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Aboriginal Law Bulletin

Aboriginal Law Bulletin (ALB)
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Skyes, Roberta B. --- "Book Review - Born in The Cattle" [1989] AboriginalLawB 52; (1989) 1(40) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 13


Book Review -

Born in The Cattle

by Ann McGrath

Allen and Unwin 200 pages

Reviewed by Roberta B. Sykes

Ann McGrath's book, Born in the Cattle is about the survival of Aborigines on their land, mainly the Northern Territory, and the means by which they. incorporated cattle and the cattle industry into their lives. The research methodology includes utilisation of the oral histories from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.

The work is divided into seven chapters, the titles of which illuminate the subjects covered - 1 The Battle for the Water-holes, 2 Men, Horses and True Grit, 3 Stockcamp and House, 4 'Black Velvet', 5 `Tame Blacks'? Paternalism and Control, 6 Workin' Longa Tucker, and 7 No Shame Job.

McGrath has tackled a very difficult and complex subject, and presents her material in an interesting manner. Her analytic skills are highly developed and she demonstrates meritorious scholarship. The work is based on her PhD thesis which, she says, "has shrunk and grown into this book", but it contains very little of the academic jargon which often renders such works unsuitable for general readership.

Despite the oral histories, the book is a very white perspective. At one point in the middle of the book McGrath writes "When I (a white woman) .. ", which, by that stage, is superfluous. The very early stages of the first chapter, for example, contains;

... Aboriginal resistance was so different from western notions of warfare that it is easily rationalised out of our historical consciousness. (my emphasis).

A black reader does not share that perspective. Aboriginal resistance has not been rationalised from the Black historical consciousness. Nor would many Blacks agree with McGrath's assertion that Aboriginal resistance to colonialism could be equated with `banditry', about which she writes:

Banditry as a form of social protest is unrevolutionary in nature. Bandits cannot achieve change, but can cause damage which could threaten an oppressive system with increased lawlessness. The savage actions of bandits alienated potential allies, and the band's structure prevented more ambitious operations.

From her own description of the admiration and assistance these `bandits' drew from their own, and other, tribal communities, the only people left to whom the term `potential allies' might apply were white. And its very much apparent from other sections of the book that most whites in the area at that period were not potential allies at all!

Throughout the book I have a lot of problems with the sequence of information and the terminology used to describe people. The use early in the book of `bandits' to describe those who resisted sets the tone for thinking about the Aboriginal people. Not until more than halfway through the book do we learn of the extremely, high level of mayhem and violence used by whites against Blacks, and that her term `settlers', for example, in many instances conceals people who were sadists and murderers:

A certain level of violence was tolerated and wanton bashings by sadistic types occurred relatively unnoticed.

The violent nature of the white society was not restricted merely to white men beating - and sometimes killing - black men.[1] White men beat black women and children, and white women sometimes beat them as well. It's unfortunate that this information follows, rather than precedes, the chapter on "Black Velvet" because it would have given greater understanding of the climate of fear in which the widespread sexual use of black women occurred.

The ambivalence caused by the sexual relationship between black and white, or, more accurately, between white men and black women (since the reverse was never tolerated) is evident particularly, but not exclusively, in the chapter titled "Black Velvet". Consider these statements:

(a) "Most of the black women living in towns were general domestics and/or prostitutes..."

(b) "... the shortage of white women in the Territory left many white men, especially the working class, with little choice but to associate with Aboriginal women."

(c) "Most [Aboriginal women] probably had more sexual experience than the average white woman."

Although there is specific reference made to instances of rape and sexual abuse, there is implicit in the text the idea that, outside of these instances, black women had choice, and that the women almost continually `agreed' to sex with white men. This disregards the climate of fear in which Blacks existed generally, since both black women and men could be and were slain with impunity, and were constantly aware of that possibility. It also assumes that coercion has to be immediate before it is effective, a notion which Shere Hite has tried to dispel in relation to rape in white contemporary society.

However, Born in the Cattle opens a very necessary dialogue on these and other issues. It exposes fraud and rip-off of blacks' wages by government, for example. Parts will be regarded by some Black readers as apologist propaganda - where, for instance, McGrath defends the practice of withholding a cash wage from Blacks because it may have "pulled Aborigines into further dependence upon white resources, especially drugs", although Blacks who received cash wages from the Army during the war years were not degraded by it.

Other sections which convey the attitude that Blacks were somehow lucky to have been invaded by white people, although "they were never truly colonised", which occur particularly towards the end of the book, are also likely to raise a lively debate.

See also “Response to Roberta Skyes’ Review” by Ann McGrath, [1989] AboriginalLB 53; 2(40)pg14


[1] The common white rebuttal, that sometimes black men also killed white men overlooks the fact that black men did not go to the white man's homelands. White men were the intruders, and Blacks had every right to protect themselves and their own in their own homes and homelands.


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