Indigenous Affairs – A New Conversation – Marcia Langton

As the anniversary of the Australian federal government’s Apology to Indigenous Australians approached, Dr Marcia Langton, head of the Australian Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Melbourne, and Warren Mundine, Chief Executive Officer, Native Title Services Corporation, addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 10 February 2009. While the tenor of their message was increasing hope that pragmatism and education was starting to make inroads into the many problems with Indigenous communities, both speakers stressed that solutions were still needed and also that the world economic crisis could overshadow recent progress in Indigenous small business initiatives.

INDIGENOUS AFFAIRS, A NEW CONVERSATION

MARCIA LANGTON

It’s a great honour to follow Warren Mundine, and also thank you very much to The Sydney Institute and Gerard and Anne for inviting me. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this place, the Gadigal people of the Darug nation and also add, as a resident of Victoria, my own condolences to the families of those lost in the bushfires.

Not far from here in January 1788, the British navy officer Captain Arthur Phillip brought his fleet ashore and established a penal settlement and gave effect to Captain James Cook’s declaration of possession, which had been made on Possession Island in 1770, to the eastern half of this still mysterious continent. I’ve described the events that followed in my chapter in the book, First Australians: An Illustrated History, published last year by Miegunyah Press as a companion to Rachel Perkins’ brilliant First Australians – which, in my view, should become an award winning television series. Rachel is here tonight. In the different chapters, historians James Boyce, Bruce Pascoe, Wayne Atkinson and others describe in detail the painful revolution in Aboriginal life that resulted from their subjection, not only to a new polity, but a radically new economic regime. The British graziers and farmers altered most Australian landscapes by clearing trees on a massive scale for their herds and crops. This, along with the military, paramilitary and vigilante and forced population removals, brought to an end the ancient hunting, gathering and fishing economy of the first Australians across most of the continent. By the end of the 1940s, only a few indigenous groups retained their pre-contact lifestyles and although limited, impaired or controlled by various means, their societies continued in Cape York, Central Australia and the Western Desert, some areas of the top end of the Northern Territory and the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Elsewhere, surviving indigenous populations became entangled in the new economy, which had transplanted their own. From the hop growers of Corranderk to the pearl shell divers of the Torres Strait, the ingenuity of the first Australians is as marvellous as their very survival in the dire conditions of the frontier conflicts.

The assimilation policies that were formalised and entrenched in the State and Territory governments in the 1940s, meant that the role of Aboriginal labour fitted in with the British caste system operating throughout the Empire that had been mastered in India, Africa and elsewhere and were used as the means of extracting labour cheaply. This system relegated people to categories such as servants, coolies, indentured labourers, controlled populations and others. In Australia, though, there were no special arrangements with the local chiefs or ruling families as there had been under the Raj in India or with the ruling aristocracies of Malaysia or elsewhere.

As well as removing the embarrassment of coloured children, whose miscegenous origins posed a threat to the establishment of the British way of life, with British wives and household domesticity, the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families was a labour policy to supplement the servile population with trained children. Those exempted from these policies remained on Crown reserves, gazetted for the benefit of Aborigines, whose racial identity was, formally in any case, that of full-bloods. The reality was quite different, of course, on the ground; reserve populations remained mixed and the goal of racial hygiene and segregation was never achieved in practice. The idea that a burgeoning coloured population in north Australia was a security threat in the first half of the twentieth century was also a factor. Hence, race and economy were intertwined throughout Australian history, although this historical process was to a great extent, invisible in the cities. The social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s in which Gough Whitlam, Charles Perkins, H. C. Coombs, W. E. H. Stanner, Barry Dexter and many others played key roles, could be described as a series of odd, distinctively Australian decolonisation experiments. In retrospect, we can see more clearly that the isolation of remnant indigenous populations in an archipelago of Crown reserves posed a series of economic and social policy conundrums. Such a small number of men they were, we can see now, who’d turned their minds to the human rights disaster located on the outskirts of many rural towns and in city ghettos.

I have been rereading Charles Rowley’s trilogy, especially The Destruction of Aboriginal Society , the most detailed economic history of Australia’s racial frontiers ever written. He explains the history and facts of Aboriginal life on the margins of Australian society and economic life up to the 1960s. In the new appraisal of the life and works of W. E. H. Stanner in An Appreciation of Difference (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008), the contributors reveal that Charles Rowley declined the invitation to join Stanner, Nugget Coombs and Barry Dexter on the Council of Aboriginal Affairs. This august body advised several prime ministers and the body’s work represents a sharp break with the post frontier thinking, which the members found in their discussions with politicians, officials, missionaries, reserve superintendents, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people throughout the continent. What I found most striking in An Appreciation of Difference and in rereading Rowley’s works, is the origins of present day debates, such as they can be called, about indigenous policy in Australia. It was clear to the members of the Council of Aboriginal Affairs that for thousands of Aboriginal communities across the country, and the numbers greatly accelerated with the Equal Wages Case and the dismissal of thousands of Aboriginal pastoral workers, modern titles were required to enable Commonwealth investment in desperately needed infrastructure and to ensure the security of these communities from yet further incursions by corrupt or malign Aboriginal Affairs officials in the states and territories. The Commonwealth Social Security Act had been extended for the first time to Aboriginal Australians. The amendments to the Constitution following the 1967 referendum brought the Commonwealth fairly and squarely into the Australian gulag archipelago, described by Rowley, and the Council’s members were faced with the task of whether to bring Aborigines residing on reserves in from cold, or to leave them in the economic wilderness that the Aboriginal protectorates had created.

Remember that a large part of the Aboriginal population at that time was already involved in Australian economic life. And somehow, the achievements of high profile Aboriginal people during those years – such as Lionel Rose, the boxer, or Darby McCarthy, the jockey, or Kath Walker, the poet – seemed less extraordinary then than did Cathy Freeman’s victories to a later, more romantically inclined, Australia. Rowley did become involved later with the establishment of the Aboriginal Land Commission, established in 1972. It purchased pastoral leases for resident or nearby Aboriginal groups that had been marginalised in the late 1960s by the angry white pastoralists who refused to pay equal wages to their Aboriginal workers. Probably many small operators could not afford to, and as Aboriginal pastoralists found later when their stake in the industry had dramatically increased, these post feudal holdings could support an owner-manager family but only agribusiness on a much vaster scale or much more profitable uses of land and diversification would enable larger populations of several hundred Aboriginal people in each community, as opposed to a typical grazier’s family, to be economically supported.

Meanwhile, in the gulag archipelago, the missionaries were asked to leave the reserves and the reserve superintendents were replaced by village councils. Their jobs in managing cattle herds, the saw mills, bakeries, butcheries, small cropping projects and cottage industries disappeared, or deteriorated slowly into a state of irreversible failure, or simply closed down overnight. The order, discipline and management culture of the old imperial hands formed the glue that, however tenuously, held together the imposed regimes of settlement on the scattered Aboriginal groups in the hinterland. Years of apartheid in the education system and the almost total exclusion of Aboriginal people from normal training, apprenticeships and employment resulted in a rapidly growing indigenous underclass in the towns and cities as Aboriginal families fled from the reserves during to 1960s and 1970s with the new wave of tolerance and thinking.

Then, two new forces collided with the Aboriginal world; just as it seemed that perhaps the social and economic issues might be understood by more compassionate voters – 96 per cent of them had voted “yes” for Aboriginal rights in 1967 – the mining boom of the 1970s and the worldwide leftist civil rights and indigenous movements precipitated a furious debate. Should Aboriginal reserves, freeholds and leases be readily accessed by mining companies without regard for the consequences on already impoverished and disadvantaged communities, or should there be a special category of rights for indigenous people encapsulated in settler states, where their fate was abuse and marginalisation?

Only following the passage of the Native Title Act a quarter of a century later were some of the more incendiary issues in this dispute, which consumed three generations of Aboriginal leaders, partially resolved. I say partially because a further challenge has presented itself in this tortuous saga of base economic pushing and shoving of Aboriginal interests around the monopoly board. While the Left romanticised and reinvented the textbook one-penny stamp Aborigine, to great literary, cinematic and textual effect and creating partly true but misleading concepts, some mining companies were negotiating formal agreements with local traditional owners.

With a brilliant research team at the University of Melbourne, I’ve worked for the last six years documenting developments in agreement making with indigenous people, resulting in an online database, several books and many articles and public presentations. Our website is used globally and now averages 5 million hits per annum. At two recent symposia, one on mining and energy projects and one on tax, trusts and managing financial benefits, and as a result of my own investigations, we have worked on a number of economic, management and governance problems in the emerging Aboriginal economic sector. The present global economic crisis has exacerbated the issues we have identified, but also presented opportunities. These issues are diversity of land title arrangements, or the need for a diversity of land title arrangements, to encourage home ownership and commercial opportunities; supporting opportunities for Aboriginal enterprises, particularly the successful Aboriginal contracting companies such as, the most famous of all, Ngarda Civil and Mining, which employ a large proportion of the Aboriginal people in the mining and related industries; providing training for indigenous people in corporate governance, financial management and other management areas; increasing the capacity of Aboriginal people to be employed and to create careers in a wide range of industries; amending the trust laws to enable Aboriginal economic development by reducing the taxation levels and capital risks of Aboriginal trusts and their commercial partners willing to invest capital or expertise; ensuring probity and good governance in arrangements for financial benefits accrued in agreement making, especially native title, mining and dealings.

So where do we stand in relation to these high priority policy issues? I regret to say that the situation is only different by a few degrees from that which Rowley and the Council of Aboriginal Affairs found in the 1960s and 1970s.  It is true that there are almost 500 agreements with indigenous people in the resource industry; that Indigenous Business Australia has supported business development and home ownership; that the Indigenous Land Corporation has purchased properties, many with commercial potential; and most heartening of all, is the substantial Rudd Government commitment to the Aboriginal Employment Covenant, on whose steering committee I have the honour of serving with Warren Mundine, my co-speaker tonight. But government policy responses, even in this financial crisis, with the $42 billion proposed stimulus package, are silent on the Aboriginal situation in this crisis. So too are Aboriginal leaders – concerned with human rights – silent on these issues; on the collapse of contracts with Aboriginal companies as BHP and Rio Tinto and other companies reduce their exposure to the crisis; on the hundreds of jobs lost in the last few months to the first substantial Aboriginal industrial workforce, which numbered at the end of last year over 3,000 in the mining industry; and the jeopardy in which the many Aboriginal trusts are placed – these trusts have recently earned financial benefits which they have invested in the market in the last 20 years. These issues are not the effective or high emotion contact issues such as the Stolen Generations or the anniversary of Captain Arthur Phillip’s ceremony held after his landing down the road from here. They are, nevertheless, the most important issues to be tackled in raising Aboriginal living standards and eliminating the horrible conditions and circumstances described so well by my colleague, Warren Mundine.

I am a board member of the entirely voluntary Aboriginal Enterprises in Mining, Energy and Exploration Association. This association receives no government funding. This year we will hold our fifth annual conference in Adelaide. Our members are concerned about these issues, and yet governments seem to be unaware, if we are to judge by media coverage, of the urgent need to development policies and responses. In the midst of the debate about the $42 billion stimulus package, I urge everyone to think about focussing on these issues.

I am not opposed to symbols. I understand perfectly well their power. There would no Aboriginal rights, native title or land rights, without the power of symbols. But I am concerned that the Federal government is putting at risk the opportunity for raising awareness of the economic challenges in the indigenous communities and addressing them, by playing to the populist issues. And I mean this with no disrespect at this time, a few days before the anniversary of the apology. But it is clear that the circumstances in the indigenous world require serious economic policy responses along with symbols.