THE AGE Wadjularbinna's promise: how a case for genocide went to court By KERRY TAYLOR Friday 4 August 2000 Wadjularbinna Nulyarimma has fought for more than 60 years to be who she was born. Stolen from the embrace of her Aboriginal grandmother, raised in a Christian reserve in north Queensland, she was given a new name and later forced to marry a man she didn't know. It has been a lifetime struggle to claim what is her birthright. The right to know the land, laws, dreaming and spirituality of the Gungalidda - the people of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her people. Through whispers in the reserve dormitory at night, she learnt her language. In hurried secret meetings with Aboriginal staff on the cattle properties her husband managed, she learnt the law. As a girl she was caught and punished for the crime of seeking to know who she really was. Her story is not unique, she says. It is a story any one of her people can tell. It is, according to Wadjularbinna, a story of cultural genocide. And it is still happening today. That is why she will today take Prime Minister John Howard to the High Court. Wadjularbinna has been fighting since 1998 to have her case heard. Last year the Federal Court rejected her claims that the Howard Government's native title legislation was an act of genocide because genocide did not exist under Australian common law. Counsel for Wadjularbinna and her fellow claimants, Julian Burnside, QC, said during last year's case that land in Aboriginal culture had a significance far beyond Western thinking. Destroying that connection had the most fundamentally damaging effect on the people involved and went to the heart of the cultural genocide, he argued. In the 2-1 ruling handed down against the claimants, Justice Murray Wilcox said: "Anyone considering Australian history since 1788 would readily perceive why some people think it appropriate to use the term genocide to describe the conduct of non-indigenes towards the indigenous population." The case prompted a Senate inquiry, which recommended legislation be enacted to enshrine the Genocide Convention - to which Australia is a signatory - in common law. But Wadjularbinna still wants her day in court. Today, her legal team, led by Felicity Hampel, QC, will have just 20 minutes to convince two or three High Court judges that the court should hear her case. Wadjularbinna knows it won't be easy. "I pray that their mind's eye will be opened and for them to realise the conditions of my people ... I've seen what they have done to my people. I have lived it as well. They have taken away everything we are about," she says. It is hard to imagine this petite grandmother, holding her plump and toddling grandson in her daughter's Canberra home, would be up for the fight. But as she tells her story her eyes change, filling with anger as well as tears. Her metamorphosis from the wife of a station manager - living a life of privilege with servants and worldly goods - to an Aboriginal activist began when shots rang through a still Northern Territory night more than 40 years ago. A fight had started between the white owners and Aborigines on the property her husband was managing near the Robinson River. Wadjularbinna, then known as Marquette (the Christian name given to her by missionaries), stepped outside to see what the ruckus was about. A white man grabbed a gun and started firing at the Aborigines. In that instant, she took flight with her people to the riverbank. "It became clear to me ... I faced it full on that night what the station owner, what the missionaries, were doing to my people. And I just thought, `What's happening? How can someone take a gun and shoot towards my people?' "I never for one minute thought, `Where am I going to go?' If I ran back to the house I would have been safe. But I knew where I belonged. I cried my eyes out on the riverbank with my people. They sat with me for a while, then this old lady sat down put her arms around me and said, `My little sister, you have to go back.' And I said no, `No!' She said, `If you don't go back, they'll come for us."' Fearing for her life, Wadjularbinna didn't want to go back, but she knew it was her duty. However, Wadjularbinna never forgot the promise she made that night: if she lived, she would fight for her people. "I didn't know at that time what I was going do and how I was going to do it, but I said, one day my people had to be free. We can't live like this, I thought." Balancing on the tightrope between two worlds had become a special talent of Wadjularbinna's - she had been doing it since 1942 when the Japanese bombed Darwin. Wadjularbinna was among the first of the children taken from her family when the Doomadgee mission was established by the Plymouth Brethren on the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1936. During the bombing of Darwin she was briefly returned to her family until the danger passed. "It was then I realised I was taken away from loving parents who wanted me to be with them," she says. Forced back to the mission after only a few weeks, she cried every night for months. She was soon asked to work in the reserve hospital and it was there the tightrope walk began in earnest. When the nurses were away she was left in charge. Her people would come to perform healing ceremonies. Filled with the fear of getting caught, she still let them in. Many years after the shots pierced that Northern Territory night, Wadjularbinna decided she could not continue to live a lie. She needed to be with her people at Doomadgee and to make good on the promise she made by the Robinson River. She left her husband and started again. But her privileged years as the wife of a station manager held her in good stead for future battles. "I learnt the white system. Sneaking around, I learnt everything about my culture that I could ... I knew who I was but I played their game of `let's pretend I'm white' and I did it well." She believes through her life and experiences she has the advantage over any prime minister she takes to court. "I've lived and been a part of their system to the very highest position. John Howard has never lived and abided by our rules or lived in our world. That is the advantage I have over all the prime ministers past and present." This is the weapon she has used shrewdly in her life as an activist which began in 1987. She has confronted police, politicians, mining executives, black and white leaders, and continually pleaded her case that Aboriginal people are entitled to their own land and self-determination. She has found herself challenging chief executives when a mining company wanted to put a pipeline through Gungalidda land. She organised a petition against having a wet canteen established in the Doomadgee community. She weathers the freezing cold of Canberra winters, quietly protesting at the Aboriginal tent embassy. She has spoken out against Pauline Hanson. Now she finds herself taking on the Prime Minister. It is, according to Wadjularbinna, the biggest battle. "I'm an old lady and I will soon be passing from this scene ... When I started this case I asked myself, `What have I done for my people? Have I done everything humanly possible?' I found myself short. I didn't measure up," she says. "I couldn't stand before my creator and say I had done everything humanly possible. That is why I took the genocide case against the Prime Minister." She says the genocide continues to this day through youth suicide, alcohol and government policies foreign to her people. She believes the only way to get it right is for Australians to accept Aborigines as the nation's first people, with their own culture, laws and spirituality. "They force us into their ways. They think they are doing us a favor but they aren't ... Everyone is wiping their hands of it, but it's genocide," she says. One day she hopes there will be Aboriginal and white schools side by side with people of all colors going between them learning both laws, both customs and cultures. Because, Wadjularbinna says, "Only when we learn from each other will we have true reconciliation. Then and only then will justice and peace come." -- ********************************** 'Click' to protect the rainforest: Make the Rainforest Site your homepage! http://www.therainforestsite.com/ ********************************** ------------------------------------------------------ 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." 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