adding another organisation to the already troubled community. New Burnt Bridge residents hoped that the Ngaku lease would now lapse but instead title passed to the KLALC with the lease in-tact. Ngaku refused to relinquish it and attempted to press ahead with its building program.
By this time the New Burnt Bridge community was extremely frustrated and hostilities broke out again. Over the next two years there were threats of personal violence, damage to property, and the barricading of the
Kempsey Local Aboriginal Land Council (KLALC) was registered under the provisions of the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1983) in 1984.
road into New Burnt Bridge to keep out the builders.^ Eventually the building program was abandoned, housing funding stopped and the
residents continue to live under the most appalling conditions (see below).
It was commonly stated that the dispute occurred because New Burnt
Bridge residents believed Ngaku was constructing the houses, not for the residents, but for 'their own people' from town who were planning to move back out when the houses were completed.^ Ngaku maintained that
the settlers from town were to be in addition to the residents and that the rehousing of the residents was the first priority. The real issue was much more complex having to do both with the wider factional
disputes in Kempsey and the desire of New Burnt Bridge residents to gain control over the land. The elders refused to let the building program continue until they had title to the land. Since they were not
incorporated they were not eligible for funding and there had been a singular lack of government support for them to become incorporated, the official view being that there are already too many organisations in Kempsey competing for housing funds. Thus self-determination had to some extent been interpreted and controlled by the government, rather than by the communities it was intended to support, and this had led to enormous anger and frustration on the part of the New Burnt Bridge community.
87
My first visit to Kempsey coincided with this period so the barricades were in place when I was initially taken to New Burnt Bridge.
^ An unfortunate decision by the Ngaku executive to rehouse a relation of one of its members, who was new to the area, before others who had been waiting with increasing impatience for so many years for decent housing, lay at the foundation of this belief. This incident was however a small part of a much broader and complex problem with intense housing competition in the community.
In 1983 residents of Old Burnt Bridge were listed by DAA as squatters on private land (DAA Community Profile, 1983) as the old reserves had been revoked in 1954 and 1964 and the land sold during the early 1970s. A small portion remained Crown land and one parcel had been purchased by an Aboriginal man who had moved to Burnt Bridge from Yellow Rock in the 1930s. The Crown Land was occupied by the descendants of one of the original farming families, who had returned to Old Burnt Bridge in the late 1970s. The ADC bought Old Burnt Bridge in 1984 and handed the title over to DAETC with funds sufficient for the construction of two houses. The houses were built and are occupied. In 1985 DAETC had plans for extended residential development at Old Burnt Bridge.
At Greenhill the condition of the cottages deteriorated, little
maintenance was done by the ALT and a community protest, supported by the staff of the Medical Service, was needed to get hot water systems installed in the late 1970s. The ALT refused to hand over the lease to the GHPA and when the ALT was dissolved in 1983 the title passed to the KLALC, along with the title to New Burnt Bridge. The Greenhill
residents still wanted to control their own affairs. In 1984 they became incorporated under the Commonwealth Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act (1976) and changed their name to the Greenhill Aboriginal Corporation. Unfortunately, their acknowledged leader, a competent organiser and astute politician, later abandoned the struggle and moved to another town and the KLALC continued to run Greenhill.
The building program there was suspended in 1986, along with all Kempsey development, but three new houses had been were completed. Most of the others were badly in need of replacement (see below).
Population, housing, employment and services (a) population and services.
The Aboriginal population of Kempsey was difficult to determine with any precision. Official statistical information from the 1981 census was available only for the statistical local area (SLA) as a whole, which included many outlying communities and isolated dwellings. Furthermore, the census data were almost certainly an underestimate of the true
Aboriginal population (see chapter one). Thus the 1981 estimated total population in the Kempsey SLA was 19,604 of whom 941 (4.8%) were
Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (TSI). For 1986 the estimated total population was 22,900 of whom 1,279 (5.6%) were Aboriginal/TSI (ABS pers comm). This is a 11.7% increase in the total but a 35.9% increase in the Aboriginal/TSI population.
Under-reporting is at least partly due to the fact that providing
misinformation and withholding information have become an integral part of Aboriginal resistance to bureaucratic control (see Hausfeld 1963). Morris (1986:235) argues for example that withholding information was a strategy used to frustrate the AWB. It is also however, a device used to exploit the welfare system. Even Aboriginal organisations in Kempsey could not get full census information. A door-to-door census attempted by the Durri AMS in 1985, as a critical first step toward an improved preventive health program, was abandoned because of antagonism from members of the local community. Kempsey is not unique in this respect. For example, Frith et al (1974) found that the population of the
'Coasttown' Aboriginal community was 36% above the official estimates.
In the field I relied on the most recent (and possibly most accurate) population estimates for the town only (Kempsey, Greenhill, and Burnt
Bridge) provided by DAA Community Profiles for 1985. These data were collected by Aboriginal field officers drawn from the local community. The estimated total Aboriginal population was 892 (Table 3.I).7
At least another 200 Aborigines lived in other settlements in the Shire, at Bellbrook, South West Rocks, Hat Head, Stuarts Point and
Dondingalong. In the statistical region as a whole, there were also Aboriginal populations to the north at Nambucca Heads, Bowraville, Macksville and to the south at Telegraph Point (see Map 1).
90
Table 3.1 Estimated Aboriginal population of Kempsey,
1985 (Source: DAA Community Profiles)•
pop dwellings pers\dw# 15yrs+~
South Kempsey 353 58 6.1 53.8
West Kempsey 276 55 5.4 64.1
Old Burnt Bridge 52 12 4.3 76.9
New Burnt Bridge 29 5 5.8 51.7
Greenhill 182 34 5.3 61.5
Totals 892 141 5.6 59.8
# mean number of persons per dwelling.
proportion of the population fifteen years and over.
Aborigines in Kempsey theoretically had access to the full range of health, educational and government services. Public pre-schools and primary and secondary schools were no longer segregated and some had Aboriginal teachers and special Aboriginal curricula. A private
residential Seventh Day Adventist Aboriginal School (Mirriwinni Gardens)
DAA Community Profiles do not provide age-class information adequate to construct a demographic pyramid. Instead I did this with birth date information from 1322 client files at the Durri AMS (see Figure 7.1).
was situated between Kempsey and Bellbrook and a preschool financed by the Save the Children Fund was located at Greenhill. Tertiary education was available at the Kempsey TAFE (Technical and Further Education) which offered a wide range of vocational courses and also employed an Aborigine responsible for encouraging Aboriginal enrolment and providing ongoing support for Aboriginal students. (The TAFE provided tuition for the Aboriginal Builders Labourers Apprenticeship Scheme which was
building houses at Greenhill in 1985 - see Figure 3.5). Aboriginal students were eligible for Commonwealth Government grants under the Aboriginal Secondary Grants Scheme (ABSEG) and Aboriginal Study Grants Scheme (ABSTUDY - for adults). These schemes provided financial
assistance for books, clothing, school fees, travel and living-away- from-home expenses for secondary and tertiary education.
The Kempsey offices of the Commonwealth Department of Social Security and the Commonwealth Employment Service both employed Aborigines as officers involved in the handling Aboriginal matters. An office of the NSW Department of Youth and Community Services (YACS) provided emergency support (both cash and services) for families in need.
The Aboriginal-controlled Durri AMS opened in 1976 to provide health services to Aborigines in the region, from Nambucca Heads in the north to Port Macquarie in the south. Before its closure in 1986 both it and the local hospital catered to the health needs (both medical and dental) of the Kempsey community and additional specialist services were
available in Port Macquarie, to which transport was provided free of charge. Community health services and drug and alcohol counselling were provided by the Community Health Service which employed an Aboriginal nurse. There was also a residential Aboriginal Alcohol Rehabilitation
Centre (Bennelongs Haven) at Kinchela, lower down on the Macleay a few kilometres from Kempsey (see Map 1).
In addition there were a number of Aboriginal organisations providing services (Aboriginal Legal Aid, the Ngaku Multi-Purpose Centre for child care), cultural expression (The Dunghutti Tribal Dancers which performed at the Fourth Festival of the Pacific Arts in Tahiti in 1985) and a political focus (DAETC, KLALC and Ngaku). The local office of the ADC in Kempsey, through which funding for local housing and development was coordinated, was closed in 1985 but regional officers for both ADC and DAA were at Port Macquarie, forty minutes away by car.
A significant amount of government funding had been provided for
Aborigines in Kempsey - for housing, land purchase, the medical service, the Tribal Dancers trip to Tahiti, two community buses, and the child care centre. More general government support was provided as assistance to Legal Aid and through the Land Tax to the KLALC. Ngaku was supported to maintain a permanent office and executive.
By 1985 there were no longer any public facilities in Kempsey which were barred to Aborigines. They could use the public swimming pool, eat at the cafes, drink at any of the hotels and gain membership of the
conservative Returned Services League (RSL) Club (which a number of them had done). Thus formal discriminatory practices and regulations had been dissolved and state anti-discrimination legislation provided an avenue through which Aborigines could seek redress for prejudicial
treatment. Through a variety of government initiatives a range of opportunities had been offered, aimed at expanding their economic and social autonomy. There had in fact been quite dramatic changes over the
93 last twenty years - from institutionalisation and negative
discrimination to self-management, the dissolution of structural discriminatory practices and moves to implement some positive discrimination (through government programs).
If these changes had been effective in improving the structural position of Aborigines one might have expected to find it reflected in improved indices of social equality such as housing, employment and health. However, while a number of important gains had obviously been made, it was apparent that Aborigines remained significantly disadvantaged, and
that the everyday expressions of race prejudice remained critical features of Aboriginal life in Kempsey.
(b) housing.
Aborigines in Kempsey lived in three distinct locations, the most
obvious difference between them being that two of them, Burnt Bridge and Greenhill, were all-Aboriginal communities, spatially segregated from
the town, while town dwellers lived dispersed throughout suburban Kempsey.
Kempsey Town: Town dwellers lived predominantly in South or West Kempsey, where newer housing development had taken place. There were few living in Central Kempsey or East Kempsey because these were the older residential areas where houses tended to be privately owned. Town