The Massacres.

By Jani Roberts - Adapted from her book "Massacres to Mining: the colonization of Aborginal Australia." and from the book she is now completing, "Gltter and Greed".

It was hard to persuade the BBC television crew for the 'Everyman' series to take him seriously. They looked askance when I sought space for him in the BBC car - and gave it grudgingly as a favor to me. Nipper Tapagee was an old man with diseased eyes with well worn clothes and a battered bag. He had met myself and the television crew when we arrived at the small dusty airport in Derby in the Kimberleys in the remote North West of Australia. But how could I convince them that Nipper's presence was a great honour, that he was a great Elder , the 'Dreamer' of Noonkanbah, who could open Aboriginal doors for us throughout the region?

He had on my previous visit to the region taken me on a jolting drive across a dried river bed between dry season pools, where fresh water crocodiles sometimes lived, to a rocky hill called Djada. He told me his people once gathered here for ceremonies and asked me to follow as he climbed it. The hill was small, not the height of a tree. About half way up he stopped by the mouth of a cave.

'Look, Jan', he said, 'can you see the bones?' I peered into the cave, momentarily blinded by the bright light outside. But when my eyes adjusted I saw long white bones inside. 'These are the bones of my people shot down by a police party when I was this high'. He indicated his thigh. Then, without a sign of bitterness, he quietly told me how a diamond exploration company had recently pegged and claimed the entire hill, entering the cave and taking the very sacred ceremonial objects stored inside. Some of these had been destroyed by the prospectors, some were taken to Melbourne and were later retrieved by Noonkanbah. 4

This was not the only burial ground desecrated on Noonkanbah. Aboriginal elder, 'Friday' Mullamulla, pointing to the potentially diamond rich plains around their settlement, had said, 'That is all CRA.[RTZ - a British mining company].. they bring bulldozer about two miles back down that way... They cut all the way around all dead bodies. All around that place where we have taken the bones of the old people.' ii The Aboriginal people of Noonkanbah had sent a petition to the State Parliament written on bark and in Walmajeri, their language. In translation it read:

'We are sending this letter to you important people who can speak and who are now sitting down there talking in the big house. We, Aboriginal people of Noonkanbah Station, are sending you this letter. We truthfully beg you important people that you stop these people, namely CRA and AMAX (who were looking for oil), who are going into our land..

These people have already made the place no good with their bulldozers. Our sacred places they have made no good. They mess up our land. They expose our sacred objects. This breaks our spirit. We lose ourselves as a people. What will we as a people do if these people continue to make all our land no good? Today we beg you that you that you truly stop them.' iii

On reflection, the elders decided they could not trust CRA to leave after prospecting if they found significant numbers of diamonds. It would surely bring in many more white people. They also noted with alarm that CRA had notified the government that it was also searching for uranium. It was time for legal action. Once they had decided to withdraw their consent to CRA's prospecting, Nipper Tabigee and other elders took me with them to Derby in an old car with no windscreen. After we arrived, windblown and dust covered, they told their lawyer to evict CRA and made the following statement:

'CRA, we have been thinking about you looking on our land. You say you only look at one part of our station then go away again after three weeks. But we say, after talking some more between ourselves, we don't want you because, if you find something up there, you may come more and more onto our land and we don't want that. Also you didn't tell us you also looking for uranium - that stuff dangerous for everyone.' 6

Following this, the Kimberley Land Council asked me to stay on as its guest to visit other communities. the lawmakers at all Aboriginal camps. They told us they were not against mining as such, for their people had always mined for tool-stones and clays, but wanted miners to respect the spirit of the land and Aboriginal ancestral rights.

The impoverishment they had suffered through loss of land had caused their health to grievously deteriorate. Instead of living into their 70s, as they did before whites arrived, now their life expectancy was that of the poverty stricken inhabitants of 'third world' countries. One in four of their elders was blinded by trachoma. An Aboriginal mother in northern Australia in 1994 was 30 times more likely to die in childbirth than a white woman. Her child was 3 times more likely to die in the first year of life than the child of a white Australiani. The discovery of diamonds on tribal lands should have brought them the income needed to ameliate living conditions. Instead it further endangered their survival as a people by depriving them of yet more land and by swamping them with white settlers.

Soon afterwards two white lawyers came up from Perth to speak to the elders at Noonkanbah about their decision to expel CRA. I was asked by the community to attend the same meeting. The lawyers spoke to the community on the benefits that mining could bring, including a mining township populated by Aborigines and many jobs for Aborigines. They did not mention that to date few Aborigines had been given responsible jobs in Australian mines , nor that the common experience of Aborigines living near mines, especially CRA's many mines, is of dispossession and powerlessness.

The elders then asked me to repeat what I had previously told them about the effects of diamond mining. I told them that miners normally scooped out the heart of a diamond rich extinct volcano by digging a pit at least a kilometre wide and perhaps 200 metres deep with shafts below this to 800 metres, and that the surrounding plains could be bull-dozed to find diamonds washed out by monsoonal rains. The discussion then continued in the Walmjeri language. Nipper Tabigee translated quietly for me. No one translated for the lawyers. I was then told the community had decided to maintain their ban on CRA. The lawyers were told to do nothing until they heard from the community.

The lawyers asked me to meet with them privately in a vast woolshed out of sight and hearing of the Aborigines, where they furiously questioned what right I had to give these Aborigines any advice. They angrily reminded me that I had no official standing with any government body. The lawyers said they knew I was going on to Oombulgurri and made unspecified threats about what would happen to me when I got there. But for the life of me, I did not expect they might persuade the federal and state governments to move against me. (The story of what did happen when I went to Oombulgurri will be in my forthcoming book "Glitter and Greed")

Some months after I left Noonkanbah, the tribal elders of Noonkanbah once more directly challenged the State government. They wrote to the government on June 9th, 1980. 'You assumed we recognize the State Government's ownership of the land. Instead of this you should have recognized us, the Elders who hold the law for this country, as the real owners of the land.' iv

Premier Court replied in the West Australian newspaper:' 'I do not believe that such radical and unlawful views are really theirs.' He spoke of 'the extremist agitation began which led the community to make absurd claims amounting to sovereignty over the crown land they occupy as pastoral leaseholders.' v Fortunately as the Noonkanbah station was leasehold and not Aboriginal reserve land, he could not ban them from having visitors.

Shortly after the Premier made this statement, advertisements funded by the mining industry appeared on television showing a black hand building a wall across Western Australia accompanied by a voiceover claiming that Aboriginal land rights would rob other (white) Australians of their birthright. The Australian Mining Industry Council also warned that Aboriginal land rights could lead to 'a system of unauthorized totalitarian control by a minority within particular parts of Australia.' 9 The miners were at the forefront of the campaign contesting Aboriginal rights to tribal lands because the Aborigines mainly now lived on barren lands not wanted by graziers but where mineral rich rocks were exposed for the taking.

But Charles Court and his government could not see very far into the future. In 1992 a revolutionary High Court decision in the Mabo case, supported by six out of the seven judges involved, stated that Aboriginal 'native rights' to crown lands still existed as the British authorities had presumed to take over Aboriginal lands without making a formal order of dispossession by right of conquest. Only the lands given away as freehold or , it seems, leasehold, by the Crown could not be regained. Aborigines under this ruling immediately laid claim to vast tracts of unalienated crown land.

In 1993, the new Premier, Richard Court (the son of the Charles Court) vowed to fight this landmark High Court ruling by all the means available. The Australian Mining Industry Council, funded by all the major mining companies, united with him in opposition. Its members feared having to pay royalties to the tribes and having to protect sacred places. The Kimberley Land Council became once more locked in legal battle on behalf of the impoverished people they represented. The war still continues as I write in 1996. (PS. And in 2000 the struggle for justicee still continued.)

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