It is appropriate at this point to consider briefly the wider policy environment outside the parliament and the Ministry, as new ideas were emerging around Aboriginal land, conceptions of justice and equality, and the limits to assimilation. The period of 1962 to 1968 was a particularly vibrant one in terms of activism around Aboriginal issues in Australia, and coalitions formed between many disparate groups of activists, including Christians, trade unions, communists and feminists (Holland 2005). Indigenous people were also increasingly able to speak for themselves, as restrictions on movement and education were lifted with the expansion of civil rights associated with assimilation throughout the decade. As a result of media attention, meetings and conferences, and the circulation of activist publications and expert opinions, many of the long settled policies in Aboriginal affairs came under critical scrutiny.
The focus of most activism in Aboriginal affairs during this period was unquestionably around civic rights, and the campaign leading up to the 1967 Referendum which saw the amendment of the Constitution to formally allow the Commonwealth the power to legislate with respect to the Aboriginal race (Chesterman 2005; Attwood and Markus 2007; Taffe 2005). In the popular understanding, the Referendum would allow Aboriginal people to become “citizens” and to be considered equals in Australian society, and in these terms it is easy to understand the constitutional change as the culmination of decades of assimilationist policy making. This was an unsatisfying outcome for many Aboriginal activists, however, and as McGregor observes, the “immediate consequence among politically active Aborigines was to foster cynicism about mainstream political processes and to induce disenchantment with the referendum campaigners’ avowed objective of national inclusiveness” (McGregor 2009, 347). Their desire to go beyond the apparent achievement of formal civic equality and demand specific rights on the basis of their Aboriginality presented some challenges within the broader Aboriginal social movement. The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), as the FCAA was known from 1964 on, was one organisation in particular which struggled with internal divisions over campaign priorities, and this came to a head when Aboriginal members ultimately seized control of the agenda and the executive positions in 1970 (Taffe 2005). In the years before this, the Aboriginal focus on land justice, as distinct from civil rights, had been an awkward issue for the FCAATSI to work on, as it challenged deep-seated notions of formal and civic equality, and initially no members of the organisation were prepared to take leadership responsibility for the Land and Reserves Committee which was responsible for fact- finding and campaigning on the issue (Taffe 2005, 188).
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Assimilation was gradually coming to be seen to be flawed as an approach, and there was a growing recognition of the assumed but questionable superiority of the European lifestyle, and the impossible expectation of true equality for Aboriginal people without a means of addressing the entrenched poverty which was the result of dispossession and discrimination. Critiques were articulated by expert academics, church leaders and activists, and land ownership was frequently identified as a policy solution which would ensure the “economic viability and cultural survival of the Aborigines” (Holland 2005, 95).
From the academic realm, for example, Charles Rowley’s address on “Aborigines and Other Australians”, published in the journal Oceania, presented a comprehensive critique of assimilation, drawing on experiences of indigenous peoples in the United States to show the dangers of the government’s approach (Rowley 1962). He observed the understandable reluctance of many Aboriginal Australians to assimilate, and called on the government to address the issue of Aboriginal poverty based on the deprivation of their inheritance by granting land to Aboriginal groups, through a system of trusts (Rowley 1962; see also Attwood 2003a, 208 and Haebich 2008, 59-60). Anthropologist Ronald Berndt, who had carried out extensive field work in Arnhem Land with the Yirrkala people, argued in 1964 that Aboriginal rights to land ownership should be legally recognised “where Aborigines are still associated with their own traditionally-inherited land”, on the basis of their own traditions of hereditary rights and inalienability of land (Berndt 1964). Berndt acknowledged the challenges of extending compensation for the injustices of dispossession to those who no longer had strong ties to land, however, and treated an Australia-wide application of “land rights” with caution (Berndt 1964, 293).
Outside academia, similar arguments were articulated within activist and church circles. Frank Engel, general secretary of the National Missionary Council, called in 1963 for the granting of reserve land to Aboriginal tribes under a system of “corporate freehold ownership” and the purchase of other areas of land for Aboriginal use, as a remedy for the moral wrong which had been committed in dispossession (quoted in Taffe 2005, 182; also Attwood 2003a, 209). Barrie Pittock, from the Society of Friends, and later the director of the FCAATSI Land Rights Campaign, applied research on the granting of title and self-government to Amerindians to the Australian case, and argued in 1965 for a new policy of transferring ownership of areas of land to Aboriginal people, allowing them to use mining royalties and make their own decisions about allocating their funds, as a form of compensation for the historical dispossession (Taffe 2004, 196-7). Clearly these ideas were having an impact, if not on the Menzies government, certainly on the Labor Party in opposition, and they were echoed in parliament by Beazley and Bryant.
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International attention was another important factor in this period, as activists compared the Australian example to race relations and segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa, and deplored the Australian failure to sign the International Labour Organisation Convention 107, the Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention of 1957 (McGregor 2011, 100; Clark 2008). The ILO Convention 107 was a significant international convention of its period, calling on national governments to recognise indigenous customary law and ownership of land, and proposing compensation for dispossession (Russell 2005, 144). Australia was falling out of step with international ideas around decolonisation and racial equality under the Menzies government, as Haebich (2008, 51-52) argues:
Australia was on the wrong side in this new world and its race-based policies and old-boy networks of empire now constituted a hindrance rather than a sign of white superiority and solidarity. Discriminatory immigration and Aboriginal policies, together with criticism of its colonial role in relation to the Trust Territory of Papua New Guinea, which was not granted autonomy until 1975, made Australia vulnerable to exclusion from new trade and political networks developing within its geographic region… The Menzies government did not immediately appreciate the extent of change. The Labor Party in opposition was more attuned to the international changes, and repeatedly referred to Australia’s international obligations throughout the decade, particularly with respect to Aboriginal Australia as well as Papua New Guinea. The Yirrkala dispute was one with international dimensions, given the Commonwealth’s constitutional responsibility for the Northern Territory, and the international interest in the traditional art and craft produced by the communities in Arnhem Land. Gough Whitlam, as newly instituted leader of the opposition, campaigned on the 1967 referendum with an argument about the need to acknowledge Australia’s international obligations, including signing the ILO convention (Hocking 2009, 298).
The campaign in support of the people of Yirrkala was fought within this contested environment of new ideas and new definitions of the policy problem around Aboriginal welfare and Aboriginal rights. Other disputes over Aboriginal land soon attracted the focus of activist groups, including the campaign for Lake Tyers in Victoria, Mapoon in Queensland, and the Wave Hill protest by the Gurindji people, which began in 1966. For activists within FCAATSI, these conflicts consolidated into a campaign demanding that reserves be granted to Aboriginal owners, Aboriginal ownership of Crown land be recognised, and Aboriginal consent be required before development of their land (Lippmann 1979, 174). There were differences between the circumstances of each specific dispute, but the campaigns were clearly linked for Aboriginal activists in the south, and shared important commonalities with their own protests through the post-war period as their reserves were revoked, leased and sold against their will. This fostered a pan-Aboriginal movement which drew activists from
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the north and south into common campaigns, though appealed less to the non-Aboriginal observers. As Goodall observes, when the Gurindji people walked off and established their camp at Wattie Creek,
[f]or Aboriginal people in New South Wales, the Gurindji demands were immediately recognisable. The demand for restoration of their lands echoed the desires which most of them had grown up with… For white Australians in the south-east, the parallels between the remote conditions of central Australia and the ‘settled’ rural lands of New South Wales were much harder to perceive. (Goodall 2008, 385).
This action marked the beginning of the land rights movement, according to Attwood (2003a, 216). In a noticeable break from the past struggles over land, the earlier pattern of local struggles over land came to be seen, and coordinated, as part of a larger, national campaign. This was significant because it allowed for a transfer of a particular notion of the legitimacy of land claims by “traditional” Aboriginal people in unsettled areas in the north to the claims over long-settled areas in the south. The Yirrkala case in particular had a resonance which was very valuable:
Northeast Arnhem land was a remote place that was, in the eyes of non-Aboriginal campaigners, inextricably connected with ‘tribal Aborigines’ and ‘Aboriginal tradition’, symbols that authenticated indigenous rights to land. A national campaign for ‘land rights’ originated in protest over this site as it could never have emerged around reserve lands in settled, Southeastern Australia…the Yolngu’s hold upon the land had not been challenged and so it was easier for non-Aboriginal people to accept and assert the proposition that these Aboriginal people were the owners of the land. (Attwood (2003a, 222)
Elsewhere Attwood observes that the earlier campaigns against the loss of reserve lands in the south had been based on “historical relationships to the lands”, the new campaigns around Wave Hill and Yirrkala were focused on “timeless” or “prehistorical” relationships to “tribal land”, adding a new dimension of legitimacy (Attwood 2000, 27). Southern activists, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, were keenly aware of the consequences of lost culture and tradition, and the economic and social impact of loss of land in the south, and so they fought hard to save the groups in the north who had not yet suffered this treatment, in an effort to prevent them sharing the fate of poverty and marginalisation (Holland 2005). For Aboriginal activists themselves, the land rights movement motivated a strong interest in their own past and culture, and “the land rights agenda bonded a legal right (to land ownership) to Indigenous culture which validated that ownership) in a way that anti- discrimination protests did not” (McGregor 2009, 354). The land rights cause was thus also closely entwined with the critique of assimilation (Attwood 2003a, 283).
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In summary, the Menzies government during this period was resolute in its commitment to assimilation, but equally firm in its unwillingness to contemplate notions of Aboriginal land ownership or political agency. Within the galvanised Aboriginal social movement, however, assimilation was diminishing in credibility as a policy approach, and land ownership was gradually being accepted as a promising path out of poverty for Aboriginal Australians. The basis for land ownership was still much contested, and provoked discord between some Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal members of the movement, but the acceptance of the legitimacy of the Yirrkala cause was widespread. Significantly, there was a growing sense that Aboriginal people should be able to control access to their reserved lands, especially by foreign mining companies, and also to claim rights to occupy land where they had longstanding traditional connections. Aboriginal people were at last receiving recognition as capable political actors, with grievances warranting government action, and the right to be heard.