Workshop 2000: Aboriginal Policy: Failure, Reappraisal and Reform

Discussion of Gary Johns' paper, 'The Failure of Aboriginal Separatism'

Keith Windschuttle

Gary Johns' paper 'The Failure of Aboriginal Separatism' is a very important contribution to debate over Aboriginal--European relations in this country because it identifies that the central piece of policy that has influenced these relations has long been, not the solution that its supporters have claimed, but the problem. The policy of separatism has been the dominant one ever since the first missionaries set up special settlements for Aboriginal people in the 1820s. Later in the nineteenth century, state-funded Aboriginal reserves took over many of the mission sites, replacing churchmen with government bureaucrats, but retaining the same policy. Today, separatism is still on the policy agenda, but it now appears under the guise of land rights, a treaty and an Aboriginal state.

The early missionaries justified separating Aboriginal people from British colonists on the grounds of saving them from violence. Research of my own, published in a series of articles in Quadrant from October to December 2000, has shown that this behaviour was characteristic of a number of well-known missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, what my work has also found is that when you examine the evidence, most of their claims are highly suspect. These missionaries took any rumour about violence towards Aborigines, no matter how unreliable or vague, and propagated it without checking its accuracy. Why would they do such a thing? They wanted to show the need for their own institutions. By portraying colonial society as awash with violence towards the blacks, they justified their policy of separating Aborigines from white society. They wanted their missions to appear as havens in a heartless world. This fulfilled the Protestant evangelical theology on which their actions were based: the everyday, material world was full of evil and corruption and the only road to salvation for Aborigines lay in a closed religious community. Here they could be kept apart from the modern world and separated from white society.

The rumours and myths disseminated by the first missionaries have coloured the whole record of Aboriginal-European relations in Australia's early colonial history. Much of this mythology informs the book by Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, a history of those humanitarians and missionaries in Australia who over the past two centuries have taken the Aboriginal side and who have tried to change the behaviour of their fellow Europeans. One important documentary source for Reynolds is the letters and papers of Rev Lancelot Threlkeld, who ran a mission at Lake Macquarie, near Newcastle, in the early nineteenth century. Throughout his tenure, Threlkeld reported lurid tales of barbaric acts by colonists against the natives, including a 'war of extirpation' he claimed had broken out in New South Wales in the mid-1820s, all of which Reynolds faithfully reproduces.

However, Threlkeld's contemporaries were not so gullible. Whenever these reports appeared, the NSW Supreme Court judge, Sir William Burton, wrote asking him the source of his evidence. Threlkeld's replies to Burton are full of evasions and dissembling. In most cases, he concedes he has no direct evidence.

He was at times caught lying, such as when he accused stockmen on Stuart Donaldson's Beardy Plains run in New England of poisoning local Aborigines with rum laced with prussic acid. 'They died about the place like rats,' he said. Donaldson replied that not only were no Aborigines killed, but the men named were not employed at Beardy Plains and Donaldson never even had a run in the district. Threlkeld himself later conceded his claims were 'not substantiated'. All of this is in Threlkeld's letters and papers, which Reynolds cites as evidence for many of his other points. But nowhere does he mention the embarrassing fact that Justice Burton and others caught Threlkeld lying, time and again.

I should point out that Burton did not question these stories because he was a friend of those who did violence to Aborigines. He was the judge who sentenced to death seven of the eleven white stockmen responsible for the Myall Creek Massacre of 1838, one of the few genuine mass killings of Aborigines of the period.

Despite the flimsy basis of the evidence about the violent predisposition of the British colonists of this era, the policy of separatism has dominated white thinking about Aborigines ever since. It justified not only the missions in the nineteenth century but also the system of state-sponsored Aboriginal reserves from 1897 until the 1970s. Some of you might remember the media and political campaign over Palm Island in 1971. This was an Aboriginal reserve off the coast of Townsville run like a jail. Its inmates had committed no crimes but were forbidden to leave. Young people could only marry with the consent of the superintendent. Palm Island breached almost every known principle of human rights and freedom. It was far worse than anything the American Civil Rights Movement had exposed in the USA. It was legalised white racism. It was part of the policy of separatism that underlay the Aboriginal reserves.

One of those responsible for Palm Island was the Reverend Ernest Gribble. He had earlier been in Western Australia and was the missionary who reported the story of the Forrest River 'massacre' in the Kimberley district in 1926. As the Perth journalist, Rod Moran, has shown in his 1999 book Massacre Myth, Gribble was an emotionally disturbed man who fabricated most of the evidence on which the claims of a massacre were made. But Gribble is another of the heroes of Reynolds' book, This Whispering in Our Hearts. Reynolds treats him simply as a whistle-blower about violence towards Aborigines and fails to discuss his role in Aboriginal policy. After Forrest River, Gribble returned to North Queensland where he was appointed chaplain of the Palm Island Aboriginal Settlement. For the next 26 years, he worked with a succession of secular superintendents to entrench the penal regime that so offended public opinion when it was finally exposed in 1971. In other words, the longest-serving official on Palm Island, the one constant figure who did more than anyone else to make it a site of such overbearing racism, was Rev. Ernest Gribble. In his homage to Gribble's career in This Whispering in Our Hearts, Reynolds fails to even mention in passing that he spent more than a quarter of his life on Palm Island.

The truth is that the greatest crime that white Australians have committed against the Aborigines was to lock them up for almost 150 years, from the 1830s to the 1970s, on missions and reserves. But this was all done by people who claimed to be their friends, by those claiming to be the saviours of the Aborigines. Instead, they were incarcerating them in a system that robbed them of ambition, esteem and hope. It is the outback relics of the system of missions and reserves, now euphemistically labelled 'remote communities', that today produce the shocking statistics of Aboriginal morbidity and limited life expectation that are such a national disgrace. In short, throughout our history, the people who have claimed to be the greatest friends of the Aborigines have really been their greatest enemies. And this is still true today.

In his book Aboriginal Sovereignty, Reynolds has summarised all the ideas that white radicals have put forward in the last twenty years. They want an Aboriginal state, governed by Aboriginal culture and laws, with traditional structures of society and political authority. This is all dressed up in the romantic garb of indigenous rights, cultural regeneration and the politics of the international 'first peoples' movement. But in reality, it is just an updated version of the separatist policies of the nineteenth-century missionaries. It is a proposal to segregate Aborigines in both political and cultural terms from the rest of Australia. Although some Aboriginal leaders have swallowed this line, it is yet another program in which white activists tell blacks what to do.

There is, however, another ideal that has been lost in all of this: that of integration. In Australia in the 1960s, black activists and white students toured the countryside, emulating the American civil rights movement in denouncing segregation, whether it was in the workforce, hotel bars or municipal swimming pools. However, in the following decade, intellectual and political circles swept aside the concept of integration on the grounds that it was a racist form of assimilation and that black power and black autonomy were the only ways to go.

Nonetheless, despite all the talk in the media, in parliament and in the courts about land rights, sovereignty and treaties, assimilation has continued, behind the scenes, year after year. The 1996 Census revealed just how far it has come. In 1996, 73 per cent of the total indigenous population of 386,000 lived in what the Census defined as 'major urban' or 'other urban' centres, principally in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Darwin, Townsville and Cairns. Moreover, in these urban areas, very few Aborigines live in exclusively Aboriginal communities or ghettoes. Most are now spread throughout the suburbs. In Sydney in 1996, for instance, there were 236 people living in the highly-publicised black community of Eveleigh Street, Redfern, while there were two thousand Aborigines in Liverpool, twelve hundred in Fairfield, eleven hundred in Parramatta, one thousand in Marrickville and one thousand in Bankstown. There are more Aborigines living in the suburbs of Sydney (34,000) than in the whole state of Western Australia outside Perth (32,000). The greatest concentration of Aborigines is still in the Northern Territory where 27 per cent of the population is indigenous but, even here, the total Aboriginal population outside Darwin is only 37,000, that is, barely more than the Sydney suburbs.

This geographical distribution is confirmed by the social and cultural statistics. In 1996, in 54 per cent of Aboriginal households, one of the adults was married to, or cohabiting with, a non-Aboriginal person. When asked about their religion, 71 per cent of Aborigines professed Christianity. Of the total indigenous population, adherents of traditional Aboriginal religion accounted for a mere 2.06 per cent, that is, a total of only 7,952 individuals. The beliefs of these 7,900 people form the basis of the current romantic movement for the restitution of Aboriginal culture, despite the fact that 98 per cent of Aborigines do not share them.

In short, despite the efforts of our white intellectual elites, the great majority of Aborigines have already voted with their feet. The majority of Aborigines have demonstrated they are not interested in the goals defined for them by white historians, clergymen, politicians, rock stars, judges and journalists. Instead of an Aboriginal state or treaty, instead of customary laws and traditional culture, most of them simply want to live like the rest of us. The assimilation of the great majority of the Aboriginal population is an accomplished fact. No one, however, should hold their breath waiting for our academic historians to discuss this. It goes against the grain of everything they've told us. It demonstrates, yet again, how profoundly mistaken they've been about the relations between black and white people in the history of this country.