56. Remote Aborigines

I am Greg and following last week’s grumble about our limited understanding of Aboriginal history, I want to reflect more on issues of colonialism and welfare.

My last grumble criticised the racist idea that the Australian population had been growing since 1788 as it was clear that in the aftermath of the arrival of Europeans the Aboriginal population – and therefore the Australian population – plummeted in the early years of the nineteenth century.

But it is important not to see colonisation as just an event in 1788 or the nineteenth century. While colonial diseases may have had a devastating immediate impact, colonisation generally refers to a process of the imposition of an imperial state on a subject population.

In 1788 there were hundreds of Aboriginal nations and the arrival of a British military garrison in Sydney was, in the short term at least, an invasion of only one country. Each Aboriginal nation was colonised at a different subsequent point, but it was not a one-off process.

Yes, land was taken and colonial law enforced, but Aboriginal people remained on much of their land and continued to live under Aboriginal law as well – that was what the Mabo judgment recognised when it found the existence of continuing native title.

For some groups a more absolute dispossession happened through the nineteenth century as towns and cities were built on their land, although even then it was rarely complete. For other nations, dispossession happened in the 1950s with their removal for a bombing range in the north of South Australia, or in the 1960s and 1970s for new mines, or the 1980s and 1990s for new resorts, roads and even bridges, or in the 2000s with the army invading the Northern Territory.

For Aboriginal groups with continuing connection to country, colonialism was not about a historic event in 1788, it is a micro process which happens every time a new land use or policy means that Aboriginal law and land is displaced by a colonial land use backed by the force of the state.

That is why the PM’s comments about a lifestyle choice to live in remote areas and the policy agenda which underpins it were so offensive. Shifting Aboriginal people off their country is another act of colonial dispossession.

That said, providing services to those in remote communities with few resources is a genuinely difficult issue. But the history matters.

Viewed from a prism of a colonisation that happened in the distant past, payments and services to these communities are seen as welfare – a drain on the public purse with an ongoing assimilationist assumption that the people there really should be more productively employed (elsewhere).

But if we see colonisation as ongoing, and we want to think instead about rights to self-determination, then perhaps we could talk about supporting Aboriginal people to stay on country – not in poverty or on welfare, but by right.

And then it is a question not of a decision in Canberra, Perth, or Adelaide, but of negotiation between equals about economic arrangements and what we might be prepared to pay not for welfare but for heritage protection, or perhaps even simply for “rent”.

It is not a panacea, but it is not colonialism either.

I am Greg and I am grumbling.

This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 24 March 2015

55. Aboriginal History

Hi. I am Greg and I want to grumble about the government’s lack of understanding of Aboriginal history. In the last week the PM has been rightly lambasted for his comment that living in remote communities was a “lifestyle choice”.

And of course before that there was his infamous comment about Sydney that it was “hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush”. Indeed, it is hard to think that!

But what caught my attention was a comment from Joe Hockey in launching the government’s Intergenerational Report that Australia’s population had been growing since 1788. Well, actually, no.

When the British Navy set up camp with their conscripted colonisers in 1788, the population of what is now Australia was probably about 750,000. Estimates are difficult because obviously there was no census of the several hundred Aboriginal nations across the continent.

Early European estimates of an Aboriginal population of around 300,000 were based on observations of communities which had already been devastated by deadly diseases which travelled faster than the colonial push into country. More recent estimates go as high as over 1m Aboriginal people at the time of initial colonisation.

Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, as a result of disease, dispossession, and the other intentional and unintentional colonisation processes, there were only about 100-150,000 Aboriginal people.

Again, estimates are difficult, but this massive depopulation is extraordinary. If we took the mid-point estimate of an original 750,000, then the equivalent of about 6 in 7 Aboriginal people disappeared over the course of the century. [See note below]

In relation to Joe Hockey’s comment, if we assume that much of that population loss was in the first half of that period, then it was probably not until the gold rushes of the 1850s that Australia’s population reached the heights of the pre-colonial period. So, no Mr Hockey, the population has not been growing since 1788.

And it is not good enough to ignore the Aboriginal population simply because they weren’t counted in the original statistics – to do so simply imports nineteenth century racism into the present.

To be fair to the Treasurer though, numbers have never been the strong point of Intergenerational Reports and it was only a throw-away line. But as with the PM’s mis-statements, such one-liners are important because they reveal underlying assumptions and arguably a more real version of government thinking than heavily manicured policy statements.

But what is more interesting was that Joe Hockey’s population comments did not cause an outcry – hardly even a stir.

It is perhaps a marker of the distance we still need to travel before we fully appreciate and come to terms with our colonial history.

And about that, moreso than the silly statements of our alleged leaders, I am grumbling.

This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 17 March 2015



Endnote: To put the figures of Aboriginal population loss in perspective, the catastrophic global influenza epidemic of 1918-20 killed more people than World War 1. It was probably the biggest single demographic event of the last century and in Australia cost the lives of over 2% of the population – yet the Australian population continued to grow in those years – in marked contrast to the massive loss of Aboriginal population after 1788 which has only relatively recently recovered to pre-colonial levels.

54. Everything

Hi. I am Greg and it has been 4 weeks since my last Grumble.

Please excuse the Catholic confessional introduction especially as it’s the Protestants now apologising because some of its Knox Grammarians took the motto of “doing the manly thing” the wrong way and were ignored or allowed to go on abusing children – probably for the same reasons that the music industry did not take Gary Glitter at his word when he asked if his pre-pubescent audience wanted to touch him there. We look forward to a nuanced government response which presumably will see the expansion of the state government Screening Unit to cover musicians and Presbyterians.

Meanwhile, there has been outrage from the anti-some-capital punishment campaigners over two Australians facing execution for drug smuggling in Indonesia. Now apart from the collusion of Australia’s police force in this debacle, I simply wonder why these two lives should mean so much more than the thousands each year whose judicial murder by our major trading partners and friends goes unremarked?

And on the subject of nationalism and dodgy analysis, we had the government’s Intergenerational Report trying to make us into the unlucky country which apparently will no longer be able to afford the health and welfare services of a decent society. And on that subject we’ve also had the McClure report into the future of welfare which either seemed to have forgotten about independent young people or contained a fairly radical proposal to cut off income support payments for any young person under 22 who is not residing in the family home (presumably surrounded by a white picket fence).

I’m still not sure about what is planned, but talking of government reports, there was also the state government review of South Australian taxes which led to a one-day media frenzy about one proposal while the rest of the thoughtful Discussion Paper got forgotten.

But of course it is a good time to forget things with Mad March’s Festival for the arty, Fringe for the hopefuls, cars that go brmmmm for the masses, and Womad for the self-righteous internationalists who can pretend to be African, Cuban, or Romanian for a day (or at least an hour).

And there, under introduced trees and over-abundant flying foxes we had a not very funny comedian ignoring structural power and vested interest and patronisingly telling us that we just need to talk to people differently about climate change.

But that was ok because if you live where I live, you might not have got to the famed parklands anyway because the government decided to repair the rail lines over the long weekend – because let’s face it our public transport system is only really for getting people to and from city offices on workdays? I mean, it is not like anyone would ride to Womad or anywhere else and want to catch a train home.

Much better to drive, particularly as the head of our Motor Accident Commission wants to make it safer for us by removing all trees within sight of any road because apparently these arboreal terrorists are leaping out in front of cars and adding to the road toll.

What was that about climate change?

I am Greg, I am grumbling.

This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 10 March 2015