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Edmunds, Mary --- "Aborigines and Public Attitudes: The Social Consequences of Inequality" [1987] AboriginalLawB 36; (1987) 1(27) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 6


Aborigines and Public Attitudes: The Social Consequences of Inequality

by Mary Edmunds

In February 1987, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies appointed a three-year Research Fellow to carry out a study on public attitudes towards Aboriginal people. The project is the Institute's response to a sequence of events that has steadily eroded the Federal Government's commitment to effective land rights legislation in all States. Two specific events were central to this process. One was the anti-land rights campaign mounted in Western Australia in 1984 by the mining lobby. The other was the Australian National Opinion Polls (ANOP) study on public support for land rights, commissioned by DAA and presented in January 1985.

The study reported that:

the Australian population can be thought of at the moment as roughly being in three camps regarding black rights: one quarter implacably opposed and unshiftable in the short term; one quarter firmly supportive; and half in the middle leaning increasingly to opposition and prejudice through fear, ignorance, misinformation, and soft racism (1985:35).

These findings were profoundly disturbing, even leaving aside for the moment the questions raised about the nature of the ANOP report, and the way in which its conclusions were used by the Government to support their about-face on land rights as represented in the preferred national land rights model (February 1985). What the ANOP study appeared to indicate was a significant shift in public support for Aboriginal rights and issues since at least the Referendum in 1967.

The Institute project is a serious attempt to confront this problem. Its task is to identify the processes through which attitudes towards Aboriginal people are both formed and transformed; what is the role of communications, particularly of the mass media, in these processes; what is the relation between so-called public attitudes and the actions of major interest groups such as the mining and pastoral lobbies; and, very importantly, what can be done in terms of practical outcomes to improve the situation described in the ANOP report.

The study will look at these questions in two different but related ways. One concerns the day to day ways in which the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups relate to each other, and the systems of behaviour and interaction that have developed. This is undoubtedly the single most significant element in areas where contact between the two groups is high. The second concerns the issue of conflict of interests, both economic and symbolic, and the ways in which particular interest groups, for example, mining and pastoral groups, have mobilised around these conflicts.

The approach that will be taken in carrying out the study will have three strands: first, a small number of community studies; second, a series of interviews with representatives of identifiable interest groups; and, finally, some case studies of single issues that demonstrate the complexities of the relationship between attitudes, ideology, practice, and political action.

In choosing the communities for investigation, there are a number of variables that are particularly important: that the town have a significant Aboriginal population; that there be a local or regional newspaper, in order to trace the historical development of present attitudes and practices; that there be some involvement of mining, pastoral, or other development interests; and that there exist a number of active Aboriginal organisations, including, if possible, an Aboriginal broadcasting body.

The first area where work will be carried out will be the town of Roebourne in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, together with its neighbouring towns of Wickham, Karratha and Kampier. The study will attempt to define the relationship between, on the one hand, individual attitudes and practices and, on the other, community practices. Those community practices that will be looked at are those that more directly affect Aboriginal people, and that have developed out of historical conditions of injustice and been enshrined in institutions that ensure their reproduction-in the education system, the employment system, churches, the police force and courts, family, community organisations, political parties and others.

Underlying the way in which the study has been developed is an understanding of people's attitudes as socially constructed within a particular historically produced distribution of power in society. In Australia, Aboriginal people from the time of first contact with European settlers have been locked into a position of subordination in relation to the dominant white society. A major outcome of this has been to oppose these two groups to each other in ways that have masked their internal complexity and defined their relations with each other as fundamentally agonistic. It will be axiomatic in the study that only a shift in these relations of power can effect the necessary transformation in community attitudes.

References

Altman, J. C 1985. A critique of the Commonwealth Government's Preferred National Land Rights Model. A Submission to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. Canberra, ANU: unpublished paper.

Altman, J. C & Dillon, M 1985. Why Hawke's model has no backing. Australian Society 4 (6): 26-29.

Australian Mining Industry Council, 1984. Aboriginal Land Rights. A Selection of AMIC Submissions and Discussion Papers 1973-84. Canberra: AMIC.

Aboriginal Studies


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