KULINMA Kulinma means ‘keep listening’ and that is what this book urges Australians to do if their attitudes towards, and policies for. Aboriginal Australians are to command respect. Dr Coombs’s understanding of Aborigines’ problems and aspirations has developed over the years when he was Chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, because he and his colleagues listened patiently and with open minds to what Aborigines have said not only to them and other whites, but to one another. The book is intended as a record of that developing understanding and as an expression of gratitude for the many lessons the author and other members of the council learned in the course of their work among Aborigines. All who are interested in the attempts that have been made in recent years to end the cruelty and indifference that have characterised the attitudes of most white Australians towards Aborigines and to find a basis for mutual respect in the future will find both disappointment and consolation in these pages. Those who know little of the original Australians will learn much. KULINMA Kulinma means ‘keep listening’ and that is what this book urges Australians to do if their attitudes towards, and policies for. Aboriginal Australians are to command respect. Dr Coombs’s understanding of Aborigines’ problems and aspirations has developed over the years when he was Chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, because he and his colleagues listened patiently and with open minds to what Aborigines have said not only to them and other whites, but to one another. The book is intended as a record of that developing understanding and as an expression of gratitude for the many lessons the author and other members of the council learned in the course of their work among Aborigines. All who are interested in the attempts that have been made in recent years to end the cruelty and indifference that have characterised the attitudes of most white Australians towards Aborigines and to find a basis for mutual respect in the future will find both disappointment and consolation in these pages. Those who know little of the original Australians will learn much. This book was published by ANU Press between 1965–1991. This republication is part of the digitisation project being carried out by Scholarly Information Services/Library and ANU Press. This project aims to make past scholarly works published by The Australian National University available to a global audience under its open-access policy. KULINMA KULINMA Listening to Aboriginal Australians H.C. COOMBS Australian National University Press Canberra, ACT and Norwalk, Conn., 1978 First published in Australia 1978 Printed in Australia for the Australian National University Press, Canberra ©H.C. Coombs 1978 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Coombs, Herbert Cole, 1906-. Kulinma Index ISBN 0 7081 1149 1 ISBN 0 7081 1156 4 (paper) [1] Aborigines, Australian. I. Title. 301.45 U991*094 United Kingdom, Europe, Middle East, and Africa: Books Australia, 3 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8LU, England North America: Books Australia, Norwalk, Conn., USA Southeast Asia: Angus & Robertson (S.E.Asia) Pty Ltd, Singapore Japan: United Publishers Services Ltd, Tokyo Acknowledgments The following kindly gave permission for the use of material quoted in this book: the editors of Aboriginal and Islander Identity, Anthropological Forum, The Australian, Australian Economic Papers, the Australian Journal o f Education and Search’, the Australian Government Publishing Service; the Department of Aboriginal Affairs; the Minority Rights Group; and Kath Walker. vii Contents page Acknowledgments Introduction x< The Council for Aboriginal Affairs 1 Understanding Aborigines 26 Some Aboriginal Australians 54 Plates 62-63 Aboriginal Handicaps 74 What do Aborigines Want? 104 Some Policy Issues 158 A Decade of Progress? 215 Index 245 viii Figures page 1 Area inhabited by the Pitjantjatjara Aborigines 184 2 Annual rainfall recorded at Ernabella 189 3 Typical land structures 191 4 Distribution of water 192 Tables page 1 Population data 185 2 Mean monthly rainfall, maximum and 190 minimum temperatures Plates Plate I Galarrwuy Yunapingu Plate II Children dance to a didgeridoo at Moremega Homeland Centre Plate III Daymbalipu, Chairman of the Yirrkala Clan Council Plate IV A humpy at Yuendumu Plate V Bark painting at Yuendumu Plate VI Smiler Gordon, Joseph Green and Brian Hargraves operate a brick making machine at Hooker Creek Plate VII Pre-school class at Hooker Creek ix Introduction Most of the papers in this collection were written between 1968 and 1976, while I was Chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. However, four were written during 1977, one about the Pit- jantjatjara Aborigines for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, one concerning the developments since the 1967 referendum for an international organisation and two especially for this book, a background paper on the establishment and development of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, and an account of its involvement in the land rights issue. The last was written to fill an obvious gap in the content of the book if it is to contribute adequately to an un­ derstanding, of Aboriginal affairs during the last decade. The coun­ cil was deeply involved in the land rights issue but most of the time was fighting a hidden and apparently hopeless battle. Subsequent changes make it possible now to trace the course of that battle and its impact on official policies. The papers do not pretend to provide a comprehensive picture of the development of Aboriginal affairs over the period. Rather they illustrate the ways in which the council’s thinking developed on some major policy issues and the ways by which it sought to bring about significant reorientations in government and administrative attitudes. Many of them are concerned to explore issues of general significance underlying policy judgments which had to be made: thus the paper ‘Decisions by Aborigines’ was concerned to scrutinise widely expressed assertions that Aboriginal society was by its own constitution and social relationships incapable of making decisions, without which any measure of self-government or autonomy in contemporary matters would be ineffective. Others, like the papers on Aboriginal health and education, were concerned to assess the scale of the problems to be faced and to provoke or stimulate professional concern among those best qualified to deal with them. In particular this selection of papers focuses on people who live in communities that are predominantly Aboriginal, with varying degrees of contact with white Australian society. It does not deal at any length with the special problems of urban or fringe-dwelling Aborigines and for that reason brief sections of some papers which merely touched on these problems have been omitted. It seemed better not to raise such profound and complex issues even ten­ tatively than to deal inadequately with them. The exception to this X Kulinma general principle is the George Judah Cohen Memorial Lecture for 1972, ‘The future of the Aboriginal Australian’, in which I spoke of four groups of Aboriginal people living in widely different social environments, including the Aboriginal communities of Redfern in Sydney and of Bourke, in New South Wales. Because it was part of the intention of this paper to illustrate the different social backgrounds against which Aborigines live in Australia, and the different sorts of problems they encounter, and also because the paper was given at a crucial period in the evolution of federal government policy towards Aborigines, in which I was closely in­ volved, I have included it in full. The Council for Aboriginal Affairs Establishment, issues and relationships The story of my official involvement with Aboriginal affairs begins on 27 May 1967, when more than five million Australians voted ‘Yes’ to a referendum proposal making two important changes to the Constitution in respect of Aborigines. The first was the repeal of Section 127, which excluded Aborigines from the census to record ‘the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth’. The second was to amend Section 51 by the removal of the words ‘other than the Aboriginal race’ from the provision that ‘the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have the power to make laws for the people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws’. The campaign for the referendum proposals had not been a controversial one. In fact no official ‘No’ case was put forward and the ‘Yes’ case was jointly supported by the Liberal-Country Party Government and the Labor Opposition, with Gordon Bryant — later to become first Labor Minister for Aboriginal Affairs' — acting as joint campaign director. In the event only a little more than 500,000 ‘No’ votes were registered, with 91 per cent of voters voting ‘Yes’, making this the most overwhelming acceptance of a referendum proposal in the history of federation. The outcome provided an opportunity for the Federal Government to act decisively in the neglected area of Aboriginal affairs, and the press was firm in its encouragement of the government to take up the challenge. Not everyone in the government, however, was eager to act. In early June the Country Party Minister for Social Services, Ian Sinclair, set out his attitude to federal action in this area by saying that he believed that Aborigines were best served by the State Welfare Boards and that ‘for this reason I can’t see that, in the immediate future at any event, the Commonwealth is likely in any way to replace the Boards’.