TIME EUROPE
September 25, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 13
The Real Australia
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Once upon a time, back in the 1950s, the hot emblematic issue in Australia's politics, as in America's, was communism. We feared Stalin and subversion by the enemy within; the "red menace" was played on, crudely but efficiently, by conservative politicians. Today all that is gone. Australian politics has a new emblematic issue, a different moral center. It has nothing to do with ideology. It is race: the politics of identity, of Aboriginal rights, and the obligation to face a murky and cruel history.
About 2% of Australian citizens are black Aboriginals. This amounts to roughly 390,000 people out of 20 million, a tiny minority. Unsurprisingly, Australian blacks have very little power, economic, political or cultural. There are no rich Aborigines, no Aboriginal-owned newspapers, no Aboriginal ceos of Australian companies. Out of the 224 elected members of the Senate and House of Representatives, which form the Australian Parliament in Canberra, only one is Aboriginal, the brilliant and resolute young politician Aden Ridgeway. Aboriginal influence is exerted mainly through bureaucracy, committees and the courts; for political clout, Aborigines depend largely on the sympathy and support of whites.
The fact that they have any serious political power at all is remarkable because Australian whites, in the course of waging an undeclared war of conquest against the Aborigines, systematically denied them any access to the culture of politics right from the moment of settlement in 1788. Aborigines weren't mentioned in the Australian constitution when it took force in 1901. Not until 1962 were they given federal voting rights. The historical weight of discrimination against them is crushing.
A lot of white Australians think of this minority as a bunch of thievish, ignorant welfare bludgers who are played upon by a handful of black demagogues. They oppose the idea of a national apology for past treatment of the Aborigines — a deserved and, in liberal opinion, an essential gesture of goodwill — by saying all this happened in their grandfathers' time, and the living bear no responsibility for it. This is Prime Minister Howard's view too, although — significantly enough — he is quick to drape himself in the nobler emblems of Australian history with which his generation had nothing to do, such as the heroism of the soldiers at Gallipoli.
The aborigines are a very old people. Their ancestors colonized Australia from the north, by sea, tens of thousands of years ago — nobody can say just how many. At the time of the first white contacts in the 18th century, there were perhaps half a million of them divided into hundreds of tribes, speaking mutually unintelligible languages, thinly scattered across the vast hot skin of Australia. They lived by hunting and gathering. These seminomads were, even by the lowest standards of Africa or the Americas, almost incredibly low tech. They had fire, sticks and stones, and little else. Yet their traditional oral culture is of great antiquity; their structure of myth is remarkably coherent and continuous across millenniums, not just centuries; and as anyone can see who visits some of the sacred cave sites scattered across northwestern Australia, their traditions of rock painting — animals and fish of every kind, spirit figures and the imposing, fearsome effigies of the great Rainbow Serpent — are as impressive as anything in the caves of Lascaux or Altamira and tens of thousands of years older. As far as we know, the Australian Aborigines stood at the very dawn of human imagemaking.
Through most of the 19th century the Aborigines were driven off their ancestral lands by settlers, and when they resisted, they were killed. Many more died of disease or social despair. Nobody knows how many because no one bothered to count either the living or the dead; the whites were engaged in the more important task, as the history books used to say, of "nation building." By the end of the 19th century it was assumed that the natives would soon be extinct, and the whites' only task was "to smooth the dying pillow."
But having been in Australia for 40,000 years or more, in contrast to the whites' 200 or less, the Aborigines were not giving up. So the policy changed to assimilation. First, the Aborigines were deprived of their nomadic tribal life and concentrated in "mission stations," communities run mainly by Protestant evangelists, where they were taught the Gospels, shown white ways and prepared for low-level jobs as servants.
Around 1910, an even more shameful policy came in: the "stealing" of children from their natural, Aboriginal mothers. These kids, whose only crime was to be Aboriginal, were abducted by the white authorities to be assimilated, as orphans, into white society. The members of this stolen generation were not told their parents' names, and most would never see their mothers again. This odious experiment was not abandoned until 1970 and did not become general public knowledge until 1997, when a report on it, "Bringing Them Home," by Sir Ronald Wilson, caused national outrage.
The key to all Aboriginal rights is land. Land is identity; to own none is to be no one, deracinated, invisible. Land is also theology. In Aboriginal myth, the Australian earth — its valleys, hills and watercourses, together with everything that grew and lived on it — was shaped by ancestral beings during an ahistoric period called the Dreamtime. When these ancestors withdrew from the earth, they left behind not only the humans they had created but also a body of sacred law, embedded in dances, songs and images, that described their worldmaking acts. These images showed how the spirits of the dead were continually absorbed into the land and recycled into the newborn living. Hence, to Aborigines, land is far more than real estate. In their struggle for rights, it is the key element.
But it has taken a very long time to drag the Australian courts and government into admitting that the Aborigines owned their land before white arrival — that the doctrine of terra nullius (no- man's-land) was legally invalid. This finally happened in 1992, when Eddie Mabo, a member of the Meriam clan on the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait off northern Australia, successfully argued before the high court that his people had been there before the whites and had never given up their ancient rights of ownership. This was the first "native title" victory in Australian law.
Its results have been explosive. Huge deposits of minerals, including, at Jabiluka in the Northern Territory, the richest known uranium deposits in the southern hemisphere, lie beneath the earth. No less than 15% of the total land area of Australia is owned or controlled by Aboriginal groups and councils. Some 700 land claims, covering 50% of the Australian landmass, await determination by the courts, and more are coming in every day. This avalanche has caused legal and bureaucratic gridlock. Few Aboriginal groups accept mediation by whites. No two groups agree on land use. Some, for instance, think that tribal land should not be exploited at all, and left sacrosanct. Others are for all-out mining.
And then there is the question of proving original ownership. Sometimes a group can show it has been on a given tract of land since records began. But this situation is rare. Often a claim is just that, a mere assertion unbacked by documents of any kind, made by Aborigines who live in an entirely different area. This infuriates some Australian graziers, especially those whose stations (ranches) are on land they do not own outright but hold in lease from the Crown. A native title claim on their land, even a weak one, can freeze their assets and put bank loans out of reach. Moreover, it is facile to fall in with the favorite assumption of white urban Australian liberals: that only Aborigines have an authentic spiritual connection to the land. Why cannot whites have one too?
The point is, however, that this and a hundred other issues between blacks and whites in Australia can be worked out only in an atmosphere of reason, trust and reconciliation. The time of name calling should be over. But despite the dignity and moderation of Aboriginal leaders, and the goodwill of so many whites, it is manifestly not over. Finishing it off, at last, is work that will take us into the millennium. But it has to be done, or we are a much lesser nation for it.
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