No Stolen Generation - Windschuttle. Prince William asked to help find Pemulwuy's head
January 26 is the anniversary of British settlement in Australia, on that day in 1788.
No Stolen Generation - Windschuttle. Prince William asked to help find Pemulwuy's head
January 26 is to be celebrated, once again, as Australia Day. The British settlement in Australia commenced on that day in 1788; the colony was established here, to replace penal colonies lost in the American War of Independence.
Dates ARE important in history - they show the sequence of events, and thus the chain of causality.
White people have stolen the land and left my people with a bottle of plonk - Guboo Ted Thomas (item 2).
Now they want to take away the plonk - and the Greens oppose it. Words to this effect by Bess Nungarrayi Price (item 7).
In Eden, on the south coast of New South Wales, there's a "Killer Whale" museum. Aboriginal whaling crews co-operatively hunted with Killer Whales, believing them the reincarnated souls of dead ancestors (items 8 & 9).
Some people feel that Australia Day should be celebrated on a different day, in appreciation of Aboriginal sensitivities.
(1) There was no Stolen Generation - Keith Windschuttle
(2) Guboo Ted Thomas - his grandfather could ride the backs of Killer Whales
(3) Burnum Burnum - laid claim to England, in the name of the Aboriginal people
(4) Pemulwuy - bullets couldn't harm him, nor could chains hold him
(5) Prince William asked to help find Aboriginal warrior Pemulwuy's head
(6) Bennelong - insisted that his wife Barangaroo give birth in Governor Phillip's house
(7) My brothers drank themselves to death - Bess Nungarrayi Price
(8) Eden: Killer Whales & humans co-operated to kill Humpbacks & Southern Right whales
(9) Eden co-operation with Killer Whales derived from Aboriginal crews, who believed they were reincarnated warriors
(1) There was no Stolen Generation - Keith Windschuttle
"There were no Stolen Generations"
by Keith Windschuttle
January 12, 2010
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2010/01/there-were-no-stolen-generations
From the conclusion to Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881–2008, Macleay Press, December 2009:
As I have demonstrated throughout this book, no state or territory in Australia ever wanted to steal Aboriginal children from their parents in order to eliminate the race or put an end to Aboriginality. No Aboriginal children were removed as part of an agenda driven by racism or genocide. There were no Stolen Generations. ==
https://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2010/1-2/why-there-were-no-stolen-generations
Why There Were No Stolen Generations
Keith Windschuttle
Most Australians would be taken aback to find that whenever academics in the field of genocide studies discuss history’s worst examples, their own country is soon mentioned. The March 2001 edition of the London-based Journal of Genocide Research indicated the company Australia now keeps. That edition carried six articles, in the following order:
“The German Police and Genocide in Belorussia 1941–1944. Part 1: Police Deployment and Nazi Genocidal Directives”, by Eric Haberer
“Comparative Policy and Differential Practice in the Treatment of Minorities in Wartime: The United States Archival Evidence on the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire”, by Rouben Paul Adalian
“Final Solutions, Crimes Against Mankind: On the Genesis and Criticism of the Concept of Genocide”, by Uwe Makino
“The Holocaust, the Aborigines, and the Bureaucracy of Destruction: An Australian Dimension of Genocide”, by Paul R. Bartrop
“Did Ben-Gurion Reverse his Position on Bombing Auschwitz?”, by Richard H. Levy
“Kalmykia, Victim of Stalinist Genocide: From Oblivion to Reassertion”, by François Grin
According to Paul Bartrop of Deakin University, Australia deserves this place in the academic literature because our past policies towards Aboriginal children were comparable to those of Nazi Germany. “It did not involve killing,” he admitted, “but its ultimate objective was the same as Hitler’s was for the Jews; namely, that at the end of the process the target group would have disappeared from the face of the earth.” Hence he declared with confidence: “It is impossible to conclude otherwise than that Australia in the 1930s was possessed of an administrative culture that in reality practised genocide.” In its first ten years from 1999 to 2009, the quarterly Journal of Genocide Research published twelve major articles of this kind about Australia. This was more than three times as many as the journal carried in the same period on the regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia. In Volume 10, Issue 4, 2008, no fewer than three of the seven articles were on Australia: one on the Stolen Generations and two on colonial history. Indicting Australia for genocide has become an academic obsession.
Australia’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission made this charge notorious when in April 1997 it published Bringing Them Home, the report of its National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. The report accused Australia of breaching the United Nations convention on genocide. For its historical analysis, the Commission relied heavily upon the work of a small number of university-based historians. Since then, the number of academics and academic programs in this field has grown exponentially to cash in on the demand created. Today, very few countries, and certainly no others of our size, devote the quantity of university resources that we now do to genocide studies. The field is concerned not only with the Stolen Generations but the so-called invasion of Australia and the genocide allegedly inherent in establishing British settlement here.
The underlying agenda of this academic pursuit is not simply the study of genocide, let alone its analysis or prevention. Its aim is political, to argue that our own society and those like it, that is, Britain and the United States, are every bit as bad as Nazi Germany. In the 2001 edition of the academic journal Aboriginal History, editors Ann Curthoys and John Docker of the Australian National University wrote:
Settler-colonies like ‘Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, the United States, and Canada’ led the way in setting out to achieve what the Nazis also set out to achieve, the displacement of indigenous populations and their replacement by incoming peoples held to be racially superior.
International academic book publishers know there is a market for such material. For their anthology Genocide and the Modern Age, editors Isidor Wallimann and Michael Dobkowski commissioned a chapter exclusively on Australia. The only other countries singled out to this extent were Turkey, which got a chapter for its 1915–17 massacres of the Armenians, and, of course, Germany, which generated several chapters on the Holocaust. In the ten-volume series Studies on War and Genocide, edited by Omer Bartov of Brown University, seven of the books commissioned were on Nazi Germany, two were general volumes about genocide in various places, but Australia was the only other country given a volume of its own, Genocide and Settler Society, published in 2004 and edited by Dirk Moses of the University of Sydney. Observing this publishing trend, University of New England historian Alan Atkinson commented:
It is disturbing for an Australian to discover that debates about genocide often do not move very far beyond the classic area of study—Europe under the Nazis—before someone mentions the antipodes. Genocide is a crime, in other words, for which Australia is listed among the usual suspects.
More recently, the focus on Australia has only intensified. In Blood and Soil, a world history of genocide published in 2007, the Australian expatriate historian Ben Kiernan of Yale University devoted more attention to the alleged genocidal activities of Australia than to any other nation or region. His book had 61 pages about Australia, compared to the Armenian massacres (21 pages), the Nazi Holocaust (39 pages), the Japanese atrocities in East Asia (31 pages), the Soviet Terror (26 pages), China under Mao (27 pages), and the genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda (32 pages). Four of Kiernan’s maps depicted scenes in Australia, the same number as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China put together. In 2008, Paul Bartrop repeated his earlier accusation. As co-author of the two-volume work The Dictionary of Genocide, he wrote the entry “Australia, Genocide in”. He again applied the term genocide to the Stolen Generations, saying its use in that context “could be sustained relatively easily”.
In March 2009, one of Australia’s best-known historians and essayists, Inga Clendinnen, reviewed the book Guilt About the Past, a collection of lectures by German novelist Bernhard Schlink. The lectures discussed how the modern German nation, now two generations distant from the Second World War, should approach the question of guilt for the Holocaust. Clendinnen was disappointed with the book, and wrote, almost as an aside: “I had hoped the lecture titled Forgiveness and Reconciliation would speak to our situation in this country.” In other words, literary reviews and intellectual discussion in this country now toss off the comparison between Australia and Nazi Germany as if it were so familiar one can now speak about it in shorthand—“our situation in this country”—as though any possible debate is over.
The argument of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881–2008 is that Australia does not deserve this reputation. While the case against genocide for the Stolen Generations has already produced several effective critics, most notably anthropologists Ron Brunton and Kenneth Maddock, journalists Paddy McGuinness, Paul Sheehan and Andrew Bolt, and two former Ministers for Aboriginal Affairs, John Herron and Peter Howson, a full defence of the charge has yet to be mounted. This book is longer, more detailed, and much less reader-friendly than it ought to be to gain a wide readership. But to address the full range of arguments made by the prosecution there was no alternative but to proceed comprehensively and forensically. That could only be accomplished properly by a complete re-examination of the foundation on which the case was originally made: its claim to be historically true.
My conclusion is that not only is the charge of genocide unwarranted, but so is the term “Stolen Generations”. Aboriginal children were never removed from their families in order to put an end to Aboriginality or, indeed, to serve any improper government policy or program. The small numbers of Aboriginal child removals in the twentieth century were almost all based on traditional grounds of child welfare. Most children affected had been orphaned, abandoned, destitute, neglected or subject to various forms of domestic violence, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. Historians have given Western Australia a particularly loathsome reputation, but when you examine the records you find the majority of children placed in state Aboriginal settlements were from destitute families and they went there with their parents. In New South Wales, some children became part of an apprenticeship indenture program to help Aboriginal youth qualify for the workforce. A significant number of other children were voluntarily placed in institutions by Aboriginal parents to give them an education and a better chance in life.
Moreover, there is no fall-back position for those who want to argue that, even if the removals might not have quite amounted to genocide, they were still done for racist reasons. In Chapter Three, I demonstrate in an analysis of welfare policy for white children that none of the policies that allowed the removal of Aboriginal children were unique to them. They were removed for the same reason as white children in similar circumstances. Even the program to place Aboriginal children in apprenticeships was a replica of measures that had already been applied to white children in welfare institutions in New South Wales for several decades, and to poor English children for several centuries before that.
Chapters Three and Eight also discuss several pieces of legislative discrimination against Aboriginal people and their children that derived from the system of Aboriginal protectionism in the first half of the twentieth century. In some states officials treated Aboriginal people who lived on reserves, government stations, and on state-funded missions, depots and settlements as though they were the equivalent of white inmates of welfare institutions. I have no desire in this book to defend these last measures since they effectively treated Aborigines as second-class citizens. However, the critical question in the debate over the Stolen Generations is not whether all Aboriginal policy was free of discrimination. Rather, it is about why some Aboriginal children were removed from their parents. The answer was the same for black children as it was for white. They were subject to the standard child welfare policies of their time. This is not to say the laws were all the same for black and white children. In some states they were quite different. Nonetheless, the intentions behind the laws that allowed the state to remove children, whether black or white, were the same.
One critical point that has always been avoided by the historians of the Stolen Generations is that full-blood children were rarely, and in many places never, removed from their parents. By the early decades of the twentieth century, most Aborigines in the southern half of the Australian continent were people of part descent, but in the northern half, full-descent populations predominated. In the Kimberley district and the Northern Territory, half-castes constituted a small minority of indigenous people. From Federation to the Second World War, the policies of the Queensland, West Australian and Commonwealth governments were to preserve full-blood Aboriginal communities inviolate. By the 1920s and 1930s, when it became clear the full-blood population was not dying out as previously thought, but was actually increasing in some places, these governments established reserves of millions of acres and passed laws forbidding Europeans and Asians from entering Aboriginal communities, employing or removing full-blood Aborigines without permission, having sexual relations with them, or providing them with alcohol or opium.
Overwhelmingly, in the north of the continent, the Aboriginal children subject to removal policies came from the minority of half-castes and those of lesser descent. They were removed for both traditional welfare reasons and to help them gain some education and training for the workforce. In the local idiom, the latter was known as “giving them a chance”. The only full-blood children taken into care were those chronically ill, dangerously malnourished or severely disabled, but this was uncommon. Less urgent cases of child abuse and neglect among full-bloods were ignored and simply regarded as Aboriginal business.
This is yet another reason why the charge of genocide is untenable. The United Nations Convention on Genocide, Article 2, defines acts of genocide as those “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. Half-castes and those of lesser descent did not constitute any such group. Their identity varied enormously. Some saw themselves and were treated by others as Aborigines, but there were many who did not. In some communities, full-blood people accepted half-castes; in others they were not regarded as true Aborigines at all; in some cases, half-caste babies born to tribal women were routinely put to death. Chapters Seven and Ten discuss evidence about many half-caste people who did not identify as members of a distinct racial community, and indeed, were more concerned to emulate white people and live like other Australians.
To say there were no Stolen Generations is not to argue there were no forcible removals of Aboriginal children from their families. There were many forcible removals in the period under discussion, just as there are today. The children of parents who neglected them, who let them go hungry, who abused them with violence, who prostituted them, who let them run wild with no supervision, or who drank themselves into an alcoholic stupor while leaving the children to their own devices, all faced forcible removals—often by the police and occasionally under scenes of great duress. Academic historians and Aboriginal activists, however, have redefined all these legitimate removals as racist and genocidal. Only by this means have they been able to mount the semblance of a case. A detailed study of the surviving individual case records in New South Wales in Chapter Two reveals an array of reasons for removal far too broad to fit into any single-minded bureaucratic program.
Some Aboriginal children do have genuine grounds for grievance, but they are not alone. In the rough justice of child welfare policy, white children could be treated harshly too, especially if their mothers were unmarried. Until as recently as the 1970s, such children, white or black, were frequently removed on grounds that we would not approve today. Before governments began paying pensions to unmarried mothers in the 1970s, children could be deemed neglected because they lacked a father, and thus a means of support. Until then, unmarried white teenage girls who fell pregnant were strongly pressured by both church and state to give up their babies, who were often taken from them at birth and adopted out to other families. But in these cases the child’s fate was determined not by its colour but by its illegitimacy. There was a common presumption throughout Australia that unmarried teenage mothers, black or white, could not and should not be left to bring up the children they bore.
Some people removed as children remember their former family life as a time when they were happy and well cared for. They recall their removal as an event of great trauma. There is no reason to doubt they are telling the truth. Some of their testimony is inherently convincing. They could not possibly have invented the kind of trauma they described. There were others, however, who remembered trauma from another source—their own homes: “I can understand why they took me,” one former inmate of the Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls’ Home told an interviewer in 1994. “Mum and dad were terrible when they were on the grog—in fact we were dead scared.”
The problem with the Stolen Generations thesis is that childhood recollections constitute the only credible evidence its adherents have provided to make their case. But no amount of childhood anecdotes can establish the argument’s central thesis that the intentions of the authorities were both criminal and racist. That accusation was embedded in both the words of the term. The adjective stolen said the removals were deliberately intended to achieve an illegal result. The noun generations said this objective was targeted at a particular line of people across successive age cohorts. The childhood memories of individuals are not enough to establish that governments had such intent or such perseverance. Indeed, memories of childhood trauma are consistent with forcible removals for the same welfare reasons as white children.
The case for the Stolen Generations needed a convincing account of government policies towards Aboriginal children. However, this book’s examination of the primary source evidence reveals there is a void at the very core of the case. There was no unequivocal statement by anyone in genuine authority that child removal was intended to end Aboriginality. The only support for that proposition has come from creative interpretations of selected statements taken out of context by politically motivated historians. Moreover, the lack of government words on the subject was matched by the lack of government action. The handful of places allocated for the care of Aboriginal children, the tiny budgets that supported the government boards and departments, and the archival records that show how small a fraction of the Aboriginal population they affected, all render the thesis completely implausible.
Another of the central claims of the academic historians who created this story was that children were taken by authorities as young as possible so they would never inherit Aboriginal culture. “The younger the child the better,” according to Henry Reynolds, “before habits were formed, attachments, language learnt, traditions absorbed.” In the SBS Television series First Australians, scriptwriters Beck Cole and Louis Nowra confidently declared: “Between 1910 and 1970 an estimated 50,000 Aboriginal children were removed from their families. Most were aged under five.” None of those who make this assertion have ever backed it with proper evidence, such as a breakdown of the ages of the children sent to various institutions. This is not surprising. For the available evidence shows the opposite was true.
The statistics of child removals in this book reveal that those most commonly affected in New South Wales were not the very young but those at workforce entry age, which in rural districts in the first half of the twentieth century was normally thirteen, fourteen and fifteen years. This was because of the influence of the state’s apprentice indenture scheme. In Western Australia and the Northern Territory the age of the few separations correlated with primary school age. This was because many part-Aboriginal children in these regions were sent by their parents to board at government and religious hostels and institutions that sent them to school.
Whatever their circumstances, it was rare for babies and infants to be removed. In one archive of 800 children removed between 1907 and 1932 in New South Wales, only seven were babies aged twelve months or less and only eighteen were aged between twelve months and two years. Some governments had policies that strictly forbade removing Aboriginal babies unless they were orphans or urgently needed hospitalisation for disease or malnutrition.
Another deception is the assertion by historians that most children were removed permanently, that they were never meant to see their parents again. “The break from family, kin and community must be decisive and permanent,” Henry Reynolds has written. “If young people could return to their families the effort had been wasted.” Chapter Two provides good evidence that this was untrue. The case records show that a clear majority of children removed in New South Wales returned either to their families or to Aboriginal communities. In fact, welfare authorities gave the older ones assistance such as money for the rail fare home, and usually accompanied the younger ones on the train. In other states, especially Western Australia, government institutions like the notorious Moore River Settlement and religious missions across northern Australia admitted the majority of child inmates with their parents. Institutions for indigent Aborigines of all ages have been widely but wrongly characterised by historians, television producers and film-makers as homes exclusively for children, when they never were.
Rather than acting for racist reasons, government officers and religious missionaries wanted to rescue children from welfare camps and shanty settlements riddled with alcoholism, domestic violence and sexual abuse. Evidence throughout this book shows public servants, doctors, police and missionaries appalled to find Aboriginal girls between five and eight years of age suffering from sexual abuse and venereal disease. They were dismayed to sometimes find girls of nine and ten years old hired out as prostitutes by their own parents. That was why the great majority of children removed by authorities were female. The fringe camps where this occurred were early twentieth-century versions of today’s notorious remote communities of central and northern Australia. Indeed, there is a direct line of descent from one to the other—the culture of these camps has been reproducing itself across rural Australia for more than 100 years. Government officials had a duty to rescue children from such settings, as much then as they do now. From the perspective of child welfare officials, the major problem was that state treasuries would not give the relevant departments and boards sufficient funds to accommodate all the neglected and abused children who should have been removed.
The Fate of the Stolen Generations Thesis in the Courts
The uncomfortable truth for us all is that the parliaments of the nation, individually and collectively, enacted statutes and delegated authority under those statutes that made the forced removal of children on racial grounds fully lawful.
—Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples, House of Representatives, February 13, 2008
[I]ntegration of part Aboriginal children was not based on race; it was based on a sense of responsibility —perhaps misguided and paternalistic—for those children who had been deserted by their white fathers and who were living in tribal conditions with their Aboriginal mothers. Care for those children was perceived to be best offered by affording them the opportunity of acquiring a western education so that they might then more easily be integrated into western society.
—Justice Maurice O’Loughlin, judgment in Cubillo and Gunner v. Commonwealth, Federal Court of Australia, August 2000, para 162
If the Stolen Generations story were true, its members should have had many victories in the courts, now that the tide of opinion is firmly on their side. The charges involved serious breaches of the law—false imprisonment, misfeasance of public office, breach of duty of care, and breach of fiduciary and statutory duties—and human rights lawyers and Aboriginal legal aid services have been lining up for years to take their cases. Yet only one claimant has ever been successful before a court: Bruce Trevorrow, who in 2007 was awarded $525,000 by the South Australian Supreme Court. Given the huge size of the potential client base, and the fact that Aboriginal people and their lawyers have had a grievance about the issue for more than twenty-five years, the lack of legal success is telling. On its own, it is enough to seriously question whether there really were any Stolen Generations.
In his apology in the House of Representatives in February 2008, Kevin Rudd avoided any use of the term genocide but he did accuse the parliaments of the nation of enacting racist statutes. That accusation, however, was untrue, as either Rudd or his speechwriters would have known were they familiar with either of the two major test cases on the Stolen Generations. The best-known of those cases, Cubillo and Gunner v. Commonwealth, was decided by Justice Maurice O’Loughlin in the Federal Court in August 2000. Counsel for the applicants, Ms M. Richards, had submitted that the Northern Territory in the 1940s and 1950s had a policy called “the removal policy” and “the half-caste policy”. She said that, because it targeted only half-caste children, it was based on race rather than welfare. It was pursued “without regard for the welfare of individual children or their individual circumstances”. In his judgment, Justice O’Loughlin said:
I cannot accept that submission; it failed to recognize those decisions of the High Court to which reference has already been made that classified the legislation as beneficial and protectionist; it failed to recognize that there was then, as there is now, an acceptance of the need for special legislation and special consideration for Aboriginal people. Finally, there was absolutely no causative link connecting ‘race’ to a failure to have regard for the welfare of children. The existence of one does not preclude the existence of the other.
What the judge meant by “those decisions of the High Court to which reference has already been made”, were several verdicts, the most recent of which had been Kruger v. Commonwealth; Bray v. Commonwealth. That was a judgment made by the full bench of the High Court in July 1997 but which today is largely unknown outside legal circles. Yet it was the major case that considered whether the removal of Aboriginal children amounted to genocide. Although handed down only two months after the Bringing Them Home report accused the nation of that very crime, most news media and virtually all members of the political commentariat ignored it. Since then, they have pretended it never existed. I discuss its findings in more detail in Chapter Ten, but let me observe here that five of the six judges commented specifically on the question of genocide. Counsel for the plaintiffs argued that the Northern Territory’s Aboriginal Ordinance of 1918, which permitted the Chief Protector and Director of Native Affairs to remove and detain all Aboriginal people in the Territory, including children, thereby breached the United Nations Convention on Genocide. All five judges rejected the claim. Justice Daryl Dawson said:
there is nothing in the 1918 Ordinance, even if the acts authorized by it otherwise fell within the definition of genocide, which authorizes acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part any Aboriginal group. On the contrary, as has already been observed, the powers conferred by the 1918 Ordinance were required to be exercised in the best interests of the Aboriginals concerned or of the Aboriginal population generally. The acts authorized do not, therefore, fall within the definition of genocide contained in the Genocide Convention.
Justice Michael McHugh concurred:
The 1918 Ordinance did not authorize genocide. Article II of the Genocide Convention relevantly defines genocide to mean certain acts ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. The acts include ‘imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group’ and ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’. There is, however, nothing in the 1918 Ordinance that could possibly justify a construction of its provisions that would authorize the doing of acts ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part’ the Aboriginal race.
In short, when they tested specific policies before the Federal Court, and when they argued the general intentions of the parliaments and legislators before the High Court, the historians and political activists who invented the notion of the Stolen Generations proved incapable of substantiating their case. As far as Australia’s highest courts are concerned, the central hypothesis of the Stolen Generations is legally extinct.
The only legal cases with any potential credibility would be those made by individuals such as Bruce Trevorrow, who was unlawfully removed from his family and suffered badly as a result. But as Chapter Twelve demonstrates, the Trevorrow case did not confirm the Stolen Generations thesis. Instead, it provided yet more evidence to disprove it.
How Many Children Were Removed?
Even though one forced removal would be regarded today as one too many, the numbers in the Administrator’s report, if accurate, do not support an argument that there was a large scale policy of forced removals occurring in this period.
—Justice Maurice O’Loughlin, judgment in Cubillo and Gunner v. Commonwealth, Federal Court of Australia, August 2000, on the paucity of child removals in the Northern Territory in the 1940s and 1950s
In the Prime Minister’s apology, he said the total number of children wrongly removed between 1910 and 1970 was “up to 50,000”. He said this meant between 10 and 30 per cent of Aboriginal children had been “forcibly” taken from their parents. The Bringing Them Home report claimed that between one in ten and one in three Aboriginal children were “forcibly removed”. In reality, these claims were unwarranted guesses. Indeed, the Human Rights Commission seriously misrepresented some of the principal research it used to reach the higher figure. As an example of the rate of removal, it reported the findings of one study made in Bourke:
Dr Max Kamien surveyed 320 adults in Bourke in the 1970s. One in every three reported having been separated from their families in childhood for five or more years.
That was not the study’s rate for the separation of children “from their families”. What Kamien actually found was this:
Between the ages of 5 and 14 years 34 per cent of the 320 adult males and females interviewed had experienced the absence of one parent for more than five years. Absence of both parents for the same time period was recorded in 5 per cent of males and 7 per cent of females.
Moreover, the great majority of the “absences” recorded by Kamien were not forcible removals. Most occurred simply because the fathers were away from home, working on rural properties. Of children separated from both parents, Kamien found the most common reason was not to lose their culture but to go to hospital. In four of the other six studies it cited, Bringing Them Home seriously misreported the results. Of the remaining two studies, one was unpublished and no one else can find any record of the other. Chapter Thirteen examines the charade of research interpretations on which the Human Rights Commission made its “confident findings”.
My own estimate of the total number of Aboriginal children taken into care in the period from 1880 to 1970 is provided in Chapter Thirteen. The total is 8250. “Taken into care” means Aboriginal children separated from parents and placed in government, church and charitable institutions, plus the very small numbers placed into foster care and adopted by white families. The figure represented 5.2 per cent of the Aboriginal population at the 1976 census of 160,000.
This total is not offered as a counter-estimate of the number of the Stolen Generations. The argument of this book is that there were no Stolen Generations. The figure is an overall estimate made from the surviving records of children separated from their families for substantial periods under the broadest range of conditions, both voluntary and involuntary, and for all kinds of reasons, both positive (education and hospitalisation) and negative (neglect, destitution, sexual abuse, and the death of parents). The total and the proportion are much lower figures than are usually claimed but they demonstrate another theme of this book. Rather than governments being over-zealous, the reality was the opposite. Everyone who worked in Aboriginal child welfare complained that the states and territories did not do nearly enough, especially in the period from Federation to the Second World War. There were always many more Aboriginal children badly in need of welfare, education and health services than governments were willing to fund.
The most offensive numerical assertion in this debate, that the removal of children was on a scale large enough to be genocidal, is not just wrong but embarrassingly wrong. In the first half of the twentieth century, when university historians and Bringing Them Home assured us governments were doing their best to eliminate the Aboriginal race, its population grew substantially. In the period nominated by the Human Rights Commission as the worst affected, 1910 to 1970, the Aboriginal population of Australia grew by 68 per cent from 83,588 to 139,456. Growth was particularly strong in those regions where governments were purportedly determined to absorb half-caste and other part-Aboriginal people into the white population. In New South Wales, the Aboriginal population grew by 65 per cent from 1915 to 1940. In Western Australia, the supposedly “doomed race” of full-descent people in the north of the state did not decline at all, while in the southern half of the state, where part-Aboriginal people predominated, their numbers were up no less than 120 per cent between 1900 and 1935. In both cases, their populations grew at a faster rate than that of white people. Chapters Two and Seven have the details. If the Stolen Generations thesis is true then the Australian Aborigines are the only people in world history to have suffered genocide in the midst of a boom in their population.
Education versus Institutionalisation
There is another good reason why it was not the policy of governments to remove Aboriginal children from their parents: they wanted the children to go to school. Governments pursued this objective with far more action and money than they ever gave to child removal. In the 1880s all Australian colonial governments instituted compulsory education for children of school age. All parents, of whatever racial or ethnic background, were required to enrol their children. In New South Wales, the Department of Public Instruction constructed schoolhouses and employed schoolteachers on all the twenty-one Aboriginal stations set up between 1893 and 1917. It also provided schools and teachers on any of the 115 Aboriginal reserves that had enough children of school age to justify it. On those reserves where there were not enough children for a dedicated school, the Aborigines Protection Board insisted they must go to the local public school. In the early years, it tried to coerce Aboriginal parents into sending their children to school by withholding rations if they refused. In its later years, it tried a more conciliatory approach by giving all Aboriginal children a hot midday meal at school.
In the early twentieth century, it was true that much provision for Aboriginal schooling was substandard. Many Aboriginal children received a lower-level curriculum than whites. In some parts of New South Wales and Western Australia, protests by white parents about Aboriginal standards of hygiene and disease (including, as I demonstrate in Chapter Four, cases of venereal disease among Aboriginal primary school children) meant some public schools refused to enrol them. Nonetheless, the number of places governments provided for Aboriginal children who lived with their parents and went to school, compared to the number of places governments funded at welfare institutions for those removed from parents, is telling. In New South Wales in the 1920s and 1930s, there were only three welfare institutions designated for Aboriginal children. One at Bomaderry housed twenty-five infants to ten-year-olds, the second at Cootamundra accommodated fifty girls aged up to thirteen years, and the third at Kinchela housed fifty boys aged up to thirteen years. At the same time, some 2800 Aboriginal children in New South Wales lived with their parents and attended public schools. That is, there were twenty-two times as many places for Aboriginal children at public schools than at welfare institutions.
In the Northern Territory in the 1950s, virtually none of the approximately 8000 full-blood Aboriginal children either attended school or were housed in a welfare institution. For part-Aboriginal children the government pursued a policy of integration and assimilation. But even here, there were between two and three times as many part-Aboriginal children living with their families and attending schools than housed in welfare institutions. In 1959, for instance, there were 815 part-Aboriginal children at Northern Territory schools and 315 part-Aboriginal children in institutions. Of the latter, many were sent by their parents to be boarders while they went to school. Chapter Ten discusses the role played by the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin and St Mary’s Hostel in Alice Springs.
On the grounds of school policy alone, no one can argue that the government was conducting a systematic program to destroy Aboriginality by stealing children from their families. The existence of this disparity disproves the core allegation of the Stolen Generations thesis.
The Origins of the Myth
The empirical underpinnings of Bringing Them Home derived largely from the work of white academic historians. The Human Rights Commission did no serious research of its own into the primary historical sources. Co-authors Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson also declined to hear any evidence that might have contradicted their preferred interpretation. They did not call witnesses from the many still-living public officials responsible for child removal to hear or test their reasons for their policies and practices. The Commission’s only original contribution was to solicit the testimony of 535 Aboriginal people who had been removed from their parents and who spoke about their own experiences. While many of these stories were completely believable in what they said about what happened and how they felt, it is nonetheless true that when these witnesses were children they were not in a position to comprehend the question at the centre of the accusation of genocide, the motives of government policy-makers.
Moreover, some of these informants made claims that should never have been published. In Bringing Them Home, the anonymous “Jennifer” claimed one child at the Cootamundra Girls Home was beaten to death by the staff, who then secretly disposed of the body. As Chapter Five argues, this assertion deserves no credibility whatsoever and, indeed, was a malicious defamation of the matron at the time, Miss Emmeline Rutter. History books have reproduced other tall tales from allegedly stolen children that could not possibly be true. One gave a vivid first-hand account of 500 children supposedly rounded up in 1938. The alleged aim was to remove all the half-caste children in the Kimberley district to the West Australian government’s Moola Bulla station. However, as shown in Chapter Eight, the entire population of half-caste people in the Kimberley at the time, adults and children, amounted to just 500 and the station’s records of the full-blood and half-caste children it accommodated and fed at Moola Bulla that year numbered only sixty-one; most of them had been sent by their parents to go to the station’s school.
Some of the most celebrated books by Aboriginal authors about supposedly stolen children also provide serious grounds for contention, especially the works of Margaret Tucker and Sally Morgan. These and other stories told by well-known Aborigines Lowitja O’Donoghue and Charles Perkins are discussed in Chapter Six. I also discuss there the influence of the Communist Party of Australia, which few people realise played a key role in making some Aboriginal authors famous.
The idea that the removal policies had a racist component and were aimed at ending Aboriginality did not originate in Aboriginal testimony. Indeed, until the term “stolen generations” first appeared in 1981, there had been no popular tradition among Aboriginal people that employed either the term or the concept. In the 1910s and 1920s, parents on some state-funded Aboriginal stations in New South Wales and South Australia did disagree with the government finding employment for their teenage children as four-year indentured apprentices. But these complaints were not about the removal of babies or young children. Moreover, these parents knew their children would be gone for a fixed term and then return.
The person who initiated the idea that the government wanted to destroy Aboriginality was a then unknown white postgraduate history student, Peter Read. He alone was granted the vision denied to all who came before him. In the course of just one day, he wrote a twenty-page pamphlet to make his case. His original title was “The Lost Generations” but his wife advised him to substitute the more attention-getting adjective, stolen.
Read’s publication, The Stolen Generations, was published in 1981 and was noticed within social policy and legal circles, but not much else. The critical turning point in the attitudes of Aboriginal people did not come until two years later. Read’s colleague in the Link-Up social work organisation, Coral Edwards, addressed a meeting of the National Aboriginal Consultative Council to ask for funding for their new service. To the forty, mostly middle-aged Aboriginal community leaders, who until then had been ignorant of any racist separation policy, Edwards’s speech came as a bombshell. Mothers had not voluntarily given their children away, she said. Rather, “the governments never intended that the children should ever return”.
It is not difficult to understand the immediate appeal of such an explanation to many Aboriginal families, especially to those who had grown up on welfare communities and segregated housing estates with high rates of crime, alcoholism, domestic violence and child abuse. This new version of events was deeply comforting. The myriad problems in their own lives no longer derived from the failings of their families or the bad choices they made themselves. Mothers had not given their children away, fathers had not left their children destitute or deserted their families or been so consumed by alcohol they left them vulnerable to sexual predators. Siblings and cousins had not abandoned their communities because they thought their way of life hopeless. Instead of reproaching themselves, Aborigines could suddenly identify as morally innocent victims of a terrible injustice. Their problems could all be blamed on faceless white bureaucrats driven by racism. Read’s interpretation has since come to be believed by most Aboriginal people in Australia.
That does not make the story true. Indeed, as an historical interpretation of government policy in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, it was poorly founded from the outset. Its creator once boasted he had read “all the thousands of childcare records of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board”. However, Read could not have done anything like the investigation he claimed. His research for The Stolen Generations was so shoddy he was completely ignorant of the existence of one government and mission-run institution in New South Wales that housed Aboriginal children for nineteen years, and he attributed to another institution a fifteen-year history that bore little relationship to what it actually did. Chapter Five provides the details. He drew selectively on the individual case files of removed children to bolster his case, but misrepresented the total picture. He provided false information about the age of children concerned and the proportion of them who never returned to their families and communities. He selected from government minutes and reports a small number of apparently incriminating quotations, took them out of context, and gave them a meaning their originators never intended. What little support for his thesis he could find he exaggerated out of all proportion. He claimed the Ward Registers of the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board openly revealed the real motives of those in charge:
The racial intention was obvious enough for all prepared to see, and some managers cut a long story short when they came to that part of the committal notice ‘Reason for Board taking control of the child’. They simply wrote ‘for being Aboriginal’.”
My examination of the 800 files in the same archive found only one official ever wrote a phrase like that. His actual words were “Being an Aboriginal”.
In the early twentieth century, according to Read, the Australian authorities began to realise the Aborigines were not “dying out” as once thought. Instead, the number of half-castes and others of part descent were increasing. So instead of being rid of the Aboriginal race by natural causes, governments decided they had to do the job themselves. “In the long term, Aborigines were not wanted — anywhere,” Read wrote. “Their extinction, it seemed, would not occur naturally after all, but would have to be arranged.” One of Read’s academic colleagues, the historian Heather Goodall, said the New South Wales government tried to do this by deliberately reducing the Aboriginal birth rate. This was, she claimed, the publicly declared reason the Aborigines Protection Board introduced its policy of youth apprenticeships:
The Board stated quite openly in its reports and minutes that it intended to reduce the birthrate of the Aboriginal population by taking adolescent girls away from their communities. Then it intended that the young people taken in this way would never be allowed to return to their homes or to any other Aboriginal community. The ‘apprenticeship’ policy was aimed quite explicitly at reducing the numbers of identifying Aboriginal people in the State.
Goodall did not give any specific source for her claim. Instead, she referred readers of her book Invasion to Embassy to the Aborigines Protection Board’s annual reports for the period 1906 to 1923. I read the board’s reports not only for the years she suggested but also for its entire eighty-five years of existence, looking for any comment about its intention to reduce the Aboriginal birth rate. I could not find anything of the kind. Instead, the board explained its apprenticeship policy in 1924 in the following terms:
[The Board’s] object is to save the children from certain moral degradation on the reserves and camps, and to give them a chance to reach maturity, after which they are given every facility to return either on holiday or permanently, according to their wish, to their own districts, where they are expected to take up suitable employment. Here they have an opportunity of meeting people of their own colour, and in many instances they marry and settle down in homes of their own.
The board also defined its policy in very similar terms in its minutes of June 1919 and its annual report of 1925–26. Chapter Three quotes them in full and examines the board’s real objectives. In short, the board saw a period of apprenticeship as the key to gaining employment, and the best way for Aboriginal youth to get off welfare and live independent lives in the modern world. It wanted to put an end not to the Aboriginal race but to Aboriginal dependency.
The Human Rights Commission used Read, Goodall and other academic historians as its major sources of information on government policy, thereby replicating their omissions, mistakes and falsehoods. Bringing Them Home reproduced a passage from Pat Jacobs’s biography of A.O. Neville, which quoted the West Australian Chief Protector apparently announcing that in the “best interests” of Aboriginal children he intended to remove as many as possible from their parents: “I say emphatically there are scores of children in the bush camps who should be taken away from whoever is looking after them and placed in a settlement …” This quotation, however, was a truncated version of what Neville actually said. His full sentence was:
I say emphatically there are scores of children in the bush camps who should be taken away from whoever is looking after them and placed in a settlement, but on account of lack of accommodation, and lack of means and additional settlements, I am unable to exercise the power which the Act definitely gives me in this respect.
In other words, instead of a declaration of intent to remove scores of such children, Neville’s full statement was actually an explanation why he could not remove them. As Chapter Eight shows in detail, he never had the funds to remove more than a handful each year. The same was true of the Chief Protectors in other states. None of them ever had enough money to remove all the genuine child welfare cases within their domain, let alone attempt as immense a task as eliminating the Aboriginal race.
That did not mean, however, that Aboriginal institutions were as impoverished as historians have painted them. Though conceding that they were not as terrible as the mass extermination camps of Nazi Germany, historian Anna Haebich nonetheless claimed: “Aboriginal people in Australia’s refugee camps and gulags faced for a far longer period the daily reality of starvation, disease, chronic ill health and often early death.” It is true that the Moore River Settlement in Western Australia was a vermin-infested dump, and some of the remote missions in the tropical north ran short of food supplies in the wet season and during periods of prolonged drought, but they were not typical. The best Aboriginal stations had superior buildings and more amenities than many white working-class people in the outer suburbs and country towns at the same time. Some institutions for Aboriginal children had swimming pools, gymnasiums, tennis courts, film projectors, radios, record players, pianos and telephones decades before many white people. Chapter Five contains details. In the midst of the 1930s Great Depression, the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board used unemployment relief funds to provide its La Perouse Reserve with new buildings designed by the Government Architect, to plant it with trees and shrubs from the Sydney Botanic Gardens, and to connect every home with fresh water and sewerage. The State Government Tourist Bureau thought so highly of the refurbished La Perouse it listed it with Bondi Beach among Sydney’s recommended visiting spots for overseas tourists. In the 1950s, the Church of England’s St Mary’s Hostel for Aboriginal children at Alice Springs, located in a former wartime recreation centre for servicewomen, was another model of its kind that attracted busloads of tourists.
The Best-Concealed Conspiracy in Australian History
On top of the awkward fact that the Aboriginal population grew strongly throughout the period it was supposedly subject to genocide, there is another oddity about the Stolen Generations. Why did this not become a public issue before Peter Read emerged on the scene in 1981? If, as the Human Rights Commission claimed, its origins went back to 1910, why didn’t earlier Aboriginal activists make a fuss? At the high point of Aboriginal radicalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the attempt to put an end to Aboriginality by removing children never received a mention in any major agenda of Aboriginal political grievances.
During the lead-up to the successful 1967 constitutional referendum to give the Commonwealth powers in Aboriginal affairs, not one of the political activists campaigning for reform mentioned stolen children as an issue to be rectified. In 1970, neither the ten-point Policy Manifesto of the National Tribal Council, nor the Platform and Program of the Black Panthers of Australia, nor the 1972 Five-Point Policy of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy at Parliament House, Canberra, or any other political manifesto of the time, mentioned stolen children, let alone the genocide that Aborigines had purportedly been suffering for the previous sixty years. Aboriginal activists of that era proved very adept at gaining attention from the news media and very capable of articulating their case. Black Panthers spokesmen included Gary Foley, later a university lecturer, Paul Coe, subsequently a barrister, and Dennis Walker, son of one of Australia’s leading literary figures. They and their colleagues were politically astute enough to mount the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns of Parliament House—an inspired piece of political symbolism—yet could not recognise the genocide and child stealing taking place right beneath their noses.
A greater mystery is that some of the best-known of an earlier generation of Aboriginal activists had been in an even better position to see what was going on. In the 1940s and 1950s, William Ferguson, Walter Page and Pearl Gibbs actually served as directors of the Aborigines Welfare Board of New South Wales, one of the very organisations then committing the purported genocide. Yet they never realised what was happening. Of all people, they were the ones who should have identified it first. How could they possibly have missed it? If the Stolen Generations story was true, then at that very time, right across Australia, in all states and territories, scores of white welfare officials, backed by parliamentarians and senior public servants, were forcibly removing Aboriginal children to put an end to Aboriginality. How did these hundreds of white people, for a period of more than sixty years, maintain the discipline needed to keep the whole thing so quiet that Aboriginal activists like Ferguson, Page and Gibbs were oblivious to its existence? Why did no one leak the truth? A conspiracy on this scale must have been the best-kept secret in Australian history. On these grounds alone, the inherent implausibility of Read’s thesis should always have been self-evident.
“The Criminals Who Enacted the Programs”
In presenting a more realistic version of this story, part of my task includes reassessing the reputations of those who worked in the field in those years. We need to know whether the white people who determined Aboriginal policies in the past, and those who provided direct-contact services to Aborigines—welfare workers, missionaries and other members of religious orders, police officers, nurses and matrons in children’s institutions, the managers of Aboriginal reserves and stations—deserve the status they now have. Historians today treat them as little better than the officers and guards at Belsen and Treblinka. They do this even though the historical record reveals that some of the most influential of them emerged from humanitarian organisations, religious societies and political movements that had long worked in support of indigenous peoples. As Chapter Seven demonstrates, although historians have misrepresented the roles of the Chief Protectors A.O. Neville in Western Australia and Cecil Cook in the Northern Territory, their careers as administrators nonetheless leave little to admire. But it is a very different story with most of those employed in the front line caring for Aboriginal children. The determination of some historians to destroy the reputations of the latter people is contemptible.
Free from any risk of defamation suits from their now dead subjects, and speaking from the comfort of tenured university positions with six-figure salaries, academics such as Peter Read, Anna Haebich and Raimond Gaita have written of “the criminals who enacted the programs” and applied labels such as “sinister”, “hated”, “monstrous” and “psychopathic” to people like Emmeline Rutter, Ella Hiscocks, Sister Kate Clutterbuck, Sister Eileen Heath, Amelia Shankelton and Father Percy Smith who spent much of their adult lives under the same roofs and conditions as the orphaned, abandoned and unloved children they worked to save. Similarly, Colin Tatz, a professor of genocide studies, defamed the famous Aboriginal tenor, the late Harold Blair, by associating him with a scheme that ostensibly offered Aboriginal children Christmas holidays by the sea, but whose purported secret agenda was to adopt them into white families.
The Human Rights Commission’s inquiry treated such people unjustly. As I show in several places in this book, the Commission’s public hearings declined to call as witnesses public officials and welfare workers who could have contradicted its predetermined conclusions. The Commission only sought evidence that confirmed its prejudices. It only wanted to hear from those claiming to be stolen children and never gave their “captors” the chance to answer the charges. Yet when some of the latter who were still living came before properly constituted court hearings, they easily disproved the accusations. This was particularly true in the Northern Territory, as Chapter Ten demonstrates in its discussion of the failed test case of Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner.
Some prominent Aboriginal people engaged in child welfare have been quietly airbrushed from history because their activities contradict the Stolen Generations thesis. One of them was Aunty Molly Mallett, a member of the Cape Barren Islander community descended from the Tasmanian Aborigines. As Chapter Eleven discusses, Mallett moved to Launceston where she provided government-approved foster care for orphaned and neglected Cape Barren Islander children. From the 1950s to the 1970s, she fostered so many she “lost count”. Even though she had far more experience than anyone else in the plight of these half-caste children, the Human Rights Commission’s inquiry never called her as a witness. Bringing Them Home declined to even mention her role, preferring its readers to believe the children were all placed with white families and in white institutions.
Many of the politicians who decided Aboriginal policy in the period of so-called genocide were anything but faceless. By far the greater number of them owed their allegiance to the “progressive” or Left side of politics. One thing the university historians who established this story kept largely to themselves was that most of the legislation they condemned was passed by Labor governments. In New South Wales, the 1915 Aborigines Protection Amending Act, which allowed the Aborigines Protection Board to remove children without recourse to a hearing before a magistrate, was the work of the first Labor government in the state, headed by James McGowen and W.A. Holman. The Act’s 1943 amendment, which allowed Aboriginal children to be fostered out to non-indigenous families, was introduced by the Labor government of William McKell, one of his party’s favourite sons who later became governor-general. In Western Australia, A.O. Neville was appointed Chief Protector in 1915 by the state’s first Labor government headed by John Scaddan. The 1936 Act that purportedly entrenched Neville’s proposals for “breeding out the colour” was the product of the Labor governments of Phillip Collier and John Willcock.
In contrast, when a proposal for “breeding out the colour” was put to the conservative government of Joseph Lyons in 1933, it wanted nothing to do with it. As noted in the preface, this proposal has been wrongly linked to the question of child removal when, in reality, it was wholly confined to controlling the marriage of adult Aborigines of part descent. As Chapter Seven records, the Lyons government treated it with disdain. In August 1934, the responsible minister, J.A. Perkins, told the parliament:
It can be stated definitely, that it is and always has been, contrary to policy to force half-caste women to marry anyone. The half-caste must be a perfectly free agent in the matter.
Not one of the historians of the Stolen Generations has ever quoted this statement. It disproved yet more of their claims about the genocidal objectives of Commonwealth government policies in the 1930s.
Some prominent radical political activists of earlier eras were complicit in policies and activities that historians and the Human Rights Commission now characterise as racist and genocidal. For instance, in the 1967 constitutional referendum, one of the leading campaigners for the “Yes” vote was Faith Bandler, then a familiar figure in radical and Communist Party circles. In January 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd awarded Bandler Australia’s highest civilian honour, the Companion of the Order of Australia, for her work on behalf of racial minorities. It is not widely known today but in 1959 Bandler adopted an abandoned two-year-old Aboriginal boy into her non-indigenous family. She raised him until he was twelve. At the time, none of her Aboriginal political colleagues thought she was doing anything wrong. To accuse Bandler of committing a racial crime for this act, let alone being a party to genocide, would be absurd and offensive. We should offer the same presumption of innocence until proven guilty to everyone else who acted from similar motives, whatever their political background or racial origin.
When their track records are examined more closely, many of those white people engaged in Aboriginal affairs a century ago become unexpectedly familiar. They were the religious and political evangelicals of their time, determined to do good works for others in order to give meaning and substance to their own lives. They bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the white lawyers, academics, social workers, journalists and political activists who do the same today. In short, accusers and accused are the same kind of people. The big difference is that those charged with crimes against humanity actually did something tangible to improve Aboriginal lives. Their accusers have offered only bogus history, feigned compassion, and empty symbolic gestures.
Today we inhabit a censorious age in which the present generation presumes it alone has wisdom and virtue. We pride ourselves on our moral and intellectual superiority to all the generations before us. We assume the right to condemn the past for not sharing our currently fashionable moral postures. Nonetheless, all those in the past responsible for Aboriginal policy and child welfare still deserve a proper hearing, with their names and reasons fully disclosed so we can judge the decisions they took in the light of the prevailing attitudes and opportunities of the time, as well as what we know about their characters through the full record of their public lives.
Ultimately, however, it is the reputation of the nation that is at issue. Thanks to the determination of academic historians and state education curriculum boards, Australian schoolchildren have by now largely succumbed to the prevailing version of this story. Many have learnt to despise their own country for this episode and to be ashamed of the Australian past. Australians abroad are saddled with a reputation for racism comparable to white South Africans in the era of apartheid. Aboriginal people themselves are taught the arrival of the Europeans brought so much violence and heartbreak they should never allow themselves to be fully reconciled to Australian society.
The philosopher Raimond Gaita has claimed that, if the Bringing Them Home report is accurate, the case for genocide is over-determined. My book argues that the only thing over-determined is the case against genocide. Not one of the major contentions made by the Human Rights Commission, or the bevy of academic historians upon whom it relied, stands up to scrutiny. Bringing Them Home is probably the most unreliable and deceptive public document ever produced in this country. Unfortunately, it has also been one of the most influential. It claimed to have uncovered a whole class of victims, children forcibly removed from loving parents whose lives were thereby ruined. In reality, the greater victims have been those generations of Aboriginal children who, thanks to the report’s subsequent influence on social workers, child welfare officials and children’s court magistrates, have since been left too long in violent, destitute and sexually abusive families for fear of creating a “new” Stolen Generation. An historical fiction has created a real-life social catastrophe, whose appalling consequences are now verified by government and judicial inquiries, time after time.
Black and White Perspectives on the Apology
“For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.” Here was the word, used twice in two quick sentences by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, that everyone in those ranked, packed galleries had come to hear. There was, quite audibly, the exhalation of breath. That same release—the hope of an expulsion, really, of a national burden—could be felt across the country, in public gatherings before giant screens in places such as Melbourne’s Federation Square and Sydney’s Martin Place, to clubs and parks in small towns and school classrooms everywhere.
—Tony Wright, Age, Melbourne, February 14, 2008
For all the reasons given in this book, I believe the parliamentary apology by Prime Minister Rudd in February 2008 was indulgent and unwise. In the short term, of course, the massive and favourable media coverage made it a public relations success for him and his government. It satisfied the millions of suburban voters who have always had goodwill towards Aboriginal people, who wanted racial reconciliation and an end to bad feeling over this issue. But in describing Aboriginal child welfare policies of the past as the “great stain” on the nation’s soul, Rudd not only defamed a great many people from his own side of politics, but did no favour to Aborigines either. He added further fuel to the politics of permanent grievance on which the hard men of Aboriginal activism have long thrived. The apology confirmed Aboriginal people’s core identity as victims of injustice rather than potential beneficiaries, like everyone else, of the prosperous, liberal, democratic, egalitarian society established here since 1788.
It is clear, however, that my views on the topic are very much in the minority, and are likely to remain so for some time. The above account from Tony Wright in the Age captured quite accurately the popular response. Throughout the country, there was a collective sigh of relief from the majority of white people at the discharge of what had felt like a national burden.
A small minority of whites, however, were anything but relieved. Among the members of Australia’s intellectual culture, the failure of Rudd to use the term genocide or to offer any reparations remained burning issues. The philosopher Raimond Gaita insisted that academics, journalists and lawyers would not drop their demands:
Even if Kevin Rudd believes (as clearly he doesn’t) that some of the Stolen Generations were victims of genocide, it would have been foolish for him to have said so on the day when he offered them a prime ministerial apology. It would have been unnecessarily offensive to many Australians who would understandably have been hurt as much as they would have been scandalised …
It is, however, inconceivable that Aborigines and their fellow Australians will stop thinking for long about which concepts are necessary to describe their past truthfully. Discussion of genocide will then be unavoidable. It would be a “moral, intellectual and political disaster” if academics and others were to censor themselves because minds slam shut or to refuse to discuss outside academe whether the Aborigines were the victims of genocide.
Even though this book disputes all Gaita’s other interpretations of this topic, what he says here is true. The charge of genocide does hurt and does scandalise most Australians. And all those white academics, journalists and lawyers who have supported the accusation are determined to persist with it, no matter what.
Aboriginal political leaders initially greeted the apology with high emotion. The visitors’ gallery of Parliament House was packed with Aboriginal identities, who gave the Prime Minister a standing ovation. Many, including Lowitja O’Donoghue, wept throughout his speech.
After the moment had passed, however, it is doubtful that the apology changed any Aboriginal minds at all. Later that morning, O’Donoghue and Aboriginal spokesman Patrick Dodson gave interviews to journalists, calling for a more material response. According to the Age:
Mr Dodson described the apology and Mr Rudd’s speech as a watershed. ‘The sincerity that he brought to that has moved many hearts of indigenous people across this country,’ he said. But he added: ‘Any group of people who have been treated badly under laws made legitimately by the Crown deserve to pursue compensation judicially, legally or politically and they deserve our support.’
Ms O’Donoghue, while declaring herself ‘very proud’ of Mr Rudd for keeping his promise to apologise, also took issue with the government over its refusal to compensate people taken from their families. And she warned that extra money to tackle indigenous disadvantage in areas such as health and education should not be a substitute for compensation.
Other Aboriginal activists treated the event with cynicism. Gary Foley, one of the radical identities of the 1970s and now a historian and lecturer in indigenous studies at Victoria University, was interviewed by the Melbourne Historical Journal:
“How do you think the apology should be taught at universities?"
“I think it should be taught in Political Science classes as an example of the duplicity and deceit of politicians. And it should be taught in psychology classes in terms of how a nation appeases itself of its guilt. And it should be taught in drama school as a classic example of Australian political comedy. And it should be taught in driving school as a magnificent example of defensive driving and evasive tactics and manoeuvres. It should also be taught in kindergartens as a fairy tale.”
Meanwhile, out on the streets where Aboriginal people congregated, some young men had little time for irony. The Northern Territory News reported:
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s national apology to the stolen generation has sparked a spate of racial violence in Darwin. Five people had to be admitted to hospital after one brawl. The Caucasian men were attacked by a group of 10 Aboriginal men, who demanded that their victims ‘say sorry’. A 28-year-old Territory woman watched helplessly as her friend was king-hit and kicked to the ground outside a Darwin 24-hour eatery on Sunday morning. She said three men ran at them from across the road, when they looked at the group yelling at two women. ‘They just started king-hitting him. They got him on the ground and then two others came over and started kicking him,’ she said. ‘They kept screaming that we were not sorry at all.’
This is an edited extract from the introduction to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881–2008, Macleay Press, $59.95, 656 pages, published in December 2009
(2) Guboo Ted Thomas - his grandfather could ride the backs of Killer Whales
http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/heroes3.html
Freedom Fighters #3
Guboo Ted Thomas
Reprinted from Sydney Morning Herald June 8 2002
{caption} Seen by many as a guru, although he insisted: "I'm no guru ... I'm just plain Guboo, and Guboo means your `good friend'."
"Guboo" Ted Thomas, Tribal elder, 1909-2002
{end}
The last initiated tribal elder of the South Coast, Guboo Ted Thomas, returned to the Dreaming last month, aged 93. A gentle activist and a spiritual innovator, Guboo believed that everyone, black and white, could share the Dreaming once they truly respected the land and began to open their hearts to her mysterious teachings. His mission was to make Aboriginal spirituality relevant to the 21st century. It was a message that many in black Australia were not ready to hear.
Guboo was born under a gum tree at Braidwood in 1909 to Yuin elder Bill Thomas and his part-Chinese wife, Linno Ahoy. The pair met on the goldfields and later settled at Wallaga Lake, where Guboo spent his earliest years. Despite the policy at the time of wrenching children from their families, Guboo's mother managed to outwit the authorities so Guboo grew up among his tribe.
His parents took him out of the tiny local school when he was eight to educate him in "Dreamtime culture". Guboo would often say: "All I was taught at school was to knit, sew, make little johnnycakes and tend a garden. In those days, no-one bothered to teach the Aboriginal children the three Rs."
Although he was the third of 10 children he was recognised as a future spiritual leader by the elders of the Yuin before he was 10. His father's mother, "Granny Tungii", was a medicine woman who took him along on her healing rounds. His father, grandfather and uncles instructed him in sacred rites, male ancestral laws and Yuin customs so that he could be properly initiated. He was eventually chosen by them to be given special knowledge and to become the future elder and spiritual leader of the Yuin nation.
Guboo always maintained that the Yuin was a nation made up of many individual tribes. When he was nine, his father, uncle and other Yuin elders took him on their Dreamtime walkabout from Malacoota on the Victorian border to the Hawkesbury River and showed him all the sacred sites for which he would later be responsible.
During his early years he watched as his grandfather called in dolphins to help them catch fish, and heard stories of how his grandfather could ride the backs of killer whales.
Seven decades later, when he was 80, he re-enacted the 350-kilometre walk with a group of Koori kids from broken homes and a 50-strong support group. It took six weeks and was a personal Bicentennial gesture. It is still recalled with awe by its participants.
While he was a teenager during the 1920s Guboo toured with a Hawaiian performing troupe and later a gumleaf dance band. He used these trips to visit every Aboriginal mission from Victoria's Eden-Monaro, up the coast as far as Beaudesert in Queensland and inland over the ranges. On all these trips he would visit the old people to learn more about their customs and beliefs, tour their sacred sites and talk to them about protecting the land and the Great Spirit that sustained it.
He was always a hard-working man providing for a large extended family. He never drank or smoked. After jackarooing through the Depression, collecting shellac and cutting railway sleepers, he worked in a foundry, where he became shop steward. Most of his working life, however, was spent as a commercial fisherman on the South Coast applying that special knowledge given to him by his elders. Even though this ensured an abundant catch, he used to say that it was hard to make a living as he was paid just fourpence a pound "and the middleman made all the money".
It was these working experiences that made him a firm Labor man and trade union supporter. He was much loved by those in the union movement, especially in Wollongong and the South Coast. He regularly attended union marches and on May Days for many years took up a position at the head of the parade, as befitted his status as elder.
Guboo sold his boat after 25 years to devote himself to the responsibilities handed to him by his beloved elders. He began by hitchhiking to Canberra to urge the Government to make Wallaga Lake mission into a reserve and to seek protection of the sacred sites. Before long he began working with the Institute of Aboriginal Studies, recording all the Aboriginal sites in coastal NSW. He made many friends who joined him on his field camps and supported his struggle.
He would take people up onto the sacred mountains and explain how powerful they are. These trips sowed the seeds of reconciliation in the hearts of many politicians, conservationists and activists. He'd tell them that his people called the rocks their "cathedral" and that they were more powerful than any man-made church. "We don't need glass windows or statues of angels to make it sacred. These rocks were not put here by cranes. They were put here by Mother Nature. They are where you should sit and meditate to understand the Great Spirit, Daramah."
Guboo was a clever and wily negotiator who was able to enlist the help of many in the labour movement along with environmental and religious leaders. He understood that environmentalism was meaningless without a spiritual dimension and would tell anyone who would listen that we must strengthen our spiritual ties with the living Earth, becoming one with her. He saw no difference between Daramah and Jesus Christ. He called them both "the Lord".
His work with the Institute of Aboriginal Studies was groundbreaking and became the basis of all future land claims along the South Coast. Outside his friends and acquaintances almost nothing was heard publicly of Guboo until 1979 when finally, largely through his efforts, the then premier, Neville Wran, ordered logging to cease on his beloved Mumbulla Mountain, south of Bermagui. This opened the way for the first land rights settlement for Aborigines in NSW.
More and more, around this time, he began espousing a spiritual message, believing that the noisy protests and marches only aggravated racism. He wanted to build bridges, bringing people together through a mutual love and respect for Mother Earth.
His work of restoring people's unity with the land had just begun. He wanted the Dreaming to enrich the lives of all Australians and devoted the rest of his life to being a catalyst for a worldwide return to selfless ancient values. He went to the United Nations to urge the World Council of Churches to accept indigenous religions and became a member of the Bahai faith.
White people have stolen the land and left my people with a bottle of plonk. It is time to redress the balance.
To take Guboo's hand or give him a hug was to be overcome with a powerful spiritual presence. Over the years many people were drawn to him and regarded him as a guru. Even his father had predicted he would become a great leader. "But I'm no guru and I don't want to be a great leader. I'm just plain Guboo, and Guboo means your `good friend', so I'm just your good friend."
He would tell them: "Whoever moulded you, moulded me. We are all one, brother." It was the magnanimity of this simple message, given the racism and terrible consequences of white occupation for his own people, that touched so many people so profoundly.
His teachings took him around the world many times, with not a penny in his pocket, and made him friends among many cultures. He met spiritual and religious leaders who would later contact him when passing through Australia, as the Dalai Lama did recently.
His life was not without controversy. During the fight to save sites from the woodchippers he took a group of supporters, conservationists and politicians up Gulaga. After sleeping on the side of his sacred mountain the group woke in the early morning astonished to see him in the distance, stripped naked and painted in traditional ochres. He poured a handful of soil onto the ground and rammed the tip of his spear into the earth. When he returned he related a dream in which an Aboriginal wise man came to him and told him that it was now time to initiate "the renewal of the Dreaming". The wise man went on to say: "My people must stop being what the white man made them and look up to their heritage as custodians of the land with pride and dignity. White people have stolen the land and left my people with a bottle of plonk. It is time to redress the balance, for the sake of my people, the white people, and this country, so that Australia can become a shining spiritual example for the rest for the world."
Guboo then declared to all his supporters on Gulaga: "Starting with the Yuin tribal territory, you are charged with `renewing the Dreaming' in Australia, mountain by mountain. When the renewing is complete here, its strength will awaken other tribes in other areas to take their heritage and renew the Dreaming in their own traditional areas."
This pronouncement represents the first time an Aboriginal elder in Australia proclaimed publicly that he would consider anyone who pledged him or herself to work towards the preservation of the forests, and the renewal and protection of the sacred sites, to be part of his own tribe. It challenged the very nature of both black and white societies and their relationship towards each other. Guboo envisioned a nation that has put internal conflict behind it in the realisation of a truly unified Australian identity with a respect for Aboriginal culture and love of the land as its bedrock.
Apart from those in his immediate family, it was a message that fell flat among his own people. While Guboo went on to work tirelessly to bring black and white together in love and unity, his own people mistrusted him for most of his remaining life. For the next 20 years he held "Dreaming camps" around Australia and overseas to teach and pass on his knowledge, to renew the Dreaming of these places and restore sacredness to the landscape. He spent each January at Blue Gum Flats, in the Budawangs, behind Pigeon House Mountain (Bulgarn). Thousands of people from around the world came to meet him in the deep wilderness and to seek a spiritual relationship with nature. While Aborigines came to the camps, many found his message confronting. It was not until he turned 90 that he returned to live in the bosom of his own family and the homeland he loved, his travelling days behind him.
Guboo will be most remembered by his thousands of loving friends for his teachings which, while seemingly simple, have proved to be transformative. They included meditating and thanking the Great Spirit every sunrise and sunset for the beautiful day, and his defining mantra, "Always remember, the best is yet to come".
Guboo is survived by a brother, Cecil, and a sister, Eileen, seven of his 12 children, 35 grandchildren, 60 great-grandchildren and seven great-great-grandchildren. He returned to Mother Earth in the presence of a huge gathering in the cemetery at Wallaga Lake under the shadow of Gulaga, the sacred mountain which he won from the woodchippers and safeguarded on behalf of his own people and all humanity.
In his own words:
The Earth is our Mother.
When I die I'm going down there.
When you die you're coming too!
And what are you doing for the Earth ?
Adrian Newstead adrian@cooeeart.com.au
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(3) Burnum Burnum - laid claim to England, in the name of the Aboriginal people
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/20/world/burnum-burnum-61-fighter-for-australia-s-aborigines.html?pagewanted=1
Burnum Burnum, 61, Fighter For Australia's Aborigines
By CLYDE H. FARNSWORTH
Published: August 20, 1997
PERTH, Australia, Aug. 19— Burnum Burnum, a battler for the cause of the Aborigines, died on Sunday in his home in the Sydney suburb of Woronora. He was 61.
He died of a heart attack aggravated by a history of diabetes, his family said.
The tall, imposing Mr. Burnum Burnum brought a gift for showmanship to his fight on behalf of Australia's indigenous people. His most memorable stunt came in 1988, exactly 200 years after the first English settlers came ashore in Australia, when he laid claim to England on behalf of the Australian Aborigines.
The symbolic gesture of defiance was played against the pomp and ceremony of the bicentennial celebrations. While dignitaries in London and Canberra were making speeches extolling the great Australian nation, he climbed the cliffs of Dover and planted the red, yellow and black Australian Aboriginal flag.
Gray beard flowing, brown eyes flashing, he made a speech full of barbed allusions to the treatment of the Aborigines by the English settlers of Australia. No harm, he promised, would come to England's "native people" from his invasion. Nor would he poison their water, lace their flour with strychnine, or introduce them to alcohol and toxic drugs.
His speeches and lobbying efforts and the demonstrations he organized helped set the stage for a national referendum in 1967 that amended the Constitution to give Australia's 300,000 Aborigines the vote and other rights of citizenship for the first time.
Throughout much of the 1970's, he demanded the honorable burial of a woman, described as the last full-blooded Aborigine left in Tasmania, who had died in the 1890's. Her skeleton was long displayed in the Museum of Tasmania in Hobart.
Finally, in 1976, the museum authorities agreed to release the skeleton, which was cremated in the Hobart suburb of Oyster Cove, the woman's place of birth.
Burnum Burnum, meaning great warrior, was a name adopted from his great-grandfather, a warrior of the Wurundjeri tribe. He was born Harry Penrith in January 1936 at Wallaga Lake, an Aboriginal community on the south coast of New South Wales.
As an infant, soon after the death of his mother, he became part of what Australians now call the "stolen generation," the group of about 100,000 Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their families between 1910 and the early 1970's.
The children were generally of mixed race, usually with white fathers or grandfathers. The idea was to make them part of white society. Full-blooded Aborigines were expected to die out from disease and low birth rates in their remote desert settlements.
Young Harry was taken from his Aboriginal father and spent time in an orphanage where, he later recounted, he suffered such indignities as a flogging with a cattle whip for breaking a window with a cricket ball, and being required to stand before his class and repeat, "Look at me and you will see that I am an Aborigine."
He managed to control his hurt and anger and became an excellent student and a talented sportsman, heading his high school cricket and football teams.
He attended law school and also wanted to be a teacher. But he turned both education and the law aside to become one of the first Aborigines to join the Australian public service. For 13 years he worked in the Agriculture Department of the state of New South Wales.
It was in the mid-1960's, said his friend and neighbor, Hazel Wilson, director of Kirinari Hostels for Aboriginal Students, that he chose a life of political action.
"It suddenly became terribly important for him to affirm his Aboriginality," she said. "He didn't want to know whether he had white blood."
He not only looked the part of a tribal elder but played it as well in two Australian films, "Ground Zero," about Britain's early postwar nuclear testing in the Australian desert, and "The Dolphin Touch," with a strong environmental theme.
He is survived by his wife, Marelle; their son, Umbarra; and four children from a previous marriage, Lua, Karen, Rebecca and Ian. ==
Photo of Burnum Burnum and Guboo Ted Thomas: http://about.nsw.gov.au/collections/doc/yuin-people-2/
Photo, Guboo Ted Thomas singing with clapping sticks at Land Title Day for Wallaga Lake Aboriginal Community, N.S.W., 1985: http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an23162944
Burnum Burnum's book
Aboriginal Australia: A Traveller's Guide (ISBN: 0207156301 / 0-207-15630-1):
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&recentlyadded=all&sortby=17&sts=t&tn=Aboriginal+Australia%3A+A+Traveller%27s+Guide&x=48&y=16
(4) Pemulwuy - bullets couldn't harm him, nor could chains hold him
http://www.convictcreations.com/history/pelmulwy.htm
Pemulwuy Pemulwoy, Pemulwy, Pemulwei
Justice or War?
Pemulwuy was a kind of resistance outlaw in the vein of Ned Kelly but one who proved as difficult to kill as Rasputin. In the early days of the colony, he seemed to indiscriminately spear colonists. As the years went by, he seemed to lead organised battles against British soldiers. Some historians have defined him as a military leader that led a guerrilla war against the British invasion. More likely he was a caradhy, a man whose position in the Bidjigal tribe empowered him to dispense justice. His attacks on the settlers weren’t attempts to drive them away, rather they were attempts to punish them for their breaches of Bidjigal law.
Pemulwuy first came to public attention in 1790 when he killed Governor Phillip's game shooter, a Convict named McIntyre. Although McIntyre was suspected of mistreating Aborigines, witnesses of the actual attack said it was unprovoked. Consequently, Phillip became so infuriated that he dispatched a military expedition to bring back Pemulwuy and "any six Bidjigal or their heads." (Phillip’s soldiers were reluctant to carry out the orders and they returned empty handed, saying that no Bidjigal could be found.)
Following many unsuccessful expeditions to apprehend him, Pemulwuy increased his attacks against the settlers. In particular, he led a number of raids against farms. Sometimes crops and clothes were stolen. Sometimes maze fields were set on fire. Because such resources were desperately needed by the colony, some historians have argued the attacks were calculated war strategies devised by Pemulwuy to weaken his enemy.
Although Pemulwuy’s actions had the characteristics of guerilla war, he also wanted to maintain friendly relations with the colony's governors. (He wasn't actually outlawed until 12 years after his initial attack.) Perhaps this would indicate that his attacks were a form of dispensing justice. Most aboriginal cultures had a payback system where justice could be inflicted on the tribe an individual violator came from rather than the individual themselves. Consequently, if one settler broke any Bidigal laws, other settlers could be punished for the violation. Once punished, the matter was in the past and a state of peace returned once more. Unfortunately, settlers knowingly or unknowingly continued to violate local laws, which forced Pemulwuy to keep dispensing justice. Settlers in turn found themselves being punished, but often not knowing what they were being punished for or even knowing they were be punished.
In 1794, Pemulwuy attacked a group of Convicts and ending up fighting John 'Black' Caesar, a huge Convict/Bushranger of African descent. With his commanding physical strength, Caesar managed to crack Pemulwuy's skull and many people in the colony celebrated because they thought he was dead. Although seriously wounded, Pemulwuy recovered to fight on.
In 1797, Pemulwuy led a sustained attack on the Toongabbie outpost, capturing more food and clothing. He then led the Bidjigal to Parramatta. Here on open ground near the Parramatta River he led what has been defined as a pitched battle against the English. Pemulwuy was quickly identified and subsequently felled after being hit by seven bullets. The Bidjigal suffered great losses and were forced to retreat. Pemulwuy was left lying in a pool of blood and thought to be dead.
Amazingly, he was only severely wounded. In a display of mercy and admiration, the soldiers took him to the hospital at Parramatta. He lapsed in and out of consciousness for many days and his death was thought to be a certainty. Against expectations, Pemulwuy recovered. Several weeks later, he escaped into the darkness - his leg-irons still in place. According to the Bidjijal people, his impossible escape was achieved by turning himself into a bird.
Pemulwuy's ability to recover from his wounds gave him a Rasputin-like reputation for being invincible. The local Aborigines believed that bullets couldn't harm him, nor could chains hold him. Even the colonists started believing the myths. John Washington Price said:
"He has now lodged in him, in shot, sluggs and bullets, about eight or ten ounces of lead."
Despite the conflict, the colony’s governors as well as Pemulwuy seemed to want to build some kind of relationship. In 1897, Governor Hunter met several parties of Aborigines near Botany Bay. Pemulwuy was among them. According to one report, Pemulwuy,
‘spoke with one of the gentlemen of the party; enquiring of him whether the governor was angry, and seemed pleased at being told that he was not.’
Although Hunter was forgiving, his successor was not. In November 1801, Governor Philip Gidley King outlawed Pemulwuy and offered a reward of 20 gallons of spirits or a free pardon for his capture, dead or alive. The prospect of spirits or freedom proved an ample incentive to prove Pemulwuy was mortal. In 1802 he was shot and decapitated. His head was preserved in alcohol and sent to England as a gift for Joseph Banks. Accompanying the head was a letter from Governor King stating that,
"although a terrible pest to the colony, he was a brave and independent character...."
Pemulwuy's son Tedbury also had an ambiguous relationship with colonists. He made trouble for some settlers but was on friendly terms with John Macarthur, an ex-soldier that became a very powerful pastoralist. Macarthur often entertained Tedbury at his Elizabeth farm. Later, when Macarthur had Governor Bligh removed from office in 1808, Tedbury arrived at Macarthur’s cottage with a bundle of spears and announced that he had come to spear the governor. Tedbury was shot by a settler in 1810 when he made another attack on a farm.
Justice man or guerrilla leader?
Whether Pemulwuy was a guerrilla leader or a justice man has implications for the way Aborigines thought of the colonists, which in turn some Australians would use to model their behaviour on today. If he was a guerrilla leader, it would suggest that he considered all colonists to be invaders and wanted them gone. If he was a justice man, then it would suggest that he was not so much concerned about the presence of colonists, but about their breaches of Bidjigal law.
There are numerous facts of history that suggest Pemulwuy was more concerned about upholding Bidjigal law than fighting a war of resistance. Firstly, when Pemulwuy speared McIntyre, there had been no settlement in Bidjigal land, and very little contact with the Bidjigal at all. As a game shooter, McIntyre probably ventured into Bidjigal territory. He was disliked by Aborigines and had been suspected of some kind of unsavoury conduct. His spearing may have been punishment for breaking laws. Secondly, it was almost 11 years between Pemulwuy's spearing of McIntyre and the date he was outlawed. If the governors saw him as a guerrilla leader then he would have been outlawed far earlier. The failure to outlaw him was probably a sign that the governors viewed his actions as typical of hunter gatherer people. Alternatively, they may have seen the actions as retaliation at poor behaviour by settlers. Thirdly, Pemulwuy's left foot had been clubbed, which was a sign that he was a carradhy (clever man/justice man). Finally, his son Tedbury maintained a good relationship with Macarthur. So much so, he came to spear Governor Bligh after he was arrested in the rum rebellion. If Pemulwuy had been guerrilla leader, then Tedbury probably would have been taught similar values. He wouldn’t have formed relationships with colonists and wouldn't have had a desire to inflict justice on behalf of Macarthur.
Presently, most white historians want to define Pemulwuy as a guerrilla leader. It fits with their theme of portraying Aborigines as victims of an invasion, which provides a moral excuse to avoid learning anything about their culture. If they defined Pelmuwuy as a justice man, then they would have to learn something about Aboriginal laws. For a variety of reasons, few white historians want to do this.
Peter Baxter - Pemulwuy
Pemulwuy lay by the side of the road
His body was silently numb
A soldier raised his sabre high
Did what no man should have done
In a silence conspired their lives would backfire
Their shadows would follow and haunt them
What fool would expect a proud man to forget
The land he fought to defend
Clever man, clever man that Pemulwuy
Pemulwuy died with blood in his eyes
In a land now others call home
They brought their ways, they brought their laws
They brought their disease and their rum
With furrowed brows pushed broken ploughs
Crippled the earth with their toil
One man stood firm, one man stood tall
Now his blood soaks deep in that soil
Clever man, clever man that Pemulwuy
The Crow he watched with a wounded stare
And a solemn chant he begun
His death wish flew on a wind that blew
From the west, across and beyond
Centuries on and still now this song
Echoes through the valleys and mountains
To the deserts away. On the great Ocean spray
In the sunshine and the cold southern rain
Clever man, clever man that Pemulwuy ==
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemulwuy
Pemulwuy was an Indigenous Australian man born around 1750 in the area of Botany Bay in New South Wales. He is noted for his resistance to the European settlement of Australia which began with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. He is believed to have been a member of the Bidjigal (Bediagal) clan of the Eora people.
Pemulwuy was the leader of the Bidjigal people and lived near Botany Bay. In 1790 Pemulwuy and 4 other Aboriginal tribesmen speared Governor Philip's gamekeeper John McIntyre, who is believed to have killed Aboriginal people, and subsequently McIntyre died. Arthur Phillip then despatched an officer called Watkin Tench (who kept detailed diaries) to hunt Pemulwuy and his followers, but they had vanished.
Soldiers were soon ordered to patrol farming areas and protect the settlers. Pemulwuy and his warriors then began using fire as a weapon. They lit fires in the hope of destroying the British farms, fences, crops, stock, houses and supplies. The British responded by organising retaliatory attacks against the Eora people. The Eora camps were attacked while the men were away hunting. Elderly people, women and children were shot and either wounded or killed.
Pemulwuy persuaded the Eora, Dharug and Tharawal people to join his campaign against the newcomers. From 1792 Pemulwuy led raids on settlers from Parramatta, Georges River, Prospect, Toongabbie, Brickfield and Hawkesbury River. In 1797, Pemulwuy led roughly 100 fighters (including some escaped Irish convicts) into "the Battle of Parramatta" and confronted the English troops near the river. Pemulwuy was shot seven times and taken to a nearby hospital. Despite having buckshot in his head and body and wearing a leg-iron, he managed to escape from hospital. This gave further substance to the belief that he was a carradhy (clever man). He often joked amongst the natives that having been frequently wounded, he could not be killed by English fire-arms. Pemulwuy was reputedly known as the rainbow warrior as he wore the colours of all the (Aboriginal) tribes.[citation needed]
He led several attacks which resulted in head-on confrontations with the New South Wales Corps, including the sacking of the Lane Cove settlement and the capture of Parramatta.
In November 1801 Governor Phillip Gidley King outlawed Pemulwuy and offered a reward for his death or capture.
In 1802 Pemulwuy was shot dead in an ambush by a patrol. He was then decapitated and his head was preserved in spirits and sent to London to Sir Joseph Banks accompanied by a letter from Governor King who wrote: "Although a terrible pest to the colony, he was a brave and independent character."
Pemulwuy's son Tedbury continued the resistance until he himself was killed in 1810. ...
The guerrilla tactics used by Pemulwuy were the same used by many Aboriginal groups on the frontier. There were other warriors, including Yagan in Perth, that have become well known; but Pemulwuy was the first to show the British settlers that the Aboriginal peoples were going to resist colonisation. ...
This page was last modified on 15 January 2010 at 21:04.
(5) Prince William asked to help find Aboriginal warrior Pemulwuy's head
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/prince-william-asked-to-help-find-aboriginal-warrior-pemulwuys-head/story-e6frfku0-1225819890923
By Caroline Overington
January 15, 2010
ABORIGINAL elders will ask Prince William to help them find the decapitated head of the great Aboriginal warrior, Pemulwuy and return it to Australia.
The head is believed to be stored in a jar, somewhere in England, having been severed from the warrior's body 14 years after the arrival of the First Fleet.
The Australian reports elder Michael Mundine, of the Aboriginal Housing Company, one of five indigenous people chosen to meet the prince during his visit to Sydney next week, said he believed William "has his mother's heart" and would listen sympathetically to a request for the head to be returned.
"He is from a different generation and, because he is young, I think he will understand that Pemulwuy needs to come home to his lands," Mr Mundine said.
The chairman of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, Rob Welsh, who will also meet the prince, said he was planning to ask him to help return Pemulwuy "and the remains of all our ancestors".
Pemulwuy is believed to have been born in 1750, and was therefore about 38 years old when the First Fleet arrived.He fiercely resisted the British colonisation of Australia, using fire as a weapon, destroying crops and animals, and raiding settlements. He was accused of spearing governor Arthur Phillip's gamekeeper.
As his legend grew, so did his supporters: at one point, he had more than 100 followers, who knew him as the "rainbow warrior" for the colours he wore.
Pemulwuy was shot dead on the orders of governor Philip King in 1802.
Some believe Pemulwuy's skull was bottled and returned to Australia in 1950, and then lost.
In 1998, a Taree man came forward, claiming to have it, but local elders did not believe him, and the claim was never proven.
(6) Bennelong - insisted that his wife Barangaroo give birth in Governor Phillip's house
http://www.bennelong.com.au/articles/bennelongbio.php
Woollarawarre Bennelong, the Bush Politician (1789--92)
by Dirk C.H. van Dissel
The 25th of November 1789, almost two years after the landing of the First Fleet, was a remarkable day for Australia, just as it was equally remarkable for a certain individual who went by the name of Woollarawarre Bennelong. It was on this day that two Aborigines, Bennelong and Colby, were lured by some fish down to Manly Bay and, once close enough, the two men were bundled into a waiting long boat and taken to the settlement of Sydney. Governor Phillip had ordered the kidnapping of some Aborigines because he was under strict instructions from King George III to 'endeavour, by every possible mean, to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them'.
However, Governor Phillip couldn't carry out these orders while there was no contact with the native inhabitants, who had kept their distance from Sydney Cove and all white people since settlement. Left with no other option, Governor Phillip felt that capturing an Aborigine and bringing him into Sydney Cove would start a relationship in which the differences of language, culture and society could be learnt. This would then allow both peoples to converse and trade, and it would gradually lead to a peaceful and prosperous society for both peoples to live in.
Although there were a few before him, Bennelong was one of the first Aborigines to learn to speak and understand English and to learn European customs and lifestyle and to enjoy their benefits. As he was one of the first Aborigines to come into the white settlement and visit it regularly, Bennelong was very instrumental in bridging the many gaps that existed between the white settlers and the indigenous people of the Sydney area, the Eora.
Kidnapping a person may seem a strange way to begin a relationship, but there is no doubt that a close relationship developed between Bennelong and Captain Arthur Phillip. Like the few Aborigines who had briefly stayed at Sydney Cove, Bennelong soon adopted European dress and ways, and learned English. He gave Governor Phillip the Aboriginal name Woollarawarre and adopted for himself the name of Governor. This was done as a mark of respect and affection for the Governor and was extremely important as the interchanging of names was 'found as a constant symbol of friendship among them', as said Captain Watkin Tench.[1]
Bennelong feasted daily with the Governor and resided in his house where he shared a room and was watched by the Governor's steward. Bennelong spent the next couple of months willingly communicating information and explaining the customs of his country and his people. He wore English attire and displayed good manners at meals and even developed a taste for wine, which was regarded as a fiery potion of some sort by the other Aborigines. It is important to note that during this period (1789-92) Bennelong is generally regarded to have not been an alcoholic as he was upon his return from England (1795), but as a person who drank socially and held his liquor well.
Five months after his capture, Bennelong escaped from the Governor's house early one morning. This was especially frustrating for Phillip as he had put a lot of effort into trying to appease and learn from Bennelong, who was easily the most intelligent and helpful of the Aborigines that had come into Sydney Cove.
The next time Governor Phillip saw Bennelong was at Manly Cove where, under a storm of confusion, Governor Phillip was speared by Willemering. There is evidence to suggest that Willemering, who was a friend of Bennelong, was carrying out orders of retribution on behalf of Bennelong to pay Governor Phillip back for kidnapping him. There could easily have been all-out war if it weren't for Bennelong's cool head, and he convinced Governor Phillip that it was a grave misunderstanding.
The peaceful coming-in of the Eora to Sydney in October 1790 was both skilfully and equally devised by two men, Arthur Phillip and Woollarawarre Bennelong and is testament to Governor Phillip's and Bennelong's great diplomatic skills. Here it was agreed that the Eora would put an end to active resistance and live on friendly terms, and in return they wouldn't be forcibly captured, manacled or held against their will and could come and go from Sydney Cove as they pleased. Bennelong demonstrated throughout these talks his talent as a skilful negotiator and a master of adaptation and improvisation in the face of a more powerful, alien culture.
In a brainwave in February 1791, Lieutenant David Collins realised that the settlers had been cleverly influenced by Bennelong and his people, who had 'shielded the market' by preventing other tribes from trading with the white settlement. This basically created a monopoly for the Eora and significantly strengthened the clan, as well as strengthening Bennelong's position within the hierarchy of the clan. It is not improbable that the English would have been represented in a quite unfavourable light by the Eora so as to scare and deter the other clans from making contact with them at Sydney Cove. Unfortunately, this retarded Governor Phillip's effort to appease and set up trade with all the clans inhabiting the area around Sydney, not just Bennelong's clan. However, it displays great insight and intelligence on the part of Bennelong and the Eora who used the gift exchange system with the English completely to their advantage.
Another example of Bennelong's foresight was his insistence that his wife Barangaroo give birth in Governor Phillip's house, even though Governor Phillip tried at length to persuade Bennelong to go to the hospital. This illustrates Bennelong's initiative and can be seen as an attempt to bring Phillip into his family kinship circle and also to reconcile Phillip as his 'beanga', or father, which he often used to call him. Furthermore, in Aboriginal society one's birthplace is of great importance and the act of giving birth in Governor Phillip's house, which lay in Cadigal territory (a neighbouring clan to the Eora), demonstrates that Bennelong's clan was forging new land associations. This once again highlights Bennelong's quick wit and his ability to take advantage of a given situation.
In December 1792, Governor Phillip, who had been governor for nearly five years, decided to return to England. Bennelong had expressed interest in long sea voyages, so Governor Phillip invited him and another Aborigine named Yemmerrawanne to join the governor on his return trip and visit England, which they both gladly accepted. Unfortunately, Yemmerrawanne died in England two years later due to a lung disease, but Bennelong enjoyed his stay in London and was soon accustomed to wearing a ruffled lace shirt and a fancy waistcoat typical of the times. He also learned to box, skate, smoke and drink. Such was his eagerness and ability to learn that people have said the he 'ate as elegantly as the Englishmen, bowed, toasted, paid the ladies compliments and loved wine.' He even met King George III and heard debates in parliament and was delighted with everything he saw. Bennelong was long applauded as a success of both cultures because of his dynamic ability to blend into English high society or the traditional Aboriginal way of living, both very different settings. However, things in England took a turn for the worse for Bennelong as he found his fondness for wine greatly increasing. In September 1795, Bennelong, fast becoming ill and longing to come home, returned to Sydney with the colony's new governor, Governor Hunter. This second stage of Bennelong's life would prove to be disastrous for him as he took to the bottle with great resolve. He was often in drunken scuffles or payback battles and soon his own people began to shun him. Woollarawarre Bennelong died on the 3rd of January 1813 at James Squire's orchard at Kissing Point (Meadowbank) on the Parramatta River at the approximate age of 50.
Time and time again, Bennelong exhibited skills of determination, diplomacy and resolve that could be likened to that of an astute and seasoned politician. He was considered a vital link between the white settlers and the Aborigines because of his ability to speak both languages and behave accordingly in both cultures. His closeness to Governor Phillip and influential Aborigines such as Colby guaranteed his position within both societies as he was the intermediary between the two different peoples. Through his own actions, Bennelong cemented his image and position as an important and influential part of the establishment of Sydney Cove during the 1790s.
Note
[1]. Keith Vincent Smith, Bennelong, 2001, page 42. ==
http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/barani/themes/theme7.htm
In December 1788, not long after the landing of the First Fleet, Governor Phillip ordered the capture of Arabanoo (born c. 1758). Arabanoo was dressed in European clothes, trained in English and called Manly (after his place of capture). Arabanoo became friendly with the colonists and dined regularly with Phillip, providing the first real information about Aboriginal society and culture for the Europeans.
He was horrified seeing a public flogging and appalled by the decaying bodies of his people, victims of the smallpox epidemic soon after the arrival of the First Fleet. He nursed two sick children named Nabaree and Abaroo back to good health, before he fell victim himself and died in May 1789. Arabanoo was buried in the Governor's garden (now the Museum of Sydney).
Bennelong, born c. 1764 of the Wangal people, is one of the most notable Aboriginal people in the early history of Australia. Also known as Wolarwaree, Ogultroyee and Vogeltroya, he was one of the first to live with the settlers, to be 'civilised' into the European way of life and to enjoy its 'benefits'.
Bennelong (married at the time to Barangaroo) was captured with Colbee (married to Daringa) in November 1789 as part of Phillip's plan to learn the language and customs of the local people. Like Arabanoo, Bennelong soon adopted European dress and ways, and learned English. Bennelong is also known to have taught George Bass the language of the Sydney Aborigines, and gave Phillip the Aboriginal name Wolawaree to locate him in a kinship relationship. This was necessary in order to enable communication of customs and relationship to the land.
Bennelong served the colonisers by teaching them about Aboriginal customs and language in an attempt to aid relations between the two groups. In May 1790 Bennelong was present at Manly when Phillip was speared and persuaded the Governor that the attack was caused by a misunderstanding. Later that year, he asked the Governor to build him a hut on what became known as Bennelong Point, the site of the Sydney Opera House. Here he entertained the Governor a year later.
Although he was said to have had a love-hate relationship with both the settlement and Governor Phillip, Bennelong and another Aborigine named Yemmerrawanie travelled with the Governor to England in 1792, and were presented to King George III on May 24 1793. Yemmerrawanie died in Britain, but Bennelong returned to Sydney in February 1795, after what must have been an enormously challenging confrontation with an alien culture. He exhibited a new sense of dress and behaviour, and tried to influence his family to imitate these things. Bennelong was long troubled by the consumption of alcohol. He frequented Sydney less often and eventually died at Kissing Point (now known as Ryde, on Sydney’s north shore) on January 3, 1813.
Much of the profile of Bennelong has been created by the writings of Judge Advocate David Collins (who preferred the spelling Bennilong) and Captain Watkin Tench (who chose Bennillon). They viewed him as an experiment in 'softening, enlightening and refining a barbarian'. While Bennelong suffered from the worst aspects of enculturation, he also represents those who tried to change the behaviour of Europeans on Aboriginal lands.
== http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennelong
Woollarawarre Bennelong (c. 1764 - 3 January 1813) (also: "Baneelon")[1] was a senior man of the Eora, an Aboriginal (Koori) people of the Port Jackson area, at the time of the first British settlement in Australia, in 1788. He subsequently served as an interlocutor between the two cultures, both in Sydney and in the United Kingdom.[1] Bennelong had a daughter named Dilboong who died in infancy, and a son who was adopted by Rev. William Walker, who christened him Thomas Walker Coke. Thomas died after a short illness aged about 20. Bennelong was later marginalised and died in obscurity.[2]
Bennelong (married at the time to Barangaroo) was captured with Colbee (married to Daringa) in November 1789 as part of Governor of New South Wales Arthur Phillip's plan to learn the language and customs of the local people. Like another captive, Arabanoo, Bennelong soon adopted European dress and ways, learning to speak English. A letter he wrote in 1796 is the first known text written in English by an indigenous Australian. [3] Bennelong is also known to have taught George Bass the language of the Sydney Aborigines, and, in a gesture of kinship, gave Phillip the Aboriginal name Wolawaree. Bennelong was brought to the settlement at Sydney Cove by order of the governor Arthur Phillip, who was under strict instructions from King George III, to establish relationships with the indigenous populations.
Although a captive, Bennelong served the British colonisers well in an (ultimately vain) attempt to aid relations between the two groups. In 1790, Bennelong asked the governor to build him a hut on what became known as Bennelong Point, now the site of the Sydney Opera House. This site is still named for him, as is the seat of Bennelong in the Federal parliament. Bennelong was the first Australian Indigenous person to be honoured in the name of an electoral division.
Bennelong and another Aborigine named Yemmerrawanie (or Imeerawanyee) travelled with Phillip to England in 1792, and were presented to King George III on 24 May 1793. Yemmerrawanie died while in Britain, and Bennelong's health deteriorated. He returned to Sydney in February 1795 on HMS Reliance, the ship that took surgeon George Bass to the colony for the first time. He taught Bass some of his language on the voyage.[4] Increasingly overwhelmed by European culture, Bennelong quickly became alienated from his own people after this return.
Long troubled by the consumption of alcohol, he frequented Sydney less often and eventually died at Kissing Point (now known as Putney, in Sydney's North West) on 9 January 1813. The area now has Bennelong Park named in his honour.
He was buried on the estate of James Squire. His obituary in the Sydney Gazette[5] [6] was unflattering, referring to him as "a thorough savage, not to be warped from the form and character that nature gave him", which presumably reflected where he had sunk to in the esteem of white society in his last years.
Unfortunately he was never fully accepted by the British as he was black and his hunter/gatherer heritage did not fit into their society. When he then returned to Australia, he was not accepted back with his own people as he had gone to England and tried to become part of the white culture[citation needed].
This page was last modified on 3 December 2009 at 02:18.
(7) My brothers drank themselves to death - Bess Nungarrayi Price
http://www.bennelong.com.au/conferences/lecture2009/howson-lecture-2009.php
Inaugural Peter Howson Lecture
Bess Nungarrayi Price
3 December 2009
I want to thank the Bennelong Society for giving me the opportunity to speak and to be able to give you an insight into how I think and feel about how our people see themselves. There are many more out there who are not given an opportunity like this to tell their story and how it is.
My name is Bess Nyirringali Nungarrayi Price. My first language is Warlpiri, English is my second and there are five other languages that I understand. I was born under a tree at a place called Yuendumu, where the airstrip now is. My father was 10 years old when he first saw a white man. My mother was a little bit younger. They were both born in the desert out of contact with the rest of the world.
I came from a family of eleven. My Mum has now outlived 8 of her children. We have lost eight, but I had a happy up bringing. I spent my childhood living in yujuku my father built, what whitefellas call 'humpies'. I was always warm, dry and comfortable. We ate both whitefella food and our own bushtucker. We camped on my Dad's country every weekend, walking a round trip of around thirty kilometres from Yuendumu and back, but we always got to school. When I was too young to go my older sister and brother rode to school on a donkey all that way. My teachers were good, hard working people. I had plenty of white friends as well as the company of my own extended Warlpiri family. I learnt both ways before we had what we now call bilingual/bicultural education at our school. My teachers and my parents taught me well.
I come today to talk to you about my people, and where they are in this land we call Australia. I have come to speak today hoping that you will listen to what I have to say.
People think Aboriginal people all think the same. They are wrong. We have Aboriginal people who live in cities, towns and in the remote parts of Australia and we all have different issues. The issues and needs are totally different. The politics in the bush are so different from the way southern blackfellas think. They, the yapa, are gullible at times and they accept anything that's put in front of them, without a question. They are easily lead whether it's in good faith or not. Others blame colonization for the reason that our people are the most disadvantaged group of people. But nobody can explain why that is ... I don't see it that way. All I see is that they are hunters and gatherers and they were vulnerable then and they are vulnerable now. They know nothing about how everything else operates outside of their communities and how they need to change in order to keep up with the rest of the outside world. They need to be given the tools and the mechanism to move forward.
We have had so many self-appointed people, black and white, who have decided to be our spokespeople, who know nothing about us and our issues. They are the people who have been running the show all these years without ever asking us whether it's okay for them to do so. They are the ones who want to keep our people in the dark as if we are some sort of stone age people.
It had to take urgent measures by the government in order to help our people, for them to recognise what was happening to them, and to do something for themselves before it was too late.
I am one of those people who embraced the government's move, what is now called the Intervention or the NTER, the Northern Territory Emergency Response. To me it meant at last somebody was acknowledging that there was a crisis and that it needed to be addressed. For a long time our peoples' lives have been in a state of crisis, spiralling downwards, rapidly, uncontrollably.
The protestors and the media only seem to care when whitefellas kill blackfellas, or blackfellas kill whitefellas. They don't seem to care when our kids are killed by their own people or they commit suicide.
Before the Intervention three of my brothers drank themselves to death on the Alice Springs town camps. Two nieces, one 21, one 26, did the same. My granddaughter was murdered on a town camp. She died because she was stabbed by her ex-husband, my cousin. The ambulance wouldn't go in there without a police escort because the drunks attack them when they go there to save a life. So she died waiting for them. This is what the town camps have been for us, places of sickness and self-destruction. Yet there are those in Alice Springs who call it racism and an attack on human rights when the government tries to help us make the camps decent places to live and raise kids.
I could go on all day about the violence I have seen. It has happened to so many of my loved ones. My own body is decorated with scars. Yet the protestors, the whitefellas in Alice Springs and those who come from Down South, who think they are supporting my people, have treated me like an enemy. They have tried to tell the world through the internet that I am a drunk and that I only support the government because it pays me to do work for them. They aren't interested in the truth. They aren't willing to open their ears and listen.
They have never given me a chance to talk at their rallies. They bring white students and cranky kooris and murris up from Down South who know nothing about us and who hate whitefellas. They look for local people who think like they do and try to keep the rest quiet and away from the media. When the UN's Special Rapporteur came to Alice my people were not told of the meetings. I was only invited the day before. The meetings were very carefully controlled and orchestrated. It was a joke. He didn't hear from the people with the problems, the ones living with the violence and the misery. He heard from those with a vested interest in the present situation.
My people, the ones with the problems that the Intervention is designed to address, were deliberately excluded. They were lining up down at the pub and the bottle shops as they do everyday or sitting in filth in the camps worrying about their kids and waiting for the next round of grog fuelled violence. People are given a fairytale version of our culture by people who don't live by our law. They want you to think that it is the government that causes all our problems. That is an outrageous lie. The government gets it wrong because it consults with the wrong people. It gets it wrong because it cannot help people who won't, or don't know how, to help themselves. We want to be able to help ourselves.
I know plenty of Aboriginal women here who want the Intervention because they can feed their kids now. The protestors treat them like enemies as well. They never support the old women who come in from bush to protest against the grog. They verbally attacked and insulted the women at the Women's Centre at Yuendumu when they set up their own shop. They took the side of the violent men and the corrupt ones in our communities and refused to support the women worried about their kids, sick of being beaten up by drunks. They have never even tried to talk to us. We are very grateful to the government for keeping income management going.
My people don't use money the way white people do. They don't save, they don't budget, they can't say 'no' to relatives even when they are drunks and addicted to gambling and drugs. They need help in spending their money wisely. We are very happy that the government has decided to extend income management to everybody. That is what we have always asked for. Don't stop doing it for us, do it to everybody who needs it if you are worried about racism. Even Warren Snowdon, our ALP Federal member admits now that it is working. That is a big change for Warren.
We still have a lot of other problems. Education is one of the biggest. Education has not worked for our mob for the last thirty years. White people told us that they wanted to preserve our language so now my people can't express themselves to the rest of the world and rely on white people and city blackfellas, who know nothing about us, or who want to keep us in ignorance to do it for them. I went to school before the bilingual program started yet I speak both Warlpiri and English better than our kids and our grand kids. Our young people now need their grandparents to speak for them to the outside world. The old ones speak better English. Most of our kids now can't read and write English or their own language. They are not learning to speak their own languages properly. They are losing the best of our culture but not learning the best of the whitefella's culture. They are learning the worst instead. They are losing on both sides. Bilingual education is a wonderful idea but it seems to me that it has never been done properly. We want our kids to keep speaking our languages but we also want them to be able to speak and read and write English. My people are linguistically talented. Many speak several Aboriginal languages. Our kids are intelligent and want to learn. Why can't whitefellas teach them English? It should be easy.
Teachers have never been trained properly. Our kids have never been taught English properly. Our schools don't get the resources they need. The high truancy rates have been ignored. Education hasn't been compulsory for our kids so they don't bother turning up and parents don't make sure they go and the government has ignored all this. We want the best of both world's, not the worst, and we will need the government's support to get it.
Our people need to be challenged. There needs to be an open and honest debate between ourselves, as people. We need to change in order to make it better for future for our children and our grandchildren. These protestors have done their best to stop that from happening and yet they call it 'solidarity'.
With all the money the government has poured into our self managed organisations and communities everything has gotten worse. Our organisations can put energy into campaigning against government policies and into getting the UN to take notice of their views but they don't stop our men from murdering our women, our kids from killing themselves. They don't make sure our kids get to school. They don't keep our languages alive. All they can do is bleat for more money and complain every time the government tries to do something.
I've read the speech by Mary Victor O'Reeri from the Kimberley. Her family's approach is exactly what is needed in our country. It was a woman who stood up and told the truth at last and the protestors and organisations can't stop her. Yet my own uncle told the Wall Street Journal that women have no power in our culture. He is wrong. The media should stop listening to rubbish like that. We women are the main ones now trying to save our kids. There are men trying to get things right but they are quietly working away and the media don't take any notice of them, their voices are drowned out by protestors and their white supporters.
Mary Victor is right. We are the only ones who can save ourselves and we don't need the protestors from our southern cities to tell us what to think and say. We have the strength ourselves if we can only be honest for once. The Intervention started this debate. That is the best thing about it. It has made us think for the first time about what's happened to us, where we are and where we want to go. More and more Aboriginal people are now getting up the courage to tell the world what is really happening. More and more are willing to take responsibility for our own problems.
The Racial Discrimination Act was there to protect us from white racism and we needed that protection. But it has not protected our people from ourselves. We need an act, we need laws that recognize that the problem now is blackfellas killing blackfellas and killing themselves. If a law like the Racial Discrimination Act gets in the way of doing that then it must be changed. We are different, we are special, we have special needs. We are caught in a trap. They want us to be citizens with the same rights but then they want us to keep our culture with no changes. How can we do both? We need to do some special things to solve our problems. Now we know that and can do something about it. Let's roll forward instead of backwards.
We want leaders who will lead us out of our misery not sit around whingeing about how hard their lives are when they have the jobs and the power. We want leaders who tell us that we are not 'Victims' who can't do a thing for ourselves but sit around dying while we wait for the government to get it right. We want leaders who will convince our own people to stop drinking, fighting and feuding, who will get our kids into school so that we can produce our own professors of indigenous rights who can go to other peoples country to listen to their stories.
Postscript
Dave Price
I am calling this a postscript because it is right that Bess' voice is heard first. I can't claim to be 'indigenous'. In my three decades of work with indigenous students, clients and colleagues I was constantly reminded of that fact. More than once I have been advised to take a look in a mirror to remind myself that I am not black and that therefore the right to speak out on indigenous issues was denied to me. The problem for me is that I have been married to Bess for three decades. My wife, my daughter, my grandsons, in fact, all of my descendants for ever more, are and will be indigenous. They do have the right to speak because they, one and all can claim the ethnic and political label 'indigenous'.
I took on board this idea that I should be voiceless and decided therefore to support Bess in her efforts to bring her people's plight to public notice. But then it occurred to me that many of those out there making the loudest noises in the public space would also fail the mirror test and many who would not had no idea of my wife's people's plight. That has not stopped them from shouting their ignorance from the roof tops. For much of the last thirty years I have mourned the death, rape, life threatening disease and injury, mostly entirely avoidable, arrest and incarceration of my loved ones, the great majority indigenous. Yes they are and were my loved ones. So I have decided to speak for myself, in support of my family and on behalf of those non-indigenous spouses who watch in agony, the destruction of their indigenous loved ones in self imposed silence.
We work as cross-cultural trainers. I have a photograph of my last class at Yuendumu taken in 1979, the year I left with Bess to start a new life. I love that photo. I wanted to use it in our presentation. Bess wouldn't let me. There were too many in that photo that had died. For most of the whitefellas I talk to all of this is academic. They expect me to discuss the issues dispassionately, objectively. They expect me to talk about my loved ones as if they were the objects of research that I was doing rather than as people I love members of my species whose lives are entwined with mine.
I will now bring up an issue that my wife feels unable to discuss publicly because she is a woman. I will do this because I am a man and I speak for my family. Last January a white, female police officer drove on to the men's ceremonial grounds at Lajamanu, a Warlpiri community at the northern end of the Tanami desert. There was outrage in response. The old men in the community and their white supporters went to great lengths to protest what had happened as a profound affront to their culture and law.
In an interview with Eric Tlozec on the ABC evening news in Darwin, Lyndsay Bookie, the chairman of the Central Land Council said the following, and I quote:
It's against our law for people like that breaking the law, they shouldn't be there. Aboriginal ladies, they're not allowed to go anywhere near that. If they had been caught, a woman, aboriginal lady got caught she (would) be killed. Simple as that.
I understand that response and I have always known that this is true. I admire Lyndsay's courage in saying in public what we all knew to be true. I also could not imagine Lyndsay himself killing anyone; he's just not that sort of bloke. This is my father-in-law's law, my wife's promised husband's---my brother's law. These are two of the men in my life I most respect. But I don't respect every aspect of their law. Much of it now doesn't work. Simple as that!
What disturbed me most about this whole affair is that there was no response whatsoever to Lyndsay's statement. Not one human rights campaigner, not one feminist stood up and publicly objected to what Lyndsay had said. In a country that rejects capital punishment in all its forms, that prides itself on its human rights record, on its struggle to improve the rights of women, indeed on its compassionate treatment of animals, nobody was willing to challenge the right of Aboriginal men to execute women for cultural reasons. Even Tom Calma, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, White Ribbon Ambassador and self described Kungarakan and Iwaidja elder had nothing to say, no response. Perhaps he missed the news that night.
It seems that everybody is willing to sacrifice the lives of women on the altar of what we call 'culture': the fetish of the age. In Australia Aboriginal people have the human right to practice their culture. Should this include the right to execute women?
When I bring this issue up with whitefellas I am usually met with embarrassed silence or an insistence that Aboriginal women know enough to avoid such situations. There is no appeal to principles or human rights. I brought the issue up with a middle aged Warlpiri man in private. He is married with daughters. He is also an evangelist and has devoted his life to Christianity. When I quoted Lyndsay Bookie he agreed and repeated some of Lyndsay's words "yeah, simple as that". I asked him how he felt about that as a Christian and got no response. I then asked him if he would kill a woman in those circumstances, he answered 'no' without hesitation. I then asked would he defend one of his female loved ones if other men wanted to kill them for such a reason. Again 'yes', without hesitation. I suggested that there should be a change to the law. He answered that he was trying to make such changes.
For me it is personal. My own wife's life has been directly threatened several times, on each occasion by drunk Aboriginal men, in one case a group armed with knives and machetes also threatening the lives of my sons, nephews by marriage whitefella way. This incident was part of a feud that had gone on for 8 years in conformity with customary law. It began as a fight between teenage girls over a boyfriend. It resulted in several cases of grievous bodily harm, several hospitalisations, several prison sentences and the destruction of property. Although my wife's life was threatened by armed men in public only one of the participants was charged, in this case with a driving offence in relation to the incident. There were no other charges laid. It was patiently explained to me that this sort of thing is so common in Alice Springs that no charges are laid if no blood is spilt or no-one is killed. We live in a war zone in which women's lives are forfeit.
We believe that many understand that the law needs to be changed. Young Aboriginal men are still trained to believe that they have the right of paterfamilias in relation to their wives and that they have, not just the right, but the duty to execute women who break their law. This causes immense confusion when they are confronted with white man's law. I have no idea why this issue is not raised when we discuss the hideous levels of violence against women in Aboriginal communities and what should be done about it. It is as if it has no effect on that kind of violence. Nothing could be further from the truth.
My father in law saw his eldest son die from the grog. After that I believe that he gave up in despair. He died not long afterwards. I have seen that same look of despair in the eyes of other old men as they watch the young ones self destruct often taking their loved ones down with them. Some tell us that the young men don't understand the old law anymore and they have not learned to respect the white man's law either. Bess' father and her promised husband applied to spirit rather than the letter of the law to their own lives. They agreed to my marrying Bess for example and let her off her betrothal although that was at the heart of their legal system. They were prepared to defend their women. Young men don't live long enough now to learn that wisdom. Customary law needs some legislative changes. We need to enter into a serious dialogue to help bring about such change.
All we want is the same protections for the most vulnerable of our loved ones that are enjoyed by the wider community. That is all we are asking for and if that means that aspects of Aboriginal law must be challenged, as our own law is continually challenged, to achieve this then for justice sake let's get on with it in a spirit of mutual respect.
(8) Eden: Killer Whales & humans co-operated to kill Humpbacks & Southern Right whales
Eden Killer-Whale Museum: http://www.killerwhalemuseum.com.au/Killers.htm ==
http://www.whales.org.au/policies/old_tom.html
Old Tom!
By Stacey Smith
Discover a mystery between man and whale. Learn how a whale turns on his own kind to help man, for mutual benefit. Where truth is stranger than fiction.
The story of Old Tom is amazing, yet tells the truth. It is hard to believe the things Tom and the other Orcas (Killer Whales) do. Read on for some fascinating whaling History that occurred in Twofold Bay, Eden, N.S.W.
Old Tom was a Killer Whale (also commonly known as Orca). Orcas have black and white markings and grow up to about 10 meters, and weigh about 7 ton. Old Tom led a pack of Orcas, commonly known as The Killers of Eden. The Killers of Eden, helped the whalers in Twofold Bay hunt the Humpback whale and the Southern Right whale. Old Tom was the last leader in the pack. Since his death on September 17th, 1930 whaling in Eden completely stopped.
The Killers helped the whalers a fair bit. Without them, whaling in Twofold Bay wouldn't be successful. Autumn was whaling season; the reason for this was that the Killers passed by the bay. The whalers recognised the Killers by the shapes of their dorsal fins.
When the Killers passed by the bay, and there was a whale swimming around on its own they would herd the helpless whale into the bay. So it would be easier for the whalers to catch. Sometimes early in the morning or during the day when the whalers weren't out, the Killers would start the attack. Say if the Killers where swimming around out in the ocean and there was a good whale to catch, and the whalers weren't there to get it, the Killers pod would split. Half the whales would go to the whaling station and slap their tails on the surface of the water; this was a signal to the whalers that there was something going on (like an attack). Then the Killers would wait for the whalers to get ready and tow them or lead them to the other half of the Killers pod. The other half would have already started the slow process of the killing of the whale. Once the whale has been harpooned, the Killers would help speed up the whale's death. The Killers would swim all around it; swimming over the top of the whale stopped it from going to the surface to take a breath, and swimming underneath the whale stopped it from diving deeper. Some of the Killers would throw their bodies over the whale's blowhole to stop it from breathing.
For all the hard work the Killers had done, they get to feast on the corpse for one night. The killers would never let the whalers go without their reward, though the whalers couldn't go any way. A freshly killed whale usually sinks and it is way too much heavy for an oar powered boat to tow back immediately. In a few days enough gas builds up inside the dead whales body because of decomposition. The dead body would then float to the surface of the water. Then it was easier for the whalers to tow back the dead carcass.
The killers would have already gone out to sea waiting for their next victim to pounce on, feeling quite satisfied with their full stomachs of the dead whales tongue and lips. The whales only ever ate the tongue and lips. The tongue by itself weighs up to four tons. So the killers loved their reward. The loss of the tongue and the lips didn't worry the whalers. They only used the blubber. They used the blubber to make, soap, margarine, lubricants, leather, pencils, candles, crayons and that was just the oil out of the whales blubber. Some of the left overs were used for animal food.
On September the 17th, 1930 a retired whaler Allie Greg found Old Tom dead floating in the bay. Old Tom had returned home for his death. George Davidson wondered what he was doing and went to see what was going on. They were discussing what they should do with the carcass, the decided they should tow him out to sea and let him drift in the currents. Then John Logan came and he had another idea. John suggested keeping Old Toms skeleton and exhibiting it in the Maritime Museum, where Eden tourists and others could look at the most fascinating Killer Whale in the world. George towed the animal back to his Try-Works. There, George and his son Wallace cleaned and numbered the bones for reassembly. This was completed in 1931. The skeleton is now being shown in the Eden Killer Whale Museum.
Old Tom was claimed to have lived for 50-80 years, but not many people are sure. Whales have only one set of teeth for life, so scientists took one tooth out of Old Tom's jaw and showed that the tooth was only 35 years old. They also realized that Tom's bottom jaw was warn away to gum level, and teeth showing marks where harpoon lines have warn holes.
People say there must have been a look alike Old Tom or was there? ... ==
Eden Killer-Whale Museum: http://www.killerwhalemuseum.com.au/Killers.htm ==
(9) Eden co-operation with Killer Whales derived from Aboriginal crews, who believed they were reincarnated warriors
Killers in Eden
Broadcast Sunday 3 November 2002
with Robyn Williams
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s713818.htm
... Descriptions of the Eden killer whales hunting strategies are very similar to those of whale-hunting pods in other oceans. Observations of whale-hunts elsewhere reveal that like the Eden animals, killer whales typically attack in groups with different animals taking on different tasks. Some prevent the whale from sounding, others stand guard out to sea, while other individuals physically attack the whale, grappling with its fins and flukes and flinging themselves over the whale’s blowhole. The Eden whales’ preference for the lips and tongue is also shared by killer whales elsewhere. A study of grey whale carcasses attacked by killer whales in Alaska found that many were missing their tongue and lips. Killer whales in other parts of the world also use shallow water to trap and even beach baleen whales, just as the killer whales seem to have used Twofold Bay. All this suggests that the Eden killer whales were probably hunting in Twofold Bay long before European whalers arrived.
So the Eden story is not so much one of uncharacteristic killer whale behaviour, as uncharacteristic human behaviour. It seems likely that it was the whalers who took advantage of the killer whales’ activities in Twofold Bay, rowing out to capture whales already under attack from the killers. Killer whales and humans have hunted whales side by side for centuries and have only ever come to blows over it, never into partnership. Whalers typically see killer whales as competitors and make every effort to deter them from stealing their catch. Early in Eden’s whaling history Brierly noted that it could take up to seven boats to protect (or steal) a harpooned whale from the killers and that the killer whales would try to sink the boats and tow the whale away. Anywhere else in the world, whalers would have reacted to such impertinent behaviour with increasing violence, but for some reason in Eden the whalers decided to co-operate. The origins of this change of heart probably lie not so much with the European whalers themselves, as with the Aboriginal crews they employed. Killer whales were important spiritual animals to the indigenous people of the Twofold Bay area. The Aboriginal whalers believed that the killer whales were the reincarnated spirits of dead warriors and whalers. Individual killer whales were named after many of the deceased local men so the killer whales were not just allies or assistances to the Aboriginal whalers, but blood-relatives. Historically, this close relationship may have stemmed from the killer whale’s habit of driving small whales ashore. An early anthropologist recorded how south coast Aborigines would call to the hunting killer whales and light fires along the beach to encourage the killers to drive the whales towards them. Beached whale carcasses played a significant role in the diet, ceremonial and spiritual life of coastal Aboriginal communities in many parts of Australia.
This pre-existing spiritual attitude towards the killer whales undoubtedly shaped the way in which the early Aboriginal crews behaved during whale hunts. Brierly reports that he could not persuade the Aboriginal crews to harm the killer whales. (He wanted to obtain a specimen for a museum). The first time he mentions a whale being buoyed and left for the killers, it is by an Aboriginal crew. Since Aboriginal crews formed the backbone of much of the Eden whaling industry, their attitudes would have been pivotal in determining the approach taken by the European whalers, particularly once they realised that the assistance of the killer whales enhanced their kill rate without significantly detracting from their profits.
With so little recorded about the cultural customs of many east coast Aboriginal tribes, we have no way of knowing how common this kind of spiritual relationship with killer whales was. But there is tantalising evidence that these kinds of relationships may have been more common than we realise. The people of Stradbroke Island apparently had a similar co-operative fishing arrangement with dolphins, which were also individually named and recognised. And among the ancient Aboriginal whale carvings on the rocky headlands of Sydney there are depictions not just of feasts on stranded whales, but also whales with large dorsal fins and distinctive peg-like teeth. Some people think these are stranded sperm whales which, unlike large baleen whales, have teeth. But they could also be killer whales. Killer whales may well have used the bays and inlets surrounding Sydney to trap migrating humpbacks and local Aborigines would have benefited from this behaviour just as much as the people from Twofold Bay did.
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