A Secret Country Read online

  In 1957, after a campaign by his white supporters, Albert Namatjira was made a citizen of Australia. Politicians and editorial writers rejoiced in the wisdom of this ‘ultimate accolade’. Unlike the rest of his people, he now would be counted in the census and allowed to vote. Unlike the rest of his people, he could move about Australia without official permission; and he could buy and drink alcohol. A letter from the Governor-General, representing the Queen, ordained him a free man. His wife, Rubina, was also made a citizen. But their children were not. There were limits.

  In 1958, a woman was killed by her husband at the Namatjira camp at Selly Oak. The man had been drinking heavily and Albert was named as the source of the booze. He was taken to Alice Springs and charged with supplying alcohol to an Aborigine; and the monstrous irony of that failed to deter a magistrate from handing down a gaol sentence of six months. His appeal to the Supreme Court was dismissed. The Federal Minister for the Territories intervened, not to free him but to send him to a ‘native settlement’: an Aboriginal concentration camp with a reputedly benign regime, where his sentence was shortened to two months ‘for good behaviour’.

  During this period of ‘good behaviour’, Albert Namatjira lost his will to paint and to live. He never painted again. Shortly after his release in August 1959 he suffered a heart attack and died.24

  In 1969 I returned to Alice Springs. The print of Albert Namatjira’s ‘Jay Creek Country’ was missing from above the hotel’s reception desk. The decorative beer mats now framed an out-of-focus colour photograph of crumpled faces at a New Year’s Eve party. The sodden carpet had been replaced by vinyl. The smell of beer and disinfectant remained.

  I hired a Ford Falcon and, with Charlie Perkins and his mother Hetti, headed for Jay Creek. Hetti, whom Charlie described as a queen of the Aranda people, gave birth to him on a table in the Alice Springs Telegraph Office in 1934. As a ‘half caste’ Charlie was ‘protected’ by the authorities from ‘full bloods’, so that he might be ‘assimilated’. He remembers his grandmother only as a face behind the wire of the ‘native settlement’ in which she was effectively interned. His brother killed himself. Charlie was sent to a mission school in Adelaide and thereafter to Sydney, where he distinguished himself as Australia’s first Aboriginal university graduate. In 1965 he and white students, emulating the ‘freedom riders’ of the civil rights movement in the United States, descended upon towns in New South Wales demanding an end to segregation.

  In the 1960s Moree, New South Wales, might have been Selma, Alabama. Life was divided racially at virtually every level. At the public swimming pool, where black children were banned, Perkins and his freedom riders were confronted by an angry white crowd. ‘I thought we’d had it,’ he said. ‘Then this black woman stepped forward and made a courageous speech in which she pointed to a white man who had gone secretly with black women and had fathered black children. “Tell your wives what you’ve been doing, you bludgers,” she said. “Go on, they’re just over there: tell ’em!” That evening black children were allowed into the pool for the first time.’

  We drove to the Santa Teresa Mission and filled our water bags, which we clipped to the front bumper. The carcass of a truck marked the turn off to Jay Creek. Mulga grew along the wire fence and a large yellow sign sanctified by the ‘Commonwealth Government, Department of the Interior’ warned that written permission was required before entering the ‘reserve’ and ‘trespassers WILL be prosecuted’. There was one ragged gate, held by a wire loop. Charlie and Hetti, whose people had been here longer than the Department of the Interior, agreed that it made no sense to drive back to Alice to await a permit which might not come. So I reversed the Falcon, revved it and drove it at the gate, which exploded in a zephyr of rust. ‘Cripes,’ chuckled Hetti, whose large black hat came off in the process.

  About three hundred Aboriginal people lived in the camp, in dead cars and under shelters of leaves and newspapers stiff with flies and what flies had left. The white administrator had complete authority over their lives. He could divide families by sending ‘trouble makers’ into the bush and children to ‘homes’ in the cities from which they would never return. As punishment he could withhold food and water and confiscate money and personal possessions. Here Aborigines were being ‘phased into society’ by way of an iron shed, a prototype of which was on display behind the garbage dump. ‘They’ll be house-broken in that,’ said the administrator, adding ruefully that no one wanted to live in it because it was either too hot or too cold. The next stage of ‘phasing’ would be an improvement: a ‘modern structure with all mod cons’, including floors of concrete and running water. The plans for that had yet to arrive. Whatever they were, said the administrator, ‘it’ll be done on the cheap’.

  On the way back to Alice Springs we stopped at the Palms. Against the skyline it looked like a village built entirely of lavatories. Charlie described it as an Aboriginal ‘pensioners’ camp’. The nearest store was four miles away, to which the old people had to walk for tea and sugar and tins of Tom Piper’s Irish stew. The store was leased by a white man known as the Pig, who swatted flies in the half-light and charged exorbitant prices and was rude whenever people approached him. ‘Mind you,’ said Hetti, ‘the bastard might be deaf.’

  In 1837 a House of Commons Select Committee completed hearings about the conditions of native peoples in the British colonies. Only one people was found to have been denied absolutely the right of prior ownership of their land: the Australian Aborigines. The Select Committee’s Report demonstrated that terra nullius, empty land, was an absurdity, a legal fiction. The first Australians had ‘an incontrovertible right to their own soil, a plain and sacred right, however, which seems not to have been understood . . . The land has been taken from them without the assertion of any other title other than that of superior force.’25

  The modern Aboriginal land rights movement began in 1966 when the Gurindji people went on strike at the world’s biggest cattle station at Wave Hill, north of Alice Springs. They were protesting against subsistence wages and poor conditions. Instead of returning to work, as expected, they camped on what they regarded as their land and in defiance of their employers, the English pastoral conglomerate headed by Lord Vestey.

  It came as something of an embarrassment to white trade unions, proud of their legal, minimum wage, to learn that highly skilled stockmen were paid a few dollars a week, plus a few sacks of flour, sugar and tea, and suffered living conditions no better than those provided for the station’s dogs. A national campaign formed behind the Gurindji; but Vestey’s refused to acknowledge their grievances. As the strike wore on, Aboriginal demands changed radically, so that the call was no longer for improved pay and working conditions but for land rights and self-determination.26

  The Gurindji’s stand had a chain reaction. The Yirrkala people instructed lawyers to challenge the British common law interpretation of terra nullius. It failed; but Aboriginal activism now grew quickly. In 1972 Aborigines set up a ‘tent embassy’ outside Parliament House in Canberra and flew a flag of red, yellow and black denoting earth, sun and people. For the first time world attention was drawn to a cause few outside Australia had known about. Gough Whitlam, then leader of the opposition Labor Party, was invited into the tent by Aboriginal representatives and joined them in an historic meeting to negotiate terms for national land rights and human rights.

  Shortly after he became Prime Minister in December of that year, Whitlam commissioned a land rights enquiry by a judge, Justice A. E. Woodward. The Woodward Commission recommended legislation to give back to Aboriginal people those parts of Australia where they now lived and had traditionally lived and which for them had spiritual importance. None of these rights was to be taken away without consent, and mining and other development should not take place on Aboriginal land without permission of the Aboriginal owners.27

  In 1975 an Aboriginal Land Rights Act was drafted by the Whitlam Government. It was to be applied at first in the Northern Territory,
which did not have statehood and was run directly by the Federal Government. In August that year Whitlam took a handful of soil and slowly poured the grains into the hands of Vincent Lingiari, a leader of the Gurindji people. The Government gave back to the Gurindji some 1,250 square miles. ‘The people of Australia’, said Whitlam, ‘are finally restoring this land to you and your children for ever.’28

  Three months later the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, dismissed the Whitlam Government in sensational circumstances, which are dealt with in Chapter 5. The following year a conservative coalition Government,fn1 led by Malcolm Fraser, introduced a version of Labor’s land rights legislation. The Act gave freehold, ‘inalienable’ title to the land to Aboriginal communities living on ‘reserves’ in the Northern Territory, and to traditional owners the right to withhold consent for mining and development and to negotiate the terms and conditions of entry. Aboriginal land councils were set up to act on behalf of their new owners. A Supreme Court judge was appointed as Land Commissioner to hear Aboriginal claims for land.29 Together with similar laws enacted by the State Labor Government in South Australia, it was a beginning.

  But there was a catch. Virtually all the ‘inalienable’ land handed back was arid wilderness. The richest, most productive land, amounting to more than half the land of the Northern Territory, was leased to cattle owners, who represent 0.1 per cent of the population.

  By the mid-1970s world tourism had found Alice Springs. Muzak-contaminated hotels and shopping malls were built. An ‘international beerfest’ was proclaimed. An ordinance banning the drinking of alcohol within two kilometres of ‘licensed premises’ ensured that blacks filled the police cells as they drank mostly in the open. The only Aborigines many tourists were likely to see on Fridays and Saturdays were those represented in fibreglass in a ‘tourist complex’, built like a McDonald’s hamburger concession and announcing itself as ‘the world’s biggest dreamtime . . . an experience not to be missed’.

  No tourists were taken to the Palms, where many of the old people continued to defy their life expectancy of forty-eight years: an age beyond which most Aborigines do not survive and which is twenty-five years less than the life expectancy of whites. When I saw the Palms a second time, it was flooded and the mud lay in the lavatory-style shelters, almost up to the level of the beds. However, the sheds had been painted bright pink, a benefit arising from emancipation.

  A cousin of Albert Namatjira told me that most of Albert’s seven sons and daughters had died ‘from the usual business’, which meant respiratory and intestinal infection, but that Oscar was still alive. When one of her daughters died, Rubina, Albert’s widow, had ‘sung’ herself to death. I went to Alice Springs cemetery, hoping to take a photograph of her grave; but it was unmarked.

  In the State of Queensland, officially a ‘tourist paradise’, the Aboriginal cemeteries are widespread, yet difficult to find. The cemetery on Palm Island is a case in point. Palm is one of the most beautiful islands on the Great Barrier Reef, yet few outsiders take the short flight from Townsville. Established in 1918 as a detention camp for Aboriginal men, women and children convicted of such ‘crimes’ as homelessness, rebelliousness and drunkenness, Palm Island has changed on the surface. While people are free to come and go, overcrowding, malnutrition, alcoholism and a plethora of other diseases remain. When I first went to Palm Island in 1980 an epidemic of gastro-enteritis had hospitalised 130 people. Two years later two researchers discovered in the records of the Queensland Health Department that Aboriginal deaths from common, infectious diseases were up to 300 times higher than the white average and among the highest in the world.30 In Palm Island’s cemetery, overlooking waves breaking gently on the Barrier Reef, many of the headstones bear the names of children.

  Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen retired as Premier of Queensland in 1987, having ruled the State for more years than many Queenslanders can or care to remember. He did this largely by gerrymandering, by moving electoral boundaries; and he did it with cronies, many of whom controlled Queensland’s business life. When the American rights campaigner Ralph Nader visited Queensland, he found laws restricting public protest so repressive that he said they would not be tolerated in Alabama.31 Indeed, Sir Johannes was to Australian blacks what George Wallace had been to American blacks in Alabama. He offered them the destruction of their lands by mining companies, and unemployment, child poverty and disease. In 1977 he personally stopped an anti-trachoma programme in Queensland when he learned that the medical teams were explaining to Aborigines their political rights.

  Under a State law passed in 1984 many Aborigines in Queensland are banned from voting for the local government in which their ‘reserve’ is situated.32 Just as the American southern Governors represented themselves as champions of ‘State rights’, the code words for keeping the blacks in their place, so Bjelke-Petersen pursued a similar strategy and dared the Federal Government to challenge the sovereignty of his domain. And therein lay an Australian tragedy.

  The 1967 referendum had given the Federal Government unfettered power to legislate justice for Aboriginal people wherever they lived; and more than a quarter of the Aboriginal population lived in Queensland. Since Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975, no national Government had met Bjelke-Petersen’s challenge. This was to change in 1983 when Labor was returned to power. The new Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Clyde Holding, a close friend of Prime Minister Hawke, compared white Australia’s crimes against the indigenous people with Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. ‘What we’ve got to face as a nation and we haven’t faced yet’, he said, ‘is that the occupation of this vast island continent was a pretty brutal and genocidal occupation.’ A national land rights policy, one which applied equal justice to every State, was the ‘only restitution’.33 In 1984 the Labor Party adopted a land rights programme which ‘solemnly pledges’ to finish that which the Whitlam Government began. Aborigines were to have a veto over all exploitation of land handed back to them. Australia was not South Africa. The first and third worlds would be reconciled in Australia.

  Almost immediately the mining companies launched a multi-million dollar spoiling campaign centred in Western Australia, the ‘Texas of Australia’, a State rich in minerals and dominated by a few transnational companies: a State with the longest record of brutality towards Aborigines. A television and newspaper campaign appealed directly to white racism. A black wall was depicted dividing the State, and the message was clear enough: the small suburban plot of ‘the ordinary Aussie’ was threatened by Aboriginal land claims. This was false; only ‘inalienable’ and Crown land would be subject to land claims. What was threatened was the mining companies’ power to exploit virtually all the land they wanted and to accrue and expatriate huge profits.

  An election was due in Western Australia. The mining lobby made clear to the State Labor Government that a national land rights policy would present a serious obstacle to its own re-election. The Premier, Brian Burke, listened, then phoned Bob Hawke, who had just called a federal election for the following December.

  On October 18, Burke met Hawke in Perth and told him that not only the State Government but several Labor Senate seats were vulnerable to the anti-land rights campaign. Hawke acted. In announcing that the Federal Government would not insist on an Aboriginal having a veto over mining, he withdrew the most fundamental right laid down in the proposed land rights legislation: security of tenure. He then fell silent. Not once during his re-election campaign did he or his Minister address the racial shibboleths and lies spread successfully by the mining companies.

  The mining lobby’s most persuasive propaganda had centred upon the ‘fact’ that land rights legislation in the Northern Territory had so seriously impeded mining exploration that the national interest was threatened. The evidence for this was one astonishing statistic: in 1983–4 money spent on exploration was down by no less than 60 per cent on the previous year. In using this figure, the former Director of the Australian Mining Industry Council, James Stron
g, said, ‘The terms upon which large areas of land in the Northern Territory have been granted to Aboriginal ownership . . . have had a severe and harmful effect on the industry which constitutes one of the largest revenue earners for the Northern Territory.’34

  The figure was incorrect. The mining companies had supplied misleading information to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which had released it without verifying it. In fact, exploration was down by an insignificant 5 per cent. When the Bureau admitted its error in March 1985, only Australian Society, a monthly, published the correction.35

  Hawke was re-elected; and contrary to his Party’s commitment and the constitutional responsibilities conferred on his Government by the 1967 referendum, he effectively returned the rights of most Aboriginal people to the State governments. This meant that in Western Australia and Queensland Aborigines remained bound to life-destroying ‘reserves’ and in New South Wales dispossessed on the fringes of towns and in Tasmania without recognition that they existed at all.

  The betrayal was exemplified by a meeting between the Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Clyde Holding, and the newly appointed Minister for Resources and Energy, Gareth Evans. The National Times reported:

  Evans put [to Holding] what he described as ‘the three s’s’, the issues which had to be accepted.

  These were that exploration and mining should not be stopped on Aboriginal land, that explorers and miners should not be unreasonably ‘stuffed around’ by poor administrative procedures for dealing with applications to explore for and develop mineral projects and that miners should not be ‘screwed’ by unreasonable claims for compensation and royalty payments to Aboriginal communities.36