Goodall, Heather --- "Aboriginal Calls for Justice: Learning from History" [1988] AboriginalLawB 37; (1988) 1(33) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 4

• Aboriginal Calls For Justice: Learning From History

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Aboriginal Calls for Justice:
Learning from History

by Heather Goodall

The discipline of history has had little to say until recently about Aboriginal people. That's changed to some extent over the last twenty years, as historians have begun to listen to Aboriginal people and recognise the force of their argument that they have an important history which has been ignored.

An important strand in the development of historical writing has been the recognition that Aboriginal people's history did not end with the guerilla wars. Even where the invasion conflicthas been recognised, it is still too easily assumed that once an uneasy huce had occurred Aborigines were unable to take decisions, to exercise agency by planning a future for themselves. We have been led to believe by their absence from mainstream historical accounts that, once the wars wereover, Aborigines simply sat around, defeated and "clinging to the fringes of towns".

As we listen toAborigines, we are made aware of the history which has been passedon and recorded orally within their communities. If we look, we find that there are documentary records created by Aborigines: the letters and petitions they wrote last century. There is indeed a great deal of Aboriginal history to be told, a diversity of interaction with post-warfare Australian society, as Aborigines worked toward strategies which would allow them notjust to survive physically, but to enable development which made sense in their own terms.

I will take here two examples of Aboriginal strategies for development over the last 150 years. The first is both extraordinary and typical. It is the story of a man called Anthony Martin Femando, who was born in northern New South Wales in 1864. He was taken away from his family as a child but struggled tomake his wayback to them, identifying strongly with the Aboriginal community. In the 1880she attempted to give evidence at the case of two white men who were accused of murdering Aborigines. He was unable to do so and so he saw them go free, which led him to believe he could no longer continue the struggle in Australia. So he went into voluntary exile to take his people's cause to Europe, back to confront his colonisers. Fernando worked his passagein theboilerroomof a ship, settled in Milan and began to publicise Aboriginal people's demands.

We hear about him first in1921. Hehad been away from Australia for a long time, caught up during the First World War in a displaced persons camp but that seemed only to drive him on to talk about his own people and their displacement. In 1921 he attempted to see the Pope but was turned away because he did not have nationally accreditedpapers. So Fernando turned his attention to theSwiss government, outlining a proposal somewhat similar to the native state concept which was to develop some years later in Australia. The latter idea was that a reserve be created in Arhnem Land which would eventually become self-governing and achieve statehood at some far-off time in the future. Fernando's proposal was more radical: he was suggesting an autonomous area in northern Australia where Aboriginal people's independence and their safety would be guaranteed by an international power under the control of the League of Nations. The Swiss were uninterested but that did not stop Anthony Fernando.

He marched the streets of Milan with placards, handed out pamphlets and talked about what was happening in Australia until Mussolini, who wished to maintain his alliance with Britain, interned him as an enemy of an ally of fascist Italy. Fernando was kept in gaol without trial for many months, then deported to England.

In London he was offered what amounted to a pension by a barrister he had met, but Femando refused. Instead he took up one of his old occupations as a toy-maker and began picketting Australia House. He covered himself with toy skeletons and pointed to them as he called out to passers-by: "This is what they are doing tomy people in Australia!" Embarrassed, the Australians had him arrested on many occasions and even attempted to have him certified insane, a well-known tactic of political repression. The doctors refused to certify him, one of them writing:

"He holds strong views about the manner in which his people are treated, but that is a sign not of insanity but of an unusually strong mind."

So Fernando continued through the 1920s.

I n 1929 he was again in front of the courts. A white man had abused him because he was black so Femando had drawn a gun on him, refusing to submit to this sort of racist intimidation. He was given a bond and used the opportunity to make yet another speech, this time recorded by the international press.

"I have pleaded my people's cause since 1887", he declared, "I have seen whites in Australia go unpunished for murdering and ill-treating Aborigines. I have been boycotted everywhere. Look at my rags. All I hear is 'Go away, black man" but it is all Tommy rot to say that we are savages. Whites have shot, slowly starved and hanged us!"

Fernando accused the British of being the real savages.

His campaign continued and in 1938 he was again before the courts after a similar incident. Fernando was 74 years old, but this time he attacked the whole structure of British colonialism:

"We are despised and rejected, but it is the black people who keep this country in all its greatness".

Anthony Martin Fernando died shortly after. He had sustained his struggle against enormous odds, alone but unfailingly presenting his people's case on the other side of the world, in the heart of the land of the colonisers.

Now, while Fernando's story is unique, it is not an unusual account of Aboriginal political struggle in its tenacity and its courage. Nor was his struggle unheard. He did not know it, but when Fernando attacked the Empire from the dock of a London court, Aboriginal activists like Pearl Gibbs back in New South Wales hungrily clipped the press accounts of his words, taking them as inspiration for their continuing campaign. Their movement had had its beginning at about the same time that Fernando made his decision to go into political exile.

From the 1860s, Aborigines in south eastern Australia were feeling a second wave of pressure. After fighting in the guerilla wars they had found that suddenly they were in demand from rural employers, who actively sought to recruit Aborigines as workers, drawing them in to both pastoral and agricultural work sometimes by coercion and sometimes by entreaties. In these arrangements, Aborigines' labour was being exploited. They were aware of this and it angered them, but they were also able to gain the important advantage, particularly on pastoral properties, of retaining access to their own land for both economic and cultural purposes.

Through this period and into the 1880s, Aborigines werenot as a whole a destitute population in NSW. Theprocess of working out a fit between some traditional subsistence economic activities, some wage labour and some ration labour meant that in 1881,82% of the Aboriginal population in the state were self-sufficient, usually from a mixture of employment of one form or another and subsistence foraging. The most extreme poverty only emerged region by region as land use started to change again.

This began in the south and east of NSW from the 1860s, as fencing and other types of technological improvements reduced labour needs, as more intensive agricultural land use penetrated the big pastoral properties and they began to be broken up for "closer settlement". Aborigines found themselves with two problems: they were being pushed out of their land. Where Aborigines were facing this new wave of pressure, they began to develop a strategy to try to stabilise their position. This was not an organised movement with a centralised leadership and a plan. But Aboriginal communities were in communication and they knew what was succeeding in other areas. From the 1860s onwards, Aborigines began to reoccupy patches of their own land, parts which hadn't yet been taken over by the new agricultural developments, areas where they had always camped or new areas where they pushed in and reoccupied part of their own country.

Then they began demanding secure tenure to the land they had reoccupied. Some Aborigines were able to gain permissive occupancies, a few were able to buy freehold, some recruited local whites to raise funds for purchase or at least pass on Aboriginal requests for land title. We can't trace all of these, as many of both the permissive occupancies and the freeholds were lost with little record in later years. But many of these areas became Aboriginal Reserves and we can follow their history. When Aborigines demanded that the government recognise their rights to land, they found the authorities quite responsive, because it was felt in the age of "Free selection" that a small patch of land would "educate" and "tie down" nomadic Aborigines and turn them more quickly into "Europeans". But Aborigines hadpushed for and succeeded in gaining some of the reserves from the 1860s, well before the Government formed the Aborigines Protection Board in 1883. Their push for land was not a Protection Board strategy to try and bind people into segregated compounds. This was an Aboriginal strategy. After 1883, there were reserves created which served the interests of some groups of whites, but of the 114 reserves created until 1910 when the area reserved reached its peak, 45% were created because Aboriginal people reoccupied land and then demanded recognition of their tenure.

W e can see Aboriginal guerilla struggles to defend their land as their first Land Rights movement. The second Aboriginal Land Rights movement was through the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s, as Aborigines pushed to reoccupy and regain secure tenure over some of their own land in south eastern Australia.

M any Aborigines began fanning their land whereitwasfertileenough. This was true from the Yass area, through the Burarong Valley west of Sydney and right up along the central coast of NSW to north of the Nambucca River. Aboriginal people in the south-west, at Cumeragunja, had also attempted to farm the land they had won back. This is one of the areas where we can read Aborigines' own letters and petitions asking for their land. They said they wanted land to farm, they wanted to be involved in the European economy, they wanted to use it in a way which was recognisable to Europeans as "economic", but they didn't want just any land. They wanted land in areas of significance to them, land to which they had traditional ties.

William Cooper, a Cumeragunja man who became an important Aboriginal political activist in the 1930s, said in 1887 that he wanted the government to give back "but a small portion of that vast territory which is ours by Divine Right". He was using Christian terminology because that is what the government might understand, but he was not talking about a Christian concept. He was talking about prior Aboriginal ownershipof land, "from time immemorial".

The Aboriginal farmers at Cumeragunja were skilful, producing wheat yields on or above the area's average, but they were working plots of land which were far too small. They had only 27.5 acres for each family in an area where 500 acres was regarded as the minimum necessary toprovide a family living. Aboriginal people to the west of Sydney in the Buragorang weremore fortunate, with 76 acres of good land bought from local Catholic funds and handed over to the Aboriginal families, who continued to "make a fair living" from farming there until the 1920s.

Aborigines further north had been able to secure more fertile land still, alluvial land which responded to their farming skills to produce good crops of vegetables. Some Aboriginal families in the Macleay were able to generate enough capital to convert to dairying. These Dhan-gadi farmers used their profits to buy sulkies and horses, to buy home furnishings and pianos, to lead in all appearances the life of comfortable small European farmers. Yet these samepeople continued to speak their own language and to continue their traditional ceremonial life right through into at least the 1930s. The independence they had won for themselves allowed them to develop a whole way of life which made sense for them. It was economically viable in the changed circumstances of colonization but it drew also on the 60 000 years of Aboriginal society and civilization on that country.

Such was the extent and success of Aboriginal development strategies around the turn of the century, but what happened? The land and the developments on it were lost in the 1920s - not because the Aboriginal farimers had failed, but because there was a new wave of closer settlement. Increased populist pressure to settle more small families on the land led to more legislation in 1905, but there were few large properties remaining in ecologically or politically accessible areas. The government turned to reserve lands and of the wide variety of reserves, the only ones which had proven productivity were those farmed by Aborigines and then reserved for their use. This independently-settled Aboriginal land was seen as a fertileprize, land still to be colonized.

From 1913, Aboriginal reserve land fell from its peak of 26,000 acres to only half that, 13,000 acres in 1927. Of that land lost, 75% was on the coast and all of it was land which Aboriginal people had settled and independently farmed right up to the point where the police arrived and literally pushed them off their land. Sometimes this was done at gunpoint but often it was by threatening to take Aborigines' children away, which was a very real threat since the Protection Board had gained total power over Aboriginal children in 1915. Once the Aboriginal farmers had been evicted, the reserve over the land was revoked and it was alienated permanently. Ironically, it became clear in the 1970s that ALL of these revocations were in fact illegal, a problem solved by the Wran Government by passing legislation concurrently with its 1983 Land Rights Act which retrospectively validated this second dispossession.

Aboriginal people in the 1920s protested intensely at this land loss and the resultingpolitical action can be seen as the resultof two things. It arose from the pressures Aborigines were facing, the structures which were oppressing them economically and socially in terms of their land AND it developed out of their own decisions about what they wanted, their priorities, strategies and beliefs. In 1925 they formed the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association, a body which bombarded the press and die Lang government with demands and long term policy. The AAPA had land as its prime demand, asking for enough land forevery Aboriginal family in the State to be economically independent. Then they insistedon the right to protect their children from the "Protection" Board, the right to live in areas of significance to them and to have Aboriginal control of any administrations of Aboriginal affairs.

So the demands of the AAPA included both land rights and civil rights. The organisation was saying clearly 'We want rights over our own land, our own country' but as well they were saying that shay wanted access to the full rights and privileges of citizenship. They were, after all, employed often in thermal economy, they paid taxes and they wanted access to the public schools, the public hospitals and the streets of the towns. The fact that these two elements were there is important when we look at later developments. Through the 1930s, Aborigines lost civil and legal rights, and so they increasingly emphasized the civil rights elements in their political platform. This emphasis is clear in the demands of the Progressive Association in the late 1930s, but when this new organisation's policy is examined, land rights is there as a major clement in the AAPA's long term strategy.

This entwining of the two elements has continued: with different emphasis according to the changing pressures Aborigines were facing, but both there nevertheless. We see both demands in the strike actions in the Pilbara in the 1940s and again with the Gurindji struggles in the 1960s, where Aborigines wanted notonly their land but also civil and industrial justice. Aborigines today are following in Anthony Martin Fernando's footsteps, taking their cause to the international forum. They are carrying these twin demands, for land and civil rights, a combination which may be uncomfortable for liberal democracies but which has been recognised immediately as valid and just by the othercolonised indigenous peoples of the Fourth World.