May 10.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
The long white silence
The appeal for a Makarrata and silence.
The land rights movement has always included both white and black Australians. While Aboriginal organizations pursued the issue a group of prominent white Australians established an Aboriginal Treaty Committee which called on the Australian Government to negotiate a treaty with the Aborigines. They launched their cause in an advertisement in the press in 1979.
We the undersigned Australians, of European descent, believe that experience since 1788 has demonstrated the need for the status and rights of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders to be established in a treaty, Covenant or Convention freely negotiated with the Commonwealth Government by their representatives. Australia is the only former British colony not to recognize native title to land. From this first wrong, two centuries of injustice have followed. It is time to strike away the past and make a just settlement together. We believe this would be a signal to the world that we are indeed one Australian people, at last.
In New Zealand, at the treaty of Waitangi in 1840, the Maori chiefs were guaranteed by their conquerors 'full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands...so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same', and most of these lands were later bought. In North America, Indian tribes negotiated treaties with their conquerors, who recognized the principle of purchase or compensation for the loss of their lands. The colonial authorities were directed by the government in London to deal with the tribes as 'foreign nations'. In Papua, in 1884, the conquerors assured the people 'your lands will be preserved unto you', again until they decided to sell. But in Australia there was no recognition of Aboriginal land ownership, no compensation for dispossession, despite the resistance of the Aboriginal tribes to their conquerors.
Indeed, the absence of a settlement leads many Aborigines to conclude even today that their resistance is not yet over. It is a sad conclusion, for all of us, after so many generations of living together in this country. We believe there is a deep and wide concern among Australians of European descent that our ownership of this land, as defined in the imported European law, should still be based solely upon force, without any documentary recognition of the quality and courage of those who were conquered. It is time to right this wrong.
...We believe that any Treaty, Covenant or Convention should include provisions relating to the following matters:
i) The protection of Aboriginal identity, languages, law and culture
ii) The recognition and restoration of rights to land by applying throughout Australia, the recommendations of the Woodward Commission.*
iii) The conditions governing mining and exploration of other natural resources on Aboriginal land.
iv) Compensation to Aboriginal Australians for the loss of traditional lands and for damage to those lands and to their traditional way of life.
v) The right of Aboriginal Australians to control their own affairs and to establish their own associations for this purpose. [1]
J. Wright, We Call for a Treaty, Collins, Sydney, 1985, pp. 318-20.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Dispossession, pp. 92-93.
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* On 8 February 1973 [Prime Minister] Gough Whitlam announced the Woodward Commission Inquiry into appropriate ways to recognise Aboriginal land rights in the Northern Territory and appointed Justice Edward Woodward as Land Rights Commissioner...In the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission Report 1974, [he] recommended legislation to restore traditional land to the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory. Justice Woodward’s report was the basis of the Aboriginal Land (NT) Bill, which was introduced into the Commonwealth Parliament in October 1975. However, with the dissolution of Parliament in November 1975, the Bill lapsed.
see 'Woodward Commission Anniversary' sbs.com.au - 9 February, 2017.