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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