1. Picture of history too black and white (The Australian, 4/3/94)
2. We need a closer look at the stolen children (SMH, 5/3/98)
3. The perils of self-determination (SMH, 12/12/98)
4. A black mark against white parasites (SMH, 27/11/99)
5. Time to bury the stolen myth forever (SMH, 6/4/00)
6. Sorry, I can’t walk (SMH, 27/5/00)

1.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Picture of history too black and white,”
The Australian, March 4, 1994, p. 13.

Since we are now well into the decade leading to the celebration of the centenary of federation, there are quite a few milestones to be commemorated along the way. So far none of these seems to explicitly involve our Aboriginal population.

But this is in part due to the popular myth that, until recently, Aborigines had no rights, were the victims of a continual campaign of genocide and had been totally ignored as citizens, actual and potential. This is untrue; the picture is much more complex.

As Professor Henry Reynolds has established quite convincingly, it was never really the intention of the original settlers (who were not in any genuine sense “invaders”) or their sponsors, the British government, to deprive the native population of land rights. There were, of course, immense problems of mutual incomprehension.

There were also subsequent problems of the inevitable clash between settlers, struggling against an unfamiliar and totally unfriendly (as they saw it) environment, and the indigenes. Always there was the attempt, often unsuccessful, of the colonial authorities to impose the rule of law on the situation. In addition, there was inevitably an independence movement (not unrelated to our modern republican movement) which was fed by a desire to be free of the restraints of civilisation and the legal penalties for maltreatment of Aborigines insisted upon by the Crown in London.

Despite the undoubted maltreatment of the indigenous population, it was never universally believed that they had no rights. Indeed, in many parts of Australia they were always assumed to have the right to vote, even if they rarely exercised it.

One of the most notable occasions on which this right was exercised was in 1896, when at Point McLeay in South Australia, an Aboriginal settlement near the mouth of the Murray River, the residents had their own polling station with more than 100 people on the electoral roll, of whom more than 70 per cent voted. This would be an appropriate occasion for a centennial celebration. (I am drawing heavily here, as also from now on, on a publication of the Old Parliament House of South Australia, a division of that State’s History Trust, the research for which was done by Pat Stretton and Christine Finnimore. But don’t blame them for my interpretations.)

Section 41 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia says that “no adult person who has or acquires a right to vote at elections for the more numerous House of the Parliament of a State shall, while the right continues, be prevented by any law of the Commonwealth from voting at elections for either House of the Parliament of the Commonwealth.”

At the time of federation, four out of the six States allowed Aborigines the right to vote; however, this was only exercised in South Australia. The reasons for excluding Aborigines from the census count (which was reversed by the 1967 referendum) was not to exclude them from voting, but to prevent States coercing nomadic populations to move around and settle in order to boost their own representation in Parliament.

The reason for not simply giving every adult the vote at Federation was that each State wanted to keep control of its own franchise. The Commonwealth gave women the vote in 1902, but did not think it necessary to do so for Aborigines.

Probably the bad news for the Aborigines was when the Commonwealth first introduced compulsory registration (1911) and compulsory voting (1924). The former measure had immense influence all over the world and is the basis of the United States’s system of primary votes for party candidates. Unfortunately, the latter came in the dreadful period of Australian history following World War I, when the whole community was in trauma. It was (and remains) a corrupt party measure.

The person who caused the trouble was that hero of federal history, Robert Garran.

During the 1902 debates on the franchise, the great Sir Isaac Isaacs said: “If it is ever desired by one or more of the States to invest Aboriginals within their territory with the franchise … they will come under section 41 of the Constitution which then gives them the right to vote for the Federal Parliament.”

Garran, secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department, advised electoral officials of the very narrow interpretation he and John Quick, his co-author of The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, advocated: that section 41 was a purely temporary provision with no force. (Unlike other temporary provisions, however, it did not include a phrase such as “until the Parliament otherwise provides”.)

So, progressively, after 1924 Aborigines were deprived of the vote by administrative fiat of the bureaucrats. In that year a magistrate ruled that under section 41 an Indian, who was of course in those days a British subject and who demanded the right to vote, did indeed have it. The Commonwealth lodged an appeal to the High Court and then dropped it lest it fail; instead, an Act was passed giving the vote to Indians, of whom at the time there were very few in Australia.

Garran advised the commonwealth electoral officer that the ruling on Aborigines’ right to vote should not be changed. Thereafter, things deteriorated even though protests from those who actually read what the Constitution said began to emerge. The nadir of the whole business was reached in 1983 when the High Court — with the single dissent of the late Lionel Murphy, who said that section 41 should be accepted to mean what it actually and clearly said — adopted Garran’s racist interpretation.

Probably it was the shame, on cooler reflection, of this decision which led to the eventual success of the Mabo case in 1992. (Three of the four judges who voted against Aborigines in 1983 were in the majority who voted for the Mabo decision in 1992.)

The important message of all this, however, is that our history of the treatment of the Aborigines is not uniformly shameful and that there were always people in our polity who accepted that Aborigines should have the full right to vote and equality of citizenship.

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2.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “We need a closer look at the stolen children,” The Sydney Morning Herald, March 5, 1998, p. 17.

Amnesty International was once an organisation which did valuable work on human rights and prisoners of conscience all over the world. But in later years it has changed its role to that of propagandist and little more.

There has been only one genuine prisoner of conscience in Australia in recent year, and that was Albert Langer, who was sent to jail during the last Federal election campaign for insisting on informing people how they could vote formally but without distributing preferences to candidates they did not like (the 1,2,2 method). I do not recall Amnesty being at the forefront of his defenders.

Yesterday, the National Indigenous Working Group, whose faith in free speech goes so far as its recent silencing of Fr Frank Brennan, wheeled out an Amnesty luminary, Dr Heinz Schurmann-Zeggel, who is supposed to know something about human rights issues in Australia, to support its campaign against the Government, a campaign about which a man of such high principle as Brennan has serious reservations. Schurmann-Zeggel is here to promote a report on the inadequacies of the Government’s response to the Human Rights Commission’s “stolen children” report.

Probably he has read that report. It is doubtful, however, whether he has familiarised himself with the concerns about the truthfulness of the report which account for the unwillingness of the Government, and many others, to leap to support its positions on every aspect of this issue.

At the very least before asserting that the Government is doing the wrong thing, the Amnesty representative ought to read the most thorough critique of the report so far, anthropologist Ron Brunton’s “backgrounder” published by the Institute of Public Affairs, “Betraying the Victims”. Of course, Brunton has already been attacked because of the politics of the IPA and his work for the mining industry. It seems that anthropologists who refuse to accept the professional bias and fads of the academic anthropologists should live on the dole.

In summary, Brunton takes apart the “stolen children” report, Bringing Them Home, and shows that despite having been chaired by a former High Court judge, Sir Ronald Wilson, it has shown scant regard for evidence, balance and the credibility of witnesses. While there is no doubt that many of the witnesses wept when they recalled their childhood, and the hearts of many were wrung, there is more than one cause of adult misery than removal from one’s parents. Again and again, Brunton shows, the report fails to distinguish between forcible removal, sending away of children with consent of their parents, total removal and partial (eg, returning to family at weekends) removal, detention imposed for repeated delinquency preceding any removal, spells in hospitals and schools, and the saving of children from physical and sexual abuse within their own family and by others.

While the evidence given by witnesses to the commission cannot be ignored, neither can it for the most part be checked against other sources of evidence. Most of the witnesses were anonymous. Little or not attempt was made to cross-check their evidence with what is on the official record. On this cavalier disregard of evaluation, Brunton writes: “According to the report, the inquiry took written or oral evidence from 535 indigenous people concerning their experiences on the removal policies (page 21). These presumably included a substantial number of people who were not themselves taken, as totals in summary tables are only around 370. However, the report presents extracts from the confidential evidence or submissions of only 143 people; extracts from 55 of those people have been presented more than once, and in two cases, five times. But there has been very little attempt to provide summary information for the witnesses as a whole. Indeed only three matters are the subject of summary tables: the types of placements witnesses experienced (pages 153, 1987), age at removal (page 182), and sexual assaults reported (page 162). Consequently it seems fair to state that the experiences of the majority of the witnesses have been largely ignored.”

Nor did the commission even attempt to compare the experience of their witnesses with the demographic information which can be derived from the 1994 Survey of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Nor is there a serious attempt to estimate the magnitude of the removal issue by proper analysis of statistics and records. Surviving administrators from any area — and policy differed from State to State to territory, and between regions — were not interviewed as to the nature of any policy of removal or its implementation.

Brunton devotes a good deal of attention to the charge of genocide, including the fifth meaning of the term, which covers “forcible transfer of the children of a group to another group”. By this definition until recently every major religion and every race and nationality has been guilty of genocide throughout history. Brunton points out that even in this matter the commission plays fast and loose with the main authority it cites, the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who “cautioned that the prohibition on cultural genocide was not directed against policies which attempted to assimilate a group into the large society. Instead the provision sought to prohibit drastic methods, used to aid in the rapid and complete disappearance of the cultural, moral and religious life of a group of human beings.” Everybody accepts that many terrible things were done to our Aboriginal peoples by European settlers and colonial societies. But to demand apology and compensation for a policy which has yet to have been established to have been universal, without fair and judicious examination of what actually happened, is conducive to neither reconciliation nor the future welfare of Aborigines.

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3.
Padraic McGuinness, “The perils of self-determination,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, December 12, 1998, p. 36.

Probably the most moving speech at the conference in Sydney this week celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came from Justice Albie Sachs of the South African Constitutional Court (the counterpart of our High Court). He talked about the reconciliation process in South Africa, beginning with the story of his meeting with the man who planned his assassination.

Certainly the Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu has had a huge impact on thinking about the terrible history of South Africa under apartheid. Forgiveness of past crimes was really the only way forward. There could, however, have been a much darker picture drawn of modern South Africa and its evolution towards a one-party State.

In a way, Sach’s speech was well aimed at the audience. Most of them were there to get another dose of feelgood and emotion, and were not the kind of people who care to think objectively about the genuinely complex issues of human rights. Just as no-one could defend Nazism, whereas many people supported the equally murderous regime of Stalin, there is a tendency to ignore uncomfortable facts in favour of the warm inner glow. There were, of course, plenty of lawyers doing well by doing good. They, too, will brook no criticism of their own activities. And there was the usual bunch of anti-democratic cynics who see human-rights treaties as a device for furthering their own causes regardless of the rest of the people of Australia.

These are all the kind of people who will applaud those Aboriginal spokesmen who are attacking the Federal Government for having reservations about the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which calls for “self-determination” for such peoples. Not autonomy or liberty or self-determination for individuals, but for a collective entity that, in fact, does not exist. The Aboriginal population is far from united — a recent letter to the Herald from the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, in whose area the Olympic Games sites is located, told Lois (Lowitja) O’Donaghue to stop threatening boycotts affecting “their country”, not hers. Which indigenous peoples are to have self-determination?

The reason why the Government is arguing for replacing the term self-determination with something like “self-management” is much more important, however. It is that self-determination is widely interpreted to mean a bid for political autonomy, a kind of enclave in which the rights of members will be different from, and possibly less than, those of Australian citizens in general. It is notable that those who call for such a move are extremely vague about the kind of political institutions they want. Little is said about either democracy or the protection of universal human rights.

The reason why some Aboriginal leaders are insisting on the term self-determination is that it is stronger than self-management. Given the kind of people who dominate the judiciary, if it were accepted it might not be long before it became the basis for separate sovereignty for indigenous people, however defined. Since the greater number of Aborigines live in urban areas, how could there be a separate nation existing in the interstices of Australian society? The more one examines it, the more it starts to look like apartheid.

Many of the advocates of the draft declaration deny any such intention. Nevertheless they insist on the term that would be the first step towards enclave nations. This is freely acknowledged by many human-rights lawyers — although in the context of public debate about the declaration’s article 3, which provides for self-determination, anybody who points it out is described as alarmist or prejudiced. This duplicity is what will ultimately bring the human-rights movement into disrepute. If the modest aim of a degree of self-management, akin to local government, is all that is really desired, why not accept the latter term?

Part of the argument involves the status of Aboriginal traditional law. Most people are first blush think it fair enough for Aborigines to continue to observe their own rules, and punish infringements of them in their own way. One of the most common punishments in traditional communities, however, was the death penalty. No-one would suggest that this be permitted. So much for our respect for Aboriginal custom. One has to wonder about other customary laws — should those clans who practise the extreme form of circumcision, politely known as “whistlecock”, be allowed to continue such mutilation? If yes, then surely those immigrant communities who practise the dreadful mutilation of female circumcision should be allowed also to get on with it.

The customary law notion is a lot more complicated than it looks. There is, of course, not one customary system of law, but many. Moreover, it is unwritten. The process of change in customary law is not understood. No doubt in the undisturbed state of the Aborigines, evolution of law would have been very slow; but the influence of well-meaning anthropologists has led to the creation of many new beliefs among Aborigines, often adopted on the basis of the half-understood traditions of disparate clans. Traditional law seems fine for an isolated community, but how is it to apply to urban Aborigines?

All this is not mere quibbling. There are two important issues involved. One is the integrity of the Australian community as a political entity, with a system of law which, whatever its defects, is reasonably clear. The other is the fact that tribal law is inherently undemocratic and oppressive. To give collective rights to an indigenous people seems a great idea, but it inevitably involves a diminution of their individual rights.

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4.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “A black mark against white parasites,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, November 27, 1999, p. 46.

Such is the sensitivity about all things Aboriginal in polite circles these days that it is almost impossible to discuss how and why things go wrong in policy towards Aboriginal affairs without being accused of racism. The result is that there is almost a conspiracy of silence about the widespread abuses that proliferate not so much among Aborigines but among the whites who profit enormously from setting themselves up as consultants and advisers to Aborigines.

We have recently seen an example of this in the case of the Gagudju association in the Northern Territory, where 300 traditional owners have received nearly $50 million in royalties from the Ranger uranium mine. While some of it has been spent on booze (at a rate of consumption not even as high as that of some journalists I have known), by far the larger part has, as the receiver appointed discovered, found its way into the pockets of white parasites. Far from accepting that they are part of the problem, the anti-uranium fanatics have blamed all the problems on uranium mining. Whatever the pros and cons of mining, the abuse of funds is not the fault of the companies which pay royalties according to the law.

Writing to The Australian to complain about its coverage of this issue, the chairman of the Northern Land Council, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, managed not to mention the central issue of where the funds went. Probably the letter was written for him by one of the white advisers living off the Northern Land Council.

Of course it would be better if Aborigines handled more of the funds themselves, but as Bob Collins, the former Labor senator for the Northern Territory and a true friend of Aborigines, has demonstrated in his recent report on Aboriginal education in the Territory, the net result of 25 years of federally funded white carpetbaggers in the Territory has been a catastrophic decline in Aboriginal literacy. It is terrible to say, but after all the money that has been spent over the past 25 years the result is a younger generation of Aborigines who are almost totally illiterate in any language. Whatever the faults of the Territory Government, it is not the main culprit. Things were better in the old days.

We are witnessing yet another disaster in the making. This is the case being heard in the Federal Court brought by Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner as representatives of a large number of people of Aboriginal descent claiming to be “stolen children”.

Instead of running dead on this issue and just paying up on demand untold sums in compensation for harms allegedly done, the Commonwealth decided to put up a serious defence and did a lot of research into the issue — unlike the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s so-called inquiry. Perhaps the white consultants and lawyers to the Aborigines now wished they had advised against bringing the case at all, since it now appears that the whole thing is going to blow up in their faces.

It is impossible to predict the outcome because the judge who is hearing the case has very properly been giving everyone a fair and extensive hearing, and he will have to exercise his own judicial judgment according to the law. But things are not looking good for the claimants. So far they have not managed to prove that either of them was “stolen” in the sense of being taken away against their mothers’ will, and their lawyers have, it seems, given up on the attempt to prove that there was an official policy of stealing part-Aboriginal children.

Quite remarkably they have concentrated on trying to argue that educational facilities and services were inadequate (which no-one would deny, even though they produced better literacy outcomes than today’s much more expensive services), and they seem to be arguing that in any case it ought to have been realised that it was hopeless to educate these children with their background. So far virtually nothing of this has been reported in the metropolitan media, whose occasional reports of the case have concentrated on the sob stories being told rather than on the facts adduced in court.

So it looks very much as if the outcome of the case is inexorably pointed in the direction of a dismissal of the applicants’ case, with the conclusion being that there is no ground in law or in fact for claiming that the Commonwealth was responsible for stealing any children at all, let alone encouraging or permitting genocide. This of course will be a disaster for the propagandists who have spent so much time complaining about a policy which did not, it seems, exist.

It might be a disaster for the white lawyers who instigated the case, too, since it seems from their evidence that many of the individuals who signed off on compensation claims did so without sufficient steps being taken to verify the basis of their claims — if the Commonwealth, or indeed the land councils, were to start looking for scapegoats they might consider the lawyers who put their case together. The first question which will be asked is: what were the complainants told when their signatures were sought?

Everybody concerned has realised that the case is in trouble, and surprise, surprise, there are now calls for the Commonwealth to abandon the litigation (which it did not initiate) because such matters are not appropriate for treatment by the courts, and instead establish a non-judicial tribunal to pay compensation to people who claim to be stolen children without testing the factual basis for their claims.

Why not give everyone concerned a blank cheque on the Reserve Bank? We can be sure that little of the money would be spent on drink, at least not by Aborigines, who would get only small change after their white consultants and advisers had plunged their snouts in the trough.

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5.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Time to bury the stolen myth forever,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, April 6, 2000, p. 15.

The fury at the exposure of the Big Lie of the “stolen generation(s)” has been wonderful to observe. It was a myth which had been taken to the hearts of many of those whose overweening moral vanity has convinced them they only have the key to Truth and Virtue.

Perhaps more interesting has been the frequency of the allegation that the whole thing was motivated by the racism of the Howard Government, the “fascist Howard dictatorship”.

The protests are reminiscent of the famous portrait of Winston Churchill — the photographer snatched his cigar from his mouth, and the old man looks like a baby about to cry with fury when its comforter has been snatched away.

However, in all the preaching about the divisiveness of a government which challenges the propaganda of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and the “bringing them home” concoction, there has been an emerging theme of great importance.

This is the admission that while terrible things were done and the fate of our indigenous people as a result of white settlement has been — if not as bad as that of other indigenous peoples subjected to worse invaders than the British — unacceptable by modern standards, it is absurd to speak of genocide.

To denigrate the honest and sincere efforts of so many people in the past who thought they were doing the right thing is merely a historical ignorance.

It is true that some of the policy makers and administrators were in past years motivated by notions of eugenics and Darwinian ranking of races, but this was in the past the orthodoxy of the Left and the progressive social engineers, not of conservative governments. It took Hitler to take eugenics off the socialist agenda.

There is a certain moral ambiguity about the most furious, or affectedly saddened, responses of some Aboriginal leaders. Charles Perkins, in particular, has done his own cause irreparable harm and his best to provoke a backlash against Aboriginal claimants everywhere.

In this context it is important to raise the issue of how much of the talk about stolen children is a question of different perceptions.

At a conference last year in Sydney, Reg Marsh, a spry 92-year-old who was for years a senior government official in the Northern Territory, related the story of how Perkins’s mother came to him and asked his help in getting school places for Charles and his brother as they were running wild and needed an education. Marsh did as he was asked.

In the biography of Anglican priest Father John Smith (who knew Perkins as a child), by his son, it is also related how the mother not only kept in touch with her sons, but contributed to their upkeep at school.

Equally with Lowitja O’Donoghue, Stewart Cockburn of the Adelaide Advertiser interviewed her and published in March 15, 1977, an account of her story. “Members of the frankly paternalistic United Aborigines’ Mission visited her tribe at Indulkana, 200 miles north of Coober Pedy, in 1934,” he wrote.

“They persuaded her mother than it would be best for Lois to be brought up at the mission’s home for children at Quorn.

“Without necessarily approving that policy, Miss O’Donaghue acknowledges that she had a happy childhood there with 50 other part-Aboriginal boys and girls. ‘Two single women ran the place,’ she told me.

“‘They were dedicated to their job, and we all had the dependable care and affection of the same foster mothers until we were well into adolescence.

“‘Of course, the younger children also had the affectionate support of the older ones, as in any good Aboriginal community.'”

It is notable that the “minimum” 10 per cent estimate of numbers of Aboriginal children separated is based on the ABS 1994 survey, in which people were asked if they had ever been separated.

Already by that date, it was common for those who had had a miserable life to blame it on forced separation.

This is why it has been compared with the invention of “recovered/repressed memories” of childhood sexual abuse which have turned out to be fabulations.

It was not the fault of the Commonwealth that the claims of Gunner and Cubillo to have been “stolen” were brought before the Federal Court. But the hearing (a judgment is expected in June) did reveal that their stories did not hold up in the face of uncontradicted contrary evidence.

Now it is being argued that similar claims should be admitted without verification.

Was “assimilation” a crime? Perhaps. But if so the last census figures reveal that it is a crime being committed in 55,397 of the 91,565 one-family Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander households; of which 40,100 were households where the “reference person” (PC-speak for head of household) or spouse was indigenous.

Like Perkins’s or Senator Aden Ridgeway’s families. While their children may well think of themselves as Aborigines, they will be thoroughly assimilated into an Australia which respects different cultures and traditions.

***
6.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Sorry, I can’t walk,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, May 27, 2000, p. 44.

I shall not be marching, walking, or otherwise participating in tomorrow’s walk across the Harbour Bridge. This is not because I disapprove of the event, or wish it ill — it is mainly because as a result of a painful knee condition I cannot. This is not an apology, but I have found that since many of the advocates of reconciliation are prepared to misrepresent the views and actions of those who do not share their emotional outpourings it is probable that my absence, if it were noticed, would be interpreted as insulting to Aborigines.

Intolerance of dissent and a nuanced approach to complex problems has become commonplace in the “stolen generations” debate. The Prime Minister is subjected to a sustained tirade of abuse and denigration for his sincere and arguable belief that there is no point in a formal national apology for the sins of our forefathers. Many media outlets have abandoned any attempt even to treat him with the respect due to his position and the fact that he was democratically elected, and accept as normal the use of the most prejudiced and insulting terms applied to the Prime Minister, and indeed anyone else who disagrees with the views of the Council for Reconciliation.

There is little hesitation in misrepresenting the views of the dissenters, either. For example, a journalist in another paper recently claimed that I have “repeatedly referred to the stolen generations as the ‘rescued’ generations”. This was pure invention. I have a database which includes everything I have written since mid-1989 (save a couple of months in 1995 which I lost due to a crash). This shows that I have never, ever used the word “rescue” or “rescued” in my newspaper writing in connection with Aboriginal issues.

In the first editorial I wrote for Quadrant, the monthly which I have edited since early 1998, I did write that the magazine intended to “… promote genuine debate on the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report on the so-called ‘stolen children’. That inquiry seems to have taken no evidence from any white administrators of any age who actually dealt with Aboriginal children (save perhaps the personal memories of its chairman, Sir Ronald Wilson), and seems to have made no serious effort either to quantify the problem or to distinguish the fate of children who were forcibly removed from the parents from that of those who were given up, abandoned, or rescued from prostitution. This is not to belittle the genuine anguish of those who suffered from the policy. But it has been increasingly recognised that past policies with respect to separation of children of all races from their natural parents were often insensitive and damaging to both.”

That is the most extreme statement of “anti-Aboriginal” sentiments I have ever expressed. Certainly it did not offend the late John Newfong, an Aboriginal journalist of long experience, who became a good friend. In an all-too-typical example of the paternalistic attitudes of the white Aboriginal industry the writing of his biography has been given over by its prospective publisher to a committed propagandist (one of those who refer to the Prime Minister as “mean-spirited”), against the wishes of his nephew and nearest surviving relative.

The real reason for such attacks, by journalists and third-rate academics, is the desire to silence those who argue with their accepted interpretations of the past, their slogans and their rewriting of history. They do not do this for the sake of Aborigines, but to enhance their own unwarranted feelings of superior virtue. There is plenty of scope for disagreement among Aborigines about past experiences and current policy, including the meaning of “Aboriginality”, which a survey commissioned by the reconciliation council has shown is itself a bone of contention among Aborigines. As in Canada, many tribal or remote area Aborigines resent the appropriation of their traditions by those to whom they are only remotely related. Nor is there anything remotely resembling a single Aboriginal people or nation.

The question of the “stolen children” is a matter of many different stages and approaches to the impact of European settlement on the various Aboriginal peoples of Australia. This varied greatly between places and times, and while there were certainly some racists among administrators of Aboriginal policies there were also many who were not and many who acted in complete good faith for the good of Aborigines. That we now accept that many of the policies were mistaken is not a reason for smearing the memory of our great-grandparents. Slavery was an unmitigated evil, and Thomas Jefferson one of the great democrats of the American republic was a slave-holder — does that make him evil?

I believe the “enlightened” approaches of today, and the moralistic propaganda inspired by the “stolen children” report, are doing immeasurable harm to Aborigines — just look at the state of affairs in many (though not all) Aboriginal communities — but this is not deliberate evil-doing. In the future, those walking across the bridge tomorrow will be seen as good at heart, genuinely wishing good only for Aborigines, but sadly mistaken in the directions of policy they endorse. I do not question their good faith — only their judgment.