I am posting this article to the list because it is of the utmost importance
that everyone read it and not just the people on my newsclip list.
I believe that this is something we should all become involved in so that we can
do our best to prevent Howard pulling off another land grab.
This is a blatantly racist manoeuvre and the 'world' should be told so.
Please post your suggestions on how best to fight this latest dispossession!
Trudy
The Sydney Morning Herald [print edition]
April 10, 1999
FIGHTING FOR THE NEVER NEVER
Alan Ramsey
JEANNIE Gunn, the “little missus” of Aeneas James Gunn, came to the Elsey cattle
station, south-east of Darwin, from Melbourne in early January 1902. Her
husband, known as the Maluka, died the next year and was buried in the outback.
Five years later, in October 1907, Jeannie Gunn, back in Melbourne, completed
writing her account of that year at Elsey in 1902. It was published in 1908.
Eighty years later, Penguin’s New Literary History of Australia would call
Jeannie Gunn’s book a “minor masterpiece of Australian letters”.
That book was We of the Never-Never.
Three years after the Penguin history appeared, application under section 50 of
the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 was made in Darwin to
the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, a statutory office under Federal law. The date
was July 17, 1991. The application is known as Elsey Land Claim No 132 and was
lodged by the Northern Land Council, an elected Aboriginal organisation set up
under the 1976 Land Rights Act, on behalf of “a number of persons claiming to be
traditional Aboriginal owners”.
The claim covered all of the old Elsey cattle station, an area of 2,062 square
miles, or half a million hectares, east of the town of Katherine. Elsey had been
founded in 1881 by a man named Abraham Wallace, who drove a herd of 2,750 cattle
1,600km from western Queensland after "acquiring” the relevant leasehold land in
three parcels “from” the South Australian Government and from two white
“owners”. Unsurprisingly, the traditional (ie Aboriginal) owners played no part
in these transactions.
By 1991 the Elsey station was covered by a 50-year pastoral lease (No 593), last
granted in November 1960 and already owned, since May 1985, by interests acting
as trustees for a local Aboriginal corporation. One trustee was Jessie Roberts,
now an Elsey claimant as a traditional owner. The other was Mick Dodson,
director of the Northern Land Council and later Social Justice Commissioner with
the Keating Government’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.
The Elsey claim was listed for hearing on September 27, 1993. Oral evidence was
completed on February 3, 1994. Written submissions for and against continued
until April 13, 1995.
Among these submissions was one from the Attorney-General of the Territory’s
hostile Country-Liberal Party Government (1) asserting that the Land
Commissioner, Judge Peter Gray, had “no power to deal with the claim”, and (2)
inviting him to “refrain from making a recommendation” for "the granting of any
part of the land” to an Aboriginal land trust.
Judge Gray’s last act as Aboriginal Land Commissioner was to submit his 125-page
report on the Elsey claim to John Howard’s Aboriginal Affairs Minister, John
Herron, on November 28, 1997. The same day, as required by law, Gray submitted a
copy to the Northern Territory Administrator (ie, the NT Government). Thus, from
lodgment until final report, the process took six years and four months. And
then?
Nothing! Once it got to John Herron it sat there for another 16 months while
“consultations”, according to Herron’s office, proceeded within the Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and with “other interested
parties”. Finally, at 3.45 pm on Thursday of last week, Judge Gray’s report was
slipped into Parliament on the eve of Easter as quietly as possible. The date
was March 31, 1998.
And? Again, nothing.
The tabling of the report included no covering statement. Nothing was said to
draw attention to it in any way. It was simply included as one of four “papers”
of which the Parliament was asked “to take note”. Herron, as the responsible
minister, didn’t even do the tabling. Gray’s report was dropped instead by Peter
Reith, as manager of Government business, in the House only. Four hours later,
Parliament was gone into Easter recess.
The House is not due to sit again until the Budget on May 11, though the Senate
will be back in a week's time to see what Brian Harradine does with Telstra and
the GST legislation. It is in circumstances such as these, as the politicians
ready to scuttle from Canberra and into parliamentary recess of one kind or
another, that all governments usually take the opportunity of the last day’s
sitting to sneak in the “difficult” reports.
On this occasion, the Government, quite deliberately, left it to the last minute
to release the “latest” figures - already nine months out of date - on what MPs
and their staff, including ministers, have been spending on their travel and
accommodation lately. It was along with these figures, in a report as thick as
the Sydney phone directory, that Peter Reith obscured, deliberately or
otherwise, the release of the Elsey land report.
Later, when it was dropped upstairs in the boxes of the press gallery, either
most didn’t notice or, like Herron’s office staff a week later, didn’t
understand the report’s history or significance. For despite the outright
hostility, in writing, of the NT Government, Judge Gray has recommended that
John Howard’s Government allow the land claim.
He endorses that “the whole of the land” sought, with specific, minor
exci-sions, including the Old Homestead of Aeneas and Jeannie Gunn, “be granted
to a single land trust, for the benefit of Aboriginal people entitled by
Aboriginal tradition to the use or occupation of that land”. Thus, a process of
inquiry, for all of three months short of nine years, has found in favour of
5.000 square kilo-metres of the We of the Never-Never cattle station being
returned to its traditional owners after 118 years.
That's quite a finding.
Sadly, it isn’t one that sits well with this Government.
If it did, Cabinet wouldn’t still be sitting on its hands, saying and doing
nothing, 16 months after Judge Gray’s recommendation, and his 114 pages of
detailed reasons, plus appendices, landed on John Herron’s desk. The Government
wouldn't be sneaking the report into Parliament, without comment, in the last
hours before the autumn recess. Nor would our Prime Minister be setting about a
process to destroy the Land Rights Act of 1976 and neuter the power of the
Aboriginal land councils.
Pardon?
That’s right. Destroy the act.
Gut the very legislation brought in by Malcolm Fraser’s Government, Howard’s own
Coalition colleagues, 23 years ago. The same legislation the Howard Government
paid $295,000 to John Reeves, a Darwin Qc and former Labor MP, to review after
it appointed him in October, 1997. Reeves completed his report last December.
His findings have now been referred to a Coalition-dominated parliamentary
committee for a series of public hearings.
These hearings began a month ago. They continue in Alice Springs on Monday. The
committee will report back to the Government later in the year. In the meantime,
you need go no further than the public views of the Liberals’ Ian Viner,
Fraser's Aboriginal Affairs Minister in 1976, to understand what John Howard and
co are up to.
In June 1976, in his speech introducing his landmark legislation, Viner told the
Parliament: “This bill will give traditional Aborigines inalienable freehold
title to land on reserves in the Northern Territory, and provide machinery for
them to obtain title to traditional land outside reserves. The Coalition
parties’ policy on Aboriginal affairs clearly acknowledges that affinity with
the land is fundamental to Aborigines’ sense of identity and recognises the
right of Aborigines to obtain title to [traditional] lands ...”
Twenty-two years later, in a written submission to Reeves’s inquiry, Viner said
of the Country-Liberal Party Government in Darwin: “The political attitudes of
NT governments over the last 20 years [all formed by the CLP] have been a
disgrace in their constant and unremitting opposition to land rights claims,
their repetitive resort to anti-land rights propaganda and playing the ‘race
card’ at election after election, [their] failure to honour the letter and
spirit of the intention of the 1976 act or complementary sacred site and
Aboriginal heritage laws, and, now, the NT Government’s desire, through [its
submission to this] review and the drive for statehood, to obtain compulsory
acquisition powers over Aboriginal traditional lands, the weakening of the
central position of the land councils, the further diminishment of Aboriginal
consent to mining, objection to native title, and the denial of recognition,
within future constitutional arrangements, of Aboriginal customary law and
traditional rights.”
That’s what a genuine liberal, and the author of the Commonwealth’s land rights
legislation, thinks of the attitudes and conduct of his own Northern Territory
political colleagues. His disgust with the Howard Government’s behaviour is only
marginally less obvious and no less virulent. In a 6,000-word review of the
Reeves report for the Indigenous Law Bulletin, Viner comments, in part:
“The reference given [by the Howard Cabinet] to Reeves, his recommendations, and
the opportunity the inquiry gave to historically hostile parties to renew their
opposition to Aboriginal land rights, are nothing less than a wholesale attack
on the structure of the Land Rights Act and the historic rights which it gave to
NT Aboriginals.
"The contrast in approach between the [Government’s] reference to Reeves and how
[Justice] Woodward [in his 1975 land rights report] saw change being considered
and implemented is dramatic. Is it any wonder that, from the start, the land
councils, ATSIC, and Aboriginal communities should be suspicious of being put in
the role of defending an Aboriginal land tenure system in operation for nearly
25 years which is a benchmark of achievement recognised nationally and
internationally in the struggle for indigenous land rights?”
This is the wider context of the long and arduous journey of the Elsey land
claim. Here is Mabo all over again, in new, more sinister clothes. The Reeves
report is the main game. And Ian Viner understands exactly what his old
colleagues want to do.
Book offers clue to land title claim
IN THE late 1940s, Mrs Aeneas Gunn’s The Little Black Princes.s was standard in
many Australian primary schools, just as was Empire Day and the singing of God
Save the Queen each Monday morning at assembly. The book reflected not only
turn-of-the-century attitudes, when it was written, but attitudes, too, of a
much later time. I still have a school textbook of The Little Black Princess
from the mid-1950s, long after I’d left school, which carries the line on the
facing page: "Adapted for use in schools."
It tells the story of the Aboriginal orphan Bett-Bett, “a wild little nigger”,
and it took for granted an attitude no Australian school would adopt or adapt in
this day and age but which remained alive and well as recently as the l950s.
“Niggers” were not only fish you caught under railway bridges or alongside old
wharf pylons, but they peopled the outback and the hooks of early Australian
writers like Jeannie Gunn.
As Gunn wrote of Bett-Bett: “All nigger dogs are ugly, but Sue was the ugliest
of them all. She looked very much like a flattened out plum pudding on legs,
with ears like a young calf, and a cat’s tail. At breakfast, I asked Bett-Bett
if any mosquitoes had bitten her in the night. ‘No more,’ she said, and then
added with a grin, ‘Big mob bin sing out, sing out.’ She seemed pleased to think
how angry they must have been when they found a mouthful of mud, instead of the
juicy nigger they expected.
“When we were ready to start for the homestead, I asked Bett-Bett if she and Sue
would like to come and live with me there. ‘Dank you please, missus,’ she
answered, grinning with delight. So Bett-Bett found a Missus, and I - well, I
found a real nuisance.”
Then there was Bett-Bett’s uncle.
'The king we were talking about - Bett-Bett's uncle, you know - was called by
his tribe Ebimel Wooloomool. The white people had nicknamed him ‘Goggle Eye’ and
he was very proud of his ‘whitefella name’, as he called it. You see, he didn’t
know what it meant. The first time l met Goggle Eye, he was weeding my garden
and I didn’t know he was king; I thought he was just an ordinary blackfellow. He
didn’t have a crown, and he was only wearing a tassel and a belt made from his
mother-in-law’s hair. It takes a good deal of practice to tell a king at a
glance when he’s naked and pulling up weeds.”
Ninety years later, when Judge Peter Gray was taking evidence at hearings in
Darwin and down across the old Elsey cattle station on the Aboriginal land claim
for the vast property Jeannie Gunn’s husband once managed for its owners, Gray
would have to try to establish who were genuine traditional owners of the land
under question, and who were not.
And on page 34 of his report, as Gray traces through the various Aboriginal
groupings and sub-groupings, Jeannie Gunn’s small black heroine comes suddenly
to life. “Talbot Hood is the son of the late Olga Gamajarr, a daughter of
Gelwanggin and sister of Elsey Dick,” Gray reports. "Mary Nurniyn is a member of
the Yangman language group and the daughter of the late Jungle Dick, who in turn
was the son (perhaps adopted) of a man called Goggle-Eye, to whom there are
references in the works of Jeannie Gunn.”
Gray painstakingly traces 410 direct descendants of Aboriginal owners of the
Elsey land, and nominates 800 people, including the traditional owners, as being
a “probably reasonably accurate” estimate of those Aboriginal numbers who would
gain advantage if the land claim was granted. But nowhere else in his report do
any other of Jeannie Gunn’s “niggers” get a mention.
Ian Viner, the former Liberal minister who introduced the land rights
legislation in 1976 that now makes the Elsey land claim possible, should get the
closing word. “The Commonwealth Parliament has no mandate to change the Land
Rights Act without Aboriginal consent,” Viner writes of the Reeves report. “It
is their land, their act.”
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