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HISTORY

PHOTOS: BLOOMBERG NEWS AND THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM, SYDNEY

A lost culture: Aborigines and members of the public gather outside Parliament House.

Two years ago, at the Australian Museum, Sydney, this view was swept aside by one of the more compelling exhibitions, and also one of the least patronised. “Indigenous Australians: Australia’s first peoples” ran for over half a year. The themes — spirituality, cultural heritage, the land, family, health and social justice — were chosen in consultation with Indigenous Australians and the museum’s audience groups.

The show began by explaining how Indigenous Australians is an inclusive term used to describe all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. “Aboriginal” is used when describing stories, histories, ceremonies or objects not relevant to Torres Straits Islander people.

The “Day of Mourning”, January 26, 1938, to protest the lack of full citizenship rights.

The first subject, spirituality, looked at how Indigenous Australians and their religious beliefs revolve around a sense of belonging — to the land and to the sea. Today, these also include the beliefs and values of religion introduced from other cultures, particularly from Europe.

How this fits in was captured in a quote: “Our people, before the white man came, were very spiritual people ... So the sad thing about it all was the missionaries didn’t realise that we had already something that tied in with what they’d brought to us. They saw the differences as inferior and they didn’t ask us what it was we had. And it’s very sad because if they had asked ... things may have been different today.”

When the Europeans first came to Australia, the assumption was that the Aboriginals had no religion. But for 40,000 years, the land was what the latter revered … an ancient system of belief called the Dreaming.

The indigenous cultures of Australia are among some of the oldest in the world, and at the time of the occupation, there were over 700 different Indigenous languages spoken in Australia. Now less than 250 are in use. It was interesting to know that a strategy of colonisation was to suppress these languages. Another fact is that they are no longer spoken as first languages, but live through individual words and varieties of Aboriginal English, which incorporate the structure of Indigenous languages.

But an even greater invasion was still to come ...

Alex Kruger, Elder, Alice Springs.

... The forced separation or the taking away of indigenous children from their families occurred in every Australian state from the late 1800s until 1969, when it officially ended. As many as 100,000 children, called the “Stolen Generation”, were removed. This took three forms — by putting them in government run institutions, having white families adopting these children, or by having white families foster them (the last two applied to “fair-skinned” mixed-race children — a part of the deliberate policies of assimilation, to think and act “white”).

A poster from the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, 1996, summed it up:

There was an elaborate account on two “homes” pivotal to this. The Cootamundra Girls Home, established in 1911, was the first set up by an Aborigines Protection Board. Girls were trained as domestic servants for middle-class families, and instructed to “think white, look white, act white”, in the hope that by eventual inter-racial marriages with white men, indigenous blood would be “bred out”. They were not allowed to communicate with their own families and often told that their parents were dead or sometimes given forged death certificates to make the claim look authentic. The home was closed in 1968, the year before the Aborigines Welfare Board (previously the Aborigines Protection Board) was abolished.

In 1924, the Kinchela Boys Home was set up in Kinchela, a 13-hectare area on the mid-north coast of New South Wales (NSW). Its mission was to “provide training” for boys between the ages of five and 15 from all over NSW. The boys had to work long hours on farms and tales of abuse were rampant. At 15, they were sent to work as rural labourers, with the board directed to keep their earnings in a trust till they reached adulthood. Most never saw it. Conditions improved in 1940 when the Aborigines Welfare Board came into being.

A key part of the exhibition was in understanding the process of occupation. Indigenous people may have occupied Australia for at least 60,000 to 1,20,000 years, but the colonisers misunderstood the crucial connections between Indigenous Australians and the land. They did not see the land being used in the way they would, and so concluded, inappropriately, that Indigenous People “simply roamed the land”.

But it was not without resistance. “The history of these battles which involved hundreds of incidents and thousands of people is often kept under wraps.” Among the more interesting stories narrated was this one: Pemulway was the first of the Aboriginal resistance fighters, between 1790 and 1802, he waged a guerrilla war on the “young colony of NSW” and its European settlements in the Paramatta and Toongabbie areas.

He was eventually shot and captured in 1802, only to die from his wounds. So great was his image that his head was placed in a bottle of spirits and later sent to an eminent botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, in England. It has never been returned.

Other battles recorded were the ones at Waterloo Creek, Myall Creek, the “Blackline battle” at Tasmania, at Kalkadoon and the capture of chief Jandamarra, but too elaborate to be listed. The struggle for land rights continues even today through legal and political systems.

Also in focus were the conflicts at Noonkanbah, Uluru or “Ayers Rock” (a symbol of Australia, and the cornerstone of most contemporary tourism campaigns), and Wreck Bay (the first community outside of the Northern Territory or Queensland to have its traditional lands returned).

Viewers then shifted to other panels on the “Declaration of the Day of Mourning” (1938) and on the “Freedom Rides” (February 1935), leading to the passing of the Race Discrimination Act in 1975.

Until 1969, state-run Aboriginal Protection Welfare Boards controlled the lives of Indigenous Australians. Set up in the early 1900s, the boards could decide where they could live, where and how their children could be raised, which jobs they could have, what property they could own and how they could dispose of it, where they could travel and who they could visit. Certain exemptions were made for those who were deemed to have reached “acceptable standards” (i.e. a European lifestyle). These people were granted a type of “honorary” citizenship, and the Aboriginal people called them “dog tags/dog licenses”.

Finally there was some respite, when, in 1969, the Commonwealth assumed responsibility for indigenous affairs. This meant that under the Constitution, Indigenous Australians were entitled to the same rights as all other Australian citizens.

Indigenous deaths in custody was another sensitive issue. Between 1980 and 1989, at least 99 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people died in incarceration, leading to their relatives campaigning for a national inquiry. In August 1987, and after the 60th Aboriginal to die in custody in that year, the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke announced that a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody would be held. In 1991, it made a series of recommendations to improve the treatment of Indigenous Australians in the justice system. Formed in June 1987 (by relatives and friends of those who died) the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Watch Commission, among other things, works to reduce the rate at which Indigenous Australians are arrested. Between 1989 and February 1997, there were 115 more deaths.

There could be hope still …

... a poignant note struck in one of the panels titled “Australian Declaration towards Reconciliation”:

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