land
children
racism		 aus.politics newsgroup & media: ¹   ²
Govt Human Rights & EO Commission
Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation
reading & links   Åߤ
terra nullius
"All they seem'd to want
was for us to be gone."
Captain Jas. Cook 4/29/1770
US SD HR Rpt '99   The Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 prohibits discrimination on grounds of race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin. The Ministry for Aboriginal Affairs, in conjunction with the Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Commission (ATSIC), has the main responsibility for initiating, coordinating, and monitoring all governmental efforts to improve the quality of life of indigenous people. A wide variety of government initiatives and programs seek to improve all aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander life. In 1998 the Federal Government spent approximately $1.13 billion on health, welfare, education, and regional development programs targeted at assisting Aboriginal people. Spending on indigenous-specific programs is now the highest on record in real terms and in 1998 amounted to almost $14,000 annually per Aboriginal household. However, in practice indigenous Australians continue to experience significantly higher rates of imprisonment, inferior access to medical and educational institutions, greatly reduced life expectancy rates, elevated levels of unemployment, and general discrimination, which contribute to a feeling of powerlessness. Nationally, indigenous people are imprisoned at 21 times the rate of nonindigenous people. Over 45 percent of Aboriginal men between the ages of 20 and 30 years have been arrested at some time in their lives. The prison incarceration rate for indigenous juvenile offenders is 21 times that of nonindigenous juveniles. Indigenous groups claim that the Government's lack of response to a series of recommendations by the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody contributes to these disturbing statistics.
U.S. State Dept 2000 & 1999 Human Rights Rpts re Australia
    post-modern
Aborigines take on whites in Australia's glamour stakes
1/10/01 Reuters

Sydney, Australia  -- Drunk, stoned and on walkabout? Australia's Aborigines are fed up with the stereotypes dogging the vast island-continent's original inhabitants and are taking on the white man where it hurts, in the glamour stakes. Two young indigenous women have produced Australia's first all-Aborigine pin-up calendar to show the world that they are beautiful and sexy too, causing a stir in a society where centuries of prejudice mean some Australians still regard them as Stone Age relics! "There's a lack of indigenous models in Australia. It's always your typical blond hair and blue eyes," said Liza Fraser-Gooda, 26, one of the founders of Jinnali Productions, which launched the 2001 calendar in December.
"What we're trying to do is break down those barriers and say, hey, here we are, we are beautiful, give us the opportunity and we'll show the world what the true indigenous Australians are," Fraser-Gooda told Reuters on Monday.
Aboriginal Australians have been second-class citizens since Britain set up a penal colony in 1788, having declared the continent "terra nullius," or an empty land, therefore allowing it to be claimed by the Crown as its own. Between the 1920s and 1960s, govt imposed a policy of forced assimilation of light-skinned Aboriginal children, who were taken from their families to live in the white community. The lot of Australia's 400,000 Aborigines, 2.1 percent of the population, has improved since they were recognised as citizens with rights in a 1967 Constitutional amendment. Previously they were administered under flora and fauna laws.

    role models
Athlete Cathy Freeman, gold medalist and home-grown star of the Sydney Olympics, gave the community's profile a huge boost at home and abroad. But the life expectancy of Aboriginal Australians remains 20 years less than the average and many live in ghettos where drug and alcohol abuse are rife. Fraser-Gooda and her cover-girl partner Dina Paulson, 31, say their calendar grew out of the desire to build self-confidence among young indigenous Australians, and to open doors into the white man's world of modelling and promotions.

"People think Aborigines are drunks, they go walkabout, they don't want to achieve," said Paulson. The image of drugs and alcohol in the park that prevails is just not the case, said Fraser-Gooda. "We are beautiful, we are also intelligent. We just have to go out and show ourselves that way," she said.
The calendar featuring 14 Aboriginal models was produced on a shoe-string budget. The main photographer was a first-year photography student. The sponsors were mainly Aboriginal organisations. The quality is not brilliant, but it's a start, say the producers, who aim to make it an annual issue. The tribes and tribal totems of the models are listed, and permission was sought from tribal elders. Three had previous modelling experience, including 16-year-old Aliera French, who took part in an Australian Fashion Show tour of Europe last year. The rest were amateurs.
The calendar is being sold on the Internet through the Web site of Jinnali Productions and costs A$24.45 (around US$14) including postage and sales tax.

    tradition meets the modern world
The initial 1,000 copy print run has virtually sold out and Jinnali, which means "full moon," plans to print 1,000 more to meet demand, including orders from Europe and the United States. The publication of Australia's first-ever Aboriginal pin-up calendar has not gone without criticism. The main complaint has been that the models "can't be Aboriginal" because they are too good-looking, or too light-skinned, a reaction that infuriates Fraser-Gooda and Paulson, as well as the models.
"The blood that runs through our veins is what makes us Aboriginal. The stories that are passed down from our elders is what makes us Aboriginal. I grew up in an Aboriginal community. I'm not anything else but an Aboriginal person", said Paulson.

As for criticism that a calendar of scantily clad models may not exactly be an affirmation of traditional Aboriginal values, Fraser-Gooda makes no apologies.
"Times are changing," she said. "We've got to learn to change with the times and have our culture in a modern way, but still respect our protocol, our culture and our values, and we've done that by acknowledging our tribes and totems." And, adds Paulson, by "getting the respect of our elders."

Aborigine leaders want treaty
1/5/01 AP

Sydney   Aborigine leaders called Thursday for a treaty to heal the rift between black and white Australians, but the country's conservative govt dismissed the proposal as a divisive waste of time. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), the country's top indigenous organization, said the treaty would help to end racial divisions and promote unity. But Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson said, "Frankly, I think ATSIC shouldn't be wasting their resources and their effort on what I can guarantee will be a difficult, often acrimonious, and, I'm convinced, time wasting debate."

Hitting close to home   Henkin
Australia's stature as a champion of human rights is tested by a UN report citing state violations.
4.13.00   Becky Gaylord Far Eastern Economic Review

Australia has long worked with the United Nations to prosecute human-rights violations around the world. Now a UN report has denounced Australia's treatment of its own indigenous people, citing state laws that mandate prison sentences for petty violations. Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer says the UN gave biased results. Will the federal govt intervene to change local laws that violate international standards?

…   By late 1997, the year the Northern Territory law took effect, the prison population there increased 42%, govt data show. Aboriginal prisoners comprised about 75% of the prison population, according to the Law Council of Australia, but 24% of the Territory population.

1998 from Emory
Comparison of Inuit & Aboriginal rights movements

Though ecologically and meteorologically quite different, these scenes share a common bond which, through separate but related processes, has shaped the political landscape in which the natural landscape is located. Each is a homeland to an indigenous people, and each has undergone previously unimaginable political changes over the last 5 years. The frozen land of Nunavut will become a recognized territory of Canada in 1999; the future of Australia and the Aboriginal homelands therein is less clear.
Comparison between two of the most visible indigenous rights movements in the world. After years of negotiations, the Inuit of Canada have finally settled a land claim with the federal government. The offspring of this claim is Nunavut, the largest indigenous-controlled territory in the world and, arguably, the most important achievement in the indigenous rights arena in history. … Meanwhile, the Aborigines of Australia only recently won the right to file land claims against the Australian government. The landmark case Mabo v. Queensland and subsequent legislation have changed and charged the political climate of Australia, and the outlook for Aboriginal rights is either promising or bleak, depending on the perspective.

Australian rules
Republicans in Britain should note what happens when the elite gets ahead of the rest
11.5.99   Martin Woollacott   The Guardian Australia & monarchy: special rpt

In the last 30 years Australia has radically reconstructed itself. Donald Horne, whose influential book, The Lucky Country, gave Australia a nickname that has stuck, wrote jauntily in 1964: "We may need some Japanese, Indians, and Chinese to help break up English influence." He reflected the view of much of the Australian educated class in the 60s and 70s that the country was in an Anglo-Saxon one-way street from which it had to escape. Escape it did.
The racial changes Horne wanted came, in the process shifting views of Australia's history, of Australia's historic enemies, and of Australia's heroes. They were part of a cultural revolution that also opened Australia to its own vigorous feminism, and which led on to republicanism as a way of capping and confirming all the changes that had taken place. The cultural revolution overlapped with another, economic, revolution that, while really very different, was preached in the same metaphorical language, that of opening the nation to the world and to new ideas.

The only trouble was that this was not an agreed process, or at least not a process agreed with a substantial section of society. The two revolutions both had a surreptitious aspect, and neither delivered as much as had been promised. For example, Don Watson, the historian who was one of Paul Keating's advisers, says: "Had we put it to the people, the white Australia policy would still be there. It had to be slipped past them".
As with immigration policy, so, later, with Australia's version of neo-liberal economic reforms. But slipping policies past people can store up trouble for the future. So Australia's extraordinary changes were of the cities rather than the towns and the countryside; among the prosperous and powerful rather than among those of average means; among the young rather than the middle aged and old.

Many now readily identify with the changes, able to imagine or want no other Australia. Others are perplexed and vexed by them, seeing always a "they" which conspiratorially wrecks and rearranges the social landscape in which ordinary folk have to live. This is the division that gave short-lived but frightening volition to Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party in 1998, with its anti-Asian and anti-aborigine tendencies.
And this is the division which may frustrate Australia's republican transition, which many had hoped could take place, with pleasing symmetry, exactly 100 years after federation on January 1 1901. A hundred years ago Australia was also divided, and many ordinary people did not participate in the debate which led to federation.

But the Australian constitution then agreed was not a document that was slavishly British either in its internal features or what it laid down about relations with the British crown. It was consciously an attempt to draw on both the British tradition and the American republican model. The compromise that resulted served Australia fairly well

…
Australian past bordered on slavery & genocide
'Great Silence' on massacres of aborigines not broken until 1998   3.30.01   Phillip Knightley

The Australian desire for progress, for egalitarianism, for a better life and "a fair go" for all did not extend to one important group, the original inhabitants of Australia, the Aboriginals. Defeated in the Aboriginal Wars of the 19th century, they had become a forgotten race, reviled, murdered, harassed, discriminated against, and subjected to cruel and unusual punishments.
It remains one of the mysteries of history that Australia was able to get away with a racist policy that included segregation & dispossession and bordered on slavery & genocide, practices unknown in the civilized world in the first half of the twentieth century until Nazi Germany turned on the Jews in the 1930s.

  The figure of 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust has been reached by comparing the known Jewish population of Europe and the German-occupied territories of Eastern Europe before World War II with the known population of the same areas after the war.
No such comparison can be made for the Australian Aboriginals for 2 reasons.
First, the size of the Aboriginal population when the first white settlers arrived is only an estimate. Next, Aboriginals were not included in census taking until 1967, when there were disputes over the definition of an "Aborigine".

So any figure for the numbers of Aboriginals killed by white settlers in the wars and massacres of the 19th & 20th centuries can only be intelligent guesswork. But experts I have consulted say 50,000 would not be an exaggeration. It could be as high as 100,000. Given the small size of the Aboriginal population, the loss of even 50,000 of its people was devastating
. The killing began early on. In December 1790, after Aboriginals had speared one of his servants, Governor Phillip decided on a punitive raid on the offending tribe "in order to convince them of our superiority, and infuse an universal terror".
He ordered Captain Watkin Tench to take with him 50 men and capture 2 Aboriginals and kill and cut off the heads of 10 others. Tench persuaded him to reduce the number to be captured to 6, of whom 2 would be hanged and 4 deported to Norfolk Island, a territory of Australia. But if none could be captured alive, then all 6 would be shot and beheaded.
 

This was not govt policy. But as writer Padraic P. McGuinness asked 200 years later, "What did the colonial authorities think would happen when they populated Australia initially with a mix of criminals and other desperates, especially those such as the Irish who themselves had a history of oppression and dispossession …
In Australia, poor & ignorant settlers were forced into close relations with the Aborigines, upon whose goodwill they depended while having no understanding of how they thought and no chance of comprehending them ever. So the most elemental accommodations of rape, abduction and violence were the only means of getting on".

In many states in the early days, these settlers cleared Aboriginals from their land as casually as kangaroos. They shot them, poisoned them and clubbed them.
In Tasmania, they succeeded in wiping them out entirely.
In the rest of the country, over a period of 150 years the Aboriginal population declined from an estimated 300,000 to about 75,000. Smallpox, tuberculosis and malnutrition took their toll, but many were murdered by the settlers.

If the Aboriginals hit back, they were punished with a reprisal raid disproportionate to the offence as in Governor Phillip's case. A settler in Queensland described how a raiding party of Native Police in the 1880s would carry out such a raid.

    "A white man, an 'officer and a gentleman,' at the head of half a dozen black murderers, watches a camp of blacks all night. The cool dawn of the morning comes, and the slender smoke circles up among the trees by the waterhole as the unsuspecting blacks wake to prepare their morning meal.
    Suddenly a shrill whistle, then the sharp rattle of Sniders, shriek on shriek, rushing to and fro: then ammunition gone, the struggle at close quarters, and well-fed lusty savages, drunk with carnage, hewing down men, women and children before them".
  It is amazing that Australians managed to keep from the rest of the world the fact that they were massacring the Aboriginals. In 1968, anthropologist William Stanner gave a series of lectures, "The Great Australian Silence," in which he took to task Australian historians for showing no interest in what had happened to the Aboriginals.
It was not really until 1998, with books like This Whispering in Our Hearts, by historian Henry Reynolds, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's TV series Frontier, that the silence was broken.

  Reynolds took his title from a legal argument defending the right of white settlers to dispossess the Aboriginals by any means they chose. The argument was prepared in 1842 by a young settler, a barrister named Richard Windeyer, who had the courage at the end of his brilliantly reasoned case to question his own logic.
"But how is it that our minds are not satisfied?" he asked. "What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts?"

The puzzling point is that Australia was a Christian nation, yet most of its Christian leaders either encouraged, if not the murder, certainly the dispossession of Aboriginals. At very least, they proved indifferent to their fate. The few who spoke out were reviled, attacked, treated as deranged, had their careers ruined, or were driven into exile.
The general attitude was: How dare they criticize the way Australians treat the Aboriginals? The white settlers come from a superior race, the Aboriginals from a weak, useless one.
"Is there room for both of us here?" an outback farmer wrote to the weekly Queenslander in 1880. "No. Then the sooner the weaker is wiped out the better, as we may save some valuable lives by the process".

Those who protested at views like this understood only too well the process of rationalization that made murder and dispossession possible. George Robinson, who held the title of chief protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip, Victoria, had made it clear in his writings that Aboriginals had a strong and clear view on land possession.
He told of meeting an Aboriginal elder along the banks of the Murray River in South Australia. The elder had stamped on the ground and exclaimed: "Belonging to me. Belonging to me. My country".
The lawyer Windeyer would have none of this. Aboriginals had no right to the land; ownership belonged to the person who first bestowed labor upon it.

Defamation & demonization had turned Aboriginals into non-humans, property of white landowners to dispose of at will, like slaves in the southern states of America, accounted for along with the animals when a sale took place.
Mary Bennett, pro-Aborigine feminist, understood human nature only too well: "The criminal cannot forgive the victim he has wronged." 
Western Australia was probably the worst state for the murder of Aborginals. In 1834 British soldiers under the command of Capt. James Stirling, the state's first governor, butchered a sleeping camp of 80 Aboriginal men, women and children from the Nyungar tribe near Pinjarra.

  The worst recorded massacre was in New South Wales in 1838. Angered at the loss of their land and at the kidnapping of their women by white settlers, the Kamilaroi tribe in northern New South Wales mounted a series of attacks on local farmers and their stock. When the farmers demanded action from state govt, Col. James Nunn led an expedition of mounted police on a reprisal raid.
They encountered a large group of Aboriginals at Snodgrass Swamp and, over a period of 3 days, killed over 300 men, women and children, a number unmatched in other recorded massacres of Aboriginals in Australia. Snodgrass Creek was then renamed Waterloo Creek, recalling Britain's victory over Napoleon in 1815.

  Massacres went on well into the next century and became so common they hardly made news. There were at least two in the 1920s. In the East Kimberley region in July 1926, a boundary rider ordered an Aboriginal called Lumbia and two women to leave the Nulla Nulla cattle station in the Forrest River area.
When Lumbia and the women were slow to go, the boundary rider dismounted and began whipping Lumbia with his stockwhip. As the rider remounted, Lumbia hurled a spear at him, puncturing his lung and killing him. Fellow boundary riders found the body late the next day, partially eaten by predators, and raised the alarm at Wyndham, the nearest town. A party of 4 whites, 2 mounted constables, 2 policemen and 7 Aboriginal trackers in police employ left the following day to find Lumbia.

However, locals who noted that the group took 42 horses and mules and more than 500 rounds of ammunition knew immediately that this was also to be a punitive expedition. The men moved from camp to camp along the Forrest River for the next week, killing as they went. When they entered a camp they first shot all the dogs, then the men, then the women and children.
At one camp the women were chained to trees and forced to watch their menfolk being shot and the bodies burned. Then they were marched for several miles before being shot and burned themselves. Estimates of Aboriginals killed ranged from 20 to 100.

In August 2 years later, at Coniston station, 140 miles from the small town of Stuart in central Australia, 2 Aboriginals killed dingo trapper Fred Brooks, claiming that he had taken one of their women and had refused to return her or supply the gifts expected as part of the exchange. Brooks's two Aboriginal assistants reported the killing and a punitive patrol under Mounted Constable George Murray, a Gallipoli veteran, set out to arrest the culprits and punish their tribe, the Waribiri.
Over the next 3 months, Murray's patrols killed between 30 and 70 Aboriginals, including women & children. To save cartridges, the children were killed by a blow to the back of the neck.

Both massacres turned out to be historically significant. A Royal Commission appointed to enquire into the Forrest River massacre found for the first time in Australian history in favor of the Aboriginal victims and not their murderers.
At the trial of the two men charged with Brooks's murder at Coniston (they were acquitted) the court listened with deep unease as Murray, still a Gallipoli hero to most Australians, testified with what can only be described as nonchalance to killing 17 Aboriginals himself.
"You mowed them down wholesale," commented the judge.

The trial made news in Britain and the Anti-Slavery Society established a sub-committee to monitor Australia's treatment of its Aboriginals. 5 years later, the press agitated for a punitive expedition to Arnhem Land to avenge the death of a policeman, but public opinion would not stand for it.
Coniston thus became the last officially sanctioned punitive expedition against Aboriginals. How widespread they were can be gathered by what Northern Territory anthropologist Dick Kimber told me in 1983:
"Every Aboriginal in this part of the country can state, quite correctly, that at least one of his relatives has been shot by a white man".

The massacres were over but the war went on in other ways. Since the Aboriginals were dying out, the Australian authorities argued, then those children among them who had some white blood needed to be saved.
    children
Aboriginal Deaths In Custody Watch Committee (WA) Inc
12.12.99   Committee was formed to "ensure the effective implementation of the 339 Recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths In Custody (RCIADIC)." News, updates, statistics, and the story of 16 year old John Pat's death while in custody.

Aborigine Enrollment Increases in Australia
6.6.99   Geoffrey Maslen   Melbourne, Australia

The number of aborigines enrolled at Australian universities rose 60% over the past 5 years, to almost 8,000. However, the persistence & graduation rates of such students remained low, according to a study by the federal Education Dept.
The study, on disadvantaged groups' access to higher education, found that indigenous people enrolling at Australian universities for the first time account for 1.5% of all entering students. That figure is only slightly less than the proportion of aborigines in the overall population, now 1.7 %.

However, because so many aboriginal students drop out before completing their degrees, the participation rate of indigenous people in higher education is only about two-thirds what might be expected, based on the size of the group in the general population.
Aborigines enrolled at universities with the highest rates of access for such students, where they make up about 6% of entering classes, had very low graduation rates. But aborigines at institutions that enrolled small numbers of indigenous students had relatively high graduation rates, a fact some observers say may be related to more-rigid admissions standards at those universities.

…
The Stolen Generations   "Tens of thousands of Aboriginal children have been taken from their families, lied to, secreted away, stolen and placed as far away as possible, sometimes overseas, to break any links with their own community. They grew up close to the missionaries, ashamed of their aboriginality, without their language or their links to the past. That was the intention." 		Extra police, military for Australian aboriginal towns nbsp; 6.24.07 &nsp; AFP

Sydney   Police backed by military support will arrive in Australian Aboriginal communities within days as part of a controversial plan to end child sex abuse, Prime Minister John Howard said Sunday. The deployment heralds a new strategy to end rampant sexual exploitation of children fuelled by alcohol abuse in indigenous communities in the vast Northern Territory.
The plan, which has been criticised as heavy-handed and "racist" by some Aboriginal groups, includes bans on alcohol and pornography in Aboriginal townships and medical examinations for all children under 16.

Howard announced the interventionist strategy on Thursday after a govt report detailed pedophilia and juvenile prostitution in Aboriginal communities across the territory. The prime minister said he had been driven to take drastic measures "because I felt the old approach had totally failed".
"The biggest single problem in these communities is that the women and the children are scared to death of complaining about the violence and the molestation," Howard told commercial television. "And unless you get police on the ground, unless you establish the atmosphere of physical security, or a greater atmosphere of physical security, nothing is going to change, and that is the first and most important requirement."

Howard did not specify numbers but said extra police from the national force as well as those from the states of New South Wales and Victoria would arrive within the Northern Territory within 10 days.
"There's a big need to increase basic policing and once you've done that, it becomes possible to go to the next stage, and the next stage is sending more doctors", he said.
Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough said he hoped extra police would begin arriving in Aboriginal communities on Monday. They will later be backed by logistics, communications and transport support from the Australian Defence Force.
"I expect to have the military deployed with the police within about a week's time", Brough told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The govt wants the changes to be rolled out across the country but this would require state govts to agree to implement the proposals. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie urged the federal government to work with state govts to ensure current indigenous programs did not overlap with the new initiative.
Western Australian Premier Alan Carpenter said he was unable to commit extra police to plan, adding that the timing of the strategy was suspiciously close to national polls due later this year.
"When an election is looming on the horizon we suddenly get this flurry of ill-thought proposals," he said.

Aborigines number about 470,000 in Australia's population of 20 million, forming the country's most impoverished community, with high rates of unemployment, alcohol dependency and preventable diseases.

Longtime Australian policy: kidnapping children from families   Practice continued to 1970s; historians, lawyers, clergy, crusading journalists were silent
2.8.01   Phillip Knightley Ctr for Public Integrity

In the U.S., Native American children, "Red Indians," had been forcibly taken from their parents and placed in institutions to "civilize" them. Australia tried a different approach. In 1937, the chief protector of Aboriginals in Western Australia, A. O. Neville, a man generally recognized as a decent, progressive bureaucrat but who nevertheless believed in "breeding out the color" (commonly called "[expletive deleted] them white"), spoke at the first national govt conference on Aboriginals, an occasion Robert Marine, associate professor of politics at La Trobe University, Victoria, has described as "a terrible moment in the history of the 20th-century Australian state".
  At the conference, Neville asked: "Are we going to have a population of one million blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia?"

The key resolution at the conference, "The Destiny of the Race", passed unanimously, called for the total absorption into the white community of all non-full-blood Aborigines. Taking part-Aboriginal children from their mothers and families by force was part of this ambition. Over the years, various regulations had been invoked to make this possible.
In 1918, while the war in Europe was still on, the Australian govt found time to pass regulations designed to segregate Aboriginals from the white population and reduce the number of children with mixed blood. It was now illegal for a white man to live with an Aboriginal woman. (No mention was made of a white woman living with an Aboriginal man because such a situation was considered unthinkable.)
This met the approval of the Perth Sunday Times: "Central Australia's half-caste problem must be tackled boldly and immediately. The greatest danger, experts agree, is that three races will develop in Australia, white, black, and the pathetic, sinister third race which is neither".

Control of all Aboriginal children was removed from their parents and given to government-appointed white superintendents. This was just another part of a process that lasted from the late 19th century until the middle 1960s. So-called "half-caste" children were seized by the state and placed in institutions where they suffered physical mistreatment and sexual abuse.
To this day, no one is certain how many were involved, but Aboriginal authorities say at least 30,000. The 1918 law caused no outcry. Govt figures released in 1921 suggested that there were only 75,000 Aboriginals left, the lowest figure ever, and that since colonization, their ranks had been reduced by nearly 80 per cent. There is doubt that these figures were accurate.

In the 1970s, a period of strong Aboriginal activism, many Aboriginal leaders I spoke with said that they had done their own, admittedly limited, census-taking in their own areas, and that their figures for the number of Aboriginals suggested that the official figures had been understated by anything from 25 to 50 per cent.
But the low official figures enabled the authorities to argue that since Aboriginals were dying out anyway, the new legislation was aimed at easing their passing and finding decent homes for their children, especially those who had some white blood or light-colored skin.

The Australian govt literally kidnapped these children from their parents as a matter of policy. White welfare officers, often supported by police, would descend on Aboriginal camps, round up all the children, separate the ones with light-colored skin, bundle them into trucks and take them away. If their parents protested, they were held at bay by the police.
Sometimes, to avoid harrowing scenes of parents clinging to the sides of the trucks, and to frustrate attempts to hide the children when the trucks drove into the camp, the authorities resorted to subterfuge. They would fit out the back of a truck with a wire cage and a spring door like an animal trap. Then they would park the truck a short distance from the camp and lure the children into the cage with sweets scattered on its door. When enough children were in the cage, they would spring the trap door and drive rapidly away.

Aboriginals tried to save their children by blackening their skin so that they did not look half-caste.
"Every morning, our people would crush charcoal and mix that with animal fat and smother it all over us, so that when the police came they could see only black children in the distance," witness No. 681 told the National Inquiry into "stolen children" (1995-97). "We were told to be on the alert and, if white people came, to run into the bush, or stand behind the trees as stiff as a poker, or else run behind logs or run into culverts and hide".
Mothers were equally stricken. "Bringing Them Home," the 1997 report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission into stolen children, tells of an Aboriginal woman so ashamed of being unable to prevent her children being taken from her that she carried on her person, until the day she died, references testifying to her good character, and of an Aboriginal family who for 32 years carried out a ritual mourning ceremony every sunrise and sunset to mark the loss of their daughter.

Where the children were taken depended on how old and how light-skinned they were. Either way, siblings would not be allowed to stay together because the authorities believed that what they called the "split the litter" system made the children easier to control.
Some started out in Roman Catholic orphanages where they were well treated. "All the kids thought it was one big family. We didn't know what it meant by 'parents' because we didn't have parents and we thought those women [the nuns] were our mothers," one said.

But as they grew older, they were moved on to "homes" run by churches and missionary societies. There, they were beaten and sometimes sexually abused. Some of the stolen children did not have even a short spell of reasonable life, but went straight from the Aboriginal camp from which they had been abducted into so-called "half-caste homes" in Darwin or Alice Springs.
The aim was to keep them segregated from local "full bloods." Conditions in these homes were deplorable. At Alice Springs, the half-caste home, "The Bungalow," consisted of a very rough frame of wood with some dilapidated sheets of corrugated iron thrown over it.

The prime minister, Stanley Bruce, thought something should be done about the half-caste homes and made an approach to the South Australian govt to try to persuade it to help. He suggested: "If these babies were removed at their present early age … to homes in South Australia, they would not know in later life that they had Aboriginal blood and would probably be absorbed into the white population and become useful citizens".
The South Australian govt was having none of this. It replied: "To give effect to this suggestion would be greatly to the disadvantage of South Australia … These persons of Aboriginal blood almost invariably mate with the lowest class of whites and, in many cases, the girls become prostitutes".

Robert Manne found in the National Archives of Australia the views of Dr. Cecil Cook, who had the job of "chief protector of Aborigines" in the Northern Territory between 1927 and 1939 and the architect of Aboriginal policy there. Manne wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1999, "No one endowed the sorry business of child removal with a grander social and geopolitical purpose than … the progressive intellectual, Dr. Cecil Cook".
"Cook's thinking was fashioned by the fashionable pseudo-science of eugenics, which taught the virtues of state-engineered human breeding programs," Manne wrote. "Cook believed that if the state encouraged marriages between half-caste females and white males, eventually, over 4 or 5 generations, the stain of Aboriginal blood could be bred out altogether."

Cook felt that the chances of "breeding out the color" were good. He believed that Aboriginals were the remote ancestors of Caucasians or Aryans, not of any Negroid race, and that therefore a systematic breeding program with whites would eliminate the darker blood with no danger of a "biological throwback", 2 apparently white parents producing a black baby.
The end of the Second World War, fought for freedom and the dignity of man, made no difference to Australia's policy of trying to breed out the Aboriginal bloodline. Compassion would not be allowed to stand in the way of progress. Even those officials who accepted that Aboriginals had normal human feelings went about their distasteful work with the thought that although the Aboriginals might not realize it, "it's for their own good".

The white settlers in Australia did their best to stamp out the country's original inhabitants. They fought a war against them as ferocious as the Indian wars in America, if not on the same scale. Aboriginals held their own against the flintlock because it could be fired and reloaded only 3 times a minute, leaving an interval long enough for an Aboriginal warrior to hurl several spears. But when the Terry breech-loading rifle and then the Snider came along, the Aboriginals had no chance and war changed to massacre in which neither women nor children were spared. These massacres continued well into the 20th century.
In parallel with the murder of Aboriginals, but continuing for much longer, ran a govt policy of "breeding out" Aboriginal blood. Full-blood Aboriginals were dying out anyway, the theory ran, but we must do something about the "half-castes," those born, in most cases, of a white father and an Aboriginal mother.

The answer was to take such children, as young as possible, from their Aboriginal mothers, bring them up in a white environment and then marry them off to white people. In this way the Aboriginal strain of blood would be bred out in a few generations. It did not matter if the Aboriginal mother were a good one and objected to her child being taken. This was a legally approved policy in the child's interest, so force could be used if necessary.
How much Australia in general knew of this theft of children is disputed. It happened in remote places, parts of the country that most metropolitan Australians never visited and cared little about. Where were the historians, the writers, the filmmakers, the social workers, the lawyers, the clergy, the campaigning journalists? When the stolen generation was being dragged from its family, kicking, screaming and crying right up into the 1970s, they were nowhere to be seen.

The feminist Mary Bennett said Australia's aim was "the extermination of the unhappy native race." She went on, "This policy is euphemistically described by Australian officialdom as the absorption of the native race and the breeding out of color. We shall be better able to evaluate this policy when another race applies it to ourselves as the absorption of the white race and the breeding out of white people."
Why did more Australians not see this? The answer can be found in a letter, written on behalf of John Howard, who was elected prime minister in 1996, explaining why the Australian govt had refused to apologize to the stolen generation.
"Such an apology could imply that present generations are in some way responsible and accountable for the actions of earlier generations, actions that were sanctioned by the laws at the time, and that were believed to be in the best interests of the children concerned".

Hannah Arendt, writing in Eichmann in Jerusalem, said that genocide was the desire to make a distinct people disappear from the earth.

per N.Territory Greens
Native Title Cases Authorities & docs on High Court's Mabo decision & Federal Native Title Act
National Native Title Tribunal
Northern Land Council
Labiluka ~ uranium
Lingiari Fdtn The Senate effectively passed the Government's Wik legislation late last night after its third marathon debate in seven months, in a historic finale to a battle between Aborigines, pastoralists and miners that has divided the nation. 		Aboriginal tribe gets control of land   ¹
9.30.02   AP

Perth, Australia   A federal judge formally gave control of a remote chunk of northwest Australia slightly bigger than Greece to an Aboriginal tribe last week, marking the end of six years of negotiations. The 52,510 sq miles, most of it desert, is the largest piece of land Australia has ever returned to Aboriginal control. The ruling recognized the Martu tribe as its traditional owners, but does not give them ownership of valuable deposits of minerals & oil.

John Howard govt abridgement of Aborigine Land Title rights. National Farmers Federation and the Australian Labor Party (ALP).
Melbourne, Australia   A policy that sought to "save" Aborigine children by forcibly taking them from their parents spawned lasting trauma and resulted in a "stolen generation," Australia's premier said Monday in an apology. John Howard offered his regrets personally, not on behalf of the govt, for the policy that removed an estimated 100,000 children from their parents between 1910 and the early 1970s in the belief that the Aborigines were a doomed race. Light-skinned children were given to white families for adoption. Dark-skinned children were put in orphanages.
…
The electoral achievement of the One Nation Party in the recent Queensland State elections in Australia sent a shiver down the spines of not only Asian migrants, but also all minority ethnic groups and Australia's own indigenous people. The 160,000 strong Sri Lankan community has reason to be concerned as one of the major 'policies' of One Nation is aimed directly at Asians. Is Pauline Hanson a political freak, or has Australia entered a danger zone? When Pauline Hanson, the Federal Independent Member for the seat of Oxley in Queensland, made her anti- Asian and anti- Aborigine maiden speech to a near-empty House of Representatives on the night of 10th September, 1996, she was dismissed as "a crank", "a loner" and a political aberration. Her ideas were blatantly racist and divisive and certainly explosive, and no ordinary Australian would give them a second thought.
Less than two years later, on June 14th, her Nation Party won 10 out the 89 seats in the Queensland Parliament, sending shock-waves through the nation, particularly among the Asian communities and the Aboriginal people of Australia. This was only the second time in 98 years of Federation, that a minor party had won a substantial number of seats in any Australian Legislature. (In 1957, the DLP, a breakaway group from the Labour Party won 11 out of the 75 seats in Queensland. The DLP is now completely defunct.) Unlike the DLP, One Nation Party is based on the negative policies of intolerance and hatred. Although the One Nation Party would not have won a single seat but for an unprincipled and opportunistic preference deal done with it by the incumbent Country/Liberal Coalition, it attracted 23% of the primary vote. Translated into Federal politics, in a nationwide election, the One Nation Party could win a few House of Representative seats in each of the States (if the same preference deal is done), and certainly a Senate position in each of at least three states, up to three in Queensland. This would give them the balance of power in the federal sphere, a horrendous prospect for a nation that has become a shining example of multi-culturalism, and a society that is trying to come to terms with its historical atrocities towards the Aborigines.

To understand this new and frightening phenomenon in Australian politics and its future implications, one has to examine the reasons behind the sudden rise in comparative popularity of a political organization based on intolerant and divisive policies and the sinister forces behind Pauline Hanson, and also the genuine concerns of those Australians who have become disillusioned with the politics and politicians of the 3 major parties. Pauline Hanson, as she herself admits, is not a 'normal' politician. She is a politician by default. Her interviews with the media indicate that she has very little understanding of the policies she espouses and, much less their national and international implications. She gets her facts wrong. She is rarely able to conduct a media interview without her minders sitting on the floor and prompting appropriate answers. One Nation policies are inward- looking, divisive and isolationist. What, then, makes Pauline Hanson tick? She was running a small "Fish and Chips" shop in Ipswich in Queensland when she was endorsed as the Liberal candidate for the seat of Oxley, held for a long time by the Labour Party stalwart, Mr. Bill Hayden, who later became the Governor-General. Two weeks before the election she was dumped by the Liberal Party over some remarks she made to a local newspaper, disparaging of the Aborigines. She stood as an independent, and won a landslide victory to become the member for Oxley in the House of Representatives (the Lower House).

It was her maiden speech that shocked the nation and brought her to national attention. From the beginning it was clear that Pauline Hanson's politics were fertile ground for extreme Right-wing organizations and all those who were anti-Asian, anti-Aborigine and against "economic rationalism" and global economics which both major political parties have embraced. The anti-Asian "policy" of the One Nation Party is blatantly racist. Immigration numbers and their effect on employment are of concern to many Australians. But Pauline Hanson has found a scapegoat in Australians of Asian origin. According the Bureau of Statistics, less than 4% of all Australians are first- generation Asians. The number of people of Asian origin in the year 2025 has been estimated at less than 8#37; . This is hardly "Asianisation of Australia" as Pauline Hanson contends. It is the "Visibility" of certain groups rather than their numbers that makes Asian in general a soft target for the very small minority of potential racists in Australia.
The White Australia Policy was finally laid to rest in 1973 . Since then, there have been two significant waves of Asian migration. They were the so-called "boat people" from Indo China after 1975 and the large number of Chinese allowed to stay on following the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. Family re-union helped to swell their numbers . Many of these people, for reasons of security, congregated in certain suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney, Footscray, and Richmond in Victoria and places like Cabaramatta in New South Wales were almost taken over by these people, making them virtual 'ghettos'. Moreover, among the hard-working and law-abiding Vietnamese and Chinese, there arose a very small but very strong criminal element, dealing in drugs. The MP for Cabaramatta was gunned down in front of his house and the accused is a Vietnamese businessman. Dr. Chan, the world-famous heart transplant specialist was murdered by a person of Chinese origin. Drug-dealings in predominantly "Vietnemese" towns have had extensive media coverage. Japanese interests have bought into real estate and tourist business on a large scale, particularly in the resort areas of Queensland. It is this "Visibility" of certain groups of migrants that has made all Asians vulnerable.

Other migrants from India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia have come on their own merits. Almost all of them are employed and are spread very thinly among the Australian population. Many of them hold very high positions in Medicine, Engineering, Teaching and Law. Their contribution has been openly acknowledged . They too are an irrational target of the One Nation Party, because they happen to be Asians. If there was any anti- Asian element in the Queensland election, it was due to the phobia created by Pauline Hanson and her One Nation and not due to any inherent racism among Australians. Australians are not anti- Asian. Asia is very important to Australia. Australia will never go back to the bad old days of the White Australia Policy. Multiculturalism is here to stay. Aborigines are the most disadvantaged group in Australia. Historical atrocities committed against these gentle people had decimated their numbers. Today, many of them live in appalling conditions in central and northern Australia, which also happen to be areas given on lease to pastoralists and mining companies. Their common-law land rights had been denied because Australia was regarded as "terra nullius" or empty land before European settlement.
Whether the 'Hanson phenomenon' is a passing political aberration or whether it will radically change the fundamental politics of Australia depends on how the major political parties respond to what happened in Queensland. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister, Mr. John Howard has shown very little leadership with regard to Pauline Hanson and her hate-wagon. He hailed Pauline Hanson's bigoted maiden speech as marking a new era of free-speech. Whatever attacks he eventually made against Hanson and her warped ideas, were half-hearted, too little and too late. He still refuses to commit his party to placing One Nation last on the how-to-vote cards. His ineptness and timidity is beginning, in the minds of many Australians, to smack of hypocrisy and opportunism.

Pauline Hanson's ideas of hatred, intolerance and blatant racism have no place in Australia. Australians are no racist. I have lived, worked, eaten, drunk and played with Australians for over 25 years. I have not found more tolerance, genuine mateship and friendliness anywhere else I have been - not even in my Sri Lanka.

May I first of all observe Aboriginal protocol by paying my respects to the traditional owners of this country, the Ngunnawal people. Having done that, I wish to acknowledge and commend the actions of the Legislative Assembly in offering an apology to those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the ACT who have suffered as a result of the past practices of forced separation from their families. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the Assembly for providing the opportunity here, today, in this place, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to speak from experience about the policies and practices of forced separation.
…
Guide to New South Wales State Archives relating to Aboriginal People
In 1967 a national referendum produced an overwhelming vote that Aboriginal Australians should be granted full citizenship, and that the federal govt should have ultimate responsibility for Aboriginal affairs. The granting of citizenship is generally construed as evidence of a political normalisation of Aboriginal status for which massive injections of federal funds for Aboriginal housing, health, and education, would provide the practical reality.
Today I want to give you some idea of the various components of 'citizenship' which have impacted on the lives of Queensland Aborigines, both before, and after, the 1967 referendum. From file evidence, I will demonstrate the construction and manipulation of these components. By moving from the concept of 'citizenship' to the realities of Aboriginal life under State govt control, we can better assess the practical significance of this policy milestone.

For most of this century there have been two categories of Aboriginal Queenslanders - those who were 'under the Act', and those who theoretically shared the civil freedoms of other Australians. The 'Act' was legislation initially passed in 1897, and updated in 1939 and 1965. It specifically targeted Aboriginal people and introduced the most intensive regime of surveillance and intervention ever imposed by governments. At the stroke of a pen, individuals and families could be forcibly extradited from their homes and confined to Aboriginal reserves. This was to be the fate of tens of thousands of Aboriginal people.
Aboriginal reserve communities have been built and operated by Aboriginal labour. Although 32 hours work a week was mandatory, there was no regulated payment until the late 1960s. Those 'under the Act' who did not work on reserves, were contracted out to employment where, when, and at whatever discounted rate of pay officials dictated. Their earnings went directly into govt hands where they were subjected to a range of levies and taxes in addition to the standard income tax paid by all Australian workers. Under govt management, which continued until only ten years ago, Aboriginal men and women working on missions and settlements never received legal rates of pay.

…
    Hot water 10.1.01
A protest at a swimming pool became a defining moment in Australia's march towards reconciliation, writes Andrew Stevenson. Can one day define a town? The notion appears crude and unwieldy, yet, in Moree, past and present seem to begin and end at a single point on the calendar. It was the day one small country town, in a nation still years from recognising the burden of its history, had the meaning of discrimination stripped bare before its eyes. On the steps of the municipal swimming pool, Australia's past and future eyeballed each other from either side of the town's colour bar and, in the middle, suffered the children. On one side stood the Freedom Riders, a busload of Sydney University students, led by the late Charles Perkins and Jim Spigelman, now NSW Chief Justice; on the other, Moree mayor Billy Lloyd and the town's civic leaders defended the realm.

One of a dozen Aboriginal children trying to gain entry to the pool on February 21, 1965, was Paul Raveneau, then 12, who remembers a scene of some considerable chaos. "For kids that age we didn't know what was going on," he says. "The police were grabbing Charlie Perkins and the other students, dragging them down the steps and dumping them on the footpath, and by the time they got one of them down, another one would be back up at the pool gate." Fred Craigie also has strong memories of the afternoon. "There were coppers waiting when we got there and the crowd threw eggs at Charlie and the uni students and they were spitting on us," he says. "There were more white people out the front of the pool than black and they were saying, 'Go home, niggers.' You felt like you weren't welcome." Raveneau and Craigie were surrounded by what the Daily Mirror described as "a crowd crazed with race hate", venting its anger on the students who had organised the brazen confrontation with the town's hierarchy.

 Sydney, Australia   29 detainees are still at large after a mass overnight breakout from a South Australian detention center. A group of 34 broke out when activists staged a daring raid on the Woomera Detention Center late on Thursday night. 5 of the migrants have been re-detained. "This is a deliberate, organized breakout by people who have been in contact with detainees," Australia's Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock said on local radio. Ruddock said 15 asylum seekers were involved in the breakout, another 19 taking advantage of the confusion to escape. Ruddock said the breakout occurred when members of an asylum seeker support group used a car to break down the fence surrounding the center and helped the detainees to escape, AP reports.

The protestors had gathered outside the former military facility to support a hunger strike by inmates. The detainees escaped into the surrounding outback where they face harsh conditions. Woomera is located in the desert about 500km (300 miles) north of South Australian state capital of Adelaide. Police roadblocks have been set up around the area as the search for the escapees continues.
Earlier this month a UN group criticized conditions inside Australia's detention camps, saying detainees "live day-in and day-out in agonizing uncertainty." The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention visited Australia for 2 weeks in June to assess whether the detention camps were in breach of the U.N.'s international covenant on civil & political rights. Working group chairman Justice Louis Joinet described conditions in the Woomera camp as "dramatic."
Woomera, the largest of Australia's 5 onshore detention sites, has been the scene of numerous riots and protests. Inmates recently went on a 2-week hunger strike and sewed their lips together.

"White women spat on girl students and screamed filthy words as the students tried to win Aboriginal children admission to the town baths," wrote Gerald Stone, later 60 Minutes founding executive producer. "Hoodlums poured from a hotel to the demonstration scene and fell upon people who appeared to be supporting the Aboriginals [sic]."
Stan Taylor, a white businessman, stood at the back of the crowd and watched. "All the councillors were standing shoulder-to-shoulder across the turnstiles when I got there. Old Geoff Muggleton, the deputy mayor, was standing at the turnstiles punching them [the protesters] down as they tried to get in." Despite the violence and hatred on display, the whole confrontation, says Taylor, was "good for man's soul, good for Moree and a necessary part of our evolution". Until that day, argues Taylor, Moree had believed there was no such thing as an Aboriginal problem. "Billy Lloyd was always shooting himself in the foot saying, 'We don't have an Aboriginal problem here.'" Taylor says. "Well, he didn't have one and we didn't have one, but they certainly did." … I, ROBERT JAMES ELLICOTT, Attorney-General, HAVING REGARD TO -

(a) the function of the Law Reform Commission, in pursuance of references to the Commission made by the Attorney-General, of reviewing laws to which the Law Reform Commission Act 1973 applies, of considering proposals for the making of laws to which that Act applies and of considering proposals for uniformity between laws of the Territories and laws of the States;

(b) the special interest of the Commonwealth in the welfare of the Aboriginal people of Australia;

(c) the need to ensure that every Aborigine enjoys basic human rights;

(d) the right of Aborigines to retain their racial identity and traditional life style or, where they so desire, to adopt partially or wholly a European life style;

(e) the difficulties that have at times emerged in the application of the existing criminal justice system to members of the Aboriginal race; and

(f) the need to ensure equitable, humane and fair treatment under the criminal justice system to all members of the Australian community.

HEREBY REFER the following matter to the Law Reform Commission, as provided by the Law Reform Commission Act,

TO INQUIRE INTO AND REPORT UPON whether it would be desirable to apply either in whole or in part Aboriginal customary law to Aborigines, either generally or in particular areas or to those living in tribal conditions only and, in particular:

(a) whether, and in what manner, existing courts dealing with criminal charges against Aborigines should be empowered to apply Aboriginal customary law and practices in the trial and punishment of Aborigines;
(b) to what extent Aboriginal communities should have the power to apply their customary law and practices in the punishment and rehabilitation of Aborigines: and

(c) any other related matter.

IN MAKING ITS INQUIRY AND REPORT the Commission will give special regard to the need to ensure that no person should be subject to any treatment, conduct or punishment which is cruel or inhumane.
DATED this ninth day of February 1977
RJ Ellicott, Attorney-General

Aboriginal Australia
Aboriginal Ed. Unit   Chas. Sturt Univ.
mythos

comprehensive links

Blood on the Wattle Bruce Elder (rev. 1999 orig. 1988). Sydney: New Holland Publishers.
Massacres & maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788 Janine Roberts
bibliographies at NTTT & CfCGS

PicoSearch
§ite map
courtesy of FreeFind 		presented by §
OCIAL
JUSTICE