I was busy unpacking my gear over the weekend, and discovered an interesting photocopy I made when sifting through files at the State Library of Victoria a few years ago. In the 1960s, in a fit of liberal fervour following the 1967 referendum, Aboriginal Affairs throughout Australia were given a shake-up. As part of this watershed in Australian approaches to their minorities, including migrants, old bastions of colonialism like 'Protection Boards', 'Welfare Boards' and Church Missions were phased out and replaced with modern bureaucracies.
Anyhow, in Victoria, this took the form of the 'Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs', which was charged with getting Aboriginal people into housing and generally taking care of their welfare. In 1971 this Ministry produced an annual report, the cover of which I was forced to photocopy for a permanent poster. It hung there in my office in Melbourne for the entire time I lived in Carlton, but it was only yesterday that I remembered why it did so.
The picture is of two boys (and no, that's not the reason...), one white and one black, both sitting on some steps. The white kid is maybe 10, very clean-cut, and wears nifty little socks and sandals. His hair is blonde, and he rests his chin on his hand while talking to the other boy. The Aboriginal boy is the same age, but kinda scruffy. He has bare feet and a woolly jumper, he's scratching his head and has this look on his face like 'what you talking about Willis?'
The caption attached to the picture said:
This non-Aboriginal boy in deep discussion with his Aboriginal friend at Lake Tyers, Victoria, has accepted naturally the concept so many adults find so hard: Aborigines are, first of all, people.
That is essentially the message of this Ministry.
Now, I'd always kept the picture because I thought it summed up the mainstream perception of 'intercultural dialogue', so the note was a bit of a surprise.
I mean, 'first of all, people'??
In combination with an blog-comment-exchange I'd been having over at Troppo Armadillo last week the quote really jumped out at me.
I know that you're all probably bored with hearing me rant about the way things are over in Australia, but believe me, the anger faded a long time ago, only to be replaced with a kind of mystification at the way minorities are perceived. 'People'?? Of course Aboriginals are people, but there was a conventional wisdom floating round in the 1800s that they were little more than 'naked savages', and not the noble kind. And being naked does wonders to contribute to anyone's reputation for being a 'savage', or uncivilised.
After all, it was when they woke up to their nudity that Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden, right?
Personally? On a good warm day I like nothing better than letting my flab hang out to tan. Yup, there's that pasty white manflesh again 'ladies'. Grrr, tiger.
Anyhow, the comment exchange centred on the way in which current Australian law prevents some groups from being able to claim native title over land if they haven't had a ongoing relationship to it. That is, a relationship prior to and since colonisation.
The main problem with this is that if an Aboriginal group was removed from their traditional area for any reason, for instance in order for them to be incarcerated, the traditional link was broken. The obvious problem then is that most all of NSW, Queensland and Victoria forcibly removed their Aboriginal people. So, no ability to claim back Crown lands under the Native Title Act 1993.
But, in the case of Victoria, after an unsuccessful claim by the Yorta Yorta people for Crown lands (in the form of the Barmah State Park), a compromise joint-custodial arrangement was negotiated with the State Government. A good outcome for all. The Crown in the form of the Bracks Government gets to save face, and Yorta Yorta get an interest in the lands.
A comment that popped up on Troppo Armadillo was that this type of thing should happen more often to solve the native title impasse, and that the money spent on the Court cases would have been better spent to simply buy land for Aboriginal claimants.
Well, the response to this was muted, but only by the 'academic' nature of the website. In a nutshell, opposition ranged from statements of the undesirability of granting 'productive land' to Aboriginal people, who obviously can't farm, to statements about the need to forget all that and just assimilate a 'stone-age culture'. Again, not shocked, just mystified. I should also mention that the pro-comments were also a little disturbing, with some readers still maintaining outright weird ideas about the perfection and nobility of the pre-colonial Aboriginal lifestyles.
What amazes me is the level of stereotyping, negative and positive that is carried about Aboriginal people. It goes back to that picture, with the reasonable and tidy white boy talking to an 'obviously stupid' black kid who just doesn't get it. Besides the natural parallels with the way some see Maori, it's amazing that in the Twenty-First Century people can still think that just because Aboriginals used to live with stone age technology that they are still stone age.
Naturally this story is larger than just the comment exchange, I walked away when the level of bigotry both left and right got too much for me, but it once again reinforces the problem of intercultural dialogue and how important it is to ensure that minorities have a voice. Without it, you end up with well-meaning and/or ill-meaning majority people coming up with the most bizarre information about minorities and their place in the world. A good situation for no-one.