent,” and whose remedy for being alarmed by Pascoe’s disinformation “is to talk to each other.” Not in our case. We have written our assessment of Dark Emu for a broad public. As far as possible, we are theory-free. Our publishers had to reprint three times in the first month and the total run has now reached 15,000. Jargon only gets that kind of audience in Paris. Gammage has got the wrong targets in mind.

A lot of editors commissioning reviews of Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? in the last few months make the false assumption that professional historians are the most relevant and best-qualified scholars to assess not only Pascoe’s book itself but also our forensic assessment of it. It follows from that bit of bad guesswork that it is documentary historians who are the scholarly masters of pre-conquest Australian food production, fertility rituals, lexicons, toolkits, ecological knowledge, shelter construction, apparel and residential patterns, and the analysis of archaeological evidence and dating methods.

A few historians, like Geoffrey Blainey and Gammage, have made the effort to study the old cultures as they were in the early contact phase, by consulting some of the vast literature in which field anthropologists have reported to a wider world what they have learned from Indigenous mentors of standing and knowledge. Pascoe largely ignores these sources.

The topics tackled by Pascoe in Dark Emu were not predominantly those that have long been the province of documentary historians of Aboriginal Australia. Regardless, Pascoe is often curiously described as a “historian.” His topics are ancient cultural, technological and ecological practices within the Aboriginal world, not records of frontier and later dealings with the colonisers. Who, then, is the methodological cuckoo in the nest?

Gammage says both Pascoe and Sutton “leave out words that don’t suit.” The context here is explorer Mitchell’s 1839 descriptions of grasslands. Gammage supplies an extension to our quotations, but they add nothing of substance to the question here: does a plain on which the grass has been pulled out demonstrate anything more than that the women had extracted the grass stems to collect the seeds? Why is Mitchell’s description of such a grass plain “suggestive of farming” as Gammage claims?

Having not read our book except for what he calls cherrypicking, Gammage would not have known that it has a later quotation from Mitchell. These words certainly don’t suit either Pascoe or Gammage. In 1848, the experienced explorer, having lived in Australia since 1827, refers to “the failure of all attempts to persuade these free denizens of uncultivated earth to forsake it for the tilled ground. They prefer the land unbroken and free from the earliest curse pronounced against the first banished and first created man.” Adam and Eve, banished from Eden, were forever condemned to a life of agriculture.

Gammage prefers white explorers as sources because, he says, “they were there.” But so also were the hundreds of senior Aboriginal mentors of dozens of anthropologists and quite some archaeologists of the last hundred years. There were also the anthropologists who lived among the free people beyond the frontier: Ursula McConnel, Lauriston Sharp, Norman Tindale, Donald Thomson and others. We discuss their respectful and rich records in our book.

Gammage’s claim that our responses given at an ANU–Canberra Times Meet the Author event were “infused with possibles and alternatives” is false. Dr Walshe’s caveats over site dating were the normal scientific cautions, unlike the reckless claims made by Pascoe in Dark Emu and since. The evidence is in the recording of that event.

Bill Gammage has had high scholarly standards but has not applied them to Pascoe. Why? Is academic tolerance of bad Aboriginal history, bad anthropology and bad archaeology okay if the author identifies as Aboriginal? Universities are in enough trouble as it is. •

Keryn Walshe writes:

In being so charmingly simple, Bill Gammage’s response to the debate about our book fails to identify science as playing a highly critical role when assessing a “history and polemic” such as Dark Emu. No reviewer to date has commented on Dark Emu’s unhinged use of scientific findings.

As an archaeologist, I prefer to work from archaeological evidence. Interrogating the data is a basic scientific principle that Bruce Pascoe didn’t apply when he was piling up Dark Emu’s evidence for farming and village life. Its absence is a significant omission, as is the omission of key parts of citations from explorers’ journals. Claims of food preservation and storage, agricultural implements and villages of stone houses are no small matters.

Dark Emu’s archaeological evidence lies entirely in the extraordinary size and number of “stone houses,” the unheard-of practice of smoking eels inside gum trees, and discoveries of agricultural implements in collections. Apparently, all of this was deliberately hidden from “us” across some 150 years.

There is no credible scientific evidence that eels were smoked at Lake Condah, and this fact removes all possibility of sedentism. This has serious implications for arguing a population of 700 or, more radically, 10,000. “Stone houses,” as a term, distracts the imagination from the reality of a low, small circle of stone over which foliage was arranged in order to form a temporary shelter. Their frequency of habitation remains unclear, and some of these perimeters of stone may have acted as no more than a windbreak during peak eel season.

Interestingly, there has been no reviewer response to Dark Emu’s inclusion of cylcons (or silcons) as agricultural implements. After comprehensive research identifying their primary role in men’s ceremonial practices was published eighty years ago, all were eventually removed from public display in Australia’s collecting institutions. Excluding these 3000 or so ceremonial objects from the clump of agricultural implements leaves just thirteen heavy stone objects (aka “Bogan picks”). Dark Emu avoids offering a time length for the practice of Indigenous agriculture in this country, but does vaguely wave a hand at a piece of ground stone from the Cuddie Springs megafauna site, which is proposed to be some 32,000 years old. Momentarily ignoring the fact that the thirteen implements selected for agriculture are absolutely not, that is not much to show for those thousands of years of laborious activity.

Gammage steps away from Pascoe’s ill-founded claim of 120,000 years for Indigenous occupation of Australia, to settle for the more popular 65,000 years. As no explanation is given, Gammage may as well stay with 120,000, as both figures have been hotly debated at the scientific level. Far more scientifically reliable is 50,000 years of occupation.

Historians may well demand accuracy when drawing from archival material, but it seems that when drawing from science, uncritical reading is perfectly acceptable. •

The post The trouble with history appeared first on Inside Story.

In the three decades since the legislation passed, the federal government process has been through many iterations, and it’s fair to say it’s had a vexed history. Some critics believe it prioritises a vision of shared national identity that’s more reassuring for non-Indigenous Australians than empowering for Indigenous Australians. Formal reconciliation policies have been weighed down, they say, by a dense bureaucracy that satisfies the idea of government action but doesn’t do enough to advance reconciliation itself.

National Reconciliation Week, on the other hand, aims to “inspire and enable” all Australians to participate in the spirit of reconciliation at a grassroots level. Coordinated by Reconciliation Australia, an independent, non-profit organisation, it is framed each year by two significant points on the nation’s slow and rocky road towards Indigenous recognition: 27 May, the anniversary of the 1967 referendum, and 3 June, the date in 1992 when the High Court released its Mabo native title decision.

This year’s Reconciliation Week focused on twenty actions that could help make reconciliation everyone’s business, including that Australians learn more about the Indigenous histories embedded in their locality and participate in community initiatives to recognise those histories.

But what does reconciliation really mean to ordinary Australians — Indigenous and non-Indigenous — and how might it prompt us to engage with our histories? Since 2008, Reconciliation Australia has been gathering insights into these very questions through a biennial survey. The Reconciliation Barometer samples the changing attitudes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians towards five dimensions of reconciliation: contemporary race relations (degrees of trust and respect), equality (Indigenous rights and opportunities), institutional integrity (support from political, business and community bodies), unity (the valuing of Indigenous cultures and heritage within Australian society), and historical acceptance (the recognition of historical injustices and their impacts).

According to the latest Reconciliation Barometer, compiled in 2020, more Australians than ever believe in the importance of reconciliation as a process. Almost all Australians value the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, it reports, and a large majority agree that Indigenous peoples should have a voice in matters affecting them. When it comes to accepting historical injustices, nearly 90 per cent of the community believe we should engage in truth-telling about the histories that Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians share, and a growing number (83 per cent) think that Indigenous histories and cultures should be taught in schools.

To some extent, a desire to give greater recognition to Indigenous people’s vital place in Australia’s post-contact history is already embedded in the public imagination. A large majority of all respondents agree that official Anzac Day ceremonies should honour Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous soldiers. Nearly three-quarters of all respondents support the dual naming of significant sites to recognise both Indigenous and English names. These responses suggest that public consciousness of our shared history is gradually growing in parallel with gradual institutional change.

Even so, the 2020 barometer shows that non-Indigenous Australians still don’t know a great deal about how Indigenous history entwines through the national story. While two-thirds of non-Indigenous respondents claim to have good knowledge of Australian history, less than half this group claim to know much about the place of Indigenous history within it. This stands in stark contrast to the three-quarters of Indigenous respondents who say they’re knowledgeable about their own histories and the national history, and the ways they interweave.

And here’s the rub. The Reconciliation Barometer tells us that the vast majority of Australia’s general community believe in the importance of truth-telling processes as a means “to acknowledge the reality of Australia’s shared history.” But it also tells us that large numbers of people remain doubtful about what truths our national history might hold. More than a third of non-Indigenous respondents are unsure or are unconvinced that the pre-colonial Australian continent was occupied by a network of Indigenous nations with their own custodial connections to land. A similar percentage are unsure or unconvinced that frontier wars took place across Australia’s nineteenth-century colonies.

If anything, this gap reinforces the importance of community initiatives designed to open a perspective on the Indigenous histories that weave through every local history.

It may be a slow process, but these kinds of initiatives have been growing over the last three decades as communities look for ways to acknowledge the stories of Australia’s violent frontiers region by region. While national controversies continue around how we remember Australia’s origins, community-led projects that recall locally contested country are emerging at the grassroots level, often driven by collaborations between Indigenous and settler-descended groups and supported by local heritage bodies or councils. In this respect, action towards reconciliation’s goal of historical acceptance appears to have been greater at the local level.

This trend towards grassroots memorialisation of colonial violence reflects the fact that frontier wars, by definition, took place in localities. Battles over land and intimidatory “dispersal” unfolded not through any coordinated, cross-continental campaign but through a pattern of repetitive violence. This cycle ebbed only to intensify again as pastoral expansion stretched, decade after decade, into Aboriginal country.

Accounts of conflicted frontiers are often passed down intergenerationally through the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities who share roots in the colonial past. For this reason, perhaps, the practices of reconciliation might feel more accessible when they emerge from local communities, anchored to intimate histories of place, than when they speak to the iconographies of the nation.

This isn’t to say that community-led reconciliation projects don’t have national impact. The Myall Creek Massacre Memorial Site, which remembers the June 1838 violence there, emerged from a community-centred reconciliation process initiated by Aunty Sue Blacklock, Elder of the Nucoorilma people of the Gamilaraay nation. It is now registered on the National Heritage List. Around Australia, Indigenous communities are retelling the histories of colonial contact on their lands in ways that reshape national narratives of foundation. From place to place, these projects don’t just acknowledge the fractious conditions of our colonial beginnings but also celebrate Indigenous people’s enduring connections to Country.

These kinds of community-led initiatives are modelling for the nation a pathway to reconciliation that doesn’t regard the past as something to be acknowledged and then put away. By voicing Indigenous perspectives on our shared past — perspectives that have long been silenced and neglected — they recognise the resilience of Aboriginal cultures and enable broader reflection for everyone on what it means to live in a nation that was built, place by place, on Indigenous land. •

The post The place of reconciliation appeared first on Inside Story.

Australians were asked this question:

Do you approve the proposed law for the alteration of the Constitution entitled — “An Act to alter the Constitution so as to omit certain words relating to the People of the Aboriginal Race in any State and so that Aboriginals are to be counted in reckoning the Population”?

The authors didn’t so much bury the lede as erase it. The second part — the bit after the “and” — was reasonably straightforward, conceptually at least, and is what most people remember today. But the first and much more important part coyly described a plan to “omit certain words relating to the People of the Aboriginal Race in any State.” Is it too cynical to assume that voters were meant to skip the “and” and assume it was all about counting?

A half-honest formulation would at least have mentioned that a Yes would give the federal government powers to legislate specifically for “aborigines” (in the nomenclature of the time). But the ballot paper was of a piece with the whole campaign, which referred to equality or simply to a “Yes for aborigines.” The politicians and advocates made a decision to de-emphasise the positive discrimination. Too hard, too potentially contentious.

Because no one voted against the legislation in parliament, there was no publicly funded No case to make that point. And most attention was on the accompanying referendum, the first on the ballot paper, which dealt with the link between how many MPs sit in the House of Representatives and how many in the Senate. (Despite also receiving bipartisan support, that one went down badly.)

The amendment’s importance lay in its kickstarting of the long-dormant “race power.” In subsequent decades that power facilitated land rights legislation, Abstudy, the Aboriginal Medical Service, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services and other policies.

Now, in the 2020s, referendum talk is in the air again. Four years ago, on the fiftieth anniversary of that 1967 milestone, the First Nations National Constitutional Convention released the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a major recommendation of which is to include a First Nations Voice into our constitutional arrangements. It’s a far cry from the “minimalist” model that had been doing the rounds, which would have taken references to “race” out of the Constitution, replaced the “race power” with one specifically referring to the advancement of Indigenous Australians, and inserted some words describing the tens of thousands of years of Indigenous life on this continent.

What are the chances of inserting the Voice into the Constitution? The track record of referendums since 1901, eight successes out of forty-four attempts, gives some indication. And this time a one-sided game, like in 1967, won’t be possible. There will certainly be a No case.

In a perfect world, referendums would involve reason and dialogue and appealing to people’s better natures. In practice they’re like elections, mostly relying on emotion fuelled by snippets of information. By-elections are a better template, because who governs is not at stake, which frees people up to give the government a bloody nose if they’re so inclined.

It’s no accident that midterm referendums held without opposition support have generally done particularly poorly. As a rule (with 1967 an exception) questions put at the same time, on very different topics, have attracted similar levels of support, which doesn’t suggest an engaged populace carefully considering the merits of proposals. This is the Constitution, after all, a document a long way from most people’s daily thoughts, and most attempted amendments are incredibly arcane and, to the voter, seemingly gratuitous. We’ve survived this long without this change, why the need now?

In the first decade of federation, referendums were held with general elections. As you would. Two out of three passed. With the ink on the 1900 document still drying, it was easier to argue for some tweaking. Then the two-party system developed, Labor took office with very ambitious plans for nationalisation and centralisation of power, and the midterm referendum habit was born. Politicians began to believe referendums would only complicate election campaigns, making bipartisanship difficult. Fair enough, but then bipartisanship has been rare between elections as well, and all but non-existent if Labor is in government. About half our referendums have been held midterm.

The overriding dynamic from around 1910 to 1990 was that Labor was in favour of constitutional change — almost any change (apart from 1951 to ban communism) — to freshen up the document, make it live and breathe, and, in the early years at least, deliver more power to the central government. The Coalition tended to oppose, largely in response to the latter.

Much of this disagreement reflected the content of the proposed amendments, but the parties’ attitudes hardened into matters of identity. Liberals would oppose something in opposition, and then in government propose the same. The upshot is that Labor oppositions have usually supported constitutional referendums, while the anti-Labor parties in opposition have not.

In fact, Liberal opposition leaders find it almost impossible to back a Labor-initiated change. They simply lack the authority. The planned referendum to recognise local government with the 2013 election is a textbook example: Tony Abbott was fully signed up until a late mini-rebellion from the party room and the wider conservative movement forced him to back out.

Then, from the 1990s, Labor began losing its enthusiasm for constitutional reform for its own sake. It was John Howard who launched the 1999 republic referendum, and its forgotten preamble partner. And, once a year or so, he would raise the idea of fixed four-year terms — popular with business groups — but it would dissolve within days, if not hours.

Kevin Rudd played with the idea of a referendum on health, but mostly as a political threat.

This table has every one of Australia’s constitutional referendums, in descending order of national vote. Three achieved national majorities but not the majority in a majority of states. The colour-coding shows whether they were held midterm (white) or with an election (yellow).

A couple of take-outs. First, see numbers 7 and 24 for one example of the importance of bipartisan support, and of the Coalition’s tune-changing once in office.

We know the golden rule by heart: bipartisan support has been a necessary though not sufficient condition for referendum success. But timing has been a largely unacknowledged but crucial driver of popular support.

Down the bottom of the table, the least successful referendums — sixteen of them, mostly without bipartisan support — were held midterm. Further up, a big bunch held with elections, almost all by Labor governments (non-Labor haven’t held a referendum with an election since 1919), still failed, but more respectably. With the election campaign gobbling the oxygen, the referendums tend to be little-discussed. In the end the Yes vote has approximated the government’s primary vote. Three received national majorities but clipped the “double majority” hurdle.

So what are the paths to success for the Voice? Ideally it would be held with the next general election, with bipartisan support. But that timing isn’t on the table. Two broad trajectories will be on offer after the election, in late 2021 or early 2022: a re-elected Coalition government and a new Labor one.

Under the first scenario, the win would probably reinvigorate Scott Morrison’s party-room stature and he might be convinced to, with the help of allies, drag the Coalition behind him on the Voice. The Labor opposition would probably support him, a midterm referendum would be held — and its chances would be pretty good.

And if Labor wins? While that would make the holding of a referendum more likely, the chances of victory would shrink dramatically because you can all but rule out opposition support. A midterm referendum would almost certainly crash, but what about one held with the following election (in 2024–25)? That would certainly stand a better chance. A required ingredient would be a big Labor re-election, and we haven’t seen one of those at federal level since 1946, which as it happens was the scene of Labor’s one and only referendum success.

But the bottom line is that a Coalition government is more likely to deliver the Voice than a Labor one. “Nixon to China” and so on.

This all sounds terribly reductionist and deterministic. It does downplay the importance of content, argument, Australians’ willingness to do good, and the energy and force of the Yes and No campaigns. But it doesn’t discount them altogether. All these will be important, but so will timing.

Creating the Voice is the main game. The accessories, the stories told about it, the why and how Australians voted as they did can be invented afterwards. As Tim Rowse recently described, the myths around 1967, not all of them based on reality, have their uses. So too would a successful Voice vote. But mythology is of little help in getting us there. •

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At least, this seems to be Pascoe’s appeal. As he writes on the back cover of the second edition of Dark Emu, “If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers, and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes, and did construct a system of pan-continental government and generated peace and prosperity, then it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more.”

The repeated, emphatic “did” hints at Pascoe’s belief that in allowing the reader to look at evidence of Aboriginal people’s constructive behaviour he is undoing a history of suppression or neglect that has stopped Australians from knowing that Aboriginal people practised agriculture. To position oneself as revealing obscured or suppressed truth is powerfully to befriend the reader; that appeal is intensified if the stated aim is to deepen the reader’s bond with “our land.”

Irresistible? In 2016 Dark Emu won both the Indigenous Writer’s Prize and Book of the Year in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards; in two other competitions it made the short list. Young Dark Emu won the Australian Booksellers Association’s Children’s Book of the Year and the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Eve Pownall Award for Information Books, and was shortlisted in four other competitions. A teaching resource book, Dark Emu in the Classroom, has also been published.

Now two academics, anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe, have called Dark Emu into question. In their new book Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate — of which Sutton wrote eleven chapters and Walshe two — they argue that Pascoe’s reading of the evidence has been determined by his firm belief that Aboriginal people gave birth to agriculture. They draw attention to many instances of Pascoe’s minimising or ignoring evidence that “the Old People” (as Sutton respectfully calls them) were hunters and gatherers, and emphasising evidence of what he sees as “agricultural” elements of their economy and society: grouped and durable dwellings, food storage, grain harvesting. Pascoe has graciously welcomed Sutton and Walshe’s critique.

In some respects, Pascoe and his two critics converge. To smash the orthodoxy (as he presents it) that Aboriginal people were nomadic, Pascoe describes them as “more or less sedentary” and as “sedentary or semi-sedentary.” Sutton embraces “semi-sedentary” (erroneously remarking that “semi-sedentary is not mentioned in Dark Emu”) and goes on to cite many instances of academic and popular works published since 1938 that characterise pre-colonial mobility in that way: people foraged within a range of intimately known country, sometimes stayed for long periods in one camp, and even built structures that they could leave and return to find intact.

What Sutton and Walshe question is whether this was an agricultural society. They chip away at so many parts of Pascoe’s thesis that it is, in my opinion, demolished. To give but one example, in his chapter “The Explorers’ Records” Sutton cites evidence that Pascoe could have mentioned but chose not to. He compares Pascoe’s quotations from the explorers’ records with his own, longer quotations — exposing Pascoe’s tendency to omit words that cast doubt on his view that explorers were reporting what they observed as agricultural practices.

The intellectual combat is not as straightforward as this in every chapter. Sometimes the reader must work harder and make choices. For example, Walshe, an archaeologist, devotes eleven pages to considering a small number of stone implements housed in Australian museums. They demand her consideration on the basis that, according to Pascoe, they are “crucial to our understanding of Aboriginal agricultural history.”

Inviting the reader to look “with an open mind” at these tools that he believes could have been hoes for tilling soil, Pascoe laments that they have been little studied. Walshe’s approach is not to say they have not been used as hoes but to ask why anyone should believe that they were. She begins by pointing out that these objects have been studied – as “picks” and “cylcons.” Documented Aboriginal testimony points to cylcons being used in ceremonies to maintain the land’s fecundity. Picks (studied since the 1940s) are likely to have been used when hafted — that is, as an axe-head — for breaking open timber. If such items are “crucial” evidence of agriculture, as Pascoe declares in Dark Emu, then Walshe has effectively questioned this particular “crux.”

For Pascoe and those devoted to his thesis, though, this might not be enough. His mind open to a new interpretation of the picks, Pascoe (teamed with historian Bill Gammage and Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones) hosted a museum exhibition, Bunha-bunhanga: Aboriginal Agriculture in the South-East, whose catalogue declares that the picks were “used to cultivate the murrnong [yam] fields” — speculation presented as fact.

Walshe’s eleven pages on cylcons and picks confront readers with a choice. Do we continue to warm to Pascoe’s speculation (ignoring the extant scientific literature as an artefact of benighted scholarship), or do we accept that we just don’t know how Aboriginal people used these objects? Can the available research show that they were never used as hoes, we might ask.

Pascoe, inviting us to believe in a might-have-been that no one can disprove, is answered by Sutton and Walshe, asking why anyone should believe a proposition that lacks supporting evidence. Walshe’s cool presentation of what is known about the use of these objects will leave some readers… well, cold. The idea that picks and cylcons were hoes solicits readers who feel that Aboriginal people would be more admirable if they could be shown to be not so very different from us. Many readers will want to make that commitment.

Pascoe and his two critics differ not only in their marshalling of evidence but also in their imagined readerships. Much of the Sutton and Walshe book assumes a reader who thinks that a proposition lacking supporting evidence is probably not true. Pascoe’s work is often an explicit appeal to readers willing to reconsider orthodoxy, positioning them as victims of colonists’ self-justifying “hunter-gatherer” myth, ready now to see that Aboriginal people were really agriculturalists. In his own words, Pascoe aims “to give rise to the possibility of an alternative view of pre-colonial Aboriginal society,” a flattering invitation to Australians’ self-renewal.

Sutton is aware that Pascoe’s readers have feelings, that they may be searching “for forgiveness, or reconciliation, or the undoing of the colonial crimes of their forebears,” and that this may dispose them to welcome Pascoe’s explicit invitation to a new way of seeing. One of Sutton’s responses is to argue that Pascoe’s self-proclaimed iconoclasm is spurious, as much in Dark Emu has been said before.

That Aboriginal people were “ecological agents” — changing the landforms and biota as they lived from them — has been accepted by researchers for many years. By setting fire to the country and by digging edible flora out of the ground (thus overturning soil) and planting the inedible portion back in the hole, hunter-gatherers had a “profound effect on the distribution of forest and grassland,” wrote Norman Tindale in 1959. Tindale even used the term “proto-agriculture” in a 1974 publication to refer to evidence that Aboriginal people sometimes stored food in excess of immediate requirements. (Sutton is critical of that term’s implied view that agriculture would have been a forward step from hunting and gathering.) A book called Resource Managers: North American and Australian Hunter-Gatherers came out in 1982 (with Sutton as co-author of one chapter).

Such examples (and Sutton gives more) tell us of academic, not popular, acceptance of the idea that Aboriginal people were canny and intentional manipulators of nature. Pascoe’s position as revealer of neglected or suppressed truth could still be justified by saying that he is the first to disseminate esoteric research on Aboriginal people’s ecological agency. Sutton challenges that as well, pointing to several popularising books and audiovisual projects since the 1970s that have celebrated the ecological agency of pre-colonial Aboriginal society. What Pascoe learned as a child in the 1950s, he says, is not what the Australian public has been learning in recent years.

But Sutton’s strongest disagreements with Pascoe are less about evidence than about what he sees as two major flaws in how he frames his argument in Dark Emu. First, Pascoe implicitly endorses an outmoded theory of human history known as “social evolution.” And second, he has not understood Aboriginal people’s comprehensively spiritual understanding of their world.

“Social evolution” was the gift of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who argued that the manifest variety in human societies arose from the fact that some societies had progressed faster than others through a series of civilisational stages that all human societies could and would traverse. The orthodox British colonial view that Pascoe seeks to overturn was that Aboriginal society was a real-life example of humanity still functioning at the most primitive stage — living by hunting and gathering.

Had Pascoe published Dark Emu 120 years earlier his foil would have been another bestselling author, Benjamin Kidd. In 1894 Kidd achieved high sales and several translations by arguing in Social Evolution that it was natural for simple societies to die out when they came in contact with the more complex society that now occupied their country. Pascoe’s pertinent message would have been that Aboriginal society was more complex than merely “hunter-gatherer.” It was in “marked movement towards agricultural reliance”; it was “burgeoning agriculture” — an economy worthy of more respect.

“In denying the existence of the economy,” Pascoe writes in Dark Emu, “[the British] were denying the right of the people to their land, and fabricating the excuse that is at the heart of Australia’s claim to legitimacy today.” By emphasising how agricultural the Aboriginal people really were, Dark Emu seeks to reimagine Indigenous Australians as dispossessed sovereigns and to undermine non-Indigenous Australians’ assurance that, by colonising Aboriginal people, Britain was enacting humanity’s natural progression.

Sutton needs no convincing that Australia’s history is a story of colonial conquest and usurpation, but he objects strongly to Pascoe’s way of questioning Australia’s “legitimacy.” The “most fundamental flaw” of Dark Emu, he writes, is that it implicitly endorses the social evolutionists’ scale of human value: by seeking to redescribe the Old People as agriculturalists it has conceded too much to the idea that agriculture is a higher stage than “hunting and gathering.” Sutton urges us to admire the Old People for what they were rather than for what, in Pascoe’s view, they were becoming.

Sutton’s plea for the inherent worth of the hunter-gatherer way of life (and implicitly, for the right of the Old People and their descendants to assert their unceded sovereignty) is a product of “cultural relativism.” In the “human sciences,” cultural relativism began to replace “social evolution” in the second decade of the twentieth century. It has been axiomatic for the research community on whose works Sutton and Walshe rely, and it has been buttressed, since the 1940s, by emerging international law concepts such as the right of “peoples” to “self-determination.” Popular assent to Pascoe’s assumption that Aboriginal people were more admirable for being agricultural suggests that cultural relativism has not yet undermined social evolution in popular thinking about human history.

The second of Sutton’s fundamental objections to Pascoe is that in his materialist conception of “economy” he can’t conceive that the Old People’s persistence in hunting and gathering entailed their intellectual rejection of agriculture. Here we should note that in this book, as in his previous book, The Politics of Suffering, it is clear that Sutton’s field work on Cape York formed him ethically and intellectually.

In the 1970s Sutton lived on Cape York with groups collectively known as the Wik. There his teachers explained how vital to human existence it was to talk to “country” in quotidian action and in ceremony. Recounting that learning, Sutton then combines his own observations of Wik on country with reports made by other researchers to argue that what we call an “economy” has been, for the Old People, a spiritualised practice; they understand “country” as imbued with spirits consubstantial with the humans who live off it.

The getting of food enacts an ontology that we have learned to call “the Dreaming.” In what Sutton calls “spiritual propagation” and “spiritual gardening,” the fertility of the biota is understood to be inherent, maintained by living off and with it. Pascoe’s preoccupation with “material methods of species cultivation” briefly acknowledges this spiritual dimension but fails to understand its significance: it was a way of seeing nature to which agricultural improvement was irrelevant. To issue this corrective to Pascoe’s “modern Eurocentric attitude” is what Sutton believes he owes his teachers.

So, what is at stake? Melbourne University Press chose the title Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? In Dark Emu Pascoe hints at discomfort with that stark binary: “Arguing over whether the Aboriginal economy was a hunter-gatherer system or one of burgeoning agriculture is not the central issue.” Rather unhelpfully, he explains: “The crucial point is that we have never discussed it as a nation.” The two sentences work against each other: why would the nation discuss “it” if “it” is not “the central issue”?

In my view, beyond the (undoubtedly important) issue of how to describe pre-colonial Aboriginal society is an issue of contemporary civics: how to respect “Indigenous knowledge” in a way that meets the Uluru Statement’s demand for “truth-telling.” To respect and include “Indigenous knowledge” we need some way to identify what it is. Pascoe’s invitation to revise and renew our view of Aboriginal civilisation and Sutton and Walshe’s challenge make clear that “Indigenous knowledge” takes many forms.

Pascoe is probably Australia’s most widely read and influential Aboriginal intellectual (with Stan Grant a possible rival) and he is likely to remain so because of schools’ take-up of Young Dark Emu. Yet his “Indigenous knowledge” is enriched, or burdened, with borrowings from the colonists’ intellectual traditions: from the Enlightenment the notion that some societies are “ahead” of others (see page 70 of Young Dark Emu), and from secular social science his materialist framing of “economy.” Sutton and Walshe are not Indigenous but they have spent years training to re-present “Indigenous knowledge” in terms that are scientifically credible because (unlike “the Dreaming”) their accounts are open to refutation. Truth-telling’s best hope is to keep in mind the distinction between teller and tale. •

Related: Tom Griffiths on reading Bruce Pascoe

The post The teller and the tale appeared first on Inside Story.

Many historians — Indigenous and non-Indigenous — had already sensed the momentousness of the Referendum Council’s work behind the Uluru Statement. They were primarily historians of Australia who could recognise, via their teaching or their research, how distinct it was from earlier discussions of constitutional reform. But few had heard a younger generation of Indigenous leaders articulate the statement’s meaning for themselves or provide insight into how it came into being.

At some point, one of the speakers mentioned having asked UNSW law professor Megan Davis for advice on how to address a bunch of historians. Davis, one of the key referendum councillors and the first to read out the Statement at Uluru on 26 May 2017, suggested that they ask us what it means for the Uluru Statement to have placed Truth third in its sequence for reform, Voice, Treaty, Truth.

Davis’s question alludes to the longstanding connection made in this country between ideas of truth and the business of history. If the Voice part of the Uluru sequence invokes the realm of politics and the Treaty part conjures the world of law, then the Truth part aligns most closely with the domain of history. In Australia, history practitioners include far more than just academics. They encompass museum curators, journalists, teachers, filmmakers and podcasters. They also include artists, activists, policy advisers, heritage consultants and parents.

One of the truths that most history practitioners know is that in other places and times, truth-telling about the past has been seen as a “precondition of healing.” The famous truth commissions of South Africa, Rwanda, Canada and elsewhere are examples of this conviction in institutionalised form. Those invested in history-work might reasonably assume, therefore, that Truth would come before Voice and certainly before Treaty. Yet in the Uluru Statement it is a deliberate third.

Clearly, the positioning in no way reflects a lack of interest in history among participants in the Referendum Council’s work. Its final report is replete with discussions and references to history. It opens with a historical summary of the deep and colonial past of First Nations people in Australia. Later, it offers an expansion of that history, peppered with quotations from the participants’ Dialogue Sessions. “Australia must acknowledge its history, its true history. Not Captain Cook,” said one participant. “Government needs to be told the truth of how people got to there,” added another.

“The need for the truth to be told as part of the process of reform emerged from many of the Dialogues,” the report concludes. “The Dialogues emphasised that the true history of colonisation must be told: the genocides, the massacres, the wars and the ongoing injustices and discrimination. This truth also needed to include the stories of how First Nations Peoples have contributed to protecting and building this country.”

Much of the wariness about the place of truth reflects what happens when states get involved in truth-telling. “Beware the state seeking ‘truth,’” Davis tweeted in March this year. “A lot of lawyers, historians will be handsomely paid. Non-Indigenous academics will do well. Govt avoids structural reform cos *wait for truth*.” Other Indigenous leaders have also commented that truth-telling in an official context can become a “can-kicking exercise.”

Even when state-sought truths do come out, the responses can be wrenchingly slow or simply useless. When Australia commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the truth-seeking royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody last month, more than 120 of its recommendations had still to be implemented and 455 more Indigenous lives had been lost.

It’s not that we lack truths about the Indigenous presence in Australian history: as Henry Reynolds declared as early as 1984, the “Great Australian Silence” has been well and truly broken. That presence is now heard in school curricula, in ceremonial events, and in a deep and extensive scholarship — each advance notably inspired by Indigenous leaders. Some have suggested that it’s more a question of forgetfulness. Tom Griffiths recently lamented that historical practitioners may well recover or facilitate knowledge about First Nations, but their efforts get buried under the “endemic forgetfulness of the dominant culture.”

The problem seems rather to be that Australians know and forget at the same time. We shatter silences and then build them up again. We fill gaps then re-gouge them. Nothing else can explain, for instance, how we admit that 26 January 1788 was not a “flash” day but insist on celebrating it anyway. Or how we recognise that Aboriginal people were placed in chains but think there was no slavery in Australia. Or how we acknowledge frontier wars but refuse to integrate them into the Australian War Memorial.

In some reply to this hectic vacillation, the Referendum Council’s final report called for the creation of a Makarrata Commission, charged with not only “supervising agreement-making” but also “a process of local and regional truth-telling.” The council didn’t specify the commission’s contours because such a task “does not fall within our terms of reference.” But the sequencing of the Uluru Statement’s reforms suggests it believes that a fresh approach to truth can only emerge after Indigenous people have secured a greater level of political assurance.

One meaning of the Yolngu word Makarrata is, as Merrikiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs explains, “a spear penetrating, usually the thigh, of a person that has done wrong… to settle them down.” It also contains the more commonly understood meaning of the agreement-making and truth-telling process that may then occur. In the Uluru Statement’s sequencing, the enshrinement of Voice may well be the spearing moment. Australians need to stop in their tracks — listen to this voice — before the truths of their past finally stick.

Where does that leave history practitioners? It certainly doesn’t mean easing up on the research that we do. We should continue to find out, deepen and communicate the truth about Indigenous pasts, so long as our practice respects the evolving desires, protocols and differences of descendants today.

But we need to discuss those truths in ways that take account of the chaotic flux between knowing and forgetting in Australian public life. The first move might be to shore up the knowing. This means threading Indigenous presence into every aspect of Australia’s past. It should not appear only when discussing massacres, reservations, or land rights struggles. It should also animate our narratives of suffrage, sexuality, migration, music, transport, political economy, foreign policy and intimate family.

The second move is to deal with the forgetting. We can do more to explain why historical truths are so readily disregarded in Australia. We can show more explicitly how the dispossessive events we recount have shaped the very ways that we remember them — or don’t remember them — today. Assimilationist practices of the twentieth century eroded the languages by which memories could survive into the future. Humanitarian practices of the nineteenth century produced the current myth that liberalism is always progressive. Keeping one eye always on history’s effect in the present makes our work more powerful and more useful.

Finally, history practitioners of all stripes should step up, when asked, to help serve the local versions of Makarrata as they emerge. On current behaviour, most will do so enthusiastically. Many educators, planners, creatives and private citizens already support existing state or regional truth-telling initiatives. Legal scholar Gabrielle Appleby, writing with Davis, envisages that local Makarrata sessions will occur “in conjunction with local councils, local history societies, or other local community groups.” No doubt any overarching national Makarrata organisation will require the same.

Nearly forty years ago, the too-often-forgotten Aboriginal scholar Eric Willmot suggested that if Australia had not by 1988 made some gesture towards what he called a “covenant” with First Nations, the country would be “in trouble.” He strongly implied that such failure would be tied to its shaky sense of history. In 2021, Australia still lacks a covenant. Its histories are louder, bigger and frankly better than they were in the 1980s. But they are yet to overcome their shaky hold on the public consciousness. History practitioners can help by continuing to build knowledge through their research. They can help by explaining how forgetfulness is built into the very dispossession that their work describes. And they can help by paving new paths to truth, once Voice and Treaty are already on the table. •

The post Why does Truth come third? appeared first on Inside Story.

When it comes to defining Australian values, the booklet’s list of attributes would be familiar in most modern democracies: commitment to the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, respect for the freedom of others, and equal opportunities (or a “fair go”) for all. But apart from the fair go, the thing that might strike prospective citizens as particularly Australian is the declaration that they are being offered the “privilege” of joining a “unique national community.”

The release of the updated information booklet follows last November’s announcement that Australia’s citizenship test will include five new questions about Australian values, all of which must be answered correctly. The questions are part of a federal government plan to tighten citizenship requirements, which also requires applicants to sign an Australian Values Statement committing them to behaving in accordance with Australian values while resident in the country.

What’s striking about the idea of citizens as privileged members of a unique national community bound by values is how much broader it is than the conception of citizenship as membership of a nation-state, with its defined rights and obligations. The federal government asks us to see citizenship as a social ideal, with shared values as a threshold for inclusion — or, to put it another way, with the absence of shared values as grounds for exclusion.

As legal scholar Alex Reilly argues, the federal government’s heightened focus on citizenship as a privilege is a departure from earlier campaigns designed to make citizenship more readily accessible to migrants. A clear measure of this shift is the increased expectation of English-language competency. When citizenship legislation was amended in 1984, at a time of emerging multicultural policy, the English-language requirement was reduced to “a basic knowledge.” In the new information booklet, by contrast, English is “part of our national identity” and “an important unifying element of Australian society.” In keeping with Australian values, migrants “should learn and use English.”

Making shared national values a threshold requirement for citizenship has attracted some criticism, but it is far from new. Rather, it recalls Australia’s longer history of treating citizenship as a cultural boundary line between “us” and others. In his book One of Us? A Century of Australian Citizenship, historian David Dutton notes that the legal position is relatively straightforward: Australian citizens have the right to vote and stand for parliament; to hold a passport, enabling them to leave and return; to work for certain government agencies; and to claim diplomatic assistance when overseas. But citizenship’s history as a cultural focal point of “national unity” is much more complicated.

As Dutton discusses, the most recognisable historical feature of citizenship is that it enabled governments to regulate immigration along racial lines, determining who could or could not join the national “family.” The White Australia policy embodied this practice for much of the twentieth century; its backbone was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which, among other things, empowered immigration agents to administer a dictation test to aspiring migrants in a prescribed (European) language. In this way, language served as a proxy for building a racially homogeneous nation (although Australia was hardly alone in prioritising an ethno-cultural understanding of citizenship).

A cultural conception of citizenship — one deeply rooted in the history of British colonisation — existed long before citizenship came into law in Australia. Until Australia’s Nationality and Citizenship Act was passed in 1948, every locally born or naturalised Australian was a British subject rather than a citizen, as was true of everyone belonging to the British Commonwealth until after the second world war. Australian citizenship didn’t replace the status of British subject; instead, Australians now held dual status as Australian citizens and British subjects.

Speaking to the Nationality and Citizenship Bill in parliament in September 1948, immigration minister Arthur Calwell was at pains to stress that the creation of “local” citizenship would in no way weaken the Australian people’s essential Britishness. Indeed, he said, it would “prove a binding and unifying factor” to remind them of their place within the British Commonwealth. He anticipated that future generations would learn “they are fortunate to be British, and even more fortunate to be Australian.”

Elaborating on the “privileges and benefits” of Australian citizenship, Calwell drew deeply upon the values of a society well versed in the white, masculine mythologies of settler explorers and pioneers. Looking towards the postwar wave of European migrants who would share in this land “of plenty,” he foresaw their assimilation to “our young but vigorous traditions of mateship, cooperation, and a fair deal.”

The 1948 legislation became active on Australia Day, 1949. In the inaugural citizenship ceremony held at Albert Hall in Canberra, seven men of various European nationalities swore allegiance to King George VI and received their citizenship.

Like everyone else, Indigenous people became Australian citizens on this day alongside a continuing status as British subjects. In Australia’s colonial history, no single moment had established Indigenous people’s status as British subjects. Instead, that status gradually coalesced as a matter of policy through the 1830s, when the British government sought to mitigate the violence of dispossession by promising Indigenous people the same legal protections that were enjoyed by other British subjects. In practice, this promised equality never materialised.

A century later, when their new status as Australian citizens joined with that of British subjects, Indigenous people were living within a web of protection laws that placed them under the guardianship of the state, subjected them to schemes of biological absorption, laid down the terms of their employment and the place of their residence, held their wages in trust, and removed their children from their care. In some states, Indigenous people could only enjoy the rights of ordinary citizenship if they secured an exemption certificate that formally separated them from their Aboriginality. As John Chesterman and Brian Galligan famously put it, they were citizens without rights.

Among extensive press reportage celebrating the birth of citizenship on Australia Day in 1949 was a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald from the anthropologist Camilla Wedgwood. In the same edition that announced the arrival of citizenship, she wrote, was a report on the state’s removal of a mixed-race daughter from her Aboriginal mother. “Is it one of the privileges of Australian citizenship that citizens can, at the dictates of a department in Canberra, be moved against their wishes,” she asked, and, if so, “how does this accord with the Charter of Human Rights?”

As Wedgwood’s letter implied, the newly adopted Universal Declaration of Human Rights, endorsed just weeks earlier by the United Nations, provided leverage to Aboriginal rights organisations that had grown in strength during the interwar years and continued to lobby for political representation and the end of discriminatory laws. It would be another two decades, though, before the oppressive laws and institutions of Aboriginal protection policies were dismantled.

At one level, the federal government’s deepening expectation that new citizens will immerse themselves in the values of their adopted society might seem to make sense, and not only because of contemporary concern about the global reach of terrorism. Recent research indicates that migrants who successfully acculturate to Australian society experience a greater sense of wellbeing and security than those who do not. This research highlights the personal benefits of social participation and of investment in migrant services that encourage it.

But does capacity for social participation require that citizens hold an articulated set of Australian values? Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond suggests that it does by describing values-based citizenship as the bedrock of Australian society and “national unity.” The booklet acknowledges the vitality of Australia’s Indigenous and multicultural histories, but appreciates them within the larger fold of an Australian society that’s united by shared values.

Ultimately, the view that shared values underpin national unity is not so far removed from the philosophy of assimilation that created Australia’s history of unequal citizenship. Of course, the historical values of a White Australia that would be forever British have been replaced with more open and democratic values: those of individual rights to freedom, dignity and equality under the law. But as the history of Australian citizenship tells us, not everyone necessarily enjoys the same access to those rights. •

The post Land of plenty appeared first on Inside Story.

“When I walked out into the foyer, there was Bruce Lee,” Gulpilil recalled decades later, still shaking his head in astonishment. “He was watching my movie and I was watching his. It was a shock to meet each other, but we got a good photograph.”

Brushes with fame became almost commonplace in the early years after Walkabout told the story of the Australian landscape’s ancient mysteries and the collision of black and white cultures. The world opened up for the teenage actor and dancer from Arnhem Land whose haunting performance made the film an instant classic.

In America he rubbed shoulders with Clint Eastwood, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali and “that singer bloke” Bob Dylan. In Frankfurt he met Marlon Brando. And in London, dressed in a twenty-four-hour Hong Kong suit, he dined with and danced for the Queen. “That was great. The Queen of England was there. I was proud. Wow! I was among the stars. I was in all the newspapers.”

Walkabout was soon joined by a string of other memorable films that secured Gulpilil’s reputation as one of Australia’s greatest actors. Storm Boy, for which he won an Australian Film Institute best actor nomination, was followed by The Last Wave and the Crocodile Dundee blockbusters. (He says he was paid a derisory $10,000 for the latter, while the white stars pocketed millions.) Then, almost as suddenly as it had flowered, his brilliant career stalled.

By the late 1990s David Gulpilil was back where he had begun: broke, frustrated and living on the fringe. Largely forgotten by the world that had feted him, he was unsettled and struggling in the land of his people.

“I am sad and ashamed,” he said when we met in 1998 in the remote settlement of Ramingining, 500 kilometres east of Darwin, where he shared a makeshift camp with his large extended family. “Once I was famous, everybody knew my name. Now I’m just a simple man living down here in a humpy. It’s a hopeless life. Why do other people have apples and I have none? I don’t want my children to grow up like this.”

Gulpilil had travelled a path sadly familiar to many of Australia’s greatest Aboriginal artists and athletes: moments of triumph and acclaim overshadowed by bouts of alcoholism and drug abuse, broken relationships, and alienation from both the worlds they sought to straddle. He was jailed for a month in 1987 for drink-driving, and he blamed alcohol for the break-up of his first two marriages. And more trouble lay ahead, including domestic violence and offensive weapons incidents fuelled by alcohol, and more time in prison.

“Sometimes I feel like two people,” he lamented. “It would have been a different life if I had stayed here with my people, but I have grown up in the Western world because the film Walkabout took me away from here. Now I have come back, it is different.”

The frustrations were sharpened in the long months when he was forced to stay in the camp at Ramingining, cut off by wet-season flooding from his homelands just thirty kilometres away. It was the place where he found peace, hunting and fishing and teaching the young men the ceremonies and dances.

“My homeland is paradise. Here, I am trapped, but in my land I am free. I am not a foreigner there. In the land of my forefathers, in my mother’s land, I can sleep under the cool shadow of trees. Back there, all I have is my spear and my woomera. It’s all I need.”

But those years in Ramingining proved to be no more than an interval in a career that had yet to reach its peak. Soon he was back in demand and being celebrated for a contribution that transcended his screen roles. Rolf de Heer, who directed him in three of his best movies, credits Gulpilil with beginning “the process of white Australia looking at Indigenous people in a different way. When he did Storm Boy, the white people fell in love with him and Indigenous people could feel proud.”

He won a clutch of accolades in 2002, including the AFI best actor award for his performance in de Heer’s The Tracker and an AFI nomination for best supporting actor for Rabbit-Proof Fence. His collaboration with de Heer in Charlie’s Country was recognised in 2014 with a second best actor award from AACTA (successor to the AFI)  and the same prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Now David Gulpilil is dying. Diagnosed with lung cancer and emphysema in 2017, the doctors gave him six months to live. The treatments that helped him defy the odds are exhausted, and soon, he concedes, he will be “going back to country on a one-way ticket.”

As the end approaches, he remains a man torn between the celebrity of his life in the world of movies and the power of his tribal heritage.

Back in 1998 I asked what he would do differently if he had his time again. He reached out and touched my arm. “You have to help me with this,” he said, searching for words. “If I had another chance, I’d still do it all again, but this time maybe I could take my children to see and learn.

“I want to teach my children about the world and to bring a better life for them. My people don’t know about the world, how the world spins. They need to learn. We have to live in the bigger world. I want my children to know how to use the woomera and the spear and the knife and fork.”

In Molly Reynolds’s new documentary on his life, My Name Is Gulpilil, the actor, now living in Murray Bridge with his carer Mary, laments the fact that he is no longer well enough to travel back to Arnhem Land. “I will miss my children. I think of them and I love them… I’m only waiting. I’m walking like across the desert of country — long, long way — until the time comes for me.”

Soon enough he will be back there, a spirit that delighted and enlightened the world reunited with those of his ancestors. •

The post How the world spins appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite growing community support for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, some members of the federal government remain reluctant, echoing prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s immediate dismissal of the proposal as “a radical change to our Constitution’s representative institutions.” Indigenous representative bodies, they say, are “inconsistent” with democracy.

International experience suggests otherwise. Around the globe, this kind of institution is relatively common. In Sweden, Norway and Finland, for example, national representative bodies — Indigenous parliaments, no less — have been set up within the processes of government. The story of these parliaments is complex and their success is mixed, but they throw light on the key challenge that must be resolved if a First Nations Voice is to be effective in Australia.

Sweden’s Sámi parliament, or Sámediggi, was opened in August 1993 with a ceremony led by King Carl XVI Gustaf in Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost city, far above the Arctic Circle. The Sámediggi was designed to enable Sámi people to develop their culture and community on their own terms, and national newspapers remarked on the size of the crowd that day and the colourful, festive atmosphere.

The creation of the Sámediggi both reflected and contributed to a shift in the rights of Indigenous peoples across the Nordic states. Just four years earlier, in October 1989, King Olav V of Norway had presided over the first session of his country’s Sámediggi. In neighbouring Finland, a Sámi representative body had existed since 1973, though its authority was limited to issuing statements on Sámi affairs; in March 1996, less than three years after its Swedish counterpart was established, it was reconstituted and its role enhanced.

Ingwar Åhrén, the first president of the Swedish Sámediggi, hailed these representative bodies as a “milestone” in Sámi self-determination. Twenty-five years later, laws and policies affecting the Sámi still vary across the Nordic states, but these three institutions continue to serve as the main vehicles for self-determination. According to the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, they are important models “that could inspire the development of similar institutions elsewhere in the world.” UN treaty bodies and the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples agree.

The Sámediggi represented a new beginning for the relationship between Sweden and the Sámi. But on the very day the parliament opened, three Sámi reindeer herders completed the fifth day of a hunger strike denouncing proposed legislation to divest Sámi of their right to be consulted about the issuing of hunting permits on their traditional lands. As Josef Pittja, one of the hunger strikers, declared, “we have repeatedly asked to be given a say in the new rules but we have been ignored.” The legislation was passed against the wishes of major Sámi organisations and before the Sámediggi could consider it — “a provocation so rough,” according to one national newspaper, “that it is hard to believe it was accidental.”

The Sámediggi clearly faces constraints, and circumstances in Australia are different. So does it offer any lessons for a First Nations Voice?

The Sámediggi is composed of three institutions: an elected thirty-one-member plenary, a board and a secretariat. Elections are held every four years, with the entire country forming a single constituency. Voting is conducted under a system of proportional representation, with no minimum threshold required to secure a seat. All people on the Sámi electoral roll aged eighteen and over are entitled to cast a vote, but to be placed on the roll they must identify as Sámi and satisfy a language-based criterion — by speaking a Sámi language at home, having parents or grandparents who speak a Sámi language at home, or having a parent listed on the roll.

Elected members of the plenary choose a board of directors, which serves as the executive. The board prepares and presents motions, manages financial administration, implements the decisions of the plenary and performs assignments referred to it by the plenary. The chair of the board, also known as the president of the Sámediggi, is elected by the plenary. Although the Swedish government formally appoints a chair of the plenary — a largely symbolic role similar to a speaker of a national assembly — by convention it acts on the nomination of the plenary.

The plenary holds three sessions each year in locations across Sápmi, the traditional lands of the Sámi people. Only the president serves full-time. No budget exists to employ parliamentary staff, but representatives are compensated for loss of income during plenary sessions.

A secretariat of around fifty staff, employed through the civil service and headed by a chief secretary, assists the plenary and board. This arrangement reflects the fact that the Sámediggi is an elected government agency. Housed within Sweden’s culture ministry, the secretariat’s principal role is to monitor issues related to Sámi culture in Sweden. It also cooperates and collaborates with its Norwegian and Finnish counterparts, as well as colleagues in Russia, to protect and promote Sámi rights.

This institutional structure is a novel attempt to make Indigenous voices heard in the processes of government. But the Sámediggi’s legal status suggests some complications. It is both a popularly elected parliament representing the Sámi in Sweden and a state authority required to observe objectivity and operate under close regulation.

How does this conflicted legal position play out in practice? On one level, the Sámediggi appears well positioned to empower Sweden’s Sámi. Its legislation gives it responsibility for “providing information on Sámi conditions” to relevant decision-makers, and “ensuring that Sámi needs are considered.” But despite this structural hook and an ostensibly accommodative political culture, the Sámediggi often struggles to ensure Sámi voices are heard.

While divisions within the Sámi community can complicate the Sámediggi’s capacity to articulate a clear position to government, the more significant challenge is the Swedish state’s approach to the parliament. Without an enforceable obligation to engage with the Sámediggi, too often the government simply ignores it.

Like all substantial political communities, the Sámi are not homogeneous in their political attitudes. The Sámediggi’s proportional representation electoral system has enabled a diverse cast of candidates and parties to secure seats. In the first election held in 1993, the thirty-one seats were distributed among eleven different parties; in the most recent election, in 2017, nine political parties secured representation. But the multiplicity of views can make it difficult for the Sámediggi to speak authoritatively, weakening its impact. Although this tension is inherent in any representative institution, it is more problematic for Indigenous representative bodies designed to channel distinctive minority views to government.

But the process can work smoothly, and the parliament has successfully used its structural link with government to influence proposals. In 2009, for example, the Sámediggi heavily criticised a draft bill purportedly aimed at bringing Swedish laws into conformity with the International Labour Organization’s convention 169. The government withdrew the bill and announced its intention to substantially revise the proposal.

At other times, the Sámediggi’s lobbying has been less successful. In 2008, for instance, the government shelved a proposal to define the Sámi as an Indigenous people in the Swedish constitution, affording them a distinctive position within the state. It proposed instead to add the Sámi to the list of minorities whose rights are protected in the constitution. The Sámediggi criticised this approach, but the government dismissed its push to adopt language that stipulates the Sámi’s special status.

In other words, the Sámi might not always be successful in influencing government, but the Sámediggi means their interests are heard in decisions that affect them. Yet the gaps in the system are significant.

Under the Swedish Minerals Act 1991, for instance, no consultation with the Sámediggi or relevant Sámi communities is required before an exploration permit is issued, even if the permit area covers traditional Sámi territory. While affected communities are entitled to comment on proposed exploration work, the chief mining inspector can approve projects using a test that strongly favours exploration. Under the Forestry Act 1979, affected communities must be consulted about tree-felling permits in year-round reindeer grazing areas but not in winter grazing areas. And even on year-round grazing areas, Sámi participants report that they have “very few” opportunities to influence proposals.

Reflecting on these and other examples, many scholars and members of the Sámediggi have expressed concern about the parliament’s effectiveness. The UN Human Rights Committee has criticised the “limited extent to which the Sámi Parliament may participate in the decision-making process on issues affecting land and traditional activities of the Sámi people.” The UN special rapporteur has reported that the Sámediggi itself is concerned by a lack of “guaranteed genuine influence or decision-making power.”

Part of the problem may be an absence of structures to promote dialogue. A 2010 report by the Swedish Agency for Public Management found that informal contacts between the government and the Sámediggi are “limited” and formal discussions are scheduled only annually and not always well attended.

A general responsibility to consult the Sámediggi has been considered and rejected several times by the Swedish government. Before the parliament was created, the government considered that consultation would occur naturally, as did the commission designing the parliament. The Sámi Rights Commission assumed that political practice would lead the Sámediggi to “acquire the status of an obligatory advisory body.” In 2002, the government acknowledged that this had not occurred, but reiterated its position. In 2006 and 2009, it again rejected proposals to impose a general consultative obligation, contending it would “represent an excessive change.”

This view may be shifting. In 2017, the culture department released a ministerial report acknowledging that consultation is not carried out in a “consistent and comprehensive way” and is “not sufficient to ensure Sámi influence.” It proposed a draft consultation law that would oblige all levels of government and state administrative authorities to consult the Sámediggi and relevant Sámi communities in matters of particular relevance to them. Consultation would be undertaken in good faith, with the intention to reach an agreement, and would be documented to reveal how genuine the process was. The report also recognised that the Sámediggi and other Sámi organisations would require better funding to effectively manage an enlarged workload.

The consultative arrangement fell off the agenda following the Swedish general election in 2018 and has not been revived. The legal onus remains on the Sámediggi to initiate consultation, with little guarantee that its position will be considered. The capacity for Sámi voices to be heard would obviously be enhanced by a political agreement or legal requirement that national, regional and local decision-makers consult at an early stage on issues that affect Sámi interests and publicly identify how those interests were considered and how they influenced the decision adopted.

Can we draw direct conclusions for the design of a First Nations Voice? The Sámediggi’s experience suggests two points: meaningful consultation is key to the effectiveness of Indigenous representative bodies; and, on certain matters at least, governments will only consult Indigenous representative bodies if they are legally obliged or politically compelled to do so.

The Australian government or parliament can’t be required to engage with a First Nations Voice, and the experiences of previous national Indigenous representative bodies in Australia suggests that the new body could lack influence. It’s for this reason that the Uluru Statement called for a constitutionally entrenched First Nations Voice.

A grassroots popular campaign leading to successful constitutional reform could place considerable moral and political pressure on the federal government and parliament to listen to and engage meaningfully with the body. The government wouldn’t be legally required to consult, but the Australian people would expect it to do just that. The experience of the Swedish Sámediggi suggests that constitutional entrenchment is vital if a First Nations Voice is to succeed. •

The post The Sámi’s voice appeared first on Inside Story.

This is a story that has been waiting to be written. I devoured it quickly, though when I found myself trying to imagine pitching it as a research project, say, to an academic funding agency, I worried it might come up short. International? Australians tend to think New Zealand is not-quite-overseas. Innovative? The country seems close and familiar. Impact? What’s the “key takeaway” here? Australians need to look, closer and longer, at something they think they know already. This is a quiet conclusion from a wise observer about an exceptional place.

Mercifully, Tingle steers away from clichés of the trans-Tasman genre. There are no lame Aussie jokes about accents, agriculture or the All Blacks. No one punches above their weight. New Zealand is neither a leftist nirvana — the best remaining global venue to see out the apocalypse — nor an overrated global bit player led by a PM more popular with overseas feature writers than her own people, as some on the right claim.

The United States is sometimes described as God’s gift to researchers. Fifty states, all taking different approaches to social and economic problems and pushing out a rich flow of data about what works and doesn’t work in subtly different circumstances. Tingle says New Zealand could have played that role for Australia, “an experiment, a point of comparison… occurring across the Tasman all these years, if we just chose to look.” The essay becomes “a political and policy nerd’s Cook’s Tour,” an effort to understand why the two countries so often “start in very similar places and finish in completely different ones.”

Situated in the Pacific and colonised by the British? Tick for New Zealand, tick for Australia. Indigenous peoples appallingly mistreated and still suffering significant disadvantage? Tick, tick. The colonisers entered into a treaty with those Indigenous people? Tick, cross. Indigenous language and cultural rituals genuinely integrated into symbols and practices of politics and nationhood? Tick, cross. A sense of economic security “upended” by Britain’s entry into the European Common Market in the 1970s, requiring “whole new ways to make a living”? Tick, tick. A left-leaning government in the 1980s overturning the historical dependence on industry protection and state capitalism, opening markets to the world, and re-orienting business towards exports? Tick, tick.

This narrative continues into 2020, when the two countries responded to the Covid-19 pandemic in intriguingly similar and different ways. It’s an absorbing tale of comparative history. New Zealanders tend to know it better than Australians, partly because around 15 per cent of them live here.

I first visited New Zealand in 1980 to run in its annual track and field athletics series. It was no backwater. This was John Walker’s last summer as reigning Montreal Olympic 1500 metre champion. A crowd of 25,000 turned up to the meet at his home track in Auckland to see him, along with New Zealand’s other Olympic medallists, Rod Dixon and Dick Quax, and the internationals who came to race them. Sixteen thousand fans were at the Christchurch stadium, where Walker had arrived on the world stage six years earlier, running faster than the old world record in an epic final at the Commonwealth Games, but falling just short of the gold medal won by front-running Tanzanian Filbert Bayi.

One of the mid-week meets was held on the magnificent old grass track at Cooks Gardens in Whanganui. Here, an earlier New Zealand superstar, triple Olympic gold medallist Peter Snell, had broken Australian Herb Elliott’s world record for the mile in 1962. Snell’s coach, Arthur Lydiard, was later crowned “All Time Best Running Coach” by the US Runners World. Auckland’s Waitākere Ranges, where Lydiard’s athletes built the strength and endurance that set up their northern hemisphere racing seasons, were cathedrals of the sport for the obsessive types who participated in it.

But it was New Zealand. Much later, Jacinda Ardern joked to American night-time host Stephen Colbert, “It’s New Zealand, we all know each other.” A former colleague of mine who worked there once told me, “It’s New Zealand, you ring cabinet ministers and they ring you back.” That summer in 1980, I was warming up in Wellington for a race I was lucky to get a start in, when John Walker jogged up to my shoulder. He was the biggest track star on the planet but he spoke to me, if only to say what every Aucklander says when they arrive in Wellington: “Fuckin’ windy, isn’t it?”

I travelled there again in the early 1990s, one of many visiting overseas wonks curious about the extraordinary policy revolution that had taken place under the governments of Labour prime minister David Lange and finance minister Roger Douglas. After operating state monopolies in broadcasting and telecommunications for decades like so many European countries, New Zealand had leapfrogged the gradual steps that Australia and others were contemplating by opening their broadcasting and telecommunications markets and privatising Telecom New Zealand almost overnight.

Most interestingly, a new broadcast funding agency was created that soon rebranded itself New Zealand on Air. It was what mainstream economic policy purists dreamed of, a public agency with a bucket of money to pursue the policy objectives that governments everywhere set for broadcasting, and generally tried to achieve through an opaque mix of state ownership, laws, regulation, taxation and spending. Along with the restructured TVNZ, New Zealand on Air was already having a big impact on New Zealand’s screens and industry, supporting the first local nightly soap opera, Shortland Street, and stimulating independent production like Channel 4 had done in Britain a decade earlier.

The “deregulatory machismo” that Tingle describes was apparent in New Zealand’s decision not just to open its markets and use purist policy models, but also to make “commitments” in international trade agreements that it would never do anything else. Of particular significance were quotas requiring minimum amounts of local programming to be shown on television. Australia had these, New Zealand did not. When signing up to the agreements that became the responsibility of the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, Australia made sure it could retain and adapt such measures in the future. New Zealand signed them away forever.

Australia’s own deregulatory machismos — who revered their Kiwi counterparts — overhauled broadcasting legislation in 1992, requiring the new Australian Broadcasting Authority to “perform its functions in a manner consistent with Australia’s obligations under any… agreement between Australia and a foreign country.” As the minister’s second reading speech made clear (though the legislation did not), that included Australia’s trade agreement with New Zealand, and especially a document with the catchy title of the Trade in Services Protocol to the Australia–New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement, or ANZCERTA, which entered into force in 1989.

In that document, Australia had not preserved its local-program-quota-making capacity vis-à-vis New Zealand. When the new regulator determined its first “Australian Content Standard,” New Zealanders argued it should treat New Zealand programs as favourably as Australian ones. Because it did not, and no political solution was forthcoming, a group crossed the Tasman to commence a legal action in Australia’s Federal Court. The new standard, they said, was inconsistent with the regulator’s legislative obligation to act in accordance with Australia’s international agreements, including ANZCERTA.

The New Zealand group called themselves Project Blue Sky. Australian production industry unions and guilds formed a body called Project True Blue to resist them. The Australians saw it as breathtaking opportunism. Go home and do the hard yards to convince New Zealand politicians to give you quotas of your own! The New Zealanders emphasised a wider goal, the creation of what we might now call a trans-Tasman bubble, a shared space for audiovisual production where the two countries made and watched each other’s TV shows.

The Federal Court agreed with the New Zealanders. On appeal, the High Court agreed with them both. The regulator had to remake its program standard. Ever since, Australian commercial broadcasters have been able to count New Zealand shows towards their local content quotas.

They have made extensive use of this in the expensive drama genres, though much less across their whole schedules. According to ACMA figures, Nine Network stations earned more than half of their Australian adult drama points in 2019 from New Zealand series like Westside, Straight Forward and The Brokenwood Mysteries. Seven earned just under a fifth and Ten just under a tenth. But less than 0.1 per cent of total transmission hours on the primary channels Seven, Nine and Ten were occupied by New Zealand programs in 2019, and no more than 2 per cent on the networks’ other channels. The Seven Network, for example, screens New Zealand fishing shows like Big Angry Fish and Fishy Business on 7mate.

As all this regulatory brawling was happening, a young filmmaker born in Wellington but living in Australia was making movies. Jane Campion directed Two Friends for the ABC, shot Sweetie in Sydney, and directed a three-episode bio-drama about New Zealand writer Janet Frame that had its world premiere in a single session at the Sydney Film Festival. She then won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Academy Award for The Piano, shot in New Zealand. More recently, the first series of Campion’s co-produced, co-directed and co-written miniseries Top of the Lake was set on the South Island, the second in Sydney.

This kind of Tasman-hopping career and sensibility, once unusual, has become commonplace. It used to be surprising when a government screen agency in either country appointed a citizen from the other as its chief executive. Over the past two decades it has become almost mandatory. Campion’s work was among the first to reveal the increasingly porous nature of the personal, social and cultural borders between the two countries. The Covid-19 pandemic has continued this now well-established historical dualism, exploiting the geographic reality of physical borders to serve short-term epidemiological ends, while raising the possibility of a Tasman travel bubble to stimulate longer-term economic revival in two countries that depend heavily on tourism.

The High Road traverses the many “sliding doors” moments in the trans-Tasman relationship, beginning with New Zealand’s decision to remain a nation in an empire rather than a state of the new Australian Commonwealth at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both nations sent military forces to the first world war, fighting alongside each other as “Anzacs” at Gallipoli and then building discrete national legends from the common catastrophe.

For decades, they sheltered with the same great and powerful friend, first Britain, then the United States under the postwar ANZUS alliance. Foreign policy stances have diverged in recent decades, especially since the French sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in 1985. “We never heard a peep out of those people who we were allegedly in a Western alliance with,” David Lange said a decade later. Now, relationships with China are providing fresh terrain for divergence between two countries that aspire to independent multilateralism but have radically different resource endowments and industrial strengths.

Perhaps the most fruitful areas of policy comparison at present, and where Tingle’s title nods, are electoral systems and the treatment of Indigenous people. The “mixed member proportional” system, or MMP, introduced in New Zealand in the 1990s, is widely credited with pushing the country’s political parties nearer to the ideological centre, turning down the heat of political discourse because of the need to operate in coalitions — at least until Ardern’s Labour Party became the first administration to win a majority in its own right at this year’s election. Yet MMP is also criticised for tempering the capacity and desire for large-scale change, precisely the thing that became part of unicameral New Zealand’s global brand in the late 1980s.

For Indigenous people, Tingle finds “an extraordinary relevance in how the Treaty of Waitangi has developed in the last half-century to the debate we are now having in Australia about Indigenous recognition and a Voice to parliament. And to a debate we are not having about truth-telling and reconciliation.” While New Zealand has been building bipartisan support for real changes based on the legal framework of the Treaty of Waitangi, Australia has been retreating from the possibilities presented by the Mabo and Wik High Court decisions in the 1990s. Offered the gracious language, opportunity and machinery of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Australia, so far, has “comprehensively stuffed it.”

This is not a plea to adopt someone else’s template, and one that doesn’t work perfectly even in its place of origin. To give one example, again from the media field, a fine recent essay by Zita Joyce explores the tension between the Treaty of Waitangi and the system of property rights in radiofrequency spectrum pioneered by New Zealand in the 1980s. She finds that “the relative scale of gains [for Māori] has significantly declined” over the now thirty-year history of Waitangi claims in the area, although they “remain the only substantial Indigenous challenge to a settler state’s right to assert control over spectrum” anywhere in the world.

The High Road may overstate the case about how little attention Australians have paid to New Zealand experience. Tingle herself acknowledges that “what has gone on across the Tasman has had a continuing deep influence on the conservative economic agenda in Australia.” In each of the fields mentioned here — electoral systems, relationships between Indigenous people and settler-colonial political systems, film and media policy — Australian specialists have paid a good deal of attention to New Zealand. Cooperation has been a reality for years in many other areas, too. The result has been administrative efficiency with horrendous acronyms: ANZIC (the industry classification used by our statistical agencies), FSANZ (a food standards agency), AS/NZS (industry standards published jointly by Standards Australia and Standards New Zealand, which sometimes break down, leaving us both with “de-jointed standards”).

But outside these many communities of specialist expertise, across the wider landscape of political discussion and historical understanding, Tingle’s argument seems absolutely persuasive. Ardern and the pandemic may have altered that landscape, at least for the time being. A Quarterly Essay is its own evidence of that. The bubble, this time, might be more than a temporary fillip to kickstart accommodation bookings in Cairns and the Coromandel. They are the neighbours, for goodness sake. We really should get to know them better. • 

The post Tasman bubble appeared first on Inside Story.

A subcommittee of COAG, chaired by Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt and Coalition of Peaks chief executive Pat Turner, oversaw negotiation between Indigenous interests and all levels of Australian governments. The result, the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, released in late July, provides an opportunity to assess the ramifications and effectiveness of the Indigenous groups’ involvement in the process.

The agreement included not only sixteen new targets — mostly in policy areas that are primarily state and territory responsibilities — but also a series of priority reforms for joint national action. The latter, included at the insistence of Indigenous interests, were designed to tackle the systemic and structural underpinnings of Indigenous disadvantage; they focused on formalising Indigenous involvement in policymaking related to programs and services; strengthening Indigenous community-controlled organisations; transforming the operations of government organisations to improve accountability and responsiveness; and improving access to data.

The reaction to the new agreement has been mixed, focusing overwhelmingly on the scope, rationale and shortcomings of the sixteen new targets and the absence of other targets. Although a significant segment of public opinion (both mainstream and Indigenous) appears to be supportive of the aspirations and content of the new agreement, widespread scepticism has also emerged. Critics point to the targets’ lack of ambition, particularly in relation to incarceration rates and family violence, and the absence of the investment needed to ensure they are met.

Nationally, Labor and the Greens support the new national agreement, but both parties have called for extra funding. The most surprising criticism came from prominent architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, who pointedly questioned the representativeness of the peak organisations that negotiated with governments — a development that raises complex issues about how Indigenous interests are represented and advocated more widely.

Despite this debate, some of the key implications of the new partnership agreement have been overlooked.

The best way to unravel the deeper policy implications of the new Closing the Gap targets is to consider what each of the parties to the agreement — the Commonwealth, the states and territories, and Indigenous interests — were seeking.

While the governments’ objectives were opaque, their shape can be discerned by analysing past policy approaches and by reverse engineering the final agreement. It would be naive to take the public rhetoric of governments regarding their objectives at face value; for example, the Commonwealth refused access to an evaluation of the National Indigenous Reform Agreement, the COAG document that established the Closing the Gap targets in 2008, on the basis that to do so would reveal “deliberative processes” regarding the negotiations.

In my view, the Commonwealth is likely to have had four objectives in refreshing Closing the Gap:

• to shift the goalposts so as to diminish the significance of the annual ritual admission of failure to meet its targets (the “humiliation driver”)

• to avoid structural or systemic policy reforms that are necessary for greater Indigenous inclusion yet would impose unacceptable political costs (the “policy stasis driver”)

• to avoid significant new and ongoing financial investment in addressing Indigenous disadvantage (the “deficit driver”)

• to shift political and financial responsibility for Indigenous services to the states and territories to the maximum extent possible (the “fiscal federalism driver”)

All of these drivers are mutually reinforcing, and their attainment would combine to compound and reinforce Indigenous exclusion.

Because the original Closing the Gap targets, fixed by COAG, were expiring, the Commonwealth was able to corner the states and territories. The premiers and chief ministers were already at the table, and couldn’t easily avoid engaging. In many respects, they also share those four objectives, except that their fiscal federalism driver points in the opposite direction. Above all, they would want to ensure that the Commonwealth doesn’t offload responsibilities for servicing Indigenous citizens and communities without providing funding too, and to ensure that the agreed targets can be implemented and assessed flexibly. In theory, they could have pushed back, but the Commonwealth had cleverly brought Indigenous interests into the design of its strategy, making it politically harder for the states and territories to resist a new negotiation.

The Indigenous parties to the process were the most transparent. The Coalition of Peaks had laid out its overarching agenda in a number of public forums. It had no choice but to do this openly, because it had to build, and importantly sustain, an alliance of disparate organisations with no established organisational infrastructure. The Peaks’ initial core objectives (as set out on its website) were fourfold: shared decision-making, community control, structural transformation of government agencies, and better access to data.

Spelling out these objectives of the parties helps clarify the dynamics of the refresh. First, the Commonwealth’s fiscal dominance and legislative heft outweigh the states and territories individually and collectively, and its policy objectives — though never made explicit — are more straightforward and encompassing.

Second, the parties’ objectives are not “mirror images”: they don’t involve zero-sum calculations and therefore allow for win/win outcomes (admittedly constrained by the respective ambition and comparative strength of the parties).

Third, the Indigenous objectives were, of necessity, dependent on ongoing commitment and implementation by governments, whereas the governments’ objectives were not dependent on Indigenous responses and were essentially one-off decisions, albeit with longer-term institutional implications.

Fourth, while Indigenous interests traditionally prefer more rather than less Commonwealth engagement, it seems likely that they faced a trade-off between their own objectives and supporting the states in resisting Commonwealth disengagement. Their focus on building Indigenous capacity lessened their ability to insist on mechanisms to pressure on the states and territories to wholeheartedly implement the necessary policies.

Finally, a further “interest” is at stake in these negotiations — namely, the wider public interest — though it is inchoate and intangible and has no seat at the table. This interest transcends the partisan and institutional interests of governments and oppositions, and extends beyond the preoccupations of the current generation of Australians. It posits a simple question without easy answers: how might the negotiations contribute to the sort of nation we hope to bequeath to our children and their children?

While it will take some years for the agreement’s tangible outcomes to emerge, an informed assessment of likely outcomes is possible now that we know the detail of the proposal. After all, the strategists and insiders within each party who determined what was and wasn’t on the table made just such an assessment.

My own assessment, against the notional objectives of the parties, is as follows.

The Commonwealth, by achieving all of its likely objectives with minimal political cost, is the big winner. It has retreated from its overarching national policy role to essentially become a mere aggregator of statistics. By strenuously advocating the notion of shared accountability, and by choosing targets that overwhelmingly relate to state and territory responsibilities, it has shifted the responsibility for explaining failure largely to the states and territories, and to a lesser extent to Indigenous interests.

Importantly, the proliferation of implementation plans and performance data across eight jurisdictions and against sixteen (plus) targets, most of which are required to be disaggregated into four or more categories, will create an extraordinarily complex maze of outcomes to be monitored, assessed and (in theory) adjusted as necessary by policymakers. Commonwealth ministers will sleep soundly at night in the knowledge that when everyone is accountable, no one is accountable.

The Commonwealth’s success in avoiding policy responsibility is not just about Closing the Gap. It is the culmination of a decade-long push to shift Indigenous policy responsibilities away from the Commonwealth and towards the states and territories, and away from Indigenous-specific programs and towards mainstream programs. On issues as diverse as heritage protection, essential services, Indigenous housing and legal aid, the Commonwealth has been reducing its footprint. Where it retains responsibility — in relation to income support, for example — it has increasingly turned to mainstream programs rather than Indigenous-specific ones. The new Closing the Gap agreement is a major capstone on a pre-existing trend that will shape Indigenous policy for generations.

Measured against their assumed objectives, the states and territories have emerged from these negotiations as losers. They will each be obliged to develop detailed implementation plans against the various targets and introduce the necessary policies to deliver them. They receive no extra funding, which means they must either raise extra revenue or borrowings, cut services elsewhere, or — perhaps most attractively from their perspectives — find ways to replace tangible actions with rhetoric (which would shift the loss to Indigenous interests).

Assessing the outcomes for Indigenous interests is not straightforward. The first-order issue is that they leveraged their partnership status into an ongoing role in overseeing Indigenous service delivery both in Canberra and in the states and territories. If implemented, this is of huge strategic importance: it would be the first time Indigenous interests are present when decisions with life-changing implications are being made.

Second, the new national agreement gives Indigenous interests a commitment by the governments of eight jurisdictions, plus local government, to a new policymaking approach based on partnership and greater community control of service delivery. This commitment is built around a formal cross-jurisdictional agreement to four overarching priorities:

• Shared decision-making, including a joined-up approach to five policy priority areas and the creation of six place-based partnerships between all levels of government and relevant communities.

• Sector-strengthening plans in priority areas, starting in early childhood care and development, housing, health and disability.

• Transformed government organisations focusing on issues such as cultural safety, improved engagement with Indigenous organisations and, importantly, improved accountability through more transparent funding processes.

• Shared access to data and information at a regional level.

Implemented effectively and with imagination, these reforms will be far-reaching and will fundamentally increase the influence of First Nations people in policymaking across the nation. To have them embedded in a formal agreement signed up to by all levels of government in Australia is a monumental achievement.

Offsetting these nominal gains are two serious downsides for Indigenous interests; risks that I assess as both high-impact and highly probable. First, they will struggle to build — and, importantly, sustain — the organisational capabilities to engage persuasively and influentially both nationally and, most importantly, across eight jurisdictions. A “seat at the table” does not guarantee positive outcomes. This challenge will be more difficult if governments pursue strategies encouraging internal dissension.

The second risk is the one I foreshadowed earlier: that governments will avoid implementing, resourcing and sustaining the strategies necessary to achieve these reforms. Implementation failure is ubiquitous across Australian governments, even in contexts where policymakers have the best intentions and a relatively free hand. Nicholas Gruen recently framed this as a disjunction between what policymakers say and what they do; a problem he described as being endemic in policy circles. Memorably, he referenced Lord Acton’s observation on rowing as the perfect preparation for public life: moving in one direction while facing the other. The new agreement will require policymakers in a variety of jurisdictions to operate at levels of coordination and cooperation that are rarely achieved in mainstream services, and will require them to take account of Indigenous views in fluid policy and political contexts.

But are governments prepared to make such commitments? Two examples, incarceration levels and employment levels, suggest they may not be, and point to the likely impact of that failure on the lives of Indigenous citizens.

After a leaked version of the final agreement revealed a proposed (and not apparently ambitious) goal of parity in incarceration rates by 2093, Minister Wyatt announced that the target would be changed. The parties subsequently reframed the target as a reduction in Indigenous adult incarceration of 15 per cent by 2031. If achieved, according to the most recent data, this would bring the rate of Indigenous incarceration down from 2589 per 100,000 to 2201 per 100,000, against a mainstream incarceration rate of 223 per 100,000. After ten years’ effort, in other words, Indigenous incarceration rates would still be around ten times the rate of the wider community.

In relation to employment, Closing the Gap now aims by 2031 to increase to 62 per cent the proportion of working-age Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are employed. According to researchers at the ANU, around 47 per cent of working-age people — those aged fifteen to sixty-four — were employed at the time of the 2016 census, compared with 72 per cent of the non-Indigenous working-age population. The new target focuses on the narrower age range of twenty-five to sixty-four, sidestepping extremely low youth employment, both mainstream and Indigenous, and shifting the latter challenge to the target that focuses on youth employment, education and training.

Even if the new employment target is achieved, some 40 per cent of Indigenous citizens aged twenty-five to sixty-four — four out of ten — won’t be employed by 2031, with all the associated health and economic repercussions for individuals, families and the wider community.

If reducing Indigenous incarceration or increasing Indigenous employment were actually a real priority for Australian governments, these targets would be much more ambitious. In fact, their failure to commit to ambitious targets — and to the policy reforms and increased funding necessary to achieve them — clearly represents a lost opportunity for Indigenous interests. But it can’t credibly be argued that Indigenous negotiators — the party with the least negotiation leverage — bear responsibility for this outcome; instead it is a failure of governments to move decisively beyond the status quo.

Finally, what of the public interest? Australia’s continued failure to tackle deep-seated Indigenous disadvantage diminishes us all. The federal government’s ongoing retreat from policy responsibility is driven by short-term politics and doesn’t align with the expectations of the Australian population when they voted overwhelmingly in 1967 to give the Commonwealth the power to legislate in relation to Aboriginal people. More insidiously, the pretence and self-deception involved in reassuring ourselves that we are doing all that is possible, and that somehow the issues are “intractable” and thus insoluble, undercut the very integrity of our democratic culture. This is not a win for the public interest.

All of us, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, have a propensity to see politics and policymaking in terms of a destination rather than a journey. Yet, as we reach each milestone, others appear on the horizon.

The Closing the Gap negotiations saw Indigenous groups successfully demanding a role in developing future policies and programs, and forced governments to formally commit to structural reforms, shifting the nature of the journey ahead. Instead of the previously impenetrable terrain surrounding arid targets and arcane statistics, we now face a climb, admittedly steep, through more open terrain on which the milestones are more visible and are linked to a framework for developing further reforms. Despite my pessimism, the opportunities for the nation have expanded. •

The post A steep climb ahead, but the landscape has become clearer for Closing the Gap appeared first on Inside Story.

We remember these sites not only because they’ve been recounted and chronicled in books. Each is also an active site of memorialisation, studded with monuments and enlivened across the years by performances and other memory acts. Cook’s declaration in August 1770 was only an indeterminate moment of possession, as Bain Attwood has recently reminded us. It was the settlers and colonisers who came after who enacted that claim, and went on to cement themselves in this stolen land by building monuments to Cook throughout the country and purchasing his relics to fill their public libraries and archives.

One of those monuments is an obelisk erected at Point Hicks on the southeast coast of Victoria in 1925. When we look at this small, rocky cape we see a landscape of Cook memorialisation, part of a global chain of monuments dotting Australia’s and other nation’s coasts. About one hundred metres due south of the lighthouse built at Point Hicks in 1890 (when it was still known as Cape Everard), the obelisk asserts that this land was the first seen by Cook in Australia. With its classical form, it seems so intentional. Yet a churn of bureaucratic correspondence, indecision and delegation — partly reflecting the focus on Possession Island in the north — lies behind the monument as it stands today.

The story of the obelisk, and of a copy made and sent to Britain in 1934, highlights the ambiguities, evasions and ambivalences that have been part of Australia’s long remembering and venerating of Captain Cook. The obelisk and the rocky land at Point Hicks testify to the great lengths to which white settler Australians have gone, including moving the very earth, in justifying their presence on stolen land.

The early decades of the twentieth century were a rich time of memory work in Australia. Historical societies formed in many of the states, and civic-minded people banded together in their communities to erect memorials and monuments that spoke of the growing maturity of their nation. It was in this context that the council of the Sydney-based Royal Australian Historical Society called on the prime minister in May 1923 “to ensure the reservation for all time of Possession Island (near Cape York) where Captain James Cook performed the ceremony of taking possession of the eastern portion of New Holland” and “cause measures to be taken to erect a memorial to Captain Cook upon that Island commemorating that fact.”

Two men pushed this proposal. The first was the president of the society, noted NSW agricultural administrator W.S. Campbell, retired from bureaucratic toil and enjoying life as an amateur historian and Cook buff. The other was the society’s honorary secretary, Karl Cramp, an “exacting” schools inspector, “feared by teachers,” whose “textbooks indoctrinated generations of schoolchildren in hero-worship, the Whig interpretation of English history and a jingoistic view of Australia bonded to Britain.”

Public memorialisation of Cook in Australia only began in earnest in the late nineteenth century. His first public statue was erected in the Sydney suburb of Randwick in 1874, and the statue that still dominates Sydney’s Hyde Park, with its proclamation that Cook “discovered this territory,” was unveiled before a crowd of 60,000 in February 1879.

With “explorers” a favoured subject of public memorialisation in the colonies, and later in the newly federated states, cairns and other blocky and rocky monuments came to stud the landscape. In 1911, for example, the Victorian education department, urged on by the Australian Natives’ Association, declared that 19 April each year would be Discovery Day, when students would think about the explorers. In the following decade, Victoria was even home to an explicit “memorial movement” dedicated to encouraging the building of structures that might cause locals to reflect on history and nation. This memorialisation came at the same time as a consequential and pervasive forgetting. The colonists and citizens of the new nation were noting the demise of the Aboriginal people but burying the truth of their violent dispossession.

The Royal Australian Historical Society’s hope that Cook would be memorialised at Possession Island was part of this larger cultural push. Yet, when it did ask the prime minister for funds to support its proposal, the bureaucracy of the young Commonwealth — still based in Melbourne — was not entirely enthusiastic. An officer of the home and territories department thought the prime minister had no power over what was plainly a Queensland government concern. Perhaps fearing a great outlay of money, the department was inclined to rebuff the proposal.

With gentle mockery, the Sydney Sun depicted a scene of bureaucratic confusion:

There were searchings of heart and of maps lately in the Department of Home and Territories, Melbourne. A letter drifted into the department from the Royal Australian Historical Society of New South Wales, suggesting that a monument of some kind should be placed on Possession Island. The question was where and what was Possession Island? There seemed to be no official record of such a place.

The playful report said that “an outside expert was consulted, and he pointed out that it was the little island just off Cape York… The department breathed again.”

That outside expert was Kenneth Binns, senior librarian for Australian collections in the Parliamentary Library, the precursor of the current National Library. With the library about to receive Cook’s Endeavour log, for which the Commonwealth government had recently paid £5000 at a Sotheby’s auction in London, Binns was in a thoroughly Cook mood.

By early July, he had marshalled his thoughts and prepared a memorandum on Possession Island. He reminded the department’s secretary that the Commonwealth had only recently purchased Cook’s journal. And he conveyed information from Captain John King Davis, famed Antarctic navigator and the Commonwealth’s director of navigation, that Possession Island “is now uninhabited, and very seldom visited.” Binns also argued that it was worthwhile to commemorate not just the last place Cook visited in Australia, but also the first place sighted: what Cook had named Point Hicks but was officially known as Cape Everard. “Speaking personally,” he went on, “I may say I am thoroughly in sympathy with the suggestions of the Historical Society; but would like to see coupled with them a similar suggestion for the commemoration of Point Hicks.”

Sensing that the Commonwealth government would not entertain a grand gesture given the large financial outlay already made for Cook’s journal, Binns thought “a simple brass-plate” would suffice to commemorate “the Historic occasion.” Given that the sites were “seldom visited, a brass-plate suitably inscribed and affixed to a suitably situated rock, would meet all requirements.” He thought that a committee of the University of Sydney’s G.A. Wood, the University of Melbourne’s Ernest Scott and Cramp could easily compose the inscriptions.

Federal cabinet approved this modest suggestion at the end of August 1923. But what followed was almost a year and a half of slowly paced developments relying on a glacial exchange of correspondence across the country. Despite being one of the forces behind the idea, Cramp, along with Wood and Scott, only finally agreed to the inscriptions  in May 1924.

There was also the nagging question of whether Cook had actually seen Point Hicks on that April dawn in 1770. In 1907, Melbourne land surveyor Thomas Fowler had argued forcefully to the Geographical Society that the voyage records and charts could not substantiate the claim. Unfortunately, Fowler was up against the prominent historian Ernest Scott, who vigorously defended Cook’s navigational competence. Kenneth Binns was conscious of these disagreements and thought the plaque should be “couched in fairly general terms, lest some hyper-critic should arise and question its correctness.”

In November 1924, eighteen months after the proposal was agreed on, the memorial plate was finally complete. But where exactly on Point Hicks should it be mounted?

Binns had asserted a year earlier that the plaque could simply be given to the navigation department and they could affix it in some suitable way. Now, for the first time, an obelisk was proposed, probably by the director of lighthouses, and duly commissioned. It was constructed of concrete in a Melbourne dockyard in early 1925 and sent by the Lady Loch to Cape Everard in May. (That it was made of concrete rather than a more noble material made it a structural sibling to the lighthouse itself, which had been the first constructed of concrete in Victoria when bluestone and locally sourced granite proved too expensive.)

More correspondence ensued. “In what Direction is the Brass plate to be?” the lightkeeper asked in June 1925. “Facing the sea or facing towards the station?” Towards the station, came the answer, with the additional injunction that “the greatest care should be taken to set the shaft true; the slightest deviation from the perpendicular will spoil the whole effect.”

By the end of August the lightkeeper reported that the obelisk had been “completed to the best of my ability, your instructions having been strictly carried out.” The instruction to paint it “mill white” was sent in late October and the lick of paint applied in early December. It was a well-meaning if slightly disorganised affair all round. Two and a half years had passed between the proposal and the finished product.

But who would even see this obelisk? Was there a vain hope that passing vessels would see the white pillar? One government engineer thought that the obelisk might be seen from a ship up to a mile away. In his recent book Seashaken Houses, author and building conservationist Tom Nancollas reminds us that lighthouses are “designed expressly to repel, to emphatically not be seen at close quarters.” What then of the obelisk that might stand proudly though diminutively beneath that repellent building? Cape Everard was not the accessible and well-tramped site in a national park that it is today.

The concrete obelisk joined with the concrete lighthouse to demarcate the nation’s edge, to attest to the division between land and ocean, to be a sentinel of history. Its erection also meant that three signal sites of Cook’s Australian encounter — Point Hicks, Botany Bay and Possession Island — were graced by this classical form.

And so the mill-white concrete obelisk stood there, little thought of, until another stone monument was made to move across the globe. In 1933, in the Yorkshire town of Great Ayton, a stone cottage was put up for sale. It had been owned by James Cook’s father, and local lore had it that young James had grown up there. The auctioneer was only too happy to play up that legend.

News of the sale reached Victoria, where the state centenary was due in 1934. The government had gathered a committee of local worthies to plan for the occasion, among them Russell Grimwade, steward of a pharmaceutical fortune, pillar of Melbourne society, philanthropist and dedicated Australian antiquarian. Having learned of the sale and proposed purchase of the cottage to the Victorian premier, Grimwade had the Victorian agent-general in London inspect the building and ask whether the family would sell to a buyer who wanted to uproot the building and send it to one of the dominions. Grimwade’s offer of £800 for the cottage easily outbid the highest local offer of £300, and he stumped up a total of £2000 for its purchase, dismantling, transport and re-erection in Melbourne.

Russell Grimwade in his Flinders Lane office, Melbourne, in 1931. University of Melbourne Archives, 2002.0003.00503

Not all were happy with this philanthropic gesture. Apart from some public friction in Melbourne about where exactly the cottage would be put, the good burghers of Great Ayton were none too pleased that a local landmark would be shipped away. How to placate them? The Victorian premier suggested a plaque: a trifle to forge and despatch to Yorkshire. Grimwade agreed, adding only that “the record we send should take the form of a stone [or] boulder from that part of the coast of Victoria which was first sighted by Cook.” Clearly aware of the disagreements surrounding the location of Point Hicks, he also told the premier that he was “having it confirmed at the moment by a competent authority as to which point this was and will advise you later, and I am preparing suggested working for engraving on the stone.”

Once again John King Davis, the gangly and storied Commonwealth director of navigation, played a vital part. Like Cook, Davis was a ship’s captain who had ascended to higher latitudes, passing the Antarctic circle and meeting with the ice. Davis and Grimwade — both members of the Melbourne Club — were friends, and Davis, as a fine mariner and navigator himself, was the “competent authority” Grimwade had mentioned to the premier.

Davis wrote to Kenneth Binns, by then the national librarian, to ask “what evidence was before the Government when it was decided to place the obelisk at Cape Everard as being the first land sighted from the ‘Endeavour’?” Davis had done only a little research on the matter, and what he read didn’t stack up. “From a perusal of Cook’s own Log,” he wrote, “it appears the first land sighted from the ‘Endeavour’ was not on the seaboard at all and if you have any papers which will assist in clearing up this point I should be very grateful for the opportunity of seeing them.”

J.K. Davis at Cliffy Island, 1933, photographed by Russell Grimwade. University of Melbourne Archives, 2002.0003.00057

Had Davis forgotten the events of 1923 and 1924, when he had played a minor role in the erection of the obelisk? Perhaps he was too efficient an administrator, and had redirected Binns’s request to the director of lighthouses, his subordinate, without a second’s thought. Binns was clearly sympathetic to the claim that Point Hicks was, in fact, the land seen by Hicks and Cook.

In late 1933, in pursuit of navigational exactitude and not entirely believing earlier investigations, Davis had one of his officers “transfer Cook’s original chart which is reproduced in the Historical Records of New South Wales to the modern Admiralty Chart.” This Davis sent to Binns for the National Library.

A year later, still not satisfied, Davis appealed to that greatest of maritime authorities, the hydrographer of the Royal Navy, for “an examination of the original records.” But those simply confirmed the problem: that Cook and Hicks, with some eighty fathoms of water beneath the Endeavour, probably did not see land at 6am that morning.

The validity of Point Hicks wasn’t the only matter in question. Grimwade’s attempt at civic munificence was undermined when many queried whether Cook had anything to do with the cottage. Had the future seafarer grown up in it? No, was the short answer. Had he ever visited his parents there? Yes, but only once… probably.

Grimwade battled doubters from the date of the purchase up to the inauguration of the cottage in the Fitzroy Gardens on 15 October 1934. His definitive and emphatic statement was that “it has been proved beyond all doubt and has become a recognised historical fact that he lived in the cottage for three weeks after he returned to England following his discovery of Australia.” He was also sure, though without evidence, that Cook “lived there for a good deal longer than that.”

Grimwade’s was not simply an antiquarian urge. In valorising Cook and appropriating him for the task of sanctifying the state of Victoria, he was celebrating a specific form of the Australian nation — a nation of white Britons who had made purportedly useless land into a productive home. Given his devotion to the explorers who had “opened up” the continent, his erasure of Aboriginal people from Australia’s past and future was near complete.

Grimwade made some of his sentiments explicit in a Sunday evening radio broadcast in September 1933. “Providence,” he began, “has granted to the people of Victoria one hundred years of peace in our land in which to transform it from uncultivated bush to a settled productive area of happy homes and bountiful harvests.” The Indigenous owners of this land, he opined, “had not reached that stage of development that had taught them to cultivate a tree bearing food nor an annual crop.”

He went on to utter the national lie of a settler colony founded on death and dispossession: “The timid and ineffective Aboriginal has been quietly dispossessed with the minimum of effort and inhumanity… Australia is the only important area of the Empire in which the blood of battle has not been spilt.” How was “the poor primitive blackfellow” to face the nation that had sailed the “uncharted seas” and “provided ample proof of their fitness to survive”?

The granite of Point Hicks, photographed by Russell Grimwade in 1933. University of Melbourne Archives, 2002.0003.00480

Grimwade wasn’t much impressed by the Gippsland coastal landscape either. For him, Cape Everard was “a lonely spot,” an inaccessible landscape of “sand, wind and tea-tree.” This sandy, scrubby land defied not only the individual wanting to pass through it but the entire imperial project of cultivation and improvement. It “offers no reward for tilling and no hope for harvest. It is entirely uninhabited save for the population of native animals it bore in Cook’s day — reduced in numbers of larger marsupials, but still prolific of wallabies, lizards and many snakes.” The rhetorical ease with which Grimwade ignored the dispossession of the original owners and minimised the ecological ravages of colonisation is stark. This is what the obelisk was for.

Grimwade also painted himself as a dynamic and public-minded businessman. Despite the fact that he would have clubbed and dined with such people in town, and despite his reliance on Davis and a whole cast of public servants to convey him and the stonemasons he employed to Cape Everard, he proclaimed that it was “easy for a patriotic Administrator in the comfort of a Melbourne office to say it shall be done, but mark what follows this simple order.”

Grimwade didn’t simply order that some stone from Cape Everard should be sent to Yorkshire as a modest token of thanks. He went to the small headland himself to inspect the site and meet the stonemasons sent to quarry the granite. He joined the Commonwealth lighthouse ship Cape York at Williamstown on 30 October 1933 for one of its quarterly resupply visits to Victoria’s eastern lighthouses. They stopped at Wilsons Promontory and Cliffy Island before reaching Cape Everard, and would visit Gabo Island on the return journey to Melbourne.

The Melbourne Age reports on the expedition on 26 October 1933. Trove

A keen amateur photographer, Grimwade travelled with camera in hand to document the journey. On 1 November, he tramped around Cape Everard, taking in its many views, while the stonemasons (who had travelled over the difficult country with their tools) loaded up the ship with the granite. In a short newspaper travelogue, Grimwade reported that the masons “chose a spot less than 40 feet from the obelisk” from which to extract the rock.

Moving the granite blocks at Point Hicks, photographed by Russell Grimwade. University of Melbourne Archives, 2002.0003.00066

The town clerk of Middlesbrough — the borough in which Great Ayton sits — had expressed gratitude for the offer of the obelisk to replace the cottage, but wondered if the new memorial did, in fact, have to be an obelisk. Unfortunately, he informed the Victorian agent-general, the cottage was already in sight of the Cook monument on Easby Moor, which was itself an obelisk. Even the agent-general was unsure: were the memorial stones at Cape Everard in the form of a cairn or an obelisk?

Grousing at the style, cost and nature of memorialisation was part of the process. Kenneth Binns, reminiscing about his own part in the memorialisation of Cook, wrote to Grimwade to recollect that the Queensland Geographical Society had itself complained in 1924 that the obelisk erected on Possession Island was at the landing place rather than at the top of the island. Binns thought that the extra cost of having it up high wasn’t warranted, given so few people would actually visit.

Loading the granite blocks, photographed by Russell Grimwade. University of Melbourne Archives, 2002.0003.00396

The stones disembarked with Grimwade and Davis at Williamstown, there to be prepared for shipping and construction. In late June 1934, to whet Melburnians’ appetite for the cottage slowly being reassembled in the Fitzroy Gardens, the new obelisk was temporarily erected on St Kilda Road, just near the Princes Bridge. So out of reach at Cape Everard, the obelisk was now accessible in ersatz form — or, rather, in a finer granitic form than its original concrete body — close to the city. The City of Melbourne even saw fit to have it floodlit in the evenings. Then, in early July, it was again on the move, bound for Yorkshire aboard the steamer Hobson’s Bay.

The Hurstbridge Advertiser reports progress on 6 July 1934. Trove

On 15 October 1934, having made it to Yorkshire safely, the granite monument was unveiled in Great Ayton on the same day that Cook’s cottage was inaugurated in the Fitzroy Gardens. The exchange of geology and memory was marked, naturally, with speeches. At the unveiling of the obelisk, the Victorian agent-general declared that “posterity will judge the nations by the heroes they crown… Cook’s character made the British Empire as we know it today.”

In his 1968 Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming, the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner observed that 1934 might be seen by some as a turning point in Australian Aboriginal history, that people were realising something had to change between White and Black Australia. For him, though, it seemed “to have been just another year on the old plateau of complacence.” Russell Grimwade’s words and his physical interventions into that “lonely spot” on the Gippsland coast testify to this. Stanner also referred to “lonely places” in the second of his lectures, “The Great Australian Silence.” For Stanner, however, the term reflected the increasing realisation among Australians that “intolerable things were happening in the lonely places.”

We can counteract the glib and unstoried obelisks that venerate Cook by remembering the words and efforts of those who put them there in the first place. When we do uncover and remember those histories of memorialisation, we must surely question our current relationship to them, and to the larger realm of myth animating them. Turning away from the land, Grimwade and those around him were vainly cementing their connection with a navigator who had neither landed in what is now Victoria nor even seen what is now called Point Hicks. •

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Having satisfied myself of the great probability of a passage, thro’ which I intend going with the ship, and therefore may land no more upon this eastern coast of New Holland, and on the western side I can make no new discovery the honour of which belongs to Dutch navigators; but the eastern coast from the latitude of 38 [degrees] South down to this place I am confident was never seen or visited by an European before us and notwithstand[ing] I had in the name of His Majesty taken possession of several places upon the coast, I now once more hoisted English colours and in the name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole eastern coast from the above latitude down to this place by the name of New South Wales.

But what exactly had Cook done in claiming possession?

In April this year the historical significance of Cook’s first landfall at Botany Bay was hotly debated, and something similar may well occur this month over his claim of possession. Yet if the controversy that swirled around the anniversary of Cook’s landfall is any guide, we will probably be none the wiser about the historical significance of this moment. History and myth have become too closely intertwined in academic and public discourse about what Cook did in 1770.

But what might happen if we disentangled these two ways of remembering Cook — if we distinguished between the myths that are told about his famous deeds, on the one hand, and the stories that academic history might tell about them, on the other? It seems to me that this task is especially important if we want to understand why the British government never negotiated with the Aboriginal people for the cession of sovereignty.

Basically, two kinds of myths are told about Cook. The first — the one that has most often been told by settler Australians — figures Cook in heroic terms. He is the man who discovered, claimed and founded Australia. This story only began to be articulated several decades after Cook was believed to have performed these historic feats. Nonetheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, this myth was being told in an increasing number of forms — in school primers, scholarly books, pictorial images, place names, commemorations, porcelain, statuary and stamps, poetry, drama and novels.

That story’s fortunes have no doubt fluctuated in recent decades but it has remained influential. Of late, it has been given a considerable boost by the federal government’s decision to grant an enormous sum of money — $48.7 million — to commemorate in several ways the 250th anniversary of “Cook’s first voyage to Australia [sic] and the Pacific,” though the more grandiose of those plans have been scuttled by the pandemic.

The second myth — the one told largely by Aboriginal people and those sympathetic to their cause — portrays Cook in anti-heroic terms. At the very least, he is held responsible for the fact that the sovereignty and rights of property in land of this country’s Indigenous peoples were denied by the British government on the grounds that this land was terra nullius. At most, he is blamed for the later dispossession, displacement and destruction of this country’s first peoples.

This myth probably began to be told some time after the settler myth started to circulate widely. But it got an enormous boost fifty years ago in reaction to the white celebration of the Cook bicentenary in 1970, and has become increasingly influential in the decades since. More recently, after campaigns for the removal of statues in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, calls have been made for statues of Cook to be removed from Sydney’s Hyde Park and other places.

Many myths have genuine connections to a genuine past and hence are in some sense true. This is certainly the case with the Cook myths. In the case of the settler myth, it could be said that Cook did claim possession of a good part of this continent for the British Crown on the grounds of discovery; in the case of the Aboriginal myth, it can be said that in claiming possession Cook failed to follow his instructions to gain the consent of the native peoples.

Yet both these myths barely represent who Cook really was and what he actually did. This is hardly surprising. Mythic stories work in highly symbolic or abstract terms. They are designed not so much to elucidate the past as to meet particular needs in the present, not the least of which are political ones. National myths that assume the form of foundational stories do their work by deeming specific historical acts or events — in this case Cook’s claiming of possession — to have created the foundations of a nation.

This is true for both the settler and the Aboriginal myths of Cook, though obviously the former claims that this was for the better whereas the latter takes the opposite view. Thus, prime minister Scott Morrison claims that Cook’s 1768–70 voyage (which he reckons saw Australia’s founding father circumnavigate the continent) “is the reason Australia is what it is today” and Labor’s Linda Burney claims that Cook’s landfall signifies “the beginning… of a very difficult period” for Indigenous people.

These mythic stories are terribly important because they help us to apprehend a good deal of the historical significance attributed to Cook’s famous acts. But they are insufficient if we are to truly understand them. While the settler and Aboriginal myths of Cook tell true stories respectively about his claim of possession and the dispossession, displacement and devastation of Aboriginal people caused by British colonisation, they don’t provide a true account of Cook’s acts or the historical significance they can be said to have. Many academic historians seem to have lost sight of, or are ignorant of, this fact. And because they don’t distinguish between the different ways that myth and academic history represent Cook, museum curators, journalists and political figures have tended to follow suit.

To begin to grasp how the Captain Cook myths misrepresent what happened in 1770, we must note that foundational stories of this kind are highly teleological in nature. In other words, particular acts or events are endowed with a purpose, cause or outcome that they only acquired later, even much later. In this case, both the Australian nation (of the settler myth) and the settler colonisation (of the Aboriginal myth) are said to have begun by dint of — or even with — Cook’s acts, especially his act of claiming possession.

And so it is that we find the National Museum of Australia asserting that “Cook’s claim [of possession] would lead to the establishment of a British penal colony in New South Wales eighteen years later.” And a Guardian Australian journalist declaring that “Indigenous people and the[ir] supporters… rightly view [Cook] as the doorman for so many ills that followed.” And a state medical officer likening Cook’s landfall to Covid-19 as a “sudden arrival of an invader from another land, decimating populations.”

Cook’s acts on this continent, which were actually few and far between, were of much less significance to the course of this country’s history than both the settler and Aboriginal myths would have us believe. This becomes apparent if we examine Cook’s act of claiming possession in some detail.

In the first instance, it is a mistake to regard Cook’s claim of possession in 1770 as a precursor to British colonisation of this continent. Imperial powers often instructed agents like Cook to make claims of possession even though they had no plans to plant a colony in those places. This was certainly true in this case.

Furthermore, imperial powers instructed their agents to make claims to very particular places — places that, in Cook’s case, the British Admiralty called “convenient situations.” Usually what they had in mind was the staking of a claim to small amounts of land that might prove useful to empires often conceived primarily in terms of influence over the seas rather than land. Even when agents like Cook made claims to large territories, they were inchoate in nature.

What is more, claims of possession like Cook’s were only preliminary: unless they were confirmed by later acts of possession of the kind associated with settlement, they were regarded as meaningless by imperial powers. In other words, if the British government had not planted a colony in New South Wales relatively soon after Cook’s claiming of possession, its claim could have been overridden by another imperial power, just as the British government later discounted the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman’s claim on the other side of this continent and was careful to plant settlements elsewhere on the coast so that the French could not claim possession.

Just as importantly, the claims of possession made by the agents of a European power were often aimed at their imperial rivals as well as their own people, rather than at local or Indigenous peoples. This is evidently so in the case of Cook, who was acutely aware of other European claims. How could he not be, given this land mass was widely known in European circles by its Dutch name, Nieuw Holland, or New Holland. It is hardly surprising, then, that in the entry in his journal for 22 August 1770 Cook referred to the Dutch claim of possession on the grounds of “discovery” to the west of Possession Island and the absence of any such European claim to the east coast of the continent.

This practice of claiming possession of foreign lands on the basis of being the first European discoverer was all the more common because European imperial agents often found it difficult to make the kind of contact with local peoples necessary to win their consent. Cook evidently felt a sense of relief when a small group of Aboriginal people didn’t oppose the landing of his party at “Possession Island” but made off instead, leaving his party, to his mind, “in peaceable possession of as much of the island as served our purpose.”

Most importantly, it is a mistake to assume that the claims of possession made by an imperial agent like Cook dictated the terms on which an imperial power would treat the sovereignty, let alone rights in land, of Indigenous people. This starts to become clear if we loosen the grip of national foundational stories and compare the case of New South Wales with that of New Zealand — or Nieuw Zeeland, as Aotearoa was named by the Dutch.

Cook claimed possession of small parts of Aotearoa on the very same terms that he claimed parts of this continent, without acquiring the consent of its sovereign peoples. Yet in 1839, when the British government decided it should annex the islands of New Zealand, it opted to negotiate the cession of sovereignty with the local chiefs. In other words, the terms on which Cook claimed possession in New Zealand in 1769 did not bind the British government in 1839. Given this, why do we assume that it did so in regard to New South Wales in 1788? The answer is surely found in the kind of teleology that characterises national foundational stories.

A comparison between these two cases reveals another important point. There is little reliable evidence to suggest that the terms on which Cook claimed possession in New South Wales were determined by his perception that the Indigenous people were either small in numbers or lacking sovereignty and rights of property in land. Cook perceived Māori very differently but still claimed possession of parts of New Zealand on the same basis as he claimed parts of New Holland.

And so we come to the famous story of terra nullius. It, too, can be regarded as a myth in the sense that I have been using this word.

Terra nullius has been used to refer to any legal claim that lands newly discovered by European powers belonged to no one. This is so irrespective of the precise grounds on which such a claim was made. In other words, claims of possession that were often based on a series of different legal rationales ― such as those of discovery, improvement, and settlement ― have been treated by historians as though they were all made on the basis of a single legal doctrine known as terra nullius.

More problematic still, the contention that the British government claimed possession of much of this continent in 1770 or 1788 on the basis of the doctrine of terra nullius is anachronistic. Quite simply, there was neither a doctrine bearing this name nor any historical record of it being used by imperial powers in any systematic fashion until the mid to late nineteenth century.

To be sure, some historians have argued that the doctrine of terra nullius derived by analogy from a similar doctrine know as res nullius and that the latter had firm foundations in a body of law that predated 1770 or 1788, while other historians have contended that terra nullius was connected to another legal doctrine known as occupation.

But the fact of the matter is that the British government invoked neither the doctrine of res nullius nor the doctrine of occupation as it began to colonise New Holland. Instead, it appears to have claimed possession of much of this continent in 1788 on the basis of an amalgam of three other legal doctrines: discovery, which was a claim to be a territory’s first European discoverer; possessio, which was a claim that a person or state who had something and intended to possess it should be regarded as its possessor; and usucapio, which was a claim on the basis of having possessed something for a certain period without interruption.

As this discussion suggests, and as I argue in my book Empire and the Making of Native Title, if we want to understand why the British government never sought to negotiate a treaty with the Indigenous people in order to acquire sovereignty and purchase land, we need to look elsewhere than Cook and his doings in 1770. Indeed, it is only by shifting our gaze away from 1770 — and by grasping the distinctive nature of the historical truths that mythic stories tell about moments that actually occurred much later — that we are able to explain the plight of so many Aboriginal Australians today. •

The post On Possession Island appeared first on Inside Story.

Mokak is leading the Productivity Commission team developing a new strategy for evaluating policies and programs affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The commission sees this as an urgent priority: as its chair, Michael Brennan, wrote in the foreword to the draft strategy earlier this month, “despite decades of new policies and programs aimed at improving the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, we know very little about their impact.”

“There’s huge variability in quality and practice,” Mokak tells me from his home in Canberra. “There’s no real central stewardship or central oversight.” While some agencies have “quite sophisticated processes” for dealing with research ethics, peer review and publication, for instance, others “haven’t even contemplated those things.”

Mokak says he’s seen “good and bad” approaches to assessing the impact of new initiatives during twenty-five years of working in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy and program management. But he has also witnessed a persistent pattern: governments launch initiatives and then move on, making little effort to determine what works and what doesn’t.

“Lots of activity, lots of policy development and design, lots of program implementation, but very little commitment to actually undertaking rigorous evaluation,” he says. “Often if an evaluation is required or thought about, it’s bolted on. It’s not planned for, and the objectives haven’t been negotiated with Aboriginal people, so the questions that need to be answered are kind of myopic.”

Mokak’s assessment is consistent with the overall decline in Australia’s public sector capabilities identified by the recent Thodey review into the public service. But he says Indigenous affairs has particular failings that have been compounded by history.

“What we found was Aboriginal people, Torres Strait Islander people are largely left out of the game in terms of planning and decision-making around evaluation,” he says. And this deepens the lack of trust between them and governments at all levels.

Mokak wants to turn things around by putting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at the centre of evaluation, because, as the Productivity Commission’s draft strategy recognises, “governments need to draw on the perspectives, priorities and knowledges of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people if outcomes are to improve.”

Beneath this overarching principle, with its emphasis on “genuine engagement and partnership,” sit four subsidiary principles: all evaluations should be “credible, useful, ethical and transparent.”

“What I’m keen to do is to take a conversation away from just being about accountability and compliance and getting rapped over the knuckles,” Mokak says, referring to the research that shows Indigenous organisations are often loaded up with much more onerous reporting and financial accountability requirements than their mainstream counterparts.

He isn’t just interested in the kind of hard data — rates of employment, income, incarceration and disease, for instance — that characterises Closing the Gap. He wants to ensure that Indigenous people have the capabilities and opportunities to live the lives they value, in a context that affirms Indigenous identities, cultures and contributions.

As the draft strategy puts it, evaluations “should be in the areas that are valued most highly by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.” This means shifting from a deficit model — focusing on the gap and assessments of what Indigenous Australians lack compared with everyone else — to building on the existing wealth of experience and knowledge within Indigenous communities, and focusing on their priorities.

Romlie Mokak comes well equipped for what is undoubtedly a challenging job. He is a Djugun man and a member of the Yawuru people, traditional owners of the lands and waters in and around Broome. His role at the Productivity Commission had its genesis in 2017 when Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister.

“There’d been quite a rocky road with the Indigenous Advancement Strategy that sat within prime minister and cabinet,” Mokak explains. “What’s the IAS doing, what’s its effectiveness, et cetera?” The response came in the 2017 budget, which provided additional funding for evaluation and research and to establish an Indigenous Policy Evaluation Commissioner within the Productivity Commission.

Mokak took up the job in April 2019 after fifteen years “heading up black organisations.” He had previously been chief executive of the Lowitja Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research, and led the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association for almost a decade before that.

“I was attracted to the statutory nature of the commission and the independence from government,” he tells me. “I was not anticipating that I’d immediately be leading a specific inquiry or specific study.”

The government’s letter of direction — essentially the terms of reference for developing an Indigenous evaluation strategy — arrived within days of his appointment. He says the project fits “hand in glove” with his other duties, which include contributing to the commission’s yearly report on government services, which assesses the equity, effectiveness and efficiency of state and federal programs in education, health, justice, emergency management, community services and housing; and chairing two working groups, one on Indigenous expenditure and the other on overcoming Indigenous disadvantage.

These working groups emerged in the 2000s when the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was seeking a better picture of the gap between outcomes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and anxious to gauge improvement over time. While Mokak appreciates the intent, the concept of Indigenous “disadvantage” has always sat uneasily with him, because of the way such language frames Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

This frame struck Mokak when he took up his first Commonwealth job as a junior executive in the health department in 1998. “The section that I worked in was called Health Issues,” he says. “I should’ve seen the writing on the walls when I looked at that label, ‘Health Issues.’ Aboriginal people have just got health issues.”

Mokak acknowledges the influence on his thinking of the anthropologist W.E.H. (Bill) Stanner, and particularly Stanner’s 1968 Boyer Lecture, The Great Australian Silence. Reflecting on the lack of Indigenous voices in histories and commentaries, Stanner wrote that “inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness.” It must be structural, like “a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape.”

Mokak applies the same metaphor to “Indigenous disadvantage.” “If we look with that lens through that window, it continues to frame the disadvantages as our problem,” he says. “My children are not to be defined by the ‘gap.’ That’s not who they are.”

He wants to look through a bigger window, one that captures strengths, knowledge and experience without glossing over uncomfortable facts. As an example, he points to the Mayi Kuwayu study, which is looking at how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander wellbeing is linked to such things as connection to country, cultural practices, spirituality and language use.

Ironically, that first federal health job working on Aboriginal “issues” in the 1990s also gave Mokak an insight into the power of evaluations that have Aboriginal knowledge and experience at their centre.

“The big issue at the time was petrol sniffing,” he says, reflecting on his role as head of substance use policy in the early 2000s. “And there was bugger-all data.” The practice was known to be concentrated in specific geographic regions, and it spread “like wildfire” within a community once it started, because “sniffing leaders are very good at recruiting others.”

The best data on the problem that Mokak could find didn’t come from government sources, but from health services controlled and run by Aboriginal organisations in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands in Central Australia. This gave Mokak and his team a baseline. They then developed a strategy whose most important element was an evaluation process, built on that Indigenous knowledge base, that would track what was working.

That early experience carries through to his work for the Productivity Commission. “A big part of this work is actually trying to reframe what evaluation means, what it should be about,” he explains. “It shouldn’t be about compliance, it should be about learning, it should be about a relationship, a reciprocal relationship, not just one-way traffic.”

Concrete proposals in the draft strategy include a new Office of Indigenous Policy Evaluation to work with an Indigenous Evaluation Council, which has a majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander members.

I suggest to Mokak that the thrust of his proposals is in keeping with the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the push for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. “I was a delegate at Uluru,” he responds. “So, separately to my commission role, as a citizen, as an Aboriginal person, a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament is something that’s very close to me.” He sees the Voice to Parliament, the Closing the Gap “refresh” and his own work on evaluation as all moving in the same direction, “which is about Aboriginal people having greater decision-making powers over their affairs.”

If government policymakers continue to think they know “what’s best for blackfellas,” he adds, “then that’s not where we’re going to get the results. Valuing Indigenous people, Indigenous knowledges, Indigenous priorities is fundamental. This is a part of that centring strategy for the evaluation strategy.”

He believes that Indigenous organisations have enormous strengths to draw on, and not only in the health sector. “Long ignored, this is a part of the continuing silence that needs to be really recognised,” he says. “That knowledge sits within communities and organisations, and those who are coming from outside need to have a bit of humility about trying to kind of access that.”

“Essentially, what is being done in the Productivity Commission now is what Aboriginal people have been talking about for a hell of a long time. The commission comes with a particular way of working, looking at the evidence, thinking deeply about that and then making some sense of it and providing some policy options to government.”

But will government listen and act on the results? When evaluations cast doubt over the value of high-profile initiatives — such as the use of cashless debit cards in Indigenous communities — governments often ignore, dispute or cherrypick the evidence.

“I’m not saying that this will be easy,” he responds. “It’ll require a bit of a mindset shift as well as a cultural shift, but I do want to emphasise that this is about really lifting the bar so that evaluations can properly look at the impacts of programs, policies on Indigenous people, with Indigenous people’s values, priorities, meaning, et cetera at the heart of it.”

While some people accuse him of living in a fantasy land, Mokak is happy to embrace a glass-half-full approach. “The government asking the commission to develop an Indigenous evaluation strategy is unprecedented,” he says. “The commission’s never had work as specific as this call and… I think there is a shifting climate, there’s different policy settings, and different discussions that are taking place.”

It’s true that governments will often talk about shared decision-making and genuine partnerships, he says. “What this strategy’s offering is how we do that in a really concrete way, ultimately to lead to better policies and programs, and Aboriginal people being at the forefront.”

After a pause, he adds, “It might be a rose-tinted view, Peter. But I’ve operated pretty well on optimism.” •

The post Closing the (effectiveness) gap appeared first on Inside Story.

The scene is set with a snapshot of the Hunter’s natural landscape and its precolonial Aboriginal society. But the Aboriginal story isn’t relegated to the first chapter, and nor is it simply scattered here and there in a token way; the Hunter’s First People and their experience, gleaned with careful consideration from the colonisers’ own records, are threaded throughout.

Dunn points out how, “with a few notable exceptions,” Aboriginal people have been “confined to the first chapters of a book and then pushed aside by a story of triumphant expansionism and settler progress, stuck in a brutal past or ‘last of the tribe’ narrative.” I was surprised, though, to see no mention of Wonnarua historian James Miller’s book Koori: A Will to Win in Dunn’s appraisal of other texts about the region; much of the content of the first five chapters of Miller’s seminal work, first published in 1985, overlaps with the period Dunn is examining.

The Convict Valley is more proof of the importance of localised studies of Australian colonialism and Aboriginal–­settler relations on the frontier. It has acquainted me with the country (to an extent) and the early decades of the region’s multilayered post-Cook history. It explores the emergence of the industries — logging, mining and farming — that came to lay waste to once-pristine lands and waters, and to devastate the Hunter Valley’s ancient Aboriginal communities.

The character of the country seems to have profoundly influenced the rollout of the colonial project region by region, including the patterns of contact and conflict with Aboriginal people. For some time in the Hunter, “[t]he mountains, steep valleys and surrounding bush remained as Aboriginal space” while “the valley floor, the creeks and rivers were increasingly becoming common ground, the space where most interactions between Aboriginal people and settlers were taking place.”

Dunn makes excellent use of colonists’ diary entries and letters about their journeys across country, fleshing out how the British reconnaissance parties interacted with their Aboriginal guides and the local people they encountered along the way. While much about these interactions goes unexplained in the archive, Dunn attempts to shed light on them by canvassing the cultural contexts that may have been at play; his inferences are perceptive and well reasoned, providing the reader with much food for thought about the complex nature of Aboriginal–settler relations at the time.

The highlighting of apparently amicable frontier relations between Aboriginal people and the coloniser (convict, free settler, police or otherwise) can have the effect of glossing over the true nature of the colonial process. Dunn rightly acknowledges the reality that exchanges, however superficially friendly, were “rarely on equal terms”:

Governors, missionaries and some settlers all believed in the civilising effects that work could have on Aboriginal people… To survive, many [Aboriginal people] had to adopt new ways and learn a foreign language, all the while facing the almost overwhelming numbers of British settlers and their stock invading the country around them. Despite a reliance on Aboriginal skill, knowledge and bushcraft, many colonists increasingly considered Aboriginal people to be inferior and dangerous, fostering a growing inequality that meant Aboriginal people were excluded from the very economy they had helped to establish.

I’d go even further and suggest that such exchanges were never on equal terms, simply because they took place in the course of a belligerent colonial invasion and occupation.

By incorporating and analysing Aboriginal place names, Dunn pays homage to the Hunter’s first languages. He also discusses the “form of hybridised English and Aboriginal language” that colonists and Aboriginal people used to communicate, given that very few Whites bothered to learn a local tongue. He offers a passage from a letter, written by settler Helenus Scott of Glendon to his mother Augusta in 1827, as an example of this “lingua franca.” The passage contains several examples of what Scott refers to as “Anglo-Black lingo”:

[W]e say “you bring it me badoo & me give it you ripo & mite, bell me gammon” which means “you bring me water (a bucket of) & I will give you a water melon & a cob of corn, I will not deceive you”… [The Aboriginal worker] might answer in the same Anglo-Black lingo “How many you give it me bulla carbon fellow? Bugeree you! Where sit down bucket?”; [meaning] how many will you give me? Two large ones? Very good. Where is the bucket?

This immediately reminded me of the language used by Aboriginal labourers on Ollera Station near the New England town of Guyra, snippets of which were recorded in the correspondence of the Everett brothers. In a letter to his brother William in 1840, for instance, George Everett wrote of how he led a heavily armed posse in pursuit of a flock of sheep allegedly seized by a band of Aboriginal warriors on the neighbouring Tilbuster run. As a tracker, they took with them an Aboriginal man, “Williams,” who worked and resided at Ollera. Everett explained that Williams came to realise his own brother may have been among those they were pursuing: “[Williams] came up to me with a sorrowful face and said ‘Baal shoot Johnny belonging to me’ of which elegant language he asked for his brother’s life.”

As well as being an example of the lingua franca discussed by Dunn, Everett’s words and the situation he describes serve as an emphatic illustration of the profoundly unequal relationships between colonists and Aboriginal people on the pastoral frontier, and of the racist derision with which Whites often regarded those they were dispossessing and dominating.

Having delved deep into my own ancestors’ history during the early decades of the colonial occupation on the New England Tableland, I found the stories of resistance and survival in Dunn’s book to be familiar in many respects: bands of Aboriginal warriors raiding settlers’ estates, the killing of convict labourers and livestock and, of course, the violence meted out in response by vigilante colonists, police and soldiers. The descriptions of the kinds of savagery perpetrated against local Aboriginal people in the chapter aptly titled “A Landscape of Violence” conjure up vivid and haunting images as you read, sufficient to make the blood boil and the stomach sick:

[A] man was taken during the pursuit of those involved in the spearing of Bowman’s stockman. This man was brought into Bowman’s hut, where a rope was secured around his neck. He was then marched a mile into the surrounding bush, forced to climb a nearby tree and tie the rope to a branch. The troopers then proceeded to fire their muskets at him, wounding him twice before he fell and was left hanging in the tree.

As they did elsewhere, the mounted police waged a campaign of terror against the Hunter’s tribes, which included massacres and summary executions. Dunn tells of how, in 1827, Lieutenant Nathaniel Lowe of the mounted police was the first military official to be charged over an Aboriginal person’s murder. The outcome was predictable: “It took the jury just five minutes to find Lowe not guilty.” Eerily familiar? Consider that no police or prison officer has yet been convicted in relation to the more than 430 deaths of Aboriginal people in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody concluded in 1991.

Aboriginal people from the Hunter Region will read The Convict Valley through a lens somewhat different from my own. It talks of their country and their ancestors’ struggle; it is harrowing in parts, but also likely to instil a sense of great pride in their people’s sheer resilience. Descendants of the convicts, free settlers and penal station commandants will read it through a different lens again, and probably with other sorts of emotional responses.

The Convict Valley is yet another vital addition to the growing body of work helping to uncover and disseminate the true history of early colonial Australia. And if you weren’t aware of this history to any great extent, I’m confident that reading this book will change the way you see and experience the Hunter — its landscapes, its industries and its peoples. •

The post Survival valley appeared first on Inside Story.

Many of the thousands of Australians who started demonstrating in early June carried placards bearing the acronym of the American campaign: BLM, for Black Lives Matter. They could have added another abbreviation, CNS, for “custody notification service,” a straightforward scheme that has been shown to bring down the number of deaths in police custody in the few places where it’s been tried.

The battle to have custody notification services introduced across the country stretches back almost thirty years to the 1991 report of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. At their heart is a simple requirement: that Aboriginal people are given twenty-four-hour telephone access to legal advice once they’ve been taken into police custody. It doesn’t seem much to expect of police themselves, and it’s been shown to be effective, but until New South Wales introduced a CNS in 2000, federal, state and territory governments had ignored the option, and most still do.

The need grows ever more pressing. Even as demonstrators thronged across Australia on 6 June, with more rallies planned, the Guardian Australia revised from 432 to 434 its count of Aboriginal deaths in police and corrective services custody over the twenty-nine years since the royal commission’s report; three days later, it revised the figure again to 437. Started two years ago, the Guardian’s “Deaths Inside” project, partnered by the University of Technology Sydney, is the only up-to-date database. The Australian Institute of Criminology provides its own count, but less regularly; it stands at almost 400 deaths.

The unacceptably high arrest and incarceration rates that lie behind these numbers have not fallen since the royal commission’s report. So bad are they that the Australian Law Reform Commission conducted its own inquiry three years ago. With 3 per cent of Australia’s population, Aboriginal people comprise 27 per cent of adult prison inmates; among Aboriginal women the rate is even higher, at 34 per cent. The commission found that overall Aboriginal incarceration rates had risen 41 per cent in the decade to 2016, and the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal imprisonment had grown wider.

Consultants PwC Australia calculated that Indigenous incarceration could cost the Australian economy almost $10 billion in 2020, and twice that figure by 2040 if nothing is done.

With numbers like these, it was little wonder that the law reform commission repeated the royal commission’s call for custody notification services when it presented its report to federal attorney-general Christian Porter in late 2017. There should be a “statutory requirement for police to contact an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal service,” it said, “as soon as possible after an [Indigenous] person is detained in custody for any reason — including for protective reasons.”

This call, too, has mostly gone unheeded. Tom Calma, a senior Aboriginal figure and a member of the inquiry’s advisory committee, tells Inside Story that a CNS gives Aboriginal detainees a “friend” on the outside whom they can speak to and trust: “It’s so sad governments haven’t adopted it broadly.”

New South Wales introduced the first custody notification service in 2000. It obliges police to put Aboriginal people in touch with the state’s Aboriginal legal service once they’re taken into custody. Nadine Miles, principal legal officer of the Aboriginal Legal Service (NSW/ACT), describes what happens next: “We provide legal advice and conduct a welfare check, asking how they’re feeling, if there’s any medication they need — matters like that. We inform family members and encourage them to attend if instructed. If further conversations are needed, we call back. For police, all this reinforces the obligations under their duty of care.”

The approach has succeeded — with one fatal exception, which pointed to a simple flaw in the NSW scheme. Rebecca Maher died in a police cell in Maitland in July 2016 after being detained by police because she appeared intoxicated in the street. She was not charged with any crime. Police did not seek medical help, and nor did they put Maher in touch with the custody notification service. At the time, the law didn’t require them to take that extra step.

In her finding on Maher’s death, the acting state coroner, Teresa O’Sullivan, suggested Maher might have lived if the CNS had come into play. She criticised the fact that police were obliged to notify the service only if someone was in custody for an offence, not if he or she were detained while drunk. O’Sullivan recommended that NSW legislation be amended to cover this circumstance; it was changed in 2019.

Some lawyers agree with O’Sullivan’s call for a wider definition of police custody for the CNS; they argue it should cover a process of police arresting someone or taking any steps that bring someone under police control.

Outside New South Wales, the rollout of custody notification services has been patchy. The former federal Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, once called for a “consistent national approach,” yet it wasn’t until last year that Western Australia and Victoria legislated for their introduction. The failure to achieve national consistency boils down to one main factor: funding for legal services.

Scullion provided three-year funding for the NSW service to 2019. It was extended to 2020, and Ken Wyatt, his successor, has recently extended it again, but only for another three years. Scullion also dangled the prospect of federal funding for similar programs in all states and territories. But he insisted not only that the rest of the states and territories pass legislation to make CNS a mandatory process (as the royal commission had demanded), but also that the states pick up funding after three years. Some states have still not passed such legislation, although they claim to offer legal help for Aboriginal people in custody. And most states have been slow to offer money.

The fact that all states still don’t provide what Scullion called a “critical service” for Aboriginal people in custody seems staggering. Nadine Miles calls for a change in political will. With the states responsible for running their own criminal justice systems, she understands Canberra’s push for them to underwrite the Aboriginal legal services for CNS. “That said, the constant argy-bargy means the Aboriginal people lose out,” she says. “Funding for CNS is a constant conversation.”

Nerita Waight, of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, says Victoria’s CNS has had about 1200 calls a month from incarcerated people since it started eight months ago. “And that’s a good month,” she adds. “It can rise dramatically.” Instead of arguing over funding, she says, governments should develop “urgent partnerships” with Aboriginal legal services: “Deaths in custody should be a paramount issue for the Commonwealth.”

On their own, custody notification services won’t stop high rates of Aboriginal imprisonment. But they can form part of a broader “justice reinvestment” approach that both the royal commission and the law reform commission recommended. This involves putting less public money into building yet more prisons and more into social programs designed to keep people out of them. It also allows Aboriginal leaders to be at the forefront of such reforms. Bourke, in outback New South Wales, has taken Australia’s most innovative approach so far, and is bringing incarceration rates down.

Governments will also have to be more upfront about recognising Australia’s historical legacy as a source of Aboriginal inequality. Nearly three decades ago the royal commission identified Aboriginal inequality as “a direct consequence of their experience of colonialism and, indeed, of the recent past.” It’s striking how Australia’s leaders by and large still shy away from debate about this central fact.

Just last week prime minister Scott Morrison responded to the outcry over George Floyd’s death in police custody in America by calling it “upsetting,” before adding: “And I just think to myself how wonderful a country is Australia.” Morrison’s complacency contrasts with the greater willingness of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to confront a problem that festers in both countries.

On 11 June, Trudeau said that “systemic racism is an issue right across the country, in all our institutions.” He added, “It is recognising that the systems we have built over the past generations have not always treated people… of indigenous backgrounds fairly through the very construction of the systems that exist.” When Scott Morrison was questioned that same day about statues linked to slavery being pulled down in other countries amid the Black Lives Matter campaign, he dismissed the notion that Aboriginal people in Australia had ever undergone slavery: “This is not a licence for people to just go nuts on this stuff.”

As he spoke, plans for more Black Lives Matters protests were going ahead. A court had banned marches in New South Wales, citing coronavirus concerns, and Morrison had warned that those who attended could be charged. But Aboriginal leaders still see the marches having a positive impact on dealing with deaths in custody. “That’s not to say there isn’t systemic racism that stops some people from taking the issues seriously,” says Nadine Miles. “But I think we have in Australia a population who are interested in hearing more and understanding the issues.” For his part, Tom Calma sees “glimmers of hope” that the national cabinet could come to grips with these issues. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post A friend on the outside appeared first on Inside Story.

In a feat of scholarship unlikely to be repeated for some time, Pybus displays an intimate, lifelong connection with the research material. She is an equal to those she counts as peers and mentors, deserving a place alongside Lyndall Ryan (to whom she dedicates the work), Brian Plomley, Rebe Taylor and Henry Reynolds as someone whose thoughtful, knowledgeable and compassionate words stick to the skin long after the reading is over.

I will revisit this volume often as I learn to see old facts regarding my many-times grandfather Mannalargenna and grandmother Woretemoeteyenner in new ways. And I am grateful for the turn of restorative history towards our countrywoman who, nevertheless, can never be at peace while she is so central to a foundational Australian myth of extinction (ours) and beginnings (not ours).

So why, then, would I hesitate to recommend this book if you, like me, were from trawlwulwuy people of tebrakunna country, now known as Cape Portland, northeast Tasmania? It is so obviously about our kin, ancestors, country and bodies, so obviously concerned to reclaim our magnificent Trucanini by finding “the woman behind the myth,” and it will become a staple in many of our homes, including mine — yet I see little of my people in it.

Some of Pybus’s narrative choices are concerning. She interprets Trucanini as “pensive, even sad” in a sculpted bust or “grumpy and uncomfortable” in a photo, when it’s more likely her expressions reflect the lengthy sitting times for those art forms. We have to be careful when we seek more than Trucanini is capable of giving. The same can be said of some of the evidence used — for example, on the renaming of the subject of Thomas Bock’s portrait of Trucanini in the British Museum. To me, the evidence cited — which includes Bock the artist mislabelling his own portrait, and George Robinson, who spent decades with Trucanini, confusing her likeness with another — is too slim to justify the claim that another woman is depicted.

It is also disappointing that the narrative ventures into the exoticised and sexualised disease of syphilis. Pybus is not the only historian to diagnose a syphilitic Trucanini, yet in the same breath she acknowledges the comorbidity of a range of common diseases (which led to a complete immune breakdown for our people) to demonstrate a poverty of health.

Is it likely that syphilis would have gone unnoticed in Trucanini, the woman whose flesh was boiled down by the best anthropologists in the business and whose skeleton was displayed in a museum? Hardly, I would say, given the evidentiary importance of the public display of her remains, and the state’s interest in demonstrating how unworthy our diseased bodies were. Absence of evidence is not evidence of syphilis.

Yet I am more unnerved by the things Pybus takes for granted in framing the research, which produce a kind of soporific that lulls us into complacency and acceptance of the things that harm First Nations. Even while doing the real work of truth-telling, and trying to repair colonising wrongs, this book reproduces tropes, stereotypes and deficits associated with First Nations, especially trawlwulwuy peoples, that permeate Western humanities.

When Pybus reflects on a 1980s Tasmanian museum diorama including Trucanini, describing it as a “melancholic requiem for the disappeared that reeked of regret without responsibility,” I can’t help but feel that strains of this sentiment are reproduced here. Her book is themed around two women — Trucanini and the author — whose stories come together through time and place, yet only one is given life. Trucanini remains a dead black woman, contrasting with the one who is very much alive and able to choose the facts, the narrative style and the story’s start and ending.

Pybus’s story ends with a poignant call for what is right: “to pay attention and give respectful consideration when the original people of this country tell us what is needed.” Trucanini’s story, by contrast, ends again in her death, with not one word of what happened afterwards. That original full stop gave rise to the myths of extinction that our peoples suffered so dreadfully between 1876 and December 2016, when we were acknowledged in the Tasmanian state constitution as traditional owners and First Peoples. Here, it again stifles and mutes her and, in effect, her kin today.

This leaves no sense that our peoples exist beyond her death. It’s hinted at, alluded to, given a sentence here or there, but it is clear that we don’t own this story and have been separated from our own historical labour and sorrow.

The choice to end with Trucanini’s death is also the choice to steer clear of engagement with “what is needed” by us, by people like me, in the complex task of picking up the pieces and gaining our own voice and spaces, and making our own interpretation of our ancestors and kin. This right is absent from Pybus’s towering volume, prompting bittersweet reflections on my own un-belonging in this narrative of my peoples and family.

Yet I unashamedly take pride in this feat of history writing because I belong to Trucanini, not by blood but by kinship and the reciprocity of our women, our Elders, our grandmothers and ancestors here in Tasmania. I do this because I know that the stories of our women, including Trucanini, are still unfolding, and hope for a time, perhaps in my lifetime, when her voice is brought alive with the joy and language and belonging and connection by one of us. Then our precious and dear countrywoman will finally finish the cultural journey home that she is due. •

* Trucanini is the reviewer’s preferred style and spelling, and the trawlwulwuy people’s language and Country are also italicised.

The post The long journey home appeared first on Inside Story.

In six pacy episodes, the ABC drama series Operation Buffalo takes its viewers on a cold war adventure. From the red-and-blue regalia of Cranky’s lodgings at Maralinga, viewers are whisked into the burnt-orange mulga-dotted landscape where Britain’s Operation Buffalo is taking place. But the story stretches well beyond the perimeter of the nuclear weapons testing site to 1950s Adelaide suburbia, the dark corners of Whitehall and the corridors of Parliament House in Canberra, all under the ever-present watch of ASIO, MI6 and the KGB.

In these settings, among the sex, scandal, intrigue and espionage, the true tale of Britain’s nuclear testing program in South Australia is synthesised, dramatised and satirised. Despite the humorously exaggerated characters, each episode is introduced with a reminder that Operation Buffalo was real. “This is a work of historical fiction,” the producers tell the viewer. “But a lot of the really bad history actually happened.”

While the satirical elements of Operation Buffalo can make it difficult to discern fact from fiction, several of the series’s key themes hew closely to the documented history of the Maralinga operation. Between September and October 1956, Britain tested four nuclear weapons in the heart of the South Australian desert. Because the tests were deemed essential for imperial defence, Australian soldiers were heavily involved, though not well informed. British scientists ran the show, and little was known — or at least revealed — about the likely effects of radiation on Australia’s landscape and population. Aboriginal people were gathered into missions to keep them off Country, though the efforts of just one man, Walter MacDougall, were not enough to secure Maralinga’s perimeter completely. Each of these elements is enough to ensure that the Maralinga story has been cast as one of the great betrayals of Australia’s land and people by the British Empire.

Much like those who served at real-life Maralinga, the characters in Operation Buffalo search for the facts about the operation. But will we ever know the “truth” about this episode in Australia’s history?

As that interaction between Cranky and Leo shows, Australia’s place in the British Empire is fundamental to this story. Nuclear weapons emerged from the second world war as the ultimate measure of scientific prowess and military might. The image of a mushroom cloud ballooning upwards was a sign of virility; a dud weapon, lying on the sand in the outback, was a sign of impotence. Or, in the case of the bumbling boffins whose task it was to ensure detonation, a sign of imperial incompetence.

Through Cranky and his colleagues in Whitehall, viewers get a glimpse of the imperial intricacies of this historical period. Before he was posted to Maralinga, Cranky served for decades as an Empire soldier, fighting “Boers, Hun and Nazis.” He is as befuddled as he is British, and has been sent to Maralinga to see out his days. Donning his military redcoat, he spends his days drinking bloody marys in his private dining room.

In other words, Maralinga is the place where Britain’s doddery former heroes and disgraced career diplomats are “sent to die.” But even in an area as remote as this, the Empire lives on. “God Save the Queen” is frequently played over the speakers, and a portrait of Elizabeth II hangs in the mess hall. Maralinga’s new meteorologist, harking from Cambridge, is none other than Dr Eva Lloyd-George (Jessica De Gouw), the fictional granddaughter of former British prime minister David Lloyd George.

Interestingly, several of the series’s most devout servants of Empire struggle to reconcile their involvement in the nuclear tests. In much of the literature on Maralinga, this was a moral position held only by Australians. By building this complexity into characters who have traditionally been cast as unquestioning followers of Queen and country, Operation Buffalo raises one of this history’s key anxieties: to what end were these tests actually striving?

It is not only government officials or those in charge who question the point of the testing through the series. The viewer is provoked to ask whether anyone understands the consequences of what they’re doing. Tests are nonchalantly rescheduled, often for the sake of drawing attention away from other events in camp. The scientists squabble like children. The meteorologist ignores unfavourable weather patterns. The soldiers and nurses know to keep quiet about the horrors they witness.

The viewer is slapped by the lack of understanding of — or concern about — the effects of radioactivity, acutely represented by the multitude of characters struck down by radiation sickness and delivered to the Maralinga hospital under the care of nurse Corinne Syddell (Adrienne Pickering). Most of these characters are left unnamed — they are simply soldiers undertaking daily manual labour around the camp — but these scenes point effectively to the real experiences of Australia’s nuclear veterans. Many fell ill and died young, without having had confirmation of what they knew to be true, that this had something to do with their work at Maralinga. They were not compensated.

The soldiers and workers on the ground were not the only ones exposed unwittingly to radiation. Little heed is given in popular accounts of this history to the families of those who served at Maralinga. Veteran testimonies from the 1980s Australian royal commission into the British nuclear tests demonstrate that it was not uncommon for wives to be exposed to radioactivity when they washed their husband’s uniforms. In Operation Buffalo, Leo Carmichael’s home and work lives collide violently when a balloon tracking radioactive fallout floats into the backyard of a young family in Adelaide and attaches itself to their Hills hoist, where two children play with it happily. Word of the balloon travels fast and Leo’s own children are invited to marvel at the mysterious object.

While there were no reported cases of meteorological balloons finding their way into suburban backyards during the tests, historians can confirm that invisible clouds of radioactive fallout tracked across the country. High readings of radioactivity were taken as far away as Queensland. As the series suggests, all of this was made possible by countless administrative errors and the impatience of two governments desperate to prove their military might.

Australia’s Anglophilic prime minister Robert Menzies is usually seen as bearing a heavy responsibility for this episode. But other Australian ministers and departmental officials were also complicit in the testing. Placated by booze and women, these politicians toddle along behind their British counterparts, leaving a trail of destruction. But for fictional attorney-general Dick Wilcox (Tony Martin), who has hopes of overthrowing Menzies, the happenings at Maralinga present an opportunity to win favour within the party.

Despite their vices and ambition, the one thing the politicians in Operation Buffalo seem conflicted by is the presence of Aboriginal people at Maralinga. At the beginning of the series, the defence minister asks Wilcox about the inhabitants of the Maralinga lands. “We both know there are people out here Dick, don’t we?” he asks nervously. Wilcox responds with a sigh, “Depends how the Constitution defines people.” This sentiment slowly unravels as several of the main characters are confronted head-on with the reality that Aboriginal people inhabit the test area. No amount of denial — government or otherwise — can change that fact.

But Britain’s testing program needed to maintain the illusion of terra nullius in order to be legitimate. This meant denying the presence of Aboriginal people, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Having intimately researched this history, I found Operation Buffalo’s depiction of the systematic erasure of Aboriginal peoples to be its most important contribution. Characters in the series look an Aboriginal woman, Ruby (Frances Djulibing), and her children in the eyes and deny their existence. The lack of humanity afforded to Ruby’s family will evoke shame or disbelief in many viewers.

Ruby’s fictional story echoes the tale of a very real Aboriginal family, the Milpuddies. Mother Edie, father Charlie and their two children were found with their dingoes within the Maralinga testing range in 1957. Having spent the night sleeping on the sand near the bomb crater of Marcoo, they were decontaminated by soldiers and driven to Yalata mission. They spoke no English and didn’t understand why they weren’t supposed to walk on Country. In Operation Buffalo, Ruby’s story follows a different trajectory, but her very existence highlights the stark fact that this was not terra nullius.

One character in Operation Buffalo is more aware of this reality than others. Dalgleish (Angus McLaren) — nicknamed “Orange” by Ruby and her family — is Maralinga’s “border rider” whose job is to secure the perimeter of the testing zone. This is official jargon for keeping Aboriginal people out. Dalgleish’s character is cleverly spun off the real-life figure of Walter MacDougall, who patrolled the missile testing range at Woomera, in South Australia, from 1947 on. Once the nuclear tests commenced, he was promoted to native patrol officer and given the job of patrolling 100,000 square kilometres of desert. MacDougall’s knowledge of Aboriginal people is echoed by Dalgleish, who provides the camp’s only means of interacting with Aboriginal people.

MacDougall’s real-life role at Maralinga, and the effects of the tests on Aboriginal communities, was captured in the documentary Maralinga Tjarutja. Screened the week before Operation Buffalo’s first episode, it was intended to provide viewers with a better understanding of what unfolded at Maralinga. The documentary was created in close collaboration with the Maralinga Tjarutja community, which has been displaced from the lands encompassed by the Maralinga Prohibited Area since the early 1950s. Photographs, paintings, landscapes and stories highlight how this vibrant landscape was peopled for tens of thousands of years prior to the tests. Viewing the series in tandem with Maralinga Tjarutja makes Operation Buffalo’s satire all the more striking and uncomfortable.

In taking its viewers into South Australia’s deserts and the centre of Australia’s nuclear past, Operation Buffalo grapples intimately with the history of Britain’s nuclear testing. While the story of Maralinga is a decidedly Australian one, the series encapsulates the broader peculiarities of the cold war period. Through its quirky characters and engaging plot, viewers are provoked to laugh, to question, to feel emotions ranging from guilt to disbelief, and — it’s to be hoped — to pursue the history of this period further. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Before the dust settled appeared first on Inside Story.

In the mangrove swamps that harbour crab colonies, a lone fisherman has found another kind of catch: a headless body. The lurking crocodiles are not the only predators claiming territory here because they, it seems, are not responsible for the decapitation.

Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), sent from “down south” to investigate, arrives at nightfall. In the opening frames of the first episode, a low-angled shot, backlit by the tail-lights of his truck, gives us a close-up of boots hitting the ground as he walks to the crime scene in darkness.

This sequence echoes Swan’s arrival in season one, as if to remind us that whatever happens here will be discovered by those who tune in to the lie of the land. Nothing stays buried permanently, as archaeologist Sandra Elmquist (Sofia Helin) is determined to prove, though she unearths a lot more than she bargained for.

Swan’s presence stirs everything up — or rather, everyone. He interferes with established hierarchies at the police station, has a stand-off with a community lawman and clashes with the owner of a major trucking station outside the town. He also pays an unwanted visit to his ex-wife Mary (Tasma Walton), who hands him a box of his possessions and leaves him standing on the doorstep.

Given his propensity to do and say almost nothing during these confrontations, he’s an odd sort of catalyst, impervious to all the passions, convictions and determinations that drive people to do what they do. Jay Swan just wants to know what they’ve done; the strategies they use to prevent intervention, however ingenious, are irrelevant. So he stands there, feet firmly planted, arms in gun-ready position, watching for whatever might come up. Nothing unnerves him.

It takes some nerve for an actor to sustain the unvarying stance and monotone delivery, and draw instead on an inner authority in the character to sustain the confidence that the performance won’t fall flat. Australian television drama is so plagued with overblown sentiment (Stateless being a recent culprit) that I wish there were an Aaron Pedersen school of acting.

In interviews, Pedersen talks about maintaining “the framework of the character” over the seven years since Ivan Sen made the original Mystery Road feature film. This, rather than the display of emotion, is the television actor’s job. Everyone is to some degree an enigma in a good crime series, and no one more so than the detective at the centre of it. There are mystery roads in everyone.

Pedersen’s command of this stoic principle invites comparison with Sofia Helin’s compelling performance as Saga, the detective with Asperger’s syndrome in The Bridge. The scenes between the two of them in Mystery Road are brief but create a meeting point between two wonderfully nuanced interpreters of human communication.

The storyline surrounding Helin’s character, an archaeology professor from a Swedish university, adds a new edge to cultural tensions already in play among the Indigenous community of Gideon, the small town where the murders are taking place. Obsessive and self-involved, she works at her dig site alone, continuing into the night hours to the accompaniment of “Laudate Dominum” played on a portable sound system. The music, along with the variety of spirituality it expresses, is an alien import.

Sandra’s overriding determination to find evidence of prehistoric Aboriginal technologies combines with an obtuseness towards the cultural life going on around her in the present. As the local people talk, sing, drink and quarrel, she literally has her head in the sand, desperate to resist any interference, including that of a roaming detective who might take an interest in some all-too-recent human remains.

Strong performances also come from Jada Alberts as the young local officer assigned to assist Swan in his enquiries and Stan Yarramunua as Jimmy Two, the self-appointed guardian of traditional law and lore. But as in season one, this is essentially an ensemble cast, again brought together by casting director Anousha Zarkesh. It is the mood and milieu of community life that gives the series its dynamic psychological texture.

Everything about the production communicates a sense of natural authority. There are no indulgences. The writing team has created a script that’s as dry as the land, relying on the inherent power of the story and setting to carry the impact. If emotions run high around here, it’s in ways that don’t communicate through dialogue. Fights are part of life.

So is music, and songs bring out emotional dimensions that are suppressed in the Spartan dialogue. In the evenings, the community gathers round the outdoor bar, bringing their quarrels with them, and listen to an array of live performers including the Saltwater Band and Fitzroy Xpress. Thematic keynotes are carried on the soundtrack, with abrasive renditions of “Rainmaker” and “Break the Silence” from Southeast Desert metal, “Rise Up” from Daphne Willis, and the haunting lyrics of RillaKill’s heavy metal “My Time Is Comin’” playing across the opening titles of each episode.

And then there is the cinematography. Warwick Thornton, who in collaboration with Wayne Blair also directs, has taken over the photographic direction from Mark Wareham (cinematographer for season one) and continues the visual romance with landscape and natural light. This place is stunningly beautiful, but also so vast and strange it dwarfs all human affairs, even the most extreme. In one scene, a man is being tortured and his scream as the ordeal ramps up is merged with the cry of birds; the scene cuts to an image of the flock rising high over the waters in deep twilight.

There are too many detective series on television. I weary of murder stories (even though I used to write the damn things myself), but every so often one with some real originality emerges. For its stringent scripting, its ensemble performance and its visual poetry, Mystery Road is in a class of its own in Australian television drama. •

The post Boots on the ground appeared first on Inside Story.

Later, as a university student increasingly absorbed in the anthropology and history of the Pacific, I retained this sense of Cook as an indomitable but apparently one-dimensional explorer, a man who wanted only to put lines on a map. Beginning research on the Marquesas Islands, I was fascinated by a drama of shamanism, taboo, tattoo, unfamiliar gender relations and cross-cultural exchange. Even as I began reading mariners’ journals for what they revealed of early encounters, Cook, the most celebrated of them, seemed a fixture of national histories rather than a character who might himself be an actor or locus of interest. Yet I was surprised when I read his account of first contact at Kamay, or Botany Bay, where the Endeavour’s crew was famously resisted by the Gweagal. After the seamen had tried fruitlessly to initiate relationships with local people, Cook candidly acknowledged, “it was to no purpose, all they seem’d to want was for us to be gone.”

I was still more surprised, a few years later, to come across a monumental but obscure book by one of the participants in Cook’s second voyage. Joseph Banks had been expected to again accompany Cook, this time on an expedition that sought to establish once and for all whether any southern continent existed. But Banks wanted to take a larger scientific party than he had on the Endeavour, and angrily withdrew after rows about the suitability of the accommodation on the ships selected for the new voyage. The hastily nominated substitute as natural historian was Johann Reinhold Forster, a polymath even by Enlightenment standards, who turned out to be both a brilliant observer and a difficult and contentious character, during and after the voyage.

Though Forster avidly collected natural specimens, he was intensely interested in the Pacific peoples encountered over the three years of the voyage. Cook’s method was to use the summers to search for the hypothetical continent in far southern latitudes, and he interspersed those forays with extended cruises in the Pacific tropics. He sought refreshment at places he had previously visited, including Tahiti and New Zealand; he investigated the situations of islands identified by earlier mariners; and he came upon other islands previously unknown to Europeans. Some visits were brief, others extended, and some repeated: the Europeans would visit Society Islanders twice and at length, and the people of Queen Charlotte Sound three times, as well as meeting, for the first time, people in Vanuatu and New Caledonia among other islands and archipelagos.

From the Admiralty’s perspective, the second voyage’s findings were negative: there was no great south land other than what might lie beyond ice, and certainly no land that offered produce or trade. But for an empirical philosopher like Forster the wealth of discovery was extraordinary. He was prompted to write a 600-page book of “observations” made during the voyage, the bulk of which reflected on “manners and customs.” He painstakingly detailed the behaviour, the institutions and the social condition of the various peoples the mariners encountered. He was particularly interested in the condition of women, especially in places like Tahiti, where they were evidently of high status and influential in political affairs. Separately, he wrote the first extended essay about the moai, the great ancestral statues of Rapa Nui. That manuscript was lost in a Polish library until just a few years ago, reflecting the extent to which Cook voyage research is not done and dusted: even now, new material continues to be found.

Forster’s intense curiosity regarding practices that were for him exotic, and the sheer variety of Islanders’ lives, was fully reciprocated by Pacific peoples. Some, like Indigenous Australians, were indeed cautious, and sought to avoid intruders, or at least maintain distance. But across Polynesia, local people, and particularly local people of high status, were eagerly interested in understanding these visitors from beyond the known universe, who came in great ships, bearing extraordinary things. Islanders keenly traded for fabrics, not least because Indigenous forms of beaten and woven cloth were of exceptional importance in their own regimes of value. The Tahitian chief Pomare, among many others, not only wanted novel things, but relationships. He understood that Cook was King George’s emissary, and presented the mariner with gifts for his sovereign. He wanted to extend the alliances he already had with the chiefs of other islands by embracing Peretania, as Britain was rendered in Tahitian.

In the Pacific, the decade of Cook’s voyages was thus an extraordinary time. The mariners’ encounters with Islanders were sometimes tense, there were misunderstandings and moments of violence. Yet there were also sustained diplomatic interactions, and much generosity. People revealed new worlds to each other; Europeans discovered Islanders, and Islanders discovered Europeans; Islanders also rediscovered each other, in the sense that Society Islanders and Māori joined Cook’s ships and visited other parts of the Pacific, encountering peoples to whom they were ancestrally related. One, Mai (generally known as Omai), also travelled to Britain, a precursor of many Pacific Islanders who visited Europe early in the nineteenth century.

Over the last twenty or so years, new scholarship focused on Indigenous perspectives has revealed and explored local experiences of these encounters. Extraordinary work by Indigenous artists has made the diversity of these perspectives and experiences public and prominent for the first time.

The decade from 2018 onwards has been and will be marked by a series of 250th Cook anniversaries, from that of the Endeavour’s departure from England through first contacts in New Zealand and Australia and other events of Cook’s second and third voyages to the anniversary, on 14 February 2029, of his death at Kealakekua Bay. These events seem defined less by the rich, unpredictable and difficult world of the voyages themselves and more by the long history of commemoration and argument about Cook. The little life itself is typically eclipsed by successive afterlives, pageants and re-enactments.

In the early twentieth century, Sir Joseph Carruthers, premier of New South Wales in the years after Federation, was an ardent Cook champion, advocating Cook statues and memorials in London and Hawaii and playing a key role in the dedication of the Kurnell landing area as a national park. Carruthers’s conservative historical imagination was challenged by writers on the left, one of whom, D. Healy, felt it important to contribute an essay on Cook’s death to the Communist, a Sydney journal “for the theory and practice of Marxism.” There was “something fascinating,” he noted, in the story of “an empire-builder who was actually worshipped by a primitive people but made the fatal mistake of being found out.” “No more than the usual arrogant, harsh and stupid British naval commander,” briefly misrecognised as a deity by the Hawaiians, Cook then died in a banal confrontation. The explorer’s death might prefigure a wider modern demystification of false gods, Healy hoped.

Mark Adams’s Cook Memorial, taken at Meretoto-Ship Cove, Totaranui-Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand. Silver gelatin prints. Courtesy of the artist

Debate of this kind periodically resurfaced. At the time of the 1970 anniversary there was growing awareness of just how damaging European settlement had been for Aboriginal people. Yet the tenor of events was nevertheless essentially celebratory. That mood has since been shaken repeatedly by war, economic challenges, environmental crises and acrimonious debate about nationality and immigration.

A consequence of an increasingly polarised politics has been much controversy about the global order’s antecedents. Some historians have sought to rehabilitate empire, suggesting that colonial rule broke up old hierarchies and hegemonies and brought the benefits of modernisation. From another direction, the legacies of slavery and other forms of oppression have been denounced by a new generation of anticolonial activists, exemplified by the “Rhodes must fall” campaigns, which sought (successfully in Cape Town, unsuccessfully in Oxford) to have statues of Cecil Rhodes removed from university precincts. In both Australia and New Zealand, monuments to “Captain Crook” are occasionally vandalised.

Cook’s own writings from the voyages make it evident that the morality of cross-cultural contact was a problem at the time. Cook was conscious of the legacies of his expeditions and was deeply troubled by the deleterious impact of sexual traffic on the health of Indigenous populations. Referring to sexual contact between sailors and local women, he wrote “I allow it because I cannot prevent it.” He was still more disturbed by the fact that the mariners’ demands appeared to have motivated Māori men to make prostitutes of their women. He feared that the trade in goods introduced new wants, and hence disease, and served “only to disturb that happy tranquility they and their Fore fathers had injoy’d.”

Cook extrapolated these reservations globally, to the whole business of European colonisation: “If any one denies the truth of this assertion, let him tell me what the Natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.” Early in his naval career, Cook had met dispossessed Beothuk of Newfoundland: he knew what he was talking about.

Among the many ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the cancellation of commemorative events associated with Cook’s arrival at Kamay. No doubt the messages offered would have been more reflective and representative than those foisted on schoolchildren such as me in 1970. But celebration, anti-celebration and even commemoration that aspires to cultural balance will inevitably diminish the rich mess of encounter, exchange, novelty, violence and moral murk that Islanders and mariners contributed to and suffered through the 1770s.

Community members studying artefacts collected during Cook’s 1769 visit to Turanganui-a-kiwa, at the Tairawhiti Museum, Gisborne, New Zealand, in September 2019. Courtesy Tairawhiti Museum

There is another story altogether. Things that people invent can, over time, assume absolutely different values from those that motivated their creation. During the Endeavour voyage, Joseph Banks, James Cook and others made extensive collections not only of natural specimens but also of Indigenous works of art and artefacts. The material they gathered, mainly through gift exchange, constituted the very first such collection to be systematically made, documented and subsequently deposited in museums.

Whatever values the Endeavour collections have had in academic, historical and artistic terms, they are unambiguously now cultural resources of unique significance. They exemplify Indigenous life and Indigenous culture; they include implements that reflect day-to-day subsistence, and art forms associated with genealogy, sanctity and ritual. They amount to material archives of sustainable ways of life. They bear the hands and values of ancestors.

To be sure, we could just cancel Cook. But the commemorative programs in New Zealand and Australia have provided occasions for artefacts to be returned for extended exhibition, on a model very different from those of standard museum loans. In Gisborne — near the sites of first contact between Cook and Māori in October 1769 — taonga, ancestral treasures normally cared for in Cambridge, were taken from the airport to the local tribal meeting house, where they were blessed, handled and deployed in performance by community members. Prior to the opening of Tu te Whaihanga, an exhibition at the Tairawhiti Museum, a series of community study visits took place, enabling descendants of the people who traded artefacts with members of the Endeavour’s crew to engage more intimately with the historical pieces. Ahead of the event, elder and artist Steve Gibbs looked forward to being able “to honour our ancestors by bringing back something very special to us all here at Turanganui-a-kiwa.”

In Australia, at the National Museum in Canberra, the spears appropriated by Cook 250 years ago are exhibited alongside a set made recently by Dharawal man Rod Mason. “The most important thing,” he has said, “is our connection to the things like the spears, that were taken from Botany Bay, and how we’re still making spears today — no one can take that away from us, because we’ve been doing it all our lives.” Shayne Williams from the Aboriginal community at La Perouse adds, “It makes me feel proud to see those spears from 1770. They are extremely valuable, not just for us at Botany Bay but for Aboriginal people right across the nation.” •

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“It’s always a huge time of the year that everyone in the community looks forward to,” says Noeleen Timbery, who chairs the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council. “That’s one of the practices we’ve kept up. There’s no trade that happens from that. It’s the guys in the community, they pass it to their children, that they go out with the nets and whatever fish they bring in, it’s just there for the community to go and get.”

Many of the families at La Perouse have ancestral, cultural and traditional historical links to the area, Timbery adds. “Many of them can trace back their heritage to traditional people who were on the shore during the time Cook and the Endeavour were in the bay.”

At Kurnell on the opposite headland, however, another regular autumn event has been cancelled. Covid-19 has put a stop to the marking of James Cook’s landing there on 29 April 1770, and his expedition’s confrontation with the local Gweagal village.

Given it’s the 250th anniversary this year, the plan was for a bigger celebration than usual. Two years ago, when he was treasurer, Scott Morrison allocated $25 million, matched by the NSW government, for a comprehensive revamp of the historic site. The Australian Maritime Museum’s replica of Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, was sent on a voyage around Australia, calling at thirty-eight ports, with the plan to drop anchor off Kurnell on the day of a “Meeting of Two Cultures” festival organised by the Sutherland Shire Council and the state government.

It would have been a big moment for Morrison especially. His electorate encompasses Kurnell and is named after Cook. In video interviews at his office in Parliament House, a model of the Endeavour is often visible on the shelf behind him.

He now has much bigger issues than anniversaries on his mind. While the 1770 festival and the Endeavour voyage were abandoned a month back, in recent days workers have continued installing two new artworks in front of the old stone plinth at Cook’s landing spot. One, by Newcastle sculptor Julie Squires and Gweagal artist Theresa Ardler, represents the bark canoes seen by the Europeans and the whales, revered by the Gweagal, that passed the cliffs on the seaward side of Kurnell during their annual migration; the other, by Alison Page and Nik Lachacjzak, is an array of big wishbone shapes that could be either the ribs of a ship like the Endeavour or those of a whale.

The foreshore was already dotted with monuments erected at previous fifty-year intervals, along with some pictorial displays of their dedications. From ranks of troops in pipe-clayed helmets solemnly raising flags, they progress to contemporary civilian monuments that are more ambivalent about the impact of Cook’s “discovery,” a word now put in inverted commas.

We will never know whether this anniversary was going to be as happy as Morrison and the leaders of New South Wales and Sutherland no doubt expected. Last October, when the Endeavour replica called at New Zealand’s Gisborne, a previous stop on Cook’s voyage, Māori protesters burned Union Jacks in memory of the nine warriors shot dead by Cook’s marines. “I acknowledge the pain of those first encounters,” British high commissioner Laura Clarke told Māori leaders. “I acknowledge the deaths of nine of your ancestors… who were killed by the crew.”

One could imagine similar protests at Kurnell, perhaps with some contemporary touches added, such as a boat trying to land “refugees” on Australia’s “boundless plains to share” or a “Chinese expedition” declaring the place terra nullius.

As a “meeting of two cultures,” the events here in April 1770, best explored in scholar Nick Brodie’s book 1787, were essentially a stand-off. The Gweagal wanted nothing to do with the Europeans. Spears and rocks were thrown, buckshot fired the other way. After one local man was wounded in the leg, Cook’s men grabbed his abandoned shield and spears. The Gweagal ignored the trinkets left in payment. The shield and spears remain in the British Museum.

The ship’s crew filled water casks and cut firewood, and its scientists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander shot bird specimens and collected strange new plants. After eight days Cook sailed off, having noted the area as suitable for settlement and agriculture.

London eventually took his advice, dispatching the first convict fleet, which landed not quite eighteen years later. It was a catastrophic moment for the Indigenous Australians: violence and imported disease and diet reduced their numbers from possibly a million or more to the low of 74,000 recorded in 1933 before the rebound to the present 800,000.

“It was a clash of cultures,” says Tim Ella, another member of the La Perouse community. Along with his old whitefella football mate Grant Hyde, Ella runs Kadoo Tours, showcasing the area’s cultural heritage to school excursions and other parties.

“I can’t see any of my Koori friends being upset that the Cook celebrations are called off,” adds Hyde, who also writes historical novels set in the Pacific. “When La Perouse play against other teams in the Koori Rugby League Knockout, the other teams cry out, ‘Give it to this mob, they’re the ones that let Cook in.’”

Nonetheless, La Perouse and its Gweagal relatives have joined in anniversary events for many years now. The “meeting of two cultures” theme is “a shift from how they used to celebrate it,” says Noeleen Timbery. “It used to be commemorated as a very one-sided story. The meeting of two cultures brings it as a more holistic viewpoint, but there’s still a need to go a little bit further than that.”

Storytelling is a big part. “This year we were planning on doing something probably bigger, and much more focused on truth in storytelling: let’s talk about what really happened,” she says. “It was actually gearing up to being a much more culturally sound event.”

The Endeavour replica’s ahistorical circumnavigation of Australia didn’t help, Timbery says. (It was actually Matthew Flinders who circled the continent and charted the entire coast three decades after Cook’s voyage.) “There’s still a lot of Australians out there that confuse the storylines between 1770 and 1788.”

I ask Tom Calma, chancellor of the University of Canberra, whether the Cook anniversary means anything to him. He also co-chairs, with Melbourne University’s Marcia Langton, a study of models for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which arose from the Uluru Statement from the Heart

“To be quite frank, no,” he says. “But it will happen. It’s one of the bits of our history, but what I would like to see it really celebrate is the prehistory. It’s an opportunity, in raising awareness with the community, that when Cook did land there were people who’d been here tens of thousands of years before. So Australia wasn’t ‘discovered’ as such.”

“Australians are ready for it,” Calma adds. This year he’d been looking forward to marking the twentieth anniversary of the walk by some 250,000 Australians across Sydney Harbour Bridge to promote historical truth-telling and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. The walk was held close to the 27 May anniversary of the 1967 constitutional amendment that counted Aboriginal people for the first time in the national census and gave the federal government powers to improve their welfare. That demonstration of support led to Kevin Rudd’s poignant apology for the Stolen Generations, on which Calma advised, and renewed efforts to “close the gap” in life expectancy and other welfare indicators.

Consultations on the Indigenous Voice have been slowed by the pandemic lockdowns, and federal Indigenous affairs minister Ken Wyatt is yet to work out with Morrison the parallel issue of acknowledging prior occupation in the Australian Constitution’s preamble. Soon after his appointment last May, Wyatt expressed hope that a constitutional amendment would be put to Australians by referendum in the current term of parliament.

If embraced by Morrison, who is at the conservative end of the Liberal Party, the idea might have its best chance of approval under the Constitution’s near-impossible amendment process.

Despite the wrangles at federal level, Timbery says that progress is being made at La Perouse and elsewhere, and Calma notes that state governments are advancing their own reconciliation steps. “My community, like many others, are progressing our own local arrangements and relationships to forge ahead with some of the elements within the Uluru Statement,” says Timbery.

If you face away from the giant tankers feeding the oil refinery along the shore, and the container terminal and airport on the north side of Botany Bay, it’s still possible to imagine what it was like at Kurnell and La Perouse when Cook burst in. La Perouse people are hoping a proposed cruise ship wharf, even closer to them, will be another casualty of Covid-19, as sad the reason may be.

Rachel Neeson, whose architectural practice Neeson Murcutt + Neille produced the masterplan for the revamp of Kurnell, is acutely aware of the historical burdens around this place. As she describes it, the plan has far less of the European propensity for physical monuments and much more of the Aboriginal notion of commemoration by storytelling.

“This is an Aboriginal place as well as part of the Cook story,” she told me in a recent interview for Architecture and Design magazine. “When Cook landed there was a village here. So this is all about equity, a balanced representation. The rupture of people from land and language happened so early in Australia’s colonial history in this place — this makes reconciliation and healing very challenging. It can’t be without tension and without truth-telling.”

So the revamped Kamay Botany Bay National Park will have walking paths through the bush: away from the old monuments, they will showcase the middens left by millennia of eating the bay’s fish, and Aboriginal lore attached to the garden of the 132 plants collected by Joseph Banks (such as a note that when the acacia flowers, the whales are migrating by). And a new visitor centre will tell the pre-1770 stories as well as the story of the Cook landing.

The state government has agreed to reinstate the ferry link with La Perouse, halted decades back, so that visitors experience arrival by water rather than by the current rather tedious drive around Botany Bay past lines of building material wholesalers, apartment blocks, mangroves and the home ground of Morrison’s local rugby league team.

With all this still to be completed, and the legalities of constitutional inclusion and the Indigenous Voice still up in the air, maybe it’s fitting that this week’s rendezvous with history has been called off — ironically by a virus from overseas. Few thinking people are yet sure we’ve got the history right, but Kurnell is a good place to start. As Neeson told me, “This place really needs to lay a table-cloth for discussion, and that discussion might not be easy.”

And that discussion is being watched. Some weeks back in Port Vila, I asked Vanuatu’s then foreign minister (now opposition leader) Ralph Regenvanu if members of what Morrison calls our Pacific vuvale (family, in Fijian) would judge us on how we responded to the Uluru Statement. To my surprise, he jumped in to this domestic political issue, showing it’s wider than a local issue and crucial to Australia’s international standing.

“We very much support the recognition of the Aboriginal people of Australia,” he said. “We are the original people of the region, they are the original people of the region. This is a black region, it’s not a white region… It’s important to recognise that originality, and especially the fact that they were the first, and they were improperly displaced, and there needs to be a recognition of that.” Their voice needs to be given to them, he added. “We were heartened at the Uluru Statement and we were hoping that this would be a way forward that everyone could agree on.” •

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Ray Kerkhove and Frank Uhr write about Southeast Queensland in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Callum Clayton-Dixon studies the New England Tableland over a longer period, reaching forward from the first incursion of settlers into the 1860s. Both books are the product of thorough research using published works, archival records and official publications. Both list more than thirty newspapers in their bibliographies, many of them obscure local publications. Both are written with the assurance of researchers who have mastered their chosen topic. The three authors know their period and they know their chosen locale.

Clayton-Dixon was born to an Australian family living in New Zealand in 1994. His family returned to Australia twenty years ago and made contact with family members in Armidale. Callum moved there permanently in 2015 and researched and wrote the master’s thesis that became the basis of this book, guided all the while by the hope that his writing would help empower his community by providing a resource for education and consciousness-raising. He had been inspired by a speech delivered by Wayne Wharton in 2013 in which the veteran Queensland activist had emphasised the importance of “telling the stories of our warriors.” Wharton declared that the colonisers had deliberately manufactured the idea that the country wasn’t defended by its Indigenous peoples.

As Clayton-Dixon unearthed details of the resistance of the local nations to the invading Europeans he shared his discoveries with his uncle. A printout of an article from the Sydney Gazette of 1841 was especially important, and the old man read it with a big grin on his face “full of immense pride.” They were his people, his warrior ancestors, and they certainly fought hard to defend their kin and country.

The bulk of Surviving New England is taken up with a wealth of evidence drawn from contemporary documents about the intense resistance to the ever-increasing numbers of the squatters, their largely convict servants and their vast flocks of sheep and cattle. Resistance fighters typically operated in small bands, taking advantage of favourable terrain and using hit-and-run tactics. With thousands of livestock seized and destroyed, many labourers killed and wounded, and stations ransacked of supplies, the pastoralists suffered significant losses.

Clayton-Dixon tabulates forty-one incidents of frontier conflict that occurred across the southern half of New England between January 1838 and May 1865 — dates much later than might be expected. By then, with close to 10,000 colonists living in the region’s towns, villages and more than 150 pastoral stations, the traditional owners were overwhelmingly outnumbered.

As Clayton-Dixon’s subtitle makes clear, his central theme is Aboriginal resistance and resilience during that forty-year period. His final words pay tribute to his ancestors’ “staunch resistance” and “unyielding determination to survive.” “It is because of them that we stand here today as a distinct people, with great pride in our identity, cherishing our continued connection to ancestral lands. Because of them, the sacred fire still burns.”

The Battle of One Tree Hill is the perfect companion volume to Surviving New England. The occupation of New England foreshadowed the rapid incursion onto the Darling Downs in 1840 and 1841 and the subsequent descent into the Lockyer and Brisbane valleys. The conflict documented by Clayton-Dixon intensified as the squatters moved north, foreshadowing the violent history of frontier Queensland.

Kerkhove and Uhr bring to their task an exhaustive knowledge of the written record, the country in question and the oral traditions of the local Aborigines. “We may not have the story entirely correct, but we have cross-examined most known and available pieces of evidence,” they write. “We have consulted every living historian who has previously written on this topic, and spoken with many representatives from the Indigenous families of the region.”

The striking feature of their story is the vigour and the initial success of the resistance, culminating in the conflict on and around One Tree Hill. The subsequent guerilla war, which persisted throughout the 1840s, resulted in the deaths of fifty-six Europeans and often crippling losses of stock and other possessions.

Here we have examples of what we now know was typical conflict during the expansion of colonial settlement for more than a hundred years. But what is new is the decisive conviction that it was warfare and that it must be treated with the gravity we reserve for battles and campaigns conducted overseas.

Kerkhove in particular has spent years documenting how the Aboriginal nations of southern Queensland conducted their campaigns and developed tactics to counter their enemies. He credits them with strategic intelligence, resourcefulness and resilience, pushing against what he sees as an overwhelming assumption that Aboriginal resistance was parochial, half-hearted and devoid of long-term planning. The usual image, he has explained, was a handful of warriors pitifully tossing some spears — a hopeless prelude to wholesale massacre. The clear implication was that Aboriginal nations were incapable of collaborating or of mounting effective, inventive, planned resistance.

Kerkhove’s views would be broadly accepted by the present generation of historians who have been rewriting the story of the frontier. But if war it was, then many changes follow, and they will influence not only how we talk about frontier conflict but also how we conceptualise it. National history itself will have to move in sympathy.

Up until now, Aborigines have typically been seen as victims and consequently either pitied or disregarded. Several generations of historians left them out of the national story as people of no consequence. W.K. Hancock, our most distinguished historian of the first half of the twentieth century, delivered a typically harsh judgement in his classic general history published in 1930, describing their response to British invasion as “pathetically helpless.” Contemporary history points peremptorily in the opposite direction.

These authors’ documentation of First Nations’ resistance establishes beyond doubt that the warriors stood their ground against overwhelming odds with resolve and courage. They were by any measure patriots and heroes who died fighting for country, kin and custom. By explaining why they fought, but more significantly how they fought, the writers put themselves among the fresh phalanx of historians opening up a new front in Australia’s military history.

The most important general conclusion that presses upon us is that it was Aboriginal resistance in its many manifestations that determined the nature of the fighting, where it erupted and how long it persisted. Settler violence was a response to that resistance. The common emphasis on the brutality of the frontiersmen and their racial animus might be understandable, but it leaves out the determining character of Indigenous initiative. If the settlers had been able to secure their prize without facing almost universal and armed opposition they would have done so peaceably, avoiding the cost, burden, fear and anxiety of guerilla warfare.

The matter of massacres is much with us at the moment. And while scholarly efforts to document them are laudable, there remains the question of whether the term is apposite in a time of war. Mass killing of the kind in question normally occurred during periods of enhanced conflict. Aboriginal bands in such circumstances cannot be considered as unarmed civilians. Warriors were always armed, ready to hunt or fight, carrying their spears with them all the time. Their tactics were not to confront groups of settlers but to stalk individuals in isolated places and kill them, often with extreme brutality.

The problem that faced the settlers was that they had great difficulty in finding their enemies in the bush. In the early colonial period, frontiersmen and soldiers were on foot and could rarely “come up” with the Aborigines, except when they attacked them around their campfires at night. The imperial tactics used to punish and harass native people were not available in Australia. There were no villages to destroy, no crops to burn, no domestic animals to kill or disperse, no wells to poison.

And then there is the question of genocide, a term widely used to describe frontier conflict. Given the known fate of many small Aboriginal nations it is an understandable usage, but it runs headlong into the competing discourse about warfare. Any examination of the evolution of the genocide convention suggests that what we are dealing with in Australia must be one or the other. One of the critical distinctions that emerged as UN committees developed the convention was that even mass killing in a time of war did not constitute genocide because the intention was to crush an enemy’s resistance not destroy them as a people.

Kirkhove, Uhr and Clayton-Dixon have provided us with valuable studies of frontier conflict at a particular time in an area overlapping the Queensland–New South Wales border. They have been able to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the resistance by Aboriginal people was well planned, persistent and carried through with courage and determination. What ultimately defeated them was the ever-increasing number of the British invaders. It is clearly time to move beyond the idea that the Aborigines were victims whose fate was simply to suffer and to die. We must see them more with admiration than pity, and above all with respect. •

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The wave of interest comes on top of a growing awareness of the broad and deep history of Aboriginal peoples’ uses of fire in the landscape. Native title and land rights reforms, Indigenous fire workshops, government-funded ranger programs, reconciliation policies, local conservation initiatives, and landmark books like Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011) and Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) have contributed to the buzz around cultural burning.

My experience researching in this area suggests that this situation is both exciting and fraught for many Aboriginal people involved in caring for Country in this way: exciting because they are accustomed to having their perspectives and interests marginalised, if not ignored, in public debates and policy decisions; fraught because much can go wrong when white individuals and institutions traipse into Aboriginal peoples’ lives, particularly if they are looking for “tradition” or “ancient knowledge.”

As Citizen Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte argues, this knowledge is often framed in terms of its “supplemental value” to dominant groups. Effectively, we ask Indigenous peoples: how can your ideas add to our established approach? Instead, says Whyte, we should understand that recognising and supporting Indigenous knowledge has “governance value” because it contributes to Indigenous peoples’ resurgence and nation-building.

Participants at the 2019 National Indigenous Fire Workshop, Yorta Yorta Country, Victoria, in June 2019. Timothy Neale

Whyte and other scholars are wary of the “supplemental value” approach for many reasons, two of which are particularly worth highlighting. First, it is plainly colonial to make whitefellas’ knowledge and approaches central by default. If we don’t want to perpetuate existing inequalities then conversations need to happen on equitable terms. Second, searching for “supplemental” or useful knowledge will create new hierarchies of value. Given the violence that colonisation has inflicted on Aboriginal peoples, not all will have a complete knowledge of how their ancestors managed fire regimes.

Indigenous peoples’ experiences of sharing their knowledge have frequently been negative and exploitative. If we only seek to engage with Aboriginal peoples who are both eager and able to share what they know, and if we expect that knowledge to fit easily into our ideas of what “tradition” is, then we are once again in a colonial mindset, maintaining old inequalities and fashioning new ones.

How Aboriginal peoples want to approach the current interest in their fire knowledge is a matter entirely for them. For non-Indigenous people with an established or new interest in this issue, the vital question to ask is: what are we trying to achieve in seeking to support cultural burning? Are we, the beneficiaries of colonial dispossession, simply trying to make our lifestyles, houses and property safer from the increasingly combustible landscapes we have helped create? After everything, are we still looking for help without reciprocity?

For those who have studied the postcolonial history of fire management in southern Australia, it has been baffling to read media accounts that assume Aboriginal peoples’ fire knowledge needs rediscovering. Government agencies and researchers have periodically “discovered” the existence of this knowledge, only to then forget these moments — though not before elements have been appropriated or certain avenues investigated and enthusiasms spent. Let me recount a few choice examples of these churning cycles of remembering and forgetting, and draw attention to how they are fuelled by our fixation on “supplemental value.”

Following the second world war, the CSIRO created Australia’s first two research units devoted to fire. One of the groups, founded in 1953, was given the task of conducting research on fire behaviour; under the direction of Allan G. McArthur it produced formative guidance on prescribed burning and fire behaviour, and various fire danger indexes still used throughout Australia.

Although Aboriginal peoples are acknowledged only fleetingly in McArthur’s early work, this changed later in his career. In 1969, pointing to “overwhelming evidence” of Aboriginal fire use, he wrote that fuel-reduction burning was a method to “return a small percentage of forested lands to their natural condition prior to white settlement.” A few years before his death in 1978, the “father” of Australian fire science wrote that “the only way” to prevent major bushfires is to burn the land “in much the same way as the Aborigines did prior to the advent of the white man.”

Others who have written about this aspect of McArthur’s work have tended to foreground wider forest-policy battles. “Natives” had established a “natural” order of combustion, the CSIRO group argued, which now needed to be mimicked by a program of prescribed burning in the name of protecting settler populations and resources. That living Aboriginal peoples were not included in these debates, and did not clearly benefit from them, is both regrettable and unsurprising.

Meanwhile, precolonial fire practices were also playing a part in the social sciences in debates about the role of anthropogenic interventions — such as burning the landscape — in the creation of grasslands, rainforest clearings and other ecological niches. In the late 1960s, archaeologist Rhys Jones made a famous intervention into these discussions, arguing that Aboriginal peoples had for tens of millennia used “firestick farming” to change their surroundings “systematically and consciously.”

Between Jones, Sylvia Hallam, Norman Tindale and others, two distinct fields of inquiry opened up for researchers. One examined the role of intent. What did Aboriginal people mean to do when they lit a fire on Country? The second examined the spatial and temporal pattern of precolonial fires. What were the frequencies, seasonal patterns, intensities and sizes of those fires? In both cases, answering the key questions has involved examining archaeological remains, colonial journals and plant characteristics. Where contemporary Aboriginal peoples have been included in these endeavours — and this has been relatively rare — they have been almost exclusively from central and northern Australia. Often, too, they have been treated as indexes for their precolonial ancestors, rather than the holders of rights or interests in the production of facts about those ancestors.

Knowledge of fire practices has arisen in other contexts, too, but perhaps the most relevant today, given the round of reviews called in the wake of the 2019–20 season, is its treatment by government inquiries. Historian Daniel May has conducted extensive research on this topic across Australia, so let me just focus on the past two decades in the southeast.

Over the 2002–03 summer, large wildfires swept across parts of Victoria, including fires ranging over 1.12 million hectares in the northeast and Gippsland regions. The resulting commission of inquiry report devoted a chapter to the potential utility of Aboriginal peoples’ “traditional burning practices,” concluding “that repositories of this knowledge are mostly lost and any reconstructed regime would largely be speculative.” Although a 2017 Victorian parliamentary inquiry into fire-season preparedness didn’t cite that report it nonetheless took a similar tack. Only “very limited data” was available on the effectiveness of cultural burning, it concluded, recommending that a “pilot scheme” be established and overseen by a non-Indigenous research organisation.

Reading back over examples like these is frustrating. Non-Indigenous individuals and institutions, often with good intentions, have repeatedly sought to understand Aboriginal fire knowledge and practices without empowering, or even engaging with, Aboriginal peoples. They have not sought to understand or facilitate Aboriginal peoples’ right to be engaged in these conversations. Far too often, in southeast Australia, our eyes have been set on deep time and distant places, ignoring the people living today in the world around us. Far too often, we have given little or no thought to how our interest in Aboriginal peoples’ knowledge of fire must be seen as an opportunity for justice. Cultural burning is, among other things, an opportunity to forge relationships of equity and integrity with sovereign peoples.

When I tell non-Indigenous people that I conduct research in this field, they tend to ask me two questions. The first question, often in a tone of sceptical rationalism, is “Do Aboriginal peoples here in southern Australia know anything about traditional fire?” I have been asked this one by a variety of people — scientists, public servants, retirees, tradespeople and others. The second question, more earnestly searching, is “What can I do to support cultural burning?” The people who ask that one, many of whom come from a similar range of backgrounds, are looking for guidance. They feel our management of fire needs to change, as does the way we relate to Aboriginal peoples and nations. Some don’t know exactly how to engage respectfully; some are worried about making mistakes and ruining a conversation before it really gets started.

The first question is the wrong one to ask. It’s not our business. My answer to the second question can be difficult for people to hear. We should all progressively take practical steps to give up control over Country, I say, and wherever possible give Aboriginal peoples the resources to manage fire in the way they want. Different groups are going to have different aspirations for using fire, and that is their matter to determine. For our part, if we don’t want to be locked in old cycles of remembering and forgetting, looking only for the supplemental value, then our efforts need to be focused on changing policies and structures of control.

In his recent book Fire Country, the Indigenous fire practitioner Victor Steffensen uses the analogy of a car to describe the change required. We can all travel together, he suggests, but it is time for settler governments and non-Indigenous peoples to get out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger seat, letting Aboriginal peoples take the wheel. To extend the analogy, it shouldn’t simply be a matter of handing over the keys and walking away, lumping Aboriginal peoples with a vehicle with a lot of problems.

I think there is real potential for non-Indigenous people and institutions to seize on the current interest in cultural burning and support substantial change. Signs of a new approach can be seen in initiatives like last year’s Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Fire Strategy, a collaboration between the Victorian government, the Federation of Victorian Traditional Owner Corporations and a range of traditional owner groups. In our research, my colleagues and I have encountered numerous cultural burning initiatives in southeast Australia, many with some level of government support. But in the absence of robust budgets or a clear longer-term commitment by governments, they will rely on persuasion, improvisation and intercultural diplomacy. In the best, Aboriginal peoples are treated as partners with self-determination, not one stakeholder among others.

It is pretty galling, if you think about it, to see centuries of dispossession simply followed by requests for more. We should treat last season’s fires as a chance to support Aboriginal peoples’ rights to Country and, thereby, their capacity to care for it. My hope is that, quite soon, when we whitefellas talk about cultural burning, we won’t be talking about an idealised traditional technique that might have helped us with our problems if only we’d been able to get our hands on it. We will be talking about a vital and vibrant network of groups making decisions about their Country. •

My thanks to Amy Brown, Minda Murray and Matt Shanks for their comments on earlier drafts of this piece. Any errors and omissions are, of course, my own.

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2 or 3 of the bakers have been closed, everyone down together. There were 7 deaths, all men. Arthur has been home from school 13 weeks. Syd had to board away from home on account of railway restrictions. All had to wear masks in shops and in churche [sic] and sit 4 feet apart — and only the minister unmasked.

By this stage of the epidemic, Singleton, 144 kilometres northwest of Sydney on the Hunter River, had been declared an “infected town.” A long battle to have the town’s plight recognised had finally succeeded, but the decision came too late to stop widespread infections and many deaths.

Jennie and her husband, George Colton Smith, had been managing the Singleton Aborigines Children’s Home since May 1910. The missionary couple sought to provide some semblance of conventional family life to the children in their care, some of whom had lived there since infancy. The home, established by local philanthropists, comfortably housed eighteen children. But since the Aborigines Protection Board had taken over its management from the Aborigines Inland Mission in 1915, the number was sometimes stretched to as many as fifty. The children were allowed to attend the local school, but when they turned fourteen the board placed them in “situations” — poorly paid or unpaid domestic employment.

“Restrictions were lifted last Wednesday,” Jennie told Percy. Of her younger children, sixteen-year-old Syd had just returned home after having boarded with a family in Maitland, where he was at school, and twelve-year-old Arthur had returned to the grammar school after five weeks at home. Seventeen-year-old Louise, her elder daughter, had been helping out at the children’s home since the restrictions had kept her from making her daily train journey to Maitland, where she was in her Matriculation year. To add to Jennie’s stress, nineteen-year-old Tilda was also back at home, recovering from typhoid fever contracted at Cummeragunja on the Murray River, where she had been working as an assistant teacher to Thomas Schadrach James, head of the Aboriginal school there.

Easing some of the pressure was the return of her Aboriginal charges to their schooling. “The children (home) went [to school] on Thursday, home five weeks, don’t you pity us with 34 of them. We received 2 more last week, tomorrow four more are coming which means 40.” The board’s demands were unrelenting.

The first Australian news of what we now call Spanish flu was published in the Sydney Morning Herald in May 1918. Some saw it as a German illness, a ruse by “Fritz” to delay or avoid defeat in the war against Britain and its Allies. By July 1918, though, it was clear the disease had caused a significant number of deaths among French and German troops and was spreading rapidly through England and Ireland. Journalists puzzled over the fact that this was a summer disease, unlike the usual winter influenza.

At the beginning of August the disease reached New York; at the end of October it landed in South Africa, with devastating consequences for the white and black populations. Some 1600 deaths were recorded there over a five-week period. In September, after India reported infections, news arrived, terrifyingly for the Australian government, that an infected ship from Canada, the Niagara, had reached Wellington in New Zealand. The epidemic occupied the press for the next three months.

Australia’s distance from Europe and the rest of the world bought it time, giving doctors a chance to learn about the illness before it struck. The disease’s symptomatology and progress were outlined by two New Zealand doctors in the Australian Medical Journal of 22 February 1919. The first case there had been diagnosed in September 1918 when the Canadian passengers disembarked in Wellington, New Zealand. It was of the “ordinary respiratory type,” they wrote, with catarrh in the upper air passages. By November the illness was showing up in lungs and then, “with explosive suddenness, a large proportion of the population was attacked; virulent cases streamed into the hospital in dozens and our resources were taxed to the limit.”

Contemporary accounts reveal the numbers of ill people to have been overwhelming. The NZ government took steps to restrict the illness, prohibiting church attendance and closing schools, barber shops and hairdressers. The population was advised to use mouthwash to prevent the spread of germs.

The Australian government had beefed up its Quarantine Department and commissioning new quarantine hospitals at each Australian port. On 27 November 1918 pneumonic influenza was proclaimed a notifiable disease for ships bringing troops back to Australia at the end of the war, and the many soldiers who showed signs of the disease were immediately quarantined.

For several months this strategy seemed to have succeeded. With deaths from influenza occurring only in the quarantine hospitals, some expressed hope that the pandemic would not break out into the community. But ships were continuing to arrive and the number of cases was increasing. The government recognised that it was only a matter of time.

That didn’t stop a Medical Journal of Australia contributor from decrying as sensationalist any talk of a wider threat and criticising estimates of a worldwide death toll in the millions. How could that be the case when London’s official figure for the seven-week period at the height of the epidemic totalled between 1600 and 1700 deaths? Despite reports of large-scale fatalities in New Zealand, he continued, the official return in the four weeks ending 2 December 1918 was “2458 cases across three of the four health districts.”

Even so, the press as a whole generally accepted that pneumonic influenza would eventually break quarantine and infect civilians. Reports of its virulence continued to arrive from New Zealand, Fiji and Samoa.

Public education had begun towards the end of November 1918. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, a health department official recommended that people inoculate themselves, make use of “respirators” — face masks — and keep “as much as possible in the open air.” Soon a medical consultative council was established, consisting of the leading members of the British Medical Association, still the body representing Australian doctors.

Pneumonic influenza became a notifiable disease on 22 November 1918, a rule soon extended to ships coming into Australian ports. The NSW government appointed its director-general for public health, Dr Thomas Paton, to oversee an “administrative committee” made up of senior representatives from local government, employer groups, unions and retailers, along with the Ambulance Association and the National Women’s Council. The committee proposed public inoculation programs, the manufacture of masks at a shilling each, and what we now call social distancing. “If a person was four feet clear from the affected person’s face,” advised Dr Paton, “the former would not be affected by the disease.”

Federal and state governments met in Melbourne on 27 November. They agreed on measures to accompany infection proclamations at state and regional levels. The Commonwealth was authorised to take control of a state for the period the infection was active, and road traffic would be blocked at its border until a case broke out in the neighbouring state. Provision was made for specialised hospitals, vaccine depots and ambulance transport; volunteers and nursing assistants were organised. Theatres, hotels, picture theatres, race meetings, music halls, churches and schools would be closed. The medical, nursing and military arms of the Department of Defence would respond as needed.

By the end of December, quarantine had been broken. Of seventy-one deaths in the Blue Mountains town of Lithgow during the four months ending 23 December, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, twenty had been attributed to pneumonic influenza. The state was declared infected. Suspicious cases were reported in South Australia, which was also declared infected, and in Melbourne. Border controls were set up between Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales. People travelling between Melbourne and Sydney were directed to return home immediately, and on 25 January passengers travelling to Melbourne from Sydney were tested for the illness. The NSW government ordered all residents within ten miles of the Victorian and South Australian borders to wear face masks while they were going about their business.

The mayor of a city, town or borough, or a president of a shire, was designated as an appropriate health authority and could declare an “infected area” covering a radius of fifteen miles from a case. For the residents of Singleton, the process of gaining such a declaration proved to be surprisingly protracted.

Influenza’s tragedy didn’t extend to regions northwest of Sydney until May 1919, when figures began coming in from outlying areas. Young people, fathers and mothers, entire families were dying. Very young children were orphaned. Singleton’s Dangar Cottage Hospital, which had set up a specialised ward, was filled to its eight-bed capacity. Residents were “fighting the goblin of horror,” as a journalist for the Sydney Sun put it. There was no other way but through.

Hardly a home in Singleton was exempt from the illness. While it might have taken a mild form in many cases, it continued to claim victims. Businesses were depleted. Two of the town’s doctors were ill. On 3 July the editor of the Singleton Argus reported thirty-one deaths in the previous twenty-four hours and 106 newly diagnosed cases. Dr Alister Bowman, Singleton’s government medical officer and a frequent visitor to the children’s home, wanted the town declared infected. But the local council — always lax about these things, according to the editor of the Singleton Argus — was slow to take the matter up, perhaps preferring to believe that the decline in cases across the state meant that the country was getting “over the crest of such cases.” Even when the council did send a report to Sydney stating that the situation was “serious,” the health department still didn’t proclaim the town “infected.”

The editor of the Singleton Argus continued to plead the town’s cause. Matters might be improving in the rest of the state, he wrote, but that was clearly not the case in Singleton. Neighbours might be pitching in to help one another, but resources were low. The bakeries were closed because of illness, and so were the butchers and fruiterers.

The children’s home, long reliant on charity from local businesses, was deprived of the leftover bread and meat that had sustained it for almost a decade. Although it ran its own vegetable gardens and received rations from the government, the donated food had been vital.

Finally, on 12 July, the local council acted on Dr Bowman’s advice and closed the town. Schools had been shut since the beginning of July; now they were joined by theatres, pubs and other meeting places. The town asked the Country Influenza Administrative Council to authorise an emergency hospital at the local school. And finally, just as the epidemic was showing signs of abating, the Singleton Argus announced on 17 July, Singleton was officially “infected.” It was a bombshell for local people after all they had gone through.  A row promptly erupted in the town over the delay and the council’s muddled approach.

The closures had not happened when the town most needed them, as Dr Bowman later pointed out, before the cases began increasing exponentially. Yet remarkably, as far as we know, there were no infections or deaths at the children’s home. As Jennie told Percy, “I am glad to say we are all well, all had slight colds, nothing serious. Dad’s was the worst but all are doing well.” We can never know whether those colds were a mild case of something more serious.

We know little about the impact of the epidemic on Aboriginal communities. The Aborigines Protection Board’s minute books and reports made little mention of this illness that had closed state borders, business and schools. Reports published by the Aborigines Inland Mission in September 1919 noted the deaths of three people at Bulgandramine, southwest of Dubbo, and three at Moonacullah, near Deniliquin. In Walgett, the missionary himself had been affected and was using the schoolhouse as a hospital. More alarming is a note that a small camp at Denawan, near Walgett, had been “wiped out.”

After the pandemic, a campaign was launched to stop the Aboriginal residents of the children’s home from attending school. Perhaps feelings had changed when the home had been taken over by the Aborigines Protection Board and was no longer an object of charitable interest. A year later the Smiths were sacked, with George accused of unspecified “improper conduct.” Within a week, the board took steps to turn the home into an institution for boys; within three years the home’s premises, long run-down, had been demolished, a feature of the town’s cultural landscape lost forever. •

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Reg Dodd: A blackfella in a tartan cap

We were always classified as Aboriginal people, even if we had just a speckled ink spot of Aboriginal blood. It didn’t matter if we had dark skin, like some of my family, or if we looked more like a whitefella. That’s just how it was in those days when I grew up. We grew up knowing we were blackfellas, and we didn’t have any choice about that.

I always say I have a foot in each camp. I’m an Arabunna person and I also have Scottish blood, and I’m proud of both, because what happened here at Finniss Springs with my Scottish grandfather and my Arabunna granny was pretty unique. The outcomes of that relationship were beneficial not just to my immediate family but also to many other Arabunna and to a lot of other Aboriginal people too — Dieri, Kokotha, Antakarinja, Adynyamathanha or Arrernte. Even people from down in the Riverland or over west on the Nullarbor — there are people from those areas who have a link to Finniss Springs as well.

For me, Finniss Springs is home. I was born here. I’ve lived in this country all my life and I’ve never left here. I have a traditional connection to Arabunna country through my mother and grandmother, but Finniss Springs was also a pastoral property that was set up by my grandfather, Francis Dunbar Warren, who was of Scottish descent. My grandfather bought this property when he sold his share of Anna Creek station, up the track a bit northwest of here, right in the heart of Arabunna country. He’d taken up with my grandmother, Nora Beralda, who was a full-blood Arabunna woman. They had a family and then they came down here in 1918. My mum, Amy, told me that she was carrying her younger brother, my Uncle Angus, on her back when they came down here from Anna Creek.

The relationship between my grandfather’s family and the Arabunna people at Anna Creek was very unusual, especially in that my grandfather married an Arabunna woman and then stayed with her and his family in this area for the rest of his life. He’s buried here at Finniss Springs — he didn’t want to be buried down south with the rest of his European family.

I know plenty of other white people who had kids with Aboriginal women but they kept it as quiet as possible. They wouldn’t openly support that family because they would have been branded “nigger-lovers.” It would take a very brave man with a strong sense of right and wrong to be able to do that. There were many kids all around the country with Aboriginal mothers and white fathers, but their fathers never acknowledged those kids or took any responsibility for them. And so my grandfather was unusually humane, in that he supported his family all along and he was determined always to stay with his Arabunna family.

Grandfather’s relationship with the Arabunna people was a two-way thing. He helped the Arabunna people understand the white man’s ways, and told them what they had to do to get along. At the same time, he took advice from senior Arabunna people about the things that he needed to understand in order to live and work in Arabunna country. In his journals Grandfather sometimes wrote in Arabunna language, especially if he was referring to birds and animals or to certain places. I remember him writing about how, up at Anna Creek, all the crabholes were full after the rains and there were a lot of kudnatyilti running around — that was those water-hens. So he used Arabunna language in that way.

There was an incident out at Parker’s Well, what we call Kuthampulyuru, which means “muddy water.” This old Arabunna fellow was out there minding the sheep but then the windmill broke down. The old bloke rode back in to Anna Creek and went to see Grandfather. He kept on saying, “Kutha thakali punthaka!” — meaning that stick or spear that comes down and hits the water — but Grandfather didn’t know what he meant. Eventually, Grandfather went and got another old fellow to come over to find out what was wrong. He translated what the first old bloke was saying, and they worked out that the pump rod had broken on the windmill. So then Grandfather understood what the old bloke was telling him, and they could go out there and fix the problem. That was the kind of relationship that my grandfather had with some of those old Aboriginal people.

Grandfather wanted to set up a home for his own family and he wanted his children to be able to have an education. They first approached the government about setting up a school here at Finniss but, in the end, it was the missionaries who were willing to come out here to educate the kids. In 1939, the year before I was born, they set up the first school out here in an old army tent. So this is where we grew up and where we were educated. Finniss Springs became a refuge for the Arabunna and for other Aboriginal people. The kids could go to school. Families could camp here. And there was always work to be done on the station, mainly looking after the cattle and sheep.

My grandmother was a proper tribal woman, and traditionally she had a high status among the Arabunna people through her connection to certain important stories. Beralda means “the moon,” and she was known as “little moon” — parala kupa in Arabunna language — and my great-grandmother was parala parnda, meaning “big moon.” Their stories also relate to the fire — thirka in Arabunna language. When we were born we had to be placed on the thirka — that warm hearth beside the fire — because we were the thirka family mob.

There’s another story I know through my mother’s line, about these old women who were travelling and they were carrying the moon — the parala. They travelled for a long time and they were holding each other’s hands up, but then, eventually, the moon became too heavy and they became very tired. So they put the moon down, and that’s how the moon sets at the end of every night. But the other meaning of this story is that it shows how, eventually, everybody has to die. If they could have carried the moon forever, so that it never had to set, then they would have lived forever too. But the moon was too heavy and so they collapsed and died. And from that time, this is what happens to all of us.

It’s all connected, like the way that the moon controls the tides, and like the way there is women’s business that’s also affected by the moon. These stories have powerful meanings; for us, they’re connected with particular sites and places across the country. And they go back thousands of years, being handed down from generation to generation.

The knowledge that gets transferred through different generations of our people is passed on in what might seem like a casual kind of way. No one tells you to sit down and listen, like when you’re at school or something. Usually it’s just an aside, or maybe it’s something told in a storytelling form. Sometimes a story has a message that isn’t immediately obvious, but you work things out — like a jigsaw puzzle where you’re putting the pieces together in your mind. You get that knowledge over time because you’re chosen to receive it. And you have to prove you’re worthy of receiving that information. This is the way it is with us mob: we don’t talk directly. I’m like that with my family. The ones of my generation, we were brought up so that we talk kind of sideways, because that’s the respectful way.

Malcolm McKinnon: The belly of a horse

It’s amazing how much water a thirsty horse can consume, just like that. I know this from close-range experience, from the perspective of a cattle trough in which I was lounging one scorching November afternoon. My girlfriend and I had fixed up the trough so it no longer leaked, and we’d cleaned out the algae and the dead galahs and the bird shit. Wearing nothing but wide-brimmed hats with flyscreens attached, we’d spend long sessions reclining and reading books in the trough when it was just too hot to be anywhere else.

The brumbies used to come by regularly, to drink water from the leaking bore on the other side of the old railway line at Alberrie Creek, the main railway siding on Finniss Springs. Initially they stood their distance, smelling the water in the trough. When they could wait no longer they ambled up to the end of the trough, not far from my submerged feet and, two at a time, wetted their noses. The cattle trough was filled from the leaking bore, with inflow regulated by a copper float valve. I can testify that a few horses can empty a cattle trough in just a few minutes, and the float valve had no hope of keeping up. The belly of a horse is an enormous, expansive receptacle.

There’s a revealing episode in the journals of the explorer and surveyor John McDouall Stuart, recorded as he traipsed through Arabunna and Kuyani country on the return leg of his 1859 expedition to Central Australia. Stuart initiates contact with a small group of Aboriginal people and makes a gift of a pipe and some tobacco. In exchange, he asks to be taken to the nearest drinkable water. Expecting to be guided to some springs, Stuart and his party were disappointed to be led only to a deep rock hole filled with rainwater. The local people, Stuart wrote, “were quite surprised to see our horses drink all [the water].” They would go no further with us, nor show us any more, and, in a short time after, left us.’

There’s an obvious etiquette being enacted within this encounter, and a spectacular failure of manners on the part of Stuart and his companions. It’s one of those encounters where, for Aboriginal people, a warning must have sounded loud and clear. Survival in this dry country requires the maintenance of a delicate equilibrium. The arrival of the white men with their large, thirsty, hard-hooved animals would irrevocably upset the balance.

At Finniss Springs there are complexes of artesian mound springs where dense scatters of ancient stone tools lie across the adjacent sandhills, directly alongside the crumbling and splintering ruins of pastoral buildings and the newer survey pegs and concrete-encased bores drilled by mining companies. At the right time of year, with the right weather conditions, it’s possible to sit quietly in these sandhills and watch the intricate mating dance of a pair of brolgas. The tall, elegant birds dance footprints into sand moistened by water that has taken almost a million years to traverse the Great Artesian Basin, before it percolates up through these springs.

In this certain light, you might readily entertain the illusion of a pristine desert wilderness. In reality, though, this place is an industrial zone, with relics and artefacts from past and current enterprises scattered liberally throughout the landscape. There are embankments and bridges from the old Ghan railway line; there’s rusting machinery and broken glass lying around old mining sites; there’s extensive cattle station infrastructure in the form of fences, stockyards, windmills and water troughs. There are artesian bores and pipelines, linked by roads and tracks heading off all over the place, many heading in the direction of the nearby Olympic Dam monster mine at Roxby Downs. There are scatters of flints created in the manufacture of stone tools, remnants of a different kind of industry. All of these artefacts trigger stories of particular endeavours and particular people operating at different levels within the overall historical narrative.

At Finniss Springs I feel close to a kind of ideological coalface, where the impacts of industry were brutally apparent. (We’re all consuming copper as a vital component of the electronic appliances we use every day, but for most of us it’s easy to disregard the place where the copper comes from, and the cost of its extraction.) The multiple layers of industrial detritus scattered around the place are confronting — evidence of so many booms and busts. Surrounded by the ruins of successive enterprises, things built and then crumbled, I can detect the shadow of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Most acutely, I could sense how this remote stretch of country might easily be written off as a kind of “sacrifice zone,” readily expendable in the quest for mineral wealth. Facing off against the tantalising promise of jobs, shareholder returns and executive bonuses, some ancient mound springs and a few dancing brolgas probably don’t stand much of a chance.

Once, camping out at Hermit Hill in a sheltered spot near the old Finniss stockyards, my friend Cameron Robbins and I were troubled by a strange, intermittent whistling coming to us on the wind. Wandering around the next morning, we traced this sound to the withered carcass of a horse lying on the windward side of a small dune not far from our camp. A scrap of desiccated hide clung persistently to the ribcage, and the wind blew fitfully and mournfully through the skeletal chamber. Sometimes the ghosts out here can seem just a little too restless or intimate; we relocated our camp. •

This is an edited extract from Talking Sideways: Stories and Conversations from Finniss Springs, recently published by UQP.

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The road to Maralinga reveals how large South Australia really is. We had been given a hand-sketched mud map to find the former nuclear test site: take a right on an unsigned mining road 170 kilometres past Ceduna; seventy kilometres later take a left onto a dirt road until you hit the crossing of the Trans-Australian Railway, along the longest straight stretch of rail track in the world; next, the map takes us on a weaving trail over claypans and dry lakes and into the Maralinga Tjarutja lands. We then have to drive for another hour through saltbush scrub until we reach a locked gate. Robin will be waiting for us there.

As we approach the rolling mallee woodlands, blue haze ripples low on the horizon; saltbush and stunted trees dot the country. There are no animals, no people and no signs of life except big, steel-coloured storm clouds spreading over the hills. Appropriately, Maralinga means “thunder” in the extinct Aboriginal Garik (or Garig) language — it seems apt considering the devastation that tore through the land here not so long ago.

During the cold war, the British were concerned that they’d be left vulnerable by the nuclear weapons programs being developed in Russia and the United States. They searched for an appropriate testing site within their empire to begin their own program. Canada was initially touted as a partner, though the government there baulked at the potential environmental damage. The remote bush in South Australia was identified as a possibility and Australia’s prime minister at the time, Robert Menzies, even agreed to pay some of the costs, something not requested by the British. The British conducted nuclear tests in Australia between 1952 and 1963, and at Maralinga from 1956. It was nuclear colonialism played out in one of the most remote areas of South Australia.

Nuclear testing started on the Montebello Islands eighty kilometres off the coast of Western Australia, before moving to Emu Field in the scrub 180 kilometres north of Maralinga. The British wanted a larger, more open tract of land where they could conduct their experiments in secret, and Len Beadell, the famous Australian bushman and surveyor who opened up the land for the Woomera rocket range in 1946, decided on the area in the west of the state as the most appropriate site for nuclear tests in South Australia. As Beadell knew, there were no towns there, but it was a significant Indigenous “highway” and Dreaming road that passed between sacred sites and the paths that led people from the south to central Australia. During his survey, Beadell even discovered what he called an Aboriginal “Stonehenge” on the track between Emu Field and Maralinga, though there was no time to investigate properly as the pressures of the cold war mounted.

A village was built at Maralinga, with London Road, Belfast Street, Tenth Avenue and East Street among the addresses where the personnel lived during the operation. There was a permanent airstrip, which at the time was the largest in the southern hemisphere, roads, an Olympic-size swimming pool, accommodation and railway access.

The first test was set for September 1956, only two months before the rest of the country would be celebrating the Olympics in Melbourne. The Buffalo 1 bomb, with a yield of fifteen kilotonnes (equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of TNT), was detonated at the One Tree site from a thirty-metre steel tower. It was the first of seven atomic bombs exploded over seven years at Maralinga. During the test years a total of 35,000 military personnel spent time at the base. Most were from Britain, though there were also men from Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand living in the Maralinga village.

We arrive at the locked gates, where the guide is waiting. Robin Matthews is a grizzled man in his sixties with the tanned skin of a life lived outdoors, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and a cigarette hanging from his dry lips. He is from an era that doesn’t exist anymore — his skin is blotched with a narrative of faded tattoos, inked long before it was fashionable. He wears a singlet with an unfurled dragon on the front, and he smokes and swears without worrying about appearances. Robin lives for this place and it’s part of him. He unlocks the gates and takes us through to the bones of the former village, a place he calls home and where we’ll camp for the next few nights.

Robin has been coming to Maralinga on and off since 1972, so he knows more about its modern story than most. He first came here on an odd job to help pull the village buildings down. He was a tuna fisherman in Port Lincoln at the time. For four weeks, he drove trucks carrying out the old materials and “it piqued my interest,” he says of an initial curiosity that has led to his nearly fifty-year association with the place.

“In 1973 I got a job on the railway at Watson and I saw some old records of the tests and the people who lived here, and I began piecing together the story,” he says. He came back again in 1984 to run the store in Oak Valley with his wife Della, who is Anangu. “Della wasn’t brought up the same way culturally as many of the Indigenous people — she doesn’t get frightened by the mamu spirits,” he says, referring to the evil spirits the Anangu believe still reside here. The land here was handed back to the Indigenous people in 2009, though, as Robin says, “So many people’s descendants died as a result of the blasts. It’s a bit like a graveyard for them.”

Robin continued to work on contracts in the area and when the land was handed back to the Indigenous people, he and Della were asked to be the first caretakers. While the people who live at Oak Valley don’t want to live in, or even pass through, the Maralinga land, they’re happy for it to be open to tourism, so the story of Maralinga can be told.

There is a strange aura to this place. The ghost town feel of the old buildings and half-buried foundations contrasts with the newness of this tourism enterprise, complete with hot water and wi-fi. We’re free to wander around the compound in the afternoon, past old water tanks, army barracks with open doors flapping in the wind, and a flagpole that hasn’t hoisted anything for years.

Robin returns the next morning in a repurposed minibus to take us out to the test sites. He speaks with fondness of the projects he’s responsible for here — he’s the tourism operator, former caretaker and maintenance man; and he knows every stretch — from the oleanders planted by the British around the dam, to the hiding places for the crimson flowers of the Sturt’s desert peas along the track.

Len Beadell’s roads take us into the Great Victoria Desert to the testing sites. It’s a nineteen-kilometre dead-straight track up onto a limestone plain scattered with stunted mulga scrub. The colour of the earth changes from red to sandy yellow in an instant. “Rabbits still dig things up,” Robin says, though as part of his job he continually digs burial pits with a backhoe to bury non-radiated junk.

After the clean-up from 1994 to 2000, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency found that someone living at Maralinga full-time — like Robin — would receive no more than five millisieverts of radiation in a year, even in the most contaminated sites around Taranaki. Tourists who don’t disturb the soil, or “eat mouthfuls of dust,” as Robin puts it, would receive less than one millisievert. As a comparison, most people are exposed to about 1.5 to two millisieverts each year from natural background radiation. “There was a 0.2 reading at ground zero, to give you an idea of the clean-up,” Robin says.

As we approach the Taranaki site, we can see, nearly to the centimetre, where the vegetation vanishes — the invisible line from where the soil is poisoned. There is nothing except for small shrubs with shallow roots, scattered around the blast site. As soon as they grow to about twenty centimetres, they wilt and die.

“Kangaroos have started coming back here,” Robin says. Aside from the herds of camels, there are emus, dingoes and “lots of king brown snakes” reappearing as well. Taranaki got its name from the second world war battle in Papua New Guinea. Around this one site are twenty-two major pits, all at least fifteen metres deep and cased in reinforced concrete, to bury the plutonium from the blasts. Another interesting technique used during the clean-up was in situ vitrification, which involved burying enormous electrodes in the radioactive waste and pumping 8.4 megawatts of electricity into the soil. The process turned the waste into glass, encasing it before it was broken up and buried.

In all, 400,000 square metres of plutonium dirt is buried here in a granite-sided coffin, along with every bit of heavy machinery used in the operations — seventy-one Landcruisers, bulldozers, scrapers and excavators, all of them tipped into the pit. One thing I do notice are the red flowers popping up on the edge of the clearing, “They’re Afghan hops,” Robin tells me. They were brought here by Afghan and Pakistani men in the nineteenth century, to be dried and used as feed for their camels on the long interior expeditions that would have passed through here.

Throughout the afternoon we drive to the different ground-zero sites, hearing stories of the explosions and their after-effects — of atomic bombs being detonated midair, held aloft by giant balloons, and of the wind that carried radioactive dust into the Northern Territory and as far away as Newcastle after the blasts.

Despite the magnitude of the “big” blasts, the most harrowing names from the atomic era here are Kittens, Tims, Rats and Vixen. These were the “minor” trials that ended up being some of the most damaging experiments on Australian soil during the latter stages of the British occupation of Maralinga. Carried out in secret, the tests examined how toxic substances would react when burned or blown up. Uranium and plutonium-239 was heated up and fired through a chimney, then left on open, exposed ground for more than thirty years. The tests were designed to find out what would happen if a truck carrying plutonium caught on fire, or if a plane with nuclear warheads crashed. Chief scientist William Penney remarked that these tests must be done in Australia because “the short-lived radioactive material used in the initiating of the nuclear explosion would not pose a hazard.” Not if you lived more than 24,000 years in the future, anyway.

The tests stopped in 1963, though there was a junkyard of radioactive carnage left behind. At the time it was said to include up to 50,000 plutonium-contaminated fragments, though that number was later revised to three million. The eventual clean-up operation, which followed the Australian royal commission into the tests in 1984–85, took six years and cost more than $100 million.

Despite the sureties of our safety now, this wasn’t always the case. The nuclear personnel here in the 1950s and 1960s experienced countless deaths and health complications, workers during the clean-ups were exposed to health dangers, and the Indigenous people continued to be disregarded. “They had not felt its age-old rocks and its forgiving sand beneath their feet. They had not slept and dreamed under its stars or seen the moon rise,” Christobel Mattingley writes of the lack of understanding shown by the British and Australian governments, in her book Maralinga’s Long Shadow.

In early 1957, a few months after a 1.5 kilotonne bomb had been exploded at ground level at Marcoo, Mrs Edie Millpuddie and her family were traversing the plains of the Great Victoria Desert, as their ancestors had done for thousands of years. The bomb had torn a crater forty-four metres wide and twenty-one metres deep into land that was part of a significant Dreaming highway for the Indigenous people.

The Millpuddies, who needed shelter for the night, came across this enormous hole that would keep them out of the wind, and they tramped across the soft earth to the bottom of the crater, where the ground was still warm. It had been raining, so they scooped rainwater from the bottom to drink and lit a fire on the red sand flecked with melted glass.

On their approach Charlie Millpuddie had noticed that all the rabbits in the area seemed blind and disoriented; they were easy pickings for dinner. He lit a fire and cooked the rabbits, before the entire family went to sleep at the bottom of what they didn’t know was an atomic bomb crater. They stayed there for three days, until scientists noticed smoke billowing from the crater and rushed in to see what had happened. The scientists and military personnel immediately took the Millpuddies back to the village. To decontaminate them, says Robin, they were given “five showers and told that the reading was clear. They were then driven to Yalata and dumped there.”

Two weeks later Edie had a stillborn baby in Yalata; many thought it was from the radiation, though Robin believes it was something else. As part of their “evacuation” they were forcibly washed by the white mamu people, who then moved them off their land to an unfamiliar place with tribes they didn’t know. The Maralinga officers shot their four dogs, seen as family members, in front of them before dumping the bodies in the crater. The 1980s royal commission awarded Edie $75,000, though more tragic is the fact that the family’s grandchildren “all have physical and mental deformities now,” Robin says. “This all happened right where we’re standing,” he adds, to reinforce the tragedy of the situation and to highlight that this is not an event that has ended for the Anangu people.

The clean-up here only finished in 2000 — at the same time we were celebrating the Olympics in Sydney — and the land was handed back to the Maralinga Tjarutja people in 2009.

The effects of the nuclear experiments were not just felt by the Indigenous community. After the Marcoo blast, 283 men, the “Maralinga guinea pigs” of the “Indoctrinee Force,” were deliberately placed in the forward areas so they could experience the effects of the nuclear blast.

These men had separate living quarters from the rest of the Maralinga citizens. Without protective gear, they would help the scientists lay out the objects to be tested post-blast: from guns, cars and dummies to jets and Centurion tanks. The British deemed their eyewitness accounts to be necessary, as they would provide data on what to expect in the likely escalation of a worldwide nuclear war in the near future. The health issues for these guinea pigs were severe: cataracts, blood diseases, arthritic conditions, stomach cancers and, more tragically, ongoing health conditions and deformities for the offspring of the survivors.

There was no overt political pressure or media scrutiny of the tests until the 1970s, when some of those injured by the tests came forward, and a small group of journalists and politicians cast a more critical eye over the tests and the secrecy surrounding them.

Driving back along the straight roads to camp, the bus is quiet. It seems appropriate. There’s no room for idle chat. The air is too heavy with what we’ve seen today. This is the most isolated spot I’ve ever been to in Australia, though it’s not one empty of stories or history. I understand better now how loaded this place has become with sorrow, anger and, as Robin suggests, maybe a little bit of hope for the future.

“We now bring our kids and our grandchildren here to explain what happened. This is their land and their ancestors,” Robin says. He would love it if the Indigenous people would become guides here to continue the process of the Anangu people taking back their land, though he understands why they never will.

The sun is shining across the village the next morning and Robin busies himself with preparations for a charter plane of tourists arriving from Ceduna. Despite his spending a large part of his life here in Maralinga, I get the impression that he’s not done with it yet. “When I come down to the village and walk around by myself, I feel like I’m in a time warp,” he says, puffing on another smoke. “I’ve been coming here since 1972 and you can imagine what was going on here in the 1950s and 60s.” It is a time warp — the devastation of the tests, the echoes of the Indigenous stories here when it was a Dreaming road, and the green shoots of the future led by Robin and the Maralinga Tjarutja people.•

This is an extract from The Crow Eaters: A Journey Through South Australia, by Ben Stubbs, published this month by NewSouth.

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The deputy premier’s announcement also reflected the growing divide between the major parties. While the federal Coalition has ruled out not only a constitutionally entrenched Voice to Parliament but also a treaty process, Labor states and territories are listening and acting.

Indigenous leaders have long argued that the quest for bipartisan support is not necessarily beneficial to their interests, but one-sided support also carries its risks. If treaties come to be associated only with the Labor side of politics, there is a danger that any process or agreement struck by Labor governments will last only as long as the parliamentary term in which that party governs.

The $1.3 billion agreement between Western Australia’s Coalition government and the Noongar people showed that treaty-making need not be a partisan issue. Although that deal — the largest and “most comprehensive” Aboriginal land agreement in Australian history — was negotiated outside an explicit treaty process, its size and scope qualifies it as Australia’s first treaty. It shows that both sides of politics are capable of negotiating innovative agreements that recognise and empower Indigenous Australians.

Treaties are accepted globally as a means of reaching a settlement between Indigenous peoples and those who have colonised their lands. They have been struck in the United States and New Zealand, and are still being negotiated in Canada. But no treaty was signed between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the British Crown at first contact or in the early years of Australia’s European settlement.

Treaties are formal instruments reached through a process of respectful negotiation in which both sides accept a series of responsibilities. In particular, treaties acknowledge that Indigenous peoples were prior owners and occupiers of the land and, as such, retain a right to self-government. At a minimum, a treaty recognises or establishes structures of culturally appropriate governance and a means of decision-making and control.

Under the 1998 Nisga’a Final Agreement, for instance, Canada recognised that the Nisga’a people have a right to exercise self-government over a range of local and internal affairs, including lands, language, culture, education, health, child protection, traditional healing practices, fisheries, wildlife, forestry, environmental protection and policing. Federal and provincial laws continue to apply on Nisga’a lands where an inconsistency or conflict arises.

Progress has been made in Australia, though only at state and territory level. Each case has been challenging, and some have been more successful than others.

Queensland: Sensibly, the negotiations announced by Jackie Trad last week will not begin for several years. Experience shows that it is important that both the government and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are fully prepared before formal talks begin.

For Indigenous nations, this means having a clear sense of what a treaty might mean for their communities, as well as a broad consensus on a negotiating position. Preparing for treaty negotiations can also enable Indigenous communities to engage in nation-(re)building, a valuable process regardless of the content, or even the completion, of a treaty. For the government, it is equally important that non-Indigenous Queenslanders understand what a treaty is and what its potential impact will be.

Reflecting these preliminary steps, the government has established a bipartisan eminent panel of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Queenslanders, with Indigenous academic Jackie Huggins and former federal attorney-general Michael Lavarch serving as co-chairs. Their responsibility is to provide leadership and engage with key groups across the state. A treaty working group will lead consultations with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, allowing them to discuss and reach agreement on what a treaty might contain. These steps follow similar processes in Victoria and the Northern Territory.

Victoria: Although the state Labor government committed to entering treaty negotiations in 2016, Aboriginal Victorians felt that they weren’t ready to commence any process and expressed considerable uncertainty as to what a treaty might look like. An Aboriginal Treaty Working Group and a Treaty Advancement Commission were established to maintain momentum and keep Victorians informed.

Consultation was recognised as critical. The working group led two rounds of community consultations in 2016 and 2017. Individuals could also nominate to run treaty circles and hold discussions in their local area, and an online “message stick” was created to allow others to have their say. Around 7500 Aboriginal Victorians (out of a 2016 self-reported total of 47,788) were consulted or engaged with directly through this process.

The result was the creation of a First Peoples’ Assembly, whose members will be elected later this year. Twelve representatives will be elected from twelve formally recognised traditional owner groups and twenty-one representatives will be elected from five voting regions based on local population numbers. An Elders Voice will also be established to guide the assembly’s work and provide cultural strength and integrity.

The assembly will not negotiate treaties. Instead, as set out in legislation, it will administer a self-determination fund to support treaty negotiations and will work with the government to develop a treaty framework to guide negotiations between Indigenous nations and the state. Once that framework has been developed, treaty negotiations will commence. Significantly, the First Peoples’ Assembly will not then be disbanded but will continue to serve as a standing representative body of Aboriginal Victorians — a Voice to the Victorian Parliament.

Northern Territory: In September 2016, incoming chief minister Michael Gunner declared that his government would establish a subcommittee on Aboriginal affairs to “drive public discussions on a treaty.” No firm commitment followed, but a treaty remained on the government’s agenda.

Eventually, in June 2018, the chief minister and representatives of the four Aboriginal Land Councils signed a memorandum of understanding committing the parties to a process of consultation. The signing took place at the Barunga Festival, thirty years after prime minister Bob Hawke’s promise that Australia would enter into a treaty with Indigenous peoples.

The Barunga Agreement is intended to initiate a consultation process that will lead to a treaty negotiation framework. The signatories also agreed to several guiding principles, including that Aboriginal Territorians never ceded sovereignty of their lands, seas and waters, and that the treaty should benefit all Territorians. Although the agreement is not legally enforceable, all parties have signalled their commitment to implement its provisions in a “transparent, consultative and accountable manner.”

Earlier this year, Professor Mick Dodson was appointed treaty commissioner. His consultations with Aboriginal Territorians are expected to take several years.

South Australia: Those emerging treaty processes are political in nature, which means that the situation is complex and subject to change — as has been the case in South Australia. There, in December 2016, the Labor government announced that it would commence treaty negotiations with the three Indigenous nations whose traditional lands sit within state boundaries. Roger Thomas, a senior Kokatha and Mirning man, was appointed treaty commissioner to lead consultations on a framework for negotiation, and on 22 September 2017 the first explicitly recognisable treaty discussions in Australia commenced between South Australia and the Ngarrindjeri Nation.

After the Labor government lost office in March 2018, though, the new Liberal premier, Steven Marshall, placed negotiations on hold. Then, just two months later, and on the same day the Northern Territory government signed the Barunga Agreement, the premier announced that his government would abandon the process.

Western Australia: Not all Liberal governments have rejected treaty-making. The settlement reached by the Noongar people and the Western Australian Liberal-National government was negotiated as part of a native title claim, but its size and scope mean that it qualifies as Australia’s first treaty.

Several parliamentarians recognised this at the time. After he was notified that the Noongar people had voted to accept the settlement, premier Colin Barnett issued a statement noting that the “breakthrough agreement” was an “extraordinary act of self-determination by Aboriginal people… provid[ing] them with a real opportunity for independence.” Later that year, the state’s deputy opposition leader, Roger Cook, explained in parliament that, “by its very nature, the Noongar agreement is in fact a classic treaty.”

The Noongar Settlement covers around 200,000 square kilometres and covers rights, obligations and opportunities relating to land, resources, governance, finance and cultural heritage. It recognises the Noongar people as a distinct community, establishes a limited form of self-governance, and provides funding for its operation. This treaty doesn’t recognise self-government rights to the same extent as its modern counterparts in Canada, but those mechanisms of self-governance may develop in the future.

Revealing some of the challenges in treaty-making, however, the Noongar Settlement has yet to take effect. In February 2018, some Noongar people lodged objections to the registration of the agreement with the National Native Title Tribunal. The registrar struck out those objections, but the applicants have sought judicial review of that decision in the Federal Court. Those hearings have not yet taken place, and the settlement will only commence if the applications are dismissed.

The abandoned South Australian process and the ongoing difficulties in implementing the Noongar Treaty suggest that treaty-making faces a fundamental challenge. Treaties are political agreements that require ongoing support from both sides. Without that support they will fail.

Canada’s experience suggests several further challenges. Negotiations should be structured in a manner that minimises inequality in bargaining power. Indigenous nations should be resourced appropriately in order to reach broad consensus on their aspirations and promote their interests effectively. Settlements should meet Indigenous expectations, especially on the size and scope of self-government powers. And disputes over the interpretation of treaty terms should be adjudicated by an independent arbiter.

Indigenous communities and governments contemplating treaties should be considering these issues now. Their resolution will be vital to the ultimate success of any treaty.

Unfortunately, one challenge is outside their control: the involvement of the federal government. No definitive statement has been forthcoming, but in his Press Club address earlier this month Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt suggested that the Commonwealth would leave treaty processes to the states and territories. This is problematic for at least two reasons.

Federal government involvement is not legally necessary — the states and territories have the authority to sign treaties and legislate to give them legal force — but the federal parliament may invalidate any settlement. Under section 109 of the Constitution, Commonwealth legislation prevails over inconsistent state legislation to the extent of any inconsistency, and the terms of any state treaty could potentially be overridden by Commonwealth legislation grounded on the races power in section 51(xxvi).

Federal government involvement is also preferable for another reason. Unless state governments agree among themselves to an appropriate minimum standard, treaty rights are unlikely to be harmonised across the country. What constitutional lawyer Megan Davis has characterised as the “uncoordinated pursuit of treaty across the federation” may lead to wildly different settlement terms. This will be a particular problem for Indigenous communities whose traditional lands cross state borders, but the risk that some processes will result in weaker settlements is a problem for all state and territory treaties.

There is, though, a clear road map for Commonwealth involvement. In the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples called for the establishment of two organisations: a constitutionally enshrined national representative body to advise the federal parliament (known as a Voice to Parliament); and a Makarrata Commission to supervise agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about Australia’s history.

A Makarrata Commission could resolve legal complications that arise within a federation and maintain political momentum for treaty. By setting out a clear process of negotiation it could also manage the risk that a significant disparity in power, resources and capacity will affect the process and the terms of any agreement.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples say that the Voice is their first priority, partly because a national representative body could ensure that the design of the Makarrata Commission reflects their aspirations. This is critical if treaties are to be effective.

The state and territory treaty processes have their challenges, but they are valuable and should continue. As the Noongar Settlement demonstrates, innovative agreements can secure important outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. In propelling the debate forward, these processes are also building pressure on other governments within Australia.

Treaties will not resolve all of the challenges that Indigenous Australians face. But they signal a commitment by government to listen to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and meaningfully address their aspirations. The federal government should reconsider its position and commit to establishing a Makarrata Commission. That commission should be designed by Indigenous representatives serving on a First Nations Voice. •

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That appears to have been well understood by the supporters of the First Nations Voice. What is proposed is a voice to parliament, not a voice in parliament. The recommendation of the Referendum Council deliberately left it to the parliament to establish the contemplated representative body. The proposals for legislation and constitutional amendment examined in detail in a series of papers, “Upholding the Big Ideas: Options for Discussion,” produced in June 2018 by Uphold and Recognise and the PM Glynn Institute, treat the preservation of parliament’s legal supremacy as fundamental, as do most of the other proposals put to the parliamentary committee. It was Professor Anne Twomey who drafted what I understand to be the original proposed form of amendment. Her proposal demonstrated that a constitutionally entrenched Voice can be achieved without legal derogation from parliamentary supremacy.

The structure, composition and functions of the proposed representative body would be determined, and susceptible to change, by legislation of federal parliament. What would appear in the Constitution would be the minimum requirements necessary to guarantee its continued existence and its essential characteristics.

There is nothing new about the idea of a body to represent Indigenous people. In its final report, the parliamentary committee on the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples said that it had considered twenty-one examples of past, current or proposed advisory or representative structures, which could inform the design of the Voice. It is difficult to see any objection in principle to the creation of a body to advise parliament about proposed laws relating to Indigenous affairs, and specifically about special laws enacted under the race power which, in its practical operation, is now a power to make laws about Indigenous people. If such a body can be designed to the satisfaction both of parliament and of Indigenous people then, logically, the question is whether such a body should be given constitutional status, as an appropriate form of Indigenous recognition.

A related issue that has been debated is whether any referendum should precede, or follow, the creation of the proposed representative body. I do not wish to intrude upon the various arguments and submissions canvassed by the parliamentary committee. However, I think it very likely that Australians, and parliament itself, would want to see what the body looks like, and hear what the Voice sounds like, before they vote on it.

I accept that there is nothing inherently impossible about providing in the Constitution for an institution before its form is determined. Although the High Court of Australia was provided for in the Constitution, two years later people were still arguing about what form it should take, and it was not established until 1903, with the first prime minister as one of its members. Preceding the Constitution, there was tension about the High Court’s proposed relationship with the Privy Council. What was ultimately provided about that (in section 74) was one of the few respects in which the British government intervened to override the proposals that came from the colonies. Nevertheless, I doubt this is an issue that can be resolved satisfactorily at a purely conceptual level.

As a practical matter, the process of design proposed by the parliamentary committee will produce an outcome only if the Indigenous people who contribute to the process have already achieved, and demonstrated to the Australian public, a substantial level of representational competence. The process itself will display Indigenous representation and decision-making in action. Australians are unlikely to support constitutional change unless there is a substantial degree of Indigenous consensus in favour of the proposed change. Establishing and demonstrating that consensus, to parliament and to the general public, will itself provide a preview of the representative body that will follow. Establishing the legitimacy of the proposed representative body to speak for Indigenous people will be an essential part of the design process.

A point that has been fairly made is that, if the proposed body is to have representative legitimacy, then its make-up will give rise to political issues and contest within the Indigenous community. Why that is a bad thing is not clear to me. Political action is the mechanism by which our own representative bodies are normally constituted, and through which they function.

Nobody underestimates the complexities of designing a body that fairly represents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but I am not sure anybody suggests it is not worth trying, and there are now a number of specific proposals on the table.

An objection that has been made to the proposal is that to make special constitutional provision for the establishment of a body to advise parliament about the needs and concerns of one particular group of Australians, namely Indigenous people, would be divisive and inconsistent with the value of equality that informs our democracy.

Equality is a word with two different connotations.

The authors of the American Declaration of Independence said it was self-evident that men were created equal, and that they were endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, one of which was liberty. Some of the signatories to that Declaration owned slaves. Their proposition about equality was obviously a moral proposition, rather than a factual observation. As a moral proposition most of us would agree with it, although nowadays some people would be made to feel uncomfortable by the identification of the will of the Creator as its source.

As a proposition of fact, based on observation of the human condition, an assertion that all people are equal is manifestly untrue. To use the language of George Orwell, all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others.

If the proposition is inverted, to treat people as grammatical objects rather than subjects, it is a valid principle that all people should be treated equally. There is, however, a difference between a general principle and an inflexible rule. In 1942, when Sir Owen Dixon was a member of the High Court of Australia, he was also an Australian diplomat based in Washington. This seems hard to reconcile with the general principle of the separation of executive and judicial powers of which he was a leading exponent. What was going on? The answer is: war. The general principle was not an inflexible rule, and it yielded to the exigencies of the time. There are many situations in which we regard it as proper to treat some people differently from others, especially if it is necessary to do so in order to remedy some injustice.

Equality can be an elusive concept. To say that the Constitution treats all Australians equally sounds reassuring, but is it true? Consider the example of representation in parliament. Under the Constitution, about half a million Tasmanians are represented by the same number of senators as about seven and a half million people of New South Wales. Is that equality? Or is it inequality? It is both, but, more to the point, it is federalism. Under the Constitution, the parliament may make special laws concerning the people of any race which, in practice, means Indigenous people. Does the Constitution treat Indigenous people in the same way as everyone else? Hardly.

The race power, by its very existence, calls into question the assumption of equality. At present, by virtue of a widely applauded amendment made last century, the Constitution empowers the federal parliament to make special laws about Indigenous people. That is an important power that has been exercised on several occasions, sometimes controversially. One reason the power is important is that federal law overrides inconsistent state law. How does it offend some principle of equality now to provide that, in recognition of the unique position of Indigenous people in the nation’s history, parliament shall establish a representative body that has a particular function of giving advice about such laws?

It has been suggested that it is divisive to treat Indigenous people in a special way. The division between Indigenous people and others in this land was made in 1788. It was not made by the Indigenous people. The race power in the Constitution is now used in practice to make special laws for them. The object of the proposal is to provide a response to the consequences of that division.

For many, government should concern itself with material and economic matters, not contestable ethical issues. On that level, the case for special treatment of Indigenous people can be summarised in a sentence from the judgement of Justice Brennan in Mabo v Queensland (No. 2): “Their dispossession underwrote the development of the nation.”

If it were fair to regard Indigenous people as merely one of the many minority groups that can be identified in the complex pattern of our social structure — and a very small group at that — then it would be reasonable to leave them to make their own way as contesting participants in the ordinary democratic process. But that would take dispossession to its logical, and unattractive, conclusion.

The history of the twentieth century demonstrated the evil of racism, and race itself is a concept based on insecure conceptual foundations. It does not follow, however, that the term is unmentionable, or that any governmental action predicated upon race must be wrong. It has a firm footing in the Constitution.

There are federal laws which are generally accepted as beneficial to Indigenous people that have been based on the race power, and very few people want to see them undone. There are others whose benefits have been doubted. That is a political issue. For the reasons given above, I would not accept that the Constitution’s references to race are morally objectionable.

In whatever country is under consideration, being Indigenous could be regarded as a matter of history, or geography, or ethnicity. This may be unlikely to matter to the Indigenous people themselves. If, as our leaders often say, we have among us a group of people who have a special place in our history, and we are satisfied they deserve a certain form of recognition on that account, it would be driving ideology to an extreme to decline them that recognition because they form what could be regarded, and is regarded by the Constitution itself, as a racial group.

A substantial issue concerns the design of a representative body that will be suitable both to the parliament and to Indigenous people. If this can be achieved it will serve an important national objective and would form the basis of appropriate substantive recognition of Indigenous people.

Representation cuts both ways. When a lawyer represents a client in court, the client receives the benefit of the lawyer’s advocacy, but the court also is meant to receive a corresponding benefit. That benefit lies not only in the enhancement of the court’s capacity to make a just decision but also in the efficiency of the decision-making process. The client is bound by the conduct of the advocate, and it is only on this basis that the court can go about its business effectively. A body that has the capacity to speak to the parliament on behalf of Indigenous people should be of advantage to parliament and, through it, the nation. But it will also, in a practical way, bind Indigenous people.

I have already referred to the diversity of Indigenous people. There will be a relationship between the breadth of the remit of the proposed body and its acceptability to Indigenous people, and to parliament, as truly representative. That is commonplace in any arrangement of agency. Balancing the desire for a strong Voice with the need for that Voice to be representative will be a major part of the design process. •

The former chief justice’s full speech can be read here.

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As with any political process, a range of views were aired in the days following. Yet for all the positional jockeying played out in the national media, quite a bit of misapprehension exists about the facts surrounding the modest reform proposals arising from the Uluru Statement, and the nature of work yet to be undertaken.

For some, it seems there is not yet enough detail around the composition and the role of the Voice — the proposal has come too early. It is true that the detail has not yet been resolved to put a full proposal to the public. This is why Wyatt outlined a process of co-design, involving his “ministerial and parliamentary colleagues, relevant departments and Indigenous communities, organisations and leaders.”

The Uluru Statement itself did not prescribe how the Voice would look or work, and Wyatt’s speech recognises that work remains to be done. It is especially important that this work keeps the faith of communities nationwide that participated in the regional dialogues that resulted in the Uluru Statement. Already, Noel Pearson’s Cape York Institute is compiling submissions for a model that would “connect the local with the national through the Voice.” Other proposals will inevitably follow extensive consultations.

Because the form and role of the Voice will emerge from a co-design process, it is too early yet to dismiss the concept. In emphasising the importance of Indigenous communities’ engagement in that process, Wyatt highlighted the goal of enhancing “local and regional decision-making through expanding empowered communities and other regional governance models” as a means of realising better outcomes for Indigenous Australians — a goal surely we all share.

Some have suggested that Indigenous Australians are already heard in parliament through Indigenous members. Similarly, Barnaby Joyce has suggested that the solution to boosting Indigenous representation is to give more Senate representation to regional Australia. These kinds of proposals may well stand on their own merits, but they don’t answer the question of how we can enhance government’s capacity to grasp opportunities for Indigenous communities, and to make a real difference. This is the purpose of the Voice. Relevantly also, Indigenous Australians have not identified these as part of the solution required. They have, however, asked for a Voice to Parliament.

Others, such as Queensland LNP senator Amanda Stoker, have indicated their belief that a Voice to Parliament will not fix social issues. The prime minister has also said he wishes to focus on Indigenous health outcomes and education. But these statements ignore the fact that government has been attempting to “fix” these issues for decades, without success.

As Noel Pearson has said, “We spend more money — unprecedented amounts of money — yet the dial is not shifting. That is because we don’t have a genuine partnership between government and communities.” Bringing grassroots recommendations to parliament about what will work will allow us finally to make headway on what Stoker describes as a “diverse bag of really serious but practical problems.”

In his speech, Wyatt addressed the co-design process independently of constitutional recognition. Indeed, there are two components to establishing the Voice. The first is a referendum to create the institution within the Constitution. The second is the co-design process.

Although 70 per cent of Australians support constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians, there are of course dissenting views. Constitutional law scholars — not known for their radical bent — have confirmed that the change proposed to establish the Voice is a conservative one. It would not be a chamber of parliament in any sense. One proposed method to introduce the change would be to insert a new section right at the end of the Constitution — section 129 — well away from Chapter I, which concerns the parliament.

The Voice would have no power to introduce legislation, or to veto it. It would not affect our parliamentary system. Like other agencies and institutions, it would simply provide a considered opinion. Imagine having such a resource available to legislators and policymakers as they implement laws and policy affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

There is also a suggestion that a Voice to Parliament would be an expression of identity politics. Unfortunately, this is also misinformed. We have in each jurisdiction a Department of Indigenous Affairs; in some jurisdictions we have Murri Courts, where Indigenous elders sit alongside magistrates in dispensing justice; we have targets and programs aimed at Indigenous communities; our Constitution itself contains a race power that parliament deploys in making laws about Indigenous Australians. Our laws already treat Australians differently based on race, yet without institutional means of designing those laws to maximise their positive impact on Indigenous communities. This is the goal of the Voice.

Constitutional reform works at two levels. It would establish the institution of the Voice so that a future parliament could not easily get rid of it. Doing so is also symbolic — but not merely symbolic. It recognises the place of Indigenous Australians within the Australian polity. This is not a divisive action. Rather, it is inclusive.

For the range of stances on the Voice and on constitutional reform, it seems that all are in furious agreement. No one wants to mess with our parliamentary system. Everyone wants to see practical solutions for problems experienced within Indigenous communities. No one wants to discriminate against fellow citizens on the basis of race. Everyone wants to maximise the benefits from government spending. If we all agree on these matters, what remains is to contribute constructively to the co-design of an institution that can make this happen. •

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From 11 June, NT police are obliged to contact the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency, or NAAJA, whenever an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person is arrested on suspicion of criminal activity. The new rule is in line with a memorandum of understanding between NAAJA and the police finalised at the end of May. But neither the memorandum nor the amendment will forbid police officers from interviewing people before contacting NAAJA. As a result, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people arrested by police could continue to give recorded interviews before they get legal advice against doing so.

Mandatory notification of an Aboriginal legal service was a recommendation of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody when it reported nearly three decades ago, in 1991. Since then, legal services have also seen CNS services as ways to advise their clients about their legal rights, such as the right to silence in the face of police questioning. This broader view of the CNS system is not typically shared by police.

This tension between the two visions for a CNS — the narrow police vision and the broader one held by NAAJA — appears to have been behind repeated delays in its rollout following its announcement by the new chief minister, Michael Gunner, in 2016.

In October of that year, Gunner wrote to federal Indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion committing the Territory to a legislated CNS scheme. Scullion wrote back offering the Commonwealth’s terms: the prime minister’s department would fund a CNS for three years on condition that the NT government introduced the necessary legislation and committed to picking up the tab after the first three years. Deputy chief minister Nicole Manison, also police minister, confirmed her government’s acceptance of Scullion’s offer in December 2017.

In November last year Scullion announced $2.25 million in federal funding over three years for NAAJA to run a CNS throughout the Northern Territory. (Since it took over the Alice Springs operations of what had been the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service in November 2017, NAAJA has been the Territory’s only Aboriginal-run legal service providing criminal defence services to Aboriginal people.)

NAAJA immediately set about recruiting staff. But it was hardly smooth sailing. Sources claim that the CNS design is flawed, and the funding agreement doesn’t provide quite enough money to run it.

NAAJA’s service won’t replicate the highly effective, nearly twenty-year-old NSW notification service, which takes Aboriginal Legal Service lawyers out of their normal court-based routines and rosters them onto phone shifts for a week at a time. Instead, it will employ entirely new staff who don’t have existing knowledge of particular police practices or of clients’ communities and likely bail options. And the new CNS team’s work will be entirely phone-based. “Like a justice call centre,” one source said.

Some of the CNS staff members at NAAJA are non-lawyers who can’t lawfully give legal advice. The federal funding appears not to be adequate to fill all CNS positions with lawyers and account for minimum after-hours loading requirements in the industry award. It is understood that when non-lawyers take custody calls from police, they will be providing clients with “legal information” based on a written manual, as distinct from advice.

Despite these concerns, the CNS seemed all set to begin operations by a March 2019 deadline. But the Gunner government’s promised legislation failed to materialise. Rumours began circulating that NT police were holding out on a CNS design agreement. The office of the police commissioner, Reece Kershaw, has not responded to interview requests for this article, but sources close to police have suggested this was the case.

In a 7 March statement obviously motivated partly by political concerns in the lead-up to the federal election, Scullion was heavily critical of what he called the “do-nothing Gunner government” and its failure to introduce CNS legislation. He said that NT police “strongly support the establishment of a CNS as a tool to also assist the police in their engagement and interactions with Indigenous Territorians.”

Kershaw, Manison and Priscilla Atkins, chief executive of NAAJA, have maintained a collective silence, and none of them commented for this article, despite requests. Behind the scenes, negotiations continued between NAAJA, Northern Territory Police and the Gunner and federal governments, resulting in the memorandum of understanding and the legislative amendment. It is understood that NAAJA was not involved in drafting the bill, and that it was written substantially by police.

A spokesperson for the prime minister’s department says that it has been working closely with the NT government to have the legislation passed, with the CNS to be governed by the NAAJA–police memorandum in the meantime. Until the amendment formally becomes law, police won’t legally be able to contact NAAJA without first getting consent from the person they’ve arrested. After it becomes law, police must contact NAAJA regardless of the arrested person’s wishes.

But in what appears a glaring omission, police may not be legally required to contact NAAJA whenever they place Aboriginal people in so-called “protective custody,” which happens often. Police can remove people from public places if they deem them too intoxicated to care for themselves. If police can’t safely leave them at home or a sobering-up shelter they can keep them in police cells overnight. Critics have long been concerned that “protective custody” is too often used to lock Aboriginal people up for no good reason, and they point to consistent research findings that show police often mistakenly assess Aboriginal people as intoxicated.

Quarantining protective custody and paperless arrests from the CNS could subvert its intent, which is to prevent Aboriginal deaths in custody. In May 2015, fifty-nine-year-old Warlpiri man Kumanjayi Langdon died in a cell inside the Darwin police watch house after police saw him drinking in Spillet Park and arrested him for the purpose of giving him a $74 fine once he’d become sober. And in January 2012, twenty-seven-year-old Kwementyaye Briscoe died in an Alice Springs police cell, where he’d been placed in protective custody. It is understood that the new CNS legislation would not have required police to contact NAAJA in either circumstance, though it is hoped these situations will be covered by the memorandum.

Across the country, more than 400 Aboriginal men, women and children have died in custody since the royal commission reported in 1991. Since New South Wales legislated its CNS in 2000, just one Aboriginal person has died while in police custody in that state. That single death, in 2016, happened after Maitland police failed to use the CNS to notify the Aboriginal Legal Service of the arrest of a thirty-six-year-old woman. Only the Australian Capital Territory has introduced similar legislation.

Police forces in other states have convinced governments to avoid legislating CNS systems in favour of provisions in police operational manuals. The Victoria Police Manual’s instruction 113-1, for instance, requires a police officer who arrests an Aboriginal person to call the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service within an hour. Notification requirements in South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia are similarly limited to police policy and operations documents, while Queensland’s CNS relies on a memorandum of understanding with that state’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service. The Northern Territory will be the third jurisdiction to legislate, with Western Australia set to follow.

Until Tuesday, NT police merely had to make “reasonable efforts” to put an arrested person in touch with a lawyer — but only if the arrested person requested legal advice. Extraordinarily, police were not required to inform people of their right to speak to a lawyer. Nor were they legally obliged to use interpreters, even if the person they arrested was from a remote Aboriginal community and spoke little or no English. Interpreters aren’t mandatory under the CNS, either, but it is understood the memorandum requires police to make genuine efforts to make one available on request by either the arrested person or NAAJA.

Sources say some inside NAAJA are disappointed that the right to seek legal advice before being interviewed — and therefore the right to silence — is not explicitly protected in the CNS legislation. A January 2018 decision of the Supreme Court, upheld in March this year, means it is rarely in people’s interests to participate in a recorded interview if they’re arrested in the Northern Territory.

While CNS services reduce the likelihood of deaths in police watch houses, they can’t prevent people from dying in prisons. (Despite New South Wales’s legislated CNS, at least ten Aboriginal people have died in that state’s prisons and remand centres in the past decade alone.) Advocates and researchers agree that the underlying reasons for the proportionally high numbers of Aboriginal deaths in custody remain the same as they were during the royal commission thirty years ago: the appalling health gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, and the astonishing — and growing — rate at which Aboriginal people are being locked up. •

The post Custody battle appeared first on Inside Story.

Why should this be so? The actual content of Folau’s views don’t explain it. I imagine that few of the people Folau is referring to will be disturbed by the message itself. Many of them do not believe in hell or they subscribe to a religious doctrine that does not hold that their sexual preferences are sinful. Perhaps young people, insecure about their sexuality, may be disturbed to find that a sporting hero thinks that people like them are bound for hell, but they will be able to find other role models who do not have this belief.

Folau also declared that atheists are bound for hell, but few express a worry about atheists feeling unwelcome at a rugby match because of his presence. Atheists are expected to tolerate the presence of people who oppose their view. Why is it different for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexual or queer?

The only explanation for why the continued presence of Folau might make LGBTQI people feel unwelcome or unsafe is because it is assumed that being gay is not merely a sexual preference but an identity. If being gay defines who a person is then an attack on their sexuality is an attack on the person. It is a way of saying that such a person should not exist. And if someone attacks a person’s very identity then the attacker is defined as an enemy of such people and this identity is inseparable from whatever else he does; it even pollutes the groups or people he associates with. This is why it is assumed that allowing Folau to remain on the rugby field would make an LGBTQI person feel uncomfortable and unsafe. Atheism, on the other hand, is assumed to be merely a belief, however fervently held.

The belief that a person’s identity gives her, or her defenders, a justification for censoring and excluding those who object to her way of life has become prevalent even in institutions that are supposed to favour free speech. John Finnis, a distinguished philosopher of law, faced a campaign to have him sacked from Oxford University because of opinions he expressed on homosexuality in an academic article a long time ago. Like Folau, Finnis held (and may still hold) the view that homosexual behaviour is a sin and ought to be discouraged by society. He recommended a traditional Christian attitude: we should hate the sin but love the sinner.

The problem for Finnis is that this distinction between people and their acts is not made by those who attack him. Finnis’s article is now read as a dehumanising attack on those who have an LGBTQI identity. Having been outed by his critics he can no longer be regarded as a person they can be comfortable with as their teacher — whatever the content of his courses. No distinction is made by his critics between the sin and the sinner.

Many of those who disagree with Folau’s exclusion complain that his freedom of speech has been violated. But limitations on freedom of speech can be justified for the sake of the dignity and safety of others. If the AFL is justified in disciplining players for making racist comments, then what is wrong with a ban on football players or academics who publicly oppose expressions of LGBTQI identities?

The answer to this question hinges on the role that identity is supposed to play in social and political relationships. Can we justify a morality and politics that uses identity as a reason for excluding or limiting the expression of others. Is it a mistake for society to validate or encourage appeals to identity?

This latter question is addressed by Stan Grant in On Identity, a book in Melbourne University Press’s “little books on big ideas” series. Grant, an author, journalist and former foreign correspondent, has a personal reason for disliking the division of society into identities. Although he is a member of the Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi community in central New South Wales, he feels that to identify himself as Aboriginal for official purposes is to deny the existence of his white grandmother, who had the courage to choose an Aboriginal man for her partner. It is to acquiesce in a history of defining people by their race. It denies the reality of his upbringing in a neighbourhood where white and black people lived side by side.

Grant thinks that identities not only enforce a history of segregation and deny the complexity of human heritage. They are also bad for individuals. They limit what people can be or feel. They deny the possibility of love that is central to Christianity. They stifle creativity. James Baldwin, says Grant, was able to realise his potential as a writer when he moved from America to Paris to escape the crippling identity of being a black man. But when he returned to America to contribute to the struggle for black liberation, he became a mere propogandist at the expense of his creativity. Identity, Grant says, does not liberate, it binds.

Grant’s criticism of identities has much in common with John Stuart Mill’s opposition to social conformity in On Liberty. Mill believes that the worst restriction on individual freedom is not state control but the stifling effect of social expectations. Individuals are forced by public opinion to become what others think they should be. They are denied the ability to discover and express their own individuality. For Grant it is not simply social expectations that hinder the development of individuals but their acquiescence in an identity. And the problem is not merely that individuality is squashed. Identities also nurture tyrants. “Identity, even with the best of intentions,” he writes, “falls too easily into the hands of petty tyrants — those identity police who monitor our words and actions, trolling social media to keep people in their lanes, telling us who qualifies to write or read — or monstrous despots who crush love under their boots.”

Mill wants everyone to realise him- or herself as an individual. But people come into the world with identities, and self-realisation cannot amount to a denial of the attachments that these identities bring with them. Grant prefers the vision put forward by Édouard Glissant, a Martinique poet and philosopher, of society as a creole garden where people have many identities and are not completely defined by any of them. “Yes, I am a Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi person, I am Irish, I am Australian, I am Indigenous and, as I said before, I have been all of those things and I am none of them.”

In a creole society people have identities that they value. But they are not imprisoned by any one of them and they transcend all of them. An insult in this society may wound but it can never be a threat to personhood. Those who condemn or insult are never defined by the position they express. In this society a person can be a conservative Christian, freely express his views, and yet also be acknowledged by those he regards as sinners as a good rugby player, a good teacher, a loving father and a valued member of his community. In this society people can acknowledge that there are good, indeed lovable, people on both sides of a conflict.

The problem is that we don’t live in this kind of society. As Grant admits, the identities that imprison people are often thrust on them. They are not only inescapable; they are also disvalued. They bring a stigma with them. People who have a disvalued identity can’t get out of their prison simply by refusing to accept the way in which they are defined. And those who act as gatekeepers of this prison are not merely voicing their views when they taunt or disparage. They are expressing their hate or distaste for all people who have the identity they despise or fear. They are signalling their allegiance to others who share their commitment to maintaining the subordination or exclusion of those they hate.

If they are educated, talented and lucky, individuals in a subordinated group may find an escape into other identities. They can, perhaps, go to a place like Paris where people are not so prone to have prejudices against people of their kind. But the fewer their opportunities, the less power people have over conditions that affect their lives, the more inconceivable is the creole existence that Grant regards as ideal.

Grant presents these people with a paradox. A struggle for freedom from the prison of a stigmatised identity requires a collective struggle — a solidarity with those who share the same oppression. The aim is to reject the low status that their identity imposes on them, but they can’t escape being so identified. They can’t change their skin colour, their heritage or their sexual preference. Their only option is to remake their identity into a source of pride and power. Identity imprisons people but it also has the potential to free them from oppression. Grant allows that this is so. What he emphasises is the price that has to be paid. “The identity of empowerment is split from the same atom as the identity of hate.” The identity of empowerment, he says, creates its own prison for individual expression, its own hate and its own tyrants. If this is the price of liberation, he suggests, then it is too high.

Many people would disagree. Baldwin probably knew that his creativity would suffer when he returned to join the black liberation movement. But joining the struggle was something he felt he had to do. Those who fight against the oppression of their group are often moved by love. Grant’s essay is frustrating because he provides no alternative for those who agree with what he says about the dangers of identity but also want to oppose the oppression that blights their lives.

Is there a way to escape the paradox of identity that Grant so movingly presents? One is to make a struggle for liberation into an inclusive movement open to anyone who shares the same ideals. Martin Luther King, who was well aware that such a struggle could breed hate, resentment and violence, represented the movement for black equality as a struggle for white as well as black Americans — for anyone who shared the dream that one day “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

The other way is to keep a firm grip on what is supposed to be the objective of the struggle: the creation of a society in which individuals are respected whatever identities they have and are not imprisoned in any of them. Those involved in a movement of liberation have to ensure that the world of “us” and “them” created by their struggle does not turn into their final destination. This objective is not served when people assume as a matter of course that those who criticise their identity have thereby identified themselves as a threat to their kind. Avoiding the harms that Grant describes requires a difficult balancing act for all members of a liberal society. They must decide when it is legitimate to limit what people can do and say for the sake of protecting members of an oppressed group from threats to their dignity and safety, and when prohibitions violate the right of individuals to express their beliefs.

Not all identities should receive the same treatment. There are good reasons why the AFL should crack down on racist taunts by players and fans. Racial vilification and the harm it causes is a continuing problem in our society. But there is no good reason why Folau should be banished from the football field for stating his religious beliefs. Members of the LGBTQI community continue to face discrimination but nevertheless their entitlement to their sexuality is accepted by most Australians — as the marriage-equality poll revealed. They have no reason to feel insecure or unwelcome because of the views of a member of the conservative Christian minority. They do not need the protection of oversensitive officials. They can join the atheists in disagreeing with Folau’s opinion while appreciating his skill as a rugby player. •

The post The identity trap appeared first on Inside Story.

But almost as soon as Nixon uttered those words the tacit consensus began to break down. Economic conditions worsened after the “oil shock,” and stagflation began to challenge Keynesian orthodoxies. In 1980, with some assistance from the Iranian ayatollahs, Ronald Reagan was elected on the mantra “government is the problem, not the solution.” With a similar philosophy, Margaret Thatcher had become British prime minister the previous year.

In Australia, by contrast, Bob Hawke governed for much of this period, his Labor government intent on internationalising the economy while attempting to preserve a social consensus, especially through the Prices and Incomes Accord with the trade unions. But Australia had its own distinctive reaction to the breaking of the Keynesian consensus, and one with lasting consequences. The first achievement of this excellent book is to trace organisational forms and key personalities in that gathering right-wing critique of the political orthodoxy.

The key figure was Hugh Morgan, for many years a senior executive at Western Mining and its chief executive from 1990 to 2003. Almost as important was Ray Evans, employed by the same company from 1982 in order, he said, “to engage in the culture wars.” Morgan had the strong public profile; Evans wrote his speeches. The third figure was a former head of Treasury, John Stone, who devoted his post–public service career to various right-wing causes, most infamously supporting the Joh for PM campaign.

This trio was involved in the formation of four organisations, each with a distinct focus. The first and by far the most important was the H.R. Nicholls Society, founded in 1986, which concentrated on industrial relations; among its other founding members was future Liberal treasurer Peter Costello. The economic turbulence of the 1970s and early 80s, and the failure of the Fraser government to use it as a pretext for a full-blooded set of policies, was the catalyst for its core members. “How could Fraser leave office in 1983 with so little achieved in turning back the Whitlamite tide of destruction?” wondered John Stone.

The group concentrated on a tension at the heart of the Australian industrial relations system. On the one hand, part of the system’s remit since the famed Harvester industrial relations case of 1907 had been to protect the living standards of Australian workers. On the other, the Hawke-era industrial relations commission could only do what the economy could afford, and its judgements flowed back into how the economy operated. Especially in the difficult economic conditions of the 1980s, the tensions were coming to the fore. For the H.R. Nicholls Society, by contrast, labour was a commodity like any other, and so needed to be subjected wholly to market forces.

One significant moment in the group’s coalescing was Gerard Henderson’s critique of what he called “the industrial relations club” in Quadrant in 1983. The following year, John Stone gave a lecture, “1929 and All That,” which portrayed the Australian economy as being in a precarious state. After a series of discussions, the group convened a conference, and conferences and publications became central to its organisational life.

Apart from staking out its political terrain — articulating and reinforcing its common line — these events were important for cementing social networks and reinforcing in the members a sense of being part of an active and growing movement. The atmosphere was “revivalist,” according to Evans: “In political life, as in warfare, morale is everything.” The society’s three offspring would also adopt this distinctive modus operandi, embracing a degree of intellectualism rarely found on the right of Australian politics.

Beneath the H.R. Nicholls Society’s patina of intellectualism, however, was always a strong core of what in the early days of communism was called agitprop. Evans and his colleagues would throw verbal grenades to create publicity, shift the terms of public discourse, and deny legitimacy to contending points of view. Thus, as Kelly recounts, Costello labelled the industrial relations system as “fundamentally corrupt” and Evans declared “the phrase ‘industrial relations’” to be “a product of Marxism.” Nor were their perceptions of other figures on the right at all nuanced: Stone later referred to Malcolm Turnbull’s supporters among Liberal MPs as “left and far-left Liberals.”

The other three groups were less influential. The first of these was the Samuel Griffith Society, formed in 1992 to address constitutional and legal issues. It was originally a reaction to the Hawke government’s creation of a committee to look at constitutional reform, and was fuelled by a push for “the Keating–Turnbull republic” and the Mabo decision: in Stone’s words, reported by Kelly, “the most legally indefensible decision in the High Court’s history.” A former chief justice of the High Court, Sir Harry Gibbs, was recruited as the society’s president.

The society’s most constant concern was to stop and/or reverse the centralisation of power in Canberra, which it saw as breaching the federal spirit of the Constitution. The stance was determinedly non-historical: like other federations, Australia was a product of an attempt to balance the existing privileges of colonial governments with the needs of a new nation. The compromises were the product of a time when it took a week to get from Perth to Sydney; when large areas were not connected by the telegraph; when nearly all businesses were local and rarely crossed state borders; and when there were almost no international political relationships beyond that with the mother country. As the scale of social, economic and political life has expanded, so has the balance of governmental relations changed. But perhaps this emphasis on preserving federalism in aspic is in reality a desire for ineffectual government.

The Bennelong Society, with a focus on Indigenous affairs, was formed in 2000. Opposed to anything it saw as separate development or as licensing a separate nation, its notable members were former Liberal minister Peter Howson and former Labor MP Gary Johns.

The final group, the Lavoisier Group, was founded in 2000 on a program of climate scepticism. Former Labor minister Peter Walsh headed an organisation that included Australia’s most prominent climate change deniers, such as the geologist Ian Plimer. To maintain its view that global warming is a hoax, the Group was reduced to increasingly outrageous conspiracy theories, arguably the final product of a long period of intellectual decline.

As Kelly shows, the influence of these groups reached its zenith during the years of the Howard government. Right-wing movements tend to have two advantages over left-wing movements — more money and better elite access. But although the government encouraged the long-running waterfront confrontation, the H.R. Nicholls Society was initially disappointed by the modesty of its industrial relations reforms. Only once the government had obtained a Senate majority after the 2004 election did it launch into a more root-and-branch approach with its WorkChoices legislation, to the applause of these societies but to great disapproval among the public.

Howard and a core of other government figures were hostile to any action on global warming, and withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol. In Indigenous affairs, the government adamantly opposed anything that could be labelled as a “black armband” view of history or could be associated with separate development, dissolving Labor’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and refusing any apology to the stolen generations. Howard also managed to defeat the 1999 referendum on an Australian republic, effectively disposing of the issue for at least twenty years. His attitude to federalism, though — one that he shared with all contemporary Liberal leaders — was wholly opportunistic.

The moment of these societies has passed. Among the pioneers, Morgan is seventy-eight, Stone is ninety and Evans has died. No parallel groups are emerging. The agenda of neoliberalism has run its political course.

Nowhere is this more evident than at the major right-wing think tanks, which seem to have run out of intellectual juice. When the biggest of them, the Institute of Public Affairs, put forward its manifesto for the 2019 election, it was a shopping list of tired clichés and lost causes, including the abolition of the ABC and — a sign of the fantasyland it increasingly inhabits — the need for an inquiry into the Bureau of Meteorology’s alleged manipulation of global warming data.

Today, the most prominent far-right groups in Australia are much uglier, and their dominant tone is nastily populist. Figures such as Pauline Hanson, Clive Palmer, David Leyonhjelm and Fraser Anning have close to no real policy content, and focus simply on mobilising resentments. Their behaviour almost provokes a feeling of nostalgia for the more gentlemanly voices of the right’s previous wave, described and analysed for the first time in this book.

At their best, the groups gave intellectual fibre to conservative views. Even though they were comprehensively out of step with public opinion, they had great success in framing political issues and changing the agenda of political discourse. That unique moment in Australian history is skilfully illuminated in this carefully researched and engagingly written book. •

The post Revivalists of the right appeared first on Inside Story.

Newfong was a general reporter who also wrote about Indigenous affairs. Deamer advised him to develop all-round skills so he would not be pigeonholed as writing only about being Aboriginal. At the end of July, however, the arrangement came to a sudden end when Rupert Murdoch sacked Deamer during a dispute over the direction of the newspaper.

Newfong was to be a secondary casualty: he was typecast by the new editors as an “Aboriginal writer” and there was no place for him in their plans. “John, I’m sorry but I don’t think there is going to be much here for you anymore,” a senior editor told him. That editor would tell this writer that the editor-in-chief “reckons Australians don’t want to read about black people.”

Newfong was well equipped to pursue a journalistic career. He was a precise and elegant writer with a sharp mind, an easy sense of humour, and a wealth of charm and warmth that inspired trust. His friend Lillian Holt, the first Aboriginal journalist to work for the ABC in Brisbane, says he had a rare quality. “It is called presence,” she says. “His entry into a space could not be ignored.”

Within two weeks of departing the Australian, Newfong was writing for the Bulletin. It seemed his career was still on a familiar track.

But it was not to be. There was a new stirring in Aboriginal affairs, led by what Dr H.C. (Nugget) Coombs called an Aboriginal intelligentsia — Black Power groups in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Newfong was a key member of Sydney’s Redfern group.

For the rest of his life he was to fight for Indigenous rights and the improvement of Indigenous people’s lives using his journalistic and communications skills. He was to become a role model for young Aboriginal people in two ways: as a pioneering journalist and as the first openly gay Indigenous activist. He never “came out” because he had never hidden his sexuality. “I never knew a time when John was not openly gay,” Holt says. This personal integrity would underpin his journalism.

Newfong, a descendant of the Ngugi people of Moreton Bay, Brisbane, was born in 1943. His mother, Edna Crouch, played cricket for Australia in the 1930s; his father, Archie, was a champion boxer.

After leaving Wynnum State High School in 1961, Newfong nibbled at the edges of the media. He worked in the ABC mailroom in Brisbane; wrote TV reviews for Sydney’s Daily Mirror; studied typography and graphic design (as well as fashion); and worked as a newspaper proofreader.

Then came the breakthroughs: a cadetship at the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1960s and the job on the Australian.

Newfong’s involvement with Aboriginal affairs began straight after leaving school. He joined the student group; he worked with Victoria’s Aboriginal Advancement League and was particularly active in the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. He ran the council’s Queensland campaign for the 1967 Aboriginal citizenship referendum and in 1970 became its national secretary.

He made a mark as an activist in 1970 when he helped lead a protest against the Captain Cook bicentennial festivities. Aboriginal people, he said, had nothing to celebrate.

Two years later he played a crucial role in what may still be the most successful of Indigenous protests — the Aboriginal Tent Embassy opposite Parliament House in Canberra. The embassy, a demonstration against the McMahon government’s denial of Aboriginal land rights, was a Redfern Black Power protest. Newfong was its chief voice, lobbying and briefing journalists, politicians and diplomats. “The Mission,” he said, “has come to town.”

Newfong’s language was less strident than that of many of his radical contemporaries. In public statements, he shunned the “copulatory adjective.” Nevertheless, the point of view was the same.

In an ABC television interview, he said governments in power were indifferent to Aboriginal people. “Perhaps ‘indifference’ is being euphemistic,” he added. His defence of the embassy’s demands for land rights, mineral rights and financial compensation was calm but unyielding.

Newfong was appointed the first Aboriginal editor of the Indigenous magazine Identity in 1972. Melbourne University professor Marcia Langton says he made it enormously influential.

By 1975 he was doing public relations for the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service. Langton remembers him returning to the office at night to help young Indigenous women produce the Aboriginal newspaper Koori Bina. “Working with John was a young writer’s dream,” she says. “He was extraordinarily well read, a brilliant analyst and writer [with a] supreme and ever-ready wit.”

Black Power waned as Newfong became a government adviser and speechwriter; public relations chief of the Aboriginal Development Commission; an adviser to the Australian Medical Association; a journalism lecturer at Queensland’s James Cook University; and a guest lecturer at several universities in Australia and overseas.

He also served on the board of the Public Broadcasting Foundation, helping spur the rapid growth of Aboriginal radio through support for Indigenous broadcasters. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he contributed to a long list of publications.

He brought to his work a depth of knowledge, a strong analytical mind and a sharp sense of humour. His style was thoughtful and measured — but with clever, often angry barbs.

The pastoral industry, he once wrote, was “the black man’s burden”; Aboriginal protests threatened “the great Australian smugness”; and Indigenous claims for mineral rights made people worry about “us digging up their nondescript sprawls of suburbia.”

But he was to become disillusioned with the nature of government Aboriginal funding and the “ever-mushrooming Aboriginal bureaucracies.” Higher spending, he wrote, might merely result in “a whole new set of anagrams.” He wrote of Aboriginal bureaucrats “of the instant-coffee variety.” And in conversation he used the phrase nouveau noir to describe people who belatedly discovered their Aboriginality.

Newfong’s abiding concern was Indigenous health, highlighted in a fiery preface he wrote for the 1989 National Aboriginal Health Strategy. It is only six paragraphs long but it shows what a powerful writer and committed campaigner he was.

The first thing, he said, was to address the reality of Indigenous Australia, a reality obscured by white history and jingoism. Aboriginal people were “dressed in the hand-me-downs that are the legacy of dispossession and dispersal.” This was “a history forged in the cauldrons of colonisation.”

Newfong died in 1999, only fifty-five years of age. His legacy is honoured in New South Wales in the annual Kennedy Awards, named after the late Les Kennedy, an indefatigable crime reporter for News Corp and Fairfax newspapers. The prize for outstanding Indigenous affairs reporting is the John Newfong Award.

This is fitting, for Kennedy was also Aboriginal. When he began his career, he walked through the door John Newfong had nudged ajar. •

The post The door John Newfong nudged ajar appeared first on Inside Story.

I worked my way around the map, tapping each button. Then I zeroed in on the Melbourne area, where there are five language groups: Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung, Wathaurong, Taungurung and Dja Dja Wurrung. I’d tap one, listen, say the name under my breath, tap it again, listen, say the name again, move onto the next one, do the same, over and over.

I love words, not just the look of them and the work they do, but the sounds they make. These words had a rhythm all their own. They set up a music in me that stayed as I wandered around the rest of the museum, learning about Victoria’s First Peoples, their relationship to the land, and their stories of the creator and protector spirits, Bunjil the eagle and Waa the crow. By the end of the afternoon, I knew more about the deeper story of this place I’d lived in for just five years than I did about the place that first formed me.

I was born in Clare, a small town two hours’ drive north of Adelaide. For seventeen years, through the 1960s and 70s, my world was family, that town of three thousand, and the bush and farms and vineyards around us. Mostly we were descendants of Irish, English and Scottish immigrants, with a few Italian, Greek and Polish families in the mix. My own ancestors on both sides were Irish, and had settled near this same area in the 1840s.

At my primary school I wasn’t taught anything about Australia’s First Peoples. At high school, the history subjects on offer were modern European and classical studies, and an Australian history subject that in hindsight could have been called “Australia Since 1788.”

After I finished school, I left Clare and lived in Adelaide for a few years, travelled overseas for a while, then settled in Tasmania in the late 1980s. I’d become interested in Australia’s colonial history and was reading about it a lot. Occasionally I went to talks by local academics and Aboriginal people.

I moved to Melbourne in 2008, during the week of the national apology to the Stolen Generations. Soon I was learning about the Wurundjeri people, and bit by bit I came to understand about the different language groups making up the larger Kulin nation. I started reading up on local history, getting to know important sites and dates in Melbourne for Aboriginal people, going to Tanderrum ceremonies, and seeing plays about places like Coranderrk. It made me feel both more connected to Melbourne and more uncomfortable about what I was hearing and what it all meant.

All through the years, I went back to Clare regularly to see family and friends. But I was oblivious to the history of the people who’d lived there for tens of thousands of years before – I didn’t know their name, culture, language, anything.

From the internet, I’d learnt that the original people were the Ngadjuri, a word in their language that means “we people.” I had no idea how to pronounce it. Each time I tried, I’d stumble over it, mumble “nud-jury,” then “naa-joorey,” then shake my head and give up. I felt stupid and awkward.

Several years ago, on a regular trip back, I decided to stay on longer and start finding out what I could.

Clare’s main street as you come in from Adelaide is as familiar to me as my own hand. The oval, the bridge over the creek, the old two-storey banks, the fish-and-chip shop where I earned pocket money and, halfway along the main street, the two-storey town hall that houses the local history centre.

I walk into the foyer and up the wide staircase, my hands on the smooth, varnished wooden banister I remember sliding down as a child. The room is huge, with high ceilings, tall bookshelves and a massive wooden table. Along a wall and tucked into corners are old grey filing cabinets, computers, a heavy-duty photocopier. The volunteer on duty is the mother of a boy I was at school with, and after a quick catch-up I tell her what I’m after. She finds me a book and some folders, settles me at the big table and leaves me to it.

The book is Ngadjuri: Aboriginal People of the Mid North Region of South Australia. On the front is a painting, by renowned contemporary artist Robert Hannaford, of a group of pre-colonial Aboriginal men walking through a stand of gum trees. Alongside it is an old sepia photograph of an Aboriginal man dressed in a light-coloured three-piece suit, his hair white, a slight smile on his face.

On the back cover is a map of the mid north of South Australia, marking out Ngadjuri country as it was documented by anthropologist Norman Tindale in 1974 – a roughly rectangular area extending from Gawler in the south to the lower Flinders Ranges in the north.

Starting from the top, I trace my finger over the map, silently sounding the names of the towns. Bimbowrie, Waukaringa, Minburra, Moockra, Coomooroo, Orroroo, Paratoo, Oodlawirra, Nantabibbie, Pekina, Tarcowie, Yongala, Appila, Mannanarie, Belalie, Gumbowie, Terowie, Caltowie, Canowie, Yarcowie, Ulooloo, Bundaleer, Booborowie, Manoora.

All are familiar to me. When we were children, my dad took us for drives up north to visit relatives, and he’d often recite the names of the towns, arranging their order to make them rhyme and sound a rhythm: Oodlawirra, Nantabibbie, Orroroo, Paratoo. On he’d go, his eyes twinkling. All these years later, I instantly remember the rhythm, nodding my head to the beat of it.

I slide my finger down the shiny paper and pause at my home town, and a cluster of other names I know well but which sound so different from the others – Clare, Sevenhill, Penwortham, Watervale, Leasingham, Auburn, Riverton. It’s abrupt, the shift. In time, I’ll come to understand more about why.

The Ngadjuri book was published as a teaching resource for South Australian schools in 2005. Writing it took a decade of work by many, among them Ngadjuri people, schoolteachers, curriculum staff, archaeologists and historians. The book’s genesis lay in two sources: research by Ngadjuri man Fred Warrior and archaeologist Sue Anderson, and a booklet produced in 1995 by Fran Knight, a teacher in the mid-north town of Peterborough, who had spent years researching Ngadjuri history and culture so she could teach it to her students. Printed on high-quality gloss paper, many of the 150 pages feature colourful photos and illustrations, and at the end of each chapter are activities for teachers to use in the classroom. The content covers Ngadjuri country, language, Dreaming, traditional life, archaeology, the arrival of Europeans, resistance to invasion in the 1840s, dispossession of the land through to the 1900s, and a final chapter on shared history and the future.

I flick through the whole book, then return to the section on language. From a sidebar I learn that Ngadjuri words that end in -owie mean fresh water. Caltowie, where my cousins grew up on a farm, is “waterhole of the sleepy lizards”; Booborowie, where I played netball, is “round waterhole”; Yarcowie is “wide water.”

Too soon, it’s time for the history room to close, so I take down the book’s details and later, back home in Melbourne, order my own copy. The day it arrives, I settle at the kitchen table with a coffee and once again head straight to the chapter on language.

Over 300 words are listed, first from English to Ngadjuri and then from Ngadjuri to English, along with instructions on how to pronounce them. I sit, like a kid again, in my classroom of one, slowly, methodically, following the invisible teacher.

Ng at the beginning of words is pronounced the same as English words ending in sing. “Sing,” I say, then drop the si part and notice the place in my throat where the ng sound is made. Ng, I say over and over, until it feels right. Next, how to say the vowels – a as in but; e as in pet; i pronounced in two different ways depending on where it is in the sentence; o as in pot; u as in push. Consonants like k, g, t and d, I learn, are said more softly than we say them in English – the book says they aren’t sounded with a puff of air. I didn’t know that’s actually what we do, so I say them the English way first, noticing those puffs of air. Then I try without the puff. Things are starting to click.

Syllables are all emphasised equally. So Ngadjuri can’t be “nud-jury” or “naa-joorey”as I’d been saying. I put it all together and even out the syllables. Nga-dju-ri. Three syllables, even weight; Ng as in sing, a as in but, u as in push, i as in happy. Ngadjuri.

Next, the lists of words. I start with the Ngadjuri ones, randomly pick them out and say them aloud, concentrating on making the sounds. Then I go through the English list, reading each one out then saying the Ngadjuri translation a few times. Words for different animals, birds, insects and plants; words for water, fire, sky, clouds, sun, moon and stars, for people, for actions. Words like butji, malku and gundu’malku for different types of cloud formations. A word for eye – mena – and another – menawalpu – for being sharp-eyed. One for “to dance” – mutanga – and a different one – guri – for an imitative dance. Words like mulka for “to talk” and jata’mulka for “talk by sticks on the ground” – also known as “silent talk,” a skill you need when hunting. Even a word for “shaking out dust” – kunma’rindma.

When I get to the letter s, I notice there are seven forms of the word spirit – ancestral beings, spirits causing heat, spirits that tease, spirits inhabiting hills, spirit children, spirit men and women, spirit world. All this going on in the place where I’d grown up, and I’d had no idea.

Most of the words in the book came from the man in the cover photograph. Barney Waria was a Ngadjuri man born in 1873 in Orroroo, north of Clare. His mother was the daughter of a medicine man; his father was born at Booyoolie Aboriginal camp in the mid north. His surname is a variation of a Ngadjuri word meaning second male child. At some stage, it was anglicised to warrior.

An initiated elder, Barney Waria knew that his language and culture were in danger of being lost forever, so he made regular trips to Adelaide between 1939 and 1944 to tell anthropologists what he could. Norman Tindale knew him and described him as a perceptive and thoughtful man.

Histories of Australia that include perspectives of the First Peoples are more plentiful now. Some time ago, when I was reading about early colonial Australian history, I listed the dates when the capital cities were founded. It helped me piece together the waves of arrival of colonisers and convicts, and the pattern of disruption for the people already here. Sydney 1788, Hobart 1803, Brisbane 1824, Perth 1829, Melbourne 1835, Adelaide 1836, Darwin 1869.

Among South Australia’s often-touted claims to fame is that it was the country’s only freely settled state, founded at a time when a new consciousness about the treatment of so-called native people in British colonies had emerged. In 1833, slavery had been abolished in Britain after years of social pressure. The Black War in Tasmania, from 1824 to 1831, had not long ended. It was well known in British parliamentary circles that many of those living here already had resisted strongly, and that the death rates were high. This formed part of the backdrop to the plans being made in London for a new colony.

But the founding documents – the South Australia Act of 1834, Letters Patent of February 1836, and the Proclamation read out by British officials at what is now Holdfast Bay in December 1836 – were conflicted and contradictory. On the one hand, “the native inhabitants” were recognised as having occupation of the land and the right to continue to occupy and enjoy it. On the other, the territory marked out for settlement was said to consist of “waste and unoccupied lands… fit for the purposes of colonisation.”

This inherent conflict continued to play out. Land wasn’t meant to be taken up by colonists unless its original owners had voluntarily ceded ownership and been awarded compensation. But early settlers who had bought preliminary land orders in England claimed they had first choice. Meanwhile, the colony’s second governor, George Gawler, in power from 1838 to 1841, oscillated between defending the rights of Aboriginal people to their land and regarding them as inferior and not capable of entering into treaties or bargains.

In October 1839, in an act of acknowledgment of prior occupation, Gawler sent out a decree to South Australians to record the names that Aboriginal people had given to features of the landscape, and for these to be included on public maps. This, I realised, was the explanation for all those Aboriginal words for names of towns north of Clare that I’d noticed on the map of Ngadjuri country. The explanation for the mostly English names south of Clare through to Adelaide lay in the timing.

In those early years, new arrivals from England and the eastern states were pushing inland from Adelaide in search of fertile land and overland routes for moving sheep and cattle. Some, like twenty-one-year-old John Horrocks, who took up land in early 1839 before surveys were completed, named small settlements after people and places in England and Ireland.

The pattern of dispossession of the Ngadjuri people is similar to that of First Australians in many parts of the country. Europeans arrived, saw fertile land with water sources close by – which Indigenous people had been using and keeping clean for tens of thousands of years – and began to move in. They brought in large numbers of sheep and cattle that contaminated the water, trampled the ground where people grew edible plants like yams, and took over the grazing areas that kangaroos and other native animals fed on.

In those early years, Ngadjuri people were, as it was often put at the time, “dispersed.” Exposed to new diseases, many became ill and died. Those who tried to resist the settlers, or who took sheep and other supplies to feed their families, were treated as criminals and many were shot or hanged. Others were driven from their land, forced onto the country of other Aboriginal people, and later into Christian missions where, for the most part, they weren’t allowed to speak their language.

Before Australia was colonised, over 250 languages were spoken, many with different dialects. Where South Australia now lies, around fifty distinct languages could be found. Aboriginal people were naturally multilingual. Up until British contact and for a while after, Ngadjuri people were fluent in the languages of the people from lands around them, including Adnyamathanha to the north and Kaurna to the south.

Across Australia today, fewer than 120 languages remain in daily use, the majority of those in the northern and central parts of the country. At present, only thirteen are considered strong, meaning they have fluent speakers across all generations. Among these, in South Australia, are Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara. Of the remaining languages, some are still spoken by at least a few adults, but not by the children. Others have people who speak a few words and phrases. The most fragile languages are those where knowledge survives only in books and archives. Ngadjuri has been one of the latter for a long time, but in recent years Ngadjuri people have been making moves to revive it.

Karina Lester is a Yankunytjatjara Anangu woman who lives in Adelaide and works with Aboriginal communities around the state to maintain, revive and reclaim their languages. She co-manages the Mobile Language Team, located in the University of Adelaide. I’d heard her speaking on a podcast, slipping easily between her traditional language and English.

When I spoke to her from Melbourne, she talked about the pride she sees in people as they come to know their language. She sees it in the children too, a growing confidence as they develop connections to country, and with the old people.

Prior to contact, she said, people knew through language how to keep country alive and thriving for future generations. “You grew up on an area of country and you knew the place names, you knew what food to eat, how to prepare seed cakes, how to use kangaroo or goanna, how to keep rock-holes clean, why it was important to harvest only what you needed.”

Linguists used to believe that once a language had no remaining speakers, that was the end of it. But during the 1980s, with the realisation that many Aboriginal people were working hard to keep their languages and traditions alive, this belief began to give way to cautious optimism.

Kaurna, the language of the original people of the Adelaide area, is one of South Australia’s early language-revival success stories. As with Ngadjuri, there were no living speakers, only archive material. Since the early 1990s, members of the Kaurna community have been working with a linguist to reconstruct their language.

I learned from Karina that, while there is no set formula, communities and linguists draw on historical records and look to neighbouring languages for similar patterns. From this they can start to build a vocabulary and grammar, and produce dictionaries, learner guides and teaching material. Sometimes, she said, breakthroughs happen when someone comes across an old family notebook and it opens up a new source of information about language and culture.

Kaurna people are increasingly using their language, and it is being spoken at welcome to country ceremonies and utilised in the renaming and dual naming of significant places. It’s also being taught in local schools, as are about nine other South Australian languages, with around five thousand Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students studying them at forty-nine of the state’s schools.

Kaurna words are even being used by people like my mother. In the Adelaide CBD with her one day, I saw a sign saying “Kaurna.” By this stage I knew the first part sounds like a G rather than a K.

“Gurna,” I said.

“No,” said Mum.

“Gaurna?”

Mum shook her head. I gave up.

“Garna,” she said, confidently. She’s heard it often at public events.

A year after my visit to the history room in Clare, I’m in Adelaide again, this time at the State Library to watch a CD-ROM that Ngadjuri people, led by Patricia Waria-Read, a descendant of Barney Waria, made with linguists in 2009. In the closed-in quiet of the reading room, the librarian loads it for me and I sit in front of the screen, headphones on, reading and listening to the Ngadjuri welcome to country.

Alongside colourful photos of birds, animals, plants, the sun and the moon are the local words, written and spoken. There are photos of current-day Ngadjuri people, many of them children, sitting, eating and talking, while recorded voices speak the word for each action. I sit there smiling as I hear them, recognising the different sounds of the vowels and consonants, and the patterns of the syllables.

The welcome to country has three variations – one for the top end of country, one for the middle and one for the bottom. I have the Ngadjuri book with me and I check the map – Clare is located in the middle section, red hawk country. The others are bronzewing pigeon and whip snake. I try to picture Ngadjuri people giving a welcome to country to the early colonists and wonder how it would have been received and understood. Then I wonder if any of my ancestors – those Irish immigrants who’d arrived in Ngadjuri country in the 1840s – had ever heard it spoken, and what their response had been.

My sixteen-year-old nephew Dominic went to the same school as I did in Clare, many years after my time there. Recently I asked him if he’d learnt about Aboriginal history and people.

“Yep,” he said. He remembered classes in grades three to five, taught by his teachers and sometimes guest speakers.

“What do you remember?”

He replied instantly.

“The land that it was – the Ngadjuri people’s all the way up to Peterborough.”

Saying Ngadjuri came easily to him. I pointed that out and he agreed, adding with a grin, “Don’t ask me to spell it, though.”

Last week I made another trip to South Australia, for the unveiling of a sculpture of an Aboriginal woman and child. It was in Riverton, a town of eight hundred people not far from Clare. Modelled and donated by Robert Hannaford, who has had a lifelong interest in Ngadjuri culture, it had been more than twenty years in the making as the community worked to raise funds to cast and install it.

South Australia’s governor, Hieu Van Le, a former Vietnamese “boat person,” did the unveiling honours in the presence of two of Barney Waria’s descendants who’d been involved in the planning over the years. Vincent Copley spoke about ancient Ngadjuri rock art in the mid north. Vincent Branson welcomed us to country in the Ngadjuri language. I stood there, part of the crowd of well over a hundred, smiling as I recognised the words and what they meant.

In the past, when I saw Aboriginal words written down, I skimmed over them. They looked foreign and I had no idea how to pronounce them. It was easier not to try. Now I take pleasure in the sounds, and the fact that I can say them. No doubt I stumble, and do it with a strange accent, but it feels like I’m a little closer to the deeper story they hold. •

I would like to pay my respects to the Ngadjuri People and to acknowledge their elders – past, present and future. Thanks to Karina Lester and Adele Pring for background information and generous insights, and to the authors of the Ngadjuri book and CD-ROM, and the many others who helped bring them to publication.

This essay appears in Griffith Review 55: State of Hope.

The post Learning the local language appeared first on Inside Story.

To make the No case, Windschuttle rehearses positions he took in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and other books. He attacks leading proponents of Aboriginal recognition, charging them with misrepresenting the Constitution as racist and promoting an exaggerated view of Aboriginal culture as distinct from that of mainstream Australia. His thesis that the break-up of Australia is a deliberate purpose or unforeseen consequence of the constitutional recognition of Indigenous people is exaggerated, however, and his historical and constitutional scholarship selective and partial in key aspects.

None more so than his claim that the Franchise Act 1902 did not deny the vote to Aborigines after federation. Quite the contrary, he contends: most Aborigines were not precluded from voting; rather, section 41 of the Constitution guaranteed their vote. If Windschuttle is right, then the generally accepted view that the Franchise Act denied Aboriginal people the right to vote is wrong. Windschuttle is aggressive in damning his opponents. Their claim that, in his words, “The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 denied the vote to Aborigines after Federation,” is one of fifteen “worst myths” that “Aboriginal supporters, especially those employed by our university law schools, have grown so audacious” in inventing. They have concocted “a contrived case of conspicuous compassion for political ends,” he claims.

Invective aside, Windschuttle does make a robust defence of the Constitution as a non-racist, liberal-democratic instrument of government. His analysis of the few sections of the Constitution that mention “Aboriginal natives” or race, and his overall assessment of the Constitution as non-racist, are painstakingly researched and correctly argued. Those who drafted the Constitution were not conservative racists but mainly progressive liberals, including Andrew Inglis Clark from Tasmania, Charles Kingston from South Australia, and Samuel Griffith from Queensland, whose early drafts shaped much of the discussion in the Federal Conventions during the 1890s and the Constitution itself. Australian constitution-making was a highly democratic process, with Convention delegates elected by the people of the various colonies and the final document endorsed by popular referendum before formal ratification by the British parliament. Even though the franchise was limited, with women unable to vote in the majority of states, Australia’s was the most democratic constitution up to that time.

Windschuttle’s positive view of Aboriginal voting rights relies on his account of the Franchise Act, which restricts “aboriginal natives of Australia” from voting “unless so entitled under section 41 of the Constitution.” This section of the Constitution guarantees the Commonwealth voting rights of an adult person who has the right to vote in their state. In other words, Aboriginal people with the right to vote in their home state were not subject to the Franchise Act exclusion.

The texts of the two sections are as follows.

Section 41 of the Constitution: No adult person who has or acquires a right to vote at elections for the more numerous House of the Parliament of a State shall, while the right continues, be prevented by any law of the Commonwealth from voting at elections for either House of the Parliament of the Commonwealth.

Section 4 of the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902: No aboriginal native of Australia Asia Africa or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand shall be entitled to have his name placed on an Electoral Roll unless so entitled under section 41 of the Constitution.

Windschuttle’s case depends on section 41’s being a cast-iron guarantee of Commonwealth voting rights for all those, including Aborigines, who have or acquire the right to vote in state elections. Clearly, state electoral law and practice were crucial. In four of the six states, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, the voting rights of Aboriginal people had never been repealed. That was also the case in the Northern Territory, which was under South Australian administration until 1911 before being taken over by the Commonwealth. Hence, voting rights of all Aboriginal people, except those in Queensland and Western Australia, which had laws effectively banning Aborigines from voting, were guaranteed by section 41. Moreover, according to Windschuttle, section 41 guaranteed the Commonwealth franchise to future Aboriginal people, not just those on state rolls at the time of Federation.

That Aboriginal voting was a guaranteed constitutional right has been endorsed by Robert Murray in his review of Windschuttle’s book for the Australian. Murray asserts: “Aborigines already had the vote and the Constitution actually guaranteed it” in the states and the Northern Territory, and were excluded only in Queensland and Western Australia by means of high property-ownership requirements.

There are two main parts to this claim: one, that Aborigines already had the vote; and two, that the Constitution actually guaranteed it.

To evaluate the first part of the claim, we need to take account of two categories of Aborigines who were not banned from voting by the Franchise Act. One category was people of mixed Aboriginal parentage who were half or less than half Aboriginal according to official categorisation at the time. (Such people would be classified as Aboriginal today provided they identified as Aboriginal and were recognised as such.) The second category was “aboriginal natives,” who had state voting rights and were thereby protected by section 41 of the Constitution.

The meaning and extent of the term “aboriginal native” became an issue immediately after Federation and was defined narrowly by the first attorney-general, Alfred Deakin. The particular case related to section 127 of the Constitution, the only other place in the Constitution where the term “aboriginal native” is used. In his ministerial directive in August 1901, Deakin ruled that “half-castes” were not “aboriginal natives” and so were not affected by section 127 of the Constitution. Section 127, which was repealed in the 1967 referendum, stipulated that “aboriginal natives” were not to be counted in determining early voting and financial arrangements for the new Commonwealth. Deakin’s restrictive definition of “aboriginal native” was applied to the Electoral Act, as affirmed by Robert Garran, secretary of the attorney-general’s department, in 1905: “half-castes are not disqualified.” However, Garran advised, “all persons in whom the aboriginal blood preponderates are disqualified.” This distinction was accepted, and the dubious category of preponderating blood was still being used by the Commonwealth Electoral Office in 1961. As a result, those who were “half-castes,” or less than half Aboriginal, were not classified as “aboriginal natives of Australia” and so were not banned from voting by the Franchise Act.

How many of these people with half or less “Aboriginal blood” voted we do not know. Windschuttle documents early voting in Tasmania by Aboriginal people whose names are prominent today. Presumably there were many such people in the other states and all had Commonwealth voting rights. In Queensland and Western Australia, however, people classified as “half-castes” and “persons of half-blood” were banned from voting in state elections. Being banned from state voting did not strictly jeopardise their Commonwealth voting rights, because they were not “aboriginal natives” according to the Commonwealth, but in practice they were likely excluded.

The second category was made up of “aboriginal natives” who had state voting rights and so were guaranteed Commonwealth voting rights through section 41 of the Constitution. Again, this should have been a relatively large group because four of the six states had never passed legislation banning Aboriginal people from the state franchise. The Northern Territory was administered by South Australia until 1911 and thereafter by the Commonwealth, and it too had no legislative ban. Only Queensland and Western Australia had banned Aboriginal people, including “half-castes” and “half-bloods,” from voting unless they satisfied a property-ownership qualification that effectively excluded most.

Thus, Windschuttle is partly right if we simply focus on the Franchise Act and section 41 of the Constitution. The Franchise Act didn’t ban “aboriginal natives” who had state voting rights; indeed, these people were protected by section 41 of the Constitution. And “half-castes” or people with “non-preponderating” Aboriginal blood were saved because they were not classified as “aboriginal natives.”

In fact, however, Windschuttle is quite wrong because many Aboriginal people were excluded from voting by much state and territory legislation, administration and practice. And many who had the right to vote were unaware of the fact and so were excluded in practice. In New South Wales, where Aboriginal people had the right to vote at state and federal elections, all those in receipt of “charitable aid” were excluded under the Parliamentary Electorates and Elections Act 1893. Charitable aid included government assistance and rations. The Select Committee on Voting Rights for Aborigines reported in 1961 that in New South Wales there were “many instances where the entitlement was not being exercised.” At Woodenborg Aboriginal Station, for example, only five out of fifty Aboriginal people were enrolled to vote.

In Queensland and Western Australia, many people who were eligible – “half-castes” and those in whom Aboriginal blood did not preponderate – were unaware of their right and were not enrolled. The select committee reported “the fact that thousands of such people in Queensland and Western Australia, who are already integrated into the community and not living in the tribal state, have the right to be enrolled and to vote at Commonwealth elections but are unaware of the fact.”

Windschuttle and Murray make special note of Aboriginal people’s right to vote in the Northern Territory, which was under South Australian jurisdiction at the time. But as the 1961 select committee reported after extensive field visits, virtually all were excluded. This was done by electoral regulations that disqualified “wards” from voting. “Of some 17,000 Aborigines in the Northern Territory, only eighty-nine have not been declared wards or have been removed from the Register of Wards.” In other words, 99.48 per cent of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory were excluded.

Aboriginal military veterans were a special case, having been granted Commonwealth voting rights in 1940 for the duration of the second world war and for a period of six months afterwards, and enfranchised permanently in 1949. Yet many eligible ex–service members in Queensland and Western Australia assumed they were precluded from Commonwealth voting because of state restrictions. In the case of the Torres Strait Islands Regiment, only fifty-seven of 659 veterans were enrolled in the Commonwealth electorate of Leichhardt in Northern Queensland where they lived, according to the select committee.

South Australia was one of the more liberal states, but even there Aboriginal people were sometimes wrongly removed from the Commonwealth electoral roll by bureaucrats. In a well-documented case, Pat Stretton and Christine Finnimore have shown that seventeen South Australian Aborigines at Point McLeay were so removed in the decades after federation.

So just how many Aboriginal people voted in the early Commonwealth and how many were excluded? We don’t have precise figures. In particular, we don’t know how many “half-castes” and people with less than “preponderating blood” who were not banned from voting actually exercised that right. The 1961 select committee found that thousands of such people who were integrated into the community were unaware of their right and did not vote. But we can readily calculate that the vast majority of those classified as Aborigines were restricted from the Commonwealth franchise by state and territory laws and regulations and administrative practice.

According to one estimate, there were 66,950 Aborigines in 1901: 26,670 in Queensland, 23,363 in the Northern Territory, 8065 in New South Wales, 3070 in South Australia, only 521 in Victoria and none in Tasmania. The 1961 select committee estimated that 30,000 adult Aborigines were denied the federal vote in Australia: 26,000 “full-blood” Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, and 4000 people of “preponderantly aboriginal descent” in Queensland and Western Australia. This figure of 30,000 did not include all those Aborigines who were unaware of their formal right to vote because they were not of “preponderating aboriginal blood”: the committee found there were “thousands of such people in Queensland and Western Australia, who are already integrated into the community.”

Nor was section 41 the sure constitutional guarantee that Windschuttle maintains. It was never intended to serve such a purpose, and did not operate in this way to protect future generations. That was confirmed by an adverse High Court decision restricting its scope to those with the right to vote in states at Federation only. The case concerned the right to vote at a forthcoming Commonwealth election of people on state rolls who had missed the deadline for the Commonwealth rolls. The High Court ruled that section 41 applied only to people on state rolls at the time of the first Franchise Act 1902. This was the accepted view of section 41 all along, as evidence by its original drafting in the 1890s Federal Conventions and subsequent official interpretation.

Section 41 was one of the more contentious sections of the Constitution designed to protect the right of women who had acquired the right to vote in their state, as women had in South Australia in 1894. South Australian delegate William Holder tried to have a universal franchise clause inserted in the Constitution, but failed for two main reasons: that it would be best left to the new Commonwealth government to enact; and that state sensitivities might be aroused by putting such a blanket entitlement in the Constitution. When Holder’s motion for a universal franchise was defeated, he proposed the more modest alternative of ensuring that those possessing the right to vote would not be deprived of that right. This was carried and became section 41.

Most of the discussion focused on protecting women who already had the vote and voicing concerns about states making unacceptable changes such as giving the vote to sixteen-year-olds or 10,000 Chinese in the Northern Territory. Surprisingly, Aborigines were barely mentioned. Most of the constitutional framers envisaged the section as interim until the new federal parliament passed a uniform franchise. It was couched in more general terms, however, and there was no sunset clause “until the Parliament otherwise provides.”

Windschuttle argues that the words “who has or acquires a right to vote” at the state level means section 41 protects future voters. The Convention record does not support this. Convention leader Edmund Barton opposed the section because he thought states might manipulate the federal franchise in unacceptable ways, and he brought it back to a subsequent session for reconsideration. There, Holder made clear his intention: “I want the states to have their rights with regard to the franchise unimpaired up to the day when the federal franchise is indicated.” Despite Barton’s misgivings, others claimed that state manipulation would be unlikely once the federal franchise was enacted, and the section was left as previously drafted. As with other contentious matters, ambiguities were left for future parliaments to decide, on the assumption that good sense would prevail.

Windschuttle’s evidence for section 41’s being a guarantee for Aboriginal voting depends on dubious and selective references. He quotes at length Sir John Downer’s claim that the states would continue to define the right to vote in the future and that such laws would prevail over any law passed by the Commonwealth. Downer’s was an exception to the general view. Windschuttle’s case also relies heavily on selective quoting of Richard O’Connor, distinguished founder, member of the three-man drafting committee, and original appointee to the High Court, who was also government leader in the Senate and responsible for introducing the Franchise Act.

O’Connor made a noble defence of the original Franchise Bill, which had no restriction on Aboriginal Australians, against senators from Queensland and Western Australia who pushed for their exclusion. Senator Matheson from Western Australia claimed, “Surely it is absolutely repugnant to the greater number of the people of the Commonwealth that an aboriginal man, or aboriginal lubra or gin – a horrible, degraded, dirty creature – should have the same rights, simply by virtue of being twenty-one years of age, that we have, after some debate today, decided to give to our wives and daughters.” Senator Stewart from Queensland railed against “these opium-eating blacks, these ignorant aboriginals, these people who do not care two straws about the government of the country so long as they can get their daily tucker and their allowance of opium.”

Against this barrage, O’Connor stressed that Aboriginal people had the right to vote in all the states, albeit with a high property qualification in Queensland and Western Australia. He said it would be “a monstrous and a savage application of this principle of a white Australia” to exclude such people. If the excluding amendment were passed, future Aboriginal people would have to tell their sons “who are becoming more civilised, and perhaps as civilised, and as worthy of the franchise as the white men among whom they are living – ’Although your people owned this territory for centuries before the white man came here, although you are his equal in intelligence, it has been prescribed by the Commonwealth that you shall not have the right to vote at all.’”

O’Connor managed to have the exclusionary amendment defeated in the Senate, but it was reinstated in the House of Representatives and supported by leading Liberal and Labor members, including H.B. Higgins, Isaac Isaacs and Chris Watson. Higgins put the motion to reinstate Aboriginal native exclusion because he favoured leaving electoral entitlement to the states; Isaacs supported it on the grounds that Aborigines might not be worthy to vote in Commonwealth elections because of their lack of intelligence, interest and political capacity, which would be best left to the states to sort out; and Watson because of his fear that “thousands upon thousands” of Aborigines might predominate in electorates in northern Australia, and be beholden to controlling squatters.

With the Aboriginal native exclusion now reinstated, the amendment passed the House. When it came back to the Senate, O’Connor reluctantly accepted the amendment as the price of getting agreement to an amended bill that would enfranchise women. Having recounted the reinstatement of the Aboriginal exclusion, Windschuttle gives the final say to O’Connor, quoting his earlier speech in defending the Bill against such an amendment. In that speech O’Connor claimed that the franchise given was “the broadest possible one. There is no class of the community left out.” The result would be the “most representative parliament, according to the truest principles of democracy, which exists in the world.” But this passage is from O’Connor’s speech defending the original Franchise Bill, which didn’t exclude “aboriginal natives of Australia,” in early April 1902. O’Connor said no such thing when the Senate passed the amended Franchise Act, which excluded Aboriginal people, in late May.

Subsequent amendments to the Commonwealth franchise confirm that section 41 of the Constitution was considered to apply only to Aborigines who had the right to vote in state elections prior to the passing of the Franchise Act. The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1949 extended the Commonwealth vote to Aborigines entitled to vote at the state level. This would have been superfluous if that right were already guaranteed by section 41. Such legislative entitlement remained the case up until 1962 with the Commonwealth Electoral Act providing that:

An aboriginal native of Australia is not entitled to enrolment… unless he – (a) is entitled under the law of the State in which he resides to be enrolled as an elector of that State… or (b) is or has been a member of the Defence Force.

Based on the evidence of the 1961 select committee and mounting criticism within Australia and internationally, federal parliament finally repealed the discriminatory provision of the Commonwealth Electoral Act in 1962. Aboriginal voting was made optional, however, and remained so until 1983 when it was made compulsory and brought into line with the general franchise.

Windschuttle is scornful of his opponents. “Today’s moral outrage by George Williams and his academic colleagues about this slightly-less-than-perfect outcome,” he writes, “is a contrived case of conspicuous compassion for political ends.” His case for Aboriginal voting is, however, a fabrication that draws on selective historical evidence and analysis, dubious constitutional exegesis, blurring of Aboriginal categories, and disregard for actual practice.

The formal exclusion of Aboriginal voting in the Franchise Act set the model for excluding basic welfare rights and entitlements from much subsequent legislation, as well as for the implementaion of policy. “Aboriginal natives” were excluded from maternity benefits in 1912; they were restricted in age and invalid pensions depending on their state classifications in the 1947 Social Services Consolidation Act; and cases of particular exclusion of needy individuals are well documented in Commonwealth archives. Aboriginal exclusion from voting was only one part of a regime of legislative and policy exclusion.

The Commonwealth that administered the Northern Territory from 1911 and passed otherwise radical democratic and social legislation might have dealt a better hand to Aboriginal people. Sadly, it did not. Commonwealth legislation and administrative practice excluded many Aboriginal people from voting and welfare entitlements right up until the 1960s. •

The post The fabrication of Aboriginal voting appeared first on Inside Story.

Four decades later, Noel Pearson, that outstanding Indigenous intellectual, nominated the decision as the first of three factors that contributed decisively to the Indigenous “descent into hell.” (Social security income and the right to enter pubs and drink alcohol were the other two; together, Pearson believes, they helped entrench the notion that Aborigines should be regarded as, and should accept the role of, “victims.”)

And earlier this year, Inside Story chose “the fateful equal pay decision in the pastoral industry” as one of the “landmark events” of 1966 worthy of revisiting in this special fiftieth-anniversary series.

But how many of today’s readers, I wonder, recall the case and share either Kirby’s or Pearson’s estimate of its importance?

A personal perspective

Unusually, I write as one who took part in most of the case, as junior counsel to John Kerr QC for the pastoralists. Returning to it after fifty years, I was astounded at how differently I now see and understand it. Why such a difference?

It didn’t take long to realise that the difference lies in what else is now in my head. When I received my brief early in 1965, I was already forty-two, about to become a QC, with some record as a participant in public debate and probably widely accepted as a “socially aware” person. Yet my knowledge of Aborigines, of Aboriginal history, of what we regard today as Aboriginal issues – let alone of Aborigines on cattle stations – was for all practical purposes zero.

I could remember having met one Aborigine in my life, a young man assigned for legal aid to an inexperienced young barrister. He declined to speak to me; fortunately, I managed to achieve an acquittal, but my knowledge of Aborigines had barely advanced.

Dramatis personae

There was nothing exceptional about my ignorance in 1965. It was shared by all of the eight professionals whom the machinery of industrial arbitration had assembled to process the equal pay claim. Among us were allotted the official roles of framing, lodging and presenting the claim, offering evidence and argument in support of or against it, and deciding what orders the commission should make.

We were all lawyers – white lawyers (there were no Aboriginal lawyers then). Three, who would jointly decide the case, were full-time salaried members of the commission. They had been specially constituted as a bench of three under the chairmanship of the president, Chief Judge Kirby, because the case was considered of special importance.

The applicant, the North Australian Workers’ Union, was represented by the very experienced, if sometimes eccentric, solicitor for the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Alfred Tennyson (“Bob”) Brodney. The federal government itself appeared in the case through barrister Ted Woodward, assisted by James Gobbo (although Ted dropped out early).

The employers, the cattle station owners, were represented by John Kerr QC and me. John was then fifty-one, a leader of the Australian legal profession and a distinguished silk of thirteen years’ standing, at the height of his advocacy powers.

Where did we get our “facts”?

All eight of us shared expertise in industrial arbitration processes; that was the reason we had been given our roles. All of us shared an ignorance of Aboriginal culture, Aboriginal history and, not least, Aboriginal work and conditions on cattle stations or elsewhere. In this we were typical not merely of the industrial bar but of the Australian community. Remember that the internet was over twenty years away, not even imaginable, and the encyclopedias uninformative on contemporary Aborigines.

We would all learn what we needed to know as we went along. Unless some piece of information is contested or critical to decision-making, an arbitration hearing is not too fussed about where its information comes from. But like most of our adjudicatory systems, it expects a party that wants it to base its decision on a contested factual basis to prove the facts at issue.

So, for the purposes of the case, the facts would be what was accepted as common ground between the parties, plus whatever additional facts one of the parties could persuade the tribunal to accept. In any field, what is acceptable as common ground may vary from time to time, most often as a result of new events or new research or discovery, but sometimes as a result of suppression, deliberate or otherwise.

Sometimes, there can be a collective forgetting of what is too painful to remember, or too inconsistent with a version of the facts on which a society wants to base its national image, or its power, property or privilege arrangements. Australia has encountered such problems in remembering and accepting what happened as the country changed from being owned, occupied and governed by Aboriginal people to being basically owned, occupied and governed by invaders from overseas.

The Great Australian Silence

The equal pay case was lodged on 21 January 1965 and litigated during that year, with decision given on 7 March 1966. This was two years before the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, in the 1968 Boyer Lectures After the Dreaming, would name, describe and expose the “Great Australian Silence.” The term referred to a silence that had become a cultivated ignorance about the effect of the white invasion, occupation and dispossession of the Australian Aboriginal homeland. Stanner traced its evolution as a “cult of disremembering,” or a “cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.”

The equal pay case was one of the last official performances of the Great Australian Silence. From today’s vantage point, I can see that there was so much that someone involved didn’t know, didn’t want to know or, in the case of the Aborigines, had no opportunity to tell. Soon thereafter, the unravelling of the Great Silence commenced in earnest, and is still proceeding after nearly fifty years (see Bruce Pascoe’s recent book, Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, for example). Noel Pearson, whose damning verdict on the decision I have quoted, was doubly protected from the Great Australian Silence by being born an Aboriginal into an Aboriginal community, and being educated in the white community at a time when the Silence was being dismantled.

The employers’ perspective

John Kerr and I, who were responsible for the only significant evidence presented to the commission, had no such protections. We were products of the Silence. Moreover, we were briefed as advocates to put the employers’ views.

So we met with a group of cattle station executives to get instructions as to the case they wished us to prepare and present. They were a mixed group, led by the aristocratic Peter Baillieu from Melbourne, representing Brunette Downs, and Peter Morris, who was the general manager of the Vestey stations. An active member of the group was Eddie Connellan, the founder of Connellan Airways and owner of a station near Alice Springs, and there were others less famous.

They told us that, generally speaking, the Aborigines in question lived on the stations. There, they worked as members of small communities that were remnants of the tribe or group that had once occupied the land now leased to the station owners by the government. Although the Aborigines had no legal title to the land, it meant a great deal to them to remain on it, which had created a fortunate synergy with the seasonally fluctuating need of the owners for labour to develop and run the cattle stations.

Up to this time, Aborigines had been excluded from the award, leaving any regulation of their employment to the Commonwealth, acting through its Northern Territory Administration. Meaningful, precise comparison between the outcomes of the two systems was difficult, one reason being, as Nugget Coombs later put it, that adopting the award meant “replacing an ill-defined (but widely understood) obligation on the pastoralists to provide modest support for a whole Aboriginal group in return for the labour of a few, with a precise and larger, but limited, obligation towards the individuals actually employed.” Moreover, money rarely seemed to change hands between owners and Aborigines because nearly every transaction became an offset in the station accounts, as did social service payments paid by the Commonwealth through the employers. I never did get to understand the system and I was relieved when the union limited the issues in a way that made the whole matter of current rewards and conditions irrelevant.

The employers agreed that some 20 to 25 per cent of the Aboriginal stockmen could perform their duties at the standard expected of normal (that is, white) employees, and that they should come under the award in the usual way.

Emphasising that they were opposed to any discrimination on racial grounds, the employers wished to argue that the remaining 75 to 80 per cent were unable to provide normal work value because of their stage of cultural or educational development. Preferably, they should not be brought under the award at all, but if they were, they should have special lower-paid classifications that recognised their lower work value.

The employers agreed that some Aborigines became very skilful in riding horses and working cattle, particularly if they went into cattle camps at an early age. But they argued that great tribal and cultural obstacles prevented most from becoming satisfactory workers in an industrial sense.

The traditional Aboriginal culture, according to the pastoralists, was one of hunting and gathering, in which the role of work was simply to achieve immediate satisfaction of some need. Once that need was satisfied, there was no point in continuing work, for example to accumulate food or other resources. After all, food could not be preserved, stored or transported during the nomadic wandering of the hunter-gatherer. Hence, Aboriginal culture didn’t value work for more than immediate needs. Many Aboriginal workers could not be relied on to continue working unless under immediate supervision.

Further difficulties arose from the fact that Aboriginal languages had no or very limited concepts of numbers, counting, mathematical accuracy, time or distance.

The pastoralists’ argument clearly assumed that Aborigines, like other “primitive” peoples, were at a lower stage of social evolution, and the aim was to hasten their ascent of the evolutionary ladder. The other parties and the members of the Arbitration Commission were comfortable dealing with issues on this basis. The idea meshed with the official federal government policy that assimilation was the future for Aborigines, a policy that was not questioned by the union or the employers, though the commission’s judgement would show that it was aware that a change to “integration” was being mooted.

Movement at the station

The employers feared that if they were required to provide award rates and conditions for all members of the stations camps whom they employed, the camps would close.

They conceded that the availability of the local pool of Aboriginal labour had been essential to the existence and development of the stations; but the situation was changing. This was partly for economic reasons, with government funding for infrastructure and private investment for internal development more readily available, and partly because of the availability of new technology.

New roads, and road trains, reduced the demand for drovers. New fencing techniques reduced the need for boundary riding, and what remained could be performed by motorcycle or helicopter. These two forms of transport could also revolutionise mustering, the activity in which the Aborigines’ horsemanship, tracking skills and knowledge of country had been particularly useful.

In the station homesteads, labour-saving devices such as washing machines, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners were reducing the need for domestic labour.

Other changes would make it easier to attract from outside the area the much reduced quantity of labour required to work a station, a quantity that fluctuated considerably over a year. These included faster and more frequent travel services, as well as the technological developments that made station life and work less onerous and more attractive.

If the station camps closed, the employers thought that many of the 20 per cent who were offered award employment would elect to leave for government settlements with the rest of their community. In the view of the employers, life on these settlements – “a life of handouts” – would not offer a satisfactory future for the station communities, and would give rise to many social problems. It would not be as conducive to assimilation as work on the stations.

Moreover, a general movement into government settlements would likely mean that the Aborigines left their traditional lands, which, the pastoralists said, would be very distressing to these people who felt themselves part of it.

The issues

Now that we understood our clients’ position in relation to the union’s claim, it was possible to define the issues to be litigated.

The union had already made it clear that it would call no evidence. Indeed, it had sought to have the case decided quickly and cheaply in Melbourne as a matter of principle, without evidence taken from any party. The commission had rejected this in favour of the owners’ submission that it should go to the Northern Territory, visit selected cattle stations, and take oral evidence offered by the parties. Following this ruling, the union had indicated it would still argue the case as simply a matter of principle, and would not produce evidence.

This greatly limited the possible range of issues in the case. It meant that the union wouldn’t be making submissions critical of the existing conditions under which Aborigines were employed by the pastoralists, and that we would not need to explore these conditions. On their side, the pastoralists weren’t arguing that any Aborigines brought under the award should not be entitled to the same standards of accommodation, food and other prescribed conditions as white employees. Again, there was no reason to explore current conditions on the stations.

On previous occasions, the Commonwealth had resisted bringing Aborigines under the award, preferring to retain administrative control of their rates and conditions. But it was now sensitive to the strength of international and national opposition to racial discrimination and had been engaged in reviewing all its laws in that light. It desired that Aborigines be brought under the same award as white workers, and professed its willingness to take responsibility for dealing with any problems that might arise as a result.

Preparing the pastoralists’ case 

It now appeared that neither the union nor the Commonwealth proposed to raise any issue that would require evidence from our clients, and that there were only two significant issues on which we needed to produce evidence. One was the pastoralists’ contention that cultural and educational factors meant that many Aborigines in the station camps were unable to work in the way, and to the standards, accepted as normal in the community. Obviously the main source of such evidence would be people experienced in working with and supervising the Aborigines concerned.

The other was the likelihood that too extensive an application of the award might well result in the closing of the station camps and the movement of the station communities into government settlements. Again, the type of witness required was obvious: the owners and managers who would make such decisions.

The task of preparing the pastoralists’ case for presentation fell to me. The pastoralists’ committee provided me with a list of suggested witnesses in the two (often overlapping) categories we had identified, and of stations where the commission might conveniently be taken to provide some background for understanding the evidence.

I took statements from suggested witnesses who were accessible from Sydney, and also visited the Territory. A very small plane, complete with pilot, was placed at my disposal, and I spent a week travelling around the stations proposed for visit in the Alice Springs and Barkly Tablelands districts, interviewing and taking written statements from owners, managers and foremen. All agreed with the general account given by the instructing committee, and could flesh it out with their own anecdotes, experiences and opinions.

As those giving us our instructions had suggested, I found what seemed a very genuine and widespread regret among the witnesses that there was a real risk of a future in which the traditional camps on the stations would be no more. Many had spent years working closely with Aborigines in the camps and had a genuine respect and affection for them. Rarely, if ever, did they regard Aborigines as their equals; nor did they regard them as having any legal claim on the stations. But they were keenly aware how painful it would be for them to be separated from their traditional lands, and didn’t want it to happen.

Using the statements I had obtained as guides, additional statements were obtained from other witnesses by officers of pastoral organisations or by correspondence. We thus built up a network of potential witnesses with experience representative of cattle stations across the whole Territory.

We knew that our witnesses would not be directly contradicted, but they could be attacked in cross-examination and argument. They were all vulnerable to the criticism that they were giving evidence in their own interests. I therefore looked around for some independent support. Similar “cultural” problems had been recognised in various official documents, national and international, and these were collated as exhibits.

No research on cattle stations by anthropologists had been published or was referred to, although, as I learnt years afterwards, some had been carried out. But there were works of a general nature on Aborigines, and it was to these I turned. The standard work was The Australian Aborigines by A.P. Elkin, and here I struck gold in terms of scientific support for my clients’ case about Aboriginal approaches to work. After the case was over, Stanner read the relevant transcript and wrote:

I was surprised to discover… just how conservative, capitalistic and favourable to long continued paternalism the writings [of anthropologists] seemed to be under counsel’s artful presentation. One could almost draw the conclusion that the writers had known in advance, in one case by as much as twenty years, what the pastoralists’ case would be, and decided to be helpful.

What Stanner sought to dismiss as “counsel’s artful presentation” was also the way the commission read the plain words of the anthropologists.

The hearings

Over the second half of 1965, the commission heard evidence, followed by the addresses of counsel. The evidence occupied thirty days. It was taken in Sydney, Darwin and Alice Springs, and on three cattle stations in the Alice Springs district and three in the Barkly Tablelands district. To assist the commission understand the oral evidence, in accordance with common industrial practice, the visits included opportunities to inspect working sites and observe examples of work performed.

Although the commission didn’t visit them, the pastoralists also called witnesses from six other stations in the Alice Springs district, eleven in the Victoria River district, seven in the Barkly Tablelands district, and six in the Darwin Gulf district. Altogether, there was specific evidence from about thirty-six stations from all parts of the cattle country.

The union called no evidence at all, and the only witness called by the Commonwealth was the director of welfare in Darwin, whose evidence did not play a significant role in the proceedings. The result was that there were no Aboriginal participants in the proceedings, whether as parties, witnesses, advocates or adjudicators.

Counsel’s addresses

The counsel delivered their addresses in Melbourne over sixteen days in December 1965. I was not present, but as part of my duties as junior counsel I had prepared comprehensive notes for my leader, supported by references to the transcript, exhibits and any other required material. By all accounts, John Kerr’s address was an outstanding performance. Kirby later spoke of the employers’ “magnificently well-presented case.”

The union advocate declined to engage with the employers’ case in any significant way, asserting that the commission should throw both the Aborigines and their white employers “into the water and let them swim.”

The Commonwealth, anxious to complete its self-imposed task of removing legal discrimination against Aborigines, submitted that the commission should remove the exclusion of Aborigines, but allow a lengthy period before the amendment commenced, so that both employers and Aborigines would have time to prepare for the changes.

Most importantly, the Commonwealth undertook that if any problem of “native welfare,” whether of employees or their dependants, arose, it would deal with the consequences.

The decision

The commission gave its decision on 7 March 1966. In a judgement of some 14,000 words, the commission seriously and thoroughly discussed the evidence and arguments that had been put to it, mainly, as I have pointed out, on behalf of the pastoralists. As Kirby told his biographer, “The NAWU’s sporadic, hit-run presentation meant that we on the bench had to do a lot of thinking for the union.”

Those who knew the members of the commission could see that the judgement bears the patient, painstaking hand of deputy president John Moore. It weaves its way through sometimes abstruse and dated arguments about the nature of the commission’s jurisdiction and what can now be seen as ill-informed speculation about the likely reaction of Aborigines and pastoralists.

There is a self-consciously heroic touch in the judgement: “We do not flinch from the results of this decision which we consider is the only proper one to be made at this point in Australia’s history. There must be one industrial law, similarly applied, to all Australians, Aboriginal or not.”

The commission accepted the pastoralists’ uncontradicted evidence about the limited work value of many of the Aboriginal station workers, but it refused as a matter of principle the pastoralists’ primary applications to refrain from extending the award to include Aborigines, or to create special classifications for those of inferior work value.

Although the commission accepted the likelihood that some disemployment might occur, it thought, for reasons it developed at length, that it might not be as serious as the employers suggested.

Those who argue that the commission should have adopted the employers’ proposal, in order to preserve the Aborigines’ station camps with their assured employment, accommodation and liquor prohibition, might ponder these perceptive words from the judgement:

Even if implementation of the employers’ proposals led to the retention of all Aborigines on cattle stations, the proposals have in them the germ of a second-class workforce. It is at least possible that for many years individual Aborigines would remain in the categories suggested by the employers and this, together with isolation and distance, would impede rather than help assimilation or integration. The employers made it plain that, although the words used in their claim would permit it, they would not apply the lower-paid categories to white employees. In the result the award would have special provisions which applied only to Aborigines and which would tend to keep them economically depressed. We consider that overwhelming industrial justice requires us to put Aboriginal employees in the Northern Territory on the same basis as white employees. The law which prevails for white employees in this industry should also prevail for Aborigines.

Why no Aboriginal witnesses?

It may help to understand the reaction to the decision if we first discuss a question that many readers may be asking and which puzzled most of us taking part: “Where were the Aborigines whose future was at stake?”

Hardly ever were any in court even to observe proceedings. A rare crowd at an Alice Springs hearing, voicing their anger when they heard their work skills downgraded, has managed to make the historical record. However, as another chance record shows, their attendance was organised by a visiting activist from the south on her own initiative.

In those days, no Aborigines were qualified to play a professional role in the proceedings, but surely the union representative would have had some in court to consult about factual issues or call as witnesses? Surely, for example, there would be Aboriginal witnesses to respond to the evidence about lower work value? It would, one imagined, have been simple, and virtually cost-free, to call one when the commission visited a station, but it never happened.

In the absence of any explanation of the lack of Aboriginal participation, the rumour mill went to work, inventing cynical explanations of the union’s involvement. Even forty years later, Ted Woodward, who had been involved as senior counsel for the Commonwealth, could write in his autobiography that the union’s “motives were suspect.” He pointed out that until 1962 it hadn’t accepted Aboriginal members. “Three years later,” he writes, “some Aborigines having joined, a claim was being made, purportedly on their behalf, without any apparent consultation. It looked very much as though the white members of the union wanted to get rid of a wages provision, which, in their view, led to unfair competition by Aboriginal workers.”

As recent historians have shown, this was incorrect and unfair to the North Australian Workers’ Union, which had runs on the board in championing Aboriginal members, including an unsuccessful High Court action on behalf of an Aboriginal activist who was banished from Darwin to Haasts Bluff (“a place as far removed as possible,” as the NT Administration boasted) because he had participated in strike activity in another industrial setting (Waters v. The Commonwealth [1951]). The apparently mysterious changes in policy had reflected the changing fortunes in a battle between different factions for control of the union.

In making the equal pay claim, the union was in fact responding to ACTU Aboriginal policy, which, since 1963, had said bluntly, “There must be an end to wage discrimination.”

How did this become ACTU policy? The credit must go mainly to communist activists, working through the Melbourne-based Council for Aboriginal Rights and the Northern Territory Council for Aboriginal Rights, and enlisting the Equal Wages for Aborigines Committee of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement. The outstanding contributor to this and other campaigns for Aboriginal advancement was a Melbourne research chemist, Shirley Andrews. (The writer Frank Hardy was, of course, a better-known communist supporter, but he became involved only after the equal pay decision had been given, and in different ways.) As well as being a researcher, advocate and campaigner, Andrews was a thinker, as this (edited) comment years later illustrates:

I always felt that we made a mistake pressing just for equal pay on the cattle stations because we should have realised that what was needed was something different where the Aboriginal people, a whole group of them, you know were paid en masse or something and then they decided what was to be done with the money. Because what happened was that [the pastoralists] got rid of everyone except their very skilled workers, when they were required to pay better pay. You can sometimes think you’re doing the right thing and you don’t understand all the factors being so much more complicated, particularly for city slickers.

Although there is no doubt that the proceedings were genuinely taken with the aim of getting better wages for Aborigines, it should be acknowledged that the union faced difficulties. It had very few Aboriginal members and little means of communication over the vast and often remote area where its potential members were spread. It employed its first Aboriginal organiser in 1965. But these were not the vital factors.

Bob Brodney, the ACTU solicitor who appeared for the union, was heavily questioned about not calling witnesses, at a seminar on Aboriginal employment held some three months after the decision was given. He conceded that he had been asked personally, “almost inundated with suggestions and requests,” publicly challenged by counsel for the employers and generally pressed very hard, to call Aborigines; he had even received an offer to pay the cost. But, he said:

I exercised my judgement against it… I could not see that they proved my case… [T]he union’s case was not to prove that all Aborigines could do certain work… The Award set out what the demands of the job were and the employer is free to hire. The case for the union was: let the Award apply, and those employers who wish to employ Aborigines will have to do so under award conditions.

This was a perfectly logical position, one that Brodney had acted on from the beginning, when he argued that the award should be extended as a matter of principle. He clung to his position to the end, and he won his point: at the end of the day, the award was extended. But by the end of the case, other issues had arisen, to which Aboriginal capacity was relevant. If 75 per cent of Aborigines could not perform to the required standard, should additional lower classifications be added for them? Should it be easier to invoke the “slow worker” category?

Moreover, even if Brodney were right (as he turned out to be) in thinking that the evidence about limited work capacity would not affect the extension of the award, it had angered those Aboriginal workers who had learnt of it. They wanted a chance to hurl it back in the face of their critics. If they had known that, unanswered, it would lead to a finding adverse to their dignity recorded forever in the judgement of the commission, they would doubtless have become even angrier, as they did when this eventuated. They should have been at least offered an opportunity to give evidence in reply. But the fact is that Brodney was not appearing for Aborigines but for the union, and doubtless had its authority to decide what he should do. Aborigines were simply not represented.

Someone who had other ideas was James Gobbo, counsel for the Commonwealth. He thought that the Commonwealth, intervening in the public interest, should call some Aboriginal evidence so that the commission would understand the system they were being asked to perpetuate. But he was instructed that there was no stockman suitable for the daunting task of giving evidence and being cross-examined. He was deeply troubled but felt unable to do anything.

Looking back from today’s perspective, it’s possible to see that a witness could have been heard if anyone had really wanted to make that happen. With the aid of a good interpreter and a skilled anthropologist, a senior stockman and community leader could have provided a statement and been offered for cross-examination. I am confident that the commission would have been flexible enough to allow this and would have welcomed the opportunity to explore aspects of the case excluded by the way the union narrowed the issues.

Reaction to the decision

As word of the decision spread through the station camps, Aborigines and their supporters were infuriated that it would not come into operation until December 1968, and pastoralists were disappointed by the extended application of the award. But there was no concerted action in response to the decision on the part either of station owners or of Aborigines living on stations.

The fact is that relations between owners and Aborigines varied enormously from station to station, and were sometimes quite benign. An example is the Bulman mob on Mainoru station, described by anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw; as part of a cordial relationship, the station owner’s sister ran a school for the station children. A pastoralist in the Kimberley spoke of “a sort of unwritten law that it was our station but their land.”

Stations ranged in size from 30,000 hectares or less to the largest holding in the world, at over two million hectares. Friendly, respectful relations were probably not uncommon on small, family-run properties, but there is a great deal of evidence of deplorable conditions and toxic relations with the managers of large absentee-owned stations.

This diversity, together with the absence of centrally directed policies or record-keeping on either side, or even regular channels of communication between station communities, makes it difficult to give a coherent account of the reaction to the decision.

Reaction among owners

So far as the owners were concerned, they had said in the proceedings that if they were burdened with paying all Aborigines award rates, they would be inclined to accelerate development programs that would enable them to employ only or mostly white labour. Although there was no concerted program of doing so, it seems that many moved in that direction and Aboriginal employment on cattle stations declined dramatically over the next decade, and continued to decline thereafter.

This happened not only in the Northern Territory but also in states where the award precedent was followed. It is difficult to get figures on current Aboriginal employment, but it seems that most if not all of the small number of Aboriginal stockmen now employed on white-owned stations are employed as individuals and the old camps have disappeared. No doubt some employees go to work from community or “Gibb” excisions (see below).

Sometimes communities were made unwelcome and walked off en masse, as happened to the Bulman mob (mentioned earlier) when a new owner took over Mainoru. Sometimes employers took quite extraordinary action. In January 1969, as part of a Christmas holiday in the middle of the wet season, the Christmas Creek mob in the West Kimberley had walked a long way from their home station towards Fitzroy Crossing. The whole community was there, including elderly women and men. Without warning, they were told by staff of a station they were travelling through to get on tractor-towed trailers. Instead of being taken home, they were dumped at Fitzroy River settlement, on the wrong side of a rising river, without food, to spend the night in the open. Presumably this was done in agreement with their home station, which then advised the Department of Native Welfare that the Aborigines had been permanently discharged from their cattle station and if they tried to return, the police would be called.

Reaction on worker side

The union, with the support of the ACTU, protested at the timetable for introduction of the award and attempted to negotiate an earlier date, but was unsuccessful.

So far as Indigenous communities on the stations were concerned, reactions varied greatly. They had not been involved in or identified with the lodging or prosecution of the claim and most did not understand the process. Many were not used to handling money, and didn’t see it as central to their lives. As J.K. Doolan documented, strong feelings of injustice and anger seem to have been widespread, but were often related to general disrespect, and various kinds of discrimination, insult and shoddy treatment (including belittlement of their work). Recognition of rights to land was more likely to become a focus of community aspiration than higher wages.

Sporadic and uncoordinated strike action extended over several years, varying from area to area and from station to station. I mention some illustrative examples. In late April 1966, Captain Major led the walk-off from Newcastle Waters of about eighty people, who went to a government reserve at Elliott. Although an Aboriginal organiser, Dexter Daniels, was involved, the union leadership was taken by surprise. It supported the strikers but did not encourage wider action.

Land rights rather than money: Gurindji men Vincent Lingiari and Mick Rangiari standing in front of the sign made for them by writer Frank Hardy. National Archives of Australia

On 22 August 1966, eighty Aborigines, mainly Gurindji, walked off Wave Hill and established a camp at Daguragu. By this time, it was becoming clear that the real focus of most Aboriginal desire was not wages and money, of which they had limited experience, but recognition of their claim to traditional land. For the Gurindji, such recognition came to some degree with prime minister Gough Whitlam’s famous “handful of sand” on 1 July 1975, but the story goes on, illustrating the problems of establishing Aboriginal-owned cattle stations. When Aboriginal land rights came to the Territory in 1978, they did not extend to claiming pastoral leases, which remained inviolate even to native title claims after Mabo in 1992.

In 1971, the Yungngora community walked off Noonkanbah station in the West Kimberley, and became fringe dwellers in Fitzroy Crossing. In 1976, the property came on the market and the Aboriginal Land Fund bought the lease to the station. About 200 fortunate people moved back, and became another of the significant number of Aboriginal-owned cattle stations.

Commonwealth actions

During the hearing, the Commonwealth undertook to deal with any problems that arose as a result of extending the award. Perhaps social services for the unemployed and accommodation for the homeless may be regarded in this light. For example, displaced communities from the West Kimberley stations have made Fitzroy Crossing a major centre.

More specific action came in October 1970, when the federal minister for the interior, Peter Nixon, appointed a committee headed by C.A. Gibb of the Australian National University to report on policies in relation to Aboriginal communities on NT pastoral properties. Reading the minister’s instructions, the committee’s account of its meagre factual findings and its mostly very general, aspirational recommendations, one could be pardoned for wondering whether anyone involved took the project seriously.

But one of the committee’s recommendations, for the excision from pastoral leases of land for “limited village, economic and recreational purposes to enable Aboriginal communities to preserve traditional cultural ties and obligations and to provide the community with a measure of autonomy,” was enacted into law. This ultimately generated more than one hundred community living areas, which have allowed some communities to maintain footholds on their traditional lands within pastoral leases not otherwise open to claim by them. They are not suitable for pastoral operations. The future of these areas is currently in play, however, under the Commonwealth’s Stronger Futures program.

Breaking the silence

Early in this essay I spoke of the Great Australian Silence as something that distorted the reaction to and understanding of the equal pay claim. One thing the Silence did was to make it possible to assume that the relationship between the Aborigines in the station camps and the station owners was sufficiently “normal’ in industrial terms for it to be the subject of award-making. In other words, that the workers were free agents able to negotiate contracts of employment or move away to seek employment elsewhere.

Nobody would have lightly made such an assumption even ten years later, after the works of C.D. Rowley and the early revisionary historians were in circulation. As the actual relationship between Aboriginal communities and pastoralists has become better known, scholars have reached back to feudal times for terms to describe it. Today it is easy to establish that the title to many of the stations is sealed in the blood of the ancestors of those who sought equal pay.

Readers of the classics of yesteryear, We of the Never-Never and The Little Black Princess, may remember the reaction of the Aborigines on Elsey station, who in 1901 were involved in the “Playaround Coronation” celebrations for Edward VII organised by the white residents. At what they thought likely to be the appropriate moment, the white staff fired a volley of revolver shots into the air as a royal salute. In a flash, every Aborigine disappeared into the night. “They thought we had suddenly gone mad,” opined the author. It seems much more likely that they thought, in a flash of terror, that, despite the recent shared celebrations and the lapse of twenty years since the station was taken up, their white “employers” might be reverting to type and a massacre might be about to take place by the armed whites against the unarmed Aborigines.

Writing specifically of the Victoria River district, Deborah Bird Rose says: “From the time the area was first occupied by pastoralists (1882–83) until Aboriginal people went on strike (1966–73), Aborigines either resisted overtly and died, or worked their lives out for the benefit of others.”

To understand what Rose meant by “worked their lives out for the benefit of others,” we can go to the one piece of anthropological research that had been carried out (but not published) on station communities before the equal pay case. In 1944–46 two anthropologists did some research on, among other topics, the low birthrates on stations. They wrote:

The overall reason [for the shortage of children] seemed to be a general feeling of disillusionment. A common attitude of station Aborigines at [Vestey stations] could be summarised as: “Why should we have children? They are a drag on our scanty rations, they evade their responsibilities when they grow up – not always through their own fault, because they are moved away from their home camps, or have to be absent for long periods, and receive only small rations and no money. Why should we breed more people for [Europeans] to use the way they use us?”

Detailed information about diet and health and general conditions on these stations is quite sickening to today’s readers.

Whether those conditions persisted twenty years later when the equal pay case was heard, I do not know. The comments of an academic researcher, Fred Gruen, who made a survey of stations during the case include a reference to “the humpies, the destitution and the general air of despondency among Aborigines on cattle stations” and the observation that, “judging from the cattle stations we visited, the six stations inspected by the Commission are about as unrepresentative as any six that one could find in the Territory.”

Kirby and Aborigines

When I think of the equal pay case, I always have the same flashback. The commission is visiting a station on a cloudless day under a sweltering sun. The official party, all of whose members are white, emerges from the homestead, where it has been welcomed, to an area adjacent to yards where a work demonstration will be given. In the vicinity there is one huge, densely spreading shady tree, under which all the station Aborigines are assembled, cool, comfortable and inscrutable, keen to observe the work practices of the white arbitrators. Poles have been used to create some not-very-effective shade for the official party some distance away, and we cluster under it.

Chief Judge Kirby, the most sociable of men, is clearly edgy and frustrated. He was a humanist of warm and generous personality who emerged from an elite King’s School education to become known as an “underdog’s man” at the Bar, and to acquire an enviable international reputation as a member of the UN Committee of Good Offices on the Indonesian Question, to which Australia had been nominated by Indonesia.

But here on an outback station, his diplomatic skills are sorely tested. Always anxious to establish a friendly personal relationship with all parties, he would expect their representatives to be introduced to him by their counsel. But here, counsel for the union doesn’t speak to the Aborigines himself, much less introduce a representative to Kirby. One can sense Kirby agonising about what to do. If he takes the initiative, he might only embarrass some Aborigine who does not want to be involved and doesn’t speak English. I don’t recall that he found a solution.

We learn from Kirby’s biography something that was not known to the parties and their representatives. He had a special sympathy for Aborigines, stemming from his early childhood in north Queensland, where he was extensively “mothered” by Aboriginal servants, particularly Ginny. His biographer writes: “Kirby found the case one of the most distressing and frustrating in his career: appalled and ashamed by what he heard and saw, he was constantly rebuked by the ghost of Ginny. ‘I talked about her and my boyhood so much that the rest of the team got sick of me.’”

What appalled Kirby was not “deliberate ill-treatment” or the conditions on the cattle stations in particular (he had visited only a carefully selected few), but the condition of Aborigines in the Territory generally. As much on the missions as on the cattle stations, Aborigines were “degraded.” “Even when treated kindly they seemed to be regarded as a mixture between dogs and cattle and sub-human beings.”

Despite the strength of his feelings, Kirby managed to conceal them in public. His anguish appears neither in the transcript of proceedings nor in the judgement. I can see no reason to think it affected the decision. •

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The Howard government began dismantling CDEP in 2004 despite official statistics and case studies that demonstrated its benefits for Indigenous individuals, communities and organisations. The government’s intention, according to employment minister Joe Hockey, was “to move people off welfare and into ‘real’ employment.” Put this way, his statement misleadingly portrayed CDEP as solely an employment program, ignoring its important role in community development, and erroneously defined CDEP participants as welfare recipients.

CDEP was conceived to assist people in remote communities where labour supply greatly exceeded demand. It was designed to operate as a community development and employment program managed by community-based organisations and local councils.

Purpose-built for remote Indigenous Australia, CDEP expanded rapidly, especially after the Aboriginal Employment Development Policy was launched in 1987. By 2004 more than 35,000 Indigenous people (as well as some non-Indigenous spouses) were participating in the scheme within 265 community-based Indigenous organisations. From the late 1980s, the scheme expanded geographically into regional urban and even metropolitan Australia, where it was abolished on 1 July 2007. The dismantling process then travelled back to remote Australia, with CDEP programs finally ending on 1 July 2015.

CDEP also migrated bureaucratically, from Indigenous-specific agencies (the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs and then the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, 1977–2004) to a series of mainline agencies, and ended up by its moment of demise with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, an agency that was assessed, even by the Abbott government’s handpicked Commission of Audit, to lack capacity in Indigenous affairs.

The Howard government believed that robust labour markets existed in the more populous regions to which CDEP had expanded, and that no discernible barriers (apart from the scheme itself) existed for Indigenous employment in mainstream jobs. Even if that were true, the abolition of CDEP right across regional and remote Australia was reckless, to say the least. (Even in the more densely settled areas, evidence suggests that the abolition of the scheme saw more participants end up on welfare than in jobs.)

In the short term, “real” employment couldn’t be conjured up magically in remote settlements where labour supply had grown rapidly but economies remained remarkably stagnant. Partly, the stagnation reflected structural factors, and partly cultural factors were at work, but it mainly reflected a lack of government assistance of the kind that underwrites most development in remote Australia.

After the dismantling of ATSIC, CDEP was unilaterally redefined from being a multipurpose, flexible Indigenous-specific program to being solely a labour-market program. But this redefinition softened as it became obvious to the Abbott and Turnbull governments that the warnings about the absence of jobs in remote places were empirically well-founded. And so the jobs-focused Remote Jobs and Communities Program, which had replaced CDEP in July 2013, was replaced by the CDP on 1 July 2015.

CDP purportedly focuses more on “work-like activity” for community benefit, but in its first sixteen months of operation – as an analysis of official information by ANU researcher Lisa Fowkes shows – it has been far more effective in penalising participants for breaching its draconian attendance requirements than in engaging them, five hours a day, five days a week, in work for the dole.

On the ground, this well-intentioned mistake has destroyed emerging and often remarkable forms of plural Indigenous economy that had been carefully incubated over many years. Take, for example, the hybrid economy of a group of 300 Kuninjku-speaking people in Western Arnhem Land with whom I have worked for decades. These people came into contact with the Australian colonial state relatively late, in the 1960s, when they moved to the government settlement of Maningrida. In the 1970s, unhappy with conditions there, they moved back to their ancestral lands to live at outstations. This was not a “lifestyle choice” of the kind lamented by Tony Abbott, but a necessity for survival.

At outstations, Kuninjku enjoyed land and resource rights and the critically important assistance of a regional outstation resource agency, the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation, or BAC. They were able to fashion a sustainable economy for themselves based on a combination of self-provisioning, arts-and-crafts sales, and access to government payments, which only included unemployment benefits after 1980.

In that year, BAC applied for access to CDEP in preference to the payment of unemployment benefits. In the absence of formal employment at outstations (apart from a handful of part-time teacher assistance and health assistance jobs), the application failed. Unemployment benefit was paid instead, without activity testing, as a form of minimum income support.

BAC gained access to CDEP in 1989, and quickly became one of the largest and most successful development corporations in remote Australia. With CDEP and the growing scale and capacity of BAC, the Kuninjku’s hybrid economy flourished. People were able to engage in more arts production brokered to global and domestic markets by Maningrida Arts and Culture (a business arm of BAC), hunt, fish and gather food on their land, and enjoy a degree of basic income security without income testing or activity testing. Some Kuninjku people moved to Maningrida and took up employment in CDEP-subsidised work as community rangers or arts workers. By 2008 about one hundred Kuninjku artists were collectively earning over $1 million a year from the sale of their art; combined with CDEP and other transfer payments, and with returns from self-provisioning, that income provided them a reasonable livelihood.

Up until the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention, Kuninjku continued to expand this hybrid economy based on what they do best: hunting and fishing for bush food, and producing art inspired by tradition for tourist and fine art markets. These skills also expanded into community ranger work in natural resource management and paid carbon farming based on prescribed burning informed by customary practice.

This growth was assisted by relatively unconditional income support from CDEP and the remarkable development efforts of BAC, largely underwritten by CDEP. It was based on the Kuninjku people’s own focus on combining the resources guaranteed by land rights and native title laws with their own skills, reflecting economist David Ricardo’s theory of “comparative advantage.”

In 2003 I had an opportunity to appear before the now defunct Ministerial Council for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, where I argued that CDEP should be maintained alongside enhanced development support for people, like the Kuninjku, pursuing productive livelihoods on their land. I recommended a policy approach that maximised participation in all sectors of the hybrid economy, aligning with Indigenous aspirations, without undue entanglement in policy rhetoric about economic independence or equality.

These views were ignored by politicians and officials in Canberra, who were busy devising new employment programs for remote-living Aboriginal people without regard to Ricardo’s theory or the realities of life in these very remote regions. After the 2004 election, with CDEP transferred to the employment portfolio, I warned that abolishing the scheme could see unemployment rates skyrocket from 7 per cent to 76 per cent in very remote Australia. I again highlighted the need to reconcile CDEP policy reform rhetoric with the challenges of outback reality.

Since 2007, the erosion and ultimate abolition of CDEP has effectively demolished the Kuninjku hybrid economy. It has also greatly weakened BAC, the organisation paid to deliver CDEP to about 600 participants on their ancestral lands. During the global financial crisis, national Indigenous art sales plummeted by 50 per cent; for Kuninjku, the decline was even greater, and more sharply felt, because this was their only point of substantial productive engagement with market capitalism. There was no industry assistance package on offer to bolster the visual arts sector, no assistance to artists as their incomes declined rapidly, just the relentless governmental commitment to abolish CDEP.

Tony Abbott suggests that CDP atones for this destruction and loss of household income. In reality, CDP fast-tracked this destruction and now ensures that people like the Kuninjku are prevented from re-establishing a productive economy that effectively and sustainably combined capitalist and customary forms.

Under CDP guidelines, able-bodied Kuninjku people aged eighteen to forty-nine years are required to work twenty-five hours a week for Newstart payments; they are frequently “breached” – their payments suspended – for non-attendance at “work-like activity.” Their arts income has been greatly reduced, as has their capacity to engage in self-provisioning that requires access to relatively expensive equipment like vehicles and guns. And if unemployed Kuninjku individuals earn extra income beyond $50 per week, which they often did when on CDEP, they will now be subject to the social security income taper. Far from atoning for the destruction wrought by the abolition of CDEP, the new CDP ensures that people are further economically disadvantaged and diverted from vital livelihood activity like hunting.

These reforms, along with a suite of other measures in recent years – many apparently conceived to force Indigenous Australians into large towns and the mainstream market economy – are impoverishing Kuninjku in a way that I have not witnessed since I first worked with them in 1979. At times during my recent visits people have told me that they are hungry and ask for food, a request I have not received in the past, and one that is extremely demeaning for proud hunters.

How might Indigenous Australians such as the Kuninjku be afforded proper opportunities to make a decent living as they choose? The reintroduction of CDEP and the payment of compensation for this most egregious transition would be a start. But it is important to avoid the trap of focusing too narrowly on CDP; such reform must be just one element of a broader shift in policy approach to decolonisation and self-determination, which must accommodate the fundamental Indigenous economic right to live regionally and remotely and make a living differently. •

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It’s understandable that families suffering grief don’t believe wider society will understand them. But the epidemic of Aboriginal suicide ripping through remote communities, particularly in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, is a tragedy for all of us. Some media reporting may have been deplorable, but their views aren’t representative of wider Australian empathy and care.

Local support and prevention is vital, and cultural support essential, but state intervention also plays a part. It can be particularly powerful when both work together, and a recent joint initiative of Western Australia’s Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Department of Culture and Arts has that potential.

In a proposal put to the state cabinet in May but not yet released, the two departments argued for a “cultural investment strategy” for the state’s Aboriginal population. Such a strategy would “use the support of cultural activities to improve cultural growth, social cohesion and engagement; and use culturally based activities to improve outcomes in health, education, community safety and employment.”

Putting aside the impersonal language, this strategy offers support for culture in local Aboriginal communities of the kind that, to date, has been targeted mainly at urban, white “high culture.”

This is a strategy for today’s troubled times. It is hard to remember that there was a time when Aboriginal people in the Kimberley region were not greatly at risk of suicide. As Murray Chapman, a psychiatrist who has worked in the Kimberley for fourteen years, said in a recent interview with Australian Doctor:

From what we can gather in the Kimberley, until the ’60s or ’70s, and even the early ’80s, there was little in the way of suicide. But then it took off. It was at the time of the first royal commission into deaths in custody, and obviously it was partly about suicides happening in prison. When you look at the massive publicity in those days there was a recognised media effect [the “Werther effect” of copycat suicides] that helped push it into the community. It was probably already going that way, but [the publicity] really boosted it.

According to the federal government’s Indigenous Suicide Prevention Evaluation Project, in this region of 36,800 people, where 46 per cent are Aboriginal, around one hundred Aboriginal suicides occurred in the ten years to 2010. Over the next five years there were another one hundred Aboriginal suicides, or a doubling of the rate. The Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Cultural Centre, which is based in Fitzroy Crossing and in constant touch with the affected communities, says there were nineteen Aboriginal suicides in the Kimberley in the first three months of 2016.

“Aboriginal suicide is not an individual phenomenon, it is a collective and community phenomenon,” says KALACC coordinator Wes Morris. “We must focus on the community and not on the individual. Governments pathologise the phenomenon as ‘sick individuals.’ Government investments in response to Aboriginal suicide are heavily weighted towards clinical interventions which are predicated on an individualised conception.”

Young people are at the highest risk. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that nearly 5 per cent of all Indigenous deaths are suicides. Among fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds, this is five times the rate of the non-Indigenous population. No one knows for sure why this is so, and no one knows for sure what to do about it, but good ideas are most likely to come from those most affected.

At a roundtable held by the Indigenous Suicide Prevention Evaluation Project in Broome last year, local people were overwhelmingly concerned with social rather than medical improvements. Their own identified themes for discussion were the impact of social factors; the need for empowerment of families and communities; mental health issues; trauma; lack of services and responses; and the need for local solutions and leadership interventions.

Murray Chapman’s observation rings true for those of us who have lived side by side with affected families, co-workers and friends in the Kimberley region. Initially, in the 1980s, each incident provoked suspicion of foul play, such was our incredulity at reports of suicide among people, remarkable for their resilience, who had survived a much more cruel period of colonisation.

This reaction now seems like a foolish attempt to run away from the facts. It is more likely that the cause was terminal pain and feelings of despair. As Tom Calma, co-chair of Reconciliation Australia, said in response to a recent report that one-in-ten young Indigenous males rate their happiness level at “zero out of ten”:

As a nation we cannot let our young people despair and lose hope. Our young people have to see they have a future and they need access to mental health and alcohol and drug services and suicide prevention programs and vulnerable communities must be empowered and supported to lead their own recovery.

I think that it is no coincidence that things have got worse psychologically for Aboriginal people as they have become better in material terms. The things that bind Aboriginal people together in social solidarity – shared language, sacred areas, religious ceremonies, ancient land-related values – have been consistently undermined. These are not part of the wider society’s economic development agenda, or are believed to actively undermine it. At the same time, Aboriginal material conditions, land ownership and shares in the fruits of economic enterprises – those things that make Aboriginal people “more like us” – have improved greatly since the 1980s.

Chapman says that threats of suicide from Kimberley youth are the “lingua franca of despair.” For young people, white people’s apparently wondrous lives, presented daily on the television and minute by minute on Facebook, might at last be within their realm of reality, but are seemingly beyond their reasonable aspirations. In their homes there is still immense interpersonal poverty.

Poverty itself does not cause suicide, but the resilience needed to confront poverty daily can often be lacking. Many of the at-risk group between fifteen and thirty-five years of age reach back for a handhold in the culture of their communities and find it doesn’t have the weight to support them anymore.

As KALACC put it in its submission to the WA government:

We can’t undo social trauma overnight but we can build protective factors. We cannot overnight “solve” or “fix” alcoholism, child abuse, unemployment, lateral violence, or post-colonial trauma including the impacts on the stolen generation. But we can invest significantly in protective factors which enable people to best respond to these challenges.

The ABC recently published an article on Aboriginal child suicide titled “Lost Between Two Worlds.” We should remind ourselves that “two worlds” is only a metaphor. There is only one world – they are part of our world, we are part of theirs. Continually recycling the “two worlds” metaphor can have pernicious effects. It places young Aboriginal people as a kind of mutant, bound only to self-destruct. For policy-makers and well-meaning commentators it presents only two unachievable solutions: recreating a separate, sealed-off culture, segregated but safe, or miraculously teleporting entire populations into a modern, wage-supported, nuclear-family future. No wonder the problem appears intractable.

The recent WA initiative from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and the Department of Culture and the Arts takes an important step away from this binary dilemma. A good deal of the strategy involves supporting Aboriginal employment in the art industry, but it takes a significant step further than this. These departments say that the strategy would

be developed to address the underlying causes of social dysfunction through connecting Aboriginal people to their culture through cultural maintenance activities that reinforce traditional values, roles and responsibilities, in… a specific area of high social and economic dysfunction.

The new strategy would “use the support of cultural activities to improve cultural growth, social cohesion and engagement, and to use culturally based activities to improve outcomes in health, education, community safety and employment.” This looks like what Kimberley communities have been asking for. It may also give a hint of how mainstreaming of Aboriginal services, which has been bipartisan Commonwealth policy since 2005, can be made to work. It may show us that the mainstream can be expanded and adapted to be inclusive of Aboriginal diversity. It may remind us that there is only one world. Although our neighbours don’t look, talk, think or feel like us, they are within the same bounds of shared human values. We need to move over and give them space to be themselves. •

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A new roadmap for resilient Aboriginal families and strong communities is needed not just in Western Australia but also in all remote areas of Australia. It is needed because the Commonwealth has overturned the forty-five years of policy consensus under which it funded Aboriginal housing, local roads, water and electricity supplies, sanitation and community administration. The instruments of choice were the bilateral agreements with the states that followed the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 2005, reinforced by the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing, signed in 2008.

The new WA roadmap has been sponsored by child protection minister Andrea Mitchell and regional development minister Terry Redman, and reflects this rather odd parentage. A good deal of it promises a re-engagement with Aboriginal early childhood and education in remote areas, and with adult training and employment. The remainder sets out a plan to channel money to a few large communities and towns while leaving the majority of smaller communities to fend for themselves or, as the roadmap puts it, be “supported to become self-sufficient over time.”

This is deja vu all over again. The Northern Territory went down this road, under similar pressure from the Commonwealth, in 2007, issuing Pat Dodson’s discussion paper in 2009. It would be nice to think that Western Australia could jump forward to the Territory’s recent rethink of its Growth Towns and Working Future policies, which now see the opportunity for employment in smaller communities and the essential links between them and the larger centres. But the statutory and fiscal differences between the Territory and other states may well mean that Western Australia will be stuck with the first, more draconian, version of a policy that threatens massive social disruption.

The roadmap may yet point in the right direction, but its release is also an opportunity to review how we set out on this journey.

When the anthropologist Kim Akerman produced his map of Aboriginal trading centres in the Kimberley region in 1980, he identified twenty-five Aboriginal communities. Six of them were in towns, nine on ex-mission reserves, and ten on cattle stations (most soon to be expelled). Between 1980 and 1985, when I produced a similar map for my PhD thesis, about fifty communities were established. By 1995, when I was preparing the map for a book, there were 150.

Today, the roadmap tells us, there are 244 communities in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions, with at least 175 in the Kimberley alone. In November 2014, WA premier Colin Barnett threatened to close all of them down. What happened in the years it took to build these communities? How did their existence come to be threatened and then offered a partial reprieve under July’s roadmap?

Most remote WA communities were established thirty years ago by the Commonwealth, in partnership with the government of Western Australia, as a way of recognising the national passion for land rights and Aboriginal traditional culture in a way that least alienated the state’s highly conservative electorate.

The Burke Labor government had won office in February 1983, and Bob Hawke’s Labor took government federally in the following month. Land rights had featured in both their election platforms. Clyde Holding, Hawke’s Aboriginal affairs minister, declared that human rights should override states’ rights and committed the Commonwealth government to legislate a scheme of national land rights.

After a two-year delay and a statewide inquiry led by Paul Seaman QC, the WA government introduced its land rights legislation. The bill failed in the state’s upper house. The minister of the day, Keith Wilson, barely disguising the government’s relief to be rid of this political hot potato, told the Canberra Times that “Aboriginal people have to see and accept that the major task before them is to commend themselves to the rest of the population.” They are still trying to do that. There never has been state-based land rights legislation in Western Australia.

The failure of the state legislation left the way open for federal Labor to legislate. But it, too, failed to follow through on its promise. Having pinned their hopes on Seaman and then on Holding, Aboriginal representatives were devastated. As the late Puggy Hunter, a revered health advocate, told a review of the Kimberley Land Council in 1989, the defeat “just knocked the shit out of everybody”:

Everybody just felt pissed off. I think they really felt they had a case… but it all fell through. The Land Council went really out there. It pushed itself. It was like one last big throw.

The Commonwealth stepped in with cash and an alternative plan called the Aboriginal Communities Development Programme, or ACDP. The Commonwealth committed $5 million over five years in cash, and the state government the same amount as in-kind administrative support, to create the communities on the Aboriginal homelands that we came to accept as part of the landscape.

Once, in conversation with one of the bureaucratic architects of this scheme, I suggested it was a Commonwealth compensation package for walking away from national land rights. He angrily declared that it was nothing of the kind. So why did you do it? I asked. He was emphatic: Because it was right! Those were the days, before the triumph of managerialism and bureaucratic churn, when Aboriginal affairs mandarins believed passionately in the Aboriginal cause.

These officials forged the bilateral agreement the Commonwealth has now walked away from. It provided funding for housing, roads, water supply (from bores), power supply (from large diesel plants), sewage treatment ponds, and community stores and offices. The state government, for its part, excised parcels of land from Crown land, mission reserves and pastoral leases, vested these in the Aboriginal Lands Trust as Aboriginal reserves under the Land Act, and leased them from the Trust to Aboriginal groups for ninety-nine years. This created the secure tenure the Commonwealth required in order to deliver the material assets for community building.

For better or worse, national policies hit hard in the localities where Aboriginal people live. While the state and Commonwealth were struggling over land rights against a fearful public and a rapidly retreating political class, the tail-end of the policy of dispossession from pastoral stations and removal of support for missions was causing havoc in outback towns. This failed assimilation policy segregated remote-area Aboriginal groups in refugee camps on the edge of towns. Centres such as Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek swelled from populations of a few hundred to several thousand almost overnight.

The poverty of these shanty settlements bred two opposite reactions. An epidemic of alcohol addiction, violence, malnutrition and spiralling ill-health developed. And a social movement was born, producing community-run support agencies like Marra Worra Worra, the oldest Aboriginal resource agency in the Kimberley. Strong leaders emerged and, backed by their own organisations, took the opportunity of the ACDP homeland settlements scheme to return to traditional lands and cut the cycle of addiction and violence affecting their lives in the towns.

Outstations, as they were called then, developed rapidly from bough shelters and tent flies into recognisable hamlets, villages and small towns. They ticked over, mostly peaceably, for thirty years, supported by federal housing and municipal services grants, the Aboriginal work-for-the-dole scheme CDEP and, in some cases (notably on the Ngaanyatjarra lands and in Kununurra), community-owned social enterprises, including building and trucking companies, community stores, and art centres.

In 2006, following the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC, the Commonwealth began implementing its plan to withdraw. ATSIC’s abolition allowed a long-running undercurrent of monocultural, managerial policy advocacy to finally break through in Canberra. Simply because the Commonwealth could make policy, these sceptics believed, there was no requirement that it should, nor that it must shoulder the economic burden. This stream had always existed, as H.C. “Nugget” Coombs’s reminiscences about the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, in his book Kulinma, show, but now they were in the ascendant.

Coombs had fought this view vigorously, yet it had nearly triumphed in 1992, the first year of the new Council of Australian Governments, or COAG, in the National Commitment to Improved Outcomes in the Provision of Services for Aboriginal People and Torres Strait Islanders. Prime minister Bob Hawke was presiding over a period of “new federalism” in which all manner of Commonwealth powers, including taxation, were mooted to be repatriated to the states. But his leadership rival, Paul Keating, had warned against this tendency – including in Aboriginal development – in a speech to the National Press Club in October 1991. Within weeks, Keating had prevailed over Hawke and taken the leadership. He and his minister Robert Tickner gave ATSIC and its regional councils the necessary backing to support remote development for the next fifteen years.

Keating’s successor, John Howard, exemplified the conservative tendency. Literally from day one, at his first press conference as prime minister, Howard sharpened the knife for ATSIC, declaring an audit of all ATSIC-funded organisations. In his third term he was able to abolish the organisation altogether. Indigenous programs were mainstreamed, and the result had all the inevitability of a slow-motion train wreck.

The takeover of ATSIC functions by mainstream agencies provided the Commonwealth retreat from Aboriginal development with its devastating logic. The Commonwealth generally doesn’t provide public housing; in Aboriginal communities it had. It doesn’t provide water, electricity, sewerage; in Aboriginal communities it had. It doesn’t do local roads; it doesn’t do primary healthcare; and its mainstream agencies were not equipped to take over these responsibilities (with the exception of health, where Aboriginal primary healthcare had sat comfortably within the mainstream health department for decades). Here was the opportunity, indeed the clear path of rational public administration, to repatriate Aboriginal development to the states.

In 2006, the year after ATSIC was abolished, Western Australia signed a bilateral agreement with the Commonwealth on Indigenous affairs. According to a state government discussion paper, the agreement sought to regularise housing, infrastructure, and essential and municipal services “such that the Western Australian government, and local governments, would assume responsibility for the delivery of services to Indigenous communities in a manner consistent with what they would normally provide to town sites.”

The Northern Territory signed a similar agreement in 2007. South Australia, alone among the states with dispersed remote communities, held out. The commitment was reinforced in the national partnership on remote Indigenous housing signed by all state and territory first ministers in December 2008.

According to a report in preparation by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, the transfer of Aboriginal housing to state public housing authorities has largely been successful. It has required a creative and flexible approach to the underlying land tenure of housing blocks, which Western Australia managed well. The transfer of municipal services may not go quite so smoothly.

In Western Australia, local governments are not required to service Aboriginal communities and there is no statutory Aboriginal equivalent of local government. Queensland operates a two-tier system, with Aboriginal municipalities coming under their own legislation, distinct from the mainstream shires that surround them. The Northern Territory created local government shires across most of its land in 2008, and these are Aboriginal-controlled by weight of numbers. Remote areas of South Australia remain unincorporated and without any form of local government.

These disparate arrangements for mainstreaming municipal services in remote settlements are a challenge in themselves. More challenging than this, though, is the fact that the system of funding of local government throughout Australia is broken for white and black alike.

In practice, despite the fiscal equalisation intention of both the GST and the Local Government (Financial Assistance) Act, federal funds are distributed on a per capita basis overwhelmingly to metropolitan areas that are quite capable of raising income from rates and services without this assistance. The rich get richer. The amounts that trickle through to rural and remote regions are often not enough to replace decaying infrastructure, let alone meet the development challenge of impoverished Aboriginal communities.

Roadmaps are useless if the road is too rough to travel. If our remote communities are to thrive, rather than wither at the end of the track, the Commonwealth must re-engage with Aboriginal development in the spirit of the 1967 referendum, and the system of remote and rural equalisation funding must be entirely overhauled. Incremental changes introduced behind closed doors by pragmatic bureaucrats have the tendency to evolve into fully formed disasters before the public notices. Burdening local governments with responsibilities previously met by the Commonwealth threatens to be the tipping point for rural and outback decay. Before it reaches that point, these changes should instead be used as a springboard for a national inquiry into sustainably funding the outback for black and white alike. •

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The people most able and willing to take up opportunities flowing from the DAA’s policy of “Aboriginalising” its workforce were English-speaking, urban and politicised. The radical agenda of some of these activists (and even their identification as Aborigines) was criticised by paternalistic whites, including former staff of the NT Welfare Branch still working in the department. “Traditional” Aboriginal people like the Gurindji were mostly untouched by these controversies, but in 1974 the elders at Daguragu – formerly the Wattie Creek camp – were also drawn into the fray.

One person inflaming these controversies locally was Philip Nitschke. Nitschke, an opinionated physics graduate of Flinders University, had been given a government-funded gardening job in the Gurindji community by two elders, Lupngiari and Mick Rangiari. Since he’d arrived several months earlier, Nitschke had embraced his role as gardener, scribe, lobbyist, mechanic and tutor with huge energy. His efforts to publicise the Gurindji’s quest for land made those of his predecessors seem half-hearted. But unlike other activists who had attempted to maintain good relations with kartiya, or whites, in the area, Nitschke had no hesitation about fronting Europeans on behalf of the “track mob” as he saw fit. His confrontational style quickly enraged the settlement’s new DAA adviser, Trevor LaBrooy – and its other white residents.

When LaBrooy arrived to replace his friend Len Ibbetson in early 1974, the Victoria River was in flood. His “welcome” included being swept several kilometres downriver before burying an old Gurindji man’s body in the dark, soaked by driving rain. A principled public servant, LaBrooy had worked on Queensland’s notorious Palm Island Aboriginal settlement. Finding the policies he was expected to enforce there unfair, he had petitioned the then Aboriginal affairs minister, W.C. Wentworth, over lunch about other work, and was offered a job by Harry Giese in the NT Welfare Branch.

As a justice of the peace who believed strongly in the rule of law, loyalty to the government and respect for “common decency,” LaBrooy was Philip Nitschke’s nemesis. To the young firebrand then flirting with anarchism, LaBrooy’s Dutch–British Ceylonese background was a sign of his “colonialism.” Although both men were on the DAA’s payroll, serious altercations occurred within weeks.

Like the Gurindji, Nitschke was dependent on the settlement’s services and needed LaBrooy’s goodwill. When a hunting rifle seemingly went missing in the post – which was being managed by Anna LaBrooy, Trevor’s wife – Nitschke angrily accused her of sabotaging Daguragu. The new superintendent was so enraged by this attack that he “bum-rushed” the younger man from his office with a well-aimed kick. Afterwards, when Nitschke threatened to dispose of him violently, LaBrooy – a former big game hunter – responded in kind.

The young activist was soon disliked by other whites in the area, too. Scottish nursing sisters Margaret and Bernadette Glass had just arrived at the settlement (and Australia), and although they were disconnected from local politics, found themselves in Nitschke’s sights. When he angrily told them to improve their service at Daguragu, the sisters called for LaBrooy to physically evict him from their clinic and filed a complaint. The nurses’ union spokesman doubtlessly had Nitschke in mind when he referred to “a new kind of… left-wing paternalism.” “The revolutionaries think they are going to take over,” he went on. “Some of the people implementing the government’s policy of self-determination are stirring things up. Some are employees of the ministry, and I think they should be sacked.”

By this point, Whitlam’s Aboriginal affairs minister, Jim Cavanagh, had received a stream of complaints and claims and counter-claims from the combatants at the Vestey family’s Wave Hill station. He defended LaBrooy, pointing out that “Mr Nitschke’s own inexperience and lack of training may well be an important factor in the situation.” Unbeknown to the Gurindji’s new adviser, the DAA was considering terminating his employment.

The conditions were certainly challenging, and although they were on better pay than the Gurindji, Nitschke and the nurses were doing it tough. In 2007 Nitschke remembered:

The first wet [season] we went through was pretty hard going, the bloody hut was awash with water. It was as hot as hell, there [were] twenty centimetre centipedes hurtling across the floor, sick dogs [were] everywhere, people were diseased. We were bloody trapped for a long period of time when the river was up… I don’t want to overstate this, but it was tough going.

According to local NT Legislative Council member Goff Letts, the nurses were living in

an undersized caravan with a leaky roof and a [tiny] refrigerator… They wash their clothes by hand… Their air-conditioning has been broken down for some time [and] there is no toilet or shower for them… They are in such poor circumstances that the Aboriginal people themselves have built them a bush shelter…

Daguragu’s elders were pleased enough by Nitschke’s work, but the fights erupting among the kartiya troubled them. Elder Vincent Lingiari, ever mindful of the Gurindji’s need to maintain good relationships in the region, attempted to prevent Nitschke from visiting nearby Wave Hill station. His concern was warranted; within months, the station manager Ralph Hayes threatened to “punch Nitschke’s head in.”

Hostility towards Nitschke even played out in the Gurindji’s camp. One night “Lynnie” Hayes (brother of Ralph), their old friend Sabu Sing (a mixed-race stockman who was raised on Wave Hill station by its manager, Tom Fisher) and the local policeman arrived for a “friendly beer” with the Gurindji. As the alcohol flowed, the visitors turned nasty. A senior Gurindji man, Pincher Nyurrmiarri, warned Nitschke that unless he left his camp, he would be attacked by irate whites. Nitschke watched from the darkness as the drunken whites came over to his camp:

My father [who was visiting] came out of the tin shed, and he stood outside where the fire was burning. I could hear the voices through the night, saying “Where is your shit-stirring son? We’re going to teach him a lesson.” My father said “I don’t know, he’s gone.” Then they started to give [him] rather a hard time, knocking him around.

Another senior man, Jerry Rinyngayarri, a teetotaller, arrived in the nick of time, and asked the visitors to leave. They got into their Toyota and issued a warning before driving off: “The weak bastard, we’ll get him one day.” Nitschke – who also received death threats – was inclined to take them seriously.

To encourage greater Aboriginal participation in government decision-making, the DAA had created a new National Aboriginal Advisory Consultative Council, or NACC, in a matter of months. The council was slated to be a key component of Aboriginal self-determination, and hopes surrounding the new body were high. At a meeting in Batchelor, Gurindji and other delegates were told they would “get a truly representative Aboriginal body, one big powerful voice to speak to the government.”

When the NACC assembled in Canberra in February 1974, its new councillors dictated their agenda. They requested far greater powers, an enormous pay rise, and reserved seats for Aboriginal people in parliament. It was not the “advice” the Labor government had wanted, and Cavanagh responded like an overbearing parent. The council, in turn, called for his resignation.

This clash at the heart of the government’s self-determination project – and the minister’s barely disguised dislike of “urban,” political Aboriginal people – put him on a collision course with Charles Perkins, the high-profile former activist who now headed the DAA’s liaison branch. Perkins, who had been given the job of creating the NACC, was unbowed. He told a national television audience that the minister had “as much understanding of Aborigines as of flying to the moon.” Coming on top of other misdemeanours, this transgression prompted departmental head Barrie Dexter to suspend Perkins.

Dexter’s takedown of the most powerful Aboriginal person in the nation increased the ire of new Black Power groups in the south. Despite his lobbying for land rights with the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, Dexter received death threats and was put under a twenty-four-hour police guard. The minister, Cavanagh, was also living with a security detail. In this environment it was not completely surprising that the DAA’s Canberra offices were stormed by three Kooris, one carrying a gun. Their leader, Bobby McLeod, had freshly returned from Wyndham, some 400 kilometres from Wave Hill, and was desperate about his people’s suffering. Finding that Dexter was out, McLeod and his friends held two senior ex-Welfare bureaucrats hostage instead. Perkins was called by the vigilantes to defuse the situation and, after talking down McLeod, went home with the gunman’s unfired bullets in his sock.

With Perkins inflaming a mutiny in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, the weekly Nation Review described the operations of the department as a “cops and robbers saga played out each day… with ever-increasing drama.” Another reporter described “open hostility between whites and blacks” and a rift that existed “from the very lowest position to the very highest.” According to Nation Review, things were so strained that when an Aboriginal staffer “floored a white in the department with a haymaker [punch], nobody was surprised.” At Wattie Creek, Philip Nitschke saw Perkins as a hero fighting the state, and encouraged him on the Gurindji’s behalf.

Nitschke and LaBrooy’s complaints about the management of the Muramulla Gurindji Cattle Company and about each other prompted Cavanagh to investigate the situation for himself, in May 1974. When LaBrooy heard of Cavanagh’s plan to visit, he adopted a more conciliatory tone and lent the DAA’s rubbish truck to Daguragu. Pincher Nyurrmiarri saw it this way: “When minister bloke coming up, that superintendent a bit frightened, so he been clean up a little bit…” LaBrooy maintained the timing was a coincidence. Far from his generosity heralding an end to the conflict, though, disagreement about these matters lingers to this day.

When Cavanagh arrived with Barrie Dexter and Gurindji supporter Don Atkinson on 29 May 1974, the pair wanted to relay news to the Gurindji about their land request. Whitlam had bestowed a small horse paddock lease on the Aborigines the previous year, and Cavanagh would soon announce the government’s intention to excise all the country the elders claimed and buy it from Wave Hill station.

The authorities’ justification for buying the Gurindji a pastoral lease at a cost of roughly $160,000 ($1.2 million today) was simple: the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights was dragging on, and the DAA was under pressure to act. A consultant’s report had found that the area the Gurindji wanted was “suitable for the establishment of a cattle station [which] has reasonable prospects of achieving long-term commercial viability.” Evidence that the elders wanted to run cattle this way was scarce, but the government would not carve up Wave Hill station without the justification that a profit could be made from the resulting excision.

While Cavanagh’s flight was en route to Daguragu, Nitschke and the elders tried to ensure that they, not the “establishment reactionaries” at the settlement, would greet the VIPs. LaBrooy thwarted them, and he and Alan Thorpe (who was now the DAA works manager) met the minister’s plane. During the drive from the airstrip, Cavanagh asked LaBrooy if it was true, as the activists had reported, that he had assaulted Nitschke. When he heard the superintendent’s tale of manhandling the scruffy activist from Commonwealth property, Cavanagh tapped him on the arm, whispered “Well done!” conspiratorially, and broke into laughter.

Upon the VIPs’ arrival in the Gurindji’s camp, Nitschke requested an audience with the minister without LaBrooy or other “Welfare” (DAA) staff present. While Daguragu’s elders watched on in bemusement, Cavanagh asked Nitschke to leave as well. Eventually, two meetings between the elders and Cavanagh were agreed upon: one with Nitschke, and one with LaBrooy present. Lingiari politely listened as the pair aired their grievances to the minister, before he moved the conversation to the Gurindji’s land.

Barrie Dexter had bad news. First, he admitted it was likely to be another two years before the excision from Wave Hill station could be made, and second, he informed the Gurindji elders that should they muster any unbranded cattle from Wave Hill station they would face prosecution. Furthermore, the elders’ Muramulla operation would soon be limited to employing two people until they got their excision. In total, thirteen people would soon need to be laid off. All of this shocked Lingiari so much he could barely speak. According to Nitschke, the effect on the group was “shattering.”

In effect, Dexter had told the elders that if they wanted more government support, their enterprise would be locked into “caretaker” mode in the interim. It seemed the Gurindji’s land rights – if they were ever recognised – would be delivered in the distant future. The old men had tasted government generosity, but remained completely at the mercy of the schedule and requirements of the state. Nitschke sensed injustice:

The catch cry of “self-determination, control and acceptance of responsibility” has become one of the strongest weapons used against the people by the… establishment reactionaries. To exercise control, there must be money and power – to crap on about self-determination whilst hanging on to the purse strings is gross hypocrisy.

The stress Cavanagh’s visit placed on the Gurindji elders was enormous. After he and Dexter departed, latent divisions among the leadership group flared. Lingiari was rebuked for his passivity and deferral before the visitors. Pincher Nyurrmiarri “wrote” angrily, leaving out the invective he unleashed on the day, “Old Vincent didn’t tell him [Cavanagh] right story from his heart. Minister didn’t find out much from Aborigine at Wattie Creek, what’s been happening.”

Such criticism of Lingiari by members of his coterie would hasten talk of succession. While the elder defended himself, saying he had not wanted to upset the minister and his party, Aboriginal politics itself was changing. Lingiari’s civility and respect for authority was increasingly missing from Aboriginal affairs. Aboriginal people elsewhere in the county were becoming – like the more radical Nyurrmiarri and Mick Rangiari – outspokenly critical. •

This is an edited extract from A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off, published this month by Monash University Publishing.

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Last Monday, the ABC’s Four Corners showed footage of child abuse at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin. Malcolm Turnbull announced the commission the following morning, and by Thursday he had proposed that the former NT chief justice, Brian Martin, would head it. On Saturday, opposition leader Bill Shorten called for two Indigenous commissioners to be added to the inquiry team. Then, on Monday, Brian Martin quit the role saying that it was apparent he would not have the full confidence of sections of the Indigenous community. 

In the midst of this rapid movement, newly elected senator Pat Dodson went on ABC Triple J’s Hack to remind us of both parties’ failure to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, on which he was a commissioner, after it reported twenty-five years ago. Asked “Have we learned anything since then?” Dodson replied:

Look, I don’t think we have, quite frankly. The royal commission talked about a duty of care that officers and police should really have drilled into them as part of their obligations and duties when they have people who are vulnerable or in their care. I don’t think that lesson’s been learnt. I don’t think the lessons about the pathways of why young people are brought to the courts and then incarcerated in the numbers in which they are incarcerated have been learnt. The health, education, the housing factors, I don’t think we’ve learnt much about that. We talk a lot about it, but we haven’t done much about it. And I don’t think we’ve done much to educate the people who legislate. Because you’re a politician doesn’t mean you’re Einstein. It doesn’t mean you understand all the things that need to be understood when you’re dealing with this most sensitive of areas.

Dodson himself was appointed late to the deaths in custody commission in response to criticism that it was top-heavy with judicial white males. I worked for him as a research officer there in 1989 and our professional paths have crossed frequently since. He was given the job of investigating the underlying problems that led to deaths in custody. He recruited a team of Aboriginal leaders – Darryl Kickett, Rob Riley, Peter Yu, Jackie Oakley – to tour the country’s jails and police lockups with him. Marcia Langton worked from Darwin to produce the landmark report Too Much Sorry Business.

These, and others I have forgotten, witnessed trauma at the front line. Referring to the present, but no doubt remembering the past, Dodson told Triple J listeners, “This is a matter of regimes that talk tough, that want to incarcerate young people, that want to throw away the key basically, that are permitted to torture, that are permitted to do all sorts of things under the law and walk free! Now that’s not right and it’s not just.” No police or judicial officers were prosecuted or disciplined for the cases investigated by the deaths in custody commission.

Dodson’s brother, Mick, was the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner during another judicial inquiry, the stolen generation inquiry into the removal of children from their families. He endured day after day of testimony about heartless officials and heart-breaking grief. Here too the commission’s recommendations have only been selectively implemented.

Pat Dodson’s stance is not political posturing. It is personal. And it takes its toll. Rob Riley tragically died by his own hand not long after the deaths in custody commission concluded. The survivors of Aboriginal campaigns are not ordinary politicians. They suffer the rough and tumble of public life with nothing to retreat to but their own inner strength, and that of their families and communities.

After watching Four Corners last week, another Aboriginal reporter from a different front line, Stan Grant, joined them with a cry from the depths. “I could call this anger,” he wrote in the Guardian. “I could tell of rage. I could describe a suffocating, nauseating hopelessness. For me it is seeing the physical scars of my loved ones: bodies marked by knife wounds, broken bones, missing fingers, and dark ink tattoos. These tell stories of lives at the coalface of bigotry and poverty.”

A royal commission will not fix this. But it may conceivably lay some groundwork if both sides of politics commit themselves in advance to implementing its recommendations. This may be politically unpalatable, but it is inherently logical.

When Brian Martin was chief justice, no one was entitled to stand before him and say, “I appreciate your decision, judge, but I’m going to ignore it.” If the federal and NT governments have faith in commissioners and the method of their inquiry, then there is no credible reason for them not to commit in advance to following their judgement.

There is no do-nothing option. Business as usual is doing something, in this case something bad. The two positions of the policy switch are the same: on/on. Not committing to full implementation is effectively committing to bad implementation.

Experience of Indigenous royal commissions tells us that without implementation or follow-up they are simply an excuse for wallowing in white guilt as a smokescreen for political arse-covering. History returns as farce.

Though he is a measured and inclusive statesman in public life, in private Dodson would probably agree with Grant’s rejection of white hand-wringing concern. As Grant says:

After Four Corners I watched a little of the Q&A panel discuss the horrors of what they had seen. They discussed Indigenous incarceration, black deaths in custody. They answered questions about constitutional recognition. They talked about the first peoples of this country and there wasn’t even an Indigenous person on the panel. Not one of them even mentioned how utterly inappropriate it is to be talking about us and not including us.

I just wanted to yell at the screen, get out of our lives!

The government resisted calls from the opposition and Indigenous leaders to appoint Indigenous co-commissioners before Martin quit – calls partly prompted by the perception of “whitewash” that Grant wrote about in the Guardian. The opportunity for appointment of an Indigenous commissioner opened up, and the government has moved swiftly to appoint social justice commissioner Mick Gooda alongside former Queensland chief justice Margaret White. But the Dodsons can tell us that is no guarantee of positive change.

It is harder to yell “get out of our lives” to an Indigenous commissioner, but even without one that was never going to happen. An achievable, though difficult, step is for the rest of Australia to stand with Stan Grant and see those kids as our kids – as Australian kids and as ours. It is at least as hard for Aboriginal people to grant us that right as it is for the rest of us to step up to it. •

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During the manoeuvring to achieve this massive shift in Indigenous policy, Aboriginal people’s deficit, their “gap,” has been front and centre of political discourse. Over the past fifteen years, and increasingly since the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC, was abolished ten years ago, the Commonwealth has used a barrage of deficit metrics as a smokescreen for its retreat.

Deficit metrics dominate Indigenous policy. They describe the variety of ways in which Aboriginal people, as a group, fall short of the rest of the population. They cover almost everything that can be measured in human life, from health and education to safety at home. Like all Indigenous policies since colonial settlement, deficit description was introduced “for the good of the Aborigines,” and like all such policies it has done them little good at all. It measures failure, and in doing so tells white and black alike just how much Aboriginal people are failing. For all its seemingly natural inevitability, it is, in the end, demoralising, demonising, depressing and, as a result, self-fulfilling.

Laurie Bamblett, a Wiradjuri man and the vice-chancellor’s scholar in Indigenous history at the ANU School of History, put it this way in his Reconciliation Week lecture at the Parliamentary Library last year:

I want to protest how people talk about our communities. Especially the slogan “Aboriginal Disadvantage.” I don’t like it. It does more harm than good. I want to get rid of it… If I start by asking you what you know about Aboriginal communities, what image comes to mind? What do you see? I come from a mission called Erambie [near Cowra in New South Wales]. I always describe it as paradise. I’m guessing that’s not the image you have. Am I right?

In public perception, Aboriginal identity is now framed by disease, inadequate education and violence.

It wasn’t always so. There was a time, following the 1967 referendum (which licensed the federal government to build its own Aboriginal affairs bureaucracy), when Aboriginal people were assumed to be brimming with capabilities waiting to be unleashed. This optimism began to peter out in the early 1990s, just in time to collide with the rise of managerialism in the Commonwealth public service. This new style of public service management borrowed the business school mantra “if you can measure it you can manage it,” and deficit metrics began their rule.

The brief twenty- to thirty-year period of Aboriginal optimism came about because the federal government had gained the power to make Aboriginal policy from scratch, taking it over from states still floundering their way out of the era of Native Welfare segregation and protectionism. The 1967 referendum didn’t give Aborigines the vote or grant them citizenship, though it’s true that lifting these restrictions on Aboriginal people at the state level did go hand in hand with the movement to allow the federal government to take the lead in Aboriginal policy.

At Federation the states had agreed that federal parliament had the power “to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to… the people of any race, other than the aboriginal people in any State, for whom it is necessary to make special laws.” The referendum removed the prohibition on law-making for Aboriginal people and allowed the Commonwealth to engage directly on its own account. With law-making comes funding, and with funding comes control. There was widespread expectation that the Commonwealth would take the lead, and it stepped up to this challenge remarkably well for twenty-five years.

Before this, Aborigines had been subjects and citizens, but “from time to time,” as former territories minister Paul Hasluck put it in a chapter he contributed to Ronald and Catherine Berndt’s Aboriginal Man in Australia in 1965, “the exercise of their rights of citizenship has been limited by legislation… In this regard their position has been analogous to that of other special classes of citizens who have been limited in their exercise of the normal rights of citizens.” His examples of these are bankrupts, the “mentally afflicted,” habitual drunkards, and people under the age of twenty-one (the voting age at the time).

Amid the international push for decolonisation after the second world war, state governments had gradually lifted restrictions and repealed, amended and renamed their Aboriginal administration legislation. This ensured de facto assimilation, but on its own it was not enough to guarantee material development, particularly in the remote areas. For that to happen, money, vision and national coordination were needed. The Commonwealth government had taken over the major share of revenue-raising during the war (and has hung on to it ever since). It also had the vision, while the state bureaucracies were still mired in a patronising “native welfare” mindset.

The Commonwealth also had the architect of postwar economic reconstruction, H.C. “Nugget” Coombs. Coombs had been one of the “seven dwarves” – the mandarins at the peaks of the Commonwealth public service – and had a passion for Aboriginal people unmatched by any senior bureaucrat since. With his two colleagues in the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner and former diplomat Barry Dexter, he set about bypassing the states and directly funding Aboriginal development through newly minted Aboriginal-controlled community organisations.

Coombs later described Aboriginal incorporated organisations as “a ‘carapace’ within the protection of which Aboriginal groups could experiment with… an acceptable working relationship with white society.” The concept, he wrote, was

seized upon in 1967 by the newly established Council and Office of Aboriginal Affairs and continued to influence the practice of the department when it was established in 1973… It made it possible for such groups to… undertake their own programs, negotiate with governments about these, receive grants-in-aid and establish their own councils, housing and progress associations, business enterprises etc, for the conduct of their own affairs.

By initiating the funding of self-managed community offices, health services, legal services and multi-function homeland support agencies that ultimately led to ATSIC, Coombs had given Aboriginal advocates the organisational infrastructure to be able to complain loudly about their disadvantage and to demand redress.

The success of Coombs’ strategy sowed the seeds of its own downfall. The existence of a vibrant and vocal, yet financially struggling and somewhat flawed, network of Aboriginal organisations provoked Australian conservatives. Liberal leader John Howard was among those who reacted negatively, first because these groups were a philosophical challenge to his deeply held conviction that “the common values” of the English-speaking countries should rule in Australia. As he declared in a different context in 2011, “I am a passionate believer in multiracialism… But when a nation draws people from other parts of the world, it draws them because of the magnetism of its own culture and its own way of life, and the ideal [is] to unite them behind the common values of the country which has made them welcome.” The rise of a sector espousing distinct cultural values within his own jurisdiction was philosophically unacceptable.

He was also politically challenged, seeing Aboriginal advocates as aligned with his political opponents. There was, no doubt, a fiscal consideration too. The rise of the Aboriginal sector placed a burden on the budget and, to rub salt in this wound, the persistence of Aboriginal poverty became a Commonwealth political liability.

Howard’s war on ATSIC began as soon as he took office. His first press conference as prime minister was held with his Aboriginal affairs minister, John Herron, standing behind him as he announced an audit of all of the community organisations funded by ATSIC, clearly signalling a belief that they were corrupt and incompetent and that ATSIC was complicit.

Unsubstantiated smears of this kind characterised the Howard years, reaching new lows with the military-style intervention in the Northern Territory under the flag of protection of children from violent, alcohol-ridden sexual abusers. Not surprisingly, the intervention was a turning point in public support for Aboriginal development. This hammering away at the multitude of ways in which Aboriginal people had failed brought widespread disenchantment not with Aboriginal policy, but with Aboriginal people themselves. They had failed to meet the requirements of the majority, and even sympathetic urban whites didn’t know what to think any more.

Deficit metrics played a big part. They had been introduced as one arm of a multipronged attack on Aboriginal disadvantage at the first meeting of the newly minted Council of Australian Governments, or COAG, in Perth in December 1992. The National Commitment to Improved Outcomes in the Delivery of Services to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, adopted at that meeting, threw out the post-1967 arrangement, under which the Commonwealth had effectively taken over state government Aboriginal affairs agencies, and substituted bilateral agreements tied to performance. At that point, though, the states still insisted that “sustained levels of Commonwealth funding will be based on the principle of the Commonwealth continuing to have a special responsibility in Aboriginal Affairs, including where appropriate, the provision of funds and resources under agreements.”

Performance must be measured against a baseline, of course, and so deficit metrics were incorporated in the sidelines of the agreement. Rather innocuously, the governments agreed on “procedures for monitoring objectives and outcomes” and “provision for nationally consistent statistical reports with a policy orientation.” The final item in the agreement was that

the governments of Australia agree that the Australian Aboriginal Affairs Council review annually progress in the achievement of improved outcomes in the delivery of programs and services for Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders; and affirm their commitment to accountability in provision of programs and services for [them].

If you can measure it, you can manage it.

The Commonwealth had another more pressing purpose in brokering the agreement. This was to re-engage state governments, who for more than two decades had been happy for the Commonwealth to pay the bills and wear the blame for failures.

The agreement fired the first shots in the turf war between the states and the Commonwealth, with the Commonwealth trying to get the states to recommit to funding services and the states insisting on the continued role of the Commonwealth. It was here that the concept of shared responsibility was first introduced, though at first it applied to the states and was only later appropriated by the Howard government to badger Aboriginal people into being more responsible citizens under Shared Responsibility Agreements, or SRAs.

By this time, after ATSIC’s abolition, deficit metrics were firmly entrenched. SRAs forced on Aboriginal communities by the Howard government listed in precise particulars the areas of deficit that a community must improve in order to qualify for development grants.

This relentless talking down of a people already well down was essential to the strategy of disengaging the Commonwealth government and reversing the intent of the 1967 referendum. After all, what can you do with people who receive so much help but steadfastly refuse to improve themselves?

COAG’s embrace of the Close the Gap campaign melded well with this tactic. Originally a community demand to Close the Gap in health, the brand was taken over by COAG, which, with a slight tweak of the label to Closing the Gap, married it to its existing arrangement with the Productivity Commission to measure continuing Aboriginal disadvantage. This measurement was instituted in 2002, fifteen years ago, and has still not resulted in improvements.

Closing the Gap’s targets in seven key areas, the annual statement to parliament on the Indigenous deficit, the biennial Productivity Commission report on failures in redressing disadvantage – all were foreshadowed in the 1992 COAG agreement that had signalled the end of optimism, the end of self-determination, the end of Commonwealth leadership and the onset of disillusion. Worst of all, perhaps, is the collateral damage caused by this process. The discourse of Aboriginal failure is most likely one of the major contributing factors to their disadvantage.

By replacing bilateral agreements with National Partnership Agreements under the new Federal Financial Relations Act in 2008, the Commonwealth divested itself, quietly and without public debate, of responsibility for Aboriginal development. Its two pillars, housing and municipal and essential services, are now the responsibility of state governments.

It was a masterful policy of the Howard years, embraced also by Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Jenny Macklin, to wash the Commonwealth’s hands of the poorest of the poor. That is not how Aboriginal people see themselves and their communities, but they know it is the way that they are perceived.

Laurie Bamblett again:

If we talk more about Aboriginal Advantage, we’ll be moving away from something that doesn’t work. Telling people they’re disadvantaged kills them. It takes their power and authority away. It disengages them. It makes it okay for them to say no. It frees people of obligation. The opposite of what we want. I really think those words “Aboriginal Disadvantage” are that bad. Think about it. How would you like to hear that all the time? Not only that, how do you think it feels that it sometimes doesn’t even need to be said any more? It’s just accepted…

He also talked about trail-blazing musicians and athletes who had grown up in Erambie and said:

Compare Don Bradman using a stump, a golf ball and water tank to become a champion. That story is seen as an example of Australian ingenuity and cheek. Evonne Goolagong doing basically the same thing to become a champion tennis player is seen as a poor bugger me story. It proves our disadvantage.

Think about this. There’s never been more than twenty-eight houses at Erambie. No more than 200 people living there at any time. Yet on top of the success I’ve just talked about, we have PhDs, masters degrees, a barrister, lawyers, a Harvard graduate and university-trained teachers.

Deficit is not an individual characteristic. Deficit metrics act like mud flung at an entire group on account of their inherent, inescapable identity. The danger, as always, is that resilience and resistance is manifested not by contest and denial – the forces stacked against Aboriginal people make that a thankless strategy – but by defiantly flinging the negativity back in the faces of those who piously recount it.

And so we arrive at a stalemate that suits all governments well. Good white people throw up their hands and wonder what, after all, can be done about “the Aboriginal problem.” We have tried so much, received so little thanks, and in the end they won’t help themselves. The Commonwealth has backed out; the states will assimilate their Aboriginal populations into their underclass; top-up handouts are flung around as an Indigenous Advancement Strategy; and, like mainstream politics, no side is bold enough to put forward a vision. Farewell 1967. •

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Cal Flyn is a Highland Scot who felt the pull of home at a moment of crisis in her life. There, during a visit to the Isle of Skye, she came across an 1845 map of Gippsland’s squatting runs in an exhibition about the Skye diaspora. It carried a reference to the explorer Angus McMillan. A chance remark by her mother – “he’s a relative of ours” – piqued Flyn’s curiosity and sent her to the archives.

She read McMillan’s entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and felt a surge of pride. But what for many amateur genealogists might have been a dream come true was for Flyn the beginning of an angst-ridden struggle to understand the past. That struggle began when the words “Angus McMillan massacres” popped up in her search engine

Much of Thicker than Water is taken up with Flyn’s journey to Gippsland in search of an answer to what she calls her core question: “What could have pushed a man to such extreme behaviour, caused him to slip his moral moorings so completely?” While the research she carried out hasn’t unearthed new material, it is very welcome. Her account of the search for the mysterious “lost white woman of Gippsland,” for instance, brings to readers an important but little-known event that deserves more attention; it was the first great moral panic in colonial Victoria and a disaster for the Gunaikurnai.

Flyn’s strands of historical enquiry are counterposed by a personal anxiety. Does she, as a descendant of McMillan, carry intergenerational blood guilt for the actions of her forebears? Her answer appears to be yes. The book’s title is perfectly chosen.

Angus McMillan has become a polarising figure in Gippsland. For generations he was admired to the point of adulation and no one seemed unduly concerned by his record of violence towards Aboriginal people. Then, thirty years ago, the historian Peter Gardner made the case that McMillan was complicit in massacres. The title of his book, Our Founding Murdering Father, gives you the general idea. Flyn’s account of McMillan draws heavily on Gardner, and is just as tendentious. My main criticism of Thicker than Water is that it simplifies the evidence against McMillan, and presents this in a way that denies readers the opportunity to decide for themselves.

It also contains curious omissions. Flyn doesn’t mention the one primary source tending to confirm speculation about McMillan’s participation in the frontier violence. In 1858, his friend Caroline Dexter wrote that McMillan was “compelled, in his early days, to destroy numbers of more treacherous natives.” This is an important revelation, and it came to light only recently (for the details, see Patrick Morgan’s book Folie à Deux: Caroline and William Dexter in Colonial Australia). In my view, Dexter’s source was McMillan himself, but what still isn’t clear is whether McMillan was referring to the tit-for-tat skirmishes he describes in his own recollections, or admitting to something that had previously been off the record. In particular, is he alluding to an event that has come to be known as the Warrigal Creek massacre?

Somewhere near Port Albert in 1843, Aboriginal tribesmen ambushed and killed a man named Ronald Macalister. This Macalister was the nephew of Lachlan Macalister, an uber squatter who bankrolled the exploration of Gippsland. The elder Macalister was a captain in the NSW border police, and an experienced hand in the violent suppression of Aboriginal resistance. In reprisal for Ronald’s death, settlers tracked down a group of Gunaikurnai camped near a waterhole, most likely at Warrigal Creek near Woodside, and killed a large number of men, women and children using firearms and possibly tomahawks.

Flyn presents McMillan’s leadership of the attack at Warrigal Creek as a fact, and her book begins with a dramatisation of the event. She makes some vague comments about sources in the Author’s Note, but you won’t be able to go to a library and use the book to check on any of this. A reader would not know, for example, that no firsthand accounts of the Warrigal Creek massacre exist, and that Flyn’s information comes from two secondary sources, both of which appeared decades later. One version is contained in George Dunderdale’s The Book of the Bush (1898) and names Lachlan Macalister as the leader of the reprisal. Dunderdale doesn’t mention McMillan in connection with the events following Ronald Macalister’s death, although he does appear elsewhere in the book.

The second source is an article published in The Gap magazine of 1925 by a writer under the pseudonym “Gippslander.” “Gippslander” was William Hoddinott, whose father held the Warrigal Creek run at the time. Hoddinott claims to have known two of the survivors. One was a boy, shot in the eye, who was forced to lead the attackers to other camps. The other was a man who managed to swim away.

This is the key piece of evidence linking McMillan to Warrigal Creek, but I wonder if Flyn has read the original text. All it says directly about McMillan is that he was the discoverer of Macalister’s body. The perpetrators are named as “every man who could find a gun and a horse” and there is no mention of anyone leading the attack.

A third source much closer to the event also confirms that violence broke out after the killing of Macalister. It is a young squatter named Henry Howard Meyrick. In my reading about William Thomas, an assistant protector of Aborigines, I came across a record of a meeting with Meyrick, which Thomas’s journal records as taking place early in 1846. Meyrick is recorded describing the “awful sacrifice of life after the murder of Mr Macalister” and then referring to “a reported Act of a Scotchman who went out with a party Scowering, not to be credited by one who calls himself a Christian.” Again no names are given. Who was the “Scotchman”?

Another Scot on the Gippsland frontier may deserve more attention than he has previously received. Frederick Taylor, a Lowland Scot born in Forfarshire, is not mentioned in Flyn’s book, and rates little mention in other accounts. In 1836, he tied an Aboriginal man to a tree and left him under the supervision of a convict servant called Whitehead, who shot the man dead. Whitehead was tried for murder and acquitted; police magistrate Willian Lonsdale “entertained a strong suspicion that he [Taylor] had given strong encouragement to the prisoner to commit the murder.”

In 1839 Taylor was overseer on a new squatting run, Strathdownie, near Lake Corangamite in Victoria’s Western District. Without provocation and with little assistance, he wiped out almost the entire Tarnbeere Gundidj clan of the Djargurd Wurrung. In what is known as the Murdering Gully massacre, around thirty people were shot dead when Taylor led an attack on their camp under cover of darkness. Other stockmen were shocked by the extremity of the act, and the details are confirmed by multiple firsthand accounts. Rather than face questioning, Taylor fled to India.

Taylor resurfaced in 1842 – in Gippsland. His presence came to the attention of the superintendent of Port Phillip, Charles Latrobe, and, through him, Governor Gipps in Sydney. Taylor’s homicidal history was known to the authorities, and Gipps ruled that Taylor was not to hold a squatting licence or supervise a run in Gippsland. In other words, Taylor was too great a risk to be given unrestrained access to Aboriginal people in the back blocks of 1840s Gippsland. Ultimately, these efforts – effectively an attempt to drive him out of the province – failed when Charles Tyers, the local crown commissioner for land, backed down on the ban. Gipps was infuriated. (I have recently transcribed the correspondence relating to the episode; it makes a fascinating case study of the limits of executive power in the governance of the colonial frontier.) Taylor’s behaviour was shocking in other ways. During a trip over the Alps in winter, he made his Indian employees sleep in the snow while the whites sheltered in tents.

The allegations against Angus McMillan are of the utmost seriousness, but there is no evidence that he was a gratuitously cruel man. In fact, Flyn discovers, as have many of us who have gone searching, that the McMillan of the 1850s and 60s was in many respects an admirable person who showed concern, in his own way, for Aboriginal welfare. This is what makes him such an interesting and infuriating figure to study. Life would be easier if we could just write him off as an utter villain.

One of the thorny problems in making moral judgements about the past is that good people could say and do things we find appalling. Henry Meyrick was willing to call out “complete murder” when he saw it. He died young, drowned while swimming across the Thomson River seeking help for a woman who was dying in childbirth. He was a good and humane man in anyone’s book. And yet he was capable of saying, “If I caught a black actually killing my sheep, I would shoot him as I would a wild dog.”

In my own journey of reading Gippsland, I have struggled with the question of where McMillan stands on the spectrums of decency and violence. The extent, nature and context of the latter does matter. Frederick Taylor would have made a fine conquistador, but we should be grateful that not all squatters were of his ilk. Was Angus McMillan such a man? Flyn is certain that he was. I’m really not sure.

For all the polemic about which squatter did what, the 1840s were years of bloody catastrophe for the Gunaikurnai, whose numbers were massively reduced by disease and violence. Thicker than Water is an important contribution to public understanding about this period, and Flyn’s compassion for Indigenous Australians is manifest throughout. But if I could recommend one text for all Australians to read about the fall of Ancient Gippsland, it wouldn’t be this book, or Peter Gardner’s writings, or even Don Watson’s masterpiece, Caledonia Australis. It would be Alfred Howitt’s introduction (pages 181–88) to his contribution to Kamilaroi and Kurnai, published in 1880, where the tragedy of the Gunaikurnai is captured in a few pages of deeply humane prose, leaving little else significant to say. •

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