Comment by Howard Daniels
Around 400 people gathered in Adelaide's Maughan Church on March 3 to comment on the issues to be discussed at the National Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (NCAR) meeting in Melbourne on May 26-28.
Hundreds of local community and sectoral meetings are being held around Australia to set the agenda for and encourage public participation in the reconciliation process. The Adelaide meeting illustrated both the potential for such progressive community energy and the potential for its squandering by conservative forces, both within and beyond the NCAR.
Many people who participated in the three workshops were concerned about Kumarangk [Hindmarsh Island] and felt that, in South Australia, the struggle to stop the bridge was central to any genuine reconciliation.
The workshop on reconciliation in the community declared the Kumarangk critical and unanimously supported the opposition to the Hindmarsh Island bridge. Another group, which focused on human rights for indigenous people, had a wide-ranging discussion about many local, national and international issues during which the struggle against the bridge at Kumarangk was raised on several occasions to almost total endorsement. When reporting back to the plenary, however, the workshop chairperson, Denis Ralphs, stated that Hindmarsh Island had been raised by only one participant.
One of the two representatives from the NCAR, mining company executive Robert Champion de Crespigny, presented the meeting's recommendations for forwarding to the Melbourne conference. By this time, Kumarangk had dropped from the agenda.
Many of us began to believe "the fix was in" and objected. Champion de Crespigny informed us that the Hindmarsh Island issue was unhelpful as it led to confrontation and conflict. He also said that it was a local issue, unsuitable for national consideration.
Apart from being about as local as Wik, this case has had four inquiries, several state and federal court cases, millions of dollars spent, lots of intimidation and is probably headed for a High Court challenge.
Champion de Crespigny said we must look to the future rather than dwell on the past (by defending Aboriginal heritage and spiritual beliefs, presumably). In his opening address, he told us that reconciliation was "about looking forward". But fellow NCAR member Archie Barton's story reminds us that the past is still written on the lives and bodies of indigenous Australians. He spent more than 40 years separated from his family.
Again, I wondered whether Champion de Crespigny, like John Howard, is troubled by the so-called "black arm band view of history" which might make the dispossessed less enthusiastic about "finding common ground".
I urge all who read this account of the NARC meeting in Adelaide to be vigilant. There have always been those who wish to "move on" and "put into context" the inhumane and brutal aspects of Australian race relations, who have argued that to be confrontationist risked a backlash.
In 1985, the Hawke government followed the advice of a future embezzler, then premier of Western Australia, to abandon national land rights legislation rather than lose the election. In 1997, the ALP, led by Kim Beazley, appears determined to betray indigenous people in pursuit of "traditional" Labor voters alleged to hold bitterly racist views.
Without social justice there can be no reconciliation. Without support for the Ngarrindjeri [opposing the Hindmarsh Island bridge], how can we support or participate in the reconciliation process? If the major political parties and the legal system cannot defend and protect Aboriginal spiritual and cultural heritage, how can indigenous Australians be expected to become "reconciled" to their dispossession?
[Abridged from Kumarangk News, April, 1997.]