A Secret Country Read online

  That the first Australians were once again being ‘stuffed around’ and ‘screwed’ was not now of political concern. Aborigines, Ministers would say to their friends in the parliamentary press gallery, were ‘off the agenda’. And this was an agenda set not by the demands of the mining lobby, but by ‘the wishes of the Australian people’. According to Hawke, the blame for the reversal of policy belonged with ‘society’ which was ‘less compassionate’ than it used to be. He regretted this, but legislating national land rights would amount to ‘jumping miles in front of the populace’.37

  Hawke did not say how this lack of compassion had been measured. Shortly after it had endorsed the mining companies’ position on land rights, the Government commissioned an extensive and confidential survey, the result of which was never officially released. A copy of the 64-page report was leaked to Rupert Murdoch’s Australian. Murdoch strongly opposes land rights.

  Beneath a front-page headline, FEW SUPPORT ABORIGINAL LAND RIGHTS, the Australian reported that the study had found that fewer than one in five Australians supported land rights. The paper’s ‘scoop’ was given wide media coverage and quoted by Opposition politicians and by the Minister himself, who appeared to substantiate the published version. ‘It was found’, said Clyde Holding, ‘that many saw Aborigines as a privileged group and that less than 20 per cent had strong feelings of support for Aboriginal people and their aspirations.’38 The implication was clear: the Hawke Government had popular backing for its abandonment of an electoral promise to implement land rights legislation. ‘White backlash’ quickly entered the political and media vocabulary.

  None of this was true. The Australian story was false. The real significance of the Government’s poll and the Australian’s misrepresentation of it was revealed much later, in May 1986, when a copy of the National Opinion Poll’s report was obtained by Eve Fesl, Director of the Aboriginal Research Centre at Monash University and Andrew Markus, lecturer in Australian history at Monash. They wrote:

  The Australian chose not to report, and to our knowledge it has not previously been disclosed, that 56 per cent of the respondents agreed with the proposition that ‘land rights will help Aborigines keep their culture and help the survival of the race’, and 52 per cent agreed that ‘Aborigines should get land rights because it’s important to their way of life’.39

  In other words, the message that the Minister and the Prime Minister received was the opposite of that which the Australian reported and Holding publicly lamented. And although the Australian Press Council subsequently upheld a complaint that the Australian had misled its readers, the Government made no attempt to disassociate itself from such a specious and negative interpretation of its own enquiry, thus helping to create a self-fulfilling atmosphere of distrust, ‘backlash’ and, above all, rejection of Aboriginal rights.

  We white Australians sometimes grow up affecting the role of innocent bystanders in our own country. The past and its price have nothing to do with us. This is understandable when the efforts to suppress our history are taken into account. Consider the Embarrassment of Bingara.

  In 1965 an adventurous Apex club in the small town of Bingara, New South Wales, proposed putting up a monument at the site of the massacre of twenty-eight Aborigines at Myall Creek in 1838. The ‘Myall Creek massacre’ represented the only time whites were convicted and hanged for the murder of blacks. The usual cover-up would have been arranged had it not been for the work of an extraordinary journalist, Edward Smith Hall, editor of the Sydney Monitor. Hall described in his columns how eleven whites had rounded up a group of peaceful Aborigines led by an old man called Daddy. ‘[He was] a man of giant-like structure’, wrote Hall, ‘and probably brave as he was magnificent in his form, the tears rolling down his aged cheeks.’

  At the place chosen for the catastrophe, the slaughter began. All, however, we can glean from the evidence is that two shots were fired. The sword, it would seem, did the rest without noise, except the cries of the victims. Decapitation appears to have been considered the readiest way of despatching them, from the great number of skulls afterwards found.40

  When all the accused were acquitted, Hall, who had little respect for the laws of libel, wrote that their ‘deeds’ had no parallel ‘for cold-blooded ferocity, even in the history of Cortez and the Mexicans, or of Pizarro and the Peruvians’.41 An issue of the Monitor seldom passed without Hall’s fire being aimed at the judge, the jury, the ‘aristocracy’ and the ‘oligarchy’, whose silence on this matter he considered a conspiracy. Finally, a second trial was ordered by the Governor. With the colony in a state of shock, seven of the eleven were hanged.

  Bingara Apex Club’s proposal that these events be acknowledged in stone had something of the spirit of Edward Smith Hall about it. Equally, the response of much of the town, described in the Bingara Gazette as ‘fast approaching apoplexy’, was not dissimilar from the outrage directed against a ‘treacherous’ Hall. In a letter to the Advocate, one J. T. Wearne expressed a peculiarly Australian view of history.

  The whole idea is ill-conceived, unconsidered and mischievous and an insult to the Bingara people. Why should we carry the stigma of an event which occurred 130 years ago and for which not one of us could be held responsible . . . The pity of it is that the Myall Creek massacre was practically forgotten and the great bulk of the people had never even heard of it!42

  Today there is no monument, and the site of the massacre is secured behind a locked gate.

  Drive west from Cooktown in northern Queensland and more of secret Australia unfolds. The bush here is wilder than almost anywhere on the continent: dense tropical vegetation implanted on desert earth. The roads are barely passable, the tracks flooded or blown away, marked by miniature skyscrapers built by ants. It is spine-gutting terrain. As I travelled hundreds of miles across it in 1987, I saw Australia as an Andean society whose historical skeletons were enclosed both by an impenetrable landscape and an impenetrable state of mind. An Aborigine called Sonny Flynn once described the latter as ‘the cult of forgetfulness’.43

  ‘Matchstick’ Matthews was camped with his son and son-in-law near Caulfield’s Lagoon on the Palmer river. Matchstick is a spacious man beneath a spacious hat. He has a middle tooth and a middle finger missing and a brace of shotguns in the back of his truck. ‘This place is running with crocs,’ he said. ‘You’re not supposed to shoot the bastards, but what do you do . . . invite them over for a beer?’

  Matchstick and his small clan are from a sepia image of the nineteenth century. In the life they lead and the work they do – clearing the land – they are not much different from the pioneers. There is, however, the difference of a satellite dish, which, says Matchstick, has brought disillusionment.

  ‘All you get out here is the bloody ABC and Pommy stuff,’ he lamented. ‘Rumpole of the Bailey and bloody EastEnders. I hate that EastEnders, mate. But I watch it. That’s what gets me. I hate it and I watch it!’

  I asked Matchstick about Caulfield’s Lagoon. ‘Murdering Lagoon is its name,’ he said, ‘that’s what we call it. Everybody’s known for years what went on over there. But you don’t say about it. You don’t say a word.’

  I asked why. ‘I dunno. You just don’t, mate. People get shitty if you talk about it . . . not a way to make mates. The boys and me pulled a bus load of Japs out of the mud over there a few weeks ago. Christ knows where they’d come from. Japs and a bus! . . . Can you believe it? I’m not pulling the next one out, mate. They should leave this place, just leave us.’

  At sunrise on November 6, 1873 a posse of Government officials and gold miners hunted between 80 and 150 Aborigines along the Palmer river. They shot them all and left the bodies floating in Caulfield’s Lagoon. Voices were raised in protest; but no one was punished. Nor did white scholarship ‘confirm’ what had happened until 1984 when a postgraduate student researching a thesis about the Palmer river gold fields came upon information previously overlooked, or ignored.44 Throughout Australia other killing fields
await ‘confirmation’.

  The truth is that only when whites get to know Aboriginal people, and win their confidence, do they learn something about the scale and consistency of violence inflicted upon their black compatriots. An Aboriginal friend remembers his mother being tied to a veranda post, awaiting the visits of a white man who abused her and his sister repeatedly. No one was punished. Another friend, a lawyer, remembers an uncle shot dead by a policeman in a railway yard. No one was punished. Another described the decimation of his grandparents’ family for ‘cattle stealing’, and the murder of an aunt at her front door. I know of other such stories; the most common is of violent death while in police custody.

  White silence is the other component. How many white policemen, lawyers, magistrates and ordinary citizens knew about these atrocities and did nothing? How many reporters knew and wrote nothing? How many editors had an unwritten policy on ‘Abos’ and would publish nothing that cast doubt on the racial and moral superiority of the majority? The press, I often heard it argued, could not publish ‘rumours’.

  Today these stories are no longer rumours. Aboriginal deaths in police custody have become a public issue in Australia; and what is finally done about it will say much about the development of Australian civilisation. In 1989 a Royal Commission was enquiring into at least 105 unexplained deaths in police and prison cells; and every few weeks yet another death was added to the list. If white people were dying in a similar ratio, the death toll would be 8,000 in eight years.45 As Australian governments of the 1980s have claimed the moral right to censure South Africa, the rate of imprisonment of blacks in Australia has risen to at least as high a level as in South Africa and the rate of deaths in custody is thirteen times higher than in South Africa.46

  In 1987 the London-based Anti-Slavery Society, a leader of the emancipation movement since 1839, published a report about Australia. It was written by Dr Julian Burger, a world authority on the struggles of indigenous peoples. Aboriginal deaths in police custody, wrote Dr Burger, occurred mostly in lock-ups in small country towns where ‘the atmosphere is closer to that of the USA’s Deep South with its history of slavery, than to the Canberra-promoted image of a multicultural society’, and ‘victimisation at the hands of the police is not the result of one or two individual policemen but an apparent policy aimed at terrorising the Aboriginal community’.47 The report gave the following examples. One-third of all Aborigines in South Australia were arrested during a six-month period. Every Aboriginal man, woman and child in the town of Roebourne, Western Australia, experiences arrest at the rate of three a year. Moreover, this is part of a national pattern.48

  In northern Queensland the lock-ups are known as ‘hell holes’. At Wujal Wujal up to twenty-seven Aborigines have been forced into a space eight feet by four feet, without light, water, bedding or a lavatory. On March 29, 1987, a young black stockman was found hanging by a pair of football socks from a bar in the cell window. When no more prisoners can be jammed into the cell, they are locked in a small yellow police van called ‘the monkey cage’.49

  Few white Australians can comprehend the anxiety of a black person living in a small country town. Young blacks are stopped and searched by police, and their names taken, as a matter of almost daily routine. If Aboriginal organisations arrange a social event, the police are likely to turn up and make arrests on any pretext. A youth worker with the Department of Community Development in Alice Springs found that up to 85 per cent of black children he had seen in the courts had been ‘bashed’ by police. Complaints by Aborigines, including children, against the police have been largely ignored. Only in one State, Victoria, is there an independent police complaints authority.50

  Eddie Murray was twenty-one when he was last arrested. Eddie lived in Wee Waa, New South Wales, where his family was well respected in the black community. His father, Arthur, was a member of the Aboriginal Advancement Council, and in 1981 Eddie was selected to tour New Zealand as a star player with the Redfern All Blacks Rugby team. He was, said Arthur, ‘a spirited, happy-go-lucky boy with everything to live for’.51 Eddie’s ‘spirit’ guaranteed that he saw a lot of the police.

  The imposing police station at Wee Waa, known to locals as the ‘Opera House’, was built in the early 1970s when large numbers of Aborigines migrated to Wee Waa seeking work in the cotton fields. ‘There was a nine o’clock curfew for blacks then,’ one of them recalled, ‘and the whites used to sell blacks metho [methylated spirits] on ice in the liquor store.’52

  On June 21, 1981 Eddie Murray was drinking under a tree with his cousin Donny and some friends. (Steel pegs were embedded in the tree, which Aborigines used to shin up to see if the police were coming.) Eddie was arrested at 1.45 p.m. and taken to Wee Waa police station. He was held under the Intoxicated Persons Act, a law used overwhelmingly against Aborigines. Within the hour he was dead, strangled with a blanket in his cell, his feet on the ground.

  At the inquest five months later the police claimed Eddie had killed himself by hanging, even though his blood alcohollevel at the time of death was 0.3 per cent. Under cross-examination, the police agreed that Eddie was ‘so drunk he couldn’t scratch himself’. Yet according to them, Eddie had managed to tear a strip off a thick prison blanket, deftly fold it, thread it through the bars of the ventilation window, tie two knots, fashion a noose and hang himself without his feet leaving the ground.

  One policeman gave evidence that he had been off duty that day, then admitted he had lied when four Aboriginal witnesses identified him as one of those in the police van that took Eddie away. The inquest was also told about serious discrepancies in police notebooks, with dates appearing out of sequence and an absence of records altogether, except for a highly detailed record of events of June 21: the day of Eddie’s arrest and death. The coroner found that Eddie Murray had died ‘at the hands of person or persons unknown’. He said there was no evidence that Eddie had taken his own life and he strongly criticised the police. And that was that.

  When I met Arthur and Leila Murray, it was six years to the day since Eddie’s death. Arthur gripped a wedge of documents, including his many requests for the case of his son’s unexplained death to be re-opened. He produced letters from three New South Wales Attorney-Generals, who either passed him on to another official or expressed no dissatisfaction with the public enquiry.53

  ‘You know how it all began?’ said Arthur. ‘Eddie’s sister was trying to give back some rotten food to a take-away shop. That’s what they do to us all the time, you know. There was an argument and her husband was arrested by the police. Well, Eddie witnessed this and gave evidence for them, and they were acquitted . . .’

  When the Murrays went to the morgue to identify their son’s body, they could not find any of the clothing he had on that day. ‘Those clothes were never found,’ said Arthur Murray, ‘I wrote again and again to get them from the hospital. There could have been evidence on them that Eddie was killed, then taken to the police station and strung up. We haven’t got an answer to these questions yet. We want an answer . . .’

  Leila interrupted, ‘They’re killing Aboriginal people . . . just killing them.’54

  After Eddie’s death, and his parents’ attempts to find answers, many in the Wee Waa black community took fright. The Murrays were ‘trouble makers’. Arthur was voted off the Aboriginal Advancement Council. ‘It bloody hurt us’, said Arthur, ‘and it’s still hurtin’ us today. The up-town niggers thought we were causing trouble. Up-town niggers are black but they’re white. The whites and Aboriginal people thought we had stirred up trouble and wanted us out of town. Whites would come to the front of our home with guns. They threatened my wife and other members of our family.

  ‘If I was caught in the street after dark, I would get a hidin’, which I got on a number of occasions, by the whites and up-town niggers. I’ve still got photos of me afterwards. The kids were hassled at the school by white kids.

  ‘In March 1983, we left Wee Waa and settled in Dubbo. A barrister wh
o was involved in Eddie’s inquest told us that it would be best if we left because of all the problems, the worry and the threats. I thought the day before we left that maybe we were running away, giving up.

  ‘It took about three weeks for my wife to pack our things. We were ready to come over to Dubbo and the police came and stood outside the front of the house on the day before we left. They were looking for some stolen goods. We don’t know what was stolen but they [the police] were informed that we had something we shouldn’t and they knew that we were movin’ . . . They pulled out all of the crockery and stuff that my wife had packed, clothing and different private property that we own. They ransacked it and when they couldn’t find the things they were looking for, they called on some extra police officers to come and look.

  ‘I drink a lot now. I couldn’t drink after Eddie’s death because I was on medication, which kept me drowsy and I couldn’t think about anything like meetings with land councils – just Eddie’s death. I was just drugged out. I was just walkin’ around like a zombie . . . I drink more now when I think about how we lost him.’55

  Shortly after they moved away from Wee Waa, the Murrays’ eldest daughter was brought home in the back of a police van. She was bleeding and had been assaulted. In 1987 their youngest daughter, aged seventeen, was arrested and imprisoned without her parents being told. In August 1988 their eldest son was placed on a kidney machine after two policemen had assaulted him.56

  John Pat, aged seventeen, died in 1983 in Broome, Western Australia. He had gone to the aid of a friend who was involved in a fight with five off-duty policemen. Witnesses at the inquest said they had seen him kicked in the head after he had lost consciousness, ‘like a dog’. Other witnesses, who lived overlooking the lock-up, said the police repeatedly assaulted John Pat after pulling him unconscious from the van. He was left in a cell and no doctor was called. He died from extensive head wounds; and he had broken ribs and a tear in his aorta, the main blood vessel leading from the heart.