August 16.

Artwork by Glenn Loughrey

Disparity of wages and conditions

“We were treated just like dogs"

Wave Hill Station was acquired by the huge Vestey international meat corporation in 1914. Ruled over by Lord Vestey from England, the Wave Hill pastoral lease grew to 27,733 square kilometres by the 1930s, equivalent to the size of Belgium.

For more than 50 years Gurindji aborigines were often treated more like slaves than employees at Wave Hill. In 1966 Billy Bunter Jampilinpa was a young stockman who described conditions on the station: “We were treated just like dogs. We lived in tin humpies you had to crawl in and out of on your knees. There was no running water. The food was bad – just flour, tea, sugar and bits of beef like the head or feet of a bullock”.

Aboriginal stockmen did the same work on Wave Hill Station as the white employees whose wages were six times higher that the Aborigines...

Vincent Lingiari was a Guridnji elder employed early in the 20th century by the Vestey company, often for little or no pay. He always believed that his ancestral lands were wrongly occupied and that his people were oppressed and exploited by what he referred to as the “Bestey mob”.

In August 1966 Vincent Lingiari asked the Manager of Wave Hill Station, Tom Fisher, for a weekly wage from about $5 to $25 for all Gurindji stockmen. Non-Aboriginal stockmen doing the same job were paid up to $46 a week.

Fisher said no so Vincent quietly led the Gurindji from the Wave Hill camp to the Victoria River bed. Later they moved again to a more permanent settlement at a waterhole on Wattle Creek, known to the Gurindji as Daguragu. It is the main place of their Dreaming.

Vincent Lingiari quickly moved from a request for better wages, food and living conditions to a demand for the Gurindji ancestral lands to be returned. He made his position clear: “No one's gonna go back – no women, no men are gonna go back to the station to do their work”.

Supported by the North Australian Workers Union and writers such as Frank Hardy, the Gurindji resisted physical and political pressure to move from Wattle Creek and return to Wave Hill.

Responding to Lord Vestey's offer of higher wages, Lingiari responded: “You can keep your gold. We just want our land back”.

Vincent Lingiari and his people waited seven long years before a new Federal Labor Government in 1972 recognised the validity of the Gurindji claim for their land.

In 1972 Lord Vestey surrendered the original Wave Hill lease. On 16 August 1975. the then Prime Minister, Mr Gough Whitlam, known to the Gurindji as “that big man”, came to Daguragu and handed over the leasehold deeds to 300,000 square kilometres of the Gurindji's most sacred land.

In a simple gesture of goodwill Mr Whitlam took a handful of Daguragu dirt and poured it into Vincent's hand. Vincent replied: “We are all mates now”.

But it would take until May 1986 for the Hawke Labor Government to hand over the “inalienable” freehold title deeds to the Gurindji.

Vincent Lingiari died in 1988 but his strike on an isolated cattle station was the catalyst for the aboriginal land rights movement that was to continue and lead to the historic Mabo judgment in the High Court in 1992.

Acknowledgment: Ownership – An exhibition of paintings by Peter Hudson celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Gurindji strike and walk-off, Caloundra Regional Art Gallery, 2006, pp. 5,8,12.