"Native title is going to be Australia's single defining issue", Aboriginal writer, activist and film-maker SAM WATSON told a February 7 Brisbane meeting. "It will be the crucible in which this nation is forged, or the holocaust in which Australia self-destructs and disappears forever." Following is an abridged version of Watson's speech.
Native title is a multi-faceted stone and different people see different faces. It is interpreted by the political leadership representing farmers and miners as the greatest threat to their continued exploitation of this land and its rich resources.
To the political leadership that purports to represent all indigenous interests, native title is perhaps the final barricade to fight for black liberation.
On the sidelines there are many spectators.
Those who actively support the indigenous cause are not fighting on a single, narrow front. Those people believe that for this nation to develop as a caring and just place we must first have a settlement with the traditional owners of this land and a recognition of their rights and their special relationship with the land. We cannot go forward before we come to terms with our past — both pre-1770 and post-1778.
Those championing farmers' and miners' right to untrammelled and unsupervised access to all national lands and territories have presented their claim as an accomplished right. Questioning or restricting that right draws immediate accusations of treason and corrupt self-interest. Only professional politicians and those dependent on farming or mining for their individual lifestyles have stood up to defend their side of the debate.
The overwhelming majority of ordinary Australians do recognise and sincerely support the rights of indigenous people to their traditional lands.
Into this debate we welcome a new and authoritative voice. Brisbane writer Martin Taylor's small book, Bludgers in Grass Castles: Native title and the unpaid debts of the pastoral industry explores native title from a number of different perspectives. I found it fresh, accurate and compelling.
He examines the history of the white invasion and its impact on the indigenous tribes. Before white settlement there were 500 separate tribes living and working on the Australian continent. Each tribe was a complete and autonomous entity with its own language and system of civil administration, and had been allocated an inalienable land area featuring its unique dreamings and mysteries.
In a matter of decades, more than 75% of the mainland tribes and 99% of the Tasmanian peoples had been slaughtered. Indigenous people were removed from their traditional lands so the whites could have total access for their precious livestock and so the mining interests could move in and search for minerals and precious stones.
Aboriginal peoples have never recovered from that onslaught. Taylor examines how the white power structure continued to remove the tribal peoples so they could not slow the march of white progress.
Taylor looks closely at Queensland, in particular, and the massive, illegal land grab carried out by farming and pastoral interests. The Murri tribes mounted a passionate defence of their lands but they were outnumbered and helpless in the face of white technology that could kill effectively and from great distances. For every one white man who fell to a black spear, more than 50 black men, women and children were slaughtered in retribution.
Black survivors were used as a pool of cheap labour by farmers and pastoralists. Blacks did not cost money: they could be paid in flour, sugar and blankets. The rural barons refused to pay equal wages to black workers until the mid-1970s when they were forced into court by the joint efforts of the trade unions and Aboriginal legal services.
Many pastoralists then chose to evict blacks from the stations rather than pay equal wages, consequently forcing a generation of Aboriginal people on to the urban fringes.
Taylor looks at the destruction of Aboriginal heritage, the crimes against humanity and the brutal exploitation of the natural environment. As an ecologist, he has a particular interest in how white farmers and pastoralists have used powerful chemicals to change the natural environment for their own short-term ends. His words are a wake-up call to us all that every day these lethal poisons are pumped into our soils and the animals we consume so that profit margins can be expanded.
It is citizens' and taxpayers' right and duty to scrutinise the pastoral industry and ask what the long-term legacies will be. Taylor points out in alarming detail the extent of taxpayer support for the pastoral industry through subsidies, special interest rates and grants that prop up an industry that is no longer commercially viable. He looks at alternatives like kangaroo farming.
When the farmers and miners are urging the federal government to fight an early election on the issue of race, this book presents us with a factual and authoritative viewpoint that explores the human and environmental dimensions of native title. My only criticism is that it is too short.
Taylor is not a ratbag or a traitor, but a person who is concerned about this land and his fellow Australians. I feel very privileged to launch this book.
[Use the order form below to obtain copies of Bludgers in Grass Castles.]