A case might be made for a view that for several decades after 1788 the damage done to Aboriginal society by the British colonists of Australia was not willful and was not seen as a necessary effect of their own presence. A hope persisted that a way might yet be found to assimilate the Aborigines agreeably into European society or to insulate them from it while giving them the benefits of civilization and Christianity.
It would be hard to sustain any such thesis for the 1820s and impossible from the 1830s onward. By then the colonists were becoming aware, and their understanding grew ever stronger, that they were in deadly struggle with the Aborigines for scarce life-space. During the next sixty or seventy years, the colonists broke imperiously away from the Colonial Office plan for a concentrated settlement and dispersed into the interior, reaching by the 1890s the farthest limits set by the market of the time as the economic margin. They dispossessed the Aborigines of all land of good pastoral potential and brought hundreds of tribes to ruin. Europeans not only had an awareness of v/hat they were doing but also had a comfortable assurance that a fusion of political authority, law, morals, religion, and rationality supported their self-interest. The situation stayed more or less stable until after the depression of the 1930s. By then a third period had begun; that period, which is the particular concern of this essay, was characterized by a slow but persistent change in the ethos of Australian society. Aboriginal problems began to come to the forefront of national attention and emerged finally as a leading issue of politics and public policy. That led to a far-reaching reorientation of policy and practice and a marked if lagged rise in the political self-consciousness of the Aboriginal people themselves. In the 1970s a fundamental issue, always immanent in the life of Australian society but not manifest for more than a century, was disclosing itself. The issue was whether European Australians would accept the fact that Aboriginal society
has a personality and, therefore, a claim and right to a future of its own.
The Years of “Fatal Consequence”
Our thesis concerning the first few decades of settlement may seem too charitable in the light of the conflict and bloodletting that did occur. But it, nevertheless, has merit and avoids anachronism. The early colonists—totally ignorant of the systematic aspects of Aboriginal society, culture, and ecology—could make little sense of the visible degradation that came upon every tribal group in touch with the settlements; nor could Europeans foresee the long chain of similar effects in events that had yet to happen. It is consistent with the mentality of authorities who, left without guidance and having no precedent, yet were bound by an idealistic imperial policy to bring old principle and new circumstance together in a bastard military-civil polity in a strange country where in many eyes “…nature is reversed, and if not so, she is nearly worn out.”
1 It suggests how occupation could become irreversible before anyone had a clear understanding of the dilemma intrinsic to and continuous in the whole undertaking. A persistently bifocal vision distracted eyes from the evidence (and minds from the appraisal) of the destruction of Aboriginal society. And it provides part of the paradigm of the political and public issue again becoming manifest in the 1970s.
In 1819 a French visitor to Sydney—repelled by the squalor of Aboriginal life in the capital and by the unseeing and unfeeling attitude of the European populace—had noted, nevertheless, that natives “from the interior” were coming into the settlements. He rightly thought them driven to do so because of interference with, or destruction of, their natural food supply.
2 The new Aboriginal mobility was widely noted.
3 Events near the coast were thus making clear what would become more obvious in the future. Knowledge gained by personal acquaintance with Aborigines was growing quite rapidly and was better understood both by travelers and by pastoralists on the transmontane slopes and plains. That knowledge was that a society of hunters and foragers could not coexist within the same boundaries with a pastoral and agricultural society.
4 The basic postulate of European society in Australia thus established, its structure and ethos developed consistently over the next century.
The settlers, whether bond or free, did not seem to have been
notably worse or better than others of their kinds and times. Also they were like all people in needing to justify their actions to themselves. Many self-exculpatory formulas were used among them: “needs must,” ethnic dogma, God’s design, the laws of nature and of history, and the supposed social correlates of biological evolution. We need do no more than mention briefly some of the things said by a few men who, assuredly representative of their day, may be thought to have expressed well the ruling mentality and moral sentiments. The instances cover roughly but adequately the period from the 1840s to the 1890s, a period of most fatal consequence for the racial situation in Australia up to the end of the First World War.
5In 1843 a man of piety and exemplary balance came to believe after an agonizing struggle of conscience that “…upon the whole, it is a gain to the cause of truth and virtue for Christian England to possess those wilds which lately were occupied by miserable natives,” of whom he thought “we may safely speak…in terms that are suitable to their degraded state.”
6 In 1860 an English traveler who apparently ranged widely in Australia saw the Aboriginal scene as one of gross darkness and misery, physical and moral: “Their God is their belly; their will, or rather their passions, are their law, as long as they are able, through violence and cruelty, to maintain their point; and the testimony of Scripture, that ‘the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty,’ finds in their case an awful verification.”
7 In 1873 an eminent novelist, contemptuous alike of “savages of the lowest kind” and of what he called “negro-philanthropy,” said that “…an increasing number of aborigines in the land, – were it possible that the race should increase, – would be a curse rather than a blessing”; that “…their doom is to be exterminated; and the sooner that their doom be accomplished, – so that there be no cruelty, – the better will it be for civilization.”
8 A few years later a historian removed the question from the plane of actuality: “Whether the interests of civilization are better served by the destruction of the race than they would have been by its preservation or redemption, is a question for philosophers to settle.”
9 At that time, possibly seventy thousand or eighty thousand Aborigines of the full blood may have been alive.
What can have made such sentiments credible and tolerable among a civilized and Christian people? They were moving toward a life hardly to be surpassed anywhere in the world for vitality, spaciousness, security, and prosperity; and they were already distinguishing
themselves by the quality of their effort to generalize democracy, equality, and justice. It is possibly more a paradox than a question. With hindsight, one can see a moral dilemma being “thought away” so as to become irrelevant to its conscious social morality. There was no conscious plan, conspiracy, or agreed intent, no process under rational control. Rather, what Alfred North Whitehead called “senseless agencies” were effecting two things at the same time. They were so disvaluing the scruples of our man of piety and exemplary balance that it came to seem an unbelievable thing for anyone to have said: “…true, indeed, these despised Australians may, hereafter, rise up in judgment against Europeans to condemn them.”
10 And they were replacing it by a mythology of self-perception such that, in the same year (1889) as the historian G. B. Barton wrote, the poet Percy Russell could say:
Certain circumstances enabled that regression to take place. Over the period of most fatal consequence the Aboriginal numbers fell at a catastrophic rate. By 1901, according to the best estimate yet made,
12 there were a scant 67,000 as against the 251,000 in 1788. Those who were left were, unless located far beyond the economic margin, either institutionalized on government or mission settlements or allowed to form camps on the fringes of up-country towns, pastoral properties, farms, and mines, which were usually tucked away well out of sight of the busier centers of colonial life. Over the same period, the European populace became predominantly urban. The transition from a rural to an urban majority (metropolitan and provincial) came in the 1880s. Thus, in the ordinary course of life, a steadily declining number of Europeans were placed where they could see or meet or get to understand the circumstances of a steadily declining number of decadent Aborigines. The decade of the 1880s was also that of the highest net immigration of the nineteenth century, so that the newcomers who saw, met, or heard about Aborigines tended to receive the now conventional impression of that gross darkness and misery, physical and moral. It was just at that time too that—largely because of foreign stimulus—the first truly scholarly study of Aboriginal
society began. Much of the work has put moderns in a permanent debt to these old-time scholars, but unhappily much of it magnified the supposedly prehistoric status of the Aborigines, so much so that more than a generation later they seemed “poor, naked cannibals” even to the genius of Sigmund Freud.
13 On the level of popular portraiture, the derision and contempt expressed in the mid-century years deepened toward a malevolent vilification at the end of the century. The member of the South Australian parliament who saw the detribalized Aborigines of Port Darwin in 1882 as “degraded specimens of humanity…some less manlike than a grinning and chattering monkey…” and questioned “…whether, on the whole, any beings bearing the semblance of humanity could be found more low-sunk than these…”
14 may be bracketed with the member of the new Commonwealth Parliament in 1902 who said: “There is no scientific evidence that [the Aboriginal] is a human being at all.”
15 And, of course, the hypothesis of the 1840s had become the axiom of the 1890s: the Aborigines were a dying race. Sir Baldwin Spencer, the greatest of authorities, remained of that opinion in 1926: “It is inevitable that the full-blooded aboriginal must disappear. The difference between the white race and the black one is so great that it cannot be bridged. All that can be done is to treat those who remain as generously as possible.”
16 Although at that time the curve of depopulation was almost certainly starting to flatten out before starting to climb, the fact was unsuspected.
17 The imminence of a demographic explosion was barely credible even in the 1950s.
Those circumstances may help us understand what was negative—the incognition, the indifference, and the neglect—in Australian attitudes and conduct over a full century. What would be needed for the rest—the irrational positive—is an anthropology of the structure and ethos of transplanted British society in the imperial days of palm and pine. It is not our intention to try to account in such terms for this part of “the paradox.” We can but point to some of the attendant circumstances that paved the way for a reversal by the third quarter of this century of most of the situations and attitudes that were assumed to be constants when the colonies federated in 1901.
The “Third Period”
The six colonies had more in common than not in their treatment of and attitude toward Aborigines.
18 The constitution which
made them into a Commonwealth contained only two specifically relevant provisions. One (sec. 127) said that “in reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, Aboriginal natives shall not be counted.” The proffered explanation has always been that to count the nomads would not have been feasible. It is less than fully convincing. At that time only a minority of the full bloods were truly nomadic, and with each year enumeration become more practicable. A better explanation has been given. The provision “was probably not an expression of racist sentiments…but a recognition of the fact that full-blood Aborigines were outside the political and social system: to include them in the operation of determining electoral boundaries and parliamentary representation would have given states with large Aboriginal populations a fortuitous advantage.”
19 The second provision (sec. 51, xxvi) gave the federal Parliament power, though not exclusive power, to make laws with respect to “the people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.” The proffered explanation has been that, because the Commonwealth at foundation “held no territory in the continent and therefore had no direct responsibility for Aborigines, it gave no thought to the possibility of such responsibility arising in the future.”
20 The provision was not, in truth, aimed at the indigenous race but at non-European peoples such as the Chinese and Melanesians who had been introduced in considerable numbers in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, the fact of its adoption tends to confirm what we have suggested. At the turn of the century, not even the most farsighted statesmen, alert as they were to the need to provide for all political contingencies, foresaw a need of special laws for a vanishing race.
The three notable developments in what we have called the third period—the shift of white attitudes to Aboriginal problems, the reorientation of policy and practice, and the rise of Aboriginal political consciousness and activity—have been attributed to “forces,” “trends,” and “causes,” which as often as not only reify what happened and, more dangerously, help generate a mythology about what happened. There is virtue in saying simply that ideas, interests, and situations changed and that people changed with them. Some essential facts of background and chronology certainly need to be considered.
It is almost forgotten that the Australian Commonwealth might have been an Australasian Commonwealth (that is, including New
Zealand) but for a fear that it would treat the Maoris as it had treated the Aborigines. After the First World War, when the fate of all native peoples under the new system of mandates became a matter of international concern, Australia’s administration of New Guinea received unusual attention simply because of its record concerning the Aborigines. Its credit fell still further when within Australia between 1926 and 1934 there were:
The official paper from which this excerpt is taken referred also to “unsatisfactory” (“discreditable” would have been a more apt adjective)
22 aspects of court proceedings in the Northern Territory and to “telephone conversations at a high level” between London and Canberra, “showing that England was concerned with the general position of the Aborigines.” The facts of the conversations have never been disclosed. But there seems no need for so oblique a description. The British government was embarrassed by the revelations and felt its own international reputation affected. At that time Australia had no foreign representation of its own, and its foreign policy, insofar as it had one, was hardly distinguishable from that of the United Kingdom. There was a tacit assumption that Australia would act (as it almost always did) conformably with Great Britain. In those circumstances it was not unusual or inappropriate for the Dominions Office to make representations to the Australian high commissioner in London and for him in turn to do so to the government in Canberra.
But domestic as well as external considerations made a contribution. The old isolation of the Australian bush was now at an end. The motorcar, the airplane, and the wireless had improved the flow of information as well as the transport and communication patterns. The treatment of Aborigines in the outback and deep bush may not have been any more inconsiderate than before, but more about the situation became known, and known
more quickly, in the cities. At that time the news media, entering on a new phase of sensationalism, exploited the revelations and in particular the justifiable suspicions of official hugger-mugger. The outcome was a public agitation, without parallel since the 1830s, for a more considerate treatment of Aborigines.
The demand was for a radical change from a negative policy of protection to a positive policy of welfare and citizenship. The first distinct signs appeared of a swing of public sentiment away from the old depreciation of Aboriginal culture toward a new appreciation. But the effects were formal and notional rather than actual and concrete. It soon became clear that people and organizations of the kind which had been dismissed contemptuously in the nineteenth century as “Exeter Hall philanthropists” still had insufficient force against the inertia of governments and their instrumentalities. An immense amount of enthusiasm, indignation, and hard work therefore had few practical results, though there were some. Commonwealth and state officials concerned with the administration of Aborigines met together in 1937 for the first time in Australian history. In 1938 Professor A. P. Elkin, who had played a leading part in the public agitation, cleverly negotiated with the Commonwealth a set of proposals for application in the Northern Territory, which had been a federal responsibility since 1911. The proposals were referred to and became known as “A New Deal for Aborigines.” They had a strong and positive welfare component and were assimilationist rather than simply protectionist in concept. Little had come from them by the time the Second World War broke out. The same was the case with formative ideas put forward by other authoritative persons, including Donald Thomson, Pearson Chinnery (both anthropologists), Theodore Strehlow, Charles Duguid, and the many devoted people who are too numerous to mention. During the war and for several years afterward Australian attention concentrated overwhelmingly on the claims of the natives of Papua–New Guinea. Aboriginal problems did not again come under serious consideration until after the Commonwealth had accepted substantial responsibilities toward other racial populations outside Australia. A disproportionate concern for non-Australian “natives” continued to characterize policy for many years.
The sequence in which new departures in external and domestic “native policy” occurred clearly suggests, therefore, that foreign considerations had much to do with the first softening of Australian attitudes toward the Aborigines. We do not suggest that this
is more than a part of the truth or that it was as true of the second part of the third period (from the 1950s to the 1970s) as of the first. But what truth it has may well be set against a myth in the making: that Australian virtue, always there but now newly discovered by its own motion, alone accounts for the attempt to reverse so much that disfigured the record from the 1830s to the 1930s.
It is also fanciful to suggest that the discovery that the Aborigines were not after all a vanishing people had a great deal to do with the change of attitudes. The discovery postdated the shift. The increase in the number of part-Aborigines probably began in the 1920s. Some anxious mention was made of it at the 1937 conference, but there was no such anxiety over the number of full bloods. Indeed, their number was not known with any certainty to be increasing until the middle 1950s although, as we have already pointed out, the turning point was probably near at hand a good quarter of a century earlier. The qualification “with any certainty” is important. In the census of 1947 only half the estimated number of full bloods were enumerated, and a relatively complete enumeration was not obtained until 1966.
23 It is one of the open secrets of Australian public life, so little had the fact of a demographic explosion registered, that even in 1972 Commonwealth advisers and officials were hard put to persuade authority that funds and plans were still dangerously incommensurate with a rate of increase in the total Aboriginal population of about 3.4 percent per annum—“…one of the highest rates of natural increase in the world and almost four times the figure for non-Aborigines in 1966.”
24The third development—the rise or at least the organized public expression of Aboriginal political attitudes—is popularly supposed to have been the prime cause of the first, the changed European outlook, and of the second, the reorientation of policy and practice. The actual relations seem to have been very nearly the opposite until perhaps the 1960s, but even then the door on which Aboriginal activists began to hammer was already unlatched and opening. Of course, resentment and open or covert opposition to Australian rule had animated the Aboriginal people since 1788, silent though the history books may be about it—as they are of the scale and pattern of resistance by arms against the spread of settlement. But apart from a few very exceptional incidents little has been recorded of organized Aboriginal political activity. In the 1870s and 1880S the remnants of the five great tribes of the Kulin
Nation persistently lobbied the government of Victoria. In 1937 exactly 1,814 Victorian Aborigines sought to petition King George VI through the prime minister to prevent their extinction and to be represented in the federal Parliament by an Aboriginal or a sympathetic European. In 1938 a New South Wales body known as the Aborigines Progressive Association celebrated the 150th anniversary of Australia’s foundation by “A Day of Mourning and Protest” and issued a public manifesto extraordinarily like statements to be made thirty-five years afterward. A few days later a deputation of the same protestants went to Canberra to ask the prime minister and the minister for the interior to bring all Aboriginal affairs under a federal ministry. (In the upshot the petition never reached the king. The petitioners were advised that both federal and state governments believed themselves to be doing everything in their power to prevent the extinction of Aborigines and fully appreciated their responsibilities for Aboriginal welfare.) But it would be unwise to deduce from the infrequency of such protests, or from the paucity of the record, that the Aborigines lacked political capacity. Another and probably better explanation can be found in the decimation of numbers, the destruction of social organization, the scattering of tribal remnants, and the consuming misery of their circumstances, without even referring to the systematic suppression or removal of outspoken or aggressive men who, being regarded as trouble-makers, may in many instances have been natural political leaders. It is a fact, however, that when in the reformist atmosphere of the 1930s an increasing number of new voluntary societies began to form around older societies, such as the Association for the Protection of Native Races and the National Missionary Council of Australia, there was little Aboriginal membership or movement toward leadership. Not for some years were attempts made by Aborigines to achieve exclusive control of new societies by members of their own race. With a few notable exceptions
25 the first generation of leaders were preponderantly men and women of mixed descent drawn mainly from urban and provincial groups, and that has remained largely the case down to the late 1970s.
The Search for a Policy
The reformist movement in the second half (1948–1973) of the third period began with a step of decisive importance. The officials who had met in 1937 had clearly recognized the needs of part-Aborigines
but not those of the full bloods. This was now corrected. Because later much was to hang on the failure at the time of transition to effect more than a partial reversal of the past, the events leading to the correction need summarizing.
The 1937 conference had recommended that “half-castes,” as they were then called, should be educated for employment at white standards so as to facilitate their absorption into the Australian populace. But it did not make any such recommendations concerning the full bloods. It suggested that they be categorized as “detribalized,” “semicivilized,” and “uncivilized.” It appeared to favor something like apartheid in inviolable reserves as an appropriate way of dealing with the last two categories but suggested that this should be done as far as possible without damage to the needs of employers of Aboriginal labor. The idea of the absorption of part-Aborigines took hold of the official imagination, though under the new rubric of assimilation, which then came quickly into general currency. Several states began to legislate or to adapt administrative philosophy and practice accordingly. The Commonwealth went a step farther. It developed an outline plan to apply the new concept in an expanded form to the whole Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory. For its time, that was a signal advance.
The design of the plan obviously owed much to Chinnery’s New Guinea experience as well as to Elkin’s and Thomson’s
26 recommendations. There were to be a Department of Native Affairs, special courts to deal with Aboriginal offenders, an Aboriginal constabulary, and a field staff trained in law and anthropology. The basic assumption was that Aboriginal culture had collapsed, or would soon do so everywhere, and that assimilation into a European mode of life was the one rational possibility. The basic postulate was that Aborigines were of right entitled to eventual citizenship in a full sense. Therefore, they should be trained for a settled life and useful occupation; taught to recognize authority, law, and the rights of property; given religious training to “replace the stability of character which has been lost by the destruction of their ancient philosophy and moral code.” The uncivilized were to be left alone until progress had been made with the semicivilized and detribalized categories.
The war came before the plan could be followed through to effect, although between 1940 and 1946 some useful preparatory steps were taken. When in 1948, after a lapse of eleven years, Commonwealth and state officials (now drawn from a wider range
of administrative, welfare, and social service agencies) again met, they recommended a policy of assimilation for the whole Aboriginal population of Australia. The recommendation was formally adopted after further meetings (with ministers meeting at the same time) in 1951 and 1953. A watershed of philosophy, attitude, and practice thus seemed to have been crossed. But, in spite of a more generous provision of funds, legislative and administrative acts of excellent intention, and hard work by a new breed of dedicated officials, controversy over attitudes and purposes persisted.
The new policy soon came under attack by Europeans who sympathized with the Aborigines and eventually by many Aborigines. The reasons are not hard to state. A new ideology was taking hold of influential sections of the Australian public, especially the young, the educated, and the well-to-do in the cities and provincial towns. It was founded in part on a belief that Aboriginal culture, being of significant value in itself, should be preserved. But governments were plainly acting as if Aboriginal preferences were unimportant and as if religious, land, law, marital, and family customs were no longer worth saving. The early forms in which the policy had been stated were also ambiguous. Certain words and phrases seemed to imply an eventual intent to compel Aborigines to become wholly Europeanized or at least appeared to assume their consent to the abandonment of their own social forms and culture. The authorities made patient and sincere efforts to find neutral words to express what seemed at that time a commonsense proposition, namely, that “…the native people will grow into a society in which, by force of history, they are bound to live.”
27 But the studiously careful version finally adopted
28 did not still the disquiet or end the controversy, even though it represented a quantum jump from the past. Certain facts deepened the antagonisms. The new policy seemed to become for governments and many officials a superior conventional wisdom which could be criticized only for irrational reasons or from dubious motive.
29 The more it was criticized, the more it had to be defended. Evidence accumulated that the habilitation of the Aboriginal people continued to lag behind the now explosive growth of their numbers. No appreciable improvement appeared to be taking place in their standards of health, housing, employment, wages, educational performance, legal status, or civil liberties. Many legal and social discriminations remained unchanged. There appeared to be no intention in the official program to rectify the gut grievances over Aboriginal land and law. Situations multiplied to show that
one consequence of assimilation would be that Aborigines might well lose their effective right of choice between Aboriginal and European ways. In the Northern Territory and Queensland especially, there appeared to be a public policy of fair words and an inner policy sharply different from them. One could hear in the Northern Territory the slogan of “assimilation through individualism,” which, as far as it was understandable, seemed to imply that a bureaucracy had the skills to dismember a society and its culture and then to fit the human pieces together again in a new social order with new values. The scene was thus set for the 1960s, the most turbulent decade of European-Aboriginal relations.
The New Aborigines
The writer has kept a running record of parliamentary, government, mission, academic, and general public events affecting Aborigines over many years. About fifty such events were noted in the 1950s. The total for the 1960s was nearly two hundred, and there were four times as many in the first four years of the 1970s. The disparities illustrate quite well the rapidly growing visibility of Aboriginal affairs on the Australian scene. They also illustrate the growth of Aboriginal restiveness.
Whereas, in the 1950s, only one event initiated by Aborigines seemed sufficiently important to note, there were at least twenty-five in the 1960s, and the high rate of increase has continued into the 1970s. Some matters of large consequence were substantially of Aboriginal origin in the 1960s. They included (1) the presentation to Parliament by Yirrkala Aborigines of a petition of protest against an excision of land from the Arnhem Land Reserve for mining leases; (2) litigation by the same Aborigines against the Commonwealth and a mining consortium; (3) a walk-out by Gurindji tribesmen at Wave Hill cattle station and the transformation of an industrial dispute into a land rights struggle; (4) freedom rides to towns in New South Wales where racial relations had caused offense; and (5) a marked growth of militant demands for the restoration of land, for the recognition of Aboriginal law, for legislation against discrimination, for compensation for alienation, and for a massive attack on poverty and ill health. In these and other matters European activists and sympathizers no doubt played a part. Both the language and the forms of protest certainly carried this suggestion, but the grievances were unquestionably Aboriginal. It was a recidivist blunder for authorities to attribute
the growth of restiveness to the influence of “stirrers.” Impercipience of this kind did much to reduce the yield of a notably productive decade.
The record is far too complex to summarize, nor is it central to our purpose to try to do so because, among other reasons, the effects are still working themselves out. But valuable advances were made in the extension to Aborigines of social service payments (including pensions and unemployment allowances), the electoral franchise, and imaginative educational benefits. Productive technical inquiries into education, housing, health, and wage policy questions were initiated or encouraged. Perhaps there were seven major events: (1) the establishment of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (1961); (2) the decision by the Social Science Research Council of Australia to undertake a study of the whole Aboriginal situation (1964); (3) the national referendum which by an overwhelming majority changed the constitution so as to free the Commonwealth Parliament from statutory restrictions on its power to deal with Aboriginal problems (1967); (4) the establishment of a Commonwealth Council for Aboriginal Affairs and an Office (which in 1972 became a Department) of Aboriginal Affairs (1967); (5) the first meeting in Australian history of Aboriginal spokesmen drawn from every part of the Commonwealth (1969); (6) the unprecedented intrusion of Aboriginal affairs as a policy issue into the federal elections of 1969; and (7) the subsequent appointment of a minister in charge of Aboriginal Affairs. It would be injudicious for the writer, who was personally much involved in these events, to attempt any very specific account of the results they produced, so the following remarks about the 1970s are very general indeed.
By the end of the 1960s, it became clear that the old, self-serving “fusion of political authority, law, morals, religion, and rationality” which had allowed an utterly discreditable racial scene to develop and persist was breaking up, and had to do so. Each of the five elements underwent independent challenges which jointly became virtually impossible to withstand.
A South Australian government under Don Dunstan experimented with the legal recognition of Aboriginal claims to land and with legislation—with real teeth—against racial discrimination. Soon, Aboriginal questions became irreversibly politicized throughout Australia. By the time of the 1969 federal election, three of the five main contesting parties had recognized Aboriginal questions as explicit issues. A fourth party did so at the next federal
election in 1972. Thereafter, the fifth, the Country party—made up largely of extreme and unquiet rural conservatives and their followers—now in a coalition opposition, by stages softened its policy toward Aborigines until by the 1975 election it stood alongside the other parties.
The first step by a Commonwealth government toward a new kind of federal policy can hardly be dated before April 1971, when Prime Minister W. M. McMahon, with the advice of his Council for Aboriginal Affairs, pledged his government to move actively toward five objectives: (1) to assist Aborigines as individuals and as communities to attain and hold “effective and respected places within one Australian society” and to preserve and develop their own culture as “a living element within a diverse Australia”; (2) to allow them to choose the degree and pace of their identification with “one Australia”; (3) to take into account their expressed wishes in forming policy and programs; (4) to follow, in collaboration with the states, a strategy that would encourage Aboriginal self-management; and (5) to base all measures on the need of individuals and groups for special care and assistance, not upon a theory of racial needs or according to a plan for separate development. The prime minister formally restated the policy on Australia Day (January 26) 1926 but for party reasons gelded the statement of the kind of promises that would satisfy the now clamorous “land-rights” claimants. By the 1972 election, at which McMahon’s Liberal-Country party coalition was defeated, the land-rights issue had precipitated two causes célèbres—Wattie Creek and Yirrkala. The first had been so mishandled by the coalition that it had turned into a kind of public torment. In the second the Commonwealth had opposed the Aborigines in a most partisan way. Justice Blackburn had found against the Aborigines on the matters actually in question—whether they had any kind of sustainable claim for relief against the mining consortium—but at the same time could easily be read as regretting that the law was indifferent to far deeper questions of a moral, social, and political order. Insofar as public feeling could be judged, the preponderant response was summed up to the writer by an Aboriginal at Yirrkala: “If that is the law then the law must be changed.” And changed it was, though not by McMahon’s government. It is fair to add, however, that the McMahon government did pass some formative measures to improve, in particular, the education of Aborigines at all levels, including the posttertiary, and to provide capital grants and loans to the more enterprising.
The legislative record of all Commonwealth and state governments, with the possible exception of Queensland, in the 1960s and 1970s was impressive. More than fifty new laws were passed, or old laws repealed or amended, to liberate Aborigines from restrictions or discriminations, to guarantee them independence and equality as far as laws could do so, and to provide them with assistance to overcome their legacy of social handicaps as an ethnic minority. The pace of change increased remarkably with the advent of the Whitlam ministries in and after December 1972 and was well maintained by the Fraser ministry, which came to power three years later.
The fusion thus fell apart under the direct impact of political and legal measures and under the indirect influence of a vast sea change in moral sentiment, which now moved unmistakably behind the Aboriginal cause. The many religious bodies which for years had been in the van of the protest and reform movements shared but did not dominate the leadership, which was at times essentially secular.
It may well appear in the light of history that the Aborigines had won what they saw as the substance of their struggle when the first Whitlam ministry moved, immediately after election, to halt the further grant of leases and mining licenses in the Northern Territory Aboriginal Reserves. The second ministry, early in 1973, appointed Justice A. E. Woodward as Aboriginal land rights commissioner to report on means to effect the government’s decision to recognize Aboriginal land rights. The final report was made in 1974. It was a work of remarkable penetration and productivity. It demonstrated that a coherent plan could be made to give Aborigines, at first in the Northern Territory and later perhaps elsewhere, titles over land that would be valid, safe, and unquestioned. The titles would freely allow the owners, whether individuals or communities, to use and enjoy their land in their own way, while not neglecting the possible national interest or abrogating any existing interest. A bill was prepared and actually introduced into the Parliament, but it lapsed with the defeat of the Whitlam government. The privilege of having a changed bill passed as an act fell to the Fraser government in 1976. But an interim land commissioner had been appointed in 1975 to begin hearing claims for land by Northern Territory Aborigines. And an Aboriginal Land Fund Commission had already begun to buy properties for, or to fund the purchase by, Aboriginal communities throughout much of Australia, again except Queensland.
The collapse of the rationalist basis of the older attitudes—that Aborigines for genetic reasons lack capacity; that their culture and society have no potential for development; that European culture and society are intrinsically superior; that modern life is morally and materially richer; and that the weak and inferior must go to the wall—through exposure to skepticism and in some cases actual disproof, left Australian opinion a ready victim of a new cult. A new appreciation of “Aboriginality” has been immensely stimulated by some contemporary ideologies, in particular those of the “third world,” “the quality of life,” antiurbanism, antipollution, and “the national estate.” An unprecedented number of competent inquiries into Aboriginal capacity and conditions by parliamentary, scientific, scholarly, and church bodies has brought a truly prodigious flow of hard information where previously there had been little or none. The facts of the Aboriginal standards of living have been shown to be so appalling and scandalous that white imagination, however unwillingly, has been compelled to respond. At the same time Aboriginal leaders and spokesmen have been presented with a large and soft area of public sympathy ready for cultivation. In the late 1970s, they are cultivating that sympathy ingeniously and for the most part with patience and moderation. Nevertheless, within white Australia, there are some unreconciled oppositions which fly new flags in front of old attitudes and are ready to make much of many continuing and new problems for which no credible and practicable answers have yet appeared. Perhaps “solutions” will prove to be the beginnings of new “problems,” but more joint wisdom, black and white, is now being called upon to consider them than at any time since 1788.
Much may now depend upon the joint effects of three ventures of policy, one being almost wholly Aboriginal in conception, the second and third being of European inspiration with some Aboriginal support. The first is a “homeland” or decentralization movement by Aborigines away from government settlements, mission stations, and other centers of white population and influence, in favor of small bush centers usually, but not invariably, in clan or tribal territory to which a claim of traditional association or ownership is made. This movement has accelerated in recent years but is of long standing, and it would have drawn notice much earlier had there been anything like the flow of government money that for some years now has freed Aborigines from their former almost absolute dependence upon the nearest European. The viability of many of the new, small settlements is not yet established.
Much thought is being given to the means of maintaining health, educational, and other standards. The apparent belief of many Aborigines that they can cobble their old settlement pattern, social organization, and to some extent ecology to a new technology of motor and air transport, hardware, firearms, and radio in a system dependent on an unfailing flow of government money must clearly be put to a severe test.
That law of human affairs which brings multiple effects from the most single-minded intention or action invites attention to the second and third ventures: the creation of a National Aboriginal Advisory Committee and the passage through Parliament of an act to allow the incorporation of Aboriginal associations of whatever kind. Both measures appeared in 1977 to be essential to the Aboriginals’ search for true identity and to their capacity in law to manage their own affairs. But many questions abide. Whereas the first venture may perhaps be regarded as an attempt by an ill-used people to escape from the hectoring solicitude of white authorities, the second and third are based rather on the logic of European lifestyles. Nevertheless, they are the best efforts of Walter Bagehot’s “hard-worked men at the end of the earth” to give reward and security to a people who lost them two hundred years ago. Exactly how they will fit in with an intention to permit and assist Aborigines to preserve and develop their own culture as a “living element within a diverse Australia” remains to be seen.
Notes
| 1 |
Extract from a letter from Major Robert Ross, Sydney Cove, November 16, 1788, to Sir Evan Nepean, Under-Secretary for the Home Department, London. Quoted by G. B. Barton in History of New South Wales from the Records (Sydney: Government Printer, 1889), 500. |
| 2 |
Ward and Olive Havard, “A Frenchman Sees Sydney in 1819” (trans. from the letters of Jacques Araga), Royal Australian Historical Society, Journal and Proceedings, xxiv, pt. 1 (1938), 24. |
| 3 |
R. H. Cambage, “Exploration between the Wingecarribee, Shoalhaven, Macquarie and Murrumbidgee Rivers,” Royal Australian Historical Society, Journal and Proceedings, vii (1921), 219–288. |
| 4 |
W. K. Hancock, Australia (London: E. Benn, 1930), 33. See also his Discovering Monaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). |
| 5 |
See Geoffrey Blainey, The Triumph of the Nomads (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1974); R. H. W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s (Sydney: University Press, 1974); and W. E. H. Stanner (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Studies (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1963). |
| 6 |
The Rev. W. Pridden, Australia: Its History and Present Condition (London: J. Burns, 1843), 73. |
| 7 |
Alexander Marjoribanks, Travels in New South Wales (London: Smith Elder & Co., 1847), 92. |
| 8 |
Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand (London: Chapman and Hall, 1873), ii, 87. |
| 9 |
Barton, History of New South Wales from the Records, 130. |
| 10 |
Pridden, Australia, 73. |
| 11 |
Percy Russell, A Journey to Lake Taupo and Australian Tales and Sketches (London: E. A. Petherick, 1889). |
| 12 |
Leonard Broom and F. Lancaster Jones, A Blanket a Year (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973), 43. |
| 13 |
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, James Strachey (trans.) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), 2. |
| 14 |
W. J. Sowden, The Northern Territory As It Is (Adelaide: W. K. Thomas, 1882), 28. |
| 15 |
Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, ix (April 23, 1902), 11930. |
| 16 |
Quoted by J. Lyng, Non-Britishers in Australia (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1927), 204. |
| 17 |
W. E. H. Stanner, “Aborigines in the Affluent Society: The Widening Gap,” paper delivered at 45th ANZAAS Congress, Perth, August 1973 (typescript, 8–9). |
| 18 |
The similarities and differences may be explored in E. J. B. Foxcroft, Australian Native Policy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1941); Clive Turnbull, Black War (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1948); S. C. McCulloch, “Sir George Gipps and Eastern Australia’s Policy toward the Aborigine,” Journal of Modern History, xxxiii (1961), 261–269; and Robert Travers, The Tasmanians (Melbourne: Castle, 1968). |
| 19 |
Broom and Jones, A Blanket a Year, 7. |
| 20 |
Department of Territories (pub.), The Australian Aborigines (Canberra, 1967), 48. |
| 21 |
Ibid., 33–35. |
| 22 |
See C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970), 290–297. |
| 23 |
Broom and Jones, A Blanket a Year, 41. |
| 24 |
Ibid., 43. |
| 25 |
For example, Pastor (now Sir) Douglas Nicholls, the first Aboriginal to have been knighted by Her Majesty the Queen. |
| 26 |
The late Dr. D. F. Thomson in 1935–1936 and 1936–1937, for a total of twenty-six months, made two expeditions into Arnhem Land to assist the federal government to understand the Aboriginal situation, which at that time was very disturbed. See his Interim General Report of Preliminary Expedition to Arnhem Land, Northern Territory of Australia, 1936–1937 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1936). See also his “Recommendations of Policy in Native Affairs in the Northern Territory of Australia,” Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers (1937–1940), iii, 805–812. As regards the similarity with the New Guinea experience, see W. R. Jacobs, “The Fatal Confrontation,” Pacific Historical Review, xl (1971), 283–309. |
| 27 |
Department of Territories, Australian Aborigines, 43. |
| 28 |
Ibid., 44. |
| 29 |
W. E. H. Stanner, “Continuity and Change among the Aborigines,” The Australian Journal of Science, xxi (December 1958), 103–104. |