Dave Riley
Palm Island is 70 kilometres north-west of Townsville. The Indigenous settlement was established in 1918 after a cyclone blew away the Hull River reserve near Tully.
While it was one of the last settlements to be created under the draconian Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act of 1897, Palm Island was established with a clear purpose in mind.
The location was seen as an ideal place to confine Aboriginal and Islander people who were regarded as "problem cases" and as uncontrollable on other reserves where the state's Indigenous population had been herded. Others sent there were the single mothers of mixed-race children and criminals recently released from prison. Over the next two decades some 1600 people from 40 different Aboriginal groups across Queensland were removed by the state government and dumped on the island.
The residents of Palm Island were subject to strict supervision. No-one was allowed to leave without the superintendent's permission and then only under supervision. Absconders were captured by the police and returned. Relatives and friends needed permission to visit. Mail was vetted and a nightly curfew imposed. Speaking Aboriginal languages was forbidden. Employment opportunities were limited and the wages earned by Indigenous workers were "managed" and misappropriated by the Aboriginal affairs department.
In 1957, the Palm Island workforce demonstrated and threatened strike action when their wages were cut. In response, the Queensland government dispatched 20 police and a patrol boat to put the rebellion down. Seven men and their families were shipped off the island in leg irons and transported to settlements on the mainland. In 1974, only one of the 1200 workers on the island received an award wage. A second strike that year erupted when the government sacked the local community council and threatened to turn control of the island over to Townsville city municipality. By 1980, there were 99 people for each wage earner on Palm Island with an average of almost 12 people in each house.
Formal state control over the island was relinguished in 1985 when title was passed to the community council in the form of a DOGIT (Deed of Grant in Trust). While the DOGIT reforms gave residents on all state reserves a greater say in their administration, on Palm Island the changes led to the removal of much of the government infrastructure. Houses, shops, a timber mill, a dock and farming equipment were disassembled and shipped to the mainland.
Most of the few businesses now on the island are owned by non-Indigenous people. Those with jobs either work for the Palm Island Council, the two schools or the hospital. The biggest money earners on the island are the supermarket, still under state government ownership, and the "canteen" selling alcohol, run by the council. As the council's adviser Don Peachy has pointed out: 'They left us with the pub, the biggest revenue raiser for the council, and the source of the community's self-destruction." The current Indigenous population of the island is around 2,000. Unemployment is 88%.
For most of its history, Palm Island has functioned as a place of secondary incarceration, employed by successive state governments as the final solution to ongoing Indigenous problems. The Palm Island community carries the burden of the island's history and represents, as local Murri activist Les Malezer has stated, "the epitome of oppression of our people by the Queensland colonial and state governments".
From Green Left Weekly, December 15, 2004.
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