Aboriginals leave Alice to find tribal roots

Press, 12 August 1985, Page 9

Aboriginals leave Alice to find tribal roots

By

GREG HUTCHINSON

oi Reuters through NZPA Alice Springs?

Thousands of Aboriginals are moving out of this oasis town in the remote heart of Australia, reclaiming traditional lands so that they can pass On to their children the world’s oldest way of life. Their exodus to the sacred lands of their ancestors is a voluntary escape from town life and a journey to rediscover 40,000-year-old traditions, say Aboriginal leaders in Alice Springs. More than 8000 Aboriginals have set up about 300 traditional camps in “settledown country” in a migration from Alice Springs that has become a torrent in recent months. Their leaders in Australia’s de facto Aboriginal capital said that the exodus was a response also to what they regard as official indifference. The Labour Government in Canberra has so far not fulfilled the pledge it made when it took office in early 1983 to grant uniform national land rights to Australia’s 170,000 Aboriginals. The Aboriginals, who had the whole vast continent as their hunting grounds before the British arrived in 1788, have rejected as inadequate a recent plan for modified land rights proposals. The Government has recognised that many Austra-

lians, especially in the Northern Territory, feel that land rights legislation has already gone too far, political analysts say. "The only sort of land rights that is going to survive is legislation that has the confidence of the broad community,” said the Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Mr Clyde Holding. Aboriginals own 28 per cent of Northern Territory’s nearly five billion sq km and are claiming in the courts a further 20 per cent although they form less than 30 per cent of its population of 150,000. “I think enough is enough .i.. All the land has been taken over by white fellows and you can’t turn the clock back,” said Mr Malcolm Roberts, central Australian secretary of the Northern Territory’s Cattlemen’s Association. “We are not the national conscience.”

Newspapers, politicians, and farmers here reacted angrily to the recent prosecution of white Australians who entered one traditional Aboriginal area without permission.

An aboriginal leader, Mr Pat Dodson, said that control of access reflected the Aboriginals’ right to protect their sacred country and the privacy of their ceremonial rights.

The Government said be-

fore the General Election in March, 1983, that 1976 Northern Territory land rights laws would be the model for all six states. Its promotion of national laws has, however, run up against a white backlash, with opposition from some state Governments as well as from mining and farming groups. Aboriginal leaders acknowledge that the clock cannot be turned back but they say that the Government must give them their sacred sites and enough land to preserve what anthropologists say is the world’s oldest living culture. The Aboriginals who have set up their co-operative camps in the Northern Territory with their own funds have no intention of going back to town, according to the residents.

The aboriginal elders decided they would take their families away from alcoholism, petrol-sniffing, and other urban health problems which cause Aboriginals to die 20 years earlier than whites, according to official statistics. As an illustration of the impact of city life, Aboriginal leaders point to figures which show that one-fifth of those in jail are aboriginals although they make up only 1 per cent of Australia’s population. One elder, Mr Silas

Turner, told how his family lost their land to farmers at the turn of the century and were eventually trucked to church missions and welfare centres.

Mr Turner, aged 60, has been living with distant relatives on their sacred lands, but until now has not had the financial and moral support to move out to his father’s country 150 km north-east of Alice Springs. He now intends to set up a camp of his own — a home for his family, a centre of learning for his grandchildren — on an area of 130 sq. km, part of a 2000 sq km cattle station. His family’s settlement on the large property will depend, however, on the white owner because Australian law does not recognise his traditional ownership, according to Mr John Tippert, a lawyer for Aboriginals. Mr Turner and other Aboriginals, returning to their traditional homes, mostly rough or unusable pasture, are pursuing their own quiet crusade to re-establish their spiritual links with the land.

“We are still left as sort of refugees looking round for a sympathetic Government to face up to the real problems,” according to Mr Pat Dodson, who is national co-ordinator of the Federation of Aboriginal Land Councils.