The Courier-Mail State gives council status to township it tried to destroy By WAYNE SMITH 8nov99 THE State Government this week is expected to pass legislation that will enable full council status to be conferred on the Aboriginal community at Mapoon – 36 years to the month after it tried to erase all trace of the Cape York township from the face of the earth. In November 1963, armed police raided Mapoon, 85km north of Weipa, forcibly herded the Aboriginal inhabitants into boats and relocated them to "New Mapoon" at the tip of Cape York Peninsula. Prominent Brisbane academic and historian Ross Fitzgerald says the church, school, stores, shops and homes of Aboriginal elders were burnt to the ground during the raid and in the days that followed. Less than two years after the removal of the community, Canadian mining company Alcan was granted a 105-year lease over 1373sqkm of the Mapoon Aboriginal Reserve. The incident became notorious internationally, to the point that a Natal newspaper cited it in a 1985 editorial to accuse the then Australian prime minister Bob Hawke of hypocrisy for his criticism of South Africa's apartheid system. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy Minister Judy Spence said yesterday a special Mapoon amendment to the Community Services Act was the most significant acknowledgement by a Queensland Government of the right of the Mapoon people to self- determination at their original site. "It is an important act of reconciliation which acknowledges past injustice and seeks to make amends," Ms Spence said. "Anything the Government and the new council can do to salve the wounds of Mapoon is part of the reconciliation process." Jean Jans, one of a handful of original residents of "Old Mapoon" who has resettled in the township, yesterday described the raid as an atrocity. "I was doing my nursing training at St Andrew's in Brisbane at the time of the raid and only learned what had happened when I read about it in The Courier-Mail," Ms Jans said. "The old people did a lot of hunting in those days and the police were waiting for them when they came back. At gunpoint they were herded into boats. They sat in the boats and watched their homes burn." She claimed the State Government and the Presbyterian Church, which founded its first north Queensland mission there in 1891, had lied to the people about why Mapoon had to be closed, with no mention of mining companies. "They told us Mapoon was sinking and that there was no water," she said. "They wouldn't trust my people with the truth. "We're still going through a lot of pain. It manifests itself in a lot of ways. But we haven't talked about this issue. It's suppressed and repressed. There is a lot of unresolved grief." Ms Jans, a former executive officer of the Aboriginal corporation that administers the township, said she had written to Premier Peter Beattie, inviting him to talk through the issue with the people of Mapoon. In particular, she wanted the State Government to help in bringing home to Mapoon the bodies of former residents who died in New Mapoon as outcasts from their own lands, among them her paternal grandfather, a Thepatagi elder. Ms Spence, who will time her visit to Mapoon to coincide with the local government elections in March, said the Government would consider any formal proposal from the new council to bring back the bodies. ------------------------------------------------------- RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." RecOzNet2 is archived for members @ http://www.mail-archive.com/recoznet2%40paradigm4.com.au/
