Event
Date
Presented by Lieutenant-General Sanderson AC, special adviser to the Government of Western Australia on Indigenous Affairs
The event was presented by the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, ANU College of Law, and Manning Clark House at the Australian National University on 23 August 2007.
Kellerberin is an important town right in the middle of the Western Australian wheat belt. Its population is approximately 1000, of whom 200 are Noongar people. Many important people have come from Kellerberin over the years. It is a relatively old town in Western Australian terms, being on the road to Kalgoorlie and the Eastern goldfields. In fact, all those miners heading towards the gold in the 1890s, my grandfather included, would have walked through Kellerberin, which was an important source of fresh water and supplies.
Behind the town is a large granite hill that provides a good view of the surrounding countryside. Locals have taken to referring to it as the Jesus Christ hill. That is because visitors to Kellerberin, when taken to the viewing point, are often heard to exclaim, “Jesus Christ”, either as a prayer or as an expletive. The reason for this is that they see clearly, many for the first time, the salt rising through the wheat fields for as far as the eye can see. In December 2000 the salt concentration of the groundwater was on par with seawater.
This environmental disaster is repeated time and again throughout the entire wheat belt region. The salt problem covers an area comparable to the size of France and has been rising ever since the State cut down all the trees to plant grain. You could blame the farmers for this, but it was State policy to clear the trees once they became convinced that the very pervious soils, with the addition of trace elements, could produce vast crops of wheat. New land continues to be brought into production and many farmers address their salinity problems by buying their neighbour’s land.
Most of the towns along the pipeline to Kalgoorlie sit on a salt boil that is eating away at their foundations and infrastructure. This all presents a very gloomy picture when you combine it with the loss of population and services in these regions. The Aboriginal population of Kellerberin struggles to survive, having been trapped in reserves for much of recent history and employed on low wages to help in the clearing of the land. Some get seasonal work at harvest time. Others are trying to attend to cultural matters, but this has lost its cohesion with the relocation and passing of the traditional elders. Those young men who haven’t left use their dole or, what was until recent times, their CDEP money to drink at the pub, having occasional engagements with the justice and corrective systems and joining their fellow Aboriginals who make up 42 percent of the jail population of WA.
A few of the lucky ones play football in the West Australian Football League with the aspiration of joining the outstanding group of Noongar footballers who are present in increasing numbers in the AFL. There are even fewer options for the women of this town.
There is not much to divert these people, either in the way of employment, relevant education or cultural engagement. They are truly the victims of our market forces world, which has little room for the spiritual engagement with the land which lies at the heart of Aboriginal culture. That said, there is an unusual piece of granite alongside the road near one of the Kellerberin sacred sites – massive and oblong, it looks as though it could have been carved by human hand. The local Indigenous people were keen to draw it to my attention. They call it “Coffin Rock”. It had been stolen from its original place at a nearby sacred site by a local farmer, against all warnings and protests. (The sacred site is called Shark’s Mouth; it was a sacred ceremonial meeting place for the Wongis from the east and the Noongars from the west). According to my informants, the farmer used the stone as a step up to his verandah. The farmer and the son died shortly after. The stone was returned and dumped the stone by the side of the road. When I asked them why they hadn’t returned it to the sacred site, they told me there was no one left who had the authority and was able, or prepared, to touch it. Consistent with protocol, I have been given cultural authority to tell this story.
I tell you this story of Kellerberin by way of introduction because it is more atypical of the circumstances of Indigenous people than the more remote communities in places like the Northern Territory, the Kimberley and the Pilbara and demonstrates more clearly how we are all linked together in the consequences of our historical relationships.
I am sure that those of you who took the opportunity to read the flyer advertising this address found it quite provocative. The idea that mainstream Australian culture is at odds with the environment of this continent is perhaps not so controversial, given what we have seen in recent times with respect to shifting weather patterns and water shortages, and the abuses of the country referred to in the contemporary observations of people like the current Australian of the Year, Professor Tim Flannery.
What is perhaps more controversial in the flyer statement is the connection drawn around reconciliation, Indigenous health and national security – the suggestion that, unless we reconnect with the land, our tenure on this continent is in serious jeopardy. In this respect, listening to and learning from Aboriginal people who have been here for a long time could be quite critical.
In welcoming this opportunity to address you provided by ANU and Manning Clark House I have to begin by telling you that I am not at all optimistic about our ability and willingness to do this. In my current role as Special Adviser to the Western Australian Government on Indigenous Affairs I find that the ignorance surrounding these issues is both deep and widespread, and is being compounded by deliberate programs of disinformation as well as our present obsession with consumption as our contribution to the market forces philosophy that dominates western governments.
I don’t want to call this ignorance racism. It is more generous to describe it as impatience – impatience with those who do not comply with our ideas about equity and ownership and who are therefore an affront to the way the rest of us live our lives. Let me also clarify at this point that I am not against assimilation per se. It is entirely appropriate, it seems to me, for those Indigenous people who want to achieve success by becoming thoroughly immersed in western society’s values and lifestyles to be able do so. Indeed, for many of those of mixed race there might be a powerful genetic need for this. The critical issue from a national perspective is that there should be no barriers –of an economic, cultural, racist or geographic nature - to them doing so. You know that this hasn’t always been so.
What I am quite critically concerned about is coercive assimilation – forcing people to give up their culture in order to have access to the services they are entitled to but cannot afford because we have deprived them of the means to support themselves. When the cultural owners of the Alice Springs Town Camps for example, were presented with this option recently in the form of $60 million of services and infrastructure in exchange for their land tenure, they rejected the money, despite the desperate need for these civil services. And that is the point at which I want to change the direction of this address.
Australia the place was quite clearly on the record before Captain Cook discovered it in 1770. Europeans had been bumping into it for nearly two hundred years. And yet it had never attracted the idea of settlement or the establishment of a trading base. There were no large concentrations of humanity and no apparent commerce, let alone the sorts of things that Europeans were prepared to fight over at that time, like spices, silks, gold, sugar, slaves and exotic timbers.
It was the super power struggle of the late 18th Century that finally brought the British to Australian shores. To establish naval bases and to prevent the French from doing so was the primary motivation. Dumping potential revolutionaries as far away from Europe as possible might have had something to do with it, particularly with the large increases in desperate people following the land enclosures and rapid increases in population. But the primary requirement was to establish a self supporting naval base – which is why naval commanders played such an important role as the original governors.
Remote naval bases were costly things – rather like remote space bases. The last thing the Admiralty wanted was trouble with the Indigenous people. They had experienced such distractions in other places and were very wary of it in the relatively unknown circumstances of New Holland.
As a consequence, the governors were given very clear instructions from the Crown about dealing fairly with the Indigenous people. Among other things they were required to protect their interests from the depredations of some of the rather unsavory people they brought with them, and those who preceded them, like the sealers. Given the very wide jurisdiction they were commissioned for, this was always going to be a problem. For one thing the Europeans were the true aliens in this place.
On the other hand, the Aboriginal’s great secret was that they represented the oldest living culture on Earth – as it turns out, some 50-60,000 years old. They had been on this continent through at least two ice ages. This embraces more climate change than you can comprehend. There is clear evidence of this in places like the Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara region where 20,000 year old rock carvings featuring many extinct animals are a fantastic heritage and are in abundance.
These people had developed a sustainable culture based on living very lightly on the land, navigating in space and time through a spiritual connection with their surroundings, moving in relatively small groups with very strict rules to avoid inbreeding, respecting the flora and fauna for what it was and taking from it only what they needed, leaving enough to restore its blessings the next time around.
Fundamental to their existence was the spiritual nature of water as the source of all life. Spiritual creatures lived in and came from the water. Sources of water were nurtured as the centre of important events in the journey of life. Terrible things could happen to people who abused the trust that was associated with the knowledge about water.
What hen to make of the Europeans, who were white, came from the sea, displayed control of higher levels of technology but seemingly, had no respect for nature? The idea that they could own the land, rather than being a part of it caused them to commit all sorts of sins in the eyes of the Indigenous people including the abuse of water. What could possibly constrain them to try to exclude other forms of life from the water – even to the extent of poisoning some of the water holes? There are recorded instances in Western Australia of Aborigines leading perishing parties of Europeans to water holes, and promptly being told to be on their way.
The uropeans, on the other hand, at first took the convenient view that the Aborigines were so close to nature that they were a part of it, like Kangaroos and Emus. Prior to the 1967 referendum for example, Aboriginal people weren't counted as people - they came under the Flora and Fauna Act. This assumption made the continent Terra Nullius – belonging to no one, and therefore free for the taking. In fact, as we now know the entire continent was fully occupied in a way that eludes us today, by hundreds of different cultures with hundreds of different languages, each with their own Law and a tried and proven way of dealing with their neighbours.
Their demographics and dispositions made sustained physical resistance to the invaders impossible. They could only cope with the European presence by cooperation - cooperation in a way that might allow them to maintain contact with the source of their physical and spiritual nourishment for thousand of years– their land.
In our ignorance and because we didn’t know any better, we Europeans despised them for their passivity. Aggressive, conquering Polynesians were more easily understood and more to our liking. Our response to our Aboriginal people was then, and has been ever since, both patronizing and paternalistic. We have never embraced them in the spirit in which their cooperation was first offered – as equal partners on a nurturing landscape.
At first, the Crown, as represented in the form of the Governors, struggled to balance the interests of the Indigenous people with those of the colonists. But as the European presence pushed over the ranges and as Governors were forced to share more power with the colonists, freehold title began to claim the best pieces of land and the harvesting of the natural resources began to have powerful support from the money backers back in the home country.
It is fair to say the Governors lost control. There was an almost lawless dimension to the way land was taken over by the squatters and the way the traditional owners were dealt with. The discovery of gold added huge momentum to this process, bringing a generation of land hungry adventurers from Scotland and Ireland who began to find their way into the early legislatures. Aboriginal leaders were not represented in this decision making at all – as they are not to this day - and could only stand by and watch as the environment began to change and their culture began to collapse about them.
I think you can understand why some among us would wish to rewrite the history of this period. While it might have been frontier like and bold it was certainly nothing to be proud of in terms of enlightened justice. The Crown provided the only brake on this process and they were too far away from it to be effective. For example, in 1889 the Crown required the colonists to insert a provision in the State Constitution of Western Australia requiring 1 per cent of the State’s revenue to be dedicated to the welfare of the Aboriginal natives. In 1905, the Government of Sir John Forrest repealed the provision. Nearly, 100 years later the High Court of Australia rejected a claim by a handful of desert Aboriginal people that the repeal was illegal and the State should be held accountable.
Federation offered a way of correcting this shortfall in jurisdiction, with the Commonwealth Government and the High Court assuming the role of protector in the administration of justice to the Indigenous people. That is what happened in 1901, and, after more than a century of federal government it is appropriate to survey the scene and ask ourselves how it has worked and is working?
This year we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the referendum decision by the Australian people to embrace Indigenous Australians as citizens with all the rights that entails. We have heard a great deal about the optimism of that time and celebrated the decision as some great turning point in national life.
Almost in the same breath, the Federal Government has launched an expeditionary task force into the Northern Territory to address social dysfunction, including child abuse in Aboriginal communities, while accusing the other states of neglecting their responsibilities and mismanaging the resources that have been allocated to them to address the needs of Indigenous people who live within their boundaries.
It would be easy to accept this action as part of the political theatre of the type that we have become used to every three years as the prelude to federal elections – the blame shifting and arousal of the darker instincts of the electorate – were it not for the fact that it amounts to an admission of a colossal failure of public policy over a century of federation. It has been accompanied by a package of legislation that is costly and enormously coercive in nature and singles out a segment of Australian citizens - based on race - for special attention.
This legislation and action is in fact, part of the scramble that has followed the demise of ATSIC – the controversial Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission that arose out of the social policy agenda of the Federal Labor Party to empower Indigenous people on a regional, state and federal basis. What has replaced it is a top down, bureaucratic construct extending out of Canberra that is philosophically at one with the market forces approach to public policy – that is, that everyone is the same, the user pays and the principal objective is to get everyone off the public purse as quickly as possible – ‘work makes you free’ and assimilation at all costs!
That this approach does not encourage appropriate governance at the local level and is not sympathetic to the actual circumstances or the enormous backlog of needs of Indigenous people should be readily apparent, but it is clearly not. The frustration generated in the minds of its proponents by this reality appears to result in less consultation and more extreme action – hence the Northern Territory Legislation. The complexity of the circumstances of Aboriginal people brought about by an almost total lack of respect for their culture and rights, and neglect caused by a diffusion of responsibility between the states and the Commonwealth since Federation, demands much more than this.
No wonder many Aboriginal people are sick and in a state of alienation. The shame at their inability to fulfill their responsibilities to the land and their ancestors would be enough to do this. Having all power to change their own circumstances taken away from them is disastrous.
Legislating against social malaise is not the answer. Providing true strategic and local leadership that builds pride and self esteem is, and the only way to do this is with Aboriginal participation in the decision making from the bottom up.
Let me explain in more detail what I mean by this by examining our present national circumstances. Where are we after 106 years of federation? It is probably time for us to lift our heads up out of the trough and survey to state of the pig sty anyway.
First of all let me assert that we are now much closer to the centre of global power – or should I say that the centre of gravity of global power is moving rapidly towards us as the economies of Asia begin to grow and become more sophisticated.
At the same time we have become more and more urbanized with our ageing populations concentrating in the estuarine areas of the southwest and southeast. Grey nomads aside, never has the rest of the continent been so empty of human life – approaching a true terra nullius in a way that Aboriginal Australia never did. In WA for example, approximately 70% of the non-Indigenous population live in the Perth metropolitan area, while 70% of the Indigenous population live elsewhere. In the meantime, we are losing much of the fabulous flora and fauna that make up the biodiversity of this continent. Imported vermin of all types flourish in the places that once sustained Aboriginal populations.
While we take some pride in the quality of our service industries, including education and finance, and their capacity to contribute to national wealth, as each day goes by we become more and more dependent on resource extraction for our export income. Most of this comes from the outer states where the imperative to get it out of the ground and onto ships at a minimal price has created an awesome momentum. Much of the profits go overseas of course, but they also power your superannuation and mine, and the royalties are major contributors to the budget surpluses of which our politicians are so proud.
There are many positives of course, but in a macro strategic sense, when compounded by the possibility of significant climate change, all this economic, environmental and demographic distortion represents a serious challenge to the future of our children and even our tenure in this part of the world. If we are going to surmount this challenge we are going to have to reassert our presence across the entirety of in this continent. The primary issue in this is going to be environmental – primarily water. We are going to have to be a lot wiser about this than we have been in the past in places like Kellerberin. We are going to need help.
It is a long bow that I draw here, I admit, but natural resource management has to be the basis of our partnership with Aboriginal people. That would require a true act of national reconciliation first – an admission that we have dealt badly with them and the land, and a national resolve, expressed in legislation, to develop the North on solid principles of sustainability. Secondly, it would require us to reorganize the way we address national development.
Where do the states and the Commonwealth sit in this equation? Their relationship has always been a large part of the problem. The Commonwealth engagement after 1967 allowed the states to step away from the responsibility that surely must have been theirs once Indigenous people became citizens rather than protectees. Building community has to be a state responsibility under our federal constitution, while the Commonwealth Government is about building the nation. I suspect that the Whitlam Government in their strategic vision saw this responsibility being taken up by the regional governments that never came into existence.
What is clear is that you cannot build the sort of partnership that I speak of here from Canberra or from Perth for that matter. It has to be done on a regional basis in accordance with a regional strategy that embraces all aspects of development. This will require Canberra and the state capitals to delegate power and resources to regional structures that enable Aboriginal peoples, Governments, the private sector and the non-government sector to work together in a genuine partnership for their region. There is the long bow for you. Is it possible for leaders in our present circumstances to take strategic initiatives of this magnitude, or do we continue to do it on an expeditionary, crisis management basis?
This is not a black armband view of history that I have put before you. It is the only explanation for a serious canker in our midst that will prevent this nation from fulfilling its destiny. We have long promoted ourselves as an egalitarian society and from time to time have exhorted others to high standards of human behaviour. After the Second World War, and against some odds, our nation played a major role in the establishment of the individual rights dimension of the UN Charter. You can hardly do that if you harbour the sorts of injustices that were practiced in Australia up to 1967. How much stronger is our moral position in the 21st Century?