Posts tagged ‘Aboriginal issues’
By the 20th century, Queensland was in white hands and Indigenous survivors lived in shanty-towns or missions. At Hope Vale in Cape York, German missionaries were successful because they learned the local language. Many Indigenous people were killed in the 1870s Palmer River goldrush and the Guugu Yimithirr people were grateful to Lutheran pastor Schwarz who provided an alternative to a fringe-dwelling existence. As in missions across Australia young strangers developed an Aboriginal identity of their own. Noel Pearson’s father was a stockman who grew up at the mission and shared its Lutheran faith and Noel was born there in 1965, two years a “constitutional alien” before the referendum was passed. Noel enrolled at a Brisbane Lutheran school, and studied anthropology and archaeology at the University of Queensland.
A great influence was Charles Perkins, another mission boy whose political fearlessness and strong sense of Aboriginal dignity saw him lead the freedom ride and later clash with numerous prime ministers. Pearson got his first taste of politics with what Marcia Langton called the Goss Labor Queensland government’s ‘nasty games’ on land rights. Pearson was excited by the 1992 Mabo decision saying native title showed the capacity of British common law. He described Keating’s Redfern speech as ‘the seminal moment of European Australian acknowledgement of grievous inhumanity’ to Indigenous people. But after Howard won power in 1996, Pearson adjusted his political radar.
Pearson was beginning to understand the problems of decolonisation. On western Cape York, Peter Dutton exposed the devastating state of Aurukun describing it as the end of the liberal consensus on Aboriginal issues. In Pearson’s Hope Vale, alcohol, drugs and gambling dependencies were rife. He saw ‘sit down money’ as a long-term corrosive and began to take ‘once unmentionable’ issues to a national audience. Pearson saw the political left was strong on land rights but weak on personal responsibility while the right was the opposite. Pearson became a ‘radical centrist’ and following Amartya Sen, he spoke of the illusion of singular identity and began understanding Australia as country shared by two peoples. His goal is to see Indigenous people recognised as “peoples” with cultural distinctiveness and “populations” who can be measured against health and education outcomes against other Australians. Pearson’s speeches speak to an ever-evolving sense of self, grounded by the dignity of his upbringing and his Aboriginality.
Bennelong, Bussamarai and Pearson are separated by time and circumstance but united by the need to take control of their lives. All faced massive challenges and all were scarred by proximity to colonialism. Bennelong was arguably Indigenous Australia’s first and only ambassador, but was discarded when Britain had no more use for him. By Bussamarai’s time colonisation was in full swing across Australia, a war on many fronts. His ‘opera’ was similar to Bennelong’s spearing of Phillip: the mark of a strategic thinker with a sense of drama.
Bussamarai was killed and victors wrote him out of the history. Today, an Indigenous man is re-writing history and imposing his own dignity on a white world. Noel Pearson is educated enough to understand the scars of colonisation but he is also honest enough to see the problems of decolonisation. His speeches are the mark of an iconoclastic intellectual, black and brave yet also human and universal. Pearson is using dignity to serve new ends for a people that have survived invasion and want to flourish on their own terms.
Forty years after Bennelong’s death (see Part 1), equal terms between black and white were forgotten as white Australia pushed out from the coast. Encouraged by British demand for Australian wool, pastoralism provided the impetus for territorial expansion. Legally the justification was terra nullius. Chief Justice Forbes called Australia an ‘uninhabited country’ but it was the settlers who were making it uninhabitable for the blacks. Squatters, blinded by profits, simply stole the land and when Aborigines fought back they were killed. Their mere presence was enough for them to be shot or poisoned – men, women and children. This was true in southern Queensland’s Maranoa as elsewhere, but there a Mandandanji resistance leader would put on a show that was just as elaborate as Bennelong’s spearing of Phillip and just as meaningful.
In April 1850 white settlers near Surat were invited to a corroboree, what Gideon Lang would later call an ‘opera’. The conductor said Lang, was ‘Eaglehawk’ (Bussamarai) who sat behind a choir of black women while men on stage acted out an elaborate play. With astonishing mimicry the actors played cattle grazing in the fields. Next they became black warriors sneaking up to spear cattle. Then others playing ‘manufactured whites’ starting shooting the ‘blacks’. To the great joy of the mainly non-white audience, the ‘blacks’ overwhelmed the ‘whites’ at the end of the opera. Bussamarai’s message was he could combine five local tribes to drive the whites from the country. The lessons the whites drew was equally clear: bring in the native police.
The history is scant on Bussamarai/Eaglehawk, two of his four names along with Old Billy and Possum Murray (Bussamarai may simply be a backward formation from Possum Murray). The first squatters searched Mandandanji lands around 1842 when Finney Eldershaw and others scouted the Maranoa and Balonne Rivers. Thomas Mitchell came through in 1846 and he was a close friend of NSW parliamentary secretary and fellow Scot William Macpherson. William’s son Allan had a property in New England and Macpherson junior was excited by Mitchell’s diary entry for the Maranoa: ‘fine open country, and from the abundance of good pasturage around it, I named it Mt Abundance’.
Armed with Mitchell’s maps, Macpherson capitalised on a March 1847 Order in Council possibly drafted by his father which granted frontier squatters 14-year leases. Macpherson claimed 400,000 acres of ‘the most beautiful land that ever sheep’s eyes travelled over’. But within a week the blacks appeared, frightening his men ‘into convulsions’. The fear was mutual, the natives dreading Macpherson’s double-barrelled carbine and horse. While Macpherson was away, they killed two shepherds and stole a thousand sheep. Macpherson was forced out after two years of ‘sundry conflicts with the hostile blacks’ and while he believed the grass was no use to them, he admitted ‘they no doubt thought they had a better right to the land than we did’.
While Macpherson showed conscience, other quieter settlers who followed did not. These men like Thomas Hall, Henry Dangar, Robert Fitzgerald and Joseph Fleming were in the Gwydir wars, and a ‘social destructive group’ with a ‘single-minded quest for wealth and status’. Hardened by the Myall Creek massacre and subsequent hanging of seven whites, they had a new unwritten law: ‘death by stealth’. In 1859 drover William Telfer heard about the slaughter that occurred after Macpherson’s time. Telfer was a witness to the Waterloo Creek killings and Telfer’s Wallabadah manuscript describes several massacres in the Maranoa including a ‘fight’ on Fleming’s property with a ‘Cheif [sic] who was shot with about fifty others’.
Bussamarai was also active killing settlers at Dulacca until a posse tracked his mob down to the Grafton Ranges. There they captured “a powerful man”. Though later released, Bussamarai did not forget his humiliation and forced Blyth to evacuate his station in October 1848. The absentee Gwydir landlords allowed 20 or so ‘insubordinate and lawless white workers’ to kill 80 Mandandanji in two years. The elusive Bussamarai’s talents got grudging tribute. Hovenden Hely, in the Maranoa in 1852 to search for Leichhardt, described Bussamarai as ‘the head and prime mover of all the depredations and murders committed there’ but admitted he was a ‘chief of great repute’. However with squatters agitating for native troopers to come, his time was up. Native Police Sergeant Skelton recounted the end after a fight in November 1852 “they [Bussamarai and another] were both shot in the attempt to apprehend them”.
Bussamarai’s death was one of hundreds in the violent Maranoa frontier war from 1846 to 1856. It was a war that moved up from the Gwydir and across from the Darling Downs and would later move north towards the Dawson River. The ruthless competition for land that led to Bussamarai’s death was forgotten and buried under pioneer legends. Through storytelling, the frontier was transformed into a battle between (white) humans and nature. But until it is accepted the frontier was a war zone, reconciliation of the past with present will continue to be an elusive goal.
Human dignity has always played a key role in political action. It is a central tenet of Christianity yet Protestant England and Catholic France both established colonial empires by force because they rated the dignity of Asians and Africans lower than their own. Aboriginal dignity was rated lowest yet is grounded in culture and religion. For two centuries Europeans stripped them of dignity, calling them ‘savages’, ‘wild myalls’, ‘ignorant blacks’, ‘niggers’, ‘coons’ and ‘drunken Abos’. Restoration of dignity is now central to Indigenous peoplehood. When Bob Maza was attempting to create Koori awareness in the 20th century, his appeal was based on dignity: “The white man can look back with pride and honour at the history of his people. So you who are black must also search and find that pride and dignity which lies in your ancestry.”
The next three posts examine how dignity shaped the lives of three Indigenous Australians from different eras. First is Bennelong from the period of encounter, who leapt across the frontier to lead an ‘Australian’ and ‘British’ life. Second is Bussamarai, a Mandandanji warrior from colonial times. This little known frontier fighter was an impediment to the British land grab for 10 years and had startling ideas for communicating with Europeans. The third is Noel Pearson, a complex modern day warrior for postcolonial times and his Guugu Yimithirr people. Pearson sees dignity as an important tool of peoplehood, ahead of a day he hopes the vast majority of Australians will agree to the ‘unfinished business’, a constitutional treaty with its Indigenous people.
There was no talk of treaties when Cook took possession of New South Wales in 1770. Cook saw fires along the coast as a ‘Certain sign that the Country is habitated’. His naturalist Joseph Banks saw fishers who ‘scarce lifted their eyes’ at their strange visitors. Cook and Banks started a tradition of an inoffensive people that hinted at innate weakness. Banks told a 1779 parliamentary inquiry NSW was a good place for a colony, because it only housed ‘naked cowardly savages’. Banks was wrong on all three counts. Indigenous people have lived in Australia for 60,000 years and had plenty of time to develop a sophisticated lifestyle. They quarried for stone and ochre and mastered firestick farming which transformed the landscape. Bradley in the First Fleet saw how they had sophisticated fishing techniques and how they also used mathematics to make calendar calculations. They traded with ‘sea gypsies’ – Muslim trepangers from Sulawesi and other islands. Possibly 750,000 people lived in Australia in 1788 networked by songlines, kinship, reciprocity and law. Most needed five hours daily to gather food. That left plenty of time for rest, sociability, spirituality, and development of dignity.
Britain’s conquest of Australia was unrelated to the ‘natives’: it was a claim against European powers and the colony would absorb, in Colonial Secretary Evan Nepean’s words, ‘a dreadful banditti’. Governor Arthur Phillip wanted Indigenous relationships but had no instructions for a treaty and offered none. Echoing Dampier a century earlier, John Hunter thought the Eora, smeared with animal fat and covered in dust and ashes, “abominably filthy”. Watkin Tench was sympathetic but trusted British guns: ‘Our first object was to win their affections and our next to convince them of the superiority we possessed,’ he said, ‘for without the latter, the former we knew would be of little importance’.
Anthropologist Bill Stanner said the seeds for the unequal relationship between black and white were sown during Phillip’s ‘muddy and incoherent’ rule. The Eora mistook Phillip’s missing front tooth as a sign of initiation and offered respect but kept their distance. Just as the Dutch did in northern Australia in the 17th century, Phillip resorted to kidnapping to establish communications, claiming it necessary to swap languages so ‘redress might be pointed out to them if they are injured, and to reconcile them by showing the many advantages they would enjoy by mixing with us’. His first victim Arabanoo died of smallpox. Judy Campbell says smallpox swept down from the north coast but it seems an extraordinary coincidence it arrived within 15 months of the First Fleet. Whatever the cause, it decimated the Eora and left an infant colony facing starvation.
Phillip kidnapped again and snared Bennelong who stayed for five months and would become a ‘personage’ in the colony. Bennelong recognised how clothes marked status and swiftly adopted British manners. Tench judged Bennelong as ‘of good stature and stoutly made, with a bold intrepid countenance which bespoke defiance and revenge’. His casual violence towards women shocked the British. Bennelong laughed while telling Tench of a wound gained while he beat a woman ’till she was insensible and covered in blood’. Bennelong’s escape after 5 months was likely due to the need for sex but it also allowed him time to plan revenge for his kidnapping. Phillip’s spearing at Manly beach was a ritual payback punishment for Bennelong’s abduction. Inga Clendinnen says Bennelong directed an elaborate performance as the ‘hinge man’ for proper compensation from ignorant invaders. Bennelong would insist Phillip visit him ten days later, despite Phillip’s serious injury. As the first Indigene to eventually formally “come in” to Sydney, he insisted his house be built on what would become Bennelong Point. It was a de facto Eora embassy where people came as they pleased to the bewilderment of the British. Tench said Bennelong had become a ‘man of so much dignity and consequence that it was not always easy to obtain his company’.
Bennelong used reciprocal obligations and kinship to manage the British, calling Phillip ‘father’ and insisting wife Barangaroo have her baby at government house. Bennelong would accompany Phillip to England as someone ‘very attached to his person’. After three years abroad Bennelong was homesick. Hunter described his condition: ‘He has for the last 12 months been flattered with the hope of seeing again his native country… but so long a disappointment has broken his spirit and the coldness of the weather here has so frequently laid him up that I am apprehensive his lungs are affected’.
On his return Bennelong’s fell on hard times as his 1796 letter to England reveals: ‘another black man took [my wife] away… he spear’d me in the back, but I better now”. He died in 1813 and his Sydney Gazette obituary noted his insubordinate drunkenness and damned him as a ‘thorough savage’. The Gazette was uncharitable. Bennelong was a dignified ambassador for his people and the first to offer a glimpse of how Europeans and Australians might exist on equal terms.
I was coming from Roma St Station towards Kurilpa Bridge to the Queensland State Library yesterday thinking about my aboriginal studies with a final assignment due on Monday. I was trying to figure out how crucial dignity was to three Indigenous ambassadors from different times, Bennelong, Bussamarai and Noel Pearson. Suddenly, out of nowhere appeared two men with an Aboriginal flag.
The timing seemed extraordinary and they were heading the same way as me. I followed them to the Commonwealth law courts in front of Kurilpa bridge. Some Indigenous people were putting up signs and waiting outside the court, while others still got ready to do a traditional dance. There were television and other media present. There was the promise of a peaceful protest and street theatre. The State Library could wait, I thought, this was a media event and I was media. This was also Indigenous people acting out their own dignity. This was important, to them, and to me.
Across the forecourt, young men put up banners while others handed out kits to waiting media. I asked for a kit and read their story. The High Court case was about sand mining rights on “Straddie”. Straddie is North Stradbroke Island, or Minjerribah, to its Indigenous people. They were here to appeal to Canberra to stop Brisbane from making laws about their island without their permission. It is also political. Labor’s law in 2o11 permits mining to 2019 – with Indigenous consent – but the LNP introduced a new law in 2013 to push the end of mining to 2035 and also increase its size. But federal law says they should have consulted with the traditional owners and this is something the Queensland government didn’t do.
The constitution says that when State and Federal law clash, the latter should prevail. But not for the moment, and the unconsulted Straddie Aboriginal people had to take it to the highest court in the land. It was blatant lack of regard, something my reading of the history told me happened time and time again across the country since 1788. Straddie is close to Brisbane but bridgeless, much to the delight of most of its residents black and white plus most of the visitors that make the ferry. Visitors are not new. Straddie has been home to humans for over 20,000 years.
We don’t know their original name but their descendants became the Quandamooka people. The Quandamooka maintain a presence on the island to this day. Straddie was annexed by Cook in 1770 and again by Phillip in 1788 as part of New South Wales but the islanders remained blissfully ignorant of British rule for another 36 years. Reality struck when another penal colony was needed to punish the ones already here that needed further punishing. Moreton Bay (Brisbane) fit the bill.
The British felt no permission was necessary to establish this colony, enforced at the butt of a carbine. They first landed on Straddie, the same year – 1824 – as they landed in Brisbane. At a place the islanders called Pulan, they built a pilot station overlooking the strategic exit to the ocean. Whites later renamed it to Amity Point. By then Moreton Bay was opened to free labour and from 1859, Straddie would by ruled by Brisbane, not London or Sydney. An early church mission named Myora failed to win converts. And though Australia was formed in 1901, here as elsewhere, the Quandamooka people were not counted and at the mercy of their colonial government. The earliest Brisbane rulers were pasturalists who had good financial reason to support “the opening up” of territory for agriculture. Later regimes were heavily paternal, locking up Aborigines in concentration camps across the state where they could be kept under control. Many Stradbroke Islanders were sent to Cherbourg or Woorabinda or Palm Island.
It was Brisbane that decided the first sandmining on Straddie would take place in the 1950s. There was no consultation with Quandamooka or any other local peoples or no profits to them either. Mining came and nothing much changed until two groundbreaking events in 1993. The first was Mabo v Queensland (no 2) where, on the second attempt Mer man Eddie Mabo and his friends proved to the High Court they had customary title to the Murray Islands in Torres Strait. In response later that year Paul Keating pushed through a Native Title Act, a brave move that cost him much political capital (giving things to blacks remains electorally unpopular in Australia). Keating’s Act provided for a national system which would recognise and protect native title, but needed to co-exist with the “land management system”. For Straddie that meant co-existing with sand mining. Mabo had got them a seat at the negotiating table, and also overrode Queensland law.
The Quandamooka people lodged their land claims in two phases between 1995 and 1999. The Native Native Title tribunal registered both claims in 2000 (the second one three months before the first). The claims were slowed up by boundary disputes, needing a 2006 workshop of elders, lawyers and anthropologists to resolve the disputes. In the meantime, the main mining lessees expired in October 2007. Two days after the close date, Lessee Stradbroke Rutile Ltd (owned by Consolidated Rutile) applied for a 21 continuation of lease. In 2009 both companies were gobbled up by Belgian company Sibelco, a “raw material producer” for the world manufacturing market.
In January 2010, the Federal Court asked the National Native Title Tribunal to facilitate negotiations with the State Government, local government and other interested parties to finalise an Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA). Sibelco nominated its subsidiary Unimin to negotiate a separate ILUA with the Quandamooka. In mid 2010 Unamin’s “offer” to the Quandamooka involved the long-term operation of the mines until 2035 and another in 2050 and they also wanted their support in their lease negotiations with the state government.
The Quandamooka came back with a counter offer. They split the ILUA in two, firstly a complex one that would deal with future mining and might take many years to agree on, called “a Future Acts ILUA”, and the secondly a simple one to have greement on the ground once the Federal Court judges on the native title claim. They also refused to be the meat in the sandwich on the leases and advised Unamin/Sibelco to sort it out with the government and come back to them for consent.
In April 2011 the Bligh Labor government passed the North Stradbroke Island Protection and Sustainability Act (NSIPSA Act) which gave effect to key elements of the ILUA between Queensland and the Quandamooka. It approved mining on Straddie until the end of 2019 at which time full native title rights would return to the Quandamooka.
The ILUA was signed almost three years ago to the day, 15 June 2011. In what was proving a historic year, the Federal Court handed down its Native Title judgment in July 2011. For the first time, a court had recognised that Quandamooka law and customs had survived colonisation. Judge Dowsett said the Quandamooka were a “pre-sovereign society” who had maintained connections with Straddie and the adjoining sea (though not with adjoining islands or the mainland). He also noted Sibelco, Telstra and other big stakeholders were adopting the state’s submissions. The National Native Tribunal ratified the claim on 11/11/11 making it the law of the land.
But Judge Dowsett was too sanguine about Sibelco’s intentions. With a state election coming up in 2012 and a likely change of government they did as all good mining companies do and ran a political scare campaign to get their original position back on the table. They focussed their campaign in the crucial seat of Ashgrove where Campbell Newman was running to become premier from outside parliament. Labor environment minister Kate Jones held the seat but it was Newman’s scalp they wanted. Newman duly proposed to extend sand mining to 2035 if the LNP took power. During the campaign Newman told the ABC Labor had acted in “a unilateral and capricious way” by bringing forward the end of mining in its 2011 law which was “all about green preferences”. Neither interviewer nor Newman made any mention of the traditional owners and Newman had no contact with the Quandamooka before his announcement.
Sibelco’s PR company Rowland would later win a PR state award for excellence demonstrating “achieving environmental and economic progress in an island community”. Rowland’s other reward was another fat contract after Newman’s landslide election win. Without changing any laws, the new Mining Minister ruled mining would stay to 2035. Still the government had not contacted the Quandamooka. In October 2013 the government brought in the North Stradbroke Island Protection and Sustainability and Another Act Amendment Bill 2013. The new NSIPSAAA Bill offered Sibelco security to 2035 with fewer environmental provisions.
When the bill went to the agriculture, resources and environment committee, the Quandamooka could finally respond as the native title holders. The committee report admitted the government had not consulted the Quandamooka on NSIPSAAA, which breached the Queensland Legislative Standards Act 1992. Despite this, the Bill became law in Queensland’s unicameral chamber on 20 November. Without consent, it had changed a range of matters previously agreed with the Quandamooka.
In March this year, the fight-back began. Elders gave their assent for the Quandamooka Yoolooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation to launch a High Court Challenge to Queensland’s 2013 Straddie law. They say the law overturning the 2011 law contravenes Keating’s Native Title Act 1993. The section of constitutional law is S109 which says if a state law is inconsistent with a Commonwealth law the latter shall prevail and the former “shall, to the extent of the inconsistency, be invalid”. The legal battle will surely be on the extent of the consistency between the two acts.
Whatever happens, the dignified Aboriginal elders outside the High Court yesterday won the moral battle. Their dancers performed a smoking ceremony where they blessed their own people and all other by-standers, including the media filming the ceremony. “It your job,” a Quandamooka dancer told them – us, me – “to tell the world”. These people are proving that dignity very much matters.
Finally caught up with Utopia, John Pilger’s simplistic but important documentary on Australia’s relationship with its Indigenous people. Nuance has never been Pilger’s strong point but pitching his film at his mainly British audience (“this is Canberra, capital of Australia”), he misses out on vast swathes of context. Pilger is good at capturing the injustices of colonisation but far less strong in dealing with issues of decolonisation.
The name of his documentary, Utopia, is a whitefella word. Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia described an ideal society that could never be reached. Formed from Greek roots, it meant either ‘no-place-land’ or ‘good-place-land’. And while Utopian now means a perfect state, Utopia itself is ‘nowhere’. Such sophistry meant nothing to the people of Uturupa in northern Australia who were ignorant of all things European for hundreds of centuries. The first settlers came in the 1880s and unable to handle Uturupa, they called it Utopia, perhaps as Pilger suggested out of the irony of such a difficult land, for this no-place-land was hard on black and white alike. But it was the blacks who suffered most.
Pilger begins his film in modern Utopian settings. The Palm beach penthouse and the leafy suburbs of Canberra’s Barton are the drop-off point for Pilger’s polemicism starkly contrasting with Utopia’s poverty (though the warm sun basked poor and wealthy alike). Barton was named for Australia’s first prime minister Edmund Barton who ushered in the openly racist White Australia Policy keeping coloured people out, while the blacks who were already here were not counted.
Pilger’s first interview is with former Labor minister of Indigenous health and NT MP Warren Snowden. Snowden stupidly turned the interview in a defence of Labor’s record and got angry when Pilger suggests they should have done more. Of course, they should have; but successive administrations have been unable to solve Indigenous health problems, caused by a legacy of 200 years of hatred and neglect. After Indigenous people were finally counted in the 1971 census, successive Closing the Gap reports have at least identified where the problems are in comparison to the rest of Australia and it will be another 50 years or more before they can be fully closed. Not that Pilger with his “puerile questions” and demands for instant change, appreciates that.
The trouble with Utopia is that Pilger is like a kid in a toy shop rushing from one shiny bauble to another. Here he is in the Australian War Memorial bemoaning the lack of recognition of the Australian frontier war, there he is recollecting his own Sydney childhood watching poor Aboriginal people in La Perouse, then he attacking Howard’s history wars before heading out on the street for an Australia Day vox pop of white people on what Indigenous people think of the day. A minute later he is touring Rottnest Island’s grisly black penal history. All are important issues but glossed over in Pilger’s rush to create an atmosphere of condemnation.
He brings black brutality up to date with the 2008 arrest of Aboriginal man Mr Ward in Laverton, WA. This is a disgraceful case that demands greater attention. Arrested for drink driving and denied bail by the local JP, Mr Ward was remanded to appear in court in Kalgoorlie 400kms away. As far back as 1975 the WA Aboriginal Legal Service had complained prisoner transport vans were “ovens on wheels” and nothing had changed by 2008 except the service was privatised. Mr Ward was given a 600ml bottle of water for the four hour journey while temperatures rose to 56 degrees inside the van. When the driver checked his welfare in Kalgoorlie, he was dead on the floor with a large abdomen burn in contact with the hot surface. The coroner noted he had been cooked to death and the department and company (4GS) were later fined for their neglect.
The responsible minister Margaret Quirk was clearly genuinely distressed by the case which she told Pilger would haunt her for rest of her life. His cynicism at her suggestion of departmental cultural sensitivity training was unwarranted, as it was clear that many public servants simply have no idea what happens in remote Aboriginal settlements and the injustices they face on a regular basis. Pilger was right to point out the high indigenous incarceration rates but on less firm ground with his description of WA and NT as ‘apartheid states’. He need not have been so strident on the high moral ground. Quirk’s point is that there are structural issues across society that led to Mr Ward’s death and many like him, that one well intentioned Minister cannot solve alone. However state politicians can be rightly condemned for their ‘law and order’ posturing on mandatory sentencing which overwhelmingly affects Indigenous populations who are usually arrested on public order offences.
Pilger addressed the touchstone case of the 1960s Gurindji land rights strike. The strike was called when the government delayed equal pay by two years following a court case. However the net result was that white owners sacked their cheap black workforce rather than pay them equally. The Gurindji got their Watties Creek but lost their jobs. By the 1970s, a whole generation of stockworkers were unemployed and homeless, drifting towards the towns and the welfare system.
Welfare was a well-intentioned but deeply flawed aspect of decolonisation as part of the Whitlamite reforms of the 1970s. It led to large amounts of money spent on community programs that offered no real sense of achievement. It was ‘sit down money’ and led to the perverse situation described by Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Peter Sutton of dysfunctional societies twisted by easy access to alcohol and drugs while domestic sexual abuse was rampant. The Lateline case exposed by Chris Graham and noted in depth by Pilger may have been exaggerated but the problems identified by Little Children Are Sacred were not. The Howard Government had its own cynical electoral aims for the Intervention but significantly the Labor Government that followed did not dismantle it. As Pearson says, the left are strong on rights and the right are strong on responsibilities, but good Indigenous policy needs to be a mix of both. Pilger, in his faraway British eyrie, shows no sign of understanding this crucial point.
Nonetheless I applaud Utopia as an important conversation starter. The best white writer on Indigenous matters, the anthropologist Bill Stanner, identified as far back as 1968 the culture of deliberate forgetting that characterised Australian views of its Indigenous population. They were written out of the history and they had little say in the present as a voiceless 2% modern minority. Indigenous people did slowly find their voice through the freedom ride, the referendum campaign, the tent embassy, the Makaratta treaty campaigns, and the land rights battles of the 1980s and 1990s.
But what of the present where casual racism, like casual sexism, remains an open sore? Where is the Indigenous conscience in 2014? I agree with Pilger we need some form of constitutional recognition but it must be in tandem with responsibility. Post-Intervention, the Stannerite silence is returning and if nothing else Pilger’s work is deafening in the dark. Let’s hope he inspires a more informed conversation on what remains Australia’s deepest wound to its psyche.
All Brisbane roads seemed to lead to Southbank yesterday. Most were headed towards Grey Street where a royal frenzy was taking place over some British tourists. My destination was nearby but more sedate, the reading room of the State Library where I looked out over the Brisbane River, dazzling in the April sunshine. I was there to take notes from a book, Thom Blake’s A Dumping Ground: A History of the Cherbourg settlement. The book covers the first 40 or so years of the settlement and the small town in the South Burnett has interested me greatly in 2014. I’ve been there twice this year and will be back a third time next Sunday for a “reconciliation fun run” which in my case may be practical reconciliation or impractical given my recent poor exercise regime.
Reconciliation is an odd theme for a fun run, but Cherbourg is not a run of the mill town. It is Queensland’s oldest surviving Aboriginal reserve, and is still home to over 1000 mostly Indigenous Australians. It has its own Aboriginal shire, alcohol restrictions and is not without some of the problems that plague many Indigenous towns like high unemployment, crime and bored kids (all inter-related). There is only one road in and out of Cherbourg, a relic of a time not long gone when Aboriginal lives were managed completely by white officialdom. Cherbourg has a dark past but has survived as a strong outpost of Indigenous culture. It is not without its sense of dignity, most notable when it celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2004. There are great people there like Aunty Sandra Morgan who turned the dilapidated old ration shed into Australia’s finest Indigenous museum. I was engrossed by the ration shed when I went there in February and I promised them I would be back for the fun run they are organising. It speaks to a community with a future as well as a past.
It is a long and often difficult past, and one that stretches back into the 19th century. It starts in 1895 with Archibald Meston, a former politician, a journalist, a businessman and a self-proclaimed expert in indigenous affairs. The frontier wars were mostly over in Queensland by then but the question was what to do with landless Aboriginals that survived the slaughter. Meston claimed he wanted ‘save that unhappy race’ and his solution was to create two new reserves, one in the south of the state, the other in the north. The watchwords would be control and discipline, and it would involve complete isolation from the white population. The problem was that Queensland had tried reserves but failed and the authorities were not immediately keen to try again. They asked Meston to examine the work of the missions and report back.
In the meantime, Queensland enacted a law that was to have profound consequences for Indigenous Queenslanders. The 1897 Aboriginal Protection and Restrictions on the Sale of Opium Act, was to become so emblematic of the state, it became simply known as the Queensland Act. “Protection” sounded like a good thing but it was section 9 of the Act that gave it menace. It gave the Home Affairs minister authorisation to “remove” Aborigines to reserves in the district. Once these reserves were established, the Minister would do the removing with Meston looking over his shoulder, believing that stern measures were necessary for the “effective protection” of Aborigines. The first reserve was at Fraser Island, with 51 Indigenes removed from Maryborough. The remote island proved an administrative nightmare, and after three years it was handed over to the Anglican Board of Mission.
Cherbourg, then known as Barambah (until the 1930s), was first mooted in 1899 by Salvation Army missionary William Thompson. Thompson lived in Nanango, the heart of the quickly growing South Burnett region. The first two reserves he proposed were blocked by either settlers who didn’t want Aboriginal neighbours, or the railway board who needed the land for the South Burnett line. Eventually Thompson found a 2800ha block at Barambah Station, and the reserve was gazetted in 1901. He persuaded some local Wakka Wakkas to settle there and the government threw in 60 more when they closed down Durundur camp, after complaints from residents in nearby Woodford. Thompson was more interested in saving souls than improving conditions which were primitive in early Barambah. There were no provisions and just tents for houses. Fate intervened in September 1904 when Thompson was incapacitated after a horse-riding accident and had to hand control to the government. It was this time that the 100th anniversary celebrated not Thompson’s earlier start in 1901.
The government hired the former superintendent at Durundur, Albert Tronson, to be the new superintendent at Barambah. Tronson did not have Thompson’s religious scruples and was determined to make the new reserve work. Drawing on lessons from his time at Durundur, that meant it had to be economically self-sufficient. Despite over 800 hectares of arable land, Tronson felt agriculture wouldn’t work but he saw a different opportunity in the explosion of new white settlers to the region.
Tronson put his black workforce at the service of the new settlers and the South Burnett would grow wealthy on the back of cheap labour. Demand for Barambah workers exceeded supply. Still, the whites did not like the large concentration of native Australians in their midst and the Kingaroy paper denounced the government for sending “notorious and scoundrelly aboriginals” to the region. But the government was delighted by the success of their project and by 1910, Barambah was mostly self-supporting. By then too the population had surged from 300 to 1000. As long as they were working, Tronson’s laissez faire approach meant there was little unrest and a lot of freedom of movement.
All that changed with the appointment of a new Chief Protector of Aborigines JW Bleakley. Bleakley strongly believed in isolating blacks from whites and actively promoted removal to the reserves. Tribes from all parts of Queensland, and even some from Cummeragunja in southern NSW ended up in a pot-pourri of nations at Barambah. Bleakley ordered removals to avoid the scourge of miscegenation, and it was also a means of control. Some were removed for ridiculous reasons like the two Coen women who were ‘dangerously affected by the moon’ and while Taroom residents asked for the removal of half-caste Carbo who went frequently through the town “mixing with members of our little community.” Refusal to work for whites was a common reason for removal. Laziness was not tolerated and Cherbourg, and later Palm Island and Woorabinda would be where Aboriginal criminals finished their sentences. Bleakley made sure the primary purpose of such places were to reform, subjugate and dominate the inmates.
Bleakley’s mission was not entrepreneurial so he did not care about Tronson’s system of outside work assignments. Bleakley preferred to keep Aborigines on the settlement and away from whites, though because they were indispensable to the South Burnett economy, many continued as semi-slave labourers. Bleakley’s purpose was to shake all remnants of Aboriginal culture out of them, so he set up children’s dorms where they would be away from the parents and their native ways. The attached school had a purpose too but it was not to educate. Oddly the lack of learning had precisely the opposite effect than intended. Children filled the gaps with lessons in their own culture, which continued to be handed down – though now in secret. In public, the education was meant to instil the virtues of cleanliness, discipline and order. There were weekly inspections where any trace of dirt was punished. Still, it wasn’t clean enough to keep away Spanish flu in 1919 and there were 143 deaths in 1000 people – seven times the Australian average.
The death rate remained high in the 1920s due to non-existent sewerage and poor diet. In 1918, authorities paid for a reticulation system by withholding money from Aboriginal salaries, but for 20 years it only covered the hospital. The food was atrocious and the superintendent admitted buying lumpy meat unfit for whites but hinted that blacks should not turn their noses up at it. Doctor after doctor visiting the settlement remarked upon the appalling diet but their protests fell on deaf ears. From 1901 to 1940, you were four times more likely to die than the average Australian, if your home was Barambah.
Renamed as Cherbourg in 1931, it suffered particularly badly in the Depression, with demand for labour falling off completely. Those that did work had most of their wages confiscated. 20% went to administration and in 1930 there was an additional 5% levy for improvements to the reserve. In practice the stolen wages went further, as they were paid into trust accounts managed by whites who couldn’t help either using the funds to do further maintenance or simply line their own pockets.
The blacks were left with pocket money and were encouraged to barter for services. They wouldn’t dare ask about their wages, because that was ‘cheeky’ behaviour and would lead to punishment like jail, or worse still, removal to another settlement. Barambah blacks lived in constant fear of being sent to Palm Island or Woorabinda, and similar threats existed at the other two settlements. All routine and mundane tasks on the settlements were done by inmates minimising the cost to the government.
The aim was to strip inmates of all respect and dignity, and create a cheap and compliant labour force. They had restricted freedom of movement, unless they had the ‘dog tag’ which allowed some rights but required papers, which could be inspected at any time and also removed. There was no chance that anyone could escape the grind or get to own property. World War II brought a renewed sense of optimism but it was crushed again in the relentless assimilation of the 1950s. Queensland has the strongest reserve system in Australia but it was also the slowest state to react to the changing tide of decolonisation in the 1960s. The Queensland Act was abandoned in 1965 but it wasn’t until 1972 that restrictions on freedom of movement were lifted in Cherbourg.
By then the local MP, a strange, awkward New Zealand-born Danish Lutheran named Joh Bjelke Petersen had become accidental premier of Queensland. It was Joh who would later claim that Queensland’s Aborigines lived “on the clover” and would become as rich as the sheiks of Arabia. His constituents in Cherbourg have yet to see the oil. But according to Sandra Morgan, they would see Joh once every three years, looking for the settlement vote. He also used Cherbourg workers on his farm at Bethany who were paid, again according to Sandra Morgan with a wry smile, “peanuts”.
Today Cherbourg is run by its own shire council. Like many Aboriginal councils it has been plagued with problems and has a small pool of talent from which to choose. In my view, Sandra Morgan should be on that council as a strong woman and a terrific role model for the region. Morgan was born and raised on Cherbourg and also has strong links to the Bwgcolman culture of Palm Island through her husband. It was her vision that led to a team of workers rescuing the old ration shed and moving it up the hill to renovate it as a museum. “We used to get food here,” Sandra told me, “now it’s food for thought.” The ration shed museum stands as in proud testament to Aboriginal culture, something that Europeans tried to kill at Cherbourg and failed. I’m looking forward to the pain of a seven kilometre run there next Sunday.
Earlier this year I wrote that a Treaty was needed to address injustices of Australian colonisation, a view supported by Indigenous scholars (McGlade 2004, Brennan et al 2005). However, Tim Rowse’s useful model (2012) of Indigenous Australians as “populations” and “peoples” gives me hope for the proposed constitutional preamble.
Measurement of Indigenous populations’ life indicators enable governments to “close the gap” on health and education. But as peoples they have a need for recognition as First Australians. This is why I now give cautious support for Prime Minister Abbott’s call for a preamble in the 2014 Close the Gap report. A 60,000-year-old society was destroyed in 150 years following Cook’s 1770 act of possession (Indigenous oral historians still give prominence to Captain Cook’s role). Indigenous people resisted occupation but Britain never acknowledged war and Australia never acknowledged its end. Survivors became fringe-dwellers as conscience-stricken whites comforted themselves by “smoothing a dying pillow”, as they did in other settler countries. Australia defined itself by whiteness and boundaries of race but the 1967 referendum and 1971 census began the repair of Aboriginals as measurable populations. They now seek recognition of identity with the land to overcome the effect of racism which remains in the criminal justice system. Real wars have been replaced by history wars but the “usurper complex” positioning whites as victim, still flourishes. This review examines two texts to see how the need for justice could inform a preamble – frontier reports from 1839 looking “through their eyes” (Lakic and Wrench 1994), and a 20th-century look at the “contested ground” (McGrath 1995) of Australian historiography.
The year 1839 was a watershed on Port Phillip’s frontier. By 1835 the law of terra nullius gave carte blanche for whites to steal Indigenous land. That same year the government repudiated Australia’s only Treaty at the cost of opening up the country to settlers. Australian exports expanded 25 times between 1825 and 1840 and wool’s high price attracted European settlers while removing original inhabitants from camps and waterholes. Myall Creek’s 1838 massacre showed settlers did not consider killing Aborigines a crime while the subsequent trial made them quiet about their conquests. The government hired Chief Protector George Robinson from Tasmania to put a humanitarian gloss on outright theft. His assistant protectors Edward Parker and William Thomas enforced what they called Britain’s “benevolent designs” with Parker’s job to track down guerrilla leaders. They regretted the inevitable outcome but their solution to Robinson was not to stop white crimes but remove Aboriginals to reserves or else bring in native police. The first path led to Coranderrk where radical hopes were quashed by greedy settlers, while native police, especially in Queensland completed colonisation’s dirty work. Parker and Thomas were writing official reports not history, but their words are a damning indictment of settler behaviour.
By 1995 the battleground had moved to books where Stanner’s “great Australian silence” was replaced by “Black Armband” history. In 1987 Ann McGrath wrote of Indigenous survivors “born in the cattle” but controversies over Australia’s Bicentennial a year later widened her focus. Tiga Bayles told the Day of Mourning protest that “asking Aborigines to like Australia day was like asking Jews to celebrate the holocaust”. Whites stole their land and their history, thus McGrath’s historiography begins with a Bicentennial history book flung into the harbour as scornful First Australians talked of their “200th bicentenary”. Aboriginal stories were expunged from Australian history which became a story, in McGrath’s words, of Europeans “discovering, exploring, settling, [and] fighting”. Winners wrote the history which ignored Aborigines entirely. McGrath acknowledged her sympathetic role as an expert witness in land claims and as a “white female historian, trained in the academy of the liberal humanistic traditions”. She was writing long after the Civilising Mission of Robinson and his men but her “questions of the dead and the living” are just as much demands for colonial justice.
There is a direct line between 1839’s events to those of McGrath’s world in 1995 which cascade on to 2014. Though “usurpers” still deny problems, the enormous 19th century gulf between white and black was recognised by the end of the 20th. Governments responded by “closing the gap” but if the 2014 Closing the Gap is to be meaningful it must address issues that affect Indigenous Australia as “peoples” as well as “populations”. The Prime Minister’s preamble might do that if tackles issues of identity and justice. To get there, we must carefully but openly examine the history in documents like Lakic and Wrench, and McGrath. Only then can we move beyond contested ground and find a meeting place of black and white.