Hasluck disapproved of the system of ‘exemption certificates’, which Aborigines could be called on by police to display to show that they were entitled to be in town or to apply for jobs, and which Aborigines themselves called ‘dog licences’ and ‘dog tags’. Exemption was ‘hedged by conditions which many coloured Australian citizens find irksome and even offensive’. Those who did not have exemption certificates were aware, however, that any Aborigine not carrying one came under severe restrictions, not least on his freedom to travel. Under the old system, said Hasluck, it was taken for granted that every Aboriginal came under restrictive legislation unless he applied for and was granted the dog tags: ‘Under the new system it is assumed that every British subject has citizenship as a birthright.’
The birthright, however, could be withheld specifically because a person stood ‘in need of special care and assistance’. Hasluck’s special legislation would still hold a number of Aborigines as wards of the state. ‘Ward’ would not be a racial designation but a legal one, applying also to those of the European race who needed special care (the mentally ill, orphans, et cetera). Aborigines needed not remain wards in perpetuity. They would automatically cease to be wards when they were able to assume the full citizenship to which they were entitled. Hasluck admitted that deciding when the moment of assimilation had arrived to cancel the wardship of this or that person would be difficult.
Hasluck faced some resistance from the Territory’s Legislative Council. Frank Wise, the Northern Territory administrator, sent many memos seeking clarification of ministerial intentions and insisting that it was not practical to avoid mentioning Aborigines in the legislation. The minister’s departmental secretary in Canberra, C.R. Lambert, responded, ‘To do so would only repeat the process of discriminating legislatively on a racial basis amongst our own people.’
The ordinance had to be passed by the Northern Territory Council, and to get it through there, Hasluck was forced to make concessions. Wise recommended that the Aboriginals Ordinances of the Northern Territory be amended to exclude all persons of mixed Aboriginal and European and other descent from its provisions. Even the North Australian Workers’ Union and the part-Aborigines themselves were in favour of this. The Australian Half-Caste Progressive Association lobbied for the complete lifting of all Aboriginal ordinances exerting control over their lives. It was only from these half-castes, Administrator Wise declared, that the significant local demands for citizenship came, because most of them lived in circumstances ‘approximating to European standards’.
The amended relevant Aboriginals Ordinance was passed unanimously by the Legislative Council in January 1953, and the ‘half-castes’ of the Northern Territory thereby acquired full citizenship. But Hasluck insisted that the emancipation of ‘mixed bloods’ was merely ‘a temporary palliative’ and did not satisfy ‘long-term policy on native welfare’. An ultimate amendment declared that being made a ward was a process restricted to those ineligible for enrolment under the Northern Territory electoral regulations. Those ineligible to enrol were Aborigines. Thus amended, the Bill passed.
Hasluck’s assimilation program continued and numerous new government settlements were established, older settlements and missions revitalised, and government expenditure on Aboriginal affairs increased. But the delay in implementing the legislation slowed his assimilation program and his plan to use welfare as a means of helping Aborigines live an ‘assimilated’ life.
When the welfare ordinance was eventually gazetted, in 1957, only six of the estimated 15,700 ‘full bloods’ of the Northern Territory escaped being wards. Hasluck had not expected such a majority to remain stuck in the ward-of-the-state classification. He told a new Territory administrator, Roger Nott, that he should abstain from declaring people wards ‘if it can possibly be avoided . . . we should regard the declaration of a person as a ward as a last resort’.
Protests against Hasluck’s legislation came from as far afield as the AntiSlavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society in London, which demanded that citizenship be granted to all Aborigines. The Labor member for Darwin, Dick Ward, persistently attacked the ordinance, accusing Hasluck of ‘racial arrogance’ and maintaining that the ‘government had been too hasty in trying to turn the Aborigine into the white man’s image’. But Hasluck admitted that he was seeking other means to identify and widen the class of people ‘who cannot be declared wards’.
Namatjira was born on 28 July 1902 at Ntaria on the Finke River, country that was part of the Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission in the Northern Territory. His parents were Western Aranda people but moved from the bush into the mission where his birth was registered. His Aboriginal name was Elia but he was baptised Albert on Christmas Day 1905. The Western Aranda gave just one name to their children and the Lutherans observed this practice by naming him merely Albert. He signed his early paintings by that name and occasionally called himself Namatjira Albert. Namatjira was the name of a flying white ant who had made the land belonging to his father’s people.
In the mission, as well as the Western Aranda, there were Southern, Northern and Central Aranda, Luritja, Pitjantjatjara, and other peoples. They lived in their own separate traditional groups on the outskirts of the mission. The mission school children, however, occupied dormitories together and were sometimes permitted to visit their parents’ camp. Namatjira was educated by Pastor Carl Strehlow, and his education was based on the German classical curriculum but was delivered in English. In the 1920s and 1930s, the people on the mission endured poverty, bad droughts and white hostility. They lacked employment and were aware that they had lost governance over their destinies. Their traditional lands had been taken up by pastoralists. Their physical conditions were affected by drought, heat, savage desert cold on winter nights, and occasional floodings of the generally dry Finke River.
Namatjira was initiated at thirteen, and at the age of eighteen married a woman named Rubina—she was a Luritja woman whose tribal name was Ilkalita. The couple would have ten children. Early in their marriage, Namatjira worked as a camel driver for Afghan entrepreneurs on the transport run to Oodnadatta in South Australia, a distance of 480 kilometres. He then worked as a ringer on cattle stations on which he and his family lived. He and his wife came back to the mission in 1923, and it was then that his wife was baptised and accepted the name Ilkalita. At Hermannsburg, Namatjira worked decorating pieces of mulga with heated wire to create poker-work images, making objects for the mission’s craft trade, decorating boomerangs, woomeras and shields for sale in the city. Police Constable William McKinnon commissioned a number of mulga-wood plaques of this nature to depict his mounted camel patrol. Then Namatjira began painting watercolour landscapes on the curved surfaces of woomeras and on wooden panels. By 1929 the railway had come to Alice Springs, and tourist coaches began to visit the mission.
The artist Rex Battarbee, a frequent visitor to Central Australia, was one of these visitors, and in 1934 he returned with his fellow artist John Gardner. Battarbee had been wounded at Bullecourt in May 1917 and invalided out with wounds to the chest, face and both arms. Unable to pursue normal trades, he studied commercial art. The Gardner and Battarbee versions of places familiar to the Aranda people had a great impact on those Aborigines who saw them, and not least on Namatjira, who asked for materials to paint similar work himself. At the time, Namatjira was living with his wife on mission lands in wurlies built of scraps of iron, canvas, sacking and bushes.
In Melbourne, the Battarbee–Gardner exhibition raised funds of £2000 to build a water supply to the mission. Namatjira thus saw that painting could have beneficial results. Pastor Albrecht, the Lutheran head of the mission, ordered water paints and brushes for him by mail order. Back in the Centre in 1936, Battarbee took Namatjira on a painting trip in return for the Aranda man acting as his camel driver. Battarbee was struck by the pace at which Namatjira learned landscape painting.
It has been estimated that Namatjira received only eight weeks of informal tuition befor
e he began to paint independently. Battarbee was Namatjira’s first customer, purchasing a watercolour landscape from him in 1936 for five shillings. Namatjira became a prolific painter. He took visitors and relatives by camel to Ntaria, his birthplace, and camped there to paint in the open air. Pastor Albrecht supported Namatjira’s painting; he took ten of his works to the Lutheran Synod in South Australia in 1937 and sold six of them. Battarbee included three of Namatjira’s paintings in an exhibition of his own work in Adelaide.
In 1938, Lady Huntingfield, wife of the governor of Victoria, organised the first exhibition of Namatjira’s paintings at the Melbourne Town Hall. His first solo exhibition occurred at Melbourne’s Fine Arts Gallery. These were the first works to be signed ‘Albert Namatjira’ instead of simply ‘Albert’. During the war, a number of soldiers in Alice Springs bought Namatjira paintings at a time when the Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission was under suspicion because of the presence of German-born Lutheran ministers. Battarbee was in 1940 appointed liaison officer to the mission. An advisory council was formed to supervise the sale and standard of Namatjira’s work on exhibition, as he became so prolific during the 1940s that there was a concern that some of his paintings would fall too far below the standard of his best. In 1942, Namatjira was quoted in the Aborigines’ Friends Association Quarterly Review as saying that ‘[you] cannot do much painting, if you have to live on paddymelons and an occasional rabbit’. The article claimed that his friends who had helped him through giving him art supplies went home and left him to work on the basis of a diet of bush tucker mainly collected by his wife.
In 1944, the advisory council organised a solo exhibition of Namatjira’s work at the Myer Emporium in Melbourne, and a book on Namatjira’s art was published. Then, in 1946, he had his first Sydney solo exhibition. He was by now a national celebrity, and he had another exhibition in Adelaide the same year. From then on there were regular exhibitions in state capitals.
Namatjira applied for a Northern Territory grazing lease in 1949, and it was rejected because he was a ward of the state. Battarbee had by now established his own gallery in his home in Alice Springs as a venue for the exhibition in 1951 of Aboriginal artists. In 1953, Namatjira received the Queen’s Coronation Medal along with a small number of other prominent and celebrated Aborigines, including David Unaipon. In 1954, he met the Queen on her tour of Australia, yet he was still a ward of the state. In 1956, Namatjira and his son Keith travelled to Sydney to collect a truck donated by the Ampol Oil Company to enable him to get around Central Australia. While in Sydney, Namatjira sat for a portrait by William Dargie that later won the Archibald. By now his name was so well known that in 1957, Namatjira and his wife were awarded full Australian citizenship by the Federal government. The complication would prove to be that the other members of his family were not.
In 1958, he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment related to supplying alcohol to his relatives who were wards of the state. After much public protest and two appeals, the sentence was reduced. Namatjira served open detention at the Papunya settlement from March to May 1959, and died of heart failure on 8 August at Alice Springs hospital. ‘They all had the very best of intentions, but all their good intentions did was to kill poor Namatjira,’ wrote a correspondent in the Bulletin on 2 September 1959.
Another injustice awaited Namatjira—after the new, ancestral and Dreaming-based paintings emerged from Central Australia in the 1960s, it would become fashionable for people with an interest in art to dismiss him as a water-colourist.
DAVID UNAIPON: MORE THAN A BANK NOTE
A similar restlessness had operated the mind of David Unaipon, a desert Aborigine from Point McLeay, South Australia, who was a man in his seventies at the height of Namatjira’s own career. Unaipon had been throughout his life Australia’s closest approximation to a Renaissance man—though his people had lived through that period of European awakening engaged in other matters on the holy ground of Australia—and no dilettante at anything he took up. In 1909 he had applied a new technology to shears, designing a device that cut in a forward motion, not in a circular one. Though he patented the invention—the first of ten patents he would take out in a lifetime—he lacked the resources to police the matter, the capital to manufacture his invention on his own terms, and access to patent lawyers. So others had benefited. A sympathetic Professor Payne of the Engineering School at Melbourne University declared that the ‘mechanism appears to be original, and fulfils the purpose for which it is required’.
Unaipon had a desert mentor, whose talents are not an explanation for Unaipon’s brilliance but show why he became interested in some of the issues he chased all his life. This person was the Reverend George Taplin of the Aborigines’ Friends Association, a rare man who made bridges between the two sides. Taplin tried to produce at Point McLeay a self-sufficient community with vegetable gardens, cattle and sheep, fruit trees, and a shop that taught blacksmithing, carpentry and shoe-making. Taplin would invite in science and agricultural lecturers, and Unaipon was thus fascinated from an early age by scientific matters.
He left the mission at the age of thirteen to live in the home of C.B. Young, a gentleman with a library and varied interests, at Walkerville in Adelaide, and received a significant and scholarly input from Young. Unaipon’s aptitude for music was obvious and he was given training, and ultimately became church organist at the Mission Church at Point McLeay. He learned to play the music of Mendelssohn and Handel in an accomplished way. He read mechanics and theology and memorised passages from Milton’s Paradise Lost.
By 1917, Unaipon was working on another idea to do away with the ‘crank motion on steam and internal combustion engines’. That remained a lifelong endeavour, but meantime he had moved back to Adelaide, where he made much use of the university library. He frequently gave organ recitals in Adelaide churches to appreciative white audiences, and was particularly accomplished at playing Mendelssohn. At a Methodist gathering he declared, ‘I am here to plead with you on behalf of my countrymen, the Australian aborigines. It has been said they cannot be Christianised and uplifted. I am here to prove the contrary.’ Unaipon’s view of why Aborigines had not advanced technologically was ‘because the hills and valleys and rivers provided us with food . . . Having no occupation, we lived in the most primitive manner, without developing in any direction. In this state of balance, we were found when white people came here with their influence for good and evil.’
His earliest publication in 1930 was the work entitled Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals, a book to which a mystery attaches, given that it carried the name of the anthropologist William Ramsay Smith. Was the book plagiarised by Smith? Indeed, Smith was a curious fellow, an Adelaide grave-stealer who experimented on dead bodies, even to the extent of firing bullets into them to assess impacts. Republished decades later in 2001 and after Unaipon’s death as Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, it validates Unaipon’s claim that his prose style was influenced by John Bunyan and John Milton.
Altogether, Unaipon was embarked on nothing less than a quest to find the ‘fundamental things of life’ and the equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone, some means of perpetual motion. One contrivance he turned his mind to was the means by which aeroplanes could rise vertically without having to occupy a large distance to take off. He applied for the patent rights for this vertical take-off machine but it was never tested due to an obvious lack of capital. Unaipon also studied natural history and Newton’s Law. Experiments with gravitation again moved him to believe that perpetual motion was a grail that would not be found within the current knowledge of mechanics. The outcome of his research, however, was a discovery that enabled lateral motion in a sheep-shearing machine. He had found how to bring about ‘the parabolic motion by which means I overcome the centre of gravity, doing away with crank motion in steam and combustible engines’.
Unaipon died in 1967 at Tailem Bend in South Australia at the age of ninety-four, just before the so-called Abor
iginal Referendum. He had always had a measured understanding of the factors that had led to Aboriginal dispossession by interracial conflict. The white man’s superior weapons had a deadly effect on native peoples, he said, but the white man’s purpose in taking over the land was not explained adequately to the indigenous people and ‘neither side had the grasp of language necessary for a proper understanding between them’. Thus he seemed to think that the sense of dispossession might have been strongly allayed by greater understanding.
THE MOVEMENT
Ed Campion was a seventeen-year-old Catholic from Enmore in Sydney who joined B.A. Santamaria’s Catholic Action Movement in 1951. Campion would later acknowledge that it was very exciting for a juvenile to be asked to join a secret organisation with codes, passwords, and pledges of secrecy, combined with the concept that the world was on the edge of extreme danger. For young Catholics of that era, the bishop was the chief mediator of God’s will and earthly intentions, and the persons of priests still possessed a sacredness now long since vanished. Campion explains therefore that the news that there were, in 1954, two thousand Catholic priests in gaol in Poland arrived like a call to arms against Communism. In Catholic schools like the one Campion attended, St Ignatius College Riverview in Sydney, the young were told about what had happened to priests and Catholicism in confrontation with Communism in Spain, Mexico, China and Eastern Europe.
Campion would later argue significantly that many Australians tended to forgive and—even given Cold War hysteria—sympathise with the Australian Communists. But, wrote Campion, ‘the Australian Communists were at least the equal of their brothers and sisters overseas—they, too, could have filled the Gulags to capacity. It seems to me that to argue that Australian Communists would be too nice to do that is a form of cultural cringe.’ In any case, that conviction—of Communist menace—was the engine driving the Catholic Action Movement.
Australians: Flappers to Vietnam Page 68