Distant Voices (72 page)

When he had finished, there was an incredulous silence, ‘almost a hurt', he told me. Then, in his rasping voice, he reminded his captive audience that in a country littered with cenotaphs to the white dead in foreign wars, not one stood
for those who fought and fell in their own country. Then he walked away.

Kevin Gilbert died last year, leaving plays, books and poetry that are not quite what Europeans might describe as the work of a literary man; they were angry. In his 1973 book,
Because a White Man'll Never Do It
, he gave a new breed of black activists the nourishment they had lacked. He called on them to abandon ‘the mentality of the victim and of acquiescence' and, ‘having faced the facts of our degradation, to fight . . .'
⁴⁴

The suppression of Aboriginality has relied on white Australia's stereotypes, especially the patronising distinction drawn between full-blooded Aborigines and those of mixed parentage. It is still said there are few ‘true' Aborigines and that the tribal minority and the urban dispossessed ‘have nothing in common'. In 1985, in an event hardly reported, thousands of tribal Aborigines came to wintry Canberra to join up with their paler cousins from the cities. They assembled on the steps of the Federal Parliament and demanded land rights. ‘As I stood with them,' wrote the author Stewart Harris, ‘I sensed that an Aboriginal nation was being born. The tribes and clans of the people who owned Australia before 1788 have become united in the past decade as never before. For the first time I saw tribal elders and old women from the Centre and North confidently using hand microphones to speak their minds in their own language and also in English. They were sharing the opportunity with Aborigines from the south and east, whom they used to call “yeller fellers” . . .'
⁴⁵

On the day of the 1988 ‘Bicentenary' more than 30,000 Aborigines converged on Sydney – ‘yeller fellers' from the urban and country slums and tribal people from Alice Springs and as far away as the Piebara, in the north-west. They travelled in ‘freedom buses', painted in the Aboriginal colours of red, gold and black, and in cattle trucks and old Toyotas. The temperature passed 100 degrees. Radiators blocked, head gaskets cracked. Eight buses broke down but only one was abandoned. The hum of the didgeridoo and the resonance
of clapping sticks generated new energy; but the old people, who had insisted on going, were severely tested. One of them died on the road to Adelaide, and the convoy faltered, consumed with grief.

When the buses arrived in Sydney, in Belmore Park, traditionally a resting place for the homeless, they were met by thousands of white Australians, young and old, in that universal solidarity that transcends nation, language and race. As a tall ship emblazoned with a Coca-Cola advertisement led the Bicentennial spectacular on Sydney Harbour, black and white threw wreaths into the water.

In December 1992 Prime Minister Paul Keating addressed several thousand people in the largely Aboriginal suburb of Redfern. It was the eve of the International Year for the World's Indigenous Peoples, the sort of contrivance that attracts rhetoric and little else. But Keating went further than any Australian leader ever had; he described vividly the genocide that is still often denied. ‘We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life,' he said. ‘We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice – and our failure to imagine these things done to us.'
⁴⁶
Whatever the scepticism one felt about the utterances of a consummate politician like Keating, there was no doubt that his damning, shaming words reinforced a landmark decision by the Australian High Court six months earlier.

This was the ‘Mabo judgment', named after Eddie Mabo, a leader of the Meriam people of tiny Murray Island in Torres Strait in the far north. With four others, he began a High Court action in 1982, seeking legal recognition of their traditional land rights. They argued that Murray Island had been ‘continuously inhabited by our people despite the coming of the Europeans'. The High Court agreed and in recognising native title, ended the fiction of
terra nullius.
To say that shock waves have since rolled across the Australian establishment is to understate white reaction to a judgment that appears to grant Aboriginal people ownership of large
tracts of Australia. The mining industry in Western Australia – a state with a shameful record towards Aborigines – seems to be suffering a sort of corporate hysteria. ‘If this decision stands,' said one mining analyst, ‘Australia could go back to being a stone age culture of 200,000 people living on witchetty grubs!'
⁴⁷

That is not likely. On the contrary, the real danger is that the historical trend will continue and the Aborigines will be subjected to a new, liberal tokenism. Assurances to white Australia that freehold land and the backyard barbie are safe have far outnumbered those to black Australia. Within days of another fine speech by Paul Keating, in which he said that white Australians could never live in peace until they had achieved reconciliation with the indigenous people, he supported a bill introduced by the Northern Territory government aimed at forestalling Aboriginal land claims over silver and zinc deposits in Arnhem Land. Sadly, more of this tactic can be expected.

Paul Coe, an Aboriginal barrister who runs the Aboriginal Legal Services in Sydney, believes the Mabo decision will give little to the majority of Aborigines and that only the imposition of international law can right the historic wrong. Under international law, a territory can be acquired by another country only if the inhabitants cede ownership or if all of them are dead. ‘Australia was stolen,' he said. ‘There was genocide, but we survived and we voluntarily ceded nothing. The Mabo decision makes it quite clear that there will be no compensation for acts of extinguishment; it legitimises the white hold over us.'
⁴⁸

Shortly before Christmas 1993 Parliament passed the Native Title Bill, described by Keating as an ‘ungrudging and unambiguous recognition of native title' as defined by the High Court.
⁴⁹
Opponents of the bill believe it fails to guarantee more for the Aboriginal people than it takes away from them and that its ‘other aim' is to ‘re-stabilise' the economic positions of the mining and pastoral industries, which represented the Mabo decision as a threat.

‘The base line for Aborigines', wrote Pat O'Shane, an
Aboriginal magistrate, ‘is control of their land. Yet the purpose of the act is to protect and preserve big capitalist interests, with only some token gesture of recognition of the moral issues underlying the High Court's decision. Its primary provisions are designed to validate (read: protect and preserve) any land grants that may be invalid because of native title. These provisions legitimise the dispossession which has continued from January 26, 1788 to this day.'
⁵⁰

Aboriginal supporters of the legislation echo a guarded optimism not dissimilar to that expressed by many Palestinians following the signing of the accords with Israel. They say that this is the ‘best offer' to date from white Australia and that only by testing it will it demonstrate value, or not.

Certainly, we white Australians are finding out that, until we finally give back to black Australians their nationhood, we can never claim our own. ‘Only those', wrote Kevin Gilbert, ‘who love the land and love justice will ultimately hold the land.'
⁵¹
His words, wrought from such pain and struggle, deserve a just reply.

March 1992 to January 1994

Introduction

1
Heroes
, published originally by Jonathan Cape, London in 1986, has since been reissued by Pan in two editions (1987 and 1989).

2
The
Guardian
, February 12, 1990.

3
The Late Show
, BBC Television, June 6, 1991.

4
The
Observer
, May 3, 1991.

5
Clive James on 1991
, BBC Television, December 31, 1991.

6
The
Guardian
, October 23, 1991.

7
Ibid., September 23, 1991.

8
Ibid., October 23, 1991.

9
Z
Magazine
, April 1991.

10
The
Guardian
, May 6, 1992.

11
Ibid., May 18, 1992.

12
The
Australian
, May 28, 1992.

13
Heroes
, p. 532.

14
Liz Curtis,
Ireland, the Propaganda War: The British Media and the ‘battle for hearts and minds
', Pluto Press, London, 1984, pp. 279–90.

15
The
Guardian
, March 9, 1991.

16
Socialist
, March 25–April 2, 1991.

17
The
Sunday Telegraph
, March 18, 1990.

18
The
Guardian
, April 4, 1992.

19
John Pilger,
A Secret Country
, Vintage Books, London, 1992, pp. 286, 290.

20
Ibid., pp. 4–5.

21
Ibid., p. 320; OECD figures researched by Carole Sklan for
The Last Dream
, Central Television, 1988; Radio 2UE Sydney economic analysis, February 4, 1992.

22
Analysis by David Bowman, former editor-in-chief of the
Sydney Morning Herald
, March 1994.

23
A Secret Country
, pp. 239–326.

24
Private communication.

25
The
Guardian
, July 4, 1991.

26
The Truth Game
, Central Television, 1988.

27
Johnson's remark quoted by Stanley Karnow in
Vietnam: A History
, Viking Press, New York, 1983. See also
International Herald Tribune
, November 21, 1991.

28
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
, Pantheon, New York, 1988, p. 184.

29
The
Independent
, March 1, 1991; also, commentators on the BBC FM's war report noted the ‘light casualties'.

30
International Herald Tribune
, June 4, 1992; also Denis McShane,
Peace and Democracy News
, winter 1992.

31
Los Angeles Times
, February 18, 1991.

32
The
Nation
, March 5, 1990, cited by Noam Chomsky in
Deterring Democracy
, Vintage Books, London, 1992, pp. 355–6.

33
The
Guardian
, May 16 and July 2, 1992.

34
State of the World's Children
, UNICEF, New York, 1989, p. 1.

35
Human Development Report
, United Nations Development Programme and Oxford University Press, 1992.

36
Poor Britain: Poverty, inequality and low pay in the nineties
, Low Pay Unit, March 30, 1992; the
Guardian
, July 16, 1992.

37
The
Guardian
, August 12, 1988.

38
As told to Karl Jacobson, ‘The Studs you like',
Weekend Guardian
, May 9–10, 1992.

39
War by Other Means
, Central Television, 1992.

40
Cited in
New Statesman and Society
, October 11, 1991, from
Nicaragua: A Decade of Revolution
, edited by Lou Dematteis, W. W. Norton, London.

I INVISIBLE BRITAIN

1
Rough Sleepers Report, London Housing Unit, May 17, 1991. See also
London Housing News
, May 1992.

2
The
Guardian
, June 4, 1991.

3
The
Guardian
, June 12, 1991.

4
‘Inner City Deprivation and Premature Deaths in Greater Manchester', Tameside Metropolitan Borough Policy Research Unit, 1988.

5
As confirmed to the author.

6
Poor Britain: Poverty, inequality and low pay in the nineties
, Low Pay Unit, March 1992. See also LPU reports 1991.

7
The
Guardian
, September 11, 1991.

8
The
Daily Mirror
, September 13, 1991.

9
Cited by Brian Simon in
Marxism Today
, September 1984. It comes from Stewart Benson's ‘Towards a Tertiary Tripartism: new codes of Social Control and the 17+', in Patricia Broadfoot (ed.),
Selection, Certification and Control
, Falmer Press, London, 1984.

10
Cited by Shelter, 1990.

11
Analysis by Michael Meacher of government statistics supplied in a parliamentary written answer,
Hansard
, March 6, 1991; also
Poor Britain
, Low Pay Unit, 1992.

12
The
Guardian
, September 13, 1991.

13
Hansard
, March 29, 1983.

14
World in Action
, Granada Television, 1978.

15
Race Attacks
, Home Office report, 1981.

16
The
Sunday Telegraph
, October 6, 1991.

17
The
Daily Telegraph
, July 2, 1991.

18
The
Daily Mail
, July 10, 1991.

19
The
Daily Star
, May 24, 25, 27, 29 and 31, 1991; June 15, 1991.

20
The
Daily Mail
, October 3, 1991.

21
The
Sun
, October 3, 1991.

22
The
Guardian
, May 15, 1982.

23
Commentary on London Broadcasting (LBC).

24
The
Independent
, December 14, 1991.

25
Cited in
CARF
, Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, no. 8, May–June 1992.