NEVILLE BONNER: A BEACON FOR INDIGENOUS REPRESENTATION

Today there are seven federal parliamentarians who identify as Indigenous, one Liberal, three from the ALP, two Greens, and crossbencher Jacqui Lambie. Another is certain of election next year – Jacinta Price from the Northern Territory will sit in the Coalition party room. Ken Wyatt is the first Indigenous minister for Indigenous Australians.

The arrival of Indigenous members into parliament is no longer seen as extraordinary. How different 50 years ago, when Neville Bonner filled a Queensland casual Senate vacancy. His very presence was a huge attention-grabber.

Then, soon after his maiden speech, he gave a boomerang throwing display on the parliament lawns, at which he climbed a tree to retrieve one of his boomerangs. He had, after all, previously had a business making boomerangs.

Bonner, in the Senate from 1971 to 1983, was a man of his time, but also one who transcended his time. The story of his ascent to the Senate was remarkable, especially because he was on the conservative side of politics. It is an important milestone for indigenous Australians, wherever people might stand individually on the political spectrum.

Bonner overcame a deprived and difficult childhood, a lack of formal education, the conservatism of the Queensland Liberal party, the hostility of many Indigenous militants, among other challenges. He fought battles and won respect within both the white world and the Aboriginal world. BUT he didn’t want to see a deepened divide between the two. He wanted ONE community.

He got into conflicts, but he more often pursued compromise. He had to deal with his own version of identity politics, as he sought to juggle (not always successfully) representing his state, his party, and Aboriginal people. He wanted recognition for the fundamental place of indigenous people as First Australians, and what should be their rights.

In 1974, many years before Mabo and in the wake of the Woodward report on land rights, Neville Bonner successfully moved a motion which said:

… the Senate accepts the fact that the indigenous people of Australia … were in possession of this entire nation prior to the 1788 first fleet landing at Botany Bay, [and] urges the Australian government to admit prior ownership … and introduce legislation to compensate the people now known as Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders for dispossession of their land.

When we review Bonner’s career and attitudes, it’s important to put him in context, both in terms of where Aboriginal Affairs policy was up to, and the general federal political scene in the years when he was a senator. Bonner was born in 1922 – under a palm tree on a small island in the Tweed River. He was a Jagera man.

He lived his early years in the toughest conditions, the fringe dwelling life of so many of his people. He never knew his father and lost his mother when he was a young child, but he did have a strong grandmother who looked out for him. He received minimal primary schooling, and soon was working at various itinerant country jobs.

As his grandson put it in his eulogy at Bonner’s funeral, “At age 15 he became his own man and he hit the road with a swag.” As a young man Bonner moved to Palm Island, where his (first) wife had been sent after she struck her employer’s wife.

His grandson said: “It was on Palm Island, realising the plight of his people, that he became actively involved in community affairs. He learned about racial ‘togetherness’ – that indigenous Australians could trust the non-indigenous Australians and to a certain extent be guided by them”.

Bonner was given responsibilities on Palm Island; he saw how it was possible to work within the system, to get results, as well as to challenge it.

When Bonner came to young manhood, it was the 1940s; assimilation was the policy and indigenous people had not, for the most part, found their political voices. By the 1950s, things were starting to stir. In the 1960s there were big changes.

The 1967 referendum secured for the federal government power to make laws for Aboriginal people in the states, and the land rights issue, that would dominate in the decades ahead, was gaining traction.

Aboriginal Affairs became a pressure point within Coalition and bureaucratic ranks, and part of Labor’s reform agenda of the late 60s and early 70s. More militant Aboriginal leaders were emerging. In 1972 came the establishment of the tent embassy outside parliament house.

The times were indeed changing, in policy and in politics, and it was into this tumultuous scene of upheaval that Bonner was thrown when he arrived in the Senate towards the fag end of the Coalition government.

Bonner had gained administrative experience initially through work on Palm Island, and then through his role in the One People of Australia League (OPAL). The conservative OPAL, founded by white people, which worked in housing and welfare, looked to the integration of Aboriginal people into the general culture.

Bonner had developed a close and friendly relationship with Pat Killoran, head of the Queensland department of Aboriginal and Island Affairs, a controversial figure. Bonner said of him, “he was a tower of strength to me as a sounding board”.

This background gives some insight into why Bonner became a Liberal. In a just-published monograph on Bonner, Sean Jacobs writes that Bonner “revered” Menzies, had a strong Catholic faith, and believed in freedom of choice, resilience and free enterprise. Also, through OPAL and elsewhere, Bonner was moving in Liberal-thinking circles.

For many new parliamentarians, hitting Canberra is a bracing experience. We can imagine what it was like for Bonner. Under the normal party pressures, but also having to define and defend his place in the increasingly activist Aboriginal world.

In his maiden speech Bonner declared, “I shall play the role which my State of Queensland, my race, my background, my political beliefs, my knowledge of men and circumstances dictate”. He described “the lot of those of my race in 1971” saying, “It would be an understatement to say that the lot of fellow Aboriginals is not a particular happy one.”

He spoke of emotional scars, a people who had been “shot, poisoned, hanged and broken in spirit until they became refugees in their own land”. They had “suffered enough from the stigma of paternalism, however well intentioned it may have been”. And they were most certainly not looking for handouts.

He wanted Aboriginal enterprises encouraged, saying, “I ask for a greater degree of gambling on Australia’s indigenous population who, since the arrival of the white man, have to a degree gambled just on existing”. He appealed for tariff protection for boomerangs, which of course attracted headlines.

Unsurprisingly, Bonner angered the more radical Aboriginal leaders who were challenging the system and believed confrontation was the only way to get results. He endured attacks of being an Uncle Tom.

For his part, he could use Aboriginal culture as a rhetorical weapon, for example telling demonstrators approaching Parliament House: “That is Australia’s Council of Elders, and you would not dare walk into an Aboriginal Council of Elders, so why should you want to march into that one?”

Bonner wanted to see more indigenous people in the general parliament, not a separate Aboriginal parliament. He would be proud to see the current seven.

Peter Baume, who went on to be a minister in the Fraser government, for a time sat on the backbench next to Bonner. He remembers his sense of humour and his goodwill:

When I first entered the Senate [in 1974] I was sat with Neville. On the first day, he pointed to the inkwell and told me solemnly that was where we put our tea money. He taught me so much about behaviour in the chamber and made me a better person too.

Baume recalls, “When we won the election in 1975, four of us were sat in the back of the government benches. There was the Abo (Neville), the Reffo (Misha Lajovic), the Jew (me) and the rebel (Alan Missen).  We called it ‘cockroach corner’”.

Bonner stressed about the Fraser opposition’s blocking of supply, and was relieved when the governor-general’s sacking of the Whitlam government ended the pressure on Liberal senators.

In the Fraser years he had a mixed relationship with his government, one that was often scratchy. As a backbencher he was a maverick. He crossed the floor some 34 times in his Senate years. It’s worth remembering this was the era when Coalition backbenchers were inclined to floor crossing, something that is very rare today. Early in the Fraser time, Bonner was part of the backbench revolt that forced the PM to reverse the government’s decision to scrap the funeral benefit for pensioners.

Bonner was involved in parliamentary committee work, but he never rose further than the backbench. He often felt he was not consulted enough or given sufficient involvement. Indeed he thought he should be a minister.

Of course, like any backbencher Bonner was going to run into blocks, finding himself at times frustrated. In terms of how he was treated by his government, it is hard to separate the strands – did he get more or less opportunity because he was indigenous? And what role did his own personality play?

In his earlier parliamentary years, he often saw the point of view of the Queensland government, when it was at odds with the Commonwealth; later he became very critical of it.

Tim Rowse, from the University of Western Sydney, who has written on Bonner, says:

[A]s land rights became more bipartisan in federal politics, it tested his loyalty to Queensland’s conservative politics – in particular the conservative Queensland views that the state held reserves in trust for Aboriginal residents and that the government could decide what was best for Aboriginal people living on reserves.

By 1983, Bonner had lost support among power brokers in the Queensland party and the enmity of the Queensland Nationals and premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Bonner was pushed to the unwinnable third place on the senate ticket.

He quit the party and ran as an independent, getting a very strong vote but not enough. He rejoined the Liberal fold later and was given life membership. After his death, John Howard told parliament that Bonner, “would always remind us, who were less conscious of the experience of the Indigenous people, of what was expected of us, but he would never seek to set the Indigenous people of Australia apart from the rest of their fellow Australians”.

So what was Bonner’s contribution? He was a parliamentary pioneer for his people. He spoke up for First Australians, was his own person, and took stands of principle on number of issues. Often finding himself subjected to conflicting pressures, he tried to find moderate ways through.

At one level, Bonner was not a political high flyer. At another, he was a beacon.