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Hi Susanne,
Here's an article that traces the use of the word
reconciliation to the Deaths in Custody Royal Commission.
Cheers
What does reconciliation mean? The concept originally emerged out of the Final Report of the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991. The Commission investigated 99 deaths-but not one charge resulted for warders or police. It had 339 recommendations--but few have been implemented with any force. The Commission was presided over by Elliot Johnson QC, and part of his report read: running through all the proposals that are made for the elimination of disadvantages is the proposition that Aboriginal people have for two hundred years been dominated to an extraordinary degree by the non-Aboriginal society and that the disadvantage is the product of that domination. The thrust of this report is that the elimination of disadvantage requires an end of domination and an empowerment of Aboriginal people; that control of their lives, of their communities must be returned to Aboriginal hands. New ATSIC chair Geoff Clarke's understanding of reconciliation as stated at Corroboree 2000 in Sydney is a rather bland version that places emphasis upon the 'consent' of indigenous people. True reconciliation means recognising we possess distinct rights. They arise from our status as first peoples, our relationships with our territories and waters, and our own systems of law and governance. Our right to self-determination is a core principle. The reconciliation process must lead us into a new era of constitutional consent. No constitutional document records our consent to the terms of our relationship with non-indigenous Australians.(Courier-Mail, 3.6. 2000) The new chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Evelyn Scott, commented recently: 'It should have been called the National Reconciliation Council, because people thought it was only for Aboriginals' (Courier-Mail, 3.6.2000). Bob Anderson gave a paper in 1996 entitled 'Justice or Reconciliation,' which concluded: 'Whenever I hear the term reconciliation, it seems it just means we've got to reconcile ourselves to the situation. There's no justice at all' (The Point of Change 47). Any justice would involve land rights and compensation not just for the stolen children but for the stolen land upon which the wealth of the invader culture was built. Noel Pearson similarly recently drew attention to the economic foundation of Aboriginal disempowerment: Reconciliation to me has got to be founded on the material conditions of the indigenous people because it is the material condition upon which our psychology and spiritual relation and political thinking is ultimately based. Anne Pattel-Gray in The Great White Flood suggests that 'the whole reconciliation process is about making whites feel good about themselves and about making it seem that they are doing something when they are not' (223). Reconciliation can purport to offer a neat closure of the past; Kim Beasley for example 'has repeatedly called for the Prime Minister to apologise, and has said a Labor government would consider a treaty or some form of settlement to bring reconciliation to a conclusion' (Australian 7.6.2000). Part of the agenda of this is put some sort of lid upon a potential flurry of compensation claims conjured by Howard as part of the Federal government's refusal to offer a formal apology. (The Canadian government offered an apology and no disastrous results for the white nation ensued.) Surveys, for what they are worth, showed on 7 June that support for a formal apology by the government had dropped slightly from 50% (in 1997) to 47%-but 45% are in favour of a treaty with 37% against. Recent demonstrations in favour of reconciliation are the largest in living memory. A mass walk across Sydney Harbour bridge on Saturday 27 May numbered 400,000 at least. 50,000 marched over the William Jolly bridge in Brisbane on June 3. Also launched at the weekend was the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation's final document. Some sense is emerging of just how fuzzy reconciliation could be, and the concept of a treaty is being re-raised, after being semi-shelved with the birth of the Reconciliation Council. Sugar Ray Robinson, deputy chair of ATSIC, argued recently that: 'a treaty has never been off our agenda' in an article with the reassuring title (maybe it wasn't his) 'Treaty's Purpose Is to Unite, Not To Divide Our Nation' (Courier-Mail, 7.6.2000). 'When you want to talk about a treaty, you have to talk about the issue of land rights and people don't have a full understanding of that,' says Evelyn Scott. For decades, land rights was consistently raised by Aboriginal men and women as the crucial issue that underlay all other concerns. At a 1980 conference, one woman commented: Land rights, for example-the whole question of children relates to the problem of identity and the loss of identity, the identity crisis of a disintegrating culture and the need for cultural revitalisation and again and again and again it comes back to land. (Fay Gale ed. We Are Bosses Our-Selves 171) In White Nation, Ghassan Hage tries to distinguish between racism and nationalism, defining the latter as the relationship between race or ethnicity and territory. Hage observes in the white nation a 'sense of cultural loss' (perceived or actual) 'from which neo-fascism is being fed.' Un-constructive perspectives on multiculturalism that suggest that any gains by indigenous or NESB peoples must involve loss for everybody else are nourished by a whole political spectrum from Liberals (often tacitly) through to One Nation and other white supremacist groups (usually overtly). In 1979, the old NAG raised the idea of a treaty and Malcolm Fraser set up a committee chaired by 'Nuggett' Coombes. They called the treaty a 'Makaratta,' but the Committee disbanded in 1983. The Coombes report said there should be: protection of Aboriginal law identity and culture; recognition and restoration of land rights; conditions on mining and exploration on Aboriginal land; compensation for loss of traditional lands; self determination and associations for that purpose. In the Bicentennial Year of 1988 Bob Hawke promised a treaty on a visit to Barunga in the Northern Territory. The Northern Land Council chair Galarrwuy Yunupingu gave Hawke an Aboriginal painting known as the Barunga statement, which called on the Federal Government to recognise Aboriginal rights to: self determination and self management; permanent control of ancestral lands; national elected Aboriginal organisation to oversee Black affairs; recognition of tribal law, and a national system of land rights. The painting came to be known as the Barunga statement and was significant in linking Aboriginal land rights to international law through United Nations covenants. Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand have treaties with their indigenous populations. There is continuing debate about how far the Waitangi Treaty of 6 February 1840 gave up sovereignty, and what treaties mean in Canada and New Zealand is still evolving. In Canada the Nunavut (Our Land) Inuit movement had been negotiating since 1976 for a new territory (in the Eastern Arctic, an area larger than Queensland) and in 1993 the Federal parliament passed legislation designed to facilitate organisation towards it that was finished in April 1999, when Nunavut became self-governing with similar powers to an Australian state. The first instance in Australia of Aboriginal stories competing with white legal practices was what is now known as the Gove Land Rights case. In the early 1970s, elders took the sacred emblems of their clan to Darwin to demonstrate their claims to Richard Blackburn QC in a secret audience. Blackburn 'appreciated that these objects decorated with coloured bird feathers and woven possum fur were religious in character but he did not find them to be legally persuasive.' Frank Brennan outlines how the case was eventually won and became the 'Mabo'judgement, in One Land, One Nation: Mabo-Towards 2001. This was the first successful land rights case, when in 1992 the High Court declared in Mabo vs. Queensland that the Meriam people of the Torres Strait were 'entitled as against the whole world to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of the lands of the Murray Islands.' Further, Justice Brennan stated that: 'The common law of this country would perpetuate injustice if it were to continue to embrace the enlarged notion of terra nullius.' The Mabo judgement seemed to offer a breakthrough in land rights claims, and was seen at the time as asserting that native title was not extinguished by claims to sovereignty by the British colonisers. In December 1992, Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating made a speech accepting 'white guilt' for the dispossession and murder of Aboriginal people. However, since then, especially since the advent of the Howard-led Liberal-National coalition Federal government in 1996 there has been little further progress. The Howard government's Native Title Amendment Act that was passed in late 1998, while it fell short of the 'bucketloads of extinguishment' promised by the Deputy PM Tim Fischer, was described by constitutional lawyer Tony Blackshield as providing 'Akubra hats-full of extinguishment.' A Federal Court judgement in December 1998 in relation to a native title claim lodged by the Yorta Yorta people in 1994, rejected the claim, with Justice Olney invoking the 'tide of history' as having destroyed the foundation of native title. Katrina Alford, in a discussion of this case, suggests: Intentionally or not, governments and the courts have framed and interpreted native title legislation to ensure that among the most disadvantaged and dispossessed of all indigenous people-namely those who the courts consider have long since been partly or wholly removed from their homelands, cultural ties and kinship networks-receive the least of all. As Alford points out, 'the Yorta Yorta had no option of remaining on most of the land within their tribal boundaries [now Northern Victoria and Southern New South Wales]' (Arena Journal 13, 1999). Land Rights were most advanced in the Northern Territory where the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act, passed in 1976, made it possible for nearly half of the Territory to be claimed for Aboriginal freehold title, until a 'sunset clause' in 1996. In 1997-8, John Reeves was appointed to review this at a cost of $1m (charged to ATSIC). He recommended the diminution of the rights of the traditional owners, increased powers for the NT government and splintering of the major land councils-probably the most potent and vocal representatives of indigenous interests in Australia. Reeves' recommendations were rejected in September 1999 by a House of Representatives Standing Committee, but there are concerns about what may happen next following the elevation of Shane Stone, formerly Chief Minister in the Northern Territory, to Federal President of the Liberal Party. Another impetus to recognition of the Black history of whiteaustralia came in 1997 with the publication of Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. The Report was prepared by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, and included many of the submissions to the Inquiry, presided over by Mick Dodson and Sir Ronald Wilson. Wilson suggested in an interview: 'we were about simply telling a story, not pursuing retribution ... we thought it was the best way to go and to simply tell a story that would move the Australian community to heal the nation.' The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa and Chile in recent times have perhaps had more effect. Perhaps part of the problem is with the conceptualisation of what kind of 'nation' it is that has to be healed. The Commission only told a partial story: Aboriginal women were unwilling and unable to speak about the immense pain, grief and anguish that losing their children had caused them. That pain was so strong that we were unable to find a mother who had healed enough to be able to speak. (212) On some levels, apology and the manufacture of 'consent' are what Noel Pearson described recently as the 'ultimately useless' notions of spiritual and personal reconciliation. Robinson has suggested: 'This "sorry" business has hijacked the reconciliation process.' John Howard has consistently refused to apologise on behalf of white Australia for 212 years of domination and for the breaking up of Aboriginal families since at least 1814 (when the first children were taken to the Native Institution at Parramatta). Some institutions are, however, offering formal apologies. On 8 June, a ceremonial sitting of the Melbourne Magistrates Court presented a 'deed of apology' to Joy Murphy Wandin, a senior elder of the Wurrundjeri people. The ceremony was also replicated in Bendigo, Mildura and Wangaratta. The apology implements one recommendation of the 1997 stolen generations inquiry, that they should be offered by institutions from the government down. Gordon Hughes, president of the Law Council of Australia, was nervous about it: 'While reconciliation goes beyond politics it has clearly become a political issue due to the stance of the Commonwealth government.' But as Nigel D'Souza from the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service pointed out, apologies don't necessarily have consequences: 'The police have apologised and it has not affected the way they are treating Aboriginal people' (Australian 7.6.2000). Another issue re-raised recently is that of allocated indigenous seats such as those held by Maori members of parliament--maybe two to four seats set aside in Federal parliament. Howard rejected the proposal as 'divisive.' (Courier-Mail, 3.6.2000); and Evelyn Scott suggested a compromise: The area of indigenous health is one of the clearest examples of the legacy of colonisation. The 'life expectancy deficiency' of indigenous people remains particularly striking, with indigenous people dying 20 years earlier than whites, and indigenous babies having five times more chance of dying in infancy. The new federal president of the Australian Medical Association, Kerryn Phelps, describes indigenous life expectancy and disease statistics as 'almost figures of despair.' The major political parties should look at the seats in this country which indigenous people an win on their own merit; if you look at north Queensland, for example, or Western Australia where you have large indigenous populations. In the 20 years from 1974-94, the Maori death rate in New Zealand declined by 45 percent. In the USA, the indigenous death rate fell by 35 percent. In contrast, there was no reduction in the death rate of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders between 1985-95. So we know that there are models of care that work. Recent reports suggest also that the tracheoma programme has not proceeded effectively since the death of Fred Hollows. As Ghassan Hage has pointed out, it is only certain people that have the power to be 'tolerant.' Similarly it may well be more in the interests of some than of others to be 'reconciled' or to 'consent.' Certainly there is little talk of justice for stolen children, stolen culture or stolen land in much of the current reconciliation rhetoric. History remains with us and is sometimes marked. The first Queensland runner with the Olympic torch is Frank Daisy, a Mt Isa sporting identity and a member of the Kalkadoon. Along with the Aborigines of the Palmer River area, the Kalkadoon conducted some of the most effective resistance to white settlement. In the 1870s, despite having only spears, nulla nullas and boomerangs to oppose bullets, both groups defended their land highly successfully with guerilla warfare. The Kalkadoon were only massacred and overcome when they abandoned guerilla tactics. In another return of history, the Mt Isa police removed indigenous people living on the banks of the Leichhardt River close to the path of the torch relay, although Murrandoo Yanner said there had been an agreement with police not to demonstrate at the torch relay 'if they let the Aborigines stay where the world media could see the conditions they lived under' (Courier-Mail 10.6.2000). 'White misconception, fear and intransigence still stand in the way of a successful accession to a national system of land rights,' Ray Evans wrote in Fighting Words. 'We must break from that mouldering grasp if a proper justice is ever to be achieved here--a natural, compensatory justice in place of the rough justice of the past.'
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