Confronting Racism's Boundary
Keywords:
Race relations, racism, Aborigines, paternalistic protectionist policies, injustice, government bureaucracyAbstract
The Brisbane of my childhood was monocultural and ethnocentric, a very white affair. Like most Queenslanders of my generation, I had virtually nothing to do with Aborigines and was given little reason to understand their culture or to see the history of the European conquest of this country from their point of view. I certainly had no knowledge of the relationship between Aborigines and police, poisoned as it was by decades of policing which intimidated, imprisoned and eliminated Aboriginal ‘troublemakers’. Nor did I know of the confiscation of children of mixed descent from their Aboriginal mothers. Similarly, I was ignorant of how Queensland's paternalistic protectionist policies had compulsorily detained tens of thousands of Aborigines on ‘missions’ scattered throughout Queensland, an injustice compounded by the practice of quarantining their miserable wages into a ‘welfare fund’ which was used in ways that suited the government bureaucrats of the day.
References
Fitzgerald, Ross, From the Dreaming to 1915: A History of Queensland (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982, 317ff.
In an address to the Northern Australian Development Conference in Darwin on 7 November 1985, as reported in The Sunday Mail on 17 November, the Premier spelt out his analysis of links between leftists and land rights as paving the way for a communist takeover.
King, Jonathan, Waltzing Materialism (Sydney: Harper and Row, 1978), 54–55.
A Barrie Pittock, Beyond White Australia, (Brisbane: Quaker Race Relations, 1975), 7.
King, Waltzing Materialism, 62.
The generic term used across Aboriginal languages in Queensland, just as Koori is used in southern Australian states.
The term is associated with liberation theology leader Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife, Brazil.
Harrison, D. Harrison, J., ‘Queensland’, in Uniting Church of Australia: 25 Years (Brisbane: UCA, 2003), 107.
The lease has never been activated. In October 2003, the Beattie government announced that it wanted the lease returned so it could be implemented after discussions with the Aurukun people.
As reported by Deborah Snow in The National Times, 20–26 March 1978, p. 18.
Preston, N., ‘ The Queensland Aborigines Acts — the Final Round’, National Outlook, 3(9) (1981): 10–11.
The Courier-Mail, Inside Mail, 22 August 2004, p. 34.
The matters reported in this and the preceding paragraph are itemised in Preston, N., ‘Black Times for Queensland Aborigines’, National Outlook, December 1979, pp. 3–5.
Malezer, Les Richards, Paul and Foley, Matt, Beyond the Act (Brisbane: Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action, 1979).
‘Church Group Attacks State's law’, The Age, 1 January 1979.
Preston, N., ‘Land Laws Without the Rights’, Australian Society, July 1991: 5–7.
In particular, the Cape York Partnership, heavily influenced by Aboriginal leader, Noel Pearson; and the seriously compromised attempts to pay out monies owed from the Aboriginal Welfare Fund which had accumulated the earnings of thousands of Indigenous Queenslanders in the years of ‘the Acts’.
Preston, N., ‘The Commonwealth Games – an Arena for Social Conflict’, Social Alternatives, 2(4)(1982).
For the record, the issues prompting the three other protest arrests were the visit to Brisbane of a US nuclear armed vessel in 1984, the SEQEB dispute in 1986 and East Timor in 1998.
Preston, N., ‘Black Australia at the Commonwealth Colosseum’, unpublished.
The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act 1991. For an excellent survey of the political response to the core issues discussed in this chapter, from land rights to reconciliation, see Robert Tickner, Taking a Stand (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001).
