[recoznet2] Front page of The Wall Street Journal!

[Trudy & Rod Bray]

August 21, 2000 

As Olympics Loom, Australians
Agonize Over Aborigine Issues 

By GERALDINE BROOKS and TONY HORWITZ
Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 
HOBART, Australia -- On a fall day in 1804, soon after the first
convicts arrived here in Tasmania, Aborigines pursued a mob of
kangaroos to the fringes of the white settlement beside the Derwent
River. The hunting party, which included women and children,
carried only clubs. Soldiers fired at them with a cannon, the opening
shot in a war that would result in the near-extermination of
Tasmanian Aborigines. Some of the 50 or so killed that day were salted
down and sent to Sydney as anthropological curiosities.

On a crisp morning almost two centuries later, blacks and whites have
come together again here -- this time in solidarity. They are
marching by the thousands across a bridge over the Derwent in support of
racial reconciliation. Similar recent marches in cities across
Australia add up to the largest public demonstrations since the Vietnam
War. "We have to come to grips with our horrendous past," says
Bob Brown, a federal senator, marching beside descendants of blacks who
survived white settlement, "and nowhere is it worse than in
Tasmania."

Not So Easy 
But coming to grips with the past is proving extremely painful and
divisive in Australia, and the controversy here carries echoes of debate
in the U.S. about making amends for slavery and for the treatment of
native Americans. Prime Minister John Howard says the present
generation shouldn't be held accountable for the decisions of past ones,
and has stood firm against pressure for a formal apology to
Aborigines. Polls show that slightly more than half of the public
supports his stance, with many whites resenting special treatment for
Aborigines and fearing that an official acknowledgment of guilt, or a
treaty, would escalate demands for compensation and further divide
Australia.

Meanwhile, the debate itself is polarizing the nation, souring its mood
and obscuring the progress in race relations that has been made in
recent decades. "We have failed a great test," says author Thomas
Keneally, whose novels include "Schindler's List," adding: "We
haven't achieved fraternity with the Aboriginal race, nor are we in a
frame of mind where we are going to achieve it."

Awkward Timing 
These bitter differences have surfaced at an awkward moment for
Australia as it girds for the international scrutiny accompanying the
Olympics. Aborigines plan to stage mass protests, with some leaders
making angry threats. "If you want to see burning cars and burning
buildings, then come over," Charles Perkins, a longtime black activist,
declared earlier this year. "It's 'burn, baby, burn.'" Most
Aboriginal leaders, however, have called for peaceful demonstrations at
sites such as the airport, a camp near the main Olympics stadium
and an Aboriginal "tent embassy" near downtown Sydney.

Australia's indigenous population numbers about 385,000, or just over 2%
of Australians. Until the 1960s, Aborigines were denied
citizenship, including the vote, and weren't even counted in the census.
By any measure, they remain a severely disadvantaged
community, and one afflicted by alcoholism, substance abuse, domestic
violence and welfare dependency. Aboriginal life expectancy is
almost 20 years shorter than that of other Australians. Unemployment is
four times the national average, household income one-third
below average. Almost a third of Aboriginal males over the age of 13
have been arrested in the past five years.

'Assimilation' Policy 
Many Aborigines have defied these odds, including Cathy Freeman, a
champion sprinter who stands a strong chance of winning an
Olympic gold medal. Her prominence is likely to put an international
spotlight on Aborigines, and though she generally steers clear of
controversy, she recently lashed out at the government for failing to
formally apologize for the past treatment of blacks. In particular, she
spoke of the damage done by a state-sanctioned policy, which persisted
into the 1960s, to forcibly remove light-skinned, usually
mixed-race children from their families into white care. The policy was
designed to "assimilate" such children by providing a
Western-style education and upbringing. (Until abolition of a "White
Australia" immigration policy in 1966, Aborigines were virtually the
only dark-skinned Australians.) Fear of losing a child was so great that
some Aboriginal mothers smeared ash on their children to make
them appear darker-skinned.

Also hotly debated is the policy, in force in Western Australia and the
Northern Territory, of mandatory sentencing for property crimes.
The impact falls disproportionately on black youth by targeting the
crimes, such as theft, that they most frequently commit. Meanwhile,
crimes such as fraud, committed more commonly by whites, don't call for
mandatory prison sentences. And the government has sought
to weaken the Native Title Act by exempting some public and leased
grazing land from Aboriginal claims and diminishing rights to other
tracts where mining and ranching are being carried out.

This angry impasse, on the eve of the Olympics, "makes me concerned
about what people overseas will think of Australia," says Gerard
Henderson, head of the Sydney Institute, a conservative think tank, and
a former chief of staff to Mr. Howard. Isolated and small in
population, Australia needs to forge links by having "a strong
international reputation," Mr. Henderson says. But because of what he
sees
as Prime Minister Howard's unwillingness to lead the nation toward
reconciliation, "we're stuck with a false image. We're going to seem
to the world to be a narrow-minded, insular country when we're actually
a very reasonable and tolerant one. We've taken a lot of change
in a short time, with very little trouble."

Indeed, in the past 30 years, Australia has gone from an overwhelmingly
white and European society to an Asian-influenced,
multicultural community. One out of four Australians is either an
immigrant or the child of one, and 150 languages are spoken in Sydney
homes. Aborigines have gained significant rights and material assets,
including title to lands such as Uluru, or Ayers Rock, all with
"almost no ethnic violence," Mr. Henderson observes.

And despite tensions over reparations, white Australia is also in the
midst of a belated but enthusiastic embrace of Aboriginal culture.
Aboriginal writer Kim Scott shared the nation's leading fiction prize
this year for a novel, "Benang," about the identity struggle of an
Aboriginal whose white grandfather sees him as the first successful
example of "breeding out" of Aboriginal blood in his family. And a
recent Sotheby's auction of Aboriginal art achieved record prices, with
a 1972 painting by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula titled "Water
Dreaming at Kalipinypa" selling for the equivalent of about $300,000.
U.S. Olympic organizers have consulted with Aborigines about the
appropriate use of their traditions in Games celebrations.

But many Aborigines reject taking part, and are staging their own,
parallel, ceremonies. While the official Olympic torch relay set off
from Uluru in a blaze of media publicity, Kevin Buzzacott was kindling a
light according to an even older tradition on his tribal lands near
the great salt lakes of central Australia. In the two months since, he
and his band of about 40 supporters have carried this traditional fire
stick, protected by a coolamon, or hollowed log, more than 1,000 miles
on their way toward Sydney.

"There was so much talk about the Games coming up, I thought, why not
let our flame come forward?" says Mr. Buzzacott, his face
daubed with white ochre after a traditional ceremony in Bathurst, west
of Australia's Great Diving Range. "Let's use it to kindle our old
fire and invite people to come and sit around it and begin the peace
talks that we've been waiting for these last 200 years." Many have
responded to Mr. Buzzacott's offer, even in rural towns with grim
histories of racism.

A Grim History 
This new openness to indigenous culture is a striking contrast to white
Australia's long-standing view of Aborigines as a doomed, Stone
Age people who seemingly melted away in the face of European
colonization. Current archaeological evidence suggests that Aborigines
came to what is now Australia at least 40,000 years ago, crossing from
northern lands that now form the islands of New Guinea and
Indonesia. When James Cook landed here in 1770, an estimated 300,000
Aborigines lived as hunters and gatherers in scattered clans,
forming one of the world's oldest human cultures whose mainstays were
mostly wood and stone tools.

As such, Aborigines posed a far less formidable foe to settlers than
native Americans or New Zealand Maoris. Aborigines' ancient
languages and beliefs, wreathed in taboos, also made their culture much
harder for Westerners to grasp than those in other countries,
where trade and compacts were quickly established. Instead, whites
simply seized Aboriginal hunting grounds, mainly for sheep farms,
without even the fig leaf of a treaty.

Even today, traditional Aboriginal culture often baffles whites. A
university manual to help medical staff in remote communities gives
dozens of hypothetical cases where misunderstandings could arise. In one
example, a nurse can't fathom why an ill woman avoids the
clinic for many days after the death of her husband, and then, when she
finally arrives, becomes hostile when the nurse offers sympathy
and mention's the dead man's name. The manual explains that some
Aborigines believe the spirits of the dead react unhappily to any
thought or mention of them, and so will go to great lengths to avoid
anything that reminds them of the deceased. The wife probably
avoided the clinic for as long as her husband's footprints remained
visible there.

Until recently, there was little will to accommodate such differences,
or even to acknowledge that many Aborigines resisted white
colonization rather than voluntarily retreating. When blacks speared a
settler, or, more commonly, his sheep, retaliation often extended to
government-sanctioned massacre of entire families and clans. In
Tasmania, the government went so far as to mass troops, settlers, and
convicts into what became known as the "Black Line," marching across the
island in 1831 in an attempt to flush out Aborigines like
grouse. Though the "Line" was no match for Aboriginal bushcraft, disease
and massacres eventually reduced the documented full-blood
population of Tasmania to 47 souls, virtually imprisoned at damp,
vermin-infested quarters south of Hobart. When the last of them,
Trugannini, died in 1876, her skeleton was put on display at a Hobart
museum as an example of what was believed to be a now-extinct
race, a human artifact that 19th-century anthropologists regarded as a
Darwinian link between modern man and his primitive ancestors.
It remained there until 1947.

Reparations and Gestures 
In fact, many Tasmanians of Aboriginal descent survived on outlying
islands, living by sealing and mutton-bird hunting. Like other
Aborigines, they are now the beneficiaries of heavy government spending
on health, education and welfare -- this year the equivalent of
about US$1.4 billion. On Flinders Island, a beautiful but sparsely
inhabited farming and fishing community off Tasmania's north coast,
government grants last year enabled the 240 Aborigines there to buy a
5,000-acre sheep and cattle farm, employing 31 previously jobless
people. "We have to break welfare dependency," says John Clark, chairman
of the Tasmanian Regional Aboriginal Council. "When the
young blokes who built the fences and cut the posts go by the place,
they say, 'We did that. We own that.'"

For the third of Aborigines who now live in major cities, there are also
signs of improvement. An Aboriginal enclave known as "the
Block," in the central Sydney neighborhood of Redfern, has traditionally
been paraded as a symbol of Aboriginal despair, and its broken
windows, burnt-out cars and open drug-dealing are reminiscent of many
American inner cities. Yet Redfern Public School, where 60%
of the pupils are Aboriginal, couldn't provide a stronger contrast.
Classes have fewer than 20 pupils and abound with support staff,
computers and programs targeting disadvantaged children. Walls are
bright with art projects featuring Aboriginal motifs, and music
classes include instruments such as the didgeridoo, a large, hand-carved
wooden wind instrument often played ceremonially. In the
playground, a newly sown "bush tucker" garden features plants Aborigines
traditionally used for food, tools and medicine.

"Run your finger down that grass-tree flower early in the morning and
it's the sweetest thing you've ever tasted," instructs John Lennis,
Aboriginal education officer for Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens. "The
young shoots of those tree ferns make great salad greens. Every
indigenous plant in this country has a use."

When the 48-year-old Mr. Lennis was a schoolboy, he recalls telling
people he was Maori rather than admit to his Aboriginal blood. "In
the 1960s you didn't want to be an Aboriginal person because that meant
you weren't a person." Like many of his generation, he left
school the day he turned 15 -- as soon as the law allowed -- "because I
wasn't interested in the crap that was being thrown at me." Only
much later did he return to get qualifications in horticulture and
education. "These kids," he says of the pupils aged between five and 12
who helped plant the garden, "aren't going to grow up angry and hurt
like we did."

Indeed, while plenty of Aboriginal anger will be on display during the
Olympics, the atmosphere at this Redfern elementary school is one
of excited anticipation. Thanks to tickets donated by the U.S. insurance
company John Hancock, every pupil will attend the Games. In
classrooms, pupils pursue Olympic-related activities such as studying
ancient Greece, creating portraits of sprinter Cathy Freeman, and
conducting reporter-style interviews with student-athletes who took part
in a recent sports carnival.

The school's white principal, Ashley Thompson, shares many Australians'
frustration with the political debate over racial healing. But he
feels reconciliation can grow from small gestures such as the school's
bush tucker garden. And in the school's foyer, he pauses to point
out a banner made by primary pupils at a white school across town, as a
gift for their Aboriginal counterparts. Each of the white pupils
has placed a handprint on the banner, in emulation of ancient Aboriginal
rock art. In careful lettering, its message reads: "I am, you are,
we are, Australia."
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