Distant Voices (71 page)

Keating is right to deride such a ‘golden age', presided over by an Anglophile
ad absurdum
(Menzies) who wrote secretly in his diary: ‘A sick feeling of repugnance grows in me as I near Australia' and who was later promoted to be Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.
³³

But how, I wonder, does Paul Keating intend to prevent other Gallipolis, other Vietnams, other Maralingas? How does he intend to get back Australia's secrets and resources from the United States, Britain and Japan and its newspapers from Murdoch? How will he stop the haemorrhage of capital and find jobs for the young? Only in the answers to these questions will he, and the rest of us, find that ‘necessary independence'.

March 6, 1992

Sydney

WALKING FROM THE
Opera House to the ferry jetties of Circular Quay, one of the most spectacular short journeys on earth, I came upon a white man playing a didgeridoo: the long Aboriginal instrument whose haunting woodwind sound speaks for black Australians in a way that some whites understand. That is to say, it reminds them that their country is not quite theirs: that it has a rapacious, secret past; that it is half won and its story half told.

Even the inept playing of a white busker surrounded by tourists had this effect on me, especially as tangible evidence was close at hand. Standing in the busker's audience you had only to raise your eyes to see the figure on the street corner opposite: that of a black man slumped in the gutter, around whom people walked, as if he was a hole in the ground. The irony would be searing were it not an everyday matter.

In Australia, such matters are ‘everyday' once again. For almost four years, following the setting up in 1987 of a Royal Commission of Enquiry into black deaths in custody, the condition and rights of Aboriginal people were issues. Newspapers published stories of atrocities against blacks as if they represented a phenomenon, rather than an historical pattern of events. In particular, the frequent, violent death of black Australians in prisons and police custody at last became news; and the news was shocking to many white Australians
who will tell you that they seldom lay eyes on their black compatriots.

When the Royal Commission was appointed by the then prime minister, Bob Hawke, the former chief psychiatrist at Bargwanarth Hospital in Soweto wrote to the
Sydney Morning Herald
to point out that the rate of black deaths in custody in Australia was thirteen times higher than in South Africa.
³⁴

Comparison with South Africa is beyond the pale in Australia; it offends the nation's self-image of ‘fair go'; and the Royal Commission was undoubtedly meant to deal with that. Royal Commissions are common in Australia. One of them is almost always in progress. They are like the teams that paint the Sydney Harbour bridge; once they finish one end, they must start again. Asked to describe the purpose of a typical Australian Royal Commission, the former judge and Royal Commissioner James McClelland called it ‘a device employed by governments to sweep under the rug a problem which they either could not or did not want to solve'.
³⁵

Because there is guilt about the Aborigines, and because Australian governments have sought to persuade their Asian and Pacific trading partners that racism is no longer condoned, as it was under the White Australia Policy, there was some hope that the Royal Commission enquiring into the deaths of black people in custody would take a high moral stand and make its recommendations so tough they were unsweepable. The chief commissioner, Elliott Johnston, declared his shock at what he found. ‘Until I examined the files of the people who died [in police custody],' he said, ‘I had no conception of the degree of pin-pricking domination, abuse of personal power, utter paternalism, open contempt and total indifference with which so many Aboriginal people were visited on a day-to-day basis.'
³⁶

The Commission spent almost four years and $A30 million in its investigations and deliberations. When it reported last year, it made 339 recommendations. Not one of them was a call for criminal charges against police or prison officers or a conclusion of foul play, regardless of overwhelming
evidence to the contrary. Instead, changes in policing and custodial methods, education and poverty, were to be left to the same state authorities that have been the main oppressors of black Australians. In the case of John Pat, who died in a police cell after a ‘fight' with four police officers (who were subsequently acquitted of his manslaughter), Commissioner Johnston commented, ‘I do not accept as necessarily true much of the evidence of the officers relating to this incident.'
³⁷
Yet he proposed no action.

One of the Commission's main recommendations was that Aborigines – a small minority who in many towns make up the majority of prisoners – should be jailed only as a last resort. This statement of the obvious had been the Commission's theme since its inception. The response of state governments has been equally clear: more Aborigines have been sent to prison than ever before. A study last month by the Institute of Criminology at Sydney University found that the number of Aborigines jailed during and since the Royal Commission had risen by a quarter. In New South Wales – regarded as the most progressive state in its treatment of Aborigines – the increase was by 80 per cent. The author of the report, Chris Cunneen, said, ‘This shatters the illusion that New South Wales is a more civilised state. It is now a leading “redneck state” – second only to Western Australia in its imprisonment of Aborigines.'
³⁸
In July 1992 the Queensland Government announced, apparently with pride, that Aboriginal prisoners who tore up blankets in a bid to hang themselves would no longer be charged with ‘wilful damage'.

In the meantime, according to a report by the Human Rights Commission, police systematically torture young Aborigines to get them to confess to crimes.
³⁹
Another report concludes that if you are black and seriously ill, you are unlikely to get an ambulance to come and get you. Aboriginal health levels are described as ‘shameful'. The death rate of black children is two and a half times that of white children; for adults, the rate is three times higher. Diseases considered
preventable in white Australia ravage Aboriginal communities; tuberculosis is an epidemic.
⁴⁰

As if this wasn't enough, a study by the World Council of Churches says the impact of such manifest racism is ‘genocidal' and accuses the Australian Government of finding an ‘institutionalised way of underdeveloping Aborigines'. For me, the Council's most telling observation was that a ‘conspiracy of silence surrounds the plight of Australia's Aborigines . . .'
⁴¹

This is both true and remarkable – remarkable because the reports mentioned above, and numerous others, were all published widely. And there will be more of them, filling columns of space in the Melbourne
Age
and the
Sydney Morning Herald.
It is as if they are part of the veneer of civilised behaviour: to be accepted with due solemnity, then disregarded.

This has not always been the case. Twenty-five years ago a national referendum was held in which more than 90 per cent of the Australian electorate voted to give the federal government the constitutional right to legislate justice for the Aboriginal people. No referendum anywhere in modern times had produced such an overwhelming, positive result. The prime minster and his ministers could override the states on all questions relating to Aborigines; they had been handed an ‘historic mandate'. The Whitlam Government drew up comprehensive land-rights legislation, part of which was made law in 1976 by the Fraser Government – but only in the Northern Territory, which the federal government administered. Redneck states were allowed to proceed with redneck policies.

When the Hawke Labor Government came to power in 1983, the minister for Aboriginal affairs, Clyde Holding, said that a national land-rights policy was ‘the only restitution' for crimes that he compared with Hitler's persecution of the Jews.
⁴²
Nothing happened. Bob Hawke dropped land rights from his government's agenda. He cried in public for the victims of Tiananmen Square in China and he damned
apartheid; Australia led the campaign for sanctions against South Africa.

Such familiar hypocrisy has, however, met a modern resistance. This springs from an Aboriginal renaissance that has yet to receive the historical recognition it deserves; I can think of no equivalent. It began in 1966 when the Gurindji people went on strike at the world's biggest cattle station at Wave Hill, near Alice Springs. They were protesting against subsistence wages and poor conditions. Instead of returning to work, as expected, they camped on what they regarded as their land and in defiance of their employers, the English pastoral conglomerate headed by Lord Vestey.

It came as something of an embarrassment to white trade unions, proud of their legal minimum wage, to learn that highly skilled stockmen were paid a few dollars a week, plus a few sacks of flour, sugar and tea, and suffered living conditions no better than those provided for the station's dogs. A national campaign formed behind the Gurindji; but Vestey refused to acknowledge their grievances. As the strike endured, Aboriginal demands changed radically, so that the call was no longer for improved pay and working conditions but for land rights and self-determination.

The Gurindji's stand had a chain reaction. The Yirrkala people instructed lawyers to challenge the British common law interpretation of
terra nullius.
It failed; but Aboriginal activism now grew quickly. In 1972 Aborigines set up a ‘tent embassy' outside Parliament House in Canberra and flew a flag of red, yellow and black, denoting earth, sun and people. For the first time world attention was drawn to a cause few outside Australia had known about. Gough Whitlam, then leader of the opposition Labor Party, was invited into the tent by Aboriginal representatives and joined them in an historic meeting to negotiate terms for national land rights and human rights.

Shortly after he became prime minister in December of that year, Whitlam commissioned a land rights enquiry by a judge, Justice A. E. Woodward. The Woodward Commission recommended legislation to give back to Aboriginal people
those parts of Australia where they now lived and had traditionally lived and which for them had spiritual importance.

In 1975 an Aboriginal Land Rights Act was drafted by the Whitlam Government. It was to be applied at first in the Northern Territory, which did not have statehood and was run directly by the federal government. In August of that year Whitlam took a handful of soil and slowly poured the grains into the hands of Vincent Lingiari, a leader of the Gurindji people. The Government gave back to the Gurindji some 1,250 square miles. ‘The people of Australia', said Whitlam, ‘are finally restoring this land to you and your children for ever.'
⁴³

Three months later the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, dismissed the Whitlam Government in a ‘constitutional coup'. The following year a conservative coalition government, led by Malcolm Fraser, introduced only a shadow of Labor's land rights legislation. The Act gave freehold, ‘inalienable' title to the land to Aboriginal communities living on ‘reserves' in the Northern Territory. A Supreme Court judge was appointed as Land Commissioner to hear Aboriginal claims. It was a beginning, even if virtually all the ‘inalienable' land handed back was arid wilderness. The richest, most productive land, amounting to more than half the land of the Northern Territory, was leased to cattle owners, who represent 0.1 per cent of the population.

At the same time black Australia began to produce its first renaissance men and women. They were teachers, historians, writers, artists and playwrights. Kevin Gilbert became the first Aboriginal playwright to be acknowledged by white Australia at a time when the national census included sheep, but not him. I last saw him standing at the back of a literary event in Canberra, shouting, ‘Killing and indifference are the same thing: don't you people understand that?' Born in 1933 on the banks of the great Lachlan river at Condolobin in New South Wales, his mother was a Wiradjuri-Kamilaroi woman, his father Irish. Like most children of mixed parentage he was taken from his mother at the age of seven and sent as an ‘orphan' to a ‘reserve' where Christianity was
meant to strip him of his Aboriginality: that was the theory. Like so many, he grew up with little education, and with violence and alcoholism. In a drinking bout he murdered his wife, for which he was imprisoned for fourteen years. At Bathurst jail, one of Australia's toughest, he spent years in the ‘intractable yards' and was regularly beaten senseless.

Yet he came back from the abyss; he taught himself to paint and to read and write; and his appetite for books became voracious. His first play,
The Cherry Pickers
, was performed in 1971 while he was still in prison. On his release he became one of the most eloquent of the land rights activists, who time and again called upon white Australia to face the truth of its past.

Typically, he once read out loud his poem,
Memorials
, facing a country town's cenotaph on Anzac Day. All around him were veterans. His was the only Aboriginal face. He read: