Aboriginal Law Bulletin
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by Heather Goodall
Allen & Unwin in association with Black Books
Reviewed by Peter Read
Heather Goodall completed her PhD thesis, 'A History of Aboriginal Communities, 1909-1939', fourteen years ago. Her many admirers who have been waiting for this volume, an updated and re-conceptualised version of the thesis, will not be disappointed. Its broad chronology, narrative sweep and low price were deservedly made possible by assistance from the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Black Books, the Australia Foundation and the Rona-Tranby Foundation for Oral History.
Those already prejudiced against Aboriginal history may be dismayed by the long narration of dreadful deeds of dispossession, especially in the twentieth century. Should we keep writing about these shameful and wicked events? Goodall thinks so, and so do I. Until the parameters have embedded. themselves in the day to day historical understandings of politicians, administrators and listeners to commercial radio, we historians surely must continue to listen, to uncover and to narrate.
Sally Morgan believes that nineteenth century massacres of Aborigines remain obscure or unknown.[1] Perhaps the killings have become more embedded in the national understanding than she realises, though generically rather than individually. The greater problem now is to document the mundane but flagrant abuses of human rights-by state employees, not feral pastoralists - in our own century. To Goodall, these abuses relate principally to dispossession, for the relentless revocation of NSW reserves throughout the century has touched every aspect of Aboriginal life. Even the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry into the Stolen Generations has not heard much evidence of the sort which Goodall presents: how the threat of separation was used to evict adults from their own small reserves and farms which they had thought, in their innocence, the government had provided for them forever. Reserve deprivation was worse than massacres in the sense that it was sanctioned and executed by responsible and elected governments.
Consider some of the events which Goodall describes. In 1917, Aboriginal families of Gingie, near Walgett, desired to have their children educated in the nearest public school. The Walgett whites insisted the school be separated; the Protection Board (as always) went to water and ordered the children out; the whites then complained that the children were neglected, and the Board removed them to the Homes. George Driver, the father of Ruby, jumped in front of the train abducting yet another Aboriginal citizen of Australia, his hands against the engine, his feet braced against the sleepers. He was dragged away while Ruby, in her own way, was dragged away too. She died in Sydney five years later having never seen her family again. Soon after, almost the entire Walgett Aboriginal community was harried to Angledool, a hundred kilometres to the north, after the whites again objected to the children in the school.
Another violation in a century of abuse: the manager of Tuncester reserve near Lismore in 1934 abruptly stopped the people's rations and threatened to remove their children if they did not move to another reserve. To emphasise the point, he then demolished the school. The same thing happened at Baryulgil: in an attempt to make the Urunga community move to Burnt Bridge near Kempsey, the manager demolished the homes of the Mosely family which had built them, then removed the WC from the school. When Mosely protested he was told he had no right to question the manager. The community nailed up the fence to prevent the manager's return; the manager, reinforced with policemen, broke back in to remove the demolished material and the water tank. Mosely asked the police inspector what was his duty: 'Give less cheek or I'll lock you away'. The Board confiscated the productive and hard-won farmland of Kinchela, near Kempsey, and by bitter irony erected the hated Kinchela Boys Home upon it. Amidst these violations, Goodall, as always, writes with considerable self-restraint In what seems the only use of italics in the entire book she writes of the failure of Aborigines to achieve as much as a single dwelling even on the edges of country towns: The infuriating thing for many Aboriginal people was that they were denied even so small a piece of land as a house block on their own country.
While massacres, then, possibly have entered the historical understanding of non-Aboriginal Australians, these forced uprootings of entire communities, the constant threats of child removal, the probability of official interference in the smallest acts of daily life, are still unknown outside the communities. Even younger Aborigines are often unaware of the depth of the tragedy which enveloped their elders within living memory, for which the state, its officials, and the white community which supported it can be held to be responsible in a much more direct way than the initial invasion and dispossession. There is at present, then, no heeding the radio journalists who cry 'we have heard enough'. Historians cannot rest until all of Australia understands and accepts these horrific events as part-though only part-of the basis on which reconciliation can proceed.
The Aborigines' desire to retain the reserves it is at the heart of Goodall's book. Note the distinction between land generally and the farming reserves: almost all the NSW twentieth century struggle has been to keep these reserves, mostly farms already granted to Aborigines in the nineteenth century. These farms, from the 1880s, worked well for a generation or two. A single family generally managed and lived on each one, kinfolk became small capitalist producers, self-sustaining in vegetables, timber and meat. The plots were spread throughout the arable areas of the state; there were dozens, for example, at Cumeragunja on the Murray. The title deeds to the farms, though, were vested in the Aborigines Protection Board, not in the occupants. By the 1940s all the Aboriginal farmers had lost them either because the nearby whites demanded the land, or because they objected to their children in school, or because the Board was short of money.
Goodall's argument is that the right to preserve these formally-granted living and farming areas has been a principal, and frequently the principal, concern of Aboriginal internal and external politics for most of this century. The forced evictions of hundreds of Koori farmers from the 1910s was a powerful motive, as Goodall has argued elsewhere, for the formation of the Aborigines Protection Association in the mid 1920s.[2] Kooris fought for their farming reserves, loved them, lived on them, cleared them, fenced them, received spiritual sustenance from them, tried to remain on them, formed political organisations to defend them, and wanted to return to them. They used every means which they had learned from the whites to preserve them: they wrote letters, they formed delegations, they published newspapers, they signed petitions, they appeared before parliamentary enquiries, they used the language and ideology of pastoralist, farmer, free selector, student, hippy and missionary.
But white supporters were often more interested in helping Aborigines end political repression or claim civil rights. Historians have placed, in her view, too much emphasis on these other aspects of recent Indigenous history. Goodall argues that the fight to retain the reserves underpinned all the other demands, subsumed under the struggle 'for recognition of their right to live undisturbed and with security on land of their choice'. Even the other key demands of the 1930s, such as the abolition of the Board, stemmed directly from Aborigines' 'deep desires to preserve family life and to remain in the places where they had been born'. Perhaps she incorporates the other demands a little too fully into the rubric 'cryin' out for land'. At other times Aborigines demanded liberty, freedom, full equality, representation in Federal parliament, equal wages, rights to ownership of property, control of personal savings, receipt of welfare benefits, equal education, equal access to the nation's resources, equality of labour conditions, the right to live, the right to live in town, the right to employment, the right to preserve the race, the right to recognition as Indigenous people, the end of caste distinctions, and the end of child removal.
Goodall has been careful not to burden her text with European thinkers and their theoretical constructions. Yet her analysis of the variety and depth of the ways by which Kooris form attachments to their country is state of the art, elegantly concealed. Traditional and spiritual association with reserve land, she argues, is only one of many bases of profound association. William Cooper's assertion of his people's 'Divine Right' to land, and the many appeals to Queen Victoria's having signed the deeds of grant, were examples of using the concept of royalty to assert the equivalent dignity of their own authority and power structures. Soon there were new, experiential layers of meanings overlaying the old. Aborigines cleared the bush, farmed the land, built huts, fenced boundaries, bore children, nursed their sick and buried their dead on the treasured reserves. The social meanings invested in the reserve land, the major events of the life cycle, the thousands of cups of tea and damper, consumed on the same iron bedstead before the same tripod and black billy, had invested the reserves with those rich and diverse social meanings. Reserves became focal points on the routes of those kin members who came to help with the harvest, or camped when little work was available. Goodall writes:
'So the richness of daily life was experienced there repeatedly over those decades, and the memories of the everyday events, as well as the knowledge of the past meanings of the land, and the hopes for the future, were all embedded within the boundaries of those reserve lands. Thus an intense new web of significance and meaning was being laid down on these lands through this period of colonisation, adding to the traditional meanings for land'.
The intensely repressive time of the 'dog acts' of the 1930s-40s wedded loyalties both to kinfolk and to the sites of action. The land grew ever richer in meaning: in memories of massacres and dispossessions long past and recent, memories momentous and mundane, of the warmth and tensions of community life, of the desire to be close to the memories of the old people, the responsibility to protect and share custody of their graves. The struggle to preserve the reserve land, then, symbolises the rich traditional culture of pre-invasion Australia; it was symbolic by its absence; it stood for the great debt white Australia owed to the people on whose land its prosperity was built, it stood for memories of events, and it stood for future economic opportunity. Of all the variety of meanings of land, Goodall emphasises most of all the social, acquired through memory, experience and oral tradition. She is right to do so. The social and experiential meanings of land have been discussed least; they are minimised in the land rights legislation in most of the States and Territories.
Such were the meanings which the land acquired. Now the political expression of those meanings was altered by the environment in which generations of Aborigines found themselves. When the Aboriginal farmers of the 1880s presented their grievances to the Board they did not utilise the language and ideology of free selection cynically: they believed themselves to be legitimate free selectors. So did the ex-servicemen after 1918 believe themselves to be entitled to soldier settler blocks. Aborigines absorbed and utilised the available ideologies of their times. Sometimes they were constrained by prevailing ideologies. The professional anthropologists of the 1930s, Goodall argues interestingly, put a temporary brake on land claims based on traditional association, for men like Elkin maintained to the government that traditional life and association were dead. In the 1960s, Goodall relates from her own experience, the new supporters of Aborigines, influenced by Fanon, Camus and native Americans as well as by African-American civil rights, were excited by 'traditional', non-competitive cultures: their desire that Aborigines should be 'pre-capitalists' may have constrained Aboriginal groups to emphasise their 'traditional' spiritual associations with land, rather than the secular meanings embedded in kin relations and economy which may have been just as important to the Aborigines themselves.
Goodall makes it plain that the revocation of hundreds of these small reserves should never have occurred. By the logic of the argument, it is the reserves which ought to be the focus of State-wide land rights today. But the NSW government, which had neglected properly to gazette the revocation of the reserves in the 1920s, only passed the 1982 Land Rights Act on the condition that Aborigines accepted these post-dated and much belated revocation orders. That now seems to have been an egregious blunder which, if land rights are to be taken seriously today, can be rectified only by regazetting those reserves which are still retained in living memory.
First (this is my argument), because non-Aboriginal rural depopulation is not only rapid, but accelerating. If there ever was a time to re-legitimate the revoked reserves for the rural Aborigines who have never left their country, now is the time.
Second (these arguments are Goodall's), because the non-Aborigines' vision of the meaning of Australian landscape has changed. Their vision of the densely settled yeoman farms has disappeared along with the paintings of sunlit flocks among the gums. Drought stricken abandoned properties and the destitute unemployed dominate rural affairs, the national icons of grassland and eucalypt have been replaced by the more uncompromising harshness of the western desert.[3]
Third, because the old reserves themselves remained the first and principal focus of desire. Indeed, Goodall relates, some of the Aborigines' supporters in the 1970s felt a little frustrated by this determinedly narrow focus. So, apparently, did Kevin Gilbert.[4] The reserves remained the focus though. The Aborigines saw them not only as part of their traditional lands, but as their own more intimate areas, won by squatting or negotiation, believed to be secure, farmed or lived on successfully, acquiring memories and associations, only to find 'their tenure challenged and lost against their intense resistance'.
Lastly, logic holds that the old reserves should be returned to their former occupants on the basis of wrongful dispossession. Surely the proposition can be based not on 'Indigenousness' but misfeasance-the wrongful use of legitimate authority. One can in a sense argue that compensation is due to the Stolen Generations not just because they were removed as Aborigines but because of the harm done to them by the state subsequently. The psychological and physical harm which befell the children after their removal demands justice and compensation in its own right-not because they were Aborigines, but because they are Australian citizens whom the Australian state has harmed. In the same way, although Aboriginality was the criterion for the establishment of 27,000 acres of reserve land by 1911, the loss of that land was a breach of good faith by government whose misfeasance now demands justice and compensation in its own right.
Consider the story of the Cumeragunja strike in 1939. The farms which so many families had successfully worked had already been leased or sold by the Protection Board. Housing, water reticulation and sanitation were consistently worse than in Surry Hills at the height of the rat plague. A drought in 1939 contaminated the water and left the residents in extreme distress. Enter the station manager McQuiggan, who was transferred to Cumeragunja as a mild punishment for a series of gross violations of managerial trust while superintendent of the Kinchela Boys Home. McQuiggan first prevented the evacuation of a child with polio. He carried a rifle about and soon brought the station to hostile and bitter confrontation. William Cooper demanded of the Premier why his people were kept as if in a Nazi concentration camp. In February 1939 two thirds of the Cumeragunja station residents, to put an end to these unendurable conditions, abandoned the land for which they had fought for thirty years, crossed the Murray and entered Victoria. The strike was finally broken when the Protection Board convinced the Victorian government to withhold food relief to strikers and to deny their children access to the Barmah school. Many of the descendants of the strikers never returned to Cumeragunja, and still seek access to some form of land grant which they have been denied.
The argument is inescapable. The residents were illegally driven from the reserve and the farms which were rightfully theirs. The argument for restoring the former reserves to the former occupants is overwhelming, especially given the current government's propensity to establish national parks to the disappointment of farmers and developers.
Nothing, of course, is simple. Since the illegal revocations of the 1920s, non-Aboriginal farmers have bought from the State the hundreds of former reserves in good faith and sunk their own emotional roots into the soil. In my recent book Returning to Nothing, which examines the different ways in which non-Aborigines form attachments to the land, I coincidentally discuss the very same mechanisms by which Goodall describes Aborigines forming attachments to the reserves. These include feelings of belonging through long association, from clearing and working the land, from walking on it, from sharing social occasions, from participating in the rites of birth, christening, marriage and burial. The deep attachments of white Australians grow out of solitary musings, from absorbing the majestic change of the seasons, from supervising the same play areas shared by children and grandchildren. Belonging grows out of a thousand cups of tea and brownies shared on the same seats at the same table in the same kitchen for more than fifty years.[5] Non-Aborigines have their roots in the land by analogous mechanisms, even though, as Goodall notes, Aborigines possess that 'something more, a glimpse of a very different vision of the land's meaning.[6]
So, if we cannot begin the work of reconciliation until we accept the dreadful narrative of twentieth century dispossession, we cannot continue it unless we mark the deep attachments of non-Aborigines to the same soil - often enough into those same reserves which have never left the cherished memory of two living generations of Aborigines. If the reserves are to be returned to Aborigines-as they should-then compensation must clearly be allowed to those white farmers who bought it. Simple appropriation contravenes natural justice. In my view, the preferred method would be fair purchase in the manner followed by the Aboriginal Lands Trust in the 1980s, by which the Federal government set aside funds for a tribunal to purchase rural properties, or parts of special significance, to Aboriginal claimants.
Compromise must also be allowed to the whites who have sunk their roots of attachment to the same soil. For the equation is not necessarily one sided. An Aboriginal speaker on Radio National recently said:
We Aboriginal people don't believe that we have a monopoly on spirituality. But we believe that we've practised it a little longer. You can only have that if you're connected to the land and you come from the position of belief in what it represents.[7]
More and more non-Aborigines seeking reassurance of their attachments to the land will, I believe, find comfort in these words. Obviously there must be compromise, based upon sharing access to those areas to which several communities, white and black, bring their associations and memories. Indeed, the re-gazetting of the reserves, momentous and improbable though the procedure may be, is no longer the only issue. That's yours, this is ours' is only a starting point, for the native title legislation currently gives local custodians the right to claim much larger areas than the former reserves. Providing the legislation remains intact, it seems likely that we will have to learn physically as well as emotionally to share the same areas of attachment, but for this tricky procedure we have few models.
Goodall describes a period of 'dual occupation' in the pastoral north-west in the second half of the nineteenth century. I don't think that shared pastoral work will be a useful model, nor was it ever: first because the cattle and sheep industry caused much irretrievable environmental damage, second because all the power was in the hands of the whites, and third because, if the analogy of the Northern Territory stations is a guide, Aborigines remained within their own country partly because if they tried to escape they would be pursued and punished. No, the 'symbiotic' nineteenth century relationship between the pastoralists and the Kooris does not help.
And the present? Thousands of tourists annually visit Uluru which is jointly managed but legally owned by the traditional owners. Relations between the park management and the Aborigines are as sound as can be expected. Slow and skilled negotiations over many months are producing a negotiated agreement between traditional Aboriginal and pastoral owners in the Willandra Lakes world heritage region. In several other areas of the State (and the country) it is the State governments, not the local disputants, who refuse to compromise, turning promising two-way negotiations into three-cornered legal stand-offs. Slow and patient negotiation of shared access between the intimately interested parties, from which the State keeps at a distance, offers the most promising model at present.
In any case we non-Aborigines should not delude ourselves that our emotional relationship with the land, nor even the ignorant intransigence of the State governments, are of first importance to the Aborigines themselves. We have some urgent making up to do first; and perhaps we should wait until the Aborigines have come to terms with some of the immense problems which the arbitrary deprivation of country this century-not last-has left them. Goodall notes that not all the people who left their country, for whatever reason, maintain a sense of identification and engagement with their land. How do the Stolen Generations perceive their relations to land and how do their communities perceive them? And do those expelled, or those who chose to leave the reserves in the 1950s and 1960s, have lesser authority, and do those who never left have greater authority? Such questions, Goodall notes, are the uneasy backdrop of contemporary land politics.
In some ways the thesis still carries the preoccupations and attitudes of the early 1980s. There are no selfish, silly, wrong-headed or bad Aborigines, and the whites are mostly unsympathetic, greedy, uncaring or cruel. Not many of the latter are named. That was the way, of course, most of us historians of Aboriginal Australia wrote at the time. Yet in one sense it doesn't matter what individual personalities, admirable or shameful, were like. Individuals on both sides were complex, but the central dispossession of almost all the land which Aborigines occupied in 1788 overshadows individual acts of kindness or compassion. Though the polarities were drawn more harshly in the 1980s, the logic of the book gives a firm basis to understand the starting points of emotional and physical reconciliation.
For reconciliation, by Goodall's logic, is still possible. Time may be running out, though, not because Aborigines will grow more militant but because they grieve too deeply. This is Deborah Mailman's last message in the one-person Murri drama The Seven Stages of Grieving:
'You know there has always been this grieving,
Grieving for our Land, our families,
Our cultures that have been denied us.
But we have been taught to cry quietly
Where only our eyes betray us with tears.
But now, we can no longer wait,
I am scared my heart is hardening.
I fear I can no longer grieve
I am so full and know my capacity for grief.
What can I do but ... perform'.[8]
Invasion to Embassy matches Henry Reynolds' Aboriginal Sovereignty in incisiveness of argument, and Anna Haebich's For Their Own Good in its massive narrative sweep. It is a powerful, gripping and heroic book.
[1] Sally Morgan, in Nikki Barrowclough, 'For All of Us', The SMH Good Weekend, 12 Oct 1996, p29.
[2] H Goodall, 'Land In Our Own Country, Aboriginal History 14 (1990),1-24.
[3] Goodall, p264.
[4] Kevin Gilbert, quoted by Graham Willett, 'To The Centre: Aboriginal Politics Before and After Mabo', Reconstruction: 1-12, p6.
[5] P Read, Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places, CUP, Melbourne, 1996, ch 1.
[6].Goodall, p76.
[7] 'Pan, Panic and the Australian Bush', broadcast October 1996.
[8] Deborah Mailman and Wesley Enoch, The Seven Stages of Grieving, 1995, typescript p13.
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AboriginalLawB/1996/84.html