The Coming of the White People: a Broken Trust
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Chapter One The coming of the white people: a broken trust …the past is never fully gone. It is absorbed into the present and the future. The present plight, in terms of health, employment, education, living conditions and self-esteem, of so many Aborigines must be acknowledged as largely flowing from what happened in the past [...] the new diseases, the alcohol and the new pressures of living were all introduced. Sir William Deane, Governor-General, Inaugural Lingiari Lecture, 1996.(Lingiari and Deane 1996:p20) Introduction This chapter will examine the history of the past two hundred plus years for indicators from which determinants of the poor health Aboriginal peoples experience today will be summarised. It will take the reader on a journey through time. Although the selection of events is a subjective one, it will allow the reader to consider the nature of the impacts of invasion on Aboriginal peoples. There are three core facts that constitute the common experience of Australia’s First Peoples. • They were invaded. • They were dispersed from their land. • They endured indescribable suffering in the wake of introduced disease. A discussion of these three factors opens this chapter in the context of the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. It must be remembered that the arrival of Europeans resulted in similar consequences throughout the entire country. In the first place, however, it is imperative for Settler or Migrant Australians to begin to understand the enduring relationship between Land and Aboriginal peoples, the interrelatedness of the people themselves, and in turn, the importance of these relationships to wellness relationships that will be further discussed later in this work. Some understanding these relationships and the pressures that have been put upon them may be found in the following summary of the views of Kaytej women from the Western Desert. For these women, wellness is a state… …which entails the maintenance of harmonic relations between people and place. Women, as the ritual nurturers of relationships, seek to maintain and to restore harmony, happiness and thus health. Disruption of this complex of values and relationships may come in different forms. Over the past fifty years, it has been the shift from a hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence to a sedentary life style which has posed the greatest threat to social harmony and which has intensified interpersonal and sexual tensions. Some of these tensions are manifest in women’s love rituals, some within the domain of health. Aboriginal medical practice and classification of disease are sensitive to mood and situation: conflict between members of a community or transgressions of the Law are considered injurious to smooth social and religious relations. Because a healthy individual or community is one in harmony with others and with the world of the jukurrpa [Dreaming], Aboriginal health practitioners seek to maintain an existing state of good health or to re-establish harmony and thus to restore good health. Underpinning the indigenous concept of good health is an equilibrium model of society backed by the dogma of dreaming which Aborigines vehemently assert exists at the level of lived reality.(Bell 1983:p146) We belong to the land Silas Roberts, first Chairman of the Northern Land Council, wrote some years ago: Aboriginals have a special connection with everything that is natural. Aboriginals see themselves as part of nature. We see all things natural as part of us. All the things on Earth we see as part human. This is told through the ideas of dreaming. By dreaming we mean the belief that long ago, these creatures started human society. These creatures, these great creatures are just as much alive today as they were in the beginning. They are everlasting and will never die. They are always part of the land and nature as we are. Our connection to all things natural is spiritual.(Rose and Australian Heritage Commission. 1996:p26)1 A colleague was told by Roberts in 1974 that ‘when deprived of their Land, Aboriginal people are like Christians without souls, wandering aimlessly, people without a purpose’.(Kerr and Roberts 1974) Writing of the Walmadjari, Gugadja and Ngadi groups now living at Balgo in Western Australia, Palmer records that each individual has … 1 See quotes by Silas Roberts:Big Bill Neidjie, Stephen Davis, et al. (1985). Australia's Kakadu Man Bill Neidjie. NSW, Mybrood Pty Ltd.:p13 … a spirituality which is derived through spiritual impregnation at the time of his physical conception within his mother’s womb. A person has an abiding spiritual affiliation with the site and country associated with his spiritual conception and can also claim rights of ownership to this country.(Palmer 1983:pp517-30) This interrelatedness and fundamental spiritual connection was not understood by the first European invaders and by relatively few outsiders since. What has been especially absent is an understanding of Aboriginal peoples’ rights to land to which they belong and the obligation upon individuals to fulfil them. In his 1973 commission to inquire into the granting of land rights in the Northern Territory and adjacent reserves in Western and South Australia, Justice Woodward wrote of the ‘owner/manager’ relationships evident within land-owning groups in central and northern Australia: Further, some Aboriginal concepts related to land-owning have no parallel in European law. The most important and widespread of the rights in land that lie outside European arrangements is the managerial interest of a nephew in the country of his maternal uncle. Everywhere the religious rites owned by a clan were the ‘title deeds’ to the land and would only be celebrated by clan members. Such rites however, could not be held without the assistance of the managers whose essential task it was to prepare the ritual paraphernalia, decorate the celebrants and conduct the rite. The agreement of managers had to be secured for the exploitation of specialised local resources such as ochre and flint deposits and for visits by the clan owners to their sacred sites.(Woodward 1973:p12) The owner/manager protocol is upheld today in many parts of Australia. It is significant in marriage and betrothal relationships and it has been noted within ritual and the resolution of conflict and the assertion of intellectual property rights in the arts industry.(Palmer 1983) During the 1970s, recordings of the owner/manager relationship in terms of women’s relationship to land were recorded. One of the first explanations given by Warlpiri women to Diane Bell in 1976 concerned the performance of a ceremony: I asked why some women wore one design and some another. Explanation revolved around the roles of kirda and kurdungurlu, words which I had heard during the performance2. I was told that the kirda were the women who followed the dreaming from the father and grandfather: they had to dance for the country and wear the designs for the dreamings and places in the country. On the other hand, the kurdungurlu were the women who called the dreaming ‘mother’: they had to sing, paint the kirda, and ensure that the Law was correctly followed.(Bell 1983:p20) In the 1980 Willowra land claim made by Warlpiri people under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) 1976, the Aboriginal Land Commissioner recognised a manager’s 2 In Warlpiri, kirda is one of the Warlpiri terms for father and kurdu the term for woman’s child. (kurdungurlu/kurtungulu) claim as ‘differentiated’ from the traditional owner’s (kirda) thereby acknowledging the co-operative sharing nature of rights to country. Diane Bell emphasises the political nature of this sharing: Women trace their relationship to the ancestral heroes and thus to the land, in a number of ways. Through mother, father, place of birth, conception and residence flow qualitatively different rights and responsibilities. In the comprehensive nature of the web of relationships linking land and people these rights and responsibilities are united with those of the men. To understand this extremely flexible system, it is necessary to look to the politics of kinship and to the way in which relationships are based on land. Like the Warlpiri men of Meggitt’s study [1962], women also define country (and relationships) in a way best suited to their purpose. This is possible because the land tenure system is one of interlocking, overlapping groups recruited according to diverse criteria. Evidence for this fluidity and for the nature of the checks and balances is, I believe, apparent in the survival of knowledge in areas where massacres occurred and entire patrilines were killed. Giving evidence in the Willowra land claim, one witness recalled the 1928 massacres: “I saw my father, grandfather, all his brothers killed”, he said. This must have amounted to the near extinction of the patriline but the knowledge survived because there were others closely related in both the father’s and the mother’s line who could rekindle and rebuild the knowledge. The land survived and so did people who could care for it. One of the old men of the desert, a Japaljarri, once told me that although there had been a fire and the sacred trees had been burnt, the new ones were coming up just like the new kirda for that country.(Bell 1983:p51) Speaking generally, the first white invaders chose to ignore the existence of a vibrant and enduring Aboriginal civilisation. Very few people, even today, have learned the protocols and diplomatic procedures considered by Aboriginal people to be simply good manners. Deborah Bird Rose, a non- Aboriginal writer who has spent many years with Aboriginal women in central and southern Australia, has learned this. Relationships between countries are sustained by a system of reciprocity and respect which Fred Myers3 an anthropologist who has worked extensively with the Pintupi people of the western desert, defines as ‘always ask’.