First Nations Telegraph

In those days, we became the Black Power militants, who governments deemed to be a threat. But the militants demanded something new: Land Rights, Self-Determination, and compensation for stolen lands. We must also recall that immediately after the 1967 Referendum the federal government created the Council for Aboriginal Affairs (CAA) made up of the chairman, former Governor of the Reserve Bank, HC ‘Nugget’ Coombs, anthropologist WEH ‘Bill’ Stanner, and former diplomat, Barrie Dexter, to advise on national Aboriginal Affairs policy.

 

The Prime Minister at the time, Harold Holt, also asked Dexter to head the Office of Aboriginal Affairs (OAA), a secretariat to administer the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. Both the CAA and the OAA were to be directly responsible to the Prime Minister. The Office of Aboriginal Affairs was essentially run by Bill Stanner and senior public servants, such as former Patrol Officer in Northern Territory, Jeremy Long, and Frank Moy, who was the last Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory. Charles Perkins was the Research Officer attached to the OAA. Reg Saunders and Margaret Lawrie were the Aboriginal Liaison Officers. It is truly distasteful to understand that the Office of Aboriginal Affairs made no effort to focus on the dispossessed Aboriginal Peoples in the south and south-east of Australia.

 

It is evident that the Office of Aboriginal Affairs had no consideration for those they called ‘mixed blood’ Aboriginal people, be they at Port Lincoln; Raukkan on Lake Alexandrina, Victoria; New South Wales; or southern Queensland. ‘Mixed bloods’ were the target of some of the cruellest pieces of legislation ever seen in the democratic world. 

 

In a statement to the federal parliament after the establishment of the Aboriginal Embassy, Peter Nixon MP and former Minister for the Interior said words to the effect of, because they have a descendent who may be Aboriginal, they should not think that they are entitled to any form of land rights. The 1972 election of the Whitlam government witnessed a very progressive approach to dealing with First Nations issues in Australia. The ideas that were gleaned by Whitlam from his visits to the Aboriginal Embassy focused Labor policies on Land Rights and Self-Determination. Whitlam had commissioned Dr Charles D Rowley to write a trilogy: The Remote Aborigines; Outcasts of White Australia; and Destruction of Aboriginal Society, which exposed early truth telling and is still relevant to this day.

 

This research contributed to Whitlam’s ability to convince his colleagues that he had to correct a wrong. His famous statement was: “Australia’s treatment of her Aboriginal people will be the thing on which the world will judge Australia and Australians – Not just now, but in the greater perspective of history.” In 1973, the Whitlam government had brought together an expert panel of Aboriginal personnel to design an elected body of First Nations Peoples from all over Australia to be called the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC) and to advise the government on policy objectives that governments should be pursuing to address the long-standing oppression of First Nations Peoples in this country. It should be noted that, in order to elect the NACC representatives, funds were made available to the Aboriginal working party under the auspices of the Australian Electoral Commission, to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander national electoral roll. Having sat on that committee and co-ordinated the New South Wales section, I witnessed how we ended up with a roll in excess of 93,000 First Nations people across Australia, in a period of three months. This figure shocked the whole of the Australian political sector because the government authorities knew this figure of eligible electors was less than one third of the potential vote in rural and remote areas.

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The elected officials became a powerful voice as the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC) because these representatives knew what they wanted for their People. It wasn’t too long after their election that the government realised these elected representatives had one thing on their mind, that was to be self-determining and self-governing Peoples, so much so that one of the formal resolutions from a NACC plenary was to have the operations and functions of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) transferred to the NACC. The parliament of Australia and the media went into such a spin that the then secretary of the NACC, Phillip Hall, has recalled how he and the Chairman, Bruce McGuinness living in Melbourne, had their homes raided by Federal Police and ASIO. All their NACC paperwork was seized and taken to a place that no-one could find. The NACC documents have never been returned, nor found, such was the Australian government’s fear and paranoia of independently elected Aboriginal organisations.

 

Much to our disappointment the responsibilities and functions of the Office of Aboriginal Affairs were not within the purview of the government to transfer those functions to the elected NACC. Instead, the Whitlam government created the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) to expand and administer Labor policies governing First Nations Peoples. The NACC’s demands were met with absolute rejection by the government. Senator Jim Cavanagh, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, hastily attended the very next NACC plenary and emphatically stated with words to the effect of: I need to set the record straight. The DAA is not an Aboriginal organisation. It’s a government instrumentality administering government policy and distributing allocated funds for the benefit of Aboriginal people. The DAA is accountable to the government, not to Aboriginal people.

 

In contrast, the Papua New Guinea Independence Act 1975 was passed by the Australian Parliament, officially changing the status of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea to an independent nation, ending colonial administration. This meant that the administrative bureaucrats had to be returned to Australia and, because of their experience in administrating the lives of the colonised Papuans, what better place to employ them than in the DAA? After Harold Holt died unexpectedly, William McMahon became Prime Minister. On 26 January 1972 he promised to buy back land that was not part of a reserve, and to lease lands to Aboriginal people, triggering the establishment of the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra.

 

The progressive Whitlam Government, however, introduced a new approach to Land Rights, including the establishment of an Aboriginal Land Fund Commission. Set up in 1974 the Land Fund was for the purpose of acquiring land for Aboriginal people. Vast tracts of land were purchased in the Northern Territory, such as Santa Theresa, Kintore, Utopia, and Willowra stations; a couple of places in South Australia, such as Ernabella; a couple of places in Western Australia such as Strelley Station and Mulga Downs; and a major property, Delta Downs, in Queensland. Acquiring Delta Downs was a battle that became the last fight in which Aboriginals appealed to the Privy Council in London over the High Court decision Koowarta v Bjelke Petersen - [1982] HCA 27 – 153 CLR 168.

 

The nett result of the 1960s and 1970s militancy was effective. We saw a Land Rights Act for the Northern Territory that enabled people to claim land. In the 1980s in South Australia, the APY Act [Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Land Rights Act 1981 amended 2005] gave back to First Peoples one eighth of the total land mass of the State, while New South Wales passed legislation establishing the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 (NSW). The Acts, however, contain severe limitations on effective self-determination.

 

To this day, I argue that the greatest fight that we have is for us, the so-called ‘mixed blood’ people of the south-east of Australia, to get our long-overdue rights recognised, and justice. We are reviving our languages and cultures which are fundamental Human Rights. Another struggle for recognition and justice is to turn the heads of Australia’s legal fraternity from maintaining the perception that we in the south-east have lost our connections to language and culture. Now native title procedures are contributing to a suggested acknowledgement that we lost our cultural norms and customs when claimants agree to make decisions the whitefellas way by a show of hands, which is not our traditional way. The claimants are oblivious to how this is then used against them in a native title determination by suggesting that they have lost the customary way of making decisions, which ultimately leads courts to rule against a customary cultural method of decision-making. And to add salt into the wound, Native Title Services (NTS) pay no attention to matriarchal ways of governance which have stood the test of time for many First Nations, instead, NTS anthropologists impose a patriarchal governance model to matriarchal native title claims by skewing the data.

 

Understanding this history gives us an insight into governments’ paranoia and uncertainty. Mabo exposed the truth when it held at paragraphs

29 and 43: 29. … In discharging its duty to declare the common law of Australia, this Court is not free to adopt rules that accord with contemporary notions of justice and human rights if their adoption would fracture the skeleton of principle which gives the body of our law its shape and internal consistency. … 43. However, recognition by our common law of the rights and interests in land of the indigenous inhabitants of a settled colony would be precluded if the recognition were to fracture a skeletal principle of our legal system. The proposition that the Crown became the beneficial owner of all colonial land on first settlement has been supported by more than a disregard of indigenous rights and interests.

 

The High Court also declared that the Crown obtained a radical title and NOT a beneficial radical title.

51. …If the land were desert and uninhabited, truly a terra nullius, the Crown would take an absolute beneficial title (an allodial title) to the land for the reason given by Stephen C.J. in Attorney-General v. Brown (95) See pp 13-14 above; (1847) 1 Legge, at pp 317-318: there would be no other proprietor. But if the land were occupied by the indigenous inhabitants 5 and their rights and interests in the land are recognized by the common law, the radical title which is acquired with the acquisition of sovereignty cannot itself be taken to confer an absolute beneficial title to the occupied land. [go to: sovereignunion.mobi for further discussion on this.]

 

Conclusion

 

If the referendum had had a successful YES vote, the world would have accepted the outcome as evidence that the First Nations Peoples of Australia had acquiesced to be ruled by this illegal colonial regime; all would have been forgotten; total assimilation would have been achieved; and the Close-the-Gap objectives would have been seen as an agreement between First Nations and the government on methodologies designed to end disadvantage. Nothing would have been viewed differently, other than total assimilation, and our assertions of Sovereignty Never Ceded would have vanished in the haze.