Lyons, Greg --- "Editorial- The Challenge for Non-Aborigines" [1982] AboriginalLawB 59; (1982) 1(6) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 2

• Editorial – The Challenge For Non-Aborigines
• The Moree Tragedy
• Colour-Bars Persist
• The Need For Agitators
• Nt Government Intervention

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Editorial –

The Challenge for Non-Aborigines

Greg Lyons

If white Australians could occasionlly glimpse the world through Aboriginal eyes, the view might be disquieting. Instead of an apparently egalitarian and just society, an inhospitable and hostile world might come into view.

The Moree tragedy

Consider the northern NSW town of Moree where on 4 November one Aboriginal person died and two others were wounded in a flash of racial violence. The tragedy was sparked when a group of Aboriginal people went to a Moree hotel reputed to exclude Aborigines. The protesters sought to break what they regarded as a colour-bar. They were ejected as trouble-makers, the point of their protest being ignored or forgotten in the tumult that followed. But in Moree and other towns like it across Australia, Aboriginal people face regular exclusion from jobs, housing, educational opportunities, medical services and so on. The exclusion may not be as blatant as that said to take place at Moree's Imperial Hotel. It is there nonetheless. Breaking the colour-bar at an hotel becomes an important symbol in attempting to change a town's status quo. It may even presage some form of real equality.

Colour-bars persist

But colour-bars do not disappear overnight. After all, Moree was one of the towns visited by the 1963 Freedom Riders who protested against Aborigines being excluded from a number of hotels, and from the town's swimming pool. The fact is that colour-bars, those subtle and not-so-subtle methods of excluding a group from available resources and opportunities, are essential if the power and influence of a town's white citizens are to be preserved. It must be remembered that the status of those white citizens is directly related to the relative poverty of the Aboriginal citizens. Pastoral properties and rural industries prosper on land that was once Aboriginal land. The wealth of Moree and its surrounding countryside exists precisely because another group - those who were and still are bound to the land - has been removed.

Colour-bars reinforce an ideology useful for those with power. That ideology suggests that f' one has employment, housing, good health, a sound-education and-access - to local sporting and recreational facilities, it is because one deserves such a state of affairs. Conversely those with poor housing and few jobs are seen as deserving lesser access to social goods. It was this set of beliefs which the Aboriginal protesters in Moree challenged.

The need for agitators

It was a similarr set of assumptions which Percy Neal challenged in June 1981 on a Queensland Aboriginal reserve. When the High Court recently reviewed Neal's sentence, following a conviction for assault (spitting at a white official at Yarrabah reserve), Justice Murphy commented on the circumstances surrounding Neal's protest. Neal, Chairman of the Yarrabah Council, had no personal grudge against the official; he did however resent the power the official and others like him had over the large Aboriginal population living there. In a moment of emotional stress, Neal's resentment erupted in the assault. His frustration was directed at a reserve system which excluded Aboriginal people from effective decision making. Justice Murphy noted society's need for agitators like Percy Neal, people prepared to stand up and be counted in the struggle for justice (see Neal v The Queen, [1982] AboriginalLB 68; 1(6)pg10).

NT Government intervention

On many fronts, attempts by Aboriginal people to make new accommodations with Australia's non-Aboriginal population are meeting with resistance. The NT Government's unexpected intervention in the Waramungu land claim is another example (see Diane Bell's article, [1982] AboriginalLB 59; 1(6)pg1 ). It is not difficult to appreciate the view expressed by one Aboriginal claimant that `White-fella Law' can be changed or torn-up, altered seemingly at will to continue the exclusion of Aborigines from social goods, in this case, land subject to claim under the Land Rights (NT) Act 1976.

To return to the opening suggestion: for the Aboriginal protesters at Moree (including Ronald McIntosh, now dead), for Percy Neal and the community he represents and for the Warumungu claimants, Australian society may well appear bent on continuing systems that preclude Aborigines from participation in that society. The challenge for non-Aborigines is to reassess their view of Australian society.