The Unlucky Australians
By Frank Hardy
One Day Hill, 2006
$24.95
Faced with mounting gambling debts, a tenuous family life, and a frustrating case of writer's block, Australian novelist and communist Frank Hardy sought to escape from Sydney for a while in 1966. He hitchhiked his way the few thousand kilometres to Darwin — a town where race relations bore the unmistakable signs of semi-official apartheid. It was in the Northern Territory where Hardy hoped "to have another look at Australia, to get some strength out of the earth", and "to think about what I'm going to write next".
The Unlucky Australians was the eventual product of Hardy's search for political and artistic inspiration. The book is a long-neglected classic of Australian social commentary that compellingly denounces the most long-lived and unshakable characteristic of the Australian nation-state: racism towards Indigenous Australians.
The historic Wave Hill strike of the Gurindji people that began in 1966 — a strike that inspired the rise of the modern land-rights movement — forms the centerpiece of The Unlucky Australians. Hardy's account combines the viewpoint of a chronicler, a supporter and an active participant in this campaign against entrenched racial discrimination.
'You know how to fight?'
Dispirited by ongoing factional conflicts within the Communist Party, Hardy was at first reluctant to play any political role in Darwin. But soon after he arrived he was sought out by a young Aboriginal leader and former organiser for the North Australian Workers Union, Dexter Daniels.
Daniels told Hardy that he was building towards a strike by Aboriginal cattlehands and stockmen across the NT. Aboriginal workers at the remote Newcastle Waters station had already walked off, demanding wages and treatment equal to white employees. He told Hardy, "the only hope my people have is to fight. The right way is to strike on more stations."
Aboriginal men and women were preparing for action as news of the Newcastle Waters strike spread across the vast outback through word of mouth. Daniels revealed that other stations were only waiting for him to arrive before also walking off. He put it to Hardy: "What you reckon about that? I read in the paper you write books about them rich fellas. You know how to fight?"
The idea was a daring one, destined to pit the Northern Territory Aborigines against the arch-conservative federal Menzies government, the influential pastoral industry and the much hated "Welfare" — the misnamed government department responsible for controlling innumerable aspects of Aboriginal lives.
Hardy could see that these powerful bastions of White Australia would fiercely resist all Aboriginal demands for equality. But now he had been asked to play his part, Hardy knew he couldn't simply walk away from the looming struggle.
He wrote: "There was a time when I would intervene if a shopping mother slapped her tired children on the street. Now I could turn my back on the horror of Vietnam because White Australia disgusted me with its complacency, its racism, its philistinism. White Australia could go to hell by its own road. But White Australia's greatest crime was its debasements of the Aborigines. Those near them didn't care; those far from them didn't want to know. Well let White Australia beware. The NT Aborigines are ready to stand; and I would stand and be counted with them."
'We help oursel' now'
Discussions with other Aboriginal activists and their white supporters followed and soon Hardy was ready to help launch a national solidarity campaign for the strikers. He played a key role on building support for the Aboriginal cause in the southern trade union movement. He was also a prominent and provocative advocate for the strikers' cause in both the mainstream media and socialist press.
An important feature of the book is the space Hardy allows those leading the strikes to outline their aims and goals in their own words. A series of recorded interviews with Aboriginal leaders helped Hardy himself gain a deeper understanding of the cultural and political motivations behind the militant actions.
Gurindji man Lupgna Giari was the leader of the Newcastle Waters strike. He became a nationally known spokesperson for the NT Aborigines after a speaking tour in the southern states initiated by Hardy. For Giari, the walk-offs were certainly sparked by unequal wages and unfair treatment. But they also reflected the long-held desire of Aborigines to win full control over their own affairs.
When Giari first demanded station management pay equal wages, the reply he received was: "I can't pay you equal money until the court and the other bosses say so." Giari responded, "That's not bin my fault. We finish up now. We all walking off. All of us. No more work."
Giari explained to Hardy that the local "Welfare" officer then tried to convince him to call the strike off. "He said, 'You are stupid to go on strike. The Union is poor and the cattlemen are rich.' He asked me for the names of all the people there and he said him help we if we go back to work. And I told him, 'You Welfare had plenty chance to help us before. It's too late now. We help oursel' now."
In the beginning Hardy and the other white supporters were focused solely on the wages issue. But the Aboriginal strikers themselves were increasingly preoccupied with preserving their cultural identity, securing rights to their traditional lands and winning the right to determine their affairs free from government or corporate interference.
In the face of threats from "Welfare" and the racist hostility of many white Territorians, the Gurindji remained determined to act to solve their problems. After station management refused demands to pay equal wages, provide decent housing and act against rapes of Aboriginal women by whites, Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari led his people off the huge Vestey's corporation owned Wave Hill station. The Wave Hill strikers proceeded to establish a permanent place of their own at Wattie Creek. They named their new home Dagaragu.
Lingiari took Hardy to see the new settlement. "I have seen men proud of great achievements in art and science on all the continents, but never such pride as this", Hardy wrote. "No millionaire could be as proud of a new mansion as they were of these crude structures. They seemed to be thinking: We have built them with our own labour, our own timber, on our own land, without any white man telling us how."
It was 10 years before the Gurindji finally won a limited legal recognition as the traditional owners of their land. But despite this important victory, the ultimate political aims expressed by the strikers have remained unrealised. The refusal of subsequent governments to meet these demands has ensured that Indigenous people continue to be the most marginalised section of the Australian population.
The Howard government's much criticised campaign (albeit fully supported by the ALP) to remove the last vestiges of land rights and self-determination in the Northern Territory is more than a cynical election ploy. It represents a long-term goal of Australia's ruling elites — especially those closely connected to the mining and pastoral industries — to wind the clock backwards and recycle the old, discredited laws fought against by the Gurindji and others in decades past.
Denial of land rights, withholding of Aboriginal welfare payments and government intrusion in Aboriginal affairs are anything but new ideas in this country. They have a long and shameful history. The insulting paternalism of the Howard/Rudd agenda for Aboriginal Australia reeks of what Hardy described 40 years ago as "the very essence of white supremacy".