In particular the Referendum also marked a turn toward the recognition of Aboriginal rights achieved on the basis of cultural difference rather than cultural surrender. During the campaign the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner was interviewed on national television and firmly rejected the idea that Aboriginal people were a ‘stone-age people, a primitive people’; he wanted to ‘kill the notion stone dead’.1 For generations assimilationist presumptions had constructed Aboriginal culture according to a deficiency model; it was something that had to be reformed. A new respect for Aboriginal culture emerged as something ‘different’ rather than ‘inferior’.
South Australia was at the forefront of this shift toward cultural pluralism. In 1962 the government introduced a new Act that removed many of the restrictive and segregationist provisions of the Aborigines Act 1934–39. Although assimilation was still embedded in government policy, attitudes were beginning to change. In 1964 the anthropologist Ted Strehlow said of assimilation that it was ‘only a new name given to old and discredited methods of forced cultural change which have been employed in Australia for the last century and a half’.2 Don Dunstan, who as Minster for Aboriginal Affairs and later as Premier was a strong advocate for change, called for a new policy of ‘integration’. The Aboriginal Affairs Board explained the new policy in 1964:
‘Assimilation’ itself has some implications that are not particularly clear and have aroused disquiet especially at the thought that Aborigines may lose their cultural identity as a people and become simply members of the community, distinguished only by their colour. The alternative is integration which suggests that Aborigines might join the white community on equal terms and yet retain the right to maintain both their physical and cultural identity so far as the latter does not conflict with the law of the land.3
The reforms of the Walsh and Dunstan Labour governments were extensive. In 1965 the Aboriginal and Historic Relics Preservation Act was introduced with the intention of protecting Aboriginal Heritage. In 1966 Dunstan introduced The Prohibition of Discrimination Act which had the effect, among other things, of making illegal what had been socially enforced ‘colour-bars’ within the community. In 1967 further amendments were introduced to the Aborigines Affairs Act which provided additional powers for Aboriginal people to administer their own reserves, because it was ‘considered desirable that the Aboriginal people should be encouraged to run their own affairs’.4
One of the most significant reforms of this era was the passage of the Aboriginal Lands Trust Act in 1966, which gave control of Aboriginal reserve lands to a board made up entirely of Aboriginal people. It is generally regarded as the ‘first legislative acknowledgement of Indigenous rights to land in Australian history’.5 Significantly, when Dunstan introduced the Bill to parliament he reached back into history to give legal authority and moral legitimacy to these changes. This Bill, he said, was a significant step in the treatment of Aboriginal people not only in this State but in Australia. ‘The Aboriginal people of this country are the only comparable indigenous people who have been given no specific rights in their own land.’ ‘It is not surprising’, he went on, ‘that Aborigines everywhere in this country have been bitter that they have had their country taken from them, and been given no compensatory rights to land in any area.’6
Like Cleland in the 1930s, he made clear in his speech that the nature of the State’s very foundational ideals gave South Australia a moral obligation to address this issue. ‘I intend to trace the history of Aboriginal land rights in South Australia’, he continued, ‘because on examination it is clear that Aborigines were wrongfully deprived of their just dues. We must as far as we can, right the wrongs done by our forefathers’. He then quoted in detail the passage from the Letters Patent which acknowledged Aboriginal prior title to the land. He outlined the principles that were to guide the Commissioners in their negotiations for Aboriginal land, and he pointed out that it was the duty of the Protector ‘not only to see that such bargains or treaties were faithfully executed … but also … to protect the natives in the undisturbed enjoyment of their lands of which they should not be disposed to make voluntary transfer’.7 He cited the instructions given to the Resident Commissioner regarding the proper process of negotiation, before noting that, with the exception of a few small areas, Aboriginal rights to land were not protected. The least that could now be done was to ensure that Aboriginal rights to the little land they had been granted were recognised in law and given over to their control.8 ‘These were matters’, he concluded, that went to ‘the moral stature of the Australian people as a whole’.9
In his later memoir, Dunstan reflected on his battles in the 1960s to reform Aboriginal policy and to further the case for Aboriginal land rights, actions clearly informed by a consciousness of the State’s foundational undertakings: ‘The Letters Patent to the Governor of the time of the founding of the colony’, he wrote, somewhat conflating the Letters Patent with the Proclamation, ‘had required protection of the rights of the indigenous inhabitants.’10 There is no small irony in the fact that South Australia’s story of its honourable and benevolent intentions toward Aboriginal people was largely a myth, yet over time, the myth itself was employed to provide the moral legitimacy for genuine reform.
Like the changes that the Referendum have been credited with, but did not initiate, the writing of Aboriginal people back into the nation’s history was a process already underway, but in fits and starts. It would be a mistake to think that the floodgates opened. A year before the Referendum the Library’s Board of South Australia published Kathleen Hassell’s Relations between Settlers and Aborigines in South Australia, 1836–1860. There was a clear sense that this was now a story that needed telling, but the irony is that the work itself was an Honours thesis written in 1921. Nationally, the break-through publication was C.D. Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, published in 1970. It was the first of three volumes describing the history and contemporary circumstances of Australian Aboriginal people, produced under the auspices of the Social Sciences Research Council of the Australian National University.
Australia’s premier historical journal Australian Historical Studies began life in 1940 as Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, but it would not be until the late 1950s that it published its first article on Aboriginal history, something that remained an unusual subject for some time to come. Henry Reynolds’ landmark book The Other Side of the Frontier was published in 1981. It endeavoured, for the first time, to explore frontier conflict from an Aboriginal perspective, but the work might have been difficult to locate under the subject of ‘history’; works about Aboriginal people were not uncommonly shelved under ‘anthropology’ in the nation’s bookstores. While scholars may have been writing Aboriginal people back into the nation’s history, in the popular imagination they were still regarded as the province of anthropology, still not sufficiently within time to be within history. It was not until the mid-to-late 1980s that articles on Aboriginal history began to appear on a regular basis in the pages of Australian Historical Studies and other Australian historical journals, while a steady stream of books, mostly regional studies, began to appear in print.
The Bicentenary of 1988 was an important marker of the movement of Aboriginal history into the mainstream of Australian history. The publication that most tellingly marks the Bicentenary was a ten volume set entitled The Australians: An Historical Library. Written by many of the country’s leading scholars, the principal volumes were designed as time-slice ‘snapshots’ of Australia at fifty-year intervals. Not only was the first volume devoted to Aboriginal Australia prior to 1788, but authors were assiduous in their efforts to incorporate Aboriginal people into the story. At the state level, South Australia’s sesquicentenary in 1986 was marked by the publication of the Flinders History of South Australia, which included a chapter on ‘prehistory’, another on traditional Aboriginal culture and two describing the experiences of Aboriginal people in nineteenth and twentieth century S
outh Australia. More significantly, the government funded an Aboriginal History of the state entitled Survival in our own land: ‘Aboriginal’ Experiences in ‘South Australia’ since 1836. Co-edited by Anglo-Australian writer Christobel Mattingley and Aboriginal writer Ken Hampton, the author line on the title page reads ‘told by Nungas and others’. The quotation marks around ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘South Australia’ and the reference to ‘Nungas’ – the collective term for South Australian indigenous people – makes the ownership of the volume unambiguous.
The ‘Great Australian Silence’ was shattering, and the voices that emerged in that space – their tenor, tone and volume – unsettled those generations of settler Australians who had grown up so secure with their given script of regional, provincial and national origin. For some, the response was to reject the challenge and adhere to the script; for others the challenge was to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable histories and develop a new story.
Memorialising the Frontier
Just three years after the Referendum the debate over the ‘Elliston Massacre’ resurfaced, initiated by Aboriginal people and their supporters. The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and the Aborigines Progress Association put forward a plan to erect a cairn on the Elliston cliffs, a memorial to ‘commemorate a massacre of 250 aborigines by white settlers’, as ‘part of a national mourning campaign by Aborigines’.11 John Moriarty, who had been a prominent campaigner during the Referendum, argued in the press that the massacre was ‘part of the history of the West Coast Aboriginal population’ despite attempts by the European population to discredit what was a ‘well-known fact’.12 The chairman of the local district council, J.B. Cameron, claimed that ‘the council will agree to the cairn if it could be proved that the massacre took place’, adding more generally that a memorial to Aboriginal people who lost their lives in the development of the region would also be considered.13
Moriarty’s article raised responses and counter-responses. One correspondent, Norman Ford, claimed to know Archie Beviss who ‘invented the Waterloo Bay massacre story’.14 This in turn provoked Laurie Bryan, a member of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, to respond. He began by deploring what he described as the ‘racist tone’ of Ford’s letter and asserting that Ford’s dismissal of the Elliston massacre as a myth was ‘directly contrary to the opinions of the aboriginal people of the West Coast’. He finished with a reference to the Referendum:
Australians voted ten to one in favour of Aboriginal equality at the Aboriginal Rights Referendum. Our proposal is that those who voted for equality be invited to share in bringing it about.15
No memorial of the sort called for has ever been erected. Yet stories of a massacre on the Elliston cliffs have endured, a symptom of unreconciled tensions in the region’s past. In 2002 members of the Elliston community initiated a community arts project, Sculpture on the Cliffs, as part of the state-wide ‘Encounter 2002’ commemoration, a bicentennial celebration of the meeting of Matthew Flinders’ and Nicholas Baudin’s navigating vessels on the South Australian coastline in 1802. Sculpture on the Cliffs aroused so much public interest in 2002, it has since become a biennial event. One of the project’s first art installations in its Bicentennial Encounters year was ‘The Sea Wailing’, by local artists Cameron Robbins and John Turpie. A sound work installed on the cliffs which draws on the ocean’s movement to play ‘a moaning lament’, ‘The Sea Wailing’ was designed, according to the artists, to respond ‘the stigma of the “Elliston Incident” and … try to redress some of the bad feeling.’16 The power of the Sculpture on the Cliffs project to express a local need for reconciliation has remained strong. When the leader of the South Australian branch of the Australian Democrats, the Honourable Sandra Kanck, opened the 2006 exhibition of Sculpture on the Cliffs, she addressed it directly as an opportunity to break silence on the nature of Aboriginal dispossession:
Today I am going to say the ‘M’ word, – massacre, murder, mayhem – because this art event is inspired by that history. We all know about the power of words, but sometimes words can be powerful when they are not said. When we avoid saying some words, the words have power over us. We must recognise what happened here and embrace it. Only then will we have the power to deal with it, perhaps even with the prospect of reconciliation.17
The kinds of questions that have defined local discussion of ‘the Elliston incident’ for generations – did it happen? how can that be proved? – have perhaps become, with Sculpture on the Cliffs, less significant than the desire for reconciliation, which takes ‘the Elliston incident’ as a marker and a reminder of the violences committed in the area against Aboriginal people in the name of European settlement.
Yet despite community projects like Elliston’s Sculpture on the Cliffs, it is still unusual to see memorials in the Australian landscape to the land wars fought on colonial frontiers.18 Two examples notable for their exceptionality are those to the 1838 Myall Creek massacre in New South Wales (now on the National Heritage list) and to the 1928 Coniston Massacre in the Northern Territory, both of which were only erected in 2001. When the new National Museum of Australia opened in 2001, its exhibit ‘Contested Frontiers’ sparked an extended controversy about historical authenticity in representing frontier violence.19 Yet if the stories of that history still circulate in regional historical memory, might not regional museums, memorials and other local history projects also challenge the concept of a ‘great Australian silence’ on frontier conflict and Aboriginal dispossession? It has become commonplace to regard the contemporary museum and memorial site as opportunities for public debate rather than as repositories for the celebrated past, and much has been written about their role in fostering a sense of conversation with more than one understanding of history.20 This trend is visible right across contemporary heritage practices more widely. James Young, for instance, describes the ways in which contemporary heritage sites have deliberately become locations ‘of contested and competing meanings’ rather than demonstrations, as once was true, ‘of shared national values and ideals’.21 If this is the case, one might expect contemporary heritage sites to be designed for the confrontation and debate of contested issues in the public domain.22 To what degree is this true in acknowledging the history of South Australia’s land wars?
Not far from Elliston, where the Sculpture on the Cliffs installations create an intriguing outlook to the Indian Ocean, lies the much larger regional centre of Port Lincoln. Port Lincoln was a site of significant frontier conflict in the early 1840s, to a degree that justified Governor Grey sending a military detachment to curb Battara attacks on settlers. How does this early history exist in memorial form in the town today?23 Port Lincoln’s attachment to an earlier pioneer history is commemorated in two plaques, one paying tribute to the navigator Matthew Flinders and the other to the explorer John McDouall Stuart, situated side by side on the main street under the ‘Flinders Archway’. A nearby street sign carries the name of the explorer Edward Eyre who also had a local presence for a brief period in the early 1840s. These references to a story of discovery and exploration are, of course, an orthodox part of twentieth century public consciousness about national beginnings, and are familiar throughout Australia. Port Lincoln’s pioneer origins are also remembered in other sites. A settler museum is housed in the historic Mill Cottage, built by a foundational pastoral family in 1866, and recreating for the visitor the atmosphere of settler life. Nearby are the nineteen-acre ‘Pioneer Memorial Park’ and the Centenary Oval, which was laid down in the centenary year to honour the arrival of the first settlers.24
Yet over the last decades of the twentieth century, other kinds of memorial and memorial restoration projects have served to recall Port Lincoln’s more fraught past. In 1978, the Port Lincoln Caledonian Society undertook the restoration of pioneer grave sites. The restoration project included the Hawson plot, which contains the graves of the early pastoralist Henry
Hawson, the former Government Resident (and Henry’s son-in-law) Charles Driver, and Henry’s older son Thomas, who after Charles Dutton’s death married his widow. The cemetery’s restoration was described in the press by Caledonian Society representative Perc Baillie as an opportunity to remember ‘the pioneers who laid the foundation of Eyre Peninsula’s prosperity’. But as the Port Lincoln Times put it, it also provided an opportunity to remember ‘the serious problem of conflict’ between early settlers and traditional owners in the region.25
The site that most clearly condenses Port Lincoln’s early history of frontier conflict is the Hawson Memorial. Unveiled on 30 March 1911 at Kirton Point on the coastal fringe of Port Lincoln, it is a tribute to the 12 year-old boy Frank Hawson, Henry Hawson’s son, whose death marked the beginning of almost a decade of conflict in the region. The Memorial was funded by public donation, and the remains of the boy were exhumed from their original burial place to be re-buried beneath the monument. Its inscription reads, in part: ‘Although only a lad, he died a hero’. Over the twentieth century, the site fell into disrepair and became overgrown by surrounding scrub, with many locals apparently never knowing what it was, let alone its history.26 In 1999, the local Kirton Ward Progress Association, in consultation with the Port Lincoln Pioneers and Descendants’ Club, restored the memorial site and erected a plaque at the original grave site. The restoration project became the occasion for focusing local attention on the history in a new way. A feature article in the Port Lincoln Times not only focused on the death of the young Hawson boy, but also opened a perspective on the history of Aboriginal resistance to dispossession that had been missing from the memorial itself. The journalist made note of the fact that unfortunately, ‘history has rarely recorded acts of violence or murder against local Aborigines by the settlers’, and suggested that here is a ‘rich history’ from which lessons might be learned in the present.27
Out of the Silence Page 23