By Liam Mitchell
ADELAIDE — A seminar here on September 8 raised a number of doubts and reservations in the Aboriginal community about the government-sponsored reconciliation process. The 50 participants were told that there are concerns that the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) was a government tool and lacked any focus on land rights.
The seminar was organised by the University of South Australia's Faculty of Aboriginal and Islander Studies and the WEA Adult Education Centre.
Faculty dean Professor Colin Bourke outlined relations between Aborigines and white society and governments — an alternative history to the glossy publication put out by CAR and the Prime Minister's Department.
Bourke said that white invasion had raised issues of land ownership, culture, development, progress, human rights and law, none of which have yet been resolved. It was a little-known fact that fierce resistance had been put up by Aborigines to invasion for 150 years, a conspiracy of silence that was only just being broken.
He mentioned events such as the 19th century march on the Victorian Parliament House that was not admitted because many of the marchers were women and women were not permitted inside parliament.
In 1837, John Macarthur and the NSW attorney general called for a treaty to counter injustices to the Aboriginal people.
In 1975, parliament passed a resolution by Aboriginal Senator Neville Bonner recognising prior ownership and the duty for compensation. In 1983, ALP policy was to continue developing recognition of the need for a treaty.
By 1988, the government had committed itself to a treaty. However, this was dropped by Prime Minister Bob Hawke.
Lawyer Ribnga Green, head of department at the faculty, went through the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and detailed some of the criticisms of the process. He said that while Aboriginal Affairs minister Robert Tickner talked about social justice and reform, in reality the council was set up following the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody with no mandate from the Aboriginal community and the power only to make recommendations to government.
Green said that there were criticisms of the process and the approach of going through the courts to achieve sovereignty from sectors of the leadership of the Aboriginal rights movement. He said that Aboriginal experience was diverse between various communities and that tribal Aborigines are becoming victims of political wheeling and dealing by white and black politicians and are being left out of the debate, which is conducted in legalistic terms.
The director of the Aboriginal Research Institute of the USA, Eleanor Bourke, detailed the make-up of the reconciliation council and outlined her problems with it.
She emphasised that this was a process of community education — specifically the white community — and that none of the council's members are from the education sector.
CAR, she said, was a non-Aboriginal recommendation to the government. She questioned whether the subcommittees set up by the council — mining, rural, industry and consultative — were Aboriginal priorities.
The council is composed of up to 25 members chosen for three-year terms. Twelve of these must be Aboriginal and two Torres Strait Islanders.
The members include the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission chairperson and deputy chairperson, and one person each nominated by the opposition and other non-opposition or government parties of at least five members. The minister appoints the rest.
Eleanor Bourke said that this fitted very much into the role of the bureaucracy in the process. Along with the media, the legal industry and the top level public servants, the bureaucracy is very much controlling the agenda.
She stressed that any form of sovereignty would necessarily entail education of Aboriginal people in their own languages and culture and would raise the question of who represented the Aboriginal people.
She also said that the question of sovereignty cannot stop with land rights, but must also take up what economic means the people will have after they have regained access to their land.