A Secret Country Read online

  The five policemen were sent to trial for murder, but the charge was later changed to manslaughter. They were acquitted and reinstated to the police force. The Aborigines arrested with John Pat were convicted of aggravated assault against the police and sent to prison. They are scarred from their beatings.

  When the news got around Brewarrina, New South Wales, that Lloyd Boney had been found hanging by a sock in the police lock-up, the Aboriginal community rose up. Lloyd Boney’s friends described him as ‘paralytic’ with drink when he was arrested and, like Eddie Murray, incapable of killing himself; and with no motive to do so.

  On the morning of August 16, 1987 Lloyd Boney, aged twenty-eight, was buried in Brewarrina Cemetery, with his football team forming a guard of honour. He was the sixteenth Aborigine to die in police custody within eight months. His aunt, Priscilla, who had looked after him since he was an infant, had to be carried away from the graveside. They had lived in a tiny house beside the river, which had walls of asbestos and a tin roof, with tyres and bricks on it to secure it during a big wind. Despite this, and the lack of sanitation, it was neat and clean and there was a small garden in front.

  That evening there were few whites on the streets of Brewarrina. Up from the river marched Aborigines to the Brewarrina Hotel, which, they said, refused to serve blacks. They hurled beer kegs and bottles, smashing windows. Riot police were called and at first were beaten back. The New South Wales Police Minister said on television that violence by blacks ‘will only cause more harm to their cause’. The local National Party candidate, who was also town coroner, accused the Sydney media of causing ‘racial disharmony’ and ‘stirring up’ the Aboriginal community.57

  In the crowd was Arthur Murray, who happened to be in Brewarrina visiting his dying mother. He had attended the funeral of Lloyd Boney who, like his son Eddie, had died violently in police custody. Arthur was charged with assaulting a policeman. At his trial a Sydney journalist, Tony Hewett, gave evidence that Arthur had been well away from the incident. An all white jury found him guilty and sentenced him to 18 months’ prison. I was one of Arthur’s character witnesses. I wrote to the court that I had known him to be a kind and decent man, indeed courageous in the terrible circumstances of his life, a man who mediated rather than initiated conflict. At the time of writing, Arthur’s appeal to the Supreme Court in Sydney is pending.

  As Brewarrina was about to erupt, the Hawke Government appointed a Royal Commission of Enquiry into Aboriginal deaths in custody. Four years had passed since the Government was first pressed to do something. In December 1988 the Commission published an interim report in which it recommended that police investigating the death of Aborigines in custody should presume homicide, not suicide, that public drunkenness should be abolished as an offence and police and prison officer recruits should be vetted to eliminate racists. And yet the Commission studiously ignored the likelihood that a considerable number of Aborigines were murdered by police and prison officers.

  The Federal Justice Minister replied that most of the recommendations were the responsibility of State governments. The Queensland Government immediately denied its police force was racist. The Western Australian Government said that it would support a challenge by its police to the validity of the Commission itself. These two States have the worst reputations for brutality against Aborigines.

  In April, 1991 – three weeks after Arthur Murray was sent away – the Royal Commission delivered its final report. There was a familiar echo in the remarks of the Chief Commissioner, Elliott Johnston. ‘I had no conception’, he said, ‘of the degree of pin-pricking domination, abuse of personal power, utter paternalism, open contempt and total indifference with which so many Aboriginal people were visited on a day-to-day basis’.58

  So spoke, once again, the Innocent Bystander. The Royal Commission made 339 recommendations, such as that arrest ought to be ‘the sanction of last resort’ and that the police should ‘exercise greater impartiality’. There was no call for criminal charges and not a single conclusion of foul play in cases that went back nine years. The Commission did not address itself to widespread police cover-ups. It referred in passing to the critical importance of land rights, as did another Royal Commission 16 years earlier.

  Once again, said Paul Coe, chairman of the National Aboriginal and Islander Legal Service Secretariat, ‘Aboriginal people will feel they have been betrayed’. He pointed out that the Commission had merely recommended that the changes in policing, education and poverty should be left with ‘those same state governments that have been the main oppressors of Aboriginal people’.59

  The Commission found that John Pat – whose death had become for Aboriginal people a symbol of injustice and oppression had died as a result of a head injury he had suffered during a fight started by the ‘ill-advised, unprofessional and provocative’ actions of an off-duty police officer. Referring to Pat’s suspicious fall from a police van, Commissioner Johnston said, ‘I do not accept as necessarily true much of the evidence of the officers relating to this incident’.60 He recommended no action.

  The Australian Government, said Prime Minister Hawke, ‘has committed itself to ensuring that there is a co-ordinated and comprehensive national response to the Royal Commission’s final report’.61 Five months later it was disclosed that the number of Aborigines in New South Wales prisons had risen by 72 per cent.62 There have since been other similar revelations. So far, as a result of the Commission’s findings, only one person has been charged and convicted. A prison officer in western Australia was found guilty of a breach of prison regulations. He was fined $A50 and returned to work.63 Black Australians continue to die in custody on average about one death every fourteen days.

  These deaths have discomfited many Australians. It is not widely appreciated that they are not a new phenomenon, but the latest in a litany of physical, political and cultural brutality which has continued, uninterrupted, since January 26, 1788.

  In the winter of 1987 I returned to Alice Springs with film makers Alan Lowery and Alec Morgan. We looked for the family of Albert Namatjira and found them living beside an abattoir, two miles from the land Albert had not been permitted to buy. They were there under sufferance of the Northern Territory Lands Department, in tenuous possession of one tree and four tin outhouses. It was terribly cold. When the wind kicked up the red dirt, it stung those at ground level. Reg, son of Oscar and grandson of Albert, wore his woollen hat almost down to his neck as he sat cross-legged and painted.

  Then an ambulance arrived. Two white nurses, in crisp white uniforms, lifted out a frail old black man and led him to a place on the dirt between Reg and the dogs. One of the nurses patted the old man on the head and said, ‘See you Tuesday.’ They had delivered Oscar ‘home’ for a few days. The night before they had found him climbing out of the window of a nursing home, trying to make his way back to the camp. Now he squatted and nodded approval when Reg repeated his words of twenty years before: ‘How long do you reckon we’ll have to wait for a bit of a decent place to live?’

  Son and grandson of the great Albert remain in abject poverty – as do some 5,000 Aboriginal artists in the Northern Territory, even though their art has an estimated market value of $A5 million. In 1988, with Australia fashionable in the United States, the owner of a Los Angeles gallery visited the Northern Territory and took away Aboriginal art worth $A52,600 for a special exhibition. She also commissioned a series of bark paintings, but later cancelled the order, complaining that the artists’ prices, between $A60 and $A750 an item, were too high. When the Los Angeles exhibition opened, its prices amounted to $A650,000. Aboriginal artists like Reg Namatjira earn an average of $A700 a year, on which subsistence is not possible.64

  I drove west from Alice to the former mission at Hermannsburg. ‘Blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it,’ warned an inscription, dated September 21, 1896, on the small sandstone church. Although few Aborigines were thus blessed, the remains of the settlement, with the bones of a ‘
T’ Model Ford at its centre, offer a testimonial to the stoicism of the Lutherans. Here, encased in woollen suits and high collars, they performed such fated tasks as translating the New Testament into the language of the Aranda, a people whose own God predated Jesus Christ by thousands of years and require no such manual: only land.

  Since the Northern Territory Land Rights Act in 1976, Hermannsburg has been owned by its 700 former residents. Three-quarters of the people, mostly stockmen, have set up ‘outstations’ – cattle ranches – where they are self-supporting and can lead a modified traditional life, free from the dependencies of alcohol and ‘the welfare’.

  Wallace Rockhole outstation is run by Barry Abbott, his cousin Mark, and their relatives. They broke even in 1987 and could afford to hire a helicopter for the muster. They wear checked shirts, wide hats and Western boots and drive Toyota trucks, which discharge at full volume the plaints of Glen Campbell and Dolly Parton. Theirs is a familiar style and swagger. It is one of Australia’s hidden ironies that its finest cowboys are black.

  The confidence of people in the outstation movement represents something new and profound in the Aboriginal world: renaissance. Aboriginal population figures reflect this indirectly. Between 1982 and 1987 the number of Aborigines increased from 160,000 to more than 227,000, an astonishing rise of more than 42 per cent. Although the black birth rate is twice that of the white, this alone does not account for the increase. The truth is that many Australians are now proud to declare themselves Aborigines.

  Whites have grown used to drawing patronising distinctions between full-blooded Aborigines and those of mixed parentage. ‘Half caste’ and ‘quarter caste’ are terms of derision. Although there are important differences between, say, the urban young and the more conservative tribal Aborigines, all Aborigines, regardless of their background and shade of skin, consider themselves one people with a common culture and struggle for survival.65 In recent years this long-suppressed sense of nationhood has found, against the odds, renewed and vibrant expression. With the establishment in the 1970s of the first Aboriginal medical and legal services, and land councils based on the traditional structure of the clans and linguistic groups, Aboriginal unity and self assertion have grown steadily.

  On a frosty autumn morning in 1985 hundreds of tribal Aborigines converged on Canberra to join up with their paler cousins from the cities. Such a momentous event had never happened before. Stewart Harris was one of the few white journalists who reported it. Moved by what he saw, he wrote:

  As I stood with them at their rally last Monday and then walked to Parlt House for their emotional meeting on its steps, I sensed that an Aboriginal nation was being born. The tribes and clans of the people who owned Australia before 1788 have become united in the past decade as never before.

  Their growing unity has been the result of a common experience of frustrated expectation. There is, for the first time, a political awareness which is broadly based . . . For the first time I saw tribal elders and old women from the Centre and the North confidently using hand microphones to speak their minds in their own languages and also in English. They were sharing the opportunity with Aborigines from the south and east, whom they used to call ‘yeller fellers’. It was very moving to see the evidence of this and, for all Australians, the whole week should have been instructive.66

  The Australian Broadcasting Corporation thought otherwise and ignored it on television. Apart from Stewart Harris’s reporting, there was little opportunity for public understanding of such a momentous meeting.

  The renaissance has not needed white backing or white approval. It has come from within, from the notion and spirit of ‘Aboriginality’ and has had a momentum of its own. It is also intensely political. Since Victor Lingiari and the Gurindji made their stand, and Charlie Perkins set out with the freedom riders, Aboriginal Australians have produced some of the most sophisticated political activists anywhere. Among them are Paul Coe, founder of the Aboriginal Legal Services, who has put the Aboriginal case before the United Nations; Marcia Langton of the Central Lands Council, who has argued that land and human rights are indivisible; Galarrwuy Yunupingu, who at the age of fifteen helped his father draft the first major land claim, written on bark and sent to Parliament, and twenty years later negotiated uranium rights for his people; Bob Riley, like many Aborigines stolen from his mother at the age of twelve, who became the eloquent chairperson of the National Aboriginal Conference; Michael Mansell from Tasmania, whose intellect and flair have unnerved politicians; Helen Corbett, chairperson of the Committee to Defend Black Rights, who has fought for justice for the families of those killed in police custody; Mick Miller, a Queensland teacher who has conducted an often lonely political struggle in Australia’s ‘deep north’; Gary Foley, whose understanding of the common strands between urban black Australians and those in the bush has made him an enduring, effective voice of his people. And many more. Such a list must be arbitrary.

  One man who personifies the renaissance is Pat Dodson, whose quiet anger and generosity, issuing from his fine, bushy head, leave few unmoved. A descendant of the Yaoro people in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, Pat was one of seven children who were orphaned when he was ten years old. Sent to a Catholic missionary school, he was ordained, at the age of twenty-seven, the first Aboriginal Catholic priest. But, as so often happened, his Aboriginality conflicted with his Christianity, specifically with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Put in charge of a mission south of Darwin, he was criticised for introducing reforms which restored Aboriginal ceremonials and placed them within a Christian context. He left the priesthood in 1981 and joined the land rights movement as national co-ordinator of the Federation of Land Councils.

  When I met Pat Dodson in Alice Springs in 1987, I asked him to explain ‘Aboriginality’. ‘Well, it means the sense of belonging,’ he said, . . . ‘to family, to where you’ve come from, and of knowing what your spirit is, that has given you life, and knowing the tradition that relates to the area of country you come from. [It’s] a bond between people from one part of Australia and people from another . . . a sense of rapport, a sense of understanding and of brotherhood . . . a sense not just brought about by common suffering and oppression, but the fact that we are the unique survivors.

  ‘You see, after years of holocaust . . . there is a certain genius not extinguished within us, despite what has happened to us. [It’s] not a genius in the sense of being highly intellectual, but in the sense of something special in us that needs to be nurtured and cultivated and brought more and more into the light.’

  I said I was puzzled by the apparent lack of bitterness among Aborigines. ‘I can recall’, he said, ‘being very angry at one point and frustrated . . . simply not knowing which direction to go, of being up against all kinds of forces. But then I listened to an older person like my grandfather, who talks in terms of the spirits that give life to the winds and the trees, and the sun and the sea, and that no one controlled that spirit; and that despite the inhumanity and injustice, mankind must be seen in this broader context. And this was a man who had suffered at the ends of the whips of pastoralists. He was not speaking from a sense of stoicism. He was saying that the total human experience includes an ability to try to see what is in another human being.’67

  Geraldine Briggs is a renaissance woman. She is eighty years old, an elder of the Yorta Yorta tribe and a teacher at Worowa School in Victoria. Worowa is the State’s only all-Aboriginal school and was established by Geraldine’s daughter, Hyllus Maris, the acclaimed author of Women of the Sun, who died in 1983. With her ability to speak a range of Aboriginal languages, Geraldine traces the kinship and tribal links of the children and is able to give those of mixed parentage a sense of who they are and where they come from.

  As a young girl Geraldine Briggs lived on a mission near Deniliquin, New South Wales. It was from here that her three older sisters were taken away by police and sent to work for white women. Only minutes before a policeman arrived to snat
ch Geraldine from her mother, an uncle bundled her into a buggy and drove her to the safety of another reserve. She was five at the time. Today her grandmotherly appearance belies her flint; her eyes say, ‘I have survived.’ To the children at Worowa School, she is Aunty Gerry.

  ‘Worowa means eagle,’ she said. ‘These children will be eagles. They’ll learn their own culture and language and then they will understand the white ways from a position of strength. In the white schools they wouldn’t find this confidence, because the system as it is reinforces prejudices and makes our kids compete on white terms. They soon lose their way and their identity. They become truants and crisis rules their lives. Here they are eagles.’68

  For Aborigines, the past is always present. Next to the school is Coranderrk Cemetery where the spirits of Baby Nelly, Old Harry, Pretty Boy and King Billy reside. They and hundreds of others died from pulmonary diseases following a Government edict ordering the removal of all ‘half castes’ from the district. This divided every family and decimated many. Today there is a monument to the memory of Barak, an elder of the Yarra Yarra people, who was one of the last to die. The monument was erected in 1934 by the Healesville Bread and Cheese Club.

  The personal odysseys of those like Geraldine Briggs, and their efforts to break the long silence and to repair the damage done to others, are at the heart of the renaissance. Few white Australians are aware of the Aborigines Protection Act and its demonic child, the Aborigines Protection Board. Black oral history has long described the inhuman practices, the suffering and division caused; white scholarship is only now offering ‘confirmation’. In New South Wales between 1901 and 1940 thousands of Aboriginal children of mixed parentage were torn from their families, and used virtually as slave labour. According to the Act, the children had to be ‘bound by indenture’ and apprenticed to ‘any master’. Moreover, ‘any such child so apprenticed [was] liable to be proceeded against and punished for absconding’.69