Bob Hawke's conscience and the Aboriginals

Press, 5 October 1987, Page 12

Bob Hawke's conscience and the Aboriginals

The “Economist” on what can be done for Australia’s first inhabitants

IT IS EASY to be sentimental about the Australian Aboriginals, and. the Australians are a sentimental people: They intend to have a good time during the next few months, celebrating two centuries of white settlement in the words of the beer advertisement Australians wouldn’t give a XXXX for anything else. But they would like to do something to cheer up the Aboriginals too. The aboriginals have been there not for two centuries but for 40,000 years, some say, and look at them now, Bruce, dirt-poor, jobless and hardly able to throw a boomerang. The Prime Minister, Mr Bob Hawke, bared his conscience this month when he said that “many injustices” had been done to the Aboriginals. He proposed a “treaty” or possibly a “compact” with the Aboriginals that would acknowledge these injustices.

Mr Hawke spoke on September 3 in the Northern Territoiy, which has the largest number of Aboriginals. Despite proddings by Aboriginal groups to enlarge on the idea, he has since been silent on exactly what sort of treaty or pact he had in mind, and may not have been sure himself.

Both Mr Hawke and a previous Labour Prime Minister, Mr Gough Whitlam, have been eager defenders of the “first Australians.” Last year the Government spent $366M on grants to Aboriginal communities. They own 12 per cent of the land in Australia, much of it rich in minerals, although they comprise only 1 per cent (160,000) of the population. They have equal rights as citizens. Yet for all the words and deeds of Mr Hawke and others, nearly half the employable Aboriginals do not have jobs, compared with a figure of 8 per cent for white Australians. Their life expectancy is 52 years, 20 years less than the white man’s. It may be that the liberal welfare payments given to Aboriginals have actually contributed to their degeneracy: the dispirited Aborigi-

nal drunk is a common sight in the outback. Few Aboriginals achieve a decent education. One of the saddest aspects of Aboriginal protest is that it is mostly articulatedby mixed-race leaders. One of the most vocal is Mr Michael Mansell, who looks and speaks like a white man. This week Mr Mansell said that the Aboriginals should set up a self-governing sovereign State in the outback on land owned by them. It is the sort of wild idea that gets momentary attention, and irritates the Government: Mr Mansell mischievously proposed that the new State should be declared on January 26, 1988, the date of the white bicentenary. But it also, no doubt unintentionally, draws attention to the inadequacy of the Aboriginals. Suppose such a State were to be set-up. Who would be its civil servants, its doctors, its tycoons? Some pretty funny States have come into being over the last 40 years, but none has started with such little promise as an Aboriginal State would. Is there something specially unadaptable about the Aboriginals? Other non-whlte people have managed to make the leap into a European-designed world without coming apart Papiaa New Guinea, Australia’s northern neighbour, abandoned the stone age in a couple of generations. Elsewhere In the Pacific the Polynesians, the Mlcroneslans, and the Melanesians have sllC, without too much of a bump, Into modern times. Although, fcr propaganda reasons, Australia is occasionally thumped for Its treatment of Aboriginals, none of the other ethnic groups claims the slightest kinship with them. Are the Aboriginals unique?

Some would say they are, and a good thing too. Books about Aboriginal "dreamtime” get admiring notices. The Aboriginals' supposed lack of a sense of property is said to be a lesson for westerners , gloating over the rising prices of their homes. Mr Hawke seemed, not for the

first time, to be drifting into the realms of fantasy when he spoke of white Australians “grafting on to a much older civilisation.’* There probably wasn’t ail that much of what people nowadays would call civilisation in prewhite Australia. Many well-intentioned people are still reacting against prejudices that go back to the first glimpses of the Aboriginals by the white man. Captain Cook, a sturdy sailor but no enlightened liberal, noted that they had no “fixed habitation” but “moved about from place to place like

wild beasts in search of food.” The first convicts (whose arrival in 1788 is being celebrated in January) regarded them as vermin, and later arrivals hunted them for sport But these are ancient wrongdoings. They cannot be undone. Australia will not be returned to its pre-white existence, where the Aboriginals would hunt hap-' plly for ever after. Mr Hawke’s pact or treaty, however sincerely it was worded, would only confirm that the Aboriginals are a museum people whose best prospect is to be .the. wards of . a >:

caring State. All settler peoples feel twinges of guilt about displacing the original Inhabitants, none more so than the Americans who pushed out the Red Indians. There are English Who regret the Norman conquest, and a few who are not ali that happy about the Romans. • The Americans have done their best to assimilate those Indians who want to be American, and provide wigwams for those who don’t The Australians?: can do no mdre.' ~ ,yy- ; EconpmM , uj