By Craig Cormick
SAM WATSON is an Aboriginal activist, writer and manager of the Brisbane Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Legal Service. He recently talked to CRAIG CORMICK.
You were recently a guest at the Sydney Writers' Festival. What were some of the key issues covered there?
There were workshops I played a part in that dealt with the recording of indigenous histories. The Aboriginal speakers and the Aboriginal people who were in the audience were very strong on the need for Aboriginal people to play a forward part in the recording of our own history so that our culture isn't hijacked by white academics, as it has been in the past.
Concerning deaths in custody, what's the current awareness? Has there been a dying down in awareness since the big media coverage of it?
Yes. The impetus has certainly been lost. Again, this appears to be contrived by our political leaders. During the taking of evidence by the royal commission, the presentation of the report and the national response by the federal government and the state responses, the political leadership of the black community seems to have been locked out of the process.
So genuine black political concerns didn't come forward and weren't embodied in the reports or the recommendations. The recommendations were largely doctored and delivered by people who weren't involved in the front line day-to-day activities of places such as black legal services.
In the aftermath, again it has been front-line agencies such as the legal services that have attempted to maintain pressure upon police services and corrective services and institutions right around Australia to implement the recommendations.
Even though we've always believed that the recommendations didn't go far enough, they're still a vehicle. We believe that if we can at least gain a broad commitment to those recommendations, then a lot more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people may survive custodial sentences within institutions and may survive short-term sentences in watch-houses.
There's been a lot of work at the coal face by people like the Queensland Legal Services and agencies such as Murri Watch in Queensland. Again, unfortunately, the Australian public and the media appear to be rather fickle in their attention spans, so unless there is a death in custody each week, it is not an issue any more. In one way that's very good, of course, but in another way it's allowing all the deaths in custody over the last 10 to 20 years to still go absolutely unanswered and unresolved.
Of the 99 deaths that were examined by the royal commission, in not one of those deaths was a police officer or a custodial correctional officer charged or even disciplined. And since the report came down in 1990, there have been a further 65 Aboriginal deaths in custody, which is absolutely unacceptable.
There has also been a tendency by government institutions to put their snouts into the trough and compete for the royal commission funds. And we've seen the police services and correctional services agencies also competing with front-line services such as the legal services for desperately short funds.
How much funds were made available initially?
There have been a number of papers on just exactly where the funds went, but the first stage of the address to the royal commission recommendations was completely administered by the Attorney General's Department. I think $150 million went out in that first stage, which lasted from 18 months to two years.
After that the federal government delegated to ATSIC to administer the royal commission funds. So it will be a nightmare to actually estimate what the dollar amount was, or where those moneys flowed to, because a lot of state governments actively competed for those funds and then they disappeared into particular departments.
But I can also say that the flow of money to the legal services has been an absolute trickle. The legal services right around Australia have put in bids consistently for increased funding to address royal commission recommendations — particularly interested in areas of preventive work such as young people, and preventive work with Aboriginal and Islander people in custodial institutions and family groups.
Unfortunately, we are being funded only to provide bread and butter responses. We are not being funded to be out there in the community and to undertake long-term preventive work, which is essentially where all the attention should be focused.
That covers an issue of representation by non-Aboriginal people of deaths in custody. In literature traditionally, non-Aboriginal people have been the ones who have written about Aboriginal issues. Do you think that has largely hijacked the way that Aboriginals are portrayed In literature? What needs to be done to seize that initiative back?
White writers can only portray Aboriginal characters as a very flat two-dimensional product. Only black writers know of and are sensitive to the Aboriginal spiritual dimension. That spiritual dimension is the absolute core of the Aboriginal reality. Without being at least aware or sensitive to that spiritual dimension, white writers couldn't even approach any sort of understanding of what goes on behind that Aboriginal mask, because Aboriginal people since day one of European settlement have worn a mask in order to survive. Chiefly urban Aboriginal people have to wear masks in order to not allow their frustrations and anger and sense of enormous despair to dominate them.
Only Aboriginal people know how to feel this. Only Aboriginal women know what it's like to be raped by a white boss. Only Aboriginal prisoners know what it's like to be produced by a society over which they have no control or no real positive input — courts over which they have no control or sense of input — and a foreign and alien legal system that has been foisted upon us by force of arms. We have no power and no sense of control.
Do you think that more Aboriginal media services — publishing, radio, television, magazines, whatever — help promote the message of what Aboriginality is about, or does it form a separateness?
In those places where there are major Aboriginal communities, in places like the Territory, Western Australia, South Australia, there are very high standard, competitive media services that do provide very effective support systems for their own communities. Unfortunately, in urban areas — and that's the only area I really feel comfortable talking about — Aboriginal people make up a very small percentage of the overall population, and Aboriginal radio, for example, is novel, but is never going to convince one particular electorate to return on Aboriginal member to state or federal parliament.
Aboriginal people still have very limited economic power. In Brisbane, for example, there are probably about 50,000 registered businesses within the central business district, and not one of those businesses is owned or operated by Aboriginal people.
We do not have one Aboriginal company listed on the stock exchange. Aboriginal people have no political or economic power because of our small numbers.
There has been quite a renaissance recently of Aboriginal art. There can be more pride in Aboriginal culture, but is there a danger that it could get hijacked out of Aboriginal hands?
There is a danger of that being hijacked. The Aboriginal artists need the money in order to survive, and I'm pleased they can use their skills in order to enrich themselves — good luck to them.
But it's probably our most cherished and enduring sense of self expressed in our art, and to see that art used on tea towels is a bit sad.
It's also projecting a negative stereotype. Prior to the 50s and 60s people thought of an Aboriginal warrior standing naked with a spear and a kangaroo over one shoulder — now that's changing. [But] we're not producing a broad range of positive stereotypes. So there is a need for Aboriginal people to offer their younger generation positive and broad stereotypes that show it is possible to survive within this society without compromising yourself or your ideals.