After consensus
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 21: Hidden Queensland
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Peter Sutton
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Peter Sutton's biography and other articles by this writer
I travelled from Sydney to Far North Queensland in 1970 to carry out ‘salvage work' on a dying and little-recorded language, Gugu-Badhun. I was a postgraduate student in linguistics and my main teacher was to be Dick Hoolihan, who came from the Valley of Lagoons, Gugu-Badhun heartland country. He was a recently retired blacksmith's striker with the railways. He had been put in touch with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, my employer in Canberra, through Frank Bardsley of Townsville. Frank was an active trade unionist with an interest in Aboriginal welfare and rights, who had begun to write down words in endangered languages of North Queensland. He also ran what would now be called a blue-light disco for the kids, I believe through the Aborigines' Advancement League, in a run-down part of Townsville. I went to a dance there with a now unplaceable Ann Smith on August 8, 1970, according to my journal.
At that time, as had been the case since the Gurindji walk-off and the Northern Territory equal wages case a few years earlier, the old working-class unionist left had not yet relinquished its historic, if short-lived, front-row forward role in Aboriginal politics. Indigenous activists and their supporting middle-class cast of lawyers, academics, liberal missionaries and others were soon to sideline them. The North Australian Workers' Union and the Waterside Workers' Federation soon faded from centre stage in Indigenous political activism. The older involvement of humane societies, the various Friendship Leagues and their like – many of which were largely non-Indigenous in makeup – and some not so old organisations with more direct Indigenous involvement, like the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) (1958-73) and the One People of Australia League (1961-present), were also soon to be moved into the wings by the new land councils, legal services and other organisations, including the National Aboriginal Congress.
These historic shifts of progressivism on Indigenous questions need to be laid out in a little more detail. In the colonial era and soon after, progressives had pushed for the protection of Indigenous Australians from violence and exploitation, for the recognition of their fellow humanity, and for the formation of inviolate reserves in remote regions. This phase merged into and was also outflanked by a later post-colonial movement for racial equality and the acceptance of Indigenous Australians as fully capable of integration into the wider community. This period spanned roughly the 1920s to the 1960s. Assimilation, for some decades prior to about 1960, was thus argued for by people of the left as an opportunity not to be unjustly denied to Indigenous Australians. There was not the sentiment for traditional culture then that there is now. Anti-assimilationists in the interwar years were either compassionate protectionists or dyed-in-the-wool racists who thought Indigenous people genetically incapable of modernisation. The protective and educative impulses spanned the colonial, interwar and postwar eras, and were most manifest in the missions, which not only provided havens and training for the people, but also dispensed medical treatment. While some mission regimes were undeniably harsh and a good number were heavily oriented to destroying the older cultures, there were also many where aspects of traditional culture were encouraged to persist, bilingual education was instituted, and the approach was basically one of compassion rather than conquest.
The missions generally either voluntarily relinquished, or were made by governments to relinquish, their administrative control of Indigenous residential communities – mainly in the 1970s. The new progressive consensus was that these communities should be free of missionaries, self-managed through elected councils and relatively autonomous. Land rights would ensure their inhabitants security of tenure and, where possible, a source of income. Traditional culture would be encouraged, not discouraged. Pressures to assimilate to a Euro-Australian way of life were racist and should be curtailed. Liberation, not retraining, was what would lift people's self-respect and pride, and enable them to embark on a new era in which the quality of their lives would improve. There was an expectation that collective decision-making would be premised on regard for the good of the community.
This essay is about how that emergent consensus of the early 1970s has come undone. It is also about how a progressivist moral politics dulled our instincts about the sanctity of Indigenous people's right to be free from violence, abuse, neglect, ignorance and corruption. Links between the morality of humaneness, the moral politics of being left of centre and a progressive rights-oriented view of Indigenous policy seemed simpler and more intimate then. The destructive naïveté of that consensus has itself come to be destroyed more than anything else by the issue that was so often central in the pre-1960s Australia, and which took a back seat for so long afterwards: ‘putting the children first'.
I also want to put on record something of the role of anthropologists in the post-1970 history of
Indigenous politics in Queensland. This is not to seek to displace the roles of others – which were generally more significant – but to ensure we are not written out of the story, and to reflect a little on the legacy
of our work.
THE EARLY 1970s WERE THOSE 'OLDEN DAYS' when Aboriginal Queenslanders could still be legally ‘under the Act', controlled (deprived of certain civil rights and income) in a dubious exchange for the care of the state or the church. They could opt out, but few did. Non-indigenous superintendents ran the bigger Aboriginal communities; police officers looked after the smaller town reserves. Some bosses were benign authoritarians, some less so, some notorious. Some were tragically flawed, like the long-remembered superintendent of Palm Island, Robert Curry who killed his children by dynamiting his house and was shot dead on staff orders by an Aboriginal police aide in 1930. The Chillagoe Protector (also the local police sergeant) told me in 1970 that he ruled the local reserve with an iron fist: his predecessor had been carted out on a stretcher. Every now and then, there was an administration with progressive views. The Presbyterians at Aurukun were discussing handing decision-making over to the populace by the late 1960s, and by the mid-1970s had transferred authority to an elected council and company and were encouraging land rights, the outstation movement and bilingual education.
At the other extreme were the state-run places like Palm Island or Lockhart River, where an uneasy and often hostile atmosphere hung over the administration building. There was in such places a casual, tropical racism that was very new to me as a southerner. In the early 1970s, Barry Gomersall – later a respected Rugby referee (now deceased), but then the Palm Island butcher – served the whites first regardless of how far back they were standing. In 1970, on my first visit to ‘Palms' – as public servants called it – I was shown the carbines placed along the windows in the government offices, just in case. The mutinous community riot of the late 1950s was still fresh in the minds of many. In the backblocks, there was still an odour of a territory recently occupied by foreigners. Cairns was still a run-down, rather seedy place fit for Somerset Maugham. Near the grim haunts of the Cairns railway yards was the slightly grimy People's Palace, the Salvos hostel where I often stayed with Johnny Flinders and other Aboriginal friends. For a while, its manager was Captain Cock, a big man without discrimination in his heart. Johnny rather affectionately called him Captain Wunda.
Before driving from Brisbane to the Far North in 1970, I thought – in my relative innocence – that I would drop in at the Department of Aboriginal and Islander Advancement in Brisbane. As I was making a survey of language survival in the Gulf Country and east to the coast, perhaps I could give them information that could be of assistance. The department's director, Patrick Killoran – ‘ah, don't, ah, think so' – could see no point. Not long afterwards, I came to regard Killoran as Mephisto, as did all right-thinking Queensland moderns. In the big room outside his office, men in long shirt sleeves, their cuffs held back by silver elastic bands, moved slowly amid a sea of yellowing dockets full of carbon copies. The vertical wooden slat walls seemed yellow as well, with a tidal stain of long use at waist level. Overhead, yellow electric fans turned slowly, covered in fly spots. There was a morgueish atmosphere, a bureaucratic presiding-over of some great sadness.
Now I have a more complex view of Killoran's regime, based partly on archival documents. It was oppressive and could be vindictive. It was chronically short of money. But Killoran was right about the decline of health that would follow liberalisation of local regimes. Unmonitored living conditions deteriorated, and at Aurukun an outbreak of hepatitis predictably followed. But the passing of Killoran's era in 1987 was not mourned
by many.
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSENSUS ON INDIGENOUS POLICY, and on a host of related, value-laden matters of public interest, rested on more than rationally convergent views. It was a matter of shared political emotion. It was important to the sense of solidarity its adherents enjoyed. They were a moral community, not just a polity. We were defined in relation to them. This is one of the reasons the '70s consensus outlived its usefulness: it was a bond that gradually became disengaged from reality. It is still evident in Central Australia, and its outstation Melbourne, where dissent from Whitlamite values can still be policed by ruthless criticism and attempted public humiliation, or by careful omission. But the skin is cracking, even there.
The consensus was initially oppositional, sustained in part by a certain comradeship. Learning that we were under Special Branch police surveillance in Queensland, my Brisbane-based anthropological colleagues and I bonded not just as people with certain beliefs, but as friends. We were actively pro-land rights in Queensland's dark age of Joh Bjelke-Peterson. We roughed it in the bush together on extended field trips in Cape York Peninsula. We babysat each other's children in the suburbs of Brisbane. We wrote papers together. In the late 1970s, the Queensland Association of Professional Anthropologists and Archaeologists was formed, partly out of self-protection, partly to provide a platform for public comment. David Trigger, Jay Hall and others were active but Athol Chase did most of the television interviews, appearing with the moderator of the Uniting Church and the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane on more than one occasion. The issues were land rights, and justice for Queensland Aboriginal people.
David Martin, who began as a community worker with Aurukun's Kendall River outstation in 1976, became an anthropologist in 1983. He had been a Quaker who had spent time in Brisbane's Boggo Road jail as a conscientious objector to national service during the Vietnam War, the subject of the famous ‘Free Dave Martin Campaign'. Although consistently independent of received wisdom, Martin – like others – supported the land rights movement. Through the '70s and '80s in Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country, anthropologists and traditional owners did long and grinding work – traversing and mapping bush countries and recording occupational histories and genealogies in preparation for the land rights era. Other people campaigned more openly, mostly from their offices in the cities and suburbs, occasionally on the streets.
During his reign as principal of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra from 1972-80, the unique Peter Ucko directed a roller-coaster expansion of research, including traditional land ownership studies directly for claimants in land and sea cases. Ucko's parents were Holocaust survivors, and he was a great hater of racists – his agenda was more than just intellectual and entrepreneurial-scholarly, it was overtly political. Thousands of sites and hundreds of ‘countries' were recorded in Queensland in research supported by AIATSIS. Many of those who carried out this research have worked on hundreds of court and tribunal cases and negotiated settlements, providing detailed evidence – as anthropologists continue to do.
At Aurukun in 1976, John and Jeanie Adams were appointed as Presbyterian Mission staff. They were self-described Christian Marxists, and drew the public ire of the state premier. In the same period, John (later Janine) Roberts and several other far left activists publicly attacked the imposition of bauxite mining in the Weipa region near Aurukun, writing The Mapoon Books under the roseate banner of International Development Action. These people worried the state government.
Inland from Aurukun, the lantern-jawed, rangy, narrow-gutted Coen police sergeant Jim Scanlon let us know he had been told to report our whereabouts in the Cape to the authorities in Brisbane. He had a list of our number plates. Born and bred in the Far North, he didn't think much of ‘those cunts' in Brisbane. He and Athol Chase had done nasho together in the RAAF at Amberley in 1955. So Scanlon let the story out. In 1977 he also let Chase know that the Special Branch had a file on him and was tapping his phone. On hearing strange clicks during calls, we would sometimes let fly a few unsolicited home truths for the gumshoes to type out. Chase's vice-chancellor at Griffith University, John Willett, told him that he had defended him against Killoran-inspired complaints about his activities in Cape York, and that he would not allow the government to influence staff at his university. Willett later invited Chase to his home to meet the South African anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzmann, who had strong words to say about the Queensland situation. We later learned that a Toyota being used by our colleague David Trigger was also being tracked by police.