Opinion & Commentary
An edited extract from Lands of Shame
After the passage of the 1967 referendum, and with the beginning of the transfer of land to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, two main approaches to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander development were emerging: a liberal and a socialist model.
In the liberal model, those liberally minded considered that with the referendum's end to legislated exceptionalism, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders would be able to integrate into the economic mainstream.
The socialist homeland model, on the other hand, was the culmination of 200 years of exceptionalist and separatist indigenous policies. It advocated the return of those Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who had remained relatively untouched by education to tribal settlements and outstations in the remote lands being returned to them under native title legislation. There they could live traditional lives as hunter-gatherers uncontaminated by modern Australia, away from mission stations and government camps.
Two strands of thought came together in the homeland model advocated by H.C. "Nugget" Coombs, an eminent economist who had been one of the authors of Australia's post-World War II reconstruction and governor of the Reserve Bank. On his retirement, Coombs began to focus on indigenous issues.
The first strand came from anthropologists who considered that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, ceremonies and traditions could be preserved only by hunter-gatherers living in isolation.
A second strand evolved from Marxist philosophies that responded to endemic unemployment and business cycles that culminated in the depression of the '30s. Socialists rejected the economic and social values of modern market economies in favour of communal property rights, including the public ownership of the means of production, notably land.
Many Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders saw an escape from alcoholism, violence and the sheer anomie of life without jobs in a return to country. They were in effect not given a choice between moving to the homelands and getting the education and health care that would have enabled them to find mainstream jobs and incomes. Not all moved. Some of the mission stations and camps survived and were incorporated into homelands. A handful were near employment markets, but poor education and health, and the ready availability of welfare payments, led to welfare dependence. Some Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders began to move to the outskirts of country towns and even to capital cities but, without education and with welfare readily available, many failed to move to mainstream employment.
The Coombs model was accepted by the Whitlam and Fraser governments as the instrument that would, together with land ownership, lead to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander wellbeing becoming embedded in traditional cultures. There was a movement to apologise to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders with implied financial compensation. To most Australians, apologising did not seem to be an appropriate response to past transgressions for which they had no responsibility or to be likely to improve indigenous living standards.
To socialists, particularly, the homeland movement, with Coombs's sponsorship, seemed a more practical way of making up for past neglect.
The Whitlam Labor and Fraser Liberal-Country Party governments provided funding for the acquisition of extensive lands, but these did not support close settlement. Without work, welfare became essential to an even minimal existence. It soon became evident that expectations of a return to hunter-gatherer economies were not realistic. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders did not wish to turn back to their ancestral living standards. They did not want to subsist on bush tucker. A parliamentary inquiry concluded in 1987 that the economic future for the homelands would be a combination of hunting and gathering with support from social services because there was a great demand in homeland settlements for Western goods and services.
The Community Development Employment Projects scheme was developed to supplement welfare by providing employment that would shelter Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders from mainstream competition, further undermining movement to mainstream jobs. Temporary advisers to the homelands became entrenched as administrators and skilled workers because Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were not being educated or trained.
An increasing gap between living standards in the homelands and mainstream Australia was hidden by a permit system that limited access to dissenting scholars and media. Those who sought to draw attention to the gap were driven out of the debate, labelled as racists.
Shocking social dysfunction, lawlessness and violence are seen as the identifying characteristics of the homelands. Until relatively recently, voices exposing the egregious situation of the homelands have not received the coverage needed to initiate serious policy reform, as evidenced by the continual deterioration in living conditions. However, more courageous women are being heard despite a permit system that hides them and the plight of their communities from public view.
The Women's Task Force on Violence, chaired by Griffith University professor Boni Robertson, revealed a horrific level of violence against indigenous women in Queensland in 1999, but her report was quickly buried. So were other reports of domestic violence. Lara Weiland, then with the Royal Flying Doctor Service, attempted to alert the federal and Queensland governments to child abuse on Cape York in August 2003. She was sacked by the Queensland Department of Health.
Finally, a brave 14-year-old girl had the enormous courage to take a "respected elder" to court. Although she had been promised in marriage to the man at the age of four, she had the temerity to want a boyfriend of her own age. When this came to the 55-year-old assailant's notice, with her grandmother's co-operation he "beat the girl with a boomerang, then locked her in a room for four days, during which time he repeatedly forced her to have anal sex".
Brian Martin, the Chief Justice of the Northern Territory Supreme Court, decided that he should hear the charges in the open at the community where the rape had taken place, 500km southwest of Darwin in Yarralin. It appears from the transcript of the sentencing remarks that Martin believed that this would have more of an effect on all the members of the remote community than bringing the offender to Darwin for sentencing. Although Martin listened attentively to explanations of customary law, he made it plain that customary law was subservient to the law of the NT, especially when it came to protecting women and children. Unfortunately, he undermined the impact of his remarks by imposing a remarkably lenient penalty a suspended sentence of two years, with only one month to be served, when the maximum penalty for the crime was 16 years.
Australia-wide outrage was immediately reflected in the press. The NT Government appealed the sentence and the territory Court of Criminal Appeal increased it to three years but suspended half the sentence, leaving only 18 months to serve. Later Martin acknowledged that he had got the sentencing wrong and had placed too much emphasis on customary law and the offender's ignorance of NT law.
More instances of violence against women and children began to be reported. The dam broke on May 15, 2006, when Nanette Rogers, crown prosecutor in Alice Springs for 12 years, went on the ABC's Lateline program and described the "culture of sexual assaults on children and violence against women" as entrenched in indigenous central Australia.
A few months later in August 2006, the leaders of the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council, an organisation founded in 1980 in the Imampa, Docker River and Aputula settlements that had fought domestic violence silently for 12 years, stated: "In our communities there is a lot of petrol-sniffing, illegal grog, people using marijuana and trafficking drugs and a lot of violence. There are a lot of people dying because of the violence, grog, petrol, marijuana, mental health problems and suicide.
"There are children and young people who wander around hungry and neglected, with no one to look after them. There are some men who will find weak young women and girls and give them petrol, grog or marijuana to get them to have sex with them. Sometimes the men who are powerful on community councils are the ones doing the talking and sometimes they are involved in making the problem."
The failure of education and lack of literacy creates severe problems in the administration of justice. Often defendants and witnesses require interpreters because of their complete lack of English skills.
Ignorance of criminal codes is credible where indigenous participants are functionally illiterate and creates a vacuum for those pressing customary law to push their claims. Aboriginal legal defence services are mainly staffed by non-indigenous lawyers. They use customary law to protect assailants against victims, as they did in the Yarralin hearing.
Women are doubly disadvantaged by traditional law that denies them rights in homelands and by the use of customary law in judgments that protect aggressors against victims. Murders are masked as manslaughter.
When Gavin Makuma Yunupingu killed his sister-in-law, he was charged with manslaughter. In May last year Trenton Cunningham, who had abused his wife, Jodie Palipuaminni, for 11 years and had been charged and convicted for pouring boiling water on her and beating her with a steel bar, killed her while out on parole. She had appealed fruitlessly for protection to health staff on the Coburg Peninsula 29 times. Initially charged with murder, Cunningham was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 11 years and six months jail with a non-parole period of six years and six months.
Since 1996, 12 indigenous people in the NT have been convicted for murder and 62 for manslaughter. There have been 24 convictions for dangerous acts causing death and 23 for dangerous acts causing death while intoxicated. That is, there were 109 non-convictions in 10 years for what were probably murders. This situation is partly due to the report of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. The royal commission investigated 99 Aboriginal deaths in custody between October 1987 and November 1990. It was clear that the high number of indigenous jail inmates was responsible for the high number of deaths. But because the royal commission failed to analyse the causes of violence and biases in policing that led to high incarceration rates, the conclusions drawn were that jail led to death so that it should be avoided at all cost. The plight of the victims of crime has been disregarded.
Exceptionalists, who have failed to identify the real causes of the high incidence of violence in the homelands, argue for community policing and sentencing instead of the rule of law. In the homelands this means that semi-literate, non-English-speaking men without any acquaintance with the law are working as auxiliary police.
It has been alleged that community police even play a role in payback. They usually support "big men" who are also often backed by formal legal representatives; for example, magistrates in judging cases such as assault within remote settlements. Practices such as these are a travesty of community policing, such as neighbourhood watch, that have proved successful in enhancing the strength of civil societies against an occasional psychopath. In the homelands context, community policing and sentencing entrench big men -- who may also be grandmothers -- further enforcing perverse rules and power structures. Daughters-in-law and children have no recourse to justice. Intimidation is enhanced. Substance abuse and violence will continue in the homelands, fringe communities and ghettos if the underlying socio economic conditions do not change and if there is not one law for all.
The evidence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deprivation in the homelands is overwhelming. So is the logic that shows the absence of education and hence the ability to work, combined with the location of most of the homelands, the Community Development Employment Projects scheme and public housing, have driven homeland Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to welfare dependence that has destroyed their ability to manage their lives. Substance abuse and violence have followed. Deprivation does not stop there. The same philosophies and policies that have destroyed lives in the homelands are the cause of welfare dependence in fringe and ghetto settlements that has reduced the movement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to mainstream jobs and incomes.
Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have been discriminated against by being treated differently for more than 200 years. It is not true that various policies have been tried and have failed. Policies have always been discriminatory, treating Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders differently from other Australians.
Sadly, the most damaging discrimination in Australia's history has been the exceptionalism of the past 30 years that was intended to make up for past mistreatment. It has widened the gap between indigenous and mainstream Australians in critical respects. It persuaded them, moreover, that they wanted apartheid in property rights, education and welfare rather than employment. The natural enemies of apartheid on the Left, who played such an important role in dismantling it in South Africa, have been the principal defenders of exceptionalism in Australia.
The reverse racism that has isolated Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in remote settlements without an economic base also attempted to turn them back to hunting and gathering in a prehistorical intellectual environment. Indigenous traditions have not been able to evolve, resulting in frustration and fear associated with sorcery, the perversion of traditions into high levels of violence, particularly against women and children.
Homeland dwellers have been denied equality of opportunity, the ranges of humanitarian and scientific learning that enable other Australians to find satisfying jobs, careers and family contentment in a tolerant, materially comfortable and healthy society. Local languages have been lost. Young people do not speak traditional languages or the English other Australians speak but are confined to the street slang of Aboriginal English. Nutrition has plummeted.
Only art, despite its many difficulties, has evolved and flourished technologically and aesthetically because at the margins at least it operates in a market environment.
Good intentions are evident in the large funding flows to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. This funding has unfortunately built significant indigenous elites and much more numerous non-indigenous political, bureaucratic, administrative, academic, contracting and consulting interests that absorb so much of the funding that little reaches most indigenous recipients. Although there is widespread frustration in the homelands, particularly with the lack of education (and hence job opportunities) and ill health, most residents are non-numerate and illiterate and cannot express themselves in English.
A few courageous leaders are demanding an end to welfare dependence, but their voices are drowned out by articulate elites and the non-indigenous beneficiaries of the present system. If homeland Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders managed their own affairs, thousands of non-indigenous bureaucrats, administrators, contractors and consultants would have to find other work.
Most Australians feel compassion for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, but little sense of urgency for ending indigenous deprivation. Media reports from time to time penetrate permit restrictions, but indigenous deprivation for the most part remains hidden from the public. This has made it too easy to plead ignorance about past and present policies, to argue that nothing works and turn to other issues. Such attitudes must be overcome so that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deprivation is placed at the forefront of the political agenda.
This is an edited extract from Lands of Shame by emeritus professor Helen Hughes.
