During the latter half of 2007, listening to the debates about the Intervention, I often wondered (sometimes aloud) where the voice of the Aboriginal people was. Plenty of people spoke on behalf of Aboriginal communities, and on both sides of any issue. But with a few exceptions, people like Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton or Tom Calma and Larrissa Behrendt, Aboriginal voices were unheard. There was certainly little published from inside the communities that were to be most affected by the policies of the Northern Territory Emergency Response.

Now, two years later, history seems to be cycling back around on itself with the announcement from Jenny Macklin's ministry of plans to consolidate "outstations" into "real towns." (The Indigneous people who were ostensibly consulted in the run-up to the policy's development expressed their preference for the term "homelands" as more indicative of the true nature of their relationship to the places they have chosen to live, but that idea was passed over, too.)

This time, however, there are Indigenous voices that can be heard speaking directly from the homelands, thanks in part to the growing sophistication of their inhabitants with media, especially video that goes out to the world via YouTube. The Yolngu have been leaders in this area for a long time now, as the success of the Mulka Project indicates, but also as documented in studies like Jennifer Deger's exemplary Shimmering Screens: making media in an Aboriginal community (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

A few months ago, a series of interviews called "Listen and Accept Our Voice!" ("Buthurru Wetjurra ga Marranga Nganapurrunggu Rirrakay!") was published on YouTube that offers the chance to hear what some people from the MataMata Homelands have to say about the government's programs. "We created this video because the Government never listens to Yolngu voices," they said. "They create laws and policies aimed at Yolngu people without listening to what we think and feel." YolnguVideo says that these short films were

Created in response to the Northern Territory and Federal Government's continued attempts to close down Indigenous Homeland communities.

Yolngu and other Indigenous people have been living on their Homelands since before Settlement. Since missionary days they have asserted their desire to remain on their own traditional country. Most people thought this right was enshrined in the Land Rights Act (NT).

However, current and recent Government policies have been effectively coercing Yolngu and other Indigenous people off their country. These measures include rolling back basic services to Homelands, and closing schools while simultaneously linking school attendance to parental social service payments.

To read about the latest Government attacks on Homeland life see: http://www.action.nt.gov.au/outstations/

Don Dhakaliny Burarrwangga and Batumbil speak out in response to simple questions: what's different about Yolngu and Balanda law? What's the best life for Yolngu? What does the Government do that is bad for Yolngu people? What does the Government do that is good for Yolngu people? Listen to what they have to say.


Yolngu Message: Interview One


Yolngu Message: Interview Two; Part 1/3




Yolngu Message: Interview Two; Part 2/3




Yolngu Message: Interview Two; Part 3/3


My thanks to Wamut at that mununga linguist for alerting me to these video posts.

For more good reading on the Territory Government's scheme to empty the homelands, check out Bob Gosford's recent posts at The Northern Myth on "Growth Towns," the Tiwi Land Council, and the "Working Future." 

Inside Story: current affairs and culture has just posted a new article by anthropologist Francesca Merlan of the Australian National University, author of Caging the Rainbow: places, politics and Aborigines in a North Australian town (University of Hawai'i Press, 1998). Merlan's article, "More than Rights," is an arresting and important new take on some of the central debates that have taken place in the twenty months since the launch of the Northern Territory Emergency Response. It is a serious and (I think) not polemical argument that deserves careful reading and consideration. Here is an excerpt from one of the concluding paragraphs.

I think that for Indigenous people and communities, relationships with the state can and should be highly productive. The federal “state,” in general, is the key institution to which all Aboriginal communities can have a common relationship of some sort, while they may also have differentiated relationships of other kinds (with business, regional government and so on). For the state, such relationships are a responsibility, more like the relation of senior to junior in Fred Myers’s account of authority. But these relationships can only be fruitful under conditions in which the first question attended to is: how can greater social capacity be developed from within conditions of vulnerability and dependency? What are the characteristics we need to demand of state involvement and intrusion? Among these must be the following: that it be open to discussion and negotiation, difficult and partial as this often is; that it have a demonstrated capacity-building intent and character; and that it is non-arbitrary, implying accountability to people and communities affected and also to the wider public, and incorporate developed ideas and practices of due process.

Her insights on racism and the racist quality of the Intervention open up new ways of thinking about a subject that has been treated with repetitive thoughtlessness by all sides in the debates. Her discussions of vulnerability and dependence in Aboriginal communities and society bring into focus topics that have rarely been examined in their proper context before. Her concluding discussion of "rights" is complex and challenging.

If you've been feeling a sense of fatigue and frustration in confronting the apparent stalemate, if you can't decide whether Labor is dismantling or reinforcing the Intervention, if the whole thing has become mentally mired, Merlan's essay will strike you like a sudden and unexpected change in the weather. However you feel about the policies of the Intervention, you should read this brilliant argument. It will make you think differently.  

A century ago, William Garnett South, the Protector of Aborigines in South Australia, railed against the Aboriginal missions at Point McLeay and Point Pearce for their failure to turn their residents into productive members of society. In South's view, only government intervention could save the day.

In advocating the taking over of these two stations I am not moved so much by the desire of saving tax-payers' money as by a wish to raise the constantly increasing number of half-castes, quadroons, and octoroons from the idle, thriftless habits of the black to the level of the white race. This I regard as most important, as in the settled districts the blacks are rapidly dying out and being replaced by a race of half-castes, quadroons, and octoroons, who in turn must inevitably be merged into the general population. It is therefore desirable that nothing should be left undone that will help convert these people into useful members of the community instead of allowing them to grow up dependants [sic] (Report of the Protector of Aborigines for the Year Ended 30 June, 1912, p. 6, quoted in Nettelbeck and Foster, In the Name of the Law, Wakefield Press, 2007).

Today, more than eighteen months after its inception, the current Intervention seems to be alive and well and rehearsing South's agenda, minus the eugenics.

Eleven months after the Apology, the Rudd Government no longer appears to feel the need to be sorry for policies that, like those of the early twentieth century, aim to force Aboriginal people into accepting the mores and laws of White Australia. The emphasis may have changed from sociology to economics, from genetics to banking, but the underlying assumption that the land must be used and controlled according to the interests of powerful non-Indigenous interests remains unchallenged. Remote Australia must be recolonized in order to be saved, run the arguments being reported in The Australian last week.

“A few years from now, anyone visiting the remote Northern Territory will see a very different picture to the Aboriginal slum towns that are such a confronting feature of the north today,” writes Paul Toohey in “A new lease of life” (January 13, 2009). The secret to the success of this magical thinking lies in 99-year leases.

Toohey rightly notes the major problem that Mal Brough wanted to address in amending Section 19 of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act to allow for these 99-year leases. Businesses and government are loathe to make investments in facilities that could improve the market prospects of the towns for housing or commercial enterprises when there is no secure title underlying that investment. Because the land itself in inalienable under the ALRA, investors have no guarantee that arrangements will not be swept aside, that assets constructed on Indigenous-owned land will have the permanence required to repay that investment. (There is a dismal irony in government agencies and businesses refusing to invest in properties that may be suddenly seized by Aboriginal landowners.)

Hence, the 99-year lease; even Indigenous Affairs Minister Macklin’s proposed 40+40 year leases are insufficient:

There is common agreement among governments that town leases must be significantly longer than 40 years. While self-sufficiency is the ultimate aim for these places, picture the situation 20 years from now, in 2029: governments will still need to build some Aboriginal housing; new businesses will be looking for opportunity; or existing companies may wish to sell.

Under a straight 40-year lease there would, in 2029, only be 20 years’ life left on the lease. That would not inspire governments or investors (Toohey, “A new lease of life.”)

Many factors complicate the search for solutions: the townships are occupied by many non-traditional owners who have gathered from surrounding country to take advantage of social services. Thus the percentage of the residents of a community who are in fact the traditional owners may be very small, yet they are the ones empowered to strike the deal. At the other end of the spectrum, effective leasing of land requires significant investment in what senior Labor advisor Michael Dillon calls “the infrastructure required for effective property rights frameworks (surveys, records of transactions, enforcement and dispute resolution)” (Dillon and Westbury, Beyond Humbug: transforming government engagement with Indigenous Australia, Seaview Press, 2007, pp. 132-133).

Dillon, as Toohey notes, was one of the architects of Territory Labor’s concept paper that began developing the notion of 99-year leases five years ago. The Northern Land Council worried that the Coalition “might exercise its national-interest rights under the Land Rights Act and compulsorily, and permanently, acquire all Aboriginal communities” (Toohey). But contra the scenario of benign economic promise and social inclusiveness that Toohey paints in his stories of nascent private home ownership in Nguiu on the Tiwi Islands, Dillon has this to say.

[T]he Australian Government has clearly been farsighted in identifying the importance of secure title over townships as a key element in addressing Indigenous disadvantage. However, its focus on home ownership rather than the development of housing pathways involving choice for local residents regarding housing tenure and its expedient and arguably premature resort to compulsory acquisition of five year leases over townships as part of the national emergency response will merely serve to undermine the effectiveness of the Australian Government policy in this area (Dillon and Westbury, p. 149).

The key difference I see between Dillon’s position and Toohey’s centers on the question of choice. Toohey’s vision of “motels, resorts, fuel stations and tours” as the engines of economic development that will somehow enable Aboriginal people to secure the income they require to own houses and fulfill a new Australian dream in the Outback, depends on a vast influx of outsiders. And of course, it means scrapping the permit system, at least in the towns.

Indeed, Toohey claims that it is the permit system that has been a major obstacle to such economic development: “the towns have been effectively closed off, with entry by permit only. This has not made it attractive for outsiders or Aborigines to run business which service only a tiny captive audience, with few passing customers.”

History offers ample proof that Indigenous people should be rightfully suspicious of incomers who propose to exploit the land for economic development, and in the process bring the benefits of civilization (or Christianity) to the underdeveloped. (In a similar vein, Toohey bemoans the restrictions on access to Kakadu in the January 17 edition of The Australian, "Tarnished Treasure: Kakadu becomes Kakadon't": what reason is there to preserve the country if four-wheel drives and tour buses can't trundle through it with ease?) But more to the point, would the lifting of permit restrictions, and the securing of title under 99-year leases actually bring such benefits to remote communities? How much passing trade will Wadeye ever receive?

Implicit in this argument for the opening of towns to commercial activity is the other, far more insidious agenda: the demolition of outstations. Perhaps “implicit” is the wrong word, though, for Gary Johns, writing in The Australian a few days later (“Aborigines must move with the times,” January 16, 2009) once again argues that “[t]he persistence with outstations has been an expensive and damaging experiment’ and the “no permanent accommodation should be funded unless a case for economic viability is proven.”

Johns takes up the call for action on housing for the poorest of Australian citizens in a manner that ultimately, once more, puts the blame for that poverty on the people themselves. The cruelty and indifference of Johns’s study arguing for the abolition of outstations—where the traditional owners and the residents are actually the same people, unlike the situation in the towns—is staggering. You need read no farther than its title to understand that fact: No Jobs, No House: an economically strategic approach to remote Aboriginal housing (Menzies Research Centre, 2009). Johns urges the government to consider four locations when thinking about accommodation for people from remote communities: two of them invoke refugee camps. I wonder if Conrad's Mistah Kurtz thought that “exterminate all the brutes” was an economically strategic approach as well.

And then there is the terrible irony to Johns’s logic exposed in the second paragraph of his article in The Australian, where he draws a parallel to the United States. “Private housing awaits the market, and the market usually says if you have a job you can borrow for a house. The sub-prime disaster in the US is a reminder than only an income stream begets a house.” The truth that Americans have come to face is that an income stream may well be insufficient to “beget a house,” despite President Bush’s exhortations to that effect several years ago. If this is the logic behind Johns’s economic strategy, Indigenous Australians, whose income is unlikely to extend to mortgage payments at 4.5 per cent, would do well to question the bona fides of the new colonizers of their communities.

But behind all of this writing is the unquestioned assumption that not only is private property the inescapable solution, the sine qua non of progress, it is the only right solution. Once again, Indigenous principles must be cast aside. Collective ownership, like other aspects of customary law, does not work in the modern world. And it can not be allowed to work. But what if, to paraphrase Stanner, Aboriginal people do not want to be like us in every aspect? What if they do not wish to know how to stop being themselves?

And so the Intervention continues its march across the country. The same day that it published Johns’s article promoting No Jobs, No House, The Australian ran two articles about new alcohol bans in the northwest (“Goodbye despair, now Fitzroy Crossing can play” by Paige Taylor and “Grog bans aims to tackle Kimberley misery” by Debbie Guest and Nicholas Perpitch). Elsewhere TheWest.com reported on new “income management” of up to 70 per cent of Centrelink payments across the Kimberley (“Welfare curbs to widen in north," by Angela Pownall, January 10, 2009).

Even the Wall Street Journal has chimed in on the chorus of condemnation and demonization.

YUENDUMU, Australia -- Two dead cows putrefy at the entrance to this Aboriginal town deep in the Australian outback. Mangy dogs scrape among naked children, as trash swirls around rusted vehicle hulks and cinderblock homes. Prominent on the local store's notice board: the bus schedule to the nearest prison. (Yaroslav Trofimov, “’Tough love’ in the Outback,” January 17, 2009)

Noting that Yuendumu wasn't "supposed to turn out this way," Trofimov continues to outline social dysfunction in the Outback, noting only that it has occurred partly as a result of reforms of the 1960s and failing to explain what he means by that complicated story of economics and racism. (Perhaps he should take a couple of hours to watch Peter Carstairs' film September.)

He ascribes opposition to the Intervention in Yuendumu to a group of elder men, dispossessed now of their stranglehold on local politics. In contrast, he offers the example of Nguru Walalja, the new community store run by women in the town. He implies that theIntervention has given the women, responsible grandmothers all, the opportunity to emerge from under the thumb of the dissolute men, and that therefore the Intervention enjoys widespread support among the women.

In support of this proposition, he trots out the controversy that surrounded Minister Macklin's visit to Yuendumu to open the swimming pool, along with reports that Peggy Napaljarri Brown spoke at the opening in support of the government action, and by extenson, income management. He notes that Brown's own welfare payments are now income-managed and manages to imply that she's just fine with that. But as Bob Gosford has detailed in The Northern Myth ("Peggy Napaljarri Brown's fury," October 28, 2008), neither assertion about Brown's opinions is true. (See Gosford's follow-up post ("Yuendumu: the pool, the pres, protocols and permits...and the Code of Conduct for Ministerial Staff," October 30, 2008) for more information on how the spin was attached to the story in the first place.)

No more correct is the notion that the women of Yuendumu assumed leadership as a direct result of the Intervention. Trofimov once again manages to impute positive change to the agency of white government while glossing over the negative changes that such imposition of government policy has brought about.

These are subjects that have been explored in great depth by Francoise Dussart in her book The Politics of Ritual in an Aboriginal Settlement: kinship, gender, and the currency of knowledge (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). Among the many themes developed by Dussart is the rise of women's control of public ritual and all that such a radical change in social organization implies as a result of men's disengagement in the public sphere. That disengagement, Dussart argues, has been brought about largely by the enforced sedentarization of the Warlpiri in communities like Yuendumu. So Trofimov may in fact be doubly wrong: men do not have such a strong control over the life of the community as he claims, and the rise of women's power and assertiveness has nothing with "Macklin's Intervention." Rather, these changes in social order have been brewing for fifty years now, and represent aspects of the continuing attempts of the Warlpiri, like other Indigenous groups, to adapt to intrusion and restriction.

What unites all these analyses is the persistent inability to imagine the Indigenous perspective. Such failures may have their roots in pragmatism, indifference, or ignorance but the end result is always the same: the marginalization of Aboriginal desires. How can an ethic a self-respect and responsibility take root in the face of such callous opposition? And there is another dismal irony at work in this debate, one that I was reminded of while watching First Australians over the holidays. In the 221 years since the English fleet dropped anchor off the coast of Eora country, it has been overwhelmingly the work of Indigenous people that has allowed any commerce between the races. It is the First Australians who have learned to communicate in a foreign language, who have adapted their economy to that of the settlers, who have acquired a knowledge of and respect for an alien religious system, and who live lives shaped by two cultures rather than languishing in the unquestioned assumptions of a single worldview. Where is the idleness in that? 

A three-part post today for Palm Island, including a YouTube video and a pair of book reviews, but first, a few words from our friends at Crikey!:
 

The Black and White of a Palm Island Tragedy
Monday, October 27, 2008 

National Indigenous Times editor Chris Graham writes:

The question the state of Queensland should be asking itself today is this: is Lex Wotton a danger to society?
The answer is that if Queensland Police stop killing black men in custody, and trying to cover it up, then Lex Wotton is no threat to anyone.

Not that it matters much. Late on Friday, Wotton was convicted of the offence of "rioting with destruction" following the November 2004 uprising on Palm Island. He is now in custody, awaiting sentencing on November 7 in Townsville District Court.

The scale of this injustice is hard to comprehend, and even harder to describe. So I won't even try. I'll just stick to the facts -- the black and white of the issue.

These are the injuries sustained by black people at the hands of police in the days and months immediately surrounding the death in custody, and the uprising: Mulrunji Doomadgee suffered four broken ribs, a ruptured spleen a torn portal vein and a liver "almost cleaved in two" (it was held together by a couple of blood vessels). After his death, Mulrunji's son Eric hung himself from a tree on Palm Island. The man who lay in the cell next to Mulrunji and comforted him as he died -- Patrick Nugent -- has also taken his own life. In the course of his arrest, Lex Wotton was tasered, as was a second Aboriginal man.

Now these are the injuries police suffered at the hands of black people during the November 26, 2004 uprising: One officer was hit in the stomach with a rock. Another was hit in the hip. Both suffered bruising.
Now to matters of criminality.

Lex Wotton has been convicted of inciting a crowd to move against police. It's worth noting there was also substantial evidence presented at his trial -- mostly by police -- that Wotton ordered rioters to stop throwing rocks at officers and secured transport (later refused) to get police off the island safely. There was also video footage of Wotton trying to stop rioters from preventing a fire truck accessing the carnage.

Now here's what we know the police did.

In June 2004 -- five months before the killing and riot -- Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley ran over an Aboriginal woman in a police vehicle. He didn't stop to render first aid, and both he and a female officer present in the vehicle denied the incident had occurred.

In response, senior police in Townsville appointed a friend (and neighbour) of Hurley's -- Detective Senior Constable Darren Robinson -- to investigate the matter. After doing nothing for a month, Robinson finally delivered his report to his superiors. His mate Hurley did nothing wrong, the entire complaint was fictitious. Robinson neglected to mention that he had not interviewed any witnesses, nor had he sought any medical evidence. Had he done so, he'd have discovered the injured woman, Barbara Pilot, had suffered a compound fracture to her leg, and her shinbone was sticking through her skin.

Robinson subsequently admitted on the stand during the Wotton trial that he lied in his report.

Three months later, in September 2004, Hurley assaulted a man -- Douglas Clay -- in the Palm Island police station. About half a dozen police -- including his mate Robinson -- witnessed the incident. Police denied an assault had occurred, but after the death of Mulrunji, the Crime & Misconduct Commission investigated, and found traces of Clay's blood in the police cell.

In November, Hurley was implicated in the death of Mulrunji. Senior police from Townsville again appointed Hurley's mate Robinson to the investigation. Robinson and several other police - including an Inspector of police from the Ethical Command unit sent to Palm Island to ensure the investigation was conducted properly - ate dinner and drank beers with Hurley that night. Mulrunji's body was barely cold.

A few days later, detectives provided an interim report to the coroner's office. They chose not to tell the coroner that an Aboriginal witness had seen Hurley assaulting Mulrunji on the floor of the police station. A pathologist's report subsequently found Mulrunji had died as the result of a "fall". It was some fall - his injuries were consistent with the sort of trauma you might see from a plane crash.

Now here's the wash-up.

Chris Hurley -- a white cop -- was tried by an all-white jury, overseen by a white judge on a charge of manslaughter. He got off.

Lex Wotton -- a black man -- was also tried by an all-white jury, overseen by a white judge on a charge of rioting with destruction. He's facing life. He may as well have a killed a copper -- he'd be facing precisely the same jail time if he had. His family -- wife Cecelia, and four children (two of whom are disabled) are without a father. His community is without a leader.

By contrast, police who lost property in the riot have been compensated.

Some officers are still receiving taxpayer-funded trauma counselling today. Darren Robinson has been promoted to the rank of Detective Sergeant. Chris Hurley received a $100,000 compensation payout from the Queensland Government. He took a two-year break from the police service -- on full pay -- while awaiting a trial of manslaughter (unlike Wotton, an all-white Queensland jury acquitted him). He has since returned to the job on the Gold Coast. He has been promoted to the rank of Inspector.

And today, police present on the island on the day of the riot will receive bravery medals. One officer, describing the uprising, told the court last week: "I feared for my life. I thought I was going to die."

So did Mulrunji. And I bet you Lex Wotton -- a black man in custody at the Roma Street Watchhouse in Brisbane -- feels exactly the same way.

 

In Search of Palm Island's True Victims
Wednesday, October 29, 2008 

Chloe Hooper writes:

On Monday it was announced that the twenty-two Queensland police officers involved in Palm Island’s November 26 2004 riot would receive bravery awards. No doubt it was terrifying to wear a police uniform on the island that day. Nineteen police officers found themselves barricaded in the police barracks as locals threw rocks and mangos and steel pickets over the cyclone wire fence, yelling, "We are going to burn you! Kill the c-nts, the Captain Cook c-nts!"

Over the road the police station was ablaze, as was the house of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley. A week earlier, Hurley had locked up Cameron Doomadgee for swearing, and left him to die with injuries consistent with a victim of a car or plane crash. Nevertheless that morning the State Coroner had announced Doomadgee’s death was the result of a fall. This riot was both a protest and payback.

A local plumber, Lex Wotton, had given the police an hour to get off the island. The officers passed around a mobile phone and rang their wives to say goodbye, then they counted their bullets. One man took a BBQ lid to use as a shield, another a cricket bat, someone else broke billiard cues in two and handed the pieces to his colleagues for protection. The police stalled for time until helicopters and planes with reinforcements arrived. Seeing they had no hope, the rioters went home and in the end no one was seriously hurt.

That night, crack police squads with tasers and other weaponry went from house to house arresting those identified as rioters. Pregnant women and children were made to lie on the floor while the laser lights of police rifles played over their faces. Nineteen men were flown off the island -- one for each cop trapped in the barracks -- and their bail conditions banned them from returning home.

Eighteen months later, most of the officers who served on that day filed Victim Impact Statements. (The first step towards receiving compensation.) These documents are revealing -- and disturbing -- for their frank descriptions of racial fear and loathing. One officer wrote that his children no longer played sport on the weekend because they didn’t want to mix with Aboriginal kids. Another wrote: "I do not trust indigenous people for fear of violence…if they can try to burn my body, they will burn and hurt my loved ones." Another wrote that he stayed up all night guarding his infant son because he was scared Palm Islanders would find his house and attack him. More than one officer claimed that they wanted vengeance: "Right or wrong," one said, "I have harboured unhealthy desires to seek revenge which often consume all my thoughts."

If payback was a common desire then surely the police have now had their fill. In June 2007, Senior Sergeant Hurley, despite having been found responsible for Doomadgee’s death by the Queensland Deputy State Coroner, was acquitted of manslaughter in three hours by an all white Townsville jury. By contrast, last week Lex Wotton was found guilty of rioting with destruction -- a crime which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

One of the officers who will soon be able to look at the bravery award on his mantelpiece and contemplate his courage and sacrifice will be Detective Sergeant Darren Robinson. Hurley’s close friend, Robinson flew to Palm Island the day of Doomadgee’s death to investigate the matter. He had previously investigated Hurley’s behaviour, including allegations that the Senior Sergeant had run over a woman’s foot and left her lying on the ground. Despite the woman requiring surgery, Robinson declared her claims were "fictitious".

The Crime and Misconduct Commission has since recommended the Queensland Police Service consider disciplinary action over the incident, although none has been taken. The Police Service is also unlikely to take action against the officers involved in the investigation of Cameron Doomadgee’s death, despite the Deputy Coroner’s findings of wilful incompetence.

Doomadgee’s death triggered a kind of war -- with Hurley becoming a battle martyr not only for cops who feel they are victims, but for anyone who believes blacks get too much from the system. At every juncture, the Police Service’s handling of the case has shown the vast gulf between physical bravery and moral bravery. Next week, while the police hold their awards ceremony in Townsville, over the water on Palm Island the Aboriginal Council might consider giving their own series of awards for hypocrisy, humbug, and hubris.

Chloe Hooper is the author of The Tall Man, published by Penguin.
 

***** 

And here's a video from YouTube featuring Andrew Boe, the lawyer who represented Mulrunji's family in the civil case against Snr Sgt Chris Hurley, speaking about another case involving violent behavior on the part of Queensland Police.

 

***** 

How did we get to this point? A pair of books written by Bill Rosser, an Aboriginal man of letters--historian, journalist, poet, playwright--offer some brilliant insight into the modern history of Palm Island. They are all the more engrossing today because they represent history being written almost while it happened.

The first of his two books on the subject, This is Palm Island (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1978) records Rosser's observations of life on Palm Island during a series of visit he made there from the mainland in 1974. Invited by organizer Fred Clay and his wife Iris, Rosser's narrative circles the twin poles of outrage and disbelief:

When I first went to the island, at the invitation of Fred and Iris Clay, I was a sceptic.

The stories I had heard about the bastardries, discrimination and injustices on Palm Island were, to me, just so much bullshit!

After all, wasn't this 1974?

Within twenty-four hours of my landing on the island, my jaw dropped in amazement!

A black fellow was fined $40 for being drunk!

Another was convicted and fined for 'arguing'!

Thirty years later, you might think, not much had changed, and indeed, Rosser details an oppressive climate sanctioned by the regulations of the Queensland Aborigines Act, which in one guise and under one name or another effectively controlled most aspects of life on Palm Island from 1884 until its final repeal exactly 100 years later.

Sadly, Rosser's second book, Return to Palm Island (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994) tells a tale that, different in its particulars, in no less grim. Ostensibly, it chronicles his return to the Island in 1988-89, after the final repeal of the Act, in a doomed attempt to help Fred Clay's son start up a newspaper and re-ignite a spirit of activism among the citizens. In truth, it becomes a series of memoirs, stories from Rosser's own life that of his friend Dot.

But these are not stories of Palm Island, nor of the 80's, but stories of life on the mainland, and in Dot's case, in the Queensland bush, stories of days when Indigenous people worked in harsh conditions on stations far from the coast. The stories on Palm Island that these memories provide respite from are stories of drunkenness and anomie, and in an awful addendum, of the onslaught of AIDS.

Rosser, to some degree perhaps unwittingly, has preserved a record of the brutalizing of island life in the late twentieth century, of the ways in which government control sapped the will of the Islanders, and of the ways that the lack of such control gave way to epidemics of dysfunction that seem to have served only to continue the cycles of brutality in different ways.

As Nick Lowe wondered, "Is there only pain, and hatred, and misery?" What will it take to win a better future for Palm Island? 

In a comment on my previous post on the root of the current Aboriginal tragedy, the one that I believe the Intervention is failing to address, David Spence had the following incisive remarks to offer:

We seem consumed by endless discussion about the ‘means’ but just what is the ‘end’ that we seek with, for, or by indigenous communities?

Maybe it is simplistic, but I think we will not achieve (with, for, or by indigenous Australians) anything of lasting benefit until someone can define a state of affairs which could be considered ‘a successful outcome’.

I have yet to read anywhere, anyone’s idea or definition of what would be considered ‘a successful outcome’. Why is that? Antigone had a simple choice. I wish it were so easy.

I don't know that I have answers to David's questions; I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable promulgating them if I did, for I don't believe it's my place to say what Aboriginal people want, or even what most Australians want. But I think I can point to a couple of problems that are impeding progress towards a successful outcome, whatever that may be.

There seems to be a fair amount of evidence that even when Aboriginal people express what they consider to be a successful outcome, there are often reasons why their desires cannot be met. There has been much talk about the failure of "self-determination" and more that a few critics have blamed the Indigenous communities for that failure. The rest have blamed the government: usually Liberals are heard blaming Labor (or small-l liberals) for promoting such a bone-headed idea in the first place.

In this matter, it is useful to revisit Pam Nathan and Dick Leichleitner Japanangka's study Settle Down Country (Pmere Arlaltyewele) (Kibble Books/Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, 1983). Written during the height of the early days of the Outstation Movement in the Central Desert, it usefully documents both things that people who were attempting to take up the challenge of self-determination wanted, and the government's response to their requests for help in establishing these remote communities.

In the book's fourth chapter, "Country Camps: Struggle for Survival," Nathan and Japanangka survey eighteen settlements in the areas surrounding Yuendumu, Papunya, and Docker River. Although there is some variation from area to area and settlement to settlement, some common themes emerge: housing and ablution facilities, trucks, radios, bores and windmills for water, stores, schools, and health care.

The authors document the status of the fulfillment of these requests, and the record is dismal.

It is clear that there are enormous deficiencies in the provision of essential services to the country camps and these, we believe, could seriously threaten the viability of the movement. The relevant government departments have not provided substantial material support, and certainly no moral support, to the people living on the camps. There appears to be no coherent explanation of the inequities in funding and the provision of services across the three regions involved in this study. The camps in the Papunya region, although by no means well provided for, appear to have more of the services essential for country camp life than the camps in the Yuendumu and Docker River regions.

The primary needs expressed by the Aboriginal people included water, transport, communication facilities, and shelter. Secondary requirement included schooling, health services, employment, stores and ablution facilities. None of these services are adequately provided at any of the country camps, some of which have been established for six to seven years.

Finally, it is remarkable that records kept on the country camps by the relevant departments are not comprehensive. One wonders about the criteria used to determine financial allocations (p. 150).

In the book's final chapter, "Two Sides of Accountability" the authors look at the differing responses of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) and the Aboriginal Development Corporation (ADC). It is their belief that the ADC, which is composed of Aboriginal people, is better at listening, but they also know that it is the DAA that controls the money. They provide an extensive report on an inquiry into conditions in Kintore in 1981, "not to make it hard for the people who work for the government agencies but in the hope that they might start to listen to Aboriginal people and might give them the right to self-determination, including the control of a reasonable share of the public money" (p. 155).

All of this is well-trod territory, and I engage with it once more primarily to recommend Settle Down Country as an interesting and important document from the early days of self-determination that might usefully be consulted, not simply for its historical perspective, but because it is one of the few places outside of official government reports where the views of Aboriginal people about what they want have been recorded and then widely disseminated.

In my second response to David's query, I would like to return to a theme that I passed over obliquely in my last post, which is that of choice. Antigone's choice is necessarily tragic because of the way in which her options are structured. What if it is not a question of what the goals or the ends are but how the pathways to them are structured or defined that means the difference between success and failure, between hope and tragedy?

Again, I will resurrect a much-discussed dichotomy for the purposes of illustration. One high-positive value for Aboriginal people is education, or literacy, which entails attendance at school. Another high-positive value is participation in ceremony, such as sorry business, whereby children learn "proper culture," Anangu way, or Yolngu way.

Parents want both for their children, but it seems that in today's world, choosing one implies the destruction of the other. The demands of sorry business can take a child out of school for weeks at a time; months possibly given the death rate in some remote communities today. Regular attendance at school presents a host of problems if parents and kin must leave the community to participate in extended ceremonies. Must children be sequestered in a dormitory environment in order to maintain their attendance at school? Who looks after them when kin are far away? Do they then grow up literate, but at the cost of cultural knowledge that can only be obtained through observation and participation?

I don't know if there is an answer to those questions, but perhaps, if cultural immersion and literacy are both high-positive values that Indigenous parents want their children to achieve, can we give some thought to how both might be accomplished? Is there a way to avoid another tragedy? 

The eponymous protagonist of Sophocles' drama Antigone has long defined the essence of the "tragic" for me. Her home city of Thebes was riven by a war of brother against brother who personified the doctrine of mutually assured destruction by slaying one another outside the city's gates. At the opening of the play, the new king, Creon, has declared that one brother, Eteocles, will be given a hero's funeral; the other, Polyneices, is to be left out to rot and to be consumed by dogs. No one is to give Polyneices the proper rites of burial, under pain of death.

Their sister Antigone is thus put in an untenable position. She is caught between two moral imperatives that are mutually contradictory. Obedience to civil law compels her to leave Polyneices unburied. Obedience to sacred law demands that she give comfort to the soul of the dead through proper burial. And yet she must choose one or the other; there is no middle ground. And whatever action she takes, whichever law she chooses to honor, she will simultaneously dishonor and betray the other law. If she obeys the gods, she will disobey Creon and die. If she obeys Creon, she will dishonor the gods and bring ruin upon her city. In order to fulfill one obligation she must renounce the other.

In his classic 1954 monograph, Renunciation as a Tragic Focus: a study of five plays, Eugene Falk describes this enforced renunciation as the essential principle that defines tragedy. Two high-positive values are arrayed against one another, and the protagonist, forced to choose one, necessarily destroys the other.

On this anniversary weekend, marking one year since the Howard Government announced the Intervention in Aboriginal communities throughout the Northern Territory, a pair of articles have appeared in The Australian: one explicitly invokes the tragic, while the other unwittingly evokes the tragedy that lies behind the Intervention.

Of all that I have read about the Intervention in the last few days, nothing compares with Nicholas Rothwell's lucid, extensive "No Question of Turning Back" (The Australian, June 21, 2008) for a critical analysis of what has happened and of the future directions being mapped out by the Rudd government.

Rothwell has always been sympathetic to the aim of relieving the suffering that has become endemic in remote Aboriginal communities, and has been outspoken on the need for drastic correctives. More than two years ago now, and more than a year before Brough's "48 hours" of planning for the Intervention, Rothwell had this to say:

It is time for the unthinkable to be put on the agenda. One logical course of action would be for the federal Government to declare a state of emergency in many of the communities and ghetto camps of the centre and the entire north, and to employ the army or a civic service volunteer corps to provide viable settlements with proper facilities and to impose a system of benign social control. This is an unpalatable prescription for those who fancy the ideals of Aboriginal self-determination. It is hard to imagine a more disturbing alternative, except the one that exists today ("Cry of the Innocent," The Australian, May 20, 2006).

Of course, the Howard-Brough plan wasn't exactly what Rothwell envisioned, although in his reporting he has often supported its ends and sometimes its means. Now Rothwell has done a superb job of distilling the bureaucratic complexities of the emergency response, this "human engineering on a grand scale." In this piece he admirably outlines not simply what Brough attempted, but more importantly for today, illuminates the changes Jenny Macklin has wrought to the Broughian program. Finally, he looks to what lies ahead under her leadership.

Rothwell provides a lengthy exposition of the current state of affairs, and in what follows I will here only selectively highlight a few of the topics he covers.

The Intervention under Rudd and Macklin continues to build on Noel Pearson's agenda to reform social welfare. It wants to emplace mechanisms to guard against corruption in the administration of government support for Aboriginal affairs, address the complexities of native title, and rework the distribution of mining royalties for the long-term benefits of Aboriginal owners. There is a new experiment underway on Groote Eylandt, for example, to divert royalties towards programs that facilitate and support initiatives in education, alcohol management, and tourism.

Overall, Rothwell focuses on the successes of both the Brough and the Macklin programs, and he offers an encouraging view of the present moment while acknowledging that there remains a multiplicity of viewpoints, often contradictory, about those successes and the means by which they can be achieved. If he ignores the downside of this human engineering--the overt racism that is entrenched in the entire spectacle of social engineering for Aboriginal people, the discredited social Darwinism that remains a living, breathing monster beneath the political landscape--I will not complain. His mission here is not to curse the darkness but to show where a few candles have begun to radiate a flicker of hope.

But it is because he remains silent about this racism and social Darwinism that I can not accept his final assessment. He may well be correct in his evaluation of the Labor response as somehow marred by its " calm, and constructive" speeches that betray a "managerial" approach lacking in "moral outrage." But to say that Brough had "the grace to see a tragedy" in the remote Northern Territory ennobles a government that does not deserve the distinction. Even if you grant Brough the passion and sincerity that has sometimes been ascribed to him, both his assessment of the problem and the solutions he proposed missed the essentially Sophoclean dilemma that faces the Indigenous people who attempt to govern their lives, to whatever degree, by their own Law. Brough never saw the tragedy at the heart of Aboriginal communities.

To illustrate one aspect of that dilemma, let me turn to Natasha Robinson's June 21 contribution to The Australian's review of the Intervention, "Secrets in the Shadows." Robinson's piece represents the worst sort of demonizing journalism, an exemplar of the insensitivity and lack of comprehension that justifies the indignities and privations of the emergency response by painting Indigenous people as violent savages, unconstrained by any sense of decency or real law. They deserve the Intervention, she argues, because they are incapable of civilizing themselves.

The chief locus of her argument resides in the recent troubles between Papunya and Mt Liebig, following the unexplained death of a 14-year old boy after a footy match and focusing on the specter of payback that is now haunting the two communities. She interprets this system of "vigilante justice" as representative of a mind set that leads inevitably to sexual abuse of all sorts (not just of children but of women in general) and to the shielding of perpetrators from a true justice that can only come from the dispassionate hands of white law.

Robinson is so caught up in her disgust with the primitive as she defines it that she become blind to the implications of her own reasoning. While claiming that "payback" shields whistleblowers and perpetuates the cycle of violence in Aboriginal communities she can not hear her own arguments clearly.

The prosecution of sexual abuse cases is tortuously slow; few child sex abuse cases reach the stage where charges can be laid. Even when cases do get to court and are proven, the victims are not safe. A woman who was sexually assaulted in her home in Hermannsburg was attacked following the perpetrator's jury conviction this year, forcing her to flee her community with her two children.

Substitute the name of another town for "Hermannsburg." Is this not a story we have heard over and over again from those who operate shelters for battered women around the world? And yet Robinson goes on to claim that "Complicating the picture is the ongoing tendency of traditional Aborigines to rely on customary law in punishing perpetrators of sexual abuse or any other crime."

Senior Papunya man Sammy Butcher says that despite changes to territory law that make customary punishment illegal, spearings and other forms of traditional payback are still common. Asked if such punishment was more effective in child abuse cases than reporting to police, Butcher says customary punishment is the first priority of many traditional senior men. "We've got to do that first and then go to the police," he says. "The police can deal with it afterwards."

Butcher, of course, is no ignorant primitive. He is the onetime lead guitarist and composer with the Warumpi Band, a man who now struggles to protect the youth of Papunya. He employs his experience of the whitefella world to manage a music studio in the community that offers direction and purposeful activity to the town's youth; he has helped to lead the successful fight against petrol-sniffing in Papunya. At the same time, his remarks as quoted by Robinson demonstrate his commitment to traditional law.

And it is here that I want to return to my opening illustration, to demonstrate how tragedy strikes in remote Australia in a Sophoclean manner and how men like Butcher are caught in the trap of dual allegiance. There is the law that governs "customary punishment" and there is the white man's law that has decreed such justice unlawful. Like Antigone, the traditional senior men must obey their sacred law and face the consequences of a Creonic retribution, or they must adapt to the imposed systems of justice and in so doing, continue to destroy the basis of their indigenous social order.

The quandary over payback is just a single example. The responsibility to walytja--kin, family, relationship--that leads to overcrowding in homes and communities stands in opposition to the dictates of housing authorities, and sometimes to the advice of health professionals from the medical establishment. The tradition of juvenile autonomy and the demands of the Australian education system stand in unreconciled opposition.

Unlike Antigone, those who opt to follow the dictates of their own law are not given swift death in return. Instead they are left to die one slow piece at a time, until choice, that central element of Sophoclean tragedy, is removed from them, until will is drowned in alcohol, until obligations are abandoned and respect for walytja is lost along with self-respect.

That so many people--including the former Minister--cannot recognize this stressful, lacerating trap that Aboriginal people inhabit, this choice of options which inevitably leads to the destruction of one or another of a pair of conflicting, high-positive values, is not in itself a tragedy. But it is a damned sorry state of affairs, and one that continues to contribute to the real Aboriginal tragedy. Until Indigenous people can make choices that do not force them to renounce their essential identities, no amount of social engineering will resolve the dilemmas they face. 

When I got back to work today, I found that my kind colleague Dave had saved the February 13 issue of the New York Times for me. I wanted to share a photograph of the front page here, even if reproducing a printed artifact in a blog seems like a strange thing to do. The story was brief, but hit all the high points; you can read it here.


More photographs from around Australia are being posted on a Flickr site devoted to "Australia says SORRY." Perhaps two dozen photographers have posted nearly 200 pictures to this group site as of today. The photos cover the events of February 13 (along with a few shots from Australia Day) from Canberra.....


credit: jthommo101
to Redfern.....


credit: sidkid
and beyond. It's a lovely set of documents. Enjoy! 

Brendan Nelson said "Sorry." John Howard's successor as head of the Coalition, in Opposition, apologized to the members of the Stolen Generation today in Parliament. Just think about it.

It was amazing to be able to watch Rudd and Nelson speak a short while ago. My hat's off to the Sydney Morning Herald for making it possible for me. I missed the actual apology from Rudd while my internet connection got buffered up, and the video froze up for minutes at a time, but still, it was nothing short of astonishing to be sitting at home and watching history being made halfway around the world.

Perhaps, come May 26, the 10th anniversary of National Sorry Day, the commemoration of the release of Bringing Them Home, might be marked one last time. Henceforth, Sorry Day could be celebrated, and celebrated on February 13, as the fulfillment in part of the agenda of that report.

I don't know much about how Parliamentary proceedings proceed; this is only the second time I've watched a sitting on video, so I wasn't prepared for the long speeches from Rudd and Nelson, and I haven't reviewed either of them, so I'm writing at the moment from memory. But I'm delighted that Rudd chose to open Parliament this way. In doing so, he has committed himself to making good on the symbolism of the apology, and to following through on his pledge to make a practical (as well as a symbolic) difference.

In this respect, I was very glad to hear him propose a limited, concrete goal of improving housing conditions. Not just because housing lies at the heart of so many of the problems that the Intervention purports to address: health and hygiene, overcrowding and its attendant violence. The commitment to housing is an implicit commitment to the existence, to the future of the remote communities themselves. If you believe, as I do, that Howard's real agenda was their destruction, the depopulation of the land leading to a de facto rollback of land rights, then this commitment to making remote communities livable can only be an occasion for real rejoicing.

As if the fact of the apology itself weren't enough to rejoice about.

I could have done without Nelson's grandstanding invocation of dysfunction, alcohol, violence, and abuse. I doubt a person watching or listening to the proceedings today didn't have the terrible troubles of Indigenous Australia in mind as both Rudd and Nelson rose to speak. It was cheap, unkind, and unnecessary. Worse was his suggestion that there might still be reasons to remove children from their families. That was stupid and heartless. Far better had Nelson just stuck to the points he could legitimately make about the accomplishments of settler Australians, had he mollified his supporters by denying personal or generational guilt. It might have made me believe that the Opposition is truly willing to transcend partisanship and put their hands to the work that Rudd proposes.

The crowd in Federation Square in Melbourne turned its back on Nelson as he delivered his reply today, and while I understand the symbolism, I'm not sure I agree with the sentiment. Rudd was right when he said that these are issues that must be beyond partisanship. Brendan Nelson said "Sorry." He acknowledged the traditional owners of the land on which Parliament sits, and he apologized. Just think about how unlikely this was six months ago.

Hallelujah.  

I. Current Affairs

It's been a tough week for reading the news. It was bad enough reading the likes of ABC's reports (here and here, for example) on the Coalition's attempts to undermine Rudd's forthcoming apology on February 13 by insisting that the term "Stolen Generations" be replaced by a euphemism. Reading the comments left on the site was worse.

Then The Australian had to bring back Keith Windschuttle with a column entitled "Don't let facts spoil the day," (February 9). He takes fear-mongering, selective examination of the evidence, and creative misinterpretation to new heights. He implies that the apology is meaningless without compensation--certainly a position he would be horrified to witness come true--and then calculates the cost of such compensation on the basis of a single case. A South Australian court's decision to award Bruce Trevorrow $500,000 in compensation for false imprisonment would in Windschuttle's arithmetic automatically translate into a $50 billion settlement for the nation as a whole.

But of course, that wouldn't be necessary, as Windschuttle goes on to argue that the Stolen Generations never really existed, largely on the basis of anecdotal evidence from New South Wales, where assimilation was old news by the time A. O. Neville championed breeding out the black in Western Australia in the 1930s. Windschuttle also notes that that it was Labor governments that passed all the laws that allowed for the removal of children. So it didn't happen, but if it had happened, it would have been Labor's fault. Thus Rudd's apology becomes even more hypocritical. Right?

When he finally gets around to acknowledging that things were indeed quite different in the Northern Territory and, under Neville's leadership, in Western Australia, he dismisses Neville's program of "biological absorption" as essentially irrelevant. It was after all, about marriage and cohabitation, Windschuttle says (and presumably not at all concerned with the usual result of marriage or cohabitation, right?), and anyway, Neville was so inept that his programs were failures.

The only successful program from this era was the NSW Aboriginal apprenticeship system, which operated from the 1880s to the 1940s. It provided real jobs and skills and gave young Aborigines a way out of the alcohol-soaked, handout-dominated camps and reserves of their parents. Indeed, it is a policy that could well be revived today to rescue children from the sexual assault and substance abuse prevalent in the remote communities.

Perhaps the Liberals' suggestion that the "Stolen" Generations be referred to as the "Separated" Generations could be discarded in favor of the "Apprenticed" Generations.


II. Reading History

Luckily, I had an alternative to The Australian to occupy my reading hours this week, in the form of a small paperback, the published record of Inga Clendinnen's 1999 Boyer Lectures, entitled True Stories. Although the raw material of Clendinnen's lectures is rarely uplifting, the diligence of her investigation, the generous heart with which she examines and interprets the human record, and her faith in the uniquely compassionate spirit of her fellow Australians make her review of settler-Indigenous relations somehow inspiring rather than depressing.

Clendinnen's lectures were (I believe) her first significant published musings on Australian history. The major focus of her career to that point had been the history of Aztec civilization and its conquest by the Spaniards. When a life-threatening illness, memorably recounted in the Tiger's Eye: a memoir (Text Publishing, 2000), curtailed her ability to continue that vein of historical research, she turned her attention to an examination of aspects of modern European history, published as Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Common to both these areas of study, however, was a quest to understand the wellsprings and mechanics of human cruelty. She extends that curiosity to Australia in True Stories.

The reflections Clendinnen presents in her lectures were shaped in part by the controversies that have become known as the History Wars, and the Howard-inspired attempt to celebrate a grand narrative of Australian history. Steeped as she is in decades of study of the complexity of human motivation, Clendinnen admits to a mistrust of simple narratives. In other respects, however, she applauds facets of Howard's desire to instill a sense of the nation's history into its citizens. She endorses his desire to see the history of immigration taught, so that each generation of incomers can understand its place in that story. In another section, her reflections on the unique character of Anzac Day and the sense of Australian history it embodies are among the most profoundly moving exercises in national pride I have ever read.

Still, the essays that comprise True Stories treat of incidents in Australian contact history from Cape York to Cape Leeuwin and from Arthur Philip to Noel Pearson. Perhaps they are just what the nation needs to be reminded of right now. They broaden the shape of the narrative and give context to the history that Rudd is about to make in Parliament next Wednesday.

Many of the stories she tells are familiar; some were new to me, despite the immersion in Indigenous history I've undertaken over the past decade. The genius of this slim volume depends in part on Clendinnen's humanity, but to a great degree it depends also on the simplicity of the individual stories she tells and that contribute the complex narrative she seeks to establish.

She begins her history of misunderstandings and unequal contests with a simple and moving story extracted from a letter written by the French explorer Nicolas Baudin in 1801. In it he describes the French scientific exploration party's encounter with a lone, terrified, and pregnant young Aboriginal woman on a beach in the extreme southwestern corner of the continent. The French first attempt to placate the young woman's fear with beads and mirrors, and then lift her bodily from the sand on which she cowers, the better to examine her physique. In her examination of Baudin's recounting of the story, Clendinnen concludes that the French surely intended no harm, and just as surely inflicted it.

Further tales of encounters feature George Augustus Robinson, the nineteenth century Protector who mediated between the races in Tasmania and Victoria, and Donald Thomson, who witnessed and attempted to ameliorate the cruelties of missionaries and police in Cape York and Arnhem Land in the 1920s before turning his attention to investigating the health of the Pintupi during the droughts of the 1950s. She retells stories gathered variously from the missions of Queensland and the stations of WA, and from the anthropological investigations of W. E. H. Stanner and Catherine Berndt.

But the most affecting, the most pertinent stories Clendinnen elected to retell nearly a decade ago are shocking in the relevance to what is happening today as the controversy over the Stolen Generation re-ignites for the moment and entwines itself once more with the stories of social collapse that have given rise to the Intervention. These are the histories of the settlements at Coranderrk and Cumeragunja in Victoria. Like the stories of the Stolen Generations from Western Australia and the Territory, these are epics that unfold over decades of misery. It would be hard to improve on Clendinnen's rendition, so I offer them only slighted condensed.

Coranderrk was established in 1863 for the remnant tribes of central Victoria, where you will remember there had been a catastrophic population collapse--eighty-five per cent over the first twenty-five years of contact. The new settlement had the luck of an excellent manager, John Green, a man who acted on the radical principle that the best way to manage Aborigines was to let them manage themselves

The people endured the usual hard lot of pioneer settlers, clearing land, stringing fences, building houses, and in time developed a flourishing, frugal community. The wages of the men, most of them seasonal workers, were supplemented with home-grown milk and vegetables, a small cottage industry in artefacts, and later a cash crop of hops.

So it went for a decade. At the end of the decade the community sustained many non-producers--old people, orphan children--was snugly housed, and close to self-supporting. ... A visitor remarked that their houses 'were equal to those of English workingmen and superior to those of many selectors in the district', while the children 'had a better education than most of the [white] farmers' children'.

That was Coranderrk. Then the Victorian Aboriginal Protection Board began to siphon off the profits from the hop-growing into its general funds, 'agricultural advisers' were moved in, John Green was sacked, and for the next decade the residents fought the Board's plans to remove them and to sell the land, which, now improved, was seriously profitable. (Does that sound familiar?)

The Coranderrk people fought hard and by the white man's rules, with appeals to the press, strikes, and petitions. And they won: a Royal Commission in 1877 and a Parliamentary Enquiry in 1881 both recommend that necessary repairs be carried out and the reserve be made fully self-supporting. It was also proclaimed a 'preserved reservation', a status which could be reversed only by Parliament. For the moment, the land was safe.

But not the people. In 1886 the Victorian Aborigines Act was passed. Since the 1850s, there had been powerful disapproval of half-castes and full-blooded Aborigines living together. In its 1861 report, the Victorian Aboriginal Protection Board expressed its naive racism along with its intention 'to interfere to prevent [half-caste children] growing up amongst us with the habits of the savage, as they posses the instincts, powers of mind, and altogether different constitution of the white man'. ... 'Absorption' was now the official policy (pp 79-80) .

Within three decades the population of Coranderrk was reduced to six old people. The remainder was dispersed, some to the mission at Maloga in New South Wales, and thence to Cumeragunja Mission. Clendinnen continues the story:

Cumeragunja was to follow much the same trajectory as Coranderrk--hard work, improvement of land, including this time private enterprise: the clearing and cropping of twenty farm lots, each of forty acres, by individual Aboriginal farmers. Painfully, a stable community of close to four hundred people, largely self-supporting, politically sophisticated, was built--to be destroyed by the remorseless hands of white administrators. In 1907 the Aboriginal Protection Board resumed some of the improved blocks because in time of drought they had been rented out as pasture, which in time of drought happens to be correct farming practice, and in 1909 the Aborigines Protection Act for New South Wales was passed, allowing the removal of 'any Aboriginal person who ... in the opinion of the Board should be living away from the reserve'. Those who had protested at the resumption of their land, the land created by their labour, found themselves expelled.

During the 1920s, more blocks were resumed and leased to whites, and half-caste children were taken and put to work for whites (p.82).

And so here is a story of official policies that separated Indigenous children from their families. It is a story that began not seventy years ago, but seventy years after the colony's founding.

But Clendinnen was not taking aim at Stolen Generation denialists when she wrote these lectures in 1999. In those days before the march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the notion of Reconciliation had yet to succumb to the manipulation and maneuverings of the Coalition. The shock of Bringing Them Home was still new and keen.

Clendinnen's argument is that Australian history--all history--is complex, multi-threaded, as diverse and messy as the daily life we all know, and that history once was. For history to be "true stories" it must encompass many stories. The removal of Aboriginal children from their parents is one such thread, and the reasons for it must always pale before Keating's judgment at Redfern:

It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.

It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?

Clendinnen's Boyer Lectures, almost ten years old now, give substance and particulars to what Keating referred to at Redfern. She speaks not generally of dispossession, but of a terrified woman, crouching face down in the sand on a beach in western Australia. She writes not abstractly of murder but tells of a young white woman in Victoria whose letters to her fiance in the Murchison district of WA urge him to desist from taking part again in the "nigger hunts" he has written to her about. Her stories are not of children taken from their mothers but of a family with two young girls that George Robinson encountered in Victoria in 1841: girls whose English consisted solely of the obscene articulations of sexual satisfaction they had learned from the white man who had been violating them.

Clendinnen wants to recognize the Australian achievement:

The settlers, despite their loneliness and fear, despite their cruelties, built a society where the centuries-old shackles of class were struck off in a generation. Egalitarianism was their achievement, not as an aspiration, but as a social fact....

But there remains a scar on the face of the country, a birthstain of injustice and exclusion directed against that people who could so easily provide the core of our sense of ourselves as a nation.... That is why I have tugged you through all this history. We need history: not Black Armband history and not triumphalist white-out history, but good history, true stories of the making of this present land, none of them simple, some of them painful, all of them part of our own individual histories (pp. 102-103).

If nothing else, the apology that Kevin Rudd offers next Wednesday will once again publicly acknowledge some of those true stories. Perhaps it can point the way beyond them as well.
 

*** 

Transcripts of Inga Clendinnen's 1999 True Stories are available on the ABC Radio National Boyer Lectures website. 

The headline for this post derives from the title of a panel discussion that took place on December 2, sponsored by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia. Organized by curator Margo Smith, the panel was designed to raise awareness here in the US about the problems posed by the Intervention. Planning began shortly after Margo and I returned from Australia and the announcement of the scheme six months ago. We were joined in the discussion by Howard Morphy, Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at Australian National University, Frances Morphy, Fellow at the Center for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, and Josh Wheeler, Associate Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression at the University of Virginia.

The entire panel discussion, including a lively question-and-answer session at its conclusion, was recorded and is available from the Charlottesville Podcasting Network. You can listen to it online, or download it to your iPod! I will attempt to summarize the main points in this post, but I recommend that you have a listen to program itself--each speaker's address lasts only ten to fifteen minutes--it's an excellent historical overview and especially in the perspective provided by the Morphy's, a fascinating, direct narrative of the history of white and Aboriginal contact and its consequences.


Margo began the session by providing an overview of the Intervention and the events beginning in 2006 which led up to the June 21 announcement of draconian measures in 73 remote Northern Territory communities. She spoke of Mal Brough's attempt to take over the town camps at Alice Springs and the Lateline reports of mid 2006 that exposed trumped-up charges of sexual abuse as key triggers of the takeover. She then outlined the report, Little Children are Sacred, that was commissioned by the Northern Territory Government in response to those media reports. She outlined the findings of the Inquiry and its 97 recommendations, particularly the critical importance of genuine consultation with Aboriginal people. Another key point often overlooked in discussions of the report in its stress on the importance of long-term funding not tied to short-term outcomes: too often funding has been withdrawn when immediate results are not seen. She went on to outline the report's recommendations for changes in policing, health programs, education and school attendance, the implementation of the Northern Territory Alcohol Framework, and improvements in employment, training and local industries.

She then contrasted these recommendations with the actual imperatives that the Howard government actually went on to implement: alcohol restrictions, welfare "reform," enforced school attendance, compulsory health checks, the acquisition of townships through five-year leases, the scrapping of the permit systems, the appointment of Government Business Managers to replace community councils, the ban on pornography, and the takeover of community housing.

Margo concluded with a brief sketch of the manner in which the legislation surrounding the Intervention was rushed through Parliament. She noted that the speed with which this legislation was introduced made it clear to many people that these measures were in large part pre-determined: this was an agenda that had been carefully prepared in advance, and was not at all a response to Little Children are Sacred, although the lack of consonance between the recommendations of that report and the actions of government also makes that transparent. Finally, there is the blanket vilification of Aboriginal people, hung on the single issue of child abuse, when the problems in these remote communities stem from decades of neglect, and in particular the last 11 years of inaction by the Howard Government.


Howard and Frances Morphy
Howard Morphy followed next, providing some general background on the community of Yirrkala, where he and Frances have conducted fieldwork since 1973. He began by pointing out a fact that often escapes notice: that the history of European colonization in northeast Arnhem Land is barely seventy years long. Thus, the Morphy's have been working with the Yolngu people of the area for approximately half the time that sustained white contact has been occurring.

Two years before Morphy arrived in Yirrkala for the first time, the bauxite mine and the mining town of Nhulunbuy had opened in close proximity to the mission settlement at Yirrkala. The Yolngu, from the moment they learned of plans to open the mine, saw trouble coming, for themselves and for their children. They knew that living in such close proximity to a new and alien culture would provoke direct threats to the stability of their way of life. They petitioned the government not to allow the opening of the mine. They attempted to ward off some of its worst consequences by demanding, for example, that the sale of alcohol not be permitted in Nhulunbuy and its surrounds. Of course, as history tells us, the Yolngu lost on all accounts.

In response, the Yolngu began moving away from the settlement at Yirrkala and its proximity to Nhulunbuy. By 1976, sixty per cent of the people who had been living there at least part of the year had retreated to their homelands hundreds of kilometers away. Based on his work in these homelands over the last 35 years, Howard has been able to observe that despite almost total neglect by the government, the homelands remained drug and alcohol free. He has seen no instances of child abuse and no youth suicide. In the homelands, away from Yirrkala itself, there is little violence. And yet near the mining settlement all of these conditions are, in Howard's words, "appallingly high."

In Morphy's view, the government is trying to close down the homelands. Ironically, the impact of the Intervention will be to take the Yolngu out of safe environments that they have built in the last thirty years and place them directly in the path of danger by forcing them to move back to centers of population where the children will be exposed to drugs and alcohol and violence. It is one thing to understand the irrelevance of most of government's actions to the recommendations of Little Children are Sacred; it is quite another to realize that they will actually force children to move into an environment that threatens their continued well-being. For the last ten years, the government has failed to respond to the Yolngu demands for better housing, education, and employment opportunities; now it is threatening and trying to close down the communities that have been safe havens.

Following Howard Morphy's remarks, I had the opportunity to speak about the threats posed to communities throughout the Northern Territory by the abolition of CDEP, which I have written about elsewhere in this blog, for instance, on the occasion of the announcement of its suspension in remote areas, and its effects as documented on the television program Four Corners.

I was also able to present some new material, particularly a response from Apolline Kohen of Maningrida Arts and Culture on the projected impact of the loss of CDEP on their operations.

MAC currently employs six CDEP arts workers who work in packing and freight areas as well as digital photography. MAC does pay top-up to all arts workers and this program has enabled arts workers to keep the flexibility they need to attend ceremonial obligations and funerals. Without our arts workers, it would be impossible to freight all the artworks we send every week.

Most of our artworks are sold via images sent to clients. Without efficient digital photography in place, our business would not be as successful. MAC looks after more than 700 artists from the region and buys about 10,000 works per year.

With the demise of CDEP, MAC is facing a crisis in terms of employment. It won’t be possible financially to keep all the workers and without the flexibility of CDEP in terms of hours & leave, none of our arts workers will be able to keep their newly ‘real job’ for very long. And, we will be very likely obliged to employ someone from outside the community to pack and photograph.

Without CDEP, the Maningrida community and region won’t function as well and this will also certainly affect the quality of the art productions.

In the week that elapsed between the election in Australia and our panel discussion, I paid close attention to reports in the newspapers about Labor's election promises to roll back elements of the Intervention, as two prominent examples were the re-instatement of the permit system and renewed support for CDEP. But the day before we were to speak, a discouraging report appeared in The Age.

Although the headline read "Indigenous expectations flying high," reporter Annabel Stafford wrote that "hopes that the old CDEP scheme is to be reinstated are likely to be dashed. [Incoming Indigenous Affairs Minister] Macklin says she is not interested in bringing back the scheme, which saw some on CDEP payments for life. She wants to use CDEP to get people into training and positions with companies." In the end, I was left wondering whether the new government will continue to pursue a policy of depopulating the homelands and refusing to consult with Indigenous people.


(l. to r.) Margo Smith, Will Owen, Josh Wheeler
Frances Morphy spoke next, offering insights on the effects of the Intervention based on time that she spent at Yirrkala during September and October of this year. Like Howard, she reminded the audience of the relatively short extent of colonization in this part of Australia, and the fact that frontier violence against Aboriginal people is still within living memory of the elders in these communities, a fact that contributes greatly to the fear that Aboriginal people are experiencing now.

Frances began by echoing the importance of government support and by explaining the complexities and the contradictions that are often involved in that support. For instance, the Department of Water was responsible for creating the Ranger program to help monitor the coastlines, but the funding for many of the Rangers themselves comes from CDEP. By abolishing CDEP, the government is undermining its own initiatives to guard against the introduction of invasive species from Southeast Asia.

This fragmented delivery of funding affects almost every aspect of life in the communities. Indeed, as Frances pointed out, government agencies act as "enclaves within enclaves", separated from one another and the people they are supposed to serve. Their failure lies in their inability to conceive of Aboriginal communities as communities. Instead, they are seen as diverse collections of programs whose objectives are carried out in isolation and ignorance of one another.

Much has also been made in the funding battles of the high degree of accountability that Aboriginal organizations are forced to endure. Frances pointed to the endless paperwork and twelve-month cycles of funding that make long-term planning nearly impossible. But conversely, there is almost no downward accountability: if the government fails to deliver on its promises, most communities have no effective means of recourse, while failure on their part to complete paperwork in a timely fashion can be met with non-renewal of grants.

There are other ways in which communities are now at risk. The insertion of Government Business Managers (GBM) into the 73 communities struck me as I listened to Frances as one of the most pernicious. Many community organizations have built up considerable assets over the years--capital assets in terms of buildings, tractors, boats, and more. Any of these assets that were acquired with any portion of government funding, no matter how small a contribution that funding represented in the purchase, can now be seized by the GBM's. This potential for asset stripping--$40 million worth in the case of the Bawinanga Corporation in Maningrida for example--is another subtle and little publicized method by which the Intervention threatens the integrity of the remote homelands.

These are examples of how the government takeover affects every aspect of Aboriginal life. As Frances forcefully put it, "It only happens to you if you are black, and it happens to you if you are black."

And the government has sought to shift the blame to the communities. They have seized on what they call the failure of land rights. But as Frances pointed out, land rights were about rights, not about development. Yet the government has moved to seize community lands under the subterfuge that giving land back to Indigenous people has not produced economic development that it was never intended to produce in the first place.

Lack of investment, not the granting of land rights, is responsible for the lack of economic growth. The abolition of CDEP will assist in another slight of hand shifting of blame. Three hundred CDEP positions that can support local businesses like art centres can be used to create only twenty permanent jobs. Twenty workers cannot provide the services that the communities will require. And thus the government has set these new enterprises up for failure from the start.

What investment there has been to date under the Intervention has largely benefited the Government Business Managers and the Centrelink employees responsible for monitoring the welfare payments quarantine. New housing initiatives have so far been limited to housing for such employees from the outside, and have not been directed at relieving the overcrowding that contributes to social dysfunction in these communities.

As Margo pointed out in her introduction, three unexcused absences by a child from school will result in garnishing 100% of welfare payments. But there are not enough seats in most schools for children, and not enough resources to make education for those who do attend effective. Frances noted that teachers associations have begun to refuse to hand over attendance records.

Health checks for children have been funded. Funding for follow-through measures to treat whatever these checks uncover is not yet forthcoming.

There are, however, plenty of meetings. Frances said that the Yolngu say it is "snowing white" in Yirrkala. In the month that she was in Yirrkala, Frances attended eight meetings. One of these was a planning meeting devoted entirely to deciding which assets to strip from the community.

Yirrkala has been offered funding to build youth education hostels, where children can live, at a remove from their communities, while going to school. Although the Yolngu have been asking for the resources to construct such accommodations in the homelands, the government has shown no interest in those proposals. They want to build hostels in Nhulunbuy to channel the children into the mines. And as Howard Morphy pointed out earlier, into a town where alcohol and violence are appalling problems.

In the end, Frances sees small signs of hope. There has been organized resistance. The Yirrkala people twice told the government administrators to go away, refusing to meet with them until they had real plans to make positive change occur. In Maningrida the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation has sent a challenge to the High Court, and other challenges based on the racially discriminatory nature of the Intervention legislation have a chance of succeeding. More than anything else, though, the Intervention has focused attention on the problems that do exist in Aboriginal Australia, and has exposed the high cost of fixing them.

The final presenter, Josh Wheeler, helped to make some of these government actions comprehensible to the American audience who might be less well versed in parliamentary forms of government. He did so by posing a question that helped to make the situation a bit more real to the audience, asking whether such actions could possibly take place here in the United States. With self-professed lawyerly good humor, he answered his question, "Yes and no."

In explaining "No," Josh noted the differences in the Australian and US constitutions: the fact that there is no Bill of Rights in the Australian Constitution; rather there are only what are referred to sometimes as the "Five Flimsy Freedoms." There is no guarantee of freedom of speech, and none of equal protection or due process as we have in America.

Similarly, the system of checks and balances built into the American government does not exist in the parliamentary structure where the executive branch of government is drawn from the legislative. The Prime Minister and his Cabinet are all members of Parliament. In this system, it is much easier for the majority party to push legislation through the Parliament quickly. It is, however, also much easier to later undo such legislation in Australia than it is in the United States.

But if one wondered if "Yes," an action like the Intervention could take place in America, Josh suggested that we ask the American Indian. Although many of the laws that established the reservation system in America are quite unconstitutional, there was no constitutional challenge at the time they were enacted. As Josh put it, the Constitution that protects us is only as good as the people who interpret it. The Constitution in America means what the courts tell us it means, and they have told us, for example, in bygone times, that segregation of the races was acceptable.

The separation of powers in the American government can also be easily overcome in times of national crisis. Abraham Lincoln, widely regard as the greatest American President, suspended constitutional protections during the Civil War, and Franklin Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans during World War II.

The bottom line, for both America and Australia, is that we need to be especially skeptical when the government declares an emergency, and tells us we must take action because of a crisis. As a people, we have the ability to effect change. Policy should reflect the problems it is design to address. We must ask where is the evidence that supports the government's claims.

As immersed as I have bee in following the news of the Intervention since returning from Australia in June, I still found much of interest and insight in the other speakers' remarks on Sunday afternoon. I have tried here to summarize some of the high points of the testimony offered to our audience. Together, I feel we painted a rich portrait of the state of affairs in Indigenous Australia in the wake of this declaration of a "national emergency," and hope that you will find listening to the podcast to be illuminating and instructive.


Good fellowship and a bit of holiday cheer at the conclusion of the day. (All photos thanks to Harvey Wagner.) 

Two Cheers for Labor!

Election Day in Australia was a long night in America. I spent part of the evening yesterday (Saturday afternoon in Australia) watch SkyNews via The Australian's web site, checked in briefly this morning at 3 a.m. local time (the polls had closed in Sydney but not in Perth) and then dreamed about a Coalition "upset" for the next four hours until finally clearing the cobwebs and discovering the Labor had triumphed (not too strong a word, I hope).

I'm disappointed to read the Brisbane Times' report "Democrats collapse in Queensland" noting that Senator Andrew Bartlett has almost certainly lost his seat in Queensland. Bartlett, who was a member of the Senate Inquiry into Australia's Indigenous Visual Arts and Crafts Sector, has written passionately against the Intervention and in support of Indigenous causes, and his voice will be missed if he bows out of the public debate now.

There was much prognosticating about the Liberals' chances to salvage the election at the last moment, with frequent references to how former Prime Minister John Howard (doesn't that sound lovely?) had come from behind at the last moment in previous contests. None of that had me especially worried, and given the results--84 seats to Labor--I'm pleased to see that Australia was ready to show Howard the door.

What did cause me dismay was the last minute assault on Rudd by Noel Pearson, which received good coverage in The Australian, including an extended analysis by Paul Kelly, "Pearson's dread of Rudd in power." I don't want to dismiss the importance of symbolic reconciliation to many Indigenous Australians; when racism permeates a culture, overt if symbolic disavowals of it are an essential element of changing attitudes and promoting tolerance, the first step towards acceptance. But for Pearson to make this a make-or-break issue the day before the election leaves me shaking my head at the stupidity of it all.

Maybe I just don't understand constitutional politics in Australia, but a preamble that acknowledges the prior occupation of the continent seems to me to be a pretty weak gesture. Given the mess Howard made of his last attempt to write a Preamble, I never placed much hope in this particular pledge. And despite the trouble that the Bill of Rights can be known to cause in America (think gun control), it still seems to me that there are more important constitutional issues confronting Australia. Of course I would prefer to see Rudd take up this initiative in his first term. But I would never have made his disinclination to do so the cornerstone of a rejection of Labor at a moment when the Coalition is bent on wreaking havoc on land rights, the sustainability of remote communities, and economic opportunity for the most impoverished.

I am much more concerned that the Rudd government act quickly to stop the demolition of CDEP, that they block the destruction of the permit system, and that they support health initiatives and community arts centres. And it's not yet clear how they will practically proceed on these matters. Given that the new Senate won't sit until July 2008, at which point CDEP could be a memory throughout the Territory, for example, I'm not really ready to break out the champagne quite yet. To say nothing of the appalling fact that Pauline Hanson received 4.5% of the vote in Queensland.

Now that the election is over, it's more important that ever to pay attention to the ALP's platforms and media releases regarding Indigenous Affairs. I don't expect overnight miracles, and I certainly wouldn't urge Labor to adopt the strong-arm tactics of pushing legislation through the Parliament without debate as the Coalition did last August. Rudd has said that he plans to continue with the Intervention for another twelve months before re-evaluating it. Maybe that timetable has something to do with the eight months remaining with a lame duck Senate. I have no idea what will happen to the new Community Business Managers and the role they will play on the ground in the Territory. But if nothing else, the new government can make one important change immediately: it can begin talking and, more importantly, listening to Indigenous people in those places where Howard and Brough sowed confusion and disturbance.  

My friend and blogmentor Jonathan Shaw posted this lovely a cappella masterpiece on Family Life over the weekend. I shall have to save it for another year in America.

For those of you who don't know them, the Spooky Men's Chorale are a self-described "fearsome bunch of larrikins with a full range of body and facial hair configurations and the sometimes accidental ability to make audiences both weep and cry at the hopeless beauty and hapless stupidity of their vocal machinations."

I don't think I could improve on that introduction, and I'm sure you're all eager now to move on to the main attraction below. If the embedded video doesn't appear in your reader, the link at the bottom should be all you need.


"Vote the Bastards Out" by the Spooky Men's Chorale. 

For the past couple of nights a special Four Corners presentation, "Tracking the Intervention" has aired on Australian television, and can now be seen in its entirety on the web. It is well worth the time to watch it: the published transcript doesn't have the coherence of the broadcast. You need to see it to understand it.

This is not simply because it's a television program that relies on visuals as well as narration and interviews. There's nothing quite like having a look at the Maningrida health-care clinic, which is funded by the Northern Territory government as is indistinguishable from any suburban medical office I've visited here in my home town. Then contrast that which the demountable clinic flown in for the use of the Emergency Task Force: two tin shacks connected by a blanket that provides some shade. You have to wonder whether the Commonwealth is spending its money wisely.

A moment later, when Geoff Stewart, a medical officer at the Maningrida Clinic, notes that the $83 million the Commonwealth is spending on the Intervention's health checks could "bring all health services across the Northern Territory up to a level of funding where we’d all be expected to be able to provide a comprehensive range of primary health care services," it's hard to find any logic. Except of course, that the health checks are a one-time cost, whereas adequate funding to provide continuing health services in these communities would require continuing investment that has so far not been discussed.

The second half of the program focuses on the more advanced state of the Intervention at the southern end of the Territory, in Aputula, where "income management" or quarantining of welfare as it used to be known, is already in place and CDEP is history. The confusion in the community store, the clear lack of comprehension that people show, is hard to watch. So is the anger and frustration at the simple unfairness of the blanket quarantine that Ray Ferguson and Pauline Coombes express.

And then there's the men who formerly worked in the community orchard. This was CDEP funded work, and it's gone now. The men's wives (some of them) have gotten "real" jobs at the Aged and Child Care Centre. As a result, the men's payments for "transitional" work in the orchard have been cut dramatically. Perhaps the most outrageous moment in the show comes when they hear that their payments for two weeks work, at 25 hours a week, is now a total of $8.24. Eight dollars!

But most of all, the program is worth watching because it's one of the few opportunities available to hear Aboriginal people speak for themselves. Some of them have good things to say about the Intervention, and bad things to say about CDEP. Others are angry, disgusted by hypocrisy and repeated meaningless promises. But it's all too rare that these people voices are heard and the emotions are seen.

The Four Corners website devoted to this program also provides access to the Constructive Engagement report on the impacts, limitations, and possibilities of the Intervention, commissioned by the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation; to the summary of the Territory's summary of the Report on the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse (i.e. Little Children are Sacred); and to a long list of other reports and news items, along with links to Aboriginal organizations.

There's also a link to another Four Corners program, "The Cape Experiment," broadcast last July. I haven't watched this latter show yet, but it's a similarly in-depth look at Noel Pearson's program out of the Cape York Institute that presaged the debacle in the Territory and should be well worth watching.

***
In related news, Kim Christen of Long Road is the guest author at the anthropology blog Savage Minds this week. Kim is summarizing her experiences of the Intervention and will be reporting on the work she's done establishing a digital cultural archive at Tennant Creek in recent months. While much of what she has to say here has already appeared at Long Road, the commentary from the Savage Minds community, most of whom are not Australianists, is as fascinating as Kim's own insights and reporting.
 

I received the following press release today from Ian Munro, CEO of the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation (BAC) in Maningrida, which has mounted what I understand to be the first legal challenge to aspects of the Intervention in the Northern Territory. There will be a directed hearing on Thursday, so watch the newspapers for more information. Some reporting has appeared recently in The Age ("Aboriginal Group Fights Canberra's 'land grab,'" October 27, 2007), The Australian ("High Court test for takeover", October 27) and on the ABC. Last Friday, on PM, Anne Barker interviewed Munro and lawyer St John Frawley.

It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that BAC is the lifeblood of enterprise in Maningrida, and represents the kind of economic engine that can offer real hope for Indigenous people, rather than the vague and ill-defined promises that government has on offer. The following description of BAC's scope of operations is quoted from Bill Fogarty and Matthew Ryan's essay, "Monday in Maningrida," published in Coercive Reconciliation (Arena Publications, 2007).

At the forefront of this development model [a cultural alignment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous governance] is an institution named the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation. The Corporation runs twenty separate businesses and last year had a turnover of $26 million. Of this figure, 55 per cent was contributed directly from enterprise and trading activities. The most successful of these enterprise, Maningrida Arts and Culture, returned $1.1 million directly to artists in the 2005-2006 financial year and purchased art and craft from over 700 producers. The corporation also runs, among other things, a mud brick factory, a 'good food' kitchen, housing, roads and building crews, an outstation supply service, a camping and gardening store, a supermarket, and a women's centre that produces quality screenprinted fabric. The Corporation's responsibilities are augmented by a range of human services that it auspices, including an aged care program, partnership with the Malabam Health Board, a disabilities service, and a program to tackle substance abuse. There is also the Maningrida Progress Association, which runs a take-away, another large supermarket, an airline charter service and a ten-room motel, while the local Maningrida Council provides a range of municipal services. Training for the labour force is also provided locally through the Maningrida Jobs Education Training Centre, which has links to registered training organisations across the North Territory (p. 265).

The Djelk Rangers, another important operation of the Corporation, has received attention in the press lately as a prime example of how the abolition of CDEP will threaten not only Indigenous livelihood, but the natural heritage of Australia's northern coasts. The Rangers provide essential services in controlling feral animals and invasive weeds, and support quarantine activities along the coast. They are working with other Indigenous groups in the area of wildfire control, and working with the CSIRO to monitor the after-effects of Cyclone Monica. A Junior Ranger program offers promising and meaningful activities for Year 11 and 12 students. There was a minor hubbub a few months ago when some of these students identified several new species of spiders.

All of this is threatened by the Intervention.

With best wishes for their success, here is the text of the press release.

CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE TO THE ACQUISITION OF PROPERTY IN NT

A case has been commenced in the High Court of Australia challenging the Constitutional validity of certain sections of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 (Cth) and the Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Northern Territory National Emergency Response and Other Measures Act 2007 (Cth).

The case is concerned solely with the Constitutional validity of the provisions that:

1. grant to the Commonwealth a 5 year lease over the Aboriginal land in and around the townships in the Northern Territory;


2. grant to the Commonwealth the power to acquire all of the moveable assets of Aboriginal corporations conducting business, enterprises or activities in the townships;


3. abolish the permit system.

The case has been brought by:

1. Reggie Wurridjal, a traditional Aboriginal owner of land in the Northern Territory known as the Maningrida land; and


2. the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation, a substantial Aboriginal community services organisation which owns and operates businesses and community services on the Maningrida land for the benefit of the Aboriginal community.

The precise basis of the claims of Reggie Wurridjal and Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation is set out in the Statement of Claim filed late yesterday in the High Court. In the Statement of Claim the Plaintiffs are seeking declarations that the relevant provisions of the legislation are invalid, and orders restraining the Commonwealth from relying on those provisions to occupy the Maningrida land or to acquire Bawinanga’s assets.

The High Court has listed the matter for directions on Thursday 1 November 2007.

Further information:

St John Frawley (Partner, Holding Redlich) (03) 9321 9809

Addendum:
Just in from The Age: Justice Kenneth Hayne has granted BAS time to file an amended statement of claim. Next court date is December 3, and the case may go beofre the High Court in March. 

Is it election season that is bringing forth a steady stream of major addresses on the politics of the Intervention? Since the start of October, Brough, Howard, Scrymgour, and now Galarrwuy Yunupingu have appeared in Melbourne and Sydney to deliver major addresses on the the state of Indigenous Australia and the state of emergency.

In the wake of last week's Difference of Opinion broadcast on the Intervention and with the speeches this week by Scrymgour and Yunupingu, along with the reactions those speeches have provoked, the press has begun to focus on divisions.

The Sydney Morning Herald ran an article on Friday (the day of Yunupingu's address in Melbourne) lining up the opposing points of view among Indigenous leaders. Scrymgour and most of the Difference of Opinion panel (Tom Calma, Olga Havnen, and Lowitja O'Donoghue) are cast as staunch opponents of the government's actions. The differing opinion of Sue Gordon puts her alongside Yunupingu, Noel Pearson, and Marcia Langton in supporting the Intervention, according to the Herald.

Meanwhile, over at The Australian, Ashleigh Wilson reported on the political fallout within the Labor Party in the wake of Scrymgour's fiery speech in Sydney, casting the NT Labor government in opposition to Rudd and the national forces of the ALP, which by a curious political algebra of the election season, come out not being the Opposition. Or at least, not in opposition to the Intervention.

On Saturday, Nicolas Rothwell weighed in with a blistering attack on Clare Martin that appeared at first to reiterate the received wisdom that Labor's best strategy right now is not to allow Indigenous issues to become a wedge that will drive voters away from Labor on November 24. But in the end, Rothwell blasted Martin for allowing her personal and political motives to undermine not just Labor but the goals of the Intervention itself. Of course, Rothwell anticipated the Intervention by over a year, starting with his piece in The Australian in May of 2006, "Cry of the Innocent," in which he chronicled violence and abuse in the Territory and ended his tale thus:

It is time for the unthinkable to be put on the agenda. One logical course of action would be for the federal Government to declare a state of emergency in many of the communities and ghetto camps of the centre and the entire north, and to employ the army or a civic service volunteer corps to provide viable settlements with proper facilities and to impose a system of benign social control. This is an unpalatable prescription for those who fancy the ideals of Aboriginal self-determination. It is hard to imagine a more disturbing alternative, except the one that exists today.

And so it has come to pass. And now, says the press, it is a matter of taking sides, seeing who falls where in the black and white discussions of what to do next.

And yet, as I read the capsule reports of the Indigenous participants here, it seems to me in many was that they are all saying much the same thing. The headlines are different, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of disagreement over some fundamental facts: that the abolition of the permit system is a bad idea, that the compulsory leases are an intolerable violation, and that neither of them has the slightest connection to Little Children are Sacred. That the quarantining of welfare is unworkable, and moreover, it is racist.

The difference that I read is that some people are hopeful, and others are cynical. Everyone agrees with Rothwell that the situation today is intolerable, nearly the worst imaginable. The big question is will the government, Howard's or Rudd's (should that come to pass), deliver this time? Will the planning be there, and the ongoing commitment? Or will the government once more fail Indigenous Australians?

And these questions bring me back to Yunupingu's speech. It's a fascinating piece of rhetoric, and it deserves careful reading and consideration. A mash-up artist or a hip-hop wizard could take whole paragraphs from this speech and combine them with selections from this month's talks by either Brough, Howard, or Scrymgour and still come away with a coherent message for the masses.

I think there are two things going on in Yunupingu's speech. While it certainly expresses support for the government's promise to do something about Indigenous disadvantage and even Howard's late recognition of the importance of reconciliation, the speech is more than that. I read it as a challenge to the government: a challenge to make good on their words, to make a positive difference in the lives of Aboriginal Australians.

More than that, it reminds me of Jennifer Deger's description of the Yolngu imagination in Shimmering Screens:

To see and make connections with the practices and priorities of the generations that have gone before, while taking up the possibilities of the modern ... this is Yolngu contemporaneity (p. 210).

Yunupingu will not allow his knowledge of past actions or his disappointment over broken promises to discourage him. When the press sees divisions and locates Yunupingu among the "idealists," I think they do a disservice to his vision. The Yolngu have tried to teach us that life is not black or white, not freshwater or saltwater. It is both. We need all these points of view to move forward. Let's hope that the people in power will listen, will understand that it is asking the unconscionable to move Indigenous Australia into the suburban backyard. Let's remember Stanner's important question: "Suppose they do not know how to cease to be themselves? People who brush aside such a question can know very little about what it is to be an Aboriginal."

Serious Business
Galarrwuy Yunupingu
University of Melbourne Law School
October 26, 2007

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for having me here tonight.

I would like to pay my respects to the traditional owners of this land, the Wurundjeri people and the Kulin nations who, like me, inherited their homeland from their ancestors in the sacred past and who are bound to it by a sacred duty. I thank you for allowing me to speak on your land.

I would also like to thank Vice Chancellor Professor Glyn Davis for his kind introduction.

A new settlement?

Ladies and gentlemen, recently the Prime Minister of Australia announced that if re-elected he will call a referendum to amend the Constitution to recognise the Indigenous people of Australia in the preamble.

He said that he wanted to see a new settlement of the relationship between Indigenous Australia and the Australian nation.

I was particularly pleased when the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Kevin Rudd, announced that he and his party would support the referendum.

In fact I waited anxiously to hear this news. I was delighted when I was told that Mr Rudd was with Mr Howard on this issue and that both leaders would support the idea of a new settlement.

I was delighted because for the first time in Australian political history we have agreement between both parties that there must be a resolution of the place and rights of the Indigenous people of Australia.

This is why I have named this speech Serious Business.

This business is the most serious business that we face as a people and as a nation.

After many long years we are now facing the moment when we must decide how this country will recognise the First Australians.

Captain Cook

When Captain Cook landed on the Australian continent he had with him an order from King George the Third.

That Order was that he obtain the CONSENT of the local people to his arrival and any settlement.

The Order said:

You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain:

Captain Cook and Captain Phillip after him ignored that order.

And of course it was not too long before he was in open conflict with the local Aboriginal people.

The Eora people who owned Port Jackson and Sydney did not recognise the Crown’s claims to ownership just as so many Aboriginal people today still do not recognise those claims.

Cook’s actions were on behalf of the King and he left a legacy that the nation is still trying to tackle today.

Indigenous people have our own law and society.

For my people it is Rom Watangu.

Rom Watangu is the law of the land and the seas, and of life itself. My people are and will always be the owner and the maker of the land and sea.

Rom Watangu is the most powerful and real thing in Yolngu life. We do not pledge allegiance to the Crown.

Captain Phillip and those that followed him failed to understand this. They failed to establish a proper order or balance and this has been tearing away at the heart of the nation ever since.

Howard

Ladies and gentlemen, 220 years later we return to where we started.

A Prime Minister has said that he will now do what was not done before.

He will recognise the special place of Aboriginal people in the Australian nation.

He will sit down and talk with us, consult with us, listen to us, and learn from us in the process of formulating questions for the whole of Australia to vote on.

As I said earlier, doing this properly and honestly is the most serious business that we have faced as a nation.

And it is not just a matter of a Preamble. Mr Howard has talked about a New Settlement and the Commonwealth government’s actions in the Northern Territory show that its search for this new settlement is more than just symbolic.

Mr Howard is trying, on behalf of the nation, and on behalf of the Queen, to get it right.

On behalf of the Gumatj people I must thank the Australian people for this.

As Mr Howard acknowledged, it is the Australian people that have maintained a sense of injustice about the place of Indigenous people in Australia, and the Australian people have finally got through to Mr Howard.

The hundreds of thousands who walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and who signed the Sorry Books, and the good people who have worked away in Aboriginal communities doing good things and volunteering their time, their money and their voice to our cause.

The efforts of these people will find a special place in the history of this nation.

So, I am very grateful as a Gumatj person to everyone who has made their voice heard in the struggle for Indigenous rights.

Because it is a struggle.

Let me just pause and talk a little bit about my people and our struggle.

My people had a good relationship with foreigners for more than two hundred years before the British came to Australia. The Macassans came to the Yolngu coastline each year with the trade winds, or monsoon winds. In my own land, the land of the Gumatj, they came to Gunyangara and camped. They caught and cooked trepang, which they then traded with the Chinese. They negotiated agreements with the Yolngu about their visits and we had very close friendships, and some Yolngu people married Macassans. Some Yolngu went to Macassar and back, and some Yolngu people are buried in Macassar. Some Macassans stayed and lived with us for a time. Children from both cultures were born during that very long history. The Macassans joined with us in our ceremonial life and we shared food, songs, and technology. Macassan words, songs and cultural traditions are still part of the Yolngu culture.

But when the whites came in the nineteenth century, our world changed. By 1885 Arnhem Land had been divided into two pastoral leases. From 1885 to 1893, whites terrorists employed by the pastoral lease companies shot Yolngu and killed them with poisoned horsemeat.

In about 1910, at Gän gan, inland from Blue Mud Bay and the homeland of the famous Yolngu artist Gawarrin Gurmana, white men killed almost an entire clan. Then they rode on horseback to Biranybirany, where they nearly wiped out the Yarrwidi clan, the saltwater people of my Gumatj people. Then they rode to Caledon Bay and Trial Bay. At Gurkawuy, they nearly wiped out the Marrakulu clan, which included the family of the famous artist Old Man Wanambi.

One of the men killed during the expedition of 1910 was an old man of the Djapu clan from the area of Caledon Bay. It was that man’s son, Wonggu, who later became a leading figure in Yolngu resistance to European invasion.

My father told me many stories about these massacres. My father was there when my people left the mainland for the islands off the coast so that they too would not be killed.

These stories are very real to every person in Arnhem Land. They are living memories. My father very courageously brought our families back to the mainland and reasserted our ownership of our land and continued in the practice of our culture.

Then in the 1960’s a mining company came to the Gove Peninsula. Representatives from the government came and simply told us that we were to move out of the way because a mine was to start on our sacred lands.

That moment was the start of land rights because it brought together the senior people of the area and they started to fight for recognition. They painted their position on bark in a statement that is now known as the Bark Petition.

That was in 1963. I was involved in the following years as this struggle continued.

But today, although we have land rights, the mine remains on my land without an agreement with my people. It is a daily reminder that I am not in full control of my land.

So my whole adult life has been a struggle for my rights.

In 1988, with the late Arrernte leader Wenten Rubuntja, I led the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory to make another bark petition, which is called the Barunga Statement. I presented it to the then Prime Minister Bob Hawke who understood our reasoning. He wanted a treaty with us, but he was opposed in Canberra by both sides of politics.

At one point a few years ago I was so frustrated that I wanted to go and bring home the Barunga Statement from where it hung in Parliament.

It was prepared after great consultation with the traditional owners of the Northern Territory. It calls for Aboriginal self-management, a national system of land rights, compensation for loss of lands, respect for Aboriginal identity, an end to discrimination, and the granting of full civil, economic, social and cultural rights.

The Barunga Statement is a foundational document and starting point for this current debate. I am pleased that it still hangs in Parliament.

But I had come to feel that its words had been so ignored that the best thing to do would be to get it out of the Parliament and take it home and bury it in a bark coffin.

My cousin, Wali Wunungmurra, who is the last living signatory to the original Bark Petition told me recently that he wished to go and get that Petition and take it home also.

These are the frustrations that men like Wali and I live with.

But without doubt we now have a new opportunity. We now face the start of a process that has the potential to set this generation apart as a generation of unifiers and peacemakers.

Ladies and gentlemen, it will not be easy.

It will be a great challenge.

Let me say again that this is serious business.

And allow me to make the following 3 points to illustrate how serious this business really is.

Number One - The referendum must be about more than just the Preamble.

We must make changes to the Constitution to make sure that our place in the Preamble is not undermined.

Mr Howard has said that the Constitution must be amended to recognise the special place of Indigenous people in Australia and that means we must deal with the section known as the “race power”.

This is Section 51(26) and it currently allows the government to make laws based on race that can disadvantage Indigenous people. This clause needs to be removed and replaced with a clause that protects and strengthens Indigenous rights.

This includes most importantly our property rights, both to land and sea.

These rights must be recognised and protected.

To date Indigenous people fight a continuous battle to hang on to what rights we have to our land. A line must be drawn that prevents any further taking of our land or sea country without our consent and agreement.

Indigenous people owned the land and the sea before anyone else. This must be recognised once and for all.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to emphasise this point. If there is to be a settlement at all, the Constitution must not just recognise us – it must recognise what is ours and what has been taken from us.

We seek this recognition within the nation, not outside it. This is a discussion we must have as Australians.

Point Number Two - We must ensure that we bring all of Australia along with this process.

These changes - this Settlement - affects every Australian. Every Australian must have a chance to have their voice heard.

We need balance in this Settlement.

To obtain balance we must ensure that every Australian has an opportunity to involve himself or herself in this discussion.

When we are done, every citizen can proudly stand and acknowledge what they have achieved in their country.

They can say: “This is our country. It is a country that we are all proud of. We now rejoice and celebrate with our Indigenous brothers and sisters together as one.”

We live in a multicultural nation that is made up of many different cultures and languages. This needs to be recognised so that we can deeply and honestly express who we are as a nation.

There will be opposition from Aboriginal people who are so distressed by their personal circumstances that they are incapable of agreeing about anything that involves government. These people too must be heard. Let us put our agreed position, achieved in good faith with all Australians, to a referendum of Aboriginal voters. This will require them to think about their future: yes or no? Do they want dignity or do they want conflict for all our future generations?

Point Number Three - This point concerns the practical aspects of this Settlement. There can be no settlement if Indigenous people remain the most disadvantaged citizens in the nation.

Words can set the scene but real commitments are required to tackle poverty and disadvantage. Fixing these problems will take time, energy and money. The immediate problems of the Indigenous world cannot be put to one side as we start to talk about symbols and words. This is why I have supported the Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory. There are problems with its implementation that must be fixed, and I am personally committed to putting my shoulder to the wheel and getting the intervention working. And so must we all, for the sake of the children.

And these children must have a future, which means economic development.

Significant investment and effort is required in order to build economies that can provide jobs and income for future generations.

These are matters I have discussed at length with Noel Pearson.

Our words must inspire us to greater efforts on behalf of the children and the old people and the everyday people who struggle out there in our communities.

Ladies and gentlemen, I ask that you come with me in this great challenge.

In this most serious business.

It will not be an easy task and I know from experience that many times we will want to stand up and walk away from the table. But we must persist. We must never give up on this task as it is the most important task.

We must find the balance between all the people of this nation.

We need to go into this Hand in Hand and Heart to Heart with our fellow Australians.

And because our loss is great we will need face to face dealings and eye to eye talk.

Reconciliation does not come about because we agree to sit down and talk. Reconciliation only comes about when we have talked and reached an understanding. It is at the end of that process, when we shake hands and go off into our day-to-day lives, that is when we are reconciled; reconciliation does not come just from turning up to a meeting place.

Reconciliation comes about because of honesty, truth and making good what wrong has been done.

There has been much wrong done to my people, including to the Stolen Generations. These wrongs must be made right.

We have the opportunity now so I encourage you all to work towards this great prize that is reconciliation.

Let's get it right once and for all.

Thank you.