Is this Why Dark Emu Was Written ?
Professor Bruce Pascoe. Author of Dark Emu, Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture
When Bruce Pascoe wrote Dark Emu in 2014, his thesis was that pre-colonial Aboriginal people were settled farmers. Many of us thought, ‘what an interesting idea, but what a load of rubbish.’
Since then however, we have come to realise why Pascoe’s book has won such wide support from the Progressive-Left in academic, intellectual and media circles. It is because it can be used as an important lever in the effort to overturn the legitimacy of Australia’s sovereignty.
One of the contributing reasons as to why Britain legally settled Australia as a colony was the undisputed fact that the Aboriginal population was nomadic with no permanent settlements and had no concept of land as a commodity that could be ceded, traded or sold to the British.
Author at the Monthly, lawyer and an honorary research associate at La Trobe University, Russell Marks
Hints that the Progressive-Left might be using Dark Emu in this way have appeared from time-to-time. For example in his essay in the Monthly of February 2020, lawyer and an honorary research associate at La Trobe University, Russell Marks wrote of how, what he calls, ‘Australia’s reactionary right’,
‘…relies heavily on an anonymous website, Dark Emu Exposed, which purports to “expose” and “debunk” what it asserts are the book’s [Dark Emu] many myths, exaggerations and “fabrications”.
Somewhat contradictorily, Marks then goes on to support our position when he says, ‘But throughout Dark Emu, Pascoe regularly exaggerates and embellishes.’
More importantly however, is the final paragraph of Marks’ essay, which reads in part,
‘…the right’s mission: to extinguish the basis for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination’.
This is where a penny dropped for us.
Perhaps Marks and many others on the Left are not so much worried about our critique of Pascoe’s Dark Emu with regard to the book’s fabrications, exaggerations or myths. Rather they are worried we will damage its standing as their planned ‘text-book’ on Aboriginal agriculture. Perhaps Marks knows that for Indigenous sovereignty to be a legal reality, Australians must come to accept that the British erred in law by not signing a Treaty for the acquisition of land from the Aboriginal ‘farmers’ living in their settled villages amongst cultivated lands.
Unfortunately for Mr Marks, brand ‘Pascoe’ took some pretty big hits in early 2020. In addition, all through 2020, the Uluru Statement and The Voice proposals were steadily sidelined and downgraded - from a euphoric demand that they be enshrined in the Constitution, to a final disappointed acceptance that they will be lucky to see the daylight as mere legislative instruments sometime in the next parliamentary cycle.
Time to bring in some big guns perhaps to revive the flagging fortunes of 'Brand Pascoe and The Uluru Statement. Enter Professor Henry Reynolds.
Historian Henry Reynolds. Author of Truth-Telling : History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement.
In early 2021, historian and advocate for the recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty and the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Henry Reynolds, published a ‘suspiciously’ timely book, Truth-Telling - History Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement.
To say that some aspects of this book were a shock to us here at Dark Emu Exposed would be an understatement.
We thought that this multi-award winning historian, and former Associate Professor, was properly trained and educated ‘in the art of historiography.’ We thought his ability to delve deep into the primary archives and locate and determine the facts, then sift the evidence, was reliable, even impeccable. Although, we might not agree with his final interpretations and conclusions, at least we needn’t have any doubts about the veracity of the facts and evidence he presented to us. Or so we thought.
Imagine our surprise when Professor Reynolds' cites Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu as a reliable source in his new book!
But then we realised what is going on. Is it that Professor Reynolds realises that more ammunition is required for the ‘noble cause’ of ‘proving’ that Aboriginal people had more than just a nomadic hunting and gathering interest in the land? To acknowledge Aboriginal sovereignty, Australians need to be convinced that Aboriginal people used agriculture and were settled farmers and actually ‘mixed their labour with the soil’, just like the sovereign nations of farmers in Europe.
The Dark Emu thesis is timely and perfectly suited to prove that this was the case in 1770/1778.
So let’s see how Henry Reynolds sets his readers up to convince them that Aboriginal people did indeed have a direct sovereign interest in the land.
Reynolds writes,
‘A…common misconception is that the Aboriginal peoples were not in possession of the lands through which they travelled. They had not fully established their ownership. Without some form of agriculture, their land rights could not be recognised and they should make way for people who would use the land more productively.
This has been a widely canvassed view in Australia, despite the vast accumulation of ethnographic information from as far back as the 1790s that has established beyond reasonable doubt that the Indigenous Australians were indeed land owners who used their country in a great diversity of ways, as Bruce Pascoe has explained in his recent bestselling book Dark Emu.
This was the conclusion made by Philip Gidley King, the third governor of New South Wales. When he was preparing to leave the colony in 1807, he drafted a memo for his successor, William Bligh, in which he observed, apropos the Aboriginal peoples, that he had 'ever considered them the real proprietors of the soil'. - (ibid., p54 here)
Quite unashamedly, Professor Reynolds wheels in Dark Emu as a ‘credible reference source’ to confirm that Aboriginal people were agriculturalists. And it appears that he does it in such a literary ingenious way that many would suspect he is a true disciple of the Pascoesque technique of literary illusion, the same technique used by magicians. (See below in Further Reading for a beautiful example of this from the master literary illusionist himself, Bruce Pascoe. Professor Pascoe we salute you!). The illusion works like this,
Step 1. Place before your reader the statement you want them to believe in, and tell them that it is commonly known, but do not present references, or name actual believers - you want to focus the reader’s attention and appeal to their innate desire to belong to the ‘right’ group, but you know you have no real proof that it is true. [Reynolds wants us to believe and focus on two things - ‘common misconception is that the Aboriginal peoples were not in possession of the lands’, and ‘agriculture.’ ]
Step 2. Bring in some ‘authority’ who declares, or ‘seems to declare’, that the statement is true. [Reynolds tells us, ‘…as Bruce Pascoe has explained in his recent bestselling book, Dark Emu.’] But be careful not to make the statement yourself directly because deep down you probably know it is flimsy or even rubbish. As it is only the illusion that you want, why risk your own reputation? You can always say later if it is exposed - ‘I never directly said that, I’m just quoting Pascoe.’]
Step 3. Finish with another, independent corroborator, reference source or fact, that you can use, or manipulate, to support your main goal [In this example, Reynolds finishes with ‘… the conclusion made by Philip Gidley King…governor of New South Wales... that he had 'ever considered them the real proprietors of the soil'.]
And bingo, the illusion has worked and your reader is now comfortably convinced they are part of the ‘sensible people’ who have followed your logic comprehensively and now believe that Aboriginal people had an ‘agriculturalists’ connection to the ‘soil’. It is now patently obvious that, even in terms of 18th century thinking and law, Aboriginal people had sovereignty and title to their lands and the deceitful British Governor King even knew it all along.
Only that, none of this is true; and here is why.
Step 1 : Possession of Land
One way to consider this is that Aboriginal people were not in ‘possession’ of their land in the sense required by International law for the making of Treaties. Their ‘possession’ was no different to that say of fishermen who ‘lived on the oceans’ and were nomadic over them as they ‘hunted and gathered’ fish. It is accepted that the fishermen do not have Internationally recognised sovereignty over those seas. They were culturally, spiritually and economical totally ‘within’ those seas and occupied those ‘seas’ but the seas are not a piece of property that the fishermen would understand that they could sell, or cede.
A second way is described by historian, John Hirst who has written,
‘…it is easier to make treaties with settled people than with hunter-gatherers. The Aborigines had no paramount chief to negotiate with. They had no notion that their land could be sold. They were intimately connected with all parts of it : they belonged to it rather than it to them. They did have a notion of allowing other people to use their land temporarily for a specific purpose. ‘
- Hirst. J., Australian History in 7 Questions, Black Inc, 2014, p.12-13.
Thirdly, one of the best explanations that we have found of why Aboriginal ‘possession’ was not recognised at British settlement, is by the Australian anthropologist, Peter Sutton from University of Adelaide who writes,
‘For most Aboriginal people of a classical cast of thought there was no publicly ordained conception of territory as something that could be annexed, by force or without force. It was a sacred endowment and not a secular achievement. Country was by and large inalienable. Mere occupation by others could not in their eyes, lead to their own dispossession. Historians who depict early European contact in such terms are careful when they recognise the dispossessive process with the advantage of hindsight, but not so careful when they attribute it to the consciousness of all involved.’
- Sutton, P. Stories about feeling, in Strangers on the shore , Veth, P. et al Ed, 2008, p.54.
Step 2 : Bring in an Authority
In this case Professor Reynolds wheels in Bruce Pascoe and his book Dark Emu. Notice that Reynolds does not explicitly endorse Dark Emu. Wise move Henry. He only leads the reader to believe that the ‘history is settled’ and Aboriginal people were ‘agriculturalists’ as Bruce Pascoe claims.
Step 3 : Finish with another independent, respected source that corroborates the argument.
Governor Philip Gidley King
Source State Library NSW
Here Professor Reynolds brings in the ‘big guns’ in terms of an official, British representative of the highest rank, the third Governor of NSW (1800-1806), Philip Gidley King.
Reynolds tells us that it has been,
‘…established beyond reasonable doubt that the Indigenous Australians were indeed land owners who used their country in a great diversity of ways…This was the conclusion made by Philip Gidley King, the third governor of New South Wales. When he was preparing to leave the colony in 1807, he drafted a memo for his successor, William Bligh, in which he observed, apropos the Aboriginal peoples, that he had 'ever considered them the real proprietors of the soil'.
Reynolds cites here as the reference : Philip Gidley King Papers, series 2, ML, SAFE/C 189.
Now, whenever we see an historian do a short, part sentence quote such as Reynolds has done here with, ‘ever considered them the real proprietors of the soil’, our ‘Incoming Pascoe Furphy’ alarm goes off.
So we thought we had better check where Henry gets this quote from. We searched far and wide to find the full source online as well as within our copy of the Historical Records of Australia, but to no avail. So we sent off one of our Dark Emu Exposed grandpas to find it in the Mitchell Library (ie: ML) and he struck literary gold - enough wealth for us to generate half a dozen additional blog posts but, more importantly in our opinion, it contained enough to totally debunk the argument Professor Reynolds is putting forward here.
We obtained a photograph of the original hand-written memo and also, very conveniently, a typed transcription done in 1922. Both can be viewed below, along with our transcription (retaining original spelling/grammar) of the 1922 transcription for easier reading.
Memo from Governor King to Governor Bligh in 1807 respecting Natives - Source : Mitchell Library Philip Gidley King papers Vol II (ML C189) p. 273
MANUSCRIPT LETTER OF INFORMATION.
From Governor King to Governor Bligh, originally in
Chief Secretary's Department, dated 1807.
Information to His Excellency, Mr. Bligh.
Respecting Natives.
You will find the Natives of this as of all other similar Countries, very capricious, and impossible to be fixed to any situation or pursuit, No securing or other means could induce them to attempt cultivation, altho they do not fail to profit of the White man's labour with greet avidity and hitherto with much treachery –
Some few make themselves usefull by rowing Boats, going in colonial vessells, and attaching themselves to Sealing gangs in which they have been much encouraged.
They have yearly plundered the isolated Settler of his all, and attacked the ripening corn of all descriptions, which has occasioned some violent acts on both sides, and I believe that were there a possibility of investigating how these quarrels arose, that much blame would attach to the White Man in the first instance not so much wickedness as from Fear and mistrust, and the Native once roused, looses no opportunity present or distant of avenging himself. Their barbarities have in many instances been very great and apparently unprovoked, but I never can think this has always been the case ----
For the last two years they have been generally inoffensive, owing to the great effect that my sending two of their Numbers to Norfolk Island in 1804 had on them - since when no disturbance has occurred or any theft been committed.
Most of them keep about Broken and Botany Bay making frequent visit in the Summer to fight their Battles which are often sanguinary and cruel to each other - It would seem almost necessary on human principles to check these acts, but being an interference with their customs and prejudices none has been offered.
Much has been said about the propriety of their being compelled to work as Slaves, but as I have ever considered them the real Proprietors of the Soil, I have never suffered any restraint whatever on these lines, or suffered any injury to be done to their persons or property - And I should apprehend the best mode of punishment that could be inflicted on them would be expatriating them to some of the other settlements where they might be made to labour as in the case of the two sent to Norfolk in 1804.
(Sgd.) Philip Gidley King.
Mr. Gullick, Government Printer, gave this photograph and typescript to the Mitchell Library. The document is in the Chief Secretary's Office. It was found by Mr. Young, officer in charge of records. Mr. Gullick thought he had better take a photograph of it for preservation in the Mitchell Library.
W.H.I.
P.L. 27.4.22.
Now is Henry Reynolds, like Bruce Pascoe, ‘Just Making Stuff Up’?
Is Henry Reynolds, like Bruce Pascoe, ‘selectively quoting’ to slant the narrative to mean something which his source does not say or mean?
In our opinion, it appears that Professor Reynolds is taking his selective quote completely out of context - To our mind, what King is actually saying is that, despite the much discussed idea that the Aborigines should be compelled to work as slaves, he would never consider anything along these lines as he believes they are the ‘real proprietors of the soil’ in the sense they are free, were here before the British and have a complete right to live their lives on the ‘soil’ as they see fit and so morally cannot be enslaved by the British (See Note 3 below regarding slavery).
King is not referring in his memo to any idea of sovereignty or land title by the Aborigines, but rather their ability and freedom to use the land. This is despite what other history revisionists would have us believe (see Note 2 below).
But don’t just take our word for it. Consider how another historian, Barry Bridges, writing in the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society in 1970, read the same memo but comes to a different conclusion to Reynolds when he writes,
‘In 1807 Governor King prepared a Memorandum on the Natives for the guidance of Governor Bligh in which he observed that he had ‘ever considered them the real Proprietors of the Soil' and had rejected a much discussed proposition that they should be enslaved.
In accordance with this sentiment King had encouraged a notorious hostile, known to the Hawkesbury settlers as Charley, in his desire to settle down to become the first Aboriginal farmer. The governor allowed Charley the use of, but not the title to, four acres of land which he cultivated with diligence and patience. But the Aborigines regularly plundered the ripened maize crops and in April 1805 Charley was unable to resist the temptation, or pressure, to join in raids in which several whites were murdered and grain destroyed. He was one of the six raiders killed by a pursuit party.
Apparently the first Aborigine to become a landowning farmer was culturally European, having been reared by a settler and grown to manhood in the white community, unable to speak the native tongue. By 1815 he had been given a farm and had settled down to cultivate it. It was not until Governor Macquarie's term, that the first serious attempt was made to give 'wild' Aborigines a stake in their country by allotting them farms and teaching them how to work the soil’. - (ibid., p97ff here) [our emphasis]
So, no second thoughts here by King, or Macquarie later on, on the issues of native land sovereignty or Aboriginal treaties, just a desire to give Aboriginal people the opportunity to settle down and take up agriculture and become farmers on their own plot of land; the same opportunity that was given to every other British subject in the colony.
Henry Reynolds wants us to believe that Governor King recognised that,
what ‘…has [now been] established beyond reasonable doubt that the Indigenous Australians were indeed land owners who used their country in a great diversity of ways, as Bruce Pascoe has explained in his recent bestselling book Dark Emu. [And] [t]his was the conclusion made by Philip Gidley King…’
To our mind this is a distortion of Governor King’s memo, which explicitly states,
‘You will find the Natives…impossible to be fixed to any situation or pursuit, No securing or other means could induce them to attempt cultivation…’
That is, they were nomadic and not farmers.
Another useful way put ourselves in the mindset of Governor King and the British government during settlement, and in relation to Aboriginal land title or sovereignty, is provided by lawyer David Ritter when he writes,
When Australia was originally colonised by the Crown, neither terra nullius or any other legal doctrine was used to deny the recognition of traditional Aboriginal rights to land under the common law. Such a doctrinal denial would not have appeared necessary to the colonists, because the indigenous inhabitants of the colony were seen and defined by the colonists as intrinsically barbarous and without any interest in land. Thus the colonists required no legal doctrine to explain why Aboriginal people's land rights were not to be recognised under law because no doctrine was required for what was axiomatic.
- Ritter, D., The "Rejection of Terra Nullius" in Mabo: A Critical Analysis SYDNEY LAW REVIEW [VOL 18: 5, p.6 (See Note 4 further reading below).
Ritter’s analysis lends support to the idea that Governor King would not have been concerned at all with any questions regarding the legitimacy of the Crown’s sovereignty or the Aborigine’s lack of any form of ‘title’ in the land, despite what Henry Reynolds would try to have us believe 214 years later.
Notes & Further Reading
Note 1 : Master Class 101 in Literary Historical Illusion by Professor Pascoe University of Melbourne.
As an excellent example of how to setup the reader to accept a ‘false’ idea, with no real evidence to support it, as historical ‘fact’, consider the following from Bruce Pascoe’s, Dark Emu. (2018 Reprint p36-37).
Step 1. Place before your readers the statement that you want them to believe in, and imply that it is commonly known. However, do not present references - you want to focus the readers attention and setup the desire to belong to the larger ‘correct-thinking’ group, but you know there is no actual proof
Statement from Dark Emu - “When early settlers found an Aboriginal tool that looked like a hoe it was dismissed because they had convinced themselves that there was no agriculture in Australia.” (The keys words Pascoe want us to believe : that Aboriginal people had tools like hoes used in agriculture).
Step 2. Bring in an ‘authority’ who ‘declares’ the statement to be true.
Pascoe tells us - “Robert Etheridge was a paleaontologist to the geographical survey of News South Wales and the Australian Museum at Sydney. In 1894 he speculated on the use of these ‘hoes’ and concluded that the myth of that Aboriginal people had no knowledge of husbandry was a mistake based on prejudice.” (key points - a scientist, Museum endorsed, ‘hoes’, ‘husbandry’ and with an accusation of racism thrown at us non-believing Aussies to boot!)
Step 3. Finish with another independent corroborating story, a referenced source, or fact that you can manipulate to support your main goal.
Pascoe, then tells of a young Aboriginal man and archaeologist, Jonathon Jones who he says goes to the museum and finds dozens of these ‘large' and heavy’ stone implements ‘like a pick or plough’ that had ‘been worked only in soil.’
Images of ‘Bogan picks’ in Dark Emu
Then drop in some photographs of stone ‘Bogan picks’ into the narrative, all the while making sure you are yourself are very careful not to say directly that these are ‘hoes’ or ‘ploughs’. That way, if the illusion is ever exposed one day, you can just blame the ‘experts’ who seem to have misled you. All very reminiscent of the survival techniques of a Soviet-era bureaucrat!
And so we have bingo - the reader has been lead to believe that these stone picks were huge and used as hoes and ploughs by Aboriginal farmers .
Only that none of it is true - it just another Pascoe literary illusion - See our block posts here and here and here.
Note 2 - Professor Reynolds pushes the boundaries, but then others go even further.
Professor of Law at University of California, Stuart Banner, writing in his book, Possessing the Pacific, Harvard University Press, 2007, p31, would have us believe, on his reading of Governor King’s memo, that,
‘…King evidently had some misgivings about terra nullius…In 1807, while turning over the office to his successor, William Bligh, King gave Bligh some advice about the Aborigines. The colonists always urged him to punish the Aborigines severely when they stole crops, King related, but he could never bring himself to do it. “As I have ever considered them the real Proprietors of the Soil,” he explained, “ I have never…suffered any injury to be done to their persons or property”. …As governor, King was the man ultimately responsible for the policy of terra nullius, by granting parcels of Crown land and coordinating the colony’s defence against the Aborigines. That King would call the Aborigines the ‘real Proprietors of the Soil” suggests he felt some discomfort in that role’.
Professor Banner appears to us that he is stretching King’s memo so far that he risks a charge of embellishment - we bet a bottle of rum that King didn’t come to work with furrowed brow and terra nullius on his mind given that the use of the phrase ‘terra nullius’ was completely absent from our colonial history. [A bottle of rum to the first reader who can find the use of the words terra nullius in any document of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries relating to Australia’s colonial history or beginnings].
In our reading of the whole memo, there is no indication that King is discomforted by granting parcels of Crown land. The only ‘discomfort’ we detect in King’s role is due to the difficulties he had in keeping the peace between the settlers and the Aborigines. The issue of land sovereignty and a lack of a treaty with Aboriginal people is nowhere expressed as a concern in his memo. Rather, the memo completely reflects what we today would say would be part of Governor King’s ‘KPI’s’ (Key Performance Indicators). King would have been conscience of his need to perform to the standards set-down by Governor Phillip’s original instructions for the colony, viz:
You are to endeavour by every possible means to open an Intercourse with the Natives and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all Our Subjects to live in amity and kindness with them. And if any of Our Subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary Interruption in the exercise of their several occupations. It is our Will and Pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the Offence. You will endeavour to procure an account of the Numbers inhabiting the Neighbourhood of the intended settlement and report your opinion to one of our Secretaries of State in what manner Our Intercourse with these people may be turned to the advantage of this country. - Governor Phillip’s Instructions 25 April 1787 (UK) p.6-7.
Banner also states,
‘The colonists always urged him to punish the Aborigines severely when they stole crops, King related, but he could never bring himself to do it.’
In our reading of the memo, we can’t see where King ‘relates’ this? And didn’t King determine that the most effective punishment actually was what Aboriginal people considered to be the most severe, namely removing their freedom by expatriation to Norfolk Island, which was King’s preferred method of punishment?
Note 3 : Slavery
What disappoints a lot of us average Australians is how many historians just seem to focus on aspects of our colonial history that can be used to make Colonial Australia and us Australians look bad, while completely ignoring the goods points and successes of our Colonial society. For example, in King’s memo he obviously stresses that there is no place for slavery in the colony. This continued on the original, strong, Progressive, anti-slavery stance of Governor Phillip, who was even ahead of such Abolishionist campaigners as William Wilberforce (Reference here).
Why don’t our historians at least spend some time telling Australians about our proud legacy as the only inhabited continent on the planet that never had legal, chattel slavery?
Maybe Australian historian Greg Melleuish was correct when he wrote in 2013 of some of his fellow historians,
As the major sins of the Australian people relate to the the past treatment of the Aboriginal people (the White Australia Policy runs a distant second) this means that Australian historians have been obsessed with Aboriginal history over the past twenty five years.
Moreover Aboriginal history fits in well with the postmodern Google historian. For one thing, one does not need to know any history outside of Australian history to practice it. These historians tend to avoid comparative studies and do not ask why, for example, Indian tribes in North America preferred to deal with the British in Canada rather than the Americans. After all, Britain was the devil incarnate.
Secondly it is fertile ground for the use of post-modern current fashions. Hence historians can argue that oral accounts of events that occurred two hundred years ago are as reliable as written documents or that it doesn’t matter if Terra Nullius is true or false; what matters is its political significance
- Melleuish, G., Australian Intellectuals, Connor Court, 2013, p.47-48
Note 4 : The "Rejection of Terra Nullius" in Mabo: A Critical Analysis by David Ritter
This essay is well worth the read in its entirety here. One very interesting part is the conclusion where Ritter writes,
The conclusions that have been reached may be stated baldly. First, in Mabo the High Court corrected the Australian common law by recognising the existence of the common law doctrine of native title, but in order to accomplish this there had been no need to "reject" any "doctrine of terra nullius". Second, by doing something like "rejecting" a "doctrine of terra nullius" in Mabo, the High Court resolved a long-term discursive crisis in Australian legal discourse in which the law had been seen to be inequitable and unjust because it no longer conformed to the relevant "truths" in Australian society. Thus, the "rejection of terra nullius" provided a rhetorical explanation for why Aboriginal land rights had historically not been recognised; it re-legitimated the rule of law in Australia; it allowed the Australian judicial system to once again appear to reflect the relevant "truths" in Australian society; and it realigned truth and power to reinforce the legitimacy of the white Australian nation. If the "rejection of terra nullius" as such marked a judicial revolution at all, it was a stage managed one: things were changed in order for things to remain the same.
Ritter tells us that regarding the final phrase [in our bold],
‘This quote in context is drawn from the Italian novel Il Gattopardo, by G T di Lampedusa, (The Leopard, 1960). The novel dealt with the events of the Italian Risorgimento and argued the broad historical thesis that the Italian unification had been managed from above in order to prevent real social reform. In the book Tancredi remarks to Don Fabrizio his uncle who is the Prince of Salina, 'if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ [our emphasis].
Incredibly, this is the feeling many remote community Aboriginal people have expressed to us - that despite the Mabo Native Title legislation having passed 30 years ago, they are still disenfranchised. They don’t have freehold land title so they can’t build, own or mortgage their own properties like other Australians; the cash from mining & pastoral royalties is piling up ($120 million in the case of an Aurukun Trust and believed to be billions Australia wide) but is not being spent on improving their lives, and their futures are being controlled by an Aboriginal Political Elite Order from above. They have swapped Christian Mission life for a Bureaucratic Mabo Mission life, with patently worse outcomes for their communities.
Many think that the political Order from above has prevented real social reform in Aboriginal affairs and hence preserved the Order’s power because it knew that, if it wanted things to stay as they were, things would have to change.
Is this film clip from The Leopard perhaps a representation of the Senior Aboriginal Political elite and their Canberra bureaucrats visiting a remote community? Many Aboriginal people might thinks so.
