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2. History Aboriginal history is not Australian history There's no point in dwelling on the past what's done is done Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people naturally have a different perspective on Australia's history than that of many immigrant Australians. What Europeans call 'settlement', they call 'invasion'. And they point to many past events and policies which undermine Australia's image of itself as a haven of tolerance and fairness. A proper acknowledgment of history is basic to understanding the present circumstances and claims of Indigenous Australians. Guilt is not a useful tool for reconciliation. An understanding of our shared history is.
The fact is that over recent decades historians have been revising Australia's history to include an account of the 'frontier', of the struggle for land waged between Aboriginal groups and Europeans over a period of some 150 years. Important too is the recognition now given to the complex and productive relationship that Aboriginal people had, and continue to have, with their country. As Australia's history was once written, Aboriginal people were mere wandering and 'primitive' tribes who naturally and inevitably gave way to more 'advanced' and industrious European settlers. The Indigenous perspective was not taken into account. In his 1968 Boyer Lectures, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner described this state of affairs as 'the Great Australian Silence'. More
than 50,000 years of human history Aboriginal Australia was a pattern of localities covering the entire continent. Groups hunted and gathered over areas defined by custom. Particular pieces of land were owned by particular groups. The land was not just a source of sustenance, but a materialisation of the journeys of the creative Ancestors. It was the basis of spiritual life and, in its own way, a religious text. Systems of land tenure were intimately bound up with spiritual attachment and notions of custodianship. Some 200-250 different Australian languages were spoken and even more dialects. Though all groups lived by hunting and gathering and had a land-based spirituality, details such as kinship systems, artforms and technologies differed as would be expected in a continent with environments ranging from dense rainforests to deserts. There was a great deal of communication between neighbouring groups. Many people would have spoken more than one language, and certain valuable resources were exchanged over long distances. Off the northern-most tip of Queensland the islands of what is now called the Torres Strait were inhabited by people who are more closely related, culturally and ethnically, to their New Guinean neighbours. Just how many people lived in Australia before European contact is unknown, but estimates range from 300,000 to more than 1 million. Many scholars now accept a figure of at least 750,000. The
frontier The spread of British settlement was accompanied by a drastic decline in the Aboriginal population. Many people died of introduced diseases to which they had no immunity. The traditional land-dependent economy was destroyed as hunting grounds were taken over for grazing and agriculture. Aboriginal people became trespassers on their own land, with disastrous consequences for the maintenance of spiritual life and social systems. Some Aboriginal people were attracted into white settlements. Others assisted settlers as guides, trackers, and stockmen. But the frontier, as it moved across the country, was generally a place of tension and sporadic bloodshed. In Tasmania and elsewhere the struggle became a full-scale land war, to which colonial authorities responded with declarations of martial law. On many occasions Aboriginal people were deliberately killed by settlers or police. Police actions were often called 'dispersals'. The last recorded massacre was at Coniston in the Northern Territory in 1927, when policemen shot 17 Aboriginals. Typically the police were later exonerated at a public enquiry. Terra
nullius Aboriginal and Islander peoples regard terra nullius as the basic injustice on which modern Australia was built. In 1992, in the Mabo judgment, the High Court of Australia overthrew this fiction when it said that Australia's common law recognised Indigenous peoples' property rights. This case was brought by the late Eddie Mabo and four other people from Mer (Murray Island) in the Torres Strait and took ten years to go through the courts. The final judgment had great symbolic as well as practical significance. It endorsed Indigenous perceptions of history. While Australians today cannot be held responsible for the past, they have benefited from the dispossession of Indigenous people. As Justice Brennan wrote in the Mabo judgment, Aboriginal dispossession 'underwrote the development of Australia'. Looking at our perspective on Australia's colonisation is essential to the production of a balanced picture, one that acknowledges not only the achievements of the settlers but also the terrible consequences of those achievements for Aboriginal Australians. And it helps us to understand how, as Justices Deane and Gaudron expressed it in the Mabo judgment, 'Aborigines came to be treated as a different and inferior people, whose very existence could be ignored in determining the legal right to occupy and use their traditional homelands'. Are these unhappy people, the subjects of our King, in a state of rebellion or are they an injured people, whom we have invaded and with whom we are at war? Are they within the reach of our laws; or are they to be judged by the law of nations? Are they to be viewed in the light of murderers, or as prisoners of war? Are they British subjects at all, or a foreign enemy who has never yet been subdued and which resists our usurped authority and domination ... We are at war with them: they look upon us as enemies as invaders as oppressors and persecutors they resist our invasion. They have never been subdued, therefore they are not rebellious subjects, but an injured nation defending in their own way, their rightful possessions, which have been torn from them by force. Letter written to a Launceston newspaper, 1831
Australians who know the facts of the frontier may be unaware of what followed the defeat and dispossession of Aboriginal people over much of settled Australia. Survivors were subject to government policies that attempted variously to displace, convert, isolate and eventually assimilate them. 'Protection' Laws were enacted to supervise relations between Aboriginals and other Australians. Using these laws various protection boards and native affairs departments were able to segregate a large part of the Aboriginal population. The people were treated as incompetent to manage their own lives and were subject to arbitrary rule by mission managers and police. Some reserves were revoked to cater for the needs of local farmers, and the people moved on this has been called a 'second dispossession'. Those outside reserves became 'fringe-dwellers' on riverbanks or the edges of towns. During the first half of this century there existed a patchwork of differing State (and in the Northern Territory, Commonwealth) laws under which Aboriginal people might be prevented from entering hotels, from marrying without permission, from living within town boundaries. Aboriginal workers were often excluded from industrial awards, and wages were held in trust by police or mission managers who gave out 'pocket money' as they saw fit. The last of these Acts was not repealed until the 1970s. 'Assimilation' But assimilation did not mean equal citizenship rights. It was promoted through a continuation of restrictive laws and paternalistic administration. The
'stolen generations' The personal and communal desolation caused by the break-up of families an effect which transmits across generations was expressed at the 1996 hearings of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. This inquiry, conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, produced the Bringing Them Home report in May 1997. After
1967 In 1967 a referendum was overwhelmingly carried to remove two discriminatory references to Aboriginal people in the Australian Constitution. These constitutional changes allowed the Commonwealth to legislate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, concurrently with the States. Before 1967 the Commonwealth's responsibility had been confined to the Northern Territory. In the 1960s the policy of assimilation was tacitly abandoned, and in 1972 replaced with 'self-determination', defined as 'Aboriginal communities deciding the pace and nature of their future development as significant components within a diverse Australia'. The
past in the present The past has set a pattern of incursion and dominance. It has entrenched ways of thinking about Aboriginal people that persist in the present. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which reported in 1991, documented how racist attitudes and assumptions still have a destructive effect on Aboriginal lives. For Aboriginal people today a sense of our collective past is basic to our cultural and political identity. For too many of us it is inscribed in our personal experiences, or the experiences of those near to us. ... until I examined the files of the people who died and other material which has come before the Commission and listened to Aboriginal people speaking, I had no conception 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. Elliott Johnston, QC, Royal Commissioner into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 1991 The Committee is concerned about the failure of many mainstream agencies to provide Access and Equity to their services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This includes providers of electricity, water, sewerage, housing, roads and health services. As a result a large proportion of ATSIC funding is being diverted into the provision of services that should have been delivered by mainstream agencies ... If mainstream agencies had been providing Access and Equity in their services for the last decade, Aboriginal Affairs funding could have been directed more to addressing ... the social and economic disadvantage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people particularly in the areas of health, housing and education. In reality, a large proportion is going to provide basic mainstream services which other Australians already receive and take for granted. Mainstream agencies are funded to provide services to all Australians, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but, in many instances, are either withholding those services or leaving barriers that act to exclude Aboriginal people. Access and Equity: Rhetoric or Reality? Report of the Inquiry into the Implementation of the Access and Equity Strategy, House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, 1993 It must strongly be said that we should no longer be fooled by the rhetoric of accountability. We should no longer take the blame for the failure of governments to do their job. We should continue in our struggle for justice and demand that governments at all levels treat us fairly and deal with us in the same way in which they would expect to be dealt with by us. ... if reconciliation is to mean anything, it must mean that you deal with us fairly. It is not acceptable to trumpet the rhetoric of equal treatment when some are more equal than others. It is not acceptable that government should further disadvantage the most disadvantaged in this country. If we recognise that disadvantage, then it must also be accepted that to rectify the present and the future requires an unequal input to achieve an equal outcome. Aden Ridgeway, Executive Director, NSW Aboriginal Land Council, speaking at the Australian Reconciliation Convention, May 1997. |
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