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.
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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