A Secret Country Read online

  It is now fitting that we should turn our minds to the purpose underlying this enterprise . . . which is to plant a fresh sprig of Empire in this new and vast land. It may be that this country will become the most valuable acquisition Britain has ever made!81

  Twenty-five Aborigines were brought from a reserve in Menindee to play the role of ‘menacing savages’. They were held overnight in a police compound next to dog kennels and relatives were not allowed to see them. They were told that if they did not co-operate their food rations would be stopped. The ‘celebrations’ attracted tens of thousands of people, and only cursory reference was made to the original inhabitants. The Sydney Mail described their fate as a ‘sorry tale’ and noted that ‘it could not have been otherwise. They are not very alert in modern business methods.’82

  The pity might have been spared; for on that day, unbeknown to the majority, black Australians were making history. The Aborigines Progressive Association, which was the creation of Bill Ferguson, a shearer, and Jack Patten, a writer, convened the first national conference of Aborigines and declared a Day of Mourning. Addressing the white nation before an audience of both blacks and whites, Jack Patten said:

  You have almost exterminated our people, but there are enough of us remaining to expose the humbug of your claim, as White Australians, to be a civilised, progressive, kindly and humane nation. By your cruelty towards the Aborigines, you stand condemned in the eyes of the civilised world.83

  In contrast to the propaganda of the day, his words have survived with dignity. Half a century later, as the ‘freedom buses’ entered Sydney, an elder held aloft Jack Patten’s manifesto and a younger man helped him read it to others, who listened in silence and tears.

  Thirty thousand Aboriginal Australians marched through Sydney on the Bicentenary day. The police halved that number, of course, and commentators with nothing else to say about it said incessantly that the march was peaceful. Only they had implied that it might be otherwise.

  Out on the harbour a sailing ship, which was meant to represent one of the ‘First Fleet’, was emblazoned with an advertisement for Coca Cola. On the quayside the Prince of Wales made a gentle speech alluding to the truth that a nation is judged as civilised by how all its people are regarded. The Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, made no such accommodation. ‘In Australia’, he said stridently, there must be ‘no privilege of origin’.84 The people from the buses, the ‘knockers’, knew what he meant. As he spoke, families of those who have died in police custody threw flowers into Botany Bay.

  Many of Australia’s secrets did not survive the Bicentenary year. People around the world became interested in the struggle of a people about whom they had known little. To them, the resurgence of the first Australians seemed a twentieth-century phenomenon and the real point of the Bicentenary. The Anti-Slavery Society, which in 1970 published a report noting that ‘many Aborigines live in dependent poverty which is extreme by world standards’, reported in 1988 that ‘these observations remain valid’.85 A United Nations study found that Aborigines lived in ‘poverty, misery and extreme frustration’ and condemned the Australian Government for being ‘in violation of her human rights obligations’.86 Most hurtful of all, Australia was compared openly with South Africa.

  One reflex response to this was to deny the past. After my series of documentary films, The Last Dream, was shown on Australian television early in 1988, in which I made reference to the deaths of more than half a million Aborigines, voices of the Established Truth fulminated that such a suggestion risked a ‘big backlash’ as ‘the most scholarly estimates’ put the Aboriginal population in 1788 as low as 215,000.87

  Suppression of Aboriginal population figures has been a feature of the imperial record. This is understandable. If history was to show large numbers of people inhabiting the ‘empty land’ at the time of the invasion, the deduction would have to be made that genocide was on an even more appalling scale than previously assessed.

  Indeed, on the eve of the Bicentenary year a sensational ‘discovery’ was made by the anthropologist Dr Peter White and Australia’s most celebrated pre-historian, Professor D.J. Mulvaney. They reported that the Aboriginal population in 1788 was 750,000, or three times the previous estimate. They concluded that more than 600,000 people had died in the years following the invasion. News of this was published on page sixteen of the Sydney Morning Herald under the byline of the paper’s ‘Environment Writer’.88

  The Mulvaney/White disclosure is not isolated. The Aboriginal renaissance has been helped by a group of white Australian historians whose work has had a striking effect whenever it has found popular expression. Henry Reynolds’s books, The Other Side of the Frontier, Frontier and The Law of the Land are outstanding examples. Similarly, the work of Noel Butlin, Ross Fitzgerald and others has broken the silence, though not without incurring the wrath of some of their compatriots, from racists to their academic peers.

  In journalism, in the face of indifference and at times hostility, the same recurring names have distinguished their craft by reporting events that once were ‘non events’. They are Tony Hewett, Jan Mayman, Stewart Harris, Jan Roberts, Graham Williams, Michael Cordell, Robert Haupt, Matt Peacock and the journalists of the ABC current affairs programme, Four Corners. In his column, Peter Cullen, Editor of the Illawarra Mercury in New South Wales, described graphically the difficulties most of them have had to face:

  There are times when journalists become totally ashamed of their profession and some of the people who practise it.

  I have experienced that sense of shame for reasons many and varied. But by far the worst case I encountered was back in 1978 when I became interested in the plight of south coast Aborigines, their health and living conditions.

  Some people had phoned the Illawarra Mercury to complain that Aborigines in Nowra and on a mission known as Wallaga Lake were living in squalor and exposed to disease.

  With a trusty photographer, I headed south. For the next few days I was to see degrading things: young Aborigine mothers and their babies living in car wrecks, families in humpies, widespread sickness and disease, teenage alcoholics, hopelessness and despair.

  I wrote about the demoralisation of the South Coast Aborigines in a special series for the Illawarra Mercury. The stories were no sooner on the streets when a long-time South Coast journalist phoned me to express his astonishment.

  ‘Are you serious about those stories?’ he asked.

  I told him I had never been more serious in my life.

  This scribe then proceeded to lambast me for some minutes for having the gall to write the stories and then lay some claim to them as exclusive pieces of journalism.

  ‘I’ve known about the Abos and their conditions for years,’ he said.

  I was becoming angry by this time. ‘Then why in hell have you not written about it?’ I inquired.

  And his reply made me ashamed of the profession I had chosen to pursue. He said: ‘I have never bothered for two reasons:

  ‘Firstly, they are only coons and live like animals anyway.

  ‘And secondly, nobody gives a damn.’

  I had no desire to continue the conversation and hung up. But over the next few weeks I encountered sneers and jibes. People even stopped me in the street with the typically insulting comment: ‘Nothing else to write about, mate?’89

  Among large sections of the Australian people common slurs against Aborigines now meet with revulsion. This was demonstrated following an extraordinary article in the Sydney Morning Herald by the English gossip writer Auberon Waugh, who described Aborigines as ‘warring, nomadic packs’ with a ‘non-existent’ wisdom and an art that ‘must be judged the merest piffle by any civilised standards’.90 So outraged was the response that the letters editor of the Herald appealed to readers to stop writing. ‘We don’t have to listen to every mealy-mouthed racist who deigns to visit from the “mother country”,’ wrote one reader. ‘A carefully fabricated persona’, wrote another, ‘cannot conceal the ersatz ba
se of his gratuitous and tiresome insults.’91

  So it was not surprising that when the ‘freedom buses’ converged on Sydney on Bicentenary day, January 26, and drove to Belmore Park, traditionally a resting place for Sydney’s homeless, they were joined by thousands of white Australians, young and old, in that universal solidarity that transcends nation, language and race.

  Flying across the sweep of Australia the wounds below become apparent. They are erosion as deep as valleys, and they are plains of petrified forests. For hundreds of miles the land does not move: the wildlife shot, stunned and beaten into handbags in Osaka and pet food in Chicago. In Alice Springs Pat Dodson lamented this destruction. ‘Trees and wetlands have gone,’ he said. ‘The country has become a large chequerboard of fences, with little hedgerow bushes that are an imitation of Britain’s countryside. None of this has anything to do with the spirit of Australia. A human being has to be in resonance, in harmony with his country, and he lives from that strength. Our efforts to regain land are simply part of our effort to regain life; and if we can’t regain our land, our life is virtually lost. This is not a vote-catching cause. It requires moral fortitude and commitment, which is politically inconvenient.’92

  In 1987 Bob Hawke was re-elected with an increased majority and, for a Labor Prime Minister, an unprecedented third term. At the start of his re-election campaign Hawke appeared in a front-page picture smiling at the camera after he had sung his campaign’s jingle, ‘Let’s stick together’. The jingle was the result of a $A2.7 million contract with an advertising agency run by John Singleton, whose other accounts included the Pope’s visit to Australia and a liquor chain known as ‘Buck Off Bill’ (‘If ya’ don’t buy from Bill, then buck off!’)

  Directly beneath the Hawke picture was a headline, ‘Hepatitis B hits NSW Aboriginal children’. The report said that 90 per cent of Aboriginal children in the western part of the State had suffered from Hepatitis B before they turned sixteen, and nearly one-third had been infected before their first birthday. The disease ‘caused chronic liver problems, which can lead to premature death’.93

  During only his second visit to an Aboriginal community in more than four years as Prime Minister, Hawke said that his Government wanted a ‘compact’ with black Australians. When asked what this meant, he refused to say. One year later, with international interest in the treatment of Aborigines at its peak, Hawke said he hoped a ‘treaty’ would be possible by 1990. When asked what this meant, he gave only scant detail. He made no mention of land rights. Almost half way through 1990 enquiries to the Government about the progress of the ‘treaty’ were met with a ‘no comment’. On the day he ceased to be Prime Minister, in December 1991, Hawke unveiled an Aboriginal bark painting in Parliament House and called on his ‘followers’ to work for a ‘reconciliation document’. He then cried. ‘It was not clear’, reported the Independen, ‘if yesterday’s tears were a product of being carried away by his abrupt loss of power or the wider losses of Australia’s indigenous people’94

  In any case, the Opposition promised to repeal any such ‘document’ or ‘compact’ or ‘treaty’, thus threatening the security of the present land rights legislation laws in the Northern Territory without which, as Pat Dodson said, ‘our life is virtually lost’.

  In the wake of the ‘ultimate party’, no leading Australian politician has yet summoned the courage and wit to explain adequately to the majority that Aborigines are not seeking unmerited privileges, merely basic human rights and justice; that support for land rights ought not to be the product of guilt, rather of an understanding that Australian society is debased by what has happened; and that until we white Australians give back to black Australians their nationhood, we can never claim our own.

  * * *

  fn1 There is no Conservative Party in Australia. I have used ‘conservative’ throughout to describe the Liberal/National (formerly Country) Party coalition.

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  HEROES UNSUNG

  As the lot of a slave depends upon the character of its [sic] master, so the convict depends upon the temper and disposition of the settler to whom he is assigned.

  House of Commons Select Committee report, 1838

  We have 25 years at most to populate this country before the yellow races are down upon us.

  Arthur Calwell, Minister for Immigration, 1947

  I think inevitably we’ll become predominantly a Eurasian country. I’m talking about twenty-five years’ time perhaps . . . that is a process which is under way.

  Bill Hayden, Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1984

  WHEN I WAS a boy, I used to ask my relatives how our forebears came to a place as remote as Australia. The story on my father’s side was straightforward enough. His father was a German clipper sailor, for whom Newcastle, New South Wales, was a port of call; there he met my grandmother, the daughter of an English surgeon who had been granted land by the Crown.

  My mother’s story, however, never seemed complete. Her mother was of ‘yeoman stock’, and as proof of this welcome distinction there was a replica of a memorial tablet to a cousin much-removed who had been ‘with’ the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. Her father’s grandfather was said to be of such elevated breeding that he had been a pillar of the Australian colony: ‘an early landowner’ who was ‘well to do’ and ‘nicely connected’. Indeed, so much was made by certain members of my mother’s family of the social pre-eminence of my great-great grandfather that I guessed something was afoot. According to one aunt, he ‘even knew the Governor’ and enjoyed the privilege of ‘delivering milk to Government House’ from his farm on ‘elegant Brickfield Hill’.

  Elsie, my mother, used to take me to Brickfield Hill, which in the 1950s was occupied by the grand Sydney department store, Anthony Hordens. This made any suggestion of prior ownership equivalent to a claim upon Harrods or Blooming-dales. It was a cavernous ‘emporium’ of mail-order mustiness, of bolts of cloth and regiments of blue serge suits and tea chests of imported ‘kitchenware’, and had a magnificent art deco tea-room. I would imagine that I was standing on the very spot where great-great grandfather oversaw his dairy herd; and Elsie and I would try to estimate the cost of the land today. ‘It must be worth thousands,’ we would agree, but what had happened to these ‘thousands’ was not mentioned.

  Nor was great-great grandfather’s wife mentioned, except that she was ‘tiny’ by comparison with her husband, who was a tall man for the period. A photograph existed of them both, taken in the 1880s. The aunt in possession of this photograph refused to show it to me or to anyone else, which of course deepened the mystery.

  One Christmas Day, with all my mother’s siblings assembled (there were nine offspring), I decided to force the issue and ask out loud about my great-great grandparents. The aunt in possession of the photograph almost swallowed her teeth. ‘Oh, we shouldn’t talk about them,’ she twittered. An aunt I liked leaned across and whispered, ‘Yer see love, they were Irish and they had the Stain . . .’ Elsie had not told me this before and nodded mischievous affirmation. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ she said. The aunt in possession of the photograph said, ‘Oh, leave them dead and buried, Elsie!’ And the matter was left there, to the relief of all but me.

  Of course, the truth was that ‘the Stain’ was upon us. ‘The Stain’ was a term deployed most commonly when discussing the ‘suspect’ origins of one’s neighbours and enemies. It meant convict ancestry; and it was almost never spoken of in the first person, as this was bound to induce embarrassment in others or, at worst, mockery. Moreover, research into these genealogical shadows was discouraged or condemned as downright subversive, or dismissed as worthless and ‘all talk’.

  There was a serious sociological purpose behind this cover-up, which was widespread. (I cannot recall anyone of my age who was aware of or would admit to convict background.) Among the theorists of the origin of character and intelligence who came to prominence during the early Victorian years were those who concluded that criminality was congenital a
nd especially prevalent among the poor. This assessment covered almost all the Irish, adding legitimacy to a belief already popular among the ‘criminal classes’ themselves. Bilge of this kind ran deep in Australia where, not surprisingly, people felt the need to speak defensively and often about the ‘good stock’ they had come from.

  My own family used this word, ‘stock’, a great deal; the milkman or a local fruit and vegetable merchant would be categorised by his apparent ‘good’ or ‘bad’ stock. During the First World War the casual behaviour of Australian volunteers, and especially their lack of respect towards English officers, whom they rarely saluted, was put down to their ‘inferior’ convict and Irish breeding. During the Second World War Winston Churchill railed against an Australian Labor Government, which wanted to give priority to the defence of its homeland, not Britain, as coming from ‘bad stock’.1 My aunts, who loved Churchill, were keenly aware of our congenital flaw; therefore secrecy was crucial.

  Unfortunately, unbeknown to the keepers of this secret, sensational evidence was to hand in St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Sydney. Every Thursday, in a vestry, a nun would turn the page of a register of Catholic, mostly Irish convicts. Their crime, sentence, the ship they came on and their physical characteristics were listed. Francis McCarthy and Mary Palmer were two among the names; and enquiries at public record offices in London, Dublin and Sydney have provided portraits, as yet unfinished, of two members of a luckless tribe who attended the birth of white Australia and were my great-great grandparents.

  Francis McCarthy could not have been more different from the accredited version. He was a farm labourer from County Roscommon, from an area where people lived in the bog in caves of mud, and worked the land for absentee Englishmen under constant threat of death by disease or, if the crops failed, of bloody eviction and arrest.

  Like many Irishmen of the time, McCarthy was neither led nor organised. He simply objected to an imposed way of life, and was arrested and convicted of ‘uttering unlawful oaths’ and ‘insurrection’. These were political crimes, also described in the English courts as ‘taking part in seditious conspiracy’. He was sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude in New South Wales. Whatever he did, it must have been considered a threat to the prevailing order, as the Tolpuddle Martyrs received only half this sentence for forming a trade union.