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