Uproar in Nanango

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33251, 14 June 1973, Page 17

Uproar in Nanango

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) BRISBANE, June 13. A forthcoming youth club ball in the little Queensland town of Nanango has given rise to a racial controversy that has pricked the conscience of Australians throughout the country.

The annual Rural Youth Club ball is the social fling of the season in Nanango, the centre of rich cattle-raising and peanut-growing country, 130 miles north-west of Brisbane. The ball features the coming out of debutantes from among the area’s 1400 people, and, traditionally, they curtsy before the guest of honour. But after the announcement that this year’s guest of honour was to be Senator Neville Bonner, an Aborigine, four of the nine debutantes to be presented have said that they will not attend. Miss Maureen Bain, convener and organiser of the ball, said that the girls’ parents would not allow their daughters to be presented to a black person. “The families have had dark persons working for them, and they still compare Senator Bonner with them, even though he is in his second term of office,” Miss Bain told reporters. “The ball will go on, in spite of the snub to Senator Bonner." The senator is the first of his race to be elected to the Federal Parliament. The incident has caused an uproar in the normally peaceful town of Nanango, and black militants will hold a demonstration outside the hall in which the ball is to be held. The committee organising the ball is reported to be divided on the issue, one faction maintaining that it was not informed in advance who the guest of honour would be. Mrs Faith Bandler, a worker for Aboriginal rights in the area, said that the Nanango district had “a

racist reputation,” but the local hotel licensee, Mr Trevor Fletcher, commented: “I treat blacks the same as whites—if the Aborigines play up, they get thrown out, but so do the whites.” Senator Bonner himself said that he was surprised that the girls had withdrawn from the ball because of his presence. “I have had a lot of contact with the people of Nanango, and I have always been favourably received,” he added. The controversy has quickly spread to the cities, where it has been debated in newspaper columns and on radio “talk-back” programmes. Most people have been incensed by the attitude of the Nanango debutantes’ parent!. The “Daily Mirror” says that the Nanango affair underlines the existence, still, of a deep racist division in Australia. “It is true that the division has become a little less marked in recent times,” the newspaper says in a leading article. “A national conscience has developed, directed towards eliminating the division altogether, but to pretend that the division has been removed, because some people want it, is national self-delusion.”